Who had the kind of political juice to get hold of a freaking Apache?
How had this place even been discovered? Either someone had amazing luck, or they had some amazing satellite imagery. Speaking of which, a satellite would have to be directly overhead to see the valley at all.
Suarez peered off to the far end of the valley. Was that a road? It looked like a road cut into the ice wall, rising at a steep grade up to the outside. Could she drive the sleigh down there? Bigger question: Could she get it back out?
The smart thing to do would be to take some pictures and get the hell out of here, get back to Tanner and let him take it from there. That was definitely the smart move.
Yes.
So Suarez, face already numb and hands getting there, climbed back into the sleigh and drove at safe speed around to the head of the road. It was definitely a road, hopefully just wide enough to allow a large truck—or the sleigh—to avoid going off the side.
“All in now,” she said to herself, and sent the sleigh creeping down the incline. This proved to be as tricky as she’d thought it might be. There was no pavement, of course, just icy gravel, dropping what looked to be about one hundred meters in the course of a quarter mile, one heck of a grade. The sleigh, like any hovercraft, was not well suited to going downhill in a controlled manner and started to slide sideways almost immediately, but Suarez got the hang of it and made it to the valley floor without plunging off the side of the ice ramp.
Still no one came rushing to greet or confront her. Either would almost have been welcome merely for the purpose of ending the suspense. The sleigh was more than capable of crossing gravel, but now, down inside the rift, it was a high-strung Thoroughbred in a too-narrow paddock.
Was the whole place abandoned? Obviously anyone there would have heard, if not seen, the sleigh. You don’t exactly sneak up on people when you’re in a jet-powered hovercraft.
She throttled forward, creeping along at walking speed, aiming for the bizarre house—which was no less bizarre down here at eye level. The glass windows were mirrored, so Suarez could not see inside and instead saw the reflection of herself scowling from beneath the canopy.
Finally, lacking any better idea of what to do, she parked the sleigh, killed the engines, and climbed out again. There was no wind, which did not make it any warmer but did reduce the effects a bit. Her breath rose as steam but her face, while cold, regained some of its feeling.
Now what? Ring the doorbell?
She crunched across the gravel to the door of the house. There was no bell. So she stripped off one glove and knocked.
Bad idea. The door was steel and very, very cold. Had she knocked any slower she’d have left knuckle skin behind.
No answer.
“This is insane.”
The next likely target was the large—quite large—building fifty meters away.
There would presumably be a satellite phone in the buildings, or an Internet connection—some way to inform Tanner. The question was whether there would also be men and women with guns. It all had an empty but not-quite-abandoned feel.
The building was not locked. Well, why would you lock a building that was a million miles from nothing much? But it bothered her. This was all too easy.
She pushed in. Lights were on, illuminating a single large open space populated by machinery of a sleek, white-coated type. She recognized only the 3D printers, monitors, and touch screens. The other objects were not familiar, and might have been anything from manufacturing to medical gear. But one particular type of equipment predominated: a chest-height, white rectangle with inexplicable slots outlined in green light. There were a lot of those. Dozens. Maybe a hundred. These definitely were some kind of manufacturing equipment, not computers. Probably automated, given that the machines were backed too closely together to allow for people to move easily around them.
Fascinated by trying to make sense of the machines, Suarez belatedly registered the sound of armed men taking positions behind her.
Six of them. Six automatic rifles leveled at her from behind the cover of the equipment.
One of the downsides of actually being a trained fighter is that you come to accept that real life isn’t Hollywood, and no one wins a fight that pits a single assault rifle against six.
“Set the gun aside. Raise your hands.”
That’s what she did.
TWENTY-THREE
The line of limos completely choked West 54th Street, extended back onto Seventh Avenue and then all the way up to 56th Street. Stretches, town cars, the occasional privately owned Mercedes or Tesla.
Crowds pushed against barricades manned by tolerantly amused NYPD pulling down some welcome overtime pay. Satellite trucks had been parked right on the sidewalk across from the Bow Tie Ziegfeld Theater, which all by themselves doubled the congestion.
It was not an uncommon situation. This was not New York’s first big movie premiere. But even New York could not be jaded about this much star power. Every A-list actor, director, and producer was here, all of Hollywood royalty, for the premiere of the year’s biggest-budget flick Fast, Fast, Dead, starring, among several actual human stars, a computer-generated Marilyn Monroe that was supposed to be so indistinguishable from the long-dead real thing that there’d been some speculation about whether the program might be up for an Oscar nomination.
Lystra Reid had managed an invitation for herself and a plus one. The plus one was at least ten years her junior, but this was a Hollywood crowd, and if the relatively unknown but reputed to be fabulously rich woman wanted a young, black, not terribly attractive boy toy who had clearly been on the wrong end of either a bar fight or a car accident, hey, who cared, really? The country had bigger problems.
“We’re toward the back,” Lystra said, guiding Bug Man in.
Despite the rocketing pain of his broken teeth and the split, swollen lips, Bug Man was enthralled. Obviously Lystra was up to something horrific, but in the meantime Bug Man played Spot the Star. Seeing a very familiar face, he said, “Man, I ufed to cruff on her when I wa’ a little ki’ looking a’ Harry Potter,” he said.
“Watching what?”
“Harry … Never mind.” Lystra Reid was not big on popular culture, Bug Man had decided. And talking was painful and difficult, though he was adjusting to the lack of front teeth.
“I’ tha’ Gwynneff?” Bug Man asked, but of course Lystra was paying no attention. And the star-dense crowd was not looking at Bug Man. They were hailing old friends and talking to the roving camera crews still pushing through packed-in A-listers.
The jocularity was strained. There was not a person in the room so oblivious to all that had happened in the world that they were not nervous. Some celebrities who had initially agreed to attend had suddenly discovered that they had headaches and would need to skip the proceedings. But the ideal of “the show must go on” and the lure of cameras had kept numbers high enough to prevent organizers from canceling.
“Time to send a text,” Lystra said. And when Bug Man failed to cease craning his neck to locate a particular buxom TV star, she said more pointedly, “This is going to go bad in a few minutes. So stay close to me.” She laid a hand gently on his swollen cheek. “I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you. And don’t forget: you wouldn’t want anything to happen to me.”
She thumbed in a text that went to the closest cell-phone tower, from there to a satellite, and from that satellite to a touch screen almost ten thousand miles away and very far to the south.
She almost blew the timing. Another minute or two and the cameras would have turned off their lights and been hustled from the theater by security people and public relations folk.
Lystra wanted cameras. All the cameras.
The first person to cry out in a startled voice that carried even over the hubbub was a big man with a big voice who said, “I see bugs!”
Ten seconds later, another voice, female, screamed.
“Oh my God, it’s like, it’s like that th
ing in Sweden!” Lystra herself cried helpfully. “That’s what they said. Bugs! That’s what happened there! Oh my God, we’re all going mad!”
“Aaaaaahhhh!” a man cried, and then more, and more, and all at once everyone in the theater seemed to realize what was happening. And what was coming.
A well-liked hunk known for starring in superhero movies started laughing and then tried to shove his entire hand into his mouth. Bug Man stared in disbelief. It was one thing knowing that something could theoretically happen. It was a whole different thing when a Marvel superhero was trying to gag himself right in front of you.
“And now we exit,” Lystra said. She smiled at Bug Man. She was enjoying his amazement. She’d been right to bring him along. It would be fun to have someone to share it all with afterward. “See, this is why I’ve savored, yeah, a few of these events in person: video doesn’t do it justice. The edge of panic. Yeah. The wild look in people’s eyes.”
The panic was like a herd of wildebeest smelling a lion. In a heartbeat hundreds of people surged toward the exits. A woman in an evening gown went down. She tried to stand, but someone tromped on the hem of her dress and she fell again.
Lystra and Bug Man barely made it out the door without being trampled, and she laughed as she was jostled and laughed as she was pushed hard against a door and laughed still as she spilled out onto 54th Street into the glare of lights.
They ran to get ahead of the flood, raced to get behind the cameras to watch as long as Lystra could without endangering herself too much.
A bloody Broadway star was shouting nonsense syllables. A famously beautiful actor was tearing her dress off while her director crawled on all fours making a sound like a sheep. Hollywood’s favorite dad was playing with his hair, twining his fingers through it and laughing hysterically.
An Oscar-winning producer launched himself at a New York police officer, pushed him to the ground, and yanked the gun from the startled cop. The first shot struck a film critic in the chest, a fact that he found funny until he fell over dead.
“Time to get out of here. Guns are dangerous,” Lystra observed.
Bug Man stared at her, looked around at the madness, and back at her. At the wild glee in her eyes.
“I know how they feel,” Lystra said without even a hint of compassion. “I’ve been there. I’ve been crazy. It’s kind of … amazing, really.”
She turned and walked quickly away, ignoring the well-dressed lunatics rushing by, dancing, twirling and attacking each other with fists and fingernails.
Bug Man followed her, because Bug Man had nowhere else to go.
The trick was to pop the natural gas pipeline in a way that would not cause a spark. Caligula was not interested in suicide.
Power saw and small explosive charge were both ruled out. And he didn’t just want to open a smaller release valve—it would take forever for the gas to build up. He needed a rupture in one of the main lines. He needed the gas to come roaring in, thousands of cubic yards of it.
He had disabled the local safety cutoffs. The next cutoff covered an entire six-block area—this rupture would probably trigger it eventually, but not quickly enough.
He had brought a car jack with him, the simple, screw-type device, capable of lifting a car off the street. More than enough if he could just find the right position.
He needed a place where the pipe was rigid. Like right … there … where it emerged from the concrete foundation. And just two feet from that point there was a junction, a sort of flange—he wasn’t exactly familiar with the terminology. Perfect. If he could just get the jack between the concrete wall and the pipe standing eight inches out from same. He pulled the jack from a bag and looked at it critically. It would be a tough squeeze. The jack, even screwed all the way down, was ten inches tall. So he either had to find another place, or he would have to chip away some of the concrete to make room.
He sighed and retrieved a chisel and a rubber mallet. Slight delay, that was all.
“He’s in the basement,” Keats said. “I can see what he’s doing. He’s chipping away at something with a chisel. There’s still time.”
They were outside the Tulip. In the alleyway behind. Staring at various doors—two loading bays, a smaller door, a door a few dozen yards away that was vented so probably contained electrical equipment.
No clue.
There was the front door, out on the street, but that was guarded. Their weapons were: one little kid with a Colt .45.
No. Wait. There was a second weapon: the biot in Caligula’s head.
Keats could blind the killer.
Or he could maybe slice through an artery and kill or cripple Caligula.
Rewiring was not going to happen in the few minutes remaining to them. There would be no time for subtlety. And if Keats moved his biot farther into Caligula’s brain, he would have to detach from the optic nerve and would no longer be able to see what Caligula was doing.
How long to blind one eye? And could he reach the other eye in time to truly stop Caligula? Or would he be better off diving down deep, finding a fat artery, and sawing away?
Keats felt sick inside. He had no plan. He had a Goth chick, a wild street kid with a gun, a biot, and Plath, who might or might not be entirely okay.
“What do we do, pretty blue eyes?” Wilkes of course, jumpy, nervous, eyes darting everywhere with manic appreciation of their hopeless plight.
The door beside the second loading bay opened. Light spilled out. A man in silhouette yelled, “Hey, move along, you three.”
Before Keats could react there was a loud bang and a flash. A cry of pain. The man in silhouette was visible for a millisecond in the flash. He was younger than his voice, maybe twenty-five, uniformed. A security guard. A minimum-wage grunt with a hole in his chest that leaked dark blood onto khaki.
Billy was moving, leapt up the four concrete steps, and grabbed the door as the man fell back.
“Jesus!” Keats cried.
Wilkes was quicker, just seconds behind Billy. She grabbed the door, freeing Billy, who calmly knelt and took the dying man’s gun.
Keats and Plath followed, Keats feeling as if he was in a dream. Two biot windows were open in his head, one showing the damned bulge in Plath’s brain, the other watching the rise and fall, rise and fall of mallet on chisel.
Billy was already proffering the guard’s pistol to Keats, buttforward. Keats stared at it. Wilkes took it.
Keats stepped over the guard. He was crying softly and holding his wound with one hand while fumbling for his radio with the other.
He couldn’t be left alive to raise the alarm.
Wilkes and Billy both looked at Keats expectantly. Waiting for his order. Plath seemed mesmerized.
On me, the responsibility, Keats thought. It had been so quick, somehow, getting to this point, the kill-or-be-killed point.
Billy must have seen the answer in Keats’s eyes. He squatted and pressed the muzzle directly against the man’s heart, muffling the sound as much as he could.
BANG!
And blood sprayed across Billy’s face.
“It’s okay,” Billy said. “I did it before. Just another first-person shooter, right?”
Keats felt like throwing up. He felt a flash of fury at Plath. Shouldn’t she have made the decision? Shouldn’t the guilt be hers to bear?
The guard was motionless now. But all was not still. They were in a short hallway—barely painted drywall, weak overhead lighting, second door now opening fast, someone coming through expecting trouble, gun already leveled and—
BANG!
Head shot. A single hole drilled right in the man’s forehead. The back of his head—a crust of skull and hair and something like hamburger—hit the wall and slid down, leaving a trail.
“Go,” Keats said, barely audible.
Through the door, now in the wide-open space within the loading bay, boxes and crates and a chair and table and playing cards laid out, and a coffee mug, and flickering monitors.
“Basement,” Keats managed to say, trying to push aside the memory of tears rolling down a doomed man’s cheeks.
One of the innocents I was trying to save, Keats thought.
Now, two of the innocents I was trying to save.
They were lost and needed light. Keats spotted a bank of light switches, crossed to them, made it halfway before his stomach sent its contents burbling out of his mouth. He threw every switch, wiped his mouth, and said, “Find a way down!”
The glare of fluorescent light had the effect of casting deep shadows that if anything made the room seem darker, with every high-piled stack of crates like a skyscraper shadowing narrow alleys.
They ran then, moved forward, the young sociopath with the name of a young sociopath leading the way. Billy moved like a cop, cover to cover, gun steadied in both hands, a goddamned gamer, a goddamned game, where would the bad guys pop up next?
“Whoa. Down here,” Wilkes said, waving her own gun fecklessly toward a dark hallway.
Billy moved smoothly ahead of her. Cover. Pause. Scan. Run to cover. Pause. Scan.
A freight elevator, with buttons for up and down.
“Down,” Keats said, feeling useless and now seeing flashes of his London home, so squalid and dull all his life, but now so beloved, so needed. To crawl into his own bed …
The elevator door opened on a guard with headphones in and singing along tunelessly, yet Keats recognized the song.
“Born This Way.” An old Gaga tune.
Keats barely flinched when Billy put a bullet into the guard’s head. The bullet must have hit just wrong because it entered the forehead and blew an exit wound out through the man’s jaw.
The ricochet could have killed one of them, but no, and the man went down with such completeness that he might have been a dropped sack of garbage.
Wilkes dragged the dead man off the elevator.
Buttons. Three different sublevels. Where was Caligula? Go all the way down. Why not? Gates of hell. Keats punched the S3 button.
BZRK: Apocalypse Page 20
