BZRK

Helen Falkenhym Morales. President of the United States.

Beneath the box with her name was a line of attack. A pathway. The trick as always was to get from point A to point Z. Fortunately there weren’t that many letters. “A” was the deputy director of the FBI, who was already an asset. “B” was a Secret Service agent who was not on the presidential protection detail but was a friend of the FBI guy. They played a weekly game of squash.

Easy transfer, there.

“B” led in turn to his Secret Service mentor, “C,” who was definitely on the presidential detail and would be in New York with the president.

“C” might be enough. He might make physical contact with POTUS at some point. But the more reliable path was from “C” to “D.”

“D” was the president’s “body man,” although in this case it was a “body woman.” Her name was Liz Law, a name that should have made her some kind of superhero. She was the first person to see Morales in the morning and the last to see her at night.

To reach Liz Law was to reach the president, period.

A,B,C,D.

E.

Four jumps.

Some of the others had it tougher. The path to the Chinese president was seven steps. Some had it easier. The path to the British PM was three steps. Someone had quickly replaced the dead Liselotte Osborne in that pathway.

Bug Man blinked, defocused the chart, and looked around at the room. Jindal was the briefer. He was standing at the ready, twirling a laser pointer nervously in his hand.

The various lead twitchers were around the table.

Kim. An Asperger’s case if ever there was one. Skinny Korean kid, looked about twelve, although he was probably seventeen. He tended to avoid eye contact. And any physical contact. And would occasionally interrupt the conversation with some totally off-topic remark. A good twitcher, methodical, careful.

Dietrich. He was maybe twenty-five, a German with hair so thin and light it seemed to float on a breeze of its own, a sort of thinning blond halo. Behind his back people called him Riff-Raff, after the butler from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. An Armstrong Twins true believer. Dude had totally drunk the Nexus Humanus Kool-Aid and licked the bottom of the glass. He was barely good enough as a twitcher, and Bug Man would not have wanted Dietrich covering his ass down in the meat.

Alfredo, now he had potential. He came from some tiny island in the middle of the ocean. The Azores, whatever those were. His family had raised bulls for the street bullfights they had there. He had made a name for himself in online games, where he had a tendency to reach the top level in half the time it took anyone else. A pretty good twitcher, Alfredo, but volatile, capable of losing it entirely when someone crossed him.

And then, there was One-Up. She was sixteen, a white girl from some Oklahoma suburb. She could have been a beauty but meth had destroyed her teeth, and now that she was clean she had a bad set of veneers. It gave her a startling, too-white, too-bright shark smile.

One-up was tough and fearless and dangerous. All the love and energy she had once put into finding meth to smoke and deal she now devoted to the game. She was weird, obsessive, as thin as a classroom skeleton, and probably clinically insane. But Bug Man had fought alongside her once, going up against Kerouac and someone they didn’t know, and bottom line? The girl had game. She had taken over the Bowen target during the reshuffling when Burnofsky got bumped off the POTUS.

There was one other person in the room. She was sitting in a corner, wearing khaki slacks and a pink pima-cotton shirt. She had blonde hair—a bit stiff—one leg crossed over the other, hands on the arms of her chair. She was a white woman with a pert little nose and sculpted eyebrows. Sugar Lebowski, operational head of AmericaStrong, AFGC’s tough-guy division. Some called her the Little Lebowski, although there was nothing laid back or cool about her.

She hadn’t been there for Bug Man’s beating. But she had sent the order and chosen the men, and sat there with her pink-lipsticked mouth smiling pertly as they reported what had gone down.

Bug Man nodded at One-up and ignored the others.

Feeling self-conscious, he took the seat at the head of the table while Burnofsky took what was either the other head or the tail of the table.

Kim had the Indian PM; Alfredo was on the Japanese; Burnofsky had the Chinese now; and Dietrich, who had been warming up to go after the German, was now prepping to fill in for anyone who pulled up sick or failed.

The pain of sitting was excruciating. The bruises ached and burned. The muscles twanged.

Jindal started to give a rundown, using his laser pointer. And listening with half his brain, Bug Man began to stew. Things were not quite what they had seemed. Yes, the POTUS was a slightly bigger target than the Chinese president, but the path to the Chinese dude was seven jumps. So while the Twins had given Bug Man the honor of the prime target, they had given Burnofsky the harder job, at least in terms of navigating the pathway.

Jindal started the briefing. It was all very official sounding. Very Defense Department. But these weren’t colonels and generals listening. One-Up was playing a game on her phone. Dietrich was acting way too enthusiastic. Alfredo seemed to be catching up on his Facebook messages.

Burnofsky seemed about to fall asleep, nodding off, catching himself.

Bug Man played his role. He stared with great focus at Jindal. But his mind was on the pain in his legs. It was also on what Burnofsky had told him. Was it a warning? Yes. But what kind of warning? He was trying to manipulate the Bug Man, but to what end?

What was it the man wanted in the end? Did Burnofsky want Bug Man to go rogue and end up as dead as his own daughter?