Looking Glass Read online

  “Who’s she?” I ask.

  “She’s not in our database. We can extend it and probably get a name. But she’s not in our filter.”

  Blurry Man turns the photo over. There’s a date stamp from March and the name Most Special Events printed on the back.

  “Grab him,” I call to Birkett.

  She calls something into her headset. “Intercepting now.”

  “Who is she?” Sanders asks, repeating my question.

  “Hell if I know. It’s the photograph. It’s from a disposable film camera. The kind they have at weddings where they send them off to be developed, then mail the photos to you with a digital copy.”

  “We don’t have a wedding on Yosef’s graph,” replies Sanders.

  I stand and turn to her and Birkett. “That’s the problem. They usually give you digital copies of those photos. Yosef clearly didn’t use a digital copy to make this print. He chose to go analog, making sure there was no electronic trace.” I call to the operator controlling the visualizations, “Bring up Mosin Kasir’s apartment.”

  Instantly we’re virtually teleported to an apartment in Yemen that a field team searched four days earlier. On Mosin’s wall, over his desk, hang dozens of photographs.

  “She’s not in any of them,” says Sanders. “The computer would have flagged that.”

  I point to a photograph of Mosin with an older woman who has the same green eyes. “Who’s that?”

  Sanders checks her tablet. “An aunt, twice removed. Did we get the back of the photo?”

  I shake my head. “No. But it’s the same size and lens distortion as the other.”

  “Mosin’s cousin was married in March. And it says here that Yosef was in Bahrain. Maybe he was actually in Yemen.”

  “Got you,” says Birkett. “Good work, Cray. We’ve got Yosef in a van now. We’ll find out soon enough. We’re also going to pull the photos from the camera company. Who knows what else we might find.”

  She’s beaming. If Yosef pans out, then it justifies this whole expenditure to her superiors.

  “We need to be sure we get the backs of any photographs we find,” says Sanders, making a note of it.

  I want to explain that’s not the point, but I know it’s useless. They’re all congratulating themselves on a success when all we have is a correlation.

  I step out of the office and into the Texas sun glaring off the shiny asphalt parking lot, trying to tell myself this was a good thing but worrying that the tools and the process might do more damage than good—or at the very least, should be in the hands of better people doing smarter things.

  As I drive back to my apartment, I try to reconcile how a trail of dead bodies led me here.

  CHAPTER TWO

  COWBOYS AND INDIANS

  A year ago I was a college professor who specialized in computational biology. I tried to build predictive models of the world around us. My work was interesting to me and had far-reaching implications, from the spread of infectious disease to understanding why the Neanderthals went extinct. Then a serial killer named Joe Vik and I crossed paths, and everything changed.

  He murdered one of my former students, and for a brief moment, suspicion fell upon me because the victim had happened to be in the same part of Montana as I, doing her own research—which to local authorities was too much of a coincidence.

  After my exoneration, the authorities decided that Juniper Parsons had died in a bear attack—a deliberate ploy by Vik, and not the first of his victims that he’d disposed of in that way.

  In trying to understand what happened to Juniper, I found more victims and more law-enforcement people who couldn’t see what was in front of them. Eventually enough bodies piled up that I was able to find Joe.

  In the end, his rampage took the lives of his family and seven police officers. I was a millimeter away from being killed myself.

  Some people think I’m a hero because I found the Grizzly Killer and helped end him. Law enforcement has a mixed view. All I know is, when I go to bed at night, I can imagine a thousand different ways I could have played the case out—and in many of them, good men and women would still be alive.

  For me, the troubling part is that I don’t feel any guilt—only an empty compartment where it should be. I think I have a number of empty compartments where similar emotions should reside.

  Jillian, the woman who saved my life and the person who really ended Joe, visited a week ago. We were trying to see if there was something more between us. The problem is, I can clearly see the compartment marked Jillian, but I can’t say whether she belongs there—or if anyone does.

  I was this fucked-up before Joe, so I don’t blame him for that. He just brought it to the surface. I don’t even know if I blame Joe in the same way you blame another human.

  After our ordeal, while sitting through endless inquiries and explaining my methods for finding bodies to still-skeptical law enforcement, I sequenced Joe’s DNA and searched for my own answers.

  I found one, a gene related to APOE-e4, the so-called risk gene. Joe had a variation I hadn’t seen before. Roughly speaking, in a manner that I’d never commit to paper or let a colleague overhear, Joe was wired for risk taking but also had a predisposition for a kind of obsessive-compulsive behavior not unlike what makes a professional golfer great or a neurosurgeon brilliant. Joe got the same thrill from extreme risk taking that a chess grand master gets from a brilliant opening gambit. Calculation, followed by euphoria.

  Whereas you or I would (or should) feel bad if we got away with some infraction, Joe would feel elation and seek out more of those encounters. He got high not only from doing evil things, but also from taking actions to keep from getting caught.

  His killing pattern was like that of a great white shark. As I peered into his DNA, I realized those correlations were more than circumstantial. The same predatory algorithm that drives a shark can also drive a software system taking over a network or a killer who finds the right kind of prey.

  When Birkett recruited me, it was with the promise that I’d be able to hunt other killers like Joe. That ended up being half true. While the war on terror remains urgent—and while I’m even more resolute that people who drive explosive-laden trucks through crowds of civilians or convince teenagers with Down syndrome to strap on a bomb vest need to be stopped—I’m not always sure about our methods.

  On one word from me, Yosef Amir was yanked off the street and pulled into a van and probably taken to some secret site where French intelligence, the Americans, and maybe some interrogator from a third country will force him to spill his guts.

  They don’t tell me what or how they do it. Lately, though, I do know that there’s been a black hole in research relating to psychotropic drugs and the speech system. In the same way that a dip in research papers on quantum computing tells you that the NSA, CIA, NRO, and their private contractors have been on a massive hiring spree, snapping up anyone qualified to work on some super-advanced encryption breaker, a publishing gap in this niche tells me that the intelligence community has been making great strides in producing so-called truth serums and other drugs to make people cooperative.

  People like me, and companies like OpenSkyAI and its Virtual Tactical Field Theater, are being given far more credit than we deserve. While I may be getting results, I’m not so sure if it’s because my methods are so brilliant or because the previous tactics were so bad.

  My phone makes a buzz. I set my beer down on the kitchen counter next to the empty Panda Express containers and check to see if Jillian has texted me back.

  It’s Birkett: Win by 7

  That’s code—Yosef led them to seven other conspirators. Officially, I’m not even supposed to know that. I’m a civilian contractor with a moderate security clearance, but Birkett likes to keep me happy—or at least do things that she thinks will make me happy.

  She sends one more text: Meeting with boss at 9

  Our boss, Bruce Cavenaugh, not the head of OpenSkyAI, but the DIA sup
ervisor who authorizes our budget, scares me. He’s a genial man in his early fifties. The kind of guy who volunteers at his church on Thanksgiving to feed the homeless and helps strangers change flat tires.

  What scares me is the kind of power he has. A few weeks into working at OpenSkyAI, during my first visit with him, I offered up some of my concerns about our profiling methods.

  When he asked what I would do differently, I thought of Joe Vik and mentioned the notion of looking for certain risk-factor genes in potential terror recruits.

  “Would nine hundred thousand dollars do it?” he asked.

  “Do what?” I replied.

  “Help us build out the tech to do that. I need authorization to go above that amount. But I can green-light a lab on that right now. We’d need a field kit in five months.”

  Based on one passing comment by me, Cavenaugh was ready to give me almost a million dollars to build them some gadget to pinpoint DNA markers that might correlate to behavior related to terrorism.

  Might. Causation and correlation are not the same thing, although they often live in the same neighborhood. I was aghast at the thought of putting some borderline pseudoscientific gadget into the hands of a CIA or DIA spook in the field looking for an excuse to justify his gut. I imagined how DNA gathered from “collateral casualties” might be used as evidence that maybe they got the right guys. One more excuse the government could use to downplay the civilian deaths in the war on terror.

  Cavenaugh didn’t see any of that. He just wanted to catch the bad guys. The real danger isn’t what the Atlantic articles or the New York Times editorials would have you believe: that good guys become bad guys.

  The real danger is that the good guys will blindly keep doing bad things that they don’t see as bad. It’s why people who would give the shirt off their back to help the poor and the hungry will then march against genetically modified food, even if such food products could save millions of children from blindness or starvation. It’s when people who want democracy in the Middle East find themselves building military bases instead of schools and hospitals.

  It’s when guys like Bruce Cavenaugh offer people like me unlimited budgets for gadgets and programs that could cost even more lives by wasting time and misdirecting resources when the real answers are less sexy and far more unlikely to get a senator aroused.

  I’ve since learned to keep my mouth shut around Cavenaugh. Unfortunately, Birkett has him thinking I’m some kind of analytical genius. While the academic world has all but shunned me for what happened with Joe Vik, in defense-intelligence circles, apparently I’m supposed to be some kind of Dark Knight avenging scientist.

  Jillian tells me I’m overreacting, but there are things she can’t ever know: for instance, that the Yemen drone strike that’s all over the news tonight happened because of something I said earlier today.

  Or that the photo of one of the victims being pushed all over Arab media is the same green-eyed woman I saw on Yosef’s refrigerator.

  Collateral damage.

  CHAPTER THREE

  PREDOX

  Bruce Cavenaugh gives me a broad smile as I enter the conference room where he’s encamped during his visit to OpenSkyAI. Birkett is sitting across from him, along with Trevor Park, the CEO and founder of the company.

  Park worked in video games and imaging before he started selling technology to the government. Rumor has it the Virtual Tactical Field Theater—or VTFT—came about when intelligence agency officials started complaining about having to go into the field to do intelligence gathering and wanted a way to make it more “dronelike.” In drone operations, a commander watches over the shoulder of a remote-control-aircraft jockey in an air-conditioned room in the middle of Nevada instead of being anywhere near the place where they’re planning on doing some damage.

  While I’m far from being an intelligence expert, the scientist in me says you want to get as close to the data as you can get, because it’s the questions you don’t know to ask that will make all the difference.

  Being able to flip the wedding photo over made all the difference in the world—for better or worse. Still, not long ago, the DIA wouldn’t let a low-level analyst like me into the VTFT, instead reserving that honor for the top brass.

  That policy changed after the first run-through I was involved with, when I pointed out literally forty different places their scoop guy didn’t collect useful samples and that the imager ignored details like making sure the books on the shelves actually were what their jackets represented. The VTFT had some spiffy software that would pull up data on a book found on a potential terrorist’s shelf and tell you whether it tended to correlate to radicalization, as well as whether it had been found in the possession of other suspects. What it didn’t tell you was if the book had been hollowed out to hide a burner phone we didn’t know about.

  Everyone seems pretty happy with themselves as I sit. Birkett is watching Cavenaugh, waiting for what he’s about to say.

  He pushes an envelope toward me with “Classified” written across it. “The French DGSI sent these over. I thought I’d let you know what you did.”

  I warily slide the photos out, expecting them to be from the strike in Yemen. Instead they are photos of a soccer stadium filled with people. A circle has been hand drawn around one hundred people.

  “That’s the blast radius of a bomb we found in Nice. It was built into the fabric of a jacket that belonged to a colleague of Yosef Amir. He had tickets for that game and that section. This photo was taken last night after they raided his apartment.”

  I study the faces of my colleagues and am suddenly conscious of an alternate time line in which I’m reading about a tragedy that happened, spending eight seconds to feel bad about it, and then clicking to read something that will make me feel better … a pattern that Kerry Sanders made me aware of.

  I set the photo back down. “What about Yemen?”

  “Pardon me?” says Cavenaugh.

  I can see Park is tensing up. He doesn’t like it when I’m confrontational, but he also knows I could have my own lab and my own budget based on one word.

  “There was a strike in Yemen on the news. It took out some ISIS commanders but also some family and staff. What about that?”

  “They’ve been in a civil war for over a year. This happens all the time. I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

  “This wasn’t done by their government or the rebels. This involved French or US assets.”

  Cavenaugh turns to Park. “Could you and Sanders give me a moment with Dr. Cray?”

  They awkwardly shuffle out of the room. Park gives me a backward glance, pissed that I just got him kicked out of his own conference room.

  Cavenaugh waits for the door to shut. “Dr. Cray, I can’t even fathom how your mind works, but the problem with the view from the ivory tower is that you don’t know how things work on the ground.”

  I would agree with him, but I don’t want to interrupt.

  “Was that attack related to what we discovered yesterday? I genuinely don’t know. What I do know is that rules of the game are different than what you’re accustomed to. If they try to push their conflict onto our soil, we can’t just try to deal with the poor sons of bitches who are sent to do those things—we have to go after the bosses and the masterminds. And not weeks or months after they pull it off. We have to punch back hard.”

  “Did we hit the right guys? What about the woman?”

  “The woman?”

  “The one all over Arab news. The woman whose photo I found on Yosef’s refrigerator.”

  Cavenaugh nods. “Her? The civilian? I pray for her. I pray for all the children that get hit by our bombs. I wish it wasn’t that way.” He stabs a finger onto the photo of the people at the stadium. “One hundred people lived. Half a dozen died. You do the math.”

  God knows I’ve tried. How do you weigh the known versus the unknown? You can’t. It all comes down to what statistics you choose to believe.

  �
��Dr. Cray, I would love an alternative. I’ve offered you a budget. I already put your terror-gene idea into place. We’ve got a lab in Maryland working on it.”

  “Terror gene?” I blurt out. “What the hell is that?”

  “The idea you mentioned about risk factors in genetics that lead to radicalization. You didn’t want to pursue it, so we got an outfit that was willing to work on a profile and a field kit.”

  I strain to keep my voice measured. “That’s bullshit. We don’t even know if there’s a correlation, and even if there was, we don’t know if the gene is switched on or off. There are a million other factors. We can’t just criminalize an entire group of people based on their genotype.”

  “A majority of all terrorism-related deaths are committed by adherents of a religion followed by one-fifth of the population. Is that just a coincidence?”

  “And homicides in Chicago are responsible for fifty percent of the increase in the United States’ murder rate in the last year. Do you think the problem is deep-dish pizza or that it’s become a shitty place to live?”

  This gets a chuckle from Cavenaugh. “That brain of yours. I’ll bet you just thought of that comparison and it wasn’t something that was just laying around. We need more of that. I’m here to congratulate you on saving over a hundred lives and to tell you that if you have a better way to do it, let’s make it happen. A while ago you mentioned some new version of that AI software you used to catch the Grizzly Killer. What was it? Predox? We’d love to see that happen. Have you made any progress?”

  “No. I ran into some technical problems and stopped working on it when I came here.”

  “That’s too bad,” he replies. “If you could do for hunting terrorists what you did for finding serial-killer patterns, the world would be a better place.”

  I wish that, too, but increasingly I find myself in the middle of something so dark I can’t even see my moral compass, let alone figure out which way it’s pointing. It’s one thing to catch a terrorist before he bombs a bunch of civilians; it’s another to know that your success will be used to justify retaliation against someone who may or may not be innocent. This is why I fear what well-meaning men like Cavenaugh would do if they had a tool that could tell them exactly who had the potential to be a bad guy.