timetable. In a few hours, by morning at latest, the news of the first gentleman’s death would be out. It would be seen as a tragic accident by the general public—but the Twins would know better.
If he was going to keep things running, he, Burnofsky, would have to get the Twins under control. Not easy. Never easy and harder now. Charles still saw reason. But Benjamin . . .
Burnofsky took the elevator up to the Tulip. The Tulip was the pinnacle, floors sixty-three through sixty-seven, of the Armstrong Building, headquarters of the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation. It was the pink polymer, one-way transparent, nanocomposite-walled home and office of the Armstrong Twins.
AFGC still made fancy gifts at factories in China, Malaysia, and Turkey. They still owned and operated the ubiquitous gift stores seen in every American airport and in European and Japanese train stations. But gifts had long since ceased to be their main focus.
Weapons technology, surveillance, and communications technology, and above all, nanotechnology, now occupied the denizens of the Tulip and most of the sixty-two floors below. The gift stores were run out of an office park in Naperville, Illinois. In the Tulip they had bigger fish to fry.
Burnofsky had called ahead to Jindal so he could get the Twins up and alert. Jindal met him outside the private elevator, down on sixty-two.
“What is it?” Jindal asked, suppressing a yawn but intensely concerned despite his sleepiness.
“Why don’t I just tell the story once?” Burnofsky said and pushed past Jindal to the elevator. It was a short ride.
“What in hell?” Benjamin asked the moment Burnofsky appeared.
The Armstrong Twins wore a robe, dark red silk, specially tailored for them, of course: Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s did not carry clothing in their size or shape.
Their legs, all three of them, were bare. Their feet—only the two useful ones—were in shearling-lined slippers, the third, deformed and three-quarter-size, was bare.
“Difficult news,” Burnofsky said.
“Well, spit it out, it’s the middle of the night!” Charles snapped.
Burnofsky tapped his pad for a few seconds, and the touch screen embedded in the Twins’ massive desk lit up.
It was the video from Bug Man’s feed. Like all nanobot video, it failed to achieve the high standards of Hollywood; it was grainy, jerky gray scale one moment and awash in unnatural computer-enhanced colors the next. This video was worse still because it was the result of tapping directly into the president’s optic nerve, pulling up the raw feed, so to speak, of rods and cones, uninterpreted by the visual cortex.
There was no sound, just a series of jerky images—a window, a wall, Monte Morales, a rumpled bed, the floor, Monte Morales again, a shower knob, a shoulder, an eye, a stream of water and then . . .
“Jesus!” It was Jindal. “Did she . . . Is that . . .”
It was fascinating to watch the reactions of the Twins. Charles’s eye stared hard—at the screen, at Burnofsky, at the screen. His mouth was a straight line, set, twitching in growing fury.
Benjamin seemed almost distracted. He looked to left and right. His mouth—well, it was hard, really, to judge his face fairly; it had been bashed and battered by the bottom of a glass bottle. There was a tooth missing altogether and another one chipped. Benjamin’s eye was a clenched purple fist with the pupil barely showing. He looked like someone who had been on the losing end of a bar fight.
Within the raw liver that was Benjamin’s eye socket, the cruel eye seemed far less interested than it should.
The third eye, the one between the usual two, seemed to agree with Charles that this was important. It focused its soulless stare on the video.
The file ended.
“It will be covered up,” Charles said. He tugged at the collar of his bathrobe and, as well as he could, tugged the belt tighter. “Bug Man must be replaced at once. And punished. Punished most severely. It’s that woman he has with him. She distracts him. Take her from him, get rid of her. Kill her in front of him! Bug Man will refocus. A beating for him, yes, a severe lesson, yes, that’s it, a beating! And kill his woman.”
“I disagree,” Burnofsky said as blandly as he could.
Oh, Bug Man would owe him. He wished he had video of Charles planning Bug Man’s humiliation and Jessica’s murder. Anthony Elder, that snotty little black British prodigy who called himself Bug Man, would kiss Burnofsky’s ass for this.
Burnofsky would own Bug Man.
“I don’t care about Bug Man,” Benjamin snarled. “It wasn’t Bug Man. It was her. Her!”
Burnofsky at first assumed he was talking about Bug Man’s girl, Jessica. But no . . . of course not.
“I want her hurt.” Benjamin touched his damaged mouth. Then he clenched his fist. “Damaged in some permanent way, something she can never overcome, something that will make her remaining life a horror. Not death, no, we still need her to get at her father’s secrets, but pain, such pain and despair, yes.”
Not poor, dumb, absurdly beautiful Jessica. Oh, no. Benjamin was thinking of Sadie McLure.
Burnofsky suppressed a sneer. Benjamin was losing his mind. The experience with Sadie McLure had unhinged him. He’d always been the more volatile of the Twins, but now? He was still “wired”—that was part of the problem. Burnofsky had volunteered to go in and pull those pins and wires, remove them before they became a settled feature of Benjamin’s brain, undo, insofar as anyone could, the damage done by Sadie McLure’s biots. But Benjamin couldn’t tolerate the idea of someone else inside his brain.
Irony, that.
And Charles? Well, just what the hell did you do if you were a conjoined twin and the other half of you went mad?
“She was inside my brain, sticking pins in my brain, making me an animal!” Benjamin bellowed.
“Brother . . .” But Charles’s voice wheezed out. Benjamin had taken control of their lungs.
“Something with acid,” Benjamin said, his voice suddenly silky. “Acid. Or something taken off. Cut something off her. Cut off her nose or her hands.” He chopped at the air with his hand. It was more than just a gesture of emphasis, he was using his hand as an imaginary meat cleaver.
Charles waited for an opening to speak. They each had a mouth of their own and a throat, but the lungs were shared property, and it could be difficult for one to make himself heard if the other was bellowing.
“Brother,” Charles began. “Let’s focus on this crisis. The next thing we need to consider is—”
“Next? Next? Next she suffers and I see it happen. I revel in it. I see it happen and I laugh at her. I stand over her and look down at her as she cries and begs and as the hope dies in her eyes. That’s next.”
He was shaking his fist now, a comic-book villain. But crying from his eye at the same time, a furious, frustrated, hurt child.
She was a sixteen-year-old girl, Sadie McLure, although now it seemed she used the nom de guerre Plath. So melodramatic, the BZRKers—such romantics.
Sixteen. The same age as Burnofsky’s own daughter, Carla.
Former daughter? No, death didn’t make you former, it just made you dead.
Charles and Benjamin had been much more calm when they’d ordered Carla’s death. They had been regretful. Charles had actually touched Burnofsky, put a ham-size hand on Burnofsky’s back as he ordered the death of his only child.
Solicitous.
Considerate.
She has betrayed us, Karl. She’s sold us out. You know how she would end up if we left her alone to leave us and join BZRK. Madness. Would you want that for your little girl?