FOURTEEN

It was called the Gyllene Salen, the Golden Hall. It was a vast space—a long rectangle with an impossibly high ceiling, reminding some first-time visitors of a medieval cathedral decorated by Liberace.

All of one long wall was taken up by five arches opening onto a courtyard. The opposite wall was seven arches. And all of it—virtually every square inch—was covered in just under nineteen million pieces of tile, most of them gold. They depicted various characters from Swedish history—kings and saints, for the most part.

Lystra had done her homework and knew all of this. The detail added to the experience. It was a wondrous place and the perfect setting for the annual Nobel Prize ball and banquet.

At this moment on this dark December night, a handful of Nobel laureates, a slightly larger handful of previous Nobel laureates, the family and friends of said laureates, assorted VIPs and kind-of VIPs—amounting, in total, to several hundred people, all in tuxedos and evening dresses—were seated at long banquet tables loaded down with the sort of china and stemware you don’t find at Bed Bath & Beyond.

This, thought Lystra, would be the point at which she would have to be very careful for her personal safety. First her immediate, physical safety—because what was coming would be violent. But more to the point, this was where the intelligence agencies of the world would focus like laser beams once the event had … well, played out. All the major intel powers—America, China, Japan, the UK, France, Germany, Russia—had prominent citizens here. What was coming would be an event of earthshaking impact. No one cared much what happened to a single actress or a single businessman, and no one would connect any of this to the nosy New Zealand cops who’d had to be eliminated, or to poor, conscience-wracked Nijinsky.

But the self-murder of the president of the United States, and then the sudden fatal “illness” of the Chinese leader, followed by the madness of the Brazilian president, and then this? Even the disaster in Hong Kong. Oh yes: the pennies would begin to drop. The spies and the cops and their ilk would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to begin to see a hand behind it all. Right now people were jumpy, worried, on edge, but they still believed the world was just sort of having a bad run of luck.

There was no luck involved. Well, she corrected herself, there was a bit of luck: the blundering Armstrong Twins had unintentionally heralded what was to come. They had provided the fanfare presaging the main event.

The Twins, poor silly buggers, were actually helping her carry out her far superior, far cooler plan.

The thought of them, those hideous freaks, imagining that they were in control. Lystra’s lip curled. For a while there had been a freak show with the carnival: a bearded lady, a dwarf who dressed up like a Tolkien character, and a genetically deformed man with hands like lobster claws. They had frightened her then. The bearded lady in particular had tried to be friendly, motherly. The Human Claw, as the lobster-handed man had styled himself, was easier to handle. He just leered, the pervert, until her father had threatened to decapitate him.

Well, let the freaks think they had something. Let the Twins congratulate themselves for killing the president, blundering idiots. The penny would drop for them, too, soon.

“Girls’ night tonight, boys,” Lystra whispered.

She wondered if Bug Man, back at the hotel, was watching and could see her on TV. She’d told him to, and while he wasn’t the obedient type, he was the frightened type.

The great thing about tonight was that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men would never suspect the end goal. They’d be waiting for some kind of blackmail demand. They’d be looking for a rational motive. The fatal weakness of rational people was that they always looked for the rational answer.

The attendees were mostly through the appetizer—a lobster-and-crab terrine with snap pea mousse, brioche, and edible flower fantasie—when last year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Miguel Reynaldo, stopped talking about his younger days when he was a hobo, or traveling minstrel, or whatever it was he thought he was, and stared hard at the Swedish finance minister, a dull middle-aged woman seated across from him.

“I … I’ve just had the strangest … But it’s still there. I’m seeing …”

And at that point the CEO of Spotify said, “Like windows? Like there’s windows in your head?”

The two men stared at each other, while those around them formed expressions of polite concern.

“Something is the matter!” This came from a second table, from a past Nobel Peace Prize winner, a man credited with saving many lives through nonviolent means—but he was not now seeming nonviolent. He had lurched to his feet, and in the process he had knocked over his very expensive glass of Champagne and caused his dinnerware to rattle and his chair to scrape.

“Moi aussi, mais c’est bizarre, ça!” cried a French industrialist. Then he, too, shoved back from the table as if scalded. He tried to switch to English, but it was a mangled job. “In my head things. I am see.”

It spread quickly. There were a dozen tables, hundreds of well-dressed folk, and some of them, far too many of them, were now whispering urgently or shouting hysterically that something was very odd, something was not right in their heads.

“Bloody hell!” the English ambassador cried. “It’s some sort of insect. Oh!”

And then versions of that in a dozen languages and multiple accented versions of English. Those not directly affected were rushing to give comfort. People shouted for doctors. The words food poisoning were spoken. Others said it was drugs. Someone must have spiked the crabe et homard with LSD.