Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 by Ramez Naam Read Free Book Online Page A

going on.”
    “And if it’s all true?” she asked him. “If we created the PLF? If Barnes killed Holtzman? And Becker? If he staged that assassination attempt on you?”
    If he won you this election, she didn’t add.
    Stockton smiled at his National Security Advisor. “Then I’ll fix it. But mark my words, Carolyn: I’m going to win this election. I’m going to be the next President of the United States. And however we got here, I’m not going to bend to anyone over this – not terrorists, not ‘posthumans’, not someone trying to screw up the election with two days left to go.”
    Then the door opened, and Stockton was rising to his feet, and his daughter Julie and her son Liam, his first and only grandchild, were rushing into his arms for a giant hug. Pryce watched as his giant, football-hero arms engulfed his family, saw the fervent mix of emotions race across his face, and the thought went through her mind again.
    Woe unto anyone who threatened those John Stockton loved.

7
    Final Testament
    S aturday 2040.11.03
    Maximilian Barnes stood on the back porch of the sprawling country house he’d inherited. The fierce rain pounded hard on the wooden awning above him. The wind snapped at him, sprayed him with a hard shrapnel of icy rain, blew through his thick black hair. Out there, down the long lawn, the Susquehanna River was running high and fast, almost at flood stage, testing its boundaries. White tops crashed on the riled up river surface. Even here, a hundred and sixty kilometers north of DC, what remained of hurricane Zoe was making herself known, thrashing the countryside with her ire.
    Barnes’s face was as furious as the storm, his brows knit, his jaw clenched, his dark eyes flicking to-and-fro, as if searching for something upon which to take out his anger.
    “Goddammit!” He brought his fist down hard on the wooden rail, felt something splinter below his hand.
    After all he’d done for this country.
    He’d been so stupid. Holtzman wasn’t like Becker. Wasn’t like the others. Wasn’t a patriot. And Becker… How could Becker have left that data behind? Why hadn’t the virus taken care of it? How had Holtzman gotten hold of it?
    It didn’t matter. All that mattered now was the mission. Keep America safe. Keep America vigilant against the threats he understood so well.
    Barnes closed his eyes, and it all came back to him. The indoctrination. The beatings. The constant striving to be perfect, knowing it would never be good enough. The crazy rants about the master race, about perfecting humanity, about starting over. He’d left that house at fifteen, changed his name from Bauer to Barnes at eighteen, and still found himself unable to ever do anything but push and push and push, still found himself looking at every enhancement that came on the market, legal or no, to see if it would give him that edge, turn him into something closer to what the father that he hated and hadn’t spoken to in years had wanted.
    And then to wake up one day, and hear the news of thousands dead in Laramie, and hear the words “Aryan Rising”, and see the pictures of those clones, those “perfect” Aryan transhuman clone kids, genetically immune to the plague they’d intended to use to wipe out humanity. Evil little Aryan transhumans bent on wiping out the rest of humanity. Vicious little clones that didn’t quite look like Maximilian Barnes. But resembled the boy he’d been at that age a bit too much for comfort.
    He’d been in the Asher administration then, had gone to the FBI immediately, told them everything about his background, about what he knew of the Aryan Rising, told his bosses in the White House, and somehow found himself rewarded, thrust into a policy role, carried forward into the Jameson administration, and then Stockton’s. The emerging technologies hawk. The man who’d convinced President Jameson to euthanize the Aryan Rising clones. The man who’d been put in charge of the program to make