The woman who called herself Kate finished her prep work for the day. The flurry of electronic messages and electronic transfers and data wipes that would initiate at her command was ready. She closed up her terminal, put it away in her go-bag with the guns and the false passports and matching disguises and everything else.

Then the story played on the wall screen.

What?

China?

She stopped, stared at it, played the story again.

Breece had killed Barnes, with the help of his mysterious hacker.

Could his hacker be a Chinese government agent? A whole intelligence agency? It would explain the incredible capabilities.

Then she thought about what was going on in China, about the chemreactor hacks, about the explosion of Nexus, about how Breece was using it to spread chaos here, about the huge protests there, also apparently sodden with Nexus.

No. Kate shook her head. Whoever was helping Breece wasn’t on the side of the Chinese government.

The story was wrong. And if the American government believed it…

Kate frowned, and thought back to a message she’d ignored.

A message she’d assumed was a trap.

What if it wasn’t?

Kate pulled out her terminal and started searching for that message, and that address. Just in case.

Sometimes there was an advantage to keeping a line of communication open with one’s enemies.

Breece stared at the anonymous message on his screen. It had arrived just this morning.

I know your plans for Monday. Do not attack your allies. Do not repeat Decision Day. Everyone else is fair game. This is your last warning.

He grimaced at it. Kate. Fucking Kate.

God that still hurt.

“Everything OK?” the Nigerian asked.

“Just fine,” Breece said.

DELETE

88
Risk Management

Saturday 2041.01.19

In the window sill of a third floor office on the former DRDO campus outside of Bangalore, a cheap, tiny camera sits, secreted in a plant, staring endlessly at a building. It watches as people come. It watches as people go. It tags them, records the times of their ingress and egress, their faces and gaits, the combinations they travel in, the urgencies with which they move on each visit.

For days it watches. The large majority of visitors to the building are the same, day in, day out. Most of those have faces that, even at this range, it can match against the database it has been loaded with.

Nothing rises to the level of noteworthiness that would warrant a realtime alert to its master.

Then, on the 13th day of its surveillance, something noteworthy does happen. A first-time visitor arrives, in the early evening, in the company of Varun Verma, a Priority 1 Monitoring Target, and two other men. Under the glow of the outdoor LEDs, the man’s face is clearly recognizable.

General Rajan Singh.