Massina had vetoed the idea, not because he thought the computer would fail the test — on the contrary, he had every expectation it would pass — but because even he didn’t have infinite resources to devote to the project. And as important as uncovering an American recruitment network might be for the country’s security, they had no reason to believe that it would help them find Ghadab.
And Massina was all about finding Ghadab. He was obsessed with it.
Chelsea had known Massina for several years, since meeting him during a lecture at Stanford she’d been invited to as a high schooler. Though others found him somewhat standoffish and often irritatingly driven, she liked him and was easily the engineer who was closest to him. Massina was relentless when pursuing a technical problem or exploring some area of science that interested him. Now that same obsession had been turned on Daesh.
How far was he willing to go? He had given the government a host of equipment and the services of two employees in an effort to nab him. When that didn’t work, he’d started this — an effort that must be costing him millions of dollars.
What if this didn’t work? What would he do next?
What would satisfy the obsession?
Chelsea’s workstation pinged a message from Massina:
Can you come Home in an hour and discuss latest?
She typed back an answer saying she’d be there, then sent a message to the automated driver tasked with bringing everyone to and from the Annex.
In the meantime, the program had been busy exploring knives. It had taken a special interest in khanjars, curved daggers often used for ceremonial purposes.
“What’s the connection to Ghadab?” she asked, scrolling through the list of databases and websites the program had consulted. It had gone into a museum, slipping past security protocols to find a list of artifacts available only to curators; it had looked up news stories and examined medical records.
Chelsea opened the inspection tool to see what the machine was finding. Among other things, the curve of the blade tended to make a deep but straight cut…
“Well, duh,” she said.
The AI began searching through police records. There were many knife attacks in the country, but none used a curved blade.
It retooled, examining the wounds that led it to conclude a khanjar had been used, then trying to extrapolate the killing action — how the knife was wielded — against different blades.
There had been several deaths in New York City recently, but the string had started a month ago, when Ghadab was still in Africa.
Then it brought up a seemingly random crime — a Canadian found with a slit throat in northern Vermont.
And from there, an avalanche ensued.
88
Ghadab knew only one of the American brothers: Amin Greene, whom he’d met at a Pakistan training camp as a young man. Greene, several years older than him, was an American citizen, and after working with the Taliban in Afghanistan under a false name and passport for a short time, he had returned to America to wait. Initially a member of a cell funded by al-Qaeda, he had become associated with the more enlightened branches of jihad and renewed his acquaintance with several important brothers, including Ghadab, through visits to Belgium over the past four years. He was an extremely careful man — he would never fly directly to Belgium, for example, rather entering the country by car or train with a false passport to make himself more difficult to track — but at the same time he was obsessed with explosives. The look on his face, even when lighting a firecracker, betrayed something akin to sexual ecstasy.
And he loved lighting firecrackers.
“You’re going to draw attention to us,” scolded Ghadab after Greene lit and tossed a small pack of firecrackers off his back deck.
Greene stared intently at the yellow speckles as the firecrackers popped and sizzled on the rear lawn. The smell of spent gunpowder tickled Ghadab’s nose, reminding him of the fight he’d left behind some months ago. It was a sacrilegious tease.
“Aren’t you worried about a fire?” asked Ghadab.
“Overrated.” Greene’s accent was very American, but then he’d spent his entire life here. He barely looked Arab at all, though his grandfather and mother had been Iraqi.
“The police may hear,” suggested Ghadab.
“State police are twenty miles away, and they know me,” said Greene. “We don’t have town cops. Even if we did, I’m way out in the boonies. Relax.”
“We have important work.”
“Of course.”
“I need to retrieve the diagrams. And to find the woman.”
“I understand all of your requirements. It will happen. For now, relax. Have a beer.”
Ghadab frowned. “You have a good life here. Perhaps it is too much of a distraction.”
Greene smiled and lit another firecracker. He waited a moment, then tossed it so high it exploded in the air.
“I’m ready,” he told Ghadab. “I’m more than ready.”
89
Understanding the program’s analysis required a crash course in forensics and anatomy, and as smart as Chelsea was, there was no way after half an hour for her to be absolutely sure that Socrates had drawn a valid conclusion about the knife wound. And if it had stopped there, she might well have written it off. But while she was reading up on wound patterns and the location of blood vessels in the neck, Socrates was out making other connections, exploring boat rentals and gas station purchases.
Collecting a good portion of this work involved penetrating supposedly secure networks — problematic at best from a legal point of view, but that wasn’t something Chelsea spent a lot of time thinking about until after she got the text from Massina saying that Johansen was in town and wanted to say hello. By then, she had already worked up a quick presentation for Massina on what she (or rather, Socrates) had found. She called over the car and ran for it as quickly as she could, eager to share what she had found.
It was an age-old question: in the race to save lives, did the ends justify the means?
Clearly, the CIA thought so — but they also wanted to cover their butts, which was why they had gotten Smart Metal involved in the first place. Any illegal, or even questionable, activity could be blamed on the company.
Massina was OK with that. Was she?
How far had she come in the past year, from creating bots that could rescue people from burning buildings to this?
I haven’t done anything wrong. Not even illegal that I know. I’m helping save lives.
Chelsea told Massina she would meet Johansen in the Box; the two men were waiting when she arrived. Walking in, she waved her hand perfunctorily, freezing Johansen as he rose to greet her. She put her flash drive into the receptacle used by the presentation computer and immediately launched into a brief. A map flashed on the screen, flight data, a receipt, then an autopsy photo, a close-up, more close-ups.
“The cut pattern is exactly the same,” Chelsea said. “That doesn’t prove that these people were killed by the same person. But it’s an interesting coincidence — especially given that the dead man was on the RCMP watch list.”
“If the dead man was so dangerous,” said Massina, “why didn’t the Mounties pick him up?”