“You’d have to ask them,” said Chelsea. Socrates had data on him, but she hadn’t bothered to bring it. “He traveled to Jordan two years ago, which I would guess got him on the list.”
“Was he on ours?” Massina asked Johansen.
“I’d have to ask Homeland Security. Canadian citizen — I assume he probably wouldn’t have been let into the country. Or if he was, would have been followed.”
“The boat was rented,” said Chelsea, bringing up the receipt.
“I’m not going to ask how you have all of this data,” said Johansen. “Why kill him? Frankly, that argues that this wasn’t Ghadab — he’s going to need help.”
“Not if he’s coming to the U.S.,” suggested Chelsea. “This guy is of no more use.”
“You usually don’t burn your bridges,” said Johansen. “Not even Daesh.”
“The parable of the scorpion and the tortoise,” said Massina. “It’s what he does.”
While in Johansen’s mind the connection was tentative, it was far too important to be dismissed. If Ghadab was in the U.S., an attack was imminent. And if he was involved, it was going to be huge. So instead of flying down to New York as planned, he rented a car and drove over to Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, where he could use a secure line to talk to Langley. His creds impressed the security detail at the gate, but inside was another matter, and it took nearly a half hour for him to get clearance to use the system.
He fretted in the meantime. The analysts had always predicted that there would be an upswing in terror attacks as ISIS lost ground. No longer able to contribute in the Levant, as Daesh called it, the sociopaths they attracted would kill in their homelands. The potential targets were limitless.
But Ghadab was a special case. He went big, and if he had concluded that the cause was lost, he’d want to go out in style. He’d want to make 9/11 look like a random IED attack compared to his finale.
Johansen quickly briefed the desk on what he had found. Still hoping to make his flight to New York, he was about to hang up when the Director himself came on the line. Colby had happened to be standing nearby when the call came in.
“I heard,” he told Johansen. “How sure of this are you?”
“Reasonably. It’s only circumstantial, as I explained.”
“This is Massina’s work?”
“His people.”
“We’re at arm’s length?”
“I don’t think that’s an issue,” said Johansen sharply. All this cover-my-ass shit was wearing on him.
“Get back right away,” said Colby.
“I was going to New York. I have a commercial flight and I was going to meet Moorehead.”
“Where are you?”
“Hanscom. It’s an air base outside—”
“I’ll arrange for a flight. Stand by.”
90
They were working on power plants. They wanted to create another Chernobyl.
Or so Socrates thought.
It was a roundabout conclusion that began with an analysis of the data from the Syrian bunker — a chat-room handle that turned up as a user name on a Russian database. That was a weak link, admittedly, but the search trail was highly suggestive, and using time stamps, the program made a host of other connections.
Intuitive leaps, if a person were making them. Algorithmic inferences if you were talking about a computer.
“Algorithmic inference” had a bit of a negative connotation to Chelsea, since it implied that the machine’s thinking was fatally limited by the construction of its programming. And while she had to be always aware of that possibility, in the brief time since developing the program’s present incarnation, she believed Socrates was no more limited by its circuitry than humans were.
But that was all theory. Finding what Ghadab and his minions were up to was reality. Hard reality.
The team Ghadab had assembled in the bunker had accessed a great deal of information about the Soviet (now Ukrainian) Chernobyl power plant and its meltdown in 1986. They had examined schematics of the plant, along with a detailed timeline and even precise calculations of what would have been happening inside the nuclear pile from two months before. They had apparently taken great interest in the response of the people running the plant, as well as the evacuation of the town that followed.
The specific information regarding the accident wouldn’t be of much use: the plant was essentially a one-off technology-wise, dissimilar to plants outside of the old Soviet Union, especially those in the U.S. The circumstances that led to the meltdown were also somewhat unique, with cascading failures and overrides that would be difficult to duplicate.
But the idea that Ghadab was interested in had universal application for most nuclear plants. And Socrates had traced further research — though here the computer’s confidence level on its links dipped below 70 percent — to other types of plants. Ghadab’s team appeared to have been doing research on Fukushima in Japan, among others. Another one-off, perhaps, given the circumstances, but highly suggestive.
Meanwhile, internet-based attacks had been made on nuclear power plants in Italy, France, and Germany. Such attacks were almost routine now, and in any event the ones Socrates recovered had all been turned back. But neither Socrates nor the respective authorities had pinned them on the usual suspects — China and Russia most prominently. The timing suggested they were “due diligence” attacks by Ghadab’s people — probes designed to see if they could easily gather data.
In that case, they’d failed: the sort of detailed schematics of the buildings and security precautions Chelsea thought she would see in preparation for an attack had not been downloaded.
There were other things in the files that Socrates momentarily found interesting — Bitcoin accounts, chat-room records, and even house listings for Argentina. The AI program, however, concentrated most of its effort on the nukes.
Was this an inherent bias in the program? A nuclear meltdown was a very severe threat, and therefore deserving of the most resources? Or was the evidence there strongest?
Chelsea couldn’t decide. And she worried that while Socrates had studied past terror events, it hadn’t correctly concluded that these were all “black swan” events — rare and seemingly random. In short, she was concerned that the computer was making the same mistakes a human might. And there would be no way to tell until they caught Ghadab.
Energized by her meeting with Johansen, Chelsea threw herself into her work, examining Socrates’s logic, working on new extensions that might help it streamline its thought process. She was so deep into her work that she missed several buzzes of her phone announcing incoming texts. It was only when she took a bathroom break to hit the john that she realized Johnny had sent her several over the past hour:
So, we doin’ dinner?
59 Minutes ago
Dinner?
28 Minutes ago
You around?
13 Minutes ago
She texted him back:
Oh, God, I forgot. ☹ I am hungry but kinda late
He responded almost immediately.
I am at Halligan’s watching Sox — be there or be square.
(Texts didn’t come through the regular network here; Massina had modified the phones of Annex employees to take calls through the cell tower nearest Smart Metal.)
She got there a half hour later, dropped off by the driverless car. Johnny had finished eating long ago and was sitting in a booth watching the Red Sox demolish the Nationals.