Lone Wolf, page 28
“Keep your gear in order. Keep your brain in order.”
She threw down the magazine and hopped back up. “Oh, great. Just what the world needs. Another white guy in cargo pants barking orders.”
They glared at each other.
Then they cracked up.
She walked past him, palm down by her hip for a low-five. “If you need me, I’ll be in the Vault saving humanity.”
Her footsteps pounded down. She’d left her phone behind. Progress.
He stood in the loft, trying to imagine how she could function with all this mess around her. And why he couldn’t. And yet here he was, allowing it. Living with it. And still functioning.
His gaze caught on a bunch of magazine tear-outs taped on the wall above the sofa in a collage. Joey’s vision board. A shirtless actor with pronounced abs. A glass house in the woods. A brunette singer in thigh-high lace-up boots, sparkly blue shorts, and an American-flag bustier with sequined stars over the right breast. White tropical sand fading into the barely rippled aqua sheet of the sea. And dead in the center, a bunch of smiling teenage girls of all shapes and sizes.
He looked closer. A musical group? A sports team?
And then he realized: It was a group of friends.
Something gave way inside him.
A tearing, a yielding, a struck note that found resonance in his chest, that echoed in the hollow he’d discovered in Blessing, Texas. It was an emptiness, yes, but also a space to hold something new, to hold inside him what Joey held inside herself and to try to feel it as his own.
He sat on the sofa.
He was shocked to realize that his eyes had moistened.
He took a minute to reset himself.
Then he walked downstairs, changed into an outfit befitting Harvard professor Stanley Leigh, and headed back to the Vault.
Joey didn’t look up when he entered. Her face was fully focused; she was in her purest state, kinetic and single-minded. Her fingers purred across the keyboard and the light of the OLED screens flowed across her face and he didn’t understand the code on the monitors but he knew it was obeying her, that she was conducting.
It was the most in-her-element he’d seen her since the beginning of the damn mission, and he knew in that moment, standing unnoticed in the doorway to the Vault, that by her hand Solventry’s encryption would fall.
She barely blinked. Her fingers moved from mouse to keyboard to mouse. Dog slept in the corner, breathing rhythmically. Everything in perfect order.
Evan pictured the phone she’d left upstairs, a portal to the insane, beeping and chiming and beckoning with no one to hear it.
He crossed to one of the weapon lockers and extracted a fresh ARES 1911 and three magazines. He seated the mags one after another, dropping them, loading them, checking for snags and hitches. There were none.
He slotted the pistol into his appendix carry and hid the backup mags in the pockets of his Harvard professor trousers. It was time to go face-to-face with Nathan Friedhoff.
All around Evan, the Vault hummed with movement, scrolling logs, progress bars, and blinking CPU and GPU meters. He started out.
Joey stayed locked in.
He didn’t say good-bye.
He didn’t have to.
48
The Permanent Hypnotic Drugging of the American Mind
Nathan Friedhoff was a confusion of disjointedness, pacing in the great shelf of a living room jutting out over a sheer cliff in the Hollywood Hills. Evan’s faux interview on the nature of genius had been desultory at best. Friedhoff’s two teenage daughters had streamed in and out with their faces adhered to their phones, along with a trio of Latina cleaning ladies, and a Slavic manservant of sorts who drifted through at intervals tidying up and then standing obsequiously with his hands clasped at the small of his back awaiting instructions that never came. Friedhoff was too busy pacing to take note of any of them, yammering in circular loops of logic that suggested the need for a med adjustment or shock treatment. No topic was too small for him to opine about, and he ladled out each declamation with theatrical heft as if anticipating its transcription for a Wired article.
There was way too much foot traffic in the house for Evan to kill him now, even if he did manage to pry loose incriminating information, so he had to buckle down and see what fuel he might gather for future ignition.
A bar with uplit shelves climbed to a raised ceiling, showing off an array of fine bottles. Friedhoff sipped rum, a substandard spirit, from a rocks glass that he refilled as liberally as if he were pouring apple juice. As the sun dimmed over the thump and pulse of Cahuenga Boulevard way below, he moved to scotch as was befitting the hour.
He swung a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue toward Evan and then the shelves. “Want anything?”
Evan remained perched on a barstool with academic delicacy, pretending not to eye the squat bottle of VDKA 6100. Made of only two ingredients, whey and spring water locally sourced near Lake Taupo on New Zealand’s North Island, it had been brought to international awareness by an American actor. It was smooth as the action on a vintage SIG P210, and it finished on a note of white pepper along the sides of the tongue.
But now was not the time or place. Friedhoff wasn’t just drinking hard; it was the wrong kind of drinking, steeped in grief and toxins. The booze had gone into him, hit bottom, and was now seeping out, clogging his pores, suffusing his clothes, riding his breath.
“No, thank you,” Evan said.
Friedhoff slopped scotch into a glass. “Johnnie Walker Blue doesn’t have the character of a single-malt,” he declared, “but you can always count on it. Like a top-notch Parisian whore. You get your money’s worth.”
Though he was well into his fifties, Friedhoff wore board shorts and a T-shirt with a Pied Piper logo. A glass-fronted mini-fridge behind the bar was stocked full of bottles of Soylent, a trendy Silicon Valley plant-based protein drink, and he wore one of those ridiculous Leatherman Tread multitool bracelets from which you could extract a screwdriver or a hex drive or a heat-pump assembly for your Tesla Model Y. Studiously tousled hair, neatly manscaped two-day growth, boyish wire-frames at odds with the lines of maturity etching his temples—he was one of those boy-men or man-boys who’d never figured out how to grow up and yet despite that or because of it had plummeted into the depths of a midlife crisis.
Luke Devine had hinted about some kind of breakdown, but Friedhoff was even more fragmented and rambling than Evan had anticipated.
He resumed his woe-is-me rant about the technology he’d helped unleash upon the world: “I wasn’t some will-to-power person from the gate, you know? I was a sweet kid who loved coding, who wanted to express himself, to share what I learned with everyone. But it gets into you. Power—the roar of it.”
Time and again, Evan had heard a variation of this speech. Of course it was men like Allman and Friedhoff who did the most damage. The ones with so much to offer who’d fallen into the gravitational pull of their own ego. People who were solely motivated by power rarely got far enough to do real damage.
As Evan sat blinking and pretending to take notes, Friedhoff slammed back the scotch and moved out to the short balcony that looked down a forever drop to scrubby brush and stone.
“When we started, it was fucking beautiful, man. We were changing the world, creating prosperity, and we were nice to people at work. Everything was possible. Smart prosthetics for amputees, VR PTSD therapy in the meta, AI diagnostics to identify cancer nodules from a voiceprint, low-carbon cities, you name it, man.”
Evan tried to imagine someone this unimpressive building a multibillion-dollar company and then ordering the execution of a key competitor. Nothing seemed real about Friedhoff, but perhaps that was the point. Maybe nothing was real to him outside a screen. Maybe everything was a VR simulation. Maybe he just punched a button on his joystick and deployed the Wolf with a throw-down .22 and a flex-tie sized for a seventeen-year-old girl’s neck.
“Now it’s all about maximization. Work product. Time. Profit. We measure our workers by metrics of how much they load in our warehouses down to fractions of seconds. Wearable tech, handheld scanners, performance-tracking software, cameras everywhere, algorithm-driven performance system metrics. Charting time-off tasks like snack and bathroom breaks. I mean, we know the percentage our employees slow down when they’re chewing a FreeWillPower bar and the percentage by which they speed up when chewing one of our caffeinated Youtropical bars. I think: How did we get here? And then I remember: I aimed at this. I did. And now … what if it’s too late?”
“For you?”
“For everyone.” Friedhoff slumped into a stool, despondent. “There’s no going back.” He spun his glass on the bar and then spun it again. “We can’t put the tech back into the box. When I was in college I used to bike through the rain. To read fucking Kierkegaard. In a library. That was open all night. Real-world dedication, right? And me, I’m a shitstain on the heel of what my grandfather was. And these kids now? Who we’re creating? Who we already created? And are powerless to stop? They’re so … softened in luxury. Eroded. I have two daughters, man. If I admit what I’ve done to them? To the kids of this world? If you teleported me in from a few decades ago to behold my work? Faces stuck to screens, anxiety skyrocketing, FOMO and body image, the permanent hypnotic drugging of the American mind. No—global mind. Not anymore. I’m out, man. I’m out.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.” Friedhoff’s eyes held equal parts remorse and pleading. “I’m tired of being disgusted with myself. Like a lot of people. But the sin I carry, my burden, it just seems … heavier. Our way of life is dying. Human life. And I helped oversee its demise. The singularity’s bearing down on us like a freight train.”
And so you had one of the world’s leading AI experts killed, Evan thought. To slow it down a little.
“What sin?” Evan asked. “What do you mean by ‘sin’?”
“Just the stuff I’ve done,” Friedhoff said vaguely. “To people.”
He grabbed at his hair, made a fist atop his forehead. A man barely holding it together.
“How do we stop it?” Evan asked. “The freight train?”
“They have too much power, man. We. We have too much power. And the laws can’t catch up. We need, dunno. An overthrow. A revolution. A coup. Something … drastic.”
Were these really the pioneers at the helm of our uncertain future? In Allman, an ambulatory left prefrontal cortex? And a third-rate Peter Pan philosopher in Friedhoff?
“It’s your belief that we need to halt AI at any cost?” Evan asked carefully. “Even violence?”
Friedhoff’s eyes jerked from his empty glass to Evan and then quickly away. “Who knows,” he said softly. “Who knows.”
He was sufficiently muddled with guilt and booze that Evan decided to take a more direct run at the object of his curiosity.
“Solventry,” Evan said, “they’re one of your competitors, right?”
“Sure,” Friedhoff said. “They’re everyone’s competitor.”
“I interviewed a man named Dr. Benjamin Hill for this study. Are you familiar with his work?”
“What is this? Why are you asking me about Hill?” The words came faster, a staccato beat of paranoia.
“The genius study,” Evan said.
Friedhoff’s daughter drifted in from the back hall. She wore a flowing white dress with a gauzy wrap across her shoulders. Straight blond hair parted in the center, 1970s long, round pale face with light freckles. Her phone cradled expertly in the palm of her hand, the light shining up at her pale green eyes. “Dad? Dad?” Her gaze didn’t lift from the screen. “The Wi-Fi’s out. I’m streaming a thing and I can’t … It keeps glitching.” She moved forward, bumped into the couch, readjusted course without lifting her eyes.
“I’m busy, June,” Friedhoff said. “I told you I’m in a meeting.”
“Daddy?” The younger daughter floated in from the kitchen. Dark curly hair, crop top showing a pierced belly button. She held an iPad before her, thumbs tapping away. “Can you reboot the server? I’m Snapping with Peyton and it just went out. Can you—” She stumbled over the edge of the rug, kept her footing.
The girls stood there, swaying, eyes locked on their screens, a bizarre walking-dead effect.
“I taught you how to reboot the router,” Friedhoff said. His face had darkened, brows heavying over his eyes. He watched Evan differently now, with suspicion.
“Yeah,” the daughters said in unison, “but you’re better at it.”
Friedhoff reached out and grabbed Evan’s forearm, not gently, his words delivered on a current of alcohol. “I don’t understand why we’re discussing Solventry.”
Evan said, “My subject pool includes—”
“Oh wait,” June said, dreamily. “It’s—hang on—it’s coming back online…”
“I got it,” the younger daughter intoned. “I quit out and then reloaded…”
The teenage girls stared at their screens, swaying slightly on their feet like anchored kelp. “We’re good,” they said in a single voice. “We’re good now.”
June stood mesmerized by her phone. Her little sister didn’t so much withdraw as rewind out of the room.
Evan looked down at Friedhoff’s hand clamped on his arm. Friedhoff followed the stare, noticed what he was doing, and let go. He covered with a nervous laugh.
“That’s it,” he said. “I think you should leave now.”
“Thank you for your time.” Evan rose.
As he started out, he felt the heat of Friedhoff’s glare at his back. Beside the couch, June blocked his way to the foyer. Her iPhone video was going full blast, an electronic beat underscoring a flurry of fast edits.
“Excuse me,” he said.
She didn’t look up.
Blading his body, he slipped past her and moved to the front door.
She didn’t seem to notice.
49
The Second-Best Sniper Hide in the Kill Zone
Evan was set up in the second-best sniper hide in the kill zone. A seventh-story corner office at a fifty-meter stagger across the street from the condo building that was Russo Dmitri’s destination. Based on the text from the recovered phone, Evan knew that the Wolf’s bullet was going to arrive in the one-block span unfurled below him.
He’d borrowed this particular office because of its open sight lines and wide vantage, its outswing casement windows, and its gauzy voile roller shades that hid the reflection of his sniper scope. He had not chosen it for its witty poster art (“You Can’t Deposit Excuses!”), nor the ponderous heave and groan of water cycling in the fish-tank-for-one (red veiltail betta), nor its Air Wick Freshmatic dispenser (Hawaii scent).
Though he intended to observe and then track or approach Karissa Lopatina, he’d brought his Savage 110 Elite bolt-action. In the event that she made his position and sought to engage, he didn’t want to find himself having brought binoculars to a sniper fight.
In the unlit office he lay flat on his stomach across a folding table two meters back from the open window and lowered blind. For the past forty-five minutes he’d moved little more than his eyelids. In his thirteenth year, he’d been taught by a marksmanship instructor to hold prone sniper position for as long as was demanded, to move in inches per hour when the necessity arose. Breathing in air perfumed with papaya and hibiscus, he let the reticle creep across the entire area of operations—curb drains and lampposts, windows and parked cars, rooftops and awnings—and land once more on the sniper hide he would have chosen himself if he were the one who was going to execute Russo Dmitri.
The double billboard was perched on the roof of Book Soup across the street from the bleached-yellow extant signage of the old Tower Records. The billboard’s two faces were separated at an angle, meeting at one end like a chevron, providing an isosceles triangle of protection within. A perfect view to a kill.
Currently empty.
He’d identified the hide for the same reasons Lopatina would. Given Dmitri’s likeliest route, the perch provided the straightest line of sight to his vehicle for the longest window of time before its planned turn in to the parking structure. It would widen the Wolf’s range to between seventy-five and four hundred meters, though if he were her, he’d take the shot at the closer end. The dual billboard had a platform as well as plentiful scaffolding beneath, opening up multiple routes across the adjoining roofs and down. The billboard faces would tamp down the echoes and mask the muzzle report, which would buffalo the shotlocs—shot-locator microphones—that the last mayor had ordered built in to most telephone poles. Lopatina would make use of a Killflash ARD honeycomb mesh cover to mute any glint of the scope and supersonic projectiles that would emanate hard-to-trace shock waves. The rounds would be machine-turned, differentially tempered, barrier-blind solid copper projectiles with hardened tips to get through a windshield and body armor with little difficulty. Hanging a wind flag would be too conspicuous, but there was plentiful lightweight debris blowing in the gutters to give her whatever cues she needed at this distance.
Yes: The billboard was the best position for the shot.
Which meant he’d wait here in the runner-up spot, patient as a mantis.
These blocks of the Strip were one of Los Angeles’s pressure points, an epicenter wired to the life of the city. The bookstore’s sign glowed in red and yellow neon. The billboard threw a spa-cool blue light. Car headlights washed across bars and restaurants, across decked-out hipsters and past-their-prime rockers. The thump and pulse of unseen dance floors set dark-tinted windows vibrating, throwing back wobbling reflections of cars and streetlights, rendering them aquatic.
A squiggle of movement along the sidewalk caught his attention, a FWIP scuttling underfoot, largely ignored by passersby and partiers. The delivery robots had become part of the scenery here, like parking meters and trash cans, just one more piece of the urban landscape to step around.
He’d unclipped his fob watch and placed it on the table in front of him next to his RoamZone. The Vertex clockwork was originally commissioned for ordnance timing by the British War Office during World War II. Its luminescent hour markers and hands showed 9:13. Another forty-seven minutes until Russo Dmitri’s approximate arrival.
She threw down the magazine and hopped back up. “Oh, great. Just what the world needs. Another white guy in cargo pants barking orders.”
They glared at each other.
Then they cracked up.
She walked past him, palm down by her hip for a low-five. “If you need me, I’ll be in the Vault saving humanity.”
Her footsteps pounded down. She’d left her phone behind. Progress.
He stood in the loft, trying to imagine how she could function with all this mess around her. And why he couldn’t. And yet here he was, allowing it. Living with it. And still functioning.
His gaze caught on a bunch of magazine tear-outs taped on the wall above the sofa in a collage. Joey’s vision board. A shirtless actor with pronounced abs. A glass house in the woods. A brunette singer in thigh-high lace-up boots, sparkly blue shorts, and an American-flag bustier with sequined stars over the right breast. White tropical sand fading into the barely rippled aqua sheet of the sea. And dead in the center, a bunch of smiling teenage girls of all shapes and sizes.
He looked closer. A musical group? A sports team?
And then he realized: It was a group of friends.
Something gave way inside him.
A tearing, a yielding, a struck note that found resonance in his chest, that echoed in the hollow he’d discovered in Blessing, Texas. It was an emptiness, yes, but also a space to hold something new, to hold inside him what Joey held inside herself and to try to feel it as his own.
He sat on the sofa.
He was shocked to realize that his eyes had moistened.
He took a minute to reset himself.
Then he walked downstairs, changed into an outfit befitting Harvard professor Stanley Leigh, and headed back to the Vault.
Joey didn’t look up when he entered. Her face was fully focused; she was in her purest state, kinetic and single-minded. Her fingers purred across the keyboard and the light of the OLED screens flowed across her face and he didn’t understand the code on the monitors but he knew it was obeying her, that she was conducting.
It was the most in-her-element he’d seen her since the beginning of the damn mission, and he knew in that moment, standing unnoticed in the doorway to the Vault, that by her hand Solventry’s encryption would fall.
She barely blinked. Her fingers moved from mouse to keyboard to mouse. Dog slept in the corner, breathing rhythmically. Everything in perfect order.
Evan pictured the phone she’d left upstairs, a portal to the insane, beeping and chiming and beckoning with no one to hear it.
He crossed to one of the weapon lockers and extracted a fresh ARES 1911 and three magazines. He seated the mags one after another, dropping them, loading them, checking for snags and hitches. There were none.
He slotted the pistol into his appendix carry and hid the backup mags in the pockets of his Harvard professor trousers. It was time to go face-to-face with Nathan Friedhoff.
All around Evan, the Vault hummed with movement, scrolling logs, progress bars, and blinking CPU and GPU meters. He started out.
Joey stayed locked in.
He didn’t say good-bye.
He didn’t have to.
48
The Permanent Hypnotic Drugging of the American Mind
Nathan Friedhoff was a confusion of disjointedness, pacing in the great shelf of a living room jutting out over a sheer cliff in the Hollywood Hills. Evan’s faux interview on the nature of genius had been desultory at best. Friedhoff’s two teenage daughters had streamed in and out with their faces adhered to their phones, along with a trio of Latina cleaning ladies, and a Slavic manservant of sorts who drifted through at intervals tidying up and then standing obsequiously with his hands clasped at the small of his back awaiting instructions that never came. Friedhoff was too busy pacing to take note of any of them, yammering in circular loops of logic that suggested the need for a med adjustment or shock treatment. No topic was too small for him to opine about, and he ladled out each declamation with theatrical heft as if anticipating its transcription for a Wired article.
There was way too much foot traffic in the house for Evan to kill him now, even if he did manage to pry loose incriminating information, so he had to buckle down and see what fuel he might gather for future ignition.
A bar with uplit shelves climbed to a raised ceiling, showing off an array of fine bottles. Friedhoff sipped rum, a substandard spirit, from a rocks glass that he refilled as liberally as if he were pouring apple juice. As the sun dimmed over the thump and pulse of Cahuenga Boulevard way below, he moved to scotch as was befitting the hour.
He swung a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue toward Evan and then the shelves. “Want anything?”
Evan remained perched on a barstool with academic delicacy, pretending not to eye the squat bottle of VDKA 6100. Made of only two ingredients, whey and spring water locally sourced near Lake Taupo on New Zealand’s North Island, it had been brought to international awareness by an American actor. It was smooth as the action on a vintage SIG P210, and it finished on a note of white pepper along the sides of the tongue.
But now was not the time or place. Friedhoff wasn’t just drinking hard; it was the wrong kind of drinking, steeped in grief and toxins. The booze had gone into him, hit bottom, and was now seeping out, clogging his pores, suffusing his clothes, riding his breath.
“No, thank you,” Evan said.
Friedhoff slopped scotch into a glass. “Johnnie Walker Blue doesn’t have the character of a single-malt,” he declared, “but you can always count on it. Like a top-notch Parisian whore. You get your money’s worth.”
Though he was well into his fifties, Friedhoff wore board shorts and a T-shirt with a Pied Piper logo. A glass-fronted mini-fridge behind the bar was stocked full of bottles of Soylent, a trendy Silicon Valley plant-based protein drink, and he wore one of those ridiculous Leatherman Tread multitool bracelets from which you could extract a screwdriver or a hex drive or a heat-pump assembly for your Tesla Model Y. Studiously tousled hair, neatly manscaped two-day growth, boyish wire-frames at odds with the lines of maturity etching his temples—he was one of those boy-men or man-boys who’d never figured out how to grow up and yet despite that or because of it had plummeted into the depths of a midlife crisis.
Luke Devine had hinted about some kind of breakdown, but Friedhoff was even more fragmented and rambling than Evan had anticipated.
He resumed his woe-is-me rant about the technology he’d helped unleash upon the world: “I wasn’t some will-to-power person from the gate, you know? I was a sweet kid who loved coding, who wanted to express himself, to share what I learned with everyone. But it gets into you. Power—the roar of it.”
Time and again, Evan had heard a variation of this speech. Of course it was men like Allman and Friedhoff who did the most damage. The ones with so much to offer who’d fallen into the gravitational pull of their own ego. People who were solely motivated by power rarely got far enough to do real damage.
As Evan sat blinking and pretending to take notes, Friedhoff slammed back the scotch and moved out to the short balcony that looked down a forever drop to scrubby brush and stone.
“When we started, it was fucking beautiful, man. We were changing the world, creating prosperity, and we were nice to people at work. Everything was possible. Smart prosthetics for amputees, VR PTSD therapy in the meta, AI diagnostics to identify cancer nodules from a voiceprint, low-carbon cities, you name it, man.”
Evan tried to imagine someone this unimpressive building a multibillion-dollar company and then ordering the execution of a key competitor. Nothing seemed real about Friedhoff, but perhaps that was the point. Maybe nothing was real to him outside a screen. Maybe everything was a VR simulation. Maybe he just punched a button on his joystick and deployed the Wolf with a throw-down .22 and a flex-tie sized for a seventeen-year-old girl’s neck.
“Now it’s all about maximization. Work product. Time. Profit. We measure our workers by metrics of how much they load in our warehouses down to fractions of seconds. Wearable tech, handheld scanners, performance-tracking software, cameras everywhere, algorithm-driven performance system metrics. Charting time-off tasks like snack and bathroom breaks. I mean, we know the percentage our employees slow down when they’re chewing a FreeWillPower bar and the percentage by which they speed up when chewing one of our caffeinated Youtropical bars. I think: How did we get here? And then I remember: I aimed at this. I did. And now … what if it’s too late?”
“For you?”
“For everyone.” Friedhoff slumped into a stool, despondent. “There’s no going back.” He spun his glass on the bar and then spun it again. “We can’t put the tech back into the box. When I was in college I used to bike through the rain. To read fucking Kierkegaard. In a library. That was open all night. Real-world dedication, right? And me, I’m a shitstain on the heel of what my grandfather was. And these kids now? Who we’re creating? Who we already created? And are powerless to stop? They’re so … softened in luxury. Eroded. I have two daughters, man. If I admit what I’ve done to them? To the kids of this world? If you teleported me in from a few decades ago to behold my work? Faces stuck to screens, anxiety skyrocketing, FOMO and body image, the permanent hypnotic drugging of the American mind. No—global mind. Not anymore. I’m out, man. I’m out.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.” Friedhoff’s eyes held equal parts remorse and pleading. “I’m tired of being disgusted with myself. Like a lot of people. But the sin I carry, my burden, it just seems … heavier. Our way of life is dying. Human life. And I helped oversee its demise. The singularity’s bearing down on us like a freight train.”
And so you had one of the world’s leading AI experts killed, Evan thought. To slow it down a little.
“What sin?” Evan asked. “What do you mean by ‘sin’?”
“Just the stuff I’ve done,” Friedhoff said vaguely. “To people.”
He grabbed at his hair, made a fist atop his forehead. A man barely holding it together.
“How do we stop it?” Evan asked. “The freight train?”
“They have too much power, man. We. We have too much power. And the laws can’t catch up. We need, dunno. An overthrow. A revolution. A coup. Something … drastic.”
Were these really the pioneers at the helm of our uncertain future? In Allman, an ambulatory left prefrontal cortex? And a third-rate Peter Pan philosopher in Friedhoff?
“It’s your belief that we need to halt AI at any cost?” Evan asked carefully. “Even violence?”
Friedhoff’s eyes jerked from his empty glass to Evan and then quickly away. “Who knows,” he said softly. “Who knows.”
He was sufficiently muddled with guilt and booze that Evan decided to take a more direct run at the object of his curiosity.
“Solventry,” Evan said, “they’re one of your competitors, right?”
“Sure,” Friedhoff said. “They’re everyone’s competitor.”
“I interviewed a man named Dr. Benjamin Hill for this study. Are you familiar with his work?”
“What is this? Why are you asking me about Hill?” The words came faster, a staccato beat of paranoia.
“The genius study,” Evan said.
Friedhoff’s daughter drifted in from the back hall. She wore a flowing white dress with a gauzy wrap across her shoulders. Straight blond hair parted in the center, 1970s long, round pale face with light freckles. Her phone cradled expertly in the palm of her hand, the light shining up at her pale green eyes. “Dad? Dad?” Her gaze didn’t lift from the screen. “The Wi-Fi’s out. I’m streaming a thing and I can’t … It keeps glitching.” She moved forward, bumped into the couch, readjusted course without lifting her eyes.
“I’m busy, June,” Friedhoff said. “I told you I’m in a meeting.”
“Daddy?” The younger daughter floated in from the kitchen. Dark curly hair, crop top showing a pierced belly button. She held an iPad before her, thumbs tapping away. “Can you reboot the server? I’m Snapping with Peyton and it just went out. Can you—” She stumbled over the edge of the rug, kept her footing.
The girls stood there, swaying, eyes locked on their screens, a bizarre walking-dead effect.
“I taught you how to reboot the router,” Friedhoff said. His face had darkened, brows heavying over his eyes. He watched Evan differently now, with suspicion.
“Yeah,” the daughters said in unison, “but you’re better at it.”
Friedhoff reached out and grabbed Evan’s forearm, not gently, his words delivered on a current of alcohol. “I don’t understand why we’re discussing Solventry.”
Evan said, “My subject pool includes—”
“Oh wait,” June said, dreamily. “It’s—hang on—it’s coming back online…”
“I got it,” the younger daughter intoned. “I quit out and then reloaded…”
The teenage girls stared at their screens, swaying slightly on their feet like anchored kelp. “We’re good,” they said in a single voice. “We’re good now.”
June stood mesmerized by her phone. Her little sister didn’t so much withdraw as rewind out of the room.
Evan looked down at Friedhoff’s hand clamped on his arm. Friedhoff followed the stare, noticed what he was doing, and let go. He covered with a nervous laugh.
“That’s it,” he said. “I think you should leave now.”
“Thank you for your time.” Evan rose.
As he started out, he felt the heat of Friedhoff’s glare at his back. Beside the couch, June blocked his way to the foyer. Her iPhone video was going full blast, an electronic beat underscoring a flurry of fast edits.
“Excuse me,” he said.
She didn’t look up.
Blading his body, he slipped past her and moved to the front door.
She didn’t seem to notice.
49
The Second-Best Sniper Hide in the Kill Zone
Evan was set up in the second-best sniper hide in the kill zone. A seventh-story corner office at a fifty-meter stagger across the street from the condo building that was Russo Dmitri’s destination. Based on the text from the recovered phone, Evan knew that the Wolf’s bullet was going to arrive in the one-block span unfurled below him.
He’d borrowed this particular office because of its open sight lines and wide vantage, its outswing casement windows, and its gauzy voile roller shades that hid the reflection of his sniper scope. He had not chosen it for its witty poster art (“You Can’t Deposit Excuses!”), nor the ponderous heave and groan of water cycling in the fish-tank-for-one (red veiltail betta), nor its Air Wick Freshmatic dispenser (Hawaii scent).
Though he intended to observe and then track or approach Karissa Lopatina, he’d brought his Savage 110 Elite bolt-action. In the event that she made his position and sought to engage, he didn’t want to find himself having brought binoculars to a sniper fight.
In the unlit office he lay flat on his stomach across a folding table two meters back from the open window and lowered blind. For the past forty-five minutes he’d moved little more than his eyelids. In his thirteenth year, he’d been taught by a marksmanship instructor to hold prone sniper position for as long as was demanded, to move in inches per hour when the necessity arose. Breathing in air perfumed with papaya and hibiscus, he let the reticle creep across the entire area of operations—curb drains and lampposts, windows and parked cars, rooftops and awnings—and land once more on the sniper hide he would have chosen himself if he were the one who was going to execute Russo Dmitri.
The double billboard was perched on the roof of Book Soup across the street from the bleached-yellow extant signage of the old Tower Records. The billboard’s two faces were separated at an angle, meeting at one end like a chevron, providing an isosceles triangle of protection within. A perfect view to a kill.
Currently empty.
He’d identified the hide for the same reasons Lopatina would. Given Dmitri’s likeliest route, the perch provided the straightest line of sight to his vehicle for the longest window of time before its planned turn in to the parking structure. It would widen the Wolf’s range to between seventy-five and four hundred meters, though if he were her, he’d take the shot at the closer end. The dual billboard had a platform as well as plentiful scaffolding beneath, opening up multiple routes across the adjoining roofs and down. The billboard faces would tamp down the echoes and mask the muzzle report, which would buffalo the shotlocs—shot-locator microphones—that the last mayor had ordered built in to most telephone poles. Lopatina would make use of a Killflash ARD honeycomb mesh cover to mute any glint of the scope and supersonic projectiles that would emanate hard-to-trace shock waves. The rounds would be machine-turned, differentially tempered, barrier-blind solid copper projectiles with hardened tips to get through a windshield and body armor with little difficulty. Hanging a wind flag would be too conspicuous, but there was plentiful lightweight debris blowing in the gutters to give her whatever cues she needed at this distance.
Yes: The billboard was the best position for the shot.
Which meant he’d wait here in the runner-up spot, patient as a mantis.
These blocks of the Strip were one of Los Angeles’s pressure points, an epicenter wired to the life of the city. The bookstore’s sign glowed in red and yellow neon. The billboard threw a spa-cool blue light. Car headlights washed across bars and restaurants, across decked-out hipsters and past-their-prime rockers. The thump and pulse of unseen dance floors set dark-tinted windows vibrating, throwing back wobbling reflections of cars and streetlights, rendering them aquatic.
A squiggle of movement along the sidewalk caught his attention, a FWIP scuttling underfoot, largely ignored by passersby and partiers. The delivery robots had become part of the scenery here, like parking meters and trash cans, just one more piece of the urban landscape to step around.
He’d unclipped his fob watch and placed it on the table in front of him next to his RoamZone. The Vertex clockwork was originally commissioned for ordnance timing by the British War Office during World War II. Its luminescent hour markers and hands showed 9:13. Another forty-seven minutes until Russo Dmitri’s approximate arrival.
