Page 77 of Mastermind

“For one, we learned much more than he realizes. Or at the very least, we learned a lot more than he assumes we already know,” Theo replies.

“Explain,” I say a little too quickly.

“What he just did, that chat bot, it’s incredibly sophisticated. Using the AI to respond to you and drive a video image of himself? That took considerable resources. It wasn’t cheap. More importantly, for a man who has supposedly spent the last several years behind bars and with only limited communication with the outside world, he’s remarkably up to date on the latest artificial intelligence research.”

“They couldn’t stop him from reading. Only accessing computers and choosing who he communicated with,” I reply.

“I understand that. But this is more than reading some research papers. This implies experimental knowledge, or at least contact with someone with that background. Also, the sophistication of what he did in the past, well before the deepfake algorithms were published, suggests he was in some kind of position where he had access to government research. Moreover, he had access to government-scale resources.”

“Are you saying that he had help from the government?” I ask.

“Not necessarily. Access doesn’t mean cooperation. Look at it another way: I can point to a building from your balcony that’s actually a top secret NSA facility. It’s got an innocuous name out front, but three floors underground there’s a server farm five times the size of the one we saw in Seoul and an entirely separate floor with a quantum computer system. Do you know who operates it? I don’t. I can tell you the agency, but the contractor is a complete mystery. They’re some shadow company formed to build the system and keep it running. Who owns the company? Some other company. I ran a company like that, and I can’t even tell you where our funding was coming from.”

This helps confirm a suspicion of mine and reinforces Gerald’s mole fear. “Heywood was a spook.”

“At some point I think the man called the Warlock was deeply involved in the intelligence community, building computer systems for them. The problem, or at least what I’ve seen in my experience, is that the people writing your checks have no clue how much power they’ve handed you.”

That would explain one of the other mysteries about the Warlock. He has no past. A man who helped install systems for intelligence agencies could also have erased his own history.

“How does this happen?” I ask.

“He could have been a brilliant college kid with a clever paper that the intelligence community saw potential in. They recruited him in some company they contract with. In time, he creates his own company and sells them on some application they’re willing to throw money at.”

“That’s also a chance for fraud,” I reply.

“Maybe. But not in the way you probably think. Those agencies are used to throwing dump trucks full of money at projects, but they like to see receipts. At least for what you spend your money on. With one exception.”

“And that is?”

“The power bill. If you’re running some supercomputer cluster that’s trying to intercept North Korean radio transmissions and build an org chart based on each official’s digitized speech patterns, then the CIA isn’t going to care if you spent thirty thousand or four hundred and fifty thousand dollars on your monthly electric bill. They assume it’s the price of running that kind of complex computer system.”

“How do you defraud the government that way?” I ask. “Besides stealing computer time?”

“Lots of ways. It’s a commodity in and of itself. I don’t know what he might have done. Run his own research, for sure. See, you have to look at computation as a valuable commodity. Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world, not because they deliver your flat-screen television the next day, but because of their computer-services division, which runs the computer systems for half the internet. That’s what makes them powerful. Heywood likely had access to that kind of power.”

“And used it to make chat bots?”

“I don’t know what he was doing, and that’s what scares me. And here’s another thing: I suspect that the heists he pulled off in those data centers may have been to steal his own data.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m just guessing, but let’s say he managed to get a government computer cluster or somebody else’s supercomputer to run a huge computational problem. Maybe running in the background or masking itself as a background process. Getting it to run is one thing, but if the result is terabytes in size, or if they’ve locked down the system, then the only way to get it out might be to physically steal it.”

“But why, Theo? What is he doing?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I just can’t think that way. Not yet, at least.”

“Well, we need to think of something.” I gesture to my laptop. “I think he wants us to keep playing twenty questions with his virtual self. You can have at it if you want, but I want to take a more physical approach.”

“What do you mean?” asks Theo.

“If Heywood was up to all this while he was supposed to be in custody, that means he had somebody looking the other way pretty hard. Until they decided to ‘move’ him to another facility, that is . . . at which point he escaped.”

“Have you considered that he was moved to a different facility because someone in the intelligence community finally realized who he was?”

“Or maybe someone knew all along. Yeah, I’ve been thinking along those lines. That’s why I think I might need to go through channels that aren’t official,” I reply.

“What do you mean?”