“Yeah, but games are real,” Billy said. That’s what you don’t get, with respect to you, Plath. Games are real to the people playing them. While they’re playing.”

No one said anything; after all, Billy was just a kid. But Keats couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d just heard something important, that Billy had blurted out the truth. It could be real, and dangerous, and deadly, and yet still be a game, he thought.

First published in Great Britain 2014

by Electric Monkey – an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London, W11 4AN

Copyright © The Shadow Gang 2014

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Endpage photograph © Georgy Shafeev@shutterstock.com

First e-book edition 2014

ISBN 978 1 4052 6313 9

eISBN 978 1 7803 1256 9

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Please note: Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont cannot take responsibility for any third party content or advertising. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.

Our story began over a century ago, when seventeen-year-old Egmont Harald Petersen found a coin in the street. He was on his way to buy a flyswatter, a small hand-operated printing machine that he then set up in his tiny apartment.

The coin brought him such good luck that today Egmont has offices in over 30 countries around the world. And that lucky coin is still kept at the company’s head offices in Denmark.

For Katherine, Jake, and Julia.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

ARTIFACT

ELAPSED TIME

FIVE

SIX

ARTIFACT

ARTIFACT

SEVEN

EIGHT

BRAZIL

LOS ANGELES

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

ARTIFACT

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

ARTIFACT

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

STATE OF PLAY

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

TWO YEARS LATER

TWELVE YEARS LATER

Coming soon from Michael Grant

ONE

Sandra Piper was having dinner with friends when it started.

She was eating chilled lobster on the teak deck of a producer friend’s Malibu home, along with a former co-star named Wade Talon (a ridiculous screen name in Sandra’s opinion), her current director, Quentin (no last name necessary), a very rich and rather magnificently tattooed woman named Lystra Reid who had an odd vocal tic that added “Yeah,” to random sentences, and an extraordinarily fit, tall, and broad-shouldered man whose name she kept forgetting but who might have been named Noble, or something very close to that.

The Noble creature was listening, rapt, while the more famous folk discussed work and mutual friends and more work. In fact, in one way or another it was all work.

Sandra had been nominated. Best Actress. Very tough competition. The oddsmakers called her a long shot at six to one. Long but not impossible. And despite the fact that Sandra Piper was a mother of two, a down-to-earth thirty-ish woman with a masters in economics who had smoked pot exactly twice in her life and never drank more than two glasses of wine, she was thinking of seducing young Mr Shoulders. Mr Shy Grin. Mr Large-But-Sensitive Hands.

Because he was definitely interested, and she had been divorced for two years and dated no one in that time. And she was exhausted from long days on the current shoot, plus her son, Quarle (three years old), had just gotten over a two-week-long bout of flu.

And really, what the hell was the point of being America’s Sweetheart if you couldn’t even get laid? Would a male actor in the same situation even hesitate? Well, some, sure. But lots wouldn’t. So why should she? Wasn’t that why Quentin had invited Noble . . . No, wait, now she remembered. His name was Nolan. Whatever. Wasn’t he there for her, um . . . amusement?

Unless. Oh, had he come with the Lystra person? Was he here for her ? She would be closer to his age, not a beauty but attractive enough, given that she was not Hollywood at all but some sort of healthcare billionaire.

No. No, young Mr Body of Steel was not eyeing Lystra. He was eyeing the next winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress. Uh huh.

But the idea sighed inside her and deflated like a balloon with a slow leak. She shook her head, a tiny movement not intended for anyone else, and took a deep breath. She had to help Quinn (seven years old) with her stupid California Mission project, due tomorrow.

God she was boring. Boring and responsible and definitely America’s Sweetheart, except that when it came right down to it, she was Mommy.

Suddenly her hand jerked and she tipped her wine glass over. The last ounce of white wine drained onto the wood surface, alarming no one.

“Sorry. I just—”

Sandra frowned. Shook her head.

“What’s the matter, Sandy?” Wade asked.

“I’m just . . .” She shook her head again. Frowned, despite the fact that frowning would crease her ageless forehead. “Oh my God, is there something in the wine? I’m . . . I’m seeing something.”

Nolan looked at her from beneath lashes that would probably have tickled her cheeks (and other places, too, if she’d just said the word) and asked, “Are you feeling ill?”

“It’s . . .” She laughed. “This is going to sound crazy. It’s like I can see something that isn’t there. I’m . . .” She looked away from them, stared out toward the black Pacific Ocean, wondering if somehow what she was seeing was a reflection off the wine glasses.

But no. It was still there. It was as if she had a second set of eyes, and they opened onto a small TV screen in a corner of her own eyes.

“I’m seeing, like, like . . . just flat, but weird.” Then, a sudden, sharp gasp. “Oh my God, a second one. Like another window in my head.”

“Maybe you should lie down,” Nolan suggested.

“Or have another glass of wine,” Quentin said and laughed. But now he, too, was staring at her sideways, with concern on his face.

“There’s two . . . Oh! Oh! Oh! There’s a giant insect. I’m going nuts. Maybe I’m having a stroke.”

“I’m calling 911,” Nolan said and pulled out his phone.

“Jesus Christ! It’s a huge bug. I can see it! It’s turning, it’s coming toward me . . . Oh, oh God, I think I’m moving it! I think I’m making it move!”

She pushed back hard from the table. Glassware clattered and toppled. Wade leapt to his feet and caught her arm as she lurched away from the table.

“It has eyes! It has eyes! Oh God, oh God. My face! My eyes! Those are my eyes!”

She pushed Wade aside violently, then, abashed, shocked by her own behavior, she tried on a fleeting smile, reached out a reassuring hand and said, “I think I need help. I think I’d better see a doctor.”

“That would be best,” Lystra Reid said coolly, then added, as if an afterthought, “Yeah.” She had moved to place her back against the railing and was watching with detached interest. At least she wasn’t taking a picture to tweet later.

“Ambulance is on the way,” Nolan reported.

And Sandra thought, Well, he certainly won’t sleep with me now . But that thought came and left in a heartbeat, because something else was happening on that eerie picture-in-picture view in her head. She was seeing a falling drop of liquid that must have been a million gallons. It was far bigger than the terrifying bugs with her face smeared across them, her eyes; those nightmare insects with her own damned eyes.

The drop landed. It swept around the two bugs, engulfing them. And instantly it began to eat away those insect legs. It chewed burning holes into those insect carapaces. It burned away those distorted reflections of her own face like an old-time filmstrip jammed in a projector that bubbles and caramelizes and is gone.

The picture frames in her head blinked out.

They were gone as fast as they had come.

Sandra stood now, seeing only through her own eyes, seeing only what was real.

She laughed. “Hah-hah-hah-hah. Hahahahahahahah!”

And then she screamed. “Ahhhh! Aaaaaahhhh! You’re devils! Devils!”

Nolan moved to grab her because she was climbing awkwardly onto the table. She slipped, skinned her knee against the edge, stared down at the blood and shrieked, shrieked like a mad thing.

She snatched up a knife. Not a very big knife; just a dinner knife with a point and modest serrations. She stabbed it into Nolan’s thick bicep.

The strong man screamed, a more feminine sound than one might have expected.

“Hah! Hah, devil!” Sandra yelled, happy at the sight of his blood, fascinated.

Wade and Quentin backpedaled, making sure to keep the table between themselves and the long shot for Best Actress.

In Sandra’s eyes they were not backing away, they were coming for her, with their fangs out, and claws for fingers, and liquid fire dripping from their eyeballs—it was all about the eyeballs, it was there, in the eyes, the demons.

Sandra Piper turned the knife around and stabbed it into her belly. It didn’t go far. It drew blood, but just a stain the size of a quarter.

“Hey, hey, hey!” Quentin yelled.

“No, no, stop that, stop that this instant,” Wade said.

Nolan made another move—this time wary—to take the knife from her.

Sandra spit at him. “Hah!” she yelled, and stabbed the knife into her own eye. Her left eye. Pulled it out bloody and clotted with viscous goo.

Cries of horror, and now even she could see that they were backing away, the devils. It was working. Hah! Run, devils, run!

She then stabbed the knife into her other eye and pushed it through cracking bone, pushed it until the hilt was stopped. Then she twisted the knife around as if she was trying to churn her own brain.

Her knees gave way. The knife dropped from her hand.

“Stupid Mission project,” she said. Then fell onto her back, laughing and howling, laughing and howling. “Devils! Dev—”

It was Lystra Reid who took the knife from her. And Lystra who placed a napkin over the bloody craters in her face.

Not that Sandra Piper could see that.

TWO

Her name was Sadie McLure. She had indifferently styled brown hair and smart, skeptical brown eyes that could take on golden highlights and even suggestions of green in certain lights. She had freckles on her cheeks and across the bridge of her nose. She’d never liked the freckles, they seemed to be accompanied by the word “cute” and she didn’t like people thinking of her as cute. Cute was a belittling word.

The cute freckles had a second outpost on her chest, and a lesser presence on her shoulders. But all her freckles were now almost hidden by a rich, deep tan.

Her name was Sadie McLure, but in certain company she called herself Plath, after the great and tragically suicidal poet.

It was her nom de guerre. Her BZRK name. The name that defiantly acknowledged that there were only two possible fates in her future as a member of BZRK: death or madness.

She had a net worth expressed in billions of dollars. She had a small but effective private army in the form of McLure Labs security under a Mr Stern. (She must have heard his first name at some point, but what had stuck was the Mr And the Stern.)

She had seen terrible things, Sadie had. As Plath she had done terrible things, too, and had terrible things done to her.

She was sixteen years old.

A month had passed since that bizarre and fateful day when the Doll Ship had burned down much of the Hong Kong harbor waterfront. A month since the president of the United States had blown her own brains out on nationwide TV after being (correctly) suspected of murdering her husband.

A month since Sadie, as Plath, had sent her biots into Vincent’s brain, one armed with acid to burn the biot-death madness from him.

The great advantage of biots over their mechanical competitors, the nanobots, was the closeness of the connection between twitcher and biot. That was also the greatest disadvantage because that same connection meant that the loss of a biot sent its creator on a downward spiral into madness.

Vincent had spiraled following the loss of one biot and serious injury to a second.

From a desperate desire to save Vincent, Sadie had undertaken a grim mission to cauterize parts of his brain. But at this moment that terrible day was compartmentalized, if not forgotten, and Sadie was doing something that was not at all terrible. She was on a white-sand beach beneath palm trees. A picnic was laid out on a woven mat of the kind the locals used. There was cold fried chicken, cold lobster and a bowl of vanilla-spiked fruit in the local Madagascar style.

There was also a bottle of white wine, now empty, and a bottle of vodka, now partly empty.

And there was a boy.

He was as naked as Sadie. His name was Noah, though like Sadie he sometimes used a nom de guerre: Keats.

Whether they were Plath and Keats or Sadie and Noah, she was on top and he was inside her. They were both smiling because the ash from the joint in Sadie’s mouth had landed on the very tip of Noah’s nose and when she blew it away it made him sneeze. Which struck them both as funny, so they laughed, and that physical convulsion had interesting side effects.

“Laugh again,” Noah said.

“Not yet,” Sadie said.

“You’re torturing me.”

“I’m teaching you endurance,” she said, voice slurring.

“I’m standing right at the very edge of a cliff,” he said, and his eyes closed and his smile became dreamier. “If you laugh . . . or even move at all . . . or even breathe deeply, I’ll go right . . . mmmm . . . over . . . the edge.”

“You’re going with a cliff metaphor?” she asked, and giggled.

Which was all it took.

She watched his face while his body arched and thrust and shuddered and finally subsided. His expression was more animal than human in the first seconds, and the sounds he made were definitely not witty banter. Or even half-drunk and quite stoned banter. But then that feral look softened into the kind of expression you’d see on the face of a saint in a Renaissance painting.

And then he laughed, too.

And opened his blue, blue eyes and said, “Don’t go yet.”

He remained inside her, in more ways than one. He was also inside her brain, and not metaphorically. A tiny creature smaller than the full stop at the end of a sentence—a creature built from an exotic stew of DNA that included Noah’s own—was deep within Sadie’s brain. This was a biot . One of his, Noah’s biots, because biots were nothing if not unique to their creator. It was designated K2. Keats 2. His other biot, K1, was in a tiny vial stuck in the buttoned pocket of his shorts, which were . . . he looked around . . . over there, somewhere.

K2 had the job of maintaining the fragile latticework painstakingly built around a bulge in an artery in Sadie’s brain. Left alone, the aneurysm might never pop. Then again it might pop at any moment, which would almost certainly kill Sadie, perhaps over the course of pain-filled hours.

Noah had worked with scarcely a break over this last month to strengthen the Teflon casing around the deadly bulge. It was tedious work. Fibers had to be carried through Sadie’s eye, down the optic nerve, up and down the soggy hills and deep valleys of her brain—quite a long trip for a biot—then carefully threaded in place. Basket-weaving.

All the while a sort of picture-in-picture was open in Noah’s own mind, an artificially color-enhanced but grainy picture. Imagine a 3D special effects movie but with the color flattened out and stripped of nuance, all shot through a dirty lens.

Noah knew Sadie with an intimacy that was impossible for people who did not travel down in the meat . When she became aroused he could feel the artery beneath his biot’s six legs pumping faster, harder.

But it was not just the relatively monotonous, liquid-encased surface of the brain that he had seen up close. He had at various times, in the course of more than one desperate mission, crawled across her eyes, her lips, her tongue.

She kissed his mouth and then the place just beside his mouth and then his neck. Then she rolled off onto the blanket and looked toward the food.

“You didn’t . . .” he said.

“No.” She struggled to find the right tone. Unconcerned but not indifferent. Nonchalant, not like it mattered. Then tried switching to a sexy purr. “But I loved every minute. That’s not the only thing in the world, you know.”

“It’s not?” he asked, trying to be funny.

“Want some lobster?” she asked, deflecting him. She didn’t like talking about sex. The effects of weed and wine were ebbing, leaving her tired and groggy. She could be cranky in a minute if she let herself.

There were things nagging at her. Distractions. She wanted to keep pushing them away, but self-medication had its limits and all those niggling worries would resurface, frequency and intensity increasing. She had pushed it all away for a month and now “it” was pushing back.

“I do want some lobster, I absolutely do,” Noah said.

“Then trot on over there and get me some, too.”

He sighed. “It’s always something with you. Undress me. Make love to me. Feed me lobster. You are so demanding.” He stood up and she saw that half his hard, lean behind was coated with sand. She lay back, head resting on one hand, enjoying that particular sight, and the view beyond. They were in a secluded lagoon on the western edge of the island, facing the much larger island of Madagascar, which was a blur of green ten miles off.

A quarter mile to both north and south, armed men—fashionably attired in white Tommy Bahama shirts and automatic rifles—watched for any threat to their privacy. Just out of sight behind a rocky point, a yacht crewed by ex-soldiers rolled in the gentle swell and kept a radar lookout over the area.

Noah brought her pieces of lobster on a small china plate.

“We’re out of wine,” he said.

“Good. Time to sober up, anyway.”

“Is it?” he asked. “Why?”

She sat up and reached for her T-shirt. He interrupted her with a kiss and gently stroked her breasts as if saying good-bye to them. “I quite like these,” he said.

“I guessed that. Can I put on my shirt now?”

“I suppose.” He started to dress as well, shorts, a T-shirt, sandals. He reached down and pulled her to her feet.

“I’ll call for our cab,” Sadie said. She pressed the talk button on a handheld radio—there was no cell phone reception this far up-island.

Five minutes later, as they packed up the picnic, a glittering white cabin cruiser appeared around the point.

The captain gave a little toot-toot on the horn and the boat blew up.

It took a few seconds for the flat CRUMP! of the explosion to reach them. It took a bit longer for the debris to splash into the water.

And just like that Sadie and Noah were Plath and Keats once again, running now, food and blanket forgotten. McLure security men were tearing along the beach from north and south, assault rifles in their hands, yelling, “Get under cover, get under cover!”

The boat burned for a while—there was no possibility of anyone having survived—and then it slipped beneath gentle waves that were a very similar color to Noah’s eyes. The pillar of black smoke was smothered. A black smudge rose until it was caught by a breeze and blown away over the island.

Vacation was over. The war for the human race was back on.

THREE

The roll that had begun was accelerating. The ship’s ballast had shifted decisively. It rolled onto its side, sending the flame shooting hundreds of feet into the air.

The inside of Benjaminia was a slaughterhouse—dead marines, many more dead residents hung from bloody catwalks. The sphere turned on its axis, and floors became walls. Bodies fell through the air.

Like the turning drum of a dryer, the sphere rolled on and now people clinging to desperate handholds fell screaming and crashed into the painted mural of the Great Souls.

Water rushed in through the opened segments.

The blowtorch submerged but burned on and turned the water to steam as the Doll Ship sank, and settled on the harbor floor.

When the Doll Ship sank the Armstrong Twins had found themselves in Hong Kong’s Victoria harbor.

They could not swim. With some effort, and if they felt in a cooperative mood, they could manage to walk, dragging the useless third leg. But swim?

It was Ling who had saved their lives. Tiny, ancient, birdlike Ling. She had cupped her hand beneath their chin and churned the filthy water with her legs. She’d sunk beneath the waves repeatedly, rising each time to gasp in a single breath mixed with salt water, to cough and gag, and yet to keep her legs churning, until a fishing boat had come to the rescue.

They would find a way to reward Ling. They had vowed that. She had saved their lives and very nearly died herself.

The Armstrong Twins had made their way from Victoria harbor to Vietnam, where they had financial interests and owned a small but useful number of local government officials. From there they’d made their way to Malaysia, to the Sarawak state on the island of Borneo.

The Armstrong facility there was involved in mining rare earths. And it did a bit of logging, as well, all very eco-friendly, with careful replanting programs and all of that. Whatever it took to avoid too much scrutiny. The Armstrongs were good corporate citizens out of self-interest.

But this facility was not strictly about mining or logging. It was built of three elements: there were two identical buildings, each a crescent, facing each other across an elongated oval that formed an enchanting tropical garden, a sort of tamed version of the surrounding rain forest.

There were trees and flowers, streams full of fish and waterfowl, pink gravel pathways leading to benches and seating areas where the white-collar employees could take their lunches al fresco .

At the top of the oval, connecting the two crescents, was a stumpy tower topped by a domed observatory. There was an impressive optical telescope there which profited from the profound darkness of the surrounding countryside.

No one was using the telescope at the moment because it was pouring rain. It often poured rain here. And when it poured it was unlike anything Charles Armstrong had ever known in New York. It came down not in drops but in sheets. The heavens did not sprinkle on Sarawak, they emptied buckets and bathtubs and swimming pools.

Charles watched a lizard climbing up the glass side of the dome, pushing against the stream of water. Sarawak had lizards. It had lizards and snakes and birds in abundance.

“I would have thought the rain would wash it off,” Charles said.

His brother, Benjamin, was less interested by the lizard or the rain, but of course could see both since it was impossible for the twins not to face in the same direction. Their individual eyes could roam this way or that, focus independently under the direction of their separate brains, but they did not have separate heads, rather two heads melded together.

This gave them two mouths, one nose, and three eyes. The middle eye was a bit smaller than the other two and often had an unfocused, glazed quality. It could see, but its focus was not consciously directed by either Charles or Benjamin. Rather it often seemed to have a mind of its own and would focus where it willed, suddenly granting depth perception to one or the other twin, but never both at once.

They were large, the twins were, tall but even more broad, with shoulders capable of carrying the unusual weight of their doubled head. Two arms, neither muscular, two fully developed legs and a third, stunted leg.

At the moment they were sitting in a modified electric wheelchair. It was far more capable than the usual motorized wheelchairs and had been given an almost dashing, exotic look, with burgundy velvet trim, two side panels that likely concealed weapons, and wheels that looked more racetrack than hospital. But it remained, in the end, a wheelchair.

The observatory was their haunt for now. There was a bedroom down a ramp, and a specially outfitted bathroom. But the bedroom had only conventional windows. All their lives had been spent indoors, and they craved the openness of the observatory, even when all they could see was water sheeting down the glass and a lizard struggling against that tide.

“Looking at lizards,” Benjamin said, disgusted.

They had both been depressed since the sinking of the Doll Ship. The Doll Ship had been their happy place, the place they could think about when life became too gloomy or the pressure too intense. Now it was gone. All those poor people, the people who worshipped them, who saw beauty in their deformity, all of them gone.

“Fish food,” Charles said, knowing where his brother’s thoughts had wandered. “And we still don’t know how it happened.”

“A Swedish intelligence officer and a British admiral.”

“But how?”

“Many questions, brother.”

They turned the wheelchair to face the large monitor that hung above a touch-screen desktop. The monitor was divided into twenty-four smaller frames. Three were tuned to various news outlets. The rest were clearly surveillance cameras. An empty room with desks. A break room with one woman making coffee. A lab with two people in white coats moving to some unheard music while they tapped on keyboards. A puzzling view of what might be a warehouse.

One by one, the video tiles flipped to be replaced by different views. Every corner of the Armstrong empire.

They could see everything, but what could they control? They weren’t even sure they could return to New York. London, too, might be out of bounds.

“We are hiding like rats from a cat,” Benjamin said.

“We’re foxes at the very least,” Charles said, trying to make fox hunts usually ended with dogs tearing at the cornered animal. “System: locate Burnofsky,”

A larger picture appeared, in the center of the monitor. The object of their search had his back to them. He was hunched over a terminal.

“There’s our Karl,” Charles said, steel in his voice.

“Ours?”

Charles sighed. “Either he hit bottom on some grand, final bender and decided to turn his life around. Or—”

“Or BZRK wired him,” Benjamin said.

“Ling!” Charles yelled. “It’s dinnertime, and I find I would enjoy a drink.”

They shared a digestive tract, despite having two mouths. It took consent from both for either to drink alcohol. Or to eat, though they tried to be tolerant on that. Benjamin liked to snack on a bowl of Chex Mix sometimes, and Charles preferred fresh fruit. Apricots. He loved a perfect apricot, though a really good one was hard to find.

“A drink, yes,” Benjamin said. “And maybe more than one apiece.”

Ling appeared, moving with a gliding speed that belied her advanced years.

“Ah, our friend and hero, Ling. I shall have a glass of wine,” Charles told her. “A Cabernet, I think.”

“I’ll have a Cognac,” Benjamin said. “You know what I like.”

They sat glumly watching the video frames opening and closing around Burnofsky as the system cycled randomly through the hundreds of surveillance cameras. Here was a woman making copies. There a man staring blankly into space. A couple putting on coats ready to go home. Jet-lag-dulled shoppers at the Twins’ O’Hare Airport store. Two men debating something, both pointing at tablets.

At the bottom of each window was a small tag giving the location. Athens. Newport News. Tierra del Fuego. Johnson City. AFGC—the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation—had locations all over the world, even without counting the shops in virtually every airport.

“We have not lost, brother,” Charles said softly with what he hoped was an undertone of iron resolve.

“Yet we’re in hiding.”

“We have not lost. We are not beaten . We have the Hounds. We can rebuild the twitcher corps. We can start again. And we have Floor 34.”

“Floor 34’s a losing tactic,” Benjamin snorted. “Defensive. It takes down BZRK. But it does not give us back the president we lost, or the premier we lost, goddammit! God damn it!” He slammed his fist down on the desk, making Charles’s glass of wine jump. “Or Bug Man. Or the Doll Ship.” He moaned. “What we have lost! What we have lost !” He drained the snifter of Cognac in a single long swallow.

“When Floor 34 is ready, we take down BZRK and all they have within weeks. It spreads, brother; it will find them in all their hiding places. And when it has done its work, we will be without enemies, we—”

“Without enemies? You think BZRK is our only enemy? Don’t you know the Chinese are dissecting every body they fish out of Hong Kong harbor? They know. They know ! And if the Americans and Europeans don’t know yet, they will soon.”

“What is it you want, Benjamin? To unleash the gray goo?”

The gray goo, a ridiculous name for a deadly threat: self-replicating nanobots. Nanobots building more nanobots with whatever material they found at hand. Going from thousands to millions and billions and trillions in mere days; consuming every last atom of carbon and a good many other elements as well. Everything that lived or had lived on the surface of planet Earth. Everything that made life possible.

Nanobots were the mechanical answer to biots. Just as small, but without the eerie and inexplicable link that connected a biot to its maker. Nanobots had to be run through a game controller. They were somewhat less capable, but they had a huge advantage: it was nothing to lose a nanobot. But to lose a biot? Well, that way madness lay.

Benjamin gestured at the screen. He happened to be focused on a family at one of the AFGC shops, this one at Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands. A family. Man, woman, blond child, poring over souvenirs. “I hate them sometimes. I hate them enough to do it.”

Charles intuited which frame his brother was focusing on. “Yes, but imagine them as ours, brother. Imagine them united with us. Imagine them happy to look at us. Imagine what we can make them into with our nanotechnology and our friends from Nexus Humanus.”

“Nexus Humanus,” Benjamin snorted. It was a cult they had financed as a way to recruit twitchers to control nanobots, and other useful folk. But it had lost steam, like bargain-basement Scientology. “We had it, the world we seek. The Doll Ship.” A tear welled in Benjamin’s eye, swelled and went rushing down his cheek.

“Nonsense, brother, it was only a model of the world we seek.”

“A world united,” Benjamin said, bitterly wondering at his own naivety. Weeping, figuratively at least, for the benighted human race that was being deprived of the utopia he saw so clearly. “One vast interconnectedness, with us at the nexus.”

“It can still be. It can. But not if we unleash the SRNs. Not the gray goo, not that final act of Götterdämmerung. The lesser tack, though . . .” Charles was offering a sacrifice to the god of Benjamin’s rage. A step short of apocalypse.

“Massed pre-programmed attack,” Benjamin said, accenting the final word. Nanobots could be programmed to carry out simple commands autonomously. Large numbers of them, so long as the task was simple. Millions of them if necessary. They could be programmed to destroy all in their reach for a certain period of time and then turned off, a sort of localized, small-scale gray goo.

“If it’s true that the intelligence agencies either know or will soon, then we won’t be safe, even here. But if we disrupt . . . If we launch mass releases. Washington. London. Beijing. Give them something to keep them very busy. And at the same time use the Floor 34 weapon to take out BZRK . . .”

“There he goes. Burnofsky. He’s doing it again.” Benjamin had spotted it. He gave the voice command to expand the screen. Burnofsky’s image pushed all the others aside.

In the image—high-def, no grainy monochrome—Burnofsky had lit a cigarette. He took a few puffs. Sat, staring at nothing. Took another drag on the cigarette.

“Here it comes,” Benjamin said.

Burnofsky slid a desk drawer open. He drew out a framed photograph of a young girl.

“The daughter,” Charles said. “He’s never gotten over it.”

Burnofsky looked at the picture and puffed his cigarette so that now the smoke partially obscured the image, swirling up around the hidden camera. They could only see the side of the man’s face, but the smile was huge, ear to ear. The smile and a silent laugh.

“Volume up,” Charles ordered.

Burnofsky was making a chortling sound, a private, gleeful, somehow greedy sound. Like a miser counting his money.

“Bugs in your brain, baby,” he said, laughing happily. “Bugs in your brain.”

“System: zoom in on Burnofsky’s face,” Benjamin ordered. The camera zoomed. “He’s crying as he laughs. Crying and laughing. Here it comes.”

Burnofsky lifted his shirt up off his corpse-white concave belly. They had a poor angle on this, just barely able to see.

Burnofsky sucked hard on the cigarette, and holding the smoke in his lungs, stabbed the lit end of it against his belly.

They heard the sizzle.

He held it there; held it, held it, held it . . . and then, with a cry of pain that caused smoke to explode from his mouth, Burnofsky at last pulled the cigarette away.

“Karl, Karl, Karl,” Charles said.

“Exercising, eating well, no more drugs, far less alcohol.” Benjamin recited the relevant facts. “Seemingly less depressed. And this self-mutilation is the price, somehow. You know it’s BZRK, brother. You must know that. He’s wired. They’ve taken our genius from us.”

Charles sipped his wine. He had to take it slow if Benjamin was going to be swigging brandy. “I don’t know it. But, do I suspect it?”

He let the question hang.

“We must return home. Home to the Tulip.”

“Back to the Tulip?” Charles’s voice was troubled. “Even now that will be dangerous.”

“I’ve spent—we’ve spent—our lives skulking and hiding, brother. Is there not, finally, a time to stand up and be seen and counted?”

Charles didn’t argue. He knew it would be pointless. Benjamin would have his own Götterdämmerung . Charles felt sick inside. He did not want this to end in apocalypse. He had never wanted anything, really, but for all the world to be happy. And to accept him for what he was. And if only he could be allowed to wire the entire human race with his nanobot forces that beautiful vision would be realized. A world of peace. A world free from want and hate and fear and pain because every human being would be brother, sister, father, mother to every other human being. One vast interconnectedness.

“We hit back,” Benjamin was saying. Over and over. “We hit back!”

Charles closed his eye and heard the voice of his brother, so many years ago, so long ago, before they understood. Before they came to accept their isolation and loneliness. The voice of the child Benjamin was the voice of the grown man now.

Hit back, hit back, hit back.

On the screen Burnofsky was giggling and crying.

FOUR

Sadie and Noah were bundled into a Land Rover and driven straight, without packing, without ceremony, without time to breathe, to a privately owned airstrip and practically shoved aboard a Gulfstream.

The pilot filed a flight plan for the relatively short hop to Sambava airport on the main island of Madagascar. But that would be the expected route and if the enemy had gone to the trouble of blowing up a boat, would they hesitate at an airport assassination?

So the Gulfstream flew on, took on fuel in Kenya, and made the long haul to Madeira to prepare for the final leg to New York’s Teterboro.

At Madeira the security men let them off the plane. Plath and Keats took a taxi into the whitewashed city of Funchal and ate voraciously at a café that smelled of garlic, red wine and cedar, and served cod and prawns and good, doughy bread in a sky-blue stucco dining room. The Gulfstream had left in too great a hurry to take on food and despite their picnic lunch hours earlier, they were starving.

“So what do we do now?” Keats asked. He had the sense that this might be the last time they could speak freely. There was a single weary McLure security guy outside on the street, gun out of view but not out of reach, but no one was watching or listening in the restaurant and the clatter of cutlery on pottery and china would have obscured their words in any case.

“Back to New York,” she said with a shrug.

“And then?”

“Then we do whatever Lear tells us to do.” It sounded bitter. It was.

Keats tore at a piece of bread then used it to sop up some gravy. “That’s not proper, is it? Proper table manners, I mean.”

“Yeah, that’s what I care about,” Plath said. “Table manners.” She offered him a smile and put her hand on his.

“It doesn’t make sense, that’s the thing,” Keats said.

“Manners?”

“Blowing up the boat.”

One of Plath’s continuing joys in her relationship with Keats came from the fact that in just about every case where she wondered if he was understanding things, he was. He might look a bit like the naive dreamboat guy, but those too-blue eyes and sensuous mouth were deceptive. There was a sharp, observant brain there as well.

When am I going to stop underestimating you, Noah? She asked herself this silently, and in her mind he was firmly Noah still, not Keats. Keats was work. Noah was . . . Well, what? Love?

He loved her. Did she love him ?

Was it a class thing? The fact that she came from money and his family had never risen to middle class? Was she really that shallow? She wouldn’t have thought so, would have angrily denied it. But at the same time, coming into her inheritance had without doubt added just a bit of swagger to her worldview.

She was rich. Very rich. He was very much not. Was that why she still held something back from him? That would be shameful. Or was it simply that she had seen him in ways no young woman is meant to see a young man? She knew too much and had memories that were far too vivid and intrusive. She knew what his lips looked like in the micro-subjective.

She knew that down there, where distances were measured in microns, those full lips were crusted parchment. She knew that his fingertips looked like arid, plowed fields. She knew that his tongue was serried ranks of pink hoods, and that trapped between the rows were bright false-color bacteria.

She knew that living things crawled in his eyelashes, tiny things unless you were down in the meat and saw them m-sub. Then they didn’t look so small. M-sub fleas looked like spiky, punk versions of the armored oliphaunts from the Lord of the Rings movies, except that they could jump a thousand times their own height.

She knew, above all, that all the intelligence and charm and wit, all of his readiness to commit, all the love he was so ready to express, was nothing but minute electrical charges firing along neurons in the wet folds of his brain.

She had not just seen these things on an image captured from a scanning electron microscope. She had been there in her biots. She had seen them all with biot eyes that were as real to her as her own.

Even now she knew that Noah was seeing the same with her. One of his biots was in her brain right now. All three of hers—P1, P2, P3—were in the vial she kept on a chain around her neck for safekeeping, but she was still seeing through their eyes, seeing a long, rainbow-hued glass wall. Three distinct windows were open inside her visual field. And if they ever began to go dark . . . Then would come the madness she defied by taking the name Plath.

Down in the meat.

Once you had gone down in the meat, the images could not simply be set aside and ignored. And after memories came imagination, so that she would picture things she had not seen through biot eyes as they would look at m-sub.

She would see the micro detail of his lips and her own; she would see the rough furrows of his fingertips as they brushed her nipples; and she could imagine the billion tail-whipping sperm cells as he ejaculated.

It was all, at the very least, distracting. Though somehow it never seemed to distract him—

Keats waved his hand up and down in front of her face.

“Sorry,” Plath said and snapped back to reality. “I was considering. The boat. Yeah, it was both crude and ineffectual.”

“Armstrong wouldn’t come at us that way,” he said. “If they knew where we were they’d deploy nanobots. There have been servants in and out of the house, we had a doctor in when I got food poisoning; there were opportunities for infestation.”

“Or they could have targeted some of Stern’s people and bounced the nanobots to us from them. I mean, if you know where two members of BZRK are, you try to wire them, you don’t try to kill them.” She glanced over her shoulder upon saying the word BZRK, pronounced with vowels intact: “Berserk.”

Keats nodded, tore off another piece of bread, sopped up more gravy and popped it in his mouth. Plath could imagine the scene down at the m-sub. The teeth would be impossibly huge, scaly not smooth, massive mountainous gray boulders dropping from the sky and rising from below to crush and—

I have to stop this. I have to get control of my thoughts.

Too easy to let that consciousness of another universe take over her mind. Too easy to go from distraction to revulsion. She had to be able to be with another human being without always picturing that other, stranger reality.

“Maybe it was something totally different,” Noah suggested. “Maybe there was a fuel leak on the boat. Maybe we’re just overreacting.”

“Maybe,” Plath said. “But our time in the Garden of Eden had to end eventually. We had to go back. We’re supposed to be running things.”

Keats met her gaze and shook his head slowly. “No, not we. You, Sadie.” Then with a wry smile he corrected himself. “You, Plath .”

She could have said that they were partners. She could have said that obviously he was as important as she was.

But she had not told him about the message from Lear telling her to get back in the game. The message she had ignored for days.

She wondered if she should tell him now.

But instead she copied him and mopped up some gravy. She didn’t have time to worry about tending to Keats’s ego. Her mind was filling with the implications of the suspicion that they were being shepherded.

Driven.

Manipulated.

Anthony Elder, who had once used the name Bug Man, was shopping for onions at Tesco. Not just onions, there were other things on the list, too. But it was onions that somehow irritated him.

Nutella

Beans

Bread

Pasta (own brand, nothing fancy)

Mushrooms (fresh, button, 1/2 pound)

Cheerios

2 oranges

3 onions (the white kind)

Three onions. The white kind.

This was his life. Again. His mother was already on him about going back to school. To school!

“You don’t want to go on neglecting your education, Anthony. That’s most likely why you were let go.”

Let go.

Well, no, Mum, I wasn’t exactly let go. I ran for my life—flew for it, actually, all the way back to England—after my mistakes caused the American president to blow her brains out in front of the whole world. It wasn’t because I couldn’t conjugate French verbs or recall the date of the Battle of Hastings.

He didn’t say that to his mother, of course.

He walked down the cereals aisle searching for Cheerios, maneuvering around a woman who was pushing both a baby buggy and a shopping trolley. He found the cereal, puzzled for a moment over what size box he should be getting. His mother would chide him no matter what he chose.

Small, then. Easier to carry home. Less chance of catching some smart remarks from passing thugs.

He’d been on top of the world. Now he was self-conscious about being seen by others his age, struggling with plastic bags of pasta and Nutella and onions. The white kind.

A pretty girl coming toward him looked right through him like he was invisible.

He’d had the most beautiful girl in the world. Jessica. She’d been a slave to him. A slave. The memories made him ache inside. He would never get within conversational range of a girl like that again.

Top of the world, that’s where he’d been. But all that was gone now. All that gone and now he was invisible to women and girls. He was a moderately attractive black teenage boy with no obvious signs of wealth or future prospects. Why would they look at him?

He rounded a corner, walked glumly past aisles of this and that, entirely forgetting the pasta, ignoring the plastic-wrapped slabs of meat to one side, heading to onions.

He felt rather than saw that something had changed.

Instinct. Some sense that was not quite sight, sound, smell or touch. The certainty that he was being watched. Without turning to look he knew he was being followed. His speed was being matched.

He walked slower, stopped, pretended to admire the lamb; but the presence did not pass him by.

He moved suddenly toward the grocery department, walking too fast, and he felt his pursuer keep pace.

Well.

Well. Ah. So. So was it cops or killers?

His heart was heavy in his chest. His feet dragged a bit, just the toes scraping on the tile. Shit, he’d just started to think maybe he was out of it, that maybe the Armstrongs would let him go. He’d given them a lot of good work, after all.

If not some hit man for the Armstrongs, was it police? Or even MI5?

He stopped in front of a bin of oranges and rested his hand on one, just feeling it. He liked oranges. Was this the last one he would see for a long while? Or the last one ever?

He turned, resigned, not seeing the point really in continuing to pretend. And there was his pursuer.

Now surely that was not a cop or MI5.

The man was well-dressed, almost like a banker. Far too posh-looking to be a cop. He was a black man, tall, thin, with glasses, and when he met Anthony’s eyes he smiled. Like an old friend. At first Bug Man felt himself relaxing, but no, no, that was a bad idea. A smile meant nothing.

“You want something?” Bug Man asked. His voice was ragged. Maybe the expensive suit hadn’t noticed.

“Anthony Elder?”

He nodded. What would be the point in lying?

What about running? He could surely outrun this man.

“Are you here to kill me?”

The man was not surprised by the question. “Not at this time.” He smiled. “But you will be taken for questioning by this time tomorrow.”

“Haven’t done anything.”

“Oh, come now, you know better than that. People of our particular skin tone don’t need to be guilty of anything to be questioned by the police, now, do we?”

Bug Man moved a step sideways, edging along the oranges. He spotted the onions. The white ones.

“Met police will pick you up tomorrow, but of course it’s not really for themselves. They’ll turn you over to the Security Service, to MI5, for questioning.”

The man moved closer so he could speak more quietly. He smelled of sandalwood and spearmint. Bug Man liked the cologne, didn’t like the man belonging to it. He had a ridiculous urge to ask him whether it was available for sale here at Tesco.

“They will detain you on a secret warrant and in all likelihood you will be given a chance to plead guilty so as to avoid a public trial. They’ll put out a statement accusing you of something like embezzlement. Something safe for public consumption. They’ll promise to let you out in a few years, and they would, really they would. Except that you’ll have been gutted by some hardened lifer in your cell long before that. They’ll make sure of that. If they don’t, their cousins will—the Americans.”

Bug Man licked his lips. This was a threat, but not just a threat. This was the beginning of an offer.

“Whatever they want, the Twins, whatever they want, I’m still the best; I’m still fucking Bug Man .”

“The Twins?” The man made a crestfallen face, an act, a little show that he was putting on. Bug Man wanted to punch him. “Oh, yes, the Twins . Well, Anthony, this is not really about them. I’m not able to tell you anything, really, but I can tell you that I don’t work for the Twins.”

Bug Man took a breath. He’d forgotten to do that. “Who are you, then?”

“My name is George. George William Frederick.”

He said it as if it should mean something to Bug Man. And it did ping some distant, dusty strand of memory. But nothing meaningful. It was a name out of a different time, Bug Man felt.

“You slept through history, didn’t you?” George William Frederick said. “That’s a shame. History is everything important, really. In any case, I’m here because the surveillance team that has been on you for every minute of the last month is outside, in the car park, drinking coffee in paper cups and eating HobNobs, confident that you will soon emerge with your groceries. They’ll follow you home, as per their orders, log your movements, and go off shift at eight p.m. They won’t bother with physical surveillance after that; they’ll be watching on the cameras they have in your home. Yes. So, as it happens, this would actually be an opportune time for you to follow me, out of the back of the shop, to a waiting car.”

Bug Man immediately ran through some of the more embarrassing things that would have been observed by cameras in his home. But he was mostly over the concept of privacy. The Twins had had cameras on him from the start of his employment by them.

“And then?” Bug Man asked.

George-With-Three-Names shrugged. “All I can tell you is that an Armstrong hit team is also looking for the right moment to shoot you, and tomorrow MI5 will bundle you off to prison where they or the Americans will do for you, and the third alternative, the one I’m offering you, is preferable.”

Bug Man knew the man was speaking the truth. Or at least believed himself to be telling the truth.

George-With-Three-Names. George William Frederick. The penny dropped.

George III.

The mad king.

“You’re BZRK.”

“Think what you like,” George said with a self-satisfied smile. “I’m your way out.”

“You are going to kill me.” Bug Man was proud that he managed to get the words out with only a minor tremor in his voice.

George tapped his waist. There was something there that was no belt buckle. “If that were my instruction, you’d never know about it. By the way, you’re not Roman Catholic, are you?”

“What? C of E, I guess. But—”

“Good.”

Bug Man let it go. The point was, this wasn’t an assassination. “Will I have time to say good-bye to my mother?”

George shook his head.

“Good,” Bug Man said. He nodded, smiled for himself alone and thought, Okay then: back in the game .

ARTIFACT

An exchange of texts

Plath: Back in NYC. What is our mission?

Lear: Destroy AFGC.

Plath: What does that mean?

Lear: Find and kill the Twins. Destroy all AFGC records. Kill or wire all AFGC scientists and engineers. Their technology must be obliterated.

Plath: I’m to do this with 7 people?

Lear: You had your vacation. Besides there is an 8th.

Plath: Caligula?

Lear: I’ve always found him very useful.

[Long pause]

Lear: Time is short Plath.

Plath: Short why?

Lear: AFGC very close to developing remote biot-killer. Nature unspecified. Days not weeks until it is weaponized. You must strike before then. Tick tock. Death or madness.

ELAPSED TIME

The Gateway Hotel could not be repaired or rebuilt. The blowtorch heat of the burning LNG carrier-ship had burned everything capable of burning. Natural gas burns at temperatures ranging from 3,000 to 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, and that’s enough to incinerate furniture, carpet and paint. It’s also enough to melt glass and soften structural steel. A human body is a marshmallow.

The Gateway was a black, bent, crumpled horror that reminded some observers of a very old woman, bent by arthritis, in the act of falling to her knees.

Buildings on either side had burned as well. Buildings further back in Kowloon, where the gas had rolled through the streets before catching fire, were burned. Some had exploded, simply popped open like rotting fruit. Kowloon Park was a field of ash.

The Chinese government had not been able to conceal the extent of the disaster. It was visible from satellites and from the decks of passing ferries and cruise ships. This was Hong Kong, not some provincial outpost. The whole world passed through Hong Kong.

The government had kept a faithful account of the dead and presumed dead. Now over a thousand. The “presumed dead” included those so badly burned that no more than a few bones with the marrow boiled away had survived and could not be identified.

Divers were still pulling bodies out of the blistered and twisted hulk of the liquid natural gas carrier—the ship dubbed the Doll Ship—that lay at the bottom of Hong Kong harbor. The Chinese government was nowhere near as forthcoming on this part. The official story was that it had been simple error on the part of the ship’s captain. He was dead: he wasn’t going to argue.

No one spoke openly of the bodies of children found blown apart. No one spoke of the fact that one of the ship’s spheres, and possibly a second one as well (it was hard to tell), had never contained LNG but had instead been something very much like a human zoo.

Crewmen who had managed to jump ship were picked up and spirited away to a camp in far-off Qinghai province. A small number of British Royal Marines were held there as well. And twenty-four civilians, neither crew nor soldiers—inmates on the Doll Ship—were being held at a small local hospital that had been taken over by the Ministry of State Security. The MSS had drafted a dozen radiologists, neurosurgeons and pathologists, snatched them up from cities all over China and bundled them off to Qinghai.

Interrogations were under way.

Medical investigations were under way.

Neither was terribly gentle.

Chinese Premier Ts’ai attempted to shut down the camp, ordered all survivors to be executed and their bodies cremated. Which would have worked had not the governor of Qinghai province slow-walked that order. He smelled a rat.

Two weeks after the Hong Kong disaster, the MSS briefed certain members of the Central Committee on their findings from the survivors. And on Ts’ai’s unusual and very out-of-channels effort to shut down the investigation.

Twenty-four hours later the Chinese official news agency reported that Premier Ts’ai had suffered a stroke. He was getting the best care available, but doctors were not hopeful.

In fact, the top of the premier’s head had already been sawed off. His brain had been carefully scooped out of his skull, flattened and stretched, frozen, cut into handy one-centimeter sections, and was now being examined minutely under a scanning electron microscope.

They found numerous strands of extremely fine wire—nanowire—in segments as long as three centimeters, and a dozen tiny pins.

Similar wire had been found in the brains of survivors of the Doll Ship.

A careful—but less drastic—autopsy of President Helen Falkenhym Morales found no evidence of brain abnormality. Then again, the single nine millimeter bullet she had fired into her own head had bounced around a bit inside her skull and made a mess of the soft tissue.

The FBI director, a man who would not have fared well himself if his brain had been carefully examined under an electron microscope, pushed for the conclusion that the suicide was a result of depression following the death of her husband.

FBI forensic experts produced a report stating that the videotape purported to have been taken (by means unknown) directly through the president’s eye—the videotape that seemed to suggest that president Morales had beaten her husband to death—was a clever fake.

There was obviously no way for the images to be real. Presidents did not commit murder.

Then again, they didn’t make a habit of committing suicide, either. But that undeniably happened.

In a bit of historic irony, the authoritarian state of China discovered the truth, while the American democracy had thus far missed it.

But there were other investigations under way. A joint committee of Congress. An independent blue-ribbon panel featuring a former Secretary of Defense, a former senator from Maine, and the chairman, a former president of the United States.

Only one of them had thus far been compromised by busy little creatures laying wire.

Minako McGrath, who had been kidnapped and taken aboard the Doll Ship, was one of the few to escape entirely. With the help of an ex-marine, former Gunnery Sergeant Silver, who’d been aboard that floating horror show, she made her way back from Hong Kong to Toguchi, Okinawa, one step ahead of the Hong Kong authorities.

But she found some changes when she finally reached her home. Her Facebook and Twitter accounts were closed. Her Internet access—in fact her whole family’s Internet access—was blocked.

Then her mother was called in to see the commander of the local base where Minako’s father—himself a US marine—had been stationed before he was sent to Afghanistan and killed. She was told quite simply that if she could keep her daughter quiet her family would be safe, and her late husband’s official military service record would remain unblemished.

There was no direct threat. Just that promise. Just the carrot. The stick was only implied. The general looked sick to his stomach going even that far, but marines obey orders, and it was clear that he was passing on an order that came from very high up the chain of command.

Having been saved by one marine, and honoring the memory of her father, upon hearing the ultimatum Minako nodded solemnly and raised a hand in salute.

“Semper fi,” she said.

A week later Minako’s mother, the police chief of their little town, was offered a civilian contract to work in security on the base, at a seven-hundred-dollar-a-month increase in pay.

Minako got a Vespa motor scooter.

And from that point on, Minako only discussed the Doll Ship with her marines-supplied therapist, who duly shredded all records of her visits and prescribed Prozac.

Despite the separate efforts of the Chinese and US governments, Google searches for various conspiracies were up in the last month.

Way, way up.

Possible suspects included the Illuminati, the Church of Scientology, Anonymous, the Freemasons, the Roman Catholic Church, the Bilderberg Group, Iran, China, the CIA, the NSA, the DEA, MI5 and MI6, Mossad, Agência Brasileira de Inteligência, direction centrale du Renseignement, the Russian Federal Security Service, and of course, space aliens.

With far fewer searches: the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation.

And with only a handful of searches, most as a result of a accidental misspellings: BZRK.

There was no change whatsoever in searches for “Lear.”

FIVE

Plath. That was her name again. Plath, not Sadie.

She’d been back in New York for just thirty-six hours, sleeping the first half of that.

Plath was provided by the weather with a perfect disguise to move about the streets of New York. It was freezing and the faux-fur-lined hood of her coat along with superfluous glasses and her newly blonde hair made it very unlikely that anyone would recognize her.

She had taken a cab to the Tulip. The Armstrong headquarters was not a place where she could take any, even slight, risks of being recognized.

But she had gotten out and walked the last block to the Freedom Tower. It soared up into low-hanging clouds. One hundred and four stories of defiance to replace the lost World Trade Center towers.

She had not yet been born when the towers fell, but she had seen the video. They’d had a unit on terrorism in school.

The Tulip was not as tall as either the World Trade Center or the Freedom Tower.

She had distinct memories of the videos of that day, September 11, 2001. Funny that she recalled them so clearly. But there it was, playing over and over in her mind.

The jets.

The initial explosions.

The spreading horror of billowing smoke.

Two hundred people leaping to their deaths rather than die more slowly of smoke and flame.

The awe-inspiring, horrific collapse as the melted, hollowed-out building fell.

Find and kill the twins. Destroy all AFGC records. Kill or wire all AFGC scientists and engineers. Their technology must be obliterated.

It was all in the Tulip. The technology, the records, the scientists. The Twins. Up there at the top, floors, what, sixty-seven? Sixty-eight? She’d been rather distracted the last time she was in the Tulip, hard to recall the exact floors where the Twins lived and looked out over the concrete and haze of the city.

A single skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan.

Her breath came out in a cloud of ice crystals. She looked around, feeling obscurely guilty, but no one in the sparse crowd of tourists or the crew at work around a steaming manhole was looking at her.

Under her breath, Plath made a sound. It was the sound of a slow-motion explosion.

Lystra Reid watched Plath as she looked up at the Freedom Tower and knew exactly what she was thinking. Exactly. She was contemplating destruction, yeah, yeah, yeah . Destruction. She was envisioning it already.

That was quick . But then, if you want great results, hire great people. Even if they are a wee bit nuts.

Lystra had a Starbucks latte in her hand. One of the things she would miss, she supposed: convenient and at least somewhat drinkable coffee. There were things about this game space, this paradigm, that she would regret losing. But it was never good to become complacent.

Time for the 2.0. As there was a Grand Theft Auto 6, there must inevitably come a day when GTA 6 was done and a GTA 7 must be born. Even the greatest game was eventually played out. When you had squeezed all the fun out of Portal you needed a Portal 2, 3, 4 . . .

“Yeah. Yeah.”

She shivered—it was cold—and tossed the cup into a trash bin. Her newest tattoo was itching and she scratched her rib cage discreetly. She was just thirty feet or so from Plath. Plath was, what, fifteen years her junior? But they could have been sisters, perhaps, in a different world. Maybe, come to think of it, they would be, in this new game Lystra was creating.

She acknowledged her own loneliness. Emotional honesty did not frighten her. There had been a price to pay for becoming what she was: rich, successful, powerful beyond what anyone would guess. Arguably at this point, the most powerful person on Earth.

No, the truth never scared Lystra.

Lonely? True. Strange? True, yeah. Yeah. Crazy? Well, once upon a time, yeah, but no longer.

She closed her eyes and replayed the memory of seeing madness overtake Sandra Piper. God, that had been intense. The eye-stabbing thing, wow, that was the kind of detail you only got from seeing things first-hand.

She remembered a girl trying to strangle herself with a bedsheet. Crazy people did crazy things. Back in the day, back in the old days, yeah. But never anything to match the weirdness of watching a famous actress stabbing her own eyes. Now that was crazy.

Sad to think that she would have to retreat soon and watch the endgame play out from a distance. But not yet. There would be many rich, visceral experiences to come before she headed south.

And then?

And then she would play the new game and win that as well. Or not. She might not master the new game. She might even lose.

The idea made her smile. Her father had taught her to understand that life was a walk on a tightrope and death was the ground. Sooner or later, no matter how agile you were, the ground would claim you.

He’d been full of gloomy pronouncements back in the old days, sitting in lawn chairs outside their trailer as the carny shut down for the night. They would sit there, the two of them, the man and the child, as the lights went out on the Mad Mouse and the Ferris wheel. They would sit and sip their drinks—bourbon for her father, unsweetened iced tea for her—and acknowledge the nods and the weary greetings as the other carnies headed for their own digs.

The nights had almost always been warm and muggy. The carnival mostly played the south: Baton Rouge, Bogalusa, Hattiesburg, Vicksburg. She’d seldom been cold, which was maybe why the cold attracted her now. Cold was clean. Hot was sweaty and dirty.

Back then, back before the train wreck that was in her future, Lystra had wanted two things. For her mother to come back. And to be able someday to take over a couple of the sideshow games. An old man named Sprinkle operated the coin toss, the dart throw, the water pistol and the ring toss. He let his games get shabby, refusing to spring for so much as a few cans of paint.

Lystra thought she could do better. She could make the games livelier and more profitable. The key was to make them a bit easier. Let the marks take home a teddy bear occasionally; it was good advertising. Run an honest game, attract more players, pay out more in prizes—but offer more levels, more depth, and make more money in the end.

“Yeah!” Lystra said to no one. It made her smile to think how even then, even when she was a lonely seven-year-old, she was ambitious.

But yes, lonely. She had always wanted a younger sister. Someone like Plath, maybe. Someone to look up to her. Someone to talk to and play with.

Even a brother would have been welcome.

Interesting thought.

“A game within a game?” Lystra muttered under her breath.

Would it add spice? Yes. Would it complicate the overall plan? She walked it through step-by-step in her mind and concluded that it would have only a small downside risk.

It would be good to have someone to appreciate what she had accomplished. It would be good to have someone to watch it all play out with her.

“Minions,” she said and laughed. “I need minions. Yeah.”

SIX

“No. Vincent is not ready to resume control.” This was from Anya Violet, and spoken in a whisper. “He may never be ready.”

Plath was making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in the kitchen of the new Manhattan safe house. One for herself and one for Keats. And seeing Billy’s level of interest she pulled out two more slices of bread for him.

They were in the kitchen: Plath, Keats, Billy the Kid who really was a kid, and Dr Anya Violet. Anya was of undetermined age—perhaps in her thirties, perhaps she had edged into her forties—but to Plath at least she seemed beautiful, sophisticated and effortlessly sexy in a way that she decided must only come with some age and some experience.

Anya had not yet chosen a nom de guerre. She thought it was a silly affectation. Of course, she understood the thinking behind choosing the name of some mad or at least seriously unbalanced person: it signaled acceptance of the core reality for BZRK members. It signaled a break with the past. It signaled a chin-out acknowledgment of the fact that madness was very likely in their future.

She understood all that, but Dr Anya Violet was not a child and was not interested in following the rules of the clubhouse. Nor was she sure she wanted to accept the authority of a sixteen-year-old girl. Yes, Plath was the daughter of Grey McLure, Anya’s former employer, and Plath had proven herself in battle. And it had become clear that she was a bit more . . . stable . . . than Nijinsky, who had been in charge during Vincent’s recovery.

But Anya was suspicious of money. She could call herself Plath, but Anya knew who Sadie was. She was rich, that’s what she was. Worse yet, she’d always been rich. She’d had life handed to her. Anya would rather have seen Keats in the top job, because there was a boy who had never been handed anything, and Anya instinctively trusted working people. She herself had come from nothing and nowhere to earn a PhD. She shared with Keats an emotional knowledge of hard times and hard choices.

But Keats was totally loyal to Plath.

Billy was a child. Wilkes was . . . well, she was Wilkes. Nijinsky had to a great extent lost the confidence of the group. And that left two people to run things at the New York cell of BZRK: Vincent or Plath.

Plath, who saw a great deal when she paid close attention, saw all this in Anya’s smoky eyes. Vincent might or might not still be damaged, but Anya loved him and would never admit he was ready to take charge again. Not if it meant risking his life and sanity.

In the matter of safe houses things had improved quite a bit. Plath had access to most of her own money now, and she had Mr Stern and the McLure security apparatus to arrange things. So BZRK New York was quite nicely established in a five-story townhouse not far from Columbus Circle on the Upper West Side.

They had obtained it through numerous cut-outs and guys-who-knew-a-guy, and bought it for cash for nine million dollars.

Just twelve blocks away was a second safe house. This had also been purchased for cash, but this time the cut-outs had been just a bit less well-managed. Not so poorly managed as to seem obvious; just a few scant clues left here and there for those who were watching the movements of Plath’s money.

The fake safe house was above a bankrupt dry cleaner. A sound system played ambient noise from within—TV, music, the sound of laughter, occasional yelling. A timer turned the lights on and off. And random people delivering handbills were hired to enter and leave the place at odd times of day and night. It wouldn’t stand up to in-depth surveillance but it would do as a diversion. It was already, according to Stern, drawing the attention of Hannah Thrum, the chairwoman of McLure Holdings, the parent company of McLure Labs. Thrum was almost certainly working for the Armstrong Twins as well, but that was all right, so long as Plath knew where all the players were.

Let Thrum follow the money. She was a numbers person. Numbers people loved to believe they saw deeper than anyone else, believing their numbers were truth. In reality, Thrum was chasing numbers like a kitten chasing a piece of string.

Plath, Keats and Billy carried their sandwiches back to the parlor where Nijinsky, Vincent and Wilkes waited. Anya sat beside Vincent on the couch. Plath stood leaning back against a walnut Restoration Hardware china cabinet, bit into the sandwich and looked over her sparse troops.

Nijinsky was a bit less elegant and well-turned-out than he’d been just a few weeks ago.

Wilkes had shaved half her head and dyed the other side a sickly yellow that was only vaguely related to blonde. Wilkes—named for Annie Wilkes, the insane fan in Stephen King’s Misery—was a tough chick: a pierced, tattooed (including a sort of downswept flame tat under one eye), leather-and-lace teenager whose personal history strongly suggested that people not mess with her. There was a fire-damaged school in Maryland that stood witness to what happened when Wilkes lost it.

Billy the Kid: a scrawny mixed-race kid who had shot his way out of an Armstrong attack on the Washington cell of BZRK. Shot his way out, and then shot his way back in to finish off any Armstrong survivors.

Keats. The working-class London boy with impressive gaming skills and too-blue eyes. And a very nice, taut body, not that Plath should have been thinking about that at the moment. But she was; in fact she was recalling a specific moment on the island, standing at the railing of their deck, watching the sun come up, Noah as he was then, behind her, his strong arm around her waist, drawing his forearm over her body, over her breasts, kissing the nape of her neck.

She took a breath. It was deeper and noisier than she’d intended and she wondered if people guessed that she’d been daydreaming.

Finally, of course, there was Vincent himself. Vincent had brought Sadie into BZRK. He had basically created Plath. He’d been their fearless leader until he had lost a biot in a battle with Bug Man. To lose a biot was to lose your mind.

The biot–human link was still not understood. The mechanism that allowed the human “parent” to see through biot eyes, move biot limbs, and to be so intimately connected with them that losing a biot was like some kind of psychic lobotomy—that mechanism, that force, was not understood. In fact, it had been a complete surprise when first discovered at McLure Labs by Plath’s father, Grey McLure, and had remained a mystery to him to the day he had been murdered in spectacular fashion.

The effects of the brain–biot connection were plain to see. Vincent, who had once been so dead calm, so in control, had fallen into madness. And the only way to save him had been with crude intervention down in the folds of his brain.

Plath herself had done the job. She had delivered acid to sites in Vincent’s brain that stored specific memories of his dead biot. She had watched through her own biot eyes as Vincent’s brain cells burst and boiled and died, erasing memory, thoughts, ideas and perhaps some piece of his personality.

After that Vincent had clawed his way back from madness. He had gone back into battle against Bug Man and he’d won. But that did not mean Vincent was back .

“Okay,” Plath said. “It’s been a month. Things have calmed down a bit. Where do we stand?” When no one volunteered an answer she nodded and said, “Jin?”

Nijinsky turned cold eyes up to her. He had not fared well in the last month. While Keats and Plath were both tanned and rested—well, as rested as they could be given the fact that their boat had been blown up—Nijinsky had become increasingly frayed and ragged. His clothing was no longer perfect. His hair was at least two weeks past its optimum. He was still by any normal standard a spectacularly handsome, well-turned-out person, a tall Chinese American with a graceful way of moving and a sad, sympathetic smile.

The changes would only be visible to someone familiar with his previous level of perfection. But the signs were there, even more visible in the red-rimmed eyes, the stress lines above the bridge of his nose, the grim tightening around his mouth. And, of course, the sour smell of a body oozing alcohol residue through its pores.

“It’s been a busy month,” Nijinsky said. “Sorry you two missed it.”

“Lear agreed I should disappear for a while,” Plath said calmly. “I’m known.”

“Yes. And Lear agreed that I should get stuck with the shit work.” He shrugged and tried on an insincere smile. “Well, here’s where we stand. Vincent is about seventy percent.” He looked at Vincent and asked, “Fair?”

Vincent nodded. His cold gray eyes focused, then lost focus. “Fair.”

“Billy is thoroughly qualified for missions down in the meat. He has two biots. Wilkes is still Wilkes, God help us all.” This he said with a certain wry tone that was very much the old Nijinsky.

“What else could I be?” Wilkes asked, framing her face with her hands.

“Anya remains a bitch,” Nijinsky said, trying to sound jokey about it and not succeeding. “The president is dead, long live the new guy, President Abbott. The country is freaked out, but we are still not under surveillance—as far as we can tell. The Chinese premier just had a very sudden illness, and we know he’d been compromised by the Armstrongs. So, it’s possible the Chinese government is . . . aware.”

“And Burnofsky?” Keats asked.

Nijinsky shrugged. He looked away, not avoiding Keats, but seeing that weirdly colored window inside his brain. He had a biot resting on Burnofsky’s optic nerve. The biot was tapped into visual input from Burnofsky’s right eye.

“At the moment he’s working,” Nijinsky said. “I can’t make out what’s on his monitor—I have a pretty good tap, but you know what it’s like.”

They all, all except Anya, did know what it was like. Tapping an optic nerve was a bit like watching an old-fashioned TV in a thunderstorm back before cable, when the picture could be wildly distorted and never entirely clear.

“Has he been in touch with the Armstrong Twins?” Plath asked.

Nijinsky nodded. He tapped a cigarette out of some exotic, foreign pack and lit it. “Four days after that ship went down in Hong Kong. By the way, Lear is sure that was an Armstrong thing. Some kind of messed-up human zoo. By that point I was done wiring Burnofsky. I sent him back in. But nothing face-to-face. Wherever the Twins are now they aren’t talking to Burnofsky in person, it’s all video link.”

“Do you have a biot in his ear?” Plath asked.

“No.”

There was a pause while everyone absorbed this. It meant Nijinsky could see what Burnofsky was seeing, but could not hear what he was hearing.

“Why?” Plath asked, deceptively quiet.

Nijinsky blew his smoke toward her. It was not a subtle gesture. He resented being demoted and didn’t mind if she knew. “Because I was using my other biots to train Billy here.”

“For a month?”

Nijinsky shook his head. “Fuck you, Plath.”

Keats’s eyes narrowed angrily, but Plath remained cool. “A lot has been asked of you, Jin. And you’ve endured a lot.”

“Endured,” he said, sneering at the word. “Yes, I’ve endured a lot. A lot of enduring has gone on.”

“Why not have Anya generate a new biot and use it?”

Billy and Wilkes were watching the back-and-forth between the two, like spectators at a tennis match. Vincent was elsewhere in his mind. Keats was keeping still, irritated by Nijinsky, but accepting that this was up to Plath to handle.

“Why not generate a new biot?” Nijinsky mocked. “When you play Russian roulette you put one bullet in the gun and spin the chamber. Click.” He mimed shooting himself in the head. “A one-in-six chance you’re dead. Two bullets? That’s a one-in-three chance. Three? At that point it’s fifty-fifty. You know why not, Plath, so don’t give me that hard look. Vincent barely survived the loss of one biot. Keats’s brother is shackled in a loony bin for losing two biots. You want to hear what Burnofsky’s hearing? Tell Wilkes to do it. Or do it yourself, Plath.”

Plath nodded. “Okay. Fair enough.”

“What are we doing?” Anya asked wearily. “What is this all about anymore? The Armstrong attempt to control the president is obviously over. And it seems the same is true of the Chinese premier. The Twins are in hiding. Burnofsky has been wired and switched sides. Bug Man is gone. What are we doing? Are we playing a game? If so, what is our next move?”

“They still have the technology,” Plath said. “They will try again. In some other way. They won’t give up.”

“How do we know that?” Anya demanded.

“They found Keats and me. They blew up the boat that was coming to pick us up.”

“Convenient, wasn’t it?” Nijinsky said.

Plath didn’t say anything to that, because she’d had the same thought. Convenient . If you wanted to push her and Keats back to New York. Say, after you’d ignored an order to get your ass back there already.

The punishment for desertion is death, isn’t it? Or is that some Hollywood bullshit?

The boat had blown up, but there was no follow-up. No attack on the beach, no attack on the compound they’d been staying in. No attack as they rushed to the airport and flew away from the island.

No attack waiting for them when they refueled in Kenya or Madeira, and no attack when they’d landed at Teterboro.

Had a quick change of hair color somehow thrown off the kind of people capable of tracking her to Madagascar and then to Île Sainte-Marie? Not likely.

Just enough violence to send her running back to New York. Not as if someone was serious about killing her.

Like someone wanted her back in the game.

Get back in the game.

That had been the text from Lear. The one she’d ignored, because, why? Because she was Sadie McLure, that’s why. Since when did she take orders? What was she, someone’s butler suddenly?

Fuck you, Lear. I’m on a beautiful island with a beautiful boy who loves me and wears himself out trying to please me.

For the first twenty-four hours after that she had felt liberated. Like maybe she had regained control of her life. But slowly her doubts had grown. What right did she have to blow off Lear? Lear was BZRK. Lear was the general and she was a lowly lieutenant or whatever.

And he’d been right, hadn’t he, Lear? Right that she had to get back in the game? The Armstrong Twins seemingly still lived. The nanobot technology still existed. The liberty of all humanity was still in danger.

The Armstrongs still had to be stopped. Didn’t they?

“I’ve heard from Lear,” Plath said. She wasn’t sure why, but she was reluctant to tell them. Maybe because once she said it she would have to take action.

“Did he mention whether he liked the whole blonde look you have going on?” Wilkes. Of course.

“Lear says the Armstrongs have developed some kind of remote biot-killer. Nature unknown. No other details. But . . .” She shook her head ruefully. “But his instructions are to destroy AFGC. Destroy their data, in particular, so this new technology doesn’t go into use.”

Long silence. Much mute staring. Biots already faced a number of potential enemies, from the slow but irritating defenses of the body itself to the much more dangerous nanobots. But nanobots could be faced, fought and—with luck and skill—killed. The idea of a weapon that could destroy biots in some unfathomable way, in some way that did not even allow for a fight, was terrifying. It would be push-button madness.

Finally, Nijinsky laughed—a low, slow sound weighed down by cynicism. “Well, I’m going to use that word again. Convenient. We’re all sitting here wondering why we’re still playing this game, and what do you know? Turns out the bad guys have the means to drive us all insane and then enslave the human race.” He lit a second cigarette and blew the smoke insolently at Plath.

She thought about telling Nijinsky to put it out. Show him that she was back and in charge.

But was she in charge? That was not clear.

She checked Keats. He was as dubious as Nijinsky.

“Yeah,” she said by way of acknowledging their doubts. “Yeah. Convenient. But I guess unless we want a visit from Caligula, we’d better . . .” She faded out, realizing what she was saying.

It was Anya who put it into words. “In the Great Patriotic War—what you call World War Two—Russia had soldiers. And behind the soldiers they had NKVD. Secret police. If a soldier complained, the NKVD shot him. If a soldier failed, the NKVD shot him. If a soldier said, ‘To hell with this, I am going home,’ the NKVD shot him. And then they arrested the man’s family and sent them to the gulag.”

“Well, they were fighting the Nazis,” Billy piped up.

Anya snorted a derisive laugh. “Yes, murderous, evil Nazis. And who were the NKVD? Murderous, evil Communists.”

“I’m confused. Which are we supposed to be?” Wilkes asked.

ARTIFACT

A News Item.

Wellington, NZ. Wellington Police Superintendent Thomas DuPré gave a press conference today in which he discussed the recent suicide of two Wellington Police Department officers, and an attempted suicide by a third, who remains in care at Wellington Hospital.

“All three officers reported seeing strange visions about an hour prior to their suicide attempts. They variously described these hallucinations as involving bizarre insects and strange objects.”

Superintendent DuPré said all three were tested for drugs but results were negative. “It’s possible that this tragic episode is simply a rather horrible coincidence.”

All three incidents occurred nine days ago. The two successful and one attempted suicides were particularly brutal and appeared to be unplanned.

The investigation is ongoing.

Nothing was said publicly about the fact that the three officers, while on their way together to a soccer match a week earlier, had come across an overturned truck on the highway apparently headed to the port.

The truck had appeared to be carrying military grade weapons.

Higher authorities were called in to take over the case. And the three policemen would have nothing further to say on the matter.

ARTIFACT

From Deadline Hollywood:

The Academy announced today that Sandra Piper’s name would remain on the ballot for the Best Actress Oscar. There had been suggestions (surely not from studios and press agents tied to competing actresses, heaven forefend!) that the actress’s bizarre suicide would send a bad message to movie lovers and especially young fans. The statement reads in part, “We believe that an Academy Award is given for the work, and only for the work, and should not be affected by the tragedy that took this great talent’s life.”

Comments:

QxT: Sandra Piper was a great lady and a great actress. Shame on those who are trying to prophet from her death.

KeyAgrippa: She was nuts. That’s who we want to show off as a symbol of Hollywood?

Book Guy: Tragedy my ass. She was murdered. I don’t know how. Yet. But I knew Sandra, we worked together on UTD. No way she killed herself, she had everything to live for.

SEVEN

Seven thousand, two hundred and fourteen miles south and a bit east from the watery grave of the Doll Ship, where bloated, bleached-out bodies still fed indifferent fish, a very different sort of vessel was roaring across very different waters. The Navy called it an LCAC—Landing Craft Air Cushion—a hovercraft some eighty-eight feet long and forty-seven feet wide.

This LCAC was no longer part of the US Navy; it was privately owned, and it had been extensively modified with more efficient turbines, tougher skirts and integrated de-icing systems.

It was one of two in active service in Antarctic waters. The craft were used to carry large cargos ashore and, just as critically, to remove garbage, and to do so in weather that would swat a helicopter down onto the ice.

Environmentalists were determined to keep Antarctica “green,” despite the fact that green was rarely seen on the ice.

The LCACs shuttled back and forth between shore and a refurbished Navy-surplus amphibious assault ship now called the Celadon . Celadon being a shade of green. (Her sister ship was the Shamrock .) The LCACs were the Jade Monkey and the Emerald—again, shades of green. But the LCACs were in fact painted white and gray with splashes of rescue-orange.

The particular LCAC arriving in a whirlwind of salt spray and noise was the Jade Monkey, skippered by Imelda Suarez. Suarez—no one called her Imelda—had a four-person crew and a cargo of booze, diesel fuel and a massive electrical generator covered by a tarp, as well as a climate-controlled steel container filled with potatoes, apples, fresh spinach, grapes and oranges. The box was painted with the logo of Whole Foods, and indeed all the produce was organic.

For the old-timers the very idea that fresh fruit and meat could be almost (not quite) year-round was astonishing, and it caused quite a bit of grumbling about how easy things had gotten.

It was nearing summer in Antarctica and there in McMurdo Sound the thermometer showed a pleasant twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. The wind was a noticeable but manageable eighteen knots. The sun was shining. This time of year it shone pretty nearly all day. All in all about as pleasant as you could ask for at McMurdo.

The Jade Monkey floated over the water and up onto gravel, its big black rubber skirts all puffed out and vibrating like a trumpet player’s cheeks. Suarez powered down and the vehicle came to rest with a disgruntled wheeze of engines and a long, slow fart as the air cushion bled out.

Imelda Suarez was twenty-eight years old, five feet seven inches tall, dark-skinned, weather-beaten but pretty in the right light. She had worked for Cathexis Inc., owner of the Celadon and her two LCACs, for three years, two as skipper of the Jade Monkey .

It was grueling, brutal, often boring but occasionally terrifying work. Suarez had never lost a cargo, she had never lost a crewman, and she had kept that spotless record by never underestimating the A-factor. The Antarctic factor. The capacity of the most alien of all continents to complicate or obliterate the schemes of homo sapiens .

Antarctica was always out to kill you.

But the advent of the Cathexis era had changed life on the ice. In the old days the bases that dotted the rim of the continent had been cut off for as much as ten months out of the year. Aircraft get a bit unsafe in high crosswinds. LCACs do, too, but these specially modified versions could make a forty-mile run from the Celadon in all but the worst conditions—and in emergencies, even then.

All of which was extremely useful, because McMurdo Base—MacTown, as it was known—was growing more rapidly than just about any place on Earth. There was oil under the ice and offshore. With the Middle East in turmoil even the greens admitted that oil exploration on the ice was a better option than fighting wars to maintain supplies from volatile countries.

MacTown, which had once been full of nothing but scientists, academics and support staff—generally from cold lands like Alaska and Montana and Maine—was now home to a whole lot of people from Texas and Louisiana. The same evolution was occurring at British, Russian, Aussie, Kiwi, Chinese, Japanese, Chilean and Argentinian bases. The effort to locate oil and develop the technology to survive the harsh environment was big, well-financed and in a hurry. And they could afford oranges that cost fifteen bucks apiece to bring in from Wellington or Tierra del Fuego.

Suarez stepped out of her cockpit, nodded at her chief, who was in charge of matters from this point, stretched up onto her toes, hefted a rather heavy shoulder bag and headed up the long gravel slope into MacTown. Solid ground, ground that was not bucking and vibrating like the deck of the Jade Monkey, felt oddly uneven and unsteady. She headed toward the new admin building where Cathexis Inc. had a small wing of cubicles—nothing but a bunk and an electrical outlet, really. This was her third trip of the day and Suarez was required by company policy to grab a minimum six hours of sleep. LCACs did not want to be steered by sleepy pilots. LCACs steered by sleepy pilots had a tendency to flip over.

She was intercepted on her way up the road by a tall, not-bad-looking man with a full beard, sunglasses and a big grin. Jim Tanner was Lockheed security. Lockheed ran McMurdo. But it was well known that Tanner was former Naval Intelligence. And it was widely assumed that he was the US government’s eyes and ears on the base. Or at least, one set of eyes and ears.

“Well, hello there, Suarez. Whatcha got in the bag?”

“What, this bag?” Suarez asked innocently.

“Wouldn’t be contraband booze, would it?”

Suarez stopped, unzipped the bag and pulled out a bottle of Scotch. “Huh,” she said. “I wonder how this got in there? And look, it has a twin. You here to help me destroy the evidence, Jim?”

Alcohol was sold at McMurdo, but it was also rationed. Nobody begrudged you a drink, but there were supposed to be limits.

“I would like nothing better.” Tanner took one of the bottles, held it up to read the label. “Ah, the Macallan 16. You’ve grown and matured, Suarez. You have grown and matured.”

“If you’re nice to me and let me get to sleep eventually, I’ll share.”

Tanner handed her back the bottle, grinned, looked away a bit sheepishly and said, “Sadly, I am here in an official capacity.”

Suarez’s eyes narrowed. “Your official official capacity? Or your unofficial official capacity?”

His smile thinned out. “This will be a conversation that involves you signing a legal document promising not to disclose the nature of the conversation. The document in question is not a company document. It’s a company document.”

The company was Lockheed. The company was the CIA.

“What the hell did I just step in?” Suarez demanded, no longer in a joking mood.

Tanner’s office was tiny—space was always at a premium in a place where Home Depot was ten thousand miles away. It was overheated, so neat that no piece of paper could be found, and seemed to have been furnished entirely with the kind of office furniture that a self-respecting Goodwill store would reject.

The document he had for her was on an iPad. If it had been printed out it would have taken up four pages. Pages full of threats and requirements and official language. The long and short of it was that if she spoke of this meeting to anyone not properly cleared for Top Secret or better, she would go to jail.

“I’m going to remind you that even though you have been separated from the Marine Corps, Lieutenant Suarez, the Corps still owns you.” Tanner turned the pad to her. She scribbled a fingernail signature and at his prompting spoke her full name to the camera.

“And now do we get to the reason for this cloak and dagger, Captain Tanner?”

He was behind the desk in the good chair, the one that swiveled. She had a steel-frame chair with the stuffing half blown out. The bag of booze was at her side on the floor.

“Cathexis Base,” Tanner said.

“Okay. What about it?”

Cathexis Base was a facility built by Suarez’s corporate masters. It was used as a transshipment point, a storage facility, a rescue facility for the Celadon and her sister ship. There were repair facilities for the LCACs there, as well as for the helicopters and planes Cathexis used on the ice.

“Well, let’s start with this: have you ever seen anything suspicious at Cathexis?

No, she had not.

“What about at the satellite facility. What do they call it? Forward Green? Good grief, sounds like a golf course.”

“I’ve never been there.”

Tanner nodded. “Know anyone who’s ever been there?”

Suarez shrugged. “I imagine a lot of the support people have. Must have been to handle construction.”

Tanner shook his head, and watched her. “No. In fact the crews have been kept almost entirely separate. There’s very little crossover. There’s Cathexis Base and its people, and there’s Forward Green and its people.”

Suarez looked at him expectantly, waiting for some kind of clue. When all he did was look back at her, she said, “So?”

“So, it’s odd.”

“Okay.”

He was an experienced interrogator and had mastered the trick of waiting. But Suarez had nothing to offer, so all she could do was wait as well.

He nodded as if he’d satisfied himself on some point, then leaned forward on his elbows. “Anyone at Cathexis ever suggest you might want to try piloting a new kind of hovercraft? Something faster?”

“Well, the Navy already has—”

“I’m not talking about a piece of Navy equipment.”

“Then what are you talking about, because I’m tired, I need sleep, and before that I need a drink.” She was bouncing one leg, a habit when she was impatient.

He opened his laptop, hit a few keys, then turned it so she could see. “The video is just seven seconds long.”

The film was obviously taken from a great distance. It shook and wobbled. What it showed, or seemed to show, was a sleek, low-slung object shooting across the ice.

“Do you recognize that?”

“Do I recognize what? Something going zoom across the ice?”

He laughed. “We did a bit of enhancement and a bit of informed speculation, and the best guess from Langley is that it’s a hovercraft, quite small, so not designed for cargo. There appears to be a bubble canopy large enough for one, possibly two people. Speed in excess of a hundred and twenty knots. And it appears to be armed.”

“Armed?” That stopped the bouncing of her leg.

“Mmm. Armed. With a type of Russian missile, essentially an anti-tank weapon, although obviously it would work even better against a tractor or a Sno-Cat or a shelter.”

The thing that came to her mind was obvious and a bit stupid. But she said it anyway. “Weapons are forbidden on the ice. Nothing beyond a couple of handguns for the security people.”

“Yes.”

“Why would somebody need missiles? On some souped-up hovercraft?”

“That’s the question,” Tanner agreed. “Why would they? Speculate, Suarez.”

She pushed back, tilting the hind legs of her chair. “If it’s as fast as you say, it would be tough to hit from the air. White-on-white, going one hundred twenty knots? You’d see a hell of an infrared signature, so if you went after it in an Apache you could use the thirty mil, but an Apache’s top speed is one hundred fifty knots, so you don’t have much of an edge in speed.”

“I knew a good pilot like yourself would see it all clearly,” Tanner said. “A pilot with SEAL training, and right here close at hand. Let’s have that drink, Suarez.”

She hefted a bottle, unwound the capsule and poured into paper cups. “Am I going to need it?”

“Lieutenant Imelda Suarez, I am informing you that pursuant to a special directive of the Department of Defense, you are hereby returned to active duty.”

“Whether I like it or not?”

Tanner raised his cup. “Cheers.”

Sailing in the San Francisco Bay in blustery weather, Francis Janklow, the CEO of Janklow/MediStat, was not as happy as he should have been. He loved his boat in the abstract, but now that he’d bought the damned thing for two million dollars he felt as if he had to use it. But the truth was, he was just not that crazy about sailing. Especially when the wind was up so that he was constantly drenched by a spray that ranged from cooling mist to fire hose.

His guests seemed to be having a good time, though. These were a senior state senator and the senator’s much younger “assistant”, a rival CEO, a supposed painter whom Janklow’s wife was sponsoring, and, of course, Janklow’s wife.

The boat had been his wife’s idea. According to her you could not own a waterfront property on Belvedere Island and not also own a boat of some sort, and after all Janklow had sailed as a youth.

And yet, Janklow thought glumly even as he affected many a grin in the face of the elements, he would much rather have been home with a spreadsheet on his screen and a Scotch in his hand. Instead he was at the wheel, yelling instructions to the kid, Antonio, who sometimes crewed for a day.

And also seeing things. Definitely seeing things. He frowned and peered off toward the Golden Gate, open water ahead, trying to figure out just what he was seeing.

“I think I’m seeing things,” Janklow said. He forced a laugh. No one heard either the remark or the laugh.

No one heard him say that it was as if a window . . . no, two windows . . . had opened in his head.

Antonio saw him stagger back from the wheel and raced back to take over.

“You okay, Mr J.?”

“I’m . . . Nah. Nah. Yeah. Oh, shit.”

And then suddenly Janklow was racing up the mast, hand over hand, like a much younger man.

Everyone saw this. The state senator’s assistant yelled something and pointed. All eyes turned to look at Janklow, now thirty feet up, his sparse hair flowing in a wind that was too strong for those below to make much sense of what sounded a lot like disconnected, wild ranting.

And then Janklow fell. Although it looked very much as if he actually leapt.

He plunged straight down into the sea.

Pandemonium. All the passengers jumped up and began yelling to Antonio to turn the boat around, turn the boat around .

But sailboats are not so easy to turn around when under wind power. So first Antonio—without help—had to lower the sail and start the engine. Only then, a quarter mile away from Janklow, could they turn back and effect a rescue.

Janklow could be seen. He was in the water, waving his hands wildly, but more as if he was a little kid splashing in the tub.

As the boat drew up alongside, the state senator had the presence of mind to throw a life vest to Janklow, while his wife berated him for being so careless.

But Janklow just laughed; a wild, manic sound that sent chills up his wife’s spine. And then, pushing himself along the side of the boat and refusing all proffered hands, Janklow went to the stern, dove down, and came up with his face shoved straight into the churning propeller.

It would be listed as an accidental death, not a suicide.

“I’m looking at the spreadsheet right now,” Lystra Reid said. She had a phone propped on her ear and a pad open before her. Tiburon police officers and California Highway Patrol detectives were milling around the marina of the Tiburon Yacht Club. They had taken statements from everyone on the Janklow boat. Lystra had little enough to say, and none of it useful, and the detectives had let her go.

But rather than take off immediately Lystra savored a bourbon rocks and split her attention between the mild chaos of the investigation and the neat order of her spreadsheets.

“Yes, I am very much aware of some of my off-book expenses, and no, I won’t enlighten you further, Tom. One of the reasons I don’t take the company public, yeah, yeah, is because I like to spend my money without being second-guessed. It is, after all, mine.”

At the age of nine, Lystra had been sent away. Her father had finally decided that he could not raise her properly. His own business was falling on hard times; the carnival business was fading fast. Her father’s act—he was a trick shooter and put on an impressive if threadbare show with guns, knives and hatchets—no longer drew enough of a paying crowd for the carny life to make much sense.

He’d sat her down and explained it all to her. She would be going to a good, decent family that would raise her properly, with school, and friends, and all of that.

“You won’t be my dad anymore?” She hadn’t cried. She’d felt sick with betrayal, but she hadn’t cried.

Her father, his lined face half-hidden in the gloom of the Louisiana dusk, had said, “I won’t be with you. I won’t be seeing you, I . . . I have to find some way to make a living. But listen to me, Lystra. Listen to me. You’re a very smart kid. And better than smart, you’re determined. You’ll do fine. And if you ever need me, really need me, life-and-death need, I’ll be there.”

“What about Mom? Is she dead?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

She knew he was lying. She couldn’t recall the exact moment when it dawned on her that her father had killed her mother. But once the idea had dawned, certainty soon followed.

Her mother had been a bit of a party girl. That was the nicest way to put it. Lystra’s mother liked a good time, and she had not found it in the life her husband gave her. She’d looked for comfort elsewhere. In booze, in drugs, in sex.

“I know,” Lystra had said. Nothing else. Just those two words.

Her father had said nothing. The two of them just sat there on the broken-down lawn chairs. Then her father had poured two fingers of bourbon into a paper cup and handed it to her.

God, it had burned her throat, but she had swallowed it and not made a sound.

“Bad things happen in this life,” he had said at last.

Lystra had held out her paper cup and said, “More.”

He shook his head. “That taste was enough. You’re still a kid.”

“You killed my mother. Now you’re dumping me. Okay. That’s all done. Yeah. Maybe I’ll never see you again.”

“Maybe.”

“But if I do, you’ll do whatever I ask you to do.”

“Will I?” He’d seemed almost amused, but seeing the look in her eyes he had flinched, looked down, and finally poured her a second drink. “I will,” he had said, and there was a sacredness to that vow.

Lystra went to live with a very nice, childless family by the name of Reid, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She got straight As in school while barely bothering to crack a book. She wasn’t just a smart kid; she was brilliant. A cold, emotionally distant, friendless but never-bullied kid.

But at age fourteen things began to change. Not her grades, those stayed top-notch. But at about that time Lystra began to talk to her long-distant father again. He would speak to her when she was walking through the corridors at school. He would speak to her as she sat in the Baptist church and listened to the sermon. Her lip would curl when she heard him. Her eyes would focus with inhuman intensity on the back of a man’s neck until by sheer force of will she could make him turn around, uncomfortable, only to become confused when the danger he sensed turned out to be just a young girl.

Her father’s voice spoke to her. And other voices as well. Angels, sometimes, though not the better sort of angel. And the voice of a girl with the odd name of Scowler.

She never told anyone about the voices, they had universally warned her not to. Yeah, don’t tell anyone we’re here, they’ll lock you up. Yeah.

Then both her adoptive parents had died in a car accident. The particulars of the accident raised eyebrows but elicited sympathy. Lystra had been sixteen at that point, just learning to drive. And despite the fact that Lystra had played various online driving games for years, she panicked while driving the real thing. She had not realized the car was in reverse. She did not notice that her parents were standing behind her, down at the bottom of the long driveway.

The police questioned her for a long time. The detectives could not quite square her story of intending to pull the car forward slowly into the open garage with the fact that the car had been in reverse and had shot at surprisingly high speed the sixty-seven feet between the rear bumper and the two Reids.

“When I realized it was in reverse, it was too late, yeah. I saw what was about to happen, and I knew what to do, but instead of hitting the brake I accidentally hit the gas pedal.”

“And then?”

“I felt the impact and my only thought was that I should pull the car forward. Yeah. Undo my mistake.”

“Right. And in the process you ran over both of your parents again. That’s your story. You’re sticking to that?”

“How can I do otherwise? It’s the truth.”

No, they had not believed her. No one believed her. People who knew Lystra Ellen Alice Reid scoffed at the notion that she had panicked. Panic? Lystra, panic?

But in the end the cops couldn’t prove a thing.

There wasn’t a lot in the way of a social services department in Tulsa, but a shrink was tasked with testing her.

“She’s a very difficult subject,” he had reported. “Hard to test. Her IQ is very high—very smart, very quick—so she knows how to answer, how to avoid setting off alarm bells. But my instinct tells me she’s concealing something. At times I got the impression she might be hearing voices. Phantom voices. She may just be traumatized. Or she may be schizophrenic but with enough control to hide it.”

Lystra was the sole heir to a million-dollar life insurance policy that was doubled due to the fact that the death had been an accident. Double indemnity, they called it.

Two million dollars. She’d been unable to touch it until she was eighteen, and at that time other family members had petitioned the court to examine her psychologically again.

The court had found her legally sane.

The voices in her head had congratulated her on the finding.

On her eighteenth birthday, Lystra had filed papers to form the Mad Alice Holding Company. And she’d gotten her first tattoo. She’d told the tattoo artist, “I want my adoptive parents, like in this picture. But I want them to be screaming.”

The tattoo artist had been reluctant, but an extra thousand dollars had cured him of all doubt.

The placement she’d chosen was strange. Her adoptive mother was beneath one breast, so that she seemed to be smothered by the weight of it. Her adoptive father, also screaming, was beneath the other.

Once both tattoos were complete, they began to speak to her. They wept, sometimes. Other times they threatened. She heard their voices so very clearly. If she stripped off her shirt and her bra she could see their mouths moving as they cried out in pain and despair.

But they could be useful, too, the talking tattoos. It was the dead Mr Reid who suggested using her inheritance to buy a small, failing medical testing company outside of Washington, DC.

So the Mad Alice Holding Company was dissolved and a successor corporation formed as an Isle of Man company, exempt from most supervision. And then, another stroke of unusual luck: a mid-sized competitor in the medical testing field had suffered a catastrophic hacking that had spilled the records all over the Internet.

Lystra Reid bought the stricken company and brought in the best security people around to ensure that a similar fate would never befall her. The result was a medical testing company, Directive Medical, which had never suffered a successful break-in, while—not so strangely—security problems plagued her competitors.

At the age of twenty-four, Reid controlled a third of the independent medical labs in North America, as well as significant portions of other markets around the world.

It was amazing what you could learn from data-mining the health records of more than two hundred million people worldwide. You could, for example, learn that the wife of a brilliant medical researcher named Grey McLure had a rare cancer. And you could learn that this McLure fellow was suddenly in a desperate search for living cell samples. And with just a bit more work you could discover that he was also looking for a wide range of animal tissue samples for a very secret project of some sort.

Lystra hung up the phone, indifferent really to the current spreadsheet drama from her office. It didn’t matter. There was no future to worry about. She swallowed the last of the bourbon and stood up to stretch. The marina was nestled between Tiburon and the adjoining Belvedere Island. Unpretentious yet extremely expensive homes rose on a cute little hill to her left and up the longer, wooded slope of Belvedere to her right. Looking south through the forest of masts she could see San Francisco. Fog was rolling out, revealing the city, all muted pastels and off-whites.

It was all in all a beautiful location, with sailboats and ferries and container ships passing by in review. A genteel, civilized, prosperous place.

And all of it about to come to a terrifying end.

It had been good to watch Janklow go mad; he had annoyed her on more than one occasion. She wanted to get a few tastes of the madness out here in the real world—before the final chapters, which would force her to hide out and watch it as well as she could via electronic means. The personal, real-world experiences would help her to enjoy the next step.

“All done?” the waiter asked, coming to clean her table.

“Soon,” she said.

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