Nexus

12 TWO TICKETS TO PARADISE

Kade shoved his carryon bag into the overhead compartment of flight 819 to Bangkok.

"Kade," Samantha Cataranes said from the seat next to his. "Heading to ISFN?"

He could feel her mind. Nakamura had told him to expect this. This was unmistakably Samantha Cataranes. If he'd had any doubts that it was the same woman given the new face, the touch of her mind erased them. He remembered that mind too well from the night at Simonyi Field.

The signal from her mind was strong and clear. Not as strong as that from Rangan or Ilya or Wats, but stronger than that of any casual user. She'd been running Nexus 5 for weeks, then. She'd been practicing.

"Hi, Robyn." He stressed her alias just a tiny bit. "You're headed there too?"

"Yep."

Full cooperation, they'd said. Sigh.

[robyn] Hello there.

[kade] Fancy meeting you here.

He tried to keep the bitterness and anger from roiling off his mind.

[robyn] How's your head?

Kade reflexively brought his hand up to his temple, where she'd hit him. The bruise had lasted for a week.

[kade] Better. How's your side?

[robyn] Better.

He didn't like that her chat ID came across as "robyn". He needed to remember who he was really interacting with. He navigated a menu, aliased it to "sam".

[kade] Why you? No offense.

[sam] I was the only suitable agent available. And none taken.

[kade] Too bad.

[sam] Think what you want, Kade. My job is to keep you safe on this mission.

[kade] I'm overjoyed.

They sat in silence for a while, but despite himself, Kade didn't have the energy to stay angry for the entire flight. He wanted to just get this over with, please his ERD masters, and get safely home.

Sam, for her part, spent the time with her nose in her slate, first flipping through guide books of Bangkok and Thailand, pointing out interesting things to Kade, then doing the same with the program of the International Society for Neuroscience meeting.

Kade idly flipped through a guide book himself. Thailand did look amazingly beautiful, with jungles and waterfalls and beaches, and temple after temple after temple. If only I was coming here for a vacation, he thought.

The conference guide yielded up a plethora of fascinating talks: Neural Substrates of Symbolic Reasoning, Intelligence and Prospects for Increasing It, Emotive-Loop Programming: A New Path to Artificial General Intelligence. How could they even hold these talks? In the US the topics of half of them would be classified as Emerging Technological Threats.

No wonder the international meeting trumps the US neuroscience meetings these days, Kade thought. The cutting edge stuff isn't legal at home any more.

He looked over at Sam. She was part of the reason he was here. She was part of the organization blackmailing him. She was an enforcer of laws he despised, an agent of ignorance and repression, with violence as her primary tool. It wouldn't do to forget that.

Two movies, three meals, and fourteen hours later, they were finally approaching Bangkok. Cloud enveloped them for a seemingly endless time, and then they were out, below the clouds, and the lights of South East Asia's second largest metropolis were everywhere. Minutes later, they were on the ground.

Kade watched Sam as they collected their bags, passed through Customs and immigration. She smiled at the immigration officer, flipped her hair casually. He waved her through. How many identities did she have? How often did she do this? Kade could feel her, cool and collected through the Nexus link.

When it was his turn, immigration waived him through just as quickly. So this is what it's like to be a spy.

Outside the air-conditioned terminal, Bangkok's heat hit Kade like a wall. It was 11pm, local time, and yet hotter than noon on a summer day at home. And louder. They were enveloped in a din of small car engines, whooshing buses, shouting touts and trinket vendors, the zipping Skytrain above them, shouts in English and Thai of all sorts, smells of biodiesel, dust, sweat, and grilling meats, the feel of the damp hot air on his skin, the bright lights, police spinners, flashing ultrabright LED signs advertising places to sleep, places to eat, places to fuck, where to see naked girls, naked boys, and more.

As tired as he was, Kade was enraptured. This wasn't even Bangkok proper – just the exit from the airport. He could drink this all in. He could experience all of this at once.

Sam whistled and waved, and then a cabbie in an officiallooking uniform was tugging at the bags in Kade's hands and jerking his head towards a waiting car. Kade let himself be led, and then they were in the cab, and onto Bangkok-Chonburi Expressway, heading into the city.

The cabbie spoke decent English and rambled on as they headed into the city. Were they here for the conference? Yes, it was filling up all the hotels in the city. If they wanted a break from the temples and markets and conference, they should see the Samutprakarn Crocodile Farm. He could take them, and here was his card. That intersection off in the distance was Phra Ram 9, where they could find the Fortune Town IT Mall and buy software and electronics of all sorts very, very, very cheap, if they knew what he meant.

"Not just Indian!" he said. "Good Chinese stuff! Korean stuff! Even some American software!" In another direction was the road to the ancient Thai capital of Ayutthaya. His cousin ran a tour company with good guides and excellent prices and he could even get them a discount. This way to Damnoen Saduak floating market – get there right at dawn if they could.

If they wanted seedier delights, here were some ideas of places to go to see the best sex shows where the women could do the most amazing things with certain parts of their anatomy, and no offense to the lady. There were boy shows too, but, ummm, the fine miss in the back might be the only woman in the audience. They should see the night bazaar – just west of the Queen Sirikit Convention Center where the conference was being held. And of course anyone who visited Bangkok, the city of angels, should pay respects at the temple of Wat Phra Kaew and see the Grand Palace. If they had time for another temple go see the Reclining Buddha at Wat Pho in the old city. And look, here they were at the Victory Monument, almost the center of the city, and here they were at the Prince Market Hotel where they were staying, and that would be one thousand baht please, plus whatever tip they felt so kind as to offer.

Sam peeled eleven hundred-baht notes off a roll and handed them to the cabbie as a hotel employee opened the cab door for her. The heat was a gauntlet to be run from air-conditioned cab to air-conditioned hotel lobby. They survived.

Inside, they checked in and found that their rooms were on the same floor, just a few doors down from each other, just as he'd been told to expect.

Sam's room was across the hall and four doors short of Kade's. She was close enough to keep tabs on him, positioned between his room and the elevator, but not conspicuously and improbably in the room next door. She carded the door, propped it open with her bags, and turned back to him with a faint smile.

"See you in the morning. 8am downstairs for breakfast, right?"

Kade grunted affirmatively in reply. Sam closed the door and disappeared into her room.

Kade's own room was small but nice, with a view of Bangkok's neon-lit downtown. He stood at the window for a moment, soaking in the tall towers, neon signs, and rivers of foot and vehicle traffic. Bright lights, big city, he thought. He tossed his slate and phone onto the charging plate atop the nightstand and collapsed into the bed, clothes still on.

Sam let the smile fall from her face as the door closed behind her. Spending time with Kaden Lane was more tiresome than she'd expected. She closed both layers of curtains to block exterior visual surveillance. Then she walked through the room, inspecting it, methodically opening every drawer, searching every nook and cranny and corner, inspecting phones, terminal, viewscreen, electrical outlets. Implants scanned for the telltale transmissions of active surveillance devices, trace molecular signatures of explosives, giveaway echoes of false walls or panels that could hide a monitoring device or worse.

She pulled out her slate, and used it to view status from the infiltration daemon the CIA had planted in the hotel's net. The cameras in the hallways and elevators were hers now, as were the locks on the doors, the fire alarms and sprinklers, the motion sensors in the crawl spaces, the discreet metal and explosives detectors in the lobby, the local network access points, the registration and booking database, the cleaning schedule, the phones, and more.

There were no known hostile agents registered at the hotel. No signs of infiltrations of the hotel's network. Which might mean that she and Kade had attracted no special attention, or might only mean that any other infiltrators were armed with tools as good as hers.

She turned her attention to Kade's room. The countersurveillance device she'd attached to his bag showed no sign of any bugs aside from hers. A composite view from the handful of bugs sprinkled across his clothes, devices, and luggage showed Kade sprawled across the bed, clothes still on, curtains wide, bags unopened. Across the Nexus link she could feel him drifting into sleep. Good. The slate would wake her at any major change in his room. If his mental state changed too much, that would wake her as well.

She instructed the daemon to continue trawling the hotel's net, to alert her if Kade's door opened, if the power draw from his room changed abruptly, if he accessed the net or used the phone, or if anyone loitered in front of his door or hers. In the meantime it would capture the faces of every person seen by any of the surveillance cameras in the elevators or hotel lobby, and especially anyone on their floor, feeding them to another CIA database for pattern-matching against known foreign agents.

She sent a clone of the data feeds off to her support team. There would be an operative awake and monitoring the feed twenty-four hours a day, ready to wake her or initiate action if any threat was detected. There were ground forces assigned as backup should they be necessary. Local contractors vetted by the CIA for trustworthiness.

The perimeter was as secure as she could make it. Sam unpacked her bag, hung her clothes out for the next day, and spread her discreet, nearly undetectable weapons out where she could reach them. She set a wakeup call for 7am, and put herself to sleep.

Across Bangkok, in a shabby rented room off Khao San Road, a slate chimed. Watson Cole paused from checking and rechecking his weapons to see what information he'd received. It was a message from his man at the Prince Market Hotel. Kaden Lane had arrived and was checked into room 2738. He'd arrived with a woman named Robyn Rodriguez, in room 2731. Photos from a lapel camera showed both in the lobby, waiting to check in.

Wats zoomed in on Robyn Rodriguez's face as he pulled up information on her in another screen. Same build. Same nose. Same chin. Eyes, hair, lips, and cheekbones were different, but those could all be altered. In all likelihood, that was Samantha Cataranes. That, in turn, confirmed that this was either an ERD mission, or a trap for Wats.

It was no matter. He had a mission. Cataranes would be a complication, but he had expected as much. She wouldn't catch him by surprise this time. He would still achieve his goal, despite her and whatever other operatives she'd brought with her.

He sent a message to the maid at the Prince Market whose services he'd purchased.

2738. Tomorrow.

His hand went to the data fob on the chain around his neck. If he could just connect this and Kade…

But would Kade accept his help? Should he even ask? He had to. Kade wasn't just a tool. He was a friend. The boy had his own decisions to make, his own concerns to weigh. Wats didn't know what they'd offered his friend or what they'd threatened him with to get him here. He didn't know what task they wanted Kade to complete.

In the end, it was Kade's karma at stake. Wats could hold out his hand, but Kade had to take it. If he had any sense, he would.

Wats went back to inspecting his equipment. His life, and that of Kaden Lane, might very well depend on it.