“Is there any evidence?” Nakamura repeated.
“The evidence is how Sam acted. Kevin, you knew her. You mentored her. You practically raised her. She was loyal.”
More loyal than I am, Holtzmann thought.
Nakamura said nothing for a while. The car switched lanes of its own accord to fall in behind a long row of vehicles, then pulled up close to the one ahead, just inches from bumper to bumper, drafting, saving fuel.
“Shu’s dead now,” Nakamura said. “How would that affect Sam?”
Holtzmann brought his hands up to his face, closed his eyes for a moment, then pulled his hands away. “I don’t know, Kevin.”
“You don’t know?”
“It depends. How did Shu program her? Did she turn Cataranes into a puppet steered by remote control?”
In his mind the Secret Service man’s gun came out out out, and fired, and fired.
“…Or did she put in something more complex? Something deeper?”
Human missiles leveled the shooter, and Holtzmann turned, looking for the President. Joe Duran screaming in his ear, “How did you know, Martin? How did you know?”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Nakamura said.
Then the world exploded in Holtzmann’s memories, hurling him through the air.
“What?” Holtzmann said.
“If Shu turned Sam, she could have sent her back to ERD as a mole. Or whisked her and Kade off to China. Shu had to know the loft was an ambush, that it was a mission to get close to Prat-Nung.”
“I don’t understand,” Holtzmann said.
“Why did Shu let Sam and Kade walk into that situation, Martin? If she’d already turned Sam, then she knew the loft was an ambush. Shu was recruiting Kade, but she nearly got him killed.”
“Shu was trying to protect Ted Prat-Nung,” Holtzmann replied.
Nakamura shook his head. “No. Shu and Prat-Nung knew each other. She could have just warned him away.”
Holtzmann dropped his face back into his hands. He was so tired. So very tired. He could feel the aches starting again, the clammy sweating, the chills deep inside.
“I don’t know, Kevin.”
“Who had the most to gain?” Nakamura asked, almost to himself. “The way to find the cause of an event is to understand who had the most to gain from it.”
The car activated its turn signal, then switched lanes on its own, into the exit lane that would take them to Holtzmann’s home.
“Lane,” Holtzmann said. “Kaden Lane had the most to gain. He escaped because of Sam.”
Nakamura nodded. “Yes. That was my conclusion as well.”
And the movie started again in Holtzmann’s mind. The hot July day. The white plastic chairs. The President blathering on. The encrypted Nexus traffic. The Secret Service agent in black suit and mirrored glasses, reaching into his jacket…
“Could he do it?” Nakamura asked.
…The gun coming out in slow motion...
“Yes,” Holtzmann replied, sick to his stomach. “I think he could.”
… Coming out, out, out…
“One last question, Martin.”
Firing, firing. Muzzle flash and terrible boom. Human bulldozers striking Travers, the gun flying from his hand. Holtzmann ached so deep inside.
“Can you get it out of her?” Nakamura asked. “Out of Sam’s mind?”
Holtzmann thought of the cure experiments, the mice dead in their cages from every batch so far. Maybe the back door that Rangan Shankari had given them? That terrible, terrible tool. Could they at least use it to counteract whatever Shu had done to Cataranes? It was too soon to say.
“I don’t know, Kevin. I just don’t know.”
Nakamura nodded.
The car slowed as it reached the turn signal at the end of the exit. The doors made a thunk as they unlocked. In the rear-view mirror, Nakamura pulled the mask of his chameleonware suit over his face once more.
“Thank you, Martin,” he said with the deep distorted voice again. “I was never here.”
Nakamura opened the door just as the car came to a stop. He stepped out onto the curb, his silhouette fading to a moving pattern of shadow and distortion before Holtzmann’s eyes. Then the door closed, and the car made its turn, and Holtzmann was alone with his thoughts and his memories and his aching need.
18
FRIENDS
Friday October 19th
Rangan woke, curled up on the floor in a corner of his cell. He’d eaten the traitor’s meal they’d given him, but refused the new, restraint-free bed. It was better than he deserved.
He blinked to shake off sleep. His dreams had been strange. Ilya fighting faceless figures with push/pull. Ilya dying in the dark, crying, alone, her heart stopped, all of her fading to nothing. And children. Strange children. Confused children.
Rangan pulled himself up to sitting. He was stiff from sleeping on the hard surface. His hip hurt and his left leg was half asleep. He rubbed his calf absently as he struggled back to wakefulness.
Ilya. Ilya was probably still resisting. She’d never give in. She had the heart of a fighter. His dream was guilt. Guilt that he’d given up, that he’d turned informant, when his friend would never put her own life ahead of her convictions.
Had they told her that he’d broken? Would they go easier on her now? It was something to hope for. What would she think of him, once she found out? Would she despise him? Hate him?
And Kade? Wats? What would they think of him?
He’d always had the easy life. Rich parents. Good looks. Success came easy, in school, in music. The Indian golden boy. Boy wonder scientist by day, hot DJ by night.
And the women. God, how he loved women. And they’d loved him. Woman after woman after woman. He could leave a club most weekend nights with a party girl, sometimes two. He’d jerked himself off to sleep so often the first few weeks here, calling up memories of their faces, their bodies, the kinky things they’d done for him. Memories remembered naturally. Memories he’d recorded with Nexus, without ever asking their permissions.
Such an easy life. Rangan Shankari, international playboy.
Yeah, right.
He was pathetic, he saw now. What had he ever done for anyone else? He’d lived his whole life as a taker. Taking money from Mom and Dad. Taking sex from girls whose names he barely remembered, girls that he honestly didn’t give a fuck about, except that they were hot and fun in bed and good for his rep.
The only thing he’d ever done that was worth a damn was Nexus. His one impact on the world. And had he fought for that? When they’d busted the party in SF he tried to run. And now, in this stinking cell, they’d given him a second chance. He could show this time that he had the strength of his convictions. But no. They tightened the screws a bit and he folded, just like that.
What did it even matter that he was going to die here? His whole life was a self-obsessed joke. He’d been so goddamn self-centered that he might as well not have existed at all.
Fucking pathetic.
Fuck!
Rangan slammed his hand against the concrete wall of his cell and then swore as he felt the pain.
Then he felt something else.
Another mind.
Faintly. A young mind, weird and warped, and reaching out for him…
Bobby closed his eyes and he could feel his new friends in his head – Tim and Tyrone and Alfonso and Pedro and Jason and Jose and Parker and all the rest. They were like him, autistic. But more than that. He could feel them in his head. They were real.
There were grownups here who came in and gave them tests, but he couldn’t feel the grownups in his head at all and he knew why it was because they didn’t have NEXUS and so they were stupid and they weren’t real people at all.