Jin nodded, wiping the tears away with the back of her hand.
“What do you know about spoofing?” Wutang asked Jin, changing the topic.
“Spoofing?” Jin breathed in and out, still shaking. “You mean like faking an email address?”
“Yeah, but not just with email.” Wutang opened a web definition on his laptop screen and pointed at it:
A spoofing attack is a situation in which a software program masquerades as another by falsifying information to gain an advantage.
Wutang’s Tor browser pinged. He was in the middle of arranging a video chat session with his gamer friend Sheldon. Clicking his browser, he sent the video call to Chen’s workstation so they could use one of the large monitors on the wall.
Chen clicked the monitor on. “We think someone’s spoofing people. And I mean really spoofing people.”
A window sprang open on-screen labeled ‘Sheldon.’
“Really spoofing people?” Jin tried to erase the image of Shen Shi falling into the elevator shaft from her mind. “And by that, you mean…?”
“What he’s talking about,” came a voice from the computer speakers, “is software that doesn’t just masquerade as another computer, but masquerades as a person.”
Wutang pointed one hand at the computer screen, and the other at Jin and Chen. “I’d like to introduce you to Sheldon. This is the guy I was talking about on the ferry, the expert in artificial intelligence.”
“A pleasure to meet you.” The image on the screen stabilized into a thin boyish face with shaggy blond hair above day-old stubble.
Chen nodded hello at the camera on top of the screen. “So you’re the chatbot expert?”
Wutang nodded. “He’s the reigning Loebner prize winner. He was the first guy to beat the Turing test.” He narrowed his eyes. “Or I mean, to write an automated agent that beat the Turing test.”
“Turing test?” Jin asked. “You mean convincing people that a machine they’re chatting with is a person?”
On-screen, Sheldon raised his hands. “It was a watered down version of the test—I only convinced eleven of the thirty judges, and I gamed it by making my chatbot a thirteen-year-old.” When Jin didn’t respond, he added, “I mean, my chatbot didn’t need to be a genius or anything. Bots have been tricking people for a long time, ‘love’ bots in online dating chat rooms have been fooling people into thinking they’re real humans for years.”
“He still beat the Turing test for the first time.” Wutang turned to Jin. “This guy’s famous.”
“So you think someone is spoofing people?” Jin pulled her mind fully into the conversation. “Like identity theft?”
Sheldon’s head nodded on-screen. “Taken to the next level. Like the attacker that does a network analysis of your social media and figures out who your best friends are, then spoofs emails from them to you. Starts a dialog. The best hacking is done through social engineering.”
“Social engineering? You mean using social interactions to extract information?”
Sheldon nodded. “I did a statistical analysis of the data Chen shared with me”—he looked away and fiddled with something on his side—”and it seems you have a sophisticated bot masquerading as a human in those communications. Usually this kind of attack requires human intervention, but in this case, it’s being done by a machine.”
Tables and graphs replaced Sheldon’s image.
Jin looked at Chen, who shrugged. She hadn’t told him he could share the data from Shen Shi’s laptop, but then again, desperate times called for desperate measures. “So you’re saying that someone is using a fancy chatbot to extract information from people?” she asked.
“In a nutshell, yes.” Sheldon paused. “And it’s linked to the identity theft ring Shen Shi investigated for Yamamoto.”
Was that why they were killed? Had he been on the verge of exposing a hacking scheme the PLA used to steal money? But if they were the ones responsible for killing Yamamoto and Shen Shi to hide their plan, why didn’t they kill her? Why kidnap her and ask her questions?
Also, she could imagine the PLA doing away with Chinese citizens, but killing a foreign national like Yamamoto? The head of Japan’s largest financial fund? The repercussions seemed too risky, but maybe—if it was for enough. “How much money are we talking?”
“Impossible to estimate, but a lot.” Sheldon shook his head, then started nodding. “A whole lot.”
“So this chatbot is messaging and emailing people, making them think that it’s a person?”
“Not just that it’s any person, but a specific person,” Sheldon pointed out. “Whoever is running this, they amass enough information about someone to mimic them. And not only through email, I think this thing is making telephone calls, too.”
“It can hold a live telephone conversation?”
Sheldon looked squarely at Jin. “How can you know that you’re not talking to a machine right now?”
That stopped Jin cold. Hard-thumping bass shook the windowpane in the silence, and she looked from Wutang to Chen. Her face flushed hot. “Are you guys messing with me?”
“I’m kidding.” Sheldon’s mouth curled into a clever smile. “But the tech has been evolving for a long time. Machines write most of the breaking new stories we read now. There are even competitions for machine-written fiction and music composition.”
“It’s never been a question of ‘if’ this would happen,” Chen said, “but a question of ‘when’.”
“A few things are kind of odd,” Sheldon added. “It’s strange that this is happening in China, in Chinese. Advanced chatbots usually come in English. No offense, but it’s what all the top geeks speak.”
“The PLA’s cyber division is spending billions on advanced research,” Chen pointed out. “Maybe they leapfrogged. They’re well-funded …”
“Maybe.” Sheldon didn’t look convinced. “But this goes way beyond your soup-and-nuts stuff. And right after the social engineering attack starts, this thing seems to replace all communications from that person.” Sheldon clasped both hands together. “It’s as if the person targeted by the attack disappears”—he pulled his hands apart—“after the machine takes over.”
18
Bear Mountain
Northern Quebec
“Who are you?”
“What?” Jake mumbled.
“Who are you?”
Jake opened his eyes to find the barrel of a gun in his face. He recoiled and banged his head against the tree behind him. Cursing, Jake put his hands down to steady himself. He must have fallen asleep. The grass was wet with dew, the sun already climbing over the clouds on the horizon. Sunrise from the top of Bear Mountain was beautiful, or it would be if he didn’t have a gun pointed at his head.
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” the grizzled voice instructed.
Jake focused on the hollow cavity of the gun muzzle inches from his eyes. He looked up. Blinking to clear his eyes, he focused on the person holding the rifle. The face looked familiar. Relief tingling into his fingertips, he realized that it was Max Lefevre holding the gun on him. Sean worked with Max. They’d been introduced a few times. Why hadn’t Sean just said so?
Jake recognized his own rifle, the one the pilot gave him, slung across Max’s back. Jake hadn’t bothered to load it. The shells were in his backpack.
“Max, it’s me, Jake O’Connell. I’m Sean Womack’s friend. He sent me to find you.”
“O’Connell?” Max moved the rifle barrel an inch closer to Jake’s forehead. “How did you find me?” Spit flew out of Max’s mouth, his arm holding the gun shook. “You got twenty seconds to explain before I blow your head off. Is there some sort of tracking chip in me?”
When Jake didn’t respond right away, Max pushed the muzzle into his forehead and yelled, “Tell me!”
“Sean sent me a map.”
The veins in Max’s neck flared. “Merde,” he muttered, shaking his head.
“We’ve met before,” Jake adde
d. “A few times. That’s why Sean sent me.”
“He’s dead.”
“I know he’s dead.”
The creases in Max’s frown deepened, sweat glistening. “You said we met before.” His jaw muscles rippled as he clenched his teeth. “Where?”
Jake squirmed in the wet grass. “At the…” He froze. Where the hell had he met Max? “We met at Bluebridge, when Sean showed me around, and one night in Guangzhou, in China when I was visiting…”
Recognition flashed in Max’s eyes. He pulled the gun barrel a few inches back from Jake’s head. “So tell me about the nuggets.”
“Nuggets?” Jake’s mind was blank. What the hell did he mean?
“Nuggets,” Max insisted. “You got ten seconds to tell me about nuggets.” He pushed the gun barrel back into Jake’s forehead. “One….two…three…”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Was this some code? And then the light dawned.…remember the nuggets.
“…five…six…”
“You mean when Sean bought those chicken nuggets?” The night in Guangzhou, instead of buying girls drinks, Sean brought boxes of chicken nuggets. Not everyone wanted drinks, but everyone needed food, he’d reasoned. Typical Sean logic.
The barrel lifted away from Jake’s head.
“I was there,” Jake continued in a hurry. “And there was that girl.” What was her name? “Jane?” He closed his eyes and dredged up the memory. “Jin?”
Max hoisted the rifle onto his shoulder. “Jake, right?” He offered a hand to Jake to pull him up. “Yeah, I remember you. From Schenectady?”
▲▼▲
Jake watched Max make his way around the windows of the cabin, peering out into the forest, his rifle still in hand while Jake’s was slung across his back.
“You mind telling me what’s going on?” Jake asked again.
The log cabin was a single open space on the main floor, with bedrooms upstairs accessed from a staircase against one wall. Under that staircase was another set of stairs that led into the basement. It was more of a half-basement, as the cabin was built atop a massive boulder that jutted up out of the ground at ninety degrees, forming a natural rock wall underneath. They’d come into the cabin through the downstairs entrance.
“So you came here alone?” Max checked the sight on his rifle. “Did you tell anyone where you were going?”
“Only my friend Dean, who’s part of the Mohawk tribe in Kahnawake. We can trust him. An old friend, and Sean told me to find him.”
“Maybe Sean wasn’t so smart,” Max growled. “He’s dead.”
Jake took a deep breath.
“Sorry.” Max scowled. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
A wood-burning stove dominated the small main living area, not really more than a room, with large windows on all four walls—one side provided a view of the forest, and the other looked down on the side of the mountain. The tiny kitchen was set against the wall opposite the staircases. The kettle on the stove whistled, and Jake stepped forward and turned off the gas burner.
A large plastic hose connected the stove to the propane tank outside. The place was functional, but hardly up to code. None of the pilot lights worked, so he’d needed to light the burner with a match. Picking up the kettle, he filled the French press he’d already scooped coffee into.
“Tell me your story first.” Max settled onto a daybed next to the window with the mountain view. The main lodge was a small dot against the sparkle of the lake below. “When did you speak to Sean last? What did he tell you?”
“I talked to him a week ago, August 13th. Just before he was killed. That was no accident.”
Max stared out the window. “Of course it was no accident.”
“I said I’d call him back…” Jake clenched his jaw, swallowed hard. “And then it was too late. Donovan gave me a memory key, saying it was something Sean had helped him with. I told Sean, but he didn’t say anything.”
“And what was on the key?”
“Some trading algorithms Donovan was using to skim from other hedge funds. That’s the most Dean and I could get from it.”
“And that was it?”
“No. Sean sent me a package.”
Max turned to look at Jake. “He sent you a package? Like in the mail?”
“Not directly to me. He sent it to our foster care worker from when we were kids, probably so nobody could track it.”
Max returned to looking out the window.
“It had another memory key in it,” Jake continued, “but its contents are encrypted. No idea how to crack it yet.” He stirred the coffee and water in the press, and put on the cover. “Did Sean give you the encryption key for it? Or do you have any idea of what it might be?”
“No and no.” Max wagged his head from side to side. “But it might be good if I could have a look.”
Finally, an inch of headway. “And there was a death certificate for Vidal Viegas in the package. It looked authentic.”
Max exhaled slowly. “I can explain that.” He leaned his rifle against the wall and put Jake’s beside it. With a final glance at the lodge below, he got up and walked toward Jake. “Is that coffee ready?”
“I think so.” Jake pushed the plunger in the coffee press down. “So what’s with the Viegas death certificate?”
“Vidal Viegas died over a year ago,” Max replied without hesitation.
The answer was so straightforward and matter-of-fact that Jake was taken aback. He expected some long-winded explanation, some fudging of the details. Max stared straight at Jake as he spoke. There was no dissembling, no wavering.
“So who was it that I ran into at Bluebridge last week?”
The plunger reached the bottom.
“That wasn’t Viegas you met. Body doubles. Montrose and Viegas used them all the time to attend charity events, show up places they didn’t want to be. They were obsessed with productivity, wanted to automate everything. Do you know how many employees we had at Bluebridge?”
Jake did an off-the-cuff calculation in his head, based on other hedge funds he knew of. “I don’t know, a thousand?”
“Not even a hundred, including administrative staff. Bluebridge has seats on the board of directors of four hundred companies, did over a thousand financing deals last year. Wonder how that’s possible with less than a hundred employees?”
“Four hundred companies?” The information staggered Jake. All hedge funds were secretive, and Bluebridge was in a class all its own, but what Max was telling him didn’t make any sense. “That’s not possible.” Then he remembered how empty Bluebridge headquarters was when he stormed in on Viegas.
“Automation, Jake. Remember that social media company with fifty employees—and five hundred million customers—that sold for ten billion dollars? At Bluebridge we did the same thing, but with financial systems.”
“Like automated trading?”
“More than that. We started using smart messaging responders that wrote emails for us, became a normal part of our internal process. Montrose funded a whole research project in Eastern Europe.”
“What does that have to do with Sean or Vidal?”
“We were already using automated agents to make trades and negotiate simple deals, but Montrose had us start using them to virtually attend board meetings. We weren’t even the first corporation to assign an artificial intelligence to a board of directors. A venture capital firm did it back in 2013. Montrose took it to the next level.”
Jake wasn’t making the connection. “But what does this have to do with Vidal dying?”
“A year ago, in the middle of the CodeCom merger—Bluebridge’s biggest ever—Viegas had a heart attack. Montrose went nuts. Vidal was central to the deal. They told us not to tell anyone. We used the autoresponder to answer all of Vidal’s emails. It copied his style, his habits. Then Montrose used the agent to attend the contract meetings remotely, using it to simulate Vidal’s voice.”
“And nobody found out?” Jake f
ound it hard to believe.
“That place”—Max shook his head—“you know how secretive they are. Nobody ever saw Montrose or Vidal in person. Sean and I were on their core technical team with four other guys. Nobody else knew, at least not at first.
“After the CodeCom merger, Montrose was ecstatic. The digital Viegas was even better than the real one, he said. We all started using the system, creating these digital clones that could attend meetings for us, do emails. Montrose loved it, said he could be in a hundred places at once. Every possible operation inside of Bluebridge became automated when Sean started the autonomous corporation program.”
“Autonomous corporations? You mean, without people?”
Max nodded. “Semi-intelligent software entities operating on darknets. Sean used Montrose’s money to pioneer a program of them.”
Sean could appear reckless to an outside observer, but he was always careful, meticulous. This sounded dangerous. Jake shook his head. “Why would Sean do that for Montrose?”
“Your friend Sean was an idealist. He was working to create WorldCoin, a cryptocurrency that would pay everyone alive on the planet a ‘world citizen’s dividend,’ as he called it.” Max rubbed his face. “He wanted to replace the global currency markets with it, dreamed of a perfectly democratic ‘One World’ autonomous government that would be incorruptible.”
The grandeur of the vision sounded like Sean. Jake smiled sadly. An impossible dream for other people, but for his brilliant friend, just another system to be implemented.
“Sean thought he could generate an $800 billion annual budget,” continued Max, “for social programs by capturing inefficiencies. He saw what we were doing at Bluebridge as a first stepping stone to his grand plan for solving the world’s problems.”
Jake tried to absorb what Max was telling him. “And this was all done at Bluebridge?”
“We took a lot of off-the-shelf tech and wired it together—autonomous trading agents, chatbots, natural language recognition, machine vision. Montrose had more money than God. By the time Sean was finished with Bluebridge, you’d think there were two thousand people working at the company, and Montrose cooked the books to make it look like there were. The shareholders loved it. Everyone knew something odd was going on, but nobody wanted to know the details.”
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