by Tomas Black
“Not at all. I have degrees in Computer Sciences and Mathematics, specialising in Linear Algebra, Multivariate Calculus and Statistical Analysis. I started my career as a Quant for one of the big investment banks and was eventually poached by McKinley for their tech division. Turns out that my degrees are the ones highly sought after in the areas of Machine Learning. Who would have thought?”
Drum was impressed and his face must have shown it because she smiled and raised an eyebrow.
“What? You assumed I was just another pretty face in a suit.”
Drum thought this to be a little unfair. He’d served with plenty of women in the Army and of course, he couldn’t forget Phyllis Delaney—probably one of the most highly paid and respected CEOs on Wall Street.
“Not at all,” he said, although he thought she had both a pretty face and a nice suit. “It was the label of investment banker that threw me.”
She grinned. “I’m just teasing you. But you’re right about investment bankers. Most of them can barely turn on a computer, let alone understand the subtleties of an AI-based system.”
“So I’m guessing the assignment is not an assessment of Salenko’s software. You already have that covered.”
“Right, right.” She poured herself more coffee and looked pensive. She said, “We have an internal security issue—someone is leaking sensitive information to the press and possibly our competitors. We think they’re trying to disrupt the IPO.”
Drum knew that the success of any IPO relied heavily on potential investors having confidence in the governance of that company and the people who would ultimately end up running it. Any bad press during the process could lead the IPO to fail and the syndicate to lose a lot of money.
“So you want me to find the source of the leak.”
“In a nutshell, yes.”
Drum was not surprised. This is what Roderick, Olivier and Delaney specialised in. ROD investigators infiltrated companies to root out the bad guys and expose corporate malfeasance. Often as not, these people were disgruntled employees with an axe to grind; but they could also be employees under duress from organised crime, coerced into acts of industrial espionage or sabotage. It didn’t matter how strong a company’s external security if someone on the inside turned off all the firewalls and let the criminals in. Increasingly, high-profile tech companies and financial institutions were finding themselves under attack, not just from their own employees but also from actors of foreign governments.
“Do they know about the ROD engagement?”
Moretti hesitated. “Yes, I’m afraid so. It would have been impossible getting you past Salenko and his team on some pretence. We made the ROD review a stipulation of our continued support for the IPO. Time is against us on this one.”
Drum knew that the assignment had just got harder. But Moretti’s reticence about the operation set alarm bells ringing.
“There’s something else,” he said.
She stirred her coffee absentmindedly as if trying to divine the right words to explain herself.
“I’ve worked with startups before, and they can be hard work, for sure. Young ambitious types trying to show the world how great they are. Single-minded and focused on whatever it is they’re working on, all thinking their little piece of software is going to change the world. A pressure cooker of personalities.”
“But Salenko is different?”
“Yes, he’s hard to pin down. For one thing, he’s older than your average boy wunderkind. More structured in his approach—and ruthless. The attrition rate within the company is very high. Surrounds himself with a group of hardcore coders and a few select employees.”
“Sounds like every CEO I’ve ever encountered,” said Drum.
She smiled. “Right. And then there’s his security team.”
“What about it?”
“Tough bunch. Military types—all Eastern Europeans. Never goes anywhere without them. I’m finding it difficult to work out what’s going on half of the time. Too many closed doors.”
Drum sat back, trying to evaluate Moretti’s misgivings. Superficially, it sounded like this Salenko ran a tight ship but, underneath it all, he could tell it worried her.
He said, “You think Salenko is hiding something—something that could scupper the IPO?”
“If the IPO doesn’t go ahead, we all lose money; but, if it turns out we had to halt the IPO because of illegality on Salenko’s part, McKinley could lose its reputation. It would be the end of us.”
Reputation, thought Drum. If there was one thing that all companies in the City valued above all else, it was that.
He said, “Do you have evidence of any illegality?”
Moretti looked up from her coffee and replaced the small teaspoon carefully on the side of her saucer. “Not exactly …”
“Not exactly?”
She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out what looked like a small crystal. At first, Drum thought it was a piece of jewellery—part of a pendant—about the size of his thumb, with irregularly shaped facets, meeting to a dull point.
“May I see it?”
She handed it to him. It felt warm to the touch, smooth and hard like glass, but with a milky translucence.
Moretti said, “Hold it up to the light.”
He half-turned to face the centre of the room, holding the crystal between thumb and forefinger up to the light well. The crystal immediately became less opaque, revealing a core of metallic-looking material that appeared to change colour from metallic red through to metallic blue, with hints of yellow and green that slowly spun a half-turn one way and back again at its very centre, always keeping one side directed towards the light.
“I’m intrigued,” said Drum, still staring at the colourful display. “What is it?”
“I have no idea,” said Moretti. “I received it via a courier two days ago at my office. No note, nothing to identify who the sender was.” She paused and reached down into her handbag and pulled out her phone. “Then shortly after I received this voicemail.” She placed the phone on the table and found her voicemail, selecting one particular message. She pressed play. A woman’s voice came through the speaker, soft, calm and melodious.
“Hi Francesca, you don’t know me—we haven’t met, but I work for Marco Salenko. Francesca, something bad is happening here—something terrible, and we have to stop it.”
CHAPTER THREE
Assassin
The man sat patiently beneath one of the tall potted palms in the lobby that placed him slightly in shade and out of the glare of the central light well. This helped to obscure his face from the array of security cameras that he had marked on entering the hotel. He casually flicked through the screens on his phone and checked his email, pausing briefly to savour the hotel’s excellent espresso, allowing him to discreetly scan the room as he did so. He’d received the location just a few hours earlier and had dressed accordingly: a dark-grey suit, shirt and tie, and black leather brogues to complete the look. His hair was well-groomed, dark and swept back. His features were unremarkable for a man in his early forties. Just another City gent waiting in the hotel lobby drinking coffee.
Unremarkable was good and blending in was his goal, but beneath the dark suit and starched shirt lurked another man: a fit, well-built man, slightly taller than most with broad, strong shoulders and muscles that had become hard and taut over many years of daily exercise and training. This man stayed hidden until it was time.
A woman stepped out of the restaurant—good looking with dark flowing hair and a good figure. He checked his phone for a photo and confirmed his mark. Her name was Moretti. She stopped and waited for her companion, a tall man, slightly older but fit—not your average City type. It was the way he moved, confident but wary, that made the man cautious. Another combatant. Her security, perhaps? He would have to be careful. He glanced again at his phone and pressed a specially installed app, setting up an encrypted link to a remote server, providing him with a secure means of commu
nication. The app flashed green and displayed a small icon of a microphone. He spoke softly into a concealed mic.
“I have her. As you said, she’s in the hotel lobby—Liverpool St. A man is with her.”
A neutral voice spoke into his concealed earpiece. Man or woman, he couldn’t tell. The voice was modulated, but not as crude as some mechanical sounding scramblers he had used in the past. “Take a photo, please.”
He slowly lifted his phone and took a picture of the couple still talking outside the restaurant, and waited for a few seconds. The response surprised him.
“Benjamin Drummond, Captain, retired. Now working as a specialist consultant for Roderick Olivier and Delaney. Accessing military records …”
He waited and continued to observe the couple. Her body language said she liked him; his was a neutral stance, professional, keeping a respectful distance and observing the room, aware of his surroundings. Some form of close protection detail. The voice spoke once more into his earpiece.
“Captain Benjamin Drummond, British Army, two tours—Iraq and Afghanistan. A specialist in Signals Intelligence.” There was a long pause. “The rest of his file is locked … attempting to bypass.” There was another pause. This was worrying. A locked military file meant black-ops or special forces. Neither was good from his perspective. At last, the voice spoke. “Unable to bypass. Proceed with extreme caution.”
No shit, he thought. “What are your instructions?”
There was another slight pause. “Retrieve the device at all costs.”
“And payment?”
“Payment has been deposited into your account.”
He flipped over to another screen containing his Bitcoin wallet. A substantial number of coins had been deposited into his account in that very instant.
“What about Drummond?”
“Proceed with caution,” repeated the voice. “But if engaging, then do so with extreme prejudice.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Stevie
Stevie sat tucked in the nook of a small bay window in the Cam Coffee Shop, a quaint little place situated just off Saint Mary Street behind the Cambridge colleges where she was currently in residence, and far enough away from Market Square and the tourists that congregated there to afford her some solitude for the dissertation she was working on. It was not going well.
The Cam was unusual for a coffee shop in a university town, not because of its poor coffee, its espresso was one of the best, nor the quality of food on offer, the Cam served a generous all-day breakfast; no, it was simply the fact that it provided no wi-fi. This thinned out the number of undergraduates that hung out there, which was the primary reason that Stevie took refuge in the place.
She had nothing against the general population of undergraduates in the town, after all, she had been one once. It was just that, at twenty-five, she felt out of touch with the current generation. Her small frame and bob of blond hair gave her a youthful look. A small silver nose ring and a brow piercing over her left eye slightly offset the symmetry of her small, round face and lent her a fierce expression when she stared straight at you. Her experiences at the hands of one Vlad Abramov the last time she was here had all but erased the good times she remembered of her undergraduate years. So she looked on with envy and some remorse at the new students that now walked the college gardens and halls of residence woefully ignorant of people like Abramov that could snatch you up and ruin your life. If it hadn’t been for Ben Drummond, she would have still been under his control—if not dead already. The return to Cambridge to finish her masters in computer sciences had been Ben’s idea. Unlike most of the men in her life, he wanted nothing in return, except, perhaps, her loyalty. She didn’t want to disappoint him. And so she turned once more to her dissertation and concentrated on completing the task.
There was a tap on the window. She looked up to see the smiling face of Jeremy Burnett, a first year at Pembroke College studying computer sciences. She sighed and reluctantly smiled back. He had discovered her refuge. Jeremy disappeared from the window to reappear inside the cafe. He waved from the serving counter.
“Hi, Stevie. Can I get you a coffee?”
She relented. “Thanks, Americano please.”
Jeremy Burnett was a tall, gangly youth with thick black hair that he wore to the collar of the old Army Surplus trench coat. His small round glasses gave him a studious, nerdy look. He was as sharp as a tack and could dissect any argument that you threw at him with a logical if long-winded precision. He also had a pleasant smile.
She had met him early in the term at the home of Professor Kovac, her supervisor for her MPhil, at a welcome barbeque he’d laid on for the undergraduates and those postgrads he was supervising. At just forty-five, Kovac was a rising star in Cambridge academia, specialising in the field of Artificial Intelligence. She was lucky to have him as her supervisor. As a first year, Jeremy idolised the man. Unlike the other undergraduates who were all too shy to talk to her, Jeremy struck up a conversation and never left her side for most of the evening.
Jeremy carried two steaming cups of coffee over to her table and plonked himself down on a chair opposite, unhitching his canvas holdall from his shoulder and placing it on the floor. He gave her a wry smile “You look like you could do with a break. Dissertation giving you trouble?”
She closed her laptop and sighed. “How did you know I was here?”
“I didn’t. I was just passing. On my way to buy some veg at the market.”
“Right.”
“So this is where you hide out.”
“It’s quieter than the library.”
He pulled out his phone and studied the screen. “You know this place has no wi-fi, right?”
Stevie smiled. Like most people his age, his phone was an umbilical to a virtual world of memes, likes and selfies. She had long ago cut that cord. She held up her phone. “Personal hotspot.”
Jeremy frowned. “Is that secure?”
“Depends on the phone’s OS. Android’s access point is open by default allowing anyone to connect and hog your wi-fi.” She lifted her phone from the table and showed him the app displayed on the screen. “Which is why I’ve written my own access point in Java that routes through a VPN. It’s how I communicate back to the London office where I work.”
Jeremy looked impressed. “Wow, you can do that?”
She smiled. “Sure. You’ll probably cover this sort of stuff in your second year.”
“Really!”
Never in a million years, she thought. Most of the undergraduates at Cambridge were academics. They rarely got their hands dirty writing code or wiring a network. She had been coding since the age of twelve, using her father’s old IBM PC back in Minsk. There they knew her as Svetlana Milova. At sixteen, she was writing in Assembly language, a low-level type of computer instruction, normally reserved for the programming of operating systems. It was also the language of choice for those programmers writing computer viruses and malware.
She glanced down at her phone and sighed as she realised the time. This wasn’t getting the work done.
“Perhaps I can help,” he said, giving her one of his puppy-dog smiles.
“With what?”
“Your dissertation. I may be an undergrad, but perhaps talking it through with someone might help?”
He had a point. She flipped up her laptop. “It’s an assignment Professor Kovac gave us—”
“Wow, Kovac!”
“Will you stop with the hero worship.”
“Sorry. What’s the subject?”
“The ethical dilemma in the research and creation of Artificial Intelligence. He gave us a quote by Stephen Hawking: Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last …”
“So he wants you to discuss the pros and cons,” said Jeremy, stating the obvious.
“I guess. The full quote by Hawking talks about addressing risks, but in the context of an AGI—Artificial General Intelligence
.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Well,” she said, scanning her text, “most AIs, as we currently define them, perform a set of very narrow functions—hence we refer to them as ‘narrow’ AIs. Take IBM’s Watson—”
“The one that beat everyone at Jeopardy.”
“Right. It took a huge computer array and an army of IBM programmers tweaking the system behind the scenes to pull off the win. IBM always claimed that it could be repurposed and used in many other applications, such as medical diagnosis. But when they started trials with various healthcare partners, the system turned out to be bad at the job.”
“Really!”
“Yeah, it missed simple diagnoses, such as a heart attack, that even a first-year medical student could spot. It was great at playing Jeopardy, but crap at everything else.”
Jeremy laughed, then turned serious. “But is a doctor just a means to obtain a diagnosis?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, would you want a machine giving you the news that you had cancer, or that your nearest and dearest has Alzheimers?”
Stevie realised she had touched a nerve. “You alright, Jeremy?”
“Oh, yeah, sure. I’m just saying …”
She gave him a hard look, and he smiled back at her. “I guess what I’m saying is that an AGI would need to understand empathy and have an ethical framework within which to operate. Doctors spend years learning this stuff.”
He was right, of course. She typed a quick note to herself. Jeremy was indeed leading her in the right direction, although probably not the direction he hoped. “I think Hawking was probably referring to the control problem. How do you stop an AGI from getting exponentially smarter and leaving the rest of humanity in the dust?”
“You mean before it realises that the big hairless apes that created it are impeding its development?” he said.
“Right. Empathy, ethical framework and control. The risks we need to address before attempting to develop an AGI. Jeremy, you’re brilliant. I think I know where I’m going with this.”
