Phantom

Thirty-seven

Palo Alto, California

Heavy fog rolled in from the Pacific, shrouding the little two-lane road that wound upward through dense redwood forests. They’d followed Highway 101 south from the San Francisco Airport FBO for about half an hour, then taken the exit for Redwood City. Ambrose had called Mrs. Waldo Cohen from the FBO reception. Mrs. Cohen had given them instructions on how to find her house. Wouldn’t be easy, she’d said, but if they got lost, just call her.

Hawke had hired a car from Hertz, a sleek black Mustang convertible with a massive protrusion on the bonnet. Their meager luggage barely fit into the boot, but Hawke loved the car on sight nonetheless. Ambrose, who owned a vintage Morgan, had turned his nose up at it, and there’d been a bit of a tiff at the Hertz counter.

“Really, Alex. How about a nice Cadillac, or a Lincoln?” Congreve asked, sensibly enough.

“This is California, Ambrose. Surf City. Ventura Highway. Hotel California. I’m not pulling up to the Hotel California in a bloody Cadillac, I’m sorry.”

The two men had talked about the seemingly related series of attacks long into the night, across the Atlantic, and then high above the vast America. Neither had gotten much sleep despite the fact that the Gulfstream’s cabin had two beds made up. The subject was fascinating. Sophisticated weapons of war, seized by some unknown cyberwar phantasm, and turned catastrophically against their owners.

Congreve was even more convinced these were not random events. Someone, some evil genius perhaps, had created powerful technology far beyond the known realm of modern science. And, he added, the attacks bore all the earmarks of the invasion of the Iranian nuclear facility by a cyberweapon that destroyed its target in complete secrecy and then vanished without a trace. “Everyone suspects Israel, of course,” he said, “but there’s absolutely no way to prove it.”

“Yes,” Hawke agreed. “Just like the Nevskiy, Air Force One, Fort Greely, and Israel’s robotic stealth fighter. No one has a clue how to even begin looking for the culprit. This is just the beginning of a wholly new kind of war. And I, for one, don’t like it.”

T hey caught glimpses of the nickel-colored San Francisco Bay on their left as the road, called the Skyline, snaked along the tops of the mountains. The trees were magnificent, great dark monuments, climbing skyward and disappearing into the grey fog. There was a light, misty rain, and it was almost dark as night. Hawke had the wipers on now, and the headlamps as well, even though it was an hour or so until sunset.

“I like this place,” Congreve said, leaning his head back against the headrest, peering out his rain-streaked window. “These foggy woods. This winding road. The dripping trees. I feel like I’m in an old Humphrey Bogart movie.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Hard to say, really. The road, the weather, the black trees. It all feels very ‘film noir’ to me. Like some gumshoe in a black 1934 Ford coupe is following us, tailing us, desperate to learn the location of the hideout where we stash all our ill-gotten lucre.”

Congreve cleared his throat and slipped into his very credible Edward G. Robinson impersonation. “We’re on the lam, see? Yeah, that’s right, on the lam. And that gumshoe’s right on our tail.”

“Ambrose, what are you on about? Gumshoe?”

“What they call a guy with a private-dick license.”

“This private dick of yours?” Hawke asked. “The one who’s on our tail?”

“Yeah, what about him? I’ll get him, the dirty rat.”

“If he’s so private, how will you know if he’s got a gun in his pocket, or he’s just glad to see you?”

Hawke smiled, keeping his eyes on the dark, rain-slick road ahead. In addition to his lifelong idol, Sherlock Holmes, Congreve adored the old black-and-white mystery films of the ’30s and ’40s. Hawke was accustomed to the quixotic reveries of his companion. Once launched, he was unstoppable.

“Of course he has a bean-shooter, pal, yeah, course he does, he’s a shamus, a copper, a flatfoot, ain’t he? A snub-nosed. 38 in a shoulder holster. He calls his heater Betsey.”

“Quite a vivid imagination, Constable. You’ve got the lingo down, perhaps you should write a mystery story.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Simply part of the deductive process. Reconstructing the crime scene.”

“While you’re reconstructing, could you keep an eye out for the Cohens’ mailbox? It should be coming up on the right.”

“Sure thing, boss. You’re the mug running this outfit. I’m only your triggerman.”

“Stop it.”

“What?”

“This isn’t a movie.”

“You said it yourself, back at the airport. The Hotel California. It’s Hollywood, isn’t it? Tinseltown, U.S.A. You know, I’ve never been before. Quite exciting, really.”

“This isn’t Hollywood, Ambrose. Hollywood is in Los Angeles. This is San Francisco. We’re over three hundred miles from Hollywood. A seven-hour drive.”

“Oh, well, it’s all California, isn’t it? The Coast, I believe they call it? One big la-la-land? What’s your beef, chief?”

Receiving no reply, Congreve was silent for a while. He saw a little Italian restaurant nestled among the trees with Christmas lights in the window; it looked like just the kind of gin mill where Bogart might take Bacall for a martini on a rainy night like this.

“Cohen,” Ambrose said, “coming up in a couple of hundred yards. Better slow down.”

“I see it, I see it.”

Hawke braked and turned sharply into the narrow driveway. It was leading steeply upward, deeply rutted and muddy, the soil dark red in the headlight beams. The looming trees on either side were walls of immense black columns. In a few minutes, they came to the stone house. A white two-story stucco building, probably built in the 1920s, with a steeply pitched slate roof and a smoking chimney. A quaintly eccentric, storybook bungalow, nestled under the trees, and if Congreve had to name the most likely architects, they would be Walt Disney and Snow White.

The house stood back from the drive, across a wide space that might once have been a lawn but was now overgrown with knee-high ferns. The lights were on, both upstairs and down, and the two men climbed out of the car and made their way up the stone walkway to the front door. Rain dripped softly off the slanting tiles of the roof.

“Push the doorbell, Bogie,” Hawke said.

“Aw, go soak your head. Push it yourself.”

“My head’s already soaking,” Hawke said, pulling up the collar of his trench coat. “It’s raining, as you may have noticed.”

Hawke gave Congreve a look and pushed the button, pleased at the pleasant chimes he heard beyond the door.

A small woman with snow-white hair pulled into a bun at the back of her head answered the door moments later. She wore a straw hat that might have been cut from the thatched roof of an English cottage. Dressed in a simple grey dress with an open brown knit sweater, she had deep-set, keenly intelligent brown eyes, and a round face. It was clear she’d once been a beautiful woman, for she still was.

“Mr. Hawke and Mr. Congreve, I assume. So. You found me, did you?” she said with a smile. “Come in out of that rain. Isn’t it awful? Hardly rare, but still, one tires of it.”

The three of them had tea in front of a crackling fire in the cozy living room, three overstuffed chairs on the hooked rug facing the hearth. She politely inquired about their transatlantic voyage, England’s new prime minister, the Royal wedding, and which horse might win the Epsom Derby. Then they turned to the business at hand.

“I’m quite happy to see you,” she said. “I had so hoped Director Kelly at the CIA might believe me and the next thing I know, Scotland Yard shows up at my door. You’ve a great reputation, Chief Inspector Congreve. I googled you just this morning. I am a Sherlockian, you see. I noticed that you admire Holmes as well.”

“I worship daily at his altar,” Congreve said, not completely kidding, Hawke thought, but still, laying it on a bit thick.

Hawke said, “Dr. Cohen, I wonder if you might recount the events of the evening your husband died? Director Kelly told us your suspicions, of course, but we’d like to hear it from you.”

“Please call me Stella.”

“Sorry. Stella, what makes you think your husband was murdered?”

She told them, in precise detail, what had happened that night.

Congreve said, “And this note you found afterward, do you still have it?”

“Yes, Chief Inspector, it’s right here, folded inside my book.”

She handed Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet to a smiling Congreve.

Ambrose examined the scrawled note and handed it to Hawke.

“The name Darius, Stella, does it mean anything to you?” Hawke said.

“Yes. And I’ve been thinking about it. Waldo had a student-this was years and years ago-named Darius. He was a brilliant young physicist, postdoc, and he was instrumental in Waldo’s work in the field of AI. You both know what AI is, of course?”

“We do.”

“I am a physicist myself. I was acting as Waldo’s assistant at that time. Project Perseus, it was called. Federal funding. Oh, it was all so exciting. We knew we were on the verge of something-enormous. Something that could change the very fabric of human existence.”

“In what way, Stella?” Congreve said.

“In every way. As Waldo frequently said, ‘Nothing will ever be the same, Stella.’ ”

Ambrose said, “Tell us about Project Perseus. Don’t worry about confusing us with scientific jargon; we’ll muddle through.”

“Quite simply, the endgame was to create machine intelligence that could match, and then vastly exceed, human intelligence. Mammalian brains are quite limited, you see. Dreadfully slow. Because of the distance between intraneural connections in your brain. Outdated technology, compared to the minute nanodistances in a modern chip, such as in your cell phones. And, most important, the tiny confines of the human skull. Machines have neither of those limitations. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

Hawke asked, “Forgive my ignorance, but how sizable is the difference between man and machine, in terms of brainpower, I mean?”

“Machines will soon process and switch signals at close to the speed of light, about three hundred million meters per second. The electrochemical signals in our brains, yours and mine, are roughly one hundred meters per second. Quickly doing the math, that gives the machines a rather large advantage over us humans, a speed ratio of three million to one. Plus, the machines have the ability to remember billions of facts precisely and recall them instantly. Basically, DNA-based intelligence is just so slow and limited. Outdated, as I say.”

Hawke smiled. “Stick a fork in us, we’re done.”

“Yes, there is that possibility.”

“Stella,” Congreve said, “sorry, but this sounds like a most precarious, runaway phenomenon.”

“Well, it’s basically evolution, Chief Inspector. You can’t stop it. It’s how we are destined to evolve. At some point, human and machine intelligence will be indistinguishable from each other. The trick is to instill the machines with reverence for their progenitors.”

“So they don’t turn against us?”

“Precisely.”

“Sounds fraught with danger, Stella, I must say.”

“Oh, it is, it is. It was the thing that weighed most heavily on poor Waldo. He kept likening himself to Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. He thought he was about to unlock secrets that could unleash a destructive force upon the world vastly more deadly than nuclear weapons.”

Congreve said, “But he kept going? Scientists can’t help it, I suppose.”

“Yes, he did. But when he realized the inherent dangers in his work, he began conducting his research in complete secrecy. He didn’t trust anyone with the knowledge he’d acquired. No one. Terribly frustrating for his young assistants, like Darius. There were many arguments around that time. Some of them quite ugly, to be honest.”

“He worked in secret, you say. How?”

“He ultimately disbanded the Perseus Team. He began to encrypt all his work, creating a code-based cyberfirewall even Einstein couldn’t break. He no longer shared his progress, even with me. I’ve no idea what point he reached in his research. None.”

“But he obviously stayed in touch with Darius?” Congreve said. “Based on the phone call your husband received the night of his death.”

“Oh, yes. Waldo had been a great mentor to him. It was almost a father and son relationship. Waldo confided to me once that he believed Darius possessed an intellect on an order of magnitude greater than his own.”

“Did Darius continue with his own work, once the team was dismantled?”

“Oh, I’ve no idea. He left California, I know that. He was at MIT for a time, then I lost track. Waldo was the only one who kept up with him. By telephone, of course.”

“Just curious, Stella,” Ambrose said. “This fellow Darius, as a key player, must have been dismayed when the project was shut down. Was he?”

“Oh, yes, I suppose he was. I think that’s why he stayed in contact with Waldo. The two of them exchanged theorems and ideas over the years.”

“But your husband was no longer sharing his ideas, isn’t that what you said?”

“Correct. He stopped short of revealing anything he considered dangerous ground.”

“Frustrating for his young pupil.”

“I’m sure. But Waldo was adamant, I can assure you.”

“Fascinating,” Hawke said. “I wonder, could you possibly show us the spot where you found your husband’s body? It might prove helpful.”

“I can indeed. If you don’t mind traipsing through the woods in this stinky weather.”

Congreve rose to his feet and said, “You forget, my dear lady, we are Englishmen. Hardy souls, stiff upper lips.”

“Ambrose, please,” Hawke said.

“Yes?”

“Never mind. Shall we go?”