The New York home of BZRK was abandoned. None of them believed they’d ever return.
No one had the slightest affection for the place, with its peeling paint, filth, and stink of grease from the deli downstairs. But it was what they had. A place. A spot.
Without it they were just three teenagers—including one certified nut—a gay male model, a crazy person, and a Russian scientist. Somehow within the safe house it was possible to believe they were significant. Out alone? Plath and Keats in a cab on the way to the airport? The others in a rented van?
Ridiculous, that’s what they were.
The cab drove past the Tulip. Keats looked up at it and whatever tiny flame of hope he’d held on to flickered like a tired candle flame in a breeze.
Airport scanning machines could see guns. They could not see biots.
Plath and Keats wore theirs in their heads. In specific, Plath had two biots—P1 and P2. Keats had one biot in his own head—K1—and K2 in Plath’s brain, working—whenever he had a spare moment and could focus on it—on strengthening the aneurysm wall.
The flight from New York’s La Guardia Airport to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport took only an hour. The problem was that Sadie McLure was a recognizable person. If she were spotted there would be media, there would be people sneaking video of her and uploading it to the web.
But she was not, despite all the incredible media focus on the terrible crash of her father’s jet and her own near miss and the hundreds of casualties, as well known or recognizable as a major movie star. A little effort at camouflage, a minimal change of hair color and perhaps a baseball cap, should do the trick.
Did, in fact, do the trick. For most people.
Plath and Keats sat in row 14, just behind the wing. The plane was three and three: three seats on the starboard, three seats to port.
Keats took the aisle seat, and Plath took the window seat (they had an empty seat between them), where she could pretend to be asleep and pull the brim of her baseball cap down over her eyes and go unnoticed.
It worked.
Until she had to go to the bathroom. And even then the cap and the dark glasses would have worked had not a particular passenger also been on his way to Washington, to deal, as it happened, with the flip side of the same problem.
When Karl Burnofsky looked up he saw, and slowly recognized, none other than Sadie McLure.
Plath went into the bathroom, peed, washed her hands in the tiny sink, and squeezed out of the door. A passenger, an older man with a ragged, Keith Richards face, was very impatiently waiting to get in. He pushed past her, practically knocking her aside.
He reached across her as if desperate to grab a paper towel, and as he did his hand brushed against her neck.
Plath returned to her row. She slid past Keats and sank into her seat and stared out of the window at hard glittering lights below and the trailing edge of the wing. It looked cold out there in the night.
She had a book to read, but she wasn’t reading it now. Keats had a book as well, but he just gazed moodily down the aisle. They knew better than to talk about anything of importance. Nijinsky had warned them.
Keats summarized his life. Brother in a mental institution. Parents indifferent, glad to have him gone, no matter how thin the excuse. In love with a girl who had two billion dollars and had told him flatly that she did not love him back. And two biots. One in Plath’s head, trudging back and forth building the wall of titanium. The other in his own eye, sitting there, watching red blood cells surge beneath its feet.
Death or madness.
He stole a glance at Plath. He wanted her, but more than that he wanted her to want him. He wanted her to need him.
And why? Because he was so reliable? Because he really could save her? No. He wasn’t fool enough to believe that. She had more resources than he did. She was probably smarter. She was certainly too beautiful for the likes of him.
And yet . . .
And yet.
Seven rows back Burnofsky smiled slyly to himself. What were the chances? And what an interesting problem. He had Sadie McLure, the daughter of his old friend and nemesis, within his reach. Had her dead to rights.
The Twins would forgive Burnofsky anything if he could deliver The McLure, dead or alive. Yes, the plan had been to use Thrum to use McLure to get to BZRK. But that plan had been laid in place before Sadie McLure had invaded Benjamin’s brain.
Charles would be upset if Burnofsky altered course suddenly to go after Sadie. But Benjamin? Oh, Benjamin would love nothing more than to have Sadie McLure in his power.
The question then was: What was best for Burnofsky?
Obviously Sadie was being sent to Washington because Lear knew his Washington cell had been obliterated. The New Yorkers were being brought in to take over. Their mission was obvious: take back the president.
Burnofsky smiled at the thought that he was playing chess with the mysterious Lear. Burnofsky moved a pawn, Lear moved a rook, Burnofsky moved a bishop. And Burnofsky’s king was half mad.
Well, he thought, most kings are at least half mad.
When they landed, Sadie would go one way and he would go another. She and the boy with her would in all likelihood go far out of range. He could lose them. He had some limited ability to track nanobots, but it was sketchy and imprecise.
Follow her? Yes, that would be the right move. Do his best to stay with her. He had placed twelve nanobots on her neck during their brief encounter at the restroom, but it was a crude, inert transfer. He was not at a twitcher station, and nanobots were not biots; they could not simply be controlled with thoughts. What he had done was to use what they called a “packet.” A packet was about the size of a single grain of table salt. Twelve nanobots packed tightly together and covered with an adhesive. He kept two of these with him at all times. One under his left pinkie fingernail, one under the right. It was one of these packets that he had “accidentally” wiped onto Plath’s neck as he passed her.