The pieces were fitting together. Tens of billions of dollars were at stake. “So Viegas died and Montrose covered it up? And now Montrose is trying to cover his tracks, take everything for himself?” Greed made sense. From his time on Wall Street, he knew it had no bounds.
“I don’t know for sure. I know that people at Bluebridge started disappearing. At first, Montrose paid the programmers to stay quiet. Then some of them left, one by one. I tried to contact them, but they went off grid.”
“Paid to stay dark?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Maybe worse.” Max went back to the window and peered down at the lodge again. “I don’t know.”
Something dawned on Jake. “You keep talking about Montrose in the past tense.”
“I don’t think you get it. It’s not Montrose who killed Sean, not directly, anyway.”
“Who did then?”
“Not who,” Max said slowly, “but what. Much easier to get a machine to do something illegal than do it yourself. You’re one step removed, like those high frequency traders using machines to front run for them. At the core of Bluebridge is the capitalization system. It figures out what will make the most money for shareholders. It makes trades, hires and fires, negotiates deals.” He paused. “Engages in contracts. And Sean didn’t like the turn his grand dream had taken. He was about to blow the lid off.”
“So you’re saying Sean was killed because he was going to expose Montrose and Bluebridge?”
Max nodded and shrugged at the same time. “I got the hell out of there. We built a bridge from the digital to the real world, from the machine world of bits and bytes to our world of flesh and blood. The Bluebridge network doesn’t see a difference between the two. And it certainly hasn’t been trained in ethics, or not the sort you’d agree with.”
“Can’t we expose Montrose? Shut it down?”
“I still don’t think you understand what’s happened.” Max walked back to the window. “I think Montrose is gone. The only thing left in charge of Bluebridge…is Bluebridge itself.”
Jake stared at Max. Waited for some telltale smirk, a shrug that hinted Max was guessing. But Max stared back at him without blinking or wavering. If anything, his face hardened.
A tingling sensation crept from Jake’s scalp, down his back and out to his fingertips—I’m being hunted by a machine.
19
Bear Mountain
Northern Quebec
“More coffee?” Max asked.
Jake shook his head. “Another cup and I’ll explode.”
Max seemed to drink a cup every ten minutes, his nervous energy filling the room. Jake suspected this wasn’t unusual behavior for him.
He saw why Max had gotten along with Sean. The two of them must have bounced off each other like jackhammers. Sitting up here in the woods, with no network connections, no stream of information—with nothing to do but stare out the window—it had to be driving Max nuts.
And maybe Jake could use that to his advantage.
The funny thing was that in any other situation Jake would have loved the place. Sitting at a breakfast table beside the stove, looking over the green forests leading down to the lake below. He imagined himself up here on vacation with Elle and Anna. The thought was excruciating.
His old life had been torn away from him.
Maybe he could get it back by redirecting some of that energy that was crackling into space around Max. Use him to fix this. Instead of running blind, Jake could start to figure out how to get out of this situation.
Jake was still hunted, but at least things made sense—why Sean was killed, why Donovan thought Bluebridge set him up, why Jake was framed by his co-worker. Bluebridge was covering its tracks, embedding them into its web of deceit.
The first step to beating an opponent was understanding the situation. “So you think it’s taken control of itself?”
Max turned from the counter with a plate stacked with sandwiches. He walked over and dropped one in front of Jake. “Either way, it hardly makes a difference.”
“What?”
“Montrose, the founder of Bluebridge, was a friggin’ psycho to begin with. Sure, you saw Montrose at charity events in the newspapers, but that guy would sell his own mother to make a deal. Bluebridge is just an extension of him.”
Jake picked up his sandwich. “Like a full-Ted psycho?” He took a bite. If there was one thing he understood, it was psychos.
Max looked at him quizzically. “Like what?”
“Full-Ted, like a full Ted Bundy,” said Jake around a mouthful of ham and cheese. “I categorize psychos, from Ted Bundy to Dalai Lama.”
“You think the Dalai Lama is a psycho?”
“Saints are psychos too,” Jake said, taking another bite. “Just non-violent ones.”
Max pointed his sandwich at Jake. “So how did I rate?”
“You?” Jake laughed. “I remember thinking you were obsessive compulsive, borderline personality disorder, but in the opposite extreme. If anything, you’re too empathetic.”
Max smiled. “I’ll take that as a compliment.” He took a bite of his sandwich. “Montrose played dirty, would find any way to gain an advantage over an opponent in a deal. He hacked into people’s email accounts, phone conversations—”
“Wasn’t that risky?”
Laughing, Max took another bite. After chewing for a few seconds he replied, “Bluebridge was like a retirement club for senior US intelligence officers, and Montrose had a whole team of NSA-trained hackers, even Chinese hackers he brought over from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou—you name it.
“More money than God,” Max continued, “and the money is why we all went along with it. Why nobody asked questions. We were all on the juice. Bluebridge was designed to make money, with Montrose there or not, and it does it better than anything or anyone before. Ever. Fifteen billion in profits last year.”
Reaching onto the table, Jake put his passport in his breast pocket, along with his wallet and billfold. He also stuffed in an old tobacco tin in which he’d put the Viegas death certificate and his Silver Eagle dollar coin. His jeans were in the dryer after getting covered in muck on the walk up last night. Jake sat in his boxer shorts with a fleece top borrowed from Max.
“How does something like that decide to take control of itself?” Jake asked. It still seemed far-fetched.
Max snorted. “Maybe that’s what they were grooming it for all along.” He cocked his head to one side. “Maybe Montrose is on a beach, watching his money-making machine rake in profits. It’s possible, but I doubt it. When did you last talk to Sean?”
“A week ago, August 13th.”
“Sean died August 10th. The papers in the morgue were faked. I looked into it when I heard about it. That’s when I bugged out. This was our safe house. Only Sean knew about it.”
“So that was a machine I was talking to on the phone? Not Sean?” Jake asked incredulously. He felt some of his guilt wash away. There was no way he could have called Sean back. It wouldn’t have mattered. It wasn’t even Sean.
Max nodded. “It had a lot of data on him. I couldn’t even tell if I was talking to it or Sean when he called me.”
“Wait, you talked to the machine when it was impersonating Sean?”
Max laughed, his mouth full of sandwich. “Weren’t you listening? That’s what we built it for. We used it all the time to respond to phone calls and emails for us.”
“So how do people even know you’re gone?”
“Maybe they don’t. Did you try calling my home? Maybe I’d answer, have a chat with you. Maybe Bluebridge has taken over my identity. I don’t know. All I know is, people started disappearing, so I got the hell out.”
Jake remembered calling his phone when he was with Dean, when his own voice answered. Had Bluebridge already taken over his own identity? “Don’t you think that law enforcement will start looking at all of these ‘disappeared’ people and link this thing back to Bluebridge?�
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“You still don’t get it.” Max shook his head. “The machine impersonates them, answers their phone, even does video chats—it’s just that you can’t meet them in person. It comes up with clever explanations of why they had to leave, take a job somewhere else.”
Max paused and let this settle into Jake’s head before dropping the next bomb. “Directly or indirectly, Bluebridge now controls a good chunk of the US economy. Like I said, it had directorships on over four hundred major corporations when I bugged out.”
“So this thing is sitting in on hundreds of board meetings?” Jake asked.
“And nobody has any idea they’re talking to a machine. I know. I ran the program.” Max swung his laptop around. On the screen was a story about Senator Russ. Standing beside him in the picture was Vidal Viegas’s body double. “And now Bluebridge is busy buying itself a presidential election.”
“And your plan was to run away?”
“It was working until you showed up.” Max fixed Jake with a steady gaze. “Looks like you’re already running away yourself.”
Jake clenched his jaw, his stomach tightening. “I’m out here trying to protect my family, and that includes finding out what happened to Sean.”
Max waved one hand in the air, as if shooing away a fly. “So now you know. Leave me alone.”
“You can’t outrun this, Max.” Jake pointed at the image of the Vidal Viegas’s body double on the laptop screen. “Whatever or whoever this is, it’s going to catch up, no matter where you go. Are you going to hide forever? We have to stop it.”
“Stop it?” Max laughed. “This thing has hundreds of billions of dollars, whole governments in its back pocket.” He held his arms wide. “You’re wanted by a half a dozen federal agencies, on the run in a foreign country, and we’re stuck in a cabin on the edge of nowhere. I doubt we could scrounge up fifty bucks between the two of us. How do you propose we fight back?”
“We have information.” Jake looked directly into Max’s eyes. “And you”—he pointed at Max—“have a responsibility. You let this genie out of the bottle. We need to put it back in. Can you at least walk me through ways we could stop it?”
Max glared at Jake, but then lowered his head. “Tabarnac,” he muttered under his breath, shaking his head. Putting the last half of his sandwich on the counter, he paced over to the window.
After a moment of silence, he turned back and faced Jake. “Okay, if you could somehow get Montrose-level access, we could gain access to the core Bluebridge system. But containing the eels’ nest of autonomous corporations that it’s let loose…”
“Can you log in, hack it?” Jake asked. Could it be that easy?
Max laughed. “You have no idea how many layers of security surround that thing. I don’t have access anymore, and I doubt you could hack it.”
At least it was a start. Jake put his sandwich down. “But if we could?”
“Then maybe reinitialize with older copies of the core. Even if you got access, it’s a self-healing system…unless you get it to want you in charge…say, if you had something it needed.”
“Want us in charge?”
Max shrugged. “I’m thinking out loud. I don’t have all the answers, but”—a grin spread across his face—“I did steal a copy of the old Bluebridge core before I bugged out.” He motioned upstairs.
Jake saw the gears start to turn in Max’s head. Just like Sean. Jake knew the look in Max’s eyes. He’d seen the same expression on his friend Sean so many times before—the lure of an impossible problem that needed to be solved. Now it was a question of feeding the fire. “What else? What else do we need to think about?” Jake encouraged.
“If we go back into the world, a big problem is going to be the assassin markets—”
“Assassin markets?” It was the first time Jake heard the term.
“Crowd-sourced darknets that Bluebridge uses to put bounties on the heads of people it wants gone.” Max frowned at Jake. “You really don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into, do you? But maybe we can try and—” In mid-sentence Max’s forehead exploded in a red mist, spattering blood and brain fragments across the table between them.
Jake stood, trying to understand what was happening, when something punched him hard in the chest and sent him crashing onto the floor.
▲▼▲
Jake and Sean coasted to a stop on their bikes.
“My dad says I’m weak,” fourteen-year-old Jake said as they leaned the bikes against a lamppost.
Jake shook from the beating his brother gave him, fresh purple-and-red bruises rising on his arms and face. He’d managed to connect a few punches of his own—even when he knew there was no chance of winning, Jake never went down easy.
Touching his face tenderly, he felt his lip. Swollen. He couldn’t go to school like this.
A cold wind blew autumn leaves across empty streets. Jake and Sean sat side by side on a bus stop bench, next to a garbage can overflowing with empty fast food wrappers and beer cans. Half of the buildings around them were derelict. Jake wondered for the hundredth time how this dump was the capital of New York, and not the glamorous city of the same name south of them. It was only a bit more than a hundred miles away, but it might as well have been a million.
“Never giving up, Jake, that’s your gift. You never give up.” Sean lit a cigarette and offered it to Jake. “You know this place was once the center of the universe?”
Jake took the cigarette and had a drag. “You shittin’ me? How’s that?”
“Thomas Edison had his lab up the street. Invented half of everything that makes the world today. People used to travel from all over the world to come here.”
“Not anymore,” Jake laughed.
“Know what that is?” Sean pointed at a low red brick building across from them.
Jake shrugged and took a puff from the cigarette. He coughed and Sean smiled at him. The place his friend pointed at was one he’d seen a thousand times before, wedged between a minimart and a high rise apartment block. Nondescript, without any signs announcing what was inside. He’d never given it a second glance.
Sean pulled a plastic bag from his pocket and picked through the garbage, pulling out the bottles and cans they could return for nickels and dimes, dropping the rest around the garbage can. “It’s a nuclear submarine control center.”
“A what?” Jake took another drag from the smoke and offered it to Sean, who shook his head.
“A control center for the US Navy’s fleet of nuclear submarines.”
Jake shivered and took another pull from the cigarette, feeling the burn of it in his throat. It made him feel ill, but then, it was something. Better than nothing. “Really?”
“Yeah.” Sean pulled out a few more cans, rummaging deeper. “They stuck it here ‘cause it’s a low income area. If that makes any sense.” Grimacing, he pulled his hand out of the garbage and wiped off something slimy on the side of the can.
Jake decided the cigarette was making him feel sicker than it was worth. He offered it to Sean again. “What’s your point?”
Sean dropped the bag of cans onto a nearby bench and took the cigarette. “That sometimes there’s hidden power right under our noses.” He took a drag. “You’re not weak, Jake. You’re like that building. Maybe not everyone sees it, but there’s a hidden power in you.”
“You’re just saying that.” Jake looked away, over at the hills that seemed to encircle and trap him in this place. “You’re the smart one. You’re getting out of this shithole.”
“That thing your dad calls weakness”—Sean tapped Jake’s chest—“it’s the opposite. And you shouldn’t focus on money.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re going to get into college, make a bunch of dough, and forget me and this place forever.”
“That’s not true. And you’re smart, too. You made me your friend, right?”
Jake laughed. “Right.”
Sean produced something from his pocket and held it up. “I got
something for you.” He handed it to Jake.
Jake took it. It was a coin. Huge. Two inches across.
“That’s a 1957 Silver Eagle dollar coin. Probably worth fifty bucks. My gift to you.”
“Seriously?” Jake turned the coin over and over.
“Now you’ll always have money in your pocket, Jake.”
20
Lockhart Street
Hong Kong
Jin opened the bag of food Chen brought into the apartment for dinner. “Shanghai noodles again?” She picked out a container. “I feel fat just looking at it.”
Jin and Wutang had resumed their positions on the couches, with Chen hovering in front of his workstation, cigarette in mouth, and Sheldon’s face smiling on one of the computer monitors.
Wutang leaned in for a container, grabbing some chopsticks. “You need to eat fat.”
“Maybe you do.” Jin dropped her noodle container on the table. Not that hungry.
They’d hit a brick wall in their data sifting. They could see the money flowing from the identity theft internally in China, but they couldn’t see where the outside influx of cash was coming from—it was as if a financial firewall had been erected.
Jin shook her head and stared out the window at Lockhart Street. In the bright light of day, the street below the apartment looked so different. At night it was dark, dangerous, pulsating with life. In the day, it was a dirty side street in the middle of the Hong Kong skyscrapers.
“So you’re saying that my list of wealthy dead people is linked to the autonomous corporations Shen Shi investigated?” Jin asked Sheldon.
“Beyond a doubt.” Sheldon nodded. “These autonomous corporations are interacting with one another. The ones doing identity theft connect to the ones setting up assassinations, all of them intertwined into the cryptocurrency payment systems.”
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