Then, Bug Man saw.
Two biots were rushing along in his wake, racing up behind him as his army pelted down along the optic chiasma.
Oh, yes.
Oh, hell yes.
Is that you, Vincent? Please, God, let it be.
No macro interference to mess anything up this time. The ultimate battle for the ultimate prize.
“I hope you’re watching, Mr. Charles and Mr. Benjamin. Because this … will be epic.”
The cops were beginning to move the crowd away from UN Plaza. There was a very serious mood in the air. Something very bad had happened, and New York’s finest were not in the mood to take backtalk from anyone.
Helicopters were overhead. Sirens were still wailing as more and more security flooded the blocks around the UN.
One thing was sure: Wilkes and Ophelia had provided one hell of a diversion.
Then, Vincent saw. He was all the way down in the optic chiasma when he spotted the nanobot army racing away.
“Bug Man,” Vincent said.
“I’m on my way!” Nijinsky replied.
Bug Man’s nanobots stopped moving away. Six platoons turned, one then the next, to face the biots. The exploding head logo was faint but unmistakable in the phosphorescent light.
Vincent smiled at Nijinsky. A real smile.
“It’ll be over by the time you get there, Jin.”
The Twins were watching the windows open on their table.
They saw the blank screen that had been focused on the UN station. It was an ominous rectangle of static now.
They saw the scene outside the UN Building, a carnival of flashing lights as every fire or police vehicle in New York gathered.
They saw Dietrich acquiring control of Kim’s nanobots, already in position, hidden for the moment in the Indian prime minister’s dark hair. That had been a good suggestion from Bug Man, although of course Benjamin had thought of it first.
They puzzled at the sight of One-Up, looking battered and bloody, being hustled into the chair beyond Dietrich. They didn’t have the audio on, but they could see her rage. She kicked a trash can as she passed and punched the air. Furious.
They also saw what Burnofsky saw inside the brain of the Chinese premier.
And what Bug Man saw as he turned to face his nemesis.
The rods and cones in their retinas fired tiny electrical signals down the optic nerve.
At the very back of their brains their visual cortex translated those signals into images.
But neither Charles’s eye, nor Benjamin’s eye, nor the eye that stared out from between them, could turn inward and see the two biots that had at last reached the hippocampus.
Neither of them could know that Sadie McLure, who now called herself Plath, lay curled in a young man’s arms, contemplating their murder.
The TFDs had a twelve-block area in which the BZRK twitchers might be hiding. Each block packed with tall buildings, with hundreds of offices each. And the fact was that even that cordon was an estimate, a best guess. No one knew the exact limits of a BZRK twitcher’s reach. But as a practical matter, if they extended the cordon any farther it would have to include Grand Central, not to mention the subway stations.
At ground level there were something like a dozen coffee shops, twice that many restaurants, fast-food joints, pizza parlors, copy shops, dry cleaners, office-supply stores, shoe shops, tourist-junk shops, florists …
It was an impossible search. Sugar Lebowski had eleven guys. But she had the advantage of knowing whom she was looking for: Sadie McLure. And some guy, but the smart play was to look for Sadie.