Authors: Ramez Naam
Ten years since fear had turned America into a police state, since the priests and the politicians had decided that they could control who you were, what you were, what genes you carried, what tech you put in your brain.
Ten years since he’d become a freedom fighter. And now, finally, they were making headway.
Breece crouched beside his parents’ graves, reached out his fingers to brush the cold stone.
“I miss you,” he whispered.
He rose to his feet hours later, as the sun dipped below the plains of central Texas. He dusted himself off and started down the hill, pulling out his phones and turning them on as he did so.
His team phone buzzed angrily the instant he activated it. An urgent message, long delayed. Breece looked at the display. It was from Hiroshi.
[Your up-phone is burned. DHS.]
Breece stared at the phone numbly for a moment, then dropped to the ground behind a headstone.
His up-phone. Fuck. The one that connected to Zarathustra. How’d they know that number? Only he, Zara, and Hiroshi knew. And Hiroshi only because he’d been employed by AmeriCom, had set up the hidden alert that would tell Breece when the Homeland Security backdoors were activated to tap into his data, his location.
They must have taken Zara. Breece pulled out the up-phone. The thing was poison now, reporting his location to DHS. How long did he have until they arrived?
He left the up-phone powered on, tossed it away from him, then reached into his pants pocket and pressed the hidden switch. His shirt, pants, and shoes shifted color to match the grass. From his other pocket he pulled out thin gloves and balaclava which did the same, then pulled them on. His clothing lacked the speed and resolution of true chameleonware. They wouldn’t turn him into a blur when he moved. They wouldn’t mimic a detailed pattern behind him. But if he lay still or moved slowly, they could blend him into the grass and the headstones and trap most of the IR signature of his body.
He slowly belly-crawled away from the phone. At the end of the row was a small family crypt. He got there and lay still against it, his body hidden from the cemetery entrance, at least. He searched the sky. Were there invisible drones up there? Did they have a lock on him already? Had a cordon been pulled around him? His eyes saw nothing.
Breece carefully peeked his head around the crypt. In the twilight he could still clearly make out the Lexus in the parking lot, maybe three hundred yards away. He could make a run for it, leave the phone in the grass, get in the vehicle and get out of here before DHS closed the noose.
His other phone buzzed again. Hiroshi, calling in real time. Good friends, the Japanese. Loyal. Good transhumans, too. Always thinking ahead.
“Breece here,” he replied.
“Breece,” Hiroshi replied. “What’s your status?”
“Nominal,” Breece answered. “No sign of DHS.”
Then he saw the other car inbound. Black SUV. Tinted windows. No insignia of any sort. He couldn’t make out the plates from here. The SUV pulled into the parking lot slowly and came to a stop just by the entrance gate. The doors opened and three men in dark clothing stepped out. They wore light jackets that were totally unnecessary in the warm evening air. Perfect for concealing weapons.
Breece’s own gun was carefully hidden inside the Lexus, a conscious choice that the risk posed by carrying the weapon was greater than the risk of being caught without it.
“Scratch that,” he said into the phone. “Someone’s here.”
Two of the men were coming up the hill now, heading in the direction Breece had thrown the phone. Unremarkable faces. Dark hair. Athletic figures held calm and erect. Eyes calmly scanning to and fro.
Professionals.
Both men coming up the hill had hands in their jacket pockets. Breece imagined their fingers curled around the grips of pistols. The third man stood at alert by the SUV in the parking lot at the foot of the hill, a bundle over his shoulder. A rifle, perhaps.
“We’re inbound to you,” Hiroshi said. “Forty minutes out.”
“Don’t think I have forty, Hiroshi. Gotta go now. Call you back.” He cut the connection.
Who were these men? No uniforms. Unmarked vehicle. Hidden weapons. Where was the SWAT team? Where were the snipers? The drones and choppers? This didn’t smell like the law.
It didn’t matter. What mattered was that these men were here for him. To capture him or kill him. And that wasn’t going to happen.
He was sweating now. The active camo he’d turned on was trapping his body heat, not letting it escape into the air around him where an infrared scope could pick it up. Without a thermal capacitor to suck that heat up, he was going to get warmer and warmer until he cooked.
Breece eased back behind the crypt, slowly, no sudden moves. Then he went Inside, launched a bootleg app.
[remote_driver -boot -silent]
The app reached through the net connection of his phone, connected to the Lexus’s sleeping auto computer, and booted the car up in silent mode, no lights, no sound, all electric. A window came alive in his mind’s eye, and he pushed it full screen, complete immersion. He could see out of the car’s cameras now. Status panels showed battery charge, GPS, engine temperature down the side of his vision. Front and center, through the car’s cameras, he could see the man standing against the SUV. The plates were Texas, standard civilian, no government endorsement of any sort. He couldn’t be sure, but inside the tinted windows the vehicle looked empty.
The man by the SUV was looking the other way, up towards the cemetery and his colleagues. The man held onto the bundle over his shoulder like a rifle. Breece used his mental finger to click on the screen, drag it to one side. Down below, the Lexus panned its cameras slowly. Through its eyes he watched the two others ascending the hill. They were almost to his discarded phone.
He’d only get one shot at this. He tapped commands into the app running on his Nexus OS for a moment. Then he reached down with his right hand and pulled the ceramic blade from his calf holster. He peered one last time around the crypt wall, then back into his inner eye and the feed from the Lexus’s cameras again.
Now.
Breece closed his eyes and tapped a mental button. The Lexus surged forward at the man by the SUV. Breece opened his eyes immediately, bringing them back to the two men here on the hill with him.
He heard the crash of metal on metal, saw a flash of something across the window in his mind. The men turned, startled, and then Breece was up and the ceramic blade was whistling through the air between them, thrown with superhuman force. The knife turned end over end, then lodged itself in the neck of the closest one with a meaty
thunk
. By then Breece was hot on its trail, sprinting at breakneck speed.
The one he’d hit staggered and fell into his colleague. The second man struggled to shake off the body and pull the gun from his pocket. Then Breece was on him. He grabbed the assassin’s wrist, stepped inside the man’s reach, and punched him in the solar plexus. The man dropped and Breece wrenched the gun from his hand.
Something bit into his arm and he dropped to one knee on instinct, thinking he’d been hit. An instant later the sound registered – a bullet shattering stone. It came again and again. Someone was shooting in his direction, hitting gravestones, sending stone chips flying.
He closed his eyes and looked out of the Lexus’s cams again. The third man was pinned, his lower body crushed between the Lexus and the SUV, but somehow the man had a silenced rifle in his hands and was shooting up the hill. Breece felt a flash of admiration for the man. A real trooper. True grit.
Breece grabbed the mental shifter of the car, threw the Lexus into reverse, tapped the accelerator. On screen, the man collapsed to his hands and knees as the Lexus backed away from the SUV. Breece braked, shifted gears, then jammed the Lexus forward again. The man’s face snapped up, loomed in the cameras, eyes wide in shock and horror, and then all went black as the Lexus crushed what remained of the would-be assassin against the SUV.
Breece opened his eyes again, still down on one knee. The world was quiet suddenly. Breece’s breath came fast and his heart was trying to pound its way out of his chest. He was drenched in sweat and burning hot. Were there any others out there?
The man he’d punched stirred on the ground next to him, and Breece grabbed him by the hair, and held the man’s own silenced pistol to his face.
“How many of you?”
The man coughed. “Three.”
“Who sent you? What was your mission?”
The man said nothing.
“Who sent you?” Breece raised his voice.
The man shook his head. “They’ll kill me.”
Breece clamped his hand over the man’s mouth, lowered the gun, and obliterated the man’s knee cap with a single shot.
The man screamed into his hand.
“
I’m
going to kill you,” Breece whispered to him. “The only question is whether you want to die fast or slow.”
He waited for the man’s muffled screams to subside, then put the tip of the silencer against his other knee.
“Ready to talk?”
The man nodded miserably, tears flowing down his face.
“Who sent you?” Breece asked again, pulling his hand off the man’s mouth.
The man closed his eyes and panted for a moment, and Breece thought he’d have to shoot the other knee. Then the assassin opened his eyes. “Zarathustra,” he said. “I’m PLF.”
Well, well, well. He hadn’t thought the old man had it in him.
He got the rest of the assassin’s story, and then it was time to go.
He put the silencer tip against the downed man’s forehead. “Any last message you want me to deliver?” he asked his would-be killer.
“Please,” the man pleaded, eyes locking with Breece’s in fear. “I’m PLF, like you. Let me live. You’ll never see me again. Please, man. I wanna live forever!”
Breece thought of his parents, their bodies decomposing just yards from here. “We don’t all get what we want,” he told the man. And then he pulled the trigger.
26
ASIAN TRAVELS
Wednesday October 24th
It took Kevin Nakamura twenty-eight hours to reach Saigon disguised as a civilian. He could have come faster via military transport, but that would risk DOD finding out about his mission. Which CIA was adamant could not happen. He pondered this as the cab took him towards the nicer end of town, to his apartment. He paid the taxi fare, took his entirely innocuous luggage, and rode the elevator to his floor.
At the door hidden biometric sensors identified him. Anyone who failed that identification would soon find themselves in for some very rude questions.
Inside the apartment he found the gear, cunningly hidden, all there. He found himself smiling, whistling as he inspected it, found everything ready and top notch.
And out there, in the countryside, and under the waters off the coast. Resources the DOD and DHS and Congress didn’t know CIA had. Resources that even the White House might not know about. Resources he’d never known existed, and that he had access to now.
That alone told him how important this task was.
Will the White House know when I’ve snatched Lane out from under the ERD? he wondered.
Doubtful.
What did that say about his mission?
Nakamura pulled the small Toyota four-wheeler out of the garage an hour later, loaded with fuel, food, cash, and hidden weapons. This would be his mobile command center, taking him wherever he needed to go to find Sam. To find Lane, he corrected himself.
The wind blew through his hair as he drove into the early evening traffic. Saigon was alive in the way that only developing world cities ever were. The traffic was complete chaos, cars going to and fro, scooters and tuk-tuks racing between them, pedestrians playing a deadly game of Frogger with the vehicular traffic.
Sidewalk vendors had their fires going, offering noodle soups, roasted corn, spicy sandwiches, whole birds cooked on spits. Music blared from a dozen directions. Lights were coming on in shops. Brilliant signs over storefronts were starting to glow in a riot of colors. Sidewalk entrepreneurs sold watches, slates, phones, belts, shoes, drugs, all shouting out their offers, competing with one another for the attention of the crowd.
Nakamura smiled. He felt alive in the field. He didn’t belong in DC, taking briefings or writing reports. Out here, where chaos rules, where his wits and his skill were all that stood between life and death, that’s where he was meant to be.
Six hours later, well after midnight, he was in the hills above Ayun Pa.
Three monasteries attacked. Two of them burned to the ground.
And this one, Ayun Pa. Local police reports – cracked by CIA – showed nine dead, four assailants and five monks. No women dead. Not in any of the three monasteries.
Nakamura left the four-wheeler, activated his chameleonware suit, and hiked up in the darkness to look down onto the monastery. His pupils dilated in the moonlight. Enhanced rod and cone density sucked up every available photon. The scene was leached of color, but as bright as day to his eyes. That thrill of the mission, of being on the edge of danger, of discovery, of action, tickled up his spine again.
The monastery complex was walled, roughly oval, with a handful of buildings, a wide open courtyard, two entrances large enough for vehicles to come through.
The autopsies revealed that one man had died from bone fragments driven into his brain. Two had died from broken necks. The last from a crushed larynx.
Sam could have done that
,
Nakamura thought. She always liked to go for the throat.
He pulled up orbital reconnaissance photos of the site in his mind’s eye. Retinal implants superimposed them on his vision. Remote Vietnam was not a high priority target for the National Reconnaissance Office, but with more than three hundred recon birds circling in low earth orbit, now, and most of them taking frames five hundred miles square, every patch of the planet was photographed at least once an hour.
Those photos had revealed two hard-top four-wheel drive vehicles hidden in the brush, off-road, a few hundred yards from the back entrance. They’d been there for three hours before the shootings.