Daniel Suarez - Influx

The little library didn’t look popular, and early on a Tuesday morning, even less so. It was deserted. Davis could see the desk Grady had mentioned—across from a large gray metal breaker box. The table, like all the others, was unoccupied, and so she sat. A glance to the right and she realized anyone in buildings across the street would be able to see that she’d sat down. There were hundreds of windows across Broadway from which she’d be visible.

Now what?

She looked at her watch. Eight A.M. on the dot. How would he contact her? Would he contact her? Davis gazed around the library but didn’t see anyone—although she could hear a couple of older women (presumably staff) talking around the corner. She had to hand it to the Twins; there was no one within sight of her. She actually did feel like she’d come alone.

Perhaps the task force had already grabbed Grady. How long would it take them to tell her if they had? Given the Twins’ attitude toward subordinates, she guessed quite a while. So she started gazing out the window—making sure her face was visible to anyone watching out there. She shifted restlessly in her chair.

Then she heard a voice from close by.

“Agent Davis. I’m glad you came.”

She snapped a look forward and back but didn’t see anyone around her.

“Down here. The vent near the floor.”

Davis looked down beneath the table, where a Victorian cast-iron grate pierced the wall near the baseboard. She leaned down. “Mr. Grady?”

“Yes.”

She was impressed. “Apparently you know this building well. Is that why you called the meeting here—you didn’t trust me?”

“It’s not you I don’t trust. It’s the BTC. They probably know by now that I’ve contacted you, and they’re probably watching.”

She raised her eyebrows. “How would this BTC know? I haven’t told anyone about you.”

“You ran lab tests. I think they probably have eyes on anything touching the Cotton case.”

“How?”

“Never mind how. I need you to listen to me.”

“I’m listening.”

“Has anything strange happened since Chicago? Has anyone contacted you?”

That gave her pause. In a moment she shook her head. “No.”

“Good, but we still need to be careful.”

“Okay.” She looked around. “Where are you? How do I get to you?”

“We’ll have to assume they’re watching. So once you start—move fast. But listen carefully first: There’s an emergency stairwell door just to your left, next to the breaker box. Do you see it?”

She saw a white metal door with a square fire-rated window in it across the room. “Yes.”

“Go through that door. It’ll set off an alarm. Ignore it. Follow the stairs to the basement. Then go right. At the end of the hall you’ll see a huge steel door with rivets in it—something from a bygone era. It has a red sign on it that says, ‘No Unauthorized Access.’”

“Okay.”

“I left it unlocked for you. Go through it, and I’ll meet you on the other side. Move quickly, Agent Davis. Go now.”

Despite herself Davis was starting to think that some one-on-one time with Grady away from the Twins’ task force was tempting. As crazy as Grady sounded, he was clearly important to folks in Washington, and she needed to know what his real connection was to Cotton. Maybe somebody was taking crazy people and using them to cover up something. But then there was always the chance that this was an ambush arranged by the Winnowers…

“Before I do that, I have one question, Mr. Grady…”

Controller Mu-Tau manned a holographic surveillance system in the tactical operations center at the BTC Detroit office. Before him was a holographic projection of the entire Columbia University Mathematics Library, with a miniature Denise Davis leaning forward at a study desk, as though inside a living dollhouse. Invisible audio-video nanoparticles had been sprayed into a network across the walls and ceiling of the room days before, giving him the ability to view every inch of the place in a live feed at submillimeter detail. He had a series of sound equalizers showing dozens of audio sources coming in from every vector.

He spun the image around and spoke through his q-link to the harvester team he was supporting. “Alpha, be advised; Davis is speaking with someone.”

A voice came over the q-link, the metadata for the transmission automatically identifying the speaker—it was Eta-Kappa. “TOC, there’s no one else in the room.”

Mu zoomed in to make Davis grow life-size in front of him. There was still perfect clarity. He spun the image around and saw that she was definitely talking to someone. He brought up the volume.

“Where are you planning on going?”

“Look, now is not the time to have this conversation. Just do what I asked.”

Mu shook his head and spoke into his q-link. “Negative, Alpha, I’m telling you she’s already talking with him.” An alert appeared on his screen. “AI just gave a positive match on Grady’s voice. The target subject is in contact.”

“TOC, we’re scanning every radio frequency. There are a couple of cell phones in the room, a Wi-Fi a few doors down, but no transmissions, encrypted or otherwise.”

Mu flipped the image to infrared and saw only Davis’s heat source. Then he flipped it to ultraviolet. No one hiding with diffraction gear. “I don’t see any invisible objects, but I’m telling you, he’s talking with her. He’s right there. He’s got some advanced tech we don’t know about.”

Mu turned to another holographic display showing a 3D real-time video map of the campus outside the Mathematics Building in miniature, with the locations of all the nearby BTC agents, marked with blue dots, as well as civilians moving about. Eta was tagged in an office on the top floor of the Mathematics Building, along with half a dozen other operators. There were no gaps in the perimeter.

“I’m telling you, he’s there. Jam all wireless communications in a quarter-mile radius, and cordon off the building. Teams Alpha, Charlie, and Echo, move in. Clear every room and maintain a perimeter. No one goes in or out. Nox everyone you come in contact with, and secure both Davis and Grady when you find them. Do you copy?”

“Echo copies, TOC.”

“Alpha copies.”

“Charlie copies.”

“Execute, execute, execute.”

As the blue dots converged on the library, Mu looked to the surveillance hologram. Agent Davis sprang up from the desk and ran to the stairwell door. “Be advised, Davis is leaving the library at speed”—he flipped to the building’s own (much poorer quality) security cameras—“moving down stairwell two.”

“Copy that, TOC.”

As Davis sprinted down the uneven stone steps, she winced against the piercing emergency door alarms. She kept going down—two floors into the basement. A glance up told her there were cameras, but she ignored them.

She couldn’t hear a thing above the wailing of the fire alarms. She wondered what the Twins would have to say about this. Bad career move. She certainly knew Tracy wouldn’t approve.

Good-bye, Denver.

Through the door, Davis ducked right and started running down a long utility corridor, its floor painted red. Up ahead she couldn’t miss her objective: a truly massive metal door with a “No Unauthorized Access” sign. The thing looked positively Victorian, with massive hinges and rivets.

She sprinted toward it and yanked on the thick metal handle. The door swung open with a groan, and in her rush to enter she almost flung herself down a flight of crude stone steps leading into yet another subbasement. In the nick of time she grabbed onto an iron railing and caught herself.