Well, Nijinsky thought: better than a bullet.

She jabbed the cables against the bare flesh of his neck.

The pain was awful. But brief. There was a popping sound and the garage went dark.

Typical suburban homes are really not wired for performing electrical torture. A breaker had blown.

Nijinsky had worked one leg free of the rope. He kicked it straight out. With all his strength. And he felt the satisfying impact with Lebowski’s knee.

She fell into him. He wrapped his one free leg around her and held her tight, willing himself to get his face close enough to hers to retrieve his biots, who were already far from the center of her brain, having left no dripping acid behind there, and were rushing to—

The lights came back on.

And at the same time Nijinsky saw something far worse than the enraged face of Sugar Lebowski. There, waiting for him, just off her lower eyelid, as though they had anticipated his every move, were two dozen nanobots.

The German had read the bluff.

Whatever fragile moment Nijinsky had had was over now. Lebowski wormed free.

His biots waited as the nanobots encircled them.

“Now, I believe we shall do this my way, yes?” the German said. “Our berserk friend here will cause you no further harm, Fraulein Lebowski.”

“How does it look?” she asked the German, and spread her eyelids apart with one hand so he could see the eye that now very definitely looked inward at her surgically perfected nose.

“Not so bad. It can be fixed,” he soothed.

Then when she turned away, the German quickly, silently, slid out of the chair, freed his hands, picked up the golf club, and swung it hard against the back of her neck. She sank like a sack of wet gravel.

Nijinsky felt the blow through his biots. He stared. At the German. At the nanobots surrounding his biots on the fallen woman’s face.

“My name is Dietrich,” the German said in an urgent whisper, and a great deal less accent. “And I will tell you that saving you was not an order from Lear. Which means I may soon be visited by Caligula unless you and I cook up some story that does not involve me blowing my cover to save your life.”

TWENTY-TWO

Bug Man had to fly down to Washington to put some of his troops aboard the deputy director of the FBI. That part was easy. The FBI guy was owned.

He had already installed Jessica at the Sofitel Hotel, where she sat pouting prettily, ordering room service, and watching movies. A TFD had been sent down with Bug Man to act as his “adult.” Bug Man might rule the twitcherverse but still a sixteen-year-old black kid—even one with an English accent—checking into a hotel with a stunningly beautiful young lady didn’t happen without a responsible adult.

The next transfer was quite easy. Again, the FBI guy—his name might have been Patrick, Bug Man could never remember—was following instructions, after all. It took place during a squash game at the University Club. An accidental bump, a tumble to the polished floor, a jab of knuckle in the ear, hold for three seconds, and ta-da!

Bug Man had decided on an ear entry after seeing that the Secret Service agent target—whose name, he believed, was an implausible John Smith—wore soft contact lenses. It wasn’t that lenses were a major obstacle but rather that people who wore them were forever dropping in waterfalls of saline, or suddenly having to take out a wrinkled lens. Bug Man did not want to find his boys trapped inside a dark contact-lens holder.

So in through the ear it was.

Ears were iffy. If someone had been swimming or showering or, worse yet, had an inner-ear infection, there was no getting through. But if you knew the way and the ear canal was clear, you could make it.

The ear canal was like a cave filled with stalactites and stalagmites and whatever you would call something that grew horizontally. The hairs came from every direction: up, down and in between. They were tiny compared to eyelashes.

The cave felt quite large down at the nano. Earwax was a constant issue, with clumps of it along the “floor” and other bits of it hanging from above. And the entire cave was pockmarked here and there with holes like a sort of tiny, slow-motion geyser. Like the holes in Yellowstone that would burp up a glob of hot mud. Only in this case the hot mud was earwax.

Up in the macro, Bug Man was installed in a van parked just around the corner on M Street. No repeater necessary, straight signal.

He moved twenty-four fighter nanobots and four spinnerbots into the ear canal, marched them over the earwax down to the eardrum. An eardrum at the nano was a hell of a thing to see. Kind of like the skin of a bass drum if that bass drum was five stories tall m-sub, and anchored not by a fitted ring but by a tiny bone behind.

Bug Man waited until the squash game was over because the effect of that squash ball hitting the wall at high speed, that thwock! sound, hit the eardrum like a rock drummer smashing it with a stick.

The whole damned thing, that five-story-tall disk of what looked a bit like bleached, translucent liver, vibrated, and down in the nano that vibration was huge.

So he waited until John Smith—could that possibly be his real name?—was done smacking hard rubber balls. But next would come a shower, and that was potentially hazardous. He picked a relatively quiet moment and sent his nanobots scurrying beneath the now-moderately vibrating membrane.

Here at least they were safe.

But the next bit of the trip would involve climbing up the back side of the eardrum—something best done when the agent was asleep.

The van would be moved to just outside the Secret Service man’s Fairfax home. And during the night Bug Man would enter his brain and put his spinners to work.