“Right. An attack. What we talked about on the ferry—that the people in the photographs were some kind of terrorist cell, that there was some kind of attack being planned overseas. An attack that would happen tomorrow, November first. No one seemed to really know anything for sure, but everyone was guessing at the same thing. That was the part I didn’t like, actually.”
He was confused. “What do you mean, didn’t like?”
“I tend not to trust anything that seems too certain.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Someone recently reminded me of something I’d said once. That everyone makes assumptions, and the only question is if they’re right or not. Take this, for instance. Everyone seemed to assume that the people in the photographs were up to no good. Criminals, extremists, whatever. Even the FBI was convinced there was some kind of plot, and they hadn’t even seen the In Retentis photos. They were just guessing off the bits and pieces Karen Li had shared, assuming some kind of terrorism connection. Guesswork based on where Gunn was traveling and the fact that she’d told them something bad would take place on the first of November.”
“FBI?” He was startled. “What? Since when have you been talking to the FBI?”
“Come on, Oliver, don’t get coy at the eleventh hour. You have to know the FBI are actively investigating your company.”
“Fine,” he allowed. “I’ve heard rumors. But weren’t we right?”
I thought of the Egyptian blogger with the missing tooth. Jumping off a roof, leaving his wife and children behind. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The governments that Care4 has been dealing with—the places Gunn’s been visiting, the places in the photographs. Saudi Arabia, Chechnya, Egypt, Iraq … sure, they’re hotspots for extremism, terrorist activity. They also have something else in common.”
“Which is?”
“They all happen to be some of the worst violators of human rights in the world.”
Oliver took off his hat, sat down on a pile of books, and wriggled around, trying to get comfortable. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“I started wondering. What if we were coming at it from the exact opposite angle that we should be? What if none of the people in those pictures were bad guys after all? Flip the assumption. What if the bad guys were after them?”
He looked more confused than ever. “Why would they be?”
“Human rights and LGBT activists, anticorruption bloggers, journalists. In the States, maybe you get some nasty tweets aimed your way. In these countries?” I thought again of the man with the missing tooth. “You get pushed off a rooftop.”
“But if it’s not a pending attack, what is it?”
“Care4’s real business isn’t the cameras or the baby monitor stuff that your PR people hype. That’s common knowledge within the company. Practically everyone must know the surveillance game is your bread and butter.”
Oliver’s face showed no disagreement. “Like you said, common knowledge. But what does surveillance have to do with November first?”
“I’ll get there. For years the company has been pouring money into deep neural network research. Care4 wanted to become the first company in the world to create a surveillance system that wouldn’t just operate without needing any human control but one that could actively teach itself to get better at finding people.”
“I think I might know a bit more about that field than you do,” Oliver said mildly. His phone beeped from a pocket. He took it out, jabbed a quick reply, put it away.
“Absolutely,” I agreed. “What do I know? I don’t even have a smartphone. Anyway, Care4 has been selling more basic versions of the system for years, all over the world, which must have demonstrated the high demand for its products. So somewhere along the line, they decided to go all in on AI-driven surveillance software. Your company has been working practically around the clock to get this revamped version up and running by the internal launch date: November 1. In Retentis was always at heart a software project.”
Oliver didn’t look sold. “We have multiple internal launch dates every year. Every company does. What does that matter to anyone outside Care4? And what does that have to do with terrorism?”
“That’s not the point. Terrorism was never the point. Teach a computer to recognize a face, to pick a person out of a crowd, and it doesn’t care whether it’s looking at bin Laden or Mother Teresa. You can use it for anything, good or bad.”
“So?”
“Karen warned us that people would die. And that got the FBI on the wrong track immediately. Because that’s how they’re trained. That’s what they’re trained to look for. An airplane going down, a truck being driven into a crowd. After nine-eleven the Bureau’s whole focus changed to terrorism. They’re so preoccupied with stopping plots that this threat seemed to fit neatly into their worldview and they never really questioned it. Assumptions, again. They saw what they wanted to see. They thought Care4 was concealing crucial information about some plot out of greed, not wanting to alienate any of its international clients. That was never what Karen meant.”
“What did she mean, then?”
“These people—in the pictures—they’re the victims. Or they’re about to be.”
“Why?”
“Care4 hadn’t accidentally collected info on some terrorist plot. It was selling a state-of-the-art AI system that would allow totalitarian governments and dictatorships all over the world to locate and round up the people they most hate and fear: men and women who risk their lives to expose injustice and corruption. The physical cameras are already up and running—God knows those places have no shortage of cameras all over. Everyone was just waiting for the network to go live so that computers could begin flagging faces and pointing to them in real time. And then security forces and secret police squads could just pluck these people right off the streets. There would have been huge sweeps in all these countries, beginning the day the system went live. No one would have known why journalists and activists were suddenly disappearing across the globe. And over time, the Care4 system would snowball, steadily teach itself to become increasingly accurate, to scan metadata and social networks to find friends, families, supporters, sources. All over the world, political opposition, the press, everyone standing up to these governments would be tracked, located, and whittled away.”
Oliver’s voice was slow and puzzled. “Why would Care4 do that? What’s in it for them? Why risk breaking the law?”
“What law? They’re selling a product, not telling people how to use it. Morally, it’s a different question, but the rationale is the same reason that just about any company does anything—profit. Don’t get me wrong, Oliver, I don’t think that Care4 wanted people to die, but they also weren’t willing to give up lucrative security contracts all over the world to stop that from happening.”
“That’s a lot of guessing.” He sounded doubtful.
“Maybe so.” I fell quiet, thinking. “The way I see it, Care4’s attitude was basically similar to that of the U.S. gun lobby. Selling as many guns as possible is what matters, and they’re not responsible for what buyers do with them. Stop a bank robbery or rob a bank—it’s all up to the individual.” I reflected. “I’m sure some countries would have used the system to stop terrorism or crime. For all I know ours is one of them.”
“So how do you know that all of the countries aren’t using this for good? Who says anything bad will even happen to these people you’re talking about?”
I didn’t hesitate. “One of the men in the photographs Karen got her hands on was an Egyptian blogger who had supposedly jumped off a roof. Police said suicide, his family said murder. Guess who was right? These countries weren’t just waiting around for Care4, naturally, they were going after anyone they could find in the meantime. They just happened to get to this poor guy without needing the In Retentis network. If it’s not a ‘suicide’ these countries always label anyone they kill a ter
rorist or security threat. You would think they’d never killed an innocent, none of them, ever.”
Oliver stood and looked at me skeptically. “So explain Karen Li’s death. That still doesn’t make sense. If my company isn’t actively trying to hurt anyone, how could they have been involved with whatever happened to her?”
I nodded somberly. “I couldn’t figure that out at first. Even if they were morally bankrupt and had no general problem with someone being killed, why would they risk the heightened exposure that comes with a dead body? Especially an American citizen killed on U.S. soil?”
“And? Why?”
“Again, a common enough reason for human motivation. They felt they didn’t have a choice.”
“What do you mean, no choice?”
“What do you know about Karen Li?” I asked.
The question clearly surprised him. “I don’t know—I mean, I worked with her, I saw her résumé, she was very good at her job…”
“Do you know anything about her parents? How she ended up here?”
Oliver shook his head impatiently. “Of course not. Why would I? I wasn’t dating the woman, I was her coworker. I care about her programming skills, not her family tree.”
I thought of the timeline. The photograph from the cabin. The little girl held in her mother’s arms. The GPS records showing the nonprofit where Karen must have volunteered, Tiananmen Lives. “She came to the U.S. in 1990 from China. She only gained U.S. citizenship later on. Something had happened to both her parents at the same time, probably the year before that. 1989 Beijing. Want to take a guess where?”
He saw where I was going almost immediately. “Tiananmen Square?”
“They were almost definitely student protesters. They probably died side by side. Afterward she came to the States to live with relatives. The woman had a lifelong hatred for any government willing to kill its own civilians for protesting abuse of power. To her, that was far more important than money or a career. More important than anything. Once she found out what In Retentis was about, she was never going to just walk away and let people die.”
“So Care4 didn’t have a choice? That’s what you’re saying?”
“I’m sure they would have far preferred any other option than murder. They probably ran through everything. But fire her? She could sue, or turn whistleblower, or go to the press—any number of things. Buy her out, bribe her? Well, she valued some things more than money. Intimidate or scare her? God knows they tried. Everything from threatening her with lawyers to hiring me to follow her. The pressure took a toll without a doubt. If Care4 could have stressed her to the point of a breakdown I’m sure they would have been delighted. But she was tough, and the woman was driven by something more important to her than even her own physical safety. She wasn’t going to walk away. And if they just ignored her? Then—”
“She gets the FBI information that shuts down In Retentis,” Oliver finished.
“Exactly.”
“When you put it that way, they really didn’t have a choice,” Oliver said thoughtfully.
“Wrong,” I corrected sharply. “Of course they had a choice. They could have chosen to place innocent lives above profit. They could have said no to blood money. They could have refused to sell their technology without stipulating how it was used, even if that cost them financially. And, most of all, they could have decided to face up to consequences, or chosen to take on their employee in court if they felt she was wrong—anything except choosing to murder her in cold blood.” I gave Oliver a hard look. “They had a choice, all right. They just chose the wrong way.”
He looked away from my eyes. “The guesswork is impressive, but how do you know for sure? Do you have proof?”
I got up and opened the top drawer of the file cabinet I had been using as a stool. I took out a sealed manila folder and opened it with a penknife that I left on the file cabinet next to the open paperback. I pulled out a sheaf of photographs. Each a page of Silas Johnson’s file from the hotel. “Take a look,” I said, extending the documents. “Attorney-client privilege goes pretty far, but I’ve never felt it should cover complicity in murder. The lawyers Care4 hired were helping to handle the In Retentis contract negotiations with foreign powers. I’m sure they were getting paid very well for their efforts.”
Oliver glanced through the first few photographs carefully, then looked up nervously. “You know they could sue you into the poorhouse just for having this stuff?”
“I’ll take my chances.”
He took a candy bar from his pocket, tore off the gold wrapper, and chewed with small, rapid bites. “So what do you need me to do?”
“Help me log into the Care4 systems. Tonight, before it’s too late. We stop the system from going live, we shut down In Retentis, and that saves these people and hundreds or thousands of others, too.”
Oliver blanched. “That’s impossible.”
“You helped build their security system. If anyone can pull it off, you can.”
“What if I get caught?”
“Right side, wrong side, Oliver. You said it yourself. Where do you want to land?”
“Isn’t there some other way?”
I shook my head. “Not this time.”
He thought some more. “You’re not exactly asking me to hack into a lemonade stand.”
I was growing impatient. Impatient, and edgy. Only a handful of hours remained. “I’m not going to argue with you all night. Either you help me, or say no, so that I can go find someone who can. We have to hurry.”
He looked around uncertainly, stalling. “This is too risky. I need to think it over.”
“We don’t have time. Yes or no? Make up your mind.”
I started toward him, then stopped abruptly.
Joseph stood in the doorway.
He was dressed similarly to when I’d last seen him, at my brother’s apartment. A dark suit, dark shirt, black polished shoes. One difference was his right arm, which was now in a sling. A .45 would do that. Impossible to tell exactly where he had taken the bullet, but his upper arm bulged slightly under the shoulder of the well-tailored suit. The kind of bulk that a layer of thick bandages might add. He held his gun in his right hand and a pair of heavy bolt cutters in his left.
I backed away fast. Last time Joseph had walked into a room with me, his pale eyes had been flat and empty. Eyes that said he was utterly indifferent to my fate. No longer. Now, his eyes surged with hatred. “You,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about everything I want to do to you.” He gestured significantly with the bolt cutters, raising the black stainless steel jaws toward me. “I’m going to make sure that it’s a very long night, and I’m going to keep you alive to the very end.”
45
“How’d you get in, Joseph?”
His voice was thick with animosity. “You think I can’t cut a lock with one arm?”
“I hope that’s on your résumé.”
He called me a couple of names that no newspaper in the country would have printed. He was holding the gun in his right hand, even with the sling. I wondered what Joseph would do if he decided to use it. Whether he’d switch hands so he could bring it up and sight, or if he’d stick to the right hand and shoot from the hip. He might still be a good shot. He might not be. “I can kill you and be out of the country long before they find your body,” he finished.
“Sure,” I said. I nodded toward Oliver. “But can he?”
Maybe the antianxiety pills were kicking in, but Oliver didn’t seem so nervous anymore. He didn’t seem so surprised to see Joseph here either. In fact, he hadn’t even seemed to wonder who Joseph was. “I thought you were helping me, Oliver,” I said. “Disappointing.”
“What are you talking about?” he said.
“It’s okay. You can drop the guardian angel bit. We’re past that.”
“I am helping you, Nikki,” he insisted. “Of course I am.”
I nodded at Joseph. “And I’m supposed to believe that he just took a wrong turn
and ended up here? Come on, why keep lying? What’s the point?”
Eyes on the ground, Oliver considered this in silence. “I was helping you at first,” he finally said, looking up. “But you were too good. You started finding out too much.”
“Why help me at all?”
He didn’t hesitate. “An insurance policy.”
“Insurance?”
“Greggory had a fairly low opinion of your abilities. He didn’t think you’d get anywhere—except where we wanted you to get. Out of the two of us, I’ve always tended toward caution. I wasn’t sure where you’d end up after Greggory first approached you. I thought it would be better to know your thought process. I didn’t give you any information or idea you weren’t going to reach eventually on your own. We didn’t know if you’d ever get to In Retentis, but if you did, we wanted to know about it—and the more convinced you were that terrorism was the answer, the less you’d be thinking about it being anything else.”
I sat again on the file cabinet, next to the open book folded spine-up. “Why me?” There was a gun in the top drawer. A .357 stainless-steel revolver with a big four-inch barrel. I had left it loaded and cocked. “Why come to me in the first place? Why risk getting an outsider involved?”
He shrugged. “We needed someone like you. You were perfect.”
“Perfect how?”
“We needed someone who actually did this kind of work for it to be plausible, but the true ideal was a loner with proven antisocial tendencies. Someone without close friends or family. Without a big network of people who would come asking questions if anything happened to her. As far as your established record of violence, the anger management therapy, the arrest for assault—well, we couldn’t have asked for anything better. For anyone better. We spent a long time searching carefully for potential candidates, and you, Nikki, were the very best.”
I didn’t much like hearing that. “The plan was to frame me for Karen’s murder?”
“We needed to establish causality. We’d hired you to follow her, but you became fixated, got out of control. When she learned you were following her and demanded you keep away, you grew angry, issued threats. You had become paranoid, obsessed with the idea of protecting her from unknown enemies. And then, finally, when she refused to accept your help, you became frustrated and lost your temper.”
Save Me from Dangerous Men--A Novel Page 32