Bzrk (14 page)

Another long silence.

“Six targets,” Benjamin said with a deep sigh. When he sighed, it stretched the flesh between their heads, slightly distorting Charles’s mouth. “Four men, two women, all surrounded and watched. Each requires a fully resourced team, a main twitcher, a relief twitcher, housekeeping, security … a minimum of ten people per team. And each is a potential target; each presents the possibility of discovery.”

Charles sighed. “Bug Man. Kim. One-Up. Alfredo. Dietrich.” Pursed lips. “Burnofsky. Six at the top level.”

“Average age, what, seventeen, if you leave out Burnofsky?”

“Twitchers,” Charles said, and made a snorting sound. “Young and arrogant, intelligent, and unstable by definition.”

“Twenty-two more at the second level. Seventy-one at third level.”

“Risky and useless respectively, for this kind of work.”

They looked down, all three eyes now, at the cards.

Benjamin placed his finger on the one that read “Chancellor of Germany.” And pushed it to the side. “He’s likely to lose in the next election. A waste of resources.”

“Five, then,” Charles agreed. “U.S., China, Japan, India, and the U.K.”

“Five.”

“Not later, but now.”

“Now,” Benjamin agreed with finality.

Their dog, a beagle, came trotting across the polished wood floor and rubbed against Benjamin’s leg. Charles took a treat from a jar on the desk and dropped it into the animal’s mouth.

“There you go, Maisie,” Charles cooed. “Good girl.”

“That dog of yours,” Benjamin muttered. “Why does she always rub against me?”

They went then to take their shower but were interrupted by news, brought to them by their body servant, Hardy, who was an old man with a wonderful ability to resist flinching when he looked at his two charges.

Hardy handed them a pad, open to a message. They read it as Hardy helped them out of their tailor-made clothing with the unusual zippers and openings.

“The trap,” Benjamin said.

“The Vincent flytrap,” Charles said, and that
bon mot
gave them both a hearty laugh.

(ARTIFACT)

To: Vincent

From:
Lear

Proceed to equip Plath and Keats.

Note: The UN General Assembly attack must be stopped. No one’s life or sense of morality is more important than that goal.

Follow orders, Vincent. It will be your salvation.

(ARTIFACT)

To: C and B Armstrong

From:
AmericaStrong, a division of Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation

Status:
EYES ONLY ENCRYPT Read and safe-delete

A recent Wikipedia edit included information prejudicial to our interests (see paragraph #3 below). That paragraph has now been deleted and was online for only twelve minutes. We suspect source material from KSI, Swedish Intelligence.

THIRTEEN

A knock.

Sadie—she hadn’t begun to think of herself as Plath, not yet—said, “Who is it?”

“Vincent.”

Vincent. Sadie hadn’t seen him since he appeared suddenly in her bathroom. He looked the same. Twentysomething going on a thousand.

The boy with the blue eyes, Keats, was with him. Keats looked like he’d just been roused from bed. Of course, she probably did, too, considering that she had just been roused from bed.

Renfield was a few feet back in the shadows. He had struck an arms-akimbo pose, like a soldier on guard. She saw the wariness with which he looked at Vincent. Vincent didn’t seem to do anything to cause this reaction, he wasn’t angry or domineering. He was quiet and self-contained and looked a little sad in his dark raincoat. But Sadie had to admit that she felt a bit of Vincent-awe herself: she remembered the blade of his pen.

It was night outside. She had slept the sleep of exhaustion, all through the day.

“Things are moving a bit quicker than we’d like,” Vincent said. “Usually there would be time to teach you. Prepare you. But we have an opportunity tonight.”

Why was it absolutely impossible for Sadie even to imagine saying no to him?

Her eyes widened. Had they done something to her? In her brain?

As if he’d read her mind Vincent said, “Both of you are alone. Keats: Renfield retrieved his biots while you were asleep. And Ophelia’s are back with her, Plath.”

Plath.

“
How do I know that?” Sadie demanded.

Renfield looked about ready to say something but stopped himself and took half a step back.

Vincent said, “Listen to me, Plath. You, too, Keats.”

He knew her real name. But he wasn’t using it. She had a feeling he would never slip and call her Sadie. Might not even think it.

Plath. It took some thinking about.

“I need you both to trust me,” Vincent said. “I don’t mean that I’d
like
you to trust me. I mean that I
need
you to trust me. For that reason, I will never lie to you. If you were ever to catch me in a lie, you would never fully trust me again. So I will never lie.”

Sadie glanced at Keats. His suspicion was an echo of her own. “Okay, then,” she said. “What are we doing?”

“We are going to make your biots.”

Her breath caught. “Now?”

Renfield led the way. Not the way they had come into the building, not through that alley, but down a steep, narrow set of steps, and then a broader set of steps, and then through a door, and a room that was obviously the dry-storage space of a restaurant. Cans of chili sauce. Big plastic tubs of mayonnaise. Pickles. Ketchup. A surprisingly tall stack of boxes of canned soup. Canned sodas and bottled water.

Sadie smelled grease, vinegar, and urine.

Renfield opened a second door, and they stepped out into a dark and regrettably fragrant hallway with a door labeled men and another ladies and at the open end of the hallway a side view of a lunch counter.

The restaurant was narrow. New York narrow. Smeared mirrors and a six-inch-wide counter on one side, five stools with cracked plastic seats on the other, a low counter decorated with chrome napkin dispensers and stained plastic menus. Behind the counter a mess of mismatched refrigeration units, a grill, a drinks cooler, and to top it all off a cash register covered with age-curled clippings of cartoons from newspapers and magazines.

A very old man with white whiskers sat hunched in a too-large jacket eating a grilled cheese sandwich. The only employee was a guy who might be in his late twenties, with a Middle Eastern complexion, sleepy eyes, and an apron. He was scraping the grill.

He did not look up though the four of them appeared as if by magic from the direction of the restrooms.

“This is the only time we’ll ever travel together like this,” Vincent said when they stepped out onto the cold, windy street.

They walked two blocks in silence to a hotel with a cab stand. The taxi ride took ten minutes—there was a lot of road repair on Sixth Avenue.

Vincent had the cab drop them two blocks from where Sadie suspected they were going. The McLure Industries downtown building. The headquarters, in theory at least, though the main campus was over in Jersey.

“They’ll recognize me,” she said tersely to Vincent. “And there are cameras.”

Vincent nodded approvingly. “Good thinking. But you don’t need to worry.” They stopped on the street across from McLure Industries. The lobby was dimmed, but Sadie could clearly see two security men at the desk, even at this hour.

They crossed, passed by the lobby door, and went around the corner to the loading-dock gate. Vincent pulled out his phone and thumbed in a code. Peeking over his shoulder Sadie saw grainy security-camera footage of the loading dock. The view shifted. And again. He had access to McLure security.

Then Vincent sent a second message. The steel door began clanking up. As soon as it was head high, Vincent led them inside and the door lowered again.

The loading-dock area was clear and as cold as the outside.

Sadie spotted a security camera overhead. The red light was off. Vincent sent a significant look to Renfield, who nodded tersely. For a heart-stopping moment Sadie thought Renfield was carrying a gun. But then he smirked and held up a Taser for her to see.

“Don’t worry, it shouldn’t be necessary,” Vincent said. “I’ve been here many times. But there is no video of me, and no one but …” He hesitated. “No one but one man has seen me here. Just the one man whom I dealt with. Unfortunately that man is no longer with us. But I still need to get to a certain facility.”

“Yes.” She said it, and somehow it knocked the wind out of her. Her father. He was the man Vincent had seen. He was the man “no longer with us.”

A freight elevator carried them up two dozen floors.

As it rose Vincent said, “We’re going to meet a woman named Anya. She’s a scientist. A friend of mine. She will most likely do what we ask of her. But there is a chance she won’t. I haven’t had time to prepare her as thoroughly as I would like.”

Prepare her.

Sadie found the words chilling. She would be meeting a woman who had been
prepared.
She noticed Keats’s reaction, a brief look of disgust that came and was quickly suppressed.

Yes. Interesting. Maybe there was more going on with blue eyes than she’d thought at first. And he looked like he had a nice body underneath the layers. And he was very definitely interested in her; she’d noticed that right away. He wasn’t subtle.

Why on earth was she thinking about any of that? It disgusted her. She disgusted herself. But a part of her brain knew the answer:
Because of all the things you have to think about, Sadie, my dear, Keats is
the only one that isn’t terribly sad or terribly frightening. So think about
what his bare arms and shoulders would look like, because the alterna
tives … oh, Sadie, you don’t want to think about any of those things.

Vincent had a swipe card that let them walk through various locked doors. There were cameras everywhere. And everywhere the little red indicator lights went dark.

A final door.

Vincent hesitated, seemed to gather himself, and knocked.

A very attractive woman, at least a decade older than Vincent, opened the door. She and Vincent did the kiss-kiss, but with a bit more than “just friends” emphasis.

Sadie was instantly certain she and Vincent were sleeping together. And it occurred to her that during that brief contact Vincent had quite possibly transferred biots to her.

Down the rabbit hole into paranoia.

“Thank you, Anya, for helping us,” Vincent said. He held her two hands while he said this. “These are John, Sylvia, and R.M.”

Hands were shaken.
Sylvia,
Sadie thought. Okay. And John must be the poet Keats’s first name. As for Renfield, she was going to have to Google that. Was it R. M. Renfield?

“The tragedy has disrupted things,” Vincent said. “Your help is vital, Anya. John and Sylvia both have very serious medical problems, and you’ll be helping them, and me, tremendously.”

Anya’s eyes had stayed on Sadie a bit too long. She recognized her, or thought she did. And a line had appeared just above the bridge of her nose, a frown, a doubt.

“Get the goddamned signal repeater back up!” Bug Man shouted. “Goddamnit! God
damn
it!”

Signal was in and out. One second he had a clear, almost HD-quality view of the people in the room, and the next second he was looking at static.

One thing was sure: that was Vincent he’d seen leaning in for a kiss. AFGC owned some bad video of Vincent, junk, but good enough that Bug Man had spent hours watching it on a loop, trying to suss out his opponent. Trying to see what the dude was about. The video showed Vincent walking to a taxi. That was all of it, but Bug Man had watched it probably fifty times.

Now he leaned forward in the twitcher chair, muscles straining, teeth gritted. Vincent. Right there, now. Real and big as life. And Bug Man with a crap repeater killing his communication.

Burnofsky was at his elbow. “They’re working on it, Anthony.”

“It’ll take three minutes just to patch in a replacement unit,” Bug Man raged. “You’d better damned well hope Vincent takes his time.”

“You have visual again,” Burnofsky remarked.

He could watch the screen over Bug Man’s shoulder. He saw what Bug Man saw, and so he didn’t need to be told that this was low-res video, glitchy as hell.

“Yeah, I’m going to take Vincent on with this,” Bug Man said with savage frustration. “I’m pulling back out of range.”

“First thing he’ll do is check on his wire,” Burnofsky predicted.

“He won’t find anything wrong there,” Bug Man said. But in his head he was going over it all again. His nanobots were well away from Vincent’s elegant web of wires and transponders. But Vincent had something eerily close to psychic ability when it came to sensing an enemy. It would take so little to alert him.

Bug Man executed a simple reverse. It would move all twenty-four of his nanobots—fighters all, no spinners—in a precise move-by-move reversal, back down into the woman’s brain. It wasn’t the best way to move, but with lousy communications it was the best he could do.

The screen split into twenty-four smaller screens. Three of them were totally dark—probably optics that had been blocked by fungus. Fungus was always an issue, little mushrooms that were unfortunately sticky. Or maybe one of them had picked up a macrophage along the way.

Bug Man enlarged one of the best-quality visuals. He saw images of half a dozen nanobots walking backward, retracing their steps. Back along the optic nerve, like daddy longlegs in a tunnel. He switched to rear-facing views. Even lower res, and he didn’t dare burn up battery by switching on all twenty-four light arrays to clear things up.

Right now Vincent could take his handicapped army apart. This repeater issue had to be solved. In a couple of days he’d be inside the brain of the president of the United bloody States, and he didn’t want to be watching visuals more degraded than a beat-up Game Boy.

“Just got news. It’s going to be a while,” Burnofsky announced. “They don’t have a backup on-site. It’s on its way, but it’ll be twenty minutes. Not three.”

“Twenty minutes?” Bug Man felt the blood drain from his face. No, this was not possible. He was not going to get his butt handed to him by Vincent. “Get some macro force in there,” Bug Man said.

“At McLure headquarters?” Burnofsky laughed. “If you have to lose some nanobots, lose them, Anthony. It’s not the end of the world.”

Bug Man pulled off his gloves, pulled off his helmet, and unwound himself from the chair. The nanobots would continue automatically returning to their earlier start point. They didn’t need him to do that.

“Oh, temper, temper, Anthony,” Burnofsky said. He was laughing.

“You want to get your balls cut off by Vincent, be my guest.” Bug Man jabbed his finger at the old man. “I don’t play this game in order to lose. When communication is up, ninety percent minimum, give me a call. Maybe I’ll still be hanging around.”