Interrogations were under way.
Medical investigations were under way.
Neither was terribly gentle.
Chinese premier Ts’ai attempted to shut down the camp, ordered all survivors to be executed and their bodies cremated. Which would have worked had not the governor of Qinghai Province slow-walked that order. He smelled a rat.
Two weeks after the Hong Kong disaster, the MSS briefed certain members of the Central Committee on their findings from the survivors. And on Ts’ai’s unusual and very out-of-channels effort to shut down the investigation.
Twenty-four hours later the Chinese official news agency reported that Premier Ts’ai had suffered a stroke. He was getting the best care available, but doctors were not hopeful.
In fact, the top of the premier’s head had already been sawed off. His brain had been carefully scooped out of his skull, flattened and stretched, frozen, cut into handy one-centimeter sections, and was now being examined minutely under a scanning electron microscope.
They found numerous strands of extremely fine wire—nanowire—in segments as long as three centimeters, and a dozen tiny pins.
Similar wire had been found in the brains of survivors of the Doll Ship.
A careful—but less drastic—autopsy of President Helen Falkenhym Morales found no evidence of brain abnormality. Then again, the single nine-millimeter bullet she had fired into her own head had bounced around a bit inside her skull and made a mess of the soft tissue.
The FBI director, a man who would not have fared well himself if his brain had been carefully examined under an electron microscope, pushed for the conclusion that the suicide was a result of depression following the death of her husband.
FBI forensic experts produced a report stating that the videotape purported to have been taken (by means unknown) directly through the president’s eye—the videotape that seemed to suggest that President Morales had beaten her husband to death—was a clever fake.
There was obviously no way for the images to be real. Presidents did not commit murder.
Then again, they didn’t make a habit of committing suicide, either. But that undeniably happened.
In a bit of historic irony, the authoritarian state of China discovered the truth, while the American democracy had thus far missed it.
But there were other investigations under way. A joint committee of Congress. An independent blue-ribbon panel featuring a former secretary of defense, a former senator from Maine, and the chairman, a former president of the United States.
Only one of them had thus far been compromised by busy little creatures laying wire.
Minako McGrath, who had been kidnapped and taken aboard the Doll Ship, was one of the few to escape entirely. With the help of an ex-marine, former gunnery sergeant Silver, who’d been aboard that floating horror show, she made her way back from Hong Kong to Toguchi, Okinawa, one step ahead of the Hong Kong authorities.
But she found some changes when she finally reached her home. Her Facebook and Twitter accounts were closed. Her Internet access—in fact her whole family’s Internet access—was blocked.
Then her mother was called in to see the commander of the local base where Minako’s father—himself a U.S. marine—had been stationed before he was sent to Afghanistan and killed. She was told quite simply that if she could keep her daughter quiet, her family would be safe and her late husband’s official military service record would remain unblemished.
There was no direct threat. Just that promise. Just the carrot. The stick was only implied. The general looked sick to his stomach going even that far, but marines obey orders, and it was clear that he was passing on an order that came from very high up the chain of command.
Having been saved by one marine, and honoring the memory of her father, upon hearing the ultimatum Minako nodded solemnly and raised a hand in salute.
“Semper fi,” she said.
A week later Minako’s mother, the police chief of their little town, was offered a civilian contract to work in security on the base, at a seven-hundred-dollar-a-month increase in pay.
Minako got a Vespa motor scooter.
And from that point on Minako discussed the Doll Ship only with her marines-supplied therapist, who duly shredded all records of her visits and prescribed Prozac.
Despite the separate efforts of the Chinese and U.S. governments, Google searches for various conspiracies were up in the last month.
Way, way up.
Possible suspects included the Illuminati, the Church of Scientology, Anonymous, the Freemasons, the Roman Catholic Church, the Bilderberg Group, Iran, China, the CIA, the NSA, the DEA, MI5 and MI6, Mossad, Agência Brasileira de Inteligência, Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur, the Russian Federal Security Service, and, of course, space aliens.
With far fewer searches: the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation.
And with only a handful of searches, most as a result of accidental misspellings: BZRK.
There was no change whatsoever in searches for “Lear.”
FIVE
Plath. That was her name again. Plath, not Sadie.
She’d been back in New York for just thirty-six hours, sleeping the first half of that.
Plath was provided by the weather with a perfect disguise to move about the streets of New York. It was freezing and the faux-fur-lined hood of her coat along with superfluous glasses and her newly blonde hair made it very unlikely that anyone would recognize her.
She had taken a cab to the Tulip. The Armstrong headquarters was not a place where she could take any, even slight, risks of being recognized.
But she had gotten out and walked the last block to the Freedom Tower. It soared up into low-hanging clouds. One hundred and four stories of defiance to replace the lost World Trade Center towers.
She had not yet been born when the towers fell, but she had seen the video. They’d had a unit on terrorism in school.
The Tulip was not as tall as either the World Trade Center or the Freedom Tower.
She had distinct memories of the videos of that day, September 11, 2001. Funny that she recalled them so clearly. But there it was, playing over and over in her mind.
The jets.
The initial explosions.
The spreading horror of billowing smoke.
Two hundred people leaping to their deaths rather than die more slowly of smoke and flame.
The awe-inspiring, horrific collapse as the melted, hollowed-out building fell.
Find and kill the twins. Destroy all AFGC records. Kill or wire all AFGC scientists and engineers. Their technology must be obliterated.
It was all in the Tulip. The technology, the records, the scientists. The Twins. Up there at the top floors, what, sixty-seven? Sixty-eight? She’d been rather distracted the last time she was in the Tulip, hard to recall the exact floors where the Twins lived and looked out over the concrete and haze of the city.
A single skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan.
Her breath came out in a cloud of ice crystals. She looked around, feeling obscurely guilty, but no one in the sparse crowd of tourists or the crew at work around a steaming manhole was looking at her.
Under her breath, Plath made a sound. It was the sound of a slow-motion explosion.
Lystra Reid watched Plath as she looked up at the Freedom Tower and knew exactly what she was thinking. Exactly. She was contemplating destruction, yeah, yeah, yeah. Destruction. She was envisioning it already.
That was quick. But then, if you want great results, hire great people. Even if they are a wee bit nuts.
Lystra had a Starbucks latte in her hand. One of the things she would miss, she supposed: convenient and at least somewhat drinkable coffee. There were things about this game space, this paradigm, that she would regret losing. But it was never good to become complacent.
Time for the 2.0. As there was a Grand Theft Auto 6, there must inevitably come a day when GTA 6 was done and a GTA 7 must be born. Even the greatest game
was eventually played out. When you had squeezed all the fun out of Portal you needed a Portal 2, 3, 4 …
“Yeah. Yeah.”
She shivered—it was cold—and tossed the cup into a trash can. Her newest tattoo was itching, and she scratched her rib cage discreetly. She was just thirty feet or so from Plath. Plath was, what, fifteen years her junior? But they could have been sisters, perhaps, in a different world. Maybe, come to think of it, they would be, in this new game Lystra was creating.
She acknowledged her own loneliness. Emotional honesty did not frighten her. There had been a price to pay for becoming what she was: rich, successful, powerful beyond what anyone would guess. Arguably at this point, the most powerful person on Earth.
No, the truth never scared Lystra.
Lonely? True. Strange? True, yeah. Yeah. Crazy? Well, once upon a time, yeah, but no longer.
She closed her eyes and replayed the memory of seeing madness overtake Sandra Piper. God, that had been intense. The eye-stabbing thing, wow, that was the kind of detail you got only from seeing things firsthand.
She remembered a girl trying to strangle herself with a bedsheet. Crazy people did crazy things. Back in the day, back in the old days, yeah. But never anything to match the weirdness of watching a famous actress stabbing her own eyes. Now that was crazy.
Sad to think that she would have to retreat soon and watch the endgame play out from a distance. But not yet. There would be many rich, visceral experiences to come before she headed south.
And then?
And then she would play the new game and win that as well. Or not. She might not master the new game. She might even lose.
The idea made her smile. Her father had taught her to understand that life was a walk on a tightrope and death was the ground. Sooner or later, no matter how agile you were, the ground would claim you.
He’d been full of gloomy pronouncements back in the old days, sitting in lawn chairs outside their trailer as the carnival shut down for the night. They would sit there, the two of them, the man and the child, as the lights went out on the Mad Mouse and the Ferris wheel. They would sit and sip their drinks—bourbon for her father, unsweetened iced tea for her—and acknowledge the nods and the weary greetings as the other carnies headed for their own digs.
The nights had almost always been warm and muggy. The carnival mostly played the south: Baton Rouge, Bogalusa, Hattiesburg, Vicksburg. She’d seldom been cold, which was maybe why the cold attracted her now. Cold was clean. Hot was sweaty and dirty.
Back then, back before the train wreck that was in her future, Lystra had wanted two things: For her mother to come back. And to be able someday to take over a couple of the sideshow games. An old man named Sprinkle operated the coin toss, the dart throw, the water pistol, and the ring toss. He let his games get shabby, refusing to spring for so much as a few cans of paint.
Lystra thought she could do better. She could make the games livelier and more profitable. The key was to make them a bit easier. Let the marks take home a teddy bear occasionally; it was good advertising. Run an honest game, attract more players, pay out more in prizes—but offer more levels, more depth, and make more money in the end.
“Yeah!” Lystra said to no one. It made her smile to think how even then, even when she was a lonely seven-year-old, she was ambitious.
But yes, lonely. She had always wanted a younger sister. Someone like Plath, maybe. Someone to look up to her. Someone to talk to and play with.
Even a brother would have been welcome.
Interesting thought.
“A game within a game?” Lystra muttered under her breath.
Would it add spice? Yes. Would it complicate the overall plan? She walked it through step-by-step in her mind and concluded that it would have only a small downside risk.
It would be good to have someone to appreciate what she had accomplished. It would be good to have someone to watch it all play out with her.
“Minions,” she said, and laughed. “I need minions. Yeah.”
SIX
“No. Vincent is not ready to resume control.” This was from Anya Violet, and spoken in a whisper. “He may never be ready.”
Plath was making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in the kitchen of the new Manhattan safe house. One for herself and one for Keats. And seeing Billy’s level of interest she pulled out two more slices of bread for him.
They were in the kitchen: Plath, Keats, Billy the Kid who really was a kid, and Dr. Anya Violet. Anya was of undetermined age—perhaps in her thirties, perhaps she had edged into her forties—but to Plath, at least, she seemed beautiful, sophisticated, and effortlessly sexy in a way that she decided must come only with some age and some experience.
Anya had not yet chosen a nom de guerre. She thought it was a silly affectation. Of course, she understood the thinking behind choosing the name of some mad or at least seriously unbalanced person: it signaled acceptance of the core reality for BZRK members. It signaled a break with the past. It signaled a chin-out acknowledgment of the fact that madness was very likely in their future.
She understood all that, but Dr. Anya Violet was not a child and was not interested in following the rules of the clubhouse. Nor was she sure she wanted to accept the authority of a sixteen-year-old girl. Yes, Plath was the daughter of Grey McLure, Anya’s former employer, and Plath had proven herself in battle. And it had become clear that she was a bit more … stable … than Nijinsky, who had been in charge during Vincent’s recovery.
But Anya was suspicious of money. She could call herself Plath, but Anya knew who Sadie was. She was rich, that’s what she was. Worse yet, she’d always been rich. She’d had life handed to her. Anya would rather have seen Keats in the top job, because there was a boy who had never been handed anything, and Anya instinctively trusted working people. She herself had come from nothing and nowhere to earn a PhD. She shared with Keats an emotional knowledge of hard times and hard choices.
But Keats was totally loyal to Plath.
Billy was a child. Wilkes was … well, she was Wilkes. Nijinsky had to a great extent lost the confidence of the group. And that left two people to run things at the New York cell of BZRK: Vincent or Plath.
Plath, who saw a great deal when she paid close attention, saw all this in Anya’s smoky eyes. Vincent might or might not still be damaged, but Anya loved him and would never admit he was ready to take charge again. Not if it meant risking his life and sanity.
In the matter of safe houses things had improved quite a bit. Plath had access to most of her own money now, and she had Mr. Stern and the McLure security apparatus to arrange things. So BZRK New York was quite nicely established in a five-story townhouse not far from Columbus Circle on the Upper West Side.
They had obtained it through numerous cutouts and guys-who-knew-a-guy, and bought it for cash for nine million dollars.
Just twelve blocks away was a second safe house. This had also been purchased for cash, but this time the cutouts had been just a bit less well managed. Not so poorly managed as to seem obvious; just a few scant clues left here and there for those who were watching the movements of Plath’s money.
The fake safe house was above a bankrupt dry cleaner. A sound system played ambient noise from within—TV, music, the sound of laughter, occasional yelling. A timer turned the lights on and off. And random people delivering handbills were hired to enter and leave the place at odd times of day and night. It wouldn’t stand up to in-depth surveillance, but it would do as a diversion. It was already, according to Stern, drawing the attention of Hannah Thrum, the chairwoman of McLure Holdings, the parent company of McLure Labs. Thrum was almost certainly working for the Armstrong Twins as well, but that was all right, so long as Plath knew where all the players were.
Let Thrum follow the money. She was a numbers person. Numbers people loved to believe they saw deeper than anyone else, believing their numbers were truth. In reality, Thrum was chasing numbers like a kitten chasing a piece of string.
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Plath, Keats, and Billy carried their sandwiches back to the parlor where Nijinsky, Vincent, and Wilkes waited. Anya sat beside Vincent on the couch. Plath stood, leaning back against a walnut Restoration Hardware china cabinet, bit into the sandwich, and looked over her sparse troops.
Nijinsky was a bit less elegant and less well turned out than he’d been just a few weeks ago.
Wilkes had shaved half her head and dyed the other side a sickly yellow that was only vaguely related to blonde. Wilkes—named for Annie Wilkes, the insane fan in Stephen King’s Misery—was a tough chick, a pierced, tattooed (including a sort of down-swept flame tat under one eye), leather-and-lace teenager whose personal history strongly suggested that people not mess with her. There was a fire-damaged school in Maryland that stood witness to what happened when Wilkes lost it.
Billy the Kid: a scrawny mixed-race kid who had shot his way out of an Armstrong attack on the Washington cell of BZRK. Shot his way out, and then shot his way back in to finish off any Armstrong survivors.
Keats. The working-class London boy with impressive gaming skills and too-blue eyes. And a very nice, taut body, not that Plath should have been thinking about that at the moment. But she was; in fact, she was recalling a specific moment on the island, standing at the railing of their deck, watching the sun come up, Noah as he was then, behind her, his strong arm around her waist, drawing his forearm over her body, over her breasts, kissing the nape of her neck.
She took a breath. It was deeper and noisier than she’d intended, and she wondered if people guessed that she’d been daydreaming.
Finally, of course, there was Vincent himself. Vincent had brought Sadie into BZRK. He had basically created Plath. He’d been their fearless leader until he had lost a biot in a battle with Bug Man. To lose a biot was to lose your mind.