BZRK (BZRK 1)

“If that’s what it takes,” Anya said, voice husky as Vincent sent V1 gingerly through the mascara line, stepping over what looked like a recently deceased demodex, interesting, onto the eye, and down below the lower lid.

He withdrew V3 from the ear. Vincent had been caught in a folded napkin once before. It was hell trying to find your way out. Vincent could probably find his way out of a larynx quicker than he could a napkin.

They did their shots.

An hour and ten minutes later they were in Anya’s apartment.

Some time later still she had fallen asleep in his arms.

Vincent was by that point fairly convinced that Anya was clean of nanobots.

And he’d already begun to use V1 and V3 with reinforcement from V2—still recovering from two legs breaks on its earlier mission— to stretch the neuronic fibers from her pleasure centers to her images of him. She may only like him now. Or maybe not even that. But over the next few hours, while she slept and he did not, her affection for him would grow. Soon the mere thought of him would release endorphins into her bloodstream. And her natural caution and reserve would be degraded. She would like him; she would trust him.

Vincent vowed that he would remove it all once he had what he needed. That, he told himself, was the difference between BZRK and the Armstrong Twins. Vincent did only what he had to do. He would minimize the betrayal. As much as he could.

“Because we’re the good guys,” he whispered to himself even as, unasked for, the memories of murder in a small restaurant in London bubbled to the surface of his mind.

Burnofsky didn’t have the kind of money or juice (or entourage) that the music producer (who shall remain nameless), or the overexposed industrialist (who shall, likewise, remain nameless) had, so he didn’t get one of the larger, deeper alcoves at the China Bone.

They didn’t know Burnofsky’s name, not his real one, just the name he gave them: John Musselwhite. Did the management know it was a fake name? Probably. Most likely they’d have been horrified if he gave a real name.

It was a loft, this room, vast, but not a wide-open space. There was a sort of catwalk that went around the room, but it had been nicely done, industrial, yes, but well lit, cinematic almost. There were security guys but ever so discreet, dressed in loose-fitting black trousers and white shirts, like something you’d see Jackie Chan wear in one of his movies. Generic Asian chic. If they had guns, then the guns were concealed, and the security men smiled. Smiles, smiles. In two of the corners were tall dancing platforms, essentially open hydraulic elevators that raised the dancers up or down, like slow-motion pistons. The girls were varied and swapped out often enough that neither they nor the patrons would become bored.

The music was softer than you might expect from a den of iniquity. It was not, Burnofsky thanked God, the music of the aging rocker he had just seen the back of. In fact he’d never heard music quite like it anywhere else. It was a soft pulsation with a repetitive melody and had a quality of perpetualness about it. A bit like house dance music, although no one but the professional dancers would be expected to dance.

Beneath the catwalk were the alcoves. They were mocked up to look a bit like an Eastern bazaar, as though they were tents, so what you saw looking across the room were tent flaps or beaded curtains or, in the case of some who enjoyed flaunting their vice, canvas drapes pulled back to reveal and invite

.

The center of the room was a rectangular bar, all lacquered ebony with tasteful red and gold highlights. They served alcohol of course, and food as well, though few people ate the dumplings. It was more that some of the patrons didn’t like staying inside their alcoves but enjoyed mingling and chatting, often with the bartenders. And then, some people liked a vodka with their pipe.

Burnofsky entered his narrow alcove, no bigger than a good-size department-store dressing room, with just a pair of easy chairs and a small table, a dim lamp, and an old-fashioned rotary phone. Burnofsky knew the drill. He lifted the receiver and waited until a voice answered.

“Yes, sir. How may I be of service?” A man’s voice, kind, understanding, nonjudgmental.

“Ah-pen-yen,” Burnofsky said, the China Bone’s preferred term.

The voice said, “Very good, sir. Shall we make all preparations, or would you prefer to do your own?”

“You prep it.” Burnofsky smiled. “I trust you.”

He hung up and relaxed back into the chair. From the alcove to his left came the spicy-sweet smell he loved. From the other side a sudden explosion of laughter, quickly stifled.

He’d been looking forward to this all day. The day had included a long face-to-face with the Twins. That was never a good thing. Especially when the heart of the meeting was to tell Burnofsky that Bug Man would be taking the lead on the UN job.

He hadn’t argued much. Bug Man’s tactics were sound. But he was arrogant, and Burnofsky could see too many ways things could go wrong. Burnofsky didn’t like the sense of plans being rushed. There would be another UN General Assembly in a year. Another year’s planning and they’d be in a much stronger position.

Right now AFGC had a grand total of twenty-seven qualified twitchers, counting himself. Twenty-seven. To target and control six major heads of state while maintaining all their existing projects? The logistics were staggering.

Infest the prime ministers of Britain, India, and Japan, the chancellor of Germany, and the presidents of China and the United States? That was six teams in six cities, spinning away inside the brains of four men and two women who were among the most-watched, most-observed people in the human race?

Bad wiring had a tendency to cause seizures. Seizures in an average person were manageable, but in a head of state? The POTUS just had to twitch to have an elite team of doctors probing her ten different ways. And what then? What happened when the doctors at Bethesda found a head full of nanobots?

Panic, that’s what. Phone calls to the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, every foreign intel outfit. The rumors were already out there. A Google search would turn up the paranoids—some with surprisingly accurate information.

If the FBI suddenly had proof? Physical proof?

AFGC might control the deputy director of the FBI, but he alone would never be able to contain something like that.