She imagined what the place would look like locked down, with all those shutters closed. And then she noticed the four half-buried towers two hundred yards out from each point on the diamond.
“I’ll be damned if those aren’t gun emplacements,” she muttered. Not that she saw anything like weapons.
A mile away to the south and barely visible because the wind was now blowing crystals of ice through the air was a larger structure—long, low, and unadorned—that could only be some sort of hangar.
That’s where the souped-up hovercraft would be.
It hit her then full force: they didn’t have anyone who could fix a fuel injector? At a facility where they were building jet-powered hovercraft? Bullshit.
She hadn’t cleverly exploited an opening to reach Forward Green: she’d been lured there.
Lystra and Bug Man left Stockholm not by way of Arlanda Airport but by car, to a private airfield fifty miles out of town, out into the landscape of snow and dark pine trees.
Bug Man had only a light parka that George had supplied, in no way sufficient to deal with a Swedish winter. The run from the car to the welcoming light of the jet was enough to freeze him, but Lystra seemed indifferent, still weari
ng her blood-drenched red dress—though she had swapped her shoes for a pair of shearling boots. She would look almost cute, Bug Man thought, if she were younger. And a whole lot less insane.
It was warm on the plane, which took off within minutes of the door closing, soaring up into the night.
“Look!” Lystra said, and drew him out of his seat to look through the window on her side.
The sky was an eerie light show, green against black, the stars all rendered irrelevant. The green was a veil, translucent, shimmering.
“Aurora borealis,” Lystra said. “The northern lights.” She nodded. “We get them in the south sometimes, too. You’ll see.”
Bug Man watched for a while, acutely aware of her nearness. Crazy, yes. Too old for him, yes. Still …
She must have sensed it because she laughed, an almost girlish sound, and pushed him back to his seat.
But then she stood up, turned her back to him, and said, “Help me with the zipper.”
Bug Man swallowed hard. Okay, yes, he’d thought about it. But seriously? With a woman who had his sanity and life in her hands? He’d watched the TV as instructed, and he had seen the Nobel madness. He had even seen a fleeting shot of Lystra dancing and twirling away from the carnage.
God only knew what the woman would do to him if he disappointed her.
He drew the zipper down. It snagged halfway and he had to tug at it for a bit, all the while with his nose just inches from her back.
Most of what he could see was tattooed. Blues and reds and greens. He couldn’t make out the patterns, except that most of it seemed to be faces. He saw eyes staring, mouths twisted in screams.
“Damn,” he whispered, and winced, hoping she hadn’t heard.
“You like my ink?”
“Uh, yeah,” he said too quickly.
“Want to see more? Want to see my latest one?”
He froze. Just absolutely froze. She let her dress fall to the floor.
“Oh … shit,” he said. There were faces on her back, on her behind, on her flanks. Not every inch was covered—maybe half of the available flesh.
More than enough. It was a horror show.
Faces. Men, women, one that might even be a child. All in agony or rage or some combination of the two.
He couldn’t breathe. He did not want to see more. He did not want her to turn around.
But she did.