Authors: Ramez Naam
But first, he must get close enough.
He looked out his window again, opened his mind wide for any trace of another. Nothing. But below his window… A trellis, climbing up to maybe four feet below his window ledge. It was covered in tropical flowering vines. He could climb down that, reach the ground, sneak in the darkness towards the south wing…
Kade had to try it. He wouldn’t get another chance.
He put one foot out over the ledge, and suddenly he had vertigo. His room was on the fifth floor. The ground looked frighteningly far away. This wasn’t a climbing gym, with smart ropes and impact-absorbing floor. This was real life. A fall could break an arm or leg. Or worse.
No choice, he told himself.
He sat himself in the window sill, held on to both sides as he put his feet out before him. Then he turned, slowly, carefully, rolling onto his belly, his hands inside the kitchen, his feet down the wall, searching for the trellis.
He pushed himself out further, his chest on the window sill now, his arms squeezing against the inside wall of the room to hold him in place, lowering his legs to find the first step.
One foot made contact. There. And then the other.
Would it hold him? Kade kept his arms inside the window, but shifted more of his weight out and down, onto his feet, his arms still ready to catch him.
The trellis held.
He eased out further, bit by bit, transferring his weight, still holding on for dear life.
The trellis held.
He paused to catch his breath. He had to move fast. He could be seen here at any time.
The next move would be the hardest. It was four feet from his window ledge to the top of the trellis below it. There was no obvious handhold in between. He’d have to hold onto the window with one hand, then lower the other to the top of the trellis.
He’d been to rock-climbing gyms. Not often, but a few times. He’d never thought of himself as athletic, but he was tall, skinny, long-limbed. In a gym he could make this move. He could reach. He could grasp the big obvious hold that the horizontal bars of the trellis were.
But in a gym, if Kade failed, the rope would catch him.
Still no choice. The only question was which hand. He could hold onto the window with his stronger left hand, always his off hand before, but the one that worked well now, and reach down with his weaker right.
Or he could hold onto the window with his right, reach down with his stronger left to grasp the new hold.
He’d do it that way. The window sill was thick, solid beneath his weight. The new hold looked obvious, but it was an unknown. He’d use his best hand for that.
He gripped the window as best he could with his right, his whole elbow over the ledge to carry his weight, tried to keep his hips close to the wall, his center of gravity over his feet, to let them take all his weight, and then reached down with his left.
No good. Kade couldn’t reach like this.
He worked his feet lower on the trellis, another step or two. He held onto the window with just his hands now. His right was aching already.
Move fast. Staying still burns you out.
He reached down with his left again, his right hand gripping as tightly as it could, aching, complaining. Almost… Almost…
Kade couldn’t quite reach with his hips against the wall. So he pushed out, pushed his hips back, lowered his shoulder. The fingers of his left hand brushed the trellis…
Then one foot slipped off, and his body lurched down and to the right, and his other foot followed. His fingers reached and found nothing. His full weight crashed down on his right hand and excruciating pain surged from it. His body swung to the right and his feet kicked, kicked, scrambling, looking for a hold.
He felt something snap in his fingers, in his wrist, felt a horrific ripping pain as some tissue not yet fully healed gave way. His grip came loose. His fingers slipped. His weight dropped. He almost screamed in agony as he fell.
And then his left hand closed around something. His body swung back to the left and his left foot was suddenly on a step. Kade wobbled, swinging like a door, scrambling, off balance, still on one foot and one hand. He kicked with his right foot, swung his half-crippled right hand. The foot found something, and somehow he slammed his right arm in through a gap in the trellis, burying it up to his elbow in foliage, letting the whole arm take weight.
He hung there, panting. The pain was enormous.
He closed his eyes.
Breathe.
Breathe.
Pain is an illusion.
Breathe.
He opened his eyes.
The pain was still there, but less crippling. It was a signal to his mind that his body was damaged. Information, not emotion.
Breathe.
He had to move. He couldn’t stay here.
Kade worked himself down, cautiously, stepping down with his feet, pulling his aching right hand out, then shoving it deep in another gap in the trellis until his elbow could take the weight, and finally shifting his left hand down to the next hold.
He nearly wept in delight when his feet touched the earth. He let himself crumple to the ground, lay on his belly to make the smallest sight possible, and paused for a few seconds to catch his breath.
He opened his mind again. Network connections were all around, all locked. Shu could crack them open with an eye blink, but he wasn’t Shu. He needed a human mind.
Kade crawled north, using the wall and benches and shrubs and trees as cover.
The circular driveway came into view. Beyond it, the gate and the small attached guardhouse. He could see a man’s head through the windows, seated inside there, turned away from Kade and out towards the island beyond the house.
Kade went Inside, opened up a control panel, grabbed a control for directional Nexus transmission, tightened it down into a focused beam aimed in the direction of the guard. He felt for the man’s mind, and found him.
He reached out to the guard, opened an encrypted connection, activated the first back door, sent his passcode for it, and then Kade was in.
And now he would…
Something was wrong.
He looked out the man’s eyes. He was strapped to the chair. There was gear all around him, electronic gear, listening gear. There was an IV in his vein, cameras watching him, a woman next to him, standing, in a white lab jacket. The serving girl. Her finger was on a button connected to the IV.
What?
Fear struck him. He issued a remote command, pulled up process and resource utilization listings inside the man’s Nexus OS. And there – strange programs were running. Loggers. Listeners. Decrypters. Trapping every bit of data about this communication stream, about the internals of the Nexus OS running in this mind’s brain, about every bit of data loaded in and out of memory.
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.