BZRK: Reloaded

And then her eyes widened.

Her mouth formed an O, and the girl with Sadie McLure’s freckles screamed.

TWELVE

“We’re going,” Nijinsky announced as soon as Plath walked in and tossed him his ChapStick. “Pack up.”

“What do you mean we’re—” Plath demanded.

“We’re out of here, Washington cell was wiped out yesterday. Killed. Lear just told me, or maybe he just found out, in any case … There’s a single survivor.” His face was the color of cigarette ashes. “Grab whatever gear you have. You two are on a plane. I’m going to drive down with Wilkes and Anya.”

Keats walked into the room, and Plath handed him a Snickers bar she’d picked up at the drugstore. He took it, made a dubious face, and stuck it in his jacket pocket. “What about Vincent?” he asked Nijinsky. “You’re not leaving him . . .” A terrible thought occurred to him. “Tell me Caligula is not coming for Vincent.”

Nijinsky wiped his mouth with his hand, a nervous gesture. He was a wreck; that was plain to see. “No. Lear has left that decision up to me.”

“Up to you?” Plath asked, not meaning to sound incredulous.

“Up to me, that’s right, up to me,” Nijinsky snapped. “I’m taking Vincent with us. We’re going to grow some new-generation biots and try a deep wire on Vincent. If that works . . .”

“If it works he lives …and if it doesn’t?”

“Do me a favor,” Nijinsky interrupted. “Don’t lecture me. And don’t give me your outrage, I have no time for your outrage. Pack. Now. This place could be hit next.”

Keats said, “If this deep-wire thing works on Vincent, it could work on Al …on Kerouac. My brother.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Nijinsky said. “Let’s just get out of here alive.”

“He means don’t start hoping,” Wilkes said sourly. “We’re BZRK. We don’t do hope. You know who had hope?”

Nijinsky gritted his teeth. Wilkes came right up to him, her face up next to his neck. “Ophelia. She had hope.”

“I didn’t order that, goddamnit, Wilkes!”

“Nah, but you would, right? Because you’ll do whatever it takes to impress Lear. Right?”

But Plath had a different take. She wondered why Lear would have let Nijinksy decide Vincent’s fate, but not Ophelia’s. Was Nijinsky lying?

Pia Valquist finished her report, logged it, and saved it into the system. It would be automatically encrypted.

It would also be forgotten. The story was horrific. Ghastly. It would have been unbelievable but for the missing arm and the terrible scars.

What the Armstrongs had done to that girl . . .

Sophie Morgenstein confirmed that the Doll Ship had indeed sunk in the South Atlantic, and that her sister had died. She herself had almost bled to death.

Valquist used a mapping app to lay out what she had gathered from Morgenstein’s account of her fellow passengers. Thus far Valquist had correlated five coastline kidnappings or disappearances. Sincheng, Taiwan. Funakoshi Bay, Japan. Pismo Beach, California. Ensenada, Mexico. Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

But of course in reality there were probably far more. Sophie Morgenstein estimated the captive population of the Doll Ship as over a hundred, not counting crew, guards, and the despicable medical personnel who used drugs and even lobotomization to create a docile population.

Her recitation had left Pia shaken. She was not unaware of human cruelty and depravity, but this was monstrous. Even now her hands trembled with suppressed fury.

Pia entered the data into the map and calculated the cruise times between her five known points. Yes, a ship moving at, say, fourteen knots, could do it quite handily.

Then she noticed something. The number of unexplained coastal disappearances did not appear to decline following the sinking of the Doll Ship.

Valquist frowned and then rubbed the frown away with her fingertips. She took the short walk to the coffee room, made a cup of Nespresso, and came back to her data.

Two women missing from Freeport, Texas. A girl missing near Cameron Parrish, Louisiana. Panama City, Florida. Punta Guayanilla, Puerto Rico, a teenager. Pampa Melchorita, Peru. Alaska. Vladivostok. Northern Japan, quite recently.

Okinawa just a little over a week ago, a Japanese American girl.

Fighting down a growing excitement, Valquist began plotting the places out on Google Earth. Yes, sailing times worked if you assumed a slightly greater speed of fifteen knots.

She paused, looking at the satellite imagery of Point Lookout. Something just north of there: a series of white dots.

She zoomed in closer. Tanks of some kind.

She checked the location of the tanks: Dominion Cove, it was called. A liquified natural gas port.

She immediately Googled all the more recent kidnapping reports that fit the profile. She had eleven in all. Of those, six were within close range of a liquified natural gas facility.

A chill went up her spine.

That was not coincidence.

There was a second Doll Ship.

She rechecked her data, took a deep breath, and burst into the office of her supervisor, Georg Gronholm.

“I need Naval Intelligence.”

Georg shrugged. “I can introduce you to—”

“Not ours. I need NATO. I have a friend with the Royal Navy.” “So? Call this friend.”

Valquist shook her head. “It’s not the sort of thing for a phone call. He happens to be in Hong Kong. I need to fly there. Immediately. On the next flight. Now.”