“Dr. Violet is wired,” said Vincent into his. “She’ll give us what we need. Tonight. It should be safe enough to bring the two young poets.”
“Are you going to equip them both? Plath hasn’t even been tested.”
Vincent hesitated. “Do you laugh at the idea of instinct, Nijinsky?”
“Yours? Never.”
“I’m going to equip them both. Instinct. And need. Time is short. She’ll do.”
At the same time miles away, in another location, Burnofsky dropped the flash drive from the China Bone in front of Bug Man.
And Ophelia wrote an e-mail to her brother back in Mumbai. She told him about her studies at Columbia. She invented some problem with one of the professors. She attached a picture of herself and a girl she didn’t really know, standing in front of Low Memorial Library, both of them making peace signs at the camera.
And Renfield showed Plath to her room and Keats to his. They were adjoining but not connected.
Plath’s room looked like a miserable, run-down hotel where a drunk might spend his last days. Keats’s room looked not unlike his room at home, except that it could do with an England poster. The rooms were identical.
“How long do we stay here?” Plath asked.
“There is usually a period of observation and training,” Renfield said. He was looking her up and down in a way that implied it didn’t need to be a lonely time for her.
“What is there to observe?” she asked. “I’m sure you have biots on me.”
Renfield did a sort of aristocratic nod, not exactly a bow, but an acknowledgment. “Not me, personally, at the moment,” he said.
“They can read my thoughts?” Plath asked. Asked and answered, but she wasn’t convinced.
“No.”
“See what I see?”
“Yes. And hear what you hear, depending on where they are placed and whether they are equipped for hearing large sound waves.”
Plath struggled a bit with that. Keats blushed.
Renfield actually seemed to experience a moment of fellow feeling. “You get used to it.”
And he was, at that moment, seeing the grainy, gray-scale images he was getting from a rather bad connection in Keats’s eyes. His biots were running yet another check for nanobots: couldn’t be too careful.
He was seeing his own proud expression as Keats looked at him. Then Keats’s quick glance at Plath’s chest. Then the refocus on her face. The quick glance away when Plath looked toward Keats. And then a bit longer than necessary on Plath’s neck, cheek, ear.
Yes, the young prodigy there was smitten with Plath. Or at least checking out the possibilities. Renfield considered resenting the fact. After all, if anyone was going to be spending quality time with the prickly young thing, it should be Renfield himself. It’s not as if he was exclusive with his other friend.
But then he remembered that Keats was Kerouac’s brother. There was a great debt there. Renfield would honor that debt by looking out for the youngster. But in a way that didn’t allow Keats to have … quality time … with Plath.
There were limits even to debts of honor.
A few minutes later, Keats lay on his cot, staring up at the ceiling. He should be afraid. Instead he was overwhelmed by the thought of her. Just a wall separating them.
Could they read his thoughts?
Maybe not. But they might be looking through his eyes and that was close enough. What about when he went to the toilet? Jesus.
Had Alex gone through all this?
And more, obviously.
But Alex was a soldier, tough as they came,