Ramez Naam - Apex

[Pryce: I want Barnes’s movements and calls for the last 48 hours. No. Last month.]

[Kaori: Why us?]

[Pryce: POTUS asked.]

[Kaori: OK. What else.]

[Pryce: So he wasn’t at ERD headquarters when Holtzman died?]

[Kaori: ERD says no one entered the room. Door remained closed till Internal Affairs opened it.]

[Pryce: Bullshit. Someone killed Holtzman.]

[Kaori: Yep.]

[Pryce: Get Holtzman’s movements and calls for the month leading up to his death too. Longer if you can.]

[Kaori: Will do.]

[Pryce: Video analysis of both videos. Any chance they’re fabrications?]

[Kaori: Already on it. Should have something for you shortly.]

[Pryce: Good. Records search. Start matching the text of the PLF-creation memos against classified archives. Phrase matches. Partial matches. Maybe someone slipped up and left an early draft accessible.]

[Kaori: You think any of it’s real?]

[Pryce: Go hunting as if it is real. That’s the only way to be sure it’s not.]

Someone tapped Carolyn Pryce on the arm. She looked up, found a giant, mirror-shaded Secret Service agent standing next to her. Hayes. One of the President’s personal protection detail.

“Dr Pryce, the President has asked that you ride with him in the Beast. You can join him in the Executive Lobby.”

Pryce nodded, then looked down at her slate again.

[Kaori: I’ve gotta say, if I wasn’t inside the administration… Becker, then Holtzman, then Barnes? I’d find this all pretty damning.]

Pryce narrowed her eyes, then swiped to delete the message, and subvocalized one more time.

[Pryce: Don’t say that again. And one more thing. Get NSA in the loop. Chase pushing the story someone coerced Barnes. If so, they hacked Barnes’s security…]

That shouldn’t be a problem for Kaori. NSA was where Pryce had hired her away from.

There was a pause. Then another message appeared.

[Kaori: Got it. On both counts. Safe travels, boss.]

Pryce nodded to herself. Kaori was good. She just needed to be careful. DC wasn’t a place to speak one’s mind.

[Pryce: I’m flying POTUS Air. Safe as it gets.]

She walked into the Executive Lobby, on the top floor of Houston Intercontinental, and into the tail end of a family discussion.

“I really wish you’d come with us back to DC,” Stockton said. He had his daughter Julie in his arms. The First Lady stood nearby, cradling their grandson, Liam.

“Dad,” Julie replied. “I have a life here. I have work to do. Steve’s here.”

“That bomb was meant for you.”

“You don’t know that.” Julie Stockton shook her head.

The President sighed. “OK. But I’m beefing up your Secret Service detail.”

The First Lady looked up at that, nodded.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” Julie Stockton said.

Pryce sympathized with the girl. She’d bristled at the idea of having a Secret Service detail herself. It felt more like being a prisoner than being protected. Pryce had disliked the idea so much that she’d made not having one a condition of taking the job.

“I can’t do my job,” the President said, his hands still on Julie’s upper arms, “if I’m not confident that you and Liam are safe. That’s that.”

Pryce followed as a pair of Secret Service agents led the President and a large retinue to a cargo elevator, which plunged them down towards the underground garage that yet more Secret Service agents had held secure since Stockton’s arrival yesterday afternoon.

One of the agents held a finger to the bud in his ear, then spoke. “We have reports of protesters outside the hotel, Mr President.”

Cindy Stockton shook her head. “Protesters,” she said. “The sun’s not even up yet.”

Then the elevator doors opened, and they were underground, in the hubbub of the forming motorcade. Scores of people. Texas State Troopers on motorcycles. More in squad cars. Secret Service in discreetly armored sedans. More sedans for staff and aides. And the special vehicles: the armed and armored Rapid Response vehicles that held Secret Service squads dressed more like marines than bodyguards; the Hazmat vehicle for responding to a bio- radio- or chem-attack on the President; the White House Comms vehicle with its ultra-high-bandwidth links from which you could run the free world; the Local Air Superiority Vehicle, with its fleet of hundreds of tiny drones and counter drones, equipped to ensure the President’s convoy was never taken by surprise.

The Army Colonel with the Football, the briefcase containing the nuclear launch codes.

How did I go from writing policy briefs to this? Pryce wondered.

Did it help that Stephen was dead? She felt a pang of guilt at the thought. But it wasn’t the first time it had struck her.

Would I have made it this far if my husband had lived? If we’d had the kid we’d planned to have?

“Carolyn!” Stockton snapped.

Pryce looked up. A Secret Service agent was holding open a door to the Beast, the custom limousine the President rode in. A vehicle like no other.

“Yes, Mr President,” she said, and strode forward, into the belly of the Beast, and took her seat facing backwards, towards the President and his wife.

John Stockton was looking out the window. And Pryce felt even guiltier for the thought she’d just had. During Stephen’s cancer, and afterwards… The Stocktons had been good to her. Both John and Cindy had supported her, back when he’d been a senator, and then VP.

And if she’d thrown herself into the job? If work was all she did the last decade?

Work was rational. Work was analytical. Work had always been something she excelled at – since grad school, since her doctorate, since her first book. She could break down problems into smaller problems, see how the pieces fit together, articulate them in ways others could understand, quantify things previously unquantified, propose solutions others had never seen.

She sighed. Throwing herself into that was easier than coping with a dead husband. With not having the child she’d planned to have.

The police cruiser lights came on. Pryce turned to look out the Beast’s window. Drones took flight, flanking the ground-based vehicles, ready to spring out to expand their surveillance and intercept any fast moving hostile.

Then they were moving. They went up the ramp, out into dim pre-dawn light of Houston at 6am.

Then she saw the protest.

There were thousands of them, lit by the glow of the streetlights. A police line held them back, kept the road free for the convoy. The Beast’s inches-thick armored glass and hermetically sealed cabin deadened the sound of their screams. Even so, their rage was palpable, visible on faces contorted in anger, in the violent gestures of signs that yelled: “TERRORIST!” “PRESIDENT TRAITOR!” “BABY KILLER!”

She flinched as something was flung at them; it burst in mid-air in a splatter of yellow and someone at the front of the crowd crumpled over in pain.

An egg, she realized. A protester had thrown an egg at the Beast. And one of their drone escorts had intercepted the unknown threat in mid-air and tazed the poor idiot who’d thrown it.

She looked back inside the limo, saw Cindy Stockton staring out the window, a look of sorrow on her face, her husband’s hand in her own. Pryce turned to John Stockton, searched his face for anger, for resignation, for regret, perhaps.

She found something else there instead. Resolve.

He’d asked her to ride with him. Why? Was he about to explain Barnes’s suicide confession?

Was John Stockton about to confide something in her that he’d hidden from her up until now? Was he going to explain to her how it had been necessary? The reasons behind it all?