BZRK Reloaded (9 page)
Authors: Michael Grant
to dissuade any male from asking follow-up questions.
“I need tampons,” Plath told Nijinsky. “There’s a Duane Reade
down the block. I’ll be back in half an hour. Do you need anything?”
He frowned. Suspicious? No, just thinking. “ChapStick,” he said.
“Plain, not cherry or whatever.”
Stern, in obedience to the note she had slipped him, was waiting in the shaving-supplies aisle, seeming to take his time choosing
a razor. Stern did not look at her, nor she at him. They were back to
back, him looking at razors, her looking at shampoo.
“Sadie,” he said.
“Mr Stern.”
“You’re in trouble of some sort.”
“I’m in trouble of every sort. Listen. My father and brother were
murdered by Charles and Benjamin Armstrong. Is that idea a surprise to you?”
Three seconds of silence. “No,” he said at last.
“My father trusted you.”
His voice was husky when he said, “I was honored by his trust.”
She leaned back just enough to make the slightest contact,
stretching her fingers back to touch his sleeve.
“Mr Stern, have you heard of something called BZRK?”
He was silent for what felt like a long time. Then he said, “I thought
it might be that, when I saw the man with the, well, the fanciful hat.”
He sighed. “I know some of it, not everything. Your father didn’t want
McLure security getting involved with …with those people.”
“I don’t want you involved with them either,” she said, surprising
herself with the force of her conviction. “I want you to work for me.
Just for me.”
“Whatever you need,” he said.
Here it came. How much to ask? How much to trust?
“I want an escape route. For me and …and for the boy I was with
earlier.”
“Yes.”
She hesitated. “The man in the hat. He’s on our side, but be careful of him.”
Stern said nothing.
“My father financed these people. I’m going to do the same. But
Thrum is a traitor, she’s working for the Armstrongs. She’s going to
trace my spending.”
“If that’s true, then yes, she certainly will.”
“So, I want to give Ms Thrum something to watch, Mr Stern. I
want her and the Armstrongs to be unsure which side I’m on. I made
it clear that I trusted you, so they’ll be watching you. I want you to
start looking for a person who calls him- …or her- …self, Lear. For all
I know it’s not a real person, or may be several people, but he, she, or
it, is running BZRK. Spend some money on that search. Let Thrum
see that you’re looking.”
She heard a soft, satisfied chuckle. “You’re capable of deviousness, Sadie. Your brother …I loved him because he was the boss’s son.
But there’s more of your father in you.”
She fell silent at that and covered the silence by bending down to
select a bottle of conditioner and appearing to read the ingredients
label. Memories of her brother, Stone, had come rushing back. How
had he been at the end? How had he felt knowing that the plane he
was in would crash?
He had been brave, she was sure of that. She pushed away a sob
and sucked in a sharp breath.
“In my father’s study, on the shelf, there’s a copy of Alice in Wonderland. In the spine, there’s a key. It goes to a safe deposit box at UBS,
the bank, in Manhattan. My father said I’d remember it by thinking
of You Bullshit Bank. You B.S. The box number is 0726, my mother’s
birthday. They’ll ask you a verification question. It won’t matter what
the question is, the answer you give is ‘pepperoni pizza.’ In the box
are bonds worth two hundred million dollars. Let Ms Thrum watch
the fifty she knows about. We’ll use the two hundred she doesn’t to
keep BZRK going and to find me an escape route.”
“Aren’t you worried I’ll take the money and run?”
Her answer was bleak, not glib. “I have to trust you. I don’t want
to, honestly, because I’m scared. I’m in a trap.But I have to, I have to
trust someone. So it’s you.”
“And the boy,” he said.
“We’ll see about that,” she said. “Don’t follow me and don’t try to
protect me. I know you’ll want to, but don’t. Caligula …the man in
the fanciful hat? He’ll …he will resent it. Find me an escape route.”
She started to walk away, hesitated, then over her shoulder added,
“Something near the beach, in Africa.”
Billy the Kid had spent the night after the massacre at the foster
home where he had not been in the three weeks since joining BZRK.
He could think of nowhere else to go, and he felt hollowed-out and
stretched very, very thin.
The man in the foster home, Daddy Tom as he liked to be called,
let him in without a word and said nothing as Billy trudged wearily to
the bedroom he shared with a boy named Marshall.
Daddy Tom smirked as Billy came in, but to Billy’s relief he didn’t
insist on seeing what was in the bag. In the morning an only-slightlyrested Billy walked out onto cold streets beneath threatening clouds.
He needed to think, and he needed to figure things out. Everyone from BZRK Washington was dead. They hadn’t really liked him
anyway, and the feeling was mutual. The Washington BZRKers kept
telling him they’d let him play the game, but they never did. He heard
about biots, he knew what they were, they’d let him see some very
weird video. But they had not given him a biot.
It was in online gaming forums that he had first heard from someone calling himself Lear. Billy had posted some impressive numbers,
and he’d let it be known that he was a foster kid, unconnected, sick of
where he was, looking for …well, looking.
Joining the Washington BZRK group had set off an uproar, with
some of the others demanding to know what the hell was going on if
they were down to recruiting children.
Well, they were all dead, weren’t they? And he was the one walking around with their credit cards and their phones and their pads.
So much for being a child.
The others had died like newbies. They had barely gotten off
a shot, like this was the first time they’d ever really played an FPS
game. They’d been surprised and they had panicked.
Newbies.
And he was the child?
Suddenly he saw that house again in memory, the common room
walls and the stink of urine and feces.
He threw up thinking about it and looked up to realize he was
throwing up within sight of the White House. How weird was that? It
made him feel …well, something made him feel …strange, sick, like
he wanted to be even sicker. But no, he wasn’t having any of that.
He stopped and sat on a park bench and searched the phones for
Lear. Lear was the big boss, right? Well, didn’t Lear owe him now?
Who had killed all those phony cops? Not the so-called adults. Billy.
Billy the Kid.
And real death, which was so much dirtier than the gaming version.
A car went past, horn blaring, and he realized he’d stepped into
traffic, like he had lost consciousness or whatever, like his brain had
stopped functioning.
He reached the far curb, shaking. His lungs felt congested. The
wound in his side burned with fresh pain. He had put some Neosporin and Band-Aids on it and managed to sleep with a couple of Advil.
But now, walking, walking, the scab that had formed was chafing. He
looked under his jacket and saw blood staining his shirt.
There were tears in Billy’s eyes, and he couldn’t explain why. The
pain was bad but not that bad.
The rain started then and he ran to shelter in an office building’s doorway. There were some people there smoking cigarettes.
He ignored them, and they ignored him. He continued thumbing
through the calls made and received on the phones but found nothing that looked like it might be either to or from Lear. Then he started
on messages. Also nothing.
That first phone had used 1111 as its password, which was just
plain dumb, but breaking security on the second phone was more
time-consuming. Any time he guessed wrong he was shut out for a
while. It was going to take all day. Then, he knew the answer: 2975,
because on the alphanumeric keypad 2975 spelled out BZRK.
“Smart,” he muttered sarcastically.
Of course no one was going to have “Lear” in their address book,
that would be too much to hope for. And unless they were complete
idiots they’d delete calls to or from Lear. But they could be slightly
less stupid and yet still forget to delete the number from their trash.
The rain stopped and he headed off again. There was always the
fear that some well-meaning adult would begin to wonder what a kid
was doing standing with the smokers in the shelter of the building.
The second phone also yielded nothing.
He had plenty of cash, so he bought a couple hot dogs and a Pepsi
and wolfed it all down in a steamy, overheated diner. It was well past
lunchtime, though you couldn’t tell from the gray-on-gray sky outside.
And then, on the third phone, he had something. It was in the
trash, as he’d expected. A number. He Googled the area code, curious because it had a strange number that began with a plus sign. The
prefix was a country code, and the country in question was Japan.
Time to make a decision. If he was still part of BZRK—and where
else did he have to turn to—then he had to contact Lear. So he composed a text.
DC got burned bad. But they didn’t get me. Billy the Kid.
He hit Send.
Then he added, This is not my phone.
He hit Send again. And waited. Nothing.
He wanted to cry then because he had halfway convinced himself
that Lear—if this was really Lear’s number—would instantly respond
and come to his rescue. But nothing, and the diner was shutting
down, the cook had begun to clean the grill.
So Billy went back out onto the darkening street, heading toward
the big green space on his map app.
Rock Creek Park, as the name implies, runs along Rock Creek
at the western edge of the city. He figured he could find a place to
hide out overnight, think things through. And indeed he came upon
a stone bridge that crossed the creek.
Trolls lived under bridges, at least in games. And when he slid
down the muddy embankment a troll is what he found. A man, large,
maybe a crazy street person, maybe not.
“Hey. You,” the man said. “This is my place. Get lost.”
The man came closer. His rough, pendulous features brightened
with avarice as he saw the not-very-large boy. The rain was back, and
Billy was tired.
The man made a suggestion for just how Billy could pay for the
right to stay dry.
So Billy stuck a nine-millimeter pistol in his face and said, “Go
away.” It was getting to be a habit.
The phone chimed.
The man laughed, thinking the gun was a toy.
“Get over here and—”
The explosion lit up the bridge overhead. The bullet, aimed past
the man’s face, but not much past it, hit the water in the rain-swollen
creek.
“Jesus!” the man yelped.
“I already shot a bunch of people yesterday,” Billy said. “So I can
shoot you.”
Billy was alone when he read the text message.
Stay hidden. Help coming. Lear.
A few hundred miles north, in New York, Burnofsky watched the
data flow on his screen.
Four Hydras had each made a copy of themselves.
Eight Hydras had each made a copy of themselves.
Sixteen Hydras had each made a copy of themselves.
Thirty-two . . .
Sixty-four . . .
One hundred and twenty-eight . . .
Each round took seven minutes. So in a little over half an hour,
the four hydras had become more than a hundred.
minutes.
It had taken eighteen cycles, two hours and six minutes, for four
hydras to become more than a million. And of course that meant at
least twenty million MiniMites.
He had used a live mouse as building material. Burnofsky pulled
up video of the mouse, at first indifferent, then agitated, then desperate as tail and legs and ears were chewed away by the hydras and their
MiniMites.
When he sped the video up he could watch the whole sequence
as the mouse’s back erupted, as it died, as it grew gruesomely smaller
and smaller and nothing but a few bones and shreds of flesh and then
all gone, all of it completely gone, replaced by a seething mass of bluetinged nanobots. They looked, he thought, like uncooked egg white,
or the stuff that ran from a punctured eyeball.
Goo, he supposed, for lack of a better word.
The world would die in agony and panic. And of course Burnofsky would die as well, but last, he hoped. Last and best and floating
on an opium cloud.
But not just yet.
Farid had never met anyone from Anonymous in the real world.
The fact that he’d even been asked for a meeting was extraordinary,
and it made him paranoid as hell.
Since the intrusion into the AFGC system he’d been jumpy. His
family was supposedly immune to prosecution thanks to diplomatic
immunity, but that immunity would be a pretty thin defense if the
American security people came after him. They might not be able to
snatch him off a street themselves—Americans were very devoted to
the illusion of law—but the city was full of American allies with no
such scruples. The Saudis, maybe, or the Israelis.
Now this request for a face-to-face from d0wnb1anki3. Blankie’s
name carried some weight. Even so Farid had been sweating bullets
sitting in the Starbucks on Connecticut Avenue. He was trying not to
be too obvious in looking for the “black woman carrying a backpack
decorated with a picture of Bob Marley.”
too little sleep, he got up to grab a cigarette outside.
And there she was, just as described. An African American
woman carrying a Bob Marley backpack. She was hurrying across
the street, looking very much like a person late for an appointment.
Farid sucked hard on his cigarette, assuming he’d have to put it
out in a few seconds. But in fact the woman walked right up to him,
gave him a dubious look, made a V of her fingers, then a give-me gesture. Farid shook out a Marlboro for her.
