Nakamura had gone over everything CIA had on Lane. He knew this boy. Lane was an idealist, in way over his head. If he was here in Vietnam, then his pact with the Chinese had evaporated. Either Shu’s death had canceled it, or Lane himself had backed out, running from them.

Yes. That was right. Lane wouldn’t willingly serve the Chinese either. He’d want to be free, free to pursue his idealistic pursuits.

He tried to imagine being Lane. Protected by monks. But on the run. He’d know about the bounty on his head, the attacks on the other monasteries, the monks dying to protect him.

How would he react? Seek out another monastery?

Oh no. Lane would be scared, but his idealism would be stronger. He wouldn’t want any more blood on his hands.

He’d find another way, put as much distance between himself and the monks as possible, reduce the risk to them as much as he could. And the opposite of a remote monastery… was a big city.

Chapter 27: Heaven

27

HEAVEN

Wednesday October 24th

Kade slept, rose, and worked. To catch the ones behind the assassination attempt and the Chicago bombing, he needed a new agent.

He started with the scaffolding of his previous agents. Code that scanned for other Nexus-running minds, that embedded itself in memory files and sensory dumps that Nexus users traded back and forth. Code that used the back doors he and Rangan had built to silently copy itself into each new mind it encountered, that hid itself from process listings and cloaked its CPU and memory usage. Libraries to rummage through the mind it entered, to alert Kade if that mind matched certain parameters, to send him back snippets of memories, contents of directories, parameters pulled from the Nexus OS.

What differed from his previous viruses was the search pattern. He wasn’t looking for thoughts of Rangan or Ilya, here. He wasn’t looking for a running coercion program, or even the source code – he already had agents searching for that. He was looking for a mind that knew about such code, that knew about a particular piece of such code.

The OS version number was the best hook he had. Nexus OS version 0.72. If someone saw it, thought of it, had code in their mind that referred to it, Kade wanted to know. He added other search criteria – memories of violence, of explosions, thoughts of the PLF. He combined them into a rough model, giving weights to each to produce an overall confidence level.

Kade worked for two days, iterating on it, testing it in various scenarios, while Feng brought him food and stretched and did his martial arts exercises and read paper books bought from street vendors.