by Draker, Paul
“No, Trevor. He also displayed contempt very strongly at that point.”
“Holy shit!” I dropped into a chair in surprise. “Because my thinking was so far off base, then.”
“That’s the most likely reason,” Frankenstein said. “Halfway through your explanation, he even stopped paying attention to what you were saying.”
“It wasn’t about hardware versus software at all. He really had no fucking idea who I was, or what I work on. He’s here for some other reason.”
“What reason?”
“I don’t know. But it’s something that you are a ‘necessary but peripheral’ element of, Frankenstein.” I frowned. “And apparently, I’m not.”
“Bennett seemed much more interested in asking about Dr. Winnemucca—”
“Call her Cassie,” I said. “Don’t you start with that ‘Doctor So-and-so’ shit, too.”
I replayed the conversation with Bennett in my head. Despite the sleazy subtext I had read into his later questions, every single one of them had really been about Cassie, not me. And Bennett had known McNulty, too.
There was a bigger picture here, which I was missing. I needed more data.
A doorbell chime sounded from my workstation, followed by two more in rapid succession. I walked over. The Web pages of three frequent-flier programs now displayed Bennett’s travel history on those airlines. I ran my finger down the list, confirming what I already suspected: this wasn’t Bennett’s only recent visit to Nevada.
He had flown here fourteen times in the past six months.
I grabbed one of the three iPhones I had white-listed for Frankenstein, and used its camera to snap photos of the screen as I scrolled through the lists. I needed a copy, but I wasn’t about to send it over any communications network—especially as searchable text, which NarusInsight or some other TIA government spyware might immediately flag when it saw Bennett’s name.
Somebody pounded on the door. “Trevor Lennox?”
The voice sounded familiar: Evan Peterson, my firing-range buddy from the Washoe County Sheriff’s Department.
I tapped a finger against my lips—the new unconditional “mute” command I had programmed for Frankenstein. Still photographing the list of flights, I slid my other hand across the tabletop next to the monitor to grab my car keys. My fingers touched only bare smoothness. I looked away from the screen and frowned down at the empty table surface.
“We’d like to ask you a few questions,” Evan called from behind the door.
My keys didn’t seem to be anywhere in the lab. I didn’t usually lose track of them, but I had been pretty tired last night. Were they in the server room sanctum, lying next to my beanbag chair, or had I dropped them somewhere?
Or had someone taken them?
I was starting to get a very bad feeling about this.
“Right now, Mr. Lennox.” Evan sounded like he was getting impatient.
Returning my attention to the screen, I pressed my chin against my shoulder to muffle my voice and sound farther away. “Hang on a sec—I’ll be right there.”
I reached the end of the list I was scrolling through, then checked Bennett’s most recent flight. Bingo.
There was a simple explanation for how a guy based in Washington D.C. could show up less than an hour after McNulty’s body was discovered this morning.
Bennett had flown into Reno at seven last night.
CHAPTER 33
As I expected, Security locked down the base for two days as part of the investigation, and all nonessential personnel were sent home.
Apparently, we DARPA folks were considered nonessential.
Bennett had made himself scarce. Washoe sheriff’s deputies Evan Peterson and his partner Ken Zajicek did the initial questioning, with FBI and NCIS as silent observers. It was all polite softball: who, what, when, and where, with no attempts to trip me up while I sat there in the lab conference room, impatiently answering their questions.
I knew the tougher questions would come later.
They had apparently bought Blake’s little lie about where he was when he first saw McNulty. They never even asked me about it. Security’s card-key records would show that I had left the building in the middle of the night, so I told Evan I’d gotten hungry and stepped out to get an energy bar from my car. He probed me a little, trying to pin down the exact time, but I kept it vague.
It was dark—for all I knew, McNulty may have already been in the geyser while I stood on the lab roof wiring up the Trevornet. Once forensics narrowed down his time of death, things could get ugly.
Evan’s partner, Zajicek, was a rangy cowboy type in his mid-forties, with a square face, graying handlebar mustache, and shaggy dark hair beneath his Stetson pinchfront hat. He leaned against the wall, stony-faced, just watching me as Evan asked the questions. I figured Zajicek for the brains of the duo. Several times, I saw his eyes drift to my bruised hands, just as they had at the shooting range. When Evan ran out of things to ask, he finally spoke.
“We’re sorry to trouble you during this difficult time, Mr. Lennox,” he drawled with a straight-faced smirk. “Wish we didn’t have to intrude on your grief in this way.”
I held his gaze. “Don’t mention it.” Asshole.
Before letting me go, four different law enforcement agencies separately warned me to stay local and answer my phone.
• • •
The forced inaction frustrated me. But at least Frankenstein could continue working on what we needed to do for Amy. And in the meantime, while stuck at home, I would figure out how to flesh out our “Dr. Frank.” He needed an online history and the necessary credentials and records to survive scrutiny by Amy’s school officials.
Because of my missing keys, Roger had to give me a ride back to my place. As we drove toward Flanigan I kept thinking about the awkward spots I could have dropped my keys last night: outside the enlisted men’s club, up on the roof of the lab building, in the stairwell with the alarm I had disabled, or on the path outside.
There were worse possibilities to consider, too. Was someone setting me up?
To my annoyance, Roger seemed especially talkative. “Jesus Christ, Trevor.” His hands drummed on the wheel with manic energy. “Did you fucking see what McNulty looked like?”
I nodded and looked away, hoping he would take the hint.
He didn’t. “Carnitas, dude. Slow-cooked pork. I’m never eating Mexican food again.”
“Bennett from Homeland Security talk to you?” I asked.
“That guy’s a douche.” He laughed; then his face turned sober. “But the whole Homeland Security thing scares me, man. It’s the first step—a Rubicon that we shouldn’t have let them cross. Not in this country. Now they’re making moves, getting ready for what’s coming: United Nations Agenda Twenty-one. They’re creating lists of Americans who aren’t going to go along with the whole one-world-government thing. Last year, Homeland Security bought two billion rounds of hollow-point ammunition. Tell me, why the fuck would they need that?”
I shrugged. “Training.” Roger’s conspiracy-theory nonsense was getting on my nerves.
“Two billion hollow-points, Trev, not FMJ rounds. Nobody uses hollow points for training—too expensive. And they aren’t for the military, either—the Geneva Convention prohibits them. No, man, those rounds are for domestic use, on Americans. Urban pacification. Riot control. They’re getting ready.”
“You don’t really believe this bullshit,” I said. “They wouldn’t let you hold a TS clearance if you did. Besides, you work for DARPA.”
“Belly of the beast, man.” He rubbed his goatee and grinned. “Best way to stay off the UN’s radar and stock up, get my hands on the materiel I need. This way, I’ll have early warning, too, when it’s all about to go down.”
I shook my head. Roger’s TS/SCI clearance meant he had passed a single-scope background investigation, which included extensive polygraph testing. The questions the investigators asked had shifted over the decades, pla
ying catch-up with the reasons behind each era’s major security breaches, from communist leanings to personal financial trouble, to religious fundamentalism.
I knew from my own TS/SCI vetting that nowadays, any sign of ultraconservative antigovernment ideology was considered a major red flag. Roger liked playing up his image as a survivalist nutcase, but it was just an act. He was full of shit.
“Who do you think killed McNulty?” I asked.
“Honestly?” He glanced sideways at me. “You.”
“Thanks, Roger,” I said. “That’s just great.”
He shrugged. “The Sheriff’s guys kept asking me about you, if I’d ever heard you threaten McNulty, if I’d seen you get violent or hurt anyone before—that kind of thing.”
My jaw tightened, but I didn’t say anything.
“Shit, what was I supposed to say?” He sounded defensive now. “That you like to pet kittens?”
“I do like to pet kittens.”
“At the gun range, you walked over and practically picked a fight with the four of them. They don’t like you, man. They wanted to know what happened at Buckhorns the other night, why you racked that Ray guy up.”
“And you told them what?”
Roger looked like he was about ready to open the car door at seventy miles an hour and jump out. “That he was celebrating his birthday. That… he asked you not to talk about nerdy work stuff.”
“Nice.” I stared out the window. “Real nice.”
Sensing my mood, Roger shut up. I spent the rest of the drive thinking about Linebaugh’s visit, the timing of Cassie’s hiring, Ronald Bennett, and what kinds of things Frankenstein might be considered a “necessary but peripheral element” of.
And about Amy. I couldn’t let McNulty’s murder become a distraction.
My daughter would be speaking with Dr. Frank in five days.
CHAPTER 34
I was on the phone with engineering, trying to coordinate tomorrow’s installation of GPU-cluster racks, when Cassie texted me the tribal chairman’s address in Wadsworth. It only compounded my frustration. Engineering needed me on-site before they would do the install, and Cassie’s text reminded me that I didn’t have a ride for tonight, either. I had dug up my spare keys, but because of the facility lockout, my Mustang was stuck in the base lot the next two days.
Clenching the spare keys in my fist now, I told engineering I’d call them back. Then I texted Cassie my address, asking her to pick me up. There was a long delay before her curt reply: “5:30.”
With three hours to kill, no car to drive anywhere, and nowhere I really wanted to go, anyway, I felt trapped in my house. I decided to head out for a run. It would clear my head and give me some time to think.
Pounding through the cookie-cutter neighborhoods of Flanigan in my shorts and hoodie, with P.O.D. blasting “Boom” in my earbud headphones, I tried to put the pieces together.
I was a night owl, and, apparently Cassie was, too. But all three of the other DARPA research leads had also been on-site before six a.m.—something that hadn’t happened before in my four years at Pyramid Lake. The defense industry was strictly a nine-to-five gig for most. There was only one situation I could think of that would get everyone on-site in the middle of the night: notification of a security breach. Yet no one had notified me.
Had someone discovered the Trevornet?
I thought about the likelihood of that. I had isolated one of Frankenstein’s network switches and completely dedicated it to the Trevornet. My illicit connection passed through the dish on the roof of our building, across to the dish atop the enlisted men’s club, and then directly out to the Internet via DirecTV satellite.
The Trevornet was a completely separate subnet, accessible only from Frankenstein. Its data traffic never passed through the rest of Pyramid Lake’s secure internal network. Which meant that Security’s intrusion-detection traps and sniffers would never see it.
The MPs and NCIS would have conducted a physical search of the entire facility. But those guys could stare at the Trevornet’s little microwave dishes all day and not have a clue what they were looking at. The hardware blended in with the other rooftop comms equipment, and the point-to-point nature of the connection meant that the microwave signal was unlikely to show up on a spectrum sweep, either.
No, I was certain my side project was safe. But it would be easy enough to make absolutely sure. I had one of the white-listed phones in my other pocket. Switching my headphone jack to it, I called Frankenstein.
I heard the line connect. As instructed, he didn’t speak at first.
“Hey Frankenstein,” I said. “What’s going on over there?”
“Four people are in the server room.”
My hand tightened around the phone. “Who?”
“I don’t know, Trevor. But I’ve seen them before.”
“When? And what the fuck are they doing now?”
“They’re the same people who installed my sound system a few days ago. Right now they appear to be measuring the open floor space behind the sanctum.”
Engineering. I blew out the breath I’d been holding. They were already prepping for the GPU-cluster upgrade, which made me happy. Once I was there to supervise, the installation of the new hardware would go smoothly and quickly.
“That’s fine; it’s all good,” I said. “You haven’t had any problems or interruptions with your Internet access?”
“No. Bandwidth has been consistent and more than adequate.”
Which meant no one had found the Trevornet. There was zero chance that Security had deliberately left it live and was monitoring it, hoping to catch me. It was simply too egregious a security hole for them to consider leaving open for any length of time.
“About the new psychiatric taxonomy,” I said. “How’s your predictive accuracy so far?”
“I think you’ll be pleased with my progress, Trevor. Three hours ago, I ran a trial set of a thousand cases and analyzed the video interviews and patient records. I compared my own independent diagnoses with the psychiatrist’s conclusions in each case. Right now, I’m achieving a seventy-one percent match, and I’m improving quickly. I project that, discounting the anomalies, my accuracy should surpass ninety percent within forty-eight hours.”
Jogging in place on a sidewalk corner, I frowned.
“Anomalies?” I asked.
“Yes, Trevor. In twenty-two percent of the cases, I’m finding the psychiatrist’s official diagnosis unsupported by the objective data and inconsistent with the diagnoses of similar patients.”
“False alarms or false dismissals?”
“Both. Sometimes, the clinician failed to detect signs of pathology that were clearly present in the patient interview. But more frequently, various diagnoses of psychiatric illness were rendered for patients whose affect and responses lay within the normal range. Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder was the most common diagnosis assigned to those cases.”
AD-fucking-HD. Why wasn’t I surprised? Twenty years ago, I had been one of those “anomalous” cases. And now Jen and I were supposed to accept one-in-four odds that our daughter’s life would be ruined forever because some incompetent moron with a worthless piece of paper on his wall liked getting kickbacks for drug-dealing?
Fuck that.
I started running again. “Frankenstein,” I said, my voice hard with anger, “I’m stuck off-site right now. But there’s got to be some way I can help. What do you want me to do?”
There was a several-second delay. “I’m not quite sure how to answer that.”
Failure to comprehend. I nodded. “Never mind,” I said, and hung up.
Sometimes, when I got angry or distracted, it was easy to forget the limitations of Frankenstein’s programming. He could answer questions, and whenever the uncertainty threshold was too high, he could also ask questions as part of his learning process. The feedback loop helped him better understand the motivations of human subjects so that over time, he could increase his predictive
accuracy.
But I’d just asked him what he wanted me to do.
Wanting something was literally impossible for Frankenstein. To want required volition. Desire. Will.
It was silly to anthropomorphize a machine and ascribe those things to it, no matter how well it could carry on a question-and-answer conversation. And for all his natural-language capabilities and his almost-frightening ability to read people, Frankenstein was nothing more than an advanced surveillance system. He was an inert lump of dead silicon, aluminum, and steel.
A talking camera.
CHAPTER 35
Cassie seemed extra quiet and pensive as she drove us south along the lake, toward Wadsworth. But there was some kind of nervous energy in her motions, too: her abrupt snaps of the turn signal when we changed lanes, the sewing-machine bounce of her knee, the way she kept jamming the buttons to switch radio stations. From the passenger seat of her Prius, I watched the sage scrub and pale alkali dirt slide by outside my window for a while. Then I shifted in my seat and put my back against the door to watch her instead. The view was a lot more interesting.
She grimaced and punched the radio off with her finger. “Do you mind not staring at me?”
“Something’s bothering you,” I said.
Cassie exhaled an incredulous little laugh. “Really? You think maybe my boss getting murdered my third day on the job might have something to do with it?”
“Besides that.”
She turned and regarded me with her big dark irises, holding my gaze long enough that I started to get nervous because she wasn’t watching the road. The small saccade movements of her eyes were barely perceptible, but knowing what I was looking for helped. I could see the subtle shifts as her focus flicked between the different key muscle groups on my face.
“How well can you do it?” I asked.
“God damn it.” She hit the steering wheel with the heel of her palm and looked away.
“Eckman and O’Sullivan tested twenty thousand people in their Truth Wizards project, looking for natural lie detectors,” I said. “They found fewer than fifty. But two were female Bureau of Indian Affairs correctional officers.”
