Ryan had taken a screenshot of the text as soon as it appeared, knowing Pat West’s penchant for self-erasing messages. Once a spy, always a spy.
Van Damm, Mary Pat Foley, and Secretary of State Scott Adler were in his office in a matter of minutes. The attorney general and the secretaries of homeland security and defense were on their way.
“Thoughts?” Ryan said, his mind in overdrive.
Pat West was his longtime friend, but the message had larger connotations than a buddy in trouble. Obviously sent under duress, the text was beyond cryptic, full of typos and vague references. An artificial-intelligence game? What did that even mean?
Mary Pat held up a sheet of paper with the printed contents of Patrick West’s message.
Stolen nxt gen AI game sftwre. Parnsus Cmpny. Calliope. Dangero. PFC honey TRaP. Somthng in wrKs. Jeff NooNan. Killed? About to b aRested. SolDiers? Cops? SPys? b careful.
weSt
“So much for autocorrect,” Adler said, perusing his copy of the text. “This thing is littered with mistakes.”
Ryan nodded.
Mary Pat said, “Cell phones were the stuff of science fiction in the days when Pat West was active. But any officer nowadays knows to disable the autocorrect function as soon as they unbox a new phone. Purposely misspelled words here, uppercase letters there, often send messages of their own. See how the S in West is capitalized, while the rest of the word is typed lowercase? A capital in the middle of the word, like the S in West, means he was in danger, but not writing the message in view of anyone. All lower means okay. A regular signoff with a capitalized first letter means we should view the message as being coerced.”
“In other words,” Ryan said, “we should be able to trust the body of the message, even if we don’t yet understand it.”
“What about these?” van Damm asked, pointing to the other uppercase letters that occurred randomly throughout the body of the message. “What do they mean?”
Foley shook her head. “Those are just noise,” she said. “They keep the one in the signature from standing out. It’s the signoff that matters.”
“PFC honey trap…” Ryan mused.
“PRC?” van Damm offered. “Sex traps are kind of their modus operandi.”
“That would be my guess,” Foley said. “F is immediately below R on the QWERTY keyboard.”
“China…” Ryan mused. “They’re using AI — facial recognition and the like — to track and jail a significant portion of their Uighur population. The PRC would be keen to get their hands on anything new.” He shook his head at his own line of reasoning. “But Father West says it’s dangerous. That’s more than just getting their hands on some new AI. For him to text me while he’s about to be arrested means he thinks this is something unusual.”
“We have two separate issues here, Mr. President,” the secretary of state said. “The possible national security risk that Mr. West proposes, whatever that may be, and the fact that your friend may have been arrested. Where was he the last time you spoke?”
“It’s Father West,” Ryan corrected. “We don’t talk often, but the last I heard from him, he was heading up Catholic relief efforts in West Java.”
“Okay,” Adler said. “I’ll have my people in Jakarta do some discreet digging with their counterparts in the local police.”
“What about this… Calliope?” Ryan said. “Does that ring a bell with anybody?”
“I have some people running it down now,” Foley said, pen poised over a ubiquitous green government notebook. “So far we know Parnassus Games is a software company in Boston. They specialize in first-person shooter video games. Two Bureau agents from the Boston office are there now. All the bosses are out of the office, on a team-building boondoggle to Australia after attending a computer technology conference in Jakarta.”
“Let’s track them down and see what they know,” Ryan said. “And bring Cyber Com in on this.”
“Happening as we speak,” Foley said. “Human Resources at Parnassus did confirm to the responding agents that Geoff Noonan was an employee.”
“Is he in Australia, too?” Ryan asked.
“Apparently not,” Foley said. “No one has heard from him since he missed his flight out of Jakarta almost a month ago.”
“But Calliope is one of their products?” Ryan asked.
“No,” Foley said. “If Noonan was working on something called Calliope, the rest of the company wasn’t aware of it.” Foley flipped through the earlier pages of her notebook. “He had a partner, though, another engineer… a guy named… here it is. Ackerman. He’s also gone off the grid. According to HR, Ackerman broke both legs in a bicycle accident a little over a month ago. He’s been on sick leave so he wasn’t on the Jakarta junket.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” van Damm said. “Let me guess. Ackerman’s been off the grid for over three weeks.”
“You got it,” Foley said.
Ryan bounced his fist on the desk. “Let’s get up on his phone, dig into this Ackerman guy’s background.”
Van Damm cleared his throat. “Mr. President, we may want to take a breath here. You have people to lead the investigation. Having this office throw its weight around at this point might look like we’re using a sledgehammer to swat a fly. PFC to PRC is not too much of a leap, but it might not be enough to get us a fishing expedition into the life of an American citizen, who, for all we know, is holed up at a beach house on Cape Cod watching Netflix and eating Cherry Garcia ice cream. I suggest we locate the Parnassus executives in Australia before we move forward with anything else. Scott’s people at State can look into where Father West is being held — as they would do for any U.S. citizen who is arrested abroad. Don’t forget that we have invited Senator Chadwick into our tent. She has already accused us ad nauseam of taking the law into our own hands. Let’s not play into hers.”
Ryan waved away the thought. “I’m not worried about Chadwick. You heard her. She wants to play nice.”
“And you believe her?” Van Damm paused for a beat, then said, “Mr. President, mark my words. It’s not going to be long before you remember that she is a viper. I just hope she’s not in your pocket when you do.”
“Give me twenty minutes,” Ryan said. “Run down what you can and then convene back here.” He found himself breathing hard, through his nose, like he was about to step into a fight.
The others stood up to leave as he swiveled his chair to look out the windows at the South Lawn.
Mary Pat stayed back, pulling the door shut so she was alone with Ryan.
He turned his chair to face her.
“I knew him in high school — at Loyola, and then later at Boston College. He was always so kind, so forthright, so…”
“Un-spylike?” Foley offered.
“I guess that about sums it up,” Ryan said. “I was surprised to see him when he showed up at Camp Peary one day when I was teaching — almost as surprised as he was to see me. He’d actually gone active with the Agency early on, right after college. I had no idea. I was still in finance then, so he never told me what he was doing.”
“Of course he didn’t,” Foley said. “That sort of thing happens all the time — old friends drawn toward the same goal but unable to talk about it with each other until they meet down the road on some assignment or retread training.”
“He was very good at it,” Ryan said.
“I know,” Foley said. “We worked together a couple of times in East Germany. We were both stationed in Bonn, but that guy practically lived in East Berlin.” She chuckled, remembering some event. “We used to make jokes about West living in the East. Fearless. But there was always something…”