Small Miracles Page 28

  “What’s the phone extension there?” Harry asked. “I can report what I find.”

  “Good idea, Harry,” Aaron said. “It’s four twelve. Door inspectors, call in.”

  Only the phones were dead. Aaron permitted himself the hope that one of his folks would know how to bring them back up. Or Kim, when he found her.

  Aaron’s search parties began returning to the infirmary, all to report suspicious devices on the exits. Still, his spirits rose just a bit when the ceiling lamps came back on, despite the tears the sudden brightness brought to his eyes. He kept treating lacerated and bruised hands.

  Janet Kwan strode into the infirmary, holding a cell phone. “Sorry, no service,” she said. “Just camera mode. I wanted you to see the phone switch.”

  So much for the notion they might communicate around the building by phone. Aaron squinted at the phone’s tiny screen, at a two-tiered rack of electronic circuit boards.

  He intuited the work of a steel-toed boot where electronics boards had been caved in.

  * * *

  Kim was gasping for breath as she reached her destination. Her chest heaved from the exertion. She managed to call out to Brent, “It’s me.”

  “Mm-mg,” he acknowledged around his gag.

  Then the lights came on. Her visor was still in night-vision mode; she looked down, hand shading her eyes, until she could reconfigure her visor. Alan lay flat on his back, his face directly beneath a ceiling fixture, grunting in pain. His eyes were clenched shut. She bent over him to block some of the light.

  “Thanks,” Alan hissed. Behind his visor, his eyes blinked and teared and darted about. “Please, kill the lights. With these tears in my eyes, I can’t turn off night vision.”

  That would leave Brent in the dark. She pulled up a help menu, found the keypad codes for visors. She switched his visor to normal mode, with heavy sun filtering. “Better?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  If the Emergent were truly gone, she could get the prisoners out of the auditorium. And she desperately needed Aaron’s calm, practical advice. She stood. “I’ll be back.”

  “Mm-mmph,” Brent called loudly.

  He had earned her trust, divulging the undocumented nanosuit control codes, but she had trussed him up with a lot of duct tape. Getting him loose would take a while.

  Making an apologetic face, she removed Brent’s tape gag and yet more facial hair. “I’ll be back,” she repeated, and dashed from the storeroom to see to the others.

  * * *

  His focus on disinfecting, stitching, and bandaging abused hands, Aaron paid little heed to the footsteps coming briskly his way. Yet someone else back to announce yet another remote exit rigged with a bomb, he supposed, or another reason they could not communicate. The bad guys were damnably thorough.

  He had resigned himself to waiting for the police to arrive, whether or not because Brent and his friends made the promised call. Sladja would be frantic by now, and she wouldn’t be the only one pressing the authorities to look for an unaccounted-for spouse.

  “Aaron!”

  “Kim?” Aaron’s head whipped around. She stood in the infirmary doorway, leaning against a jamb. She had a nasty bruise on her forehead and a relieved grin. He wound the Ace bandage one more time around Mason Tanaka’s sprained wrist before rushing to her.

  Beneath Aaron’s bear hug, Kim’s clothes turned rigid. He hadn’t noticed until that moment that she wore a nanosuit with its hood thrown back. His hands, as battered as many he had treated, complained. He ignored them.

  “Are you okay?” he and Kim asked in unison.

  “Uh-huh,” Kim said.

  “Me, too. Umm, Kim, what was your call about?” That had been, what, twenty minutes earlier? Aaron released her and stepped aside so Mason could get out the infirmary door.

  “One of the Emergent—that’s what they call themselves—was about to get me.” She shivered. “With your help, I got him. Alan Watts. Thanks for saving me.”

  Thanks for getting me out of my funk. “Does Watts need medical attention?”

  “I don’t think so, Aaron, but Brent might.” She brought him up-to-date.

  Aaron picked up a medical bag. “You better show me.” He had Brent’s supposed miraculous cure as much in mind as his medical condition.

  * * *

  More than anything, One craved information. With difficulty it waited for Kim’s footsteps to recede into the distance before allowing its host to speak. “Alan? Are you okay?”

  “Couldn’t be better.” A bitter laugh. “I can see you, Brent, just barely, from a corner of an eye. Facial muscles are about all I’m able to move. It appears you aren’t having a good day, either.”

  That was the single plus of being bound to the lally post: captivity explained its/their earlier disappearance. “How goes the revolution?”

  “Fine, except for some collateral damage. For which, it appears, you and I will be the fall guys.”

  The host’s back itched. One allowed Brent to squirm against the post, which did not quite mitigate the itch, while asking the question that Brent was dying to ask. “Bombs on the exits, though? Is that true?”

  “Yeah. The longer our people have to disperse, the better. Going underground will be harder once the word gets out.” A long silence. “Brent, there’s a potential snag.”

  “Begin at the beginning, Alan.”

  “A few of us stayed back to find you.” Alan’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “Have-Mercy reconnected a router to a fiber-optic cable so we could keep in touch with everyone already on the road. If anyone here finds it.…”

  If Kim found an external link, she would e-mail the police in a flash. That would mean less chance for the others to scatter and hide and—of more immediate concern—less opportunity for One itself to escape.

  It needed time! If it could convince Kim to cut loose her dear friend Brent, and if it could get a nanosuit for protection, then maybe it could yet extract itself from this situation. That would have to be Alan’s nanosuit. The suit Kim wore barely fit her; it would never accommodate Brent.

  Brent intruded with a memory: a crude image, an ancient cartoon. Two ragged, bearded men in wrist and ankle manacles dangled from a rough-hewn stone wall. One said to the other, “Now here’s my plan.”

  Irony, One decided. As with amusement, One still struggled with the concept.

  Then in the distance—voices! Kim and Aaron, Brent/One decided. They were coming this way. One/they said softly, “Alan, listen. If I can gain Kim’s trust, get myself cut loose, I can take down the comm link.”

  “Okay. I’ll play along.”

  The voices drew near. Alan whispered hurriedly, “Brent, the bombings were Morgan’s doing. And I’m the one who assaulted Ethan. If we don’t get out let me take the heat for those.”

  “Understood. Now be quiet.”

  * * *

  Arguing voices.

  Kim and Aaron had stopped a good hundred feet away, but One’s enhancements to the associative auditory cortex extracted meaning where an old-style human would scarcely sense a murmur. They would not anticipate eavesdropping.

  “He’s not the same,” Kim insisted to Aaron.

  “That’s what you told me months ago, meaning exactly the opposite.”

  “You know what I mean,” Kim retorted. “Brent’s more like he was. And how he should be.”

  “Suppose that he is, Kim. Is he sincere? Is the reversion permanent? The new Brent is very smart. He could be manipulating you.” An awkward pause. “Because unless Brent gets away, he’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison.”

  Old Brent surfaced enough to agree—and to notice a painfully full bladder. One tuned out both stimuli to focus on the dispute in the hallway.

  “Aaron, Brent gave me the code I needed to immobilize Alan. If not a change of heart, why would Brent do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Aaron said. The tone was grudging, not entirely conceding the point. “Maybe I
need to see Brent for myself.”

  A few seconds later, Kim appeared.

  Aaron followed, looking around at everything. He started at finding a holstered handgun on the rigid figure on the floor. Aaron took the gun and tucked it into his waistband.

  Old Brent smiled inwardly at Aaron’s surprise. I guess, Doctor, you don’t know Kim as well as you think. No way would she touch a gun, not if she had any choice.

  “I was starting to worry,” Brent/One said. It/they would ask to be freed if that didn’t happen soon, but why risk raising suspicions when Kim might free them unasked?

  Meanwhile, there was a way to build trust. “Kim, Alan hasn’t spoken for a couple minutes.” That was a lie, but for now Alan was playing possum. “Fully rigid like that, the suit fabric may not be very oxygen permeable. I just don’t know. We need to lift his hood.”

  Aaron came close, peering into Brent’s eyes.

  “Looking for reassurance, Doctor? For what it’s worth, I don’t think I would trust me, either.”

  “Aaron,” Kim said. “What if Alan is suffocating in there?”

  Aaron looked torn. “What if they’re playing us? What if releasing the hood cancels the suit’s rigidity mode?”

  “We won’t speculate. We’ll test.” Kim got up on her toes to whisper to Aaron, who jotted something down.

  Given Brent’s/One’s enhanced hearing, Kim might as well have shouted. She had passed along the codes he had given her earlier for freezing and unfreezing a suit, and a third code—which he deduced she had found in her suit’s online help—to release the hood.

  She raised and sealed her hood, then extended her arms. Aaron keyed in a code that froze her. “Okay, I can’t move,” she confirmed. “Now enter the hood-release code.”

  Aaron keyed that in, and folded back her hood. “Can you move?”

  She shook her head. “Can’t say I like being stuck like this. Unfreeze me, please.”

  That code also worked as advertised. Kim knelt and opened Alan’s hood.

  “Thanks,” Alan wheezed. His face was red and he panted a bit—if One had to guess, from holding his breath for effect.

  “So will your friends call the police for us?” Kim demanded.

  Wheeze. “If they say so, sure.”

  Brent/One added, “I agree,” that being the politic answer. No one had made any move yet to loosen his/their bonds.

  “Where are your friends going?” Aaron asked.

  This time from Alan: stony silence.

  “How do you reach them?” Aaron continued.

  “I can’t,” Alan said.

  Time to buy some credibility. Brent/One cleared its/their throat. “He’s lying. He told me earlier there’s hidden Internet access from the building.”

  “You bastard!” Alan snarled. “You no-good … never mind. I’ll say no more.”

  “Brent, what else do you know?” Kim asked. “Where’s the connection?”

  “I don’t know anything more. I can surmise a bit.” One held Brent’s eyes on Kim. She wanted to believe, wanted to trust him. “The comm link out the building can’t be wireless, or the police would have been here hours ago to shut it down. So we’re looking for a landline of some kind. Possibly it’s a tapped line, or an unused fiber out of a cable that passes nearby. There’s no way to know where in the building the line terminates, or what encryption is in use.”

  “Alan’s visor!” Aaron shouted belatedly.

  Alan laughed. “The connection is broken.”

  “Let me help,” Brent said. Help myself. “I know how the Emergent think. I might be able to find the link and crack the security—if you cut me down. Get you people rescued faster.”

  Kim looked imploringly at Aaron. Aaron nodded, and she started slicing Brent’s tape bonds with a box cutter. “I’ll have you down soon.”

  “That’s a relief,” Brent said. “I really need to pee.”

  * * *

  Waiting for rescue is hard, Kim thought. Watching Brent try to move things along is almost as hard.

  Brent had helped capture Alan. Brent had disclosed the hidden comm link. Spying on Brent made her feel lousy. Why couldn’t Aaron see Brent was … repentant?

  Kim and Aaron had parted ways midfactory, near the cleanrooms, she and Brent turning toward R & D, Aaron and Alan heading toward the infirmary where Aaron would treat more scrapes and sprains and monitor their prisoner. Alan was bungee-corded to a two-wheeled hand truck, trundled along like the mannequin Kim remembered from months ago, stiff as a statue in his rigid nanosuit—only complaining vociferously.

  Brent keyed awkwardly, muttering about fat fingers. Router code scrolled on most of his screen. A graphic of the in-house network served as backdrop. “This is like swimming in molasses,” he said. “It’s been months since I did any serious work by keyboard.”

  Still, for all his griping, he worked faster than Kim could. He had brushed off her offer to help, saying explaining things to her would only slow him down.

  “Sorry,” she said, studying the PC screen over his shoulder. Sorry about spying on him. Sorry that, as soon as the police got them out of here, Brent must go straight to jail. Even Brent insisted on that. Sorry she and Aaron hadn’t, somehow, figured things out soon enough to save Brent from himself and prevent all the death and destruction.

  “Kim, if you’d only let me use—”

  “Stop right there,” Kim said. “Aaron could be right. You can’t know what old, bad reflexes using VR specs could trigger.”

  Not that they had specs since she crushed Brent’s pair while tackling Alan. Well, that wasn’t quite true: The nanosuits, hers and Alan’s, had VR capability in their visors. Only Brent couldn’t possibly wear the suit she hadn’t taken the time to remove, and it wasn’t at all clear how safely to recover Alan’s suit without risking him getting away.

  And it wasn’t certain, she had had to concede to Aaron, that Brent, given the protection of a nanosuit, wouldn’t try to get away.

  Grumbling, Brent returned to his clumsy typing.

  “Sorry,” Kim said.

  friday, 4:20 P.M., january 20, 2017

  Keystroke by keystroke, Brent/One set their trap.

  The hardest part was feigning ineptitude. To type too quickly, to absorb information concurrently from too many windows, to let data fly past too speedily—any of those could reveal the superior mind once again in control.

  And so, with Kim watching the screen over its/their shoulder, One piped the occasional burst of keystrokes directly to a file. Command by command One assembled the script that would end this charade. But had there been a typo?

  A moment after Brent loudly kicked a metal wastebasket, One pulled the script file onto the display. The half screen of text was shown, proofread within an eye blink, and banished. “Sorry,” Brent/One said. Kim looked away from the mess to him. “I was just stretching. I’ll pick that up.”

  “Not important,” she said.

  The file had had a one-character typo. Between for-show surveys of another several routers, One sneaked in, again bypassing the display, an edit to fix it. The next surreptitious command invoked the script.

  Brent/One went on about an imaginary search (it/they had found the open comm line almost immediately), closing and repositioning windows until an icon was revealed on the PC desktop. The blinking symbol hadn’t been there before. He’d “happen” to notice it if Kim didn’t.

  “What the heck?” Kim leaned over his shoulder. “Is that new e-mail?”

  Brent/One clicked on the icon to open his in-box. The ostensible sender was a well-known overseas anonymizer relay. “What the hell? Sent at four o’clock.” That was before the breakout—and the apparent time stamp, like everything else in the e-mail, had been created by its/their script. Kim had to be thinking: who sent this message, and how? One/they waited.

  “Open it,” she said.

  “Okay.” Below a legible message header revealing copies addressed to Brent and Alan, the message was gibberish. Brent/
One said, “It’s encrypted”—which it/they had done for authenticity. It/they supplied a private key. “There we go.”

  They looked together at the clear-text version:

  The comm link into the factory will go offline 4:30 ET. Thereafter begins a one-month comm blackout. If you get this too late to respond, we’ll synch up after. Good luck.

  “It’s four twenty-three,” Kim said. “We don’t have much time.” Curiosity got the best of her. “A month?”

  “Morgan is a counterterrorism expert. And I recruited”—One induced a guilty-seeming shiver at its choice of verb—“heavily among the guards, mostly vets and ex-cops. The Emergent know pretty much everything there is to know about identity theft, going undercover, who to see for fake documents. They’ll be hard to find.” Time for another dramatic shiver. “Except they’ll need money. So ex-cops and ex-Army, equipped with bulletproof nanosuits, are about to go on a crime spree.”

  “Can you find …” Kim began.

  “Yeah, I traced the outside connection from the message header.” If pressed now, his backtrack would be in error. But the point was to press her; Brent/One lowered its/their head sorrowfully. “This is entirely my fault! I’ve got to stop it.”

  “We can contact the police now. For another six minutes, anyway.”

  “Too little, too late, Kim. They’re already scattered! Let just one of the Emergent get away with a supply of the bots and the contagion spreads.” Pregnant pause. “But I have an idea.”

  * * *

  Brent could control nothing but his own thoughts. When One severed Brent’s connection to eyes and ears, he raised such a mental clamor that One relaxed the blockade. A bargain was struck: watch; don’t try to interfere.

  The closest Brent came to obstruction was, with massive effort, a typo inserted into the stream of keystrokes. The extraneous character was detected, of course, as he knew it would be. Not to be seen even trying to interfere would seem suspicious.…

  * * *

  Brent/One stumbled to its/their feet. “My legs still feel like wood,” it/they complained. The less threatening it/they looked, the better. “Come on, Kim. I’ll explain on the way.”