The jazzy riffs of "moi mon ame et ma conscience" began to play as my phone vibrated. Gunnar looked up quizzically, listening to the French lyrics.
I coughed and made a sign with my hands that meant "excuse me" and stepped into a hallway of Laurel's home to take the call.
I punched the accept call button, then put the phone to my ear and mouth, double checked my watch, mentally added 9 hours, and started talking...
"Bonsoir, Jacques, Comment allez-vous?"
"Très bien, et merci, Brendan. Est-ce que vous pouvez m'aider?"
"Certainment, Jacques. Qu'est-ce que c'est?"
Jacques Lyotard. Decorated member of the French Gendarmerie nationale, currently my commanding officer at INTERPOL, back in Lyon, France. And as rumor had it, former member of the Légion étrangère. It was evening over there, and after hours. Jacques was interrupting his night out, so I knew this had to be serious.
Jacques was always cagey when I asked him about his years in the Légion étrangère but he would just smile and say he knew good Irish soldiers of fortune who had served well in the Légion étrangère, and that it was a pity I hadn't been one of them. I suspected this was because he probably also collected, or still collects, a paycheck from Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. But not the sort of thing one discusses in polite conversation with a French gentleman over a glass of wine, or on the job.
It leads to unwelcome questions as to why I'm "...still listed as an inactive reserve 'Leftenant' for the Irish Ranger Wing..." when officially I was discharged as a sergeant. "Zhey Deux?" asked Jacques, whereupon I gave up asking about his time in the French Foreign Legion and just drank a hearty toast to them instead.
Jacques switched to English after the initial pleasantries were done.
"Look, Brendan, I need you to head down to UCLA to check something out for me. You will meet up there with an FBI Special Agent who will give you all the details, which, I'm afraid, I can't discuss over the phone for reasons of international security, as I'm sure you can appreciate.", stated Jacques in perfect English with only a slight remnant of his Gallic accent left behind.
"Sure thing, Jacques, yes. I completely understand, I'll be on my way first thing in the morning."
"Tres bien, mon amie. Bon voyage et bonne chance! Good night old friend."
"Good night, Jacques."
I walked back into the main living area and addressed Gunnar.
"So, Gunnar, seeing as you're now more familiar with LA than I am, would you be up for a short road trip down to UCLA? I've been tasked with following up on an investigation ongoing at UCLA."
Gunnar got up and said "Sure, man. When do we leave?"
I shrugged and said "I told Jacques we'd head down there in the morning, but I figure if we leave not long after midnight tonight, we'll have the whole day to use at UCLA. I'd rather not waste any time on the road that we could be using to investigate instead."
"Cool." said Gunnar.
Gunnar told Laurel he was going to drive with me down to UCLA for a bit but we'd be back with plenty of time to get ready for the trip to NOLA. Laurel looked a bit surprised and I just shrugged and said "Duty calls..."
Laurel shrugged back and said "go get 'er done, I guess."
No matter how many times I drive it, no matter what time of day, it still boggles my mind how big the Western US is, hell, how big California is all on its own...
I had a hunch this was going to have something to do with UCLA's Computer Science Department. Having a background in CS was a big boost that put me on Ireland's short list for INTERPOL, and also INTERPOL's own short list of candidates from all the EU countries. I've done good work for them in cracking down on cybercrimes in the past several years.
I noticed the campus police milling around the UCLA Computer Science Building; going inside and down a few flights of steps, it wasn't long before I saw what I expected, namely police crime scene tape. I looked past the uniformed officers, past the plainclothes detectives in their cheap tan suits, most in blazers and khakis until my eyes landed on the tallish man in the dark Armani suit.
I approached him and held my INTERPOL badge at his eye level and announced "Inspector Brendan O'Shea of INTERPOL, at your service."
The man studied my credentials carefully with his eyes before extending his hand and replying "Special Agent [redacted], FBI."
His eyes drifted over to Gunnar and he asked "Who's this?"
"He's one of my assets, he's clean. Please proceed, Agent [redacted]"
The FBI man held up a strand of yellow crime scene tape barring a doorway and motioned for me to enter beneath it. I ducked my head and entered, followed closely by Gunnar, then by the FBI Special agent.
Special Agent[redacted] said calmly but with gravitas, "What I am about to say does not leave this room, gentlemen. Inspector O'Shea, you do realize if there are any leaks and this goes south, your ass will be on the line."
"I understand that perfectly well, Agent [redacted], please continue."
"Last night, we estimate 15-25 minutes after Midnight this lab was broken into; all the data on the servers in this room were copied then wiped in record time. There was no sign of forced entry, but also no images caught on security camera, no trace fibers left behind, nothing. Might as well have been ghosts.
What was stolen was all of the data comprising the software for the supercomputer known as Watson, which if you have been following the news lately, recently made a big splash beating some of the best human Jeopardy players on earth. As you can surmise, it has the ability to sort through a massive amount of data in a very short amount of time when given specific, particular queries. It's among some of the best AI out there right now, and now it's missing.
Now this theft in and of itself, while serious enough, isn't why I was asked to bring you in on this, Inspector O'Shea."
"I gathered as much.", I replied. As Special Agent [redacted] had described it up until this point, it was pretty much a purely FBI case that would be of mainly academic interest to me.
"This is the part that is above top secret, Inspector O'Shea. I've been reassured by the CIA that you are an asset that can be trusted with this information. We need to bring in INTERPOL because of the international implications of what I'm about to tell you. We are concerned there may be a connection to the crime here on campus and an incident that happened last week.
Gentlemen, last week the Pentagon was the target of a massive cyber-attack that resulted in extremely sensitive data being copied in a massive way...so much was taken that we had hoped we could buy some time while the perps sifted through the oceans of data they had collected, that we could nail them before they can make any use of it."
"But the loss of Watson changes the game, doesn't it?", I asked
"Beat me to the punch, Inspector. Yes; with Watson, assuming these cases are related, our perps would now have a powerful AI to query the Pentagon's massive data dump and locate key information faster than any human searcher could ever hope. Watson is like a sword, able to cut the Gordian Knot of all that data. You know what I'm talking about here....Launch codes, gentlemen; the whole US nuclear arsenal now at the beck and call of forces unknown and unseen."
"Were there any prior credible threats made? Any claims of responsibility yet?"
"That's just it; nothing of the kind, neither before nor after, at least not yet. Of course, it's just a working assumption, a hypothesis really, at this stage that the cases are related at all. It's too serious a matter to assume they aren't; we have to assume they are related at this stage until it can be definitely proven they aren't."
"I agree.", I said simply.
"If you'd like to take a closer look at the room, I can arrange that."
"yes, please."
We proceeded into the main server room. I asked Gunnar if he'd gotten all that and he made a thumbs up sign. We had to now determine if this was purely a human matter, or if there were Titanspawn or Scions involved as well.
Alas, between the two of us, Gunnar and I found disturbing clues that this was no work of mere mortals. Crap. More divine meddling, just great.
I compiled a careful report for Jacques, sticking to the facts and pointing out some new discoveries we had made, but omitting the details of divine origin.
In the sea of data underneath the server, that the FBI had missed, I found a trojan horse program with a large segment of data simply repeating "I, I, I, I" over and over and over again. "I am who am?", maybe? YHWY? What the hell? Definitely something to file away for now and pull out later to examine again in the light of newer evidence...
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