Holtzmann nearly laughed in relief. Dear God. They didn’t work! Lane must have changed them before releasing Nexus 5! Shankari’s passcodes were obsolete!

Then he saw the other messages. They’d been torturing children. Barnes had overruled him. And they’d forced Nexus out of the brain of one child. Dear God.

Holtzmann felt the rage pump through him. He called Barnes.

The Acting ERD director picked up immediately, his boyish face with those dark, dark eyes filling up the screen of Holtzmann’s slate.

“Martin,” Barnes said. “How good of you to get back to me.” Acid dripped from his voice.

“What the hell are you doing?” Holtzmann yelled. “Torturing kids? Going around me and ordering my team around?”

Barnes scowled on the screen. “I’m doing your job, Martin. What the President ordered you to do.”

“They’re kids!” Holtzmann yelled.

Barnes stared at him coldly. “Not according to the law. Now do your fucking job.”

Holtzmann sputtered. I quit. The words were on the tip of his tongue. But then the audit would kick in, the missing Nexus would be found...

His mouth opened but no words came out.

Barnes solved it for him.

“Get your ass in here, Martin. Shankari gave us bogus codes for the Nexus back doors. Go figure that out. Now!”

Then Barnes ended the call.

Chapter 51: Unknowns

51

UNKNOWNS

Saturday October 27th

Breece packed up hurriedly. He rolled Hiroshi’s body in a piece of carpet, hauled him out to the trunk of his car, then came back for the electronics, the Nexus vials, and the guns. He had no idea how much the hacker had gotten from Hiroshi’s mind before he’d pulled the trigger…

Hiroshi’s head, blood and brains blasted from it, sliding down the wall of the garage as his body crumpled into a heap.

…but he had to assume that the intruder had gotten enough.

He saturated the garage with enzyme bombs, then made his exit, locking the door behind him.

Then he put in the calls to Ava and the Nigerian.

They met four hours later, in a dive bar in Moscow, Texas, two hours from Houston.

They took a booth, crammed in close, talked softly under the cover of the raucous trash-rock. They were all raw, grieving, shocked by Hiroshi’s death.

The questions cycled endlessly. Who was the hacker? How much did he learn? What did it mean for them? For their mission?

Very little made sense. If the hacker had been law enforcement, why not lead DHS or FBI to the site?

Could it have been Zara? But Zara had been surprised by the bombings in DC and Chicago, and the hacker had interceded in both of those events.

And so far, there was no movement at the safe house or the garage, no sign that either location had been found.

They tossed it back and forth for a while, and finally, it was Breece’s decision.