Chapter 19
I hardly had to wait at all, which was so unlike the universe. I no sooner found the new hit of a common ancestor and signed out of my site and then the doors to the hush-hush meeting opened and Red was first out, a smile on her face.
“Oh,” I said as it became clear. I glanced at the closed tablet. “You slaved it to yours. Of course. Well, can we contact that lady about her family tree?”
“How about we just look at her tree and not have contact with someone who doesn’t need to know about you or draw the attention of anyone who already does?” she asked.
“Right. Government hacking at its best. Well, that’s likely the NSA, but close, right?”
“We have an NSA feed,” Red said with a smirk.
“Cool. Do you realize the shit I would find if I watched over your shoulder for, like, a day?”
“It has occurred to me; I may never sleep again. Right now though, we have enough trouble with the killer pharmacists and the pseudo terrorists.”
“So Oscar Wymer works for William Cramer. Ergo, he’s behind the attack. If CATMAP was used in any way, then he was trying to support it with this false flag.”
Agents Carmine, Kessler, and Steele were walking by as I said that, and all three turned.
“Why would he need to, Cassie?” Agent Steele asked.
“Because I think his prototype is unreliable. He was trying to make something that thought differently than a human… he might have succeeded.”
“You think it, what… ignores orders?” Kessler asked.
“I don’t know. My friend at home told me that she had overheard him talking in the casino and he was majorly pissed off at his own machine.
But she didn’t hear why. I’m guessing it’s not reliable.
Might not follow orders, might get distracted, might not understand prioritizing.
Who knows? It’s not supposed to think like a human by its very design. ”
“So your best guess is that it doesn’t produce the results he says it does?” Steele asked. He didn’t seem shocked by the idea.
“Maybe. I mean, why would it? If he built it right, it should think however it thinks. It might answer a question or it might just study star spirals in the Milky Way. If you build a new kind of intelligence, you should be prepared for it to be new and think new thoughts, right? Sociopaths and psychopaths think differently than we do; why wouldn’t this thing? ”
“Hmm. That makes sense,” Steele said.
“And then there’s the fact that I seem to have beaten it to the punchline on the New York attack.
And Washington. Why? It should be faster than any human, right?
And both Oscar and this task force found me super quick when I didn’t really leave many clues.
Why would I take a train toward Washington? ”
“Because there are no direct trains from Pittsburgh to Fort Benning?” Agent Carmine asked.
“Yes, but did you know that was where I was headed? At that point?”
“Well, we didn’t have that piece yet,” Agent Steele said.
“But you do now,” I said.
“Yes. People have come forward. Powerful people.”
“JSOC wants me,” I said. “They always have. And my attorney called Director Brown.”
“He did. Which reminds me, we need to get Cassie a phone call to Taylor Coors at Coors Bennington right away,” Steele said to Red.
“No problem,” she answered.
“Can you really fly a helicopter?” Rose asked out of left field. Made me curious as to what they talked about in that meeting of theirs.
“Theoretically. I’ve never done it, but I’m pretty good on a simulator. But I’m not a pilot—yet. I’m not a soldier, and I am not a Ranger. Only Rangers are Rangers.”
“No, of course not. You only just became eligible to join the military,” Steele said.
“Exactly. But going back to Cramer’s AI device… I suspect it gave my probable location to both Oscar and to you.”
“Why would it do that?” Kessler asked. “I understand Oscar, but why us?”
“Because it thinks differently,” I said.
“Hmm. Still, it seems unlikely,” Steele said.
“Granted.”
“So… your mom?” Steele asked.
“Found a common ancestor. My third-great grandfather on my mother’s side. James McHugh. But the family tree of my matching relative is private.”
“Private-ish,” Red said. “I was gonna pop into it.”
“That sounds…” Agent Steele said, “…like a plan. Go to it. We have some killers to investigate. Red, we’ll have a number of things for you to look into shortly.”
“Yes, boss. This shouldn’t take long.”
The agents moved off to the bullpen and Red turned back to me. “Okay. Let’s pop this open and find your grandparents.”
She did. Took her all of five minutes. James McHugh had a son, Justin, who had a daughter, Jane. Jane married George Shipley, and had a daughter, Amy—my grandmother.
“There’s a picture,” Red said, clicking the keyboard.
“Oh. She looks like my mother. Very much like my mother,” I said.
“I can’t believe you remember your mother’s face,” she said.
I pulled out my spiral notebook and opened it to the inside back cover. My pencil work was pretty good, if I do say so myself. The picture was drawn from a memory of Mom looking at me in my crib, short brown hair hanging around her face like the frame of a photo.
“Oh, that’s uncanny,” Red said. “Sorry,” she amended instantly.
“I get it. I’ve been weirding people out my whole life.”
“She does look like Amy. Undeniably like her. But Amy never married,” Red said. “That I can find.”
“How good were the records? She was born in the seventies,” I said. “Pre-digital age.”
“True, but the physical analog records were pretty good. Birth, school, death, college transcripts. A lot of that has been digitized since then. Much of Amy’s life is on digital record. I can tell you where she was living for most of her life: Chicago.”
“If you let me dig into them, I could do that while you do government hacker stuff,” I said.
“Yeah, I can set up a little workspace right here. But first, let’s get you that phone call.”
Five minutes later, I was on the phone with one of the partners of a major DC law firm.
It’s one thing to talk about it like it’s no big deal but it was…
a very big deal. Amazing what money could do.
I had never tapped my crypto investments until this trip.
Paying a big retainer to the firm had been very solid insurance. I had plans for the rest of the money.
“Are you okay, Ms. Blake?” Mr. Coors asked.
“I am, Mr. Coors, but I’m very happy I retained your services.”
“My understanding is that you are being kept in safe custody to protect you? Is that your understanding too?”
“It is. Plus, I’m helping them.”
“Helping how?”
“I told you that I have certain skills when I first retained your firm. The kind of skills that allowed me to make a small fortune with Bitcoin. In short, I have an extremely unusual aptitude for pattern recognition.”
“Well then. At the very least, you should be earning compensation for service you provide.”
“Oh, yeah, that would be great. I mean, I’d do it for free, because, you know, America, but I imagine this call is expensive.”
“Okay. I will expect a call every day at this time. Should I not hear from you within an hour of this time, I will rattle the halls of the justice department until I do hear from you. I will also negotiate compensation for what seems like irreplaceable expertise. How does that sound?”
“Excellent, sir.”
“All good?” Red asked.
“Yeah. I have to make a call every day at this time or he’ll send in the cavalry, but otherwise, things are fine.”
“Well, I have a workstation for you, right behind mine. I’m looking into the prescriptions the suspects filled for the victims.”
“You know, I wonder how many times they might have failed… you know, filled a med but the victim hasn’t taken it yet? The poison mixed with the blood pressure meds. The false epi-pen that hasn’t had to be used yet?”
“Shit!” Red said, staring at me. Then her fingers were flying over her keyboards in an awesome display of physical dexterity.
Kessler came rushing up. “Got your alert,” he said to Red.
“I’m running every med the Penrods have filled since they retired,” Red said. “Cross-referencing it with living politicians. There are dozens that haven’t died… yet. We’ll need agents and law enforcement all across the country.”
Within minutes, I got pushed out of my makeshift workstation by the flood of task force agents who jumped into action to protect what turned out to be twenty-seven other officials.