10. The Final Solution
Dinner was at a plush rooftop restaurant whose outdoor terrace commanded a view north to City Hall. That meant a view of the protests from nearly the same altitude as the helicopters keeping station above the crowds. In the slowly fading evening light, I could see hundreds of cops surrounding as many protestors—a small crowd by recent standards. The racket of the choppers and sirens waxed and waned with the breeze. Fortunately, a high plexiglass barrier around the restaurant’s terrace allowed us to hear each other shout.
Marcus Daffy, Special Agent in Charge—SAC—of Katz’s department, had invited us. He’d come up from Washington with his deputy, Doug Land.
That afternoon, Katz and I had waded through a dumpster-load of Internet dross. I’d have liked a shower to wash away the soiled feeling the stuff gave me, but only had time to change at my hotel while Katz waited in the lobby. I’d chosen the more eccentric of two suits, one with broad maroon stripes, the better to look not-a-Fed. The downside was that the suit would confirm Tom Baker and Wilde in Katz’s mind.
We’d done pretty well, Katz and I, as she was explaining, while I sipped wine. The Pythia AI, once adjusted by Alexandra Evangelos’s team, turned out to be an able assistant. By the time we’d left the office for dinner, we’d found seventy angel-and-cross pictures in several social media sites, going back a year.
“So, Krome’s AI thingie was … helpful, in this case, was it?” asked Marcus Daffy, in a tone that suggested he didn’t want to hear that it had been. An affable man with sandy hair, a tenor voice, and an educated Southern twang, Daffy gave the impression of being soft and portly, without actually being so. Maybe it was the elegant, pale suit, or the way his loosened tie hung over his fine white shirt. Maybe it was the slightly protruding eyes. He’d started with a cocktail and moved on to red wine.
“Yes, sir,” said Katz enthusiastically. “Pythia identified most of the pictures herself, even though the cross changed.” Katz was calling Pythia ‘she’ now, as though the AI was a person. She hadn’t used the pronoun earlier.
“But the system did not predict anything, did it?” prompted Daffy, a doubtful frown in his voice, nothing but mild interest on his boyish face.
“No, sir. She just looked for pictures with similar features.”
Daffy sipped his drink, apparently reassured.
Apart from introducing himself, Doug Land had said nothing at all. He was a tall, grave man in a standard-issue gray suit, who sat with his hands clasped over one knee in an attentive attitude, looking a little to the side. His beer glass was empty, but he hadn’t called for another.
Daffy looked at me, then Katz. “And do these pictures show the progression you’re expecting?”
“Well, they show a progression,” said Katz. “Though I don’t know that we had an expectation. Maybe Dr. Arklow did.” She glanced my way.
I shrugged, content to hear her tell it. It took effort to talk over the helicopter noise.
She continued. “The composition styles and figures evolved. In the earlier ones, the angel was more androgynous, with only hints of wings and armor, like a boy Mercury. The emphasis was on monsters devouring boys, boys in cages, boys set free. Sometimes surrealist, like Salvador Dali, sometimes like figures by … who’d you say?”
“James Ensor,” I replied.
“Yeah, him. And Chris Riddell.”
I had to smile. He was the illustrator of children’s stories she’d enjoyed when younger. Coraline. Goth Girl.
“Anyway—” began Katz.
Daffy interrupted. “Would you say it’s the work of a group of artists?” He was looking at me now, as if I was an expert—which I was not.
I shrugged again. “Or one versatile artist, whose knowledge of composition and symbolism ranges from classical to contemporary. But the progression is strange. The changes are sometimes too gradual, like frames in a flip book. Sometimes, the change is abrupt, but elements remain for continuity.” I glanced at Katz, trying to return the conversation ball. I knew she had a theory.
The chopper noise bloomed. She took a sip of her half pint, waiting for the noise to fade.
“But close up,” she said, “at the level of fine detail, the technique doesn’t change. There’s always the frost on glass effect. Because of that, I’m sure Photo Lab’s art attribution software will decide it’s all the same artist.” She didn’t say more, but had that cat-got-a-mouse smugness in her posture.
Daffy must have seen it, because he raised his eyebrows, his expression one of inviting curiosity. He drawled, “Any more you’d like to share, Agent Katz?”
“Well, sir, I think the artist used generative AI to create the work. A tool that takes a photo collage or conceptual sketch or description and substitutes detailed artwork from archetypes.”
“Elaborate, please,” said Daffy, his Southern drawl stretching out the words like a red carpet.
“Like, you give it a sketch of a house and tell it to re-paint it in a medieval art style, based on examples of houses from medieval paintings. The result would have medieval qualities like flattened perspective. There’s AI software now that does this—like those apps that make a feminine version of a man’s face or an old version of a young one.”
“Deepfakes kind of thing?”
“Yes, sir, like that. It would be too much human effort to spend on Lohman. But it wasn’t human effort—it was software.”
Daffy nodded. “Could the pictures have been created by an AI working on its own?”
That question surprised me and struck Katz silent for a moment. Lights and chimes stung from the terrace pergola clinked in the breeze, adding their sound to the clangor of police activity.
Katz tried, tentatively, “I don’t know, but there’s definitely—”
“Russian AIs are pumping out political spin and conspiracy theory articles by the thousands,” Daffy said impatiently. “They create fake profiles for the writers, too. Quality’s low, but good enough to get picked up by newspapers looking for fillers. Social media’s full of it. The stuff we know about’s all text. Could it be pictures now?”
Katz’s frown got a shocked twist. “Sir, I thought we shouldn’t to speculate about Russian—”
Daffy snorted. “Speculate all you want—just not in writing.” The look he gave Katz was withering. He turned to me. “Were these pictures in any sense training material for Mr. Lohman?”
Daffy was jumping far ahead of what we were sure of, but his intuition was sound. I guess plodders don’t get to be SACs.
Katz had wilted under Daffy’s scorn, so I took up the burden of shouting. “They do contain self-education suggestions. Agent Katz figured out how it works. She matched the angel-and-cross pictures posted on one message board to text messages posted on another. Always the text message first, then three minutes later, the picture-message that referred to it. Different screen names. The message containing the plan of the community hall was an example. From that temporal relationship, we identified an alchemic symbol in the angel pictures that seems to mean ’look it up, research it yourself’. Other symbols showed the site to visit. Lohman must have learned the symbols from the pictures.”
Katz had recovered enough to pick up the ball again. “The messages on that other site referred to news stories about pederasts and missing boys. Like a story about a Mexican priest who molested altar boys and one about imprisoned kids being rescued from slavers. The stories might be years apart, but the postings made the connection, anyway.”
“A connection that Mr. Lohman believed,” Daffy concluded.
“Seems so,” agreed Katz. “He posted a comment on the one about the Mexican priest. Said the priest should be shot on sight.”
“How convenient for the prosecuting attorney,” said Daffy, smiling. He turned to look at me. “So, Dr. Arklow, in your professional opinion, would this procession of angelic images be enough to drive Mr. Lohman to murder?”
“Not by itself,” I said with confidence. “As far as I can tell from the sample we’ve seen, they would prime him, but not drive him to the act. On the surface, the pictures tell a story the way Chick Tracts do. Do you know them?”
Doug Land smiled, the first reaction I’d seen from him.
Daffy gave an evil-looking grin. “Those little evangelical comic books, you mean? Sinners, hellfire, and eternal damnation. Kids traded them when I was young.”
“Yes, those. From the psychology perspective, they’re quite good. Simple message, simply told, repeated often. Seen alone, the angel pictures are like that. But alone, they lack something: feedback. For a believer to become a soldier, to become a fanatic, the believer needs the opportunity to show proof of faith, and to have that proof accepted by an authority. The believer needs to feel that he is part of something bigger, that his faith matters.
“We see Lohman was receptive to the messages, but not yet how he was called on to give proof, or how that proof was accepted.”
As the sky darkened, the racket of the choppers altered. The chanting crowd down on South Broad thinned out, leaking away where the police cordon opened to allow them to disperse. The choppers moved slowly with the main body northward toward the loop around City Hall.
Daffy leaned forward. His eyes glinted with reflections of the swinging pergola lights. “Now tell me, was there any sign of pictures meant for someone else? Another Lohman, another soldier? Perhaps a different series of pictures?”
“We were looking,” said Katz, also leaning forward, her enthusiasm restored. “We think the series might branch into other series. I believe there was at least one other series. It was another Pythia case: a relic theft early this year. Um, you probably wouldn’t …”
Daffy and Land looked blankly at her.
Katz hurried on. “No, it was a nothing case. But the Lohman angel pictures reminded me of a picture in that case. This afternoon I found the frost on glass effect in that picture too. In other ways, they were nothing alike. So, I had a thought …” She stopped, uncertain.
“Do enlighten us, Special Agent Katz,” purred Daffy.
“Well, sir, we could easily miss other pictures that have a distinct style and don’t have a triple cross. But the one thing they all had in common was the frost-like fine structure. If Dr. Evangelos can train Pythia to search based on the fine structure alone—”
“Excellent idea, the fine structure. I’m sure Photo Lab can do that.”
“Yes, sir, but maybe using Pythia—”
Daffy leaned back again. “I’ll get them working on it tonight.”
“Um, sure, sir.”
I suppressed a grin. It was clear enough. Katz served two masters—Daffy and Krome—and they were rivals. A tough spot for her to be in.
Daffy drank off his wine, then set the glass aside. “Now, speaking of other soldiers, let us turn our attention to the reason Doug and I drove up to this delightful city to meet both of you.”
The two men simultaneously slipped their hands into inner jacket pockets, a disconcerting movement from federal agents who were almost certainly armed. Land drew out a wallet, Daffy, his phone.
Daffy continued. “Your boogaloo boy acquaintance, Lem Barston, along with his vehicle and its impressive cargo of weapons, has been transferred into federal custody. We believe him to be a member of the Aryan New Order Church and an Atomkrieg commander.”
Atomkrieg. The name made my scalp prickle. It was the center of an international network of neo-Nazis, and one of the most violent domestic terrorist organizations in the US. Members carried out beatings, rapes, murders, and attacked nuclear plants and federal buildings. They plotted the extermination of Jews, non-whites, gays, pretty much anyone who didn’t fit their idea of an ‘Aryan’ Christian. They posted videos of ritual executions on darknet sites.
“We found the original of this in his wallet,” said Daffy. He waved a hand theatrically toward Land.
Land pulled a folded printer page from his own wallet, unfolded it, then held it up for us to see. It was a picture of me. Me in a long winter coat, open over an even more eccentric suit than the one I wore now. Me with shorter hair.
*Me—*in the wallet of an Atomkrieg commander.
Then Daffy held up his phone so that we could see the screen. “And your colleagues in the CID, Agent Katz, not that Pythia thing, found this video. Mr. Barston posted it yesterday afternoon on a neo-Nazi website called The Final Solution.” He touched the play button.
There was me again, in the unsuitable suit and too-long hair. There was Special Agent Katz, smart and trim. We strolled side-by-side toward the camera, then past it, and on. As the camera turned to follow us, the community hall where Father Torres had died came into view. Barston must have made the video from his SUV.
Daffy said, with what sounded like relish, “I am told that to have your picture posted on The Final Solution is akin to a death sentence.”