Island Airport pushed up against the southern reaches of the static dome. There was no island that Clarke could see, only a low broad building with helicopters and ultralights scattered across its roof. Either there was no security or Lubin’s negotiations had seduced it; they walked unaccosted to a four-seater Sikorsky-Bell outfitted with passive cloaking. The pearl shucked from Laurel’s guts proved to be the keys to its heart.
Toromilton dimmed in the distance behind them. They flew north beneath the sight of some hypothetical radar, threading between silver-gray treetops. Darkness and photocollagen hid a multitude of sins; for all Clarke knew every plant, every rock, every square meter of the landscape below was coated in ßehemoth. You couldn’t tell through the photoamps, though. The terrain scrolling past was frosted and beautiful. Occasional lakes slid beneath them like great puddles of mercury, dimly radiant.
She didn’t mention the view to Lubin. She didn’t know if his prosthetic eyes came equipped with night vision, but he’d switched them off anyway—at least, the little green LED was dark. Nav must be talking directly to his inlays.
“She didn’t know she was carrying it,” Clarke said. They were the first words she’d spoken since Laurel’s eyes had fixed and dilated.
“No. Yuri made her a home-cooked meal.”
“He wanted her dead.”
“Evidently.”
Clarke shook her head. Laurel’s eyes wouldn’t leave her alone. “But why that way? Why put it inside her?”
“I suspect he didn’t trust me to keep up my end of the deal.” The corner of Lubin’s mouth twitched slightly. “Rather elegant solution, actually.”
So someone thought that Ken Lubin might be reluctant to commit murder. It should have been cause for hope.
“For the keys to a helicopter,” Clarke said. “I mean, couldn’t we just—”
“Just what, Lenie?” he snapped. “Fall back on all those high-level contacts that I used to have? Call the rental agency? Has it still not dawned on you that a continental hot zone and five years of martial law might have had some impact on intercity travel?” Lubin shook his head “Or perhaps you don’t think we’re giving Desjardins enough time to set up his defenses. Perhaps we should just walk the distance to give him a sporting chance.”
She’d never heard him talk like this before. It was as if some chess grand-master, renowned for icy calm, had suddenly cursed and kicked over the board in the middle of a game.
They flew in silence for a while.
“I can’t believe it’s really him,” she said at last.
“I don’t see why not.” Lubin was back in battle-computer mode. “We know he lied about Seppuku.”
“Maybe he made an honest mistake. Taka’s an actual MD and she even—”
“It’s him,” Lubin said.
She didn’t push it.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Sudbury. Evidently he didn’t want to give up home-field advantage.”
“It wasn’t destroyed during Rio?”
“Desjardins caused Rio.”
“What? Who told you that?”
“I know the man. It makes sense.”
“Not to me.”
“Desjardins was the first to slip the leash. He had a brief window in which he was the only man on the planet with all the power of a ’lawbreaker and none of the constraints. He used it to eliminate the competition before Spartacus freed them.”
“But it wasn’t just Sudbury. Rio took out cities all over.” She remembered words and images streaming across the Atlantic. An industrial lifter inexplicably crashing into the CSIRA tower in Salt Lake. A fast-neutron bomb in the unlikely hands of the Daughters of Lenie. Quantum shriekers falling from orbit onto Sacramento and Boise.
“Sudbury wouldn’t have been the only franchise seeded,” Lubin pointed out. “Desjardins must have obtained the list and gone to town.”
“And blamed it on Rio,” Clarke murmured.
“All the post-hoc evidence pointed there. Of course, the city was vaporized before anyone had a chance to ask questions. Very little forensic evidence survives ground zero.” Lubin tapped a control icon. “As far as anyone knew at the time, Desjardins saved the day. He was the toast of the town. At least he was the toast of anyone with enough clearance to know who he was.”
There was a subtext to the aridity in Lubin’s voice. His clearance had been revoked by then.
“But he couldn’t have got everyone,” Clarke said.
“He didn’t have to. Only those infected with Spartacus. That would have been a minority even in seeded franchises, assuming he hit them early enough.”
“There’d still be people off shift, people off sick—”
“Wipe out half a city, you get them too.”
“Still—”
“You’re right, to a point,” Lubin allowed. “It’s likely some escaped. But even that worked in Desjardins’s favor. He can’t very well blame Rio for his actions now. He can’t blame everything on Madonnas, but as long as convenient scapegoats from Rio or Topeka are at large, nobody’s likely to suspect him when some piece of high-level sabotage comes to light. He saved the world, after all.”
She sighed. “So what now?”
“We go get him.”
“Just like that, huh? Blind spy and his rookie sidekick are going to battle their way through sixty-five floors of CSIRA security?”
“Assuming we can get there. He’s likely to have all approaches under continuous satellite surveillance. He must have planned for the word getting out eventually, which means he’ll be equipped to handle large-scale retaliation up to and including missile attacks from overseas. Far more than we can muster.”
“He thinks he can take on the rest of the world?”
“More likely he only expects to see the rest of the world coming in time to get away.”
“So is that your plan? He’s expecting an all-out assault so he won’t notice one measly helicopter?”
“That would be nice,” Lubin admitted with a grim smile. “I’m not counting on it. And even if he doesn’t notice us on approach, he’s had nearly four years to fill the building itself up with countermeasures. It would probably be impossible for us to guard against them all even if I knew what they were.”
“So what do we do?”
“I’m still working on the details. I expect we’ll end up walking through the front door.”
Clarke looked at his fingernails. The dried blood beneath turned their edges brown.
“You’ve put all these pieces together,” she said. “They make him a monster.”
“Aren’t we all.”
“He wasn’t. Do you even remember?”
Lubin didn’t answer.
“You were going to kill me, remember? And I’d just killed everyone else. We were the monsters, Ken, and you remember what he did?”
“Yes.”
“He tried to save me. From you. He’d never even met me face to face, and he knew exactly who I was and what I’d done, and he knew first-hand what you were capable of. And it didn’t matter. He risked his life to save mine.”
“I remember.” Lubin tweaked controls. “You broke his nose.”
“That’s not the point.”
“That person doesn’t exist any more,” he said. “Spartacus turned him into something else.”
“Yeah? And what did it do to you, Ken?”
His blind, pitted face turned.