Bzrk (12 page)

They didn’t know Burnofsky’s name, not his real one, just the name he gave them: John Musselwhite. Did the management know it was a fake name? Probably. Most likely they’d have been horrified if he gave a real name.

It was a loft, this room, vast, but not a wide-open space. There was a sort of catwalk that went around the room, but it had been nicely done, industrial, yes, but well lit, cinematic almost. There were security guys but ever so discreet, dressed in loose-fitting black trousers and white shirts, like something you’d see Jackie Chan wear in one of his movies. Generic Asian chic. If they had guns, then the guns were concealed, and the security men smiled. Smiles, smiles. In two of the corners were tall dancing platforms, essentially open hydraulic elevators that raised the dancers up or down, like slow-motion pistons. The girls were varied and swapped out often enough that neither they nor the patrons would become bored.

The music was softer than you might expect from a den of iniquity. It was not, Burnofsky thanked God, the music of the aging rocker he had just seen the back of. In fact he’d never heard music quite like it anywhere else. It was a soft pulsation with a repetitive melody and had a quality of perpetualness about it. A bit like house dance music, although no one but the professional dancers would be expected to dance.

Beneath the catwalk were the alcoves. They were mocked up to look a bit like an Eastern bazaar, as though they were tents, so what you saw looking across the room were tent flaps or beaded curtains or, in the case of some who enjoyed flaunting their vice, canvas drapes pulled back to reveal and invite.

The center of the room was a rectangular bar, all lacquered ebony with tasteful red and gold highlights. They served alcohol of course, and food as well, though few people ate the dumplings. It was more that some of the patrons didn’t like staying inside their alcoves but enjoyed mingling and chatting, often with the bartenders. And then, some people liked a vodka with their pipe.

Burnofsky entered his narrow alcove, no bigger than a good-size department-store dressing room, with just a pair of easy chairs and a small table, a dim lamp, and an old-fashioned rotary phone. Burnofsky knew the drill. He lifted the receiver and waited until a voice answered.

“Yes, sir. How may I be of service?” A man’s voice, kind, understanding, nonjudgmental.

“Ah-pen-yen,” Burnofsky said, the China Bone’s preferred term.

The voice said, “Very good, sir. Shall we make all preparations, or would you prefer to do your own?”

“You prep it.” Burnofsky smiled. “I trust you.”

He hung up and relaxed back into the chair. From the alcove to his left came the spicy-sweet smell he loved. From the other side a sudden explosion of laughter, quickly stifled.

He’d been looking forward to this all day. The day had included a long face-to-face with the Twins. That was never a good thing. Especially when the heart of the meeting was to tell Burnofsky that Bug Man would be taking the lead on the UN job.

He hadn’t argued much. Bug Man’s tactics were sound. But he was arrogant, and Burnofsky could see too many ways things could go wrong. Burnofsky didn’t like the sense of plans being rushed. There would be another UN General Assembly in a year. Another year’s planning and they’d be in a much stronger position.

Right now AFGC had a grand total of twenty-seven qualified twitchers, counting himself. Twenty-seven. To target and control six major heads of state while maintaining all their existing projects? The logistics were staggering.

Infest the prime ministers of Britain, India, and Japan, the chancellor of Germany, and the presidents of China and the United States? That was six teams in six cities, spinning away inside the brains of four men and two women who were among the most-watched, most-observed people in the human race?

Bad wiring had a tendency to cause seizures. Seizures in an average person were manageable, but in a head of state? The POTUS just had to twitch to have an elite team of doctors probing her ten different ways. And what then? What happened when the doctors at Bethesda found a head full of nanobots?

Panic, that’s what. Phone calls to the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, every foreign intel outfit. The rumors were already out there. A Google search would turn up the paranoids—some with surprisingly accurate information.

If the FBI suddenly had proof? Physical proof?

AFGC might control the deputy director of the FBI, but he alone would never be able to contain something like that.

Twenty-seven twitchers. And of those, maybe five who could fight half as well as they spun. That’s what the kid didn’t get. Bug Man didn’t understand that twenty-seven was really closer to seven who could fight. And maybe three who could fight and win against the very best.

A waitress appeared. She was carrying a silver tray. She bowed slightly, set the tray down, and backed out of the alcove.

The tray was covered with a thick, white cloth, and on that cloth rested a narrow glass tray of long matches and an ornate, Cloisonné water pipe with a long, bent bronze neck and a tiny bowl.

Burnofsky closed his eyes and smiled. When he opened them again, his worries and troubles were already starting to recede because rescue was at hand.

Troubling visions of failure, discovery, capture followed by twenty years cold turkey in a federal prison, would disappear soon enough.

But not just yet. A sweaty, nervous man was standing in the entrance, pushing aside the drape, diffident, bobbing like he was halfway to a bow.

Burnofsky had forgotten. There was business to be conducted before pleasure was to be savored. He didn’t stand up. He did offer his hand.

“Lord Elfangor?” the man whispered, practically wetting himself. “I’m Aidan Bailey.” The accent was Australian or New Zealand, one of those. A UN employee, of course.

Burnofsky sighed. Of course. This would be One-Up’s work. And as usual she had taken the most dramatic route. He squinted up at the man, trying to recall the exact nature of his wiring. He was a Scientologist, which meant he was already prepared to buy into alien mythology. A bit of a change from the usual giddy idealists churned up by Nexus Humanus and delivered to AFGC.

Burnofsky wondered how One-Up had inserted that “Lord Elfangor” bullshit. Had she actually gone to the trouble of tapping phonemes to invent a name? Unlikely. More likely she’d cauterized some critical thinking—there couldn’t have been much there to begin with—wired the man’s religious indoctrination to some bit of TV trivia or movie lore and come up with the name, then tied it to a pic of Burnofsky.

She tried too hard, One-Up. Occam’s razor: find the simplest solution.

“I am Lord Elfangor,” Burnofsky said. “Thank you for coming.”

“I …” The man laughed, sudden, surprised. “I don’t even know why I’m here, really. I just knew …”

“You knew you had to be here,” Burnofsky said, doing his best not to glance at the pipe, willing himself to play out the role. “As though a force greater than yourself, a mind much deeper than your own—”

“Yes! That’s it!”

“Mr. Bailey, very rare are those who can hear the summons. Rarer still those with the wisdom to heed the words of the Masters.”

He was making it up as he went along. He’d seen One-Up’s report, skimmed it, but hadn’t memorized all the details.

“What you do here today will save the human race,” Burnofsky said solemnly. “You have something for me.”

Bailey nodded. He was believing. But he was troubled that he was believing. He sensed something wrong. A part of him knew. A part of him was fighting it, even as his hand went slowly to the inner pocket of his jacket.

“You are feeling enturbulated. You are concerned that you do not have your ethics in,” Burnofsky said, and held his breath. Had he said it right? He had a near-perfect memory, and he’d read about Scientology—

“Yes,” Bailey said, and laughed with relief.

Burnofsky winked. “When we are done, you will feel clear.” He watched the man closely. It was dangerous to be playing with unfamiliar cult terminology. It was too easy to make a revealing misstep.

Bailey drew his hand from his pocket and placed a flash drive in Burnofsky’s palm.

“Thank you,” Burnofsky said. “You have done well.”

Bailey breathed a huge sigh of relief.

“You can go,” Burnofsky said. “And, oh, um, if you happen to meet a young woman with the unusual name of One-Up, give her a message for me.”

Burnofsky looked him in the eye. He was sure that One-Up’s nanobots were tapping the optic nerve, or perhaps even listening. He scribbled a few words on the pad of paper, tore off a sheet, and held it up so Bailey could see it.

“Make it clean, and far from here,” Bailey read the words aloud. “I don’t understand.”

Burnofsky waved a hand to shoo the doomed man away. The last thing they could afford was this fool talking to his Scientology auditor and sending those loons into a frenzy.

So at a safe distance from the China Bone, an artery in Bailey’s head would burst.

Burnofsky wondered why he had given the kill order to One-Up. She didn’t need it. She knew a wire job this rough and ready, this tenuous, needed to be terminated.

It occurred to him that he wanted to take the burden of guilt on himself. That he often did that. Maybe if One-Up were older … But a seventeen-year-old girl should have some deniability for murder.

How in hell had it come to this?

Burnofsky remembered—how many years ago had it been—when he and young Grey McLure had worked together. Back in the day. Now Grey was dead. And Burnofsky had made it happen, even if it was Bug Man who had done the actual deed.

He slipped the flash drive containing security codes—CCTV access, computer access, door passes for the United Nations Building—into his pocket.

He raised the pipe and lit a match.

Twenty-seven twitchers to take over the world. Half of them nothing but messed-up children.

Yeah. Well. What …

Oh! Oh, yes.

Oh, yeah …

Burnofsky lay back, forgetting the pipe still dangling from his hand, and laughed softly, happily to himself.

ELEVEN

“Who are you?” Sadie asked.

Noah shrugged. “They said not to tell anyone my name.”

They looked at each other across the shabby room. The walls were a water-stained green. The ceiling was pressed tin with a repeating wreath pattern that wrapped around the place where a light fixture must once have hung. The couch was cracked brown leather, and there was a rectangular glass coffee table decorated with rings left by cups and mugs. A disappointingly empty bag of hot-and-spicy Doritos sat next to an equally empty soda can.

There was a TV. CNN was on, but muted.

There was a computer. Someone had left it on a game site.

There were cameras, but neither Sadie nor Noah saw those because they were no more than nail holes in the crown molding.

Sadie was seated in a deep, badly upholstered Morris chair. Noah had just walked in and looked a bit lost. She had a mug of green tea. He had a camouflage backpack that he pushed against the wall so as not to trip anyone.

Sadie was sharply alert, despite not having slept at all, and Noah was blinking too much and breathing too hard as a result of not having slept enough.

Morning had cast a gray shadow behind the pulled-down blinds in the tall windows.

Sadie saw the inexpensive luggage, the jacket that had definitely not come from any of the shops on Fifth Avenue, the sneakers, the arguably cute and definitely authentic bed head, the tentative mouth, the alarmingly blue eyes.

She had noted the English accent. She knew—from her mother, from her mother’s British friends, from several visits to London—that English accents came in a wide range of types, from “My ancestors cleaned out stables” all the way up to “Your ancestors cleaned my ancestors’ stables.” Noah was definitely on the stable-cleaning end of the spectrum.

That made her inclined to like him. Or at least to think that it might be possible to like him.

For his part Noah saw a girl doing her best not to look like the sort of girl who was probably comfortable ordering around grown men and women.
A girl with servants,
he thought,
you could see it in
her look.
Not haughty. Not a bitch. But also not even a little bit shy about looking him in the eye and allowing her judgment to show clearly.

She thought he might have some potential. She also expected to be disappointed.

He thought she would never agree to go out with him.

She liked his eyes.

He liked her freckles.

She thought that he probably thought she looked a little startled.

He thought she could probably smell his “I slept on a plane” breath from clear across the room.

Nijinsky and Ophelia came in together. Renfield just behind them. He took up a post leaning against the corner of two walls.

Noah looked at Nijinsky with some surprise. He had last seen him in London and somehow identified him with that city, despite his being an American.

Nijinsky smiled. He had a warm, quizzical expression, and Noah thought, hoped, anyway, that Nijinsky might not be a bad person.

Noah watched the way Nijinsky took in the physical setting. Weary familiarity and disdain. Nijinsky was not a young man who would ever approve of water-stained green walls or coffee rings on tables. He was casually dressed in a blazer and slacks and collared shirt that taken all together must have cost—by Noah’s estimate— a hell of a lot.

Noah had not met Ophelia, Sadie had not met Nijinsky, but of course no one wanted real names spoken, so neither Noah nor Sadie were introduced.

It was frankly starting to annoy Sadie. She was quite confident that Nijinsky knew who she was. Obviously Ophelia did. They all did. Except maybe the boy. The one with the startled look on his face and the eyes that kept going back to her again and again.

As for Noah, he knew that Nijinsky knew who he was, but beyond that there was no reason anyone should know him.

Ophelia sat on the couch, close to Sadie, and patted the space beside her while smiling at Noah. Noah obeyed and sat.

Nijinsky looked around, a little desperate for a seating solution, and finally lowered himself with minimal physical contact onto an armless chair. He flicked his blazer expertly so that it draped just the right way. His trouser legs stayed where they should and did not reveal above-sock flesh.

“We’ve never had two new people at once before, so procedures are a bit ad hoc,” Nijinsky said.

“But very glad to have you both,” Ophelia said. She had two smiles, one right after the other. The one for Sadie was sisterly. The one for Noah was cordial, and also included the information that she was too old for him, nothing personal, but he was not to flirt with her.

Noah hadn’t been considering flirting with her. He was in fact desperately trying to avoid looking at the sprinkling of freckles across Sadie’s nose and cheeks, and he was trying not to feel the sadness that throbbed through her tough-girl expression, because, well, there was no because, really. He just wanted to look at her. And he knew he shouldn’t. But he did look at her and then looked away and did this possibly twenty times. And bit his lip, which didn’t help.

“You’ve both been given some basic information,” Nijinsky said. “You know why you’re here. Your motivations are your own. You just need to know that you’ve already crossed the line. Sorry if that wasn’t obvious, but you are in.
In
. And there is no out for either of you.”

He didn’t smile, so it wasn’t a joke. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, signaling that this was serious.

“You are part of us now. You’ll get orders. And you’ll obey them.” Nijinsky’s eyes slid over Noah to rest quite deliberately on Sadie. Noah used the excuse to steal his own look, and boy, you did not want to be the guy who was on the wrong end of the defiance in Sadie’s eyes. It wasn’t a put-on; it came from all the way down deep. From reptilian brain and spine and fist.

Noah looked away and rested his own gaze on Nijinsky. Was it racist of him to think that Asian eyes showed less expression? Whether it was or not, Nijinsky was hard to read. And then, just a glint of amusement. Nijinsky liked Sadie. Not
that
way, but he liked her.

“We all get orders,” Ophelia said.

“Yes, we do,” Nijinsky agreed.

“We all understand.”

“Yes.”

“The stuff that matters …” Ophelia finished the sentence with a shrug.

“We’ve all lost people,” Nijinsky said.

Ophelia nodded. No smile. The skin of her face was brittle, stretched, concealing memories. It was hard now to imagine that face ever smiling. And yet she had, hadn’t she?

“We don’t want to lose any more,” Nijinsky said. “We put our lives on the line. And those who run biots risk their sanity. We do this of our own free will. We do it so that we and the rest of the human race will continue to
have
free will. So that people will be able to choose: right or wrong, good or evil. The other side claims to want universal happiness, and I’ll tell you: they aren’t lying.”

He let that sink in for a moment, a self-consciously dramatic pause.

“They would use technology to make the human race into a sort of insect society. To make us all one mind, united. No unhappiness, no stress, no rage or jealousy. But we choose a different world. We choose the right to unhappiness.”

“We’re fighting for unhappiness?” Noah asked skeptically. “It sounds a bit crazy when you put it that way.”

Nijinsky laughed, delighted. “Oh, it is.” Then, serious again, he said, “We fight for the right to be what we choose, to feel what we choose. Even if what we choose seems crazy to others.”

“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll fight for revenge,” Sadie said.

Nijinsky’s eyes glittered. “Oh, yes. That’s fine with me.”

A look passed between him and Ophelia. Ophelia looked satisfied, almost an “I told you so” look. They were pleased, Nijinsky and Ophelia, pleased with their new recruits.

“We leave our old names behind, and choose a new name,” Nijinsky went on. “From the start it became a … let’s say a custom … to choose the name of someone, real or fictional, who had slipped the surly bonds of sanity.” He made a wry smile.

Ophelia said, “Vincent for Vincent van Gogh, Nijinsky, Hamlet’s Ophelia, Stephen King’s Annie Wilkes, Caligula.” She blinked when she said that name. “Kerouac, Renfield here—a character from
Dracula
no less—and of course, Lear.”

Sadie, who missed very little in life said, “Who’s Caligula? That’s a pretty heavy name.”

Ophelia used her eyes to direct the question to Nijinsky. Nijinsky closed his blazer and buttoned it. “This isn’t the Girl Scouts. We can’t allow betrayal.”

Sadie smirked. “Caligula is your enforcer.”

“What is this?” Noah asked. The sound of his own voice surprised him. He hadn’t intended to speak. “You came to me. You told me and—” He glanced at Sadie, realized he wasn’t supposed to be indiscreet, blushed, and picked up the dropped thread of his thought. “You came to me. Then that fucking test. And I was, like, okay then. Now you’re saying what? What are you saying?” His mouth didn’t look tentative now. There was a curl in the upper lip that made it seem just a little bit as if there was someone harder hiding behind the blue Bambi eyes and the diffident manner.

Nijinsky nodded slightly to himself. “I’m telling you that if you betray BZRK, you will get a visit from Caligula. And I want you to understand this, boy.” He stabbed his manicured finger at Noah, not angry, but like, “Hear me, remember this, or God help you,” and said, “No matter who tells you they can keep you safe from Caligula, they’re lying. No one can keep you safe from Caligula.”

Sadie looked at him, the blue-eyed boy. Never a blink. No flinch. “I wrote a paper on Sylvia Plath. She was a poet. She was thirty when she stuck her head into the oven. Turned on the gas. Breathed it until she was dead. Her children were in the next room.” She blinked once, a slow, deliberate move. “Is that crazy enough for you?”

Nijinsky drew back, almost like he feared contamination.

Noah looked at her in absolute wonder and he thought,
She’s
already crazy
. And at the same time thought he would fall asleep that night only after lying awake a long time and thinking of her.

“Sylvia, then?” Nijinsky asked.

A slight headshake. “Plath.”

It had a religious feel, that moment. No one smiled or laughed or winked or, Noah was sure, even considered doing any of those things.

“How about you, kid?” Nijinsky asked, still looking at Sadie. At
Plath
.

“I don’t … know …” Noah said. “I mean … I wrote an essay on Nelson Mandela once. But he wasn’t crazy.”

That did earn a smile from Ophelia, an unambiguously sweet one. Renfield looked puzzled and a little offended to find himself puzzled. He had no idea who this Nelson Mandela was.

Noah wasn’t sure how to read Plath’s look. Sizing up. That was as close as he could get to defining it. She wasn’t quite judging him, just assessing him. Measuring him. Like she might do if she was picking up a screwdriver and wondering, “Is this the right size?”

Ophelia said, “If we’re to have a Plath, perhaps we should have a Keats. Also a great poet. Plath was American; Keats was British. He was also depressive and an opium addict. And like Plath, he died very young. In his twenties.”

“Two poets in one day,” Nijinsky said. He stood up, moving with just a little less grace than he’d shown sitting down. “This may seem silly. Making you take new names. But it has a point.”

“It’s not …” the newly named Keats began to say.

“The point,” Nijinsky said, eyes seeking theirs, each in turn, “Is that you must right now, here, without pause for further consideration, and without later regret, accept that you are in a fight with a deadly enemy. From here forward your lives are in danger. From here forward you surrender any claim to privacy. From here forward there are only two outcomes for you: death or madness.”

His phone rang.

He drew it out, looked at the caller, turned abruptly, and walked away.

“Or victory,” Ophelia said quietly, when she was sure Nijinsky would not overhear.