Then a car slowed, pulled onto the shoulder of this lower road. Black sedan, tinted windows, government plates. The passenger door opened even before it had come to a stop. A man in a dark suit stepped out. The door closed behind him and the car accelerated back into traffic.
Nakamura watched the man approach. Tall, fifty-something, with sandy hair going to gray, a paunch slowly spreading on what had once been a lean frame. McFadden. Deputy Director for the National Clandestine Service. The CIA’s top spymaster, reporting straight to the Director of Central Intelligence himself. He looked older every time Nakamura saw him.
They stood between two of the massive pillars holding up the highway, hidden from above and from the road, visible only to the rats that dwelled deeper in the underpass.
“Kevin,” McFadden said. “Thanks for coming.”
Nakamura nodded. As if he’d had any choice.
McFadden pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, offered one to Nakamura.
Nakamura shook his head as McFadden lit up and took a hearty draw. Cancer-free nicotine delivery, they said. But still not for him.
McFadden exhaled out of the side of his mouth, away from Nakamura, then withdrew a folded sheaf of papers from inside his jacket. Nakamura could see the faint glimmer of monolayer gloves molded to the Deputy Director’s hands. No fingerprints.
McFadden handed the top sheet to Nakamura. Blank. Nakamura swiped his thumb across it, and an image appeared. A heavy-set, middle-aged man, jowly.
“Two weeks ago,” McFadden said, “this man, Robert Higgins, turned himself in to police in Des Moines. Higgins is a fifty-three year-old computer security consultant with a history of emotional imbalance. He told Des Moines PD that he’d created a hacked version of Nexus and used it to coerce, abduct, and rape three women. He’d stopped a month earlier when a ‘cyber Buddha’, in his words, mentally neutered him. Nexus won’t work for him anymore, and he can’t even think violent thoughts without convulsing.”
“Jesus,” Nakamura replied.
“Cyber Buddha,” McFadden corrected, taking another draw on his cigarette. “A week before that, Mexico City PD was contacted by a girl who claimed that she had been coerced via Nexus, and that just before the perp could rape her, in her words, an ‘angel of the Lord’ came down, paralyzed the man who’d abducted her, and set her free of the coercion software.”
Nakamura said nothing.
“We have three more cases like this,” McFadden said. “Interventions in Nexus 5 coercions. Two more rapes, one multimillion-dollar theft. In each case, someone breaks into the mind of the coercer, renders the Nexus in their minds inoperative, and creates a block against future behavior.”
“So we have a Nexus vigilante,” Nakamura mused. The image on the paper was already disappearing, smart circuitry wiping it out, scrambling the data irrevocably.
McFadden nodded. He handed Nakamura a second sheet of paper, blank again. “One more,” the Deputy Director said. “Fresh from this morning. Classified. DHS tried to keep it from us.”
Nakamura swiped his thumb and video played across the sheet. Four lines of people moving through a security checkpoint, all of them wearing badges. DHS’s Chicago office. The video zoomed in on one man, in business attire with a backpack slung over one shoulder. A red oval appeared around him, and a name and bio. Brendan Taylor. Accountant for DHS.
One moment Taylor was slowly moving forward with the line. The next, a look of bewilderment appeared on his face. In the video he patted himself down, turned around frantically, slammed his bag on the conveyor.
Then he yelled something, “I think I have a bomb! A bomb!”
Then chaos and static.
Nakamura looked back up at McFadden, found the man’s dark eyes staring into his.
“The bomb site’s positive for the presence of Nexus,” McFadden said. “But it seems that, at the last second, Taylor snapped to, realized what was going on, and tried to stop it.”
Nakamura blinked. “You think this is connected?”
“We think all of these are Kaden Lane,” McFadden said. “We think he has a back door into Nexus 5, one we haven’t been able to find, and he’s using it, to stop abuses he sees.”
Nakamura narrowed his eyes. “So what’s the mission? And why all this?” He gestured at the underpass, at the cloak-and-dagger. They could have met at a conference room in Langley.
McFadden took another drag on his cigarette, then exhaled to the side. “We want you to find Kaden Lane, Kevin. Find him before the bounty hunters ERD has let loose do. Then bring him back to us. And we want you to do it completely off the record.”
So off the record that even the CIA’s secretaries and its meeting scheduling system don’t have a record of it, Nakamura thought. Black. Total black.
The video was wiping itself from the paper in his hands as he watched. Pixels were dissolving into nothingness.
“Why?” he pushed McFadden. “Why not let ERD reel him in?”
McFadden took another drag. “You know what ERD is like, Kevin.” His eyes kept boring into Nakamura’s. Nakamura squinted. “Lane can’t fall into their hands. He can’t fall into Defense’s hands either, or FBI’s, or anyone else. Only us.”
He handed Nakamura a third sheet. “Instructions for delivery,” McFadden said.
Nakamura thumbed it, scanned the text that appeared, committed it all to memory.
Nakamura looked up at McFadden. “What about Cataranes?”
McFadden ground out his cigarette on the concrete pillar, took out a small metal case, dropped the butt into it. No DNA to be left behind.
“We know you were close,” McFadden said. “Use your discretion. Just bring Lane back, alive.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Nakamura saw another car pulling off the road, its windows as tinted as the first.
“Burn those papers, Kevin,” McFadden told him. “And do this quietly. Get Lane before ERD’s bounty hunters do. And don’t let anyone figure out that we took him.”
Then the Deputy Director was striding away, towards the car door that was opening for him.
Nakamura sat cross-legged on the floor of his apartment, spine erect, hands folded in his lap.
This place was so empty now, since Peter had left. Since Peter had decided that it wasn’t working, that he couldn’t live with a husband who disappeared for weeks or months at a time, who felt more alive away from home than in it, who wrestled with demons but couldn’t share any of them with his partner in life.
Just another failed relationship in a long string of them. Forty-seven years old now. What did he have to show for his life? He’d killed people on six continents. He’d saved lives. He’d thwarted terrorists and gleaned intel and completed missions whose purpose he still didn’t understand.
I’m getting maudlin in my old age, Nakamura thought. He forced himself to bring his attention back to his new assignment.
Trust. It all came down to trust. CIA didn’t trust ERD or the rest of Homeland Security. Homeland Security didn’t trust CIA. And none of them trusted Defense.
And he, who did he trust? Who was he loyal to?
They’d picked him because he was available, because he was experienced with totally black, totally deniable missions, because he had a deep distrust of ERD, because he’d known and trained Lane before his trip to Bangkok. And because of Sam.
Sam. That was one life he’d saved. He’d done that much good in the world. Back when he was FBI. Before he’d come into the ERD at the ground floor, at its very inception. Before lies and half-truths and missions that seemed more about stopping progress than protecting people had turned him into a cynic and sent him into the welcome arms of the CIA.