Ramez Naam - Crux

“A level three lockdown now is in effect. All non-essential personnel must evacuate. Repeat: An explosion has occurred in the Chicago office. A level three lockdown is now in effect. All non-essential personnel must evacuate.”

Explosion. Lockdown. Evacuation.

That meant him. He didn’t think he could get to the exit. And he couldn’t let anyone find him like this.

Opiate overdose. Dear God.

He needed something to counteract it. Holtzmann racked his confused brain. Was there anything in the lab that could help him? Naloxone? Some opiate antagonist?

Dammit, he thought, I can’t even make it to the lab.

He’d have to settle for a stimulant, try to counteract the massive opiate concentration in his brain.

He tried to pull up the interface to the neurotransmitter release app, and fumbled the command. He tried and failed a second time. He stopped himself, took a deep steadying breath, and succeeded on the third try. Once the app was up, he selected a release of norepinephrine. How much? He was still so woozy. Too little wouldn’t help. Too much and he’d risk a heart attack or worse.

The alarm kept blaring in his head. He could hear people in the hallway outside his door. If someone came in to look… He couldn’t be found this way.

He dialed up what he thought was a moderate dose, only twice as large as the bumps he’d taken yesterday, and hit the mental button to release it.

His thoughts felt a little clearer within seconds. The fog receded a bit.

He kept a hand on his desk and pulled himself to his feet.

The world spun again and he fell to his knees, gasping.

Dammit.

Holtzmann stayed there for a moment, getting his breath, and then gave himself another burst of norepinephrine, as large as the first. The world cleared further.

On the second try he got to his feet and managed to fetch his cane from where it had fallen. His skin crawled, his hair was matted with sweat, and his stomach wanted to empty itself, but he was up, he was moving.

He crossed the room to the door, a little unsteadily, and pulled it open to join the exodus.

It wasn’t until he was in his car and had told it to take him home that he checked his phone. Five missed calls. Three messages. All from Anne, wondering where he was, if he was still alive.

He leaned his seat back and told the phone to call her.

“Martin!” she answered. “Are you OK? Where have you been?”

He could hear voices behind her. The hubbub of Klein and Perkins, the law firm she was a partner at.

“Anne, I’m so sorry. I fell asleep at work. Don’t feel quite well.”

“I was worried,” she replied, sharply.

“I’m sorry, Anne. I’m in the car on the way home now.”

There was a pause on the line. Then Anne spoke again. “I’ll meet you there.”

“No, no. No need. I think I’m going to just lay down when I get home.”

Another pause.

“Call Dr Baxter, Martin. This might still be an effect of the bombing.”

The neurologist. The last person he’d let examine him right now. “I’ll call him as soon as I get off the phone with you.”

“OK,” Anne replied. “It’s good to hear your voice. I’ll come home early this afternoon. Love you.”

“I love you too.”

He hung up the phone and lay there, feeling like death warmed over, as the car continued towards home.

Someone stole Nexus from my lab, he thought. And used it to try to kill the President.

I have to find them. Before the ERD comes looking and finds me.

Martin Holtzmann lay in his car and began to make his mental list of suspects.

10

THE MISSION

Thursday October 18th

Kevin Nakamura waited in the dark, below the DC underpass. The road above rumbled as a caravan of trucks roared over it. A hard rain was falling, dripping down off the edges of the highway above, making the road wet, the air misty. In the brutal heat of DC’s hottest October on record, neither rain nor darkness brought relief, only an oppressive humidity.

Even in this rain, DHS’s domestic surveillance drones flew. Nakamura could picture them out there, all-weather models, circling below the clouds, cameras tracking objects on the ground, interleaving data with the road camera network, with the cell phone tracking databases, with the auto transponder systems, forming a pervasive information web, tracking all activity in the nation’s capital.

Except for the few dark spots. The spots like this one, devoid of cameras, protected from overhead surveillance. The men like him, devoid of tracking devices, their true identities carefully camouflaged below innocuous public personas.

Nakamura waited, watched the cars go past, watched the rain drip down the pillars holding up the road, listened to the rumble of the highway overhead.

Then a car slowed, pulled onto the shoulder of this lower road. Black sedan, tinted windows, government plates. The passenger door opened even before it had come to a stop. A man in a dark suit stepped out. The door closed behind him and the car accelerated back into traffic.

Nakamura watched the man approach. Tall, fifty-something, with sandy hair going to gray, a paunch slowly spreading on what had once been a lean frame. McFadden. Deputy Director for the National Clandestine Service. The CIA’s top spymaster, reporting straight to the Director of Central Intelligence himself. He looked older every time Nakamura saw him.

They stood between two of the massive pillars holding up the highway, hidden from above and from the road, visible only to the rats that dwelled deeper in the underpass.

“Kevin,” McFadden said. “Thanks for coming.”

Nakamura nodded. As if he’d had any choice.

McFadden pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, offered one to Nakamura.

Nakamura shook his head as McFadden lit up and took a hearty draw. Cancer-free nicotine delivery, they said. But still not for him.

McFadden exhaled out of the side of his mouth, away from Nakamura, then withdrew a folded sheaf of papers from inside his jacket. Nakamura could see the faint glimmer of monolayer gloves molded to the Deputy Director’s hands. No fingerprints.

McFadden handed the top sheet to Nakamura. Blank. Nakamura swiped his thumb across it, and an image appeared. A heavy-set, middle-aged man, jowly.

“Two weeks ago,” McFadden said, “this man, Robert Higgins, turned himself in to police in Des Moines. Higgins is a fifty-three year-old computer security consultant with a history of emotional imbalance. He told Des Moines PD that he’d created a hacked version of Nexus and used it to coerce, abduct, and rape three women. He’d stopped a month earlier when a ‘cyber Buddha’, in his words, mentally neutered him. Nexus won’t work for him anymore, and he can’t even think violent thoughts without convulsing.”

“Jesus,” Nakamura replied.

“Cyber Buddha,” McFadden corrected, taking another draw on his cigarette. “A week before that, Mexico City PD was contacted by a girl who claimed that she had been coerced via Nexus, and that just before the perp could rape her, in her words, an ‘angel of the Lord’ came down, paralyzed the man who’d abducted her, and set her free of the coercion software.”

Nakamura said nothing.

“We have three more cases like this,” McFadden said. “Interventions in Nexus 5 coercions. Two more rapes, one multimillion-dollar theft. In each case, someone breaks into the mind of the coercer, renders the Nexus in their minds inoperative, and creates a block against future behavior.”

“So we have a Nexus vigilante,” Nakamura mused. The image on the paper was already disappearing, smart circuitry wiping it out, scrambling the data irrevocably.

McFadden nodded. He handed Nakamura a second sheet of paper, blank again. “One more,” the Deputy Director said. “Fresh from this morning. Classified. DHS tried to keep it from us.”