The Acting ERD director picked up immediately, his boyish face with those dark, dark eyes filling up the screen of Holtzmann’s slate.
“Martin,” Barnes said. “How good of you to get back to me.” Acid dripped from his voice.
“What the hell are you doing?” Holtzmann yelled. “Torturing kids? Going around me and ordering my team around?”
Barnes scowled on the screen. “I’m doing your job, Martin. What the President ordered you to do.”
“They’re kids!” Holtzmann yelled.
Barnes stared at him coldly. “Not according to the law. Now do your fucking job.”
Holtzmann sputtered. I quit. The words were on the tip of his tongue. But then the audit would kick in, the missing Nexus would be found...
His mouth opened but no words came out.
Barnes solved it for him.
“Get your ass in here, Martin. Shankari gave us bogus codes for the Nexus back doors. Go figure that out. Now!”
Then Barnes ended the call.
51
UNKNOWNS
Saturday October 27th
Breece packed up hurriedly. He rolled Hiroshi’s body in a piece of carpet, hauled him out to the trunk of his car, then came back for the electronics, the Nexus vials, and the guns. He had no idea how much the hacker had gotten from Hiroshi’s mind before he’d pulled the trigger…
Hiroshi’s head, blood and brains blasted from it, sliding down the wall of the garage as his body crumpled into a heap.
…but he had to assume that the intruder had gotten enough.
He saturated the garage with enzyme bombs, then made his exit, locking the door behind him.
Then he put in the calls to Ava and the Nigerian.
They met four hours later, in a dive bar in Moscow, Texas, two hours from Houston.
They took a booth, crammed in close, talked softly under the cover of the raucous trash-rock. They were all raw, grieving, shocked by Hiroshi’s death.
The questions cycled endlessly. Who was the hacker? How much did he learn? What did it mean for them? For their mission?
Very little made sense. If the hacker had been law enforcement, why not lead DHS or FBI to the site?
Could it have been Zara? But Zara had been surprised by the bombings in DC and Chicago, and the hacker had interceded in both of those events.
And so far, there was no movement at the safe house or the garage, no sign that either location had been found.
They tossed it back and forth for a while, and finally, it was Breece’s decision.
“We’ll wait and see,” he said. “Stay ready to evac if we’ve been made.”
“And if they don’t come?” Ava asked. “If there’s never a sign that we’ve been made?”
Breece nodded. “Then the mission’s a go.”
52
SAIL AWAY
Sunday October 28th
“No tracers,” Sam repeated, her gun to Lo Prang’s head. “Your boss is coming with me. I find a tracer, he dies. Badly.”
“No tracers,” Lo Prang echoed, calmly, agreeably.
His men nodded, kept on loading the last of the food and fuel and gear onto the stealth boat in this hidden cove. It was a smuggling craft, a low, skinny, quiet affair, with a sonar absorbent hull and a chameleonware upper shroud. If anything could get her up the coast and to the island she’d seen in that soldier’s mind – Apyar Kyun, the Blue Island – this was it.
Lo Prang’s two razor-nailed slave bitches watched her, still in their party dresses from the night before, their blades extended. Murder was in their eyes. The claw marks one of them had cut down her back ached. This was personal for them. If she crossed their paths again, they’d do their worst.
“Time to go,” Sam said. She stood, dragged Lo Prang up with her, propelled him forward towards the low cigar of a vessel, her free hand on the cuffs that bound his wrists behind his back. Now was the time of maximum danger. Transitions are points of vulnerability, Nakamura had taught her. If they were going to try to take her, it was now or never…
But she and Lo Prang made it onto the boat unharmed.
Sam pushed Lo Prang forward, away from her, towards the driver’s seat. “Drive,” she said.
An hour later they were past the island of Koh Phayam, a few hundred yards off shore, and on their way towards the Burmese border.
“You could have done this the easy way, Jade,” Lo Prang told her. “I meant what I told you. If you joined my household, you’d be happy.” He gestured with his cuffed hands towards his head. “A little tweak here and there. All this stress? All this hardship? I could have taken care of whatever problem you have. And you’d have contentment, the satisfaction of having a purpose in life, of knowing what it was, of having a master who loved you.”
Sam stared at Lo Prang and shook her head.
Lo Prang smiled. “Trust me, Jade. I’ve never had happier staff than I do now. They come to me willingly, for what I can give them, for the satisfaction, the peace and contentment. Even the whores are happy.”
Sam shuddered. “There are more important things than happiness,” she told the man. “Doing the right thing. Doing what matters.”
Lo Prang smiled at her. “The right thing? What matters? Those are just patterns in your brain, Jade. A few tweaks, and your right thing would be mine.”
“Not in this lifetime,” Sam told him.
Lo Prang shrugged. “You’ll change your mind one day. I’ll be waiting.”
They were leaving Koh Phayam behind now. It was time to make a choice.
Only kill when you have to, Nakamura had taught her. Spare the lives you can, even of your enemies. You never know when someone might do the same for you.
“Do you swim?” Sam asked Lo Prang.
The mob boss turned to look at her again, and snorted in amusement.
“And here I was looking forward to a vacation in Burma with you, Jade,” he replied.
“You’d just slow me down.” She smiled at him, sweetly, then tossed him the keys to his wrist and ankle cuffs.
Lo Prang snatched the keys from the air, snorted again, then killed the boat’s engine and uncuffed himself.
He stood, afterwards, the cuffs in his hand, weighing them. Weighing the option of attacking her, Sam suspected. She shook her head ever so slightly, and Lo Prang smiled, dropped the cuffs, and took off his shoes and shirt.
He stood at the edge of the boat, looked into those waters and towards the shore. Then he turned to her. “I’ll see you again, Jade.”
“Not if I see you first,” Sam replied, gesturing with the gun once more.
Lo Prang smiled. Then he dove into the blue waters, and started swimming for shore.
Sam watched until he was a dozen yards away, then she steered the boat further out to sea, towards the string of small uninhabited islands on the horizon. She’d need to find a place to hide until the sun went down. Perhaps to sleep. Then, when night came, she’d be on her way, and toward her target, Apyar Kyun, three hundred miles up this militarized coast.
53
PERSPECTIVE
Sunday October 28th
Kade received Shiva’s summons the next morning, after they’d brought him breakfast. A guard locked the Nexus jammer around Kade’s throat, escorted him to the rooftop where Shiva waited, reclining on a wooden chair. The older man gestured to the chair beside him, and Kade sat.
The view was glorious, straight out to the west over an uninterrupted expanse of sea. The nearest waters were jade green, turning to deeper and deeper shades of blue further to the west. In the other direction, to the east, Kade could see the wings of the mansion encircle the courtyard visible from his window. Beyond that was rolling land, then more water. An island.