“I didn’t want you to give me money,” said Lyle. He held up the briefcase, and walked toward the door. “This is me robbing you, that’s different.”
“How is stealing money better than earning it from ReBirth?”
“Just … shut up,” said Lyle. He reached the door, only to realize he had no free hands to open it. Which did he dare to set down, the money or the gun? How many Larries were waiting on the other side of the door, or at the bottom of the elevator, or in the lobby? He stared a moment longer, then turned and walked to the window. The fire escape wasn’t the best option, but it was the best one he had left.
“Lyle?” said Kerry. His voice was weak.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for not shooting my house. This stuff’s really hard to replace.”
“No problem,” said Lyle. “Say hi to Carrie for me.” He pushed open the window, stepped out onto the metal walkway, and started climbing down.
41
Friday, September 14
9:10 A.M.
The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.
91 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
Ira Brady, one-time CEO of Ibis Cosmetics, sat in the back of a conference room, watching it slowly fill with generals and analysts and politicians—everyone important enough to be invited to the briefing. One of the men paused to shake his hand, and he stood with a smile.
“General Blauwitz,” said Ira, “so good to see you again.”
“And you, as well, Senator Moore.” Blauwitz clapped him on the back, as familiar as if Ira were actually the real Senator Moore. Which, as far as anyone in this room knew, he was. He’d been Moore for almost four weeks now.
The room quieted, and Blauwitz got straight into his presentation, switching the lights off and a projector on. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “This briefing has been called to discuss the situation in São Tomé, and our options for appropriating the NewYew facility there.”
“‘Appropriating,’” said a woman in a military uniform. Ira recognized her as General Clark. “That’s an awfully diplomatic synonym for ‘conquering.’”
“The facility in São Tomé is the only such facility in the world still capable of producing ReBirth,” said Blauwitz. “Call it what you want, but we need that facility under our control as soon as possible. ReBirth is the most single powerful tool of espionage ever created.”
Ira/Moore smiled at the irony.
General Blauwitz cycled to the first slide in his presentation. “This is the first obstacle in our way; we don’t know his name, but this is his face.” The slide showed a tall African man, his features twisted in an angry scowl. He was wearing a green military uniform with a red beret, clutching a well-used AK-47. Similar men milled around in the background of the photo, and the audience of officers and politicians leaned forward, probably trying to determine if the other soldiers were copies of the first, or if their inability to tell them apart was some kind of latent racism they hadn’t realized they held. Blauwitz let them off the hook with an explanation: “For now we’ll call him Lagbaja, which is generic enough. NewYew has begun manufacturing Lagbaja in their compound on São Tomé—”
“Excuse me,” said Alexis Miller, one of the mid-ranking officers. “What do you mean, NewYew is ‘manufacturing’ a man? ReBirth can’t build new people, can it?”
“A better word would be ‘mass-producing,’” said Blauwitz. “NewYew has adopted the worst excesses of the child army and actually found a way to make them worse. They’re recruiting children, but instead of just arming them they’re treating them with NewYew and turning them into Lagbaja—six foot five, and two hundred pounds on average. Through satellite reconnaissance and our agents on the ground, we place the count somewhere around five thousand copies.”
“That’s abominable,” said Miller.
“The morality of it is beside the point,” said Blauwitz. “The more pressing matter is that five thousand Lagbajas make it very hard to mount any kind of successful invasion. NewYew essentially owns the island now.”
“I don’t like any of this,” said Miller.
“You’re not here to like or dislike it,” said General Clark. “You’re here to tell us what to do about it.”
“We’re running out of ReBirth,” said Blauwitz, and the room grew quiet. “The lotion we seized from NewYew’s manufacturing facilities will last us for years,” he continued, “assuming we want to turn people into attractive models with good circulation. If we want to do anything more interesting—if we want to use blank lotion, for example, which is the technology’s primary political application—we have very little to work with and no way to make more. All of our attempts to re-create their formula have failed.”
“So you need more than the facility,” said Miller, “you need the people who run it.”
“We need Igdrocil,” said Blauwitz. “It’s the only ingredient we haven’t been able to identify.”
“Because it’s not in the formula,” said Ira/Moore. He’d tried everything he could think of to reproduce the lotion, and now he was just going to use the U.S. government to go in and take it for him. “Igdrocil shows up in the ingredients list, but not in the recipe. Many of our analysts suspect that it’s an artifact of the manufacturing process, rather than a literal substance.”
“Senator Moore,” said General Clark. “You told me you had a plan to present to us.”
“I do,” said Ira/Moore, and stood up. “If you’ll permit me, General?”
“By all means,” said Blauwitz.
Ira/Moore walked to the projector, unplugged Blauwitz’s laptop, and plugged in his own. “Let me introduce you first to Jessica.” He clicked the trackpad on his laptop, and the first slide popped up: a cheerleader, maybe nineteen years old, grinning energetically as she posed with her pom-poms. Her face was framed by bright blond pigtails. “Jessica is the youngest of NewYew’s ReBirth models, marketed with a slim, muscular build for customers interested in gymnastics and similar sports. She’s five feet even, ninety pounds soaking wet, and—more germane to our discussion—we have approximately eight hundred ounces of her DNA. If we weaponized that DNA, we could turn NewYew’s army of Lagbajas into an army of Jessicas. I think you’ll all agree that our invasion would be much simpler under those circumstances.”
“How do you intend to weaponize it?” asked Blauwitz.
“By dumping it in the water supply,” said Ira/Moore. “Testing shows no loss in effectiveness, even when the lotion is severely diluted.”
“I’m concerned about the wide-scale use of a biological weapon,” said Clark. “What if it hits civilians?”
“Then São Tomé gets a really big cheerleading squad,” said Ira/Moore. “It’s not the best human rights situation in the world, but we’re talking about invading a neutral foreign power. We’re not the good guys here.”
“Are we at all concerned about the racial issue?” asked Miller. “Most of the population, and obviously all of the Lagbajas, are black, and you want to turn them white?”
