Page 1 of Insidious Threats
1
January 2023
The early morning sunlight streamed in through the large window in Leo Connelly’s home office. A beam bisected his face and fell across the card he held loosely in his big hands. He had the note memorized by this point, but stared down at the elegant cursive writing on the thick linen paper and read the words aloud in a soft voice as if, this time, their meaning would reveal itself to him:
Agent Connelly,
I must apologize for my behavior earlier. I was reeling, having realized that I have made a grievous mistake.
I have made other mistakes in my life. Lord knows I have. But I have always tried to do the right thing. I may not always have succeeded, but I did try.
Everything I did, I did in Josh’s memory, as an effort to honor him. Please bear that in mind when you judge me. But all my work is about to be used for ends that are dishonorable at best, dangerous for certain, and dystopian if they prevail.
I must find a way to make amends for my recent errors of judgment. If you’re reading this, then I have failed, and I must ask you to pick up the task. I don’t know where else to turn, and I feel seeing you out my window was a sign of some sort.
Enclosed is a program that you can use when the time comes to stop Mjölnir. It will not complete the task, but it will get you in the door.
Best regards,
Landon Lewis
He twitched his lips and dropped the card onto his desk. Nope. Still gibberish.
He flipped through the small notebook in which he scribbled down his thoughts every time he studied the blasted letter. The notes dated back to last summer. For half a year, he’d been trying to tease out the meaning of the dead man’s words. Some bits made sense, but the overall picture remained murky, muddy, and mysterious.
What had Landon been thinking? Surely job one in giving someone instructions to be carried out posthumously was to be clear. Clear, unmistakable, explicit directions were vital. Was it really so much to ask?
He grabbed a pen and reviewed his scrawled notes from the last time he’d engaged in this exercise in futility.
“All my work”had to be a reference to Cesare, Landon Lewis’ ill-conceived artificial intelligence tool. The AI was designed to predict and prevent crime by identifying law-abiding citizens with a latent propensity for criminal behavior. To the surprise of absolutely nobody but its creator, Cesare had proved to be a disaster—and a racist one, to boot.
But the rest of Landon’s sentence was a head-scratcher. There was no way Cesare could be used foranypurpose, let alone a “dishonorable, dangerous, dystopian” one. Sasha had seen to it. His formidable, pocket-sized wife had gotten the Justice Department to shove a consent decree down Landon’s throat. He couldn’t do a blessed thing with Cesare.
Leo straightened in his chair.No, that wasn’t true.At least, he didn’t think it was. He was pretty sure the consent decree prohibited the use of Cesare for any predictive policing purpose. Maybe, if Sasha had been very pushy—which was almost a certainty—it might also prevent using the program’s predictions for other purposes. He’d heard about an AI program used in the Netherlands to weed out welfare fraud. Like Cesare, it had created a mess.
But even Sasha had her limits. Leo bet that the consent decree wouldn’t stop Landon if he’d tried to tweak Cesare to serve a purely financial purpose. Like what? Predict whether someone would file an insurance claim? Or default on a mortgage?
He bobbed his head back and forth. Maybe. But that didn’t seem dramatic enough to warrant Landon’s note.
As someone who believed in the concept of free will, Leo was willing to describe fiscal determinations made by an AI algorithm as dishonorable. But he couldn’t imagine Landon describing those predictions—no matter how poorly made—as dangerous or dystopian. No. It had to be more than that.
And, he suspected, it was related to the one hundred million dollars wired into Landon’s account the day he died. Landon Lewis had sold Cesare to the highest bidder and then gotten seller’s remorse when he learned what the buyer intended to do with it. There was no way Landon would have reacted to someone using his creation to set insurance premiums by sending Leo … what, exactly?
He dropped the pen and picked up the flash drive that had been tucked into the package with the note. The drive had a physical keypad. To unlock the drive, a person would have to enter a PIN on the keypad. For further protection, the drive was coated with an epoxy, and the information on the drive was encrypted. Any effort to break into it without the PIN would destroy both the data and the drive itself.
Landon’s note referred to the data on the drive as a program. One that could help stop “Mjölnir.” Leo knew from his extensive understanding of Norse mythology—okay, fine, his love for Marvel movies—that Mjölnir was Thor’s mighty hammer. But he had no clue what it meant in this context. Was Mjölnir Cesare? Was Mjölnir a copycat technology? Maybe Cesare was on the flash drive. Maybe Landon had, in fact, suffered a psychotic break the day he died and the note was the sheer unhinged raving of a mentally unwell man.
Leo hadalmostconvinced himself that was the case. He’d beenthisclose to deciding that he didn’t need to do anything at all with the drive because Landon had been suicidal and most likely not lucid when he wrote the note. He’d keep it tucked away in his safe, untouched.
He huffed out a heavy sigh. But then, right before the new year, Maisy—Sasha’s long-time friend—had roped Sasha and Leo’s babysitter into starting a true crime podcast with her. And less than a week later, Maisy and Jordana had disproved Leo’s theory by exposing Landon’s alleged suicide as a murder, landing a police detective and a well-heeled commercial real estate broker in jail in the process. And he was back to trying to puzzle out what he was supposed to do with this freaking USB drive.
He glanced at the time. Sasha would be getting the twins up to get ready for their day any moment, which meant this sliver of quiet contemplation was about to end. He returned the card, the drive, and his notebook to the biometric safe in the closet, and headed downstairs for breakfast duty. As he dodged the cat lounging in a sunbeam on the top step and avoided the dog’s apparent efforts to trip him by weaving between his feet, the word “Mjölnir” looped through his mind.
What the devil was Mjölnir?
2
Two thousand-odd miles away, in a nondescript office park in Sun Valley, Idaho, Garwood March stifled a yawn while waving his ID badge in front of a card reader. He stomped his boots against the snow-packed pavement while the reader blinked. Once, twice,beep.
