Rangan jammed the gas pedal, sat up straighter, lifted his arm to shield himself from the storm. He looked up and the lights were closer, right behind him. The a boom sounded, louder than the storm, and another. The van lurched as something struck it. He fought to keep it on the country road. Then another boom burst out and sharp pain lanced through his midsection.
Out of the rain a side road loomed, a crossing in the middle of nowhere. He spun the wheel hard to the right with both hands. The rain lacerated his face as he did. The turn pressed him against the door and he groaned in pain. Then the wheels slipped and the van was spinning, the world turning around him. He saw the flashing lights go by, right to left, then gone again, and then the wheels came off the road and out over the ditch – and the van was tumbling, rolling, and a giant force was pressing against him.
The world spun and when it made sense again, Rangan was upside down, pressing into the seat belt that held him in place. He reached to his waist, pressed the release, and collapsed painfully to the new floor of the van. His insides were a riot of pain. He was in a heap on what was once the ceiling. He could smell gasoline. The crash or something had torn the lid off the gas can, or a bullet had pierced it. The box of flares was open, scattered around him.
Rangan grabbed a flare, then another. He pulled himself painfully up, his body protesting, and stuffed the flares into his pocket. He reached for the door, tried to open it, couldn’t make sense of how it worked. Through the window he could see lights, the flashing lights, a pair of white lights, flashlights, pointed at him, coming closer.
He scrambled backwards, fell, pulled himself up again. The other door. The trashcan blocked it. He pushed into the back of the van instead, grabbed the handle to the wide side door, twisted. The door lurched open an inch. Then the wind grabbed it, ripped it out of his hands, forcing it all the way open. He fell out onto the ground, tried to rise, failed, slipped instead, down a muddy bank. The wind hurled more mud at him, threw it into his face, his mouth, his eyes.
Rangan turned to look and the van was there, behind and above him, not ten paces away. Behind that, the flashlights, shouting maybe, hard to hear over the storm.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a flare. The gasoline vapors… when flame hit them, they’d go up like dynamite. Was he far enough? Fuck if he knew.
Rangan pulled the cap off the emergency flare, saw it burst into life. He yanked his arm back, heard shouts over the storm, and threw the flare up and at the side of the van.
For an instant the flare hung in mid air, in the midst of a lazy end-over-end turn, a superbright jet of white-hot flame and glowing sparks erupting from one end of it, a point of daylight in the dark deluge.
Then it reached the cloud of gasoline vapors emerging from the van. Rangan’s whole world exploded, and all went black.
78
TRUTH OUT
Saturday November 3rd
Holtzmann collapsed heavily into his office chair. Door locked from the outside. Computer off the net. Office phone dead.
He pulled out his own phone. It still had weak signal, intermittent connection. He could use it. But who would he call? Who could help him at this point?
He stared at the screen of his workstation.
No. Not who could help him. Who could he help? He still had this data.
Holtzmann took the most damning diary entries and the memo creating the ERD, concatenated them, then advanced them page by page as his Nexus OS took photographs of each on the screen of his workstation. He had to get this out to the world.
He linked his mind to the net through his phone connection again. It was halting, painfully slow. He tried to connect to the anonymizing service, waited, waited, there.
He tunneled from there to the Nexus board, to his inbox, to the messages he’d exchanged with the underground railroad person. They needed this.
The connection was terrible. He had to refresh multiple times, but then he had it going. He started uploading the file from his mind to a new message. Holtzmann had no idea how long this would take. He hunted through options, clicked “compress on wire”, “auto retry uploads”, and “send once complete”.
He turned back to his workstation, to dig deeper, to learn more.
Then the door to his office opened with a click, and Maximilian Barnes walked in.
Holtzmann stared slack-jawed at Barnes. The man looked completely unruffled in his black suit and white shirt, every one of his black hairs in place, his dark eyes almost lively, amused.
“Martin,” he said.
Bluff! Bluff!
“Director Barnes!” Martin replied. “I’m so glad you’re here. Shankari stole my badge.” He chuckled. “I was stuck here.”
Barnes smiled, closed the door behind him, and sat down in the chair across the desk from Holtzmann.
Holtzmann had to keep playing. He could do this. He could talk his way out of here.
He shook his head ruefully. “That was foolish of me. Have they caught Shankari yet? They know to keep him alive, yes?”
Barnes smiled wider. “I’m not here about Shankari, Martin.”
Zoe pounded a hard gust of wind against the windows, followed it with a machine gun fire spray of rain.
Holtzmann raised one eyebrow. “The Nexus kids, then? They can’t get far.” He gestured back behind himself at the armored window, at the hurricane beyond it.
Barnes chuckled. “You opened the wrong file, Martin.”
The cold dread clenched around Holtzmann. He knows.
Then he thought: I’m not getting out of here.
Holtzmann closed his eyes, raised his hands to his face.
[record –video –audio | mailto lisa.brandt@harvard.edu –autobuffer –autoretry]
He opened his eyes and looked at Barnes again. Warnings scrolled down his face about poor connection quality, about low bit rates.
[Bandwidth Poor – Upload Delayed]
[Bandwidth Poor – Upload Delayed]
He ignored them.
“Here,” Holtzmann said, lifting the briefcase off the floor. “The files Warren Becker left are in here.” He put it on the desk, slid it towards Barnes.
Barnes took it, placed it on the floor next to him. “Becker, eh?” He sounded amused. “Haunting us from the grave.”
[Bandwidth Poor – Upload Delayed]
“Where you put him,” Holtzmann ventured.
Barnes’ expression became grave. “I think it’s time you joined him, Martin.”
Barnes reached into his jacket pocket and Holtzmann’s heart froze in fear, expecting a gun. He produced a pill instead. Small. Green. He placed it on the surface of the desk between them, and as he did, Holtzmann noticed for the first time the thin shimmer around Barnes’ hands. Monolayer gloves. He’d leave no trace behind here.
[Bandwidth Poor – Upload Delayed]
“The President values your loyalty,” Barnes was saying. “You’re a true American hero, Martin. Your wife will be taken care of. Your boys – off at college, right? In Europe? They’ll do great.”
Holtzmann stared at that little pill. His vision contracted around it until the room and Barnes and everything else shrank to insignificance, and only the pill remained, huge and ominous.
End of the road, Holtzmann thought. End of this long life of compromise. I should have followed my dreams, just once. I should have stuck with my convictions.
[Bandwidth Poor – Upload Delayed]
He looked up at Barnes again. “Does the President even know?” he asked.
Barnes shrugged. “He doesn’t need to be concerned with details.”
“You created the PLF,” Holtzmann said. “Does he know that? That you run them? The people who shot at him? Who killed men and women he knew?”