Chapter 35
“Mr. President.”
The Secretary of Defense had arrived in the Oval Office, having asked for a private meeting.
“Make this quick, Joanne. I have a call with the UK PM and her CObrA committee in ten minutes. Is the Seventh Fleet in position in the South China Sea?”
“Yes, sir.”
Pardington looked at her closely. “But you could have phoned that in. What’s up?”
“We’ve intercepted a hacking attempt on the fleet’s ERM 4 system.”
“Shit.” He took a deep breath. “That can’t be good news.” He was trying to remember what that was.
She smiled wearily. If she was tired, she could see he was exhausted. “It isn’t.”
“I think I know what the ERM 4 is, but you need to be clear. This’s no time for confusion.”
“It’s the AI system designed for our navy.
The USS Ronald Reagan is the first nuclear-class warship to have it installed.
To even attempt to get into the ERM 4 means someone has an AI program that is considerably more sophisticated than ours.
It means that another AI has figured out how to get into our military. ”
Pardington sat up straight. If confidence had nuts, his had just taken a direct hit.
“You think it’s adaptive predictive AI.”
“I do, sir.”
“You think the Chinese got there first?”
“I think someone did.” She paused and looked him straight in the eyes. “I think only your head of National Intelligence can answer that.”
Was Pardington mistaken, or had Secretary Clavelle just intimated that Grant McAllister—and not her—should be the one bringing this news to the President?
How could he not know about this serious, perhaps fatal, breach?
But the President knew the answer to that. McAllister did know about the breach. He’d made it happen.
As though reading his thoughts, the Secretary of Defense said, “Someone must have given the intruders access. Someone on our side, sir, opened the door.”
It was, Pardington knew, how the Great Wall of China was finally breached after holding back invaders for centuries. Someone on the inside—a general, in fact—opened a door. And let them in.
“You say it was an attempt. They didn’t get in?”
“We don’t know.”
“How can you not know?” he shouted. Then lowered his voice. “A clear threat, almost certainly a hostile nation, might just have broken into our military, and you don’t know?”
“APAI is, as you know, adaptive. Just as we think we have it, it shifts, disappears.”
“So it’s in the system?”
“We think so. We’re tracking something. We believe that so far we’ve managed to block it. But—”
“But eventually it will get through.”
“If it hasn’t already.” She stopped suddenly.
“Go on, Joanne. Out with it. I need to hear it all.”
“It’s also possible this particular attack is a stalking horse.”
“A what?”
“A blind. That the real threat is hiding behind something that looks like it belongs in our system. It is predictive but not predictable. It adjusts.”
Pardington was reminded of Darwin’s famous line, so often misquoted. It was not the fittest that would survive, it was those that could adapt. Which was what made adaptive predictive AI so very dangerous.
If APAI could adapt, then they had to too. And quickly.
“What do you think the end goal is?” he asked.
She hesitated.
“Come on, you must have thought about it before coming to me.”
“I don’t think the Chinese leadership is behind it.”
“Joanne, I asked about the end goal. And if the leadership isn’t behind it, who is? If it’s Pangu, they’re Chinese.”
“But not the regime. Not the leadership.”
It was still far from clear if the CCP and Pangu were, in fact, one and the same. Pardington had bet a lot on Chen being as in the dark as he was. More so. But still …
“Why are you so sure?”
“I wasn’t until…”
“What?”
She took a breath. “I could be wrong—”
“For Chrissake, out with it!”
“This hacking happened just as our fleet got into position. Our missiles are now aimed at the mainland.”
“What’re you saying?” Pardington paled. “Oh, shit. You think APAI is trying to take control of our nuclear weapons, and when it does, it will fire on China.”
“And others, perhaps. Likely.”
Pardington’s mind worked quickly. “How far do you think they have gotten? Their AI is probably in the ERM 4 already, but have they breached our other systems?”
“You can bet they’re trying. We’re doing a diagnostic now, but we only found the ERM 4 incursion because it’s our most sensitive system, and even then, we can’t actually find it. It’s like trying to grab hold of mercury.”
“You said it might be targeting others. You mean North Korea. Iran. Even Russia.” Now the president sat back heavily in his chair.
“We’re being set up as the aggressors. It’ll look to the world as though we were the terrorists all along.
What was it you called it? A stalking horse.
The world will think, our allies will think, we’ve been hiding behind some mythical, fabricated organization named for a Chinese god.
If our missiles hit those countries, in unprovoked attacks… ”
Paddington Bear looked like he’d just swallowed an arsenic sandwich.
His Secretary of Defense glanced at the time. It was close to midnight. “Tomorrow is the CCP National People’s Congress. If our rockets hit Beijing—”
“The entire Chinese leadership will be wiped out, and we’ll be blamed. And if our intercontinental ballistic missiles are compromised, no country is safe. Fuck. We have to stop it. Disarm the missiles.”
“That will leave us completely defenseless, and it’s possible that’s their intention. We either fire and set off a world war, or we disarm and expose our chests to an enemy.”
Chests, thought Pardington, or something lower. Like most men, his first thought was of his genitals.
Now another thought struck him. He stared at his Secretary of Defense.
“What?” she said, her turn to demand an answer.
“Could we even fire on ourselves?”
That had not occurred to her.
Secretary Clavelle felt herself going faint. A war vet with extensive combat experience, cool and calm under pressure, this was a step too far even for her.
She took a deep breath in. Held it for a count of four, then released it before she dared answer.
“Yessir. If it is APAI, anything is possible. If it senses we’re about to shut down, it could fire immediately. If it senses we’re informing allies, it could shift to domestic targets. If we can think of something, it can too. It will protect itself and carry out its programming, at all costs.”
The President nodded. “Okay. Options?”
This was something Clavelle, like the three-star general she was in the army, had prepared for. “We only have one. We need to find out where the terrorists are operating from and shut it down. Have we had any luck?”
Luck. Pardington almost laughed. They had the most sophisticated intelligence and surveillance network in the world, but it came down to luck. Once again, she wasn’t wrong.
“Not yet.” Now he too looked at the time. They had hours now. Hours. “Do what you can to keep the APAI at bay, Joanne.”
“Yessir.”
“And as you leave, ask Kathleen to send in my private chef.”
Passing along the message, the Secretary of Defense said, “How could he be hungry now?”
“People react to stress in different ways,” said the ever-loyal Kathleen.
And yet Joanne Clavelle was left with the tiny nagging suspicion that maybe the President was not as shocked as he said he was about the APAI incursion.
Maybe, just maybe, the US really was behind Pangu.
Maybe the USA had cracked the APAI code, the next gen of technology, and was using it to bring down China. To own China.
Was the US to blame after all? For the alarms. The elevators. The worldwide blackout that had taken so many lives.
As she stood in the hall, the chef hurried by. As though food were the answer to the crisis.
“Good. Take this down,” said Pardington to his chef. “APAI taking control of our missiles. Targeting Beijing? Others?”
The chef, who was a fully trained chief petty officer in the navy, looked up in shock. Then nodded and ran out.
Secretary Clavelle was hurrying down the hall to an urgent meeting with the cyberterrorism unit when the chef passed her at a run.
What had Paddington ordered that was so urgent? éclairs? Profiteroles? A soufflé?
She picked up her pace, breaking into a jog, then a run.
President Pardington dropped his face into his hands and rubbed, feeling the scrape of two days’ growth of beard. He hadn’t shaved, hadn’t showered since the blackout.
He’d caught a few hours’ sleep on the sofa, and once found himself face down on his desk, saliva spreading over a top-secret document plastered to his cheek.
Within minutes, it would be Friday, February 26. The day of the National People’s Congress in Beijing. The last chance to stop Pangu before it wiped out the CCP, and God knew who else. And the USA got blamed.
It was a strange position to be in. The US President desperate to save the Communist regimes in China and North Korea. Never mind the bloody regime in Russia.
But here he was. He had to adapt to this new reality. Or they would all go the way of the dodo.
The President hit a button. “Find Mr. McAllister. Send him here.”
He’d beat the truth out of McAllister if he had to. Pardington knew Joanne Clavelle was right. Their only hope was to discover where the APAI was being controlled from and shut it down. His hope was that McAllister knew and could be “persuaded” to tell them.
But … could detaining McAllister set off the attack?
The problem was, he didn’t know who to trust.
He’d considered having McAllister monitored, his communications examined. But McAllister ran the intelligence services. He’d probably recruited, subverted, agents to his cause. Telling them God knew what to convince them to turn on their own government.
Probably, thought Pardington, telling them the government was not legitimate. That it had betrayed American values by getting into bed with foreigners. That it was in cahoots with China and other Communist regimes. And that they had a moral right and duty to stop it.
For young, impressionable minds, a strong father figure like McAllister could shape their thoughts. Their loyalties. Their actions.
No. There was no one to turn to for help. Like Chen, he was reduced to playing a lone hand. But he still had one slim hope.
Vivien Li.
Though he’d subtly suggested to Chen that if he killed her, it would not be a bad thing, he didn’t want the human rights activist murdered.
But he knew her death warrant had already been signed by Chen, so he might as well play into it.
It would not hasten her death, and it might give Chen more confidence that he could trust the American President.
But now he had to stop it. Was desperate to keep her alive.
“Sir.” Kathleen’s calm voice came over the intercom. “The UK Prime Minister and CObrA are waiting.”
“Let them wait. Send the chef back in.”
He had to send another message to Chen, to get him to stop the hunt for Madame Li.
“The chef? Perhaps it can wait until after your meeting.”
“Now. I need her now.”
What he really needed was for Vivien Li to still be alive. To succeed in tracking down Pangu.
What I need is luck.
Alice tried the door to the fish ball joint. It was locked. Inside, a young man sweeping the floor looked up and shook his head. Not open.
“What do we do now?” asked Ming-na.
“This can’t be the only door,” said Alice, and without looking to see if anyone followed, she walked around the side of the building. At the back, the smell of curry was stronger.
They could hear sizzling.
“No,” said a cook when Alice opened the door. “Closed!” She shook her spatula at them.
“We want curried fish balls,” said Alice slowly, clearly, then, remembering the rest of Liam’s message, “… in wonton soup.”
The spatula stopped waving. It froze, suspended, in a stance reminiscent of Auntie Gugu’s initial reaction to them.
Auntie Gugu.
Alice shoved away the thought of the fate of the tiny elderly woman and focused on the chef, who was staring at them. Then she went back to waving the utensil.
“No. That’s just stupid. Go away.”
“Curried fish balls in wonton soup,” Vivien insisted.
After years as a vocal critic of the Chinese regime, her survival instinct had sharpened her ability to read even the subtlest of expressions. She was pretty sure she’d seen hesitation in the cook’s face.
The chef was right, or course. It was a ridiculous order. No one ate them together like that. Fish balls were deep fried and served on a skewer. Not plopped into soup. And certainly not wonton soup.
And yet that’s what Liam had described.
The cooks in the cramped kitchen glared at the newcomers, who stared back. A tableau of suspicion.
Could they have it wrong? Had Liam been to a different stall? He hadn’t specified. Just said it was the best on the island.
“It’s okay, let them in.” The beaded curtain separating the tiny kitchen from the small dining room had parted. “You made it.”