BZRK Reloaded (7 page)

Dr Anya Violet, who had been dragged unwilling into violence, into
lunacy and horror, sat forgotten in her room, in her narrow, filthy
room, and against all odds and logic thought of Vincent.

Oh, she knew it was all part of the same insanity. She knew that
Vincent had been inside her head, that he had wired her. She was a
scientist, a trained observer. She knew.

Once she had found Vincent desirable. That had been honest.
That had been real. She remembered meeting him for …at least she
believed she remembered. She searched for the memory, ran the pictures back in her head, testing them for tampering. It was hard to tell.
Hard to be sure; in fact, impossible to be sure. But she believed that
first meeting at least, and that first visceral impression, had been real.

She had found him interesting. And sad. Sadness was not a terrible thing to her. She was Russian by birth, from Samara, located in
the middle of nowhere. She was not an American raised on the idea
that happiness was the natural human condition. She tired quickly of
smiling people. Have a nice day. Hey, honey, smile.

She had seen wariness in Vincent, lessons learned, pain endured,
limitations accepted. He was perhaps ten years younger than she, but
that was only chronology.

Where it didn’t matter, Vincent was young. The other places,
where it mattered, he was old, old, old and sad.
He had touched her that first time. Yes, of course he had targeted
her. She was a scientist at McLure, a biot researcher and designer, and
Vincent had even then been laying out a back door to McLure, anticipating the day.
So he had touched her that first time, and yes his invisibly small
biots had raced up her shivering shoulder and across the neck and
into her through nose or ear or eye.
Into her brain, there to probe and discover and spy and wire her.
To prepare her for a continuing relationship that he needed and she
wanted.
Yes, she had wanted. Yes, that surely was an honest memory. Yes,
that first liquid feeling had been real, that first parting of her lips, that
first animal response to him, that at least had been completely real.
And now she loved him.
Real love? Or wired love? In the end did it matter?
They had made love. Not once, more than once. Had it been
enhanced by busy biots laying wire and transponders in her brain?
He had claimed not. He claimed he wired her only minimally, only
to obtain her …professional …services. He wired the scientist in her,
not the woman.
So he had said.
Did it matter? Did it change the fact that her heart had been a
desperate animal in her chest? Did it change the way he’d made her
breath catch in her throat? Did it change the fact that she had gasped
and made strangling, inarticulate cries into a pillow, and he had
taken the pillow away because he wanted to hear her, needed to hear
her pleasure, needed to experience secondhand at least what pleasure
could be?
Maybe some of it, most of it, all of it, was false.
He had told her that it was not. Vincent had sworn that he only
made her more suggestible to co-operating on the building of new
biots, that he would never …That that sort of thing was not BZRK,
not what they fought for.
Did it matter?
Anya sat in her one chair remembering, and while remembering
thus was unable to work on the formula she’d begun to complete on
the sketch pad, covered like a college chalkboard with obscure symbols.
There was a knock at the door.
Her eyes flew open. She waited a few seconds for the unsteadiness
in her voice to calm. “Yes?”
There was the sound of a lock. The door swung inward, practically halving the room. Nijinsky stepped in.
Anya didn’t like him. He was beautiful and perfect and not
interesting to her. And she knew that his relationship with Vincent
was deeper than her own. She was jealous of him. It annoyed her
somehow that he had chosen a Russian nom de guerre. The Chinese
American model didn’t have a Russian soul, he was not a Nijinsky.
“Dr Violet,” he said politely. He glanced at the sketch pad, quickly
at her, then resumed his usual mask of indifference. “I wanted to talk
to you about …well, whether you’ve had any strange feelings lately.”
Nijinsky raised his eyebrows and made a slight, wry smile.
“Why don’t you tell me what you mean,” Anya said curtly.
“Okay. I mean that Vincent still has a biot inside you.”
She nodded. The idea was not a surprise to her. “So, a little Vincent still crawling around in my hippocampus or wherever. A little
biot controlled by a madman.” She had to laugh. “Wasn’t there a song?
The lunatic is in my head?”
Nijinsky’s brown, almond eyes went cold.
She noticed and shook her head derisively. “Ah, I see, we aren’t
supposed to say that kind of thing about Vincent, are we?”
“He cares about you,” Nijinsky said. “He saved your life.”
“Right after he endangered it,” she snapped. “I’m not sure that
counts as a net plus.”
Nijinsky said nothing.
“Where are the others? His other biots? You used a singular in
describing the one he had in me.”
Nijinsky nodded. “One is dead. One is in a dish, rebuilding,
healing. The other one I’m carrying. It’s right here. He tapped his
forehead lightly.
“And so you and I both get to keep a little piece of him.” Anya was
tired of sparring. “No. I haven’t noticed anything. If anyone is wiring
me I’m not noticing it, and if a …mentally unbalanced …twitcher
were doing it, it would be clumsy enough for me to notice. So, I very
much doubt that Vincent is even aware of the biot inside me. If he
is, it’s as a series of hallucinatory images that probably mean little or
nothing to him.”
Nijinsky nodded. “I haven’t seen any activity at all from his biot.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed, his knee almost touching
hers. In a straight man she would have suspected a flirtation.
“What’s on the pad?” he asked bluntly.
“I’m not stupid,” she said. “I know you have surveillance in here.
I know you’ve already seen and investigated.”
He shook his head. Then he hung his head down and shook it
again. “No, actually. We don’t have the manpower for that, I’m afraid.
I mean, yes, we have a camera in here, but aside from making sure you
haven’t hanged yourself or tried to dig a hole through the wall . . .”
“It’s what I was working on before you and your charming crew
decided to destroy my life,” she said, but the bitterness was false and
sounded it. Vincent was not something she could regret.
“Biot?” he asked.
“Biot version four,” she said. “Fourth generation. What you use
now is version three. Or threes with various upgrades.”
“Okay,” he said cautiously. “Do you want to tell me?”
“It’s faster. It can jump. It has an improved rack for add-on weaponry. The legs are stronger.”
“Yes?” he asked, not nearly as cool as he wanted to sound.
“And it has a rather interesting penetrating proboscis, hollow of
course, with a bladder. Mosquito-derived.”
“So it can suck blood?” He was puzzled.
“It goes the other way. The bladder can be filled with any number
of interesting agents—chemical, bacteriological, viral—and injected.
No more carrying sacks of germs with you if you want to plant something deadly.”
“We don’t do that,” Nijinsky said.
“Ah. Of course. I forgot: you’re the good guys,” she mocked. “Not
for you, planting a bit of flesh-eating bacteria in some enemy’s brain.”
“There are limits,” he said.
“Just like you don’t wire people.”
He raised his head and looked at her. “Dr Violet, we will endeavor
to remove any alterations made in your brain.”
She swallowed in a suddenly dry throat.
“We do things out of extreme necessity,” he went on, sounding
sanctimonious even to himself. “Vincent wired you, as little as he
could, just enough to—”
“I’m in love with him,” she said, and now her voice was no longer
tight and controlled. “And your solution is to take that away from me?
And then what?”
He looked quickly away, as if eye contact had become painful.
Neither spoke. His knee no longer touched hers. She wondered
if his biots were now making the slow, laborious climb up the length
of her thigh on their way to her brain. No, not likely: he could have
simply planted them on her face, no need for subterfuge.
“What else?” he asked.
“The visuals are better. It will make wiring easier and more accurate. The downside? You feel pain when it feels pain. And God himself
only knows what effect it has if you lose one.”
Nijinsky controlled his breathing, not wanting to signal his
excitement. “Can you make them?” he asked.
“Version four? Of course I can make them, they’ve been successfully tested,” she said. “Get me to the lab and I can grow one in a few
hours.”
Nijinsky nodded. Not an easy proposition. The McLure labs had
been the scene of a bloody battle. A massacre. But Lear had been busy,
and a backup existed.
“What if it wasn’t your lab?” Nijinsky asked. “What if it was a
place with all the same equipment, the same samples or most of them,
essentially the same data files, even better computers, and so on?”
That surprised her. “You have another lab in New York?”
“Not in New York,” he said, and offered no further explanation.
She ran down a list of equipment. To each item Nijinsky said, “Yes.”
“Well, aren’t you clever little conspirators?” she asked sarcastically. “Yes, if everything is as you say, yes, I can do it. But why should
I?”
“What do you want?” he asked.
“So many things,” she said with a hard laugh.
Silence again, as the truth seeped into her consciousness. The
truth was a pain in her heart. “What do I want? Don’t. Don’t take him
from me. Don’t send your bugs into me, and don’t cut the wires, and
don’t find his last biot and take it from me.” Tears had already rolled
down her cheeks. “It’s all I have of him.”

A short elevator ride for two billion dollars.
“Sadie. It’s good to see you,” Stern said. He shook her hand firmly.
Her hand was not empty. His eyes barely flickered as he palmed the
note.
“Same, Mr Stern,” she said. “This is my friend, Keats.” She stumbled over the word friend. They weren’t exactly friends, were they?
They barely knew each other.
“My friend,” she repeated, as if needing to emphasize it.
Stern was head of McLure security. He’d sat by her bed when she
was recovering from injuries following the assassination of her father
and brother, and as far as Plath felt she could trust anyone, she trusted
him. He gave Keats the same dubious, sizing-up look her father would
have.
The lawyer, Don Jellicoe, was an older man, tall, spare, with
a hovering grin and an open collar. He rose to shake her hand as
well.
The office was a corner, with windows that looked out on the
Empire State Building and, beyond it, at the Tulip—Armstrong cor
porate headquarters.
She had been there, seen it from the inside. She had watched her
wiring take effect on Benjamin Armstrong. She almost flinched,
thinking they could see her now.
She stared, probably too long, then looked with exaggerated and
unconvincing calm around the room and turned her back on the
Tulip and the memories.
A younger lawyer sat discreetly in a corner. The remaining person in the room was Hannah Thrum. Thrum was middle-aged but
looked younger, expensively but conservatively dressed. She had a full
face and somewhat droopy eyes that seemed at odds with the wellcoiffed businesswoman look.
Thrum was the interim chairman of the board of McLure Holdings, the parent corporation of McLure Labs.
“Can I get anyone some coffee? Water? Tea? We have it all,” Jellicoe offered, very genial. Keats asked for coffee, Thrum ordered
a sparkling water, and the younger lawyer raced off to get both.

“So,” Jellicoe said. “We have copies for you, Sadie, and for you, Hannah.” He handed iPads to each and tapped his own to bring up the
document. “We have the small matter of two billion dollars.” He
grinned. “Give or take a dime.”

That drew only tense stares. Jellicoe sighed, a little deflated.
“As you can see, it’s quite a long document. But I wondered if we
could dispense with a literal reading of every single word and you
would allow me to summarize?”

Keats surprised everyone by speaking up. “Of course Pl— Sadie
would get a full copy?”
“Yes, of course,” Jellicoe said, and seemed amused.
“Go ahead, Don,” Thrum said. Like this was her meeting.
“Well, the long and short of it is that Sadie is the sole surviving heir.
She inherits the bulk of the estate. There are some bequests for some
of Grey McLure’s friends, relations, employees, and charities. All told
those bequests are quite substantial, amounting to something on the
order of two hundred million dollars in McLure stock and cash.”
Keats whistled, then apologized.
“It’s worth whistling at,” Jellicoe allowed. “So is what’s left to
Sadie.” He looked at Sadie, raised his Saruman eyebrows, and said,
“You inherit the rest of your father and brother’s shares of McLure.
Added to those you already own, you hold fifty-five percent of the
company. At today’s prices, as I said, that’s just a hair under two billion dollars. Of course the share price has dropped quite a bit since
your father and brother died so tragically. But if the company is well
managed, the stock value will bounce back.”
“And you won’t need to worry about that: managing the company
is the responsibility of the board,” Thrum said with what she hoped
was absolute finality.
“The company belongs to its stockholders,” Plath said levelly. She
had not come here to be bullied.
“Yes, of course,” Thrum said. “And your shares will be voted by
your executor.” She turned to Jellicoe, whose expression was unreadable.
“Here it comes,” Keats said under his breath.
“Executor?” Plath asked, already knowing the answer. It would be
interesting to see how Thrum responded.
Jellicoe sighed. “It is usual practice to assign an adult executor in
the case of a minor, a wise, trusted older friend or lawyer.”
Keats made a wry face.
“But in this case,” Jellicoe went on, “Grey McLure specifically
declined to do so. In fact, he directed me to take such measures as
would ensure that his daughter not only inherited his company, but,
in the event of her brother’s death, should run it.”
“That’s absurd,” Thrum snapped. “That can’t be legal.”
“Ah, but it is,” Jellicoe said. “Grey emancipated his daughter. And
with some effort—many, many billable hours, I’m pleased to admit—I
was able to enact his wishes.” He dropped the grin. “I think Grey, who
was my good friend for twenty years, expected to die, you see. I heard
it in his voice. I saw it in his actions. He expected to die.”
Plath felt a lead weight pressing down on her heart. Of course her
father had expected to be killed. Of course. He had guessed what was
coming.
As she could guess at the terror that was coming for her. Will it
be death? Or madness?
She closed her eyes, not realizing she’d done so. Silence fell
around her as she remembered her father, and that day. Images of the
jet screaming down out of the sky …Not what she wanted to remember about her father and brother. Not the images she wanted to hold
on to for the rest of her life.
“Maybe he was mentally compromised,” Thrum suggested. “Not
competent.”
Plath opened her eyes, and her lips curled into a snarl.
Jellicoe cut in quickly. “He anticipated that line of …reasoning.
Attached to the document are affidavits from three board-certified
psychiatrists who each examined Grey within a month of his signing
of the will.”
Thrum at last exhibited frustration. She threw up one hand. Just
one. And said nothing.
Plath noticed Stern smiling, not at her but at some memory. He,
too, had been with McLure for a long time, and Grey was a man who
made friends for life.
“I don’t want to run the company,” Plath said. “In fact, Ms Thrum,
my father always said you were the smartest person on the board, and
that if you hadn’t been a woman you’d have been put in charge of your
own family’s company.”
Thrum looked surprised, genuinely, this time. And she acknowledged that last point with a curt nod.
“So,” Plath said, “I guess I’m appointing you as president. I’ll ask
Mr Jellicoe to work out the financial terms: fair but not extravagant.”
Plath had thought this next part out well in advance.
“But I have certain things I do want,” Plath continued. “I want
fifty million dollars—cash—in offshore banks. That’s mine to do
with as I see fit.”
Jellicoe and Thrum both nodded warily.
“I want Mr Stern to be my contact with you, Ms Thrum. He was
loyal and stayed by me when my family was murdered. Loyalty is
important. Isn’t it?”
Thrum, thrown off guard by the question, reddened and stammered, “Yes, I’m sure it is.”
“Mr Stern gets paid twice what’s he’s making now, and although
he informs you of all relevant security issues, he works for me.”
That brought a frown to Thrum’s face, but only a frown.
Ah, Plath thought, hiding her emotion, keeping her eyes steady,
her mouth straight. Ah, you didn’t see that coming, did you?
Plath stood up. Keats did so as well, a few seconds later.
“Ms Thrum, Mr Jellicoe, Mr Stern. The day may come when I
want to take a more active role in the company. I may want to choose
additional board members. But right now what I want is for the three
of you to treat me with respect, to do what I ask you to—and I don’t
intend to ask much—and to take care of my father’s company. Each of
you in turn, I’m going to ask that you remain loyal to my father, and
to me. Mr Stern?”
“I’m a McLure man,” he said. “Your man.”
“Mr Jellicoe?”
“I’m your lawyer,” he said, and smiled.
“Ms Thrum?”
“I’m in.”
“Okay, then,” Plath said. “My father was a smart and good man,
who chose his allies well. I’m not as smart. I’m also not as good. For
example, I’m not as forgiving as he was; I hold grudges. I can be a
bitch.” She softened that with a slight smile. “And I’m the bitch who
owns the company.”
That at last brought an honest smile from Thrum, who actually
threw her head back and laughed.
In the elevator on the way down Keats said, “That was absolutely
amazing. I mean …you just bossed those people around. You’re no
older than I am and you were like a captain of industry. A bloody
capitalist.”
Plath nodded. She was distracted and sad and worried. “I could
have fired all three of them. They didn’t know what crazy thing I
might pull. They were all three relieved.”
“Yeah, but just to stand up there with that total-domination voice,
like that.” He sighed. “Hot.”
Plath said nothing. She just stared at Keats.
“What?”
“It was too easy,” she said. “At least one of them is a traitor.”
“You don’t know that,” he said, but he was nervous, eyes flicking
back to her, to the floor indicator, then back to her.
Plath shook her head. “If they try to kill us on the way out, then
they’re innocent. If not then it’s a setup. It’s Thrum,” she said. “She’s
the traitor. Jellicoe could easily have lost the will and substituted
another. Stern had plenty of opportunity to kill me off when I was
recovering. So it’s Thrum: she’s working for the Twins.”
“I’m pulling out of aneurysm work,” Keats said, buying in. “I can
at least keep one eye out for nanobots.”
“If they’re AFGC, they’ll know I’ll be checked at the nano level.
This is old school: they’re going to track my money, see where I spend
it.” She bit her lip. “I’m not important as a foot soldier for BZRK. I’m
only important for what I can reveal. They want my father’s technology, and they want BZRK.”
She wondered how Keats would react. Boys didn’t always like
clever girls, and if he said something stupid now, well, at least then
love would be off the table. She would never love a dull boy.
Keats’s absurdly blue eyes narrowed. “If they think you don’t
know …That’s an opportunity for us, then.”
So, not stupid. Not that she’d really had any doubt.
Damn.
The elevator reached the lobby. The McLure security men were
waiting. Caligula was nowhere in sight. The limo steamed at curbside.
No TFDs.
The limo driver had changed.
“What happened to the driver?” Plath asked the back of Caligula’s head as they pulled away.
“He had some vacation time coming.”
“What happened to the TFDs?”
Caligula shrugged. “One tried to put a tracking device on the car.
It was an amateurish job. I resented it.”
She saw his eyes in the mirror, as deep as desert ravines, creased
with sunbaked lines.
“It’s all a setup,” she said. “The TFDs looking tough when I got
here? That was a show. If they really wanted to kill me there are buildings all around, windows with perfect sight lines for a sniper.”
Caligula’s eyes wrinkled in merriment. “They gave you exactly
what you wanted, didn’t they?”
“Yep,” she said. “They lined up and rolled over like well-behaved
puppies.”
Caligula laughed, delighted. “I’ll pass that description along to
Lear.”
“Lear needs to contact me. Directly.”
Caligula said nothing.
“You tell him or her. Or them. Or whatever, that I’m going to keep
financing BZRK, just as my father did. But not unless I know who I’m
dealing with.”
He did not answer. He neither nodded nor shook his head. It was
getting on Plath’s nerves, which were already frayed.
“Ophelia,” she said.
Caligula nodded slightly, as though he was expecting it. “She’s
gone.”
“Was it …was it easy for her?”
Caligula pulled the car over to the side of the street. He turned
around and looked at her. She did not flinch. “It’s never easy. It’s
death. And death is terrible and profound.”
“And when it’s me or Keats you have to kill?” Plath demanded,
shamed by the quiver in her voice.
“Then that, too, will be terrible and profound,” Caligula said.