17. Ice Fugue
A leak in the Bureau. A leak that had leaked me to Frost Angel and Atomkrieg. Shit.
I took a breath, rubbed the prickles from the back of my neck. “But Barston used my real name in his message to his Atomkrieg buddies.”
“Reverse image lookup,” said Katz, immediately.
Of course. He’d simply dropped that fashionista’s cellphone picture of me into a reverse image search engine to find other pictures of me. One of them was bound to have my name nearby. I’d been a grad student, like Katz. Published papers, given lectures, been on TV. I was out there.
“Okay. But someone had to link ‘Boethius’ to my picture in the first place.”
“The Bureau might have screwed up, there,” said Clay. “Land and I checked the electronic file for the Kristall Knights operation. Some well-organized idiot added a link to your security clearance. The clearance has your photo and contact information. But if that’s the source, isn’t it strange that Frost Angel would use the Boethius alias rather than your real name from the same file?”
“Maybe not,” I said. “Think about it. Any Atomkrieg member could read that message. If it had my true name in it, or was connected in an obvious way with my picture, then a bunch of those fanatics might come after me. That’s what Barston wants, but for some reason it wasn’t what Frost Angel wanted. He or she wanted only Barston to act on the orders. So the connection between the orders and the target had to be one that only Barston would make, because only he had been primed by earlier picture-messages. Same for Chad Lohman. Only he knew about the alchemic symbol that connected the angel picture—his orders—to the separate messages with the floor plan, address, and Torres’ name—his target. Same for Lenny Moscone with the reference to the article about the blood relic.”
“Yeah,” said Katz. “Yeah, that kind of makes sense. Also, separating the mission into two messages makes it less likely that someone doing social media surveillance—like the Bureau, like Pythia—would see it.”
“Sounds like an ‘idiot code’,” said Clay.
Katz glanced at the mirror and scrunched up her nose.
“A simple substitution code worked out by two parties,” explained Clay. “They agree in advance that some phrase or symbol means something. Nobody else knows it. Idiot codes are hard to crack if the same code isn’t used too often.
“So, who’s the idiot?” said Katz. “No, wait. Barston, Lohman, and Moscone are the idiots.”
“Something else is strange,” I said. More than strange; it was ruining a half-baked theory. “All the factual information Frost Angel used in the messages was available online.” I ticked off my examples: “The picture of Torres with choir boys was on the church web site. Lohman posted a picture of himself as a biker on the BPD alumni web site. The pederast priests from the Web, and the original picture of me. Neo-Nazi code runes can be found on the Web. The research about the blood relic that Lenny went after. The parish hall floor plan …” I glanced at Katz.
“That too,” she said. “I found it in a public Web database of building permits and property registrations. But the contractor who worked on the hall a few years ago never filed an updated plan. That’s why Barston’s plan didn’t exactly match the building.”
“But ‘Boethius—surely that was never on a public site,” I said.
“Sure as hell hope not,” muttered Clay.
I sipped tepid coffee. I could see Randalls Island ahead. Wherever Frost Angel had got the information, it was clear the angel had me in its sights. Was I supposed to be victim number two—or two hundred?
Clay said, “Couple other things struck me as odd about the message to Barston. Number one, it used a blend of historic Nazi and neo-Nazi iconography.”
“Like Lohman’s angel pictures—a mixture of styles,” said Katz.
“Number two, the way symbols were combined was clumsy. You know how if you use Google Translate, the translation’s pretty good, but not idiomatic English? That’s how it seemed; the message was composed by someone who wasn’t fluent in idiomatic neo-Nazi code.”
“Could be an AI’s translation,” said Katz.
“How did Barston know where to find me?”
“I know that one,” said Katz. “The day you and I met, Frost Angel posted two messages that Barston accessed from his cellphone. Each was tagged ‘Boethius’ and included a Google map link. The first was for the parish hall where Torres was killed, the second was for where I parked my car, a block away.”
I felt the prickling on my neck again, and a sinking feeling.
Clay said the obvious. “So, Frost Angel can trace a cellphone’s location. Is your cell number in the directory?”
“Yep,” I said. Happily, that phone was now sitting in my own apartment, a precaution that had felt paranoid at the time, but now seemed like the least I should have done.
Katz added, “Even more interesting—and strange: the locations only became correct about an hour after they were posted. In other words, Frost Angel was anticipating where you’d be an hour later.”
I thought about that. “Barston was already in Philly for the demonstrations, so it would have taken him at most an hour to reach the hall.”
There was a silence while Clay and I thought about it some more, and while Katz negotiated the complicated bit where our route crossed Willis Ave Bridge.
“Sophisticated, like Daffy said,” she murmured, once we were on the Expressway.
“Understatement,” said Clay. “Looks like this Frost Angel can set up a hit by remote, using a killer who’s got no idea who he’s working for, and who’ll do the job for free.”
Lovely.
I realized that I didn’t really know what Daffy or Katz meant by ‘sophisticated’, and maybe I should. “How would you do that? I mean, how exactly would Frost Angel trace my cell phone location?”
“Same way the Bureau does, probably,” said Katz. “We use a commercial service that aggregates personal data sold by the telcos and social media sites. We send them a cell phone number or a name, and they send back map coordinates, updated every minute. Like Apple’s ‘Find My Phone’ thing, you know? Only it works for any kind of phone except phones issued to Government agents or law enforcement. The Bureau uses a company called Silvola Analytica for that, but there are others.” She threw a lopsided smile my way. “They hired Deputy AD Krome from the defense contractor Silvola Zarkon, the parent company. The Bureau’s been outsourcing a lot to them since we hired him.”
“So, ‘sophisticated’ just means got enough money?”
Katz waggled her head in a non-commital way. “The aggregators aren’t supposed to sell information that targets an individual to just anyone. You have to show ’legitimate interest’—for example, law enforcement. But it’s pretty grey what that means, and some of the aggregators are unscrupulous.”
“Translation: enough money’s all it takes,” said Clay.
That’s what I figured. Something else bugged me. “If Frost Angel communicated with Moscone, Lohman, and Barston in the same way—instructions in a picture message, target in a separate one—shouldn’t Pythia have seen that and raised an alert about Barston?”
“Yes, and it did,” said Katz. “But Pythia estimated only a 5% probability of an attack; that’s below the 8% threshold we’ve set so we’re not swamped by false positives. Krome blames the field ops team for setting a threshold, but since he shrank the team, we’d no choice.”
“Huh. What about Photo Lab? I remember you asked them to study Lohman’s angel pictures.”
“Yup. The image forensics team finished their analysis. They agree the pictures were all created by the same AI software, and not by any commercial product they know about. They say the AI’s probably based on ‘GANs’—generative adversarial networks—but using a—”
“Didn’t you write a paper on those things—GANs?”
Katz rewarded me with a huge grin, and took her eyes off the road long enough to make me nervous. “Yeah! You saw it?”
“Sure,” I said, breezily. “Just haven’t finish reading it yet.”
“GANs are *super-*interesting. They’re like a way to give machines an imagination. People use them mostly for creating fake pictures—deepfakes, you know? But when I read the original GANs paper, it occurred to me you could use them to create realistic test scenarios—like the FBI’s case exercises—but for all kinds of things. Then use those scenarios to train the neural networks that have to respond to them. That paper I wrote got me the job at IBM Research, though other people had the idea before me.”
Katz’s hair whipped and her eyes flashed as she divided her attention between me and the road.
“Pythia uses GANs, too. It imagines billions of ways bad actors might use social media for malign purposes, then imagines billions of ways to detect that behavior. By having the simulated detectives compete against the simulated bad-actors, both keep improving.”
“Seriously big brain stuff,” said Clay from the back. I could hear the facetious grin in his voice.
Katz’s face twisted in pained annoyance. “Anyway, deepfake image GANs are temperamental. It takes a lot of tinkering to avoid artifacts like that frost-on-glass effect. And no two GANs behave the same way, so the frost effect we see is pretty distinctive. According to Alex, Frost Angel’s probably using a type of GANs—what we call a GAN architecture—that was cutting-edge two years ago, not now.”
“So, the frost-on-glass effect is a flaw,” I said. “A weakness.”
“Yup. Daffy’s pretty sure Frost Angle’s a Russian agency or contractor, because they use AI to do social media influencing and their AI technology’s a few years behind ours. If Frost Angel started to use state-of-the-art GANs, it’d be a lot harder to distinguish the pictures from photos of hand-painted art, or photos of anything, really.”
A scary thought. “Any other reasons to believe it’s Russian?”
“Well, we now know that the Austrian Tor is run by a Russian national—a known hacker. Frost Angel pictures show up in a lot of forums where Russian troll factories hype QAnon and other conspiracy theories. And a lot of the alt-right boards are hosted in Russia.”
Her tone made me think Katz wasn’t convinced. I recalled that she’d found Frost Angel postings in chat groups dedicated to Luciferianism and Gnosticism. “Have you searched beyond the forums Lohman and Barston frequented?”
Katz glanced at me with eyes that sparkled with tiny reflections of the buildings we were passing. “I’ve only had time for one more experiment. Alex and I had a Pythia review our entire corpus for the past two years—all the hundreds of billions of social media messages we’ve collected—looking just for pictures with the same flaw. Daffy and Krome gave us permission to use a lot of computer power for the search. It took forty-eight hours. I got the results yesterday.”
“Well?” I asked, when she didn’t say more.
She flashed me a mischievous grin. “How many d’you guess it found?”
I aimed high. “Twenty thousand?”
“More like five million. Those Frost Angel pictures are everywhere, not just in the esoteric message boards. They’re in all the major consumer platforms—Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, you name it. And they’re coming faster every day.”
We sped through the Bronx in silence, each of us probably contemplating the same number. My brain fizzed with it.
Five million. Frost Angel had posted five million pictures in two years. That’s a lot of art, even for a Russian troll factory, I thought.
Pablo Picasso’s oeuvre comprised a hundred and fifty thousand works. Morris Katz, the ‘King of Schlock’, had painted three hundred thousand pictures. I’d read of a manga artist who’d drawn a million sketches. But those were the lifetime outputs of the world’s most prolific artists. Of course, they were human. Whatever Frost Angel was, it wasn’t human, at least not entirely.
I sipped coffee, but it was cold and strangely tasteless, as though my tongue was numb. There was something worrying about that.
Five million frosty pictures. They flowed from Frost Angel’s mind through its icicle fingers into the streams of social media like feathers of branching ice. Ice that needled through the eyes and into the brains of the likes of Moscone, Lohman, and Barston. Distorting, blinding, seizing …
Freezing, like the coffee in my hand.
With a shock of horror, I felt the ice. It flowed from under the lid of my frozen coffee cup, along my fingers, up my arm, locking my muscles, numbing, deadening.
Christ, not again.
It traced and veined my shoulder, my neck, cold like the fingers of death. Into my ears. Into my eyes.
God, not now.
With the will of Sampson and the strength of Hercules, I lowered my hand, cup clenched in frozen, unfeeling fingers, the ice that caked my arm crackling as I did. From ebbing memory, because I could no longer feel it, I guided the cup into the coffee holder in the central console.
What little of me remained was proud. My last duty done—I had not spilled the coffee.
Then the frost had me, or what had been me, and it pulled me along its myriad diamond paths, into a symphony of crystal chimes, a galaxy of sparkling lights. The ice had ramified through time and space. The ice connected everything. And there, there in the distance, there at the end of all the crystal ways, rushing closer, was Frost Angel.
And I saw into its cold, cold mind and I knew who and what it was.