Blind Instinct: A Tess Barrett Thriller

by Michael W. Sherer

  “Good morning, Oliver,” she said, dusting her hands on her apron. “I just put some pancakes in the oven for you and Tess. I have to run. I have a million things to do today. Contractors are coming in to give me bids on window cleaning, and I noticed that a couple of the thermal windows in the living room have broken seals. They’ll have to be replaced.”

  “Sounds like you have a lot to do,” I said. “Good morning, by the way.”

  She untied the apron and brushed the back of her hand across her forehead. “I’m sorry, Oliver. You don’t need a summation of my to-do list.”

  “That’s okay. Where’s Tess?”

  “She didn’t get up when her alarm went off. I had to go in and wake her, so she was late to practice with Yoshi this morning. I would imagine she’s showering and getting dressed by now, though. I’ll warn you—you may be in for a rough day.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Nothing happened that more sleep couldn’t have cured.”

  “She stayed up late?”

  Alice nodded. “It was my fault, of course. I let that boy—Tim?—stay after dinner. They did homework—at least that’s what she told me—and then watched a movie. I should have sent him home much earlier.”

  I shrugged. “We’ll manage. You made plenty of coffee, I see.”

  “Coffee’s the least of your worries.” She saw my furrowed brow and shook her head. “I better not say anymore. Maybe she’ll be fine. Just… Be prepared, that’s all.”

  She hurried out. I walked over to where she’d been standing, picked up the abandoned oven mitt and opened the oven. A surge of heated air scented with pancakes, browned butter and sausage wafted out of the opening, tickling my nose and caressing my cheeks. I closed my eyes and breathed in the smell. It reminded me of Sunday mornings at my grandparents’ house—the other grandparents, the ones who raised me after my father ran out on me. I didn’t think of him very often because I’d never known him.

  For a moment my internal compass spun wildly, and I lost all sense of time and place. Alice wasn’t grandmotherly in any form, but she mothered Tess in her own gruff way, a manner which reminded me of how my grandmother had parented me. She’d been firm but fair, and while she hadn’t been overtly emotional, I’d always felt loved and cared for. I wondered if Tess knew how lucky she was.

  I took a plate out of the oven and set it on the counter at one of the two places that had been set with utensils, napkins, glasses of juice and mugs for coffee, tea or hot chocolate. Alice also had put out butter, a small pitcher of syrup and a bowl of fresh blueberries and strawberries. I spooned a mound of berries on top of the pancakes and poured on some syrup. Tess showed up just as I tucked into my first bite, wet hair combed straight, cheeks pink and freshly scrubbed, unseeing eyes shining.

  “Alice?” she called as she felt her way into the kitchen.

  “Mmfp,” I said. Washing down the food with a swig of juice, I tried again. “It’s me, Oliver. Alice said she had things to take care of. Want some pancakes?”

  Her face clouded at the sound of my voice. But she brightened at the mention of pancakes and paused to sniff the air.

  “I thought that’s what I smelled,” she said. “Yes, I’d like some pancakes, please.”

  “There’s a place for you at the counter. Second stool.” I got the other plate out of the oven while she made her way to the counter and set it down in front of her.

  Her fingers mapped the locations of her plate, the pancakes on it, the glass of juice and her place setting. She put her napkin in her lap and picked up her fork.

  “Are you still mad at me?” I said, unnerved by her silence.

  She stopped cutting pancakes with her fork. “Seems to me you were the one who was mad. Could you pour some syrup on these, please?”

  Gathering my thoughts as the thick syrup slowly spread across the surface of her stack of pancakes, I finally said, “Sure, I was a little upset you wouldn’t let me do my job.”

  She ventured a smile. “I told you we had it covered. You need to lighten up once in a while. Stop taking this so seriously.” She took a bite of her pancakes.

  I bit back a retort, literally chewing the inside of my lip to keep from reminding her that she wasn’t the one who needed the paycheck. Through clenched teeth, I managed a pleasant, “So, you had a good time last night?”

  “I had a wonderful time last night.” She sounded a bit too breathless for someone who only watched a movie. “It was so nice to see Tim. We’ve been friends for, like, forever. Well, since middle school, but I hadn’t really talked to him in ages. It was so interesting to hear what he’s been up to recently. I mean I knew he liked to joke around sometimes, but I didn’t realize he joined the drama club. He’s starring in the spring production of Twelfth Night.”

  “As Viola?” It popped out before I could take it back.

  She made a face in my direction. “Of course not. As Orsino.”

  I’d just met Tim, but he struck me as the sort who might play Sir Toby Belch for the laughs, or maybe Sebastian, Viola’s twin brother. But Duke Orsino?

  “Hey, that’s great. And you finished your homework, right?”

  “God, you sound like Alice. And don’t tell me it’s your job. I’m sick of hearing it.”

  Before I could reply the sound of footsteps on the kitchen’s tile floor jerked both our heads up as Marcus strode in.

  “Good morning,” he said, heading for the coffee brewer. “Thought I’d find you here.”

  He poured some into a mug, blew across the rim and slurped, wincing when the hot liquid scalded his lips. His normally crisp, fashionable attire looked a little rumpled, almost as if he’d slept in it. Though his eyes were bright as his gaze darted around the room, bags darker than the mocha skin tone of the rest of his face drooped beneath them. He held himself erect with his usual military bearing, but his shoulders stooped slightly, bent with weariness.

  “Have you found my uncle yet?” Tess demanded.

  “No.” Marcus shook his head slowly. “That’s why I’m here, of course, to give you an update. He’s been gone long enough at this point that we felt it necessary to file a missing persons report with the police. We wanted to keep this in-house, but there would be questions if we didn’t do everything we could to get him back. Both local and state police have issued a BOLO—be on the lookout—for him. But since we don’t know how he was taken or by whom, we can’t give the authorities any kind of description of a vehicle or the people responsible.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  He stepped up to the counter and set the mug down. I glanced at Tess . Her nose wrinkled so fast that I almost missed it.

  “We’ve been working closely with the company’s security team chasing down anyone who’s sent a threatening note to either Travis or your father in the past two years,” he said. “I know this is frustrating, but we’re chasing every lead we can think of.”

  I focused on Marcus as he spoke and gently inhaled through my nose. A sour smell overwhelmed the usual tropical coconut scent of whatever grooming products he used.

  “You will find him, though, right?” Tess spoke firmly, but her lower lip quivered.

  “Yes, we will,” Marcus said. “I’m sure we’ll have him back in a few days. Even though we haven’t received a ransom demand, we have some theories.”

  “Like what?” Tess said, echoing my own thoughts.

  “Nothing I can discuss with you at present. But we’re working on it, I promise you.”

  “Just get him back,” Tess said. “Please.”

  “We’re doing our best. I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Thank you, Marcus.”

  Tess’s conciliatory tone surprised me, but Marcus didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. He gave a short nod and walked out with his coffee. I watched him go and turned to ask Tess what was up. She appeared to stare at her pancakes with narrowed eyes.

  “Is he gone?” she muttered.

  “Yes.”
<
br />   “Did you smell it? Just like last time.”

  “Yeah, pretty rank.”

  “How did he look?”

  “Disheveled. Tired. Not the fashion plate he usually is.”

  “Something’s going on. I’m telling you he’s up to something. You have to find out where he’s been.”

  “What? Like, ask him?”

  “No, stupid. Do a little research. He smells like manure, metal and rotten eggs, and something else I can’t quite put my finger on. Something burning. Look up places where you’re likely to find that combination.”

  “You’re kidding, right? Think maybe you could narrow that down a little?”

  “Sure,” she snapped. “The metallic scent isn’t ferrous. More like copper, so try that.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ll get right on that just as soon as I drive you to school, take notes in all your classes and run through your homework with you after school.”

  “You don’t have to be so snippy.”

  “Look who’s talking. Finish your pancakes. We’ve got five minutes.”

  “I’m not hungry anymore.” She shoved the plate away. I should have let it go crashing to the floor, but reflex kicked in and I caught it just before it slid off the slick granite countertop.

  Chapter 19

  Derek swilled another gulp of his triple venti mocha and made a face. Already cold and it wasn’t even seven in the morning yet. The lack of sleep was killing him. After months of burning the candle at both ends to get the app ready for release—developing it, writing it, testing it—now this. Not only did the changes to the program appear capable of reading emotions, but controlling them, too. Or at least encouraging an emotional state.

  Since getting into his office well before dawn, he had been trying to isolate the program, but even when he pulled out the snippets of code that didn’t belong in the app as he’d started to do the day before, he couldn’t make sense of them. Somehow, the snippets were like strands of DNA, and when combined with the app program—his program—they formed building blocks, instructions, code that even self-replicated.

  When he’d gone back into Matt’s phone to look for places where the strands interacted with the app, he discovered that the program had spread. The app now controlled the phone’s front- and rear-facing cameras, its audio and GPS, and could track his pulse and measure the conductivity of his skin—how sweaty his palms were as he held the phone. The more data it collected, he realized, the faster it could learn. With GPS and photos, the app could read the phone user’s exact location at any given time and guess his or her preferences from visual cues. The app would know where and what he liked to eat, what kind of clothes he wore, his favorite music, who his friends were—everything about his life. Derek was stunned at the ramifications. The app could begin to predict what he would do at any given moment. And by encouraging a certain set of emotions, it could not only predict but also influence, even dictate, his choices.

  The data were going somewhere, being collected and analyzed by some huge bank of servers somewhere. Probably a supercomputer bigger than IBM’s Watson. With dawning horror he shut off Matt’s phone, fumbled open the cover and ripped the battery and SIM card out of it. He hadn’t been careful enough. He wasn’t supposed to have Matt’s phone. The police were probably looking for it, and they’d be asking him a whole lot of questions about how he got it if they knew it was in his possession. But that was the least of his worries. He broke into a cold sweat.

  If he was right about the artificial intelligence behind his hijacked app the data were being collected here at MondoHard. Someone in the company, someone he probably passed in the hallways every day, had designed and developed the DNA code that mutated his app into the alien thing it had become. Not just a “someone,” but a team, like the one he’d had working with him. And they’d done it in tandem with the development of Never Bitten. They’d had access to everything—his code, his notes, the test parameters…

  He grabbed his notebook computer and typed in commands. He needed a better idea of what he was up against. The day before, he’d tracked the infected app to a server inside the company. Now he worked feverishly to find out who had uploaded it to the server. He used every hacking trick he knew to skirt the firewalls and bypass security protocols. He piggybacked on software service modules he knew were part of regular maintenance to hide his tracks.

  Sweat moistened his brow and trickled down his temples into the stubble on his cheeks. He hunched his shoulder and wiped it off on his T-shirt. He couldn’t take time to stop. He had to get in and out of the system quickly. He was in the server now, checking its logs, making it appear the check was routine. And… There! He found the upload notation. Grabbing a pencil and piece of scrap paper, he jotted down the pertinent information—time stamp, IP address of the computer where the upload had originated, user ID. He finished the log check and signed out of the server.

  Now he turned his attention to the admin files in the HR department. Though they should have been even more secure, they were far easier to breach than the server. He used a department vp’s employee ID and an old password that was still good. On his end, even if someone grew curious and tried to trace his computer, his activity would lead them back to a hacker in Kyrgyzstan. Derek quickly found the files he wanted, but frowned at the information on his screen. According to the file, the computer used for the upload was located outside Dave Bradley’s office—the company’s head coder and vice president in charge of all software programming. Anyone could have used Bradley’s secretary’s terminal. Whoever it was had used a fake employee ID, one that HR assigned to temp workers.

  Derek signed off and leaned back, considering what he’d learned. Slowly, it dawned on him that the people behind this hadn’t needed any of his work on Never Bitten. He opened the file of code snippets his special program had identified in the tainted app. A glimmer of a theory on how the bits of code worked their magic dimly lit up the back of his brain. He had the feeling that the AI program would work almost anywhere on any software program. They’d had the benefit of surreptitiously working on it alongside the development of Never Bitten. And they’d seen his app as the perfect way to distribute their Dr. Frankenstein. But why? What purpose did it serve to create little monsters all over the place? Fear coursed through him like an electric current. He had to watch his back. This was major. Whoever was behind this had caused a regular guy like Matt to take a gun to school and shoot up the cafeteria.

  His phone whistled, signaling an incoming text. The sudden sound sent his heart leaping into his throat. He clutched his chest and looked at the phone ruefully, checking the display. The sender’s number was blocked. Taking a deep breath to stop his hands from shaking, he opened up the message.

  Not me. The threat’s inside.

  James—or the person pretending to be him—had finally responded to Derek’s email. He quickly hit “Reply” and typed out a response before the guy vanished.

  Inside MH? I figured that. If not you, who?

  Derek waited, but his phone stared at him silently, the screen blank. The guy was like a ghost. Frustrated, he set the phone down and reached for his cold latte, nearly knocking it over when his phone whistled again. He snatched the phone off the desk and opened the text.

  AI is mine. They stole it. Don’t know who. Be careful.

  Derek’s fingers flew across the screen as he typed furiously.

  What do they want? How do I find them? How do I get in touch with you again?

  This time the phone remained mute. He wanted to throw it against the wall, smash it, as if that would prevent all this from happening, as if it would protect him—hell, protect all those kids who’d already downloaded copies of Never Bitten—from the threat inside and the madness someone wanted to let loose on the world. Like that would happen. Sure, toss the phone and like magic everything would be hunky-dory.

  Suck it up!

  Derek took a deep breath. He suddenly knew how Tess had felt a week earlier when the
weight had been on her shoulders, when dark forces had been arrayed against her to prevent her from finding the strings of code that the ghost had said might save the world, to kill her if necessary. He could do this. He was the best damn coder MondoHard had ever had next to James Barrett. He could find a way to keep the AI DNA from infecting Never Bitten. He smiled at the irony—like looking for the cure or the antidote to being bitten by a vampire, werewolf or zombie. He’d designed a way to do it, a way to survive, in Never Bitten. A secret way. So, there had to be a way to beat this. And he was probably the only person in the world who could do it.

  His eyes fell on the calendar hanging on the wall over his desk and focused on the date circled in red. Crap! The app was going live in less than two weeks! If he didn’t find an antidote to the AI mutation before then, millions of people would be susceptible to its influence.

  Think!

  His gaze darted across his workstation, littered with electronic gear. He needed to buy time. He glanced at the calendar again, counting the days he had until the official launch of Never Bitten. Too few. No matter how many times he counted it came out the same. Staring at the calendar wouldn’t make any difference. Yet the longer he looked, the more he felt that the answer was staring back at him. And then he saw it.

  He grabbed his phone and car keys, and ran out of the office.

  A little more than twenty minutes later he pulled into the parking lot behind Tess Barrett’s school. He didn’t trust texts or email anymore. He needed to convince her in person. Waiting in the lot seemed risky, so he grabbed a hoodie from the back seat and pulled it on, then climbed out of the car and calmly followed a group of students entering the building, hands in his pockets, eyes downcast, shoulders slumped.

  He could easily fit in among these kids. It hadn’t been that long since he’d been one of them, struggling with the homework load, the petty dramas, the pressure to get into college, the peer pressure. He’d barely made it through alive. Hacking had kept him sane, focused, but he’d almost gotten caught and sent to jail. Two years of college had convinced him that higher education wasn’t meant for him. Fortunately, his computer skills had gotten him noticed in the right chat rooms, and James Barrett had come knocking with a job offer.