Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 (39 page)

Her heart pounded harder.

“I’m leaving,” she said, tugging her arm back.

It didn’t budge. His grip might as well have been steel.

Jameson’s assistant smiled down at her. “The President insists.”

The micro-Taser embedded in her phone. If she could just reach into her briefcase…

“Is there a problem here?” a woman’s voice asked.

Pryce looked over, saw Noora standing there. She was tall, muscled, still half a head shorter than the brute who had her.

“Nothing for you to worry about,” Jameson’s assistant rumbled.

“This man is restraining me against my will,” Pryce said.

Noora raised one eyebrow.

“The President wants to talk to her,” the assistant growled. “It’s
none
of your
business
.”

Pryce put all her authority into her voice. “I am the
National Security Advisor.
The
ex-President
is
no authority over me
. I am walking. Out. That. Door.” She pulled against the man’s grip again. “NOW!”

She felt his grip waver the tiniest bit.

Noora nodded her head towards Pryce. “I’d let her go, Troy. She can probably drone you in your sleep.”

The assistant named Troy made a low sound, nearly a growl. “You think you’re pretty tough, don’t you?”

Noora chuckled. “Troy, forget about me. You really want to be on
her
shitlist?”

T
he drive
to her car was interminable.

She hopped out as soon as the SUV stopped, bolted for the trunk of her car. Taggart got out of the driver’s seat.

“Nice to see you, Dr Pryce!” he yelled, a hand upraised. “Call ahead next time.”

By then Pryce had the gear bags out of the Tesla’s trunk, was shoving them into the open driver side door ahead of her, then following them in to the cabin of the car.

“Drive,” she told the car. “Darken windows.”

The car turned itself in the road, started back the way it had come. The windows and windshields all went dark. Internal lights came on.

“Drive faster,” she said.

“Driving at maximum legal speed,” the car responded in its silky tones.

Pryce pulled her phone out of her briefcase, pulled up a menu, made sure it was paired with the carcomp.

“National security override,” Pryce said. “Executive Branch, office of the National Security Advisor. Carolyn Pryce speaking. Ignore local traffic laws. Invoke law enforcement bypass. Reset safety margins to five percent. Execute.”

The acceleration shoved her back into her seat.

The bait’s on the move, she thought silently at Jameson. Are you going to bite?

“Place maximum security call,” she said aloud. “Video. Replace setting with backdrop: my office. Route call through my office. Record, all available spectra, maximum resolution. Activate physiological response monitors.”

She reached up and pressed her phone against the windshield in front of her until it adhered.

“Recording audio or video calls without the permission of all parties involved is prohibited by law,” the phone informed her. “As is the use of voice and visual stress cues to infer non-communicated information. Please seek permission of all parties before proceeding. Permission can be signified by pressing–”

“National security override,” Pryce cut in. “Suspected terrorist activity clause. Authority: Executive Branch, office of the National Security Advisor. Carolyn Pryce speaking. Invoke.”

“Authority accepted,” her phone said. “Call configured. Call destination?”

“The White House,” Pryce said. “President John Stockton. Priority: Urgent.”

It picked up within ten seconds. The President’s secretary Elizabeth Finch appeared, her face projected directly onto Pryce’s retinas by the phone’s projectors.

Pryce had known the woman for more than twenty years. She’d been working for Stockton for all that time.

“Carolyn,” Finch said. “The President’s in with the Dutch Ambassador, talking about the Copenhagen Accords. How urgent is this?”

Text and numbers appeared to the side of Liz Finch’s face. The pulse in her throat was amplified in false color for Pryce. Her eyes had circles around them, showing pupillary dilation.

Pryce exhaled slowly. “What I’ve got tops that, Liz. Sorry. It should be fast.”

Finch was a professional. “No problem. I’ll get him. Hold on.” On screen, her finger reached for a key.

Telltales showed calm and cool.

“Wait!” Pryce said.

“Yes?”

“Liz,” Pryce paused. “Have Miles Jameson or his people called? In the last, say, hour or two? Or any time today?”

Finch frowned on screen. “Carolyn, you know I can’t tell you that.”

Mild anxiety.

“It’s important,” Pryce said. She took a breath. “Liz… I can’t even tell you how important it is.”

Finch pursed her lips. Then Stockton’s secretary gave the tiniest shake of her head.

Elizabeth Finch’s finger reached out, and the Presidential Seal replaced her face in Pryce’s view.

Truthful response. That’s what the stress meters made of Liz Finch’s little shake of her head.

Pryce took another deep breath, fought to regain her composure, to present a calm visage for the coming conversation.

Just over a minute later, the President’s face appeared. He was in his private study, just off the Oval Office.

More telltales appeared, giving her incredibly illegal monitoring of John Stockton. Of the man she’d worked for over the last two decades and more.

“Carolyn,” he said. “What’s the situation?”

Calm. Cool.

“Mr President,” she said, in her best analytic tone. “We’ve had a breakthrough in the PLF investigation.”

Stockton frowned slightly. “OK. Go on.”

Nothing unusual in the stress monitors. This wasn’t the topic he’d expected.

Stay cool. Stay calm.

“You recall the leaked memo,” she said.

“Yes,” Stockton replied.

He was still calm, still focused.

“The clue was the mention of the CALVINIST program,” she said. “That led us to more information about…”

She saw his brows knit just a tiny bit in concentration. His eyes went a little further away in attempted recall.

The telltales showed focus. No anxiety. No spike of fear. No rapid dilation of his pupils. No unusual visual saccades.

“You recall the mention of CALVINIST?” Pryce asked.

“Not… specifically,” Stockton said. “But go on.”

Mild befuddlement, perhaps. Concentration. No fear.

Hope grew inside her. She had to push on.

“It was the second program discussed, after HARBINGER,” Pryce said. “You remember that one, yes?”

Stockton’s brow knit a tiny bit more in concentration. “You may have to… refresh my memory. But just cut to the chase here.”

Confusion. Blood pressure rising the tiniest bit. Impatience.

One more. One more test.

“Yes, sir,” Pryce said. “Well, if you’ll think back to SENTINEL…”

Stockton shook his head slightly. His lips parted in apparent frustration.

Pulse rising the tiniest bit. Blood pressure also. But no real spike, no shock of recognition. No shock of being found out.

“Carolyn. Just tell me: what did you find out?”

Pryce took a breath.

God I hope I’m right about you, she thought.

“Miles Jameson ordered the creation of the PLF, Mr President. I’d bet my career on it.”

In fact, she thought, I already have.

“What?” John Stockton replied. The spike came now on screen. Icons showed his pupils dilating, his carotid artery pulsing harder and faster, betraying a rising blood pressure, a more rapidly pounding heart.

“How do you know?” Stockton demanded.

“The code words I just gave you are real, Mr President,” Pryce told him. “They were tied up with the PLF’s creation. But they weren’t in the memo that was leaked.”

Stockton was staring at her. “You were testing me.”

Pulse still rising. Blood pressure still rising. Pupils narrowing now.

Pryce pursed her lips. “You passed, Mr President. Miles Jameson didn’t.”

“Pryce,” Stockton said, his voice rising. His face was growing red. His carotid was pulsing wildly in the false color imagery.

“I have to go now, Mr President,” Carolyn Pryce said. “If anything happens to me, Jameson’s probably the one behind it.”

“Wait!” the President said. “Pryce, what are you talking about? Where are you?”

Pryce cut the connection.

P
ryce pulled
out her second phone, the new one Kaori had used cash to buy her for this trip, and sent a single message to Kaori. “01” Zero for Jameson. One for Stockton. She popped the data card out of her primary phone and swapped it into the new phone, tunneled the new phone to an offshore anonymizer, and started beaming the video to a pair of remote accounts she’d created for herself and Kaori.

The primary phone started ringing.

She ignored it.

Someone overrode her, forced a connection to open against her will.

She reached over and hung up on them.

This video was, if not proof, then at least circumstantial evidence of Stockton’s innocence of the PLF’s creation.

The bandwidth was terrible out here. But she had other things to do. Pryce rotated her seat to face backward, to the wide open cabin configuration many preferred. Then she opened her gear bag and started pulling out the heavy Special Forces parka, snow pants, hood, face mask, and the rest of the gear.

Three times she reached over and hung up when the White House forced her phone on.

Finally, the gear was all on. Jesus, just putting it on was a lot of work.

“Display map,” she said.

There, that was the spot. That overpass.

She reached out with her finger. It trembled.

Whew.

She took a deep breath. Superior intelligence. Data. Planning.

I’ve got a plan, she told herself. It’s going to work.

She reached out with her finger again, pointed at the overpass. Her finger was steady this time.

Steady enough, anyway.

“Pause at this underpass,” she told the car. “Let me out. Then continue towards Billings at normal speed.”

T
hree hours later
, as the light was starting to fail, Carolyn Pryce stopped her off-road hike across the fields of Montana and stood, panting, trying to catch her breath, her heart pounding in her chest, cursing herself for not keeping up a more intense training regimen in her day-to-day life.

To anyone passing by, she would have been the faintest of blurs, with the faintest of wide, soft depressions as tracks left behind her.

Then the blur reached down into a thigh pocket of the heavy chameleonware parka she wore, pulled out the un-stealthed black rectangle of her second phone, and punched in a code, before returning the phone to her pocket, and returning herself to near invisibility.

Her primary phone she’d left in the Tesla. Not to avoid the President.

But as a beacon for Jameson.

Twenty minutes later, she heard the whup-whup-whup of the helicopter. The Special Forces cold weather mask painted a vector for her. She turned, blinked at the tiny spot, and it magnified.

Blink, magnify.

Blink, magnify.

Blink, magnify.

Until she could read the registration on the side.

Only then did Carolyn Pryce deactivate her chameleonware.

It was only once she was in the helicopter, chartered under an alias, on her way to the airfield at Bozeman, that she checked the news on her phone.

Then she saw that there had been a terrible accident on icy highway 87.

The highway to Billings.

Head on collision between a truck and a passenger vehicle.

Her vehicle.

Total loss. Completely flattened.

Pryce felt numb from it. She felt no victory. No sense any more that her plan had been superior, that she’d outsmarted anyone.

I deal in lives and deaths in my job, she thought. But this is the first time that it’s been
my
life on the line. Or my death.

Then later, as the airfield of Bozeman appeared below her, and the entirely different plane, with a different aircrew, chartered under yet another name, came into view, did she think:

They’ve tried to kill me. Like they killed Becker. And Holtzman. They’ll probably try again.

T
uesday 2041.01.08

Yuguo limped tiredly from the subway stop to their residential tower. It was past midnight now. His clothes were caked in mud. His face and lungs still burned from gas, as much as he’d tried to rinse it out with water. One eye was circled in an ugly black bruise from where a boot had met his head as he’d tried to make his way free. A cut above his brow throbbed. Tears still fell, from the remnants of the gas, from the utter failure.

He’d made it out, crawling, kicking, running, stumbling, in a press of near strangers. They’d run past the armored, mirror-faced riot police, run through campus, run and run and run until he’d fallen over coughing, gasping, unable to breathe.

Alone.

Where was Xiaobo? Wei? Lee? Lifen? Longwei? Had they escaped? There was no answer on their phones. No response on any service online. He had to just hope, as he trudged slowly towards home, past the accusing stares and the cold indifference of the strangers of Shanghai.

You didn’t come, he stared back at them. We did what we could. It wasn’t enough.

He scraped mud off his shoes outside their building and let himself in with their code. The lobby was empty. The lift took him straight up to their floor. At the door to the apartment he could hear turmoil coming from within. Shouts. Police? He tensed.

No.

Or rather yes. Police voices. Certainly.

Dozens of them. And protesters, by the hundreds.

Impossible.

Curiosity overcame fear.

Yuguo punched in his code. The door opened.

“Yuguo?” His mother’s voice carried from the living room. She ran out into the hallway in a dressing gown. The sound of yells and screams, ordered commands and clashes followed her.

“Mother…” he started.

Then she had her arms wrapped around him.

“Yuguo!” she cried. “I was so frightened. I saw the videos! I kept watching, looking for your face, to see if you’d been taken.”

“Mother,” he said, softly, his arms wrapping around her in response, soothing her, some amazement striking a calm deep into him, some tiny sliver of hope blossoming through the despair. “What videos?”

Y
uguo watched
them again and again. Dozens of minutes of video. Signs waving, denouncing the coup, calling for Sun Liu’s reinstatement, calling for democracy, calling for a Billion Flowers, calling for Bo Jintao’s arrest. Police charging, beating protesters, beating them after they were down and helpless, dragging them away.

Xiaobo, beaten bloody, kicked mercilessly into unconsciousness, dragged by one foot, face down in the mud. Wei, shot at close range with what Yuguo hoped was a rubber bullet, then gone from the screen. Lifen, the woman who’d inspired him, who’d told him that they were weak apart or strong together, unconscious, being dragged off by an armored State Security thug, her shirt half ripped off her body, another mirror-helmeted riot police man following behind them.

Yuguo felt tears falling down his face. Sorrow and remorse and rage.

He should have been up there. He should have leapt onto that table. For all he’d said about coming together, about someone needing to be first… he’d kept his head down when the police had come.

He slammed a fist into his palm.

“You’re alive, Yuguo,” his mother said. “I’m so thankful! We’re so fortunate.”

He turned to the discussion boards. They were alive with buzz. The video was everywhere, millions of views. There were other videos, he saw now. Videos from Beijing, from Hong Kong, from Guangzhou, from
everywhere
… More signs, stating the truth for once. More evidence of brutality, of repression.

And thousands of threads, tens of thousands of threads, hundreds of thousands of messages, at least. People talking openly of their anger, of their anger that the police would beat students this way, their anger over being censored their whole lives, their anger over having no control.

People talking openly of how shocked they were that their messages and videos were getting through. That the censors weren’t working.

The conversation had evolved over time, he saw. As people realized that something had changed. That they could talk. They became emboldened. He saw people talking openly of things they’d never spoken of before.

That the police were part of the Ministry of State Security. That the man who controlled them now controlled China. That he was responsible. And his name was Bo Jintao.

That the police could beat a few hundred students. But that they couldn’t beat a billion Chinese citizens.

There were people talking openly of the coup.

Of bringing back the Billion Flowers.

Of democracy.

Of striking back harder, in larger numbers, with more organized protests,
tomorrow.

Of revolution.

“Mother,” Yuguo said. “I’m not sure how this happened… but I think we’re winning.”

Z
hi Li stood
at the wall-to-wall window of Lu Song’s penthouse flat in the Pudong, staring out and down into the lights of Shanghai at night.

Across from her, her own gigantic face winked and smiled at the river of humanity, watching over all of Shanghai like a goddess.

Or a demon.

“We should join them,” she said aloud, pulling the bed sheet more snugly around her naked form. “The protesters, tomorrow.”

The videos had been shocking, raw. She’d seen such things when she traveled outside of China. Not here. She wanted to be there, fighting against Bo Jintao.

Lu Song came up behind her, still nude himself, and wrapped his strong arms around her.

How she loved when he held her.

“He’d kill us, my love,” he said, kissing the top of her head.

She looked down at the streets, hundreds of meters below them, then looked back up at the digital representation of herself, twenty stories high, on the skyscraper opposite her, a more perfect version of herself, more beautiful than she or any human woman could ever be, flawless, un-aging.

Unthinking.

“They look to me,” she told her lover. “You said it yourself. Millions of them talk to me every day. What kind of person am I if I don’t go to them? If I don’t fight for what’s right?” She twisted to look up and back at Lu. “What kind of people are
we
?”

Lu pursed his lips, held her more tightly. “You’re a living person, my love,” he said, squeezing her again. “Remember what Bo Jintao said. He could kill you, kill us. And he’d still have that screen over there.” Lu gestured with his chin, and Zhi turned to look at the digital her again.

“He’d still have his simulacra of us,” Lu went on. “Give him a reason to kill you, and you’ll be under his control forever.”

Zhi slammed her palm against the glass in frustration, hating the face she saw across the street now more than ever before.

“Impostor,” she cursed aloud at the thing with her face.