The next week went by in a blur. He worked through the weekend. In the mornings he was cranky, but hid it. During the day he looked over test results from the children, progress on the cure, more encouraging progress on the vaccine.

Every night he’d put himself to bed with a sweet opiate nightcap. Or two. Or three. Some evenings he’d have a little one on the drive home as well.

In his spare moments his mind turned that list of twenty-two suspects over, again and again. But, try as he might, he could see no way to zero in on the thief. On Thursday he switched gears, cleared an afternoon on his schedule, and dug into the ERD’s complete files on the Posthuman Liberation Front.

Over the years ERD had disrupted more than twenty Posthuman Liberation Front operations. Fifty-seven men and women, mostly PLF foot soldiers, had been caught and convicted by an Emerging Threats Tribunal. He flipped through case files, intelligence reports, after-action briefings.

Amazingly, over the eight years prior to the July assassination attempt, there had been only a handful of casualties in all those attempted operations. Even in the few attacks that had succeeded, the damage had been overwhelmingly to property and not people.

Some of that, undoubtedly, was a result of ERD’s competence. Was some of the rest PLF incompetence? Probably.

So how had July happened? How had Chicago happened? Had the PLF suddenly become dramatically more competent? Had ERD Enforcement Division slipped somehow? What had changed?

He was mulling this as he worked backwards through the PLF’s history, when he encountered something that surprised him.

The Spears kidnapping in 2030. The heiress to the media fortune that included the American News Network kidnapped, dosed with DWITY, the do-what-I-tell-you drug. She’d been brainwashed, reprogrammed to siphon off part of her billions in wealth. It had been before ERD had even existed. FBI had broken the case, with Warren Becker as one of the agents.

Holtzmann remembered Becker talking about it, over rounds of drinks one night, at an international Policing Emerging Technological Threats conference, in ’32 or ’33. Mexican cartels, Becker had said, expanding from drugs and prostitution to extortion and brainwashing.

But the files said that the PLF were behind it. Was he remembering wrong?

Holtzmann’s terminal beeped at him. High priority incoming call. He looked up at it. Maximilian Barnes. A sudden dread hit him. Barnes knew what he was doing, and why… Perspiration broke out on his brow.

Get a grip, Martin! Answer him!

He took a breath. It was nothing. A routine call. Nothing more. The terminal beeped again. Another breath, and he reached out to accept the call.

Barnes’ face, always perfectly calm, with those cold dark eyes, filled his screen.

“Martin.”

“Director.” Holtzmann tried to act calm. “What can I do for you?”

“Martin, the President has a conflict with the briefing on the Nexus children next week. A campaign trip.”