Zhi looked out through the floor-to-ceiling windows, out across the gulf between buildings, to where her own face, twenty floors tall, winked and smiled and sipped the latest expensive drink.

Then the real Zhi closed her eyes, clenched an all-too-human fist, and shook.

28
Strategic Direction

Friday 2040.11.09

They met in an apartment rented under a false identity. Breece couldn’t remember being so happy to see Kate and the Nigerian ever.

If only Hiroshi were here, some part of him whispered. He put that away for later.

He picked Kate up when she entered, and whirled her around and around, burying his face in her long black hair as she laughed and batted at him.

Then the Nigerian picked him up, with a giant grin across his broad face, spun Breece around and around and around as Breece laughed, until finally Kate demanded that their weapons specialist put the new Zarathustra down.

“What would the movement think?” she asked, laughing. “It’s not dignified!”

“No dignity in this one!” The Nigerian bellowed joyously. “No dignity!”

But he put Breece down, eventually.

Breece briefed them at the kitchen table, over big bowls of chicken stew and rice that the Nigerian made. He walked them through it all: the contact from the mysterious hacker who knew so much, the infiltration of Barnes’s security, the takedown of Barnes himself, the judgment he’d passed, the hacker’s delivery as promised – of Barnes’s files, an incredible treasure trove for and about the movement.

They grilled him on the hacker, and, time and again, Breece had to say that he simply didn’t know. He didn’t know who the hacker was. He didn’t know how the hacker had found him. He didn’t know how the hacker had penetrated Barnes’s security so easily. He didn’t know why the hacker cared. He didn’t know if the hacker was American, or Chinese, or Indian, or Russian, or something else. He didn’t know anything.

“I was suspicious too,” he said. “The whole drive down…” His mind went back to it, driving, in the dark, in a rainstorm, his car’s navcomp illegally hacked to forget his location.

He shook his head. “I kept thinking I was heading into a trap. I couldn’t figure out the angle. And then, sneaking up to the house… the same.”

His eyes went back and forth, between Kate’s, the Nigerian’s.

“Part of me kept saying that I’d missed something. That there was going to be a SWAT team or DHS in there. Even though it didn’t make sense, even though they could have nabbed me in my motel room.”

Kate held his eyes. “You took a big risk…”

Breece nodded. “And it paid off. I was suspicious as hell. But everything this hacker said, he followed through on. Barnes is dead.”

He grinned at them. The Nigerian grinned back. Kate nodded, reached over to take his hand. He squeezed hers back.