Crux

76 PRIOR DAYS

Friday November 2nd

Rangan crouched in amazement at Abigail’s feet, reached out his hands gently.

“May I?” he asked looking up at her.

The petite blonde smiled down at him, nodded enthusiastically.

Rangan’s fingers touched Abigail’s belly. His mind touched… something wondrous. Something like he’d never felt before.

The baby was aware, alive. She felt Rangan’s mental touch – she – and she touched him back, with her mind, with her feet pressing against the inside of her mother to make contact with his hands. Her world was an ocean of sensation, of warm constraint, of her mother’s heart beating and blood pumping, of her mother’s mind, her ever-present mind.

Rangan felt her curiosity, felt her thoughts probe his. Her mind was delicate, uncoordinated. She explored Rangan with her thoughts like his cousin’s newborn child had once explored his face with her tiny hands, flailing about, gently, trying to make sense of this shape she’d encountered. The memory made him smile, and she caught it, giggled mentally, touched on his memory of little Reina, his cousin’s child.

This is you, he tried to show her. You’ll be like this.

Waves of wonder and peals of mental laughter touched him in return.

He looked up at Abigail again. He could feel her joy, radiant, inundating this room, encompassing her unborn daughter.

“She hasn’t met many men before,” Abigail said. “Besides her daddy.”

Rangan turned. Levi was there in the corner of the room, smiling at them.

“But…” Rangan started. “You don’t…”

“Have Nexus?” Levi replied.

Rangan nodded.

“I purge it and redose,” Levi said. “Ministers get too much attention to have it all the time.

“Rangan,” Levi went on, “there’s something we’d like you to help us with.”

Rangan nodded. “Anything.”

“We help sneak Nexus children and parents down the line, to others who can get them out of the country,” Levi said. “But we want to do more, to end the persecution of these children. And to do that… we want to show people what’s going on.”

“We want to record what you’ve seen,” Abigail said. “What you’ve been through.”

Rangan went silent. There was so much he wanted to forget. The torture, the drugs, the mind games where he’d thought he was about to die. The boys, and what he’d seen in their memories, what they’d been through…

He swallowed hard, then nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s show ’em.”

Levi brought him coffee while Abigail set up the equipment. The recorder was an innocuous device, just a phone-sized black rectangle plugged into a terminal. Abigail did something to shield the baby’s mind, and the baby faded in Rangan’s senses.

It took hours. The storm battered the little church as they recorded, sent a keen wailing sound through the building.

Rangan showed them all of it. The bust of the party at Simonyi field. The blackmail. Being threatened with prison for them and dozens of their friends if they didn’t cooperate, if they didn’t give the feds Nexus 5, if Kade didn’t go to Bangkok to spy for them. And later, after something had gone wrong on that mission, jackbooted thugs kicking down the door of his apartment, pointing their guns at him. The restraints and interrogation. The lectures where they told him he had no rights, that they could kill him and no one would care, no one would know. The electrical shocks. The waterboarding. The twisted mind games.

The day they broke him. They day he gave up, and gave them what they wanted.

And the boys’ memories. Bobby watching his dad get shot and killed. Tim being torn out of his mother’s hands. Alfonso being clubbed across the face when he tried to bite one of them. More. The beatings. The experiments. Bobby’s last session, the one where they’d tried to force the Nexus out of him.

And the faces. Every face he’d seen in custody. Every face the boys had shared with him, the one who’d tortured Bobby, the ones who’d beaten them, stuck needles into them.

Rangan had to stop over and over again, overcome with emotion, tears streaming down his face, his body trembling in anger or remembered terror. Each time they offered to end the session. Each time he refused. People needed to know this. They needed to know.

When it was over they hugged him, both of them. Rangan held on for dear life, held onto them for what seemed like an eternity.

And after, he felt lighter. Abigail led him to another room. She peeled back a carpet, and there was a door in the floor there. She opened it, led him down a set of stairs, to a hallway, then a darkened room. The boys were there, on cots, already asleep. She led him to a cot of his own, hugged him again, and left.

Rangan lay there in a daze. It was over. It was really over. He was free again.

The sleeping minds of the boys surrounded him, engulfed him in hope, in a tranquility he hadn’t felt in months.

Rangan closed his eyes, breathed that hope in, and drifted off to a peaceful sleep.

Holtzmann’s first task was to send the underground railroad the rest of the files he’d promise them. He waited for the guard to leave. Then he closed his eyes, opened a control panel, paired his Nexus OS to his phone, used it to get online.

The signal quality was terrible. Zoe had been battering cell towers across the DC metro area. He had one bar of service, hardly any bandwidth at all.

He punched in the address of the anonymization service, waited, waited, waited, and finally it loaded. From there he went to the Nexus board, waited again for it to load, waited to put in his username and password, and for his inbox to load up.

Holtzmann pulled up the message in his inbox, started a reply to it, attached the already uploaded file, and hit Send.

Nothing happened. He had a moment of fearing that the connection had been lost. Then finally the screen updated as the packets got through.

He thought for a moment, then wrote another message to the underground railroad ID that had contacted him, this time with locations of other groups of Nexus children. The labs in Virginia, in Texas, in California.

Send.

Holtzmann waited, waited for confirmation that the short message had sent. The connection dropped out for a moment, then came back, then finally: Message Sent.

Holtzmann smiled grimly, nodded in satisfaction of having done something right, then turned to the other task at hand. The data from Warren Becker’s memory foil.

There were dozens of files here. He hunted through them, trying to understand what he was looking at. One caught his eye.

diary

That sounded like a good place to start.

He opened the file, started scanning for information about the PLF, anything that might confirm or dispel his fears.

The diary was huge, an entry for almost every day of the last fifteen years. It took him hours just to skim them all. Zoe beat and pounded and drummed against the outside window of his office as he worked. More than once he looked up, wondered if he should go somewhere more physically secure, somewhere without windows.

But no. These were armored glass, impregnated with layers of carbon mesh. They’d stop high-powered bullets. Surely they’d keep the storm at bay?

He stayed and toiled as Zoe raged just feet from where he sat. And bit by bit, Holtzmann distilled entries from 2032 – eight years ago – into a story. A story that terrified him.

March 9th – discussed formation of red cell again, under false flag. bad idea.

March 18th – false flag discussed again as means to entrap potential terrorists. CP killed idea.

June 12th – false flag raised again. twin goals: entrap terrorists, generate public support for ERD mission.

June 16th – false flag moving forward. PLF as name. will claim credit for some incidents, launch plots that fail.

August 23rd – false flag on hold pending prez election.

November 18th – false flag happening. lead agent MB, code name zara. see . i’ve protested as much as is safe – maybe more. time I forget and keep head down.

Holtzmann stared at the pieces he’d put together. He opened the linked file. And there it was. A classified memo detailing the creation of the PLF. An undercover operation that would take credit for terrorist activities, would lure in potential transhuman terrorists, send them off on missions that were sure to fail, letting the FBI and ERD foil most of those missions… Letting others missions “succeed” in a controlled manner, with no loss of life…

A false flag indeed. One that would capture transhuman terrorists. And keep the public afraid.

So what happened?

He scanned back, and an entry caught his eye again.

false flag happening. lead agent MB, code name zara.

MB.

Maximilian Barnes.

Special Policy Advisor to two presidents.

And now Acting Director of the ERD.

Holtzmann’s heart was pounding hard now. This was too much. Too much. He’d had his fears, but this… This?

He needed to get these files to the right people. Anonymously. Not from his workstation.

He moved to copy the files to his phone instead, found that his workstation couldn’t see the phone.

Fear crept up Holtzmann’s spine. He turned to the workstation again, pulled up a random site on the net.

Network failure. System offline.

Oh no. Oh no. Holtzmann stood as calmly as he could. He had a bad feeling about this.

He opened his briefcase, unplugged the kludgy foil reader he’d constructed, the foil still in it, and shoved the whole mess in. Then he picked up his cane and limped to the door. He had the data. He could finish this from home. From anywhere. Not here.

He shifted his cane to the briefcase hand, and put his free hand on the door knob.

It was locked.

What? He hadn’t locked it.

He reached into his jacket for his badge, but of course the badge wasn’t there. Rangan Shankari had it.

He slid open the backup authentication panel next to the door, swiped his thumb across the pad, held his eye steady where the retinal scanner could see him.

ACCESS DENIED flashed across the small screen.

Just a mistake, he told himself. A glitch from the lockdown. Or the storm.

Stay calm. Stay calm.

He turned back to his desk, limped to it on his cane.

He picked up the secure line on his desk. He’d call security, have them unlock his office.

Nothing. The line was dead.

He was trapped here.