42
A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE
Kade woke slowly. He'd fallen asleep at some point, his head against the car door.
Sam was still awake. She felt tired, strung out, tense. He could feel the same thoughts cycling through her head. Mai. Her responsibility for the girl's death. The things she'd done in response. The men she'd killed. The hunters who'd be coming for them.
And plans. Plans. Cambodia. Laos. Burma. Where could they escape to? How?
Kade had no answers for her. He was completely cold inside. There was no emotion but an icy rage. The serenity package held him. Or perhaps it was shock.
The car wound left and right. They were up high above the Thai plains now, climbing a winding mountain road. Half the slopes were covered with rice paddies, terraces of green, yellow, and muddy brown. The rest was jungle, wild and thick. The sky was blue, dotted with white clouds. It was beautiful. He felt it not at all.
They came over a rise, and a structure appeared in the distance. A complex, nestled on a ledge in the side of the mountain. White buildings. Courtyards. Red roofs. Ornate gold towers above them. A waterfall sluiced out from below it, falling down a sheer cliff to crash into a jungle lake hundreds of feet below.
Twenty minutes later, they were there. The Tata pulled in through a gate in the wall, stopped in a wide stone courtyard. Monks met them at the car. A nun. A doctor. They hauled Sam away in one direction, Kade in another. They carried him to a monk's cell. A monk shaved the hair off his head with electric clippers. The doctor examined him, changed his dressings, peered at the swollen closed eye, injected him, put drug patches on his neck, made him swallow something. Darkness closed over him like a welcome friend.
The call came at 3am. Becker reached over to the nightstand to get it, struggled to pull himself back to consciousness and comprehension. It was Maximilian Barnes. Did the man ever sleep? It didn't matter. Becker had approval for the recon drone launches. He started to thank Barnes, found he was talking to dead air. The connection had ended. Becker looked at the phone in his hand, shook his head slowly.
"Who was that?" Claire asked sleepily.
"Just work, honey," Becker answered.
He rose to get his robe. He could call the Boca Raton from his secure home office. It was 2pm in Thailand. They could have the recon birds up tonight.
"Go back to sleep, Claire."
She was already out.
"Where are we on the candidate list for the surveillance drops?" Becker asked.
"Transmitting to your slate now, sir," Nichols answered.
Becker studied them. One hundred and twenty targets for a first wave of drops. They'd intercepted a call between Shu and Ananda. It had been in a language no system could translate. They'd hired a linguist, discovered it was Pali, a dead Buddhist ceremonial tongue. Translating it had confirmed their suspicions. Ananda had agreed to take on custody of "the boy" and "the woman with him" and help get them out of the country.
These target sites were largely places associated with Ananda. Monasteries he had influence in. University facilities he could use. Places where two Westerners could be hidden.
"When do we start?" Becker asked.
Nichols glanced at another screen, then looked back at Becker.
"The UAVs are fueling now, sir. First sorties launch tonight, after dark. 2300 hours local time."
"You're going to lose the eye. I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do."
Kade lay in the tiny bed in his little cell, ran the doctor's words through his head again and again, played back the moment when the ERD agent he'd attacked had bashed him in the face with the butt of his rifle. Lee. Sam said the man's name had been Lee. Wats had killed him not two minutes later.
Wats, who was dead, like so many others, while Kade was still alive.
He touched the data fob hanging around his neck. Wats had died to give him this. Had died trying to get him free.
All he'd lost was an eye. Just one puny eye. He should have lost more. He should have been the one to die.
And now Ilya and Rangan… He scanned the article again.
DEA BREAKS UP MAJOR WEST COAST DRUG RING
Friday 9.49pm, San Francisco, California
The DEA is announcing this afternoon more than a hundred arrests and the disruption of what they're calling one of the largest West Coast distribution networks for the street drug Nexus. […]
Rangan and Ilya had been taken. They were on their way to a National Security Internment Center. They'd never make their way out.
Kade understood Shu, now. He understood her anger, her rage.
They'd killed and imprisoned his friends. They'd killed Narong and Lalana and Chariya and so many innocents he had just met. They'd killed a little girl, a special little girl.
They deserved the worst. He was icy with rage. He wanted to hurt them. He wanted to tear them down. He wanted to annihilate them. Slowly. Painfully. Inch by inch.
It was too much. He had to get out of this cell. He had to think of something else, anything else.
He levered himself up on the crutches a young monk named Bahn had brought him, awkwardly propelled himself out of his cell, into the hall, around the corners, out another door into the courtyard.
A hot, muggy, late-afternoon rain was falling. Kade propelled himself along under covered walkways towards the main hall. He could feel the minds of the monks in there, even from a hundred yards away. Thirty of them. Forty of them. He could feel them breathe in. Breathe out. They were practicing a meditation of some sort. It wasn't heady like the Synchronicity had been. It was pure and clean and self-aware.
He let himself into the meditation hall, found a cushion in the very back. He tried to lower himself as silently as he could, wincing at the pain in his ribs, in his leg. A crutch slipped from his hand, clattered on the ground. He felt the collective mind in the room observe the sound, recognize it, pull its attention serenely back to its breath.
This calm was remarkable. It made a joke of the "serenity" code running in his head. This calm ran deeper, truer. He wanted it.
More than calm. Union. Concordance. He had more Nexus nodes in his mind than any monk in this room. He was sure of it. Yet somehow, they were using those nodes to achieve something he'd only dreamed of. They were doing what Ilya had long talked about. Together, now, as they meditated, they were creating something greater than the sum of their parts. They were more than a set of monks meditating. This room was alive. This room was conscious. This room was a mind, and they were each part of it.
Kade wanted that union as well.
He lowered himself painfully, awkwardly down, sat with his splinted broken leg protruding out, closed his eyes, and joined them.
Sam leaned against the stone balustrade, gazed south as she finished her third bowl of stew. Her body demanded calories, demanded protein to heal the damage done to it. She flexed her injured leg. It felt noticeably better after less than a day. The miracle of modern science. A mere muscle tear was nothing to her body's augmented ability to heal. She gulped down more stew, more fuel to power her body's accelerated recovery.