A false flag indeed. One that would capture transhuman terrorists. And keep the public afraid.
So what happened?
He scanned back, and an entry caught his eye again.
false flag happening. lead agent MB, code name zara.
MB.
Maximilian Barnes.
Special Policy Advisor to two presidents.
And now Acting Director of the ERD.
Holtzmann’s heart was pounding hard now. This was too much. Too much. He’d had his fears, but this… This?
He needed to get these files to the right people. Anonymously. Not from his workstation.
He moved to copy the files to his phone instead, found that his workstation couldn’t see the phone.
Fear crept up Holtzmann’s spine. He turned to the workstation again, pulled up a random site on the net.
Network failure. System offline.
Oh no. Oh no. Holtzmann stood as calmly as he could. He had a bad feeling about this.
He opened his briefcase, unplugged the kludgy foil reader he’d constructed, the foil still in it, and shoved the whole mess in. Then he picked up his cane and limped to the door. He had the data. He could finish this from home. From anywhere. Not here.
He shifted his cane to the briefcase hand, and put his free hand on the door knob.
It was locked.
What? He hadn’t locked it.
He reached into his jacket for his badge, but of course the badge wasn’t there. Rangan Shankari had it.
He slid open the backup authentication panel next to the door, swiped his thumb across the pad, held his eye steady where the retinal scanner could see him.
ACCESS DENIED flashed across the small screen.
Just a mistake, he told himself. A glitch from the lockdown. Or the storm.
Stay calm. Stay calm.
He turned back to his desk, limped to it on his cane.
He picked up the secure line on his desk. He’d call security, have them unlock his office.
Nothing. The line was dead.
He was trapped here.
77
END OF THE ROAD
Saturday November 3rd
Rangan woke to minds in turmoil. There were people on the other side of this wall, talking quietly, intensely. Something was wrong.
Outside the storm sounded louder and angrier than ever, a raging maelstrom of wind and water pummeling them, trying to beat them down.
Rangan crept off the cot and out into the hallway. There he found Levi, an exhausted-looking Abigail, and someone he didn’t know – a boy, sixteen maybe, soaked to the bone, his long black hair plastered to his face, dripping water onto the tile floor.
“What’s going on?” Rangan asked.
Levi looked at him, unhappily.
“Police are out,” Levi said. “They’re going door to door. Jordan here says they came to his house. They have a picture of the van.” He shook his head. “We must have passed a camera I didn’t know about.”
“I ran here,” the boy said. “Phones are down. Our house is half a mile up the road.”
Abigail spoke up. “We have to get rid of the van. Hide it.”
Levi nodded. “I’ll go.”
“Wait!” Rangan said. “If they catch you in the van, that’ll lead them back here.”
They all stared at him. These people who’d saved him. This boy who’d run half a mile through a hurricane to warn them.
“I’ll go,” Rangan said.
“The van’s unregistered,” Levi said as he led them to the garage. “From a junkyard. Just get it a few miles from here, dump it, and come back.”
“What about prints?” Jordan asked. “DNA?”
They stared at him.
“Like in the movies!” Jordan said. “You have to sanitize it. Dump it in the river. Set it on fire. Somethin’.”
Levi cursed something not very preacher-like under his breath.
They siphoned gas into a can. Levi gave Rangan a box of roadside flares.
“Dump the gas in it,” Levi said. “Open the doors. Get far back, then toss the flare in. You understand?”
Rangan nodded. “Tell the boys…” He stopped.
Abigail put a hand on his. “They know.”
“Just be safe,” Levi said. “Get back here if you can. If not, the Miller farm is two miles south. Use my name and they’ll hide you.”
Then Levi threw his arms around Rangan, embracing him. Rangan hugged the man back.
Then it was Abigail’s turn. She hugged him and he hugged back, and he felt her mind and the baby’s, felt the baby embrace him mentally, and felt tears coming to his eyes again. He pulled away, and it was time to go.
“Thank you,” he told them. “I’ll be back soon.”
Zoe tried to kill him as soon as he left the church.
The wind was a monster, rocking the van to and fro. The rain sheeted the windshield in water instantly, hopelessly overpowering the wipers. Rangan turned the antiquated van in the driveway, trying to see where he was going. He put it in forward, turned onto the street, drove south, away from Jordan’s house. A terrible crack sounded and he looked up in time to see a tree falling at him. He turned the wheel hard, braking, felt the tires skid on the wet slippery pavement. Something thudded on the van’s roof, then somehow he was past, still in one piece.
The rain pounded like machine-gun fire against the body of the van, ratatatat, ratatatat. It drummed and battered. The wind blasted at the vehicle, tried to push it over. Rangan fought with the wheel, tried to keep the van going straight, struggled to make sense of the world outside the windshield.
It was chaos, chaos everywhere. There was water in the street, inches of water that he drove through. Tree limbs tumbled end over end. A power line was down, throwing sparks as it jumped and skipped in the wind. Debris hurtled through the air. He winced as something large and dark slammed into the already spiderwebbed windshield with a wet thud, then bounced off and continued its flight. There were overturned cars on the road. He passed a building that made no sense, until he realized it had been a gas station, until the storm had ripped its pumps free and torn its roof away.
He dragged his eyes back to the road, tried to make sense of it through rain and the spiderweb of cracks, tried to stay in the middle of what was fast becoming a river. Something dark came at him, hurtling through the street, skipping across the water. Rangan spun the wheel. The front windshield exploded in a shower of glass. He brought his hands up reflexively, closed his eyes as pieces of it cut him everywhere, on his forearms and brow and chest and shoulders. The van spun, skidded, and he slammed the brakes until the vehicle stopped moving. He looked to the side and saw a metal trash can half-embedded in the front passenger seat.
The storm came in through the shattered front of the van now, pummeling him with rain like a sandblaster, with wind that tore at him. He could barely keep his eyes open. He pushed his head down low, used one hand to cover his eyes until just a slit remained between his fingers, drove with the other.
He made it another mile that way, as the storm buffeted him, past the buildings of the tiny main street, past what was left of another gas station at the edge of town. It was farmland out here. He was looking for shelter, a copse of trees, a farmhouse, something.
Then he saw the squad car ahead. It was coming towards him, flashing out of the chaos of the storm. It zoomed by and its flashing lights came on as it did. He looked up into the rearview mirror and he could see enough to see those lights, see the squad car turning back towards him.