The twentysomething woman rode her bike at a furious pace down the concrete path that stretched along Santa Monica beach, then braked sharply and stopped near the white high-rise apartment building. Behind her, a wide stretch of flat sand, riddled with footprints, ended at the blue waters of the Pacific. It was less than half an hour after sunrise, and the beach was still mostly empty at that hour, except for the beautiful people doing their early workouts. Lana Moreno was among them.
She was lithe and fit, wearing striped bicycle shorts over her long brown legs, plus a purple bikini top. Her skin shined with sweat. When she took off her alien-like bicycle helmet, she shook out her honey-colored hair, loosening the strands with her fingers. She checked her vitals on her smartwatch, then pulled her bike off the path and did a series of yoga stretching exercises on the sand.
Bourne waited for her, leaning against a stone wall in front of Lana’s apartment building. After her post-workout was complete, Garrett Parker’s assistant picked up her bike under one arm and trudged toward him. Her eyes zeroed in on him almost immediately, and she seemed to recognize that he was waiting for her.
“Are you Bourne?” she asked.
“I am.”
Lana propped her bicycle against the wall and sat next to him, pulling her legs up underneath her. “Abbey Laurent told me about you.”
“You’re willing to talk to me?”
“Well, she says you’re trying to help Garrett. If someone’s really trying to kill him, then I guess he needs help from somebody. Since I can’t see him myself right now, I guess I’ll have to take her word for that.”
Bourne noted an edge in her voice. “You don’t like Abbey much, do you?”
“I barely know her,” Lana said with a shrug.
“And yet your boss is married to her. Is that a problem for you?”
“Why would it be?”
“You followed him from Seattle. You must be pretty loyal.”
“I am. So?”
“So I just wonder if there’s anything personal between you.”
“There isn’t,” Lana snapped. “Garrett’s smart, and he’s a good boss, and he pays me well. You can’t fuck off good jobs these days. Plus, I didn’t have any roots in Seattle. I went there for college, that’s all, so nothing was keeping me there. If I can come down here and afford a place like this on the beach, why wouldn’t I go?”
“True enough.” Bourne glanced at the building behind him, which was prime real estate even by California standards. “Nice location. He must pay you well.”
“He does. What of it? Tech bros make good money. His focus is his work, and he needs someone to run the rest of his life. That’s how geniuses roll.”
“Garrett’s a genius?”
“Yeah, he is.”
“How did you first hook up with him?”
“I applied to be his assistant when he was hired at Jumpp,” Lana said.
“There must have been a lot of competition for that job.”
“There was. But I made sure I knew his life story backward and forward before I met him. I read every article he ever wrote about AI and every article that had been written about him. I knew his dog’s name when he was a kid. I knew how he ordered his coffee at Starbucks. I knew his favorite resort in the Bahamas, and I knew he’d had a thing for redheads ever since he fucked the girl next door.”
Bourne’s eyes narrowed. “The girl next door?”
“Yeah. Her name was Fawn. They were both in high school. He talked about it on a podcast one time, and I listened to it. Why?”
“There’s an app called mygirlnextdoor. I was wondering if Garrett was involved with it.”
“He consulted on the code on his old job when the site was in start-up. That was what the podcast was about, and that’s why he told the story. So what? Some of the most advanced technology applications cut their teeth in porn. If you need day-to-day cash flow, there’s always money in sex.”
“Garrett told me he had nothing to do with the app,” Bourne said.
“Was his wife there at the time?”
“Yes.”
“Case closed,” Lana said with a smirk.
“I get the feeling you don’t approve of Garrett and Abbey,” he told her.
“It’s none of my business, but it all moved pretty fast, didn’t it? They met in an airport, and next thing I know, she’s got him uprooting his life for her. Do I not approve? Am I jealous? Not at all. I admire what a fast operator she is.”
Bourne glanced at the apartment building again. He figured the units had to go for at least five thousand dollars a month. And that was probably for a studio that would make Superman squeeze to change clothes. He took another look at Lana and noticed how attractive she was, with a Camila Cabello face and a fit, petite body. He couldn’t help but wonder if the relationship between Garrett and Lana went deeper than she was saying.
“Did Abbey tell you someone tried to kill him?” Bourne asked.
“Yes, that’s what she said.”
“You don’t believe it?”
“I don’t know what to believe. Technology is cutthroat, but murder is something else.”
“Except, when China is involved, anything’s possible,” Bourne said. “You know about Mr. Yuan, right? Garrett’s predecessor?”
“Yeah. I do. But that was in China.”
“Have you checked out our southern border lately? Infiltrators from China are fanning out across the country.”
Lana frowned. “You think the Chinese are going after Garrett? Why? He’s not even at Jumpp anymore.”
“That may not make him any less of a threat. Or the killer may be worried that Garrett will talk to the Chinese. The fact is, someone wants him dead. I need to know who, and I need to know fast. It seems like you’re the only person other than Garrett who might know who it could be. You said yourself, you run everything in his life except the work itself.”
“I do.”
“Then who would want to kill him, Lana?” He added a moment later, “Abbey thinks it’s a woman.”
“A woman? Is she sure?”
“Yeah, she’s pretty sure. Is it you?”
Lana’s eyes flashed with anger. “Me? You’re crazy. I . . .”
“You what?”
“Nothing. It’s not me. That’s ridiculous.”
Bourne let it go, but he wondered if that sentence was going to end, I love Garrett.
“Then who?” he asked.
Lana kicked at the Santa Monica sand with one of her sneakers. She glanced around to make sure they were alone outside the apartment building. “Okay, look, I can think of one woman who might be wild enough to do it. It’s been a while since we heard from her, but she was definitely a problem.”
“Who?”
“Her name’s Vix. That’s what she calls herself. I don’t know if that’s a nickname or what. You mentioned the Chinese, right? Well, she’s Chinese. She’s a programmer from Shanghai.”
“An AI coder?”
“Isn’t everyone these days?”
“So what’s her connection to Garrett?” Bourne asked.
Lana sighed. “Two years ago, when he was looking for a job, Garrett went to an AI conference in Washington. That’s when he hooked up with the people from Jumpp. He also hooked up with Vix.”
“As in?”
“They fucked. Sounds like it was hot and heavy. Garrett doesn’t really talk about it a lot, but I got the impression they were really into each other.”
“Who does Vix work for?”
“That’s the thing,” Lana said. “She worked for Jumpp.”
“She was part of their AI team? I thought the whole AI team left after Mr. Yuan was killed.”
“No, she didn’t work in his section. Garrett thought there was some bad blood between them. I don’t know, maybe she wanted in, and Mr. Yuan didn’t think she was good enough to make the majors, you know?”
“So what happened after the conference?” Bourne asked.
“Garrett and Vix started a relationship. Rocky but intense. Except once Garrett got to Jumpp, she wanted into his section. She kept badgering him about it. In fact, he began to think that was the only reason she’d come after him in the first place. To fuck her way into the job she really wanted. But Garrett said he couldn’t hire her, not with the two of them being involved. So she quit Jumpp.”
“Where did she go?”
“That big dictionary word game based here in L.A. DicTrace.”
Bourne remembered Garrett talking about the link between the Jumpp software and an app that fed a hack of his computer. The only thing I could find that lined up was posting on Jumpp about my fucking word puzzle game.
“Is Vix still there?”
“I have no idea.”
“This must have been more than a year ago,” Bourne said. “If Vix is going after Garrett now, why would she wait so long?”
Lana shook her head. “There’s more. After Garrett broke it off, Vix began stalking him. Sending him threats at all of his email accounts. Showing up at his door in Seattle. He blocked her online, but that didn’t stop her. Except—except he didn’t know about all of it.”
“What do you mean?” Bourne asked.
“I didn’t tell him that it kept going for a while. He thought it was done after he blocked her, and I didn’t think he needed to know she was still trying to contact him. Vix was messing with his head. Getting in the way of his productivity. The police wouldn’t do shit, so what difference would it make if he knew? I was the gatekeeper. I kept her away. But she kept at it for a while, and she—”
Lana stopped.
“What did she do?”
“It’s not what she did. It’s that she knew things.”
“Like what?” Bourne asked.
“Personal things. Shit she shouldn’t know or be able to find out. She was able to guess things about him that weren’t online anywhere. Like somehow she’d hacked his whole life and could read his mind.”
Like an AI engine assimilating data, Bourne thought.
“How do I find her?” he asked.
“I guess you could go to the puzzle people. Like I say, she worked there, but I don’t know if she still does. It’s been a while. She hasn’t come after Garrett in months. I figured she got tired of the chase.”
“What does she look like?” Bourne asked. “Do you have a picture?”
Lana rolled her eyes. “Oh yeah. More than I want to see, believe me. She used to send Garrett naked pics when they were together.”
She reached over to her bicycle and unzipped a small pouch strapped to the frame. Her phone was inside. She opened it up and scrolled through her photos until she found what she was looking for, and then she handed the phone to Bourne. She was right. He found himself staring not just at parts of Vix, but at all of Vix. She had a taut body, skinny and all muscle—the kind of physique a woman would need to hit Garrett in the back of his head and drag him down the porch steps.
Jason felt the clues rearranging themselves in his mind like a word puzzle.
Vix.
An AI coder. A connection to Jumpp. A connection to one of the apps that went rogue on Jumpp’s command. A connection to—maybe even an obsession with—Garrett Parker. Vix was exactly the kind of unstable mastermind who would know how to hack an AI engine and see an opportunity to use the Files for her own ends.
Bourne focused on her face. She had narrow, delicate features, deceptively hiding her strength. Her lips were ruby red against pale skin, her short black hair parted in the middle, her dark eyes huge between her almond-shaped lids and a little too close together. The effect he felt staring at her—particularly with her naked body on display in the rest of the photograph—was of someone who managed to be both submissive and scary at the same time.
“You see it, don’t you?” Lana murmured. “She’s crazy.”
“I do.”
But Bourne saw something else, too. Vix’s face was familiar. He’d seen it before. Recently.
Where?
Who was she?
Then he remembered. He pulled out his own phone, and he found a photo he’d taken of the cover of Wired magazine that he and Johanna had found in Chinatown. He studied the faces of Mr. Yuan’s team and didn’t see Vix among them, but when he looked more closely at the picture, he knew why.
Mr. Yuan hadn’t refused to hire Vix for his AI team because he doubted her skills. No, he didn’t want anyone to know who she really was.
Because Vix was on the magazine cover. She was there in miniature, in the large family photograph posed on the man’s desk. The face was younger, from several years earlier, but it was definitely the same girl.
Vix was Mr. Yuan’s daughter.