“A billion dollars right down the hole,” Diaz said.

“Right,” Tony said. He seemed a little surprised that Diaz was still there. “And that’s the thing. You don’t spend a billion dollars on a neural network you can’t sell. You especially don’t spend a billion dollars now, because up to now Haden research costs were heavily subsidized by the government. Abrams-Kettering ends that. The Haden population in the U.S. is less than four and a half million, almost all of whom already have networks in their heads. Even if this architecture were legally viable, it still doesn’t make sense to spend that much money because the market’s already saturated and the number of new Haden’s cases that pop up every year in the U.S. won’t get you into the black. Even worldwide you’d have a hard time with it.”

“It’s a boondoggle,” I said.

“It really is,” Tony said. “As far as I can see, anyway. Maybe I’m missing something.”

“Let’s look at it from the other side,” Vann said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Let’s stop asking why someone would do this for now,” Vann said. “Let’s ask who could do it. If we have some idea of who could do it then maybe we can come back around to why they would do it. So. Who could do it?”

“Lucas Hubbard could do it,” I said. “A billion isn’t nothing to him, but he’d have to lose several billion before he would seriously feel it.”

“Yeah, but you’re describing every owner of a Haden-related company, aren’t you,” Tony said. “We threw a shitload of money at Haden’s because the first lady had it. Hell, Chris, that old picture of you with the pope probably kept Haden funding rolling for a year or two. I’m no big fan of Abrams-Kettering, but one thing they weren’t wrong about was that Haden’s funding’s become a long trough a bunch of piggies are feeding from. Hubbard’s one. So is Kai Lee, who runs Santa Ana. So are about twenty other people in the C-suites of these companies. Any of them could have funded something like this without it hurting them.”

“Yeah, but Hubbard’s got a connection to Sani,” I said.

“The dead guy,” Tony said. I nodded. “What’s the connection?”

“Accelerant owns the company that’s licensed to provide health care to the Navajo Nation,” Vann said. “And Sani’s Navajo.”

“It’s not a really great connection, is it,” Tony said, after a moment.

“Working on it,” I said.

“Hubbard wouldn’t want to toss a billion dollars away at the moment anyway,” Tony said. “Accelerant is trying to merge Metro with Sebring-Warner, and might just try to buy it outright. If he does that, a cash payout is going to be part of that deal.”

“You’re strangely well versed on the business dealings of Accelerant,” Vann noted.

“I keep up with all the companies I do work for,” Tony said, looking over to her. “It’s part of how I know which clients are going to have work for me. And what I know right now is that all the companies in Haden-related industries are getting ready for the crash. They’re either merging or buying each other outright, or trying to diversify as fast as they can. Abrams-Kettering’s knocked over the trough. It’s done.”

“So we’re saying that even if Hubbard or Lee or anyone else could fund something like this, they wouldn’t,” I said.

“Not right now,” Tony said. “That’s my guess. I mean, I’m not an FBI agent or anything.”

“Who else is there, then?” Vann said, looking at me. It was apparently time for a test again.

I thought about it for a minute. “Well, there’s us, isn’t there,” I said.

“The FBI?” Diaz said, incredulously.

“Not the FBI, but the U.S. government,” I said. “A billion dollars wouldn’t matter to Uncle Sam and it’s possible we’d build something we wouldn’t commercially exploit, either for pure research or just because it’s pork for some congressperson’s district.”

“So we have this developed in some NIH institute as busy work,” Vann said.

“The U.S. government has been known to pay farmers not to plant crops,” I said. “No reason that principle couldn’t go high tech.” I turned to Tony. “Any maybe that’s why it’s not in the registry, since it was never intended to be commercial.”

“That’s great,” Tony said. “But it still doesn’t explain how this”—he gestured at the network—“got into someone’s head.”

“Working on it,” I said again.

“Work harder,” Tony suggested.

“What about the software?” I asked.

“I’ve only glanced at it,” Tony said. “I was going to get to that next, but I thought you might not want to wait for a hardware report. From what I can see it’s programmed in Chomsky, which makes sense because that’s the language designed specifically for neural networks. The software’s got substantially fewer lines of code than most Integrator software I’ve seen. Which means it’s either really efficient, or that whoever programmed it only wanted it to do specific things.”

“When will you be able to tell us which it is?” Vann asked.

“I should be able to give you a general report this evening,” Tony said. “If you want more specifics, you’ll need to let me take the code home with me tonight.”

“That would be fine,” Vann said.

“Uh, I should tell you that when I work in the evening I get time and a half.”

“Of course you do,” Vann said. “Just as long as you have an early report ready for us by seven.”

“Can do,” Tony said.

“And you,” Vann said, looking at me. “You think you’ll be back from Arizona by then?”

“I should be,” I said.

“Then fly, Shane. Fly.” Vann walked off, reaching into her jacket for her e-cigarette.

Chapter Seventeen

IN THE OFFICES of the Window Rock Police Department is a conference room. In the conference room today was a display, with a password-protected video file waiting to be opened.

I was also in the room. So were May and Janis Sani. Klah Redhouse and his boss, Alex Laughing, sat across from the two women. Standing the back of the room were Gloria Roanhorse, speaker of the Navajo Nation, and Raymond Becenti, its president.

It was the last two who had been making Redhouse jittery when he spoke to me earlier in the day. It’s one thing to have your boss breathing down your neck about a case. It’s another thing to have the two most powerful people in the Navajo Nation doing the same thing.

I glanced over to Redhouse. He still didn’t look entirely thrilled to be in the room.

“I don’t know any password,” May Sani was telling Redhouse. “Janis doesn’t either. Johnny never told us any passwords.”

“We don’t think he did,” Redhouse said. “We think maybe he wanted to give it to you but then he died before he could do it. But we do know he wanted the two of you to see this. So maybe the password would be something that meant something to you, or something only the two of you would know.”

Janis looked over to me. “You couldn’t just break the password?” she asked.

“We didn’t want to do that,” I said. “It would be disrespectful to Johnny, and to the two of you. If you want, we can try. But it might take a long time. I agree with Officer Redhouse here that before we try doing that, you should take a few guesses.”

“When people make passwords, they sometimes use the names of family members or pets,” Redhouse said, and went over to the keyboard that was wirelessly connected to the display. “For example, ‘May.’” He typed in the word. It came up wrong. “Or ‘Janis,’” Redhouse said. That one also came up blank. “Any pets?”

“We had a dog when Johnny was a boy,” Janis said. “His name was Bentley. Our mom named him.” Redhouse tried it. It came up blank. Several combinations of the three names likewise came up uselessly.

“We’ll be here all day,” Roanhorse whispered to Becenti, who nodded.

“Did Johnny know any Navajo?” I asked. “Did he speak or write the language?”

“A little,” Janis said. “We were taught it at school, but he didn’t do very well in school.”