Beautiful Intelligence by Stephen Palmer Read Free Book Online

afraid... in fact Yuri looked horrified. Hound nodded once at him. “Yeah,” he said.
    “But...” Leonora murmured.
    “How?” Hound supplied. “Man, don’t know.” He shook his head. “But think. You lose two of the greatest artificial intelligence researchers you got. From a team nobody is s’posed to leave. What d’you do? You follow ’em. Tsuneko June might have thought the same. She might’ve thought, I can’t do this. I’ll get help. And she knows where you and your ex came from.”
    “But why leave da BIteam?” Dirk asked.
    Again Hound shrugged. “We can’t know. Tsuneko was light on info, even though she was good. Classic unhappy mole. We gotta deduce from what we see. I’m telling you man, I’m setting up our escape route right now. Africa. Desert, maybe. I got contacts in Tunisia. We could shufti into West Libya. Get tents, camels. No satellite rider’s gonna see us.”
    “No,” Leonora said. “I’m sorry, but we cannot leave the caves, not with Zeug so close to fruition.”
    Hound laughed. “You don’t realise, ” he said. “Aritomo Ichikawa, he lost everything. So he’ll do anything to get it back.”
    Yuri nodded. “I regret to say that I agree with Mr Hound. My father will try anything and everything. The security assessment is valid.”
    Hound stood up. “So. I’m off outside again. I left a pinpoint ultra on her. Man, she won’t escape me. Get yourselves ready. Get Zeug ready. Maybe we’ll stay, maybe we’ll run, I don’t know. But prepare to run.”
    He left the cave pod. They didn’t look happy.
    ~
    Back in the village Hound sat at a roadside bar gaming on his moby, settling in, making himself seem ordinary. After an hour he saw Tsuneko emerge from the village hotel – it was more of a converted farm, with chickens and hydroponic silos – then head towards the geologists’ bar. He followed. When she paused to take something out of her bag he walked on, knowing that an observed synchronised stop/start could be fatal. But as he passed her, so close he could smell her jasmine scent, he noticed something. She was checking a duocard.
    He walked on, stopping at a bar to buy tea and sit by the road. A duocard. His skin went cold.
    He had assumed that she had traced him somehow. But the duocard suggested an alternative explanation. As AIteam security man, the only way he interfaced with the nexus and thus left records was financial. The data incarnation known as Hound would have a spending pattern attached, and that spending pattern could be analysed.
    It could be sought.
    He shuddered. He realised he had been wrong at the cave meeting just now. Tsuneko June had not followed a lead to Malta. Aritomo Ichikawa had sought a spending pattern. Leonora’s.
    Leonora’s last known position was Damascus. Through the nexus Hound accessed public records of Ichikawa Laboratories purchases, logging in to a Korean library database for safety. There: a thirty trillion yen computer and the staff to use it. They must have analysed the spending profiles of data incarnations in ever-increasing radii out from Damascus, an incredible task, a prodigious task, but a mathematically possible one; and at last, by accident, they had stumbled across Hound spending Leonora’s money in Valletta for things Leonora wanted. Hound found that he was trembling. He had utilised his own ’ware to conceal ID patterns in Valletta. He was safe. Fairly safe.
    He looked up. Tsuneko walked by, glancing at him. He returned his gaze to his moby and she walked on.
    He realised that her presence in the village was in fact a coincidence. The trail would have gone dead in Valletta, the spending profile meaningful but linked to an untraceable alias, though that alias in itself suggested the presence of a nexus witch doctor. Such as himself.
    He began to wonder if the death of Goodman Awuku might be probed by Japanese investigators.
    For a few vertiginous seconds he looked down upon himself – followed, watched, in peril,