Nexus 02 - Crux (39 page)

Sam threw herself forward and to the side as he fired, felt the bullet graze her hip. And then she was inside his reach. He threw an elbow at her in the close quarters, raised a knee towards her gut. He was fast, and he was good, but he was old, and Sam was young and had the better tech in her body. She blocked his elbow with her right forearm, raised a leg and took his knee to her thigh, then spun, throwing him to the floor and pulling the gun from his hand in one brutal motion. Her shoulder ached but did as she told it.

Lo Prang rolled with the fall, came up on one knee, fast as a snake, with a knife in his hand. Sam moved faster, grabbed the knife hand, twisted it behind him, and brought his pistol to his head.

She looked up just in time to see the two girls get to their feet, trying to blink away the momentary blindness, and the two guards from outside the door push their way through the crowd, automatic weapons in hand.

They stopped when they saw her holding a stunned, blinking Lo Prang, a gun primed to blow his head off.

“Now,” she said to her prisoner. “I’m going to Burma. And you’re coming with me.”

47

NEW HORIZONS

Sunday October 28th

Kade woke slowly, head spinning, disoriented. There was static in his mind. His head ached. He cracked his eyes open ever so slightly. He was on his back, atop something soft. He saw sunlight, a ceiling with a lazily spinning fan and gold filigreed moldings. He was in a bed, giant and ornate, with elaborately carved wooden posts at the corners that towered above him.

He blinked, tried to adjust.

“Good morning,” the Indian man said. Kade looked over. The white-haired figure was dressed in white. He’d pulled back cloth-of-gold curtains from a wide picture window. Beyond it, there was blue sky and ocean. Between Kade and that ocean, there were bars on the windows, a fine mesh built into them.

Kade sat up in the bed. He found himself dressed in cotton trousers and a loose cotton shirt. They’d changed him while he’d slept. Feng. Where was Feng?

“Where am I?” he asked.

“You’re at my home,” the Indian man said. “In Burma.”

“Who are you?” Kade asked.

“My name is Shiva Prasad,” he answered. The name sounded familiar.

“…and I hope we’ll become good friends,” Shiva finished.

Kade felt his anger flare.

“Some way to start a friendship,” he spat out.

Shiva smiled. “Eat first,” he said. “Then we’ll talk.”

Then the Indian man strode out of the room.

Kade jumped to his feet, but before he could follow Shiva out through the door, a young Asian woman wheeled in a cart. A muscular, dusky-skinned man whose origin Kade couldn’t place followed her. The server and the guard. Kade stopped and stood where he was.

The girl wheeled the cart to the middle of the room and unveiled a platter of eggs, bacon, and potatoes; then another of pancakes; flagons of juice, water, and coffee.

“Breakfast,” she said in heavily accented English. Her eyes met his briefly. Then she looked away, and she and the guard left through the door, and he heard a lock click as they did.

Kade ate. If they wanted to drug him or poison him, they could just hold him down and administer what they wanted. Then he explored his prison.

The room was spacious. A king-sized four-poster bed. An antique writing desk and chair. Two oversized ornate antique chairs in a small sitting area. A private bathroom suite almost the size of his apartment in San Francisco. A walk-in closet. Clothes waited for him there. More pants and baggy shirts in soft cotton. Jeans, shorts, T-shirts, sandals, hiking boots, socks, underwear, two bathrobes, a pair of swimming shorts. All in his size.

A kitchenette held snacks, dishware, bottles of beer and sparkling water and expensive-looking wine, a coffeebot, a cookbot that probably cost more than most cars.

Every room had windows. He had incredible views in two directions of a green and blue sea, seen from atop a cliff. From the kitchenette another window afforded a view east into a courtyard dotted with date palms, orange trees, bright tropical flowers, and flowing water. He looked to be on the fifth and topmost floor of what could only be called a mansion.

The windows opened at the touch of a switch to allow the breeze and the scent of sea and citrus. But inset in the window sills were metal frames that covered the space with bars and a fine metallic mesh. Kade could see that these, too, were built to open. But they were all locked and bolted in place. The bars would keep his body here. The mesh was a Faraday cage, he imagined, to keep his mind and any electronics trapped just as surely.

This was an elaborate cell. However luxurious it may be, it remained a prison, and he, the prisoner.

Last, he came to the final piece of his bondage. Around his neck, a thin metal chain held in place a dull metal disk, perhaps two inches in diameter and half an inch thick. Try as he might, he couldn’t get it loose, couldn’t get it over his head. There was a slot where a key of some sort would slide into it. Other than that there was no way he could see to remove it.

A Nexus jammer. Another layer of his prison.

He knew more now than ever before. He’d learned things, from studying Feng’s mind, from his contact with Ling, from meditation with Ananda and the monks, from secrets and tools and pieces of code gained legitimately or stealthily from scientists around the world experimenting with Nexus. He could make his Nexus nodes stand up and do tricks now.

He tried the tools in his toolbox one by one. Frequency tuning code that searched for a band with weaker interference. Filtering packages to suppress the static. An active noise reduction app he wrote himself that played the static reversed, back at itself, to cancel the signal out. Directional tuning of his Nexus antennae, to bore through the jamming in one direction, or boost gain in that direction.

Nothing. Nexus worked fine inside his mind. His code all ran fine. But he could broadcast nothing through the interference, could pick up nothing from around him.

He tried to think like Ling, to remember the feel of her contact, to amp and broaden the sensitivity of the Nexus in his brain until he could pick up the feel of the circuits in the walls, the transmissions all around him, and in particular the inner logic of this jammer.

The static only grew louder in his mind, painfully louder until he broke off in frustration.

He sat down on the floor, crossed his legs, closed his eyes, and began the practice of
vipassana
. He would rein in his attention until he could shift it in such a way that the static wasn’t there, was completely removed from his awareness, and then perhaps he’d be able to pick up…

The door opened. Kade opened his eyes, and Shiva was there, a slate in his hand.

48

ACCESS DENIED

Saturday October 27th

Holtzmann closed his eyes again.

Alive. I’m still alive.

He had to get Rangan Shankari free. He felt it in his bones. The strong desire. The deep
need
to break Shankari loose from ERD custody.

Lane had done this to him, had bent him this way, had turned him into a tool. The boy’s mind had been monstrous, terrifying. The memory of it sent shivers through him. And the President, the assassination… Panic was rising again, clawing at him, threatening to break loose.

He needed something. Relief from this horror. Holtzmann pulled up the neurotransmitter controls, dialed up a dose of his own opiates, just a little one, just enough so he could think. He pressed the mental button, waited for the sweet relief.

Nothing.

What?

He pressed the button again. Nothing happened.

He closed the controls, killed the process, relaunched it, dialed up an opiate dose again.

Nothing.

The panic was rising higher now. Higher every instant.

Lane. Lane must have done this.

He pulled up a diagnostic suite within Nexus OS, ran it to scan the system. Half the diagnostics failed, instantly. Error messages came back. ACCESS DENIED. ACCESS DENIED. ADMINISTRATOR PRIVILEGES REQUIRED. ACCESS DENIED. INSUFFICIENT PERMISSIONS. ACCESS DENIED.

Oh no. Oh God no.

Lane had taken away Holtzmann’s root access to his own Nexus OS. He’d taken away control of the software running on Holtzmann’s own brain.

He forced himself to think, forced himself to concentrate. There must be some way around this.

He reached out to his home network again. Success. He could still access the net. From there he linked to an anonymization service, and from there out to a Nexus code repository. There, a new version of Nexus OS, more recent than his own. He clicked the link to install it, to override his current Nexus OS.

ACCESS DENIED.

Damn it!

He could uninstall Nexus, remove it from his brain. Then find another dose, somehow, reinstall his apps… He launched the command to evict the Nexus nodes from inside his skull

[Nexus purge]

The system threw up a prompt:

[This command will erase Nexus OS and purge all Nexus nodes from your brain. All stored data and applications will be lost. Are you sure you want to continue? Y/N]

[Yes], he thought at it eagerly.

[ACCESS DENIED.]

Holtzmann nearly screamed in frustration. He tried a dozen more things, installing patches, changing permissions on files, editing raw bits that controlled access to resources, writing his own crude code to control his neurotransmitter levels.

[ACCESS DENIED.] [ACCESS DENIED.] [ACCESS DENIED.]

He was sweating now. He could see Rangan Shankari’s face. He could see the boy in captivity. His stomach was clenching. It was intolerable. He had to get the boy out of ERD custody. But he had another problem. A problem that would get in the way.

How long had it been? How long since his last opiate dose? Twelve hours? Something like that?

He was due. He was due to take more. He felt the
need
for it. Even if this added stress wasn’t here, he’d need another dose soon. And without another dose…

Martin Holtzmann was going to go into withdrawal.

49

CAGED

Sunday October 28th

“I hope the room is to your liking,” Shiva said.

Kade pushed himself to his feet.

“Where’s Feng?” he asked.

“We have feelers out,” Shiva replied. “Informants. We hope to know soon.”

“Let me go,” Kade said.

Shiva smiled slightly. “I want us to be friends, Kade. To work together.”

“You try to kill me,” Kade shouted, “get my friend killed or captured, and you want me to
work with you?
” Spittle flew from his lips.

Shiva’s face became stern. “I’ve never tried to kill you. I
saved your life
, and your friend’s.”

“Oh please.” Kade waved away Shiva’s claims.

“What did you think awaited you outside that club?” Shiva asked.

“We knew,” Kade went on. “We would have made it.”

“Oh?” Shiva asked. “Past the snipers on the rooftops?”

Kade’s confidence wavered.

“And if you had, what then? Run again? Where to?”

Kade stared at him, mute.

“And when you were caught, eventually, what then?” Shiva asked. “Do you want your back door in the hands of the Americans? The Chinese? How do you think those governments would use it?”

Kade’s face was hot. He said nothing.

“Can you blame me for what I did?” Shiva asked. “You were out there, irresponsibly, putting yourself at risk, putting more than a
million other people
at risk. Can you blame me for wanting you off the streets?”

“No one gets the back door,” Kade said. “No one.”

“No one but
you
,” Shiva replied. “Isn’t that what you mean?”

Are you wiser than humanity?
Ilya’s whispered in his mind, echoing Ananda.
Not even
you
should have that power.

“Here.” Shiva stepped closer, held out the slate to him. “I won’t let you touch my mind. But I’ve done the next best thing. I’ve recorded my thoughts, my plans, direct from my mind. They’re here for you to peruse. To see how much we could do together.”

Shiva stood before Kade, just feet from him, the slate in his outstretched hand. Kade knew what he needed to do. He closed his eyes, took a steadying breath, and went Inside.

[activate: bruce_lee mode: attack_and_capture]

Targeting circles appeared on the inside of his eyelids. Kade opened his eyes, clicked on Shiva, and Bruce Lee launched him at the man.

His body surged forward. His left fist snapped out, connected with Shiva’s jaw, rocked the man’s head to the side.

[Bruce_Lee: Attack Succeeded!]

His body moved in for a lock, to capture the older man.

Then Shiva’s left hand shot out, grabbed Kade by the neck, lifted him off his feet, and hurled him across the room.

Kade hit the far wall with a thud, the wind knocked out of him. A framed picture jumped off its hook, crashed to the floor a foot away, glass shattering all around it.

[Bruce_Lee: Block Failed L]

Shiva set the slate down on the writing desk, then turned and walked to the door. “I look forward to your thoughts,” he said. Then he was gone, the door closed behind him.

Kade sat there, reeling from the blow.

When, he wondered, has that app ever fucking worked?

He pulled himself slowly to his feet, one hand on the wall for balance.

The door opened, and one of Shiva’s men came in, something in his hand. He brought it up to Kade’s throat and Kade backed away haltingly, until he realized what it was. A key.

The man inserted it into the slot in the medallion around Kade’s neck, and it came loose, falling into the man’s hand.

Kade reached out, immediately, with Nexus, to feel whatever he could. But this man wore a static-producing jammer as well, and the slate was the only other thing in the room transmitting, advertising a set of files for Kade to consume.

The man nodded to Kade. “I’ll be outside if you need anything, sir.”

Then the guard turned and left, locking the door behind him, leaving Kade with the slate, with Shiva’s promised thoughts and plans.