LITMIR.BIZ

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glance at Keats.

      “Stupid of me, caring about Vincent,” Nijinsky said. “Loving him. And no, I don’t mean like that. I mean, if I’d had a brother . . .” He looked at Keats, who did have a brother, and there were tears in Nijinsky’s eyes. “I mean if I’d had a brother, if I knew what that was like, that would be Vincent. I’d give my useless life for him. And I was too late.”

      In a flash Plath saw what she had missed. She wasn’t the only person in the room haunted by What if ? and Why didn’t I?

      “Maybe we could rescue Ophelia from the FBI . . .” Wilkes started to say. “She could . . . No one’s a better spinner than Ophelia.” She was pleading for a life and knowing better, knowing that decision would have already been made.

      “You’re talking about a deep wire,” Nijinsky said, not meeting anyone’s eye.

      “Yeah, deep wire. The deepest. Take some time and get all the way down in Vincent’s brain.” Wilkes sat up. “Ophelia could—”

      “Damn it, Wilkes.” Nijinsky was pleading with her. Plath could see that he was on the ragged edge. He couldn’t think about Ophelia. “Ophelia was the best.”

      His use of past tense did not escape anyone’s notice.

      Wilkes’s face twisted. It was like someone had kicked her in the stomach. She jumped from her seat and walked on stiff legs to the sink. She turned on the faucet and drank straight from the tap. When she straightened up her head banged the cupboard door.

      “Son of a bitch!” she screamed. She banged the side of her fist against the cupboard door. And then harder. Then both fists and on and on until it seemed she would beat her hands bloody.

      Keats moved smoothly behind her, imprisoned her arms, and waited as she cursed him and struggled madly to get away.

      “Was it us?” Wilkes demanded. “Was it us? Was it Caligula? Did Lear order Ophelia killed? Jesus Christ!”

      After a while Wilkes said, “Okay, blue eyes, you can let me go.”

      He did. She smashed the cupboard one last time and headed for the door. Nijinsky’s arm shot out, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her to him. She struggled for a minute but finally collapsed, sat on his lap, and let him put his arms around her.

      He spoke past her spiky hair, his voice quiet, calm. “I don’t know if you’ve seen the news in the last hour,” he said.

      Heads shook in the negative.

      “The president’s husband is dead. Supposedly he slipped in the bathtub,” Nijinsky said. “I think that’s most likely bullshit.”

      “Why would anyone want him dead?” Plath asked.

      Wilkes was listening for the answer. For Keats it all meant very little: America’s first gentleman was not on his radar.

      “I doubt anyone wanted MoMo dead,” Nijinsky said. “I think the other side screwed up. I think they’re having a very bad wire.”

      Plath was the first to grasp what he was saying. “You think she did it? The president?”

      “It has occurred to Lear,” Nijinsky said, pushing Wilkes off and standing up stiffly, “that controlling the puppeteer is almost as good as controlling the puppet.”

      “We’re going after Bug Man?” Wilkes said. Her incredulous expression hardened into a feral look, which in turn brought out an almost canine laugh.

      “If you can’t wire the target, wire the twitcher,” Nijinsky said.

      “When do we go?”

      “This is mostly on the Washington cell,” Nijinsky said. “But Lear wants us to be ready. In case they call for help.”

      “So we just sit on our butts?” Wilkes demanded.

      “No, we go. We go. As soon as Vincent can go with us,” Nijinsky said, and doubted the words even as he spoke them.

      The group broke up. Plath stayed behind just a moment to talk to Nijinsky. “Do you still want me to go to the reading of the will?”

      “You have no choice. It’s dangerous. But you have no choice. Caligula will have your back. You think the lawyer will co-operate?”

      “I know what my dad’s will said. But who knows? Who the hell knows anything in this world?”

FIVE

      A rebel group: misfits, borderline personalities, freaks, and definitely geeks. Who signs up to fight when the choices are death or madness?

      No one joins a group calling itself BZRK expecting a country club. But among the far-flung cells of BZRK some were more conventional than others, and none was more stable, more normal seeming, than BZRK Washington.

      Their safe house was on Capitol Hill, the somewhat dubious residential neighborhood near the Capitol Building where the US Congress convened.

      Fifth Street, Southeast, just off Independence Avenue. It was a narrow, two-story row house painted a muddy maroon color, with dirty windows in cream-colored frames.

      But unlike their New York counterparts, BZRK Washington enjoyed a very pleasant interior environment. They had a gourmet kitchen. They had brand-new faux deco bathrooms. The plumbing worked. The heating worked. In summer even the air-conditioning worked.

      There were five bedrooms in all, each rather small, but all pleasantly if blandly furnished. The living room had become the common meeting room where the six members could lounge on comfortable couches or decamp to the formal dining room.

      There was a crystal chandelier in that dining room.

      The kitchen was small but very nicely appointed, with a six-burner restaurant-quality gas stove top, a double oven, and a massive Sub-Zero refrigerator that dwarfed the rest of the room.

      The kitchen was the domain of Yousef, who called himself Andronikus after the mad Byzantine emperor. He was . . . But it really doesn’t matter what Andronikus was, because as he stood stirring the couscous he had three minutes left to live.

      Four other members of the Washington cell of BZRK were also present. They were sipping teas and sodas—no booze or wine or beer: house rules—while waiting for the food.

      They had put in a long day narrowing down the possible locations of a certain Bug Man.

      Bug Man, they knew, would want to work within range of the White House and not be forced to rely on AFGC’s often-unreliable signal repeaters. That meant a half-mile radius for his base of action. Probably. No one knew for sure.

      But there would also be a separate abode of some sort. Living twenty-four hours a day in an office attracts attention from building management. So, two possible locations: an office near the White House and a hotel.

      They were running facial-recognition software on CCTV footage, but no one had a good picture of Bug Man. All they knew was that he was a male black teen. That would lead nowhere.

      But from Lear had come a solid lead. It seemed the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation had a long-standing corporate discount rate with Hyatt Hotels. If they had Bug Man living at a Hyatt, that narrowed it down to seven likely hotels.

      To find an office location they had gone back through occupancy permits and subtracted tenants who had been in place for more than a year. They searched the “for lease” ads for offices within the target area. They focused on those that had the greatest degree of privacy, with no shared facilities.

      The list was not that long. They had fairly quickly come up with nineteen possible locations. They expected to have the exact location within three days. And with the CCTV facial-recognition software focusing on Hyatts, they expected to have the hotel pinned within a day or two.

      Which

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