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Watkins put a hand up, halting Pace, then looked down at the iPad in front of him. “Where are you getting ten? I only know of six.”
“Yes, sir,” Pace said. “A software engineer who had worked for the Ministry of Defense in Moscow left just under a year ago, moving to Austria to start his own company. He and a Russian businessman based in Berlin, himself ex-military, were shot dead on a street this afternoon in Mexico City.”
Watkins rubbed his face. “The Russians. Terrific. That’s eight.”
Pace nodded. “In the past hour it’s been reported that”—he opened a folder and looked down at the top page—“Dr. Ju-ah Park, a researcher at Yonsei University and a leading specialist in the field of electrical engineering, was found floating in the Hangang River in downtown Seoul last evening. She was fifty-five years old. There is no direct evidence yet of foul play, an autopsy will have to rule it in or out, but the water temperature in the Hangang is forty degrees Fahrenheit.”
Watkins said, “Safe to assume she did not enter the river of her own volition.”
“Agreed.”
“That’s nine,” Watkins said as he glanced to his second-in-command, and Naveen Gopal’s administrative assistant dutifully jotted down notes.
Pace turned a page in his folder and looked at it. “Less than ten minutes ago I learned that a midlevel engineer of intelligent systems who had worked for several automotive companies was stabbed to death in the subway in Munich on his way home from work at BMW. He doesn’t seem to be nearly as high-profile as the other victims, but he was, reportedly, very well regarded in the automation field.” He added, “Only thirty-one years old.”
Watkins rubbed his eyes under his glasses. “What’s being done to protect American AI and robotics experts?”
“The Bureau is leading the way on that, pushing local law enforcement to beef up coverage of those who might be targets.” He flipped pages in his folders. “LE is all over MIT, Boston Dynamics, Massachusetts Automation Endeavors, Carnegie Mellon, two dozen other places. These facilities are essentially on lockdown at this point, and the key players in the industries targeted are aware of the situation. As far as overseas, it’s a fluid situation. Everyone is aware of the danger, even if they don’t understand it yet, so the killers are going to have a tougher time in the days to come there, as well. Assuming, of course, that there are more targets.”
Watkins nodded, taking it all in. “You’ve been working in this realm for a while, Jim. Any idea what’s going on?”
“The most likely hypothesis is that all the people killed shared some sort of common knowledge. A bad actor, likely China, is planning to field a new capability of some kind, and they’re trying to remove anyone who can stop them from doing so, or anyone who could build something to combat this new capability.”
“What kind of capability?”
“Judging by the victims and their expertise, it’s some sort of weaponized platform using artificial intelligence. A lethal autonomous weapon, or LAW.”
Before anyone could ask the question, he said, “In a nutshell, an autonomous weapon is any weapon that can, on its own and without any human interaction, search for, decide to engage, and then engage a target.”
Gopal asked, “And what will that mean for our military?”
Pace turned his attention to the assistant to the DDO. “Artificial intelligence can give the enemy weapon something we call ‘first mover advantage.’ Sun Tzu said it best. ‘Speed is the essence of war.’ If you take the human out of the equation and solely give artificial intelligence the power to control a weapon, then your speed will outmatch your enemy.”
“And you win,” Watkins said softly.
Pace said, “If this is what we fear it might be, and if it goes online, then China will have a tactical and operational overmatch on our military.”
Watkins leaned back in his chair. “Mother of God. What could they be fielding that the Agency doesn’t know anything about?”
“China’s R&D into artificial intelligence in the past decade has been through the roof. But not only China; private civilian firms, labs with no connection to the military whatsoever, have made massive strides in this field. I’ve been spending the past year talking to companies that have been compromised by the Chinese. Beijing is robustly going for all the knowledge out there, buying it, stealing it, whatever, so they can then militarize it.” He shrugged.
“This problem is a day old, there’s a lot of work to be done to get to the bottom of this. Hell, it might not even be the Chinese.”
“It’s obviously the Chinese.” The comment came from an operations man named Nance.
The African American woman seated next to him raised her hand.
Gopal said, “Angela?” He looked around the room. “For those of you who don’t know, this is Angela Lacy. She’s assisting me on various initiatives, and I asked her to sit in to see how she can help.”
Pace fought a gasp, but one or two others in the room made audible noises in surprise. Angela Lacy was a rock star in CIA at the moment, enjoying a meteoric rise up the ranks. Now she worked as a special deputy assistant to the deputy director of operations, but six months earlier she’d been a lowly case officer.
She said, “Chinese involvement in this is so…on the nose. I am wondering if instead this could be some sort of a false flag operation.”
“By who?” Watkins demanded.
“I don’t know.”
Nance said, “I guess it could be someone else, but it would have to be a major state actor of some sort, considering the scale of this.”
