The extra sample data he had managed to pull from the cameras built into the monitors of the staff made him wonder whether he could somehow create a routine to circumvent the security system. He wondered whether they had given him access to images of Joshua himself. He searched through the samples and was surprised to find that they had indeed opened up the feeds to every camera in the building, including Joshua’s. He used the images of Joshua’s face to build his three-dimensional model. He wondered whether he would be able to fool the image recognition system into thinking that his face was Joshua’s. It should be easy enough since he had access to all of the source code and it just needed him to put in some special algorithms. If he got this right, he should be able to get some elevated permissions in the system which could only be a good thing. It wasn’t just about facial recognition. There was the problem of the key cards too, and copying one of those was going to be difficult considering he had no way to bring the hardware he needed to read and copy a card into the building.
Chris thought back to the time when Wyn and himself had been taken into this building and he realized they hadn’t gone through any kind of security scanner and there was no swiping of cards, and no surrendering of weapons as they entered the building. But they’d also entered through a different door. Was this door controlled in a different way? Maybe it was a special lock that could only be opened by Joshua’s face or other senior members of the team. The changes to the software would take all afternoon. He took a stroll to the canteen and grabbed a soda from the fridge and there was another programmer there making a coffee for herself. She was a red-head and kind of cute, maybe in her twenties.
‘I’m Chris,’ he said holding out his hand. ‘I’m new around here.’
‘I know who you are,’ she said, ‘there was a memo.’
‘I must have missed the memo that told me who you are,’ he said, his hand still extended in the hopes of a greeting.
With that the girl smiled and shook his hand. ‘I’m Stephanie,’ she said. ‘We were told to keep an eye on you, make sure you’re not making a nuisance of yourself.’
‘I’ll remember to try and be good,’ said Chris. ‘So what do you do here?’
‘I work on stabilization. I create routines that take feeds from electronic gyroscopes and wind speed indicators and use that to calculate thrust vectors that help to keep aircraft perfectly stable.’
‘Sounds interesting.’
‘It is. I get to play with some serious hardware. Most of the work I’m doing is normally done through creating physical models and testing them in a wind tunnel. Did you know we have more computing power in our department than in the whole of the NSA?’
‘Yes,’ said Chris. ‘I get the impression that money is no issue for these guys. But tell me, how do you feel about the other thing?’
The girl finished making her coffee and looked a little perplexed. ‘What other thing?’ she asked.
‘You know,’ said Chris, ‘killing people.’
‘I try not to think about that. The way I see it, if it wasn’t me working on these routines, it would be some other person and this is too good an opportunity. I know the work I am doing is going to be used in military applications sometime in the future, but for now, I can just concentrate on the ground-breaking work I’m doing.’
‘You sound like someone I know.’
‘And just who would that be?’ she asked.
‘Me,’ he said with a smile. ‘But do you know, the thing is that the work we are doing isn’t just going to be killing people at some time in future, it’s being used to kill people now. In some cases innocent people.’
‘Like I said, I try not to think about it.’
Chris was stunned. ‘That’s it?’ he said. ‘I tell you that your work is being used to kill innocent people and you tell me you try not to think about it?’
‘Listen Chris, I’m twenty-six and there are dozens of young graduates desperate to land a job like this. A lot of them are probably smarter than me. I know when I’m on to a good thing and this job is helping me do work that would be impossible in the commercial sector. Who knows, by the time I’m thirty I could be running my own company, consulting to the big aeronautics companies. Or even retired.’
‘So that’s it? You don’t give a shit about other people just as long as you’re getting what you want?’
‘It’s not like that. Sure I like the job and the opportunities I get. How many jobs are there where you get to work with such state-of-the-art equipment like they have at this place? But it’s not just that. We’re actually doing some good. Protecting our nation from the terrorist threat. Creating a safer country for our fellow citizens and for future generations.’
Chris held up his soda can, ‘I guess I need to keep drinking the Kool-Aid,’ he said. ‘Where do you draw the line? Don’t you sometimes feel like you’re Oppenheimer, working on the first atomic bomb? Maybe he felt the same way, that he was serving a greater good, protecting his country. Maybe he was excited to be given the funding and equipment that allowed him to continue with his ground-breaking research. But what happened when they dropped those bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I’ll tell you what happened. Hundreds of thousands of citizens died, and not all of them in the intense inferno of white heat that destroyed those cities. Some of them died slow and agonizing deaths. Some of them are still suffering today and their future generations are still plagued by the after effects of having their genes ripped apart by the radiation that resulted from Openheimer’s work. I wonder whether, if he had known what he was creating and how it would be used, whether he would have continued with his work just because if he didn’t do it, someone else would?’
The girl was starting to look uncomfortable. Either she wanted to get away from Chris because she was finding him irritating, or she was being forced to look at what she was doing without blinkers for the first time.
‘The work we are doing will save millions of lives,’ she said. ‘What about the twin towers? If we could have stopped those bastards before they flew planes into our world trade center, don’t you think we would have taken that opportunity?’
‘Sure we would, but how do you know for sure that someone is going to pull the trigger? What about a reasonable doubt? What about being presumed innocent until proven guilty? What about the law? Do you just kill everyone that has the wrong colored skin? Or the wrong religious beliefs? There was another group of people that did that back in the 1940’s, you may have heard of them? The Nazis were led by fanatical power-hungry villains who fed off the kind of idealistic bullshit that you’ve been spouting to me. How many of those soldiers that put the Jews into the gas chambers were just following orders? Or serving the greater good? How many of them truly believed they were doing the right thing?’
The girl didn’t seem to want to discuss this with Chris any longer. She left her coffee and stormed out of the canteen, but before she left, she turned to Chris. ‘Before you start throwing accusations, I think you need to take a long look at your part in this. I only write the software that makes things fly. You write the code that paints a cross-hair on people’s faces. If either of us should have trouble sleeping at night, it should be you.’
Ben tried Chris’s number again, but the phone was still diverting to his answer service. What was it with this guy? Didn’t he switch his phone on? He’d given up on leaving messages and had decided to drive over to his house. Ben remembered that Chris had often commented that he seemed to be the unluckiest guy on the planet, but now Ben knew about Joshua’s background, things started to make a lot more sense. The hard part was knowing what he could do about it. If Joshua was still working for the government, whichever set of initials that happened to be, then Ben was treading on thin ice. If Joshua had the powers to try to get a citizen killed to cover up another murder then he was clearly a dangerous man and appeared to be operating above the law. But what if his actions were not sanctioned? What if this Joshua character was a maverick, acting outside of his remit? Who could Ben go to for help? To whom would a man like that be answerable, and who could be trusted? He wondered about Agent Salter. Was he a man he could trust? What if he was part of this whole operation and had pulled Ben in just to find out how much he knew?
Ben walked up to the house and knocked at the door. There was no answer, he looked to the lock and thought about picking it. He’d picked locks on very rare occasions, but if he was honest, it wasn’t a skill he had mastered. There was seldom a need to pick locks, if he had a warrant or reasonable cause to enter a property, he could bring a specialist with him or even get the landlord to open the door for him. He was surprised to see that there were no keyholes on the door. He thought about Chris and realized that the door probably opened when it saw him coming. Nothing would surprise Ben anymore. He left the house and called back to the station and got the number for Michelle. She answered on the third ring.
‘Michelle, this is Detective Ben Naylor from Metro PD. I’m trying to get hold of Chris, do you know where I can reach him?’
There was a long period of silence.
‘Michelle?’
The phone went dead.
It shouldn’t really come as shock that Michelle wanted little to do with him after all she and Chris had been through. He tried the phone again and this time it went straight through to voicemail.
‘Michelle, I can understand if you’re pissed with me but I believe Chris may be in danger. He’s not in any trouble, legally, but I think I know who killed Jasmine Allan. When you get this message, please call me. I need to get to Chris and warn him.’
Chris hated himself for enjoying this work. Could he really reconcile what he was doing with the people he was doing it for? He was serving his country after all, well his newly adopted country. As a soldier he knew what it was like to do things for the good of his country, or for the cause, or simply because he was following orders, that most people would have problems with. But a soldier performed his duties in a battlefield which seemed to give justification to the acts he carried out. Shoot someone on a battlefield and they give you a medal, shoot someone in Wal-Mart and it’s a different story. It was the nature of the war that America was fighting against the terrorists that made this all so confusing. It was an honest fight. The combatants were hidden and didn’t care about hurting civilians, in fact that was their main objective, so was it really so bad to use such tactics in return?
He looked at the new facial recognition routines he had written. He was pleased with his work, but he thought about what the red-headed girl had told him. It was his work that painted a cross-hair on the face of the victim. He thought about Joshua. He was an enigma. He seemed as though he was a genuine guy and he was definitely intelligent. He had built quite a department and the technology he had fathered by assembling such great teams of engineers would change warfare forever. But there was something that Chris felt uneasy about, the way Jasmine had died. Could this really have been an accident? How could something like that be allowed to happen? Chris was shocked out of his daydreaming state when the door to his office opened and Joshua stood looking at him.
‘So, Mr. Sanders, how was your first day?’
‘It was good. I have to admit I enjoyed it.’
Joshua smiled and walked fully in to the room. He sat on the edge of Chris’s desk and Chris looked at him. He really did seem like a nice guy, and a good boss.
‘I’ve heard good things about those new algorithms you’ve cranked out. Apparently you’ve gotten our low-light recognition rates up to around ninety percent. That’s very impressive. We’ve had people working on those routines for a long time and have never come close to that, and yet you seem to have achieved the impossible in a single day.’
‘Sometimes it helps to get a fresh perspective.’
‘I think you’re going to do well here Chris. I see you having a long and brilliant career with our engineers.’
Joshua stood and walked back towards the office door and then turned before leaving.
‘No reservations?’ he asked.
‘Some,’ said Chris. ‘It’s going to take me a while getting used to this new role. My soldiering days are a long way behind me, but I think I understand what’s happening here and I know it makes sense.’
Michelle looked at her watch, it was gone five. She should probably be getting back. The day had gone better than expected and Wyn had been good company. He was a funny guy and she could see why Chris liked him so much. They’d visited the National Mall, the Smithsonian, and the Washington Monument. Tomorrow she planned to take Wyn on a tour of the White House. She looked at her phone. She had one new message, but that could wait. She knew it was not going to be Chris calling and she didn’t really want to hear what that asshole detective had to say. She looked up and Wyn was watching her.