Bzrk Apocalypse (11 page)

which you will take downstairs in the restaurant. That’s when the

maids will come in and clean the room. They have to come in, or it

will set off alarm bells down at the desk. Normal. Everything nor-

mal.”

“I can’t sit in here twenty-four/seven,” Bug Man argued.

“You can and you will,” George said flatly. “Order all the in-room

movies you like. But don’t draw attention to yourself. Italian police

may not be geniuses, but let’s not give them a chance. Right?”

That was a depressing reminder. When would he be free to walk

out in the world without being afraid? Maybe never. But never was a

long time, and Bug Man was an optimist.

“So what’s my path?”

“Path?”

“How do I get from here to there?”

George sat down in the easy chair. Bug Man stood looking out

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MICHAEL GRANT

through the balcony’s sliding glass door.

“We have access to the wafers used for the Pope’s communion.”

Bug Man snorted. “Are you nuts?”

“Is it a religious objection, because—?”

“It’s an objection over the fact that the mouth is not a point of

entry unless you want to end up riding an infallible papal turd out

the far end.”

George shrugged dismissively. “Surely there’s some way to—”

“Have you ever seen a mouth down at the nano level? It’s about

as big as a valley, and it’s full of massive boulders chomping, plus a

tongue and spit and wind. Maybe you can grab onto a tooth and get

safely up under the gums, but I’m not trying it.”

“All right, there’s a second way. We have access to a person who

has an audience with the Pope on Tuesday. It’s traditional to kiss the

papal ring. Does that work for you?”

“I’m still sitting out there on a lip hoping this dude doesn’t get

nervous and lick them.”

“It’s a woman, and she’s not the nervous type.”

“A woman? Who?”

“Her name is Lystra Reid. Owns some clinical testing company or

other. Directive Medical? Rich American.” He didn’t seem to approve

of rich Americans. “She owns medical labs and such. A lot of them.

And she’s made some big contributions to an African mission the

Pope is fond of.”

“Is she one of your people?”

“No. But her maid has debts, and we have money. So we can get

the maid to place the biot . . . sorry, nanobots in this case . . . on Ms.

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Reid. You then merely have to be on her fingertips when she takes the

Pope’s hand, or on her lips when she kisses the ring. Then it’s grab a

sample and find your way out.”

A loud guffaw erupted from Bug Man. He turned to look at

George, feeling that he had the better of him for the first time. “You

don’t know much, do you? What do you think? My nanobots walk

back here to the hotel? It’s only a few hundred yards, maybe, but that’s

a hell of a long walk when you’re two hundred microns long. A nano-

bot can’t even see objects at much distance. The optics are calibrated

for work down in the meat, so I wouldn’t know where it was and where

to make it go, even if we had a month or so to walk it back here.”

“We’ll find a way,” George said, and yawned.

“Oh, will we . . .”

It was meant to be sarcastic dismissal, but George didn’t take it

that way. He clapped his hands once as if drawing the scene to a close.

And in fact, he did draw the scene to a close, by leaving behind a

baffled, worried—but also excited—Bug Man.

Plath and Keats arrived at the alleyway door of the McLure building

after much skullduggery that made them both feel like spies. They

were reasonably sure they hadn’t been followed. They were ushered

into a private elevator and whisked to the twentieth floor. It was a bit

of an old-home week for Plath, not all of it good. She’d been in and

out of this building since childhood, but her last visit had begun with

Anya creating Plath’s biots and ended in a massacre between McLure

security men, AFGC hired hands, and Caligula. Needless to say, Cal-

igula had come out on top.

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MICHAEL GRANT

Mr. Stern met them in his office then led them down a guarded

hallway to an unmarked door.

“So, how are you adjusting to being back in New York?” he asked

them both.

“I liked the island better,” Keats said.

“I can imagine. Well, let me show you what we have.” Stern slid

a keycard and opened the unmarked door. Inside was just a room

with half a dozen workstations, each focused on a large monitor. The

ambient light came from the monitors, the keypads with keys out-

lined in light, and softly glowing touch screens.

It had the feeling of a room that had just been emptied of people.

Plath touched a coffee cup and felt that it was still warm. Stern had

emptied everyone from the room for greater privacy.

He sat down and Plath and Keats pulled up chairs.

Stern tapped a few keys, then switched to a touch screen.

“You asked me for what we have on the Tulip, and specifically

whether there’s a data center,” he said as the image of that strange

building appeared. “This is the Tulip. This is a photo, obviously, taken

from across the street. And this”—he swiped the screen—“is the heat

signature using infrared.”

The skyscraper was now a sort of layer cake of red, purple, and

blue—mostly red.

“Of course we had to wait until the building was in shadow so

we didn’t just pick up reflected sunlight,” Stern explained. “We took

three readings, three different days, and this is the composite heat

signature. This—”another swipe—“is the same building but shot

from the north. And this is from the east. We don’t have a westerly

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

view, but we have a high degree of confidence that these heat signa-

tures are persistent and not just one-time things.”

“Okay,” Plath said, making a puzzled face at Keats, who was look-

ing intently.

“There’s a lot of variation by floor,” Keats said.

“Oh, obviously,” Plath said, with just a little sarcasm.

“But it’s all centrally air conditioned, yes?”

“It is. Normally,” Stern said with unmistakable pride. “But we

turned off the AC. We risked using our back door into their computer

network and reset the thermostat overnight. It takes a while for the

system to catch up when it’s turned back on, and in the meantime we

could get a picture of what’s being done and where.”

“Can you show the temperature readouts?” Keats asked.

Stern winked at Plath. “This one’s smart.” He tapped a few keys,

and numbers popped up beside each floor. “You get a clearer picture

off this data.”

“One floor is far hotter.” Keats used his finger to count the floors.

The eighteenth, yes? Something is giving off a lot of heat.”

“Servers, we believe,” Stern said. “They have their own emergency

climate control, but it’s not enough to disguise the heat signature

when the overall air-conditioning system is down.”

“So, the eighteenth floor is where they have their main comput-

ers. Their own personal cloud,” Plath said.

“That seems likely,” Stern said.

“Okay, how do we get to it and destroy it?”

There it was again in Plath’s head, that crystalline memory of the

World Trade Center falling. It seemed almost sensuous. Had she just

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MICHAEL GRANT

become used to it? Had she seen that imagery so often that it had lost

its potential to shock and had now become almost balletic?

Stern sighed. He pulled up a different diagram of the building.

“Those are the elevator shafts. If you see those thicker areas there,

that indicates an elevator stop, a door. If you look even closer, you’ll

notice there are none for the eighteenth floor. And I’ll spare you the

suspense and just tell you that the stairs, the emergency access, also

doesn’t open onto eighteen. There is a single stairwell connecting

eighteen to seventeen. And there’s a stumpy freight elevator that goes

only from seventeen to eighteen, and nowhere else. Floor seventeen,

in case you were wondering, is where AFGC security lives.”

“Oh,” Keats said.

“Indeed. There are never fewer than ten security—TFDs as we

call them: Tourists from Denver, since that’s the look they put on—on

that floor at any time. Another two dozen or so patrol the building or

watch the entrances. They are all armed. They are mostly very well

trained, many are former special forces or commandos. U.S. Marines,

ex-Delta Force, Royal Marines, SAS, ex-Mossad . . . dangerous peo-

ple.”

“So, how do we do it?” Plath asked. “How do we get in there and

destroy those servers?”

“I believe what Mr. Stern is about to tell us is that we
don’t
,” Keats

said. “We’d have to get past ground-floor security, go up to seven-

teen where we would be shot at. A lot. Then somehow we’d have to

reach the connecting stairwell and climb to eighteen, where we would

have another fight on our hands, with forces coming from all over the

building to attack our rear.”

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

“Exactly. Now, we’d have some advantages—we can use our

network access to shut down elevators, block some doors, turn off

cameras, that sort of thing. But to actually have a decent chance of

success? We would need a hundred men.”

He laid that last fact out like a poker player showing the ace that

would win the pot.

Keats snorted. “A hundred men?”

“In Midtown Manhattan. Imagine a hundred armed men appear-

ing on the street outside the Tulip. There would be no way to avoid

the police being involved, especially once bullets started to send plate

glass falling down onto pedestrians.”

“Isn’t there some kind of . . . I don’t know,” Plath said, frustrated.

“Some Tom Cruise kind of thing? Crawling up the side of the build-

ing?”

“The shape of the Tulip, with that suggestive bulge at the top,

means that’s physically impossible, even if we were insane enough to

try such a stunt.”

Stern turned away from the monitor with an air of finality, but

Keats leaned past him and pointed at the screen. “Did you see this?

Eighteen isn’t the only floor that’s shut off from elevators. This is,

what? Thirty-four, yes?”

Stern spun back and peered closely at the monitor. “I believe

you’re right. But the heat signature is quite average on thirty-four, so

that’s not our server farm.”

“No,” Keats agreed. “But it’s
something
.”

“In the end, as you can see, the building is effectively impregna-

ble. Not that we would ever have participated in such a thing, anyway,

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MICHAEL GRANT

but just so that you know: that server farm cannot be taken out by

direct attack.”

“Which means our friend Lear has ordered us to do something

impossible,” Keats said.

Plath looked troubled and uncertain. But she finally stood up,

took Stern’s hand, and thanked him.

Back on the street Plath said, “So why did Lear tell us to do the

impossible?”

Keats had no answer to that.

Unless, of course, it isn’t impossible.

In Plath’s mind the towers fell.

90

BRAZIL

Lystra Reid was nowhere near when the president of Brazil was dis-

covered naked and babbling on a street in São Paulo, apparently

collecting dog feces in a Gap shopping bag.

The president was taken to a hospital, where no explanation

could be found for his condition. He was diagnosed first as suffering

a breakdown as a result of stress and overwork. But it soon became

clear that this was no mere nervous breakdown but a complete psy-

chotic break.

He had gone mad.

A solemn vice president assumed the office and attempted to reas-

sure a worried nation. But halfway through her speech she appeared

to become distracted.

There were, she said . . . , “
Bugs
.”

And soon after she began to weep and curse violently, and from

there began to scream and had to be taken away by her chief of staff

and security personnel.

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LOS ANGELES

The Los Angeles County coroner, Dr. Baldur Chen, issued two dif-

ferent reports on the death of actress Sandra Piper. One was very

thorough and public and reached the obvious conclusion: suicide.

The second was a report prepared with help from an agency in

Washington. That agency sent its own pathologist to “assist.” This

second pathologist focused on an exceedingly careful examination of

the actress’s brain. Dr. Chen had never seen an autopsy that involved

centimeter-by-centimeter microscopic investigation of the brain tis-

sue.

It would have taken a much more obtuse man than Dr. Chen to

fail to recognize that the agency pathologist was looking for some-

thing very specific.

Both pathologists signed off on a second, eyes-only report that

dealt with this second, microscopic examination. The conclusion was

that there was no evidence of nanotechnology present.

Dr. Chen was required to sign an official secrets document