Текст книги "Spin Control"

Автор книги: Крис Мориарти

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

At the moment Didi was definitely in undertaker mode. If Cohen hadn’t known better, he would have thought they were talking to the janitor. Did the man have some reason for wanting Li to underestimate him, Cohen wondered, or was it just the habitual camouflage of an old spy who’d long ago learned not to trust new faces?

Li, meanwhile, had gone into her full-blown dumb-soldier act. There was no glint of humor in her dark eyes, no ironic drawl in her voice. Not one thing about her face, manner, voice, or words suggested that she’d ever had an intelligent thought in her life.

He should have expected it, Cohen told himself sourly. He’d looked forward to this meeting for years. And now here they were, both playing dumb with such consummate skill that Cohen was beginning to feel like he was the only sentient life-form in the room.

“You two,” he burst out finally, “are absolutely impossible!”

“What?” Didi and Li said at almost the same moment in voices of wounded innocence.

And then Li, having caught Cohen’s invective-riddled comment on the bad social graces of all spies and retired soldiers, laughed.

“So,” Didi said. “Now that we’re all having fun, what do you say we take a look at Catherine’s spins from Abulafia Street?”

They ran Li’s spins on Didi’s long-past-obsolete desk monitor, the three of them hunching over the small display shoulder to shoulder. It was unnerving to see the whole meeting replayed from Li’s perspective: to see the thoroughness with which she checked people over; the way her eyes flickered constantly from door to window to floor to ceiling; her almost subconscious awareness of the minute changes in the flow of traffic beyond the walls that could mean danger; the restless, constant, animal awareness of a body that had survived enough combat drops to know that bad luck can kill you at any time and from any direction.

And it was pretty obvious what pieces of bad luck she’d been alerting on back in that hotel room. First and foremost, Turner. No explanation needed there; only a fool, and a suicidal fool at that, would mess with the Americans. But her source of worry was less obvious. In fact, Cohen was embarrassed to realize that he himself had missed it entirely in real time. While he’d been glaring at Korchow and inspecting the antiques collection, Li had in fact been doing her job. And as far as she was concerned that job had mainly consisted of keeping an eye on Shaikh Yassin. Or, more precisely, on one of the hard young men hovering at Yassin’s elbow.

Li had ignored the two gorillas, obviously mere hired muscle, and reserved her vigilance for the slim young man with those pale green eyes that still popped up every now and then in the Palestinian gene pool and, a full millennium after the last crusade, were still called crusader’s eyes.

The boy had an athlete’s slouch. His body was still and relaxed, every betraying tic leached out of it by the same iron discipline that every Mossad katsalearned. His face was schooled into a calmly attentive, completely unreadable expression. And the green eyes were cold and alert and moved constantly around the room, taking in everything but never appearing to stare too hard at any one thing. The boy was Arik’s opposite number; and only a novice could fail to recognize him for the superlatively trained professional that he was.

“So who’s the bright young thing?” Cohen asked. He had a niggling feeling that he’d seen that face before, yet he could match it to none of his stored spinfeed databases. Unsettling. “Could he be Safik’s? Safik always liked the pretty ones.” Cohen cut a sideways glance at Didi. “So did you for that matter.”

“You’re right about his being Safik’s,” Didi said, “though not in the way you think you mean. Look again. Ring any bells?”

Cohen looked again, and suddenly bells were ringing all over the place. The slim, neat build; the intelligent, humorous face; the extraordinary eyes.

“Yusuf Safik,” Didi said. “The only son of Walid Safik, head of the Palestinian Security Service’s counterintelligence department.”

“So Safik didhave a set of eyes at the auction,” Li said with grim satisfaction.

But Cohen wasn’t thinking about the auction. He was thinking about Gavi. If the boy was Safik’s son, then that made him…what? Leila’s first cousin once removed? That explained the eyes. And the family resemblance to Leila was unmistakable once you looked for it. He wondered if Gavi and Leila’s Joseph—obviously both boys had been named after some common ancestor—would have looked like Yusuf if he’d survived the war. And then he thought about that other lifetime before the war in which they’d all danced at Gavi and Leila’s wedding.

Cohen’s better-than-human memory called up a detail-perfect image of the day, as accurate and unfaded as remastered spinfeed. Gavi slim and handsome in his uniform, and so achingly young that he looked like a boy just playing at being a soldier. Leila all business—and to everyone’s ill-concealed delight already visibly pregnant. Didi had been Gavi’s commanding officer. Cohen had been…well, what he’d always been. And Gavi Shehadeh and Walid Safik had been just two more bright young men who might or might not amount to anything. It had been Leila—the intense young doctor with the startling eyes and the even more startling opinions—who everyone thought would change the world.

Well, the world had changed all right. And Leila had been among the first casualties. It was still hard to believe that such an extraordinary person had been killed by something as wastefully impersonal as a stray bomb.

Cohen looked up to find Didi’s eyes searching his face. The memory of Gavi hung between them. Unasked questions rose and drifted and shredded themselves in the backwash of the ceiling fan.

Didi turned off the monitor and sat down heavily. He took off his glasses, cleaned them on the tail of his shirt, put them back on and peered fretfully around the room. He seemed disappointed with the result, as if he’d expected the world to look better through clean lenses. Then, with a mournful little shrug, he got down to business.

He described Arkady’s appearance at Maris Station; his approach to Maris consulate junior intelligence staff; his disappearance and subsequent resurfacing in Moshe’s hands; GolaniTech’s agreement with Korchow, insofar as they understood it; the cautious back-channel contacts with the bidding parties.

Cohen didn’t even try to calibrate Didi’s version of events against his own information and look for discrepancies. You might as well try to catch a bird in flight as catch Didi Halevy in a lie. You just trusted him to tell you what he thought you needed to know. Or you didn’t trust him at all. There was no middle ground.

“The big questions are two,” Didi said when he’d come to the end of his tale. “One, what is Arkady selling? And two, why should we care?”

“You read my report?” Cohen asked doubtfully.

“Yes, yes. And I’m sure you thought it was perfectly comprehensible. But I’m not Gavi. And even if I were, I’d still need to get it into terms the prime minister can understand.”

“Does the interest in this case go that high?”

“This is a country of population one million and dropping. Everything goes that high.”

“Well,” Cohen began. “First of all, let’s talk about so-called weapons’ infection vector. It’s a retrovirus, and as far as I can see a relatively straightforward one. So the real question isn’t what the virus is. The real question is: What’s the transgenic payload it’s inserting into the target organism’s cells?”

Cohen stopped to collect his thoughts—a task that was both difficult and necessary because he and the half dozen or so of his aggregated Emergents who had worked on this problem had not reached anything even remotely approaching a consensus on what the payload of Arkady’s mystery virus actually was.

“Let me guess,” Didi said wryly. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.”

“On the contrary. It’s exactly like something I’ve seen before. Or rather something Hy Cohen saw, and actually messed around with a bit before he invented me. Ever heard of Turing Soup?”

“I don’t cook.”

“Oh my, aren’t we funny? Turing Soup was a turn-of-the-twenty-first-century idea, child of the era of networks…just like me. People had networks on the brain back then. The way Enlightenment thinkers had clockwork on the brain. Or the way people in Darwin’s day had steam engines on the brain. Or the way we’ve got spin on the brain. Actually some associates and I are working on a paper about…right, okay, never mind. Turing Soup was the brainchild of a guy named Walter Fontana. The same Walter Fontana who invented AlChemy, more prosaically known as Algorithmic Chemistry. One thing you have to say about the guy, he had a gift for names. He also happened to be at MIT toward the end of his career, and to take under his wing a bright young French postdoc in theoretical computer science called Hyacinthe Cohen. Which is why I might just be the only person still alive who remembers Turing Soup.

“The idea behind Turing Soup was to look at the evolution of algorithms as a model for the evolution of organic life. A Turing machine is a universal computer—in fact, the paradigmatic universal computer. It has a reading head that can ‘read’ any tape run through it. It has an execution apparatus that carries out whatever instructions the reading head reads. Turing couldn’t know it back in 1950, but he was essentially describing RNA: a ‘reading’ mechanism that zips itself to the unraveled DNA strand in order to reproduce its folded protein sequences. Fontana’s idea was to throw a bunch of molecular Turing machines together and let them ‘read’ each other’s programs and see if they could construct new programs from the components of the existing ones. It didn’t work, mainly because Turing machines have a problem that RNA and DNA either don’t have or figured out how to solve a long time ago: they hang, like just about every other computer ever invented. So the machines in Turing Soup would just lock up with each other, start reading each other’s tape, slip onto a positive feedback loop, and hang.

“So that was Turing Soup: wrong tool for the right job. Fontana moved on to lambda-calculus and AlChem. And everyone filed Turing Soup away as an idea whose time had come and gone. But if I had to describe this sample Moshe’s flogging around, that’s what I’d say it was: Turing Soup made out of DNA. Or more accurately, a virus that takes its host’s DNA and turns it into Turing Soup.” Cohen grinned. “Which—if you’ll forgive a joke that about eighteen of my associates have already made at some point in the last few weeks—gives a whole new meaning to parasitic computation.”

“So you’re saying this is…what? AI in a virus?”

“God, no! Start letting your metaphors gallop around like that and you’ll never be able to sort out what it actually is.What Moshe showed us was…conceptually provocative. But it wasn’t artificial intelligence. At least not in any form that’s recognizable to thisparticular artificial intelligence. If you need a layman’s label to hang on it, let’s call it…a search engine in a virus?”

“And what’s the engine searching for?”

“That, my friend, I can’t begin to tell you.”

Didi pursed his lips, considering. “And you believe Arkady’s story that they found it out on—what was the place called?”

“Novalis. I’ve never heard of it either. It’s off the maps. No record of any survey. No BE buoy within light-years, probably because the spectrometry wasn’t promising enough. It’s one of those ‘you can’t get there from here’ planets. Anyway, the host genotype is descended from an old Monsanto patent. That tells us nothing; half the known universe is littered with that crap. But it certainly would make sense if they really did find it out there. And it fits in again with what I said about it not being Syndicate splice work. They won’t touch corporate genesets as a general rule; bad associations.”

“I take it the planet’s terraformed, then?”

“That’s what they went out there to find out. And given what they seem to have brought back with them, I’d say the answer is yes.”

“Is this something UNSec ought to know about?”

“Well, I’m sure UNSec would think it was.”

“But you don’t.”

“I’m a live-and-let-live kind of boy. And UNSec has a nasty habit of breaking planets so other people can’t use them. A good planet’s a terrible thing to waste.”

Didi smiled slightly. “Okay, we’ll let it ride for now.”

Which they both knew only meant that they would let it ride until either Didi or the PM decided it was time not to let it ride.

“All right then.” Didi leaned back in his chair, caught sight of a food stain on his tie, peered at it, scrubbed at it. And then abandoned the effort, having only succeeded in making the tie wrinkled as well as stained. “You’ve answered my first two questions—what the virus is and who put it there—with more questions. Now what about the one question we ought to be able to answer: Why the hell should we be interested in it?”

“Well,” Cohen said slowly, “I know why ALEF is interested. Immortality, if you want to stick a name on it.”

“But you’ve already got that.”

“Not strictly speaking. No more than an ant swarm or a beehive does. And AIs have life spans just like any other superorganism. Even the ones that don’t collapse prematurely under the weight of their own competing identities.”

“But how does an organic virus make a machine live longer?”

“Because the underlying dynamics are the same whether you’re dealing with organic or synthetic superorganisms. We’re interested in any mechanism that propagates beneficial mutations across a population while somehow repressing harmful ones.”

“Controlling evolution, essentially.”

“Well…tweaking it. I think this would fall into what Syndicate genetic designers call the ‘soft chaos control’ theory of directed evolution. It’s what makes the quality of their genetic engineering so superior to the UN version. And it’s exactly the kind of biocomputing concept that holds the most promise for resolving the problem of decoherence in Emergents. Along with all the other dysfunctions that, tellingly, have the same names in AI design as they do in ecophysics: brittleness, perturbation intolerance, maladaptive red queen regimes, and so forth…” Cohen cleared his throat and shifted in the hard-backed chair. “But none of that answers the question of why Israelwould be interested.”

“We’re not,” Didi said blandly, “or we wouldn’t be letting GolaniTech sell Arkady to the highest bidder.”

“That’s pure spin, and you know it,” Cohen objected. “You’re taking some heavy risks to do this. I don’t care how greedy GolaniTech is or how uninterested you are. They wouldn’t be running this thing if they didn’t have at least tacit approval at the highest level—”

“—which doesn’t necessarily mean from me—”

“Granted. Still. This is treaty-banned tech any way you slice it, and if you weren’t after something, you would have damn well made sure that Arkady never made it to Earth.”

At that instant a decorous knock at the door was followed by Arik’s sleek head—and by one hand, held wrist out to put the boy’s IDF-issue wristwatch on full display. The watch’s crystal was cracked, Cohen noticed. Personally he thought that was taking the look a little far.

“Time,” Arik murmured in tones that would have done an English butler proud.

“Oh, yes,” Didi said. “Thank you, Arik. Give us…shall we say five minutes?”

The boy retreated, closing the door as carefully and silently as he’d opened it.

“Well?” Didi looked around inquisitively. “I think we’ve about covered the things we need to cover. I’m just asking you two to go forward and keep your ears open and let me know what you hear. That’s all. And now let’s get home before I get in trouble for making Zillah overcook the lamb shanks.”

That was when Cohen finally figured out three things that hould have been obvious from the start:

1. Their hour-long wait by the elevators had been no accident, because;

2. Didi’s office was bugged, and;

3. Didi was cheerfully spoon-feeding his own specially mixed barium meal to whoever was on the other end of the bug.

The underground parking lot in the basement of Mossad headquarters was probably one of the most heavily secured pieces of real estate on the planet. So it was amusing to see Li and the four hard-jawed Mossad bodyguards fingering their weapons and peering into the shadows as if they were stepping into the OK Corral instead of a well-lit, thoroughly guarded, and obviously empty garage. Or it would have been humorous if he hadn’t known how deadly earnest they all were.

The Mossad’s motor pool wasn’t taking any chances either; Didi’s government-issue Peugeot sedan had blastproof windows and armor-plated coachwork. They got in—one of Didi’s young men in front with the driver, the other two flanking Didi on the forward-facing seat, and Li and Cohen facing them across the foot well—and the car pulled up the ramp into the late-afternoon traffic on King Saul Boulevard with the muffled clank of ceramic compound antimine flooring.

It was nothing all that new to Cohen; Hyacinthe had driven the autobahns back when private cars were still legal and seen Porsches and BMWs romping through their native habitat at upward of two hundred kilometers an hour. Li, however, was enthralled. She inspected the floor and the doors, predictably pleased to meet a new piece of semi-military hardware. “I’ve never been in an actual car,” she said. “Is this a Mercedes?”

One of Didi’s bodyguards gave a strangled-sounding cough.

“Oh,” Li said after a moment. She cleared her throat, started to mutter something about being sorry, and fell abruptly silent.

“Never mind.” Didi leaned forward to pat her knee. “History just has a longer half-life here. Now tell me about your home planet.”

“It looks a lot like Israel, actually. Rocks and sky. Desert and mountains.”

“But without people, yes?”

“Mostly. Most of it people can’t live on yet. And even where they can, I wouldn’t exactly call it healthy.”

“And its history?”

“There is none. It’s not much older than I am.”

“A planet with no history,” Didi said. He turned to the agent next to him. “The perfect place for a week on the beach, don’t you think? They could sell vacations there. Jerusalemites would snap them up like falafel.”

“Any Interfaithers there?” the other guard asked.

“Not as bad as here.”

The Israelis exchanged significant glances with each other.

Cohen gazed at Didi, wondering if this turn of the conversation was entirely coincidental. “Is it true they’re expected to win another eight seats in the Knesset this election?” he asked, nudging the conversation along and wondering what surprises would emerge from the after-dinner chitchat.

But Didi just spread his hands in the characteristic shrug that was the Israeli reply to all life’s unanswerable questions from politics to tomorrow’s weather.

“I love my country enough to believe that she will outgrow her infatuation with the men of God and violence,” he said simply.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say that about their countries,” Cohen said.

“And were any of them ever right?”

“Not that I can remember.”

Didi opened his mouth to answer, but at that moment the car turned onto a residential street and they passed a large extended family out for a walk in the last warmth of the dying afternoon. A clucking, fussing, cosseting parade of aunts and uncles and grandparents. A pair of anxious-looking parents—and they had good reason to look anxious, given the recent wave of vigilante assaults on “bad” parents. And finally that fragile bird, rare enough in the blighted land of milk and honey to turn heads and kill conversations: a child.

As they passed, the child stumbled slightly and vanished into a dense thicket of protective adult arms. Cohen remembered Hyacinthe’s free-ranging childhood, littered with broken bones and private triumphs, and wondered what it would do to this generation of children to grow up never allowed to play or fall or risk themselves.

He glanced at his fellow passengers. Li was indifferent. Didi had glanced at the child when it first appeared, but was now staring impassively through the windshield at the road ahead. But it was the look on the faces of Arik and the other young men that would stamp itself on Cohen’s memory of this moment. Intent. Utterly still. Mortally hungry.

So this is what extinction looks like.

Didi’s house was perfectly ordinary, no less modest and no more obviously well fortified than any other house in its affluent Tel Aviv suburb. The only thing that set it apart from its neighbors were the towering trunks of the five cedars of Lebanon that had been planted there, or so the young recruits whispered, when the legendary Rafi Eitan still owned the house.

The car pulled into a garage full of the usual clutter of bicycles and sports equipment. From there they filed solemnly into the entry, where they were introduced with all due ceremony to Didi’s wife and twin daughters. Li examined the daughters with interest—as well she might, Cohen thought. Their willowy height and their cool, even-featured beauty belonged to the Ring, not to Earth. They might look like their parents in the more predictable ways, but there were other things about them, equally predictable, that put them a lot closer to the posthuman end of the genetic spectrum. The girls were the legacy of a long-ago Ring-side tour of duty under diplomatic cover, and they were at once Didi’s greatest pride and his deepest sorrow. His pride because of their obvious intelligence and beauty, and because they’d chosen—unlike so many of the Ring-bred children of affluent Israelis—to take advantage of the family unification exemption and complete their education and military service in Israel. His sorrow because the genetic engineering that had made their birth possible had also stripped them of the Right of Return that would have been theirs if their very DNA hadn’t been banned technology under the Kyoto Addendum.

Zillah greeted Cohen with special warmth. “Don’t eat too much over drinks,” she murmured as they kissed each other in greeting, “I’ve made lamb shanks. And you know what it takes to make me stay home from work and cook all day.”

“Dinner at eight?” Didi asked her.

She checked her watch. “Let’s say eight-fifteen. See you all then.” She turned to the guards, who were eyeing the twins with an enthusiasm that made Cohen think lust was about to give ambition a run for its money. “Can I make you boys a sandwich in the meantime?”

A minute later Cohen was looking around Didi’s study, wondering how recently the place had been swept for bugs…and who had swept it, given that Didi didn’t seem to trust the sweepers at the Office.

Didi subsided into his chair, looking small and fragile, and focused his gaze on Li. “What do you know about Absalom?” he asked.

Li’s eyes widened. “The mole?”

The word surprised Cohen. He’d assumed the old earthbound terminology became extinct with the insectivore that inspired it. He’d also assumed that UNSec didn’t know quite that much about the Mossad’s internal housekeeping problems.

“If that’s what you want to call him,” Didi agreed, not looking much happier than Cohen felt.

“I thought you caught him in Tel Aviv,” Li said.

“So did we. Until Arkady showed up. What I didn’t tell you in the office is that Arkady showed up asking for Absalom.”

“Thereby all but guaranteeing you would hustle him through the blockade to Earth.”

“The fact that information may be false doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore it. Besides, GolaniTech seems quite confident he’s genuine.”

“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 istechnically committing treason; you always have to give the other side somereal 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 LIE ⁸, 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.”