“They tried to make us read Tale of Two Cities. Remember?”
“What has that to do with this?” Charles demanded, frustrated. He’d only ever had one person to celebrate victory with, and his brother seemed indifferent and distracted.
“What?”
“Tale of Two Cities?”
“What about it?” Benjamin demanded. “Incontinence. It’s spelled e-n-c-e. Like ‘influence.’ Not like ‘ambulance.’?”
Charles stared at the mirror monitor, at the reflection of his brother’s eye. And suddenly Hardy was rushing toward them, a man who never rushed, whom the Twins would have thought lacked the capacity to rush.
“Sirs!” Hardy said, but already the cause of the interruption was clear. The Twins twisted their body to see Sugar Lebowski and four of her men carrying the squirming, kicking, gagged body of a boy.
They threw the body onto the Oriental carpet.
“What the hell?” Charles bellowed. No one entered the Tulip without a specific invitation. They might have been indisposed! They might have been unprepared!
It was outrageous. No: sacrilegious.
But clearly that was not at the top of Sugar Lebowski’s mind at the moment. The Twins had seen Sugar furious, scared, sarcastic. They’d watched her cook with her daughter, shave her armpits, and make love to her husband. But they had never seen anything like the look of disordered panic on her face.
Sugar patted her disordered hair into place. She was red in the face, her newly made lazy eye staring at the bridge of her nose. She was panting.
Scared.
Of them, of Charles and Benjamin.
“What is this?” Benjamin demanded, furious.
The dog came waddling over to investigate the boy.
“There’s been a … a … a breach,” Sugar managed to get out.
“A what?” Charles snarled even as he watched a killed, split-open nanobot twisting slowly inside the president’s brain.
Sugar gathered her wits, took a steadying breath, and said, “One-Up was in an altercation at a coffee shop. The one across the street. She spotted what she believed were two BZRK twitchers. They attacked her and escaped.”
“That’s why she was late?” Charles demanded. “I thought i
t was because of traffic disruptions caused by the UN debacle.”
“No, sir. But she had a hard time getting through because the UN matter flooded the local cell-phone service. As you saw, I was busy coping with the UN situation. As soon as One-Up got through to me I—”
“I’m sad,” Benjamin said. “I wanted to ride Arabella.”
That stalled conversation for several seconds.
“We believe one of the two was Sadie McLure,” Sugar said. “This is the other one.” She kicked Keats’s leg but without much conviction.
Charles tried to stand, but Benjamin lagged behind and the effort failed. Then he stood, too, but now Charles was off-balance.
This was something that never happened to them. Not since they were children.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” Charles demanded sharply.
“Remember the Morgenstein twins?” Benjamin asked.
Something like a look of panic crossed Charles’s face. The twins had long since learned to move in synch. This kind of disconnect was humiliating. And Benjamin’s distraction was nothing short of bizarre.