by J. A. Jance
“This has nothing to do with Lance and everything to do with Stu and Owen Hansen’s artificial intelligence,” As Ali outlined the contents and likely consequences of Graciella Miramar’s letter, Cami listened, wide-eyed.
“Are you serious?” she asked when Ali finished. “Stu’s really going to reactivate Frigg? I thought he said she was unreliable.”
“He may be right about that,” Ali agreed, “but it turns out Frigg is most likely the only source for the passcodes Stu will need to sort out his financial situation. That’s why I suggested the leasing option. He wasn’t happy about it, but he said he’d get right on it.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Cami said with a laugh. “At this very moment, he’s over at the DMV and hopefully passing his driver’s test. Shirley took him, and she’s letting him use her Honda for his test drive. While they’re gone, would you like me to take a preliminary look-see at a leasing option?”
That was one of the things Ali had come to appreciate about Cami Lee. She was a self-starter.
“Would you, please?” Ali asked. “You’re likely to find us a better deal than Stu will. Having him making inquiries and negotiating a deal with his nose out of joint and a chip on his shoulder probably won’t lead to the best of all outcomes.”
“Presumably not a computer chip?” Cami asked with a smile.
Ali smiled back. “Presumably.”
“So if the goal is to get Frigg working again, we’re talking about a bunch of hardware, right?”
“Yes, the works,” Ali agreed. “Stu told me that before Hansen took Frigg down, she was operating on eight hundred blades.”
Cami nodded. “I didn’t know the exact number, but from seeing the crime scene photos, that’s about what I would have figured. There’s a shortage of CPUs right now, so trying to lease that many isn’t going to be easy, and it’s going to cost a bundle.”
“I know that, too,” Ali agreed, “but as I told Stu, his problem is High Noon’s problem. In terms of PR, we can’t afford to have one of our principals caught up in some complicated unpaid taxes difficulty with the IRS. My understanding of Ms. Miramar’s letter is this: whether Stu can access the money or not, it’s his at the moment and whatever taxes are due will probably be payable in a hurry—taxes Stu won’t be able to cover without having access to the funds themselves.”
“And the only way to do that is to reboot Frigg?”
“Exactly,” Ali replied.
“Okay,” Cami said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
By the time Cami left the room, Ali had been on hold for so long that she had almost forgotten the phone was still at her ear. Just then, the airline service rep came back on the line. By the time that call finally finished, Ali’s e-mail account dinged with the confirmation information from Jet-To-Go. Once Ali forwarded that to B., she was finally able to return to the other items on her to-do list. An hour later, she was deep in handling routine correspondence when Cami showed up in her doorway again, this time grinning from ear to ear. “You’re not going to believe this.”
“Believe what?” Ali asked.
“After I went back to my desk, I called a couple of leasing agencies, and they practically laughed in my face. It turns out nobody has any equipment available for lease at any price. Then it occurred to me that maybe there was someone out there with a bunch of perfectly good computer equipment that was just sitting around gathering dust.”
“Who would that be?” Ali asked impatiently.
“Owen Hansen’s mother,” Cami replied, “so I gave her a call.”
Ali’s jaw dropped. “You did what?”
“I called Irene Hansen and asked her if she had any interest in unloading her son’s computer equipment.”
“And?”
“Obviously she has no idea that she’s got a potential gold mine down in her basement. She told me she’s hired someone who’s supposed to come next week and haul away the junk, as she called it. I asked her if she’d be willing to sell it. She said if we’d come get it, we could have it for nothing. It turns out she’s getting ready to sell the house and needs to clear out the basement so her contractor can start work early the following week. The junk guy is due on Wednesday. She says if we can pick it up sooner than that, the stuff is ours free for the taking.”
“A collection of computers like that is worth a fortune,” Ali objected, “and she’s willing to give it to us for nothing?”
“With her only son dead, it sounds to me as though she mostly just wants it gone. And even if we’re not paying her for the equipment, there are bound to be some shipping and handling charges involved. We can’t just wave a magic wand to get all those GPUs from there to here.”
“What will Stu think of all this?” Ali asked.
“I’m not sure,” Cami said, “but reloading the AI into a system where it’s already been resident should be a hell of a lot easier than starting over from scratch. I doubt even Stu would argue with that, so what should I do—call Mrs. Hansen back and tell her we have a deal?”
“High Noon played a major part in bringing down her son,” Ali replied. “Is she aware that we’re the ones who would be taking the equipment?”
“I maybe didn’t mention that,” Cami conceded, “at least not straight out.”
“What if she finds out later and calls the whole deal off? We’re better off being up front with her to begin with.”
“All right, then,” Cami said. “I’ll tell her.”
All the while they’d been talking, Cami seemed to be only half listening, absorbed in her iPad screen. Finally locating what she wanted, she passed the device to Ali.
“This it what we’re talking about,” she said. “It’s the crime scene photo I was telling you about.”
Ali looked at the array of loaded shelving units. “They’re huge!” she exclaimed.
Cami nodded. “Yes, they are,” she agreed. “Empty, each of these racks probably weighs about a hundred pounds. Fully loaded it’ll be closer to four hundred.”
“Should we call a moving company, then?” Ali asked. “It’s already Friday afternoon. They might be able to get a crew up and running by Monday, but I doubt it.”
“A moving company?” Cami echoed. “You’ve got to be kidding. If you send a bunch of untrained movers over to pick this stuff up, you’ll end up with exactly what Irene Hansen already thinks it is—a pile of junk. If you want any of it to fire up and work again, it has to be dismantled properly, with both ends of every cable and every connection properly numbered and labeled.”
“Sounds like we’d need a team of geniuses to get the job done the right way.”
“Yes,” Cami replied, “but it turns out you just happen to have a team of geniuses on staff, three of them, actually—Stu Ramey, Lance Tucker, and me.”
“You’re saying you should go get it?”
“Absolutely. Stu and I can rent a truck, drive to Santa Barbara, and pick the GPUs up ourselves. With any luck, maybe Lance can come help out. He and Stu can do the dismantling while I round up a crew of Home Depot day laborers to do the heavy lifting.”
“You make it sound doable,” Ali said.
“It is doable,” Cami countered. “We just have to make it happen.”
Stu appeared in the doorway behind Cami. “Make what happen?” he asked.
Cami spun around to face him. “Well,” she demanded, “how’d you do?”
“One and done,” he announced with a triumphant grin. “I passed with flying colors!”
“Congratulations,” Cami said, “now go pack.”
“Pack?” Stu repeated with a frown. “What for?”
“Road trip,” Cami joked. “Me and you, babe. We’ve got ourselves a whole passel of used computers that we’re going to pick up, bring back here, and install in our new computer bay.”
“But—” Stu began.
“No buts,” Cami told him, dismissing his objection. “What would you say if I told you Owen Hansen’s entire collection of blades can be o
urs for the taking?”
Stu’s jaw dropped. “You mean like for free?”
“Exactly,” Cami told him. “All we have to do is go get ’em.”
Ali held her breath expecting a pyroclastic blast. Much to her surprise, none was forthcoming.
“Free is good,” Stu said. “How soon do we leave?”
14
For the remainder of the afternoon, High Noon Enterprises shifted into high gear. While Cami and Stu went off to get organized for their unanticipated departure, Ali reached for her phone and dialed Lance Tucker’s number.
“Hey, Ali,” he said cheerfully. “How’s it going?”
Hearing Lance’s voice on the phone reminded Ali of the night years earlier when she’d first laid eyes on him. At the time he’d been gravely injured and lying in a hospital bed in a medically induced coma. A year earlier than that, while still a juvenile, Lance had objected to the San Leandro school district’s proposal to tag all their students with GPS tracking devices. Lance, a talented computer science whiz, had staged a protest by successfully hacking into the district’s computer system and disabling their server.
High Noon Enterprises had been called in to counter the attack. When the hack was traced back to Lance, the school district had gone after him tooth and nail. Rather than graduating with his class, the former honors student had sat out his senior year in a juvenile detention facility while his mother—a single mom, scraping by as an LPN while supporting her four sons—struggled to pay $100,000 in court-ordered restitution.
B. Simpson had felt responsible for the dire circumstances in which Lance Tucker found himself. The kid was nothing short of brilliant. Working in conjunction with Everett Jackson, his beloved math teacher, Lance had created a game-changing program called GHOST which allowed untraceable access to the dark Web. There were plenty of people on both sides of the law who had been eager to lay hands on that invaluable piece of intellectual property, and B. Simpson had simply outbid them all. To begin with, he had paid a fair price to both Lance and to Everett Jackson’s widow for High Noon to lease GHOST on a temporary basis. In addition, B. had offered to fund Lance’s further education on the condition that, once out of school, both Lance and GHOST would come onboard with High Noon on a permanent basis. That expected outcome was due to come to fruition in the spring when Lance was scheduled to graduate from UCLA.
With all that history flashing through Ali’s head, it took a moment for her to realize that she had never answered the question. “Turns out things are hopping around here,” she said. “What kind of plans do you have for the weekend?”
“Plans? Hitting the books, I suppose,” Lance said. “Why? What’s up?”
In as few words as possible, Ali brought Lance up to speed on what was going on, starting with the letter to Stu from Graciella Miramar.
“You’re saying that Frigg somehow boxed Stu into a corner where he has to reboot her?”
At the time Stuart had deleted the kernel file, Lance had been the only person involved with High Noon who had mourned the loss of Owen Hansen’s rogue AI.
“That’s whole the idea,” Ali answered. “It’s what it’s going to take to straighten out Stu’s financial entanglements in a timely fashion. If we delay too long, whatever taxes are due may end up in arrears. The last thing we need is for the IRS to come after him for unpaid taxes.”
“Right,” Lance said. “After all, since High Noon already has one jailbird on the company roster, you probably can’t afford to add another one.”
“You don’t count as a jailbird anymore,” Ali reminded him. “Your record was expunged, remember?”
“Right,” Lance returned with a self-deprecating chuckle. “I keep forgetting that. But you still haven’t said why you wanted to know what I’m doing this weekend. Is someone from there coming over?”
“Two people, actually,” Ali said, “Stu and Cami.”
She went on to explain how Owen Hansen’s mother had offered to give them his collection of computers for free, on the condition that someone come to Santa Barbara and fetch them prior to that midweek deadline.
“Wait,” Lance said, “High Noon is going to end up with Owen Hansen’s very own GPUs?”
“Yes, but only if we can pull together a program that will get us there before the junk dealer arrives. Cami’s in the process of calling down to Phoenix to rent a truck,” Ali finished. “She and Stu are planning on driving over to Santa Barbara to pick up the equipment. I was hoping maybe you could show up and help out.”
“How’s this for an idea?” Lance suggested. “Instead of Cami and Stu spending twenty or so hours driving back and forth to California, why don’t you just fly them over? I’ll rent a truck on this side and pick them up at the airport. That way they can be in Santa Barbara dismantling that equipment before they’d even finish driving to Palm Springs. How many blades, do you know?”
“Eight hundred,” Ali answered.
Lance whistled. “That’s a lot of dismantling,” he said, “and a lot of loading and hefting, too. I’ve got a few friends here at school who are your basic starving-student computer science majors. Some of them might be willing to spend their weekend earning extra pocket money. In fact, a couple of the guys I have in mind are kettlebell enthusiasts who’ll be great when it comes to doing the hard physical labor. What do you think?”
Ali had grown up listening to her father recite from his collection of tried, true, and exasperatingly trite sayings. One of his favorites had always been, “A wise man changes his mind; a fool never does.”
This was an occasion when changing her mind seemed like the right idea. “You’ve got yourself a deal,” she told him. “As soon as I book their flight, I’ll call you with Cami and Stu’s ETA. As for your worker bees? Feel free to pay them the going rate.”
“Will do,” Lance told her. “And let Stu and Cami know that they won’t need to drag any tools along on the plane. I’ll show up with everything they need, including rolls of pallet wrap.”
“What’s pallet wrap?” Ali asked.
“It’s heavy-duty plastic film. We’ll wrap it around the racks before we move them.”
“Fair enough,” Ali said. “It sounds like you know what you’re doing.”
Within a matter of minutes, Ali had Cami and Stu booked on an early evening flight out of Sky Harbor in Phoenix that would have them landing at Burbank shortly after nine p.m. When she went back to the lab to pass along the change of plans, Stu—who had yet to master all of his fear-of-flying issues—was less than overjoyed.
“Fly, really?” he grumbled. “Do we have to?”
“Yes, you have to,” Ali told him. “If necessary, take some anti-anxiety meds before you board the plane. Believe me, flying for a couple of hours is a better idea than having you and Cami wear yourselves out driving there and back.”
Cami entered the room toward the end of that conversation. “Wait,” she said. “We’re flying?”
“Yes,” Ali answered. “I just booked your tickets.”
“So I don’t need to rent a truck after all?”
“Lance will rent the truck in California,” Ali told them. “This way I won’t have to worry about the two of you driving in both directions. And speaking of that rental truck, Stu, Cami and Lance will be the only authorized drivers. You may have a your license now, but I have no intention of turning an inexperienced driver armed with a loaded U-Haul truck loose on the state of California. On the trip home, Cami drives and you function as copilot, got it?”
“Got it,” Stu agreed. “Copilot only.”
Ali glanced at her watch and saw that it was already a little past two. “Your plane leaves at seven, so you’d better get cracking.”
Stu and Cami left the business park a short time later with Stu lugging his carry-on bag. Once they cleared out, the office seemed unnaturally quiet. Ali arranged for hotel rooms for Cami and Stu at the Burbank Residence Inn and then forwarded the itinerary information to Lance. By the time she finished cle
aring her desk, a glance at the clock told her it was already nearly midnight in London. Having missed her window of opportunity to bring B. up to speed, Ali went out to the front lobby, where Shirley was holding down the fort.
“I’m bushed,” Ali said. “I think I’ll head out early.”
Shirley looked up from her keyboard. “A little TGIF?” she asked.
“Maybe a little,” Ali admitted.
“Since you’re the boss, I don’t see why not,” Shirley responded with a smile. “When it’s time for me to leave, I’ll close the shutters, turn on the alarm, and leave the place locked up tight.”
“Thanks,” Ali said.
Ali walked out into the parking lot and was surprised to see her father’s Bronco sitting there. She had forgotten about it completely, and now she’d need to drive on into Sedona to drop the Bronco off at the garage before going home. With that out-of-the-way jog in mind, it was just as well she was leaving early. On weekends, and especially on Friday afternoons, traffic in Sedona was a mess. Locals had adjusted to the series of recently installed roundabouts that had been strung like so many beads along the main thoroughfares running through town. Unfortunately, the redesigned traffic patterns still baffled out-of-town visitors who flocked to Sedona on weekends.
It was 3:40 when Ali drove out of the parking lot. She noticed that there was a single battered white work van still lingering in the lot. The contractors and their workers usually called a halt early on Fridays, too, but evidently whoever was driving that van wasn’t one of them.
15
Ronald Webster, the driver of that late departing van, was a patient man and a dangerous one. After accepting the assignment earlier in the week, he’d spent most of the next three days on-site at the Mingus Mountain Business Park, blending in with construction workers, masquerading as one of them, and eating lunch along with the other guys when they trooped outside to a shade-covered picnic table.
Armed with a set of well-used rakes and hoes he had purchased at a garage sale and dragging around a large plastic garbage container, Ron busied himself with pulling out dead landscaping and heaving the remains into a Dumpster that was already close to overflowing with accumulated construction debris. That was the thing about doing physical labor. As long as you carried tools and seemed to be working with them, you became totally invisible and could do your reconnaissance at leisure. Had the real landscaping company shown up about then things might have gotten dicey, but for now it looked as though Ron was home free.