He jumped. Others in the room jumped as well. They were all staring at her with accusing eyes. She was the one who had ordered the bomb.
“She …” Jindal began. “You know she always has to have a Starbucks. She went out and …” He shrugged and looked around helplessly. “It’s a thing with her. It’s a superstition. You know that! Half these twitchers have OCD. They’re all nuts.”
Sugar’s phone rang. It made her jump. It had to be them. It had to be the Twins.
Sick with dread she looked at the number. It was not a recognized number. She pushed the answer button and held it to her ear.
“Who is this?” she asked.
“It’s me, it’s me, I’ve been trying to get through!”
One-Up.
“Slow down,” Sugar said with all the authority she could manage. “Explain yourself.”
Sugar listened. And she glanced at the camera and imagined those two freak faces, imagined those three awful eyes boring into her.
She would never survive this day. Sugar saw her house. Her daughter. Her husband, whom she didn’t like very much, but he was good cover.
The Twins were going to have her killed. By one of her own men. She glanced quickly at the angry faces around her. One of you, she thought. One of you.
She wished she could cry. But if there was any way out of this, it was by dealing with this new threat.
There was an opportunity here, a desperate opportunity.
She turned away from the monitor to her deputy, a beefy but smart former cop named Paul Johntz.
“Paul. We’ve been penetrated. There are at least two BZRK twitchers. They’ll have to stay within range of the building to run biots. Get every piece of muscle we have and follow me.”
“I’m tapping optics,” Plath said. She’d been shown how to do it. But only once. She sank the probe. It was a rigid little spear on the end of a piece of nanowire. She had to use her mantis arm to do it, and it was awkward. Like throwing a harpoon with a lobster claw.
The probe sank and … and nothing.
She reeled it back in. Stabbed it deeper into the nerve. And suddenly, “Ahh!” she said.
“Shh,” Keats said. “People.”
There was movement near the Dumpster. Plath fell silent. A new visual had opened up. So strange. Like a window inside a window. Like picture in picture on a TV, except that this picture was black and white and grainy, as if the pixels were all an inch on each side.
Then she remembered: the raw feed from the optic nerve was upside down. She reversed it mentally, as well as she could, anyway, but still it made no sense.
She drew back the probe. Twice more she stabbed, and then she had it. Not clear, still grainy, but wider in scope, less like she was looking at the world through a straw.
She was seeing an eye. The very eye she was looking through.
She was looking in a mirror, that was it.
Her stomach was tied in knots. Yeah, it was a mirror, or the high-tech equivalent of a mirror, and now the eye swept across the mirror, no longer looking at itself. Looking at a face.
A face like no other.
“It’s them,” she whispered voicelessly.
Keats held her close.
Bug Man and Burnofsky got the same message on their monitors at the same time.
One-Up missing. Kim and Alfredo dead. UN locked down.
You must take your targets.
CBA
CBA. Charles and Benjamin Armstrong.
Bug Man and Burnofsky.
Both had reached their targets.
Two armies of nanobots were in place. One on the Chinese leader, one on the American.
Kim’s nanobots were in place on the Indian, Chauksey. Alfredo’s little army was still two jumps away from Prime Minister Hayashi. Those forces were immobilized for now, until they could be repurposed to a new twitcher. That would take time.
Dietrich wasn’t good enough to reach the Japanese in Bug Man’s estimation. But assuming One-Up was on track, they might still take the American, the Brit, and the Chinese.
Bug Man took a gamble. Time to make it clear he was more than just a twitcher. His game could extend into the macro. He keyed a message to Twofer.
Suggest: take Dietrich off Jap give him Indian.
No reply. But that was okay.
Victory was still within reach. The unknown was whether any of the targets were defended. In a fight One-Up could handle herself, and so could Burnofsky.
Even if only Bug Man and Burnofsky prevailed, the world’s two greatest powers would be subtly but inexorably bent to serving the wills of Charles and Benjamin Armstrong. Whatever had happened or was still to happen to the others, it wouldn’t matter, not if he and Burnofsky succeeded.
Of course in a perfect world, Bug Man thought, in a perfect world, Burnofsky and all the rest would fail and only Bug Man would triumph.
But that was an ambitious dream.
Time to begin the wiring of the president of the United States.
He laughed out loud at the thought.
The Twins would kiss his ass this time. They would bow down before him.
Then, Bug Man saw.
Two biots were rushing along in his wake, racing up behind him as his army pelted down along the optic chiasma.
Oh, yes.
Oh, hell yes.
Is that you, Vincent? Please, God, let it be.
No macro interference to mess anything up this time. The ultimate battle for the ultimate prize.
“I hope you’re watching, Mr. Charles and Mr. Benjamin. Because this … will be epic.”
The cops were beginning to move the crowd away from UN Plaza. There was a very serious mood in the air. Something very bad had happened, and New York’s finest were not in the mood to take backtalk from anyone.