Ramez Naam - Crux

“Martin Holtzmann?” Alice asked with a raised eyebrow.

Lisa could feel the wave of surprised curiosity and concern radiate from her wife, overlaid with the mixed fatigue and contentment of Dilan suckling at the milk produced by her hormonally augmented breasts.

Lisa nodded. “Holtzmann.” But her eyes were on their son. She could feel his sleepy hunger, his secure comfort. Such a special child.

I should have taken the hormone boost too, Lisa thought. I should be doing my part nursing him . But it was easier for Alice, easier with her career in finance already established enough that she could take so much time off, while Lisa still toiled daily towards tenure in her ivory tower.

“What did he want?” Alice asked.

“To talk,” Lisa said. “Maybe to blow a whistle.”

Alice squinted, and Lisa could feel her skepticism. “Whistle-blowing takes balls and a conscience. The Martin Holtzmann you’ve described didn’t sound like he had either .”

“No,” Lisa sighed. “He didn’t.”

Anne got home an hour later.

“You look better,” she said.

Holtzmann smiled. “I feel better. In fact, I think I’ll go to the office tomorrow.”

Anne Holtzmann lay in bed, pretending to sleep, listening to her husband’s breathing until she was sure he was out.

Something was very wrong here. Paranoia. Emotional outbursts. Night sweats and vomiting. It almost reminded her of…

Anne rose quietly and padded into the bathroom. One by one she opened the medicine cabinets, then the drawers, searching through them, looking for a bottle of pills.

Nothing. Martin had finished the painkillers months ago. So why was he acting like a man on drugs?

Anne Holtzmann crept quietly back into bed, troubled. Tomorrow. Tomorrow she’d do some digging into her husband’s activities.

56

EN ROUTE

Monday October 29th

He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious . Sun Tzu had written that in The Art of War . Feng repeated it to himself again and again as Nakamura drove them out of the city, to a darkened piece of coast on the Mekong Delta, as Nakamura left Feng chained inside the jeep as he loaded supplies into the inflatable boat, as Nakamura clipped a metal leash to Feng’s restraints and pointed with his gun towards the beach.

So tired. Every part of him hurt. He’d downed thousands of calories and the hunger still gnawed inside, his body ravenous for resources to apply to its reconstruction. At his best, he thought he could take the CIA man. But chained, wounded, tired, and weaponless?

Ahead the inflatable boat waited on the sand, piled high with supplies as waves crashed down a few meters beyond it.

“The engine won’t start without me,” Nakamura said. “Drag it out into the water.”

Feng did as he was told, dragging it out with his bound hands as Nakamura followed, until he was thigh-deep in the surf. The CIA agent climbed in, the end of Feng’s leash still in his hand. “Come aboard,” he said. And then Feng was in the boat as well, in the front, looking back at Nakamura.

“We going all the way to Burma in this thing?” Feng asked.

His CIA captor just laughed.

Nakamura kept half an eye on Feng. The rest of his attention he devoted to the rendezvous. He steered south and east for an hour, his eyes peeled for any sign they were being followed or observed. Off to his left, robotic container ships bobbed on the horizon, their superstructures illuminated for safety, waiting for their turn to enter the Nha Be River and unload their wares. Ahead, the sea was dark and apparently empty.

His GPS told him it was time. They were in the zone. He killed the engine. At the forward end of the boat, Feng raised an eyebrow.

Access resource “Manta 7,” Nakamura subvocalized. Initiate pickup sequence. Execute.

“You may want to turn around,” he told Feng with a smile. Reluctantly, the Confucian Fist did so.

For a moment nothing happened. And then a patch of dark sea became calmer, darker, flatter.

Something was rising up. Something wide and blacker than the midnight water, shaped like a stretched rounded wedge, a boomerang with a thickened center. It rose above the waves and water ran off of it.

The central fuselage of the sub was a thicker bulge in the middle of the flying V, twenty feet long and perhaps five feet wide. It gave way in a graceful arc to the wide wings, forty feet from one wingtip fin to the other, swept slightly back behind the body. Every surface was curved for stealth and hydrodynamic efficiency. Barely visible were the ports that could open to launch probes, sensors, and weapons. It was a thing of beauty.

Feng whistled softly. “Manta class,” he said, turning back to Nakamura. “Chinese. How’d you get this?”

Nakamura smiled broadly. “Feng, weren’t you listening? I’m with the CIA.”

They loaded the supplies into the sub. The interior was too small to stand upright in, but more than large enough for the two of them and their supplies. When they were done, Nakamura sent instructions to the jeep on the beach. It would tint its windows and drive itself carefully and unobtrusively back to its home.

“This sub…” Feng asked. “If things go wrong, everything’s blamed on China, yeah?”

Nakamura shrugged, then made the ground rules clear to Feng.

“This sub is slaved to me. The controls respond only to me. And if my biometrics fail, it vents the air and dives to the deepest point it can find. If you try to take the controls, it does the same thing. You understand?”

Feng nodded. “I understand.” He smiled grimly. “You my buddy.”

Nakamura smiled in return. “Feng, I’m the best friend you’ve got in the world right now.”

57

THE FREEDOM TRAIL

Tuesday October 30th

Holtzmann called in sick, then took the train to Cambridge. He passed Nexus detectors, all of his own design, all blind to him. The news on the train was of the pending landslide election and of Zoe. The tropical storm turned hurricane had beaten a path across Cuba, leveling buildings, tossing cars around, killing dozens, sending tourists fleeing for shelter before heading north to narrowly miss Miami.

He emerged hours later into stifling heat. He’d been an undergrad at MIT, not far from here, thirty years ago. October should be cool, highs in the sixties, trees turning yellow and red. But today it was in the eighties. The trees were brown, suffering in heat that had beaten down the Eastern Seaboard the last several months, wiping out crops and feeding energy into storms like Zoe.

He found Lisa Brandt at an outdoor table in a cool white dress, an iced drink in a plastic cup in front of her. His heart beat fast at the sight of her.

She saw him, met his eyes, and rose, gesturing for him to follow her.

“Lisa…” he started.

“Wait,” she said, as she led them off, across the street and onto the Harvard campus.

Holtzmann bit his tongue.

She led them to the Harvard Yard. Undergrads sped past them, on their way to and from classes.

“Now,” Lisa said. “Softly. And from the beginning.”

Holtzmann took a deep breath.

“There’s someone… someone I think you’d be interested in.”

Lisa turned, raised an eyebrow at him.

“Rangan Shankari,” he half whispered.

Lisa frowned. “What about him?”

“I know where he is.”

Her frown deepened. “It’s the children we’re most interested in, Martin. If you have information that can prove children are being held for research purposes…”

Holtzmann swallowed. “You need to get Shankari out. I need him out. I need him safe.”

Lisa stopped walking. “What are you talking about?”