BZRK Reloaded (18 page)

Charles Armstrong had fought with Benjamin before.
Age twelve. Living in their grandfather’s gloomy mansion. Up in
the doll house.
The mannequins all wore clothing of recent vintage, the current
styles. All had eyes and mouths—the more abstract mannequins with
mere suggestions of faces were not for Charles and Benjamin. No,
their mannequins were people with personalities and opinions. And
hair.
Ludamilla, one of their grandfather’s maids, dressed the mannequins. The outfits came from buyers at Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s.
The mannequins themselves cam from mannequin supply companies.
On the occasion of their twelfth birthday they were presented
with a particularly attractive mannequin pair, both females, one with
a wig of long, stiff, honey-colored hair. The other, identical except for
the wig, which was pert, dark, and short. The boys named these new
creatures Jessie and Betty.
Jessie and Betty were made part of the schoolroom tableau, along
with the teacher, Mrs. Munson, and the four students in desks, Tina,
Tony, Terrell, and Ty.
Jessie and Betty were to be the school nurse and the new music
teacher.
Betty, the dark-haired one, was the music teacher. She had a saxophone draped over one shoulder. Her eyes were blue and never looked
at you, always looked, by virtue of some artist’s design or simple error,
away.
Benjamin was the first to suggest that the two new mannequins
might be made into the equivalent of Charles and Benjamin.
“We would just need a saw,” he’d said. “A saw, some glue, some
clamps.”
This had not started the fight. The fight had started because
Charles had felt they should have identical hair, but Benjamin had
liked the fact that they had this small difference.
They had been sawing awkwardly away at the tough plastic when
the fight turned ugly. Charles had threatened his brother with the
saw, waving it around furiously as they conducted their argument in
the reflection of a tilted, oval-framed mirror on a floor stand.
Benjamin had started screaming, “Use the saw, use it, use it to
saw us apart! Saw us apart!”
Then Benjamin had yanked a hinged arm from Jessie and started
beating Charles with it.
Not their first fight or their last.
But the two of them had always found a way to manage. They
loved each other. What was the alternative? They were stuck together.
“We will not mutilate this girl just because she reminds you of
Sadie McLure,” Charles said.
“Look at her,” Benjamin sneered. “She thinks she’s beautiful.
Does she think I’m beautiful?” He glared at Minako. She was handcuffed wrist and ankle to the gurney. He tried to force his face down
close to hers but Charles resisted. They came close to toppling over.
KimKim, who had been lent to them as servant, steadied them with a
timely grab for Charles’s arm. He let go as quickly as he could. Ling,
who had been across the room, glared poisonously at KimKim.
“Brother, we cannot make ourselves beautiful by making others
hideous,” Charles pleaded. “You know that this is not the way. We are
here with our people. They love us.”
“They have no choice!” Benjamin raged.
“Just as people have no choice but to fear us,” Charles argued.
“I’m sick of it. I’m sick of it all. Enough. All my life …I want . . .”
“What do you want, Ben?” Charles could feel his own heart and
lungs clenching, tightening from his brother’s emotion.
“To no longer be this,” Benjamin cried out. “To be a man and
not a freak. To smile at a girl and not have her run screaming. It’s
pathetic, isn’t it? I should accept my life. Pathetic.”
“We aren’t accepting it,” Charles snapped. “And please stop, we’re
hyperventilating, I can barely breathe! We are accepting nothing. We
are changing the world! We are remaking the human race! We’ve
begun on this ship, my God, did you hear the cheers and the cries? It
was love, brother.It was love for us.”
Benjamin said nothing, just stared at the terrified girl with the
sprinkling of freckles. At long last, in a dreamy voice, Benjamin said,
“I’ve thought of having Burnofsky wire me.”
“What?”
“But it wouldn’t work, would it. Do you know, Charles? Because
when you wire a brain, you can only connect those things that are
already there. What is there in my brain, in my memory, that could be
tapped for happiness? For joy? When that evil girl, that spawn of Grey
McLure, was in my brain, what was she wiring together? Old hates
and new. Old pain and new pain. Emptiness, brother, you know it’s
true, emptiness. That’s what she made me face. That’s what I couldn’t
pretend away. Wherever she stuck a pin she hit sadness and rage and
pain. And nowhere happiness.”
“There were good times,” Charles said weakly.
Benjamin made a small laugh. “Do you know what memory she
tapped into? Certainly not what she had hoped, but there it was, the
memory of that day, that morning, when Sylvie and Sophie Morgenstein awoke.”
Charles bit his lip and closed his eyes, remembering now as
well.
“How they screamed,” Benjamin said. “Not because they saw us,
but because we had made them into us. Pretty twins sewn together.
They saw the horror of the rest of their lives stretching out before
them. They saw the horror of being us.”
“They were in pain,” Charles said. “They were startled.”
“I was never so happy again as at that moment,” Benjamin said.
Charles remained silent. How could he argue? The memory was
clear to him as well. The feeling of …what? Revenge? Yes, revenge.
Not just on the Morgenstein twins, but on everyone who had ever
sneered or mocked or shrieked.
Revenge.
The word must have filtered into Benjamin’s brain because now
he took it up. “Revenge on all of them. On our father and mother. On
life. On God.”
Then Charles swallowed in a dry throat. “Those tactics are no
longer necessary. We have the technology now. This girl, we don’t
want her to scream, we want her to sing, like all the others on this
ship. Besides, it won’t be the same. She’s not a twin.”
“She’s not a twin,” Benjamin conceded. Then his eye brightened.
“There’s no twitcher. But the equipment is aboard. There are nanobots.”
“We’ve never . . .” Charles began, but he was intrigued.
“We’ve seen it done many times,” Benjamin said. He stroked the
side of Minako’s head and she tried to pull away, as though his very
touch was foul and poisoned. “She cannot go unpunished. I won’t
allow it. Not after what the McLure girl did to me. No, that is the last
time I will be humiliated and made a fool of.”
Charles was troubled, but this was better than the alternative. And
it fit within the beliefs they now had, the enlightened understanding
that had come hand in hand with the power to rewire minds. Terrorize and inflict pain, yes, but only if necessary. This act, conquering
the girl down in the nano, would empower Benjamin, hopefully without feeding the growing madness in him.
“Then, let’s go, my brother and friend,” Charles said. “Let’s go …
what is it the twitchers say?”
“Down in the meat,” Benjamin whispered. “Down in the meat.”

Pia Valquist had understated the nature of her contact in the Royal
Navy. Understated both in terms of his position—rear admiral—
and relationship. They had been friends. Close friends.

There was something very nineteenth century about Admiral
Edward Domville. He was not particularly fit or trim, he was beefy,
long-armed, short-legged and his face was the cheery red you might
expect of a man who had spent years climbing masts and running
out cannon. Of course he’d done neither; he had mostly served in
submarines.

Pia had not been attracted to him because of his looks, but
rather for his intelligence and completely unaffected sense of
humor. His family stretched back to the Norman Conquest, with
many an admiral or general or member of Parliament in that long
lineage. Possibly even a marquess (or was it a baron?), if she recalled
correctly.

They met in the lobby lounge at the Intercontinental Hotel. Most
of Hong Kong was within a stone’s throw of water, but the Intercontinental was very nearly in the bay.

“Pia, my God, you’ve let yourself go completely,” he said, grinning around a missing tooth.
“Eddie, I can’t believe they still let you wear that uniform.”
They did a cheek kiss that went on a bit longer than it might if
they’d really been only casual acquaintances.
“Let me! Hell, they’ve given me extra decorations. The sheer
weight of them is wearying. How have you been, Pia?”
They looked at each other like old friends, in fact were old friends.
The admiral was beginning to show his age in the jowls and the bulbousness of his nose. On the other hand, the extra decorations he’d
alluded to were not for merely standing around and looking distinguished.
They took a table that looked out through prismed windows onto
a stunning view of Hong Kong harbor and across the water to the
wall of skyscrapers that was a sort of mirror of the similar wall of
skyscrapers just behind the hotel.
“Tea is coming,” the admiral said. “Neither milk nor sugar, as I
recall. But what can one expect of a Swede?”
“I have something rather bizarre, Eddie. You’re going to have a
hard time believing what I have to tell you.”
“Am I?” His eyes narrowed and he got that conspiratorial badboy look that she liked.
“Have you ever heard of the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation?”
“I believe they deal in gift shops. Also weapons systems,” he said
drily.
“And you know about the Armstrong Twins?”
“In a general sort of way,” he admitted. The tea came, and they
spent several minutes performing the small rituals of pouring, parceling out sandwiches, tasting, complimenting.
“They are a tragic case,” Eddie said. “Or perhaps I should say
tragic cases, plural.”
“Do you recall an old American surplus amphibious assault ship
that foundered off the coast of Brazil a couple of years ago?”
“Oh hoh,” he said. A tiny sandwich hovered in his hand, forgotten.
“Eddie, it was a floating house of horrors. The Armstrong Twins
were kidnapping people, often very young people, and using drugs
and lobotomization and quite frankly Nazi techniques to . . .” She
fell silent when she realized from his expression that none of this was
news to him.
Eddie sat back in his chair, and the cheery face was less cheery by
several degrees. “I have heard rumors.”
“The hell,” Pia said hotly. “You knew?”
Eddie shrugged. “There isn’t a great deal that goes unknown on
the high seas. If the Royal Navy doesn’t know it, the Americans do. In
this case, we both had suspicions.”
“Eddie, don’t dance around on this, please. I’ve met and interviewed one of the survivors.”
That surprised him. “Have you?”
“She’s in Finland. And let me tell you that her story would give
you nightmares. She lives in fear, surrounded by former Mossad and
dogs and electrified fences.”
Eddie looked grim. “By the time we knew anything about it, it
had sunk. There was nothing actionable.”
“Actionable?” She chewed on the word. “You’ve spent too much
time with Americans.”
He laughed at that. “Oh, no question. I’d far rather be spending
my free time with lovely and ageless Swedes.”
“Eddie, there’s another.”
“Another man? I’m shocked.”
“Another Doll Ship. That’s what she called it: the Doll Ship. It’s a
human doll house for the Armstrong Twins. And there’s a second. A
replacement for the one that sank. They are still at it.”
Eddie’s face darkened. His eyes went from interested to predatory. “Is there indeed? Do you have proof?”
“I have evidence. Circumstantial evidence. I need you to supply
proof.” Pia sat forward and spilled a little tea in the process. “Eddie,
they kidnapped a young Japanese American girl from Okinawa just a
week ago. A fourteen-year-old child. The Doll Ship is near.”
She let that hang in the air. The wheels were turning in her
friend’s head.
“The Albion has completed maneuvers with the Five Power
Defense Arrangement and is steaming toward Hong Kong for a bit
of a show….”
The admiral made a tiger shark smile that must have come down
through generations of prize-seeking Royal Navy captains and a few
privateers as well. His eyes were dreamy. He said, “I was just this very
minute thinking that the Albion could do with a sudden, surprise
inspection by a senior officer. Do the Americans know anything
about this?”
She shook her head. “I came straight to you.”
“Better and better,” he said. “Do you have a description of this
Doll Ship of yours?”
Pia nodded. “I believe it is a liquified natural gas carrier.”
The admiral opened his briefcase, an ancient leather object with
far too many buckles. He pulled out a pad and began tapping away.
“Yes,” he muttered.
“Yes what?”
He held up a finger to silence her. Tapped some more. Swiped.
Frowned. “Interesting. As luck would have it, there’s an LNG carrier
on a course that would have brought it past Okinawa at roughly the
right time.”
Pia’s heart leapt. “Where’s it heading?”
“Practically to our table.”
He went back to his pad. “But there is no way to have Albion
intercept this ship…. It’s the SS Gemini, that’s the registered name.”
Their eyes met. “Gemini,” Pia said. “The twins.”
“We don’t want some sort of fight with a dangerous LNG carrier
inside Hong Kong harbor. They are floating bombs, really, if mishandled.”
“But you said your ship can’t intercept them.”
“No, but the Albion’s helicopters certainly can. I’ll fly out as soon
as I’ve taken care of a few things here.” Then, innocently, “I don’t suppose you’d want to come with?”
“It would take more than one aging admiral to stop me,” she said.

Plath was inside Vincent’s brain. She was touching his memories.
She was seeing things he would never have shown her. Things no one
would ever voluntarily show another person.

Plath lay back on a dusty IKEA Poang chair. She wore sweater
and jeans. No shoes, but two pairs of socks so her feet wouldn’t get
cold. It was chilly down in the sub-basement.

She lay back, eyes closed but not asleep. Sometimes she would
gasp or suck air like a person surfacing after a deep dive. Sometimes
her fists would clench on the paint-spattered blond-wood arms of the
chair, only to be released by conscious effort.