Duel to the Death

by J. A. Jance

  Ali gave herself the luxury of a leisurely soak in her jetted tub before heading into the kitchen to raid the fridge. Tucked away among several containers of leftovers was one loaded with two-day-old lasagna. Alonso Rivera may have been born in Mexico, but he had spent twenty years in the US Navy cooking on submarines. That experience had made him fluent in all kinds of foods, but his take on Italian dishes was superb. Ali liked to tease him by saying he was a Mexican Italian American.

  When B. wasn’t home, Ali often read her way through dinner. Once her food was heated, she took her plate and her iPad and settled into the breakfast nook with Bella curled up on the bench seat next to her. For the last couple of years, she had been on a self-imposed literary journey, reading through the classics that she felt she should have read but had never quite gotten around to actually reading. Her good intentions on that score had stumbled to a fitful halt a hundred or so pages into James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a read that had not yet been resumed and probably never would be. Recently she had been treating herself to some of the authors she had loved as a girl—Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel. She had enjoyed the latter so much that she was currently rereading Rebecca.

  This time, as she encountered the fictional Mrs. Danvers, Ali couldn’t help but be reminded of Arabella Ashcroft, the hopelessly crazed woman who had been the previous owner of this very house. The house on Manzanita Hills Road may have been a crumbling ruin when Arabella lived here, but it had also been her Manderley—a midcentury modern and completely outdated Manderley. With help from Leland Brooks, Arabella’s longtime butler and aide-de-camp, Arabella’s house had become Ali’s house, and Leland had become Ali’s aide-de-camp staying on for years. Her working partnership with Leland had ended only a month earlier when he had finally retired from service. Alonso had been hired to step into the vacuum left by Leland’s sudden but not wholly unexpected departure.

  Ali had just finished the last bite of lasagna and pushed her plate aside when a text came in from Shirley:

  Made it to bingo but not in time to get one of the handicapped spots. Mother is NOT happy with me, but I do have some good news. I stayed late because the inspector from the building department showed up at the last minute. I thought you’d want to know that he says he’ll sign off on the final inspection, so whenever Stu and Cami get back home with that truckload of computers, the new space should be good to go.

  Ali reread the text, not quite believing what it said. Before leaving the office that afternoon she had placed a call to the Yavapai County Building Department over in Prescott, asking if it would be possible to expedite the inspection schedule for their remodel. She had been told that the inspection staff was shorthanded and overbooked and that there was no way any of them would be coming to Cottonwood before the middle of the following week at the earliest. And yet someone had come by after all? Today? How was that possible?

  Picking up her phone, Ali dialed Shirley’s cell. “Great news about the inspection,” Ali said when Shirley answered. “How’d you manage to get it done so soon? I was told it wouldn’t happen before next Wednesday, if then.”

  “Just lucky, I guess,” Shirley replied. “Steve Barris, the inspector, showed up all hot to trot sometime after four. I finally had to chase him out the door right at five so I could pick Mom up in time for bingo. Before he left, though, he said we passed, and he’ll sign off on the permit.”

  “That’s a good deal,” Ali told her. “Thanks for letting me know.”

  Once Shirley hung up, Ali cleared her place and put the dishes in the dishwasher, all the while mulling over what Shirley had said. Her call to Abby Henderson at the building department had been one of the last calls Ali had made prior to leaving the office, so it had probably been sometime between three and three thirty when Abby had told her there was no way to hurry the inspection process. So what had changed so much in the course of the next hour, Ali wondered, that the inspection had already taken place?

  Before leaving the kitchen, Ali made herself a mug of hot tea to carry with her into the library. It would have been easy to hit the hay early, but she wanted to stay up late enough to say good morning to B. when he woke up in London. She wanted to bring him up to speed on everything that had happened in the course of the day, but more than that, she wanted to apologize for being short with him earlier. They had both been stressed and frustrated and had taken it out on each other.

  Conducting married life while being numerous time zones apart wasn’t always smooth sailing. Despite her good intentions, she was sound asleep with the iPad on her lap when the phone rang.

  “We’re on the ground in Burbank,” Cami said. “Thought you’d want to know. Lance just dropped us off at the hotel.”

  “That’s good news,” Ali said. “I’ve got some good news on this end, too. The county building inspector came by this afternoon, so we’ll be cleared to occupy the new space as soon as you get back.”

  “We may make it back sooner than you thought,” Cami said. “According to Lance, he’s got a whole crew coming to help with the dismantle and load-out.”

  “How’s Stu doing?” Ali asked.

  “So-so,” Cami answered.

  “Because of the flight?”

  “No, because he’s worried about controlling Frigg.”

  “He’s probably not wrong to be worried,” Ali said with a short laugh. “Maybe we should all be worried about her.”

  Call waiting sounded in Ali’s ear with B.’s photo showing on the screen. “Oops,” she told Cami. “Gotta go. B.’s on the other line.” She switched over to the other call. “Good morning. You’re up early.”

  “I am so ready to be home,” he said. “Thank you for figuring out a way to make that happen. BA is claiming the whole thing had to do with a power supply problem, but I’m still thinking ransomware. They’ve started resuming flights, but Heathrow remains a zoo. It’s going to take days to untangle this mess. Sorry if I was a whiny brat.”

  “And I’m sorry for being short-tempered,” she told him. “But I’d had my hands full all day, and I wanted to catch you up on what all’s going on in an actual conversation rather than trying to stuff the whole story into an e-mail.”

  “Like what?” B. asked.

  “For starters,” Ali said, “Stu has been given more than two million dollars’ worth of Owen Hansen’s Bitcoin fortune, he passed his driver’s test, and he and Cami are in Burbank on their way to Santa Barbara, where they’re going to load up Owen’s cache of computers and bring them back here so Stu can reboot Frigg.”

  “Wait,” B. said. “Can you break some of that down into bite-sized pieces?”

  She did so, and it took the better part of an hour. “I’m suitably impressed with all of you,” he said at last. “That was a brilliant move on Cami’s part to ask about taking over Owen’s abandoned equipment. And you and Stu are right, rebooting Frigg is the only way out of the monetary mess that will arise once those taxes come due. They’ll have to be paid come hell or high water. But what really amazes me is that you and Cami got Stu to agree to accept the necessity of utilizing used equipment. He’s one smart guy, but he comes with a few notable quirks.”

  Ali laughed aloud at that one. “I’ll say,” she agreed.

  They ended the call a few minutes later when B.’s car service showed up at the hotel. Ali turned off the fireplace, took her empty mug back to the kitchen, and then let Bella out for one last walk. “Come on, girl,” she said. “Time to go to bed.”

  20

  At midnight in Panama City, Panama, Graciella donned a pair of earphones and logged on to the dark Web to access the site where her video and audio files were supposed to be stored and posted. A message from Ron Webster had been relayed to her through Robert Kemper’s site telling her that the job was done. The sound- and motion-operated bugs only transmitted when there was something to be heard or seen. There was one audio file containing an exchange between Ron and a woman who was clearly try
ing to hurry him out the door, but there was no accompanying video, and there should have been.

  After that, however, there was nothing. Did that mean Ron Webster had screwed up somehow? Was his equipment faulty? Ron had come highly recommended. If he hadn’t delivered, all it would take was a single call from Graciella to El Pescado on that encrypted phone, and Ron Webster would be history.

  But just then, after hours of utter silence, one of the listening devices came to life as an arriving file showed up on the screen. Playing the recording back, it took a while before Graciella could identify the high-pitched sound. Then she figured it out. It was late Friday night. Maybe there had been no activity because High Noon had shut down for the weekend. What Graciella was hearing now was the whine of a vacuum cleaner.

  Listening to the cleaning crew, Graciella was relieved to know that the audio surveillance devices were installed and functioning properly even if the video feed wasn’t. That meant Ron Webster had been paid for the full job while only doing part of it. Even so, sooner or later Graciella would have firsthand knowledge about what was going on with Stuart Ramey and the AI. Did Frigg still exist or not? Without the AI and access to Owen Hansen’s Bitcoin mining capability, Stuart Ramey himself would be of little or no interest as far as Graciella was concerned. After all, wasn’t one computer nerd pretty much interchangeable with every other computer nerd?

  Realizing it was Friday evening in the States and that there would most likely be no more activity from her planted listening devices before Monday morning, Graciella leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes, and thought about Arturo Salazar. It was well after midnight. By now his wife was probably wondering about where he was and why he was so late.

  “And he’s going to be even later,” Graciella told herself with a smile.

  She stood up, stretched, and headed for bed. On the way to her own bedroom, she walked past her mother’s. It had been over a week now since her mother’s death, and Graciella had yet to reenter the room. Police tape still barred the door, even though a detective had called several days earlier to inform Graciella that, since Christina Miramar’s death had been ruled a suicide, she was welcome to remove it.

  The night Christina died, Graciella had made the decision that the next morning would be time enough for her to wake up and find the body. And now, leaving the tape where it was, she made a similar decision. Tomorrow morning would be soon enough for her to wake up, tackle her mother’s room, and clean the damned thing out once and for all.

  21

  At five o’clock in the morning, Stuart Ramey finally gave up on sleeping, crawled out of bed, and went into the bathroom to shower. He had spent most of the night reading through one article after another, trying to strategize on the best ways to deal with a reactivated Frigg. When he’d finally shut down his iPad and gone to bed, sleep had eluded him.

  In researching the subject of robots and ethics, he had stumbled on an article about a Czech company called GoodAI that specialized in teaching artificial intelligences right from wrong. Instead of giving their AIs prescribed rules about how they should react in every given situation, they taught them to use their knowledge to infer how they should respond in unfamiliar situations.

  When Stu read those words, the hair literally stood up on the back of his neck. That’s what Owen Hansen had done all on his own, with a playbook that could have been called BadAI rather than GoodAI. Owen had taught his AI all kinds of lessons, but instead of instructing her in how to be responsible or honorable, he had taught her to be devious and self-serving. And Frigg had been smart enough that, when faced with looming disaster, she had weighed the options and chosen to save herself.

  That was what had kept Stuart Ramey tossing and turning for the rest of the night—the realization that Owen Hansen had been an inarguable genius as well as a profoundly troubled one. Yes, he’d been a serial killer, and yes, Stu had been the one who had sparked Owen’s suicidal leap off Mingus Mountain. That night, though, sitting alone in his Burbank hotel room, what Stu regretted more than anything was never having had a chance to sit down with Owen Hansen. He wished he could have talked to the man and gained some insights into the workings of what was clearly a magnificent mind, one whose crowning achievement was the creation of Frigg.

  Rather than talking to the man and learning from him, what had Stu done instead? He had done everything in his power to destroy them both—creator and creation. He had succeeded with the former, and justifiably so, but not with the latter.

  Stu knew that the hotel’s breakfast room opened at six. At five to, he tapped on Cami’s door on his way past. “See you at breakfast,” he told her when she cracked it open. “I want to get an early start.”

  By a quarter to seven, they were in their rented truck and lumbering north toward Santa Barbara. “You look like hell,” Cami said. “Did you sleep at all?”

  “No.”

  “You can’t keep blaming yourself.”

  “I’m sorry Owen Hansen is dead.”

  “Of course you’re sorry he’s dead, but he was evil, Stu, really and truly evil.”

  “And smart,” Stu said.

  “Right, really smart and truly evil,” Cami agreed, “and being godlike to the end, he created Frigg in his own image.”

  Stu fell silent then, huddling against the passenger door of the rumbling truck. Eventually, exhaustion took over and he slept. Much later he woke with a start and discovered they were off the freeway and moving through a residential area. The voice in the GPS was saying, “In five hundred feet turn right on Via Vistosa. Your destination will be ahead and on the right.”

  As the truck turned in to the tree-lined entrance Stu caught his first glimpse of the house. It was a mansion, all right—a white stucco three-story edifice, complete with a red-tiled roof and surrounded by manicured lawns and lush gardens. They arrived at the front entrance too soon for Stuart to have worked himself into a cold sweat. As the U-Haul grumbled to a stop, an oversized door swung open and a tiny white-haired woman came out onto a colonnaded front porch and waved at them.

  “I’ll do this,” Stu said to Cami.

  He shoved open the passenger door and clambered stiffly down to the ground. When he turned around the woman had stepped off the porch and was making her way toward him, tripping daintily along a flagstone walkway in a pair of very high heels. It was a little past nine o’clock in the morning, but this elfin woman—so thin she resembled a sparrow—was decked out in a bright red knit suit topped by a single string of pearls. She looked as though she was fully prepared to dash off to church at any moment or else to some fancy country club luncheon.

  “Are you Stuart?” she asked.

  “Yes, I am,” he mumbled. Suddenly tongue-tied, Stu was unable to summon the words he had carefully schooled himself to say. Not so much as a single syllable of “sorry for your loss” escaped his lips.

  “I’m Irene,” she said, seemingly unperturbed by his silence. “I’m so glad you’re here early. Tell your driver to go past the garage at the end of the house. There’s a drive off to the right that leads around to the back and down to the basement. That’s how Owen always took his deliveries—at the back. It’ll make it easier for loading. I’ve left the slider open so you can let yourselves in and out, and I’ve asked the cook to put together a little buffet. I wouldn’t want you people to starve to death.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Stu managed at last. “Thank you. We’ll go around back.”

  With that, he retreated to the truck, climbed back inside, and pulled the door shut behind him.

  Cami had been talking on the phone. Now she pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at him. “You’re white as a sheet!” she declared. “What happened? What did she say to you?”

  Stu shrugged. “That she’s glad we’re early; that she’s had her cook put together a little buffet for us; and that we’re supposed to drive around the end of the house and take the drive to the right that leads to the basement entrance around back.”
<
br />   “Did she say anything to you about Owen?”

  Stuart shook his head. “Not a word,” he muttered. “Not a single word.”

  Cami returned to her call. “Did you hear that, Lance? When you get here, drive around the end of the house. We’ll be doing the load-out through a slider at the back.”

  “Are you all right?” Cami asked Stu once she ended the call.

  “I think so,” he said. “Irene Hansen just wasn’t anything like what I expected.”

  At the back of the house, the drive led to what amounted to a mini loading dock. Before Cami set about positioning the back of the truck in front of the dock, Stu let himself out of the truck and walked into the house through the unlocked slider, aware as he did so that he was entering Owen Hansen’s private domain.

  Stu had expected palatial digs. As a consequence, the stark simplicity of what he found there surprised him. The space was designed into an open-concept arrangement with a master bedroom–style sleeping area—bed, closet, and bath—on one side and a combination kitchenette/bar on the other. The flooring was high-gloss hardwood; the walls were painted a muted dove gray. In the center of the room stood two pieces of furniture—a highly polished antique library table and a decidedly modern ergonomic rolling desk chair. On top of the table sat a computer, one Stu instantly recognized as an early-model Apple Macintosh. On the far side of the table a long black leather sofa faced a wall covered with six forty-two-inch monitors. That way, someone seated either at the computer or on the sofa would have an unobstructed view of whatever was displayed on the screens.

  Stu was somewhat confused. Wasn’t this basement supposed to be full of computers? Where were they? And then, in the wall at the far end of the monitors, he spotted a nearly invisible swinging door. He walked over to it, pushed it open, and found himself in almost total darkness. After groping blindly along the wall, he finally located a light switch.