Читать книгу: «Bzrk Apocalypse»

For Katherine, Jake, and Julia.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

ARTIFACT

ELAPSED TIME

FIVE

SIX

ARTIFACT

ARTIFACT

SEVEN

EIGHT

BRAZIL

LOS ANGELES

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

ARTIFACT

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

ARTIFACT

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

STATE OF PLAY

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

TWO YEARS LATER

TWELVE YEARS LATER

Coming soon from Michael Grant

ONE

Sandra Piper was having dinner with friends when it started.

She was eating chilled lobster on the teak deck of a producer friend’s Malibu home, along with a former co-star named Wade Talon (a ridiculous screen name in Sandra’s opinion), her current director, Quentin (no last name necessary), a very rich and rather magnificently tattooed woman named Lystra Reid who had an odd vocal tic that added “Yeah,” to random sentences, and an extraordinarily fit, tall, and broad-shouldered man whose name she kept forgetting but who might have been named Noble, or something very close to that.

The Noble creature was listening, rapt, while the more famous folk discussed work and mutual friends and more work. In fact, in one way or another it was all work.

Sandra had been nominated. Best Actress. Very tough competition. The oddsmakers called her a long shot at six to one. Long but not impossible. And despite the fact that Sandra Piper was a mother of two, a down-to-earth thirty-ish woman with a masters in economics who had smoked pot exactly twice in her life and never drank more than two glasses of wine, she was thinking of seducing young Mr Shoulders. Mr Shy Grin. Mr Large-But-Sensitive Hands.

Because he was definitely interested, and she had been divorced for two years and dated no one in that time. And she was exhausted from long days on the current shoot, plus her son, Quarle (three years old), had just gotten over a two-week-long bout of flu.

And really, what the hell was the point of being America’s Sweetheart if you couldn’t even get laid? Would a male actor in the same situation even hesitate? Well, some, sure. But lots wouldn’t. So why should she? Wasn’t that why Quentin had invited Noble . . . No, wait, now she remembered. His name was Nolan. Whatever. Wasn’t he there for her, um . . . amusement?

Unless. Oh, had he come with the Lystra person? Was he here for her ? She would be closer to his age, not a beauty but attractive enough, given that she was not Hollywood at all but some sort of healthcare billionaire.

No. No, young Mr Body of Steel was not eyeing Lystra. He was eyeing the next winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress. Uh huh.

But the idea sighed inside her and deflated like a balloon with a slow leak. She shook her head, a tiny movement not intended for anyone else, and took a deep breath. She had to help Quinn (seven years old) with her stupid California Mission project, due tomorrow.

God she was boring. Boring and responsible and definitely America’s Sweetheart, except that when it came right down to it, she was Mommy.

Suddenly her hand jerked and she tipped her wine glass over. The last ounce of white wine drained onto the wood surface, alarming no one.

“Sorry. I just—”

Sandra frowned. Shook her head.

“What’s the matter, Sandy?” Wade asked.

“I’m just . . .” She shook her head again. Frowned, despite the fact that frowning would crease her ageless forehead. “Oh my God, is there something in the wine? I’m . . . I’m seeing something.”

Nolan looked at her from beneath lashes that would probably have tickled her cheeks (and other places, too, if she’d just said the word) and asked, “Are you feeling ill?”

“It’s . . .” She laughed. “This is going to sound crazy. It’s like I can see something that isn’t there. I’m . . .” She looked away from them, stared out toward the black Pacific Ocean, wondering if somehow what she was seeing was a reflection off the wine glasses.

But no. It was still there. It was as if she had a second set of eyes, and they opened onto a small TV screen in a corner of her own eyes.

“I’m seeing, like, like . . . just flat, but weird.” Then, a sudden, sharp gasp. “Oh my God, a second one. Like another window in my head.”

“Maybe you should lie down,” Nolan suggested.

“Or have another glass of wine,” Quentin said and laughed. But now he, too, was staring at her sideways, with concern on his face.

“There’s two . . . Oh! Oh! Oh! There’s a giant insect. I’m going nuts. Maybe I’m having a stroke.”

“I’m calling 911,” Nolan said and pulled out his phone.

“Jesus Christ! It’s a huge bug. I can see it! It’s turning, it’s coming toward me . . . Oh, oh God, I think I’m moving it! I think I’m making it move!”

She pushed back hard from the table. Glassware clattered and toppled. Wade leapt to his feet and caught her arm as she lurched away from the table.

“It has eyes! It has eyes! Oh God, oh God. My face! My eyes! Those are my eyes!”

She pushed Wade aside violently, then, abashed, shocked by her own behavior, she tried on a fleeting smile, reached out a reassuring hand and said, “I think I need help. I think I’d better see a doctor.”

“That would be best,” Lystra Reid said coolly, then added, as if an afterthought, “Yeah.” She had moved to place her back against the railing and was watching with detached interest. At least she wasn’t taking a picture to tweet later.

“Ambulance is on the way,” Nolan reported.

And Sandra thought, Well, he certainly won’t sleep with me now . But that thought came and left in a heartbeat, because something else was happening on that eerie picture-in-picture view in her head. She was seeing a falling drop of liquid that must have been a million gallons. It was far bigger than the terrifying bugs with her face smeared across them, her eyes; those nightmare insects with her own damned eyes.

The drop landed. It swept around the two bugs, engulfing them. And instantly it began to eat away those insect legs. It chewed burning holes into those insect carapaces. It burned away those distorted reflections of her own face like an old-time filmstrip jammed in a projector that bubbles and caramelizes and is gone.

The picture frames in her head blinked out.

They were gone as fast as they had come.

Sandra stood now, seeing only through her own eyes, seeing only what was real.

She laughed. “Hah-hah-hah-hah. Hahahahahahahah!”

And then she screamed. “Ahhhh! Aaaaaahhhh! You’re devils! Devils!”

Nolan moved to grab her because she was climbing awkwardly onto the table. She slipped, skinned her knee against the edge, stared down at the blood and shrieked, shrieked like a mad thing.

She snatched up a knife. Not a very big knife; just a dinner knife with a point and modest serrations. She stabbed it into Nolan’s thick bicep.

The strong man screamed, a more feminine sound than one might have expected.

“Hah! Hah, devil!” Sandra yelled, happy at the sight of his blood, fascinated.

Wade and Quentin backpedaled, making sure to keep the table between themselves and the long shot for Best Actress.

In Sandra’s eyes they were not backing away, they were coming for her, with their fangs out, and claws for fingers, and liquid fire dripping from their eyeballs—it was all about the eyeballs, it was there, in the eyes, the demons.

Sandra Piper turned the knife around and stabbed it into her belly. It didn’t go far. It drew blood, but just a stain the size of a quarter.

“Hey, hey, hey!” Quentin yelled.

“No, no, stop that, stop that this instant,” Wade said.

Nolan made another move—this time wary—to take the knife from her.

Sandra spit at him. “Hah!” she yelled, and stabbed the knife into her own eye. Her left eye. Pulled it out bloody and clotted with viscous goo.

Cries of horror, and now even she could see that they were backing away, the devils. It was working. Hah! Run, devils, run!

She then stabbed the knife into her other eye and pushed it through cracking bone, pushed it until the hilt was stopped. Then she twisted the knife around as if she was trying to churn her own brain.

Her knees gave way. The knife dropped from her hand.

“Stupid Mission project,” she said. Then fell onto her back, laughing and howling, laughing and howling. “Devils! Dev—”

It was Lystra Reid who took the knife from her. And Lystra who placed a napkin over the bloody craters in her face.

Not that Sandra Piper could see that.

TWO

Her name was Sadie McLure. She had indifferently styled brown hair and smart, skeptical brown eyes that could take on golden highlights and even suggestions of green in certain lights. She had freckles on her cheeks and across the bridge of her nose. She’d never liked the freckles, they seemed to be accompanied by the word “cute” and she didn’t like people thinking of her as cute. Cute was a belittling word.

The cute freckles had a second outpost on her chest, and a lesser presence on her shoulders. But all her freckles were now almost hidden by a rich, deep tan.

Her name was Sadie McLure, but in certain company she called herself Plath, after the great and tragically suicidal poet.

It was her nom de guerre. Her BZRK name. The name that defiantly acknowledged that there were only two possible fates in her future as a member of BZRK: death or madness.

She had a net worth expressed in billions of dollars. She had a small but effective private army in the form of McLure Labs security under a Mr Stern. (She must have heard his first name at some point, but what had stuck was the Mr And the Stern.)

She had seen terrible things, Sadie had. As Plath she had done terrible things, too, and had terrible things done to her.

She was sixteen years old.

A month had passed since that bizarre and fateful day when the Doll Ship had burned down much of the Hong Kong harbor waterfront. A month since the president of the United States had blown her own brains out on nationwide TV after being (correctly) suspected of murdering her husband.

A month since Sadie, as Plath, had sent her biots into Vincent’s brain, one armed with acid to burn the biot-death madness from him.

The great advantage of biots over their mechanical competitors, the nanobots, was the closeness of the connection between twitcher and biot. That was also the greatest disadvantage because that same connection meant that the loss of a biot sent its creator on a downward spiral into madness.

Vincent had spiraled following the loss of one biot and serious injury to a second.

From a desperate desire to save Vincent, Sadie had undertaken a grim mission to cauterize parts of his brain. But at this moment that terrible day was compartmentalized, if not forgotten, and Sadie was doing something that was not at all terrible. She was on a white-sand beach beneath palm trees. A picnic was laid out on a woven mat of the kind the locals used. There was cold fried chicken, cold lobster and a bowl of vanilla-spiked fruit in the local Madagascar style.

There was also a bottle of white wine, now empty, and a bottle of vodka, now partly empty.

And there was a boy.

He was as naked as Sadie. His name was Noah, though like Sadie he sometimes used a nom de guerre: Keats.

Whether they were Plath and Keats or Sadie and Noah, she was on top and he was inside her. They were both smiling because the ash from the joint in Sadie’s mouth had landed on the very tip of Noah’s nose and when she blew it away it made him sneeze. Which struck them both as funny, so they laughed, and that physical convulsion had interesting side effects.

“Laugh again,” Noah said.

“Not yet,” Sadie said.

“You’re torturing me.”

“I’m teaching you endurance,” she said, voice slurring.

“I’m standing right at the very edge of a cliff,” he said, and his eyes closed and his smile became dreamier. “If you laugh . . . or even move at all . . . or even breathe deeply, I’ll go right . . . mmmm . . . over . . . the edge.”

“You’re going with a cliff metaphor?” she asked, and giggled.

Which was all it took.

She watched his face while his body arched and thrust and shuddered and finally subsided. His expression was more animal than human in the first seconds, and the sounds he made were definitely not witty banter. Or even half-drunk and quite stoned banter. But then that feral look softened into the kind of expression you’d see on the face of a saint in a Renaissance painting.

And then he laughed, too.

And opened his blue, blue eyes and said, “Don’t go yet.”

He remained inside her, in more ways than one. He was also inside her brain, and not metaphorically. A tiny creature smaller than the full stop at the end of a sentence—a creature built from an exotic stew of DNA that included Noah’s own—was deep within Sadie’s brain. This was a biot . One of his, Noah’s biots, because biots were nothing if not unique to their creator. It was designated K2. Keats 2. His other biot, K1, was in a tiny vial stuck in the buttoned pocket of his shorts, which were . . . he looked around . . . over there, somewhere.

K2 had the job of maintaining the fragile latticework painstakingly built around a bulge in an artery in Sadie’s brain. Left alone, the aneurysm might never pop. Then again it might pop at any moment, which would almost certainly kill Sadie, perhaps over the course of pain-filled hours.

Noah had worked with scarcely a break over this last month to strengthen the Teflon casing around the deadly bulge. It was tedious work. Fibers had to be carried through Sadie’s eye, down the optic nerve, up and down the soggy hills and deep valleys of her brain—quite a long trip for a biot—then carefully threaded in place. Basket-weaving.

All the while a sort of picture-in-picture was open in Noah’s own mind, an artificially color-enhanced but grainy picture. Imagine a 3D special effects movie but with the color flattened out and stripped of nuance, all shot through a dirty lens.

Noah knew Sadie with an intimacy that was impossible for people who did not travel down in the meat . When she became aroused he could feel the artery beneath his biot’s six legs pumping faster, harder.

But it was not just the relatively monotonous, liquid-encased surface of the brain that he had seen up close. He had at various times, in the course of more than one desperate mission, crawled across her eyes, her lips, her tongue.

She kissed his mouth and then the place just beside his mouth and then his neck. Then she rolled off onto the blanket and looked toward the food.

“You didn’t . . .” he said.

“No.” She struggled to find the right tone. Unconcerned but not indifferent. Nonchalant, not like it mattered. Then tried switching to a sexy purr. “But I loved every minute. That’s not the only thing in the world, you know.”

“It’s not?” he asked, trying to be funny.

“Want some lobster?” she asked, deflecting him. She didn’t like talking about sex. The effects of weed and wine were ebbing, leaving her tired and groggy. She could be cranky in a minute if she let herself.

There were things nagging at her. Distractions. She wanted to keep pushing them away, but self-medication had its limits and all those niggling worries would resurface, frequency and intensity increasing. She had pushed it all away for a month and now “it” was pushing back.

“I do want some lobster, I absolutely do,” Noah said.

“Then trot on over there and get me some, too.”

He sighed. “It’s always something with you. Undress me. Make love to me. Feed me lobster. You are so demanding.” He stood up and she saw that half his hard, lean behind was coated with sand. She lay back, head resting on one hand, enjoying that particular sight, and the view beyond. They were in a secluded lagoon on the western edge of the island, facing the much larger island of Madagascar, which was a blur of green ten miles off.

A quarter mile to both north and south, armed men—fashionably attired in white Tommy Bahama shirts and automatic rifles—watched for any threat to their privacy. Just out of sight behind a rocky point, a yacht crewed by ex-soldiers rolled in the gentle swell and kept a radar lookout over the area.

Noah brought her pieces of lobster on a small china plate.

“We’re out of wine,” he said.

“Good. Time to sober up, anyway.”

“Is it?” he asked. “Why?”

She sat up and reached for her T-shirt. He interrupted her with a kiss and gently stroked her breasts as if saying good-bye to them. “I quite like these,” he said.

“I guessed that. Can I put on my shirt now?”

“I suppose.” He started to dress as well, shorts, a T-shirt, sandals. He reached down and pulled her to her feet.

“I’ll call for our cab,” Sadie said. She pressed the talk button on a handheld radio—there was no cell phone reception this far up-island.

Five minutes later, as they packed up the picnic, a glittering white cabin cruiser appeared around the point.

The captain gave a little toot-toot on the horn and the boat blew up.

It took a few seconds for the flat CRUMP! of the explosion to reach them. It took a bit longer for the debris to splash into the water.

And just like that Sadie and Noah were Plath and Keats once again, running now, food and blanket forgotten. McLure security men were tearing along the beach from north and south, assault rifles in their hands, yelling, “Get under cover, get under cover!”

The boat burned for a while—there was no possibility of anyone having survived—and then it slipped beneath gentle waves that were a very similar color to Noah’s eyes. The pillar of black smoke was smothered. A black smudge rose until it was caught by a breeze and blown away over the island.

Vacation was over. The war for the human race was back on.

THREE

The roll that had begun was accelerating. The ship’s ballast had shifted decisively. It rolled onto its side, sending the flame shooting hundreds of feet into the air.

The inside of Benjaminia was a slaughterhouse—dead marines, many more dead residents hung from bloody catwalks. The sphere turned on its axis, and floors became walls. Bodies fell through the air.

Like the turning drum of a dryer, the sphere rolled on and now people clinging to desperate handholds fell screaming and crashed into the painted mural of the Great Souls.

Water rushed in through the opened segments.

The blowtorch submerged but burned on and turned the water to steam as the Doll Ship sank, and settled on the harbor floor.

When the Doll Ship sank the Armstrong Twins had found themselves in Hong Kong’s Victoria harbor.

They could not swim. With some effort, and if they felt in a cooperative mood, they could manage to walk, dragging the useless third leg. But swim?

It was Ling who had saved their lives. Tiny, ancient, birdlike Ling. She had cupped her hand beneath their chin and churned the filthy water with her legs. She’d sunk beneath the waves repeatedly, rising each time to gasp in a single breath mixed with salt water, to cough and gag, and yet to keep her legs churning, until a fishing boat had come to the rescue.

They would find a way to reward Ling. They had vowed that. She had saved their lives and very nearly died herself.

The Armstrong Twins had made their way from Victoria harbor to Vietnam, where they had financial interests and owned a small but useful number of local government officials. From there they’d made their way to Malaysia, to the Sarawak state on the island of Borneo.

The Armstrong facility there was involved in mining rare earths. And it did a bit of logging, as well, all very eco-friendly, with careful replanting programs and all of that. Whatever it took to avoid too much scrutiny. The Armstrongs were good corporate citizens out of self-interest.

But this facility was not strictly about mining or logging. It was built of three elements: there were two identical buildings, each a crescent, facing each other across an elongated oval that formed an enchanting tropical garden, a sort of tamed version of the surrounding rain forest.

There were trees and flowers, streams full of fish and waterfowl, pink gravel pathways leading to benches and seating areas where the white-collar employees could take their lunches al fresco .

At the top of the oval, connecting the two crescents, was a stumpy tower topped by a domed observatory. There was an impressive optical telescope there which profited from the profound darkness of the surrounding countryside.

No one was using the telescope at the moment because it was pouring rain. It often poured rain here. And when it poured it was unlike anything Charles Armstrong had ever known in New York. It came down not in drops but in sheets. The heavens did not sprinkle on Sarawak, they emptied buckets and bathtubs and swimming pools.

Charles watched a lizard climbing up the glass side of the dome, pushing against the stream of water. Sarawak had lizards. It had lizards and snakes and birds in abundance.

“I would have thought the rain would wash it off,” Charles said.

His brother, Benjamin, was less interested by the lizard or the rain, but of course could see both since it was impossible for the twins not to face in the same direction. Their individual eyes could roam this way or that, focus independently under the direction of their separate brains, but they did not have separate heads, rather two heads melded together.

This gave them two mouths, one nose, and three eyes. The middle eye was a bit smaller than the other two and often had an unfocused, glazed quality. It could see, but its focus was not consciously directed by either Charles or Benjamin. Rather it often seemed to have a mind of its own and would focus where it willed, suddenly granting depth perception to one or the other twin, but never both at once.

They were large, the twins were, tall but even more broad, with shoulders capable of carrying the unusual weight of their doubled head. Two arms, neither muscular, two fully developed legs and a third, stunted leg.

At the moment they were sitting in a modified electric wheelchair. It was far more capable than the usual motorized wheelchairs and had been given an almost dashing, exotic look, with burgundy velvet trim, two side panels that likely concealed weapons, and wheels that looked more racetrack than hospital. But it remained, in the end, a wheelchair.

The observatory was their haunt for now. There was a bedroom down a ramp, and a specially outfitted bathroom. But the bedroom had only conventional windows. All their lives had been spent indoors, and they craved the openness of the observatory, even when all they could see was water sheeting down the glass and a lizard struggling against that tide.

“Looking at lizards,” Benjamin said, disgusted.

They had both been depressed since the sinking of the Doll Ship. The Doll Ship had been their happy place, the place they could think about when life became too gloomy or the pressure too intense. Now it was gone. All those poor people, the people who worshipped them, who saw beauty in their deformity, all of them gone.

“Fish food,” Charles said, knowing where his brother’s thoughts had wandered. “And we still don’t know how it happened.”

“A Swedish intelligence officer and a British admiral.”

“But how?”

“Many questions, brother.”

They turned the wheelchair to face the large monitor that hung above a touch-screen desktop. The monitor was divided into twenty-four smaller frames. Three were tuned to various news outlets. The rest were clearly surveillance cameras. An empty room with desks. A break room with one woman making coffee. A lab with two people in white coats moving to some unheard music while they tapped on keyboards. A puzzling view of what might be a warehouse.

One by one, the video tiles flipped to be replaced by different views. Every corner of the Armstrong empire.

They could see everything, but what could they control? They weren’t even sure they could return to New York. London, too, might be out of bounds.

“We are hiding like rats from a cat,” Benjamin said.

“We’re foxes at the very least,” Charles said, trying to make fox hunts usually ended with dogs tearing at the cornered animal. “System: locate Burnofsky,”

A larger picture appeared, in the center of the monitor. The object of their search had his back to them. He was hunched over a terminal.

“There’s our Karl,” Charles said, steel in his voice.

“Ours?”

Charles sighed. “Either he hit bottom on some grand, final bender and decided to turn his life around. Or—”

“Or BZRK wired him,” Benjamin said.

“Ling!” Charles yelled. “It’s dinnertime, and I find I would enjoy a drink.”

They shared a digestive tract, despite having two mouths. It took consent from both for either to drink alcohol. Or to eat, though they tried to be tolerant on that. Benjamin liked to snack on a bowl of Chex Mix sometimes, and Charles preferred fresh fruit. Apricots. He loved a perfect apricot, though a really good one was hard to find.

“A drink, yes,” Benjamin said. “And maybe more than one apiece.”

Ling appeared, moving with a gliding speed that belied her advanced years.

“Ah, our friend and hero, Ling. I shall have a glass of wine,” Charles told her. “A Cabernet, I think.”

“I’ll have a Cognac,” Benjamin said. “You know what I like.”

They sat glumly watching the video frames opening and closing around Burnofsky as the system cycled randomly through the hundreds of surveillance cameras. Here was a woman making copies. There a man staring blankly into space. A couple putting on coats ready to go home. Jet-lag-dulled shoppers at the Twins’ O’Hare Airport store. Two men debating something, both pointing at tablets.

At the bottom of each window was a small tag giving the location. Athens. Newport News. Tierra del Fuego. Johnson City. AFGC—the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation—had locations all over the world, even without counting the shops in virtually every airport.

“We have not lost, brother,” Charles said softly with what he hoped was an undertone of iron resolve.

“Yet we’re in hiding.”

“We have not lost. We are not beaten . We have the Hounds. We can rebuild the twitcher corps. We can start again. And we have Floor 34.”

“Floor 34’s a losing tactic,” Benjamin snorted. “Defensive. It takes down BZRK. But it does not give us back the president we lost, or the premier we lost, goddammit! God damn it!” He slammed his fist down on the desk, making Charles’s glass of wine jump. “Or Bug Man. Or the Doll Ship.” He moaned. “What we have lost! What we have lost !” He drained the snifter of Cognac in a single long swallow.

“When Floor 34 is ready, we take down BZRK and all they have within weeks. It spreads, brother; it will find them in all their hiding places. And when it has done its work, we will be without enemies, we—”

“Without enemies? You think BZRK is our only enemy? Don’t you know the Chinese are dissecting every body they fish out of Hong Kong harbor? They know. They know ! And if the Americans and Europeans don’t know yet, they will soon.”

“What is it you want, Benjamin? To unleash the gray goo?”

The gray goo, a ridiculous name for a deadly threat: self-replicating nanobots. Nanobots building more nanobots with whatever material they found at hand. Going from thousands to millions and billions and trillions in mere days; consuming every last atom of carbon and a good many other elements as well. Everything that lived or had lived on the surface of planet Earth. Everything that made life possible.

Nanobots were the mechanical answer to biots. Just as small, but without the eerie and inexplicable link that connected a biot to its maker. Nanobots had to be run through a game controller. They were somewhat less capable, but they had a huge advantage: it was nothing to lose a nanobot. But to lose a biot? Well, that way madness lay.

Benjamin gestured at the screen. He happened to be focused on a family at one of the AFGC shops, this one at Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands. A family. Man, woman, blond child, poring over souvenirs. “I hate them sometimes. I hate them enough to do it.”

Charles intuited which frame his brother was focusing on. “Yes, but imagine them as ours, brother. Imagine them united with us. Imagine them happy to look at us. Imagine what we can make them into with our nanotechnology and our friends from Nexus Humanus.”

“Nexus Humanus,” Benjamin snorted. It was a cult they had financed as a way to recruit twitchers to control nanobots, and other useful folk. But it had lost steam, like bargain-basement Scientology. “We had it, the world we seek. The Doll Ship.” A tear welled in Benjamin’s eye, swelled and went rushing down his cheek.

“Nonsense, brother, it was only a model of the world we seek.”

“A world united,” Benjamin said, bitterly wondering at his own naivety. Weeping, figuratively at least, for the benighted human race that was being deprived of the utopia he saw so clearly. “One vast interconnectedness, with us at the nexus.”

“It can still be. It can. But not if we unleash the SRNs. Not the gray goo, not that final act of Götterdämmerung. The lesser tack, though . . .” Charles was offering a sacrifice to the god of Benjamin’s rage. A step short of apocalypse.

“Massed pre-programmed attack,” Benjamin said, accenting the final word. Nanobots could be programmed to carry out simple commands autonomously. Large numbers of them, so long as the task was simple. Millions of them if necessary. They could be programmed to destroy all in their reach for a certain period of time and then turned off, a sort of localized, small-scale gray goo.

“If it’s true that the intelligence agencies either know or will soon, then we won’t be safe, even here. But if we disrupt . . . If we launch mass releases. Washington. London. Beijing. Give them something to keep them very busy. And at the same time use the Floor 34 weapon to take out BZRK . . .”

“There he goes. Burnofsky. He’s doing it again.” Benjamin had spotted it. He gave the voice command to expand the screen. Burnofsky’s image pushed all the others aside.

In the image—high-def, no grainy monochrome—Burnofsky had lit a cigarette. He took a few puffs. Sat, staring at nothing. Took another drag on the cigarette.

“Here it comes,” Benjamin said.

Burnofsky slid a desk drawer open. He drew out a framed photograph of a young girl.

“The daughter,” Charles said. “He’s never gotten over it.”

Burnofsky looked at the picture and puffed his cigarette so that now the smoke partially obscured the image, swirling up around the hidden camera. They could only see the side of the man’s face, but the smile was huge, ear to ear. The smile and a silent laugh.

“Volume up,” Charles ordered.

Burnofsky was making a chortling sound, a private, gleeful, somehow greedy sound. Like a miser counting his money.

“Bugs in your brain, baby,” he said, laughing happily. “Bugs in your brain.”

“System: zoom in on Burnofsky’s face,” Benjamin ordered. The camera zoomed. “He’s crying as he laughs. Crying and laughing. Here it comes.”

Burnofsky lifted his shirt up off his corpse-white concave belly. They had a poor angle on this, just barely able to see.

Burnofsky sucked hard on the cigarette, and holding the smoke in his lungs, stabbed the lit end of it against his belly.

They heard the sizzle.

He held it there; held it, held it, held it . . . and then, with a cry of pain that caused smoke to explode from his mouth, Burnofsky at last pulled the cigarette away.

“Karl, Karl, Karl,” Charles said.

“Exercising, eating well, no more drugs, far less alcohol.” Benjamin recited the relevant facts. “Seemingly less depressed. And this self-mutilation is the price, somehow. You know it’s BZRK, brother. You must know that. He’s wired. They’ve taken our genius from us.”

Charles sipped his wine. He had to take it slow if Benjamin was going to be swigging brandy. “I don’t know it. But, do I suspect it?”

He let the question hang.

“We must return home. Home to the Tulip.”

“Back to the Tulip?” Charles’s voice was troubled. “Even now that will be dangerous.”

“I’ve spent—we’ve spent—our lives skulking and hiding, brother. Is there not, finally, a time to stand up and be seen and counted?”

Charles didn’t argue. He knew it would be pointless. Benjamin would have his own Götterdämmerung . Charles felt sick inside. He did not want this to end in apocalypse. He had never wanted anything, really, but for all the world to be happy. And to accept him for what he was. And if only he could be allowed to wire the entire human race with his nanobot forces that beautiful vision would be realized. A world of peace. A world free from want and hate and fear and pain because every human being would be brother, sister, father, mother to every other human being. One vast interconnectedness.

“We hit back,” Benjamin was saying. Over and over. “We hit back!”

Charles closed his eye and heard the voice of his brother, so many years ago, so long ago, before they understood. Before they came to accept their isolation and loneliness. The voice of the child Benjamin was the voice of the grown man now.

Hit back, hit back, hit back.

On the screen Burnofsky was giggling and crying.

FOUR

Sadie and Noah were bundled into a Land Rover and driven straight, without packing, without ceremony, without time to breathe, to a privately owned airstrip and practically shoved aboard a Gulfstream.

The pilot filed a flight plan for the relatively short hop to Sambava airport on the main island of Madagascar. But that would be the expected route and if the enemy had gone to the trouble of blowing up a boat, would they hesitate at an airport assassination?

So the Gulfstream flew on, took on fuel in Kenya, and made the long haul to Madeira to prepare for the final leg to New York’s Teterboro.

At Madeira the security men let them off the plane. Plath and Keats took a taxi into the whitewashed city of Funchal and ate voraciously at a café that smelled of garlic, red wine and cedar, and served cod and prawns and good, doughy bread in a sky-blue stucco dining room. The Gulfstream had left in too great a hurry to take on food and despite their picnic lunch hours earlier, they were starving.

“So what do we do now?” Keats asked. He had the sense that this might be the last time they could speak freely. There was a single weary McLure security guy outside on the street, gun out of view but not out of reach, but no one was watching or listening in the restaurant and the clatter of cutlery on pottery and china would have obscured their words in any case.

“Back to New York,” she said with a shrug.

“And then?”

“Then we do whatever Lear tells us to do.” It sounded bitter. It was.

Keats tore at a piece of bread then used it to sop up some gravy. “That’s not proper, is it? Proper table manners, I mean.”

“Yeah, that’s what I care about,” Plath said. “Table manners.” She offered him a smile and put her hand on his.

“It doesn’t make sense, that’s the thing,” Keats said.

“Manners?”

“Blowing up the boat.”

One of Plath’s continuing joys in her relationship with Keats came from the fact that in just about every case where she wondered if he was understanding things, he was. He might look a bit like the naive dreamboat guy, but those too-blue eyes and sensuous mouth were deceptive. There was a sharp, observant brain there as well.

When am I going to stop underestimating you, Noah? She asked herself this silently, and in her mind he was firmly Noah still, not Keats. Keats was work. Noah was . . . Well, what? Love?

He loved her. Did she love him ?

Was it a class thing? The fact that she came from money and his family had never risen to middle class? Was she really that shallow? She wouldn’t have thought so, would have angrily denied it. But at the same time, coming into her inheritance had without doubt added just a bit of swagger to her worldview.

She was rich. Very rich. He was very much not. Was that why she still held something back from him? That would be shameful. Or was it simply that she had seen him in ways no young woman is meant to see a young man? She knew too much and had memories that were far too vivid and intrusive. She knew what his lips looked like in the micro-subjective.

She knew that down there, where distances were measured in microns, those full lips were crusted parchment. She knew that his fingertips looked like arid, plowed fields. She knew that his tongue was serried ranks of pink hoods, and that trapped between the rows were bright false-color bacteria.

She knew that living things crawled in his eyelashes, tiny things unless you were down in the meat and saw them m-sub. Then they didn’t look so small. M-sub fleas looked like spiky, punk versions of the armored oliphaunts from the Lord of the Rings movies, except that they could jump a thousand times their own height.

She knew, above all, that all the intelligence and charm and wit, all of his readiness to commit, all the love he was so ready to express, was nothing but minute electrical charges firing along neurons in the wet folds of his brain.

She had not just seen these things on an image captured from a scanning electron microscope. She had been there in her biots. She had seen them all with biot eyes that were as real to her as her own.

Even now she knew that Noah was seeing the same with her. One of his biots was in her brain right now. All three of hers—P1, P2, P3—were in the vial she kept on a chain around her neck for safekeeping, but she was still seeing through their eyes, seeing a long, rainbow-hued glass wall. Three distinct windows were open inside her visual field. And if they ever began to go dark . . . Then would come the madness she defied by taking the name Plath.

Down in the meat.

Once you had gone down in the meat, the images could not simply be set aside and ignored. And after memories came imagination, so that she would picture things she had not seen through biot eyes as they would look at m-sub.

She would see the micro detail of his lips and her own; she would see the rough furrows of his fingertips as they brushed her nipples; and she could imagine the billion tail-whipping sperm cells as he ejaculated.

It was all, at the very least, distracting. Though somehow it never seemed to distract him—

Keats waved his hand up and down in front of her face.

“Sorry,” Plath said and snapped back to reality. “I was considering. The boat. Yeah, it was both crude and ineffectual.”

“Armstrong wouldn’t come at us that way,” he said. “If they knew where we were they’d deploy nanobots. There have been servants in and out of the house, we had a doctor in when I got food poisoning; there were opportunities for infestation.”

“Or they could have targeted some of Stern’s people and bounced the nanobots to us from them. I mean, if you know where two members of BZRK are, you try to wire them, you don’t try to kill them.” She glanced over her shoulder upon saying the word BZRK, pronounced with vowels intact: “Berserk.”

Keats nodded, tore off another piece of bread, sopped up more gravy and popped it in his mouth. Plath could imagine the scene down at the m-sub. The teeth would be impossibly huge, scaly not smooth, massive mountainous gray boulders dropping from the sky and rising from below to crush and—

I have to stop this. I have to get control of my thoughts.

Too easy to let that consciousness of another universe take over her mind. Too easy to go from distraction to revulsion. She had to be able to be with another human being without always picturing that other, stranger reality.

“Maybe it was something totally different,” Noah suggested. “Maybe there was a fuel leak on the boat. Maybe we’re just overreacting.”

“Maybe,” Plath said. “But our time in the Garden of Eden had to end eventually. We had to go back. We’re supposed to be running things.”

Keats met her gaze and shook his head slowly. “No, not we. You, Sadie.” Then with a wry smile he corrected himself. “You, Plath .”

She could have said that they were partners. She could have said that obviously he was as important as she was.

But she had not told him about the message from Lear telling her to get back in the game. The message she had ignored for days.

She wondered if she should tell him now.

But instead she copied him and mopped up some gravy. She didn’t have time to worry about tending to Keats’s ego. Her mind was filling with the implications of the suspicion that they were being shepherded.

Driven.

Manipulated.

Anthony Elder, who had once used the name Bug Man, was shopping for onions at Tesco. Not just onions, there were other things on the list, too. But it was onions that somehow irritated him.

Nutella

Beans

Bread

Pasta (own brand, nothing fancy)

Mushrooms (fresh, button, 1/2 pound)

Cheerios

2 oranges

3 onions (the white kind)

Three onions. The white kind.

This was his life. Again. His mother was already on him about going back to school. To school!

“You don’t want to go on neglecting your education, Anthony. That’s most likely why you were let go.”

Let go.

Well, no, Mum, I wasn’t exactly let go. I ran for my life—flew for it, actually, all the way back to England—after my mistakes caused the American president to blow her brains out in front of the whole world. It wasn’t because I couldn’t conjugate French verbs or recall the date of the Battle of Hastings.

He didn’t say that to his mother, of course.

He walked down the cereals aisle searching for Cheerios, maneuvering around a woman who was pushing both a baby buggy and a shopping trolley. He found the cereal, puzzled for a moment over what size box he should be getting. His mother would chide him no matter what he chose.

Small, then. Easier to carry home. Less chance of catching some smart remarks from passing thugs.

He’d been on top of the world. Now he was self-conscious about being seen by others his age, struggling with plastic bags of pasta and Nutella and onions. The white kind.

A pretty girl coming toward him looked right through him like he was invisible.

He’d had the most beautiful girl in the world. Jessica. She’d been a slave to him. A slave. The memories made him ache inside. He would never get within conversational range of a girl like that again.

Top of the world, that’s where he’d been. But all that was gone now. All that gone and now he was invisible to women and girls. He was a moderately attractive black teenage boy with no obvious signs of wealth or future prospects. Why would they look at him?

He rounded a corner, walked glumly past aisles of this and that, entirely forgetting the pasta, ignoring the plastic-wrapped slabs of meat to one side, heading to onions.

He felt rather than saw that something had changed.

Instinct. Some sense that was not quite sight, sound, smell or touch. The certainty that he was being watched. Without turning to look he knew he was being followed. His speed was being matched.

He walked slower, stopped, pretended to admire the lamb; but the presence did not pass him by.

He moved suddenly toward the grocery department, walking too fast, and he felt his pursuer keep pace.

Well.

Well. Ah. So. So was it cops or killers?

His heart was heavy in his chest. His feet dragged a bit, just the toes scraping on the tile. Shit, he’d just started to think maybe he was out of it, that maybe the Armstrongs would let him go. He’d given them a lot of good work, after all.

If not some hit man for the Armstrongs, was it police? Or even MI5?

He stopped in front of a bin of oranges and rested his hand on one, just feeling it. He liked oranges. Was this the last one he would see for a long while? Or the last one ever?

He turned, resigned, not seeing the point really in continuing to pretend. And there was his pursuer.

Now surely that was not a cop or MI5.

The man was well-dressed, almost like a banker. Far too posh-looking to be a cop. He was a black man, tall, thin, with glasses, and when he met Anthony’s eyes he smiled. Like an old friend. At first Bug Man felt himself relaxing, but no, no, that was a bad idea. A smile meant nothing.

“You want something?” Bug Man asked. His voice was ragged. Maybe the expensive suit hadn’t noticed.

“Anthony Elder?”

He nodded. What would be the point in lying?

What about running? He could surely outrun this man.

“Are you here to kill me?”

The man was not surprised by the question. “Not at this time.” He smiled. “But you will be taken for questioning by this time tomorrow.”

“Haven’t done anything.”

“Oh, come now, you know better than that. People of our particular skin tone don’t need to be guilty of anything to be questioned by the police, now, do we?”

Bug Man moved a step sideways, edging along the oranges. He spotted the onions. The white ones.

“Met police will pick you up tomorrow, but of course it’s not really for themselves. They’ll turn you over to the Security Service, to MI5, for questioning.”

The man moved closer so he could speak more quietly. He smelled of sandalwood and spearmint. Bug Man liked the cologne, didn’t like the man belonging to it. He had a ridiculous urge to ask him whether it was available for sale here at Tesco.

“They will detain you on a secret warrant and in all likelihood you will be given a chance to plead guilty so as to avoid a public trial. They’ll put out a statement accusing you of something like embezzlement. Something safe for public consumption. They’ll promise to let you out in a few years, and they would, really they would. Except that you’ll have been gutted by some hardened lifer in your cell long before that. They’ll make sure of that. If they don’t, their cousins will—the Americans.”

Bug Man licked his lips. This was a threat, but not just a threat. This was the beginning of an offer.

“Whatever they want, the Twins, whatever they want, I’m still the best; I’m still fucking Bug Man .”

“The Twins?” The man made a crestfallen face, an act, a little show that he was putting on. Bug Man wanted to punch him. “Oh, yes, the Twins . Well, Anthony, this is not really about them. I’m not able to tell you anything, really, but I can tell you that I don’t work for the Twins.”

Bug Man took a breath. He’d forgotten to do that. “Who are you, then?”

“My name is George. George William Frederick.”

He said it as if it should mean something to Bug Man. And it did ping some distant, dusty strand of memory. But nothing meaningful. It was a name out of a different time, Bug Man felt.

“You slept through history, didn’t you?” George William Frederick said. “That’s a shame. History is everything important, really. In any case, I’m here because the surveillance team that has been on you for every minute of the last month is outside, in the car park, drinking coffee in paper cups and eating HobNobs, confident that you will soon emerge with your groceries. They’ll follow you home, as per their orders, log your movements, and go off shift at eight p.m. They won’t bother with physical surveillance after that; they’ll be watching on the cameras they have in your home. Yes. So, as it happens, this would actually be an opportune time for you to follow me, out of the back of the shop, to a waiting car.”