Crux

by Ramez Naam

  He dialed up what he thought was a moderate dose, only twice as large as the bumps he’d taken yesterday, and hit the mental button to release it.

  His thoughts felt a little clearer within seconds. The fog receded a bit.

  He kept a hand on his desk and pulled himself to his feet.

  The world spun again and he fell to his knees, gasping.

  Dammit.

  Holtzmann stayed there for a moment, getting his breath, and then gave himself another burst of norepinephrine, as large as the first. The world cleared further.

  On the second try he got to his feet and managed to fetch his cane from where it had fallen. His skin crawled, his hair was matted with sweat, and his stomach wanted to empty itself, but he was up, he was moving.

  He crossed the room to the door, a little unsteadily, and pulled it open to join the exodus.

  It wasn’t until he was in his car and had told it to take him home that he checked his phone. Five missed calls. Three messages. All from Anne, wondering where he was, if he was still alive.

  He leaned his seat back and told the phone to call her.

  “Martin!” she answered. “Are you OK? Where have you been?”

  He could hear voices behind her. The hubbub of Klein and Perkins, the law firm she was a partner at.

  “Anne, I’m so sorry. I fell asleep at work. Don’t feel quite well.”

  “I was worried,” she replied, sharply.

  “I’m sorry, Anne. I’m in the car on the way home now.”

  There was a pause on the line. Then Anne spoke again. “I’ll meet you there.”

  “No, no. No need. I think I’m going to just lay down when I get home.”

  Another pause.

  “Call Dr Baxter, Martin. This might still be an effect of the bombing.”

  The neurologist. The last person he’d let examine him right now. “I’ll call him as soon as I get off the phone with you.”

  “OK,” Anne replied. “It’s good to hear your voice. I’ll come home early this afternoon. Love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  He hung up the phone and lay there, feeling like death warmed over, as the car continued towards home.

  Someone stole Nexus from my lab, he thought. And used it to try to kill the President.

  I have to find them. Before the ERD comes looking and finds me.

  Martin Holtzmann lay in his car and began to make his mental list of suspects.

  10

  THE MISSION

  Thursday October 18th

  Kevin Nakamura waited in the dark, below the DC underpass. The road above rumbled as a caravan of trucks roared over it. A hard rain was falling, dripping down off the edges of the highway above, making the road wet, the air misty. In the brutal heat of DC’s hottest October on record, neither rain nor darkness brought relief, only an oppressive humidity.

  Even in this rain, DHS’s domestic surveillance drones flew. Nakamura could picture them out there, all-weather models, circling below the clouds, cameras tracking objects on the ground, interleaving data with the road camera network, with the cell phone tracking databases, with the auto transponder systems, forming a pervasive information web, tracking all activity in the nation’s capital.

  Except for the few dark spots. The spots like this one, devoid of cameras, protected from overhead surveillance. The men like him, devoid of tracking devices, their true identities carefully camouflaged below innocuous public personas.

  Nakamura waited, watched the cars go past, watched the rain drip down the pillars holding up the road, listened to the rumble of the highway overhead.

  Then a car slowed, pulled onto the shoulder of this lower road. Black sedan, tinted windows, government plates. The passenger door opened even before it had come to a stop. A man in a dark suit stepped out. The door closed behind him and the car accelerated back into traffic.

  Nakamura watched the man approach. Tall, fifty-something, with sandy hair going to gray, a paunch slowly spreading on what had once been a lean frame. McFadden. Deputy Director for the National Clandestine Service. The CIA’s top spymaster, reporting straight to the Director of Central Intelligence himself. He looked older every time Nakamura saw him.

  They stood between two of the massive pillars holding up the highway, hidden from above and from the road, visible only to the rats that dwelled deeper in the underpass.

  “Kevin,” McFadden said. “Thanks for coming.”

  Nakamura nodded. As if he’d had any choice.

  McFadden pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, offered one to Nakamura.

  Nakamura shook his head as McFadden lit up and took a hearty draw. Cancer-free nicotine delivery, they said. But still not for him.

  McFadden exhaled out of the side of his mouth, away from Nakamura, then withdrew a folded sheaf of papers from inside his jacket. Nakamura could see the faint glimmer of monolayer gloves molded to the Deputy Director’s hands. No fingerprints.

  McFadden handed the top sheet to Nakamura. Blank. Nakamura swiped his thumb across it, and an image appeared. A heavy-set, middle-aged man, jowly.

  “Two weeks ago,” McFadden said, “this man, Robert Higgins, turned himself in to police in Des Moines. Higgins is a fifty-three year-old computer security consultant with a history of emotional imbalance. He told Des Moines PD that he’d created a hacked version of Nexus and used it to coerce, abduct, and rape three women. He’d stopped a month earlier when a ‘cyber Buddha’, in his words, mentally neutered him. Nexus won’t work for him anymore, and he can’t even think violent thoughts without convulsing.”

  “Jesus,” Nakamura replied.

  “Cyber Buddha,” McFadden corrected, taking another draw on his cigarette. “A week before that, Mexico City PD was contacted by a girl who claimed that she had been coerced via Nexus, and that just before the perp could rape her, in her words, an ‘angel of the Lord’ came down, paralyzed the man who’d abducted her, and set her free of the coercion software.”

  Nakamura said nothing.

  “We have three more cases like this,” McFadden said. “Interventions in Nexus 5 coercions. Two more rapes, one multimillion-dollar theft. In each case, someone breaks into the mind of the coercer, renders the Nexus in their minds inoperative, and creates a block against future behavior.”

  “So we have a Nexus vigilante,” Nakamura mused. The image on the paper was already disappearing, smart circuitry wiping it out, scrambling the data irrevocably.

  McFadden nodded. He handed Nakamura a second sheet of paper, blank again. “One more,” the Deputy Director said. “Fresh from this morning. Classified. DHS tried to keep it from us.”

  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.

  What happened to you, Sam? What really happened in Bangkok?

  He needed answers.

  11

  CLOUDS ON THE HORIZON

  Mid October

  Sam almost opened herself to Jake three times that week. The first time was as she watched him work on the old truck, which had broken down again. She watched as he explained what he was doing to a curious Sarai, pointed out the parts and how they worked, handed her the wrench and showed her how to use it.

  He’d make a great dad, Sam thought. But that night he was distracted and his mind felt troubled, his head buried in his slate dissecting the budget of the house, line items weighing on him like stones. She let the moment pass.

  She decided again two days later, when little Kit fell from the tree he was climbing and his pain and shock lanced through all their minds, and somehow, even though she knew she was faster, Jake was there before she was, shushing Kit and sending soothing thoughts and gently probing the arm the boy had fallen on. She could feel Jake’s calm win the boy over, feel the fatherly awe Kit held Jake in, and it warmed her.

  But that night, drunken village teenagers came to their gate and threw insults and stones and bottles. Sat pralat! they shouted. Monsters! You have monster children in there!

  A bottle flew over the wall and crashed into one of the windows of the house, sending a spiderweb of cracks out. Jake winced. Sam’s anger rose, and she got up to go show these punks a lesson, but Jake put a hand on her arm.

  “They’re just kids, Sunee. Just ignore them.”

  Then she felt ashamed.

  She decided a third time three nights later, while she waited for him to return from a supply run. She lay awake in
the bed that she’d invited him into every night for weeks, and lost herself in the conjoined dream of the children, a riot of forms and shapes and thoughts and memories.

  Sam drifted off to sleep, smiling, in love with these magical children, in love with her life, and maybe, maybe just a tiny bit in love with this man.

  She woke two hours later. She was alone in the bed. Where was Jake?

  She rose, pulled on an oversized shirt for modesty, and padded down to his room. The door was open. His bed hadn’t been slept in.

  Frowning, she went outside. The truck was nowhere to be seen. The gate was still shut and locked. It was past midnight now. He was long overdue. A flat? A problem with the truck?

  She went inside and tried his phone. It went straight to messages. She checked her own messages. Nothing.

  It was probably something simple. A breakdown. A drained phone battery. A reception dead spot.

  But Sam sensed trouble.

  She pulled on boots and pants, threw water and food in a daypack, and left a terse note for Khun Mae and then a gentler, truth-evading one for Sarai. She slung the pack over her shoulders and headed out the door. Then, as an afterthought, she went back and grabbed one of the machetes they used to hack back the jungle, and slung that over her shoulder too.

  She took the road from the hilltop house to Mae Dong at a jog, her posthuman eyes scanning right and left, picking out rocks and holes in the road in the darkness. She found him nine miles down the road, three miles from the village.

  He was on foot, limping, a cut on his brow. His clothes were torn and one eye was black.

  “Sunee!” His mind lit up with joy. Beneath it was shame, resignation.

  “Jake!” She was on him and then she was kissing his face and holding him close. “What happened?”

  He shook his head. “I was dumb. I forgot to fuel up earlier, so I stopped in Mae Dong. They were drunk. Four of ’em. And they recognized me.”

  He stopped and leaned against a tree. “They took the truck… all the supplies… Beat the shit out of me.”