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

sure the US public never faltered in its opposition to transhuman technologies.
    Maximilian Barnes was a man who knew the face of evil. And he’d be damned if he ever let the US public soften in its resolve, or ever let a capitulator like Senator Stanley Kim take the White House, and throw open the floodgates to transhumans and AIs and worse.
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    I n a rented room in a roadside motel in Massachusetts, a man named Breece leaned over a table, staring at a slate. He was tall, broad of shoulder, muscular, but not conspicuously so. His hair was sandy this night, the indeterminate color between brown and blond, long enough to need combing, but not much longer. His eyes were as unremarkable as his hair. He preferred them that way.
    Breece played the video again, his hands tense on the oversized slate, the sound coming in through headphones, so no one in this cheap motel would realize just how obsessively he was watching and re-watching this.
    “PLF is a lie… you created.”
    Breece shook his head in wonder.
    He flipped back to the documents that had been released with the video. A memorandum signed by President Miles Jameson. A memorandum creating the Posthuman Liberation Front, as a false flag operation, a front group run by a splinter office of what would become Homeland Security’s Emerging Risks Directorate, run specifically by a man named Maximilian Barnes.
    Maximilian Barnes had gone on to be Special Policy Advisor to Jameson, and then to President John Stockton after him.
    Maximilian Barnes had become Acting Director of Homeland Security’s Emerging Risk’s Directorate four months ago when Breece’s bomb – aimed at Stockton – had killed the last ERD Director.
    Goddammit. Breece had gotten this guy promoted.
    And all this time…
    All this time Maximilian Barnes had also been Zarathustra. The leader of the Posthuman Liberation Front.
    Breece’s superior in the Cause.
    The man who’d given Breece his marching orders, sent him on missions, for all these years.
    Breece yanked the headphones from his ears, tossed the slate onto the desk, and pushed back in his chair, his hands coming up to his face.
    It all made so much sense. All the missions that made headlines, but where human targets just barely escaped.
    Oh god. The miss. The miss on Stockton. The software should have fired that gun perfectly. The bullet just barely missed Stockton’s head!
    Zarathustra gave them the software. Of course.
    Zara had been so furious that Breece had improvised, had added a bomb to the plan, on top of the gun.
    They’d been meant to miss.
    They’d been played.
    And then Breece started laughing.
    Because Zara – Barnes – might have meant to play them, but he hadn’t meant for Breece to set off that bomb in DC, or the one in Chicago.
    Barnes sure hadn’t meant for Breece and his team to set off a bomb at Westwood Baptist in Houston this morning, assassinating Daniel Chandler – author of the Chandler Act – and the Reverend Josiah Shepherd.
    The laughter kept coming. He’d eliminated two of the greatest enemies of the future this morning, human purist fascists, along with hundreds of their dittoheads. He’d set an example in front of the whole nation.
    I pushed the button, he thought. Me! And this Maximilian Barnes has been funding me for years.
    It was rich.
    Faces flashed through Breece’s mind. Faces of men and women he’d known. PLF operatives that had been caught, killed, imprisoned.
    He stopped laughing.
    Barnes. Barnes had set those men and women up.
    More faces. The assassins who’d tried to kill him outside Austin. Who’d found him in the cemetery. Who Breece had killed. They’d begged for their lives.
    Barnes had sent them too.
    Breece’s face turned grim.
    He reached for his slate to scan the documents again, looking for details he could use. The Cause would be in chaos. And Barnes… Barnes had a lot to answer for.
    A message was flashing on his slate.
    ] I can get you to Maximilian Barnes.
    Breece froze.