Public Secrets (Artificial Intelligence Book 1) (10 page)

Chad looked as if he were going to refuse. He first glared at Luke in defiance, then at Carla with malice. “To hell with it. To hell with you both,” he muttered as he stormed from the room.

Luke closed the library door, sighing in relief. When he turned, Carla was tending to several cuts on her legs.

“Are you hurt?” he asked, stepping closer to see if any of the cuts were serious.

“I’m fine,” she replied, pressing the edge of her robe against the deepest cut, trying to stop it from bleeding.

Luke reached for a box of tissues on the desk and folded several into a small square. “Here, let me,” he insisted, pushing her hand and robe away from the wound. He dabbed away the blood and studied the cut. “You’ll live. Just hold the tissue on the cut for a few moments.” He returned to the window and studied the man in the red car.

“So where did you and Davis meet?” he asked casually.

“I’ve never met Davis.”

“Was it blackmail? Is that the scam? Give me a million dollars or I’ll write a bestseller all about your life?” He kept his voice calm and soft. When she didn’t reply, he turned and moved in front of her, squatting on his heels so he could study her face straight on. “But it all went wrong this time, didn’t it? And a woman has died because of it.”

He could see her fear. It emanated from her. “A woman who should have been you,” he added. He laid his hand sympathetically on her knee. “You had no idea it would come to this, did you?”

She shook her head, tears welling in her eyes.

“You want to stop this nightmare, don’t you? Stop it now?” he asked with only the gentlest of squeezes from his hand.

“I don’t know how,” she whispered, no longer able to hold back the tears.

“Then let me help you.” He stood and pulled her to her feet.

As she stood, she cried in pain, lifting up a barefoot and pulling a small shard from her heel.

“Well, that’s a fine start,” Luke murmured to himself. Before she further injured herself, he caught her in his arms and lifted her off her feet, carrying her to the couch, safely away from the porcelain shards. Setting her down, he studied her cut heel. “Just a scratch,” he assured her as he patted her foot.

Her robe had become dislodged again, exposing a very beautiful leg that seemed to go on forever. He was quite certain that she wore nothing beneath her loosely tied silk wrap, and suddenly the idea of her nakedness ran amuck in his senses.

He stood and walked away. God, Chad was right. The woman was seductive! Once steadied, he forced himself to return to her side. He was too close to getting a confession to give up now.

Sitting down on the edge of the wooden coffee table, he faced her. She’d taken advantage of his momentary escape to retighten her robe. He leaned forward, with his elbows resting on his legs. “You want out of this, right?”

Carla nodded.

“You want protection?”

She nodded again.

He captured her clenched hand in both of his. “We can do that, but you’re going to have to be totally honest with me. You have to answer all my questions to the best of your ability. Are you willing to do that?”

“Of course.”

“First of all, how are you connected to Davis?”

She pulled her hand from his grasp and pushed herself up into a seated position. “I told you, I’ve never met Davis!”

Luke shook his head in disappointment. “So if I go look in that computer, I won’t find a profile on the fellow?”

Carla didn’t reply. Nor would she look in his eyes.

Luke stood and walked over to the computer, turning it on. “Name....Carla. Password...Publicsecrets.”

Carla looked up, stunned.

Luke smiled at her shock at his knowing her password. “You forget. We thought you were dead and the secret of your killer might reside on the computer in your office. So I got a warrant and had a professional hack into your password. Fortunately, you’ve used the same one here.”

Luke located the profile directory and selected Davis. He scanned the document, amazed at the detail. She had items on Davis that the FBI wasn’t even aware he had done. “Impressive. I can’t imagine Davis would intentionally reveal this much about himself. You must be very persuasive.”

He returned to the profile list and skimmed the names. Most meant nothing to him, but a few were known. Juan Coralles, Columbian drug lord—that might be worth reading. He clicked on it. He was again amazed at the detail. No doubt the CIA would love to get this. When he finished reading, he approached her and sat down on the coffee table. “Does Juan Coralles know you have that much information on him?”

“Who?”

“Juan Coralles. He’s in your profiles. Columbian drug lord.”

She looked up in concern. “He’s real as well?”

Luke let a slight smile cross his face. “Quite. And if he discovers what you know, I don’t think you’ll be safe anywhere on Earth.” He turned her head, forcing her to look at him. “Be honest with me. Have you attempted any contact with the drug lord?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“I swear to you. What can I do to make you believe me?” She leaned forward and grabbed his hands.

Her movements once again loosened the robe, exposing more cleavage than he would have wished.

“I wrote your story. How could I have done that? Who knew those details other than yourself?”

“It’s impressive research, I’ll give you that,” Luke replied.

“It’s impossible research! Who besides you knew what you were thinking and feeling when you first saw her? No one. You never told anyone how much you loved her. You kept it all locked up inside.”

He suddenly broke free of her hands and stood, as he declared, “Enough.”

“The truth frightens you, doesn’t it?” she asked, her voice filled with bitterness.

“The truth?” Luke scoffed. “I have no idea what the truth is.”

“How can you possibly help me when you’re too much of a coward to accept reality just because it doesn’t fit into the nice little world you’ve created for yourself?”

Luke turned towards her. “Very well, then—tell me your version of the truth. Let me understand the strange little world you’ve created for us all.”

He paced and listened as Carla explained how she had written novels most of her life, solely for her own enjoyment. Her undergrad work had been in computer science, and for a while, she had dated a fellow student named Carl Gates. He’d been extraordinarily brilliant and keenly focused on developing software programs with artificial intelligence. He’d been trying to create programs that could learn from history and improve its future performance. At the same time, Carla had been working on her own project, which had been a word program that would correct spelling and grammar automatically as one wrote.

“Carl needed a program to test his. Since he was certain mine was full of bugs, he decided my program would be his first test. Without my knowledge, he embedded his program into mine. I wasn’t aware he’d done anything. It ran exactly as I had hoped. Mistype a word, and before your eyes, it would correct itself. Type ‘I are going to town” and it would change the sentence to ‘I am going to town’. And if it determined the story was in past tense, it would change it to ‘was going’.”

Luke had stopped pacing at this point and sat in a chair across from her. “Sounds like a useful program. Why didn’t you sell it to XCaliber Software? Oh, I know, they already have one.”

“Not then, they didn’t. And I did show them a demo. They didn’t seem terribly impressed, but they did ask me to sign a billion pages of legal documents so I could send them an electronic copy of the program.” Carla shook her head. “Now that I’m older, I realize they were just trying to play it cool. They must have been chomping at the bit for my code. A few years later, they even came out with their own, lesser version.”

“So what happened to yours?”

“When I told Carl I was going to send them a copy, he went ballistic. Said I was stupid to ever think XCaliber Software would buy such a piece of crap. Before I knew what he intended, he had erased my hard drive and my program with it. He said he was doing the world a fucking favor.”

“Couldn’t you re-write it?”

“It’s harder than you’d think to recreate all those inspired moments of brilliance. I tried. I spent all my time working on it. All my time. Didn’t attend classes, didn’t do assignments. Finally, the school had no choice but to kick me out, and I still couldn’t get it to work.”

She sighed. “So I gave up. I got a job at a local radio station. Since I had a good voice, it wasn’t long before I had the drive time show.”

“That must have been an interesting job.”

“Actually, once I got the hang of it, my job went directly from terrifying to terribly boring.”

“A lot of jobs can seem that way,” Luke replied, thinking about how the idea of being in the FBI was certainly more exciting than the reality of it.

Carla laughed softly. “Be very careful what you wish for in life, Mr. Gallagher. Wishes can come true in terrible ways. My boring but successful life was altered by the addition of my very own celebrity stalker.” She closed her eyes. “His name was Billy. At first, he seemed a harmless annoyance. I thought I could handle it. I thought it was part of my job.”

“What changed your mind?”

“The death of the station’s engineer’s wife. She had come to my house, expecting to catch her husband and me in bed. Billy was waiting inside. He killed her and then he killed himself.”

Luke sighed. “How old were you?”

“Nineteen.”

“Were you having an affair?” Luke asked. He knew the answer, for he had made himself very familiar with her background. But he was curious how honest she planned to be.

She shook her head. “It’s ironic. Angie had been accusing Jed of sleeping with me for months. Her accusations had practically driven him into my arms. The reason I didn’t go home that night, the reason Billy killed her instead of me, was because I was with Jed for our first and only time. That infidelity saved my life but almost cost me my sanity.”

Luke frowned. He was uncertain whether she had spoken the truth but unable to prove it a lie. The file suggested the affair had been going on for months, based entirely on second-hand speculation. However, the only night the investigator could actually verify the two had stayed in a hotel room together was the night of the murder.

“The reporters were horrible, stalking me day and night. I couldn’t stand it. I quit the station and moved to a new town, changed my name to Carla Simon and hid in my house, too afraid to go out in case I might be recognized.”

Not likely
, Luke thought, remembering the pictures of her as a radio announcer with short brown hair, and then as an anorexic blonde the following year. “So what did you do with your time?”

“I wrote stories, characterizations, and profiles of characters. I’d write ‘til four in the morning, sleep until noon and resume writing. It was all trash: poorly written, misspelled words, bad grammar, and typos. Most of the time I was so fuzzy from sleep deprivation that I could barely think, much less write a coherent sentence.”

“What I read on Eder and Juan seemed pretty coherent to me.”

“They are now, but then they were two-dimensional trash.”

“When did you rewrite them?”

“I didn’t. I received a package from a lawyer who was handling the estate of Carl Gates.”

“Your boyfriend from college?”

“Yes. He had died in a freak accident—electrocuted when he touched his wall switch.”

Luke’s eyebrows rose in disbelief.

“I didn’t believe it either, but that was what the letter from the executor claimed.”

“And why had the executor contacted you?”

“He sent me a 64 Gigabit USB along with a letter from Carl. The letter explained how Carl had embedded his own program in mine, which was why he couldn’t allow me to sell it to XCaliber Software. He couldn’t risk them getting his life’s work.”

“And the USB?”

“His copy of my program. He had kept track of me and knew I was writing again. He thought it might help me recover.”

“How did the executor know where to send it? You didn’t exactly leave a forwarding address.”

“Carl could find any information he wanted. He was the God of hackers.”

“Did he have a pseudonym?”

“Einstein.”

Luke recognized the name. When he had first come on to the Bureau, the FBI had been going crazy about Einstein hacking into the classified files. They’d never been able to stop him from breaking through their security, nor had they been able to discover his identity. There had been an entire organization set up just to find him. They’d never come close. Then one day he’d just stopped. Electrocuted by a light switch. Someone must have found him after all.

“I tried downloading the program on my computer, but I didn’t have enough memory and couldn’t afford to buy a better one. Thus, I put the USB in my drawer and would have forgotten about it, except a week later I won a door lottery at the local computer store. I had to network my old and new computers together to get sufficient processing power to run the program, but it was worth the effort. The program worked beautifully, better than I recalled. I’d pull up one of my pathetic stories and it would revise it into a masterpiece.

“I was so pleased with the end results that I sent a manuscript off to a publisher. I fully expected to receive a rejection slip for my efforts. I knew how hard it was to break into the publishing business. You can’t imagine my surprise when a week later Dan Anderson knocked on my door. I was in total shock. He wanted to publish my book; no rewrites, no changes needed, just my signature on the contract.”

Carla smiled. “And what a contract it was. I was to give them sole publishing, marketing and movie rights to my next nine books. In return, I would get three percent of the net take.”

Luke frowned. “That doesn’t sound very good.”

“Good? The contract was criminal. Dan intended to take advantage of my innocence. He’s lucky I signed with him at all.”

“So you got a lawyer?”

“No, I couldn’t afford one. Instead, I retyped the contract into my program. The program rewrote the document in far more favorable terms. I signed the revised document and sent it back to Dan with a note to accept or reject it, but there would be no negotiations on terms.”

“And he accepted.”

“He first said he couldn’t sign until he had spoken to my lawyer. I assured him that would not be possible, and if he didn’t sign and return it by the end of the week, then I would shop my book to other publishers. Dan signed the contract. He’s grumbled about it ever since. He still asks me for the name of my lawyer.”

“So how did a word program know literary contractual law?”

Carla shook her head. “It didn’t know law until it needed to write a legal document. I believe it sources its information from the Internet.”

“You believe? Wouldn’t you know?”

“Before my first book sold, I didn’t have money to pay for an Internet line. Evidently the computer made use of my phone line. The only reason I had the phone line plugged into the computer at all was because it had a rather nice phone message program that enabled me to screen my calls. But sometimes, when I would pick up the phone to call someone, there wouldn’t be a dial tone. I would have to click the receiver several times before I finally got an active line.”

“You’re saying the program was calling the Internet all by itself?”

“I have no other way to explain the facts,” Carla replied, clearly annoyed by his tone. “There was only me and my computer in the house. If I wasn’t on the phone, then who was?”

“How could it do that?”

“Carl must have taught it. Keep in mind the program he wrote had the ability to learn. All it would have to do was monitor his hacking capabilities one time.”

Luke sat down on the couch beside her. “Now you’re scaring me.”

Carla looked at the computer. “The thought worried me as well. That’s why I moved it to a laptop once I could afford one capable of running the program. I thought I could confine its reach by turning off the Wi-Fi.”

“If it scares you so much, why don’t you just reformat the hard drive?”

She stared up at him in horror. “That would be murder.”

“It’s a program, not a person.”

She shivered and pulled the robe tighter around her. “You want to destroy my program?”

“Me?” Luke replied. “Not at all. I’m just trying to understand your point of view. You represent it to be this evil, all-powerful thing, but you refuse to stop it.”

Carla frowned. “I never said it was evil. All it does is rewrite my novels into bestsellers.”

“Novels that happen to be true and destroy lives when you make their secrets public.”

“The program just wants to be accurate. It doesn’t understand the pain the truth can cause.”

Luke rose and massaged around his eyes with his fingertips. “So you’re saying the program digs up all these secrets about people.”