BZRK Reloaded by Michael Grant Read Free Book Online Page 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 was amazing work and really almost as amazing as the fact
that AmericaStrong—a division of Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation—and the ETA had already narrowed the BZRK cell’s location
down to one address.
Just one.
Around the corner from the house on Fifth Street SE, what
looked exactly like a Washington, DC, police SWAT team had assembled. This excited only mild interest from passersby—it was hardly
the first time they’d seen a SWAT team. Even the passing patrol cops
shrugged it off.
“What’s that?” This from the kid—everyone called him the kid.
Not The Kid, like it was some kind of cool nickname, just the kid.
So he had taken it as his nom de guerre, his alias. Except he called
himself Billy the Kid, because why not? Maybe Billy the Kid wasn’t
clinically crazy, but he was crazy. Not insane: but crazy.
Billy’s real name was André. His mother had been Guatemalan.
His father had been African American. The result of this interesting DNA mash-up was a boy of only medium height, with dark skin,
a flat nose and lush, long, almost girlish—in fact, no almost about
it—straight black hair. The combination worked perfectly to make
him feel excluded from both the African American and the Hispanic
communities of Washington, DC.
André had interested, observant eyes. Nothing scary, there, just a
birdlike quickness. His two front teeth stuck out a bit, which gave him
a sweet childlike look and were the only physical feature he shared in
common with the real Billy the Kid.
No one called him Billy the Kid. He had not found a way to mention that he shared buck teeth with the famous gunman.
Andronikos didn’t call him Billy, either. Andronikos hated people looking over his shoulder as he cooked. Which is the last data
point about Andronikos, other than the fact that as the front door
was beaten in with a battering ram, and the back door was kicked
in, and black-suited “SWAT cops” came rushing into the room yelling, “Police, down, down, down!” Andronikos reached for a butcher’s
cleaver and was shot in the chest, head, neck, again in the chest, and
again in the head.
The hole in his neck sprayed like a fire hose.
Billy the Kid didn’t so much drop to the floor as find himself
knocked to the ground. Andronikos’s hand dragged the couscous pot
down with him, although he was dead before he hit the floor.
The couscous—little pearls of wheat, along with boiling hot
water—sloshed onto Billy as he fell and Billy screamed because the
heat was instantaneous and the “cop” waited until Billy was on the
floor trying desperately to crab walk backward away from the couscous and the blood and now the blood-red couscous and BAM!