Ramez Naam - Apex

Text and numbers appeared to the side of Liz Finch’s face. The pulse in her throat was amplified in false color for Pryce. Her eyes had circles around them, showing pupillary dilation.

Pryce exhaled slowly. “What I’ve got tops that, Liz. Sorry. It should be fast.”

Finch was a professional. “No problem. I’ll get him. Hold on.” On screen, her finger reached for a key.

Telltales showed calm and cool.

“Wait!” Pryce said.

“Yes?”

“Liz,” Pryce paused. “Have Miles Jameson or his people called? In the last, say, hour or two? Or any time today?”

Finch frowned on screen. “Carolyn, you know I can’t tell you that.”

Mild anxiety.

“It’s important,” Pryce said. She took a breath. “Liz… I can’t even tell you how important it is.”

Finch pursed her lips. Then Stockton’s secretary gave the tiniest shake of her head.

Elizabeth Finch’s finger reached out, and the Presidential Seal replaced her face in Pryce’s view.

Truthful response. That’s what the stress meters made of Liz Finch’s little shake of her head.

Pryce took another deep breath, fought to regain her composure, to present a calm visage for the coming conversation.

Just over a minute later, the President’s face appeared. He was in his private study, just off the Oval Office.

More telltales appeared, giving her incredibly illegal monitoring of John Stockton. Of the man she’d worked for over the last two decades and more.

“Carolyn,” he said. “What’s the situation?”

Calm. Cool.

“Mr President,” she said, in her best analytic tone. “We’ve had a breakthrough in the PLF investigation.”

Stockton frowned slightly. “OK. Go on.”

Nothing unusual in the stress monitors. This wasn’t the topic he’d expected.

Stay cool. Stay calm.

“You recall the leaked memo,” she said.

“Yes,” Stockton replied.

He was still calm, still focused.

“The clue was the mention of the CALVINIST program,” she said. “That led us to more information about…”

She saw his brows knit just a tiny bit in concentration. His eyes went a little further away in attempted recall.

The telltales showed focus. No anxiety. No spike of fear. No rapid dilation of his pupils. No unusual visual saccades.

“You recall the mention of CALVINIST?” Pryce asked.

“Not… specifically,” Stockton said. “But go on.”

Mild befuddlement, perhaps. Concentration. No fear.

Hope grew inside her. She had to push on.

“It was the second program discussed, after HARBINGER,” Pryce said. “You remember that one, yes?”

Stockton’s brow knit a tiny bit more in concentration. “You may have to… refresh my memory. But just cut to the chase here.”

Confusion. Blood pressure rising the tiniest bit. Impatience.

One more. One more test.

“Yes, sir,” Pryce said. “Well, if you’ll think back to SENTINEL…”

Stockton shook his head slightly. His lips parted in apparent frustration.

Pulse rising the tiniest bit. Blood pressure also. But no real spike, no shock of recognition. No shock of being found out.

“Carolyn. Just tell me: what did you find out?”

Pryce took a breath.

God I hope I’m right about you, she thought.

“Miles Jameson ordered the creation of the PLF, Mr President. I’d bet my career on it.”

In fact, she thought, I already have.

“What?” John Stockton replied. The spike came now on screen. Icons showed his pupils dilating, his carotid artery pulsing harder and faster, betraying a rising blood pressure, a more rapidly pounding heart.

“How do you know?” Stockton demanded.

“The code words I just gave you are real, Mr President,” Pryce told him. “They were tied up with the PLF’s creation. But they weren’t in the memo that was leaked.”

Stockton was staring at her. “You were testing me.”

Pulse still rising. Blood pressure still rising. Pupils narrowing now.

Pryce pursed her lips. “You passed, Mr President. Miles Jameson didn’t.”

“Pryce,” Stockton said, his voice rising. His face was growing red. His carotid was pulsing wildly in the false color imagery.

“I have to go now, Mr President,” Carolyn Pryce said. “If anything happens to me, Jameson’s probably the one behind it.”

“Wait!” the President said. “Pryce, what are you talking about? Where are you?”

Pryce cut the connection.

Pryce pulled out her second phone, the new one Kaori had used cash to buy her for this trip, and sent a single message to Kaori. “01” Zero for Jameson. One for Stockton. She popped the data card out of her primary phone and swapped it into the new phone, tunneled the new phone to an offshore anonymizer, and started beaming the video to a pair of remote accounts she’d created for herself and Kaori.

The primary phone started ringing.

She ignored it.

Someone overrode her, forced a connection to open against her will.

She reached over and hung up on them.

This video was, if not proof, then at least circumstantial evidence of Stockton’s innocence of the PLF’s creation.

The bandwidth was terrible out here. But she had other things to do. Pryce rotated her seat to face backward, to the wide open cabin configuration many preferred. Then she opened her gear bag and started pulling out the heavy Special Forces parka, snow pants, hood, face mask, and the rest of the gear.

Three times she reached over and hung up when the White House forced her phone on.

Finally, the gear was all on. Jesus, just putting it on was a lot of work.

“Display map,” she said.

There, that was the spot. That overpass.

She reached out with her finger. It trembled.

Whew.

She took a deep breath. Superior intelligence. Data. Planning.

I’ve got a plan, she told herself. It’s going to work.

She reached out with her finger again, pointed at the overpass. Her finger was steady this time.

Steady enough, anyway.

“Pause at this underpass,” she told the car. “Let me out. Then continue towards Billings at normal speed.”

Three hours later, as the light was starting to fail, Carolyn Pryce stopped her off-road hike across the fields of Montana and stood, panting, trying to catch her breath, her heart pounding in her chest, cursing herself for not keeping up a more intense training regimen in her day-to-day life.

To anyone passing by, she would have been the faintest of blurs, with the faintest of wide, soft depressions as tracks left behind her.

Then the blur reached down into a thigh pocket of the heavy chameleonware parka she wore, pulled out the un-stealthed black rectangle of her second phone, and punched in a code, before returning the phone to her pocket, and returning herself to near invisibility.

Her primary phone she’d left in the Tesla. Not to avoid the President.

But as a beacon for Jameson.

Twenty minutes later, she heard the whup-whup-whup of the helicopter. The Special Forces cold weather mask painted a vector for her. She turned, blinked at the tiny spot, and it magnified.

Blink, magnify.

Blink, magnify.

Blink, magnify.

Until she could read the registration on the side.

Only then did Carolyn Pryce deactivate her chameleonware.

It was only once she was in the helicopter, chartered under an alias, on her way to the airfield at Bozeman, that she checked the news on her phone.

Then she saw that there had been a terrible accident on icy highway 87.

The highway to Billings.

Head on collision between a truck and a passenger vehicle.

Her vehicle.

Total loss. Completely flattened.

Pryce felt numb from it. She felt no victory. No sense any more that her plan had been superior, that she’d outsmarted anyone.