Caligula drained the last of his beer and set the glass down just behind the saltshaker.
Deliberate?
Plath’s P2 looked at Keats’s K1. A body shake that was the equivalent of a headshake. No, that didn’t get me.
But it had been close, very close. The glass—a rainbow-swirling object so big it looked a bit like some rainbow-hued desert mesa—came crashing down out of the sky. It sent vibration and water droplets in all directions. One of them, an Olympic pool of water, crashed behind him as he sped on.
“It is your decision,” Caligula said. “Lear will insist that it be your decision.”
Lear will insist, Plath thought. Never “he” or “she,” always the careful gender-neutral name.
“And I will make that decision,” Plath said. “But first—”
“I’m afraid that as enjoyable as this is, I must go,” Caligula said.
“Is there a way for me to contact you directly?”
Caligula smiled. It was a surprisingly genuine thing, that smile. He was no comic-book villain playing a role and posturing for the camera. He smiled and meant it when he said, “Sadly, no. My orders come from Lear. My loyalty is to Lear. But Lear will respect your decision and convey it to me.”
He pushed back from the table and stood.
He spoke very definitely about Lear’s state of mind, it seemed to Plath. And not for the first time it occurred to her that she might have been speaking to Lear all along. Was Caligula Lear?
Except that there was something in the killer’s eyes when he spoke of his master. There was affection, it seemed to Plath, affection and … not fear. No, Caligula did not fear his master. He liked Lear. He was … he was …
Proud!
It hit her so suddenly she gulped and blushed and ended up awkwardly extending a hand, which Caligula bemusedly refused.
No, Plath thought, Caligula is not Lear. But neither was he a mere employee.
Affection and pride.
Unable to sit still in the safe house, Keats had come halfway and met her on the sidewalk. With neither of them acknowledging the other, they made their way to a Starbucks. Standing in line, speaking the proper Starbucks drink formula, squeezing around a tiny round table too close to the bathroom—it was all reassuringly normal.
“Did you make it?” she asked him.
He smiled. “I grabbed his sleeve as he was standing up. I’m on his arm and heading north. In an hour I’ll be seeing what Caligula sees.”
“And who he sees,” Plath added.
“So what did you two talk about?”
Just a flicker in Plath’s eyes. “I told him what Stern had said about the Tulip being impregnable.”
“And Caligula accepted that?”
Plath shrugged. “What else could he do? He agreed to pass it along to Lear.” She frowned, formed a sentence in her head that went like this: There’s something proprietary in the way Caligula speaks about Lear. There’s a relationship there. Almost father-son, I think.
But she didn’t speak it. Under the table she clenched her hands into fists. She found it difficult to talk about Lear at all. She could feel it. She could guess that it was wiring.
What she could not do was decide to rip up that wire. That felt suicidal. It felt painful, though of course it would not be.
More wiring. She’d been wired to fear ripping up the wire.
Games within games. Ever-deeper circles of hell.
Plath’s phone lit up. She recognized the number. She covered one ear against the noise of steaming milk.
“Mr. Stern?”
To her surprise it was a woman’s voice. “No. He’s dead.”
Plath froze. Then, “What?” It sounded childlike to her, her own voice. She sounded wounded.
“This is Camilla Strange. I’m … I mean, I was … Mr. Stern’s second-in-command. I am now holed up at McLure Labs with reports of four of our people dead.”
Plath found she was breathing hard. Audibly. “How did you know to call me?”
Was it her imagination or were there an unusual number of police sirens. Too many even for New York?
Was it her imagination, or were unflappable New Yorkers hunched a bit too tight around their lattes? Were their eyes less big-city averted and more alert-scared?
“Mr. Stern left a file to be opened in the event of his suspicious death.”
“And was it suspicious? His death?”
Camilla Strange laughed humorlessly. “He seems to have been … eaten. Consumed. His driver brought him here, dead, with maybe a third or a half of his body gone. Muscles, viscera, organs: all eaten. Like millions of ants had been working on him. That’s how he looks. Like roadkill.”
“Nanobots,” Plath said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Camilla Strange said. “That was our thought, too. A mini gray-goo scenario. They must have been programmed in advance to replicate only so many generations. And then … I’m sorry, someone is … hold on, please.”
The phone muted. Then Camilla was back. “I just sent you a piece of video.”
Plath switched apps, opened the video, and turned so that Keats could see. It showed a sedan screeching to a halt at McLure Labs. A man whose entire head and shoulders seemed to be weeping blood staggered from the car, walked three steps, and fell.
“Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God, what is that?” The voice on the video was saying.
The picture zoomed in, and for just two seconds before focus went hazy Plath could see the dead man liquefying before her eyes.