Ramez Naam - Crux

Oh no. Oh fucking no.

It was a trap, a trick to find his back door.

He’d sent the passcode over an encrypted connection. No one listening in between the two of them would be able to pick up anything but encrypted garbage. But inside the guard’s Nexus OS copy, for just an instant during the back door’s invocation, what he’d sent would be held in memory, unencrypted, to be compared to the passcode embedded in the Nexus OS…

He had to erase the knowledge in this mind. He started hunting, looking for the logfiles, looking for data he could wipe out…

Then his connection to the man’s mind dropped. Static kicked in. Static everywhere. Pools of it spreading out from all over. Flood lights kicked in across the courtyard. And then Shiva was there, standing above him, pulling off the hood of a chameleonware suit that was detuning itself. Security men appeared around him.

They’d been here all along, sitting silently, their Nexus nodes in receive mode. He’d been tricked.

Shiva looked down at him.

“See to his arm,” Shiva said. And the medic that Kade had first seen in Heaven rushed forward, something in his hand.

The man pressed a hypersonic injector to Kade’s neck, and Kade felt the cool pinprick of something entering his bloodstream.

The last thing he remembered was Shiva, his eyes, looking down at him, and the man shaking his head slowly.

69

THE PLAN

Friday November 2nd

Nakamura held Sam’s eyes. He thought of the hell she’d been through as a child, hell created by the Communion Virus and those who abused it.

Nexus was so much more. With a back door to Nexus... the coercion possibilities were enormous. The scale of atrocities was larger than he could imagine. Did he trust the CIA with that power?

He remembered the underpass, McFadden’s repeated warnings, that no one else could know. Not the ERD. Not the rest of Homeland Security. Not Defense.

Not Congress.

Not the White House.

Jesus, Nakamura thought. How could I have been so stupid?

Sam spoke as if reading his thoughts. “You can’t let them have it, Kevin.”

Nakamura stared at her. Loyalty. He was loyal to his friends. He was loyal to his family, what little there was of it. He was loyal to his country.

Yes. He was loyal to his country. He’d always been that.

“The things they’ll do with it, Kevin,” Sam was saying.

She was right. His country didn’t need that. America wouldn’t benefit from putting that kind of power in anyone’s hands. And most especially not the hands of someone trying to hide that power from everyone else.

McFadden, Nakamura thought. What did you think you were going to do with it?

It didn’t matter now. Nakamura wouldn’t allow it.

He thought back to his time with Lane. Not a monster. Not a killer. Not an evil man. Just a kid, really. A kid in way over his head.

A kid with dangerous knowledge in his head.

Nakamura took a deep breath. That knowledge was the problem. That knowledge was the threat to the United States.

He exhaled slowly. What he had to do left a bad taste in his mouth. A taste of betrayal. A taste of compromise.

But his duty was clear. He’d sworn an oath to protect the American people. That trumped CIA, trumped ERD, trumped his own qualms. There was only one way he could think of to really, truly protect the American people against this threat.

Kade’s face flashed through Nakamura’s mind, a memory of the weeks he’d spent training the boy in San Francisco. The kid that couldn’t lie to save his life. Something twisted inside Nakamura. But there was no other way he could see.

“OK,” he said, and nodded to Sam. “You’re right.”

“You won’t give them Kade?” she asked.

“I’ll tell them he died,” Nakamura replied.

And that was true enough.

They took the more useful of Sam’s supplies from her boat, scattered palm fronds over the parts of it where the chameleonware had failed, then rowed back out in Nakamura’s little inflatable, talking all the way. They had the bones of a plan. A weak plan, to be sure. But it would have to do.

It was well after midnight when the wing-shaped sub rose out of the depths before them. Sam whistled softly. Then the hatch was opening, and they were climbing in.

“Nakamura!” Feng yelled. He was seated in the cramped interior, his arms chained above his head and his feet manacled to the floor. A display surface before him showed infrared action from somewhere. Then his eyes took in Sam, and they widened.

“What’re you doing here?” the Confucian Fist asked.

Sam laughed, then she was climbing into the small interior herself, keys in hand, and the manacles fell from around Feng’s wrists.

“What’s going on?” Feng demanded, as Sam placed the keys in one of his hands.

Nakamura raised an eyebrow at Feng, then grinned. “Things have changed, Feng. Looks like we’re partners after all.”

They hashed over variants for hours. They had imperfectly aligned goals. To free Kade. To deny Shiva the back door. To get the children away from Shiva and to safety. There were no ideal options. Only options with greater and smaller risks, greater and smaller unknowns.

They had one new piece of intel. The drones had picked up aberrant behavior on infrared, had prioritized monitoring of it, had routed it to the sub. Feng played it back for them. They crouched around the horizontal display in the cramped interior of the sub.

On screen, the IR displayed an interior courtyard, ground and building walls evident as darker areas, cooler than the air around them. Then something changed. A false-colored figure appeared in a window, long and lean. The figure climbed out a window facing the courtyard, tried to climb down, slipped, made it eventually. The figure crept along the interior wall of the courtyard, towards the gate on the eastern side where it would lead out to the rest of the island.

Then other figures appeared around him, their IR-blocking chameleonware uncloaking, and carried him off, across the courtyard, and into the building via a door.

“How long ago was this?” Nakamura asked.

“Two hours,” Feng said.

“And you think this is Kade?”

Feng nodded. “Tall? Skinny? Trying to escape? Yeah, Kade.”

Nakamura looked at Sam. She nodded slowly. “Yeah.”

“So now we know where he was ,” Nakamura mused. “And what door they took him in. It’s a start.”

Three hours later, they were agreed. As they sun rose over the Andaman Sea, they stretched out to get what sleep they could. Tonight, after nightfall, would be their assault.

An assault that Nakamura could not let Kaden Lane survive.

70

MISSION EVE

Friday November 2nd

Breece, Ava, and the Nigerian met for the last pre-mission check-in Friday night.

All the data lay before them. No sign of new surveillance on Miranda Shepherd. No sign of added security measures at the prayer breakfast site. No intrusions to the safe house. No sign of activity around the garage.

Hiroshi was dead. The memory of firing a bullet into his brain still haunted Breece, still filled him with immense sorrow and even greater anger.

But he’d done what Hiroshi had wanted. He’d ended things before the hacker could learn who they were and what they planned.

Damn it. He was going to make someone pay for that.

Later. After tomorrow. After this mission.

He looked at what was left of his team, a question in his eyes.

“Go,” the Nigerian said.

“Go,” Ava said.

Breece nodded, thoughtfully. In twelve hours they’d end the lives of two of the greatest criminals of the modern era, and hundreds of their supporters. Among the dead would be the man responsible for his parents’ deaths.