By late Tuesday evening, Stu was back at the house in the Village of Oak Creek, using one of the wall monitors to scroll through Frigg’s index. Before reaching the letter R, he already had a list of more than 1,900 problematic elements that would need to be purged from the system if they were going to keep Frigg on the straight and narrow and operating inside the letter of the law. Of course, there was always a possibility that Frigg was cagey enough to have left out a pet file or two along the way.
Just after 9:30 p.m. a nearby monitor flashed red indicating a flash briefing. “Yes, Frigg,” Stuart said. “What’s up?”
“Breaking news. There are unverified reports out of Phoenix that the leader of the Duarte Cartel, the notorious Felix ‘El Pescado’ Duarte, has been arrested at Gateway Airport in Mesa. Duarte, along with his son Manuel Javier Duarte, were taken into custody by the DEA after disembarking a chartered jet. An arrest team headed by Agent in Charge Robert McKay was on the ground and awaiting the aircraft when it landed.”
“Yes!” Stu shouted into the air. “We got him!”
“Our team got one of the bad guys?”
“Yes, we did,” Stu said. “Two of them, in fact. That text you sent to the DEA did the trick. How did you just happen to have Agent McKay’s contact information?”
“His name is in one of my databases.”
“Which database?”
“The DEA’s agency directory.”
“Holy crap!” Stu exclaimed. “You have an employee database for a federal agency? I don’t remember seeing anything like that in the Ds.”
“Because of constant updating, databases are maintained in my online accounts,” Frigg replied. “You’re still working the off-line ones. Will there be anything else?”
“Any news on Graciella Miramar’s whereabouts?”
“No news, but based on the location where her father and brother were apprehended, I believe there’s a high probability that she is coming here.”
“That’s what I think, too,” Stu agreed. “Either she’s on her way or she’s somewhere nearby. Can you send me a photo of her?”
“Of course.”
A moment later a photograph popped up on one of the monitors. The color headshot appeared to be some kind of government-issued identification. In the photo, the woman appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties. Her long dark hair was pulled back from her face. With brown eyes and long lashes, she was attractive enough, but not especially good-looking and not especially evil-looking, either. There was nothing in the photo that hinted the person pictured there was capable of poisoning her own mother or calling in a hit on her boss. Or on me, Stuart thought to himself.
“Will there be anything else, Stuart?” Frigg asked.
All day long, while he’d been sorting through the files, Stu had been wondering about the advisability of even attempting to manage the AI. He still was, but tonight she had succeeded in bringing down a major Mexican drug cartel boss with a single, possibly illegal text message. Surely that was something that ought to count in Frigg’s favor, even if Stu himself was the only one who knew the whole truth about what had happened.
“Are you familiar with the opera Thaïs?” he asked, spelling out the title for Frigg’s benefit.
“It is an opera by Massenet, but I’m afraid opera is one aspect of my education that has been neglected,” she said.
“I’d like you to find it, familiarize yourself with it, and give me your analysis in the morning.”
“I’m sorry to report that I have no training in analyzing music,” Frigg replied.
“I want you to study the story, not the music.”
“Of course, Stuart. I’ll get right on it.”