BZRK

Somewhere in that man’s brain was a picture of his mentor and friend, agent Francine Petrash, attached to the presidential detail. It would be a tough wire job. Bug Man would have to convince John Smith to touch Agent Petrash’s face. He had some ideas about that. But it would mean an all-night wire job.

So, for now, Bug Man headed back to the Sofitel for some sleep.

Roughly three hundred miles away Dr. Anya Violet looked at Vincent and said, “I know you’re doing something to me.”

At that moment Vincent was sitting with his feet up on the windowsill. He was gazing out over a gray, overcast Atlantic. Down on the beach, his two new recruits were walking and talking. Obviously relaxed in each other’s company. Leaving footprints on pristine, damp sand.

“I’m just watching the waves,” Vincent said.

“I feel differently about you,” Anya said.

“Do you?”

“Goddamnit it, Vincent. I didn’t betray you. I was used. I was set up. They must have guessed you’d come through me. They knew you’d need access to the lab.”

“That’s right,” Vincent said. He was half listening. Watching Plath and Keats down on the beach. Thinking that Nijinsky had told him only part of a story, that Jin didn’t trust Vincent—or want to burden him—with more.

Vincent and Wilkes and Ophelia, the three of them, had swarmed over Jin’s brain. There was no sign of nanobot infestation. No wire. They had checked eyes, ears, even nose. They had sent biots crawling across his skin and deep into his brain and found nothing at all.

Nijinsky was clean.

But he wasn’t telling the whole truth about his encounter with Sugar Lebowski. He was telling only what he had to tell. Concealing something.

And all the while, Vincent’s two injured biots were stringing wire deep inside Anya’s brain. It would be some time before they were capable of battle. His two healthy biots were in his own head. Waiting.

“I know you’re wiring me,” Anya said. The sound of her voice was a stab in the heart because it was her voice, but no longer entirely her own tone or emotion. She was speaking as someone would to a loved one. There was a sense of hurt. Of betrayal. Like you’d feel if someone you cared about was treating you badly.

Wire. It stretched from her memories of him to memories of everything she cared for, believed in, admired. Loved. Already Vincent was entwined with her mother, with her sister, with her favorite sushi restaurant, with her childhood teacher—who had told her she had a special ability—to her favorite scents.

She was being hard-wired to trust Vincent.

And maybe more than trust.

But she was still doubtful. Suspicious, because she was a very smart woman, and very self-aware, and he liked that in her. And soon he would wire all of that suspicion away.

“I do what I do because I have no choice,” Vincent whispered.

I am not Scipio. I do not slaughter women and children and boast of it before the Roman Senate.

I will save your life, Anya, he thought. You don’t understand: Lear will send the Carthage message unless I make you one of us.

I will save your life, Anya, by destroying your will.

“I want you to make love to me,” Anya said. Her voice cracked with need.

“This isn’t the night for—”

She rose, came to him, knelt, took his legs down from the sill, and touched him.

Vincent pushed her away, gently but decisively. “No, Anya. I’ll do what I have to do to save your life. But I won’t let you lower yourself.”

Vincent knew about Bug Man and Jessica, the beauty he had turned into a living slave. He was not Bug Man.

Anya’s eyes flashed furiously. “You make me need you and then give me nothing? That’s your act of charity, Vincent? Wire me to be hungry and then let me starve?”

“I have to live with myself,” he said. He stood up and she followed him as he rose, still very close, so close they touched and where they didn’t touch they wanted to.

“You want me,” she said. “You may not take any pleasure from it, but you want me, your body betrays you. And whether or not it’s real, Vincent, whether it’s my true desires or something you’ve done to me, in the end there’s no difference.”

“There is to me,” he said.

He pushed past her, his throat tight, blood pounding through him.

I am not Scipio. And I am not Bug Man.

So many things I’m not, he thought bitterly. And so few things I am.

Later Keats and Plath cooked pasta. It wasn’t an old family recipe, just some sauce from a jar. Plath used the massive pot her mother had once used to boil crabs, right here, right absolutely here in this very kitchen in a very different world.

And they had a dinner, all of them, Vincent and Anya, Nijinsky, Ophelia, Wilkes, Keats, and Plath. They drank a nice Barolo. They passed around the freshly grated Parmesan. And it was normal if by normal you meant a horrible parody of normality.

Nijinsky had somehow found enough clothing of Plath’s father to look quite modelish again. And Wilkes kept her sudden digressions into hostility under control. And Anya looked at Vincent with loving eyes while he ate mechanically. And Ophelia somehow found her repertoire of smiles that made them all feel better.

And still it was the most desperately sad meal Plath had ever had.

It was Keats who broke the code of silence and asked Vincent, “When does it start?”

“Tomorrow,” Vincent said. “Our British cousins are in the city. They’ll be taking—defending—their prime minister. We have our president. And …” He paused, glanced at Anya as though not sure whether he could speak freely in her presence. Something reassured him, and in accepting reassurance, Plath thought something inside Vincent twisted and writhed a little bit, too, and he said, “And we have a little surprise for the Armstrong Twins.”