She watched his face turn gray.
She watched his eyes dart toward the assault rifle. Which was in her hands before he could move.
“This is the part where you tell me everything,” she said. “This is the part where you answer all my questions, because if you don’t, I shoot you, and you die.”
Not a good liar, Sadie McLure.
“I told Lear no,” she said.
But it was right there in her eyes.
“Then what are we going to do?” Keats asked her.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. This madness, the Nobel thing, whatever happened there, that must be the secret weapon Lear wants destroyed. Right?”
He had not known what to say then. He had not known what he could safely say to her. He did not know whether the girl he loved would have him killed for turning against Lear.
It felt as if his insides were dying. Like he was a piece of fruit left out in the sun, rotting from the inside, collapsing in on himself. He felt sick.
She was wired. She knew she was wired. Yet she had refused to let him try to fix her.
The insidiousness of it. She was like a schizophrenic who knows she’s supposed to take the meds but refuses to. She was becoming party to her own mind-rape.
He wanted to grab her shoulders and shake her. Everything he was to her was less important to her now than carrying out Lear’s plan.
She had always held something back from him, he knew that. That was okay, he’d told himself, she just needed time. At first he’d decided the reticence was a class thing. That made him feel a bit better, really, because it was something he could understand. It was something he could defend himself from emotionally.
He still loved her. But she had never loved him, had she? And now … now where was Sadie McLure?
“Do you want to make love?” she asked him, that and he wanted to punch her in the face.
Not her, not Sadie, no, it was … it was whoever this person was, this reprogrammed, wired alteration of Sadie. It was this truly new creature called Plath.
“I’m tired,” he said, and the relief in her eyes was almost more than he could endure.
“Yeah. Big day tomorrow,” she said.
“Oh? Why?”
Her eyes flicked right—guilty, caught. She shrugged and forced a phony smile. “Aren’t they all big days?”
She left, heading toward the bedroom they still shared.
Tears filled his eyes and since no one was around to see him standing there like a fool, he let the tears roll down his cheeks.
Back to New York, that’s what Lystra said. “Back to New York to watch the show, yeah. A lot happening very soon. Timing. It’s all in the timing, yeah.”
So here they were. New York City, and damned if the tattooed madwoman didn’t have an apartment a block away from the Tulip. He could look straight down Sixth Avenue and see the building. He could run for it, escape, get to the Twins and say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but you don’t know what this crazy bitch is doing!”
He could do that. And they’d thank him for the information and then kill him. Or Lystra would catch him and she would show him that scary face she had, the one where she seemed almost to turn into a skeleton. And then she could kill his biots and turn him loose.
Death or madness. Seriously? That’s what it was down to? The three windows in his head said yes, yes, that was exactly the choice.
He wondered rather morbidly just what kind of crazy he would be. Stories were still leaking out of Stockholm. They said some big-deal banker found a way to hang himself from a chandelier. They said a French general was found smeared with feces, crying. They said a famous American horror novelist had run into the street and beaten a party Santa to death with a fire extinguisher.
Which crazy will you be, Anthony? he asked himself.
What escape was there? The Twins? The American government?
He stopped breathing. The answer—not a good answer, a weak, probably worthless answer—popped into his head.
Someone brilliant. Someone with mad skills. Someone who once had almost, sort of, liked Bug Man. And was just a block away.
Burnofsky.
Lystra had taken his phone. She was on her own phone right now in the adjacent room, telling her CEO, some dude named Tom, to fire all the remaining employees, effective now, this minute, shut it all down, the whole Directive Medical shebang, stop all checks and buy more gold. Yeah. Just don’t touch Cathexis.
Burnofsky. The dude had invented nanobots. It stood to reason he’d have … something. But how to reach him? He knew Burnofsky’s e-mail and his cell, but Bug Man had no phone.
He would have to wait until she was asleep, the monster in the next room.
Maybe I won’t be a hanging-myself crazy, Bug Man thought. Maybe I’ll be a nice, gentle, shit-smeared kind of crazy.
Somehow he was convinced that none of this would ever have happened if he’d just found the onions sooner. Gotten home.
With a chill he remembered his mother coming down with a sinus infection a year ago, give or take. She’d had tests done. Her DNA, too, might be stored somewhere on one of Lystra Reid’s drives.
Her plan was now frighteningly clear. She had used her web of medical testing companies to acquire and digitize DNA from millions of people. Once you had the DNA, you could grow a biot derived in part from that DNA. The biot-DNA-donor mind link would happen—which would be disorienting all by itself. Suddenly having windows open in your mind … well, that was going to be disturbing.
But nothing to what came next. Lear wasn’t out to disturb or unsettle people, she was out to destroy civilization. For that she needed madness. Widespread, inexplicable, irresistible madness.
So once the biots were born, she had only to kill them. An electrical surge maybe, or extreme heat or acid.
Would it really work? Would one crazy woman be able to bring the whole world crashing down?
He turned on the television; it was all he had. Al Jazeera TV had a news bulletin. He reached for the remote. He did not want to see more video of that horror show in Stockholm.
Suddenly he felt Lystra’s presence and realized he was no longer hearing her from the other room. “Leave it,” she said, looking toward the TV screen. “I think something kind of, yeah, big just happened.”
Seven months earlier, the younger British prince had given blood in a public show of support for a National Blood Service blood drive. The NBS had been helped in their work by volunteers from Directive Medical UK.
Of course security for the Royal Family was very tight, so no one would be allowed to actually know which was his donation. It was labeled anonymously, just a numerical tracer, and sent off to the blood bank.
Except that the Directive Medical lab tech had already swapped it out with an earlier sample.
Now, as the television picture showed, the prince was in a gondola of the London Eye—the huge Ferris wheel beside the Thames—as part of an outreach to disadvantaged youth.
The gondolas were large enough to hold a couple of dozen people at once, and were in fact holding twelve specially chosen children of carefully varied ethnicities, who shrank in horror against the far end of the gondola as the prince repeatedly ran at the transparent wall and smashed his head into it.
Blood smeared the plastic. Blood completely covered the prince’s face and would have rendered him unrecognizable if not for the familiar red hair.
The Eye was slowly coming around, bringing the gondola back to earth, but that footage from three minutes earlier—brutal video of the raving royal slamming himself again and again and again—was competing in one half of the screen with a live shot showing him flailing, kicking, spitting blood in every direction as appalled Royalty Protection in plainclothes and uniformed London Met police tried to get him under control.
“That was excellent,” Lystra said. “You try to nail the timing, yeah, and arrange something spectacular, but wow, that was better than I’d hoped for. Yeah.”
Bug
Man stared in horror. “I liked that dude. He was the fun one.”
“Who, the prince?” Lystra laughed. “Don’t go soft on me, Bug. Much more to come. I’ve got three officers at a nuclear missile base near Novosibirsk. High hopes. Fingers crossed, yeah?”
And yes, she had her fingers crossed. She left and closed the door behind her.
Bug Man watched as the prince was hauled away to a waiting ambulance. “Fuck you, crazy lady. Yeah? I liked him. He was a gamer.”
NINETEEN
“I need your help.”
Keats to Wilkes and Billy the Kid.
Plath was asleep. He had crept silently from bed to bed waking them, holding a silencing finger to his lips.
“Anything for you, pretty blue eyes,” Wilkes said, and yawned.
“Plath has been wired,” he said. He knew she might wake up at any moment. No time for delicacy. “She’s been wired, she knows it, but she won’t pull the wires. It’s got to her. We need to go in there and clean her up.”
Anya was not invited. Plath had a biot in Anya. Keats badly wanted to ask Anya if she had built any more biots for Plath. But Plath might have been watching through Anya’s eyes, or listening in her ear.
“You saying someone from Armstrong wired her?” Wilkes asked.
Keats hesitated. “This is lunacy. This is mad. But she saw something. Down in the meat. She doesn’t think it was a nanobot. I helped her look. I didn’t find anything. But I have found wire, a lot of it.”
He let that sink in. “She thinks Nijinsky—” Wilkes began.
“No,” Keats said. “Whatever it is, whoever’s running it, it’s still apparently active, so not Nijinsky. Someone else. Maybe one of you two. Maybe a traitor from some other cell.”
Wilkes got up, came over to Keats, and sat down beside him. Very close, uncomfortably so. “How do we know it isn’t you?” she asked. “You’ve had a biot in her for a long time, right? Fixing that hole in her artery or whatever? Could be you, right? And maybe you’re just lying in wait for one of our biots to come crawling along and, boom!”
“This is kind of crazy,” Billy said.
“Nah, this isn’t kind of crazy,” Wilkes said. “This is full-on crazy.” She heh-heh-heh laughed and said, “This is where it all goes, right? I mean, this is where it kind of had to go, didn’t it? You start playing with people’s brains, man.… How do you know? Right? Whole world’s going crazy. All those big brains. And now your prince dude.”
Keats nodded tightly. “Right.”
Wilkes pulled away from him. “Maybe I just transferred one of my kids to you, Keats. Just now.”
“Maybe,” he acknowledged.
“Maybe it’s me, and if I put one of my kids into Plath, maybe that’s my second one, you know? Maybe I get in there and make it worse. What’s Plath doing? What’s she up to? Did this wire make her soft in the head?”
“She’s planning to blow up the Tulip.”
“What’s a tulip? A flower, right?” Billy asked.
Wilkes snorted. “It’s a skyscraper in Midtown. Blow it up? What’s that even mean?”
“It means that she’s given the go-ahead to Caligula to blow it up. Kill everyone in it. Destroy all their labs, all their computers.”
Wilkes stared at him.
“Lear told her to—” Keats began.
“Lear?” Wilkes shrilled. “Lear told her to murder all those people?”
“That was her own … her own solution. Maybe. Who knows? She’s met with Caligula. She knows she’s wired, and she knows it’s wrong, but she can’t, you know.… she can’t pull the goddamned wires. We have to do it for her. And we have to find whatever is in there. Nanobot or biot, we have to find it and kill it.”
“Who is doing it?” Billy asked. “I mean, who is wiring her brain to do—”
“To do what Lear wants done?” Keats asked, his voice rising. “Who is wiring her to do exactly what Lear wants done?”
Wilkes drew a sharp breath. “The hell,” she said.
“I don’t have any choice but to trust you two,” Keats said. “For all I know, you’re as wired as she is. Or maybe you just think it’s okay. Or maybe I’m as messed up as she is and the way I see this is all wrong. But I have no choice, I have to … I can’t …” He spread his hands, helpless.
“You’re talking about ripping out wire that Lear or someone working for Lear put there?” Wilkes asked. “Lear’s going to see that as treason. You know what that means? You know who comes to talk to you when you betray Lear? Jesus, Keats, if she’s as wired up as you say, Plath’ll send Caligula after you herself.”
“I know!” he raged. He pushed his fingers back through his hair. “I know. I know.”
No one spoke. Keats sniffed and wiped at his eyes. “This fight has changed,” he said. “This isn’t us against them anymore. Not that simple. I mean, doesn’t there have to be some line we draw? Doesn’t there have to be something we won’t do, even if it means maybe we lose? And doesn’t there have to be some limit on how far we’ll let ourselves be used?”
“The Twins don’t have a limit,” Wilkes said.
“Neither does Lear,” Keats said. “I think he’s the one using biots—creating them, killing them—to drive people crazy. Sweden. The prince. The Brazilian.” He waved his hand vaguely. “Probably a bunch of other stuff. The Twins, Lear, they’re just two sides in the same crazy game, Wilkes.”
“Yeah. And we are playable characters, right? We’re game pieces.”
“If we let ourselves be,” Keats said.
“So now you’re taking over?” Wilkes asked.
“Only until Plath is cleared. Then …” He shrugged. “Then we … I don’t know.”
“I’m in,” Wilkes said, but her usual smart-ass smirk was gone. Her face was gray and slack. She looked far older than she could have been. “Death or madness. Right? We’ve always known it would come down to that.”
Keats nodded. “Death or madness.”
The Russian officers proved to be disappointments to Lear. A major and two lieutenants duly lost their minds as their biots died, but at the time they were not on duty. The major wandered off into the Siberian wastes and froze to death. One lieutenant was dead drunk, too incapacitated to do much of anything.
The remaining lieutenant had just finished a shift. He saw the windows opening in his mind and acted quickly. He stripped off his sidearm and threw it into the snow. Then he ran toward the medical dispensary, but lost his mind halfway there.
Naked, he charged the guarded gate of the missile silo and was arrested by security.
The lack of a nuclear event—it would have registered on seismographs—disappointed Lystra.
So she opened her laptop and scanned the list of high-value targets. She picked out the pilot of a Virgin Australia plane making the long haul from Los Angeles to Sydney.
As he approached Sydney in a few hours, his biots would be born, windows would open, and if Lystra was lucky the world would have one more thing to fear. An appetizer, so to speak, before the pasta course.
“Funny,” she said. “Yeah.”
She watched some old Beavis and Butt-head on Netflix, and fell asleep with it still playing.
Bug Man had never heard of Beavis and Butt-head. That would give him an excuse in case she woke up and saw him creep into her room with his heart in his throat. He could say, I heard this on TV, didn’t know what it was, so I came in and …
… and lifted your phone.
And then you killed me, so, yeah, yeah, crazy bitch, yeah, then you killed me. The end.
Suarez had not found it necessary to threaten him much. Dr. Babbington was amenable enough once she’d made clear that she would do bad things to him if necessary. And an assault rifle was hard to argue with.
“Because society is going to crumble. That’s why. She’s absolutely convinced that society is about to crumble like a stale cookie.”
“Who? Who are you talking about?” she had demanded.
“J
esus, you don’t even know who is running this? Our lord and mistress. The owner. Of Cathexis. Lystra Reid.”
“Lystra Reid? Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m quite sure. This is only one of two secret facilities. This is where we create the sleighs, where we train pilots: this isn’t the final level any more than Cathexis is the final level.”
“There’s a third base?”
A third base. Three hundred kilometers south in a small dry valley. Dry valleys are a phenomenon unique to Antarctica, places of rock and little else, where for reasons of ice drift and unusual wind patterns the ground is bare of snow.
If Lystra Reid had built a base in a dry valley, it would not be one of the McMurdo group. The McMurdo Dry Valleys were more or less permanently infested by scientists collecting rocks and drilling core samples and complaining about their grant proposals.
She pointed this out to Babbington.
“Yes, well, this dry valley is an odd duck. It’s extraordinarily deep and also quite narrow—just two kilometers across at its widest point. The ice is piled high against both mountain ridges, and sooner or later, of course, the weight of all that ice will crumble the mountains and take the valley. Soon by geological standards, so within a hundred thousand years.”
He laughed, obviously thinking that was a science joke. When Suarez mustered up a half smile, he seemed encouraged.
“There’s actually a meltwater river there, helped by some subterranean geothermal activity, and the whole place is quite sheltered from the wind. It’s a garden spot, really. The average annual temperature remains within twenty degrees of fifteen degrees Fahrenheit. So sometimes it’s actually above freezing.”
“Garden spot.”
“Anyway, that’s where the third base is.” He showed her on a map.
And that was when Babbington made an ill-fated leap for the gun. In a hand-to-hand battle of SEAL vs. scientist, the outcome was not in doubt.
Babbington landed on his butt several feet from where he started.
“I’d stay there if were you,” Suarez warned.
He took her advice, crossed his legs awkwardly like a kindergartener, and sat.