The music was softer than you might expect from a den of iniquity. It was not, Burnofsky thanked God, the music of the aging rocker he had just seen the back of. In fact he’d never heard music quite like it anywhere else. It was a soft pulsation with a repetitive melody and had a quality of perpetualness about it. A bit like house dance music, although no one but the professional dancers would be expected to dance.
Beneath the catwalk were the alcoves. They were mocked up to look a bit like an Eastern bazaar, as though they were tents, so what you saw looking across the room were tent flaps or beaded curtains or, in the case of some who enjoyed flaunting their vice, canvas drapes pulled back to reveal and invite.
The center of the room was a rectangular bar, all lacquered ebony with tasteful red and gold highlights. They served alcohol of course, and food as well, though few people ate the dumplings. It was more that some of the patrons didn’t like staying inside their alcoves but enjoyed mingling and chatting, often with the bartenders. And then, some people liked a vodka with their pipe.
Burnofsky entered his narrow alcove, no bigger than a good-size department-store dressing room, with just a pair of easy chairs and a small table, a dim lamp, and an old-fashioned rotary phone. Burnofsky knew the drill. He lifted the receiver and waited until a voice answered.
“Yes, sir. How may I be of service?” A man’s voice, kind, understanding, nonjudgmental.
“Ah-pen-yen,” Burnofsky said, the China Bone’s preferred term.
The voice said, “Very good, sir. Shall we make all preparations, or would you prefer to do your own?”
“You prep it.” Burnofsky smiled. “I trust you.”
He hung up and relaxed back into the chair. From the alcove to his left came the spicy-sweet smell he loved. From the other side a sudden explosion of laughter, quickly stifled.
He’d been looking forward to this all day. The day had included a long face-to-face with the Twins. That was never a good thing. Especially when the heart of the meeting was to tell Burnofsky that Bug Man would be taking the lead on the UN job.
He hadn’t argued much. Bug Man’s tactics were sound. But he was arrogant, and Burnofsky could see too many ways things could go wrong. Burnofsky didn’t like the sense of plans being rushed. There would be another UN General Assembly in a year. Another year’s planning and they’d be in a much stronger position.
Right now AFGC had a grand total of twenty-seven qualified twitchers, counting himself. Twenty-seven. To target and control six major heads of state while maintaining all their existing projects? The logistics were staggering.
Infest the prime ministers of Britain, India, and Japan, the chancellor of Germany, and the presidents of China and the United States? That was six teams in six cities, spinning away inside the brains of four men and two women who were among the most-watched, most-observed people in the human race?
Bad wiring had a tendency to cause seizures. Seizures in an average person were manageable, but in a head of state? The POTUS just had to twitch to have an elite team of doctors probing her ten different ways. And what then? What happened when the doctors at Bethesda found a head full of nanobots?
Panic, that’s what. Phone calls to the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, every foreign intel outfit. The rumors were already out there. A Google search would turn up the paranoids—some with surprisingly accurate information.
If the FBI suddenly had proof? Physical proof?
AFGC might control the deputy director of the FBI, but he alone would never be able to contain something like that.
Twenty-seven twitchers. And of those, maybe five who could fight half as well as they spun. That’s what the kid didn’t get. Bug Man didn’t understand that twenty-seven was really closer to seven who could fight. And maybe three who could fight and win against the very best.
A waitress appeared. She was carrying a silver tray. She bowed slightly, set the tray down, and backed out of the alcove.
The tray was covered with a thick, white cloth, and on that cloth rested a narrow glass tray of long matches and an ornate, Cloisonné water pipe with a long, bent bronze neck and a tiny bowl.
Burnofsky closed his eyes and smiled. When he opened them again, his worries and troubles were already starting to recede because rescue was at hand.
Troubling visions of failure, discovery, capture followed by twenty years cold turkey in a federal prison, would disappear soon enough.
But not just yet. A sweaty, nervous man was standing in the entrance, pushing aside the drape, diffident, bobbing like he was halfway to a bow.
Burnofsky had forgotten. There was business to be conducted before pleasure was to be savored. He didn’t stand up. He did offer his hand.
“Lord Elfangor?” the man whispered, practically wetting himself. “I’m Aidan Bailey.” The accent was Australian or New Zealand, one of those. A UN employee, of course.
Burnofsky sighed. Of course. This would be One-Up’s work. And as usual she had taken the most dramatic route. He squinted up at the man, trying to recall the exact nature of his wiring. He was a Scientologist, which meant he was already prepared to buy into alien mythology. A bit of a change from the usual giddy idealists churned up by Nexus Humanus and delivered to AFGC.
Burnofsky wondered how One-Up had inserted that “Lord Elfangor” bullshit. Had she actually gone to the trouble of tapping phonemes to invent a name? Unlikely. More likely she’d cauterized some critical thinking—there couldn’t have been much there to begin with—wired the man’s religious indoctrination to some bit of TV trivia or movie lore and come up with the name, then tied it to a pic of Burnofsky.