BZRK Reloaded

by Michael Grant

  The boat that had come ashore showed signs of having been at sea for a long time. Weeks, perhaps. And it showed signs of having been occupied for that time, because there were three sets of footprints crossing the sand away from the boat toward town.

  That same day local police found a mad, filthy, bearded man wandering the streets of Natal and picked him up for questioning. He told them a wild, disconnected story of having been kidnapped from a yacht sailing from South Africa. Then there was some nonsense having to do with a two-headed man and hideous experiments and brainwashing. The police dismissed him as mentally unbalanced.

  That night the man hanged himself in his cell. With a belt that was not his.

  The second and third sets of tracks were never identified. One matched the suicide victim, another appeared to belong to a grown woman, and a third could have been those of a teenage boy or girl.

  The only reason that Pia Valquist knew anything about the matter was that she’d been visiting a Brazilian friend who happened to be the regional police lieutenant. He also happened to be absurdly handsome and wonderfully romantic and quite infatuated with Pia.

  The fling had gone nowhere in the end—how could it? But it had left Pia with the kinds of memories that still brought a smile to her face years later.

  And a mystery.

  For two days she had assisted her friend’s investigation into the boat and the suicide and the unexplained footprints. The mystery had gotten its hook into her.

  When she had returned to Sweden, she’d taken another look at maritime incidents in that time frame. She’d come across reports of a body washed up in Madeira. And an unconfirmed report by a freighter captain who claimed to have seen a ship foundering in the storm. The ship matched the description of the U.S.S. Tiburon.

  The best official guess was that the ship was involved in drug running or human smuggling. But Pia had observed the questioning of the “madman.” She thought that explanation was nonsense.

  The incident was officially forgotten. But not by Pia Valquist, because she wasn’t someone who gave up a good mystery. She was, in the words of her boss, unique, by which he meant difficult, by which he further meant that she was a pushy obsessive who just would not let something go.

  Valquist knew better than to go chasing every highly fragrant bit of nonsense that crossed her desk, but she had sensed something very wrong going on. For one thing: people who smuggled immigrants or drugs did not own amphibious assault ships. They moved people and drugs around in tramp steamers and rickety fishing boats.

  Valquist had searched every record she could find. From the ship’s decommissioning in Norfolk, Virginia, to its purchase by a cutout corporation, to a brief appearance off the coast of Tisno, Croatia, and Tunis, and the Ivory Coast, to an equally brief appearance off the coast of Capetown, South Africa.

  Capetown, South Africa, where two people had been reported missing in the time frame, and where a yacht had been found floating empty, thirty miles out, with no sign of crew or passengers.

  One of those missing people looked exactly like the Natal suicide. Had in fact been that unfortunate man.

  Of the seven disappeared, the average age was seventeen. And in precisely zero cases was there an explanation.

  Here is what Valquist knew about smugglers: they didn’t go around kidnapping Croatians or Tunisians or Ivorians or South Africans.

  And then she had begun to look at mysterious disappearances in port cities even further back in time. Two in Ireland. Three near Southampton, U.K.

  It went on.

  And no, there was no way to prove that the mystery ship had been in each of those locations. But, critically, it could have been. Given normal sailing times it could have been in each place where the disappearances occurred.

  Now, Valquist was convinced that she had at last tracked one set of those footprints in the sand all the way from far-off Brazil to relatively nearby Finland.

  The house was rather grand, very un-Finnish. It had the look of a fort. It was large, made of a pale stone, one corner a tower, a sort of stunted mockery of a medieval castle. The windows were narrow, as if the person who had built it was anticipating a siege, with crossbows and lances.

  The front door was well-maintained oak, thick enough to discourage a battering arm.

  To the left was a detached garage. To the right was what might have been a small guest cottage but spoke rather of guardhouse . This suspicion was confirmed when a man emerged carrying a rifle. He had been interrupted in his lunch: there was soup in his beard, already beginning to solidify as it froze.

  “Stop,” he ordered.

  She stopped. Automatically she turned gloved palms out: no weapon, nothing to hide, no threat.

  “What do you want?”

  “To show you my identification,” she said. She held her fingers up, pincers, ready to reach into an inner pocket and pull out her ID.

  “Go ahead,” he said. His accent was not Finnish or Norwegian or Swedish. Israeli, she thought. Well, poor man, he was a long way and many degrees Celsius from Tel Aviv.

  She pulled out her official MUST identity card and handed it to him.

  His eyes widened.

  “I’m here to see your boss,” she said.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “Do you think it’s likely that I have an appointment?” “This isn’t Sweden,” he observed.

  “No. And I have no official standing here,” she admitted. He was a small man, a good six inches shorter than her and certainly younger and more fit. And he had a gun. She waited.

  He pulled out a cell phone and made a call. “There’s someone here. She’s Swedish.” He considered his next words. “Swedish intelligence.”

  There was quite a long wait then, during which Valquist and the Israeli looked at each other.

  Finally, he said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  Sixty seconds later Valquist stood dripping melting snow and offering her chilly hand to an old woman with a hard-looking face. The woman did not speak. Instead, she stood aside as though ushering Pia forward to the more important person in the room

  “You’re here about the Doll Ship,” said a dark-haired girl with only one arm.

  Pia Valquist had never heard or imagined the words, “Doll Ship.” But she looked the strange young woman in the eye and said, “Yes. I am.”

  EIGHT

  “You have fifty million dollars,” Keats said. They were walking down lower Broadway, having been dropped off by Caligula at a discreet distance from the safe house. If anyone was following them, Caligula would spot the tail. And he would, as he would have said, resent it.

  “Actually, I have two billion dollars.” “I can’t think about numbers that big. No one should have two billion dollars.”

  “You’re not going to be that way, are you?” she asked wearily. How strange was it that this familiar city, these familiar sidewalks seemed so alien? When had she last walked down a city street? She wore a hat and had the collar of her jacket turned up. She might still be recognized, but she doubted it: New Yorkers don’t look people in the eye.

  “What the hell are you doing in this stupid game, in this stupid war?” Keats asked. “You could go anywhere.”

  “And take my biots with me?”

  “Yes, take your biots, yes.”

  “And what about when they die of old age, or whatever it is that kills biots?”

  She could see that this was not a new thought for Keats. “We don’t know how long they live. Maybe by then there will be some sort of answer. You could always spend a billion figuring it out.”

  “When you say ‘billion’ there’s an edge to it,” she pointed out.

  He didn’t answer. In fact, he didn’t look at her.

  Plath sighed.

  “It’s ridiculous,” Keats said at last. “You and me. What would I be? Your butler? It’s Downton Abbey and you’re the duchess or whatever, and I’m the footman.”

  “Keats, don’t do this, okay?”
/>   “It’s why you could talk to them that way. With that whole I-getwhat-I-want, tone of voice. It’s the voice your class are born with.”

  She stopped, and after a couple of steps, he stopped, too. “Listen, Keats, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to have to defend myself from you. I have more than enough to deal with.”

  “Yeah, well, saving your pennies so you can afford to take a girl to the movies isn’t one of them.”

  He looked genuinely angry, and that fact made Plath genuinely angry. “Hey: I’m not responsible for you being poor. Or working class. Or whatever you call it.”

  “I didn’t say you were,” he muttered. “We should keep walking. Caligula is certainly watching this. From somewhere.”

  “I don’t care what he’s watching,” she snapped. “He killed Ophelia.”

  They walked for a block in silence. Then he said, “We could just go, Sadie. If you don’t mind being with a footman, we could just go. Just go. Get on a plane to …to …Africa.”

  She didn’t answer at first. They dodged around street vendors selling cheap copies of designer bags, and vendors selling cheap copies of designer watches, and tourists buying same.

  “Costa Rica,” Plath said at last. “The Pacific Coast. I could learn to surf.”

  It was his turn to fall silent now, brooding.

  “Or Africa,” she said. “What is it?”

  “What?”

  “Your name.”

  “Noah.”

  “No? Why not, do you think it really matters?” she snapped.

  “Not ‘no.’ Noah. Like the old Hebrew with the big boat full of animals.”

  “Oh. Noah,” she said. “That’s a strange name for a footman.”

  He sighed.

  “The thing is . . .” he began, then cut himself off.

  “The thing is what?” she demanded.

  “The thing is, sometimes I get myself through something with a story. You know, a fantasy.”

  “Yes?”

  “A fantasy. Imagination.”

  “Yes, I know what a fantasy is,” she said, irritated again. “What’s yours?”

  He made a bitter laugh. “I haven’t worked out the details, but somehow you and I end up together. And not in a mental ward, but like, together. Like I say: I haven’t worked out the details. There’s a house. Nothing grand. You know. Just a place.”

  “You’ve moved straight to marriage? You’ve only known me a couple of weeks.”

  “Fantasies don’t have to make any sense,” he snapped. “That’s what makes them fantasies. They aren’t meant to be logical, they’re meant to keep you from losing your mind or panicking or wanting to kill yourself.” He noticed the way she was looking at him and said, “No, for God’s sake, I’m not bloody suicidal. And I’m not proposing, either. Forget I said anything.”

  They were walking slower now. Both had decided they wanted to extend this time, not cut it short.

  “I have a fantasy, too,” she said. “It’s that this is all an elaborate dream and I wake up and I’m only seeing through one pair of eyes and I’m not noticing that it’s time to move away from that lymphocyte.”

  A bike messenger barely missed running them down. They were both city kids, London and New York, so neither missed a step.

  “So, all a dream, eh?” Keats asked.

  “A dream. Yeah. Everything goes back to normal.”

  “And I’m not there.”

  She stopped. He stopped.

  “Oh my God: you are there.” She made no effort to hide the surprise in her voice. It was true and it startled her: even when she imagined everything going back, no Vincent, no Caligula, no biots or Armstrong Twins, no terrible plane crash killing her father and brother, Keats was still there.

  “I assume I’m your footman.”

  “You’re the guy who saves up his pennies to take me to a movie,” she said, shaking her head as the truth of it came home to her. “I buy the popcorn. Large, of course, because I’m rich.”

  They moved close together. He put his arms around her waist and drew her closer still.

  “In this vision I’m ridiculously attractive? Incredibly sexy?” he said.

  “Not at all,” she said, deadpan. “You look just like you do now.”

  He laughed a bit crookedly at that, and she found herself needing to touch his face. “We’re in this together.”

  “But not in love,” he pressed.

  She hesitated. She couldn’t say it, didn’t want to even think it, knew it was nonsense.

  “Together,” she said at last.

  She glanced at a clock scrolling by on a neon marquee. She had an hour. It would be tight, but Stern would wait.

  Hide in plain sight. Keep the lie simple. And say the one thing sure to dissuade any male from asking follow-up questions. “I need tampons,” Plath told Nijinsky. “There’s a Duane Reade down the block. I’ll be back in half an hour. Do you need anything?”

  He frowned. Suspicious? No, just thinking. “ChapStick,” he said. “Plain, not cherry or whatever.”

  Stern, in obedience to the note she had slipped him, was waiting in the shaving-supplies aisle, seeming to take his time choosing a razor. Stern did not look at her, nor she at him. They were back to back, him looking at razors, her looking at shampoo.

  “Sadie,” he said.

  “Mr Stern.”

  “You’re in trouble of some sort.”

  “I’m in trouble of every sort. Listen. My father and brother were murdered by Charles and Benjamin Armstrong. Is that idea a surprise to you?”

  Three seconds of silence. “No,” he said at last.

  “My father trusted you.”

  His voice was husky when he said, “I was honored by his trust.”

  She leaned back just enough to make the slightest contact, stretching her fingers back to touch his sleeve.

  “Mr Stern, have you heard of something called BZRK?”

  He was silent for what felt like a long time. Then he said, “I thought it might be that, when I saw the man with the, well, the fanciful hat.” He sighed. “I know some of it, not everything. Your father didn’t want McLure security getting involved with …with those people.”

  “I don’t want you involved with them either,” she said, surprising herself with the force of her conviction. “I want you to work for me. Just for me.”

  “Whatever you need,” he said.

  Here it came. How much to ask? How much to trust?

  “I want an escape route. For me and …and for the boy I was with earlier.”

  “Yes.”

  She hesitated. “The man in the hat. He’s on our side, but be careful of him.”

  Stern said nothing.

  “My father financed these people. I’m going to do the same. But Thrum is a traitor, she’s working for the Armstrongs. She’s going to trace my spending.”

  “If that’s true, then yes, she certainly will.”

  “So, I want to give Ms Thrum something to watch, Mr Stern. I want her and the Armstrongs to be unsure which side I’m on. I made it clear that I trusted you, so they’ll be watching you. I want you to start looking for a person who calls him- …or her- …self, Lear. For all I know it’s not a real person, or may be several people, but he, she, or it, is running BZRK. Spend some money on that search. Let Thrum see that you’re looking.”

  She heard a soft, satisfied chuckle. “You’re capable of deviousness, Sadie. Your brother …I loved him because he was the boss’s son. But there’s more of your father in you.”

  She fell silent at that and covered the silence by bending down to select a bottle of conditioner and appearing to read the ingredients label. Memories of her brother, Stone, had come rushing back. How had he been at the end? How had he felt knowing that the plane he was in would crash?

  He had been brave, she was sure of that. She pushed away a sob and sucked in a sharp breath.

  “In my father’s study, on the shelf, there’s a copy of Alice in Wonderland
. In the spine, there’s a key. It goes to a safe deposit box at UBS, the bank, in Manhattan. My father said I’d remember it by thinking of You Bullshit Bank. You B.S. The box number is 0726, my mother’s birthday. They’ll ask you a verification question. It won’t matter what the question is, the answer you give is ‘pepperoni pizza.’ In the box are bonds worth two hundred million dollars. Let Ms Thrum watch the fifty she knows about. We’ll use the two hundred she doesn’t to keep BZRK going and to find me an escape route.”

  “Aren’t you worried I’ll take the money and run?”

  Her answer was bleak, not glib. “I have to trust you. I don’t want to, honestly, because I’m scared. I’m in a trap.But I have to, I have to trust someone. So it’s you.”

  “And the boy,” he said.

  “We’ll see about that,” she said. “Don’t follow me and don’t try to protect me. I know you’ll want to, but don’t. Caligula …the man in the fanciful hat? He’ll …he will resent it. Find me an escape route.” She started to walk away, hesitated, then over her shoulder added, “Something near the beach, in Africa.”

  Billy the Kid had spent the night after the massacre at the foster home where he had not been in the three weeks since joining BZRK. He could think of nowhere else to go, and he felt hollowed-out and stretched very, very thin.

  The man in the foster home, Daddy Tom as he liked to be called, let him in without a word and said nothing as Billy trudged wearily to the bedroom he shared with a boy named Marshall.

  Daddy Tom smirked as Billy came in, but to Billy’s relief he didn’t insist on seeing what was in the bag. In the morning an only-slightlyrested Billy walked out onto cold streets beneath threatening clouds.

  He needed to think, and he needed to figure things out. Everyone from BZRK Washington was dead. They hadn’t really liked him anyway, and the feeling was mutual. The Washington BZRKers kept telling him they’d let him play the game, but they never did. He heard about biots, he knew what they were, they’d let him see some very weird video. But they had not given him a biot.