BZRK: RELOADED. Майкл Грант

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 six-burner 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 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! BAM!

      The cop was shooting again.

      At him? At him? At a thirteen-year-old kid?

      A bullet grazed his side.

      From the other room, continuous gunfire. Like a jackhammer. A wall of noise. Screams. Shouting and BAMBAMBAMBAM!

      The cop stepped in the red couscous and slipped. He fell to one knee.

      Billy grabbed the pot. It was a heavy iron pot, but the weight was nothing to him because adrenaline and fear and the crying need for survival make the heaviest pot weightless.

      He swung that pot and hit the cop’s helmet.

      The cop slipped a little more.

      The hand that held the gun, that hand, he had landed on that elbow and that made it hard to shoot and his body armor made him awkward and he slipped again; suddenly it was all Call of Duty to Billy. He slammed the pot down with all his strength on the gun hand.

      The gun fell from the cop’s nerveless grip.

       BAMBAMBAMBAM!

      They were still shooting in the other room. And screaming. Someone actually yelled, “What the fuck?” Except that the F-bomb ended abruptly in gunfire.

      Not real cops, Billy realized through the blood-mad rage that was falling over him, and he grabbed the gun and had to use both hands to get a grip on it and pointed it at the visor of the stunned man and the “cop” knew he was done for and he raised his visor so that Billy saw his face and it was a middle-aged man, a little pudgy, with a silly mustache and he was starting to say something when Billy pulled the trigger and a big hole peppered with powder burns appeared in the upper lip of the cop, taking out one side of his mustache.

      Billy was up and running for the back door but bullets were flying like crazy there, СКАЧАТЬ