BZRK Reloaded by Michael Grant Read Free Book Online

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: the American’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 U.S.
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 sixburner 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