Joey chewed her thumbnail, leaning over Evan’s shoulder as he sat before the Dell laptop, staring at a list.
Five names.
One of them was Joey Morales.
Morales. All this time he didn’t know her last name. He’d been unable even to get her full first name out of her.
The hillside crowded the back windows of the safe house, shadows making the interior dismal. That ever-present moisture had taken hold in the trapped air, turning the place dank. It smelled of microwaved food and girl’s deodorant. Evan ran his eyes across the screen once again.
“So much encryption,” Evan said, “for five names.”
She paused from chewing her thumbnail. “Not just five names. It’s a list of people in the Program who were associated with Jack in some way. Look.” She shouldered him aside, taking over the keyboard. When she hovered the cursor above the top name, a hidden file appeared. She clicked it, and a host of images proliferated. “This guy? Jim Harville? He was Orphan J. One of the original guys. Jack was his handler way back when. It says it was Jack’s first Program assignment.”
Evan scanned the files. “How the hell did Van Sciver get his hands on this? This is intel that isn’t supposed to exist.” He scrolled down the page. “And it’s from channels outside the Orphan Program. Look here. See, this is NSA/CSS coding.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means someone else in the government is watching Van Sciver and the Program—keeping tabs. Van Sciver didn’t oversee this intel collection, and he doesn’t control it.”
“Well,” Joey said, “till he got control of it.”
Dread crept into Evan’s stomach, digging in its nails. Van Sciver’s cryptic comments looped through his head once again: You have no idea, do you? How high it goes? You still think it’s about me and you.
Evan said, “What happened to Orphan J?”
“They caught up to him in Venice.” She brought up a crime-scene photo of a man lying in a flooded piazza, the back of his head blown off. Another red spot bloomed below one of his shoulder blades. Blood ribboned the water around him. The picture had been taken moments after he was shot, a cell-phone snap.
Evan noted the time stamp on the photo. “Van Sciver’s updating the initial files, building on the intel pieces he got his hands on. He’s taken these five names and turned them into active hit missions.”
“That’s right. Like Orphan C.” She brought up a picture of an older man, half in shadow, moving through the concourse of a shopping mall in Homewood, Alabama. He was dressed shabbily, toes showing through one of his sneakers. “Now look at this.” She’d dug up an article about an unidentified homeless man murdered beneath a freeway ramp in Birmingham. A picture from a local shelter accompanied the article, showing the man at a soup kitchen.
Evan sank back in the chair. “That’s why Jack was in Alabama. He knew this was coming, that this file could leak.”
“And that’s why he found me,” Joey said. “Why he moved me to Oregon and hid me.”
Evan stared at the name, bare on the screen: Joey Morales.
“It’s beyond creepy.” Joey slid the cursor over her own name, and a surveillance grab from a 7-Eleven security camera popped up, showing her walking through the aisles, baseball hat pulled low. But the angle was sufficient to capture her face. It was dated nearly a year ago, an address listed in Albuquerque. Same faded NSA/CSS stamp at the bottom of the page.
“This is from a week after I took off from Van Sciver,” Joey said. “But it was enough to get them on my trail. And lead them here.”
She tapped another link, and zoom-lens surveillance photos of the Hillsboro apartment populated the screen. Joey through a rear window, brushing her teeth. Joey shadowboxing, no more than a silhouette in the unlit apartment. Joey in the open doorway, casting a wary eye as she paid for a take-out order. She minimized the windows, exposing a report beneath that listed sixty-three nodal points of facial recognition and the same Oregon address that Jack had scrawled on his truck window right before he’d been forced aboard that Black Hawk and lifted sixteen thousand feet in the air.
“You were right,” Joey said. “They had someone sitting on me. Waiting for you.”
Evan looked at the remaining two names.
“Tim Draker,” he said. “Jack told me about him. Orphan L. He was one of Van Sciver’s guys until they fell out about a year ago. Is he dead, too?”
“Probably,” she said.
Evan put his finger on the trackpad, targeted Draker’s name. A streetlight camera had caught him exiting an anonymous drug-rehab center in Baltimore ten months ago. The imagery featured the NSA/CSS stamp.
A newer surveillance photo caught Draker smoking outside a facility in Bethesda, Maryland. It was dated November 28, two days ago, the time stamp showing 8:37 P.M. Minutes before Evan had blasted through the door of the pest-control shop, killed everyone inside, and taken the laptop. Van Sciver’s update must have just come in. This second photo had no stamp or coding of any kind.
“The NSA intel put Van Sciver on the trail of drug-treatment places,” Joey said. “From there it was only a matter of time.”
Evan stared at the date on that surveillance photo and knew in his gut that Draker was lost.
“Which means that we’re down to one little Indian,” Joey said.
Evan stared at the last name: David Smith. Moved his fingertip a few inches. The ghost file opened.
A photo of a twelve-year-old boy. A birth certificate. A file painting a familiar story, various foster homes in various poverty-stricken counties. And then it showed a recruitment report from two years ago, listing Tim Draker as David’s handler.
Evan looked for more information, but there wasn’t any to be had. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Won’t Van Sciver have found him by now?”
“There are 33,637 people named David Smith in the country,” Joey said. “And believe me, with how well Jack’s been stashing people? The kid ain’t using that name anymore.” She jabbed a finger at the screen. “These people are hidden as well as it is possible to hide someone. Everything I know—hell, everything you know about being invisible? We learned from Jack. So I think Van Sciver’s still searching for this kid. I think he’s chasing him down now. And if we don’t find him first, he’s gonna kill the kid like he killed everyone else.”
Evan stood up. Laced his hands at the back of his neck and breathed. “All this…”
Joey completed the thought. “All this is because of you.”
He looked at her.
“Van Sciver’s killing his way to you right now,” she said. “All of us—these five names and however many more Van Sciver doesn’t have yet? We’re all on borrowed time.”
“How do we help that kid?” Evan said.
“We find him.”
“We can’t compete with Van Sciver’s resources. I have access to databases, but he’s at a whole other level.”
“You’re right.” Joey was chewing her thumb again, drifting behind the table, her eyes intense. “When it comes to David Smith we have an absence of data.”
“Right,” Evan said. “How do you look for an absence of data?”
“Deep-learning software,” she said. “Believe me, that’s what Van Sciver’s using.”
She looked over at Evan, saw that he wasn’t following.
“It’s machine learning using advanced mathematics,” she said.
“That doesn’t help.”
She leaned over the table, peering at him from above the laptop screen. “It finds patterns you don’t even know you’re looking for.” She took another turn around the table, passing behind Evan. “Between the name David Smith, potential fake names befitting a thirteen-year-old white kid, facial characteristics, his birth-certificate information, physical developmental changes, purchase patterns for foster kids fitting his analytics, past locations, receipts, meds, and thousands of other factors we’re not aware of but can be extrapolated from on the basis of that thin file”—she jabbed a finger at the screen—“let’s say that there are five billion combinations of data. Being conservative.”
“Conservative.”
“Yes. Without a machine learning system, it would be impossible to correlate all that data, let alone zero in on David Smith under his new name in his new hiding place.”
“Okay,” Evan said. “So what’s the best way for us to do that?”
She paused long enough to flick a smile his way. “Someone who knows where he is—”
“—and a hammer,” Evan said. He stood up. “Seriously, Joey. Can we break into somewhere that has these capabilities and run the data?”
“No. This kind of processing takes time. Days even.”
“What equipment do we need?” he said.
“A pile of hardware,” she said. Mutual exasperation had given the discussion the tenor of an argument. “And like, say, a shit-ton of common graphics-processing unit chips. The mathematics involved in machine learning take advantage of the massive parallelism of the thousands of cores in those things. We’d need giant-ass GPU arrays, computer towers stuffed full of graphics cards, linked together with a high-speed InfiniBand network, running at eighty gigabits and—.” She stopped, looked at him. “More stuff I’d explain to you if I thought you could understand.”
“So how do we do that? Right now?”
“Raid the computer-graphics lab building at Pixar.” She studied his expression. “Joking.”
Frustration mounting, he drifted over and leaned against the couch. The cushions and pillows had been rearranged for her to sleep there, a T-shirt balled up for a pillow.
He stared across at an old-school photograph of David Smith on the screen. He wore a dated bowl cut and a collared three-button shirt with a frayed shoulder. Lank blond hair with a cowlick parting his bangs, hazel eyes, pleasingly even features. His gaze was lifted from the camera, as if the photographer’s last directive had caught him off guard. He looked lost. They always did.
“I’m not gonna let Van Sciver get to that kid,” Evan said. “So give me an answer for how to find you what you need to figure this out.”
“It’s complex shit, X,” she said. “It’s not like we can just drive through a Best Buy. Your average person doesn’t have—”
She stopped, mouth slightly ajar. She bowed her head, pinched her eyes at the bridge of her nose.
“Joey?”
“Don’t talk.”
“Joey—”
She held up a hand. He silenced. She stayed that way for thirty seconds. Thirty seconds is longer than it sounds.
And then, with her face still buried in her hand, she said, “Bitcoin mining.”
“What?”
“You do bitcoin mining.” She lowered her hand, and her face held something more than joy. It held triumph. “No government regulation, no oversight.”
“Yes.”
“Which means you have a 2U rackmount computer bay.”
“Two of them.”
Her eyes were shining. “I could kiss you. Figuratively. Each rack has sixteen graphics cards. At four chips per card and 2,048 cores per chip, that gives us 8,192 graphics cores per card. We have thirty-two cards, which makes”—she closed her eyes again, her lips twitching—“262,144 graphics cores.” She looked up. “That’s a lotta horsepower.”
“So I can just use my bitcoin-mining setup?”
“No.” Her irritation flared again. “Everything has to be reconfigured.”
Evan looked at the Snickers wrapper on the kitchen counter, the T-shirt pillow on the couch. “Pack up your stuff,” he said.
“What? Why?”
“I just came up with a new Commandment.”
At this her eyebrows rose. “A new Commandment? What is it?”
“‘Don’t fall in love with Plan A.’”