"They caught me," Rangan announced. His voice shook.
Kade could feel the bitterness of it. The words tasted like ashes in his mouth.
"They sent me back in to deliver a message," Rangan said. "They have this place surrounded. They have Wats too."
"Ugh." Kade felt it like a blow.
"They want the three of us to come out, with her." Rangan nodded towards Sam, still bound to the chair. "They want us to shut down the party, send everyone home with some excuse, and surrender ourselves. Just us. We're not to mention the ERD at all. If we don't come out in thirty minutes, they say they'll come in here with guns out."
"What about everyone else here?" Kade asked.
"As long as we surrender, everyone else can go home."
"I'd rather make a scene," said Ilya. "Force them to arrest a hundred of us. Take it public. Show people what they're doing. That's how we fight."
"Everyone knows what they're doing," Rangan said. "No one cares. We're just druggies to them."
Kade spoke up. "I don't want other people going to jail because of us. That was the whole point of not running."
"That was part of the point," Ilya said. "The other part is standing up for what's right. We've done nothing wrong. The ERD are the bad guys here. We can show the world that."
Kade shook his head. "No. This is our fall to take."
"I'm with Kade," Rangan said softly.
Ilya bowed her head. She didn't look convinced. Her mind felt angry to Kade, defiant.
"Fine," she said. "I'll go start shutting things down." She left through the open door.
Rangan looked at Kade. "You OK?"
Kade nodded but said nothing.
Minutes passed. They waited in silence.
What's taking so long? Kade wondered.
Just then, through the door, they heard the current track fade, Ilya's amplified voice, something about a noise complaint, the party over, time to go, drive safe.
Ilya returned shortly after that. Her eyes were wet. Had she been crying? He wanted to comfort her, but she felt hard and angry.
"I left Antonio in charge of clearing people out," she said. "That'll take a while. We might as well go now."
"They said to head out the side entrance and walk towards the golf course parking lot," Rangan said.
Ilya untied the rope around Sam's feet, helped her up with a hand on her bicep.
Sharp pains lanced up Sam's left side as she rose. She ignored them. The four of them walked out of the storage room, turned and took a hallway away from the main hangar area. A minute later Rangan opened the side door of the hangar and they emerged into the cool night air.
Sam's contacts immediately lit up with the positions of the DEA SWAT team that was providing her support on this mission. The two vehicles were a hundred yards ahead. Two agents were with the vehicles. Four more in a loose perimeter blocking possible escape. All showed ready to fire, half with lethal loads, half with tranq. A green handshake glyph showed that their tactical systems had registered hers as well.
She looked to her right at Rangan, squinted to illuminate him as a target, then Kade on her left, squinted, and hit the fire icon with her eyes. Rangan started to turn, the start of a frown on his face. Sam felt him tense in her mind. Then tranquilizer rounds shot out from two agents and hit each men in the neck. They went down like comic actors, hands rising to the sudden wasp stings at their necks, gurgling cries of surprise, then eyes going glassy, balance lost, toppling into loose-limbed heaps.
"Bitch!"
Sam felt Ilya grab her physically from behind, her arm around Sam's throat. Sam spun to present a clear shot on the woman to the shooters, heard the thwap of a silenced tranq dart, and a moment later felt the grasp around her neck loosen and Ilya's limp body crumple to the ground.
Watson Cole came up for air under the Dumbarton Bridge. He slid his body slowly into the shallows where it came to ground in Menlo Park, gradually letting just his face rise above the level of the water. With luck, the bridge would shield him from any cameras, IR or visual, searching for him from above. He'd swum more than six miles underwater, an exhausting feat in the best of times. He needed time to let his blood hyperoxygenate again. He rested a moment, then started the pressure breathing that would accelerate his uptake of precious oxygen. He had miles to go before he slept.
5
LEVERAGE
Rangan woke slowly. His head ached. His muscles were cramped, his stomach restless. God, what a hangover. What had he been doing last night? What time was it? He cracked one eye to take a peek.
This was not his bedroom.
Memory rushed back. Oh, fuck…
Rangan sat bolt upright. He was on a thin mattress atop a rigid metal bench along the wall of a starkly white cell. Fuck fuck fuck. He looked down at himself. His clothes were gone, his watch, his shoes. He was in shapeless grey cotton slacks, like hospital pants, and a baggy grey shirt. Prison garb. They'd taken his phone, his wallet, everything.
Think, Rangan, think.
If there was an unguarded net connection here, he could get online, maybe figure out where he was. Maybe get a message out as insurance…
Nexus OS would have the tools to locate an open net connection. It wasn't running. It must have crashed last night when they'd tranqed him.
[nexus_restart] he mentally commanded. The boot sequence scrolled across his vision.
[Nexus OS 0.7 by Axon and Synapse]
[Built on ModOS 8.2 by Free Software Collective]
[8,947,692,017 nodes detected]
[9,161,412,625,408 bits available]
[visual cortex interface 0.64 ... active]
[auditory cortex interface 0.59 ... active]
[...]
More scrolled across his vision as the operating system they'd ported to the Nexus platform came to life. He paced as it booted.
In a top secret facility outside Washington, DC, two men stared at a wall screen. One man was tall, fit, square-jawed, in a dark suit, hands clasped behind his back – Enforcement Division Deputy Director Warren Becker. The other was a scientist, wearing rumpled clothes, in old-fashioned spectacles, with a shock of unruly white hair – Neuroscience Director Martin Holtzmann.
On the screen, a dark-skinned, bleached blonde man in prison fatigues was pacing a small, starkly white cell. Rangan Shankari.
"I still don't think this is necessary," Holtzmann said.
"We have to know if your weapon works," Becker replied.
Holtzmann shook his head. "It works. We've seen it work. Many times."
Becker turned to look at him, then looked back at the wall showing Rangan Shankari. "Martin, we need to know if it works against Nexus 5. We don't know what changes they've made since Nexus 3."