That had changed when she met Vincent. For one thing Vincent was an attractive younger man. Anya was ten years older than Vincent. Anya was lovely. Tall, with near-perfect legs and just a little poochy-pooch at her waist that hardly anyone would notice, and her skin still looked very good, and so did her reddish-brown—do they call that auburn?—hair.
A good face. A face with character, which in this case meant that she had the echo of eastern invasions from the steppes.
And Vincent. Ah, once he confessed to the whole anhedonia thing there wasn’t a woman worth her tight skirt and her generous display of cleavage and the expensive scent steaming from her neck who wasn’t interested.
Unable to experience pleasure.
We’ll see about that.
That’s what they thought. And he would find a way to explain that he still knew how to give pleasure. That was game, set, and match, as one might say if one were talking about tennis.
Anya’s working theory was that Vincent had probably dated nothing but bimbos his own age or younger. All very pretty, no doubt, but what did a girl that age really know?
“Vincent!” Anya said, lighting up, swiveling on her stool so that he would catch just a bit more inner thigh than was strictly necessary. Kiss kiss, cheek cheek, all very New York. But Vincent slid back just a bit slower than he might and let his cheek linger a little too long, and yeah, she responded.
He drew back at last, and now in addition to seeing her flushed face he saw through two sets of biot sensors.
V1 was headed toward the eye, running through a deep valley filled with tumbled crystalline boulders of makeup. Expensive makeup—finer grained—had a tendency to stick to biot legs, a bit like mud.
V3 confronted a landscape Vincent could not at first make sense of. He was on a long, gently curved plain of dimpled, spongy flesh. But in the distance, perhaps half a centimeter mack, was a huge pillar as big around as a redwood tree. It was vertical to the fleshy plain. V3 was sideways, which meant that actually the thick pillar was roughly horizontal.
Vincent’s actual eyes, the big, brown, real ones, flicked toward Anya’s ear. Of course: an earring. Maybe white gold or platinum. Through the eyes of the biot it looked flaked and corrugated, like an old muzzle-loading cannon. And when the biot got closer, Vincent had a view of the hole, the puncture through which the metal passed.
In the macro Vincent saw the diamond that hung below the lobe. He’d never seen a diamond from biot level. It might be interesting. But this wasn’t a sightseeing trip.
One in the eye, one in the ear.
“I just stopped off to get a few things,” Vincent said, holding up the bag as proof. “I was early. But I didn’t want to be rude and show up early.”
Maybe he could have just trusted her. Maybe he could have told her what he needed. Maybe he could have brought her into BZRK. That had been his original plan, to recruit her, to have a back door into the McLure labs.
But he couldn’t afford a maybe anymore. He needed a yes. He needed what she could give to the cause, and he needed it immediately.
Ticktock. It was all a matter of necessity, and didn’t necessity justify everything?
“It would have been okay. I was early, too.”
They shared a conspiratorial “we like each other” smile. Vincent assumed she was planning on sleeping with him. He certainly hoped so: he needed time to do his work.
He needed time with Anya. And, too, there was attraction. Vincent was anhedonic; he wasn’t asexual. Need was one thing, the pleasure one took from satisfying a need was a different matter.
Damnit. She’d been swimming. Or maybe just showering. Either way, V3, in her ear, had just run smack up against a wall of water. Probably no more than a few milliliters, but it was held in place by surface tension, so rather than forming a lake he could run across, it was more like a giant water balloon he would have to swim through.
Unless he broke the surface tension. In which case V3 would go for a sort of flume ride, probably into the outer ear. But also possibly into a hastily raised napkin and from there to a lap or the bar counter.
“I’ll have what she’s having,” Vincent said to the bartender.
Anya put her hand on his arm and laughed. “No, no, this is awful, really. No self-respecting man should drink this. Too sweet.” She was so confident in interrupting. He noticed. Older woman, accomplished woman, advanced degrees and a responsible position.
“We’ll have two shots of vodka, very cold, neat,” Anya said. She winked. “My Russian blood, you know.”
“Are you trying to get me drunk?” Vincent flirted.
“If that’s what it takes,” Anya said, voice husky as Vincent sent V1 gingerly through the mascara line, stepping over what looked like a recently deceased demodex, interesting, onto the eye, and down below the lower lid.
He withdrew V3 from the ear. Vincent had been caught in a folded napkin once before. It was hell trying to find your way out. Vincent could probably find his way out of a larynx quicker than he could a napkin.
They did their shots.
An hour and ten minutes later they were in Anya’s apartment.
Some time later still she had fallen asleep in his arms.
Vincent was by that point fairly convinced that Anya was clean of nanobots.
And he’d already begun to use V1 and V3 with reinforcement from V2—still recovering from two legs breaks on its earlier mission— to stretch the neuronic fibers from her pleasure centers to her images of him. She may only like him now. Or maybe not even that. But over the next few hours, while she slept and he did not, her affection for him would grow. Soon the mere thought of him would release endorphins into her bloodstream. And her natural caution and reserve would be degraded. She would like him; she would trust him.
Vincent vowed that he would remove it all once he had what he needed. That, he told himself, was the difference between BZRK and the Armstrong Twins. Vincent did only what he had to do. He would minimize the betrayal. As much as he could.
“Because we’re the good guys,” he whispered to himself even as, unasked for, the memories of murder in a small restaurant in London bubbled to the surface of his mind.
Burnofsky didn’t have the kind of money or juice (or entourage) that the music producer (who shall remain nameless), or the overexposed industrialist (who shall, likewise, remain nameless) had, so he didn’t get one of the larger, deeper alcoves at the China Bone.
They didn’t know Burnofsky’s name, not his real one, just the name he gave them: John Musselwhite. Did the management know it was a fake name? Probably. Most likely they’d have been horrified if he gave a real name.
It was a loft, this room, vast, but not a wide-open space. There was a sort of catwalk that went around the room, but it had been nicely done, industrial, yes, but well lit, cinematic almost. There were security guys but ever so discreet, dressed in loose-fitting black trousers and white shirts, like something you’d see Jackie Chan wear in one of his movies. Generic Asian chic. If they had guns, then the guns were concealed, and the security men smiled. Smiles, smiles. In two of the corners were tall dancing platforms, essentially open hydraulic elevators that raised the dancers up or down, like slow-motion pistons. The girls were varied and swapped out often enough that neither they nor the patrons would become bored.
The music was softer than you might expect from a den of iniquity. It was not, Burnofsky thanked God, the music of the aging rocker he had just seen the back of. In fact he’d never heard music quite like it anywhere else. It was a soft pulsation with a repetitive melody and had a quality of perpetualness about it. A bit like house dance music, although no one but the professional dancers would be expected to dance.
Beneath the catwalk were the alcoves. They were mocked up to look a bit like an Eastern bazaar, as though they were tents, so what you saw looking across the room were tent flaps or beaded curtains or, in the case of some who enjoyed flaunting their vice, canvas drapes pulled back to reveal and invite
.
The center of the room was a rectangular bar, all lacquered ebony with tasteful red and gold highlights. They served alcohol of course, and food as well, though few people ate the dumplings. It was more that some of the patrons didn’t like staying inside their alcoves but enjoyed mingling and chatting, often with the bartenders. And then, some people liked a vodka with their pipe.
Burnofsky entered his narrow alcove, no bigger than a good-size department-store dressing room, with just a pair of easy chairs and a small table, a dim lamp, and an old-fashioned rotary phone. Burnofsky knew the drill. He lifted the receiver and waited until a voice answered.
“Yes, sir. How may I be of service?” A man’s voice, kind, understanding, nonjudgmental.
“Ah-pen-yen,” Burnofsky said, the China Bone’s preferred term.
The voice said, “Very good, sir. Shall we make all preparations, or would you prefer to do your own?”
“You prep it.” Burnofsky smiled. “I trust you.”
He hung up and relaxed back into the chair. From the alcove to his left came the spicy-sweet smell he loved. From the other side a sudden explosion of laughter, quickly stifled.
He’d been looking forward to this all day. The day had included a long face-to-face with the Twins. That was never a good thing. Especially when the heart of the meeting was to tell Burnofsky that Bug Man would be taking the lead on the UN job.
He hadn’t argued much. Bug Man’s tactics were sound. But he was arrogant, and Burnofsky could see too many ways things could go wrong. Burnofsky didn’t like the sense of plans being rushed. There would be another UN General Assembly in a year. Another year’s planning and they’d be in a much stronger position.
Right now AFGC had a grand total of twenty-seven qualified twitchers, counting himself. Twenty-seven. To target and control six major heads of state while maintaining all their existing projects? The logistics were staggering.
Infest the prime ministers of Britain, India, and Japan, the chancellor of Germany, and the presidents of China and the United States? That was six teams in six cities, spinning away inside the brains of four men and two women who were among the most-watched, most-observed people in the human race?
Bad wiring had a tendency to cause seizures. Seizures in an average person were manageable, but in a head of state? The POTUS just had to twitch to have an elite team of doctors probing her ten different ways. And what then? What happened when the doctors at Bethesda found a head full of nanobots?
Panic, that’s what. Phone calls to the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, every foreign intel outfit. The rumors were already out there. A Google search would turn up the paranoids—some with surprisingly accurate information.
If the FBI suddenly had proof? Physical proof?
AFGC might control the deputy director of the FBI, but he alone would never be able to contain something like that.
Twenty-seven twitchers. And of those, maybe five who could fight half as well as they spun. That’s what the kid didn’t get. Bug Man didn’t understand that twenty-seven was really closer to seven who could fight. And maybe three who could fight and win against the very best.
A waitress appeared. She was carrying a silver tray. She bowed slightly, set the tray down, and backed out of the alcove.
The tray was covered with a thick, white cloth, and on that cloth rested a narrow glass tray of long matches and an ornate, Cloisonné water pipe with a long, bent bronze neck and a tiny bowl.
Burnofsky closed his eyes and smiled. When he opened them again, his worries and troubles were already starting to recede because rescue was at hand.
Troubling visions of failure, discovery, capture followed by twenty years cold turkey in a federal prison, would disappear soon enough.
But not just yet. A sweaty, nervous man was standing in the entrance, pushing aside the drape, diffident, bobbing like he was halfway to a bow.
Burnofsky had forgotten. There was business to be conducted before pleasure was to be savored. He didn’t stand up. He did offer his hand.
“Lord Elfangor?” the man whispered, practically wetting himself. “I’m Aidan Bailey.” The accent was Australian or New Zealand, one of those. A UN employee, of course.
Burnofsky sighed. Of course. This would be One-Up’s work. And as usual she had taken the most dramatic route. He squinted up at the man, trying to recall the exact nature of his wiring. He was a Scientologist, which meant he was already prepared to buy into alien mythology. A bit of a change from the usual giddy idealists churned up by Nexus Humanus and delivered to AFGC.
Burnofsky wondered how One-Up had inserted that “Lord Elfangor” bullshit. Had she actually gone to the trouble of tapping phonemes to invent a name? Unlikely. More likely she’d cauterized some critical thinking—there couldn’t have been much there to begin with—wired the man’s religious indoctrination to some bit of TV trivia or movie lore and come up with the name, then tied it to a pic of Burnofsky.
She tried too hard, One-Up. Occam’s razor: find the simplest solution.
“I am Lord Elfangor,” Burnofsky said. “Thank you for coming.”
“I …” The man laughed, sudden, surprised. “I don’t even know why I’m here, really. I just knew …”
“You knew you had to be here,” Burnofsky said, doing his best not to glance at the pipe, willing himself to play out the role. “As though a force greater than yourself, a mind much deeper than your own—”
“Yes! That’s it!”
“Mr. Bailey, very rare are those who can hear the summons. Rarer still those with the wisdom to heed the words of the Masters.”
He was making it up as he went along. He’d seen One-Up’s report, skimmed it, but hadn’t memorized all the details.
“What you do here today will save the human race,” Burnofsky said solemnly. “You have something for me.”
Bailey nodded. He was believing. But he was troubled that he was believing. He sensed something wrong. A part of him knew. A part of him was fighting it, even as his hand went slowly to the inner pocket of his jacket.
“You are feeling enturbulated. You are concerned that you do not have your ethics in,” Burnofsky said, and held his breath. Had he said it right? He had a near-perfect memory, and he’d read about Scientology—
“Yes,” Bailey said, and laughed with relief.
Burnofsky winked. “When we are done, you will feel clear.” He watched the man closely. It was dangerous to be playing with unfamiliar cult terminology. It was too easy to make a revealing misstep.
Bailey drew his hand from his pocket and placed a flash drive in Burnofsky’s palm.
“Thank you,” Burnofsky said. “You have done well.”
Bailey breathed a huge sigh of relief.
“You can go,” Burnofsky said. “And, oh, um, if you happen to meet a young woman with the unusual name of One-Up, give her a message for me.”
Burnofsky looked him in the eye. He was sure that One-Up’s nanobots were tapping the optic nerve, or perhaps even listening. He scribbled a few words on the pad of paper, tore off a sheet, and held it up so Bailey could see it.
“Make it clean, and far from here,” Bailey read the words aloud. “I don’t understand.”
Burnofsky waved a hand to shoo the doomed man away. The last thing they could afford was this fool talking to his Scientology auditor and sending those loons into a frenzy.
So at a safe distance from the China Bone, an artery in Bailey’s head would burst.
Burnofsky wondered why he had given the kill order to One-Up. She didn’t need it. She knew a wire job this rough and ready, this tenuous, needed to be terminated.
It occurred to him that he wanted to take the burden of guilt on himself. That he often did that. Maybe if One-Up were older … But a seventeen-year-old girl should have some deniability for murder.
How in hell had it come to this?
Burnofsky remembered—how many years ago had it been—when he and young Grey McLure had worked together. Back in the day. No
w Grey was dead. And Burnofsky had made it happen, even if it was Bug Man who had done the actual deed.
He slipped the flash drive containing security codes—CCTV access, computer access, door passes for the United Nations Building—into his pocket.
He raised the pipe and lit a match.
Twenty-seven twitchers to take over the world. Half of them nothing but messed-up children.
Yeah. Well. What …
Oh! Oh, yes.