Despite herself, Suarez laughed. “Well, you got me there. What kind of range does this thing have?”
“The sleigh has a three-hundred-fifty-mile operational range. Six surface-to-surface missiles, four surface-to-air missiles just inside the engine cowling, twin thirty-caliber machine guns.”
With a show of reluctance Suarez climbed out of the cockpit.
“I have to tell you, Dr. Babbington: three hundred large would be very nice. Very, very nice. But there’s something else. The U.S. Navy taught me to drive hovercraft, but that was incidental to my core training.”
“Which was?”
“Marines, first, as you already know. Then Sea Air Land, Doctor. Navy SEAL.”
She watched his face turn gray.
She watched his eyes dart toward the assault rifle. Which was in her hands before he could move.
“This is the part where you tell me everything,” she said. “This is the part where you answer all my questions, because if you don’t, I shoot you, and you die.”
Not a good liar, Sadie McLure.
“I told Lear no,” she said.
But it was right there in her eyes.
“Then what are we going to do?” Keats asked her.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. This madness, the Nobel thing, whatever happened there, that must be the secret weapon Lear wants destroyed. Right?”
He had not known what to say then. He had not known what he could safely say to her. He did not know whether the girl he loved would have him killed for turning against Lear.
It felt as if his insides were dying. Like he was a piece of fruit left out in the sun, rotting from the inside, collapsing in on himself. He felt sick.
She was wired. She knew she was wired. Yet she had refused to let him try to fix her.
The insidiousness of it. She was like a schizophrenic who knows she’s supposed to take the meds but refuses to. She was becoming party to her own mind-rape.
He wanted to grab her shoulders and shake her. Everything he was to her was less important to her now than carrying out Lear’s plan.
She had always held something back from him, he knew that. That was okay, he’d told himself, she just needed time. At first he’d decided the reticence was a class thing. That made him feel a bit better, really, because it was something he could understand. It was something he could defend himself from emotionally.
He still loved her. But she had never loved him, had she? And now … now where was Sadie McLure?
“Do you want to make love?” she asked him, that and he wanted to punch her in the face.
Not her, not Sadie, no, it was … it was whoever this person was, this reprogrammed, wired alteration of Sadie. It was this truly new creature called Plath.
“I’m tired,” he said, and the relief in her eyes was almost more than he could endure.
“Yeah. Big day tomorrow,” she said.
“Oh? Why?”
Her eyes flicked right—guilty, caught. She shrugged and forced a phony smile. “Aren’t they all big days?”
She left, heading toward the bedroom they still shared.
Tears filled his eyes and since no one was around to see him standing there like a fool, he let the tears roll down his cheeks.
Back to New York, that’s what Lystra said. “Back to New York to watch the show, yeah. A lot happening very soon. Timing. It’s all in the timing, yeah.”
So here they were. New York City, and damned if the tattooed madwoman didn’t have an apartment a block away from the Tulip. He could look straight down Sixth Avenue and see the building. He could run for it, escape, get to the Twins and say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but you don’t know what this crazy bitch is doing!”
He could do that. And they’d thank him for the information and then kill him. Or Lystra would catch him and she would show him that scary face she had, the one where she seemed almost to turn into a skeleton. And then she could kill his biots and turn him loose.
Death or madness. Seriously? That’s what it was down to? The three windows in his head said yes, yes, that was exactly the choice.
He wondered rather morbidly just what kind of crazy he would be. Stories were still leaking out of Stockholm. They said some big-deal banker found a way to hang himself from a chandelier. They said a French general was found smeared with feces, crying. They said a famous American horror novelist had run into the street and beaten a party Santa to death with a fire extinguisher.
Which crazy will you be, Anthony? he asked himself.
What escape was there? The Twins? The American government?
He stopped breathing. The answer—not a good answer, a weak, probably worthless answer—popped into his head.
Someone brilliant. Someone with mad skills. Someone who once had almost, sort of, liked Bug Man. And was just a block away.
Burnofsky.
Lystra had taken his phone. She was on her own phone right now in the adjacent room, telling her CEO, some dude named Tom, to fire all the remaining employees, effective now, this minute, shut it all down, the whole Directive Medical shebang, stop all checks and buy more gold. Yeah. Just don’t touch Cathexis.
Burnofsky. The dude had invented nanobots. It stood to reason he’d have … something. But how to reach him? He knew Burnofsky’s e-mail and his cell, but Bug Man had no phone.
He would have to wait until she was asleep, the monster in the next room.
Maybe I won’t be a hanging-myself crazy, Bug Man thought. Maybe I’ll be a nice, gentle, shit-smeared kind of crazy.