I pull myself away from the abyss of his thoughts as he dies, and I notice Zhang making a face, almost wincing.
“You feel that too?” I ask. I’m genuinely curious. This is the first chance I’ve ever had to talk to someone whose talent matches my own so closely. I wonder if he’s got a trick that I don’t know, or if he has some way of handling the pain and nightmares that I haven’t learned yet.
Zhang doesn’t seem in a mood to swap secrets, however. He wipes the sweat off his face with one hand and keeps walking. “How do we get out of here?” he asks. “Godwin had to have some way out.”
I search my memory. I was in Godwin’s head for a good long while. Even if I wasn’t looking specifically for this, it’s possible it’s still there. It’s like picking apart a snarled ball of yarn, with one association leading to the next, all knotted together. Childhood memories leading to old songs leading to locker combinations leading to the names of lovers leading to favorite snacks.
I think I have something. A feeling of queasiness. Checking a pocket for Dramamine. Godwin is fine with flying in most cases. But he always gets airsick when he has to ride in a—
“Helicopter,” I tell Zhang. “He came in by chopper, that’s how he’s going out. We need to find a clearing.”
We circle carefully around the smoking crater that was Golden Boten City, in case the drones are still monitoring. There is a visible break in the trees just south of the main stretch of road. It’s as good a place as any to start.
We don’t come across any more of Godwin’s men. But we both know that they’re dead or gone. I can tell from the way Zhang moves—too fast, not checking around him. I can feel it too. There are no other minds in this building.
Still, I try to slow down, to be more careful. It’s possible they’re too far away. Or deeply unconscious. Or that Zhang and I are missing them completely as our reserves run lower.
But at the edge of the clearing, neither of us needs our talents to hear the sounds of a struggle.
And I pick up the familiar thoughts.
Godwin.
And Sara.
I don’t know how and I don’t care. I’m off and running, past Zhang, out into the open, and I see them both.
Godwin is pulling Sara along, a knife at her throat and his gun jammed into her side. Her hands are cuffed by zip ties behind her, keeping her off balance. Her arm still hurts with every step. If she struggles or resists, he can slice her carotid or disembowel her with barely more than a twitch.
I glance inside her short-term memory. Godwin’s men pulled her out of the hotel and stashed her behind the place just after the software transfer. Godwin wanted her nearby, in case he needed to use her as leverage— against Stack, or possibly against anyone from the U.S. government, or me, in case I managed to somehow escape from Zhang.
Godwin grabbed her and hid with her in the jungle until the missile strikes stopped. He sent his men after us and called for his helicopter ride.
Now she’s shell-shocked, like the rest of us, and she’s tired and dehydrated and suffering a few cuts and bruises, and her arm hurts like hell from where she was strapped to a mattress for twelve hours.
But she’s alive. Because Godwin was paranoid enough to know he’d need a hostage in case everything went south.
God bless him for being such an unmitigated bastard.
Neither of them has seen me yet. Godwin is trying to get her to move out into the open, using both the knife and gun to prod her. Sara is not making it any easier. She’s moving like a sack of flour—heavy and slow.
His frustration is loud and clear to me all the way across the clearing.
Sara, on the other hand, is just waiting. Quiet. Keen. Looking for the opening.
Within a second, she finds it.
He gets one step ahead and pulls at her with the knife, keeping its edge against her neck.
But he’s extended his arm and opened a space between them. And that gives her enough room to move in close and check her shoulder right into his throat.
Even though it’s her bad shoulder and brings tears to her eyes, she knocks him back with all her weight.
He gags and reflexively reaches for his neck with one hand. The one holding the gun.
Sara whips around and takes his legs out from under him with a hard sweep. He goes down on his back. He drops his weapons.
Sara kicks him hard in the ribs. And then the head. She stomps his fingers as he reaches for the knife on the ground. I can hear the crack of bone all the way across the clearing.
I start moving to help her, but she doesn’t really need it. She is a professional, after all. I could watch her beat the shit out of Godwin all day.
But then I see what she’s planning next.
And I’ve got to stop her.
I start running and shouting, “NO!”
I realize Zhang is a few steps behind, limping as fast as he can. He can see the plan in her head as well.
She doesn’t know it’s going to be fatal for her.
Sara doesn’t quite hear me—she’s been partially deafened by the explosions too. And most of her just doesn’t care about the outside world. For her, at this moment, there’s only one thing that matters—and that’s making sure Godwin does not get up again.
She falls to the ground and rolls. I know what she’s doing. So does Godwin. He tries to grab her, to tackle her.
He misses. She gets her fingers, behind her back, on the gun.
Years of practice flip it around, put the butt in her hand and her finger on the trigger.
Even behind her back, she can aim. She levers herself up into a half-sitting position and points the barrel at him.
She doesn’t know. She’s got no idea about Godwin’s suicide vest.
Godwin doesn’t care anymore. He is filled with nothing but rage. The inside of his mind is like the mobs that he’s created. There is no tomorrow, no consequence, nothing beyond the need to hurt, to make someone else pay.
He launches himself at her.
Sara fires.
She’s in a bad position. Most people wouldn’t have been able to make the shot at all. But she’s had a lot of practice. The bullet hits him low, in the upper thigh just below the hip.
I feel his femur shatter, and nearly collapse myself.
Godwin’s weight goes sideways, and he goes down like a mudslide.
His blood pressure drops and his life begins to spurt out of him in warm, red jets.
The bullet hit the femoral artery. About half his blood just left his body.
Godwin is about to die. Which means so is Sara, if I can’t save her.
*
I use the last of my breath to run to her side. She’s doing her best to tie a tourniquet around his leg with his own belt, but the blood is still coming in great spurts. The exit wound is bigger than my fist.
I try to find some words to explain, but all I can come up with is “run.”
I pull at her. She doesn’t understand. She thinks we can still salvage this.
I’m too weak to pull her away now. I pull open his shirt, show her the vest, but she doesn’t quite realize what it means. She’s too busy trying to keep Godwin alive.
Zhang lands heavily next to us. He looks too wrecked to run another step.
I lock myself into Godwin’s brain, shoving past his higher consciousness and voluntary functions, and dive down deep to the place where I can monitor his heartbeat.
It’s not looking good. His pulse is already weak and skipping. I pull at Sara again, words like “bomb” tumbling from my mouth.
That’s a mistake. Her hands are already slippery from all the blood, and when I pull, I yank the tourniquet open again.
Godwin loses another liter of blood. It seems like it’s drenching the ground under him.
“Can you defuse it?” I s
hout at Zhang.
He looks at me, and then at Godwin. His eyes widen in shock. He shakes it off and begins pulling at the suicide vest, tearing open the nylon, looking for the wires.
Sara looks at me, bewildered.
“Sara, run,” I say again.
And then it’s too late.
Godwin’s heart skips a beat. I can feel it.
His body has been through too much over too many years to endure this latest insult. His heart cannot take it.
I know, because I am tied right into his autonomic nervous system. I can feel it, teetering on the brink. His body is about to shut down.
I place my hands on his chest and prepare to start CPR. I don’t know if that will be enough to fool the tracker, but I have to do something. As hurt and slow as we all are, we won’t be able to get clear of the blast. Not in time.
As soon as I put my hands on Godwin, however, Zhang slaps them away hard. He looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Please don’t move the vest,” he snaps, with the kind of icy boredom that you hear only in combat or before something explodes.
Godwin’s pulse dips again. Sara is cranking on the tourniquet, Zhang is doing his best, but his heart simply does not have that many beats left in it.
So I do something I’ve never tried before.
I reach in as deep as I can go, going below the brain, all the way down, right into the nerves. It’s like swimming in arctic waters. He’s almost gone.
I find the nerve endings, and I send a jolt into them. I force another heartbeat.
His pulse flutters against the tracker on his wrist. It’s enough to keep the signal going.
I force another contraction of his heart. His blood moves like mud, but it moves. Another beat, and the tracker registers it.
Godwin barely has a mind left at all. I get only the faintest impressions of his life and memories now. He is cold. He cannot feel anything but the cold. He knows with sudden and sharp clarity that when he is gone, he will not be missed. Not a single person will mourn his loss. He thought he was superior, and now he is dying like everyone else.
“Almost there,” Zhang says. I feel like I’m down at the bottom of a dark well, looking up at him. I can see his fingers, slick with blood, working on a wire and a battery pack.
I clench my fists and find the nerve endings again and push as hard as I can. His heart gives one more beat. His pulse bounces against the tracker on his wrist one last time, and the radio signal keeps beaming to the receiver on the vest.
But that’s it. I am done. I cannot squeeze any more blood from this stone.
I reach for Sara’s hand. She takes mine. And I wait.
The signal ends.
And Zhang holds up the receiver, disconnected cleanly from the vest. He’s defused the bomb.
For a moment, we just sit in the clearing. The sun beats down on us. Insects begin to crawl in Godwin’s blood.
What feels like hours later, I hear the sound of a helicopter.
///26
The Next Internet Outrage
Sara meets me outside the courthouse. Stack’s first appearance in front of a judge is today, and she is here to help the legal team in whatever way she can. She has brought him a suit and tie from the Nautilus, which is docked in Oakland, where it was parked by the Coast Guard.
Stack has been held down here at the federal facility in Los Angeles, ostensibly because that’s where the case was filed, but also because it’s a lot less comfortable than the holding cells they have up in San Francisco. The prosecutors think this will make him more amenable to cooperation.
They haven’t been inside his head. He’s tougher than he looks. And he believes he’s doing the right thing. That helps a lot of people bear what seems unbearable.
Or so I’ve been told. Personally, I’d take whatever deal they’re offering and be sleeping in my own bed again.
Sara waits for me on the steps. Her bruises have faded to a dull yellow. They are only noticeable under her makeup if you know where to look.
“You look better,” she says.
I don’t, at least not in her eyes. I went to my usual suite of doctors once we got back from Laos, and they all marveled at the damage I’d managed to do in such a short amount of time. I’ve lost weight, I’m on a new course of antibiotics for the germs that wormed their way into my wounds, and I still get a ringing noise in one ear every now and then.
But I got a bunch of new prescriptions for painkillers out of it, so it’s not all bad.
Downvote, at least, has fallen apart. The site went dark suddenly, and people moved on to the next Internet outrage. There have been three mass shootings and a couple of celebrity stalkings in the past month, but nobody can blame them on a website anymore.
Sara is ready to talk to me about the money. I’d like to cut her off before she begins, but I know she hates that. So she steels herself like she’s about to rip off a Band-Aid and tells me what I already know.
“Look. It’s probably going to be some time before Aaric is able to pay you for your work. I wanted you to know that. But you will be paid. I promise you that. Once this ridiculous case is thrown out—”
“I don’t need to be paid. I started this with another client, remember?”
And, I don’t add out loud, it’s going to be a long time before the case is resolved. The government wants to make an example of Stack. Without Godwin, he’s got nothing to trade with them.
“Aaric will pay you,” Sara insists. “I will see to it.”
There it is again. That faith. The world is going to be a better place. Or at least it will if Sara has anything to say about it.
“I told you, I’m fine. What about you?” I ask. “How are you going to pay the bills with your boss in jail?”
“I’ve got savings,” she says. But in her head, I see that she is a little nervous. Her entire professional life is up in the air.
“You could find something else to do.”
“He needs me,” she says.
“What if I said I needed you?” I ask.
I have to give her credit. She laughs at me only inside her head.
“I think we both know how that would end,” she says. “But it doesn’t matter, does it? Because you’re not going to say it.”
I might argue the point. But then I pick up some familiar thoughts behind me, and I am determined never to let this guy sneak up on me twice.
I turn and face Agent Gregory Vincent, who is walking toward us and looking at me with something between a grin and a grimace.
“John Smith,” he says. “You planning on interfering with a federal witness again?”
“Sara, this is Agent Greg Vincent,” I tell her.
Sara just looks at him, but her mind goes cold.
“Right,” she says. “I know who you are.”
“You must be Sara Fitch,” Vincent says to her. “Look, I’m sorry, but this story about some mystery hacker in Cambodia—”
“Laos,” Sara interrupts.
She’s angry because we did our best to get Vincent on our side. We tried to tell him what had happened to Downvote. We tried to tell him about Godwin.
The problem was, we couldn’t prove a single thing. And Vincent already had what he wanted. He got a lot of credit for being ahead of the curve on Downvote, even if he didn’t get to do much with his task force before the website imploded. There was just no incentive for him to go chasing down our ghost story. I could hardly blame him, even if I have the scars to prove it was all real.
“Right, Laos,” Vincent says. “If you’ve managed to come up with some new evidence—”
“Do your job for you, in other words—”
“—we’ll be happy to look at it. In the meantime—”
“In the meantime, Aaric stays a federal prisoner,” she says.
“Witness,” Vincent corrects her. “He’s not a prisoner. He’s a protected federal witness.”
“Yeah,
right,” Sara scoffs.
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Vincent says, but he is far too pleased with himself today to let it bother him much.
“So why are you here?” I ask, mainly for Sara’s benefit, because I already know.
“We still think that Mr. Stack can help us out with Downvote as well as Bankster. Tying up the loose ends.”
Sara makes a little exasperated noise rather than calling Vincent all the names going through her head.
Vincent, meanwhile, has no doubt he’s doing the right thing.
Two true believers, facing off.
“Well. I’d better get in there before the hearing starts. And if you do come up with anything solid, I’m always happy to hear it.” He smiles at both of us again, giving me a particularly sharp look.
I bite down on any replies, mainly because I want him to leave before Sara decides to punch him.
He turns and walks up the steps, leaving a trail of satisfaction in his wake. It’s a good day to be Greg Vincent. Not so much the case for Aaric Stack. I resist the urge to give Vincent some intestinal problems for the hearing.
Sara takes a deep breath and shakes off her anger. “I should go too. Aaric will be waiting.”
She is due inside the federal building to hand over Stack’s courtroom suit. Then she’ll sit behind him and provide whatever moral support she can. Once they take him back to his cell, her plans are a little fuzzy.
But she does not have a moment’s doubt that she’s doing the right thing too. She believes in him. She knows he will win this, and that he will, eventually, go back to writing his software that will make us all better people.
We say good-bye, and she walks away without looking back, or even thinking about me, all the way to the doors.
///27
I’ve Got My Reasons
I walk into The Standard. The desk clerk notices me at once and smiles. The model, in her glass case behind him, does not look up from her book. Her mind is filled with details about embedded cultures and Tibetan rituals. She’s got an anthropology exam coming up.
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