Georg shrugged. “I can introduce you to—”
“Not ours. I need NATO. I have a friend with the Royal Navy.” “So? Call this friend.”
Valquist shook her head. “It’s not the sort of thing for a phone call. He happens to be in Hong Kong. I need to fly there. Immediately. On the next flight. Now.”
The New York home of BZRK was abandoned. None of them believed they’d ever return. No one had the slightest affection for the place, with its peeling paint, filth, and stink of grease from the deli downstairs. But it was what they had. A place. A spot.
Without it they were just three teenagers—including one certified nut—a gay male model, a crazy person, and a Russian scientist. Somehow within the safe house it was possible to believe they were significant. Out alone? Plath and Keats in a cab on the way to the airport? The others in a rented van?
Ridiculous, that’s what they were.
The cab drove past the Tulip. Keats looked up at it and whatever tiny flame of hope he’d held on to flickered like a tired candle flame in a breeze.
Airport scanning machines could see guns. They could not see biots. Plath and Keats wore theirs in their heads. In specific, Plath had two biots—P1 and P2. Keats had one biot in his own head—K1—and K2 in Plath’s brain, working—whenever he had a spare moment and could focus on it—on strengthening the aneurysm wall.
The flight from New York’s La Guardia Airport to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport took only an hour. The problem was that Sadie McLure was a recognizable person. If she were spotted there would be media, there would be people sneaking video of her and uploading it to the web.
But she was not, despite all the incredible media focus on the terrible crash of her father’s jet and her own near miss and the hundreds of casualties, as well known or recognizable as a major movie star. A little effort at camouflage, a minimal change of hair color and perhaps a baseball cap, should do the trick.
Did, in fact, do the trick. For most people. Plath and Keats sat in row 14, just behind the wing. The plane was three and three: three seats on the starboard, three seats to port.
Keats took the aisle seat, and Plath took the window seat (they had an empty seat between them), where she could pretend to be asleep and pull the brim of her baseball cap down over her eyes and go unnoticed.
It worked.
Until she had to go to the bathroom. And even then the cap and the dark glasses would have worked had not a particular passenger also been on his way to Washington, to deal, as it happened, with the flip side of the same problem.
When Karl Burnofsky looked up he saw, and slowly recognized, none other than Sadie McLure.
Plath went into the bathroom, peed, washed her hands in the tiny sink, and squeezed out of the door. A passenger, an older man with a ragged, Keith Richards face, was very impatiently waiting to get in. He pushed past her, practically knocking her aside.
He reached across her as if desperate to grab a paper towel, and as he did his hand brushed against her neck.
Plath returned to her row. She slid past Keats and sank into her seat and stared out of the window at hard glittering lights below and the trailing edge of the wing. It looked cold out there in the night.
She had a book to read, but she wasn’t reading it now. Keats had a book as well, but he just gazed moodily down the aisle. They knew better than to talk about anything of importance. Nijinsky had warned them.
Keats summarized his life. Brother in a mental institution. Parents indifferent, glad to have him gone, no matter how thin the excuse. In love with a girl who had two billion dollars and had told him flatly that she did not love him back. And two biots. One in Plath’s head, trudging back and forth building the wall of titanium. The other in his own eye, sitting there, watching red blood cells surge beneath its feet.
Death or madness.
He stole a glance at Plath. He wanted her, but more than that he wanted her to want him. He wanted her to need him.
And why? Because he was so reliable? Because he really could save her? No. He wasn’t fool enough to believe that. She had more resources than he did. She was probably smarter. She was certainly too beautiful for the likes of him.
And yet . . .
And yet.
Seven rows back Burnofsky smiled slyly to himself. What were the chances? And what an interesting problem. He had Sadie McLure, the daughter of his old friend and nemesis, within his reach. Had her dead to rights.
The Twins would forgive Burnofsky anything if he could deliver The McLure, dead or alive. Yes, the plan had been to use Thrum to use McLure to get to BZRK. But that plan had been laid in place before Sadie McLure had invaded Benjamin’s brain.
Charles would be upset if Burnofsky altered course suddenly to go after Sadie. But Benjamin? Oh, Benjamin would love nothing more than to have Sadie McLure in his power.
The question then was: What was best for Burnofsky? Obviously Sadie was being sent to Washington because Lear knew his Washington cell had been obliterated. The New Yorkers were being brought in to take over. Their mission was obvious: take back the president.
Burnofsky smiled at the thought that he was playing chess with the mysterious Lear. Burnofsky moved a pawn, Lear moved a rook, Burnofsky moved a bishop. And Burnofsky’s king was half mad.
Well, he thought, most kings are at least half mad.
When they landed, Sadie would go one way and he would go another. She and the boy with her would in all likelihood go far out of range. He could lose them. He had some limited ability to track nanobots, but it was sketchy and imprecise.
Follow her? Yes, that would be the right move. Do his best to stay with her. He had placed twelve nanobots on her neck during their brief encounter at the restroom, but it was a crude, inert transfer. He was not at a twitcher station, and nanobots were not biots; they could not simply be controlled with thoughts. What he had done was to use what they called a “packet.” A packet was about the size of a single grain of table salt. Twelve nanobots packed tightly together and covered with an adhesive. He kept two of these with him at all times. One under his left pinkie fingernail, one under the right. It was one of these packets that he had “accidentally” wiped onto Plath’s neck as he passed her.
But if he lost her now he might never be able to activate the nanobots.
Burnofsky played it forward in his mind. He would be met at the airport by a limo. The driver would be an AmericaStrong thug with instructions to drive him to the Crystal City Hyatt to meet Bug Man. The driver would follow Burnofsky’s orders, but would he be able to track whatever limo or cab or bus Sadie McLure took? BZRKers tended not to be fools: they would take steps to throw off any pursuit.
The jet touched down and taxied to the gate.
The passengers clicked off seat belts and stood en masse. Burnofsky stood.
There had been no time for Burnofsky even to get a drink on the short hop from New York to DC. And he badly needed a pipe. He had the address of a place in Washington …No one claimed it was as nice as the China Bone, one of the world’s great opium dens, but it was apparently the very best place to find a pipe, or indeed whatever you wanted, in Washington. The rumor was that two congressmen, the secretary of education, and the White House doctor were regulars.
The plane’s door opened. Keats hauled his bag down from the overhead locker. Plath hauled her own down as well. They did their best to act as if they didn’t know each other, Sadie and the boy, but no close observer—and Karl Burnofsky was quite a close observer— would miss the tiny clues. The way they refused to make eye contact. The way he moved reflexively to help her when her bag slipped but stopped himself. The indefinable energy field that vibrated between them.
Oh, they more than know each other, Burnofsky thought. There’s some powerful something going on there.
The plane emptied and Burnofsky followed docilely behind them. Would they have a car waiting? He didn’t see one.
Now it was either off to the cab stand or the bus or .
. .
No, they were heading toward the car rentals. No way. That wasn’t going to happen, was it? They were too young to rent …Unless of course they had fake IDs.
Damn it. That would make things awkward.
A husky black man in dark livery carried a sign that read belvedere. That was Burnofsky’s fake name for this trip.
“Give me your card and wait here,” Burnofsky told the man.
Burnofsky followed Plath and Keats. Watched them stop to stare in some bewilderment at signs indicating that car rental could be reached on foot or by a shuttle. Saw them head off pulling their bags behind them to reach the place on foot, no longer even really trying not to know each other, though still not touching.
The boy reached up to rub his eyes. But it wasn’t rubbing, it was a very special touch, and Burnofsky should have seen that. He really should have seen what was coming next. But he believed he was the predator, not the prey.
Suddenly they turned.
Burnofsky was caught off guard. His eyes were not sufficiently bland, not appropriately disinterested. Gazes met. His first instinct was to bluff it out, keep walking.
“Hey, there,” Sadie McClure said to him.
“I . . .” he managed to say before the boy, the blue-eyed naif, stepped in fast, confident, and suddenly the boy’s hand was on Burnofsky’s throat, and Burnofsky was suddenly terribly aware of how old he was, how feeble, and the boy, not cold-blooded but angry, pushed his thumb right into Burnofsky’s eye.
“You know what just happened old man,” the boy hissed.
People were passing by on either side, hauling their luggage, sleepy, weary, resigned, impatient, completely uninterested. And it wasn’t like Burnofsky was being mugged. What could he do? Cry for help? To whom, the police?
The AmericaStrong driver was far behind, out of sight, probably grabbing himself a doughnut.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Burnofsky bluffed.
The girl wasn’t having it. “Yeah, and yet you’re not screaming your head off for the cops, are you?”
“Let me ask you this,” Burnofsky said, switching tactics. “How do you get your biots back?”
“By taking you with us,” the boy said, but Burnofsky could see the concern on his face. The kid was new to this war. He hadn’t thought it through. He’d just done the brave/stupid thing and not considered that his biot was now a hostage.
“Not so easy to do, is it?” Burnofsky laughed his rasping laugh. “Throw me over your shoulder here in the airport? Carry me to the rental car?”
“Or just keep you trapped long enough that I can do some interesting wiring. Or blind you,” the boy said.
It was Burnofsky’s turn to flinch. It wouldn’t be easy, even with acid and claw, to cut the optic nerve, but it wouldn’t be impossible, either. And if the boy knew some anatomy there were easier ways. An artery that could be punctured, for example.
He would have to take his chances. He would have to break and run. He was carrying his own special hydras and a portable twitcher control; he couldn’t have them pawing through his things.
One problems with that: he was old and slow.
“No!” Burnofsky cried suddenly. “I won’t let you steal my money!”
He shrugged, and winked at the boy, then he bolted for the door.
The McLure girl and her friend easily kept pace, but now that Burnofsky was yelling, people were paying attention. A middle-aged woman made a vague gesture, as if she was going to get in the middle of it, but thought better of it and instead yelled, “Someone needs to help this man!”
A businessman looked on skeptically.
Burnofsky made it out the door with the two kids right behind him. Traffic whizzed by, buses, cabs, limos, and the noise level rose, which made it harder for Burnofsky’s hoarse voice to carry. There was a police car parked a hundred yards away, looking in the wrong direction.
A shuttle bus was bearing down.
Limos glided by.
“Grab a taxi!” the boy shouted to Sadie McLure.
“They’re trying to rob me!” Burnofsky cried, but few heard and none seemed to care.
The boy pressed close behind him and pushed his knee into the back of Burnofsky’s knee. Burnofsky lost his balance, the bag swung forward forcing him to step into traffic and the boy wrapped an arm around him, hauled him back and to the inquiring, anxious face of a passerby said, “My uncle’s recovering from a stroke. Hardly knows where he is.”
“Get the police!” Burnofsky yelled.
“Now, uncle, you know that’s nonsense.”
Burnofsky was beginning to get really afraid. Then he had an inspiration: maybe no one would rush to rescue an old man. But there was another way. “Sadie McLure! Sadie McLure! It’s the girl from the Stadium Massacre! It’s Sadie McLure!”
Yelling a celebrity’s name had more effect than yelling “Help,” but it drew only eyeballs, not offers of assistance.
Then Burnofsky saw the burn line. It was right through his field of vision. He knew what it would look like to the boy’s biot. Down there, down in the nano, the biot had laid a trail of acid. Only a few cells in width and at most a millimeter long, but it was there, a blur, like someone scratching a diamond on a windowpane.
If the goal was to scare him, it had succeeded. Irrationally, perhaps, but he could not work without sight. It could finish him. In any event, no one was helping him anyway.
Burnofsky stopped yelling. He stopped struggling.
“Stop it, stop it,” he said.
“I was going to see whether I could burn ‘BZRK’ into your eyeball,” the boy said.
A limo came tearing up in reverse, fishtailing as it rushed madly against traffic and screeched to a stop.
Keats didn’t need an invitation. He yanked open the door and threw Burnofsky in. He slid in beside him. Plath was at the wheel.
“You stole this car?” Keats asked breathlessly.
“Borrowed,” Plath said, and hit the gas pedal. “The driver was wrangling some luggage and talking to his passenger. In two minutes the cops will have the plate number, so we need to get somewhere fast and switch cars.”
Keats pulled out his phone and opened the map app. “You’re coming up to Interstate 385. Go east. East! It takes you into the city.”
They merged into fast-moving traffic.
“What do you two young fools plan to do with me?” Burnofsky asked.
“Search you for a start,” Keats said. He thrust his hands into Burnofsky’s pockets and came up with a wallet and a phone.
“Power the phone off,” Plath advised.
“No,” Keats countered, “He may get interesting calls. We just need to turn off his GPS.”
Keats next flipped open the wallet. A driver’s license in the name of Richard Belvedere. The picture matched the man seated beside him. There was an American Express card in the Belvedere name, too, but two other credit cards were in a different name: Karl Burnofsky.
To Plath he said, “What do you like, Belvedere or Burnofsky?”
He saw Plath’s eyes in the rearview mirror. She said, “My father knew a guy named Burnofsky. The name stuck with me because I always picture someone burning.”
“I’m going to text Nijinsky.”
“Ah, Nijinsky is in charge in New York, is he?” Burnofsky asked. He laughed. “So: poor Vincent. No longer with us, eh? Bug Man will be absurdly pleased.”
Keats sent the text.
He hauled Burnofsky’s suitcase onto his lap and unzipped it. Inside were shirts, underwear, more toiletries and medications than might be expected, an iPad, and a very old-school Xbox. There was also a tin of Altoids that felt too heavy.
“That’s probably a nanobot controller,” Keats said, poking at the wires and game console. “What’s this?” He held up the red-and-white tin.
“I like to have fresh breath,” Burnofsky said tightly.
Something rolled inside the tin. Keats opened it and saw two Duracell batterie
s. He closed the tin again.
Plath turned off the highway and plunged into the city of monuments.
Keats’s phone lit up with a message.
Hold him. Awaiting instructions from Lear. Jin.
Keats absorbed that, wondering what it meant that Nijinsky had to ask for guidance from Lear.
“Let me guess,” Burnofsky said. “The male model kicked it upstairs to Lear.” Burnofsky coughed, swallowed, and shot a wry look at Keats. “Yeah, kid, I know the name. I’ll admit, we don’t know who it belongs to. But yeah, we know about Lear. So melodramatic, don’t you think? The whole noms-de-guerre thing? Taking the names of madmen. Not very British, really, is it? More of a Hollywood thing.”
“Am I meant to be impressed that you know I’m English?” Keats said. “I’ll say this: you have the whole stiff-upper-lip thing down. Very cool under pressure and all that. Let’s see how you feel when you get desperate for your next drink or your next fix.”
Burnofsky’s eyes glittered in the dark. He had swallowed reflexively at the mention of a drink. His coated tongue licked dry lips.
“I’ve known a few junkies, seen a few in my old neighborhood, and God only knows how many drunks,” Keats said. “I know the look.”
Suddenly Burnofsky grabbed for the door handle. Keats let him: Plath had locked it from the driver’s seat.
A police car, siren screaming, tore past.
Plath said, “We need to switch cars. Google ‘how to hot-wire a car.’”
“You’re serious?” Keats demanded. But he Googled it. “I’ve got a YouTube.”
Plath pulled over suddenly and killed the lights. They watched the YouTube. But first they sat through an ad for a new Avengers movie.”
“Looks good,” Keats said.
“Boy movie,” Plath said. “But save your pennies. I’ll get the tools from the trunk.”
“Trunk?” Keats asked.
“The boot,” Burnofsky explained helpfully.
“We’ll need an older car,” Keats said. He scanned down the street. They were in a residential neighborhood. Through the gap between two houses he could see a slice of the Capitol Building, a bright ivory dome.
Plath returned with the tools. “No wire cutter but there was a Swiss Army knife. How about that old Toyota over there?”
BZRK Reloaded Page 13
