Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 (17 page)

She had no idea what to say, what to do. She just stared up at him, one hand slowly rising to her mouth, the metallic taste still flowing onto her tongue. Terror gripped her.

“Do you want things to escalate? Protesters in the street perhaps?”

He crouched down, closer to her. She could feel the heat coming off his body now.

Her heart pounded in her chest.

“Where do you think that would lead?” His eyes searched hers. They were cold eyes. Dark eyes. The eyes of a man who could ruin her without remorse.

“Soldiers? Gunshots? Tanks?” His eyes bored into hers, not letting her go. “Students, dead in the street? Or worse? More Shanghai events? Tens of them?”

She swallowed, said nothing. She couldn’t breathe. Didn’t trust her words not to betray her.

“Is that what you want, Zhi Li?” Bo Jintao asked. “No?”

Bo Jintao stood back up to his full height, his hands straightening his suit.

“Your nation educated you,” he told her, looking down. “Your nation marketed you to the people. Your nation
made
you. Now you owe your nation a certain degree of service and respect.” He smiled faintly at her. “And if that’s too difficult to accept, then remember that the state
owns
your face
. It owns your
voice
. We can make a
billion copies of you
. Think on that the next time you try to undermine your country.” He shook his head. “Because that would be the
last
time.”

Then Bo Jintao and his aide and his guards walked away, leaving her with Lu Song and a very on-edge Dai and Qi.

L
ater
, in the limousine, as it drove them to the airport and her private jet and their homes in Shanghai, Zhi Li scanned the video feeds, again and again.

The fan tubes had dozens of videos of their interview. All were missing that question. Fans slyly commented that Zhi Li had said something very clever. Others complained that their phones had malfunctioned at that very moment. None dared mention the word coup. None dared speculate that censor codes had deleted those seconds of video from their phones, though everyone must know it was so.

Even as she watched, posts mentioning camera malfunctions began to disappear before her eyes.

Her hands clenched into fists.

She turned to the sanctioned channels next. And they had the full interview. All of it. Jin Lien asked her, “What would you think of acting opposite Lu Song again?”

And on every channel it was the same. Zhi Li looked over at her lover, looked back at the cameras, and smiled broadly. “If the studio could land Lu Song for the male lead,” her smile broadened even wider. “That would be perfect. Just perfect.”

Zhi Li shook in frustration and rage, as a mute, trembling Lu Song held her.

S
he woke in Shanghai
, in Lu Song’s penthouse suite in the Pudong, the closer of their homes to Shanghai’s airports, to messages on her phone, from producers, directors, collaborators.

Budget cuts.

Production delays.

New directions for projects.

Zhi looked out through the floor-to-ceiling windows, out across the gulf between buildings, to where her own face, twenty floors tall, winked and smiled and sipped the latest expensive drink.

Then the real Zhi closed her eyes, clenched an all-too-human fist, and shook.

F
riday 2040.11.09

They met in an apartment rented under a false identity. Breece couldn’t remember being so happy to see Kate and the Nigerian ever.

If only Hiroshi were here, some part of him whispered. He put that away for later.

He picked Kate up when she entered, and whirled her around and around, burying his face in her long black hair as she laughed and batted at him.

Then the Nigerian picked
him
up, with a giant grin across his broad face, spun Breece around and around and around as Breece laughed, until finally Kate demanded that their weapons specialist put the new Zarathustra down.

“What would the movement think?” she asked, laughing. “It’s not dignified!”

“No dignity in this one!” the Nigerian bellowed joyously. “No dignity!”

But he put Breece down, eventually.

B
reece briefed
them at the kitchen table, over big bowls of chicken stew and rice that the Nigerian made. He walked them through it all: the contact from the mysterious hacker who knew so much, the infiltration of Barnes’s security, the takedown of Barnes himself, the judgment he’d passed, the hacker’s delivery as promised – of Barnes’s files, an incredible treasure trove for and about the movement.

They grilled him on the hacker, and, time and again, Breece had to say that he simply didn’t know. He didn’t know who the hacker was. He didn’t know how the hacker had found him. He didn’t know how the hacker had penetrated Barnes’s security so easily. He didn’t know why the hacker cared. He didn’t know if the hacker was American, or Chinese, or Indian, or Russian, or something else. He didn’t know anything.

“I was suspicious too,” he said. “The whole drive down…” His mind went back to it, driving, in the dark, in a rainstorm, his car’s navcomp illegally hacked to forget his location.

He shook his head. “I kept thinking I was heading into a trap. I couldn’t figure out the angle. And then, sneaking up to the house… the same.”

His eyes went back and forth, between Kate’s, the Nigerian’s.

“Part of me kept saying that I’d missed something. That there was going to be a SWAT team or DHS in there. Even though it didn’t make sense, even though they could have nabbed me in my motel room.”

Kate held his eyes. “You took a big risk…”

Breece nodded. “And it paid off. I was suspicious as hell. But everything this hacker said, he followed through on. Barnes is
dead.
”

He grinned at them. The Nigerian grinned back. Kate nodded, reached over to take his hand. He squeezed hers back.

“And the hacker delivered Barnes’s files,” Breece went on. “We have Barnes’s contacts in every PLF cell in the US, and every affiliate worldwide. We have the identities of all of his
moles
inside the PLF. We have lists of thousands of
other
people they’ve been monitoring, many of whom would make good recruits for us. And more. Huge anonymous cash reserves – dollars, crypto currencies, you name it – hundreds of millions at least. Stashes of weapons and specialized equipment. ERD security procedures and passwords.
Bypass codes to disable surveillance equipment.
”

He paused, then took two data fobs out of his pocket and laid them on the table.

“These are for you. All the data I have, you have. It’s too important. Encrypt it.”

He pushed the data fobs at the two of them, met both their eyes, saw the understanding there. Life expectancy was too low in this business. Trust was too rare.

He swallowed, then went on.

“OK, so the question is, what next? And I have a proposal. A proposal from this same hacker, actually…”

“
S
o
…” Breece finished, taking a slice of pie, “that’s the idea. In short: We help bring about a bottoms-up transhuman revolution. Personally, I love it.”

Kate was chewing her lip again, her bowl of stew only half finished, no pie in front of her. “We’ve done a lot,” she said. “The men who killed your parents are
dead
. The author of the Chandler Act is
dead
. The ERD is
disgraced
. Stockton’s disgraced. The country’s ready for change. We could overplay our hand if we’re not careful.” She paused.

“Let’s wait. See if the Supreme Court hands this to Kim. Then see if he really does any of what he says. In the meantime, use the money and the intel to make ourselves and the other cells more secure. Build fresh identities. Recruit, regroup, take a low profile.”

The Nigerian shook his head. “I’ve studied your nation’s Supreme Court. It does not rule on the basis of your constitution or your laws. It rules on the basis of politics. Six of the judges side politically with the President. They will rule for him.”

“You don’t know that,” Kate said. “Sometimes they rule the right way.
Especially
when popular opinion is so aligned in one direction.”

The Nigerian shook his head, having none of it.

Breece held up his hands. “How about a compromise then? We move forward with
tests
of the revolution plan, but
not
full scale.
If
the Supreme Court rules for Stockton, then the kid gloves come off.” He looked back and forth between Kate and the Nigerian, trying to gauge them. “Agreed?”

The Nigerian took his time, then nodded. “Agreed.”

Kate shook her head. “How do we know we can even trust this hacker? Why should we be collaborating with someone we know so little about?”

Breece nodded. “You’re right. I
don’t
trust him, or her, or
it
. I can’t without knowing more about who we’re dealing with. But so far, our interests have aligned. And so far, cooperation has been hugely beneficial. So we stay careful, but we keep cooperating, so long as those interests stay aligned.”

“It?” The Nigerian raised an eyebrow.

Breece pursed his lips. “Given the capabilities we’ve seen, we have to face the possibility that what we’re dealing with here is someone who’s already transhuman. Or post.”

“Well then,” Kate said. “That just makes everything better then, doesn’t it?”

F
riday 2040.11.09

Pryce listened as the dead man spoke to the widow.

Martin Holtzman’s voice first. “Claire, I’m looking for any files Warren may have left behind. Anything from the early days of the ERD, or even further back, from his time at the FBI.”

Metadata appeared on the wallscreen, annotating the conversation pulled from the NSA’s archives.

Speaker: Holtzman, Martin

Date: Thursday, 2040.11.01, 12:07pm EST

A woman answered him. “Martin… I think they killed him. To keep him quiet.”

Speaker: Becker, Claire.

Warren Becker’s widow.

“I know, Claire,” Holtzman replied.

“You believe me?” Becker’s widow answered.

On the recording, Holtzman sounded uncertain. “I don’t know… I don’t think it’s impossible.”

Becker’s widow gushed with relief. Then Holtzman spoke again.

“Claire,” the dead man said. “What I’m looking for in Warren’s files… If I found it, it would be the opposite of keeping him quiet. You understand?”

Pryce looked up at Kaori when it was over.

“An hour later, Holtzman is at the Becker home, per his car and the Becker’s security system,” Kaori said.

“And two days later, if you believe the video,” Pryce went on, “he hands a briefcase with files that he says Warren Becker left behind over to Barnes…”

“The briefcase is missing,” Kaori said.

“Missing?” Pryce raised an eyebrow.

“Not at the crime scene,” Kaori said. “Not in Barnes’s car or home or office, before you ask. FBI swears that Barnes never left his home, by the way. Video does show that Holtzman had the briefcase when he walked into ERD headquarters that day. He
also
had it when he visited the Becker home.
And
he took it with him inside the ERD building to the electronics workshop, where he seems to have built himself a custom reader for an old physical data format.”

Pryce narrowed her eyes. “So you think he really got something from Becker. And that someone has disappeared it.”

“Maybe,” Kaori said. “Or maybe Holtzman found a way to get it out.”

Pryce looked at her sharply. “You don’t mean…?”

“Hear me out,” Kaori said. “NSA has trawled all of Holtzman’s comms now. And it turns out he was doing a
lot
of encrypted and anonymous data routing. Almost all of his personal comms were that way, actually. Especially the last couple months. But he didn’t do it at the office. Big risk, right, doing that on a DHS campus? Except the
night he died
. Two data calls, terrible bitrate because of Zoe, but he did it. Twenty-eight minutes in total. And the second call terminates at the
same timestamp
as the video of his death does.”

Kaori sat there, looking proud of herself.

Pryce shook her head. “That provides some validation for the video.
Some
. But nothing about the files.”

Kaori nodded. “Next point.” She tapped a surface, and the wallscreen advanced, showing one of the memos that purported to create the PLF. “The files released. They’re not text. They’re not data. They’re
images
. And they show signs of having been taken slightly off angle, and then rotated and keystoned to fix that.
And
the image quality is better…” Kaori tapped again
.
A roughly circular red highlight appeared in the middle of the image. “In an area consistent with the higher resolution of a human fovea.”

“Hmm,” Pryce said. “Possibly. Circumstantial, though.”

Kaori shrugged. “My gut says this is it, boss.”

“Let’s say you’re right. Holtzman dies. The video and files appear online hours later. Is he working from the grave? Deadman switch?”

Kaori shook her head. “My guess is he had help. You asked me to pull his calls from NSA. He did a lot of encrypted data connections. But he made one or two odd
unencrypted
calls. And one was to this woman.”

A face appeared on the screen. Late thirties, perhaps, red hair, green eyes.

“Lisa Brandt,” Kaori said. “They had an affair at MIT when she was his grad student. Would have been a scandal, but no one ever found out, including his wife. Except NSA, of course. No contact for eight years. Then he runs into her on the Capitol steps. Two weeks later he calls in sick to work, takes the train to Cambridge to meet her.”

Pryce looked at her deputy. “Could be nothing. Maybe they were just starting up their affair again?”

Kaori nodded. “Could be. But three special things about Dr Brandt.” Kaori turned and looked up at Pryce. “One, she lobbies for CogLiberty, for Nexus legalization.”

Pryce raised an eyebrow at that.

“Two,” Kaori said, “there’s quite a lot of encrypted, anonymized traffic on her accounts as well.”

Pryce nodded.

“And three,” Kaori said, “FBI put her home under direct surveillance five days ago, following up on this. And they found Nexus transmissions.” Kaori tapped the screen, and the image changed again, to an interior view, a bedroom, a crib, and inside it, a tiny bundle, a small human inside.

Kaori finished. “From the brain of the special needs child that Brandt and her wife adopted six months ago.”

Pryce narrowed her eyes. “I want to talk to this Lisa Brandt.”