The memory came unbidden. The ERD had turned his new friend Narong Shinawatra into a robotic assassin as well. They’d used Kade’s technology in exactly the way the Chinese had used Su-Yong Shu’s, just as she’d warned him they would. The code he was hunting now was just as complex.

I won’t let anyone use Nexus that way, Kade thought. Not the ERD, not the PLF, not anyone.

You’re using Nexus that way, Ilya’s voice whispered to him. You’re the one enslaving people now. You’ve made yourself into judge and jury.

Kade ignored the voice inside his head. He had no choice.

He went back to the beginning. He pulled up logs taken from the mind of Secret Service agent Steve Travers, in the seconds before he’d died. They still mystified him. His agent had infiltrated Travers’ mind four days before the assassination attempt. It had spotted the coercion code immediately. But the agent hadn’t been able to alert Kade, because it hadn’t had network access until just before the assassination attempt.

That made no sense. If Travers had been running Nexus for weeks to connect with his autistic son, the agent should have jumped to the son’s mind, at least. And autistic kids running Nexus seemed had an endless appetite for network apps and experiences they could plug into.

What were the odds that for all that time, Kade’s software agent wouldn’t get word back to him, and that suddenly, just seconds before the assassination attempt, while on-duty, Travers would link his mind to the net, letting the agent contact Kade? It was totally improbable.

Kade checked more of the logs. The Nexus OS running had been Nexus 5 version 0.72. 0.72 was old, hardly more than a few bug fixes over the 0.7 version Kade had released. He himself was running Nexus 5 version 1.32 now, with quite a lot of special mods atop that. He pulled up a release calendar. The assassination attempt had been in late July. If Travers had installed Nexus in, say, late June, he should have been downloading 0.9, at least. Why such an old version?

He flipped to the Chicago bombing. Brendan Taylor had been an apparently mild-mannered accountant. Two daughters, both neurotypical. A financial planner wife who had tested clean for Nexus and sworn that Brendan wasn’t the type to have tried it. Kade checked the logs from that alert. The Nexus OS version was the same – 0.72. A Nexus OS version from early May, used in a bombing in October. And again, Kade’s agents had infiltrated the man’s mind a week before the attempt, had detected the coercion code immediately, but hadn’t been able to access the net to send a message back to Kade until just moments before the bombing.

What did that mean?