“What do you have in mind?”
“I think I walk down there, knock on the door, and hope she shakes hands.”
“I’m going to try to get through to some rational person, either in D.C. or Langley or any random naval vessel that might be within range. But don’t count on the cavalry. You understand?”
“I do,” Plath said.
He gave her an appraising look. “What are you, sixteen?”
“Yes,” Plath said. “But I’ve packed a lot into the last few months.”
He nodded. “I have a son about your age. Back in the world. Minneapolis, with my parents. I’m trying to tell myself he’s okay.”
Plath started to answer, stopped herself, shook her head, and finally said, “I was about to say I’m doing the same. But everyone I care about is either dead, or here with me.” Noah, lying in his own blood, gasping final breaths.
She squeezed her eyes shut. There were no tears—which, she thought, was a good thing as they would have frozen.
Her father, her brother. Ophelia, Nijinsky, Anya. Billy. She saw his head fall to the side, his neck cut almost through.
At least her mother had died of natural causes. She hadn’t been murdered. So much sadness, and now, the whole world was joining Plath in that sadness. That did not help. The old saying was that misery loves company. But Plath knew that misery needed hope. Misery needed to believe in a better future.
What was happening back in the world where Tanner’s son lived? Had Lear’s madness killed millions, or just hundreds of thousands? Had Burnofsky’s vile machines escaped to obliterate all of life?
How much could the human race stand? The dinosaurs had thrived for tens of millions of years before dying out. How many species had evolved, survived, and then at last succumbed?
Homo sapiens were, what, a million years old? And all of human civilization just a tenth of that. Had the clock run out?
Noah, lying in his own blood while the Twins raged and Burnofsky gloated.
Had she loved him? Then how could it be that she’d not told him? Too late now. Now she could only offer him more blood. More murder.
I’ll kill her. For you, Noah.
“It’s cold,” Plath said. “Let’s get this done.”
“We’ll drive you around to the far side, to the top of the ramp, and then stay out of sight.”
Staying out of sight was an illusion. Sensors had tracked the approach of the sleighs. And now Stillers reported to Lear that the sleighs were behaving strangely. They had stopped for a while at the northern end of the valley before continuing on around to the southern entrance.
“Now they’re just sitting there.”
Interesting, Lear thought. Frightened employees? Was some of the biot conditioning that all her core people had been subjected to beginning to weaken?
Her eyes flicked to the TV. YouTube was still up, thankfully. Bug Man was watching a shaky video of a Tesco being looted.
“Do we have cameras on the ramp?” Lear asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Stillers said.
“Get them on-screen here.” Soon a dimly lit image of the ramp opened. At first: nothing, just gravel and ice. Then, someone walking down the ramp. The person wore a heavy parka with a fur-lined hood, with dark goggles covering the upper part of the face.
“Can’t see the face,” Stillers said. “I’ll send some guys up there.”
“No.” Lear smiled. “I think … I think maybe I can guess who this is. Yeah. Have men ready, get a sniper into position to cover my door, make sure all security personnel are armed at all times, and I’ll want a handgun for myself. Do nothing unless I give the order.”
Stillers nodded and went about his work.
“I believe we have company, yeah,” Lear said to Bug Man. “I do not know how she did it, clever girl, but if I’m right, we’ll have an old friend of yours over for a drink.”
Opportunity for Suarez came with Kung Pao chicken—extra spicy, the way she liked it—brown rice, and a glass of Austrian white wine.
After so long planning what to do with a bucket as the only weapon, she was handed a golden opportunity: Chesterfield came armed.
She immediately recognized it as a Glock nine-mil with a eventeen-round clip. She had fired hundreds of rounds from a weapon essentially identical to this. All that was good, but the beautiful part from her perspective was that the standard cop holster was also very familiar, and she would be able to draw it smoothly, especially if she could get behind him.
Much better than trying to beat him down with a pee bucket.
The final piece of the puzzle was the Kung Pao. And more specifically, the peanuts.
She accepted her tray, invited him to stay so she could be sure it wasn’t too spicy. She took a bite and cried, “Oh, no. No! Peanuts!”
“What’s the matter?”
She put a hand to her throat and began wheezing dramatically. “Allergic … to … peanuts. I can’t breathe! Help …” And then choking noises and a strained, whooping breathing and Chesterfield made the fatal move: he behaved like a human being, stepped in, knelt down, and in a blur of movement felt the muzzle pressed against the side of his head.
“I would honestly hate to do it,” Suarez said. “You’ve been decent to me. But Chesterfield, I will blow your brains out if I have to. The alternative …”
Which was how Chesterfield ended up wearing her chains, with handcuffs added to keep him in a hog-tie position, and his own socks stuffed in his mouth with his belt wrapped tight to hold them in place.
“Can you breathe okay?” she asked him.
He nodded, and Suarez, armed with the gun, an extra clip, his radio, and his keys, opened the door to her cell very slightly and looked cautiously left and right. If there were cameras, they were not in evidence. Which did not mean they weren’t there.
Nothing you can do about that but move fast, Suarez told herself. Down the hallway, which carried the ridiculous medieval dungeon theme forward. A door. She cracked it slightly. There was a sort of control room—monitors and swivel chairs and two women chatting as they watched the screens. Panic buttons were large and prominent. She winced. There was no room for error or pity.
“Hey,” she said, stepping into view, and with two head shots dropped the women. One was clearly dead. The other rattled her shallow breaths in and out until Suarez covered her mouth and nose and waited for the final spasm. No point wasting ammo, and no point risking a third shot attracting attention.
Her immediate goal was simple: to find and take the sleigh she’d ridden in and get the hell out of there. But that would require some intel. She dropped into one of the dead women’s seats and began cycling through the camera angles, one of which did in fact show the hallway outside her dungeon. She had been lucky they hadn’t spotted her.
This monitoring station appeared to have only limited access to cameras, concentrating on the dungeon and what appeared to be extensive storerooms. Really quite impressive storerooms, too large to be in any of the aboveground buildings. She saw other people, some armed, some not. Some doing mundane tasks with iPad inventory systems, others driving forklifts, still others …
A man walked toward the monitoring station, holding three disposable cups and a paper sack in a recyclable cardboard holder. He might easily have been coming from a Starbucks.
“Hey, coffee!” he said as he stepped into the room. Suarez grabbed his hand, yanked him forward, slammed the door shut, and blew out his brains.
One of the coffees survived the fall, and she took a sip before getting back to her research. Surely there must be a way to break out of this limited protocol and access more cameras.
She was beginning to regret having killed all three of them—she could have used some help. But then she stumbled upon an open link that led her helpfully to a schematic of the base. The schematic had green dots for camera locations.
The first was password protected. She tried the usual combinations, and none worked. So she rifled the pockets an
d wallets of the dead, and finally found a tiny slip of yellow legal pad.
“Thank God for unreliable memories.” Moments later: “And bingo. We are in.”
The sun was just millimeters above the horizon, and the weak light left the valley in darkness. Stadium lights cast a circle of eerie orange across the main buildings, excepting the house, which cast its own warm, buttery light.
Plath was shaking with cold and fear by the time she had descended the long ramp and then crunched her way across the gravel to the house. She did not spot—indeed did not look for—the sniper who watched her through his telescopic sights.
She climbed the few stairs and stood on the porch of the impossible house belonging, she was certain, to Lystra Reid, also known as Lear.
She pulled off her glove and knocked.
The door flew open to reveal an attractive young woman wearing white yoga pants, shearling boots, and a blue down vest over a sheer white tunic.
Plath pushed up her goggles and slid back her hood.
“Oh. My. God.” Lear said. “It is you.”
“May I come in?” Plath asked, feeling an absurdity in it all that went beyond the merely surreal.
“Mmm, not just yet. First, I should tell you there’s a very good shot watching you, yeah, and ready to fire at any excuse. So. Shrug off the coat, keep your hands where I can see them, and don’t move.” In order to emphasize her point, Lear pointed with one hand at the gun in the other.
Plath complied.
“Now, turn around slowly.”
This, too, Plath did.
“Ah! There we go. You do have a gun. I thought you might.” Lear pulled the gun from Plath’s waistband and tossed it out onto the ice. It came to rest by a lawn ornament, a pink flamingo that must have been someone’s idea of witty commentary on the climate.
“Now, come on and warm up,” Lear said. “Bug and I are drinking excellent bourbon, would you like some?”
“Bug?”
Plath looked past Lear and saw a badly battered Bug Man, sitting on a couch and looking miserable and humiliated, and perhaps just a little hopeful.
“You two have met, right?”
“Briefly,” Plath said. Then added, “I don’t drink.”
“Yes, you do, yeah, not a lot but on occasion,” Lear said smugly. “Yeah.” She handed Plath a glass. Plath took a sip, grimaced, and put the glass aside.
“If we’re going to be friends, you’re going to have to get into the spirit of things,” Lear said, her face darkening.
So Plath picked the glass back up and followed Lear’s direction to sit, sit down, take it easy, relax.
Plath sat. She saw the TV, currently on a YouTube of a burning house. Where it was she had no idea. Bug Man sat stiff and wary.
“I did it,” Plath said.
“Did it?” Lear asked.
“I blew up the Tulip. I gave the order to Caligula. Then I followed the breadcrumbs here.”
That had the desired effect of throwing Lear off stride. “Are you trying to tell me that—”
“Did I know it was you behind it?” Plath interrupted. “Yes. After you killed Jin it was obvious that he had failed you, somehow. Was it that he found out the reason you’d ordered him to wire Vincent?”
Lear, small smile growing. “In a way. Nijinsky hated you. He didn’t like being pushed aside for some kid. So that was part of it. But yeah, he was starting to get cold feet. Developing a conscience.”
“I didn’t want to die choking on my own tongue on an escalator. So I didn’t fight it very hard. I could have sent my own biots in to stop it all happening, my own rewiring. But I could see where it was all going.”
“Oh?”
“I came to like the idea. I came to like the whole, meticulous planning of it. It was brilliant. It was genius. It’s historic.”
Lear’s nostrils flared, and her eyes widened. “Historic?”
So, Plath noted, she liked that word. “Well, yeah,” she said. She took a sip of the whiskey, suppressed the face she wanted to make, and instead said, “It gets better as you get used to it.”
“Historic, yeah?” Lear prompted.
“I remember this lecture in history class. All about Genghis Khan. You know, the Mongol guy.”
“I know.”
No, Plath thought, Lear had not heard of the great Khan. But she didn’t like admitting it. “Well, the point was that Genghis killed, like, thirty million people, no one is sure how many. Maybe twice that much. There was this one thing where he took a bunch of captured enemies, and built a platform on top of them. His own soldiers had lunch on the platform as it slowly crushed all the men beneath.”
“Yes,” Lear said fervently.
“But the point was, that later, like nowadays, we look back on him, Genghis, I mean, as a great historical figure. He, like, improved the economy and so on by clearing out a bunch of people who were in his way. But he killed millions.”
“He changed the game. But I’m changing it more. I’m changing it all,” Lear boasted. “I’m creating whole new species, yeah, to take over. I mean, you know, thanks to your dad, who was a genius. Yeah. By the way, condolences on his death, he was a great man.”
Plath’s mask almost dropped then. Almost. “Yes, he was.”
“But we used his techniques and played around, and now we have three very interesting species. Macro, not micro. We’ll breed them up, yeah, and then release them when the time is right. One of them can’t metabolize anything but pork and human meat. Hah! Later, at the next level, yeah.”
“But how are you going to watch what happens? I mean …” She waved a hand at the YouTube video. “How much longer is Google going to work?”
“Oh, don’t worry. The satellites will work independently for a long time. And we’ll start placing cameras here and there, when the time is right.”
“You’ve thought of everything,” Plath said.
Lear smiled, a shark’s smile this time. “You don’t really think I’m buying any of this, do you?”
“Sorry?”
“This bad-girl act. This Sadie McLure, indifferent to suffering. You tried to stop Caligula. I know. I spoke to my father before he died. That was kind of a drag. He was very useful, the old man. I was never going to bring him here, no, no, but it would have been fun watching him deal with the world I’m creating. He would have been an interesting player in the game.”
Plath put her drink down again. Her hand was shaking. Lear saw it.
“The world you’re creating?”
But Lear wasn’t playing along anymore. “How much longer do you think you have to live, Sadie?”
Plath did not answer.
“Two ways forward for you, Sadie. The usual choice: death or madness. We have some decent twitchers here, and we could easily wire you up. Or I could be disappointed that you would just walk in here and think you could lie to me.” Lear raised the pistol on her lap and leveled it at Plath.
The muzzle looked huge. What a cliché, some corner of Plath’s mind thought. That’s what everyone who has ever stared down the wrong end of a gun thinks: oh, it’s big.
“Go ahead,” Plath said.
“You don’t think I will?” Lear stood up and let the down vest slide to the floor. The sheer tunic revealed shadows of the tattoo horrors beneath. Lear pointed to a spot on her belly, right where an appendix scar would be. “Right here, yeah. That’s where I would tattoo your face. Maybe then you’ll talk to me, yeah? They speak the truth, the tattoos do. Yeah.”
“I believe you’ll kill me,” Plath said. “You’re a mass murderer. Before you’re done you’ll kill more people than Genghis or Hitler. You’re a sick, twisted, crazy woman playing an insane game. So yeah, I think you’ll kill me.”
Lear cocked her head, all the while keeping the gun aimed. “Don’t you want to beg?”
Plath forced a smile of her own. A peace had descended over her. It was like what Noah had described to her, the eerie feeling of detachment and fearlessness that c
ould come in the midst of a very challenging game. It would be over in minutes.
“I’m not afraid to die,” she said. “So long as I take you with me, you foul, fucked-up psychopath.”
“Hah!” Lear said. And then, the wheels began to turn in her head. Plath could see her retracing her steps. “You never touched me. Yeah, you never touched me.”
“No,” Plath said. “But you took my gun. As I knew you would.”
Lear swallowed. She glanced at Bug Man, as if he would or could help.
“You know the anterior cerebral artery?” Plath asked. “Don’t be embarrassed if you don’t. I never would have, if some sick creature had not dragged me into her little BZRK game. But now, hey, I know a fair amount. Like I know that the anterior cerebral artery feeds blood to the frontal lobes. Which is where your consciousness lives.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“Three biots, Lear. Each has a nice, long spike buried in that artery. There’s blood leaking, but just a few cells, nothing fatal. It takes pressure to hold them in place. I think you may have high blood pressure, because it’s a little like holding a Champagne cork in. If I keep up the pressure, leave the spikes in, well, eventually the clotting factor will seal the damage. But if I let the spikes out … which is what will happen if my biots are suddenly no longer being controlled … there will be a sudden spurt of blood. The pressure of cells forcing their way out of the holes will actually widen the holes. And since all the spikes are close together, the whole area will probably tear wide open. I know these things because of my own aneurysm. Useful.”
Lear lowered the pistol and squeezed the trigger. The bang rattled the glassware.
Plath felt a terrible blow, like a crowbar against her knee. The pain was immediate. Blood gushed from the wound. Bits of white bone stuck like teeth from ripped skin.
Plath fell to her other knee and shrieked in pain.
“See, little Sadie girl, there are other ways. I don’t have to kill you. I can just keep hurting you. How does it feel? Does it hurt? It’s weird, yeah, but people who can face the idea of dying can’t always face the idea of suffering, yeah?”