Bzrk (13 page)

TWELVE

“They’re in,” Nijinsky said into his phone. “Plath and Keats.”

“Dr. Violet is wired,” said Vincent into his. “She’ll give us what we need. Tonight. It should be safe enough to bring the two young poets.”

“Are you going to equip them both? Plath hasn’t even been tested.”

Vincent hesitated. “Do you laugh at the idea of instinct, Nijinsky?”

“Yours? Never.”

“I’m going to equip them both. Instinct. And need. Time is short. She’ll do.”

At the same time miles away, in another location, Burnofsky dropped the flash drive from the China Bone in front of Bug Man.

And Ophelia wrote an e-mail to her brother back in Mumbai. She told him about her studies at Columbia. She invented some problem with one of the professors. She attached a picture of herself and a girl she didn’t really know, standing in front of Low Memorial Library, both of them making peace signs at the camera.

And Renfield showed Plath to her room and Keats to his. They were adjoining but not connected.

Plath’s room looked like a miserable, run-down hotel where a drunk might spend his last days. Keats’s room looked not unlike his room at home, except that it could do with an England poster. The rooms were identical.

“How long do we stay here?” Plath asked.

“There is usually a period of observation and training,” Renfield said. He was looking her up and down in a way that implied it didn’t need to be a lonely time for her.

“What is there to observe?” she asked. “I’m sure you have biots on me.”

Renfield did a sort of aristocratic nod, not exactly a bow, but an acknowledgment. “Not me, personally, at the moment,” he said.

“They can read my thoughts?” Plath asked. Asked and answered, but she wasn’t convinced.

“No.”

“See what I see?”

“Yes. And hear what you hear, depending on where they are placed and whether they are equipped for hearing large sound waves.”

Plath struggled a bit with that. Keats blushed.

Renfield actually seemed to experience a moment of fellow feeling. “You get used to it.”

And he was, at that moment, seeing the grainy, gray-scale images he was getting from a rather bad connection in Keats’s eyes. His biots were running yet another check for nanobots: couldn’t be too careful.

He was seeing his own proud expression as Keats looked at him. Then Keats’s quick glance at Plath’s chest. Then the refocus on her face. The quick glance away when Plath looked toward Keats. And then a bit longer than necessary on Plath’s neck, cheek, ear.

Yes, the young prodigy there was smitten with Plath. Or at least checking out the possibilities. Renfield considered resenting the fact. After all, if anyone was going to be spending quality time with the prickly young thing, it should be Renfield himself. It’s not as if he was exclusive with his other friend.

But then he remembered that Keats was Kerouac’s brother. There was a great debt there. Renfield would honor that debt by looking out for the youngster. But in a way that didn’t allow Keats to have … quality time … with Plath.

There were limits even to debts of honor.

A few minutes later, Keats lay on his cot, staring up at the ceiling. He should be afraid. Instead he was overwhelmed by the thought of her. Just a wall separating them.

Could they read his thoughts?

Maybe not. But they might be looking through his eyes and that was close enough. What about when he went to the toilet? Jesus.

Had Alex gone through all this?

And more, obviously.

But Alex was a soldier, tough as they came, and Noah was not. Noah was a kid whose only training was in video games, footie, and the arcane art of barely scraping by on schoolwork. He had been in three fights in his life, the first when he was nine and an older boy had called his mother a MILF. That had cost Noah a black eye and a torn ear. The other two had involved eruptions on the football field and had ended when teammates pulled him back.

War? That was Alex, not Noah.

Not Noah: Keats. He supposed he’d have to look the poet up. Three poets suddenly in his life: Pound, Plath, and Keats. Did poetry drive people mad, was that it? And Kerouac. Not a poet, but another writer.

What a strange way to be following in Alex’s footsteps.

Would his brother notice when Noah missed his scheduled visit? Would some part of him guess where Noah had gone? Would he be proud? Or would he yank on his chains and shriek a mad warning about the nano and Bug Man and BZRK?

At some point jet lag reached for him and dragged him down hard and fast and he fell asleep.

Plath, pacing her room, did not.

Could they read her thoughts? She tended to believe they could not. But that didn’t mean they weren’t watching her pace.

If they were reading her thoughts like a Facebook page, these would be the status updates:

I am completely alone. I feel scared, also liberated.

Renfield is an asshole.

Ophelia and Renfield are playing Good Cop/Bad Cop to gain my
trust.

I chose “Plath” for myself so they chose “Keats” for the boy with the
blue eyes. That was deliberate: they want us to be a team.

My arm hurts like hell, can I get an Advil or six?

What next?

Across town, in the Tulip, Charles and Benjamin Armstrong used very old-fashioned tools to organize their thoughts: 3 × 5 cards.

Coordination, fine motor skills—and gross motor skills, too, for that matter—had always been difficult for them. Each had an eye. But a single eye does not allow for depth perception.

Each had an arm. But writing sometimes requires two arms, one to hold the paper in place.

The Twins had struggled to master writing. Keyboards and pads were easier. But Charles and Benjamin valued the pain of overcoming difficulty. Life had always been hard for them. Anything physical had been difficult and sometimes humiliating. On the day many years earlier when the seventeen-year-old Twins had smothered their grandfather with a pillow, they’d had great difficulty coordinating the action.

Old Arthur Armstrong had raised the boys on a diet of paranoia and reckless self-indulgence. They had loved him in a way, and he had been proud of them.

He had asked them to end his pain-wracked life, and they had agreed, but only on condition that they immediately inherit Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation.

Arthur had beamed with pride. He had raised them right: if they were to kill him then, by God, they had a right to demand a payment.

Still, when the time had come, it had been hard to manage. The old man was near death, but still some panicky instinct drove his body to spend its last energy struggling. And with two uncoordinated hands, it wasn’t easy to hold the pillow down long enough, hard enough, to complete the suffocation.

The cards now before them bore carefully handwritten notes in felt-tip block letters:

POTUS

PM OF U.K.

PM OF JAPAN

CHANCELLOR OF GERMANY

PRESIDENT OF CHINA

PM OF INDIA

It would be a global strike. The six most powerful political leaders on Earth. Taken together they ruled half the human population. Three-quarters of the world’s wealth. Virtually all of the world’s technology.

An argument could be made for including Russia, France, and South Korea. Indeed those three cards were set aside for future use.

“Ambitious,” Charles said.

“Too ambitious?” Benjamin asked.

“Burnofsky made good arguments for a more incremental approach,” Charles said. “And with McLure dead maybe he is right. BZRK will be crippled without access to McLure money and facilities. Perhaps we have more time.”

Twin monitors moved on robotic arms, keyed to their movement. Each monitor had its own camera, and each camera focused on one side of that too-broad face. It allowed them to see each other’s face, to speak not just beside each other, but to each other—eye to eye to eye.

The surface of the desk was a touch screen with identical menus to left and right. From here they could call up cameras everywhere. The fifty-ninth floor, where the twitchers worked. The twelve floors of laboratories, the testing facilities on the twentieth and twenty-first, the business offices on the lower floors, the model gift shop at ground level, the subterranean garage, the dedicated elevators that serviced the Tulip.

They could also call up sight and sound from the main offices of Nexus Humanus in Hollywood, and the satellite offices in Washington, London, Berlin, Moscow, Buenos Aires, and just blocks away in Manhattan.

And, too, they could see the hundreds of Armstrong Fancy Gift shops in airports and train stations and on tourist streets around much of the world.

And they could watch the homes of key employees, see who came to visit, observe their families, watch as they fought or showered or cooked dinner or made love.

Their empire came to them through a thousand hidden cameras, a system for them and for them alone. Charles and Benjamin Armstrong, who could not go out into the world, watched unseen and unsuspected.

But for now they watched each other. Watching his twin’s eye, Benjamin could see that Charles was not very serious, that he was playing devil’s advocate. Benjamin smiled tolerantly.

“The longer we wait, the greater the chance of discovery,” Benjamin said, walking back through their decision making. Reiterating. Like it was a liturgy. It was reassuring. “We’ve had several close calls.”

“At any moment the technology might be discovered,” Charles agreed.

“We know the FBI had possession of a nanobot. What if we had not managed to retrieve it?”

“And we know that MI5 is actively investigating.”

“There have been repeated efforts by Anonymous to penetrate our AFGC networks as well as Nexus Humanus,” Benjamin said.

“Oh, yes, the hackers are after us.”

“The FBI is thwarted for now. But MI5 persists.”

“Indications of Mossad interest.”

“An attempt by Swedish intelligence to penetrate Nexus.”

“Too many eyes are turning toward us, brother.”

That image troubled both men. They watched: they were not themselves watched.

“BZRK is weakened by McLure’s death, but not defeated,” Benjamin cautioned.

“Fuck BZRK,” Charles snapped.

“Fanatics.”

“A death cult.”

There followed a long silence, during which both men looked down at the cards, and the third eye wandered lazily. Beneath the cards the table screen showed a lab worker entering data.

“Time is short.”

“The time is now.”

“If we are to succeed, brother.”