Perhaps a nice piece of cod. He liked cod when it was not overdone.
Yes, the final chorus! Applause from the thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people in the square. Time to applaud, time to enlarge the benign smile, time to …
The Pope blinked.
Then he frowned.
What was that? What was he seeing? Some sort of … it looked like an insect, a bizarre insect. He was seeing it, but … but it was nowhere around him.
He looked around, puzzled and a little concerned. No one else seemed to see anything unusual.
And now … now another vision. Like a movie screen lit up inside his head, like two of them, really, and both of them showing fantastic insects.
The one insect, he could see its face.… He could … he was hallucinating. Clearly, he was hallucinating. Was it a stroke? He dreaded a stroke; his father had died at age fifty-four of a stroke.
The insect face … It …
“It’s me,” he said in his native Spanish.
Then, as quickly as it opened, one of the windows in his head closed. Gone.
“Ah!” he cried out. “Ah!”
He sank to his knees, and now everyone was looking at him, now the TV cameras and the phone cameras all swiveled toward him, as he cried, “Oh, oh, oh!”
The Pope began to laugh. He began to laugh and laugh and then he was screaming, he knew he was screaming, though he felt no pain.
He screamed and tore at his vestments.
The world was swirling colors, all zooming crazily around him, faces suddenly coming into focus, distorted, demonic faces.
Only when he grabbed an elderly woman’s walker and began attacking the children with it did anyone try to stop him.
In the end he was hauled away by Rome police and his own plainclothes Swiss Guards.
TWENTY-ONE
The sense of approaching doom was rising now. The country was scared. The world was scared. Glances were shielded. Heads were lowered. Shoulders hunched. Jaws tight. Voices too high or too low, too loud or whispering like a scared child.
Not as scared yet as it should be, no, not yet. But when people figured it out, the true panic would begin.
The Twins had pulled the trigger on massed preprogrammed attacks: Burnofsky had seen the footage of Stern. There would be more of that. Benjamin was in the driver’s seat increasingly, and Benjamin would have his apocalypse.
But that was nothing compared to what Lear was doing.
“Of course it’s Lear!” Burnofsky cried aloud, as though someone was arguing with him, as though he was fighting someone to make them understand.
Lear. What a clever, clever fellow he had turned out to be. Burnofsky saw it all now, saw the games, saw the ultimate destructive power that flowed from Grey McLure’s little lifesaving creatures.
Poor old Grey. They’d been friends, he and Burnofsky. The last friend Burnofsky had had. Poor old Grey, who had gotten his panties all in a twist when he learned Burnofsky was weaponizing nanobots for the Armstrongs. A lovely idealist, old Grey. A good man who just wanted to save his sick, dying wife.
Had he ever realized the destructive potential in his creatures? Had he even an inkling of what they could do in the wrong hands?
Fucking idealists. They were ever so useful to those with evil minds.
It was all coming down, Burnofsky thought. And when it did, the Twins were going to kill him. Kill him or rewire him.
That second thing made his stomach turn. He had endured it once, was still enduring it. But like many traumas, the threat of a repeat performance was even worse. He could not be used this way; he couldn’t be turned into some computer made of meat, rewrite, delete, up-arrow, down-arrow, parentheses, backslash.…