Borderless (An Analog Novel Book 2)

by Eliot Peper

  Feeling Rachel beginning to lag, Diana slowed the pace. This long descent would be a physical challenge for anyone. It was a lucky break that Hsu climbed mountains as often as Rachel swam laps—otherwise they would have been trapped in the skies above San Francisco by elevators that no longer worked. At least the supporting hands would help steady them.

  Hsu had survived enough geopolitical firestorms to weather this one. He had initiated some of his own as he navigated Taiwan’s rise through the world order and bulwarked the institutional power of the UN. He was a man who saw opportunity in chaos and was pragmatic to a fault in shepherding his little nation. That’s what had driven him to side with Lowell three years ago and then divest as soon as the tide turned against the oil magnate. He would pursue whatever path offered the most advantages for Taiwan.

  Javier was a different story. He was an idealist, and idealists were difficult to work with. You couldn’t buy them or even threaten them. Because they focused on abstract goals above all else, you had to actually win them over if you wanted them to change course. The direction Javier took out of this crisis would need to align with the better future he obsessively pursued.

  And then there was the issue of Emily, Javier’s partner and the group’s original ringleader who seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. Was Javier still in contact with her? Was she yet another principal directing events from behind the scenes, a bitter dropout licking her wounds in a Kathmandu tenement, or something else entirely? Diana’s stomach tightened at the thought, remembering Dag’s utter, custom-built fascination with her.

  But Rachel would be the hardest nut to crack. Even now Diana could feel the echo of the woman’s gaze as surely as the knobby knuckles clasped in her sweaty grip. Those hands had built the feed. It was her empire, her baby, that was under threat. Rachel’s path out of this labyrinth would depend entirely on why she had dedicated her life to constructing the digital fascia that stitched the world together. Was it wealth? Fame? Pride? Power? The simple joy of solving a riddle? The satisfaction of touching billions of lives? Whatever it was that had driven her so hard for so long, it would find its ultimate expression in her response to Helen’s attack. Liane and the CFO were just along for the ride.

  Time acquired a warped quality in the endless darkness of the emergency stairwell. It stretched out, languid and thick, and then snapped back as Diana’s silent floor count finally reached its end and she pushed open the door to the atrium.

  With only ambient natural light, the redwood grove might appear to be a haunted forest shrouded in mist, but for the pilgrims stumbling out from the black abyss of the stairwell, it was like reaching the promised land. Diana was Orpheus, leading them out of the underworld. Confident that there was no Eurydice to banish with a glance, Diana looked back over her shoulder. Haruki had thrown an arm around Hsu and was helping him along. The CFO was wheezing, and his shirt was soaked with sweat. Rachel was pale and shaky but fierce. Dag was bringing up the rear, making sure they didn’t lose anyone. He caught her eye and smiled, the first unguarded smile she’d seen from him in ages, and something unexpected and solid and warm welled up inside her, and she bit her lip and smiled back.

  Then they were out on the street, blinking in the direct sunlight, looking around at the crowds of confused pedestrians, Commonwealth employees emerging from their office blocks, frustrated passengers disembarking from stopped cars, everyone as helpless as they were incredulous at the sudden disappearance of something as pervasive, vital, and taken for granted as the very air they breathed.

  “Wait here.”

  After pressing the briefcase into Haruki’s hands, Diana crossed the street and dashed up to the corner, leaving the rest of the group to catch their breath and dodging around groups of people asking each other the same questions over and over again.

  There. Nine or ten blocks up the street, helicopter blades drooped above the intervening cars. That’s where the convoy had been stopped in its tracks. But it wouldn’t take them too long—

  Shit.

  FBI agents were jogging between the cars in formation, announcing their presence to the scared civilians who scattered out of their way. The strike team was advancing on foot, and Helen wouldn’t be far behind. Diana spun and ran back toward the group.

  If they were caught right here and now, it would be even worse than before. The feed blackout would give Helen all the justification she needed to take emergency action to subdue Commonwealth, and she could simply leave the feed off in every country that didn’t immediately surrender on her terms. Diana needed to get her people clear of the raid, but the FBI agents were only a block away and closing fast. Hsu and Rachel might be in good shape for octogenarians, but they would never be able to outrun trained combat operatives. They would somehow need to blend into the crowd of civilians, keep their faces hidden, work their way slowly around the adjacent buildings until they were free of the search perimeter.

  “Stop! FBI! You’re under arrest.”

  Fuck. The vanguard had turned the corner and spotted her sprinting down the sidewalk. No better way to draw attention. Her old teachers at the Farm would have been horrified at her clumsy tradecraft.

  “Freeze or I’ll blow your fucking head off!”

  There was nothing for it. She accelerated, legs pumping, lungs burning. At least she knew they were bluffing. Even if they were willing to fire in the middle of a crowded street, their guns were as useless as any other feed-connected device. The high-powered targeting software that made their weapons so deadly now rendered them useless. She wanted to shout back, Go ahead and pull the trigger, assholes, but couldn’t spare the breath. Her defiance would be short-lived anyway. Fists would do where guns wouldn’t.

  “Come on.” Dag was waving to her.

  There was one final car between her and the group. Over the roof she could see they were all standing . . . strangely. Torsos bent slightly forward. Not running and scattering into the crowd as they should be, dispersing into whatever open doors they could find. Again she wanted to yell, to tell them to get out however they could, to figure things out on their own, that she would cause a scene, distract the invaders while they made their escape. But she was gasping as she sprinted the last few steps, unable to force out the words.

  “All of you, on the ground,” someone screamed from behind, voice hoarse with rage.

  “Come on,” Dag repeated.

  Almost there. She leapt, sliding across the hood of the car instead of detouring around it. And then she understood. They were all mounted on bicycles. Dag shoved one at her.

  “No feed, no locks,” he said, shrugging. “And Hsu’s a sneaky one. He slashed the tires on the rest.”

  Diana could see the adolescent boy shining through the old man’s grin.

  “Let’s go,” said Dag.

  Diana didn’t need to be told twice. She hopped on the proffered bike and pedaled with all her might, leading the little gang down the street, through the cars, and away from the frustrated pursuers. She cut around the first corner, and then another, and the shouted threats began to fade. A few more turns and they were free, flying along the streets of San Francisco, weaving through frozen cars, adrenaline surging, sunlight pouring down on them like honey, feedless and present as never before, and then Diana realized she was laughing, that they were all laughing and whooping like a bunch of maniacs, these people who hardly knew each other and yet were bound by the deepest secret that had ever graced her collection.

  As their energy bubbled down to a simmer, Diana noted the next intersection and placed them in her mental map of the city. She led them down block after block, under freeway overpasses, through public parks, and past condos and warehouses and hole-in-the-wall food joints until they finally reached the right street in the right postindustrial neighborhood.

  “Yo, D!”

  Diana met Gerald’s fist bump as she dismounted.

  “I know you like to be fashionably late,” the enormous bouncer continued gruffly, “but
Sam here was starting to get real worried. For the sake of his cuticles, you should really make more of an effort to be timely.”

  “I don’t bite my nails,” said Sam indignantly.

  “Of course you don’t.” Gerald rolled his eyes at Diana. “Seriously, though, even Nell was starting to lose her cool a little bit after you had that Haruki kid arrange everything and then didn’t show up, and then the feed just went poof and—”

  Diana raised her palms. “Better late than never, right?”

  Gerald jerked his head toward the imposing oak doors.

  “Go on, then,” he said, and Diana felt the latent strain, the forced professionalism, the fear lathered in playful banter.

  Sam opened the doors for them, and Diana led the group into the anteroom where Nell waited, radiant as ever behind her polished podium.

  “Welcome to Analog,” she said with a lustrous smile.

  “Of course this is your safe house.” These were the first words Rachel had spoken in Diana’s presence. “Every disaster seems to lead me back to this place.”

  “Well, I hope our hospitality makes up for it,” said Nell, unasked questions circling like hammerheads behind her pale-gray eyes. “Normally I’d warn you that the . . . transition . . . can be disorienting. But we seem to be ahead of the game in that regard. If you’d just follow me.”

  The fire roared in the enormous hearth, bottles glittered on the wall above the bar, and oil lamps guttered overhead. Virginia was polishing glasses, holding them up to check for imperfections. Everything was entirely normal inside Analog, except that there were no other patrons and a large circular table had been set in front of the fire. As the red satin curtains fell closed behind them, the feedless world beyond seemed less a victim of their desperate escape attempt than the result of a simple expansion of Analog’s borders to include the entire planet in its anachronistic embrace.

  CHAPTER 36

  “First step is to find out what they’re actually charging us with and tear it apart.” Liane gained steam as she leaned into her argument. “We’ll bury the Justice Department in suits, appeal all the way to the Supreme Court if we have to. We can have a technical team analyze every molecule of the material in that briefcase. If we get a single skin cell with DNA matching one of Helen’s team, it’ll corroborate Diana’s version of events. At the same time, we’ll vet every claim made in the documentation and refute it with time-stamped data. Meanwhile we’ll have PR launch a counteroffensive, the most important campaign they’ve ever touched. We need to control the narrative here, in the courtroom and in the press. That’ll be particularly important for the appellate courts. We can frame the current shutdown as an emergency measure against criminal USG overreach. We’ll have every headline. It’s going to dominate the news cycle for months anyway, so we can get ahead of the game and stack the deck before a judge even sees a brief. Might be best to start with international press. They’ll be primed to spin things as a nationalist coup. Our government-relations people will storm every office in Washington, and we can rest assured that every vendor on the feed is going to demand answers too. That’s just the start. We can use the momentum from the overall effort to push forward our current policy priorities and end up stronger than we started.”

  The shared moment of hysterical celebration of their temporary escape faded as quickly as vapor boiling off hot blood spilled on an Arctic helipad. Diana’s gaze wandered up above the heads of the others to take in the tapestries hung on Analog’s walls. Medieval armies rode into battle, pennants flying, horses rearing, the sky dark with arrows. Some artist had invoked this violent vision, painstakingly selected a palette and materials, translated it into thousands upon thousands of stitches. Time emasculated the raw brutality of the scene, the modern eye so absorbed in the hubris of the present that chain mail and lances appeared almost romantic, evoking the nostalgia of half-forgotten children’s stories instead of bloodshed’s horror.

  “Helen’s not stupid,” said Dag. “Do you really think she’ll let this go to the courts?”

  “We’ll take it to the courts.”

  Diana’s fingertips began to itch. Sofia would know. Sofia would understand. But Sofia wasn’t here. War. No one else at this table had experienced it. To them, war was statistics, Pulitzer award–winning photos that made destruction glamorously tragic, political debates over the defense budget, a crazy vet uncle, occasional donations to charity, and watching a feed documentary that made the skin crawl even as it filled that strange need to play voyeur to the suffering of others. Helen hadn’t even experienced it, not really. She’d directed a long list of black ops, but always from afar, always from the safety of her DC office. Like an eager archaeological intern stumbling upon a tome of necromancy in a pharaoh’s dusty tomb, Helen was invoking a demon with which she was utterly unfamiliar, as damnably innocent as the artist who had dreamed up that tapestry.

  “When I was working deep cover in Amsterdam,” said Diana, “I discovered an assassination plot targeting a member of parliament. Helen decided we should let it happen because the minister was opposing a new bilateral trade deal we wanted passed. After he was killed and the deal was signed, we assisted Dutch intelligence in the ‘search’ for the assassin, whose identity we already knew. When we brought them in, the US was hailed as a stalwart ally in the press, and the Pentagon was able to deepen our ties to their security agencies.” Diana paused, making eye contact with every person seated around the table. “If Helen’s sending in the FBI, she’s willing to risk everything. The Pentagon will already be scrambling troops to support her feed sanctions and takeover bid. She’s not going to let due process get in the way of winning. They’ll wait for us to surface, take control of the feed, and then questions like jurisdiction and rights won’t matter anymore. I forced Helen’s hand by coming to you. Our escape forces her hand even more. She can’t afford to be subtle, so she’ll go for shock and awe instead. Liane’s points prove it. Given time, the fact that you’re being framed will come out. So Helen won’t give it any time at all.”

  The fire hissed and popped in the hearth, fracturing the silence that followed Diana’s words. She could feel the specter of war gathering in the world beyond, sliding soft tendrils into hidden corners like fog fingering through San Francisco’s hills. Déjà vu transported Diana to a time long past and a place that no longer existed. Adults whispered while she lay awake, eyes closed. Other children intensified their bullying, displacing aggression and anxiety they felt but couldn’t understand. Grocers ran out of canned food. Even the street dogs had a harried, nervous look about them. Years later, in combat training on the Farm, Diana’s instructor had choked her out on the mat. Black spots that she couldn’t blink away danced at the corners of her vision until the world receded into a pinprick that winked out of its own accord. That was how the engine of war advanced, quietly, relentlessly, throwing shadows in the forms of premonitions you couldn’t quite dispel.

  “You really think she’s prepared to bulldoze her way into a dictatorship?” asked Liane.

  “Are you willing to bet that she isn’t after what you’ve seen today?” asked Diana. The lengths to which people were willing to go to live in denial always amazed Diana. But she couldn’t really blame Liane. When you grew up in a world where rules were respected, where institutions mattered, where justice might arrive late but always came, how could you internalize the reality of impending chaos? “Knowing Helen, she won’t claim any titles for herself. She’ll deliver the empire to Lopez. There’s no need to upset American political structures when she’s already subverted them.”

  “Lopez won’t want this,” Hsu said sharply.

  “No,” said Diana. “He won’t.” Lopez was a moderate progressive, and this would be the last thing he wanted. Helen had never much cared about the desires of her many pets. “But he won’t have a choice. Lopez didn’t want to approve this raid in the first place, but Helen fabricated evidence and then used people she holds sway over to twist his arm. She’s ru
n in the highest DC circles for longer than almost anyone. She’ll make this happen and then hand Lopez an empire before he can even figure out what’s going on. Once other countries surrender, Lopez won’t be able to renege. Doing so would destabilize everything and risk the rest of the world launching a devastating counterattack.”

  Dag nodded. “Helen’s thinking in historical terms. She’s not limiting herself to the current sociopolitical system, and she knows that nobody else can catch up. They’ll be constrained by the assumptions baked into the system because it’s what they’ve always known. She’s using the feed as a catalyst to set off a phase change in global politics and consolidate control. It’s like Rome establishing their base around the Mediterranean or Qin Shi Huang uniting the Chinese states into an empire. Only this time it’ll be much, much faster.”

  Hsu raised a hand. “Hold on,” he said thoughtfully. “The solution here might be simpler than we think. What gives Helen the ability to take down Commonwealth all in one go?” He paused, then spun his index finger in a tight circle. “Because Commonwealth headquarters is here in California along with the majority of key personnel. ‘Seizing the feed’ really means kidnapping and coercing the people around this table to yield root access and operational control to Helen and her team. So . . . we relocate. I can arrange for us to move Commonwealth headquarters to Taipei. The government will extend every benefit they can: land, housing, freedom to operate, tax incentives, the works. Between Taiwan and its allies, there will be more than enough military resources to defend against any physical attacks from aggressors, even the United States. Given the feed’s global presence, it would make sense for Commonwealth and United Nations headquarters to be colocated anyway. We can get ourselves onto a private plane, turn the feed back on, and be the first ones off the ground and out of US jurisdiction. Then we can evacuate the staff and fight Helen in court without ever letting anyone with command-level access touch US soil.”