And now he would…

Something was wrong.

He looked out the man’s eyes. He was strapped to the chair. There was gear all around him, electronic gear, listening gear. There was an IV in his vein, cameras watching him, a woman next to him, standing, in a white lab jacket. The serving girl. Her finger was on a button connected to the IV.

What?

Fear struck him. He issued a remote command, pulled up process and resource utilization listings inside the man’s Nexus OS. And there – strange programs were running. Loggers. Listeners. Decrypters. Trapping every bit of data about this communication stream, about the internals of the Nexus OS running in this mind’s brain, about every bit of data loaded in and out of memory.

Oh no. Oh fucking no.

It was a trap, a trick to find his back door.

He’d sent the passcode over an encrypted connection. No one listening in between the two of them would be able to pick up anything but encrypted garbage. But inside the guard’s Nexus OS copy, for just an instant during the back door’s invocation, what he’d sent would be held in memory, unencrypted, to be compared to the passcode embedded in the Nexus OS…

He had to erase the knowledge in this mind. He started hunting, looking for the logfiles, looking for data he could wipe out…

Then his connection to the man’s mind dropped. Static kicked in. Static everywhere. Pools of it spreading out from all over. Flood lights kicked in across the courtyard. And then Shiva was there, standing above him, pulling off the hood of a chameleonware suit that was detuning itself. Security men appeared around him.

They’d been here all along, sitting silently, their Nexus nodes in receive mode. He’d been tricked.

Shiva looked down at him.

“See to his arm,” Shiva said. And the medic that Kade had first seen in Heaven rushed forward, something in his hand.

The man pressed a hypersonic injector to Kade’s neck, and Kade felt the cool pinprick of something entering his bloodstream.

The last thing he remembered was Shiva, his eyes, looking down at him, and the man shaking his head slowly.

Chapter 69: The Plan

69

THE PLAN

Friday November 2nd

Nakamura held Sam’s eyes. He thought of the hell she’d been through as a child, hell created by the Communion Virus and those who abused it.

Nexus was so much more. With a back door to Nexus... the coercion possibilities were enormous. The scale of atrocities was larger than he could imagine. Did he trust the CIA with that power?

He remembered the underpass, McFadden’s repeated warnings, that no one else could know. Not the ERD. Not the rest of Homeland Security. Not Defense.

Not Congress.

Not the White House.

Jesus, Nakamura thought. How could I have been so stupid?

Sam spoke as if reading his thoughts. “You can’t let them have it, Kevin.”