The Tau Directive

by Tomas Black

  He moved over to the body and felt for a pulse to be sure. Charles’ head flopped to one side. His neck had been snapped clean through. Drum examined the rest of the body, which was now stiff from rigor mortis. The rigor in the body coincided nicely with Sahil’s visitor. It was safe to assume that whoever had kicked in the door had probably killed Charles. But why? Moneylenders rarely kill their clients.

  Drum noticed something gripped in Charles’ right hand. He prised open the clenched fingers and removed a small strip of paper. He moved to the window and unravelled it to reveal a long string of printed characters and digits. On the back were twelve seemingly unrelated words. He neatly folded the paper and placed it inside his wallet and searched the rest of the room.

  There wasn’t much to search. An old bookcase stood in one corner with a few dog-eared books accumulating dust. A small dining table occupied the rest of the room and there were a few ornaments. Nothing appeared out of place or damaged. Whoever had broken in wasn’t looking for anything.

  Drum moved to the bedroom. In the corner was a set of ropes and safety harnesses laid out for inspection. Charles was looking for something. He cast an eye over the gear and noticed a carabiner missing from one set. What was Charles looking for? He walked back to the lounge. He stood there for a moment contemplating the fate of his friend and comrade of many years. Soldiers don’t jog Drummond, they fucking run! He found it ironic that, having survived several theatres of war, someone had killed Charles in the safety of his own home. And whoever had killed him had carried out the act with great skill. Someone with military training and not his first execution. There was nothing more to do than call the police.

  He pulled out his phone and was about to dial when his phone buzzed. The number was unknown.

  “Drummond.”

  “Hi, Ben.”

  Drum didn’t recognise the woman’s voice, but it was soft and melodious. “Hi, who am I speaking to?”

  There was a pause on the line. “You don’t know me—we haven’t met. You need to leave the apartment immediately.”

  “Who is this?”

  “You’re out of time. The police are on their way and they must not associate you with the murder of Charles Renshaw.”

  Before he could reply, the caller hung up.

  He hurried to the entrance of the flat. Sahil and his brother had vanished. He heard the urgent squeal of tyres outside. He moved through the communal area to one of the windows and looked down. The caller had been right. Several police cars had pulled up outside the entrance to the block and officers were piling into the building. They would have blocked the elevators. He hastily sought the stairwell and began running down. He stopped when he heard the clomp of feet on the stairs coming up from below.

  Drum sprinted back up the stairs and ran into the flat. He had been set up. If he didn’t get out of the building, he would become the prime suspect in a murder investigation. He grabbed a set of climbing gear from the bedroom and hurried through to the lounge and out onto the balcony. It was a sunny day, but a chill wind whipped across the building. He hastily pulled on the harness and attached a series of carabiners. He looked over the edge of the balcony. It was a sheer drop to a small courtyard that backed directly onto the canal. The good news was there were no police at the back of the building; the bad news was he didn’t think he had enough rope.

  The balconies of the building alternated between floors. The next balcony was two floors down. Drum estimated a drop of six metres. He had no choice. He coiled the rope and slung it around his shoulders.

  He could hear voices outside the flat. He climbed over the top of the balcony and lowered himself gently over the side, hanging from the balustrade by his fingertips. He peered down and could just make out the next balcony below him. There were voices from the lounge. He dropped.

  The wind struck him as the cladding of the building raced past. He saw the top of the window of the next apartment and waited. He glimpsed the edge of the next balcony and lunged forward, scrambling to grasp onto the balustrade. One hand found purchase and broke his fall. He felt a sharp, stabbing pain in his shoulder as he hung there, the wind threatening to rip him off. He swung around and grasped hold with his other hand and, with an effort, pulled himself over the top of the railing.

  He straightened and gently rotated his shoulder, making sure it wasn’t dislocated. It was sprained, but functional. There was a tap on the window. An elderly lady in a bright, floral skirt and heavy knitted jumper opened one of the balcony doors and poked her head out.

  “Can I help you, dear?”

  “Safety inspection. Checking all the balconies for unauthorised barbeques.”

  “I see,” she said. “I’ve complained so many times I wasn’t sure if anyone from the council was taking me seriously.”

  Drum smiled. “We take all safety complaints seriously, Mrs …”

  “Dooley. Would you like a cup of tea? Looks dangerous. Come inside, out of the cold.”

  Drum looked down over the edge of the balcony. It was still clear of police, but it wouldn’t be for long. “I’d love to stay, Mrs Dooley, but I can’t hang around. More inspections to make.”

  Drum shook off the coil of rope and secured one end to the balcony balustrade. He completed his rigging and turned to Mrs Dooley, still watching from her lounge. He beckoned to her.

  “Would you be a love and cut the end of the rope when I’m safely on the ground? Save me coming back up.”

  “Of course, dear. You be careful now.”

  Drum leaned out and looked up to check if the coast was clear, then climbed back over the balcony, keeping his belay line taught to stop him falling. He crouched on the balustrade and gave Mrs Dooley a wave before jumping backwards into space. He belayed down to the next balcony and pushed off immediately, falling several more floors, repeating the belay until he had landed safely in the courtyard.

  Drum looked up and waved. Mrs Dooley waved back and after a few minutes, the end of the rope fell to the ground. He gave Mrs Dooley a thumbs up, then quickly gathered up the rope and headed for the back of the courtyard and a gate that took him directly onto the footpath by the canal. He walked for a few minutes until he was sure he was clear of the building, then removed his harness. If his memory served him correctly, it was a short walk along the canal to the Limehouse Basin and the Thames. From there, he’d pick up the Docklands Light Railway and head back into the City.

  He walked briskly, occasionally turning to look behind him. There was no one following. After about five minutes he came to a large set of lock gates and the entrance to the Limehouse Basin, an artificial dock that provided leisure boats and other small working craft safe harbour from the River Thames. A flotilla of small boats, barges and some expensive-looking yachts were moored up in the bright morning sunshine. Expensive apartments and restaurants surrounded the basin. The place had become a playground for the rich and the City workers in the towers of Canary Wharf which loomed up in the distance through the crisp morning air. He sat on the wide beam of a lock gate and dialled Brock.

  “Brock, it’s Drum.”

  “Hey, how did it go with Charles?” said Brock.

  “He’s dead—murdered.”

  There was a long pause on the line. Drum rose and continued his walk to the station. “Still there?”

  “Yeah, yeah. How?”

  “Professional job,” said Drum. “Thought you should know.”

  There was a long silence before Brock answered. “Yeah, yeah. Thanks. Where are you now?”

  “I’m heading back to the Tower,” said Drum.

  “Stop by the market and fill me in,” said Brock, his voice taut with emotion. Brock was going to make someone pay—he just didn’t yet know who. He hung up.

  He made the short walk to the Limehouse DLR station and swiped his travel card to access the platform. The driverless trains ran every few minutes and would take him straight back to Tower Hill. He looked around, checking for surveillance, but could see none. Th
e station was empty at this time in the morning.

  His phone buzzed. It was another unknown number.

  “Drummond.”

  “Hi, Ben.”

  It was the same person who had phoned him at Charles’ flat. “Who is this?”

  “You don’t know me—we haven’t met. I work for Marco Salenko.”

  “Do you have a name?” asked Drum.

  There was a pause. “You can call me Jane.” There was another pause. “Ben, something bad is happening here, something terrible, and we have to stop it.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Professor Kovac

  Professor Andrew Kovac gazed out of the large office window onto an expanse of meadow that ended at the River Cam. Here and there a few sparsely planted poplars struggled to take root in the newly created parkland of the Salenko Systems campus. His summons had not been unexpected.

  “Looks like your Populus alba is struggling a bit, Marco. Probably too wet this close to the river.”

  Marco Salenko rose from his desk and walked to the window and contemplated the scene. A thick-set man with a crop of short dark hair, he stood a head shorter than Kovac. “I’ve been told we’re missing two of the keystones, Andrew. Is this your doing?”

  Kovac turned to his colleague, his face impassive. “Why would you think that?”

  Salenko walked back to his desk with a look of frustration on his face. “To delay the IPO, of course.” He slumped back in his chair. “You realise that if the IPO doesn’t go through, all the work we’ve done here goes down the toilet. We’ll lose our investors; no investors, no money. That’s how things work in the real world.”

  Kovac continued to take in the scene. He admired the effort it had taken to turn a piece of derelict land on the outskirts of Cambridge into a green and pleasant park in such a short time. He recognised a few of his students making their way across the campus. Salenko made good use of the talent pool of the nearby university, and the students were only too happy to work here to gain whatever experience he offered. His association with the work also helped. Theirs was a symbiotic relationship. But now he wondered if the university selling his research to Salenko had been such a good idea.

  “I appreciate that,” sighed Kovac, “But I think you’re rushing into this. You’re taking unnecessary risks.”

  “You don’t think I’ve come this far by not taking risks? This is not academia, Andrew, where you can sit back for the next ten years and hope for a breakthrough. We have to make progress or this enterprise is finished.”

  Salenko was right, of course. He had also sacrificed to get this far. Even his wife, in the last few days of her illness, had not been enough to stop him from working on the project. It had become an obsession. And now, when he sat all alone in that big empty house, he wondered if it had all been worth it. A thought occurred to him.

  “This is about the group from Kiev,” said Kovac. “They want their money. They’re the ones pressing for the IPO.”

  Salenko shrugged. “Of course.”

  “You should never have got involved with these people.”

  “Don’t be so naive,” said Salenko, gesturing with his arm. “How did you think all of this got financed in the first place? As a startup, we didn’t have the luxury to be picky about where the money came from. And you, as I recall, were only too happy to get involved when we started.”

  It was true. His university funding was ending and, with no promising research papers in the pipeline, all his work would have been shelved. The arrival of Salenko in Cambridge had seemed like an opportunity at the time. Of course, he knew Salenko long before his fame as an entrepreneur. They had both been undergraduates together in Kiev. But that seemed like a lifetime ago. Salenko had been quick to see the commercial potential of his work; unlike the university, which had no qualms about giving his work away. Ever strapped for cash, they were only too willing to embrace a joint enterprise. But he hadn’t reckoned on Salenko’s business partners. They weren’t interested in the science, merely an exit plan so they could cash out.

  “So let me ask you one last time,” continued Salenko. “Have you taken the keystones?”

  Kovac turned away from the window. “I’m telling you, it wasn’t me.”

  “I think you’re not being honest with me.”

  “I don’t think you can preach to me about honesty. We had an agreement. The research for continued access to the project after the IPO. Now I find you have broken that agreement.”

  Salenko absentmindedly shuffled some papers on his desk. “Investors need to see a product that will make them money. They’re not interested in endless research. I had to reassure them you wouldn’t impede the rollout of our first system. And you came through. You cracked it, although I don’t know how.”

  “I opened up the code,” said Kovac.

  Salenko looked up. “But we said we wouldn’t do that. It would weaken the controls.”

  “We had no choice, we hit a dead end. Back propagation of the deep learning algorithm had stalled.”

  “What about the change in the activation function?” said Salenko.

  “It had little effect. We moved away from using a sigmoid function to a RELU which helped, but it had little effect on bringing about the convergence of the neural net—even over thousands of iterations. The core AI governing the network was hindering the process. We needed to open it up and get it to evolve beyond its current level.”

  “But you took years to code those core functions,” said Salenko, now standing with some agitation. “You told me they couldn’t be changed—at least not in the timeframe we were looking at.”

  “And that is still true. So I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t. So what did you do?”

  “We forked the code—made a copy and created a Generative Adversarial Network,” said Kovac.

  “You forked the code!” said Salenko, incredulously.

  “We now have two neural networks—one teaching the other. Both are improving, way beyond what we had hoped for, and at an incredible rate. At least they were …”

  Salenko nodded. “Without all three keystones, we can no longer decrypt the code.” He paused. “But we still have control?”

  “Yes,” said Kovac. “We just need the one for control, but the neural nets of each AI remain frozen in their current states until we can retrieve the other two. What do you intend to do?”

  Salenko stood and walked back to the window. “Well, I don’t believe they have just gone missing, so someone has stolen them.”

  “Really,” said Kovac. “Do you intend to call the police?”

  Salenko smiled. “God, no. Our people will look into it. Which reminds me. There’s a security consultant on his way, a guy called Drummond. The press leaks have caused some concern among our investors. He’ll want to talk to all of us I suspect so make yourself available.”

  “Of course,” said Kovac.

  “There is something else,” said Salenko. “I’m not sure if you have heard? I know how you shun the news.”

  “Heard what?”

  “Moretti. She was found dead in her hotel room a few days ago.”

  “How?” said Kovac, a stunned look on his face.

  “Murdered—at least that is what the police are saying.”

  Kovac turned back to the window and stared out. That was Moretti’s problem, he thought. She kept on digging. He wondered if this Drummond would do the same.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Undergraduate

  Jeremy Burnett cycled along the footpath that followed the River Cam as it wound its way through the suburbs of Cambridge and out towards the small village of Fen Wootton, a ride of about thirty minutes past lush meadows and beneath small footbridges, passing the occasional jogger out for a run on a chilly but sunny February evening.

  He liked this ride. It gave him time to think, mostly about Stevie. He’d never met anyone like her before, older, more experienced, cute with a nice smile and a fierce stare. There was something abo
ut her, not just her good looks but something mysterious. He hoped to get to know her better. What had that creep in the coffee shop called her? Svetlana. A Russian name. Perhaps Ukrainian, like Salenko’s men. He wondered why she called herself Stevie? After that meeting, he hadn’t seen her—or she was avoiding him. He hoped not.

  He pulled up beside a gated enclosure, just off the footpath, that marked the rear entrance to the Salenko campus. He’d been excited when he had got the call from Professor Kovac at the start of term. It had always been his dream to work for Salenko; his research here was groundbreaking. And he’d be a part of that. He wheeled his bike up to the gate and pressed a button on the intercom.

  “Jeremy Burnett for Professor Kovac.” He looked up at the security camera atop the fence.

  “Welcome, Mr Burnett. You’re on this evening’s list. Please report to security.”

  The gate buzzed open, and he wheeled his bike into an enclosed area and waited for the facial recognition cameras to do their work. A ‘Man Trap’ someone had called it, a security device to prevent someone from rushing the gate. It was a legacy system left over from its days as a Ministry Of Defence facility, or so the rumour went. The second gate clicked open, and he was now free to enter the campus.

  The campus had been meticulously laid out in a geometric design with lush green spaces and newly planted trees. Neat flower beds lined the brick-paved paths and the first daffodils of spring had just sprouted. Soon the campus would be a riot of colour from the many varieties of plants, carefully selected by a horde of gardeners. A small amphitheatre marked the centre of the campus where students and researchers could sit and relax in the sunshine and exchange ideas. Jeremy found it hard to believe that, just a short time ago, this had been a piece of derelict land.