Inside Outt

horror and self-pity and fear and grief had simply overwhelmed him.
    Finally, it subsided. He picked himself up, staggered to the sink, and splashed cold water on his face. He looked at his reflection in the mirror, his eyes red, his cheeks dripping and unshaven, his teeth bared, his nostrils flaring with his agitated breathing. He looked like a nightmare.
    Then be a nightmare.
    Yes, that was it. Make them pay. Make them pay for everything.
    But first, he had to move. That lesson had been drilled into him from the start: no matter what you were hit with, no matter the pain or shock or confusion, never stop moving. Never give them a stationary target.
    A corollary lesson was that when you’re ambushed, your best chance of prevailing almost always involved a simple strategy:
    Attack back.
    They’d be expecting that, of course. In fact, as the shock of the call wore off, to be replaced by a seething determination, he began to understand they were baiting him, hoping he would be provoked.
    What he would do, therefore, wouldn’t be a surprise. How he would do it would be everything.
    He checked his watch. He tried not to imagine what it would be like to be impossibly rich. He could have chartered a jet, been on the ground in San Jose in three hours. Instead, he was glued to this seat in an airport, waiting for the interminable minutes to pass.
    The worst part was that he couldn’t figure out what the vulnerability had been. It was distracting him, his mind wouldn’t let it go, he kept going over every aspect of his preparations and his movements and he couldn’t identify a single thing he’d done wrong. The only thing he could remotely come up with was those two brothers, the ones who’d been tailing him and who he’d assumed had just been petty criminals. Maybe they’d been more than that… but even if so, who were they, and how had they been tailing him in the first place? He’d been so careful not to create patterns, but somewhere, he must have done something, he just couldn’t understand what. Maybe the NSA had capabilities beyond even what he’d known of? Maybe he’d made some small mistake, and their supercomputers had unraveled everything from that?
    He checked his watch again. He’d always prided himself on the supernatural calm he could summon before combat, but it wasn’t working for him now. He’d imagined a dozen ways this might have ended badly. All of them were unpleasant, but he’d been prepared, he could have faced it. What he’d never imagined was that they’d get to him through Nico.
    He scrubbed a hand across his face. He was so exhausted. The announcements and the beeping from the goddamned golf carts… it was all so loud and cacophonous, his head was beginning to pound from it. The dreams were killing him, too: he’d had no idea how bad it was going to be without the pills. It wasn’t getting better, either—in fact, every night was worse than the one before. What had he been thinking, what monumental hubris had caused him to believe he could take on the entire fucking government and walk away from it clean? It was never going to work, he could see that now. Was it some kind of dramatic stand he was taking, Ahab slashing at the back of the whale even as it carried him down to drown in the dark and the deep? What the hell had he been trying to do?
    If he was going to die anyway, he should release the tapes right now. All he had to do was log on to one of the sites he’d created, enter a password and then a command, and it would be done. Or fail to log in for a preset interval, that would do it, too. Would they really hurt Nico after that?
    He decided they might. He couldn’t take that chance. And besides, maybe, maybe, maybe he could turn this around. Regain the momentum. Show them who they were fucking with.
    The main thing was that the tapes would be released, one way or the other. He focused on that, thinking,
one way or the other, one way or the other,
until he started to feel a little calmer. One way or the other. That was pretty much the only thing still keeping him going in the face of the suffocating knowledge that he’d screwed up and probably doomed Nico and rendered all his own most ardent hopes into pathetic, childish fantasies. Knowing that the tapes would get out, one way or the other.
    That, and imagining what he was going to do to the people who would be waiting for him in San Jose.

CHAPTER 24
He’ll Come From Here
    B en and Paula fueled up with an enormous