Nexus 02 - Crux (49 page)

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 slate 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.

The wind hit him immediately. Gale force. Outside the trees were bending hard, their branches all pushed in one direction. Sharp pinpricks of rain sprayed painfully into Rangan’s face. The sound of the storm was a constant roar. A boom sounded from some place, then a cracking sound. He looked around to get his bearings, thought he understood where they were going. He reached out with his mind to the kids, did his best to hold them together, to focus them. He showed them in his mind where they were going, showed them that they
had
to hold hands, and then they were off.

He felt the wind and rain take their toll on the boys. They were all in slippers, not proper shoes. They were completely soaked from head to toe in seconds. Their slippered feet slid on wet asphalt. Halfway across the open square, Parker raised his hand to shield his face from the stinging of the rain and the human chain broke. Rangan made them link up again, even in the pelting rain and the harsh wind, made them hold hands and started them forward again.

They made it another hundred yards, almost to the trees, when he felt a sharp wince of pain from behind him. Jose! Jose was down on the ground. He’d tripped on a curb. The boy had hit his head and there was a bloody scrape on his brow and he was crying.

Rangan shoved the taser into the pocket of his prison pants, then hoisted Jose up over his shoulder. The boy was heavy! He grabbed Tim’s hand again, made the other boys link up, and then they were into the trees.

Leaves blew around them. The wind and rain were less here, but they still stung. Twigs and rocks hurt the boys’ feet but he made them keep moving. On the other side of the trees they’d find…

There. They came out of the trees, and ahead was the side gate to the complex. It was a chain link affair, barbed wire at the top, with automated stations to allow ingress and egress on either side. There was a guard booth, but Rangan couldn’t see anyone in it. A pale red light glowed on the card reader on the station on this side. This was it.

“Come on, boys,” he shouted out loud and into the howling wind. He reached out with his mind to enfold them, to push them forward.

He dashed out of the trees, into the road, to the station, Tim’s hand still in his own, Jose still on his shoulder. The rain lashed him with increasing fury. The wind came on strong enough that he almost lost his feet. He was soaked now, soaked to the bone, shivering from it. He felt misery and cold and fear and confusion from the boys behind him.

Then he was there. Rangan let go of Tim’s hand, fished out Holtzmann’s badge, swiped it against the evil red eye of the scanner, and waited. And waited.

The red eye blinked at him, stayed red. Nothing happened.

Fuck!

Rangan swiped the badge again. And again. He jammed it up against the reader, swiveling it around.

“Come on, you piece of shit!”

Then abruptly the red eye was green. Rangan turned his head. Slowly, slowly, the gate was swinging itself open.

He shoved the badge back into his pocket, grabbed Tim’s hand, and dragged the boys through the widening crack, not waiting for it to open fully. They ran out across a road, into more trees, through the trees. Jose was heavy but Rangan kept the boy on his shoulder, kept moving, kept consulting Holtzmann’s map in his mind.