It’s Bug. Bad shit happening. Crazy bitch I think is Lear. Going to kill me and the whole damn world.

Then:

Are u there? Talk to me! I’m not playing.

Then:

Fuck! Do NOT call back. I’m using her phone. Can’t wait. I’ll try again later.

Burnofsky stared at the messages. His first thought: Anthony’s alive still? The Twins must be slipping.

And then, Jesus, he’s fallen in with Lear? And that made him laugh. Of course Anthony would end up back in some kind of world of shit. Of course he would.

And then he saw the words bitch and her.

Okay, he told himself, tamping down his excitement. Bitch could be slang for anyone, male or female. And the difference between he and her could be a simple mistyped letter.

Going to kill me and the whole damned world.

The Golden Hall in Stockholm. The Brazilians. That actress. The prince. The Pope. Even that slimy prick Nijinsky, of whose death he had at last learned.

“Yes, biot madness,” Burnofsky said. He gave himself a deep swig, feeling the savage joy of destruction, and the subtler pleasure of having his theory, his educated guess, ratified. He felt as if he was vibrating from the rush of discovery, the way he had when he used to make breakthroughs in the lab.

He could call the phone number back. Who would answer? Bug Man? Or Lear?

“Biot madness. Jesus Christ,” he said, voice an indecipherable slur. “BZRK. It’s a joke. It’s a goddamned joke.” Then, pushing himself back from his desk, shaking his head, he whispered, “Ah, no, not a joke: a game.”

With trembling fingers he hit the call-back button.

The number you have dialed is not a working number.

No, of course not. Lear would swap phones regularly, clever boy. Or girl. Could it really be a woman? Was a woman capable of such malice? Would a woman play this game?

He opened his browser. How did one get samples of DNA? Any hospital, sure, but these were samples from multiple countries. Who could do that?

He searched medical testing labs, impeded somewhat by the fact that he couldn’t quite direct his fingers to hit the right keys. He came up with too many results. He added qualifiers and came up with fewer hits. Then refined the search further to focus on corporate structures.

There were only six that were privately owned and reached beyond just North America. One of them, Janklow/MediStat, had recently lost its owner in an unfortunate boating accident.

“Accident. Hah.”

Among those present on the boat and giving statements to the police was another—competing—corporate titan. A woman.

Three seconds later he had a photograph looking at him from his monitor, the face of Lystra Ellen Alice Reid.

L. E. A. R.

He stared at the picture. He laughed. My God, a pretty young woman. That face, that serious, intelligent, attractive face hid a madness as profound as anything bubbling beneath the surface of two men so hideous they couldn’t walk down the street.

Lear. Self-aware madness, then. She knew, Lear did; the creator of BZRK knew she was mad. The wicked thing. The wicked, wicked thing.

He raised his mostly empty bottle to her in a wry toast. “Nice. Very nice.”

He could probably stop her. He could take this to the Twins, and they could probably stop her.

“I could save the world,” Burnofsky said, his tone mocking.

In the old days, he might have been tempted by that. He could be a hero. A hero/murderer. A hero who had helped to cause the suicide of the president of the United States. Right. Hero.

He could save the world.

Or.

Or he could beat Lear to the punch and shove it in the Twins’ face as well.

Hero? Sorry, Dr. Burnofsky, that role is no longer available to you. How about killer? How about destroyer of worlds?

Yeah, that position was still open.

“Why?” Keats asked it, though he knew it was foolish. How did you ask for explanations when the person you were asking might be wired himself? But he asked, anyway. “Why, Vincent?”

“I had my orders. From Lear. He gave me instructions.”

Plath licked her lips, nervous, angry, but feeling as if she should be far angrier. Knowing she should be far angrier. But somehow the emotion didn’t quite come. The rage did not rise in her. “Tell me what he instructed,” she said, her voice roughened to simulate the emotion she did not feel.

“He said to wire you. To reduce your skepticism. To avoid suspicion of Lear. Or of me.”

“What else?”

“Seventy percent,” Wilkes snarled. “Right.”

“There are … holes in my mind,” Vincent said. “I feel them. I know something is wrong with me. That’s not a lie.”

“Asshole!” Wilkes said, far more furious than Plath.

Plath raised a hand to silence Wilkes. “Tell me the rest,” she said to Vincent.

Anya sat beside Vincent, who seemed terribly small. She was weeping quietly, holding one of his hands in hers. Expecting him to be killed.

Plath saw herself through Anya’s eye. She saw a grim-faced girl, a sixteen-year-old girl with freckles for God’s sake, with stupid freckles. That picture of her finally brought the true emotion to the surface, but the emotion was disgust. Plath was disgusted with herself, with what she had become.

“Tell me what you did about the Tulip, Vincent,” Plath said.

Vincent flinched and broke eye contact. “You know what I did.”

“You wired the Tulip and the Twin Towers together,” Plath said bitterly. “And you looped in, what? Something that would make me less questioning, something …”