The Big Kahuna

by Janet Evanovich

  Kate was wearing her pleasant-show-no-emotion FBI face. She nodded politely at Olga.

  Olga returned the polite nod. “Right, down to business then. I have your friends in the car. I don’t see Viktor.”

  Nick called Jake on his cellphone. “Send him up, at least partway.” He handed Olga a pair of binoculars and pointed down the canyon toward the platform on the other side.

  Olga focused the binoculars on the platform where Jake was pulling on one end of a rope-and-pulley system. On the other end of the rope, Viktor Neklan was trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey and strapped into a black harness. With each of Jake’s pulls, he was slowly inching his way up the cable leading across the canyon toward Nick and Kate’s platform.

  “Far enough,” Nick said to Jake. “Let him hang out there for a while.”

  Olga watched Neklan as he dangled from the cable in the middle of the canyon a hundred feet above the valley floor. “That’s certainly not something you see every day.” She handed the binoculars back to Nick and winked. “You showed me yours. I guess it’s time for me to show you mine.”

  Kate stuck her finger into her mouth and pretended to gag.

  “I saw that,” Olga said.

  “Sorry,” Kate said. “I had something caught in my throat.”

  Olga waved at the Escalade. The two gunmen opened the rear passenger side door and waited while Vicky and Cosmo got out.

  “What’s the capital of Thailand?” Vicky asked one of the guards.

  “Bangkok?”

  “How about that?” Vicky said. “You got it first try.” She executed a perfect kick to his johnson, and walked with Cosmo over to Nick and Kate.

  “What took you losers so long?” she asked Kate. “I was stuck in some house in the middle of nowhere with no TV, no Internet.” She motioned toward the guards. “And these four morons plus Firecrotch over here for company.” She paused. “No offense, Firecrotch,” she said to Olga.

  Olga shrugged.

  “What about Larry?” Kate asked. “Where is he?”

  Cosmo shook his head and bit his upper lip. “She killed him.”

  “He might have been a greedy little weasel,” Vicky said, “but he didn’t deserve to die.”

  “Oh please,” Olga said. “Let’s be honest about this. If he said ‘per se’ one more time, you would have drawn straws to see who got to kill him.”

  “You’re not a nice person,” Cosmo said to Olga.

  “Thank you,” Olga said. “You’re very perceptive.” She turned her attention back to Nick. “How are we going to do this?”

  Nick attached Vicky and Cosmo together in a tandem harness and secured them to the zip line cable. “We’ll send Vicky and Cosmo across the canyon first. You can start pulling up your boss once they’re safely across.”

  Vicky and Cosmo positioned themselves at the edge of the platform.

  “I don’t like the looks of this,” Cosmo said, peering down. “Is it scary?”

  “No. Not at all,” Kate said. “By the way, you brought extra underwear, didn’t you?”

  “I usually carry extra,” Cosmo said. “On account of the, you know, gluten thing. Why?”

  Kate pushed Cosmo and Vicky off the edge, and they shrieked nonstop as they plummeted down the rock wall. They reached the end of their free fall and the swing engaged, pushing them in a hundred-mile-per-hour arc toward the other side of the canyon.

  Nick watched through the binoculars as Jake pulled them onto the platform on the other side and detached them from the cable. Vicky and Cosmo were still face-to-face, holding on to each other for dear life when Jake pulled them in.

  “They’re down,” Jake said into Kate’s phone, “but they can’t stop screaming. I think Cosmo has lost it.”

  Cosmo ripped the phone from Jake’s hand. “I love you,” he shouted into the phone. “I love Nick. I love Vicky. I love everyone. Holy crap. Who did I leave out?” He released Vicky and gave Jake a hug. “I love you most of all.”

  “Judas H. Priest,” Jake said into the phone. “Get down here ASAP.”

  Kate watched as the two bodyguards worked feverishly to haul Viktor Neklan to the top of the cliff. He still had another hundred feet or so to go. “On our way,” she said. “I don’t want to be here when they finally get Neklan topside.”

  Nick and Kate tethered themselves together in their own tandem harness, walked out onto the platform, and secured themselves to the cable. Olga pulled a gun and followed them out. “I really must insist you stay. I know Viktor will want a word with you. Don’t worry. I’m sure he’ll send you on your way when he’s done. It might be without the cable and harness, but that’s life.”

  Kate and Nick stood motionless, watching as Viktor Neklan was pulled closer and closer to their side of the canyon. About twenty seconds later, the two men hoisted him onto the platform, cut off his restraints, and ripped the gag out of his mouth.

  Neklan coughed and spit, then slowly got to his feet and turned to Olga. “Give me the gun. I want to shoot them myself.”

  “Time to go,” Kate said, and she pulled Nick off the platform, into the free fall.

  Neklan stumbled to the platform and got off several shots that missed their target. Kate heard a snap, and felt her direction change suddenly. A millisecond later, she and Nick were soaring across the canyon at breakneck speed. She held tight to Nick as more shots were fired.

  Nick looked into Kate’s eyes and smiled the same crooked grin that always seemed to precede trouble. His lips brushed over hers and settled into a knock-your-socks-off, head-spinning kiss. She was still kissing him when Jake pulled them onto the platform and disconnected the cable.

  “Hello.” Jake pointed at himself. “Overly protective father standing here.” He watched as Nick and Kate continued to kiss for a few more seconds. “Judas H. Priest. Where’s Cosmo? I’d rather get hugged than watch this.”

  Kate let go of Nick, got out of the harness, and looked back across the canyon. “That was pretty off-the-charts amazing.”

  “Yeah,” Nick said. “And the zip line was pretty fantastic too.”

  * * *

  —

  It was 7 P.M. by the time Nick and Kate drove Cosmo, Vicky, and Jake back to the CIA safe house on the outskirts of Arrowtown. Cosmo and Vicky took long, hot showers as soon as they arrived and immediately after collapsed into their beds. Jake went outside to smoke a cigar. The Kahuna was sitting in the kitchen with the laptop Nick had taken from Neklan’s bedroom, trying to break through the password protection.

  Kate looked over the Kahuna’s shoulder. “How’s it going?”

  The Kahuna cracked his knuckles. “I just booted up the computer in single-user mode,” he said and typed in a series of command-line codes.

  Kate watched as the Kahuna typed. “Looks mostly like gobbledygook to me.”

  “I’m trying to reset his password. It should work so long as he hasn’t encrypted his computer.”

  “I doubt he would go to the effort,” Kate said. “I’m sure he never thought anybody would be able to get close enough to steal it from him.”

  “We’ll know for certain in a couple seconds.” The Kahuna hit one final keystroke then pushed the return key. He turned to look at Kate and smiled. “We’re in. Not bad for a fifty-year-old surfer, right?”

  “Let’s check his emails first,” Nick said. “Olga said his buyer was an Asian government official.”

  “Which country?”

  “We might as well start with the usual suspects in high-stakes intellectual property theft,” Kate said. “Look for anything connected to China or North Korea.”

  The Kahuna scanned through the recent emails in Neklan’s sent folder. “There are a dozen or so to a guy named Zhang Wei at the Chinese embassy in Prague.” He googled the embassy website. “It looks like he’s the ambassador to the Czech Republic.�
��

  Kate read through the emails. “Neklan kept most of the details purposefully vague, but he was definitely trying to organize an in-person meeting with Zhang Wei in Prague. They agreed to one price if the software was delivered in an encrypted form and triple that if the Kahuna was delivered to them along with the merchandise.”

  “That’s consistent with what we know so far,” Nick said. “When are they supposed to meet?”

  Kate looked at Nick. “Tomorrow. At the embassy.”

  “Do you have any idea what Olga might have stolen from Sentience?” Nick asked.

  The Kahuna shrugged. “Sentience develops artificial intelligence software. Mostly it’s used for smart houses and self-driving cars and things like that.”

  “‘Mostly’?”

  “We don’t have any contracts with the Pentagon, but we’re very aware that our AI could be used for military applications. Most of Silicon Valley is ethically opposed to using the technology that way, but the Chinese government isn’t. Their military has tons of partnerships with private Chinese-owned tech companies.”

  “I sat in on an FBI briefing on that a couple months ago,” Kate said. “U.S. intelligence believes that the Chinese are intent on becoming the dominant power in cyber warfare over the next ten years.”

  The Kahuna searched through Neklan’s computer for anything related to Sentience. “I’m not finding anything in any of the obvious places. Let’s see if there are any deleted files.”

  The Kahuna downloaded a data recovery app onto Neklan’s computer. “When a file is moved to the trash, sometimes it’s not really gone for good. The name of the file is removed but the underlying information remains, at least until new information is written over it. So if we’re lucky we’ll have access to anything he recently deleted.”

  Nick, Kate, and the Kahuna waited while the app scanned Neklan’s laptop. After a couple of minutes, all the files capable of being recovered were displayed in a new folder on his desktop. The Kahuna scanned through them one by one. “No. No. No. Wait a minute.” He pointed toward the laptop. “I think I just found a memo from Olga.”

  Nick looked over the Kahuna’s shoulder and read the subject line. “What are ‘LAWs’?”

  “It’s an acronym for lethal autonomous weapons,” the Kahuna said. “Basically, they’re war machines capable of operating on their own. U.S. military policy is that LAWs are legal so long as a human being is the one ultimately making decisions about the use of lethal force. The drone program is an example.”

  “Sentience was designing killer robots?” Kate asked.

  “No. But I’m developing technology that allows machines to think and learn. Sentience’s technology will enable us to build things like cars and houses and blenders and vacuum cleaners that could anticipate what you wanted and make decisions for you.”

  “Sounds like science fiction.”

  The Kahuna pushed back in his chair. “Kind of. The newest stuff we’re doing is light-years ahead of anything else being developed. It could change the world.”

  “Or destroy it,” Nick said, “if the technology was used to create an army of LAWs that can think and learn and make their own decisions. It sounds like a recipe for disaster on a global scale.”

  The Kahuna grimaced. “That’s always been the risk of innovation. One man’s unlimited source of free energy is another man’s thermonuclear bomb.”

  Jake walked back into the house. “What did I miss?”

  “It looks like Olga and Neklan stole military-grade AI software from the Kahuna, and are selling it to the Chinese ambassador in the Czech Republic tomorrow,” Kate said.

  “Bummer. What are we going to do about it? Do you have a plan?”

  “Sure, I do,” Nick said. “I just haven’t thought all of it out yet. But we’re going to Prague.”

  23

  Kate awoke and stretched while her eyes adjusted to the darkness and the unfamiliar room. She got out of the bed, opened the door to the little stateroom, and walked into the main body of the Bombardier Global 6000 aircraft that Nick had somehow managed to procure in the middle of the night. Jake and the Kahuna were playing cards. Nick was on the satellite phone. Cosmo was hunched over his laptop, feverishly filling out paperwork, and Vicky was sitting across from him, wearing a low-cut size-zero Bavarian barmaid costume, taking selfies.

  Cosmo looked up from his laptop. “You packed a lot of costumes,” he said to Vicky. “How did you manage to get them all into your suitcase?”

  “The trick is skipping nonessential items like underwear,” Vicky said. “If you want to be a super Instagram model you need to learn to prioritize. Plus, most of my stuff is long on style and short on fabric so it doesn’t take up a lot of luggage space.”

  “I know what you mean,” Cosmo said. “It’s just like this one time when I skipped packing extras of form J17, Request for More Forms, and you know what happened? You’ll never guess.” He paused and looked at Vicky. “I ran out of forms. I don’t have to tell you what a mess that was. So, you know what I did? I used my last J17 to order more J17s.”

  Vicky scrunched up her nose and looked at Cosmo.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Cosmo said, holding up his hand. “That’s like using the last of your three genie wishes to wish for more wishes, but that’s how I roll. I’m a lone wolf who follows his own rules.”

  Kate plopped herself down on the seat opposite Nick and waited for him to finish his phone call. “I don’t even know how long I slept. How close are we to Prague?”

  “It’s a twenty-hour flight, not including the hour we spent in Hong Kong refueling.” Nick looked at his watch. “Probably another eight hours.”

  “Do we know where Neklan and Olga are right now?”

  “I checked for all the flight plans over the past twenty-four hours between Queenstown, New Zealand, and the Czech Republic,” Cosmo said. “As you might imagine, there weren’t too many of them. Just us and one other flight, also on a Global 6000.”

  “That has to be Neklan and Olga. Are they still in the air?” Kate asked.

  Cosmo checked FlightAware. “They’re supposed to land in a couple hours. Do you think we should alert the authorities to detain them?”

  Kate shook her head. “No. The Chinese ambassador already has the stolen IP from Sentience. Our first priority is recovering the data. We can worry about Olga and Neklan later.”

  “Agreed,” Nick said. “Hopefully the data hasn’t been transferred out of the embassy yet.”

  “What do you and my dad have cooked up?”

  “What if I told you we could recover the data, steal hundreds of millions from the Chinese government, and put Neklan and Olga out of business permanently?”

  Kate held up her hand. “Just a second. What was that second thing?”

  “‘Put Neklan out of business’?”

  “Before that and after ‘recover the stolen data.’”

  Nick tried giving her the crooked grin. “I don’t think there was anything else.”

  “I distinctly heard you say ‘steal hundreds of millions from the Chinese government.’”

  “Maybe it’s best to think of it as more of a reimbursement for all our expenses. Our time is worth something, and we logged a lot of hours on this assignment.”

  “And you’re thinking this reimbursement of money would get channeled into our secret slush fund?” Kate said.

  “Oh boy,” Cosmo said. “This could be a problem. I don’t have a slush fund form. I’m not sure it exists. I might have to use P184QQ. That’s an Unexplainable Acquisitions form.”

  Kate rolled her eyes. “Let’s just hear the plan. I’m sure it’s a beaut.”

  “You worry too much,” Nick said. “It’s going to go off smooth as butter.”

  “Humor me.”

  “The ambassador’s eighteen-year-old son just happens t
o be a heavy-duty Fortnite player, and a superfan of my client Gregory’s podcast.”

  “You mean the one with the sexy actress who specializes in goofing off and pretending to play video games in stretchy yoga pants?”

  “Don’t sell Betina short,” Nick said. “She also cracks jokes in stretchy yoga pants.”

  “I know her,” Cosmo said. “She’s so funny. I blorted my pants the last time I watched her on YouTube.” He shook his head and chuckled. “Fortnite, more like blortnite. Classic.”

  Kate and Nick stared at Cosmo for a couple seconds. “Isn’t blorting when you blow milk out your nose?” Kate finally said.

  Cosmo’s eyes darted back and forth. “Oh.” He tilted his head back and groaned. “That makes a lot more sense.” He grimaced. “It’s probably for the best if you don’t mention what I just said about me blorting my pants to anyone else. I’m kind of the cool guy around the office.”

  “Moving on,” Kate said. “What are we doing with Gregory and his alter ego?”

  Nick grinned. “Gregory, Betina, and his production crew are already on their way to Prague. I’ve arranged for him to broadcast an episode of his podcast directly from the Chinese embassy. The ambassador’s son was very enthusiastic about it.”

  “And by production crew, you mean us?”

  “Bingo.”

  “If it works, that gets us into the embassy. But I seriously doubt the ambassador keeps his stolen military technology in his son’s bedroom.”

  “I called in a favor and used my social media influencer influencer connections to arrange for a distraction,” Nick said. “The Colonel is in charge of that phase of the operation.” He gave Jake a high five. “Don’t worry. It will be a doozy.”

  “I have no doubt,” Kate said. “And, while the entire city of Prague is distracted?”

  “We sneak into the ambassador’s office with the Kahuna and replace the stolen files with something else.”