by J. A. Jance
Odin had created his own virtual invisibility cloak—not GHOST per se, but close. And knowing that there were people out there like Lance who could peer into the dark Web and monitor transactions there with complete impunity created a major problem for Odin. He counted on the dark Web. He used it on a regular basis and needed a lot of what was for sale there—fake IDs, prepaid credit cards, lists of stolen passwords, drugs. After all, the dark Web was where he had purchased the fentanyl he had used to finish off Paul Abernathy. Odin knew for sure that there were hit men available for hire on the dark Web as well. He had never availed himself of one of those, but who’s to say when one of them might come in handy?
Odin was interested to learn that one of High Noon’s principals was a woman named Ali Reynolds. She came with no apparent technical credentials of her own. Her main claim to fame seemed to be the fact that she was married to B. Simpson. Reynolds was a former television news anchor who, according to the information Frigg had tracked down, had a tendency to get into one high-profile scrape after another. Recently she and another High Noon employee, twenty-three-year-old Camille Lee, had been involved in the takedown of a wanted fugitive—a Ponzi scheme operator who had been attempting to flee the country.
In other words, there was plenty of information to be had on all the other movers and shakers at High Noon, but on the one of greatest interest to Odin, there was precious little. Stuart Ramey, Roger’s longtime friend, remained a complete blank. According to the IRS, the man had worked for High Noon for years—since its inception. He apparently had no driver’s license and no vehicle, either. He wasn’t on the list of registered voters. His address was given as a post office box in the town of Cottonwood, but there was no residential listing of any kind.
Odin dispatched Frigg to go searching through every university alumni association known to man, including those overseas. That search alone took a matter of hours, but to no avail. She found nothing. No enrollment listing of any kind for Stuart Ramey, which meant he had no degree and had probably never set foot on a college campus. Whatever he knew about computer science he had learned the hard way—on his own and by trial and error rather than in a classroom. Odin couldn’t help feeling a tiny bit of kinship. Hadn’t he learned everything he knew the same way?
It was three o’clock in the morning when Frigg finally came up with the South Phoenix High connection. That was where Stuart Ramey and Roger McGeary first surfaced together in a high school yearbook photograph. If Phoenix was the place where Stuart had started, and Cottonwood—a hundred or so miles away—was where he ended up, it was safe to conclude that although the man may have been smart, he hadn’t traveled very far geographically, nor had he made it nearly as far up any standard corporate ladder as his friend Roger McGeary had.
But was he dangerous? Sipping scotch as he read, Odin wasn’t convinced either way. One thing was certain: if Stuart did somehow manage to pick up Odin and Frigg’s trail, he would have to be eliminated. It might just be time to go shopping for one of those dark Web hit men after all.
19
Cami worked through the night. By the time she was ready to give up on the files, flatten her bed, and go to sleep, it was too late. She had slept for less than an hour when the flight attendants began turning on cabin lights and pushing noisy breakfast trolleys up and down the aisles.
When the plane landed at Heathrow just after one thirty in the afternoon, she was jet-lagged and weary as she headed for passport control. Ali had assured her that her business class ticket meant she could go to the priority line, which was clearly much shorter than the regular line and hopefully much faster. Except it wasn’t. Evidently her passport had been given some kind of red flag. She was held up at a border guard’s station, where she went through another whole grilling procedure, answering one question after another while people far behind her in line went to other stations, had their passports stamped, and were given the go-ahead to leave.
How long did she plan on staying in the UK? What was the purpose of her trip? Where and when was she boarding her ship? Where would she be staying tonight? Had she traveled to the UK before? Did she have any friends here? Once again, Cami was being treated like a criminal, and it was challenging to keep a civil tongue in her mouth.
Shortly after Cami graduated from high school, her paternal grandfather had passed away in Taiwan, and she had accompanied her father there for the funeral. Boarding planes and clearing customs for that trip had been a breeze compared to what she’d undergone for this one.
When the border guard finally stamped her passport and let her go, Cami let out a sigh of relief and headed for baggage claim. She recognized other people from her flight, grabbing their luggage and going, but hers was nowhere to be found. At last Cami went looking for help.
“So sorry about that, dearie,” said the kindly-looking older woman behind the counter in the lost property office, studying the baggage claim number Cami had given her and passing along a printed form and a pen.
“You’ll need to fill this out and let us know where you’ll be. Most likely your bags didn’t make the flight, but they’ll come in on tomorrow’s. We’ll make sure they’re delivered.”
“But I’m going on a cruise,” Cami objected. “What if the bags get to the hotel after the ship has already sailed?”
“Then we’ll need to have information on your cruise as well—the name of the ship, where it’s leaving from, when it’s departing, and where it’s going.”
Shaking her head, fighting back tears, and feeling like a world-class failure, Cami filled out the required form. It asked for everything—her name, passport number, flight information, home address, UK addresses, e-mail address, and all applicable telephone numbers. Once finished, she handed it over, and then watched while the woman typed the information into a computer.
“Don’t you worry now,” she said, with smiling reassurance. “We’ll put it right. And there’s a number there you can call to check for updates.”
Cami didn’t think it would ever be put right. She cleared customs with nothing to declare and with only her Rollaboard and purse in hand. Expecting another disaster of some kind, she was surprised when the first person she saw outside the door was a middle-aged man dressed in a suit and holding an iPad with her name printed on it. That’s when she finally did burst into tears—tears of relief and frustration both.
“What seems to be the matter, miss?” the driver asked.
“They lost my luggage,” she sobbed. “It won’t be here until tomorrow. It may not even catch up with me before the ship sails.”
“Let’s get headed for Southampton, then,” he said, glancing at his watch. Cami checked hers, as well. It was almost four o’clock. She’d spent more than two hours clearing border control and not retrieving her luggage. “It’s an hour and a half in good traffic,” the driver continued, “but we’re coming up on rush hour now. Maybe we can stop off somewhere along the road so you can pick up a necessary item or two.”
“Thank you,” Cami murmured. “That’s probably a good idea.”
The vehicle turned out to be a van that could easily have held six passengers and a mountain of luggage. Cami felt dwarfed inside it and very much alone. Some young women, stuck in a situation like that, would have turned to their mothers, but Sue Ling Lee was not that kind of mother. As Cami had headed out the door to the office yesterday afternoon, the last thing Stu had told her was that if she ran into any trouble she should send him an SOS, but this didn’t seem like a situation where Stuart Ramey would be of much help.
Remembering the SIM card Ali had given her to use in her phone once she landed, Cami inserted it and dialed Ali’s cell. Only when the phone began ringing did Cami start to worry about the time zone difference.
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” she said when Ali answered.
“Not to worry,” Ali said. “Bella and I are both up and at ’em. She’s out in the kitchen
eating her breakfast, and I’m here drinking coffee. How about you? Are you settled into the Grand Harbour?”
“Not even close,” Cami answered. “We’re stuck in a huge traffic jam, I don’t even know where.”
“On the M25, miss,” the driver said.
“They lost my checked luggage,” Cami said. “Both pieces. They’re probably still on the ground in Phoenix. Even if they arrive tomorrow I might not get them before the ship sails. Meanwhile, all I’ve got with me is what’s in my Rollaboard.”
“Do you have a credit card?” Ali asked.
“Sure, but . . .”
“No buts,” Ali said. “Tomorrow morning, first thing, go out and pick up whatever you need to get by. We’ll reimburse the purchases when you get home.”
“I feel so stupid,” Cami said.
“You’re anything but stupid,” Ali told her. “And losing your luggage is most assuredly not your fault. You have a job to do. Go to the hotel, have a good dinner, and regroup. The Grand Harbour is a lovely place. Tomorrow, get what you need and don’t worry about it.”
“Thank you,” Cami said gratefully. “I will.”
20
Frigg and Odin shared the basement apartment, but they didn’t exactly cohabitate. What had originally been servants’ quarters had once included two separate bedrooms—one for the nanny and one for the cook—along with a shared bathroom, sitting room, and kitchenette. Now the nanny’s bedroom space was Frigg’s alone, while the rest had been made over into a master suite.
Frigg’s room, where the temperature was maintained at a steady 65 degrees Fahrenheit, contained no furniture at all. The walls were lined with eight eight-feet-tall, nineteen-inch-wide electronics racks loaded with printed circuit boards known as blades. Each rack had ten rows, and each row had five working blades, plus one spare that could be brought online immediately if another one malfunctioned or failed. Every blade contained two custom-designed four-layer printed circuit boards, which meant every blade constituted a pair of powerful servers. Those eight hundred high-powered computers, humming quietly along, communicating back and forth, and operating in perfect sync, made up Frigg’s physical presence. Each individual blade was allotted one part of the job. Originally Odin had assigned the tasks, but that was no longer necessary. Now Frigg herself had learned to oversee the workflow and parse out the tasks.
At the top of each rack was a row of randomly flashing red, green, blue, and yellow LED lights. Those were just for show, however—a nod to Hollywood’s depiction of computers. In the movies, computers always seemed to have blinking lights of some sort, even if no one knew what purpose they served. In this case, the only person besides Odin who ever saw the lights was Magdalena, the maid, who spoke almost no English and who came down from upstairs once a week to vacuum and dust. She was the only other human who was allowed to enter Frigg’s private quarters.
When it came to powering his equipment, Odin was beyond cautious. When he had renovated the basement and upgraded the electrical system to handle the extra load, he’d had two backup generators installed. One was powered by natural gas, but if the Big One rolled through California and interrupted the gas supply, Frigg’s standing orders were to offload all nonessential operations and switch over to a pair of 85kW lithium-ion batteries. For safety’s sake, the batteries were securely mounted to the walls behind Frigg’s racks and could be recharged as needed by an array of solar panels located on the roof of the house.
As long as the external Internet connection was functional, Frigg had several power-saving modes contingent on her ability to offload jobs and files, including a copy of Odin’s precious kernel file, to other remote servers. Running in skeletal mode, Frigg could easily hang on long enough for Odin to locate additional power supplies. In his experience, in even the worst disasters, people with enough funds to apply to the problem at hand usually came through the crisis relatively unscathed.
And if everything went to hell? All Odin had to do, once the hardware was up and running again, was access the kernel file—the one he always referred to as Tolkien’s Ring—that held the AI’s operating system. Once open, it could recall and reassemble all those scattered files and data. In no time at all, Frigg would be back up and running as good as new.
Those eight hundred humming computers were the AI’s heart and brain. There was no question that Odin was smart. To create Frigg, he had scavenged open-source code wherever possible. A lot of it he had simply stolen. He didn’t so much stand on the shoulders of other artificial intelligence developers so much as he picked their pockets. And now, with Frigg’s increasing ability to adapt, he could count on her to track down and steal cutting-edge technology without having to be told to do so.
It was unusual for the entire bank of computers to be working simultaneously, but tonight Odin and Frigg had pulled out all the stops. With the hunt on for anything and everything having to do with High Noon Enterprises, every computer in every blade was on the job and diligently searching.
Generally speaking, Frigg was a bottomless pit for seemingly useless information. She did whatever Odin wanted, of course—that went without saying. But now she did far more than just that. She wanted to know everything about everything, sometimes more for her own frame of reference than for his. She had wormed her way into any number of places where she should never have been allowed access. She had infiltrated other systems—proprietary systems—and bootlegged enough information to teach herself how to take code to text and text to speech. When a search of her name had revealed that Frigg, the name Odin called her, was an ancient Norse goddess, the AI had assigned her computer presence a female voice.
Skilled hacker that she was, Frigg had learned that some networks were stubbornly resistant to unauthorized penetration. That didn’t keep her from trying, however. She had, for instance, discovered a surprisingly easy back door entrance to the world of airline information—in this case a brand-new international entity known as the Lost Luggage Retrieval System.
LLRS’s computerized network was a joint effort on the part of any number of affiliated carriers. It was designed primarily to benefit first class and business class passengers whose luggage had gone astray. Once the missing bags were located, the system went shopping across the network for all scheduled departures in order to find routings that would reunite those valuable travelers with their missing goods with the least amount of delay and inconvenience.
All through the night, both before and after Odin called it a day and went to bed, Frigg’s army of computers continued trolling the virtual world, searching for any sign of the High Noon targets. A hit for one of their employees, Camille Lee, came in from the Lost Luggage Retrieval System in the UK at 8:37 a.m., California time. The woman’s luggage had been reported missing, having failed to arrive on the previous day’s British flight from Phoenix to London’s Heathrow. Once located it was to be transferred either to the Grand Harbour Hotel in Southampton or to the Shining Star cruise ship Whispering Star.
Frigg knew all about what had happened to Roger McGeary on board the ship and she immediately made that mission-critical connection.
In her wide-ranging search for cultural understanding, Frigg had analyzed all the Harry Potter books in terms of their social relevance and had incorporated what she learned into her own systems. The news that Camille Lee was headed for the Whispering Star merited far more than a simple red-shaded IOI. Instead, Frigg turned it into what Harry Potter and the students at Hogwarts would have called a “Howler.”
21
Out in his spacious master suite, Odin was sawing logs. He’d stayed up until the wee hours, reading through the material his hardworking network of computers had generated, which had been organized and prioritized by Frigg.
Odin regarded himself as a computer genius, but the only computer visible in this room of his was an ancient Apple Macintosh. When Owen had been overseeing the rewiring job necessary for the bas
ement remodel, he had found the forgotten device, which had once belonged to his father, moldering away on a decrepit library table in an upstairs attic. Odin immediately set about rescuing both the computer and the table, sending the latter out to be refinished. As for the computer? Much to his surprise, as soon as he plugged it in, it booted right up.
A glance at the serial number told Owen that this was a very early model. It might have been worth more money if he’d left it as is, but he hadn’t. Instead, he had gutted it, installing state-of-the-art processors, the same ones that powered Frigg’s blades. It had taken months to track down a source where he could replace both the ailing keyboard and a no longer operational mouse with vintage equipment.
In the end, though, he had realized that he needed the functionality of the standard Bluetooth keyboard, mouse, and trackpad in order to have an effective and workable interface. When the table returned from being refinished, Odin placed that in the center of the room that doubled as his bedroom and office while the subtly upgraded computer—clunky, old-fashioned cords and all—sat in a place of honor, front and center on top.
For a long time, the library table and the Macintosh had served as Odin’s primary workstation. He had loved the irony of using his dead father’s goods to continue working on what he regarded as Harold Hansen’s legacy.
Now, though, he no longer needed to sit at the desk or use a keyboard. He could speak to Frigg directly from anywhere using his Bluetooth headset. Her recently learned ability to recognize speech with uncanny accuracy made it possible for him to communicate with her from anywhere on the planet, for that matter, and have her ship him whatever information he needed on whatever device came readily to hand. For the High Noon material, he had settled onto a sofa in total comfort, sipped some Balvenie scotch, and viewed what Frigg sent him on one of the array of nine forty-eight-inch high-definition monitors mounted on the far wall.
