“Damn,” Bernbach said aloud. Bernbach sent a return text to Billings that read: “Interesting. Thanks. Do you know her?” Billings’ responding text said, “No.”
Moving from the blog to the rest of the website, he noticed Valerie was giving the keynote address at a political science conference in New York City on Tuesday. After he checked his calendar, he called his assistant, whose job depended on being available 24/7. “I need a meeting with Rakesh Jain and his wife this Tuesday or Wednesday in the city,” he barked. “Be sure his wife, Valerie Williams, will be there.”
Chapter 5
Monday morning, Eva was up ahead of Dan as usual, putting out yogurt, fruit and granola for breakfast and enjoying some quiet time with her coffee by the pool. As usual, she was dressed in something sexy she threw on for breakfast. She had this thing about not starting the day in her robe or nightgown. It helped her kickstart her morning and Dan’s as well. Today, she was wearing a short white coverup with a handkerchief hem and an open crocheted bodice, which she wore without a bikini or anything else.
As Dan and Eva were finishing their breakfast by the pool, Dan received a text on his phone. He said, “It’s from Scott Perkins. Li thinks she may have left the supplemental battery pack for her cellphone here on Saturday in her pool bag. Maybe outside. She’s leaving town later today and needs it. Have you seen it?”
“That’s probably the bag I noticed out by the pool this morning when I was making coffee,” Eva said, standing and stepping over to the bag. “It’s right here. Let me look. Yep, it’s in the bag, along with her little black bikini. Can’t believe she forgot this. How does she want to get it back?”
“She can swing by here this morning and pick it up if you’ll be here,” said Dan.
“Yeah, that’ll work,” said Eva. “It’s Monday and I’m on my usual schedule. Tell him to have her text me when she gets here, and I’ll open the gate.”
Dan returned the text to Scott and drank the rest of his coffee.
“Li was quite something on Saturday,” Eva said. “Quite a switch from the first party she and Scott came to when she spent most of the time covered up in a tee shirt.”
Dan agreed, then stood and said, “Sorry to leave sooner than normal for a Monday, but I have to get to the airport for my flight to New York. I’ll be back about 7:00 p.m. tomorrow. I have an important meeting with Rakesh on Thursday, although we may have to move it to Friday. Hope you have a great day in the studio. You look beautiful, by the way.”
She kissed him. “I should be home all day and in town all week. Good luck on your trip. See you tomorrow night for dinner,” she said.
She didn’t relish having Li stop by. Eva loved mornings. She was always in a good mood as she looked forward to her day. After Dan left for the office, she’d usually walk around her pool and back yard with another cup of coffee, enjoying the early-morning sun and absorbing the world around her. She’d do her meditation and swim a dozen or two laps in the pool. Three days a week she’d ride the Peloton and do Pilates or weight training. After that, she’d make some calls and scan her favorite news sources online, maybe even pick some wildflowers in the garden. She’d also think, just think. After a shower inside or out, she’d be in her studio, ready to create by 10:00 or 10:30.
She’d have to interrupt that routine today to deal with Li, but hopefully just for a while. Much as she disliked the interruption, she had to admit she was curious about what made Li tick.
No telling when Li will show up, Eva thought as she pulled off her coverup and dove into the still-heated pool. After 15 minutes of aggressive swimming, she stepped to the outdoor pool shower, turned it on and moved under the warm water. Seven minutes later she was out, partially drying her stylish layered hair in the master bathroom. No makeup on Mondays. In her closet, she pulled on a pair of soft white cotton beach pants with a drawstring waist and added a bright pink semi-sheer long-sleeved top. She had several variations of her Monday outfits, for warm weather and cold—all involving some combination of comfy pants and a sexy top, always with nothing underneath. If it was too cold, she replaced the summer tops with an open mesh sweater or a zip-up sweatshirt and traded the shorts for sweats or tights. But the idea was the same—casual, comfortable and sexy, on her terms—and it helped make her Mondays happy. No reason to change things for Li, she thought.
The gate control alert for the drive gate vibrated on Eva’s Apple Watch when she was back in the garden. Picking up her iPhone, she used the app to view the gate area cameras. She pressed Open to let Li through the gate. Eva met Li as she parked her black Honda Accord in the motor court. Li got out and gave Eva a perfunctory hug, glancing at her barely camouflaged breasts through her pink top. In stark contrast to her outfits at Saturday’s party, Li was dressed conservatively for work in black slacks, a silk shirt with a black and white print and black pumps with no heels.
As they walked through the house toward the kitchen, Li babbled on. “I am so sorry to bother you with this,” she said. “I normally don’t carry this backup battery with me on social occasions, but my phone was low on juice and I didn’t have a chance to charge it before we came over. We really enjoyed the party. I hope I wasn’t too much for everybody. I was just trying to show I could do a better job at joining the fun than I did at the first party you invited us to.”
“You were great,” Eva said, without elaborating. She picked up Li’s bag on the kitchen counter and handed it to her. “Here you go. Your bikini’s in there too, along with a scarf I hope is yours.”
Li took the bag and looked through it. “All mine,” she said, holding up the battery pack with a smile. Looking around, she said, “This is an amazing place. Did you say your studio is here too?”
“Thanks. Yes, my studio is in the building beyond the pool, over there,” she said, pointing. “One of our guest suites is in the same building. You’ve had the house tour, I assume.”
“No, I’ve seen the great room, the kitchen and the pool, but that’s it,” Li said. “I’d love to see more sometime.”
“I need to do some work in my studio, but if you have time, we can do a mini-tour right now and follow up with a longer tour later,” Eva said. Li nodded favorably.
Eva said, “This house is smaller than you might think. Big picture in terms of layout, the master bedroom suite is over there, and the three-car garage is through this door, right off the kitchen and utility room. There are two guest suites over there on the other side of the great room and that open hallway door leads to Dan’s study. It has a nice view of the pool and the back yard.” Walking outside to the pool area, she said, “Let me show you my studio. This was a guest house when we bought this place. We reconfigured the layout and added my studio space the first year we were here.” Li followed along, carrying the bag she had forgotten on Saturday.
“Do you spend a lot of time working from home?” Li asked?
“It depends,” Eva said. When I’m in town, like today, I’m in here a lot. But I do more traveling than I’d like—mostly to gallery shows of my work, but also to work with my software team now that I’m really getting into AI and VR.”
“Wow!” Li said as they stepped into the first room of Eva’s studio. The space had white walls with dark grey matte tile floors, ten-foot windows and hanging movable panels that could be used to configure display space. “This is amazing! So much glass and the view of the property is beautiful.” Gesturing toward four large color prints on the back wall, she asked, “Are these your work?”
“Yes,” Eva said, smiling. She explained how she collaborated with her AI to create the prints.
Walking into a second darkened room devoid of any windows, Eva said, “This is where I do my computer work, create multi-media installations and assess how my art looks in different lighting. Although I have most of my museum work reproduced professionally, I have two wide-aspect high res printers. The ceiling has six 4K projectors. I can even control the temperature color of the LED lights.” She glanced at Li,
who stood staring with her mouth ajar. Eva added, “There’s a bathroom for me through this door, and the guest suite is just through that door over there. There’s also some well-needed storage next to the guest suite. Let’s go back to the main house. I want to show you our master bedroom before you go.”
As they walked back to the house, Li said, “I had no idea you were using such advanced technology in your art. It probably shows my own ignorance, but when I hear digital art, I think about someone editing and enlarging photos on a computer and printing them out on a printer.”
“You’re not alone,” Eva said. “The field has come a long way since I graduated, and the technology is really accelerating. I have a software company run by one of my CMU classmates that’s doing some amazing things.”
“Is your software company here in Austin?” Li asked.
“Eva said, “No. Pittsburgh. There’s a lot of good talent up there.”
Li said, “What is the name of your software company?”
Eva said, “It’s called Daneva Technologies.”
“Talking about technology reminds me of a question,” Li said. “My company is looking for a good password app. Do you use one of those cloud-based vaults to keep track of all your passwords?”
Eva said, “I do. I use PassPass, which I like. My software company uses the business version. I don’t know what Dan’s company uses.”
Eva led Li into the master bedroom from the great room. The bedroom had high windows above a rosewood slab bed with built in cantilevered night tables on the sides. A huge color block painting hung over the bed. On the opposite wall, 10-foot tall windows overlooked the pool and gardens. “The bedroom itself isn’t big,” Eva said, “but the bathroom and dressing area more than make up for that.”
They stepped through an uncased opening onto a long walkway surfaced with dark grey matte stone. The walkway was about five feet wide. The left side was a long wall of built-in sinks, cabinets and dressers. The walls and cabinets were white. The ceiling was wood bleached pale grey. The stone countertops matched the dark grey floor. Between the two main sink cabinets, doors led to huge his and hers walk-in closets and separate toilet rooms, hers with a bidet. On the right side of the walkway, the floor level dropped down one step to long area about six feet wide paralleling the walkway and containing, in sequence, a large soaking tub, a shower completely surrounded in glass and a workout area containing a Peloton bike, a Hydrow indoor rowing machine, some hand weights and a glass exterior door. Grey baskets of phalaenopsis orchids filled with sprays of purple flowers hung along the row of windows.
“Wow!” Li said again. “Are those orchids real?”
“They are. I love flowers. We rotate them every month or two, so we always have some blooming. It’s one of my splurges.”
The windows overlooked a landscaped terrace set under a weathered-wood pergola covered in wisteria. Partially paved with huge rectangular limestone slabs, the terrace included an outside shower and a tall, multi-level stainless steel sculpture powered by wind and water. Beyond the pergola, the terrace garden flowed into the back yard.
“The prior owners had curtains on these windows, but we took them out because they ruined the ambiance,” Eva said. “Fortunately, you can’t see this area from the pool or my studio. Wildflower beds and flowering trees help keep this area off limits. We also put Smartglass in the shower windows that face outside, just in case we need to shower when the gardeners are around.”
Li stared at Eva, saying nothing. Eva was on a roll. She said, “I know you have to go, but let me show you one more thing.” She pointed to a huge black and white photograph of Yosemite’s Half Dome on the wall at the end of the bathroom hall. The photograph was displayed on an 80” flat screen mounted vertically in portrait mode. She pulled a handheld controller off the hallway wall and touched two numbers. The picture instantly changed to a full-sized photo of Eva standing topless in tight blue jeans and sandals on Fifth Avenue in New York. Her arms were folded under her breasts. She was looking up and away, her face filled with a mixture of self-confidence and defiance.
“What a fantastic photograph,” Li said. “How did you get that? Who took it?”
“This is actually another one of my projects,” Eva explained. “My image is a self-portrait I took in my studio here. The New York City shot is a high-res photo I licensed from Getty Images. I melded the two with some pixel-level image editing software my company developed. I got the idea for the New York venue from a book called Uncovered that was published in 2009 by a talented photographer named Jordan Matter.
“You mean it’s like a green screen they use on TV?” Li asked.
Eva laughed. “Conceptually, yes. But it’s a lot more sophisticated than a green screen. This was produced by separately editing and replacing millions of pixels in two very high-resolution digital photographs. Because of the detail required, we used AI-directed editing. My company is still working on this technology, but the current quality is pretty good.”
What Eva didn’t say was this work had brought her company an investment from In-Q-Tel, effectively the venture capital arm of the CIA, and two contracts with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to leverage the AI editing capabilities to video and to the three-dimensional datapoint and skin textural analysis tools used in facial recognition systems. The work had also brought considerable interest from both the CIA and the NSA. The video and facial recognition capabilities were what really excited them, or concerned them, or both. That and the ability to make the editing possible or impossible to detect. In an age of fake news and state-sponsored lies, the technology was both dangerous and valuable.
“We did a series of these topless shots in different venues,” Eva said. She smiled to herself as she remembered how Daneva Tech had used the topless photos of her in demonstrating the editing technology to some of their early backers. Steve Cole had said it would increase their interest. He was right, whether they were male or female. The photos had made for some interesting conversations when she started showing up at the meetings. Not sure we could get away with that today, she thought.
Li walked closer to the screen and peered at the photo, still clutching her bag in front of her. “That’s an 80” OLED 4K display,” Eva said. “We also use this screen to display art and photos from some of our favorite vacations, like the Yosemite photo you just saw.” Seizing the opportunity to wrap up the tour, Eva said, “Anyway, we need to get you moving.”
Eva ushered Li toward the front door, thanking her for stopping by and giving her a quick farewell hug at her car. Eva thought she looked shell-shocked. “Thanks,” Li said simply as she closed the car door and started the engine.
◆◆◆
At the first stop light she hit after leaving Eva’s house, Li picked up a burner phone from the seat and called a number. When a man’s voice answered, “Li said, “Clear” and terminated the call. Then she reached into the bag she had retrieved from Eva and pulled out her backup battery. She simultaneously pressed two hidden buttons on each side of the small power brick, provoking two chirps and two green LED flashes from the device. Satisfied, she placed the brick on top of the bag and drove on when the light turned green.
On her way to Houston, the brick started uploading its cache of encrypted data to a secure global server that automatically downloaded a copy to an elite team at the Ministry for State Security outside of Beijing, China. The four gigabytes of information included data from a scan of the Johnson’s home networks, the modems, routers and firewalls used, the IP addresses of exposed devices, and the results of initial level network penetration tests. To the enjoyment of the Chinese agents reviewing the feeds, the digitized information also included some video clips from what appeared to be an American swimming pool party with topless women, including a very sexy Chinese lady with excellent taste in swimwear.
The team in Beijing would compare the information to the data and video recordings they had received 36 hours earlier from a drone flight
in Austin, Texas. Although the drone had crashed, it had sent gigabytes of videos and other data before its batteries were disconnected.
When Li reached her office in Houston, she sent an encrypted message that said: “MagicBox data sent today on JPAC home scan and party. Discovered new digital editing software by Daneva Technologies in Pittsburgh. Watch video from today. Suggest flagging for Tech Group.”
Chapter 6
Glad to be rid of Li, Eva decided to change her clothes for something cooler. The day was turning out to be warmer than she’d expected. In the master bedroom, she pulled on tan cotton short shorts and a fluorescent orange sleeveless vest. She put her Apple Watch in the pocket of her shorts, slipped her iPhone in her waistband and tied the soft cotton top with a single string between her breasts, leaving a few inches of tanned skin from her neck to her navel. One of her girlfriends once told her the top looked like a Home Depot safety vest. Home Depot should be so lucky, Eva thought, looking in the mirror.
She had a full day planned for her studio. She wanted to collaborate with her AI on a new collection of virtual flowers and do some test prints. She needed to decide on the pieces for a museum exhibition in Dallas and solo gallery shows in San Francisco and D.C. Since Dan was out of town for the night, she hoped to spend the evening working with some new ideas she had for a VR art exhibition later in the year.
As Eva walked out of the master bedroom into the great room, her world changed in a heartbeat.
A man’s hand reached around her, clamping her mouth shut. At the same time, his other arm wrapped across her chest and pulled her arms tight against her body. In seconds, she was immobilized, unable to scream and barely able to breathe. “Don’t move!” the man said. “Don’t scream and don’t try to remove my mask! The less you know about me, the safer you and your husband will be. I don’t want to hurt you, but I can, and I will if I have to! I’m armed, but I am only here to get some information. If you cooperate, you’ll be fine, and I’ll leave you alone. If you understand me and you’re willing to cooperate, nod ‘yes’.”
Intentional Consequences Page 4
