I thumbed the button and said, “Sean.”
“Hey, Joe.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Huh?”
“Is Dad okay?”
“What? Oh. Sure. He’s fine. He’s out on a date.”
“Wait… what? Dad’s on a date? Why?”
Sean laughed. “Why not? People do date, you know. Even old guys. It’s been known to happen.”
“Dad’s not allowed to date,” I protested.
“Joe, Dad’s been alone for a long time.”
It was true enough. Our mom died years ago, but like most children — even adult children — I naturally assumed that our father would be in some kind of permanent state of mourning. How could he even want to date? It didn’t compute with the part of me that will always be a kid rather than a grown son.
“Who’s he out with?” I demanded.
“The artist lady.”
“What artist lady?”
“Jesus, Joe,” said Sean. “He’s been seeing her for six months. Michelle Garry. She’s great. How do you not know this?”
“You sound like you approve of Dad running around with some strange woman.”
Sean sighed. “Oh, right. I forgot he has to get your written approval before he has a life.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?”
I had no answer to that, because it pretty much was what I meant. So, like any coward, I changed the subject.
“What’s happening, Sean? Ali and the kids okay?” I had a first-grader nephew, Ryan, whom we all called Lefty, because even at eight he had one hell of a fastball, and a little niece, Emily — known as Em — who was a rambunctious three.
“Yes, Joe,” said Sean, “we’re all okay.” He paused, though he sounded uncertain of his reply. “Actually, though… this isn’t a social call. It’s business.”
“Business?”
“It’s about a case,” he said.
I dug a fresh beer out of the cooler by my chair, twisted off the top, took a sip, and rested the sweating bottle on my belly. The cold felt nice. “Since when do you call me about cases? Or did something happen with one of my old cases?”
It happens sometimes. Even though, like Sean, I had a high clearance record when I was a detective, there were plenty of cases that went unsolved, and, with advances in forensics, old cold cases sometimes get hot again.
“No,” said Sean, “this is something else.”
“What is it, then?”
He paused again. “Look, I know that you work for one of those top-secret agencies that you can’t talk about, but—”
“But you’re talking about it.”
“No, it’s just that—” he said, and then hesitated now that he was up to the edge of it. “Look, after what happened at the ballpark that time, Dad kind of… you know… let something slip.”
Our dad was the mayor of Baltimore and two years ago he’d gone to Citizens Bank Park in Philly to co-host the opening day of baseball with the Philly mayor. That was the day the Seven Kings hit the place with a bunch of small drones carrying high explosives. A lot of people died, and Dad was almost one of them. It really rattled him, and Dad’s not an easy guy to shake. I guess I could imagine the conversation between him and Sean afterward. Maybe over drinks late one night after Sean’s family was in bed. Father and son. Former cop and current cop, swapping stories, sharing confidences.
“What, exactly, did Dad say?” I asked.
“Not much,” said Sean. “No details. Just a little bit about the kinds of cases you handle. Weird stuff.”
“Like…?”
“Like you going after terrorists who have cutting-edge science weapons. General stuff. But he kind of hinted that you had something to do with what happened in Philly. Not just the ballpark but before that… at the Liberty Bell Center when the terrorists released whatever kind of plague or chemical or whatever that made people go apeshit. You know what I’m talking about.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I read about it in the papers.”
“Come on, Joe…”
“Dad told you all this? What else did he say?”
“Well, it’s not like he said who you worked for, but, Joe… Dad’s proud of you. He said you saved a lot of lives.”
I said nothing.
“He said you caught the bastards who did all that.”
I said nothing.
“He said that if I ever caught a whiff of something like that… I should call you.”
“Something like what? A terrorist group?”
“That’s just it, Joe. I don’t know what I have, but I think I need your help. I don’t know who else to call. Hell, I don’t know who I can trust.”
“Sean, what are you talking about? What’s happening?”
There was a long pause this time. “Joe… something really bad is happening here, and I don’t know what to do about it. I… I’m scared, man. Really scared.”
I said, “Tell me.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Deputy Director Sarah Schoeffel spent three days at the DARPA camp.
When she arrived it was to receive a briefing about new robotics hardware and computer software that was being developed for the military, and about versions of the technology that might be made available to Homeland Security. Her own counter-cyberterrorism division of the FBI needed more tech, and a Senate subcommittee had arranged her visit here.
Some of what she saw was truly encouraging, and at first she wasn’t a fan, but with each day, each demonstration of counterterrorism technology, she could feel her resistance ebbing.
“This,” said Major Schellinger as she escorted Schoeffel into a cabin lined with computer workstations and staffed with programmers who typed furiously, “is WhiteHat. And I imagine this is one of the projects that will interest you most.”
Schoeffel bent and looked over the shoulder of one of the programmers, trying to get a sense of the code he was writing.
“WhiteHat is a brand-new line of adaptive artificial-intelligence programs that were designed to think like hackers in order to anticipate cyberattacks,” the major explained.
Major Schellinger went through the systems, and Schoeffel was dazzled by the power, sophistication, and subtlety of WhiteHat. And she was flattered to learn that some of her recommendations to the Senate subcommittee had influenced a number of the system’s components. WhiteHat’s overall level of sophistication was intimidating, but Schoeffel felt that was appropriate. Guns were intimidating, too, until they were pointed in the right direction.
She was less sanguine about some of the other projects being tested at the camp.
“You’re not serious?” she blurted after Schellinger introduced her to the group building the next generation of autonomous-drive combat machines.
Schellinger held up placating hands. “I know, I know, this is scary, but—”
“Does ‘scary’ really cover it, Major? America does not have the best track record when it comes to AI being used for combat systems. It was AI-driven fighter planes that destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge. They’re not even done building the new one and you want to put an even more advanced set of self-guided drones in the air?”