The Confessions by Paul Bradley Carr

Author:Paul Bradley Carr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2025-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-SIX

A HALF HOUR LATER

The video began calmly enough: A tall woman wearing a red baseball cap and blood-flecked white T-shirt, apparently shopping for a new tablet. The footage was shaky—the person recording it was standing maybe twenty feet away and was trying to be discreet. The woman looked up and, a moment later, chaos erupted: The camera swung first toward the shiny floor and a man’s black boots, running in pursuit, and then back to his face.

“She’s trying to get away,” he was panting. The video had been posted online with the title “StoicAI CEO out shopping while the world burns.” Suddenly the screen was filled with a burst of sunlight, then the image stabilized just in time to see the woman jumping into a red jeep, followed soon afterward by…

Simon tapped the screen to pause the footage that had just been sent to his encrypted phone. He pinched and squinted at the frozen image. No doubt the woman in the red hat was Kaitlan Goss, still bloodied from her confrontation with his car, and the driver was Maud Brookes. But who was this third person scrambling into the jeep? No matter how tightly he zoomed, he still couldn’t make out her face.

He spat out a loud curse, startling the driver in the front seat of the SUV. This was only ever supposed to be about Kaitlan Goss and Maud Brookes: Nobody had said anything about a third woman. He dragged the image down an inch: Jesus, was she pregnant? So now he was supposed to deal with four people?

Simon would have to process that curveball later because now something else had caught his eye. His finger swiped across the final frame of the video, and rested on a banner strung above the entrance, reading “Welcome to Walmart, Compton.” Now he understood why his handler had sent him the video, accompanied by the chilling message “Please explain.” Less than an hour earlier, Simon had confidently assured his boss that the women were trying to get back to the StoicAI HQ in Northern California. He and the driver were close behind and would soon have the chip. Neither Kaitlan nor Maud would ever set foot back on Campus.

But this video told a different story. They were heading west, not north.

A map search easily confirmed it—if they had driven from Pineridge to Compton there was only one possible final destination: StoicAI’s data center in El Segundo, barely an hour’s drive from South LA. He leaned forward and quickly gave the driver the new destination.

The SUV lurched forward. Simon looked at his watch: seven p.m. He thought about Sandeep Dunn, waiting back at the Campus, hurriedly making preparations for Simon to arrive with the chip. He thought again about their conversation that morning: The shock when he had explained—darkly—that information had come to light about “criminal misconduct” by Kaitlan Goss, suggesting that it was she who had sabotaged LLIAM. The glow of excitement in the young engineer’s eyes as Simon explained that the

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