by J D Lasica
She wasn’t okay. Not at all. Gabriel was gone. Her fingers found the pendant beneath her shirt. Her palm curled around the digital display on the back. She clicked twice. She wondered if Gabriel could hear her.
Bo leaned over and said in a low voice, “I let the others know we’re a go.” He pecked his way into sending a text.
“I thought technology was against your religion,” she said.
“Just anti-AI. Taking everyone’s jobs away.” He stashed his phone in his jacket pocket. “Anyway, you’ll like this place. Loud and last minute. Perfect for what we need to discuss.”
“Which is?”
“Next steps.”
She sent a voice message asking Nico to meet them at Suya, the new Afro-Caribbean underground club in the Village. Bo said he was concerned bad actors inside the NSA had been eavesdropping on the gatherings he’d organized. The noise in the club would tamp down any chance of surveillance.
By the time they arrived, Annika and Nico were waiting at the entrance. If she was about to go dark to look for Bailey and hunt down Gabriel’s killer, she wanted to brief Nico, and she persuaded Bo to see if Nico wanted to join the effort. She was still dubious that Gabriel’s murder and the girls’ kidnappings were connected, but she would damn well find out.
Bo paid for their covers, and she sidled up to Nico as they entered the dark space. “Hey, I like the look.”
Nico was rocking a new hairstyle, an Afro—edges fringed with mint green—pulled back and tied with a rubber band.
“Thanks. Figured it was time for a change.”
The place was hopping but roomy enough to grab two wooden tables along the far wall. On stage a foursome was kicking out some high-energy Cuban jams. Red lights played on the young bodies busting salsa moves on the dance floor.
“As you requested,” Nico said, handing her the kit from her flat with her smart lenses. “Annika and I thought they looked cool. We almost tried them on while we were waiting for you.”
That stopped her. She grabbed him by the wrist. “Nico, this is important. Never, ever, put these lenses on. The consequences would be dire.”
“Hey, okay, lighten up. I didn’t put on your lenses. But I did bring two pairs of glasses so we can finally see what you’ve been working on for so long, Ms. Programmer From the Future. That okay?”
Leave it to Nico to turn a compliment upside down. She let go of her grip just as the waitress came to take their drink orders.
Annika inspected one of the smartglasses, put them on, then removed them, dangling them in front of Bo. “Age before beauty,” she said.
Bo shook his head and leveled a glare at Kaden. “You mean if I put these on I’d be able to see your imaginary friend?”
Kaden looked up at the waitress. “He’ll order whatever’s on your drink menu that hasn’t changed in twenty years.”
Bo smirked. “Jack Daniel’s, neat.”
“See?” Kaden placed an order for iced tea, hold the Long Island.
Annika reached out and clasped the top of Kaden’s hand. “It’s too early to talk about tech, or the mission, right?” She whispered, “You’re still in mourning. You can tell Bo, he’ll understand.”
Kaden looked at her father and then turned back to Annika. “Bo’s been mourning for six months, since the Disappearance. It’s all right, I’ll get through this.”
Annika brought her voice back up to normal. “All right. Tell me and Nico about your AI.”
Kaden asked the waitress for the Wi-Fi password then turned back to her friends. “You know how most people just settle for outfitting their personal AIs with off-the-shelf templates to look like wizards, robots, baby dragons, cats? As if their AI were some kind of damn pet?”
This was one of her pet peeves. The personal AI revolution was off to a ragged start. Most people still talk about artificial intelligence as if it had to come wrapped inside a robot or device, but that never made sense to Kaden. Why have any hardware at all? All you needed was code, the cloud, and some visualization software.
She saw Tosh and Carlos enter the club and join their group at the main table. She nudged their smaller table a few inches away to keep the conversation to just her, Nico, and Annika.
“You know how much I’ve always loved Amelia Earhart.”
“Yeah, you worship her.” Nico began reciting from memory. “First woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. First woman to fly coast to coast nonstop. First cross-dresser to win the Distinguished Flying Cross—“
“She was a risk taker,” Kaden cut him off. No dissing Amelia tonight! “Always searching for something just out of reach. Never fit in her time.”
“Like someone else we know,” Nico said.
Kaden had felt that way about Earhart for as long as she could remember, from her childhood search for her gender identity to her adoptive parents’ abusive treatment of her when she dressed like a boy. Amelia was her role model.
“You both felt alienated from your worlds,” Annika offered. “Maybe that’s why you spent so much time on coding Amelia. You could relate.”
Kaden nodded. “I’ve been working on the code for years but only deployed Amelia six weeks ago. Decided to make her lifesize even though it takes a ton more bandwidth. I wanted to do her justice. Used old newsreels to get her voice exactly right. Made sure her period outfits and expressions were authentic. Kept her running in the background, trusting her to use deep learning to self-improve.”
The waitress set down their drinks. Kaden pulled out an empty seat at the end of the table and gave Nico and Annika permissions to join her network. “Looks like we have a strong signal. Amelia, say hi to my friends.”
Amelia materialized standing next to them, wearing a strapless party gown with a three-strand pearl necklace and a mink stole wrap. Kaden made a mental note. Update Amelia’s wardrobe accessories.
Amelia looked around. “Oh, what fun! This reminds me of the speakeasies I used to go to in my twenties!” She spotted the band and walked a dozen feet in that direction.
Also, update Amelia’s empathy settings. No condolences about Gabriel.
“Amazing,” Annika said. “She can simulate a realistic walk across a room.”
Kaden nodded. “It’s partly illusion—she can’t see the band or detect anything from over there. She can only see what I see, unless there are Internet-connected cameras around. But she’s convincing, isn’t she? The Internet Archive contained old footage with hundreds of Amelia Earhart’s movements. Her gait and posture, her hand gestures, her laugh, her speech patterns. I wanted to simulate a realistic physicality.”
“Well, you sure got it.” Annika looked impressed.
Amelia returned and sat in the empty chair between them. “Hi, Nico. Hi, Annika. Nice to finally meet you.”
“Hi. Hey there.” They stumbled over each other’s words and laughed.
“I hope you don’t mind, I ordered a bloody Mary.” Amelia raised her virtual cocktail glass and they toasted, with Amelia even tossing in a clinking sound for their glasses meeting hers. She leaned closer to Kaden and whispered, “Sugar pie, before we socialize, I have some news for you. Should we speak in private?”
Kaden looked at Nico and Annika. “These guys are good.”
The smartglasses came with built-in micro-speakers, and Amelia raised her voice above the strains of the music. “To bring you all up to speed—is that the right term? I adore it! To ‘bring you up to speed,’ I’ve been working in the background on an assignment Kaden gave me six weeks ago. Remember, darling? After you hacked into that trove of digital files from Randolph Blackburn?”
She grimaced. Fortunately, Nico was her accomplice in that operation and Annika knew all about it. “Go on.”
“My task was to search for anything in Blackburn’s files related to Kaden’s late mother. That search came up empty. But I came across one curious digital file, unlike all the others. The file’s name is Project Ezekiel. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Just the guy in
the Old Testament,” Kaden said.
“What’s especially curious is the military-grade encryption. Not the sort of thing you normally see on a business file, or so I’m told. On my own, it would take more than a hundred years to decrypt. But I’ve reached out to thousands of other AIs to tap into their spare processing power to make it a more manageable task.”
“Wait,” Annika said. “I didn’t know that was a thing. You’re collaborating with other AIs like in some kind of global virtual co-working space?”
“I see.” Amelia thought about it. “Sure, let’s go with that metaphor.”
Amelia reached into her handbag for a pack of Lucky Strikes and lit one. Kaden felt ridiculous at having to resist the impulse to tell her about all the studies about lung cancer and second-hand smoke that have come out since the 1930s. Let Amelia be Amelia.
Amelia blew out a string of smoke circles, then continued. “Our neural network is still working on it. Most of the content remains gibberish. But I’m beginning to piece together some strands. I may have something for you soon.”
Bo leaned toward them. “Am I interrupting anything in ghost world?”
“No, we’re good,” Kaden said.
“I’d like you to meet some people,” Bo said.
“You mean Tosh and Carlos? We met already, remember?”
They smiled at her and lifted their beers in a salud.
Bo raised his hand and signaled for four newcomers to join them. Two middle-aged couples skirted the dance floor and pulled up chairs at the now crowded table.
“Kaden, this is Yuan and Wendy Deng, parents of Ling. And Judy and Ernie ‘Viper’ Matthews, parents of Piper. Their daughters were kidnapped on the same bus Bailey was on.”
They gave polite smiles and shook hands. Wendy was the last to shake and squeezed Kaden’s hand. “Thank you so much.”
“So sorry about your daughter. I’ll do what I can.”
Tosh broke in. “They’re here for a reason, Kaden. We’re organizing a grassroots effort. A Disappearance task force.”
“We don’t call it the Disappearance,” Wendy said firmly. “We call it the day our lives ended.”
Tosh looked wounded, so Kaden took a shot at playing peace-maker. “Me, Nico, Annika, and a fourth guy operate Red Team Zero, a hacker collaborative. But Nico and I also have some experience in the field after we spent ten months at a special-ops boot camp.” She looked at Viper, who no doubt had seen more action on the ground. “I’ll explain more later, but no reason we couldn’t extend the assets of Red Team Zero to all of you.”
“Red Team Zero.” Viper chewed it over. “I like it.”
Everyone nodded. Bo hunched forward in his chair. “The fact is, by whatever name, we’re all here because traditional law enforcement channels haven’t gotten anywhere.”
Kaden looked around the table and saw a lot of passion and pain. What she hadn’t heard yet was a course of action. “Okay, fill me in. What do we know so far?”
Bo looked at the others. “After the … event, a lot of conspiracy theories were floated about who was behind it. The U.S. government. The Russians. Domestic terrorists. Aliens. Teams of serial killers. So far nothing’s panned out. The girls disappeared without a trace. So far.”
He lifted his whiskey glass, hand shaking, and placed it back down.
“Parents and relatives of the abducted girls banded together. We looked for patterns. But there were no patterns. In fact, just the opposite. Other than their age range, all the missing young women had different ethnicities and came from different backgrounds. Different heights. Different eye colors. Different hair colors.” That faraway look came to his eyes again. He went quiet.
Carlos spoke up. “There was one pattern. The one constant seemed to be … variety.” He let the word hang in the air with all its implications.
“Variety?” Kaden wasn’t expecting that.
“Quantico seems to think the abductions weren’t random. That the wide variation in appearance, body type, and physiognomy was itself a pattern.”
Kaden nodded. “Anything else?”
“A statistical anomaly,” Carlos added. “A higher percentage of the girls’ parents work in law enforcement when compared to the general population.”
“Maybe not a coincidence,” Kaden said, thinking back to the hunch Bo shared about this being personal.
Bo managed to pick up and knock back the rest of his Jack Daniel’s. “Some parents of the missing girls have skills we can use.” He turned to the others.
“I’m a systems analyst,” Wendy Deng said.
“My company makes surveillance equipment,” her husband Yuan said.
“I speak eight languages, in case that’s handy,” Judy Matthews said.
“It is,” Bo said.
Viper looked at the others but stayed silent until his wife Judy prodded him in the back. “Former Special Forces.”
Bo put on a grave face. “Viper made some enemies overseas, too. We think this cartel is making it personal by targeting our daughters.”
Kaden looked around the table. On the one hand, these were some high-powered pissed-off mommas and poppas. On the other hand, whoever heard of crowdsourcing a covert intelligence operation?
Bo hunched his shoulders forward. “We’ll take this in two stages. Intelligence gathering and extraction. Carlos?”
Tosh, who’d been lying low, looked around to make sure he wouldn’t be overheard outside this small circle. His voice barely carried over the band’s jams. “Over the last twenty-four hours, we’ve detected chatter that could lead us to one or more of the assets we think may be involved.”
“Definitive?” Kaden asked.
“Fifty-three percent probability,” Tosh replied.
“So, coin flip.”
“Yeah,” Carlos said. “But more solid than any other leads in the past six months.”
She shut her eyes, lowered her chin, and hugged her chest. Gabriel’s killing was seared into every movement around her, every waking moment of her day. And someone was trying to kidnap her.
Should I walk away and try to return to a normal life? Or join this covert operation and maybe get captured or killed? I still have a lot to prove to the world.
“All right, I’m in. Now what? Do we wait? Make plans?”
Tosh shook his head. “We have hours. Not days.”
“Hours?” This was unspooling much faster than she’d imagined.
Bo leaned forward and locked eyes with her. “We fly out at five a.m.”
13
Catskill Park, New York
Dražen Savić had only a cursory knowledge of New York state’s water system, much less an understanding of the science and technology that was about to unfold beneath the brilliant blanket of stars in the sky above the Catskill Mountains. But he knew enough about field logistics to organize a black ops mission.
Tonight’s goal: Get the strain into Pepacton Reservoir’s intake pipes without being noticed. Not an easy task.
The speaker on his phone in the fire engine barked out Lucid’s familiar voice. “Come in, Ezekiel One.”
“Ezekiel One here,” he confirmed over the encrypted line.
“I have faith that you’ll get it done this time, Ezekiel One.”
Savić was still brooding over his failure to capture Kaden Baker last night. And now this—Lucid rubbing salt in the wound. But he kept his cool. “My men are in place.”
“You are a go, Ezekiel One. Repeat, you are a go.”
Savić and Lucid had spent weeks mapping out every detail of this mission. Getting the timeline worked out. Lining up the vehicles and heavy equipment. Researching the manmade lake’s intake structures and access roads. Getting his men trained to carry out land and aquatic assignments.
Savić knew similar operations were underway at water supplies all across the United States. But he’d been walled off from learning any details about those missions.
No matter. New York was the big kahuna. And he was running th
is operation.
The goal was simple: Prepare this reservoir for delivery of the strain.
“Bison Team leader, do you copy?” Savić called out on his comms.
“Roger that, Ezekiel One. Bison Team is in position.”
“We are go, Bison Team. Light her up!”
He’d picked the team names himself. The European bison was Belarus’s national animal. Hunted to extinction, just like the Americans would soon be.
He switched to the next frequency. “Scorpion Team, you are go. Confirm.”
“Scorpion Team reads you, Ezekiel One. My men are fanning out.”
Savić scanned the hillsides with his binoculars. It took less than two minutes for the first glimmers of orange flames to appear along the southern and western rims of the reservoir. The gasoline and fire accelerant his team had added to the already dry underbrush in the past hour began to light up the forest like a tinderbox.
Yuri Groza, his red-faced underling and comm chief, sat across from him in the front seat of the repurposed fire engine. Groza checked the airwaves for a distress call. Budget cuts had reduced the number of conservation officers and game wardens who monitor the state's reservoirs. The ones who remained were full-fledged police officers equipped with radios, firearms, and other equipment.
“They spotted the fires,” Groza said, lifting the headset from his left ear. “Call’s gone out to the local fire departments.”
“That’s our cue.”
Savić flicked on the siren and directed the men sitting in the extended cab just behind them to put on their helmets and gear. Their wildland fire engine, smaller and more rugged than a standard fire truck, was built to withstand difficult terrain. They roared out of their hiding spot, leading a convoy of four tanker trucks right on their tail. Each water tender, as the Americans called them, carried 2,000 gallons of water, far more than a fire truck.
He did not know what kind of biological agent was added to the water in the tanker trucks. All he knew was that he and his men had received vaccinations and were safe.
He switched to the third channel on his comms. “Dragonfly Team, stand by, we’re minutes away.”