Wilkes and his men looked at each other for a moment, then slung their weapons. One man took the heavy canvas tarp off Chip Dawes, now awake and wide-eyed, and beat out the fires with it. Two more men laid out Sally’s body with a crisp white tablecloth for a shroud, then wrapped her in the still-smoking tarp and laid it on the back of the flatbed beside Chip, still silent and trussed like a chicken.
It didn’t take long. June sobbed softly, shoulders heaving. Her dad had both arms around her.
When Wilkes and his men had left, Oliver called out into the night. “There’s plenty of food, gentlemen. If anyone is hungry, they’re welcome to come to supper.”
Peter made a bet with himself, whether Manny and his guys would appear.
He won the bet. Nobody showed.
But the darkness of the orchard became somehow indefinably less crowded, and he knew Manny and his guys were headed home.
Oliver unlocked Peter’s cuffs, then held out his hand. “My name is Oliver Bent.”
Peter shook hands with the man despite himself. “Peter Ash.”
“Your country needs your help.”
Peter looked at him. “You have got to be shitting me.”
The shadows shifted again and Lewis coalesced from the trees, the big Remington over one shoulder. He looked at Shepard, nodded politely, leaned the rifle against the buffet table, found a clean plate, and began to load it with food. He had a black automatic pistol tucked into the back of his pants.
Oliver said, “I know who you are, Mr. Ash.” He angled his head at Lewis. “Your friend, too. For all her faults, Ms. Sanchez was right about one thing. The world is a dangerous place.”
“I’ve done my time for my country,” said Peter.
“Your official file is impressive,” said Oliver. “Your unofficial file, too. And now I’ve seen you at work. We could use you here, you and Ms. Cassidy both.” He nodded at June. “You are both uniquely suited to help run this place. You’d be good at it. Maybe it would be good for you, too.”
“You want me to take over this cowboy operation? You used Sally to do your dirty work.”
“Don’t mistake me for any kind of Boy Scout,” Oliver said softly, the planes of his face standing out in the candlelight. “I’m every bit as ruthless as Ms. Sanchez. She was my employee, albeit several steps down the chain of command. Her task was to maintain research operations here, and keep Mr. Kolodny happy and productive. She was not authorized to be quite so, shall we say, entrepreneurial. If Ms. Sanchez had contacted me on learning of the algorithm, things would have proceeded very differently. Hazel Cassidy, and many others, would still be alive.”
June had wiped her face with her sleeves and was listening closely. “What would Sally have done with it?”
“I believe she planned to use the algorithm for her own profit. She and her former supervisor had already paid themselves a great deal from the proceeds of this little research venture, including a substantial amount of Mr. Kolodny’s remaining funds. In short, her primary interest was her own. When this became clear to me, I began to take steps.”
“What about her partner?” asked Peter.
“He’s no longer with us.” Oliver glanced at Shepard. “He took his own life, I believe. Asphyxiated on the exhaust fumes of his antique Mercedes several days ago. Racked by guilt from his crimes.”
“I’m sure that was it,” said Peter.
“Let me be frank with you,” said Oliver. “This work is necessary. The world is not getting simpler, it’s getting more complex. We once worried about nation-states, and we still do. But now a small group of people can do a great deal of damage. Destabilize the financial markets, for example. Or overturn decades of electronic security with a single self-learning algorithm.”
Peter looked at Sally’s corpse on the flatbed, rolled up in the tarp. Chip beside her in his seersucker suit, eyes wide, a dirty cloth tied around his mouth.
“What about June? What about the algorithm?”
“An excellent question,” said Oliver. “Ms. Cassidy, is the algorithm still in your possession?”
“It never was,” she said. “It was growing on its own, spreading deeper and deeper into the Internet.”
“You say that like it’s alive.”
“Maybe it was,” she said. “Or maybe it could have been. I don’t know. The first true artificial intelligence.” Her face was bleak. “But it listened to me. And I told it to kill itself. To delete every trace of what it had been.”
“Ms. Sanchez had capture software on the valley’s Internet connection,” said Oliver. “My office is now in control of that software. We will have a copy of the algorithm.”
She shook her head. “Tyg3r knew all about your filters,” she said. “It didn’t matter. Tyg3r had colonized your system before Peter and I even showed up. It was already here.”
Oliver blinked at her. “Well,” he finally said. “Perhaps your actions are for the best.”
“They are,” said June. Peter had never seen her more self-possessed. “Now I have a question. Who killed my mother?”