Nexus (43 page)

  Kade nodded again, locked eyes with her. One day they'd make their enemies pay. He opened the door to get out. One of the monks was there in a flash. He took Kade's arm over his shoulder, helped him hop on one foot towards the other car. Sam was waiting at the front of the car, her eyes darting to and fro, scanning for threats.

  She expects them to find us, Kade thought to himself. And she would know.

  Feng hugged Kade. "No more getting beat up!" he told him with a grin.

  Kade nodded numbly.

  The Confucian Fist turned to Sam, held his arms open as if to embrace her. Sam frowned. Feng dropped his arms and the grin, offered her one hand to shake. She took it.

  "Someday we fight together for real," he said, giving her a respectful nod.

  The young monks put them in the back of a cramped, beatup four-seater Tata.

  "Where are we going?" Kade asked.

  The two monks exchanged words in Thai. The one in the passenger seat turned.

  "Mountains," he said, gesturing towards the sky. Then more Thai.

  "He says they're taking us to a monastery," Sam said. "A very special monastery."

  They drove out of the airport garage, into the early morning light. The clouds had broken apart. The sun was rising in the east, an orange ball of fire illuminating a wet landscape. They drove north, and towards the peaks that loomed over the Thai plains below.

 
 

Becker swore softly to himself. Morning was breaking over Thailand. His emergency request for aerial recon in the pre-dawn dark three hours ago had been denied. The National Security Advisor had called a meeting to discuss events in Thailand for Sunday morning in DC. That was more than thirty-six hours in the future. They couldn't wait that long.

  Was this a time to use the card he'd been given?

  
The President cares very much about your work
, he'd been told.
If you ever have a pressing issue that needs fast attention, just let me know.

  Barnes. Maximilian Barnes, the President's Special Policy Advisor. The President's bag man. A man that had done things Becker wished he didn't even know about… A man that Warren Becker frankly feared.

  
This is my private number.

  Becker sighed. This was one of those pressing issues. He reached down, pulled a bottle and a glass from his bottom drawer, poured himself two fingers of Laphroaig, and took a swallow. Then he dialed the number.

  Barnes answered right away. Yes, he certainly remembered Becker. What did he need?

  Becker explained. Their conversation was brief and to the point.

  Yes, this sounded like the sort of thing the President would take an interest in. Yes, waiting another two days before launching recon drones would be unacceptable. No, Becker hadn't presumed too much in calling. He would have his approval to launch recon drones by nightfall, Thailand time.

  Becker disconnected the call. His hand was shaking slightly. That man terrified him. The things Becker knew Barnes had done were enough… The things he was
rumored
to have done…

  He shook his head, took another swallow of the Laphroaig to calm himself, turned his attention to the after-action report on the events in Bangkok.

  Twelve ERD contractors killed. Ted Prat-Nung dead. Three of his men dead. Watson Cole dead. Suk Prat-Nung found dead in the building across the alley, next to a high-ranking monk and a petty criminal, both also dead. Yet another man dead in the alley itself, his throat messily cut. Four dead men on the roof of that building. It had been a multi-site bloodbath.

  And last of all, twelve civilians killed inside the apartment – a handful of students, a burnt-out ex-nun and and her burnt-out ex-monk husband, a used-up whore, a young drug dealer – and this freakish child, this freakish creature.

  Mai, they'd called it.

  Becker shivered. What they'd pieced together corroborated one of the President's worst fears. Children born with Nexus abilities from birth. A new subspecies able to communicate telepathically with one another. How would they treat the rest of humanity? He thought of his two beautiful, normal, healthy daughters. Would these freaks turn his daughters into a new underclass? Into slaves for the new elites? The thought made him ill.

  This creature Mai. The Confucian Fist clones. Shu – quite possibly no longer human herself. It was an unholy convergence of perversities. His daughters would live in a world where they were beset by enemies, beset by threats to the entire human race.

  He took another swallow of the Laphroaig, followed it with a deep breath.

  And Cataranes. Sam. What happened there? Shu must have coerced her. Nothing else made sense. Damn it. It was his fault, for sending her out in the field with Nexus in her skull. They hadn't imagined that Shu could coerce someone so quickly, so silently, without warning.

  I'm sorry, Sam. We're going to get you back. We're going to fix you, if we can.

  Becker turned back to the dead contractors, studied their faces, memorized their names. They'd been good men, doing an important job. He'd sent them into danger. He'd given the order to detonate the charges in their skulls, in the skulls of the dead and the still-breathing alike, rather than let them fall into Thai custody. Their blood was on his hands.

  Had he done the right thing?

  Yes. He was a good soldier. He'd followed the rules. Rules that were there for a reason.

  He swallowed the last of the Laphroaig. It warmed him as it went down. It comforted him.

  He read through the contractors' bios again. He would remember these men.

  And he would do the same thing again, if he had to. The stakes were far too high for anything else.

 

Martin Holtzmann sat in his own office, reviewing the events in Bangkok.

  Such a waste. Such an appalling waste.

  Narong Shinawatra, the boy they'd coerced. Dead. Senselessly dead. What had gone wrong with their software?

  Ted Prat-Nung, a competent nano-engineer before he'd become a drug dealer. Dead.

  The child Mai. What would it be like to be born with Nexus in one's mind? To be able to speak mentally from birth with others who had the same capabilities. How would it affect language development? How would it affect intelligence? How would it affect social behaviors?

  He had so many questions.

  Dead. Just another dead end.

  The Lane boy, with all he knew, all his ideas. Lost to them. Holtzman had hoped still to persuade that one to join them.

  Not for the first time, Holtzman contemplated the Nexus stored in the secure laboratory two floors down. He had complete access to it. There were so many curiosities he had about it…

  No. That was crossing one line too many.

 
 

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.