Nexus

by Naam, Ramez

  Ananda stepped into line behind Kade, eyes fixed forward, lips pressed together in that perpetual serene half smile the senior monks wore, and then… The conversation was short, hardly more than a few words. Nothing in it seemed particularly shocking.

  Sam looked at the times again. Interesting. It was hard to say the exact sequence of things, given that it had taken her a few seconds to react. Even so, it seemed as if the sense of surprise might have come before he turned around and had his brief conversation with Ananda.

  Sam rewound the clock, added a third wall frame with a wider view of the area, played the scene again, one-quarter speed, with the two shots in sync, timestamp displayed at the bottom of each.

  Ananda stepped into line behind Kade. His face was impassive. His mouth closed. He said nothing. Kade turned. Why? And as he turned, Ananda's eyes moved, changed from the faraway gaze of someone lost in thought or taking in all around him to the near-set focus on an object in one's immediate foreground. A second passed. The time stamp Sam had noted was on the screen now. Another second passed. Only then did Ananda's mouth open. Sam queued the audio from one of the bugs on Kade. Young man, what is your name?

  And then another interesting thing happened. Kade reached the front of the line and ordered his beer. While he fumbled, Ananda simply walked away, not even asking for the water or juice the monks were drinking.

  Sam zoomed out, stitched together two more cameras. Ananda walked briskly, head turning this way and that, apparently searching, until he spotted a particular monk, nearly six feet tall, thin, angular, with a large hooked nose. They spoke a few words. The tall hook-nosed monk bowed, turned towards the bar where Kade and Ananda had spoken, and walked briskly there.

  Kade was nursing his beer a few feet away from the bar, now. The unidentified monk stepped towards the edges of the room, outside Kade's peripheral vision, his face turned towards Kade, and waited. By this point she would have been asking Kade if he was ready to go. She watched it happen. Kade kept his eyes down on the floor. He looked lost in thought. In reality he was lost in a chat conversation with her.

  And then he looked up, set his beer down on a table, and walked towards the exit to meet her. She zoomed out again. The monk followed discreetly. He had a clear view when Kade and Sam met and then walked out together. The monk paused for a moment. A few seconds later he followed them out the door.

  Sam switched to an external camera. She watched herself flag down a tuk-tuk. She and Kade climbed into it and off they went. The unidentified hook-nosed monk climbed into the next one, and it took off in the same direction.

  Fuck. That was twenty minutes ago. He could be inside the hotel right now.

  First, secure the tactical situation. Nakamura had drilled that into her.

  She felt for Kade. He was asleep, calm. Video showed him passed out on his bed, clothes on. Hallway cams. Empty. Stairwells, lobby, elevators – no orange-robed monks, no bald men. A lot of people sitting and chatting in the bar.

  She took control of Kade's door, instructed it to throw the safety bolt until she overrode it. Next she sealed the stairwell doors and locked the elevator out of this floor, set alarms on them directed to her slate.

  Sam grabbed the monk's face and a clip of him walking from the video feeds and forwarded them to the CIA daemon in the hotel net; told it to watch all cameras for that individual, any bald man, any monk. She instructed it to spawn a new watcher and sent it digging from the present back through time to find any telltales in the hotel logs.

  And then she rewound the hotel's lobby and external cams, watched herself and Kade arrive. There they were. Climbing out of a tuk-tuk, walking through the lobby, into the elevator. She waited. No additional tuk-tuk appeared. No monk walked through the lobby.

  The daemon returned. In eighteen months of data from all cameras in the hotel, it had 8,572 instances of orange-robed monks and zero of this monk. Nor were there any hits in the past twenty minutes. He was not in the building.

  Sam relaxed fractionally. He had followed them, it seemed, but had not come in. Or if he had, he was much more than a normal monk. She took a breath. Forty seconds had passed since she'd realized they'd been followed. They'd elicited attention of some sort but immediate danger was likely low.

  She called her support team, debriefed Nichols quickly. He agreed with her assessment. They'd attracted attention but were likely safe. Even so, he sent two of the local contractors into the lobby as backup.

  OK. At this point, attracting attention was the greater risk. She unlocked the stairwell doors and let the elevators reach her floor again. She left Kade's door locked and bolted and alarms to alert her anytime someone approached their floor. The support would be here soon. She doubted there was a risk. Something had drawn Ananda's attention to Kade, and he'd wanted to learn more. That did not spell an imminent assassination attempt.

  When seeking to understand, go breadth first. That was Nakamura again.

  Breadth first. From the top again. Kade's jolt of surprise in the late afternoon. She pulled up the feed from the bugs in his room and on his body around that time. Kade was not a good liar, not good at masking his emotions, except when he activated the emotion-suppression software he had. And Sam was fairly certain he'd activated that after the jolt of surprise, either to manage his own reaction to something, or to hide it from Sam.

  The cameras in the lobby and elevators showed no jolt of surprise. It had happened sometime after he got out of the elevator. The video from the tiny bugs in his room was low quality. She couldn't see the minor tics that would give someone away to her in person.

  Audio then. Sam closed her eyes, then played only the audio stream from the moment Kade entered the hotel. The lobby was loud, but even so she could hear his breathing and his footfalls. The transition to the elevator was obvious. His breathing stood out in the relative quiet of the small space. Then the elevator door opened; his breathing was louder now. Footfalls. Breathing. Trouser legs rubbed against each other. Pause as he reached his door. Beep of the door lock as he swiped it and it accepted him. Click of the door as it unlocked a fraction of a second later. A breath as he walked into the room. Audio from the room bugs joined the audio from the bugs on his body now. His conference tote bag landed on the floor in a light thud and a crumpling of cheap plastic. A breath as he kicked off the shoes. Foil unwrapping, the sound of chewing as he popped the first mint into his mouth. And then… a break in the rhythm. A breath missed. Chewing paused. A second passed. Another. Another. And then he swallowed, and breathed again.

  That was it. Sam paused the playback and opened her eyes. On the slate, Kade was frozen, still standing, the comment card in his hand. She couldn't tell what was on it, but something there had caught his attention. Excellent.

  And the interaction with Ananda? Sam pulled up the interlocking video again.

  Assume it was two seconds between his jolt of surprise and when I noted the time, she thought. Mark the point two seconds earlier…

  She replayed the videos at one tenth speed this time, zoomed in to each of their faces in two projections on the wall, out to the level of their two bodies together in a third. Ananda stepped behind Kade. His face was serene, impassive, lips curved into just the slightest smile at nothing at all. The marker happened. Kade's whole face twitched. The angle of his neck changed. He inhaled sharply. A quarter-second later his eyes and chin moved to the left, starting the turn that would bring him around. Ananda stayed impassive, serene.

  No, wait, play that again, focus on Ananda. She went backwards, forwards again. He stepped behind Kade. The time marker arrived. Kade reacted. And a quarter-second later, there, on Ananda's face, there was the tiniest flutter. Ananda's nostrils flared by the barest margin. His eyes flicked from their thousandyard stare to focus on something in front of him. Kade had just barely begun his turn, only milliseconds before. There was no time for Ananda to have responded to the motion. He was responding to something else.

  Sam thought furiously. Ananda
had been a monk for forty years. He'd spent more hours in meditation than Sam had spent awake. He must have nearly complete control over his expression, over his underlying emotions. He'd trained himself to accept the world with equanimity. But not perfectly so. Something had cracked that long-practiced equanimity. For a split second, Professor Somdet Phra Ananda, eminent Buddhist monk and accomplished neuroscientist, personal friend to the King of Thailand, had been sufficiently surprised that something broke through that Buddhist calm and made itself known on his face in the tiniest of ways. Something to do with Kade.

  Neither Sam nor her support team observed the third tuk-tuk, which had followed the unidentified monk, nor the large darkskinned man in black clothing within it.

  Across town, in his tiny rented room, Wats zoomed in on an image of a tall, bald, hook-nosed Thai in monk's robes. Who was this man? Why had he followed Kade and Cataranes? Whoever he was, he'd spooked the ERD. Two military types had arrived at the Prince Market Hotel half an hour ago. They were Thai men with the bulk of augmented muscle, wearing blazers in this heat, blazers large and loose enough to conceal weapons in. They were still there, sipping sparkling water in the lobby. Just two businessmen out late for some Perrier in a hotel lounge on a Monday night. Yeah, right.

  He stared at the monk's picture again.

  Who are you?

  This was a complication. An unknown. Wats didn't like unknowns.

  16

  A SLIGHT CHANGE OF PLANS

  Kade woke before the alarm. He looked at the clock. 5.47am. Too early by far. He rolled over, but sleep wouldn't come. Today was the day. He'd meet Shu for lunch. What would happen then? Would she offer him the postdoc? Would she ask him about Nexus?

  Could she truly deliver on what her mind had hinted at? Wasn't that what he wanted?

  Wats. Was he really here? Was there any way to reach him?

  And Ananda. Had that been real? Had he imagined that? Was the monk running Nexus?

  Kade tossed and turned. It was no good. His mind was spinning too much for sleep.

  He rose and threw open the curtains. It was raining outside. It would be a muggy steamy rain, he was sure. Three hundred feet down from his window, Bangkok was alive. Traffic was a chaotic dance of scooters, tuk-tuk, taxis, and private cars zipping to and fro, barely avoiding collision. Pedestrians moved in rivers of human bodies down the sidewalks, holding cheap umbrellas or wearing cheaper clear plastic ponchos. Bicyclists pedaled in the rain between pedestrians and motorized traffic. Food stalls occupied every corner but one, selling noodles or sticky rice topped with mangoes. Steam rose from them. On the fourth corner stood a small temple. Even in the rain, Thai men and women streamed continually in and out of it, paying their morning respects to whatever Buddha or bodhisattva was within.

  In other circumstances he would love to explore this exotic, confusing city.

  He pulled open his slate, instead. There was a message from Ilya asking how his trip was going, a dozen threads within the lab on various topics, and a single message from Su-Yong Shu.

  Kade,

  An unavoidable conflict has come up with lunch. Could you do dinner tonight instead? My driver can pick you up at 7pm from your hotel.

  Best,

  SYS

  Curious. Kade shrugged. He fired off a quick reply. 7pm at his hotel would be fine. He answered a few more messages, then showered and went down to breakfast.

  Sam seemed unperturbed about Su-Yong Shu moving their plans for the day. She ran him through the plan for interacting with Shu twice over breakfast. Kade felt as ready as he was ever going to be. Sam seemed to agree.

  The conference whizzed by in a blur of sessions and brief conversations. Neuro-Optics: Laser Based Neural Stimulation. Hilbert Transforms in Deciphering Neural Correlates of Emotion. Planning and Deliberative Structures: Neural Circuitry and Firing Patterns.

  Coming out of the planning structures session and on his way to lunch, Kade caught something out of the corner of his eye and turned. There was Su-Yong Shu, walking towards the conference center exit, with none other than Professor Somdet Phra Ananda.

  How very interesting. Could that have anything to do with the encounter he'd had with Ananda the night before? Kade shrugged. It was impossible to know.

  At least I was bumped for someone important.

  He ran into Sam at the last talk of the day: Understanding Volition: From Dopamine to Dynamic Systems. They sat together. Sam seemed focused on the talk.

  Finally, the day's sessions were over. It was time to return to the hotel to meet Shu's driver. Sam would meet Kade later, at the neuroscience students mixer that Narong had invited them to. If they were interested, there was a smaller afterparty afterwards.

  Sam reviewed the plan with Kade one more time on chat, then stood there while he suppressed his Nexus transmissions. Then it was done. He was on his own. He headed back to the hotel to freshen up and iron his one button-down shirt in preparation for his dinner with Su-Yong Shu.

  Wats crouched in the alley with the maid. They were four blocks from the Prince Market Hotel. Hopefully that put them outside the ERD's surveillance cordon. Hopefully.

  The rain had stopped, at least. Small blessing.

  The maid was not telling him what he wanted to hear.

  Mai me But, she was saying. No card.

  Haa Nai Thung Khaya? he asked. Had she searched the garbage?

  Chai. Yes, she'd searched the garbage.

  Kang Laang taitiang? Under the bed?

  Chai, chai.

  Hong naam? Had she looked in the bathroom?

  Chai, chai. Mai me But.

  And so it went. The card wasn't anywhere in Kaden Lane's room. Could he have put it in his bag to fill out later? Why would he do that? Wats had known that there was a chance that Kade would miss the card entirely… But then it should have still been in the hotel room somewhere.

  Could Cataranes have taken it? Why would she? Unless they'd detected it somehow?

  He felt a chill. He'd put his name on that card. It had been a risk, but he'd deemed it necessary in order to convince Kade to accept the offer.

  So the ERD might know he was here. So be it.

  The maid was waiting impatiently, her hand outstretched for her payment. Wats counted out the bills. Two thousand baht. He put them in her hand but didn't let go. He locked her eyes with his.

  Mee ngahn Pheum, he told her. He had more work for her. He flashed more money in his other hand.

  The maid smiled, rubbed the bills he'd given her with her thumb, and nodded. Wats let her go, and she turned and was off.

  He stayed there in the alley after she'd gone, idly playing with the data fob around his neck. What now? Should he make his move without Kade's consent? And what were the consequences? What were they holding over Kade's head? Who would suffer? He'd trade dozens of lives for the light that Nexus 5 could shed on the world. But was it Wats' place to make that decision? Would his friend welcome it?

  Fuck. Two years ago he would have charged in, guns blazing, pulled Kade out of there whether his friend would thank him or not, and damn the consequences.

  Now… We must all walk the path ourselves. We must all choose our own karma. We must all allow others to choose their own karma as well.

  Kade had to choose. If at all possible. That's what Buddhism said. Every individual had to make their own choices in life. Wats couldn't impose what he thought was right on Kade, especially with so much in the balance. The ones who imposed their own will on others – they were the ones wrecking the world.

  Wats just needed a way to communicate with Kade to make sure he knew he had the choice at all. He needed a way to do so without being picked up by any of the cameras or microphones he suspected Kade was covered in. Without words being overheard by the inevitable microphones on Kade's body. Without being picked up by the cameras in the conference center, the cameras in the hotel. Even the note had been a risk, a bet that invisibly small surveillance cams wouldn't be able to read the text.


  He'd find a way.

  And if he couldn't get confirmation one way or another? What if, in the course of Kade's seven-day visit to Thailand, Wats couldn't be sure that his friend knew the option of escape was even open? Or if the rest of the situation became too suspiciously sketchy before he had that confirmation?

  Then Wats would have to choose for him. And damn his karma, damn the consequences.

  Sam watched as Kade headed towards the conference exit. She hadn't confronted him about yesterday's events yet. She wanted him to be as calm and cool as possible for his dinner with Shu.

  Today had proven to be almost as interesting as last night. The conference center cameras had spotted Su-Yong Shu and Somdet Phra Ananda leaving together at lunch. The man who'd picked them up, the driver of the car that had taken them away, was Confucian Fist. One of the clone soldiers.