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“SHE DOESN’T SPEAK ENGLISH.” Petra Sudova pointed at the shortest woman in the laboratory, who was looking at us with tears in her eyes. “Nikola worked with Doctor Jan on a daily basis. She’s heartbroken.”
“We all are.” Dominik fiddled with a ballpoint pen that was adding to the stains on his fingers. He’d introduced himself as Doctor Novotný’s work neighbour. Their offices were next to each other. Of all Doctor Novotný’s colleagues, only Petra had introduced herself giving her surname. The others had said foreigners found their surnames too hard to pronounce. Dominik had said his was the hardest. “The rest of us speak English and will translate for Nikola.”
“Doctor Jan loved English.” Tears formed in Petra’s eyes. “He said it was a noble language. International. He insisted we use it as much as possible. He did all his work, all his writing, everything in English.”
We were in a large open workspace. Long work tables ran along the walls as well as across the room. The florescent lighting made it easy to forget that it was dark outside. After one of Vinnie’s quick pasta dinners, we’d arrived here no more than an hour and a half after we’d left the hotel crime scene.
Francine, Vinnie and Daniel had stayed behind. Ivan had made a valid argument that we should not arrive in a large group to interview the scientists. Manny had insisted I join him and Ivan, and had agreed when Colin had stated he would travel with us, but wait in the car. But Manny had argued with Vinnie when Roxy had agreed to join us. It had taken a threat from Roxy before Vinnie had relented in his insistence on accompanying us as protection.
Roxy and I were standing behind Ivan and Manny as the two men spoke to Doctor Jan’s colleagues. This allowed me to observe their nonverbal cues.
I witnessed a lot of deep sadness.
“How can we help?” Emil Nedvěd had met us at the entrance of the four-story building and had introduced himself as the director of Prokop Industries and Doctor Novotný’s friend.
“What can you tell us about Patrik?” Ivan asked.
“Who’s Patrik?” Emil—the man who’d told us no more than seven minutes ago he knew everything about Doctor Novotný—frowned.
“A person of interest.” Manny took his time looking at all eight individuals in the room. “Any of you know about Patrik?”
They silently shook their heads. I observed no deception cues.
“Hmm.” Manny leaned against one of the long tables. “Can you tell us exactly what Doctor Jan was working on?”
“I’ll do it.” Petra took one step forward. “I had to give a presentation to our investors and had to change the scientific language to something non-scientists would understand.”
“That will be greatly appreciated.” Ivan heaved an exaggerated sigh of relief that made the scientists laugh.
“Okay, so Doctor Jan started this research four years ago, but it was only the year before his sabbatical that he started making significant breakthroughs.” Petra paused and shook her head. “We never understood why he took a sabbatical. He just disappeared.”
“Now we know.” Dominik, standing next to Nikola, paused in his translation, his fist on his hip. “He was being used by a madman and then killed.”
“What do you mean used by a madman?” Manny’s question came out slow and soft. Angry.
“It’s on the news.” Dominik took out his smartphone. “It was breaking news early this evening.”
Manny jerked and turned to me, his lips in a thin line. “Did she do this?”
“I don’t know.” I wouldn’t have expected this from Bree. I’d only witnessed sincerity when she’d given her word not to betray our trust in her.
Manny turned back to the group, his body tense, but his expression open when he looked at Petra. “You were telling us about Doctor Jan’s work.”
“Yes. Well. Um. Where was I?” She snapped her fingers. “Yes, he started out using machine learning, but then chose deep learning to search for links between genomes and the proclivity to addiction. He was part of the study that showed some people’s genomes carried a type of ancient retrovirus called HERV-K HML-2 which made them more likely to become drug addicts because this virus affected the production of dopamine.”
Manny just stared at Petra. Then he turned to Roxy. “I think it’s best if Doctor Ferreira translates what you just said into a language I understand.”
Roxy smiled at him, then at Petra. “Can you explain artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning in one sentence?”
“No.”
“Exactly. These are extremely complex fields to define.” Roxy put her hand on her chest and looked at the scientists. “Please forgive me for how much I’m about to simplify this.”
Petra smiled. “Oh, please go ahead. It’s too hard for me to skip all the defining detail.”
Roxy turned to Manny. “Okay. Hmm. Artificial intelligence is like an umbrella term. If we had a diagram, AI would be the encapsulating circle that contains machine learning and deep learning. The basics of AI is a machine that shows a form of intelligence by solving a problem. Are we good so far?”
Manny nodded once and pushed his hands in his trouser pockets.
“Great.” She smiled. “Now, at its very most basic, machine learning uses algorithms to analyse data, learn from it and then make a prediction or determination based on the results. This is when machines are learning by experience and acquiring skills without human involvement.”
“This sounds like a horror sci-fi movie.” Ivan’s arms were crossed, his brow furrowed.
“Ooh, then you’re really going to like deep learning.” Roxy giggled when Ivan shook his head. “Deep learning was inspired by the human brain and all the interconnected neural paths. In deep learning we have neural networks that are algorithms that look very much like the biological structure of the brain.
“A deep learning algorithm learns from large amounts of data. I’m talking ridiculously large. The same as we as humans learn from experience, a deep learning algorithm repeats a task, but each time, it tweaks it a little bit to improve the outcome.
“Deep learning is actually machine learning on steroids. Deep learning has many more layers than machine learning to process data. Basically each layer extracts different pieces of important information. A good example here would be a self-driving car. One layer would detect the edges of the road, another layer the lane lines, another the distance between cars ahead, another the distance between cars behind and so on and so forth. Still with me?”
“Hmm.” Manny nodded.
“Deep learning is used in many, many things we use today. Virtual assistants like Alexa or Siri, computer translations—”
“They’re sometimes really bad,” Dominik said. “We tried once to use it for an email in English. It was terrible.”
“True. But if you were to correct those mistakes, the machine would learn and the next translation would be better. Another example relevant to this moment is how great deep learning is in medicine and pharmaceuticals. It does all kinds of diagnoses for diseases and tumours and is also able to create personalised medicine for an individual genome.”
“That’s what Doctor Jan was doing.” Petra’s mouth was slightly agape. “That was the best short description of AI, ML and DL I’ve ever heard. Can I please steal it?”
Roxy giggled. “Oh, please do. I did a lot of reading and learning about this when I realised how much it could help in my field.”
“Doc?” Manny turned his back on the scientists and stepped into my personal space. I leaned back, but he moved even closer. “Can we trust these people?”
“I need context.” I didn’t know what kind of information Manny wanted to share with them.
“You can trust us,” Emil said. “We work with projects that have the potential to earn millions of euros. The non-disclosure agreements we sign threaten us with our livelihoods if we so much as breathe a word of the projects we are working on.”
“Which brings me to a question.” Roxy tilted her head. “Why are you so readily answering all our questions about Doctor Novotný’s work? Isn’t his cure also protected?”
“Not any more.” Emil crossed one arm in half a body hug. “The whole project rested on his shoulders. He was the only one capable of making this work. The investors knew the potential this had and gave him everything he needed and more. And he never demanded anything he didn’t need. Just the best equipment and people.”
“And pay,” Petra said softly. “He fought for us to be paid far above the average salary for scientists here. He believed that people should be paid their worth. He valued each one of us.”
“Not one of us would betray him, his work.” The director looked at his scientists as they all nodded enthusiastically. “And now we won’t betray the trust of whatever it is you need to ask or share.”
Manny turned to look at me.
“I don’t see any signs of deception.” Or inappropriate eagerness to gain information.
He turned back to the scientists. “How loyal was Doctor Jan?”
“Very.” Emil’s answer was immediate and confident. “He’d adopted us as his tribe and treated us as such. If one of us published in a journal, he would go to great lengths to defend us and our article to any critics. That was one of the reasons we loved him. He made us feel important to him.”
“Just how great would those lengths be?”
Emil, Petra and Nikola were shaking their heads. The others looked disgusted.
“He would never do anything illegal, never something that could harm others. Never.” Petra’s voice got firmer and louder as she spoke. “If anyone says that he did something bad, and that after his death, we will not stand for that.”
Emil put his hand on Petra’s shoulder. “Petra’s right. We won’t stand for it. The man we knew and loved was working on a cure for opioid addiction because he wanted to help people.”
Manny glanced at me and I nodded. I only saw truth in their nonverbal cues.
“Did Doctor Jan leave any of his personal effects here when he went on sabbatical?” Ivan asked.
“His tablet.” Dominik turned towards the door. “He left it in my office. When I phoned him the next day to ask if I could bring it to him, he told me to keep it until he returned.”
“Can we have it?” Ivan looked at Emil. “We can go through legal channels if it will help protect you.”
“That won’t be necessary.” Emil shook his head. “I’ll deal with any investor or anyone who has anything to say about us co-operating with the police. I pride myself in running a company that is completely transparent in our ethics and goals. It’s only in the development phases that we have to keep things very confidential in case of intellectual property theft. No. You can have his tablet.”
“I’ll go get it.” Dominik left the room.
Roxy looked at Emil. “We’ll treat any information we find in there with the utmost sensitivity and confidentiality.”
“I know.” He paused when Dominik came rushing back into the room. He took the tablet from Dominik and handed it to Ivan. “The news said Doctor Jan was working for a psychopath, creating a drug that the psychopath believed would cure fanaticism.”
“What?” The corners of Roxy’s mouth turned down. “Being fanatical about something cannot be found in a virus, genomes or genetics. That doesn’t make sense at all.”
“That’s why we don’t believe it.” It wasn’t Emil’s tone as much as his micro-expressions that caught my attention.
“Who believes this?”
“Conspiracy theorists are already jumping on this. They are saying this is a sign they were right all along—being a liberal, a fascist or an extremist of any kind is genetic.”
“Bloody hell.” Manny turned to the director. “Emil, am I right to think that we can call at any time if we have more questions?”
“Absolutely.”
“Doc? Roxanne? Any more questions?”
“No.” I looked at Roxy who was shaking her head.
We left the building five minutes later. Colin was standing outside his SUV waiting for us. He straightened when he saw us. “How did it go?”
“We have a gift for Francine.” Roxy pointed at Ivan. “We have Doctor Jan’s tablet.”
“Frey.” Manny stopped in front of Colin. “Do you know where that paparazza is staying?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Take me there. Now.”
“Okay.” Colin drew out the last syllable as he opened the passenger door for me. “You can tell me about it on the way there.”
