BZRK: Reloaded (BZRK 2)

What the Armstrongs had done to that girl . . .

Sophie Morgenstein confirmed that the Doll Ship had indeed sunk in the South Atlantic, and that her sister had died. She herself had almost bled to death.

Valquist used a mapping app to lay out what she had gathered from Morgenstein’s account of her fellow passengers. Thus far Valquist had correlated five coastline kidnappings or disappearances. Sincheng, Taiwan. Funakoshi Bay, Japan. Pismo Beach, California. Ensenada, Mexico. Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

But of course in reality there were probably far more. Sophie Morgenstein estimated the captive population of the Doll Ship as over a hundred, not counting crew, guards

, and the despicable medical personnel who used drugs and even lobotomization to create a docile population.

Her recitation had left Pia shaken. She was not unaware of human cruelty and depravity, but this was monstrous. Even now her hands trembled with suppressed fury.

Pia entered the data into the map and calculated the cruise times between her five known points. Yes, a ship moving at, say, fourteen knots, could do it quite handily.

Then she noticed something. The number of unexplained coastal disappearances did not appear to decline following the sinking of the Doll Ship.

Valquist frowned and then rubbed the frown away with her fingertips. She took the short walk to the coffee room, made a cup of Nespresso, and came back to her data.

Two women missing from Freeport, Texas. A girl missing near Cameron Parrish, Louisiana. Panama City, Florida. Punta Guayanilla, Puerto Rico, a teenager. Pampa Melchorita, Peru. Alaska. Vladivostok. Northern Japan, quite recently.

Okinawa just a little over a week ago, a Japanese American girl.

Fighting down a growing excitement, Valquist began plotting the places out on Google Earth. Yes, sailing times worked if you assumed a slightly greater speed of fifteen knots.

She paused, looking at the satellite imagery of Point Lookout. Something just north of there: a series of white dots.

She zoomed in closer. Tanks of some kind.

She checked the location of the tanks: Dominion Cove, it was called. A liquified natural gas port.

She immediately Googled all the more recent kidnapping reports that fit the profile. She had eleven in all. Of those, six were within close range of a liquified natural gas facility.

A chill went up her spine.

That was not coincidence.

There was a second Doll Ship.

She rechecked her data, took a deep breath, and burst into the office of her supervisor, Georg Gronholm.

“I need Naval Intelligence.”

Georg shrugged. “I can introduce you to—”

“Not ours. I need NATO. I have a friend with the Royal Navy.” “So? Call this friend.”

Valquist shook her head. “It’s not the sort of thing for a phone call. He happens to be in Hong Kong. I need to fly there. Immediately. On the next flight. Now.”

The New York home of BZRK was abandoned. None of them believed they’d ever return. No one had the slightest affection for the place, with its peeling paint, filth, and stink of grease from the deli downstairs. But it was what they had. A place. A spot.

Without it they were just three teenagers—including one certified nut—a gay male model, a crazy person, and a Russian scientist. Somehow within the safe house it was possible to believe they were significant. Out alone? Plath and Keats in a cab on the way to the airport? The others in a rented van?

Ridiculous, that’s what they were.

The cab drove past the Tulip. Keats looked up at it and whatever tiny flame of hope he’d held on to flickered like a tired candle flame in a breeze.

Airport scanning machines could see guns. They could not see biots. Plath and Keats wore theirs in their heads. In specific, Plath had two biots—P1 and P2. Keats had one biot in his own head—K1—and K2 in Plath’s brain, working—whenever he had a spare moment and could focus on it—on strengthening the aneurysm wall.

The flight from New York’s La Guardia Airport to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport took only an hour. The problem was that Sadie McLure was a recognizable person. If she were spotted there would be media, there would be people sneaking video of her and uploading it to the web.