Ramez Naam - Crux

Nakamura swiped his thumb and video played across the sheet. Four lines of people moving through a security checkpoint, all of them wearing badges. DHS’s Chicago office. The video zoomed in on one man, in business attire with a backpack slung over one shoulder. A red oval appeared around him, and a name and bio. Brendan Taylor. Accountant for DHS.

One moment Taylor was slowly moving forward with the line. The next, a look of bewilderment appeared on his face. In the video he patted himself down, turned around frantically, slammed his bag on the conveyor.

Then he yelled something, “I think I have a bomb! A bomb!”

Then chaos and static.

Nakamura looked back up at McFadden, found the man’s dark eyes staring into his.

“The bomb site’s positive for the presence of Nexus,” McFadden said. “But it seems that, at the last second, Taylor snapped to, realized what was going on, and tried to stop it.”

Nakamura blinked. “You think this is connected?”

“We think all of these are Kaden Lane,” McFadden said. “We think he has a back door into Nexus 5, one we haven’t been able to find, and he’s using it, to stop abuses he sees.”

Nakamura narrowed his eyes. “So what’s the mission? And why all this?” He gestured at the underpass, at the cloak-and-dagger. They could have met at a conference room in Langley.

McFadden took another drag on his cigarette, then exhaled to the side. “We want you to find Kaden Lane, Kevin. Find him before the bounty hunters ERD has let loose do. Then bring him back to us. And we want you to do it completely off the record.”

So off the record that even the CIA’s secretaries and its meeting scheduling system don’t have a record of it, Nakamura thought. Black. Total black.

The video was wiping itself from the paper in his hands as he watched. Pixels were dissolving into nothingness.

“Why?” he pushed McFadden. “Why not let ERD reel him in?”

McFadden took another drag. “You know what ERD is like, Kevin.” His eyes kept boring into Nakamura’s. Nakamura squinted. “Lane can’t fall into their hands. He can’t fall into Defense’s hands either, or FBI’s, or anyone else. Only us.”

He handed Nakamura a third sheet. “Instructions for delivery,” McFadden said.

Nakamura thumbed it, scanned the text that appeared, committed it all to memory.

Nakamura looked up at McFadden. “What about Cataranes?”

McFadden ground out his cigarette on the concrete pillar, took out a small metal case, dropped the butt into it. No DNA to be left behind.

“We know you were close,” McFadden said. “Use your discretion. Just bring Lane back, alive.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Nakamura saw another car pulling off the road, its windows as tinted as the first.

“Burn those papers, Kevin,” McFadden told him. “And do this quietly. Get Lane before ERD’s bounty hunters do. And don’t let anyone figure out that we took him.”

Then the Deputy Director was striding away, towards the car door that was opening for him.

Nakamura sat cross-legged on the floor of his apartment, spine erect, hands folded in his lap.

This place was so empty now, since Peter had left. Since Peter had decided that it wasn’t working, that he couldn’t live with a husband who disappeared for weeks or months at a time, who felt more alive away from home than in it, who wrestled with demons but couldn’t share any of them with his partner in life.

Just another failed relationship in a long string of them. Forty-seven years old now. What did he have to show for his life? He’d killed people on six continents. He’d saved lives. He’d thwarted terrorists and gleaned intel and completed missions whose purpose he still didn’t understand.

I’m getting maudlin in my old age, Nakamura thought. He forced himself to bring his attention back to his new assignment.

Trust. It all came down to trust. CIA didn’t trust ERD or the rest of Homeland Security. Homeland Security didn’t trust CIA. And none of them trusted Defense.

And he, who did he trust? Who was he loyal to?

They’d picked him because he was available, because he was experienced with totally black, totally deniable missions, because he had a deep distrust of ERD, because he’d known and trained Lane before his trip to Bangkok. And because of Sam.

Sam. That was one life he’d saved. He’d done that much good in the world. Back when he was FBI. Before he’d come into the ERD at the ground floor, at its very inception. Before lies and half-truths and missions that seemed more about stopping progress than protecting people had turned him into a cynic and sent him into the welcome arms of the CIA.

Nakamura looked across the room. There, the picture of his grandfather as a boy, during World War II. Kenji Nakamura, the first of his family born in the United States. The picture was in black and white. His grandfather was little more than a toddler. He was in the arms of a beautiful, smiling Japanese woman in a dark coat. In the foreground, between them and the camera, was a chain link fence, topped by barbed wire.

His grandfather and great-grandmother had been interned, made prisoners in their country, while his great-grandfather had gone off to fight for America in World War II. It was the oldest family picture he had, more sentiment than anything else. A photo that represented a different time, the sort of thing that couldn’t happen in America any more.

Except that it could, and it was. ERD had developed new internment plans while he was there, to deal with potential threats like the Aryan Rising clones. Those plans had been quietly nixed. But lately he’d heard from his contacts in ERD that they were being reactivated, upgraded, quietly put at the ready in anticipation of a wave of children born with Nexus.

Jesus.

Nakamura sighed. He’d let himself stay at ERD two years after he’d discovered those plans the first time, until finally one too many deceptions, one too many missions about stopping science instead of guarding the nation had pushed him over the edge.

He’d tried to quit. And when ERD wouldn’t let him quit, he’d turned to McFadden, already a department head at CIA. And McFadden had pulled strings, gotten him reassigned.

When the CIA is the place you turn to for moral clarity, Nakamura thought, you might have a problem.

CIA wanted him to find Lane. Finding Lane most likely meant finding Sam as well. And no one knew Sam better than Nakamura.

When he did find her… Did he trust her? Would she trust him?

Images of Sam filled his mind. Sam at fourteen, coughing in that burning room at Yucca Grove, the first instant he’d seen her, with the gun at her feet and blood pouring from the dead prophet below her. Sam in his arms as he’d jumped from the third-floor window of that burning building. Later, huddled in the blanket he’d put around her shoulders as she watched the ranch where she’d lived and been imprisoned and degraded go up in flames. Sam waiting to hear if her sister or parents had made it out, knowing already what the answer would be…

Sam at fifteen, karate practice, the hours they’d spent together with him teaching her how to protect herself. Her tears and anguish on the one year anniversary of Yucca Grove.

Sam on her sixteenth birthday, in a long black gown, out to the opera with her “uncles” Kevin and Peter, resplendent in their tuxedos.

Sam at eighteen, the target pistol he’d given her as a gift.

“What kind of a gift is a gun?” Peter had asked. But Sam’s eyes had lit up when she’d opened the box, and she’d hugged him tight.

Sam as an ERD trainee, working twice as hard as anyone. So determined. So sure of what was right and what was wrong. So naively loyal. So patriotic.