I opened the results from my subquery—financial transactions related to travel. There was a list of flight and hyperloop ticket numbers for Block D.
Relief flooded through me.
Out of 291 AI-collated candidates, 94 people from Block D had international airline tickets purchased in their names, with destinations to all of the major cities I’d listed off for Edwin, and many, many more. And they were all flying out of Newark, La Guardia, JFK, Philadelphia, and Boston Logan International, over a period of two days, beginning in seventy-two hours.
I zoomed in on New York City and requested returns on the surveillance cameras that had the highest frequency of image capture for Blocks A, B, and D.
Three hits came back.
A camera at the intersection of Furman Street and Doughty Street, near a waterfront park in Brooklyn Heights.
A camera at the intersection of Richmond Terrace and Nicholas Street, near North Shore Waterfront Esplanade Park at the northern tip of Staten Island.
And a camera at the intersection of Washington Street and Dudley Street, near Morris Canal Park in Jersey City.
Okay. Before this moment, I’d been operating on a mix of mental models of Kara’s thought process and sheer speculation. But that last query felt solid. It built a foundation under my theory of how Kara was building her upgrade in secret.
I suspected those parks—all on waterfronts—were points of departure and arrival, for when Kara and her team traveled back and forth from her lab.
They were boating across New York Harbor, the East River, and the Hudson, into the flooded no-man’s-land of Lower Manhattan—the perfect place to finalize her upgrade.
Lower Manhattan checked multiple boxes for Kara. A blackout zone with no CCTVs. Existing infrastructure in the form of abandoned mol-bio labs for Kara to plug into. Proximity to numerous international airports. And the densest population center in America, which would provide ample cover for watch-list scientists traveling to NYC to become beta-testers and super-spreaders, thus avoiding any suspicion from the GPA.
Simply by conjuring a satellite image of New York, I knew there were approximately eleven thousand buildings in the new ghost town of Lower Manhattan. Before it flooded, Lower Manhattan was home to more than four hundred life-science companies—far fewer than before the Gene Protection Act. Only some of those companies would have labs on site. Only some of those labs would be appropriate for Kara’s needs. Only some of those appropriate labs would still be intact and accessible.
I could build a query to come up with a target list. It would still be a daunting number of buildings to contend with, and I would never have time to search them all.
But if my theory was right, I wouldn’t have to.
* * *
—
Twenty-nine minutes after walking into the office, I walked out again. Nadine and Edwin were sitting across from each other in the long, silent corridor.
“That was fast,” Nadine said.
Edwin watched me intently. I walked over and looked down at him. “I need a bio-SWAT team,” I said. “Twelve people. Full tactical hazmat gear. Thermal-imaging drone. The works. They’ll need rafts. I’ll need a two-person kayak. For my loadout, I want NightShades, Chainmail body armor, a dozen C-4 door-breach charges, a flashlight, a Spyderco Harpy, a can of compressed air, and an FN Five-seveN with four magazines of armor-piercing rounds. Oh. And duct tape. Always duct tape.” I looked at Nadine. “You’ll come with me? One last raid? Like old times?”
“Um…” She looked at Edwin, then back at me. “Sure. When are you—”
“Now. We finish this raid before dawn.”
“I’m sorry,” Edwin said, struggling up onto his feet. “Where are we going?”
I didn’t hesitate. “Miami.”
NADINE AND I WALKED through the vaulted spaces of the great hall, our footfalls echoing in the church-like stillness that was Union Station at two in the morning.
I stopped at a kiosk and purchased two tickets to New York City, paying extra for a private pod.
Nadine said, “I thought—”
“Edwin’s compromised.”
“How do you know?”
“Saw it in his face.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
We walked into a passageway, under a sign that read TO ALL NORTHBOUND TRAINS. By the time we got through security, we were second in the queue.
I scanned our tickets at the gate, and the attendant showed us to our pod. We climbed through the open door into a tight space with two facing chairs, sat across from each other, and strapped ourselves into the three-point harness system.
A modulated female voice said, Departing for New York City in sixty seconds. Time to destination: twenty-nine minutes. Please secure all personal items under your seat. Thank you for riding Virgin Glideways.
The pod glowed inside with gentle purple lighting and a calming soundtrack of synthesizers played over ocean waves.
We began to move.
There were slit windows built into the hyperloop tube at ten-meter intervals. I got four glimpses of the gates below Union Station and then we were off into the tunnel under the city.
“So what’s the plan?” Nadine asked.
“We’ll have to do this on our own.”
“Do you know where in New York Kara is?”
The lights of the subterranean tunnel whipped past faster and faster until they were nothing but a blurred line of light through the curved smart-glass of our pod. At slower speeds, like now, the effect was distressingly strobe-like, providing jarring glimpses of the world outside. But at cruising speed near the sound barrier, these portholes flowed by so fast that they made a zoetrope, smoothly animating the world outside and creating the illusion that the pod was traveling under a continuous piece of glass.
I woke the touchscreen between the seats and dimmed the glass so we couldn’t see the portholes.
“Lower Manhattan.”
I could feel the 0.5g acceleration kicking in, watched the speed creeping up on the touchscreen: 300mph.
325mph.
350mph.
375mph.
Nadine took her phone out for the first time since we’d left Constitution Center. I took out my phone as well, sent the text to Edwin I’d written on the ride over to Union Station.
Nadine looked suddenly frustrated.
“Everything all right?” I asked.
“You have a signal?”
“Yeah. I just sent a text to Edwin.”
“Saying what?”
“To shut off your phone.”
Her head snapped toward me with a sudden intensity.
I felt our pod lift out of the subterranean tunnel.
“When did she get to you?” I asked.
I could almost feel her body tensing. For a long moment, the only sound was the ocean waves coming through the speakers. Considering our rate of speed, the ride was preternaturally quiet.
Nadine’s face remained implacable, or rather trying desperately to be so. But I observed her inner turmoil. The manic-thought train hurtling through her mind, wondering what I knew for sure and where I was still in the dark.
For a fraction of a second, she considered lying, and then I saw her realize that it would be pointless. Leaning back in her seat, she let out a quiet sigh.
“Last summer,” she said. “I took some vacation time, went down to Tulum. Saw the ruins. Swam in the cenotes. I was alone. One day, I was sitting by the pool when who walks up but your sister. At first, I thought it was a wild coincidence. And she let me believe that. She told me she was also traveling by herself. Invited me to dinner. We’d had some chemistry that night we spent at her cabin in Montana. It was still there. She was charming and so damn smart.