BZRK Reloaded (10 page)

He lit her cigarette with his Marilyn Monroe lighter, and she said,
“Let’s walk.”
She did not give her name, and he didn’t ask. She led the way,
south toward Dupont Circle. The sidewalk was busy—it always
was—but they were walking slow, and Washingtonians—the most
self-important people on Earth—were all rushing past them. Anyone
following them at this slow pace would have been instantly obvious,
so Farid looked around and convinced himself that things were cool.
“This is some very dangerous stuff,” the woman said.
“No shit.”
They walked on for a block past boutiques, crossing the street
through the eternally impatient traffic.
“You need to wipe it all,” the woman said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Wipe it. Burn it. Bury it in a deep hole and then forget you ever
saw it.”
Farid thought about that. He frowned. “Wait. What? We’re supposed to cover this up?”
The woman made a cynical face. “It’s Washington, kid. Coverups are what this city’s built on.”
Farid stopped. After a few steps, so did the woman.
“Yeah, but we aren’t about cover-ups. We’re about exposing the
truth. I mean, this is profound stuff. This is craziness.”
“You think this is the only time the president has murdered
someone? She sends drones out every day to kill people; you’re a Muslim, you should know that. Look, this whole thing needs to go away.”
She waved her cigarette, trailing smoke. “And you need to tell me who
else is aware of this intrusion.”
Farid was shaking his head and wishing he had a second cigarette going. “No, no, no. There’s more going on here. I’m all up in the
AFGC system now. Those guys are deep into some serious nanotech.”
He saw a flicker on her face at that.
“They’re building nano robots. Ever heard of the gray goo?”
“Sounds like the name of a band.”
He stared hard at her. What she’d said sounded like a joke, but
her eyes weren’t on the same page as her tone. He didn’t know her.
She was someone supposedly sent from people up the food chain in
Anonymous, but how did he know that for sure?
Now she was telling him to walk away? Destroy data? Give up
names?
“I don’t think I want to talk to you anymore,” Farid said.
“What’s the matter? Getting paranoid? Walk another block with
me. Let’s get this straightened out.”
“What’s a block from here?” Farid demanded.
“Okay, just stay where you are,” she said in a very different voice.
A cop voice: ordering and controlling.
Suddenly Farid was aware of two men moving swiftly up the
street behind him. A black sedan roared up and hit its brakes.
His next move was purely instinctive. He was standing just outside a bookstore and coffee shop. He ran for the door. The woman
cursed and leapt after him, but he caught a break, a shopper emerging
through the narrow door let him in and unintentionally blocked the
woman’s path.
It was just a few seconds, but it was enough.
He glanced around frantically, looking for a way out, a weapon, a
savior, something. The coffee shop was full of the usual latte-sipping,
laptop-tapping crowd.
“Listen to me! Everyone! My name is Farid Berbera. I’m a Lebanese
citizen with diplomatic immunity. That woman is trying to kill me.”
He pointed a finger at the woman with two men at her back, all
now clearly revealed as security types.
“Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation is creating nano robots.
They have video from inside the president’s eyes as she murdered her
husband!”
He didn’t expect to be believed; he barely believed it himself. But
he expected to be heard, and Tweeted and texted.
“They’re trying to stop us from finding out,” Farid yelled. He held
his hands up in the air, the universal language of helplessness.
The black woman no longer carrying the Bob Marley backpack
hesitated, nonplussed, and then Farid saw the reason for her hesitation: a Washington DC cop was picking up a coffee to go and holding
a small bag of some sort of pastry.
“Officer! Officer! You have to help me, I have diplomatic immunity!” He fumbled in his pocket and out came the passport, the
blessed diplomatic passport with that lovely word, Diplomatic, in big,
gold-embossed letters. The policeman would have seen passports like
that many times before.
“People are watching!” Farid warned. “People are watching! Farid
Berbera, Lebanese Embassy.” People were watching, but they were not
on his side. So he said the thing he would never before have imagined
saying. “I’m part of Anonymous. They’re trying to stop me before I
can tell what I know.”
The woman and her two agents moved then, grim-faced, but the
policeman was setting down his coffee and pastry and said, “Hold up,
just a second there. This is my beat. I’m calling this in.”
“You are not calling it in,” the woman snapped.
“What are you, FBI? Let me see your shield,” the policeman said,
and a voice in the crowd said, “Hell yeah.”
Phone cameras were coming out.
“This man is a dangerous criminal,” the woman said. “We are
federal officers. Put down those cameras and—”
“Show us your badge,” a second voice yelled.
The policeman was definitely on guard now, torn between his
instinctive need to control the rowdiness and an unfamiliar sensation
of having people actually take his side.
“Just show some ID, ma’am. If you’re feds, we’ll work it out.” He
was preparing to call it in but a bit perplexed at what code would
apply. Was this a 10-31? Or more of a 10-34?
“We’re with the ETA,” the woman said. She flipped her ID open.
The policeman frowned. “Sorry, I’m not up on all the—”
“Emerging Technology Agency.”
The policeman blinked. Stared. Laughed. “You gotta be pulling
my leg.”
“They’re trying to stop me from telling what I know. AFGC.
Nanotech. Video of Falkenhym killing her husband. Gray goo scenario.” Farid was just repeating it over and over, frantically, in a loop,
as the cop confronted the feds, and the store denizens blasted the
entire scene out over the Internet. “Farid Berbera. Anonymous. Lebanese diplomat.”
“Lady,” the cop said, “in this city I got to put up with FBI, Secret
Service, DEA, but I have surely never heard of an ETA, and you aren’t
arresting—”
BANG!
It wasn’t until the explosion that Farid even noticed the gun in
the woman’s hand.
The police officer was wearing a Kevlar vest. It did not protect his
face. Or stop the bullet from punching a hole out the back of his neck,
spraying bits of spine and blood all over the coffee counter.
“Kill them all,” the woman said. “No witnesses.”
Three guns began firing.
Somehow, he would never be able to explain how, Farid ended
up on his elbows behind the counter, crawling and whimpering as
BANG BANG BANG BANGBANGBANG! The glass display case full
of croissants and pre-made sandwiches shattered. People screamed.
People yelled nonsense like, “Hey, what are you doing?” Tables were
overturned. Smoke filled the air.
“Stop it, stop it!”
Steam was venting from the espresso machine through a bullet
hole.
The woman, still with a cigarette in her mouth, was around the
counter now and BANG! shot the cringing barista and BANG! fired at
Farid and missed as he jumped up and ran, screaming into the stacks,
grabbing at handfuls of books and slinging them over his shoulder.
BANG! and the bullet hit a thick political text and blew it apart in
midair, making confetti of the pages.
The shots and screams from the café were dying down, and now
there were sirens too late, way too late, as Farid tripped, fell against a
table loaded with books, slipped to the floor, and saw himself staring
up at the muzzle of a gun.
He said, “No!”
BANG!
His head jerked. Stabbing pain in his mouth.
Smoke drifted.
She was looking right at him, the muzzle no more than two feet
away. Ash fell from her cigarette. He could see the way her finger
tightened on the trigger. All slow motion now.
Snap.
Instantly the ETA agent reached for a new magazine, but Farid
was up and scrambling, leaping, sobbing, tasting the blood that filled
his mouth, not knowing what had happened just knowing: run. RUN!
The store had a second entrance, out on Nineteenth Street. He
was on the street before he knew it, nearly ran into a passing taxi,
raced north up the street and the taxi, amazingly, miraculously,
thought he needed a ride, thought he was chasing it.
The cabdriver stopped.
Farid ripped open the door and collapsed into the seat. “Go! Just
go!”
The driver looked skeptical until he heard the gunshot from
behind. The driver had not survived the waves of war in Sudan just to
die here in Washington, DC.
He floored it.
The cab sped away. It was then that Farid realized the bullet had
gone in his mouth and out through his cheek. It had taken the top off
a molar in the process, but he was alive.

Jessica gazed longingly out of the window at the city, Washington,
DC, as she sat astride Bug Man and rubbed his narrow back with
long, steady strokes.

The sun had gone down and painted the Washington monument
orange. Then the rain came, and the landscape disappeared in gloom.
It was depressing. Surely over there, somewhere, was a club, a night
spot. Something.

It was right there, across the river. All that history. And probably
shopping as well. Restaurants. Boutiques. And the White House and
all that.

It was a curiously squat city, more like Brooklyn, where both
Jessica and Bug Man—she knew him as Anthony—lived, than like
Manhattan. It didn’t look to be such an important place.

“Can’t we go out tonight?” she asked. To ask the question she
leaned down, flattening herself against him, and tickled the back of
his neck with her lips.

“We can’t go out,” he muttered. “I’ve told you that about nine
times.”
She pouted. He failed to notice.
“Couldn’t we at least go downstairs to one of the restaurants?”
No answer.
She had known Anthony for much longer than she had loved
him. At first he’d been nothing to her, just a boy two years her junior,
not especially handsome, definitely not tough or rich or exciting.
But over a very short time she had come to first notice him, and
then to like him, and then to want and need him almost desperately.
She would do anything for him.
And yet he still wasn’t objectively attractive in any way.
It puzzled her sometimes. She puzzled herself sometimes. She
still remembered what she had found attractive in other boys and
men. She still found hard muscles—which Anthony lacked—and long
muscular legs—which he also lacked—and a quick wit—ditto—to be
the things that turned her on.
Yet Anthony—too short, too weak, too sullen—had a devastating
effect on her. She worshipped him. What he asked for he got, and if he
failed to ask, she gave it anyway.
Well, Jessica thought, life is a mystery, isn’t it?
“It’s boring here,” Jessica said, resuming the massage. He was
always tense. But more so since yesterday. He was so tight, it was
almost as if he worked out and had muscle tone.
“It’s a boring place,” he agreed.
“At least you get to go out,” she said.
“I go to work.”
“How long is this so-called temporary assignment? We had more
fun in New York,” she said. She knew the answer, but he hadn’t told
her to shut up, yet. When he did she would, of course, shut up. But he
hadn’t said it yet, so she asked.
“Don’t know,” he said into the mattress.
“I can’t just stay in a hotel room forever,” she protested.
He reached back blindly, fumbling with one hand until he
touched her thigh. “Hey, you’ve got me, right?”
“Mmm. Yes, I do.”
“Okay, then shut up.”
And she did.
But as she pressed her lips together she remembered a dream. She
almost told him about it, but he had told her to shut up.
In the dream she had been somehow buried up to her neck. Just
her head stuck up above the ground. She couldn’t move. She had
wanted to put her hands to her head, had wanted to press her palms
against the side of her head and squeeze, really hard. She didn’t know
why.
Jessica had been very angry in the dream. That’s mostly what she
remembered. That she was very, very angry, because she didn’t want
to be buried in the ground and someone had done that to her.
Sometimes she could almost see who it was. But she couldn’t turn
her head far enough to make him out. She rolled her eyes back and
forth but she couldn’t see him because he kept scuttling out of sight.
Even now, recalling the dream, she was angry. It rose up in her,
that anger, like boiling oil rushing through her veins.
But Anthony didn’t like her to be angry. So she wasn’t. And the
boiling oil turned slow and sluggish as it cooled. It became thick, like
jelly.
Jessica breathed for the first time since the memory of the dream
had come to her. Her hands were kneading the back of his neck. From
where she sat it looked almost as if she was choking him.

Bug Man opened his eyes and stared at the sheet beneath his face.
He hadn’t meant to do that, to tell her to shut up. It made her seem
like a robot. Like a machine. Any other girl would have argued, but
no other girl had quite as much “wire” in her brain as Jessica.

She was in many ways his greatest accomplishment, second only
to taking down Vincent and Kerouac. She was so beautiful, a tall,
elegant African beauty with amazing eyes and a perfect body, and a
mouth that, oh God, and even now it hurt him to think about how
much he had wanted her. She was so beautiful, she could silence a
whole noisy restaurant just by walking in the front door. And she was
his, all his, 100 percent his.

She was amazing. When she was on his arm, she made him a
king. Men looked at him with baffled respect. Women looked at him
wondering just what it was about him that could command a girl like
Jessica.

But Jessica didn’t really have much to say. When they watched
movies together, she would wait until he had expressed an opinion
and then parrot him. He could see she hadn’t really liked Tron 2 until,
as the credits rolled, he’d said he loved it. And then, so had she.

When a minute later he said that the truth was it kind of sucked,
she agreed.
And agreed again when he changed his mind and praised it.
That could have gone on for hours.
It was creepy. It was boring. She would say what he wanted her
to say. She would do what he wanted her to do. She was, he realized
sadly, like a game you’ve already mastered completely. She was Portal
2 in a Portal 3 world.
He eased her off him, stood up, and went to the window. “It’s a
boring town, anyway,” he said. “I don’t think there’s much to do.”
She was about to agree with him, and the prospect made him
cringe. “On the other hand, maybe we could sneak out for a little bit,
right? Maybe just to my place where I work. Whatever.”
She agreed with him. It seemed sincere.
Go limp, Burnofsky had told him. Do nothing for now. So he
would do nothing. But he could still watch, right?