BZRK Reloaded (3 page)

Burnofsky brought that news to the Twins right away, middle of
the night. There could be no concealing it. The best he could hope for
was to save Bug Man’s life and leave his own plans intact. That above
all: his own plans.

To that end he’d hoped to convince the Twins to take a victory
lap, to take a tour of foreign facilities or even a vacation aboard their
floating house of horrors, the Doll Ship.
Bug Man had forced his hand and disrupted Burnofsky’s timetable. In a few hours, by morning at latest, the news of the first
gentleman’s death would be out. It would be seen as a tragic accident
by the general public—but the Twins would know better.

If he was going to keep things running, he, Burnofsky, would
have to get the Twins under control. Not easy. Never easy and harder
now. Charles still saw reason. But Benjamin . . .

Burnofsky took the elevator up to the Tulip. The Tulip was the
pinnacle, floors sixty-three through sixty-seven, of the Armstrong
Building, headquarters of the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation.
It was the pink polymer, one-way transparent, nanocomposite-walled
home and office of the Armstrong Twins.

AFGC still made fancy gifts at factories in China, Malaysia, and
Turkey. They still owned and operated the ubiquitous gift stores seen
in every American airport and in European and Japanese train stations. But gifts had long since ceased to be their main focus.

Weapons technology, surveillance, and communications technology, and above all, nanotechnology, now occupied the denizens of
the Tulip and most of the sixty-two floors below. The gift stores were
run out of an office park in Naperville, Illinois. In the Tulip they had
bigger fish to fry.

Burnofsky had called ahead to Jindal so he could get the Twins
up and alert. Jindal met him outside the private elevator, down on
sixty-two.
“What is it?” Jindal asked, suppressing a yawn but intensely concerned despite his sleepiness.

“Why don’t I just tell the story once?” Burnofsky said and pushed
past Jindal to the elevator. It was a short ride.
“What in hell?” Benjamin asked the moment Burnofsky appeared.
The Armstrong Twins wore a robe, dark red silk, specially tailored for them, of course: Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s did not
carry clothing in their size or shape.
Their legs, all three of them, were bare. Their feet—only the two
useful ones—were in shearling-lined slippers, the third, deformed
and three-quarter-size, was bare.
“Difficult news,” Burnofsky said.
“Well, spit it out, it’s the middle of the night!” Charles snapped.
Burnofsky tapped his pad for a few seconds, and the touch screen
embedded in the twins’ massive desk lit up.
It was the video from Bug Man’s feed. Like all nanobot video, it
failed to achieve the high standards of Hollywood; it was grainy, jerky
gray scale one moment and awash in unnatural computer-enhanced
colors the next. This video was worse still because it was the result of
tapping directly into the president’s optic nerve, pulling up the raw
feed, so to speak, of rods and cones, uninterpreted by the visual cortex.
There was no sound, just a series of jerky images—a window, a
wall, Monte Morales, a rumpled bed, the floor, Monte Morales again,
a shower knob, a shoulder, an eye, a stream of water and then . . .
“Jesus!” It was Jindal. “Did she …Is that . . .”
It was fascinating to watch the reactions of the Twins. Charles’s
eye stared hard—at the screen, at Burnofsky, at the screen. His mouth
was a straight line, set, twitching in growing fury.
Benjamin seemed almost distracted. He looked left and right.
His mouth—well, it was hard, really, to judge his face fairly; it had
been bashed and battered by the bottom of a glass bottle. There was
a tooth missing altogether and another one chipped. Benjamin’s eye
was a clenched purple fist with the pupil barely showing. He looked
like someone who had been on the losing end of a bar fight.
Within the raw liver that was Benjamin’s eye socket, the cruel eye
seemed far less interested than it should.
The third eye, the one between the usual two, seemed to agree
with Charles that this was important. It focused its soulless stare on
the video.
The file ended.
“It will be covered up,” Charles said. He tugged at the collar of his
bathrobe and, as well as he could, tugged the belt tighter. “Bug Man
must be replaced at once. And punished. Punished most severely. It’s
that woman he has with him. She distracts him. Take her from him,
get rid of her. Kill her in front of him! Bug Man will refocus. A beating for him, yes, a severe lesson, yes, that’s it, a beating! And kill his
woman.”
“I disagree,” Burnofsky said as blandly as he could.
Oh, Bug Man would owe him. He wished he had video of Charles
planning Bug Man’s humiliation and Jessica’s murder. Anthony Elder,
that snotty little black British prodigy who called himself Bug Man,
would kiss Burnofsky’s ass for this.
Burnofsky would own Bug Man.
“I don’t care about Bug Man,” Benjamin snarled. “It wasn’t Bug
Man. It was her. Her!”
Burnofsky at first assumed he was talking about Bug Man’s girl,
Jessica. But no …of course not.
“I want her hurt.” Benjamin touched his damaged mouth. Then
he clenched his fist. “Damaged in some permanent way, something
she can never overcome, something that will make her remaining life
a horror. Not death, no, we still need her to get at her father’s secrets,
but pain, such pain and despair, yes.”
Not poor, dumb, absurdly beautiful Jessica. Oh, no. Benjamin
was thinking of Sadie McLure.
Burnofsky suppressed a sneer. Benjamin was losing his mind.
The experience with Sadie McLure had unhinged him. He’d always
been the more volatile of the twins, but now? He was still “wired”—
that was part of the problem. Burnofsky had volunteered to go in and
pull those pins and wires, remove them before they became a settled
feature of Benjamin’s brain, undo, insofar as anyone could, the damage done by Sadie McLure’s biots. But Benjamin couldn’t tolerate the
idea of someone else inside his brain.
Irony, that.
And Charles? Well, just what the hell did you do if you were a
conjoined twin and the other half of you went mad?
“She was inside my brain, sticking pins in my brain, making me
an animal!” Benjamin bellowed.
“Brother . . .” But Charles’s voice wheezed out. Benjamin had
taken control of their lungs.
“Something with acid,” Benjamin said, his voice suddenly silky.
“Acid. Or something taken off. Cut something off her. Cut off her
nose or her hands.” He chopped at the air with his hand. It was more
than just a gesture of emphasis, he was using his hand as an imaginary meat cleaver.
Charles waited for an opening to speak. They each had a mouth of
their own and a throat, but the lungs were shared property, and it could
be difficult for one to make himself heard if the other was bellowing.
“Brother,” Charles began. “Let’s focus on this crisis. The next
thing we need to consider is—”
“Next? Next? Next she suffers and I see it happen. I revel in it. I
see it happen and I laugh at her. I stand over her and look down at
her as she cries and begs and as the hope dies in her eyes.That’s next.”
He was shaking his fist now, a comic-book villain. But crying
from his eye at the same time, a furious, frustrated, hurt child.
The “her” in question was a sixteen-year-old girl, Sadie McLure,
although now it seemed she used the nom de guerre Plath. So
melodramatic, the BZRKers—such romantics.
Sixteen. The same age as Burnofsky’s own daughter, Carla.
Former daughter? No, death didn’t make you former, it just made
you dead.
Charles and Benjamin had been much more calm when they’d
ordered Carla’s death. They had been regretful. Charles had actually
touched Burnofsky, put a ham-size hand on Burnofsky’s back as he
ordered the death of his only child.
Solicitous.
Considerate.
She has betrayed us, Karl. She’s sold us out. You know how she
would end up if we left her alone to leave us and join BZRK. Madness.
Would you want that for your little girl?
Burnofsky drew a shaky breath. They might at least offer him a
drink; of course, the Twins were a bit distracted. Benjamin was still
ranting, and Charles was growing increasingly impatient with it.
“I was raped by her!” Benjamin bellowed. “Violated!”
Plath had managed to infiltrate Benjamin’s brain with her biots.
Burnofsky knew she was new at the business of nano warfare, but
she had improvised, the clever, clever girl. Given the time frame she
could have had only minimal training in the sophisticated business
of subtly rewiring a human brain. And she’d been in a hurry and
under pressure, so she had simply stabbed pins and run wire almost
randomly.
She had made scrambled eggs of Benjamin’s brain.
That was some of her father’s intelligence in evidence. She was
smarter than the brother who had died. He wondered if they had
killed the wrong McLure child. Stone was a stolid, dutiful type, his
sister on the other hand . . .
The result of Sadie’s wiring had been severe mental disruption.
Benjamin had screeched and babbled and generally made a fool of
himself, straining the physical barrier that connected his own head to
Charles’s—very painful—and caused the unfortunate incident of the
glass bottle, the results of which were still so obvious on Benjamin’s
face.
The membrane, the flesh, whatever the word was for the living
intersection between Charles and Benjamin, had been strained and
torn. The central eye, that eerie, third eyeball that sometimes joined
with Charles and other times with Benjamin, and at still other times
seemed to decide its own focus, was red-rimmed, the lower lid crusted
with blood that still seeped from a deep bruise.
At the end Plath had let Benjamin live when she might well have
killed him. Burnofsky wondered whether at this moment Charles
thought that was a good thing or not. How many times must one or
the other of the Twins have pondered the question of what happened
if one of them died?
Their heads were melded. Some areas of their brains were directly
connected. They shared a neck, albeit a neck with two sets of vocal
cords. They had two hearts—one apiece—and had a sort of two-lobed
stomach that fed out through a single alimentary tract.
Each had an arm. Each had a leg. And there was the third leg as
well, a leg that dragged like so much dead weight. As a consequence
they moved with extreme difficulty and usually chose to get around
in a motorized cart or wheeled office chair customized to fit their
double width.
Charles tried again. “We have important matters to discuss, Benjamin. We are on the cusp of completing Phase Three of our plan,
brother, don’t you grasp that? Don’t you see how far we have come?
But we must deal with this crisis. Bug Man’s incompetence may upset
everything!”
“It wasn’t you,” Benjamin snapped. “It wasn’t you. It was me. It
was me she humiliated.”
“Look, we’ll deal with the girl when we get an opportunity,”
Charles soothed. “Of course you feel violated. Of course you’re angry.
But—”
It was part of the strangeness of dealing with the Twins that when
they spoke to each other they could not look at each other. They had
never made direct eye contact in their lives.
“You think I’m being irrational,” Benjamin said, sounding rational for the first time in several minutes. “But you don’t understand.
This cannot be tolerated. If we can be humiliated this way, then we
will lose credibility with our own people. Do you think our twitchers
aren’t talking about it?” He stabbed a finger in Burnofsky’s direction.
“Do you think Karl isn’t smirking?”
In fact, Karl Burnofsky was smirking, but he hid it well. His sagging, whiskered face and rheumy blue eyes did not appear to reflect
any pleasure.
It occurred to him that this was his opportunity to speak. He
said, “Perhaps a vacation. Some time off. We have come a long way.
You’re both tired. Deservedly so, the weariness of a long battle.”
Charles shot a sharp, suspicious look at Burnofsky. “Are you out
of your mind? This thing with Bug Man and the president, for God’s
sake, target number one, the purpose for which we lost so many good
people. The woman has to give Rios the go-ahead.”
“She did,” Burnofsky said. “The initial go-ahead, anyway. I can
show you the video. She finished cleaning up the blood and went to
her pad, pulled up the ETA mission, and approved it. Rios has long
since started planning counterattacks on BZRK. The president has
scheduled a meeting with him to discuss raiding McLure, blocking their accounts, arresting individuals on suspicion of terrorism.
I am confident she will give him free rein; Bug Man has succeeded
in that. And gentlemen, wasn’t that our goal?” Burnofsky puffed out
his cheeks in a sort of world-weary gesture. “Bug Man screwed up,
but—and it’s a very big but—he did accomplish the goal. We own the
president, and we control ETA, the agency that will deal with any
nanotechnology information.”
“Damn, Karl, you might have told us,” Charles chided, but he was
too happy to be genuinely angry.
“This thing with Monte Morales, it’s a blip,” Burnofsky said. “It’s
a bump in the road. And you’re …tired.” He tried to send a meaningful look to Charles without it being intercepted by Benjamin, but of
course that was a physical impossibility.
What he wanted to say was, Look, your twin is losing it. If he
goes, you go. Get him out of here. Get him some rest.
“I can handle Bug Man,” Burnofsky said. “Jindal will be here running the daily operation. I can go to Washington and supervise the
wiring of the president personally. If I do have to take it over, I can
do it without relying on signal repeaters. Meanwhile, Rios is moving immediately against BZRK in DC and New York. BZRK will be
effectively taken out, in this country at least. We’ve been probed by
Anonymous, but we’re confident they’ve been shut out. We have substantial control of the FBI, we have some assets in the Secret Service.
Our overseas targets are being well managed. So…honestly? Now’s a
good time for a break.”
Charles looked hard at Burnofsky, reading his thoughts. Charles
knew his brother’s stability was tenuous at best.
“You’ll go to Washington yourself?” Charles asked, seeming
oddly deflated. “You’ll take charge?”
“I will go. I will oversee the wiring. I’ll touch base with Rios. And
I’ll deal with Bug Man.”
Benjamin frowned. Then his eye brightened, and the third eye
seemed to join in sympathy. “The Doll Ship.”
“It’s in the Pacific. Somewhere near Japan, heading toward
Hong Kong to pick up a very nice haul of Korean refugees, and one
moderately good twitcher,” Jindal reported. He had deemed it a safe
moment to speak up. Jindal was a true believer, a Nexus Humanus
cultist, wired and, in the favorite Nexus Humanus phrase, “Sustainably happy.”
A sucker, in Burnofsky’s view. A fool. A middle manager with
delusions of importance.
The mention of the Doll Ship soothed some of the anxiety from
Benjamin’s face. Charles, too, softened a bit.
“The Doll Ship,” Benjamin said, and his bruised mouth smiled.
Sick bastards, both of you, Burnofsky thought. Sick, sad, screwedup freaks. It would be good to get them out of the way for a few days.
He had work to do.