Nexus 02 - Crux (52 page)

“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.

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 [email protected] –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?”

Barnes’ jaw tightened. “Swallow the pill, Martin.”

“Non-lethal missions,” Holtzmann said. “I read the file. What happened three months ago? What happened in Chicago?”

A muscle twitched in Barnes’ jaw. He leaned forward, used one monolayered finger to push the pill towards Holtzmann.

“You’ve lost control, haven’t you?” Holtzmann asked. “The fiction you’ve created has become real. Your pet terrorist group is biting at your hand now, isn’t it?”

Barnes stared at him, coldly, then leaned in close. “Take that fucking pill, Martin, or I’m going to shove it down your throat.”

[Bandwidth Poor – Upload Delayed]

Holtzmann pushed back in his chair, his hand on his cane, propelled himself up and back, back, until he touched the window. He could feel the rain drumming against it, a high-pressure barrage of fat water droplets shaking the glass.

Holtzmann closed his eyes to see the bandwidth. It was up a notch higher here. Signal strength was just the tiniest bit better.

He opened his eyes and Barnes was standing in front of him, half a head taller. His hand was up before him, the green pill pinched between thumb and forefinger.

Holtzmann scooted to the side, away from Barnes, away from his death, towards the corner. Barnes followed him, grimly, the taller man’s eyes drilling into Holtzmann’s. Holtzmann closed his eyes in fear, not brave any more, not wanting this, not wanting to see his own death coming.

[Upload 1 Complete – Message Sent]

[Upload 2 Streaming … 120 Seconds Behind Present]

Holtzmann’s eyes flew open.

Yes. Yes.

Barnes reached out for him and Holtzmann retreated further, into the corner, shuffling fast.

Barnes followed him and Holtzmann swung his cane at the man – swung it at his head!

Barnes snatched the cane in midair with his left hand, an annoyed look on his face. Then he yanked it out of Holtzmann’s hand, flung it across the room.