“Cyber Buddha,” McFadden corrected, taking another draw on his cigarette. “A week before that, Mexico City PD was contacted by a girl who claimed that she had been coerced via Nexus, and that just before the perp could rape her, in her words, an ‘angel of the Lord’ came down, paralyzed the man who’d abducted her, and set her free of the coercion software.”

Nakamura said nothing.

“We have three more cases like this,” McFadden said. “Interventions in Nexus 5 coercions. Two more rapes, one multimillion-dollar theft. In each case, someone breaks into the mind of the coercer, renders the Nexus in their minds inoperative, and creates a block against future behavior.”

“So we have a Nexus vigilante,” Nakamura mused. The image on the paper was already disappearing, smart circuitry wiping it out, scrambling the data irrevocably.

McFadden nodded. He handed Nakamura a second sheet of paper, blank again. “One more,” the Deputy Director said. “Fresh from this morning. Classified. DHS tried to keep it from us.”

Nakamura swiped his thumb and video played across the sheet. Four lines of people moving through a security checkpoint, all of them wearing badges. DHS’s Chicago office. The video zoomed in on one man, in business attire with a backpack slung over one shoulder. A red oval appeared around him, and a name and bio. Brendan Taylor. Accountant for DHS.

One moment Taylor was slowly moving forward with the line. The next, a look of bewilderment appeared on his face. In the video he patted himself down, turned around frantically, slammed his bag on the conveyor.

Then he yelled something, “I think I have a bomb! A bomb!”

Then chaos and static.

Nakamura looked back up at McFadden, found the man’s dark eyes staring into his.

“The bomb site’s positive for the presence of Nexus,” McFadden said. “But it seems that, at the last second, Taylor snapped to, realized what was going on, and tried to stop it.”

Nakamura blinked. “You think this is connected?”

“We think all of these are Kaden Lane,” McFadden said. “We think he has a back door into Nexus 5, one we haven’t been able to find, and he’s using it, to stop abuses he sees.”

Nakamura narrowed his eyes. “So what’s the mission? And why all this?” He gestured at the underpass, at the cloak-and-dagger. They could have met at a conference room in Langley.

McFadden took another drag on his cigarette, then exhaled to the side. “We want you to find Kaden Lane, Kevin. Find him before the bounty hunters ERD has let loose do. Then bring him back to us. And we want you to do it completely off the record.”

So off the record that even the CIA’s secretaries and its meeting scheduling system don’t have a record of it, Nakamura thought. Black. Total black.

The video was wiping itself from the paper in his hands as he watched. Pixels were dissolving into nothingness.