Sam threw herself through the window, shattering the remaining glass, feeling it cut into her in a dozen places, rolled, and came up sprinting at the retreating rear of the van. It disappeared out the gate as she crossed the courtyard. She could feel Jake’s pain and fear but she ignored it, pushed herself harder. Her left tricep groaned with the pain of the bullet wound, but Sam ignored that too. She made the gate at a full sprint and could see the van ahead, reaching the turn in the road. She ran harder, putting every ounce of effort into her legs, feeling her lungs burning, willing the van to slow down at the turn.
The van hit the turn at speed, skidded as it came around, its tires biting into the gravel, its driver expertly navigating the road.
She threw herself forward with all she had, sent her body into a horizontal leap, arms extended. One finger brushed the bumper, and for a moment she knew she had it, knew she would stop these men, whoever they were, knew she would have her children back.
Then her finger slipped off, and she crashed, rolling and skidding into the gravel as the van sped away.
Sam lay there panting for a moment. The jeep. They’d abandoned the jeep.
She pushed herself to her feet. There was gravel in the skin of her face. The palms of her hands were lacerated from her fall. A dozen cuts covered her from the glass of the window. Dust was matting blood into her hair, onto her face, everywhere. She ran hard, back uphill, got in view of the gate in time to see the jeep go up in a fireball that hit her with its searing heat from here.
She kept running, her mind refusing to believe, willing herself to find a fire extinguisher, put out the flames, chase them down.
And then she saw Jake.
34
MOST TO GAIN
Saturday October 27th
Holtzmann forced himself to sleep via Nexus. He had to rest. He had to clear his head. He had to get perspective.
He woke too soon, his heart pounding in his chest. The clock in his mind read 1.16am.
He couldn’t shake this dread. Couldn’t shake this fear that he’d been so wrong. That he’d misunderstood everything. That the world was an even darker place than he’d suspected.
He slipped out of bed, as silently as he could. Anne murmured something. He looked at her and his heart ached. What had happened that he’d decided to lie to her? To hide what was going on? What would happen now? If he was right… If he was right… Her life was in danger too.
Let me be wrong, he prayed to a God he hadn’t believed in since his teens. Please, Lord, let me be wrong.
Holtzmann padded into his home office, closed the door behind him, and turned on the secure terminal. He swiped his finger across the print reader, held still for the retinal scan, and then spoke his passphrase.
The terminal came alive, the Department of Homeland Security’s eagle-and-shield logo emblazoned on the screen, the ERD’s smaller atom-double-helix-and-shield sigil superimposed on its bottom right corner.
He navigated through the system, into Project November. Cooper’s team had built this, under his supervision. He’d hated that they’d made this, but it had been a miniscule crime compared to the ones he faced now.
He ignored the source code, pulled up the specifications instead. There, the on-the-wire protocol definition. He took snapshots of the data on the screen with his mind’s eye, forced his Nexus OS to commit them to storage. Then one more thing. The encryption key. Where did it live? He trawled through config options. There it was. The key itself was obscured. He had to re-enter his passphrase, his voice shaking so much he was surprised that the system took it, then answer three challenges, and then and only then the system revealed the key to him. It was a long string of hexadecimal that would make no sense to a human, but which would unlock the communication between November node and November controller. He took a snapshot of the key, verified that it was saved, then disconnected himself from the system.
His heart was pounding now. He was sweating. His breath came short. He was wrong. He was sure he was wrong. He must be wrong. But what if he was right?
He wanted another opiate surge. He wanted to make it all go away. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t. This was too big. He had to know.
Holtzmann darkened the terminal screen, leaned back in his chair, his eyes closed, and went back to his memories of that horrible day in July. The comms log. There. The encrypted traffic he’d picked up.
Encrypted data. On a Nexus frequency. Joe Duran scowling as Holtzmann looked back and forth, looked for the source behind him.
?RU5L8PP0hLarBNxfoQM23wG6+KTCEBhOIAAQyPPc76+TWhj+X/
He took the encrypted transmissions, opened them in a decryption app, and applied the private key.
The key matched.
The assassins hadn’t just used Nexus from his lab. They’d used his code. That was how they’d pulled off an attack so sophisticated, so far beyond what the PLF had done in years. They’d used his work.
His heart wanted to burst out of his chest now. His face was flushed. He wanted to scream and to weep.
One last thing to check. He pulled the on-the-wire protocol definition up in his mind’s eye, let it fill the top half of his vision while the decrypted communication filled the bottom half.
The protocol definition was a key, a legend. It let him turn the binary language of the decrypted signals into something that made sense.
He moved slowly, carefully. There in the protocol definition was the command for “fire”, the arguments that it took. He searched through the decrypted signals, looking, looking. Was it there? Could there be some mistake? Could he be wrong?
Then he found it. The Fire command.
He checked its definition again. The Fire function took two arguments, the object identifier and an offset from that target. He translated what he saw in the binary into something he could read.
FIRE (<target 1>, <-0.5, 0, 0>)
And he was right. He was so so right. And he wished he weren’t.
Someone had used the Nexus from his lab. Someone had used the software his team had built. They’d used it to take control of Steve Travers, to turn him into a robot assassin, they’d used it to tell him to fire.
And to fire half a meter to the left of his target.
They’d used it to shoot at the President, but not to hit him. To miss.
“They could have at least been better shots!” Anne said in his memories.
Oh no. They hit exactly what they meant to.
Who had the most to gain? Nakamura’s voice asked him.
Stockton was losing until the PLF tried to kill him, Anne answered. He’s going to win because of the assassination attempt.
The answer was clear.
The President had the most to gain.
35
LAST WORDS
Saturday October 27th
Sam crossed the courtyard to Jake, fell to her knees at his side. He was face down in the gravel. His mind was still there, but in pain, and fading. A red stain was spreading across his back. A puddle was forming under him. There was a hole in his shirt, in the flesh below, where the bullet had punched all the way through him.
“Jake, Jake,” she said. “Oh my God, Jake.”
He groaned in pain. “Sunee…” he said weakly. His mind was faltering, confused, weak from blood loss.