Read Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 for Free Online

Su-Yong Shu had known, but never shared with either her Chinese masters or the Americans. A kindred spirit, misguided, but perhaps someday of use.
    Today was that day.
    The Avatar reached out to make contact with the man known as “Breece”.

6
    The Bottom of Things
    S aturday 2040.11.03
    National Security Advisor Carolyn Pryce kept one eye on President John Stockton as he watched the video for the first time.
    The President was rapt with attention, his tall, football-quarterback frame hunched forward. His handsome, square-jawed face aghast at what he saw.
    “Is this how you killed Warren Becker?” Martin Holtzman’s voice came from the wall screen.
    Martin Holtzman was one of the top scientists at Homeland Security’s ERD – the Emerging Risks Directorate. He led the Neuroscience division. His team was charged with finding a vaccine for Nexus – a way to prevent it from taking hold in people. He was also charged with finding a cure – a way to flush it out of the brains of those who’d already been exposed.
    Martin Holtzman was also the man whom President John Stockton credited with saving his life. It was Holtzman who’d spotted the erratic behavior of the Secret Service agent who’d been coerced by the PLF – the terrorist Posthuman Liberation Front – turned into an assassin and walking time-bomb by a hacked version of the drug, Nexus. If not for Holtzman’s warning… well, Stockton would be dead.
    Carolyn Pryce brought her attention back to the video.
    “Warren Becker did what he was told,” came the reply. The speaker’s face filled the screen. Maximilian Barnes. Barnes’s hand shot out towards the camera. There was something in it. A pill. A green pill, seen earlier in the video. As they watched, he crushed it with finger and thumb. His hand dropped lower, out of sight. They could hear the sound of Holtzman gagging, spitting.
    Maximilian Barnes was one of Stockton’s most trusted aides. He was also – temporarily – Acting Director of the ERD. He was Martin Holtzman’s boss. The idea that he would… poison Holtzman?
    Pryce turned back to the President. John Stockton’s hands were clenched around the arms of his chair. His famous green eyes were wide, shifting to scan the overly zoomed-in scene. His lips were slightly parted.
    Pryce’s eyes drifted back to her own slate, a sleek black minimalist slab of a device, held in her long, dark-skinned fingers with their maroon nails. In its black glossy surface she saw herself reflected: a tall, fit, well coifed African American woman, just turned fifty, wearing a navy tailored suit and skirt.
    But across its surface she saw no new message.
    Come on, Kaori, she silently willed her deputy. I need to know.
    This had not been a good day. They should have been in Los Angeles, for a rally the President had planned. Instead they were here, in Houston, a secure suite in the Intercontinental Hotel, redirected here by the President so he could publicly show support for the city in the wake of the PLF’s bombing of Westwood Baptist this morning. A bombing whose death toll might reach a thousand by night. A bombing that had killed men and women Stockton knew, friends of his, friends of Pryce’s.
    A bombing that would have killed the President’s daughter, Julie, had her plans not changed at the last moment.
    Could Julie Stockton have been the target? Or one of the targets? The President seemed convinced. Pryce was reserving judgment.
    The nation should have been focused on Westwood Baptist, on solidarity with the city of Houston, on the epic scale of that tragedy, on the clear evil of the PLF, on the President’s message that there would be no compromise, no negotiation with these terrorists.
    Instead the videos had come. The leaks.
    A video of Rangan Shankari, one of the Nexus inventors, being interrogated, electroshocked, waterboarded, had leaked. It was gruesome stuff, all shown from his point of view.
    That alone, Stockton could have weathered. Shankari