The news had more on Stockton’s impending victory. The rest was Zoe. The hurricane had sped north and east into the warm, wide open Atlantic, sucking energy from the unprecedentedly hot surface waters as it went, intensifying from the Category 4 storm that had wrecked Havana into a Category 5 monster, with hundred-and-sixty mile per hour winds and ten-foot sea swells. And now Zoe’s track was bending again, turning it towards north by northwest, putting it on a course towards central New Jersey, with possible landfall Friday night. God, what a disaster that would be.

He arrived at the office a little after 7 o’clock, collected his slate and the images he needed, then headed to the Human Subjects wing. ERD Headquarters was no prison. It wasn’t equipped for long-term interment. But the Human Subjects wing could house up to fifty subjects, for research purposes, for months at a time.

Holtzmann swiped his ID to enter the wing, then walked up to the security desk.

He recognized the guard. “I’m here to see Rangan Shankari,” he told the man, holding up his ID.

The guard nodded, then looked over at his maze of monitors.

“Room 31,” he replied. “He’s still asleep.”

“Wake him up,” Holtzmann said. “I’ll be in the interview room.”

Two guards brought Shankari to him ten minutes later, his wrists cuffed to one another. They clipped his cuffs to the hardpoint on the table, which was itself bolted to the floor. Holtzmann waited across that table for the guards to leave. Just seeing Shankari sent a powerful buzz through him. He was so close… So close to getting Rangan out of here…

Wait for it, he told himself. Tonight.

The guards left.

“Rangan,” Holtzmann said. “It’s been some time.”

“Not long enough,” Shankari muttered darkly.

Holtzmann slid his slate across the table to Shankari.

“Open it. See what Nexus has done to the world.”

With his hands restrained, Shankari could just barely touch the surface of the slate. The first image was an aerial view of the assassination site, just a quarter-mile from here. Bodies were scattered across the ground, the geometry of the white seats shattered in a zone around the blast.

Shankari looked at the image. “What’s this?”

Holtzmann answered him. “Three months ago the Posthuman Liberation Front used Nexus 5 to reprogram a Secret Service agent. They tried to assassinate the President. The President lived, but dozens of others died.”

Shankari looked up at him for a moment. His eyes showed nothing. Then he looked back down and touched the surface again to advance the images.

“This is why we want the Nexus back doors,” Holtzmann told him. “To stop these sorts of things.”

A lie, he told himself. We want them for control. Surveillance. Nothing more noble than that.

“I already gave them to you,” Rangan said. “Not my fault they don’t work anymore.”