Lock In (Lock In, #1)(54)

“Probably not, but it will still be easier to ask his family first,” I said. “Pretty sure it was meant for them. I made a copy of data. I need to take the copy to them and see if they know what to do with it.”

“Are you going to ask them if they know why Johnny was living under an assumed name, too?”

“I will, but I don’t expect they’re going to know,” I said, and thought about it a bit. “What’s weird is that Oliver Green doesn’t seem to have any ID, either.”

“What do you mean?” Vann asked.

“When I was talking to the lady at the post office, she said that Sani wanted to rent a P.O. box, but when she said he’d need two forms of identification, he lost interest,” I said. “And the apartment wasn’t rented by him, it was rented by Filament Digital. He didn’t need any ID there, either.”

“What is Filament Digital?”

“It’s a component manufacturer for neural networks,” I said. “It’s a Chinese company. I called and no one answered. It’s the middle of the night over there right now.”

“They don’t have a U.S. office?” Vann asked.

“As far as I can tell that apartment was the U.S. office,” I said. “I have the L.A. office looking into that, too.”

“The L.A. office must love you right about now,” Vann said.

“I don’t think I’m their favorite person, no,” I said. “What have you been up to?”

“I cleared out some more of the Hadens from Metro’s holding pens,” Vann said. “Most of them took the ‘get the hell out of D.C.’ option, but there were a couple who didn’t and a couple who really needed to be prosecuted, so they’re all now guests of the federal government for the next few days. We’ll deal with them after the march. The Metro people tell me things are getting a little tense out there. Oh, and I shook up that Integrator.”

“Which one?” I asked. “Brenda Rees?”

“Yeah, her,” Vann said. “I called her up and identified myself and said that I would like her to come meet with me to answer a couple of questions. She asked why and I said we were following up on the Loudoun Pharma explosion. Then she asked why I’d want to talk to her about that, and I told her we were just following up on an anonymous tip.”

“We didn’t get any anonymous tip about her,” I said.

“No, but it made her nervous when I said it, which I thought was interesting.”

“Anyone would be nervous if you told them you were following up an anonymous tip about a bombing by talking to them,” I pointed out.

“What’s important is how they get nervous,” Vann said. “Rees got all quiet and then asked to meet this evening.”

“We bringing her here?” I asked.

“I gave her the address of a coffee shop I like in Georgetown,” Vann said. “Feels less formal, and will get her to relax and open up.”

“So first you make her paranoid and then you want her to feel comfortable,” I said. “You don’t need me to help you play ‘good cop, bad cop.’ You can do it all on your own.”

“This is the sort of thing your pal Trinh calls ‘sloppy,’” Vann said.

“I’m not sure she’s wrong,” I said.

“If it works she’s wrong.”

“That’s a dangerous philosophy,” I said. Vann shrugged.

A call popped up in my field of view. It was Tony. “You didn’t tell me I would be working in an actual morgue with an actual brain when I took this gig,” he said, after we got our greetings out of the way.

“I had to be circumspect until you were vetted,” I said. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Tony said. “I’ve just never seen a real live brain before. Also I had to dial back my sense of smell pretty much down to zero.”

“Have you found anything?” I asked.

“I’ve found a lot of things,” Tony said. “I think maybe I should talk to you about them. And your partner too, probably.”

“Let’s meet,” I said.

“Not in the morgue,” Tony said. “I think I need to get away from all this meat.”

* * *

“Okay, here’s the first thing,” Tony said, and he popped up the image of Johnny Sani’s brain, still in its skull, peeking through the veil of tinsel that was the neural net. We were in the imaging lab: me, Vann, Tony, and Ramon Diaz, who seemed amused at Tony taking over his imaging console.

“It’s a brain,” Vann said. “And?”

“It’s not the brain I want you to look at,” Tony said. “It’s the neural network.”

“Okay,” Vann said. “What about it?”

“It’s totally unique,” Tony said.

“I thought every neural network was unique,” I said. “They adapt to the brain they’re in.”

“Right, but every model is the same before it’s installed,” Tony said. He pointed at my head. “The Raytheon in your head is the same as every other version of that model. Once it’s in your head the tendrils and receptors are placed in ways that will be unique to your brain. But it’s still the same hardware and the same initial software.”