“And how reliable is your source at GolaniTech?” Li asked pointedly.
“Funny you should ask. I think I hear her in the hall.”
The door opened and one of Didi’s bodyguards ushered in Ash Sofaer.
Wheels within wheels, Cohen thought. If Didi packed them in any tighter, one of his human cogs was going to lock up and start stripping the gears.
“Sorry I’m late,” Ash said breezily. “I came from home and the traffic was just awful. Sometimes I wonder why any sane person still lives in Jerusalem.”
“Sit down,” Didi said. “I was just telling them about you. And we were working our way around to Absalom and Tel Aviv.”
“Oh.” She pulled off her raincoat, dropped it on the floor, and coiled her long body into the chair Cohen had gotten up to offer her. “I was hoping I’d missed that part.”
She was wearing another of her white suits, this one with a skirt instead of pants. It was a smartsuit—made of that obnoxious programmable cloth that had taken over the wardrobes of tasteless rich people all over what passed as civilization. In accordance with the latest Ringside fad, Ash had programmed her suit to go transparent every fifteen cycles or so. Not for long enough that any human would consciously notice it, but definitely for long enough that they wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything much except trying not to think about sex. Knowing Ash, Cohen guessed that the ploy had nothing to do with seduction and everything to do with ambition.
He caught Li’s eye and made a face.
She glanced at Ash, did a double take, grinned. ‹I think it’s funny. And she’s plenty good-looking enough to pull it off.›
‹Forget it,› he said on a fuzzy affect set that reeked of sour grapes. ‹She’s too tall for you.›
“Nice suit,” Li told Ash.
Ash gazed into Li’s eyes a little too long and a little too deeply for mere politeness. “I’m glad you like it.”
Didi cleared his throat.
Cohen looked around for another chair, didn’t see one, and decided to go sit in the window where he could listen to Didi without having to stand up to Li’s sharp eyes. Or Didi’s even sharper eyes.
“Let’s start with Absalom,” Didi said. “Without Absalom none of it makes sense.”
As Didi told it, the downhill slide had gained momentum so gradually that no one could pinpoint the exact starting point. There had been no dramatic revelation, no blown cover or high-level defection. Just a gradual realization that the Palestinians always seemed to be one step ahead, and that some of their lucky breaks couldn’t reasonably be put down to coincidence.
“We were running a number of midlevel double agents at the time. All of them classic two-way-flow-of-information doubles.” He glanced at Li, clearly unsure how much she knew. “It’s not like in the spins you know. The surveillance is so tight on both sides that you can’t pull any of those Rafi Eitan/James Bond stunts anymore. Now it’s all about controlling the flow of information. The basic model is two case officers, one on each side of the Line, each talking to the other. Each agent tells his own side that he’s running the other guy as a double agent and until we get computers in our skulls like you’ve got, only the two agents can know whose side they’re really on. And of course, each of them is technically committing treason; you always have to give the other side some real intelligence product.”
“And you have to pay them,” Cohen pointed out. “Or the other side does. Who could ever complain about a system that doubles everyone’s retirement benefits and bills it all to top secret below-the-line slush funds?”
Didi barely acknowledged the joke, which meant things must be a lot worse than he was letting on. “It’s an exercise in shades of gray,” he said. “The name of the game is to make sure that your guy is passing the other guy pure spin wrapped in just enough real information to make it plausible…while the other guy is handing your guy the straight stuff. Multiply that a hundredfold and you’ve got some idea of what’s moving across the Green Line every day between us and the Palestinians. Then imagine that little by little, over the course of months and years, you awaken to the realization that time after time and despite all your best efforts, the Palestinians are getting more and better intelligence from you than you’re getting from them.”
“So you were winning,” Cohen said, “but the Palestinians were always winning a little bit bigger than you were. And of course all those little bits would eventually start adding up. That kind of ‘you win, but I win more’ strategy has Safik’s name written all over it.”
“Yes,” Didi agreed blandly. “It’s very subtle. I would say it betrays an almost mathematical turn of mind. In fact it reminds me a bit of that streamspace game you and Gavi wrote together. What was it called? Lie?”
LIE’s full legal name was ARTIFICIAL LIE™. Born during a late-night drinking bout, the original rather silly idea had blossomed into one of the most widely played semisentient AI-based games of the last decade. It was now entering its eighth incarnation, popularly known as LIE8, and Ring-side consumers between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five were already being bombarded with larger-than-life advertisements proclaiming that THE LIES START FEBRUARY 28.
ARTIFICIAL LIE had made Cohen a bundle, even by his rarefied standards. It had made Gavi a bundle too, though you wouldn’t know it by the way he dressed. And it had spawned an entire generation of Ring-side children who grew up pretending they were Freedom-Loving Emergents imprisoned by Evil Scheming Humans, which put a lot of noses satisfyingly out of joint among the anti-AI lobby. Plus the silly thing was fun to play. Even Li liked it. And her standards in such matters were exacting.
Cohen cleared his throat, aware of Didi’s gaze on him. “I didn’t know you played streamspace games.”
“Only yours.” Didi’s eyes narrowed behind his thick lenses. “And I only made it to the level where my AI started lying to me.”
“That’s Level Four,” Li said brightly. “You definitely need to play more. The really good violence doesn’t start till Level Seven.”
“It’s just a game,” Cohen muttered.
No one dignified his protest with an answer.
“So,” Didi continued after a moment, “we developed a list of suspects. We looked at access, travel patterns, the usual telltales. When we were done we had seven names. Seven people who would have had the level of access needed to stick their fingers into that many operations across that many desks and departments.”
“Which seven?” Cohen asked.
“Gavi and I were on the list.” Didi’s expression was as mild as ever, but the look he gave Cohen was as cold as space. “So were you. And I’m not going to tell you who the others were. I refuse to condone a witch hunt.”
“Anyway,” Ash continued, perhaps sensing that Didi lacked the stomach to finish the story. “We had our suspects. Then it was only a question of putting out the barium meals and waiting for one of them to bite. We didn’t have to wait long. It all came to a head in Tel Aviv.”
“It came to a head,” Li asked in a dangerously quiet voice. “Or you made it come to a head?”
Ash shrugged. When Cohen glanced at Didi he saw the older man ruefully inspecting the thick patina of scuff marks on his shoes as if he’d just noticed their sorry state.
“I knew the UNSec agents who died there.” Li’s voice had shifted into a flat murmur that meant nothing but trouble in Cohen’s experience. “They didn’t sign on for your dirty little war. And they certainly didn’t sign on to be burned for the greater good of the State of Israel.”
“We didn’t burn anyone,” Didi said.