Terrorism . . .

Rios . . .

I didn’t mean to hurt him.

I loved him.

I still do. I miss him. But something . . .

Backspace—erase.

There were six nanobots tapped into her optic nerve. Left eye. Getting actual visuals was hit or miss, but with multiple nanobots tapping simultaneously, sometimes you could get a pretty good picture.

Bug Man could see what she was writing.

He was in his twitcher chair, in the office space, and Jessica was standing beside him. He was showing her. She had never seen it before, never even guessed at what Bug Man did at his “job.”

“See, I’m down there inside her head,” he explained.

“What are you doing there?”

Why was he telling her this? If the Twins found out, they’d kill her. They’d flat out kill her. Or maybe not: maybe they’d make him do it.

Or maybe they’d make him rewire her even more.

Once when he was maybe six, seven, he’d heard his mother talking to her sister, his aunt, about some dude named Mills, an American. His mother and aunt had been drinking gin and tonics, not drunk but not sober, either. There had been a lot of laughing and he’d ignored it all, in the next room, paying a game. But when the laughing stopped and the conversation grew quiet, he’d put down the game and crept closer to eavesdrop.

When his mother talked about this man, this MIlls person, her voice grew heavy with emotion. It seemed like every three words there was a sigh. She had cried, and Bug Man’s aunt had comforted her and said things like, “You had him for a while, be grateful for that.”

“He loved me,” his mother had said.

“He loved you more than he loved life itself,” his aunt confirmed.

That cliché phrase had stuck with Bug Man, with Anthony Elder. More than life itself. That’s how Jessica felt about him. She loved him more than life itself. Of course that DeShawn, whoever he was, he hadn’t been made to love. No one had wired him to feel that way. Somehow it had just happened.

What would be left if he were to start tearing out the wire he had laid in Jessica’s brain? What would she see when she looked at him? What did she see now?

He looked at Jessica speculatively, watching her watch the monitor. Watching her understanding what he was and who he was. How powerful he was. How important he was.

Why was he showing her?

Why was he even here? Burnofsky had told him to go limp, to do nothing, but how could he do that? What if Morales pulled some other crazy bullshit? What if she went nuts and killed someone else?

“She’s saying she loved him.” Jessica said softly, reverently. “She must be sad. Strange, kind of, huh? I mean, the president being sad and all. Because she’s so powerful.”

Bug Man wiggled one of the probes just a little, hoping for a better resolution.

I hurt him and I hurt myself in the process, and I don’t even know why. Is that normal? Do you all understand how that happens?

Backspace—erase.

I was so determined. I knew at that moment what I had to do.

Backspace—erase.

Bug Man felt weakness in his arms. His breathing was shallow.

“I’m in trouble, Jessica,” Bug Man Anthony Elder said.

“You’re the best, Anthony,” Jessica said. It was automatic. He knew the connections that made her say it. He had laid that wire.

“They’ll kill me if this goes wrong,” he said. “They’ll fucking kill me.”

She laid a hand on his shoulder. She leaned down to nuzzle his neck. “I can make you not so tense,” she said.

Jessica was beautiful, as beautiful as when he had first seen her, and he wanted her so badly it hurt, wanted her so badly he’d pay any price….

I loved Monte the first time I saw him

And his head made a sound like a walnut

Backspace—erase.

“Did she kill MoMo?” Jessica asked, and suddenly it was a little girl’s voice. A voice full of wonder and sweet, innocent worry.

And even as she worried she was caressing his face and neck, doing what he had programmed her to do, and something like panic rose in Bug Man’s chest, making his heart beat too fast and then too slow and he felt sick.

Oh God, how did it come to this?

That’s what the President typed. And Bug Man read it and thought, Yes, yes: How?

THIRTEEN

The Stone Church was evidently abandoned, though perhaps not so long ago. It was the sort of building that might have been considered historical, perhaps, but was small and ugly and too patched up to quite make one think of George Washington in attendance. It seemed squeezed and oppressed between a coin-op laundry and a halfway house.

Needless to say, it was not one of Washington’s tonier neighborhoods. Local residents had decorated the stone exterior with graffiti, none of it terribly original, none of it rising to the level of street art.

Keats used the tire iron from the car to pry plywood from the side door. It was a noisy job. Billy slid through the opening and pushed from the inside. Once in, Plath and Keats used the lights from their phones to find a switch. Amazingly, the switch lit up a pair of clamp lights hanging from scaffolding.

As their eyes adjusted they saw a space that was more impressive from the inside than it had been from the outside. The only window was a small, peaked, stained glass set beside the door. It was protected by plexiglass so it had not been broken, but it had been largely obscured by graffiti. Its much, much larger cousins were in a shallow dome in the ceiling. It was impossible to see the scenes clearly, but Plath counted ten panels. The moon shone through one and revealed a scene of a man in a red robe raising a knife in a threatening manner. The Ten Commandments, maybe, with “Thou shalt not kill” the only one now illuminated.