Grey Lady Read online

  “Tell us what you remember.”

  He furrowed his brow. “I’m getting bits and pieces. I remember being chained to the cot in that crummy room.” He stared at the handcuffs dangling from one wrist.

  “We’ll get those off as soon as we can,” I said.

  “That would be nice.” He blinked a couple of times. “What the hell was that place?”

  “It was a Cold War bunker built on Nantucket, probably for the president’s staff.”

  He glanced around the cottage and sniffed the sea air coming in the window. “Where am I now?”

  “You’re in a beach cottage on Nantucket.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  “I discovered the bunker during an investigation. Do you have any idea how you got there?”

  “Everything is fuzzy. It’s like my brain is surrounded by a white curtain.”

  “That’s because it is,” Flagg said. “The curtain’s made up of chemicals that induce amnesia. It’s the same stuff they use in surgery, so you won’t remember the tough part. You’ll get your memory back slowly.”

  I said, “Maybe we can speed it up if you’re willing to try.”

  He asked for more water, then signaled with a wave of his hand that he was ready.

  “Okay. I’ll do my best. I just hope my brain cells haven’t been destroyed.”

  “Brain cells are overrated,” I said. “I’ve washed thousands of them away with booze. Close your eyes and picture a resume form in front of you. Imagine that you are filling out the blank spaces. Start with your first name.”

  He scrunched his eyelids. “It’s Sean. My name is Sean Malloy.”

  “Good. Date and place of birth?”

  He struggled with that one, but after a moment gave me an answer I assumed was correct. I asked him where had been raised and had gone to school. He answered, slowly, and each successful reply helped link him with another. He’d been born in Englewood, New Jersey, attended the University of Pennsylvania, and did graduate work at MIT. He recited his academic record with wonder, as if he couldn’t believe his own accomplishments.

  “I wrote some books, too, but I don’t remember the titles.”

  “That will come. Tell me about your daughter,” I said.

  A broad smile lit his face. “She’s a smart kid. Studying statistics at Stanford.”

  The mention of his daughter cracked the dam blocking his memory, because when I asked him where he lived and worked, he replied with no hesitation. “Cataumet, Massachusetts. I’ve got a lab there called MAC.” His eyes flicked open. “That is I had a lab there. Bastards!”

  Flagg said, “Good job, Soc. I think Mr. Malloy here has returned to planet Earth.”

  “Stuff is coming back.” Malloy looked as if he had a sudden headache. “Oh no!”

  “What’s wrong, Sean?”

  “I just remembered. We’ve got to stop it.”

  “What do we have to stop?” I said.

  Malloy looked like the unhappiest man on earth. When he spoke it was in a harsh whisper.

  “The swarm. The deadly swarm.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Malloy was on the verge of a full-blown panic attack. His face was ashen and he was taking big gulps of air into his lungs. I was afraid he’d pass out before he explained what had triggered his anxiety.

  I put my face close to his, and in a calm voice, said, “Tell us about your books, Sean.”

  The diversion seemed to work. In order to answer, he had to slow his rapid breathing. His eyes, which had been darting around the cabin, refocused. “You know about my writing?”

  “I saw the books in the place you were held prisoner. Didn’t have time to browse.”

  “They’re pretty dry stuff to most people.” He rattled off some highly technical sounding titles. “They dealt mostly with the concepts governing chain-based path formation in swarmbots.”

  “Flagg and I can be a little dense, Sean. You’ll have to speak English.”

  “Sorry.” He must have realized it was like a teacher explaining quantum physics to a golden retriever. “Swarmbots is short-hand for swarming robots. Groups of autonomous machines that have the ability to self-organize and perform a task you set out for them. It’s a concept you find in nature. Think of the way some insects work as a unit.”

  I had a flashback to the MAC lab. “There were photos of ants and bees on the walls of your lab.”

  “You’ve been to my lab?” he said.

  “A couple of days ago. Tell us more about what you did there.”

  He nodded. “It was an attempt to replicate nature. Ants and bees, for example. Another parallel might be wolves hunting as a pack. These seemingly unorganized groups organize themselves to do a job without benefit of outside control.”

  A snort came from Flagg. “Sounds like the way you and I work, Soc.”

  Flagg’s antipathy to authority sometimes got him in trouble, and his preference for improvising had gotten us both in trouble.

  “Probably a lot more efficient than the way we work.”

  Malloy laughed. A good sign. “You guys teamed up to get me out of a nasty situation, so from my point of view, your working arrangement is a raging success. On the other hand, you’d be hard-put to top the efficiency to be found in an ant hill.”

  “You obviously gave it a try,” I said.

  “Pardon me if I sound smug, but we gave it more than a try. We actually mimicked the way it is done in nature. Picture an anthill. Hundreds of insects scurrying around in seemingly random patterns. One ant discovers a dead cricket. The ant tries to haul it back to the nest, but it’s too big. So the ant goes for help. It lays down a trail of pheromone, a chemical that attracts other ants, so they can follow it back to the cricket.”

  “Smart ant,” Flagg said.

  “It would seem that way. You can find intelligence in organisms in the lowliest of creatures, and it’s the same with man-made brainpower. You only need enough computer capacity for a few relatively uncomplicated jobs. The beauty of the swarmbot is that each unit in the group only has to be smart enough to perform simple tasks.”

  “Kinda like the government bureaucracy,” Flagg suggested.

  “That’s not a bad analogy, except an anthill is more productive. The collectivity of the group allows it to perform complex tasks that can’t be done individually. The ants need only the capacity to dismember the cricket and find their way back to the nest. Bang. Mission accomplished.”

  Flagg uses the latest in technical gear in his day job. While I was trying to wrap my mind around the ant and the cricket, he homed in on the nuts and bolts.

  “How do you get a machine to lay down a chemical trail? You’d have to use mechanical odor detectors. Could get cumbersome.”

  “I agree. In fact it would be next to impossible, and would get away from the simple approach we wanted. In my concept, the bots form chains with other bots that serve as trail markers. You don’t have to give each unit its control mechanism. You achieve complex behavior at the colony level.”

  “Like the ant nest,” I said, trying to get my oar in the water.

  “Exactly. Let’s imagine that you want to form a path between the nest and the prey. The bots have no clue of the target’s location. They’re scattered about, moving in a random search pattern. One encounters another bot and forms a chain. If no prey is detected right away, they break apart and keep searching. When one finds the prey, it scurries around until it finds others to join it in a chain between the nest and the prey. Maybe several chains are formed. Together they work to accomplish the task.”

  “You got that far in your experiments?” Flagg said.

  Malloy nodded. “The key was self-acquisition. Using ants for my inspiration, I developed an algorithm that induces a divi
sion of labor at the group level.”

  “And it worked?” Flagg said.

  “Beyond my dreams.”

  I listened with glazed eyes to the talk of algorithms, but I was thinking of another component of Malloy’s work. “What’s your definition of prey?” I said.

  “Practically anything you want. Swarm concept is readily adapted to military use. Ancient horsemen roamed vast plains, singly or in small groups. When they detected the enemy, they closed in, destroyed it, then vanished into the sunset. U-Boat wolf packs used the same technique in World War II with deadly efficiency. The Office of Naval Research has been looking into swarms as a way to protect ships in shallow water or to use to attack if necessary. They’re worried about China, which has been building up its navy. I had no trouble getting a navy contract. “

  “What did the navy want from your lab?”

  “My contract was to develop swarming robots for mine detection and neutralization. I built the lab, hired staff, and development was moving along. About a year ago, the navy got hit by budget cuts. ONR chopped funding for experimental high-concept research. We switched to non-military applications like toxic waste clean-up, search and rescue, collecting specimens in hostile environments. There was interest, but no one wanted to spend on R and D. Not long after I shuttered the lab, I got a call from Nantucket Capital Investment Partnership.”

  “Michael Ramsey’s outfit,” I said.

  “That’s right. You know Ramsey?”

  “We’ve met. What did he want?”

  “Ramsey said he owned NCIP and explained that it was a company that bought out sick businesses, pumped a little life into them, and sold them at a profit.”

  “How did Ramsey know about MAC?” I said.

  “I asked Ramsey the same question. Navy contacts,” he said. “Seemed to make sense. I was low-hanging fruit. I said I’d talk to him. He came by the lab for a demo. It impressed him, I guess, because he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I refused it. I’d done some research, learned that folks in Wall Street called the Nantucket bunch, ‘The Young Cannibals.’ I asked Ramsey about that. He laughed and said don’t worry about it. Didn’t like the smell of things. Ramsey kept calling. My bills kept going up, so eventually I caved in.”

  “What was your deal?” Flagg asked.

  “Ramsey’s company would become stockholders, but I would retain majority holdings. In return, he promised a cash infusion from a foreign investor. I said that was a deal-breaker. My research still had military potential, and foreign involvement could kill any future navy work. Ramsey backed off and we did the deal one-on-one.”

  “What happened next?”

  “The money arrived as promised. I hired lab staff, started doing field tests. Ramsey got very excited when he saw us do a robot launch and target retrieval. I was higher than a kite. Then Ramsey pulled the rug out from under me. He said the money used for the investment had come from loans made against the company. Since I was the major stockholder I owed big bucks.”

  “Or you could bring in the foreign investor,” I said.

  “Bingo,” Malloy said.

  “Sounds like a set-up,” Flagg said.

  “That’s exactly what it was. This time I said okay. That’s when I met Ivan Chernko, my new partner. He came by for a demo. Had a couple of hard-assed bodyguards with him. He pulled me aside and suggested that I go back to military applications. I refused. He told me to think about it.”

  “What made you change your mind?”

  “The photos of my daughter that arrived in the mail a couple of days later. Someone with a camera had followed her around. There were pictures of her apartment, her car, and she and her friends. No note, but I knew it was Chernko sending me a message.”

  “Where was Ramsey in all this?” Flagg said.

  “I called him after I got the photos and said I wanted out. He said that it was no longer in his hands. That I should do what Chernko wanted. I figured that even if I played along, there was no guarantee that my daughter or I would be safe.”

  “You were probably right about that,” I said. “It would only have been a matter of time before you both had outlived your usefulness.”

  “That’s why I decided to take a gamble. I figured I had one card to play. The algorithm. I told Ramsey that the whole system was inoperable without it.” Malloy shook his head. “I was in deeper than I thought. A few hours later, Chernko’s thugs showed up at my door. They took me to see Chernko, who said that if I didn’t cooperate I would watch my daughter die. Then they knocked me out with an injection and I woke up where you found me. Only time I was allowed let out was for sea trials on Chernko’s boat.”

  “Tell us about the trials,” Flagg said.

  “The chopper would pick me up at night and fly me to the yacht. The first time they did this, Chernko was already aboard. He told me that he wanted me to reprise my military research.”

  “Specifics?” Flagg said.

  “He wanted autonomous swarming robots that would attack a ship.”

  Flagg’s chair creaked as he leaned forward. “Tell me about the hardware.”

  “Each bot is around eight inches long. I relied on nature again, so the bots have a chubby fish shape, like a miniature nuclear sub. The design allows for a battery, the computer circuit and motor. The nose contains a small but powerful explosive with a triggering device.”

  “How would the bot deliver the explosive without destroying itself?” Flagg asked.

  “It’s designed to self-destruct. The computer isn’t much more complex than what you’d find in a toy, so each unit can be built at low cost.”

  “Kamikaze robots, in other words.”

  “You’ve got it. That way there is no evidence to leave behind.”

  “How are they launched?” Flagg asked.

  “The nest is a plastic platform, towed behind the boat that floats just below the surface. If the bots don’t find their target within the range of their battery power, they are programmed to return to the nest. It is circular in shape, with docking ports to accommodate each pod of twenty fish. There is an electrical contact on top of each bot, like the conning tower on a sub that plugs into a low-level power source that recharges the battery. It deactivates the explosives, too. When the bots are ready to launch, the same connection sends a signal over the power line that arms the bot for action.”

  “What prevents the swarm from attacking the launch ship?” I said.

  “Good question. That was one of the first things we looked at. Before each launch, waterproof transmitters are dropped off the bow, both sides and stern of the ship. They broadcast a signal that activates a turn switch in the bot. If a fish encounters this perimeter while it is searching for the prey, it automatically turns away and looks elsewhere for its target.”

  “How does it identify the target when it does find it?”

  “It uses a combined sound and laser system for detection and communication.”

  “Lasers,” I said. “That would explain the blue lights in the water!”

  Malloy furrowed his brow and stared at me. “Damn! That was you out there a few nights ago, wasn’t it?”

  “Guilty as charged. Tell me what happened.”

  “It was a launch and retrieval test. The unarmed swarm was supposed to scour the programmed search area and come back to the nest. Only this time they found an unexpected target—your boat—and went into attack mode. They formed chains and threw themselves against the hull of your boat as if they were trying to blow it up.”

  Flagg said, “You lucked out that night, Soc. You’d be dead if the bots had been armed with explosives.”

  “Yeah, lucky me.” I turned to Malloy. “The swarm kept whacking away at the hull until they punched
a hole in it.”

  “I saw the helicopter go out to investigate,” Malloy said. “When the crew returned to the yacht they were talking in Russian, but I heard Chernko tell Ramsey that the bots had taken out a boat. Chernko was pretty happy that the swarm did its job even without explosives. Unfortunately, your experience set things up for the real world test on a real moving ship.”

  “What ship is that?”

  “I don’t know. Our discussion never got that far. I pointed out that people would certainly die during this demonstration. He said that was irrelevant. I refused to do the test. Chernko said his men could carry out the test without me.”

  “Can they do that?” Flagg said.

  “The system is set up so it can be operated without a lot of technical expertise. Once he said that, I thought I was dead, but they just knocked me out and tucked me away, probably in case anything went wrong that I would have to fix.” He stared into space. “Good God. What have I done?”

  “It’s not your fault, man. We can straighten this out, with your help.”

  “I’m still worried about my daughter.”

  “We can make sure she’s safe,” Flagg said.

  “I’ll hold you to that. Okay, where do I start?”

  “Chernko say where or when this test is happening?” Flagg said.

  “They knocked me out again, but I must have built up a resistance to the drug because I didn’t go under right away. I heard Chernko and Ramsey talking.” His thoughts seemed to drift off. Flagg grabbed the back of Malloy’s neck like a faith healer treating a patient.

  Flagg said, “Stay with us, Sean. Think about what they were saying.”

  Malloy took a deep breath to steady himself. “They were arguing. Ramsey said he didn’t want blood on his hands. Chernko laughed and said he already had blood on his hands. He said Ramsey owed him for a big favor. Then Ramsey seemed to back down and he asked when and where. Chernko said it was better for Ramsey not to know, given his sensitivity. But if he wanted to lay low, that it would take three days for the observers to arrive.”