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Dr. Ryder said, “Again…you’re with Homeland Security?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well…I’ve already talked to the police.”
“We’re not the police. We’re trying to get an understanding of what’s going on. We just have a few questions.”
She didn’t seem happy, but she eventually nodded. “Go ahead.”
“You remained on speaking terms with Dr. Halverson after your divorce?”
“He was the love of my life, despite our problems. So, yes.”
“Did he ever express any concerns about anything he was working on? Something that he thought might have put him in the crosshairs of some enemy?”
She shook her head slowly. “Obviously the work he does, it has utility for the Defense Department. That makes him…in a way…a weapon.” She shrugged. “In the eyes of America’s enemies, anyway.”
“Had Dr. Halverson done any work with China in the past?”
To this the woman bristled noticeably. “Everything Lars has done in the past two decades is public knowledge. Places he’s worked, partners and colleagues and competitors. Yes, he’d done some work with companies in China, but the man was an open book, and those parts of his book that were not open were known by me.” Before the man across from her could follow up on this, she said, “Lars was one of the good guys, Mr. Pace.”
“We’re just trying to figure out why he lost his life. Maybe we can prevent others from losing theirs. That’s all.”
“Look, I’ll tell you what I told the BPD. Lars was extremely concerned about what’s been happening the past five days; many of these people who died were friends. He hadn’t slept; he was always working, trying to find out what exactly was going on and who was responsible.
“He thought this had to do with the Chinese, some new artificial general superintelligence weapon they were in the process of developing. I don’t know if he was right or not, but that was his belief.”
Pace knew all this; he needed more. “Did he ever mention a DARPA program called Mind Game?”
To his surprise, Ryder nodded. “Of course. He worked on Mind Game until it was shut down.” She cocked her head. “Is that work related to all this?”
“I don’t know. It came up in another interview. There are suspicions the Chinese now have control of it.”
Ryder looked out a window at a little courtyard. “That wouldn’t surprise me in the least. Mind Game was always going to get out. No technology remains in the hands of the nation that created it.”
Jim Pace tracked high-tech weapons proliferations for a living, and he knew Dr. Ryder’s words to be true.
“Can you think of anything else he might have said, any clue at all?”
She shook her head slowly, then looked up. “There is something I haven’t shown BPD yet, because I only just found it in Lars’s messenger bag, which was here. He came over for dinner last night, and he accidentally left it behind. I was about to call Detective Casey when you showed up.”
“What is it?”
“I found a handwritten list.”
“A list of what?”
“Names. Many of the people who’ve been killed are on it. It was as if he was crossing them off as they died.” She got up quickly and walked into her home office; Pace rose and followed her, his curiosity piqued by what she’d just said.
Travers and Takahashi trailed behind.
When he got into her large and cluttered office, Pace said, “Some of the names on the list…the people are still alive?”
She opened the leather messenger bag on the desk, then quickly lifted a handwritten sheet from a legal pad. “As far as I know, they are, but my colleagues are dying by the hour, aren’t they?”
She handed it over to Pace, who sat down in a leather chair in front of the desk and began looking it over, while the two Ground Branch men stood in the doorway, gazing on.
Lars Halverson’s own name was the first on the list, which surprised Pace. Presumably this was not, as he’d hoped, a collection of potential suspects the tech guru had identified, because clearly he wouldn’t have been identifying himself.
