Ward had gotten it into his head that coming up the stairs without any warning would get him shot. He seemed to have decided that the men in Rapp’s business spent their off hours dozing in the sun and when startled awake sprayed everything with whatever firearm was at hand.

He appeared a moment later and took a seat on the other side of the rattan table.

“Sara received the phones no problem. The personal one is probably too full of concrete to salvage, but she has some of our hardware people doing what they can. The burners started right up.”

“Has she gotten anything off them yet?”

“Nothing interesting. She’s still working on a cover story for the international data collection protocol we need to run.”

“What kind of cover story?”

“I don’t know exactly, but it’ll work. She’s smart as hell and this kind of request isn’t all that unusual.”

Ward couldn’t help but notice Rapp’s skeptical expression. “Do you know what captcha is, Mitch?”

“Like when you get into a website and it asks you to identify some distorted numbers to prove you’re not a bot?”

“They’re not all like that, though. Have you ever seen one that shows you a bunch of pictures and asks you, say, which one has a streetlight in it?”

Rapp sawed off another piece of mystery meat and put it in his mouth. “Yeah. Streetlights, intersections, ladders. Stuff like that.”

“Exactly. Those pictures were likely images that Google’s artificial intelligence couldn’t identify. So, while it worked well as captcha, the real purpose was to make millions of people teach their AI to identify a streetlight, a ladder, or whatever. Sara will come up with something similar—a reason to mine anonymous data for a purpose that appears to have nothing to do with actually identifying or locating individual phones.”

Rapp chewed thoughtfully. If he lived for a million years, he’d have never thought of any of that. Yet another reason to stay away from electronics to the maximum degree possible. Cameras, artificial intelligence, phones, the Internet. He didn’t envy the next generation of operatives. They’d have no way to escape it.

“But you said you could give me a name. If your data is anonymous, I don’t see how you accomplish that.”

Ward chewed his lower lip for a moment, then pulled out a marker and began drawing on the place mat in front of him.

“This is a hypothetical chain of communication from your… Tangos, right? Scott’s been tutoring me.”

“Sure.”