Chapter 42

CHAPTER 42

P ARIS

"You're a bad Muslim," the young man stated. He was seated behind a laptop covered with stickers acquired at French hacking conferences. "We never see you at mosque anymore."

"You know I changed mosques," MoMo replied.

"Yes. Allegedly, you go to the same one as my cousin. I asked him, but he says he hasn't seen you in months."

"I've been busy."

"Too busy for Allah?"

MoMo held up his hand. He wasn't interested in rhetorical questions. "Amir, please. I didn't come here for a lecture."

"Correct. You came for my help. And that's what I'm giving you. I don't want you to lose your way."

"I'm not going to lose my way."

"Says the brother who no longer goes to mosque."

In the interest of getting what he wanted, MoMo relented. "If I promise to go to mosque this week, will you shut up and help me?"

"How many times this week?" the other man asked.

MoMo was losing his patience. "You know what? Forget it. Instead, I'm going to go back to my office and tell the DGSI that I saw someone moving a bunch of bomb-making equipment in here."

"Into my mother's home? How dare you."

"Give it a rest, Amir. You and I both know your mom moved back to Morocco three years ago. Which means you're not only squatting in this rent-controlled apartment, but I bet if I looked into it, your mom is still collecting social assistance funds. Funds meant for residents of France. So let me ask you, does she have direct deposit, or do you cash her checks and send the money directly back to Rabat?"

The young man shook his head. "As I said, you're a bad Muslim."

"With apologies to you and Allah, peace be upon him, I'm also a French citizen. And as such, I have a duty to uphold the oath I swore when I joined the DGSI. You took a similar oath, remember?"

Amir did remember. He had been a highly skilled cyber specialist for the Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d'information, or ANSSI for short, where he worked in the national cyber incident-response center. But despite his pious pose, Amir loved money, which was why he had allowed himself to be wooed out of government service by a French company at the forefront of artificial intelligence.

MoMo didn't begrudge him the move. For a handful of kids in their old neighborhood, computers were their way out. While other children were practicing their soccer skills, dreaming of becoming professional athletes, MoMo and Amir were learning how to program and code.

As his frustration with cracking Brunelle's flash drive had continued to build, he had thought of Amir—especially in light of the successes they'd had in using the AI software to track the initial movements of Jadot's killer. He'd also gotten a taste of being in the field and he liked it.

If he were being honest, the fact that he still hadn't been able to track down the Russians' getaway vehicle, the one they'd fled Seine-Saint-Denis in after torching their stolen Peugeot, was also weighing on his mind. He wanted to prove he had good investigative instincts and that he should be entrusted with more fieldwork.

All of that was what had brought him to the little apartment in Paris's posh 7th arrondissement. How Amir's mother had finagled her way into it was beyond him. A stone's throw from Napoleon's tomb and the Rodin museum, the unit couldn't have been situated in a more perfect location.

"Your uncle wouldn't agree with how you're comporting yourself," Amir stated, attempting a stab at his conscience.

"And my father wouldn't agree with you and your mother ripping off the French taxpayer," MoMo replied, parrying the blow. "So let's just leave our families out of this and focus on the reason I'm here."

With an almost imperceptible tilt of his head, Amir conceded the point. He knew what he and his mother were up to. It wasn't just wrong, it was illegal. Flagging him as a potential terrorist was probably the least of the things MoMo could do to make his life a living hell. He decided that discretion was the better part of valor, especially when it came to someone he had grown up with in the old neighborhood.

"Fair enough," said Amir. "Did you bring the device with you?"

Pulling it out of his pocket, MoMo handed it over.

The other man looked at it in disbelief. "Somebody stored national security information on a flash drive disguised as a key fob? You've got to be kidding me."

"Pretty clever if you ask me," MoMo replied. "Probably the last place anyone searching for national security information would ever look."

Amir plugged it into his laptop's USB adapter and logged into his work account. "Let's see what we've got."

"You can use your Sirocco program to break it, right?"

"As long as we do it before Sirocco becomes fully sentient and destroys all of humanity," Amir joked, playing upon the public fear of his company's new large-language-model chatbot.

Capable of self-improvement, Sirocco was revolutionary in the AI field. It possessed the ability to evolve on its own, independent of humans. Getting "smarter" solely by being asked questions was no longer its modus operandi. Sirocco now actively sought out information, broadening its intelligence.

Where it was really making strides was in math—one of the biggest weaknesses in AI models. And one of the ultimate puzzles to be solved with math was encryption. It was rumored that Amir's company had cracked the global gold standard: AES-192 encryption.

It was a feat that even the biggest supercomputers could never achieve. Now, with a laptop and access to the right software, it might be banged out in a matter of moments.

"You're lucky," Amir stated. "Whoever encrypted this key fob was good, really good, but he wasn't perfect."

"Meaning?"

"He didn't anticipate me, and Sirocco, cracking his flash drive."

Turning his laptop around, he showed MoMo what he had done. "We're in."