BZRK: Reloaded (BZRK 2)

“What happened to the driver?” Plath asked the back of Caligula’s head as they pulled away.

“He had some vacation time coming.”

“What happened to the TFDs?”

Caligula shrugged. “One tried to put a tracking device on the car. It was an amateurish job. I resented it.”

She saw his eyes in the mirror, as deep as desert ravines, creased with sunbaked lines.

“It’s all a setup,” she said. “The TFDs looking tough when I got here? That was a show. If they really wanted to kill me there are buildings all around, windows with perfect sight lines for a sniper.”

Caligula’s eyes wrinkled in merriment. “They gave you exactly what you wanted, didn’t they?”

“Yep,” she said. “They lined up and rolled over like well-behaved puppies.”

Caligula laughed, delighted. “I’ll pass that description along to Lear.”

“Lear needs to contact me. Directly.”

Caligula said nothing.

“You tell him or her. Or them. Or whatever, that I’m going to keep financing BZRK, just as my father did. But not unless I know who I’m dealing with.”

He did not answer. He neither nodded nor shook his head. It was getting on Plath’s nerves, which were already frayed.

“Ophelia,” she said.

Caligula nodded slightly, as though he was expecting it. “She’s gone.”

“Was it …was it easy for her?”

Caligula pulled the car over to the side of the street. H

e turned around and looked at her. She did not flinch. “It’s never easy. It’s death. And death is terrible and profound.”

“And when it’s me or Keats you have to kill?” Plath demanded, shamed by the quiver in her voice.

“Then that, too, will be terrible and profound,” Caligula said.

Pia Valquist was forty-one years old. Her hair had always been blonde. First because her DNA had dictated that color, and now because her hairdresser made it so. Her tired eyes had luggage— dark bags. Her feet were a source of constant pain made worse by the snow that seemed to laugh at boasts of waterproofing for boots.

A long time ago she had been tall and moderately pretty, with the kind of body you expect from a five-foot-eleven-inch Swedish girl.

She was still tall.

And she was a spy. A very cold spy as she tramped from the rented Saab she had reluctantly left parked at the gate. It was a long driveway, but no one had answered the call box, and well, she’d be damned if she was going to stop now. It was very dark, but then this time of the year, this far north, it was dark almost all day. The sun was nominally visible for a few hours on either side of noon, but today’s sun had been a distant, helpless light filtered through mist. It was long gone now.

People know that all the great powers have intelligence services, the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, and of course the famous MI6 of James Bond fame.

People do not expect that a small country, a small peaceable country like Sweden that had last fought a war in the nineteenth century, would have spies. They didn’t have many. The Militära underrättelseoch säkerhetstjänsten—the MUST—did not have a giant complex like the CIA. They didn’t have their own array of satellites. They didn’t blow people up with missiles fired from drones.

The KSI—Kontoret för Särskild Inhämtning—MUST’s most secretive branch, had even fewer people, a relative handful. The advantage of small size and a lack of current war, or likelihood of war, meant that the KSI could tolerate individual strangeness to a degree that one of the tight-jawed, do-or-die, save-the-world spy agencies could not. It could, for example, allow Pia Valquist time to obsess over the Natal Incident.

Three years earlier a very strange thing had occurred in the northern Brazilian city of Natal. A ship’s boat had come ashore there in the wake of a devastating hurricane. The ship’s boat belonged to a converted, repurposed amphibious assault ship purchased through shell corporations from the U.S. Navy. It was an older ship, Vietnam War–era. Originally, when it had been a U.S. Navy ship, it had been the U.S.S. Tiburon.

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

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