White Death

by Daniel Blake

  Fifteen minutes. Longer than Misha usually spent on a move this early, but by no means unusual for grandmasters at this level.

  Unzicker clicked on the Show observers icon again. There were almost 100 now. You may be watching history, my friends, he thought, if you only knew it. You may be watching history. He wondered if they were chattering to each other online. Observers to a game can chat together, as can players, but one group can’t see what the other is saying.

  Misha moved, so suddenly that Unzicker almost started.

  Bishop to b4.

  He sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes.

  I’ve done it, he thought. I’ve bloody done it.

  A line came up in his dialogue box:

  killerinstinct32: That what I think it is?

  repino: You betcha.

  killerinstinct32: Wow. Just wow.

  repino: I know.

  killerinstinct32: I’d better start thinking!

  Kwasi and Misha went at it for three more hours, and eventually agreed a draw. Unzicker couldn’t have cared less about the result. Misha had self-corrected an error, and that was all that mattered.

  But one move different wasn’t enough, not for Unzicker. He wanted to be sure. This is the scientist’s way: a great leap forward followed by a welter of self-doubt. No experiment could be said to have properly succeeded without running it against a failsafe.

  He knew the ICC had a department called Speedtrap which ran checks to see whether players purporting to be human were actually computers. Speedtrap kept their methods quiet, for fear that making them public would help the cheaters beat the system, but Unzicker could guess most of them anyway: diagnosing processor actions through the server interface, checking moves against those known to be played by certain engines, those kind of things. In any case, he didn’t need to know how they did it, only that they did it.

  He set up two new accounts. Kuokkala (the original Finnish name for Repino, Botvinnik’s birthplace) would be Misha. Akbyr would be Rybka, one of the strongest search engines around; Unzicker had a copy in his office. He would pass them both off as humans, set them playing against the strongest grandmasters on ICC, and see how long it took for Speedtrap to issue a warning.

  Akbyr managed three games before Speedtrap sent a message saying they’d detected that it was a chess engine. But Kuokkala just sailed on and on: game after game without arousing the slightest suspicion.

  In its twelfth game, it came up against killerinstinct32. Kwasi didn’t know this was Misha, Unzicker realized. Should he tell him? No. This was a perfect blind test.

  Misha/Kuokkala beat Kwasi in sixty-four moves. It was almost poetic.

  Kwasi instantly issued a rematch challenge. Unzicker typed in the dialogue box.

  Kuokkala: It’s me, Misha.

  killerinstinct32: WTF?

  Kuokkala: New handle to see whether can remain undetected as engine.

  killerinstinct32: Why the hell didn’t you tell me?

  Kuokkala: Had to be a blind test.

  killerinstinct32: You don’t fucking trust me?

  Kuokkala: It had to be a blind test. You must see that. Tell me honestly: did you recognize this as Misha?

  killerinstinct32: Misha’s beaten me before.

  Kuokkala: Not my question. Did you think you were playing man or machine?

  killerinstinct32: Never had reason to think it machine. So man.

  Kuokkala: KK, we’ve done it. Properly done it.

  killerinstinct32: Fuckin A.

  The best chess player in the world had played sixty-four moves against a computer and not known it. That was the Turing test, right there: where the actions of a machine were indistinguishable from those of a human.

  Misha had passed the test. Misha was learning. Misha was thinking.

  Misha was growing.

  56

  Friday, November 26th

  Cambridge, MA

  Thanksgiving itself had been a hiatus: a regathering, a truce, like Christmas Day in the trenches. Someone had pressed pause, and for twenty-four hours or so, no one had done anything of note. Patrese had taken over the surveillance of Unzicker himself, as everyone else had wanted to be at home with their families.

  Patrese’s sister Bianca had asked him to stay with her family in Pittsburgh, as she always did, and he’d told her sorry but he had to work, as he usually did. Sooner or later, he thought, she’d just give up asking. She’d told him time and again that there was more to life than work, and that was coming from a doctor at Pittsburgh’s biggest and busiest hospital. When she stopped telling him, maybe he’d start listening.

  Anyway: Patrese had watched Unzicker all day, and he’d rather have watched paint dry. Unzicker had done nothing apart from sit in his room and go for a walk. He’d seemed almost amused by Patrese’s presence, as though denying Patrese his vacation was somehow a small triumph. Perhaps it was.

  Today, the day after Thanksgiving proper, was also a holiday: most folks tended to extend the vacation into a long weekend of four or five days. Patrese was still waiting for the subpoena order on the ICC to come through – he’d gotten an e-mail saying that his form had been deemed complete and was now being processed, which he guessed was at least something positive.

  How long it would be was still anyone’s guess, and then of course it would have to be served, which involved either putting it in the mail – another day gone – or flying to Pittsburgh himself, which was the last thing he needed. Perhaps they’d have found Kwasi by then. Hell, perhaps they’d have found Jimmy Hoffa and D.B. Cooper by then too.

  Patrese and Anderssen met over a late breakfast to discuss their options. The surveillance team on Unzicker had just phoned in to say that he was back at the shooting range. Patrese wondered briefly whether he should be alarmed, and then thought that he sounded like one of those hysterical Brady Bill fanatics. Millions of Americans liked to shoot. There was nothing sinister about that. Unzicker happened to be a bit of a freak and a hell of a shot, which was a worrying combination: but they’d been on his case for a week now, on and off, and they’d found absolutely nothing concrete on him. If the man wanted to go and knock holes out of a paper target, then let him.

  Anderssen’s cellphone rang. He answered, listened, smiled wolfishly, said: ‘I’m on my way,’ and ended the call.

  ‘News?’ Patrese asked.

  ‘Yeah, but not on this case. Another one. Bank robber.’

  ‘I thought you did homicide.’

  ‘I do. This motherfucker killed a customer during one of his raids. They just got him.’

  Patrese thought for a second. ‘He do one near Harvard on the first of this month?’

  Anderssen raised an eyebrow. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I was there. Popped in to get some money after interviewing the principal of the college where Showalter taught.’

  ‘Small world, huh? You shoulda capped him there and then, saved me the bother.’

  Patrese remembered standing in the foyer of the bank with his gun out, Hoodie Man with his own weapon pressed to the temple of an Asian woman. Patrese hadn’t taken the shot because that would have endangered the lives of people there. He hadn’t taken the shot because he’d remembered Samantha Slinger and lost his nerve. Take your pick.

  ‘That’s the Bureau for you,’ he said. ‘You help us, we make your lives harder.’

  Anderssen laughed. ‘Yeah. Thanks a bunch.’ He stood up and pulled out ten bucks from his hip pocket. Patrese waved it away. ‘You sure?’ Anderssen asked.

  ‘Sure. You get the next one.’

  ‘Mr Bank Robber’s got any of his ill-gotten gains on him, I’ll ask him to reimburse you personally. Let you know how it goes.’

  ‘OK.’

  When Anderssen had gone, Patrese had another cup of coffee and a fruit salad. He hadn’t been running enough lately, and he was wary of chubbing out: too easy to do when caught up in a case. The moment he was back in New Haven, he was going down to the lighthouse, there an
d back. Clear his mind, sharpen his focus.

  His cellphone rang. ‘Patrese.’

  ‘Sir, the subject is heading on foot into the Veritas Hotel.’

  The Veritas was the best hotel in the Harvard Square neighborhood: a swanky boutique place that was presumably deluged with the well-heeled parents of Harvard students every time there was a play, a graduation, whatever. ‘Veritas’ – ‘Truth’ – was Harvard’s motto.

  ‘He ever been there before?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of.’

  ‘You have any idea why he’s going there?’

  ‘Negative, sir.’ Another cop who thought he was in Star Trek or Delta Force.

  Might be nothing, Patrese thought.

  Might have an old friend visiting. Except Unzicker didn’t do friends.

  Might be going for a cup of coffee. Except coffee was probably twice as expensive there as anywhere else, and Unzicker hadn’t shown himself the extravagant type.

  Might be nothing. Might be something. Only one way to find out.

  ‘OK,’ Patrese said. ‘Follow him in there, see where he goes. I’m on my way.’

  New Haven, CT

  Tartu had spent hours over the past few days looking at games on the ICC involving killerinstinct32. He was ever more sure that killerinstinct32 and Kwasi were one and the same, but something else was still bugging him: something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  He logged on to the ICC.

  killerinstinct32 wasn’t online, but by typing hist killerinstinct32 in the command box, Tartu could call up his last twenty games. killerinstinct32 had lost quite a few of them, Tartu saw: one to Kuokkala, which Tartu had been watching, and five to sequinedberg. killerinstinct32 had also beaten sequinedberg five times, and they’d had four draws. Tartu had watched a few of the games killer-instinct32 had played against sequinedberg, but there’d been a few more since he’d last logged on.

  It was something about these match-ups that was bugging Tartu. Who the hell could beat Kwasi five times in fourteen games? sequinedberg wasn’t declared as a computer, Tartu had checked that already, and he – let’s face it, he wasn’t going to be a she – certainly didn’t play like a computer.

  Tartu called up one of the games at random (killerinstinct32 white, sequinedberg black: result – a win for black) and began to analyze it. Not a quick glance through the moves, but slowly, carefully, as though he were annotating this game for a chess periodical. He worked out why each player had made the moves they had; thought about what he’d have done in various positions, and not gone on to the next move until he’d seen why their chosen options were better.

  It took him an hour and a half to do this properly, just for one game, but by the end he was beginning to feel … well, something. That thing that had been bugging him about these games: he couldn’t be sure what it was exactly, but somehow he knew that his understanding was beginning to coalesce, that thoughts and theories and patterns were taking shape, hardening, crystallizing.

  Tartu picked another game: again a win for black, but this time the colors were reversed, and killerinstinct32 was black. Again Tartu analyzed it to the point of exhaustiveness, looking for similarities and differences with the other game. Strategy, tactics, styles: all these were visible to him, as the layman can see how Picasso painted differently from Constable and how Mozart sounded different to Kurt Cobain.

  And this time Tartu saw what he’d been looking for.

  He sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes.

  It couldn’t be, he thought. It couldn’t be what he thought it was.

  Why couldn’t it be? Only because it seemed so unlikely that someone would do that. But unlikely was not impossible. Especially not in this case.

  Tartu picked up his cellphone to dial Patrese, and stopped.

  Could he really be sure? Did he even know what any of this meant? What if he was wrong? He didn’t want to send Patrese on a wild-goose chase just because of some crazy theory that might all be moonshine. But equally murder was murder, however much Tartu might otherwise have liked Kwasi and felt protective towards him. One way or another, he felt, the sooner this whole thing was ended the better.

  OK, he thought: this is what I’ll do. I’ll look at all the games these two have played, but it’ll be quicker now, because I know what I’m looking for. And when I’m satisfied that I’m right, and that my theory all checks out, then I’ll ring and tell him.

  He called up the next game and set to work.

  Cambridge, MA

  Anderssen’s suspect was in an interview room, waiting for him. Anderssen picked up the file from Registry and leafed through it, more as familiarization than anything else: he had most of the details in his head. Black guy, smooth skin, always wore a hoodie, about six feet tall and of average build. Handy with a firearm, and keener on taking other people’s money than making his own.

  The bank robberies, Anderssen wasn’t judgmental about: everyone knew banks were insured up the wazoo, and everyone also knew that a few grand here and there was peanuts compared with the extent of corporate theft further up the scale. Anderssen had been to Moscow – Russia, not Idaho – a few years back on some international crime conference, and remembered one of the speakers recounting a Russian motto: Why rob a bank when you can own one? No: the bank robberies he didn’t care about, other than the obvious need to solve the case.

  The homicide committed during one of them, he cared very much about.

  He went down to the interview room. Merrimack, the suspect’s name was: Stewart Merrimack. Didn’t sound too much like a black guy’s name, Anderssen thought. And there was no black guy in the interview room, either. Just a white guy in his late twenties, sitting quietly with his handcuffed hands on the table in front of him.

  ‘Shit,’ Anderssen said. ‘Got the wrong room.’

  He checked against the roster he’d been given. No, it said: Room 4, Stewart Merrimack. This was Room 4. So that must be …

  ‘You Merrimack?’ he asked.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Bank robbery?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Bank robber’s a black guy.’

  Merrimack nodded to the table in front of him. There was something lying there, a little crumpled. Anderssen walked across and picked it up.

  A mask. A mask of a black guy’s face. And not some crappy ten-buck Hallowe’en mask, either. Anderssen held it up in front of him. Damn, but this thing was realistic. It was a full head and neck mask, so once you had a top on, the point where your skin became the mask was invisible. This was the kind of stuff you saw on those Mission: Impossible movies when the Tom Cruise character turned out to be some other guy. This was proper Hollywood.

  There was a label inside the mask, at the back of the neck:

  SPFX Masks, 14713 Oxnard Street, Van Nuys, CA 91411, USA. This silicone mask is a high-quality product. It looks and behaves like real flesh and muscle. Disguise yourself so that even your nearest and dearest will never recognize you. We do not condone any illegal activity with our masks.

  I’ll bet you don’t, Anderssen thought.

  ‘How much did this cost you?’ he said.

  ‘Mask, eight hundred bucks. Eyebrows, one twenty. Hair, nine seventy-five. Pretty much two grand, all in.’

  Anderssen didn’t bother to state the obvious: that two grand for a mask was the investment of the century when you’d used it to steal thirty grand from various banks. If Anderssen’s stock portfolio had a similar rate of return, he wouldn’t be a cop no more, that was for sure.

  Before he tore this guy a new asshole, though, he’d ring Patrese and tell him. Might give Patrese a chuckle, since he’d been there at one of the hold-ups. Fooled by a dude in a mask from Van Nuys. Only in America.

  The main entrance of the Hotel Veritas was a Victorian carriage house façade, but inside was pure chic contemporary. The two cops detailed to Unzicker were perched on chairs in the lobby, looking almost hysterically out of place: not nearly beautiful enough, inte
lligent enough or sufficiently up themselves to cut it in a place like this. Patrese went over to them.

  ‘Where’s he gone?’

  ‘Penthouse suite. Mr Nursultan.’

  Nursultan was here? Patrese was surprised: not that Nursultan would stay in a place like this – this was the bare minimum of luxury someone like him demanded – but that Unzicker had come to see him here. Every time Patrese had stumbled across the two of them together, it had been in Unzicker’s office at the Stata Center. So why the change? Again, it might be nothing. Meeting your most important benefactor on a day when most of the population were on vacation might also be nothing.

  More likely to be something urgent.

  ‘How was he looking?’ Patrese said.

  ‘Unzicker?’ replied one of the cops.

  ‘No. LeBron James. Yes, Unzicker, of course.’

  ‘Er … hard to say.’

  ‘Try.’

  ‘Purposeful,’ said the other cop.

  ‘Purposeful?’

  ‘Yeah. Like he was walking with purpose. Like he had something to do. Not just meandering around.’

  ‘He seem nervous?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘He seem bothered by you following him?’

  ‘Didn’t really seem to care about that. Must be used to it by now, I guess.’

  Patrese thought for a moment. If this meeting was urgent enough to take place right now, it was also urgent enough for Patrese to want to know what was going on. Unzicker – and by extension Nursultan – were still pretty much their only links to Kwasi.

  Unzicker knew they were following him. He wouldn’t know that Patrese was here. And Patrese didn’t want him or Nursultan to know if he was listening in.

  How to get close enough to listen in the first place?

  Going up in the elevator to the suite was out of the question. Patrese remembered from his visit to the Waldorf-Astoria in New York that Nursultan traveled with bodyguards, and it was pretty much a sure thing that there’d be a couple of bull-necked lunks standing guard in the corridor outside the suite.