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“Ethan Edgar’s car ran off the road in Sydney this morning, and Montri Churat was shot dead in his home in Bangkok. All four of them died in the past twelve hours.”
Now the Israeli understood. Kotana Ishikawa was, like Tomer Basch himself, one of the top two dozen or so pioneers of weaponized AI in the entire world. And Rick Watt, while not a developer himself, had been at the very forefront of acquisition of the technology that Ishikawa and Tomer had created. He knew as much as if not more than they did about which research labs in which countries were developing which AI initiatives, at least as far as military applications were concerned.
Ethan Edgar and Montri Churat were also leading AI pioneers and acquaintances of Tomer Basch.
“Are you saying I might be in danger?” Basch asked, but this was Ami, the security chief and a very serious man, so Tomer knew that was exactly what he was saying.
“Your officers are in place?”
Basch looked out the window over his kitchen sink. A private security car sat parked in the driveway. Two men armed with rifles leaned against it, their eyes out to the street ahead.
“Yeah. I’m looking at them now. No issues.”
Even though this entire community was regularly patrolled, covered with cameras, and as safe a neighborhood as one could find in all of northern Israel, he always had guards on his property during the nighttime hours, just to ensure his family’s safety.
Ami said, “Okay. I’m sending an extra team of our guys from the institute, just to watch over you.”
Basch thought a moment. “Okay, get them here for my family, but I’m coming in to work.”
“On a Saturday night?”
“If someone is targeting me, I’m going to figure out who it is. I can’t do that from home. I have to get to the office.”
Ami protested. “Tomer, we don’t have to figure out who’s doing this because we know. It’s the Chinese, obviously. They’ve been amping up their efforts to win the AI arms race. This could just be the next phase. Killing their competition.”
Basch said, “You may be right, but there might be something else going on here. I need to get in there and make some calls.”
Ami Madar breathed into the phone a moment. “All right. I’ll meet you there. Take your weapon with you for the drive.”
Tomer’s heart was pounding in his chest. He suddenly felt like he was back in the IDF, a young man facing the threat of death every day.
He turned away from his kitchen, looked back into his den at his family. “Ami, I’m not going to say anything to Lior about this. She’d just get upset. But get your guys here as soon as possible.”
Ten minutes later he climbed into his blue Mercedes AMG E63, fired the throaty engine, and pulled out onto Shvedya Street.
As his AMG wound through the beautiful neighborhood for a few blocks, he turned to a classical station on his satellite radio to calm himself, then made a left turn onto Abba Khoushy Avenue.
Basch had helped design both hardware and software for many different autonomous platforms, including drones, and he therefore had the ability to recognize the distinctive buzzing of a UAV, even a small one, when he heard it. But his brain’s total absorption on getting to the office while thinking about the puzzle he was facing, plus the powerful strings and horns of Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony’s Allegro molto coming from his Bowers & Wilkins speakers, made it impossible for him to detect the tiny quadcopter following his every move from above.
Not long after the turn onto Abba Khoushy he did notice, however, a black cargo van ahead of him in traffic. It bore the emblem of a local heating and air conditioning service, and didn’t seem in any way out of place, but it slowed in his lane, so he flipped his blinker to pass it on the right, then waited a moment because a scooter with both a rider and a passenger was coming up the lane quickly.
The forty-six-year-old waited for the scooter to pass him by, but once it came level with him on the right, it slowed to match his speed. He saw two helmeted figures on board; neither was paying any attention to him, but he was stuck there until they moved on.
At forty kilometers an hour he waited for either the van to turn off or change lanes, or for the little bike on his right to get out of his way, but as he listened to Rachmaninoff, he noticed movement from the man on the back of the scooter.
Basch looked back to the van in front of him; it had slowed further, but when he shifted to his right again, he saw the scooter still there, keeping level with his rear passenger door.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. Basch didn’t have a perfect angle looking through the mirror, so he turned and glanced back through the window, and just as he did so, he saw the passenger on the bike swing something, a rope with a large pack on the end of it, over his head and down towards the Mercedes. Before he could react, he heard a loud impact on the roof of his vehicle, just above and behind the driver’s seat, and then the scooter peeled off abruptly to the right.
The passenger no longer had the pack in his hand.
Tomer shouted in surprise, and then he slammed on his brakes, desperate to get out of his sedan because he knew what was happening.
The scooter passenger had just affixed explosives to the roof of his car.
The van revved off, Tomer Basch threw open the door of his now stopped AMG E63, and he unfastened his seat belt as fast as he could.
He was not fast enough. The bomb on the roof detonated, sending shrapnel and flame through the vehicle; the gas tank erupted, and Tomer Basch’s body was ripped to shreds in a ball of fire.
