Crux

by Ramez Naam

  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.

  “It’s unanimous,” Breece said. “We’re a go.”

  71

  LIBERATION

  Thursday November 1st

  The wind was starting to blow in earnest as Holtzmann made his way back home Thursday night. The house felt empty without Anne. He unpacked his cargo – Becker’s workstation, his slate, the gold memory foil, the bottle of Laphroaig.

  Now to find a way to read the digital memory Warren Becker had left behind. The memory foil was a format both old and specialized. His sla
te wouldn’t read it. His workstation wouldn’t read it. He hunted through old electronics in his garage for an hour, came up with nothing. Then he searched online, looking for any data. Tools were out there. They were specialized and rare. The electronics lab at the ERD would have what he needed…

  Tomorrow, then.

  He set about making the house ready for the coming storm, nailed fitted plywood they’d had made after Hurricane Catherine over the windows, made sure the house batteries were charged, filled up a barrel of water for himself.

  And then he slept, as the wind and rain peppered his home.

  Friday November 2nd

  Friday morning he rose to fiercer winds. They howled outside. He checked the power, phones, and net. All were still online, but the news broadcasts warned that all systems could fail with Zoe’s advance. Be prepared.

  There was another message on the Nexus board.

  [Fire alarm will go off at 7.22pm. Be ready.]

  He loaded emergency supplies into the car, in case he was stranded – food, water, a raincoat, a flashlight, and the first aid kit their oldest son had insisted they keep in the house. Then Holtzmann told the car to make its way to the office.

  From inside the car the storm was a surreal thing. Not yet the hurricane proper, but already its effects were being felt. Trees bent under the onslaught. The rain was a near horizontal spray, splattering in rapid fire across the windows of the car. The windshield wipers couldn’t hope to keep up. The car drove itself, without need of Holtzmann’s eyes.

  There were thousands of cars on the roads, all headed out of the DC area. The police had turned all the lanes of the highway into an exodus eight cars wide. Only the shoulder was heading in towards DC. Holtzmann instructed the car to take it, overrode its emergency warnings about traffic out of bounds. He kept his hands on the wheel, ready to take over if the car became too confused.

  The police stopped him, then again, then a third time. He was going the wrong way. This was an emergency vehicles only lane.

  Each time he flashed his Department of Homeland Security ID. The word “Director” was emblazoned under his picture, and for once he used that rank, dropped phrases like “national security” and “mission critical”.

  They let him through each time. On the third instance they offered him an escort. Holtzmann declined and drove on.

  At the DHS campus he found no one at the outside gate. The automated defenses were active. He waved his badge, held his eye up to the retinal scanner, and the gate rose, letting him and his vehicle onto the grounds.

  Inside the building it was a ghost land. The hallways were empty. Lights were off. Holtzmann fetched his slate from his office, made his way to the Human Subjects wing. The same guard was there. He looked up in surprise as Holtzmann approached.

  “I want to see Shankari,” Holtzmann told the man.

  “Director Holtzmann… We’re on emergency staffing only. I don’t have anyone to bring him to you.”

  “Issue me a taser,” Holtzmann told the man. “I’ll be fine.”

  The guard looked flustered. “Director… the protocol is to have security with you. The prisoner’s dangerous…”

  Holtzmann stared the man down. “The protocol doesn’t work today. The prisoner is a college student, and you have us on camera.” He pointed at the bank of screens in front of the man. “I need to talk to Shankari. This is a national security matter. Now issue me that taser.”

  Three minutes later he opened the door to Shankari’s cell, his cane in one hand, a taser in the other.

  Rangan looked up as the door opened. Holtzman was back. His heart beat faster.

  “Have you reconsidered?” Holtzmann asked him. “Thought of anything new?”

  Rangan shook his head. “I’ve told you everything.”

  [holtzmann]File transfer request. File: tonight.txt. Accept? Y/N

  [rangan]Y

  A file started downloading to his brain.

  “Keep thinking,” Holtzmann told him. “I’ll be back tonight, and if you haven’t thought of something new then, you’re going to regret it.”

  The file download completed. Then Holtzmann turned and left the cell, closing the door behind him.

  Rangan waited, then opened the file.

  Inside he found instructions. Instructions for his escape, and for the children’s.

  Holtzmann returned the taser to the guard. “See?” he told the man. “No problem at all.”

  The electronics lab was on the fifth floor. Holtzmann used his badge to unlock the door, let himself in, and flipped on the lights.

  He knew what he needed. And it must be here somewhere. He pulled up the inventory on the open terminal in the lab, and started hunting.

  Two hours later, in frustration, he gave up on finding exactly what he was looking for. The foil format was fifteen years old, and had only ever found narrow usage. No new readers for it had been built in a decade. There were readers here that could load the foil, could read the data on it. But none of them would talk to a modern slate or workstation.

  He wasn’t going to find a ready-made solution. He was going to have to build one.

  It took him most of the rest of the day, resurrecting skills he hadn’t used since grad school, chaining components together, testing the data path, until he had something he thought might work. The wind howled outside as he worked, picking up speed, sending a spooky moaning sound through the building. What a day.

  Holtzmann took his connected components down to his office at 6pm, grabbed coffee and a pre-packaged snack from the break room on the way. He delicately seated the foil in the kludge of a device he’d built, then plugged it into his workstation.

  Garbage. The thing wouldn’t load properly.

  He spent half an hour debugging, cursing his rusty computing skills, until he figured out the problem. One of the components had an ancient version of its firmware, more than a decade old, that wouldn’t properly interface with his modern workstation.

  He hunted online for the right update, found that the device manufacturer had gone out of business, hunted further, found an obscure site with an archive containing what he needed. He downloaded the new firmware, loaded it onto the component, then held his breath.

  Loading files… Load successful.

  Yes!

  The interface was slow, painfully slow. He started the files copying onto his workstation.

  And then it was almost seven. Time to get Rangan and the children out.

  Rangan looked up from the floor of his cell as the door opened. Holtzmann again. The man had a taser in one hand, his cane in the other.

  “Tell me more about how to reverse-compile Nexus,” Holtzmann said.

  Rangan shrugged. “It’s not gonna be easy. There’s a lot of evolved code in there. The neural connectivity map. The synaptic weights. The mapping models for different parts of the brain. They all look like garbage, like random numbers. The obfuscator would have seen that as great camo. The back doors are probably woven into that, split up into a thousand little pieces of code, spread around in little random-looking blocks.”

  “So how do we peel it apart?” Holtzmann asked.

  “I have no idea,” Rangan said honestly. “Brute force?”

  They went back and forth, back and forth and nowhere at all.

  Then the alarm sounded. It blared and blared.

  Holtzmann turned around, as if looking for the source. The taser hung loosely in his right hand.

  Then Rangan was up, running forward, tackling the man. The cane fell from Holtzmann’s grip. Rangan shoved the older man against the wall, got his right hand on the taser, punched Holtzmann in the back of the head with his left fist, then jabbed the taser into the man’s back and pressed the button.

  Holtzmann’s body jerked and spasmed, then crumpled to the ground.

  Rangan reached into the man’s pockets, found his badge, found his wallet, grabbed them both. Then he yanked Holtzmann’s shoes off, put them on his own slippered feet. They fit
for shit, but they were better than nothing. Now was the test. He waved the badge at the door with his left hand, the taser still in his right.

  And the door opened.

  Booyah.

  He jumped into the hallway. It was deserted. Right turn. Down the hall. Next door. He waved Holtzmann’s badge at the door reader and the door opened, and a dozen young minds greeted him.

  72

  INTO THE STORM

  Friday November 2nd

  Rangan hustled the children down the hall, following the path that Holtzmann had sketched out for them. Their minds were chaos, disorganized, scattered. He’d told them this was coming, but they were still so hard to herd. The fire alarm blared and blared, making everything worse, pushing itself into the kids’ minds. He made them hold hands, Tim just behind him, holding Rangan’s hand, chained all the way to the back, to Bobby. Alfonso came in the middle. The other boys would have left him, and that pained Rangan, but Alfonso was the one who’d suffered the most, and Rangan was going to get that little boy the fuck out of this place.

  Ahead they were coming up on the security desk. Rangan clutched the taser tight. If shit was gonna go bad it was gonna be here. They turned the corner and he made ready to jump out, to throw himself at the guard. But the station was empty. The bank of screens showed Rangan and the kids on one display, but no one was here to see it.

  Then they were past it, at the elevator. Rangan waved Holtzmann’s badge and the door opened, and then they were all cramming in. Rangan hurried them along, pulled them all into the elevator, then pounded the button for P1. He waved the badge again and P1 lit up. The doors closed and they descended.

  The doors opened again onto a nearly empty garage. They piled out of the elevator and Pedro dropped Tim’s hand and the chain was broken. He stopped and forced the boys to chain up again, counted them to make sure he had them all. Then they hurried across the garage, the way Holtzmann had told him, Rangan half dragging the boys until they reached the stairwell. He yanked on the door and it was open. They took the stairs up, opened the next door, and suddenly they were outside.