Ramez Naam - Apex

It would be even safer to just leave, the Nigerian had told him, by way of the thin thread of throwaway contact addresses they’d given each other.

But Breece wasn’t ready for that. There was one more op the hacker had pitched to him. And it was a doozy.

He waited for the Nigerian to take a seat, here in neutral territory, in this spot that was neither of their hidey holes.

Then he laid out the plan for his old friend.

“It isn’t possible,” the Nigerian said, when Breece had finished.

“Anything’s possible, my friend,” Breece replied. “If you have the right resources.”

“The cameras,” the Nigerian said, pointing at a diagram. “The sensors. All these spaces are highly secure.”

“So was Maximilian Barnes’s home,” Breece said.

The Nigerian nodded at that, thoughtfully, still studying the diagrams in front of him.

“And this would be the best mission ever,” Breece went on.

The Nigerian looked up at Breece, and a shockingly white smile split that broad, dark face. “Yes. The best.”

The truck was stolen. Breece had procured it himself, changed the color and plates, and lobotomized it. It would never record anything about their travels. They took it to Baltimore, to the warehouse space Breece had secured two weeks ago, careful to minimize the biological evidence they left inside.

When the Nigerian saw what Breece had in the warehouse, he whistled.

They moved in the small hours of the night, while the Capitol slept. The cameras and other sensors, anything that could be hacked, were not the problem, or so their hacker ally had claimed to Breece.

Humans, on the other hand, were. Humans couldn’t be hacked.

Unless, of course, they could.

The chameleonware suits he’d retrieved from Barnes’s storage were the highest end he’d ever seen, higher end than he’d known existed. They bent light and T-rays, muffled sound, alerted him to sensors scanning for him, and more. The largest stretched to fit the Nigerian.

They moved towards the garage ramp of the Rayburn House Office Building. There were two Capitol Police officers at the garage entrance at this hour, plus others on patrol elsewhere.

[Ready?] Breece subvocalized to his hacker friend.

[The cameras are mine] came the reply, printed in text across Breece’s tactical display. [They will see nothing.]

Breece looked over, saw the Nigerian outlined in a man-shaped grid of green lines, and gave him the signal. They moved forward, silently, lethally.

Seconds later, there was Nexus coursing through the arteries of these Capitol Police officers. Long minutes after that, the officers were back on duty, but with new orders, new priorities.

Breece went back for the truck, while the Nigerian stayed to keep watch.

[All clear] came the signals, once from the Nigerian, once from the hacker.

He rounded a corner and eased down the ramp. The armored gate to the garage rose up, and Breece pulled the truck forward, into the enclosed space. His pulse shot up. This would be a fine time to pull the noose shut.

Nothing.

He parked it in a dark corner, and they got on with business.

The carts were things of beauty, if you liked your beauty barely visible. Loaded down with the tanks, they each weighed hundreds of pounds, but were all but impossible to see. Their chameleonware warped light as well as the suits that Breece and the Nigerian wore. Only at their wheels, where true chameleonware had been sacrificed for lower end active camo, was there a decent chance of detection. And even that subsided dramatically if they stopped moving.

They lowered the three carts down the ramp of the truck, linked them together into a chain, then closed the truck up. It was a professional delivery vehicle, that hopefully wouldn’t look too out of place here, if it were even seen at this ungodly hour. Even so, it was one of their greatest risks of detection.

The faster they moved, the better.

From the garage, they took service doors, all of which opened at their touch, which led in turn to a long tunnel. They moved down the tunnel quickly, silently, no other human in sight, slowing only to maneuver the substantial and cumbersome mass of the three carts and their tanks around the bends and corners of the subterranean tunnel network that linked this vast complex of buildings.

At the tunnel’s end, they would make one more turn, and then reach the United States Capitol.

Instead, they stopped, by a red maintenance door with a sign that proclaimed FIRE PROTECTION EQUIPMENT – AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Breece punched in a code he’d been given, and it unlocked. They opened the double door, rolled the carts inside, and followed another hallway to an elevator, where they had to unhook the carts from one another. Then down, to another hallway, chain up again, then to another door, which opened to another code.

Breece looked around, and smiled beneath his chameleonware. The walls of the giant room were subdivided into individual panels, each of them labeled. Almost every panel had a set of tanks hooked up to pipes. Breece searched until he found the right label, above a massive panel. Then he and the Nigerian set about silently swapping the tanks they’d brought for the tanks connected to pipes there.

Kate walked slowly, silently, nearly invisibly through Breece’s Baltimore warehouse, clad in high-end chameleonware. The cameras in her visor took picture after picture, amplified the light, presented the scene to her.

She took it in, processed it, made sense of it.

The chemreactors.

The pressurized tanks.

The fittings.

The labels on the tanks.

She put it together with the blueprints and maps she’d found in his accounts.

She knew his identities. She knew his accounts. He’d been careful with everyone. But not with her. Not anywhere near as careful as she had been with him.

Kate stopped in the middle of the warehouse, turned slowly, taking it all in, imagining it in action.

Breece was up to something big. This part, at least, she approved of.

73

By Their Very Absence

Monday 2041.01.07

Sam sat at the terminal in her office, her face lit by the pale blue glow from the screen, her brows knit together.

Feng was long gone for the night. She’d left, herself, had eaten with the children, had played games and read stories and given baths and kisses and hugs and goodnights.

The best thing ever. There was nothing that compared.

Now they were asleep. And she was back.

Her role as an external advisor to Division Six came with certain access. A security clearance. Not a particularly high one. Less than she’d enjoyed in the US. But she needed some access to do her job.

Over the past weeks she’d slowly used that access for her own purposes, to investigate the people she dealt with, the people the children dealt with: their tutors, the domestic staff, the programmers on Kade’s team, Lakshmi Dabir, all the rest. And she’d used it to investigate their home – this campus. This strange oasis of calm in the frenzied digital boomtown chaos of Bangalore.

It wasn’t so hard. She’d trained in data archeology. That was both her most common cover as an ERD operative and a real skill she used in unraveling the webs of organizations misusing emerging technologies. She applied it here.

She ran into walls, of course. There were files she simply didn’t have access to. Records that demanded credentials she didn’t have, authorizations she hadn’t been given. Exactly where she met those barriers, and what she could read prior to them , was informative. It defined a space of possibilities, scoped out a landscape of information containment.

What struck her more was what she couldn’t find.