Delphi Initiative Read online
The Delphi Initiative
A Tommy Donovan Novel
WJ Lundy
AJ Powers
Edited by
Sara Jones
Illustrated by
AJ Powers
Contents
The Delphi Initiative
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Epilogue
About WJ Lundy
Five Roads to Texas Series
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental. All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.
© 2020 W.J Lundy
The Delphi Initiative
A Tommy Donovan Novel
W.J. Lundy & AJ Powers
V3.30.2020
Chapter One
On Washington’s south side a three-story stone building sat in the shadows. A relic of the old days, the structure was away from the normal hustle of the Capital. Most senators held private office spaces in their home districts and only used official meeting spaces while in session. But Charles Shafer wasn’t your typical senator. He was corrupt and dirty and had plenty to hide. His history and shady past were no secret in Washington, but still, his colleagues always managed to look the other way, and his constituents always managed to keep him in office. Seniority brought power, and when it came to years in office, nobody had more than Chuck Shafer.
Of course, even his enemies were more than happy to take a bit of what he was passing out in return for their support. Especially at election time when the coffers were running dry and they just needed a few dollars to buy those one or two extra points in the polls. Shafer always knew how to get his name into every special-interest agenda so that the voters felt he was fighting for them. He was the blue-collar man, the Regular Joe sent to Washington to take on the evil enterprise, and his people loved it.
Senator Charles Shafer knew his way around the swamp he lived in, and he thrived on it. But today he was dealing with a dangerous gator and it wasn’t good business to let gators into his public office in the Capitol Building, and that was why he was here. Charles was tired and feeling a bit buzzed from a two-martini lunch that had turned into four, but he forced himself to extinguish the temptation of a nap.
He took a deep breath and spun his chair. From a small refrigerator behind him, he retrieved a can of club soda. He opened it, listened to the fizz, and took a long drink before setting it on the corner of his desk.
There was a subtle knock at the door, and then it slowly opened. He expected to see the face of Sharon Carlisle his secretary, but instead, it was the face he had been ignoring for weeks. Mark Dorsey, the Seattle phenom, the genius behind the predictive artificial intelligence they called the Delphi Initiative.
Mark had been the low bidder and the lead contract holder for a big intelligence project in the Midwest, and now that the facility was close to going online, he had been wagering bets on being put in charge of all of it. Charles waved the young man in. He looked him over and smirked; the kid dressed like a big-city hipster, his beard well-groomed, his trousers two sizes too tight.
How the man became a billionaire dressing like a vagrant amazed the senator. Charles knew the kid’s backstory, but it still shocked him. See, unlike the other tech wizards who made millions off the Internet’s boom and innovation by inventing things, Mark didn’t really make or sell anything; no, he was what the tech giants called a “fixer.” He made his money by bundling and compiling existing products. He basically stole technology to slowly eliminate the competition.
If Company A was doing something, Mark took what he needed, paying off engineers, buying thumb drives of data then put up the research capital to allow Company B to do it better. Sure, there was litigation and patent violations, but it was all pinned to Company B. In the meantime, it was Mark Dorsey with the big tech backing who financed all of it, including the lawyers. With billions in the bank, there was no legal challenge that could stop him. Soon companies would settle out of court. Company A went out of business and Company B merged into the hands of the technology giants.
All the prime tech quickly absorbed and drifted into the catalogs of the giants. What was once a company prized application, soon became a widget on a browser toolbar. With Dorsey’s help, the tech giants became monopolies, and the little guys vanished. But what do monopolies do when they are king? What do you do when being the best in the industry is not enough? They needed more, they wanted it all. And Mark helped them get it—that was until Mark found something he couldn’t resist keeping for himself.
While others in Congress slowly mobilized to push back against big tech and to break up the monopolies, Senator Shafer passed the money around the Senate to make sure nothing ever got done. He quickly learned you don’t have to buy everyone; you don’t even have to change any minds. Votes were a numbers game, and he only needed just enough to keep a bill from passing, or enough to ensure it passed; the details rarely concerned Shafer anymore. He grinned, thinking about how many votes he’d paid for with the kid’s money. Then, looking at his gold Rolex, his grin turned into a full smile, thinking of all the money he had kept for himself.
He stood and waved a hand toward an overstuffed leather chair. “Mark, it’s good to see you, my friend. Could I get you a drink?”
The young man rushed in; he was twitchy as always. Probably a drug thing, the senator thought, watching the man pace in front of his desk.
“You said it would be up for a vote today.”
Shafer frowned and leaned back in his overstuffed chair. “We talked about this; things take time. And something this big takes even more. The committees are demanding more research; they want studies done, they want guarantees.”
The young man turned and faced the door, his hands balled into fists, his head twitching. Shafer smiled. No, it isn’t drugs. Probably too much of those frappy-whatever-a-chinos the kids were all into these days. He shook his head. Whatever happened to just drinking coffee like a man?
The senator took a deep breath and exhaled. “Listen, Mark, if it came up today, Delphi wouldn’t have the votes. There are just too many unknowns.”
The man shook his head and turned back around. “Delphi can save lives. It will save lives.”
“I believe that it will—many of us do,” Shafer said. He looked at the club soda and wished he’d poured a scotch instead. Dealing with the kid this late in the afternoon was going to be a pain in the ass. He sighed. “There are just too many privacy concerns, too many things to convince people that Delphi won’t be used against law-abiding p
eople.”
Mark slapped his palm against his forehead. “This again, I cannot believe it’s this again.” The young man turned and sat in the previously offered chair. “Listen, if people are law-abiding, they have absolutely nothing to worry about. Delphi doesn’t care about law-abiding; the protocol only engages on crimes and suspicious activity. It uses metadata to identify threats.”
Charles sat up and pointed a finger. “Exactly, but it’s that metadata that’s got folks concerned. The judicial committee said it might even violate privacy laws.” The Senator looked down at a leather briefing case on his desk. He flipped it open to a double-spaced printed page. “This says you are planning to use phone records, banking, travel documents, even social media and utility bills to identify threats, and all without a warrant.”
“Yes,” Mark said. “That is precisely how Delphi works. No warrant is needed because only the system knows your identity, and the system doesn’t care who you talk to or what you talk about. Joke with a friend about robbing a bank, the system doesn’t care. Post threats to the bank online, the system doesn’t care. But make a threat, buy a gun, and then case out the bank or get a positive facial recognition on the bank’s cameras, and the system wakes up—it begins to predict probability. It makes rational decisions, and it moves quickly to save lives. Only after complete calculations will it issue a conclusion to human operators.
“There is still reasonable doubt, sure. Don’t put the pieces together, joke but don’t plan, and it’s like it never happened; Delphi forgets about it. No action is ever taken, nobody will ever know.”
Shafer shook his head. “But you are listening to people’s conversations, you are tracking what they buy and where they go.”
This time, the man shouted. “No! Stop thinking one-dimensionally. You act like some old lady is listening to a police scanner, spying on you.”
He paused and reached for the briefing folder, flipping through the printed pages, until finding one with a wiring diagram. He dropped the page on the center of the desk. “This is all existing software. Decades have been spent putting these pieces together. Nobody is listening to how you spend money any more than your bank’s fraud department. Nobody is listening to your phone calls, or paying attention to what you watch on TV, or reading your text messages. It’s just data, and Delphi isn’t a person; it’s banks of servers in a basement in St Louis. These are thousands of independent systems. They aren’t agents reading your information, so there is no privacy breach. Delphi is a machine, the same as the talking AI in your smartphone. The AI in your phone doesn’t tell on you, it doesn’t care who you text or if you watch porn, it will never shame you to your friends. Delphi is the same—it just pieces things together. If you have nothing to hide, you are fine, the data will never be acted on. Ever.”
“But what happens when Delphi is wrong?” Charles said.
Mark put up his hands. “If the system is wrong, and there is no crime, then who cares? Nobody died. That’s what is important, right?”
Charles made a fist with his left hand and put it against his chin. He slowly pursed his lips then sighed. “People are afraid of what the system could do. This is a lot for me to sell, Mark.”
“You already took payment. Let’s not pretend like this is optional for you anymore. You’ve spent a lot of our money to ensure that Delphi goes online. And to be frank, Delphi knows a lot about you too, Mister Senator.”
Shafer went to speak, but Mark held up a finger, silencing him. “Delphi is already installed. We just need a vote to turn it on, connect with law enforcement. So, tell me, what do we have to do to get those votes?”
Charles turned in his chair so that he was looking out the window. “You are going to have to make people more afraid of a world without Delphi, than they are of a world with it.”
Mark stood and rubbed his beard. He nodded. “Easily done, we shall be in touch.”
Chapter Two
Tommy Donovan jerked awake, his head off the pillow, the muscles in his neck tensed. He was ready to strike; he just didn’t know what at. The pounding of his heart, his head thumping with every beat so hard he could feel it in his eyes. He held his breath, his eyes surveying the room without moving his body, ready to launch himself at some dark shadow. He relaxed, finding they were still alone.
Eighteen months since he’d left Syria and a trail of bodies. He looked up at the ceiling fan slowly rotating above him. So much had changed in that time for him, but one thing was still constant, and that was the war that constantly replayed in his dreams. They weren’t always nightmares, but they were always there. Drinking and company tended to dull it, but it was still there. In his mind, he’d heard gunfire, in his mind it was real. Even when he was back here in his island paradise, there were parts of his mind that refused to shut it all down.
He looked down at the cold blue illumination of the clock’s digital numbers. Just after two in the morning. He’d been asleep less than an hour. He reached for the glass of water on the nightstand and took a long sip. Turning back, he saw her still sleeping soundly beside him, Tanya’s body outlined by the light linen that covered her. Watching her, he wondered what she meant to him, or really what exactly he meant to her.
She was the only thing stable in his life, and even she was technically paid to keep an eye on him, to keep him on a short leash. There was intimacy there, but was there any emotion, any connection outside of convivence? She was his handler—or was it liaison, as she said she was? He watched her chest rise and fall with each breath and wondered where her professional responsibilities ended and the personal began. Smiling, he laughed thinking about her bosses at the agency and what they would think if they knew she was in his bed. He sat up, swinging his feet to the floor, and rubbed his head.
“Hell, they’d probably give her a medal,” he whispered. “They appreciate dedication.”
Tommy lifted the glass to his mouth again just as a long volley of gunfire racked the air. His hand shook, and he dropped the glass. It fell to the rug, spilling its contents as it rolled toward the nightstand. His body went rigid on high alert. He turned back to her; she was still asleep.
She didn’t hear it? But he did, didn’t he?
He held his breath again with his heart beating in his chest. He wasn’t going crazy, he thought. Was the gunfire real or was he losing his mind? No, it was real; he not only heard it, he felt it that time. Tommy stood and walked away from the bed, his heart still pounding, the hairs on the back of his neck stiff and tingling while shivers ran down his spine. Cold sweat began to bead on his forehead.
Not here, he thought, this is the Virgin Islands. People here aren’t even armed, that’s why he lived here. Wearing only boxers, he moved through to the patio door and out onto the street-facing balcony. His small apartment was on Dronnigens Gade, the main street through his new home. Unlike some of the crime-ridden ghettos he’d lived in previously, the main street here was filled with high-end shops and tourist attractions—all the hot spots of Charlotte Amalie. This wasn’t a place where you heard gunfire.
He stood at the railing and listened intently. He could hear the tourists walking, their laughs and shouts echoing as they returned to hotels and resorts from closing bars. He gripped the railing and leaned forward, his eyes clenched shut, taking in the humid evening island air. Letting the warmth soothe and shake off the jitters, he breathed in deeply and exhaled.
The gunfire had sounded real to him. Far away, but very real. But it could have been anything, fireworks, a dream. “No,” he whispered and shook his head. He knew it was gunfire, every synapse in his brain was snapping and screaming at him to act, every bit of training already identifying the caliber and possible weapons used. They were pistols calibers, but rapid like a submachine gun, probably HK, multiple shooters, two maybe three hundred meters away.
His brain wanted him to prep and respond. Take cover, grab a go-bag, and leave. He rubbed his forehead and cursed. “What the hell is wrong with me?” It didn’t make a
ny sense, not here. He closed his eyes tight again and took in another deep breath. “It had to be a dream.”
As Tommy was beginning to clear his thoughts and return to bed, a clap of thunder smacked his ears, and the apartment shook under his feet. He saw the flashes in the western sky roll over French Town. He squatted to his heels, looking over the railing. He watched a black cloud bleed smoke into the distant sky.
“My God,” he muttered. “It’s the Capital. Who would bomb the Capital?”
The tourist laughter on the streets hushed, then turned to panicked screams. The gunfire was back, and this time it was close and unmistakable. He couldn’t pinpoint the source. It seemed to come from all around him. He heard police sirens and more screams. On the apartment block across the street, there was a second explosion. Glass blew out of the first-floor lobby of an upscale apartment building.
He pulled back as he felt his own building rumble from a third explosion. Smoke and fire filled the street below him. Tommy turned back and ducked into the room.
Tanya was standing in front of the bed, looking at him, her eyes wide with fear. Faster than he could speak, he heard shouts and more gunfire from the hallway outside. A man screamed as an extended burst of automatic gunfire rattled in the hallway.