It wasn’t even the first suicide they’d seen that day.
“Attention,” said the PA system, and the room fell quiet. “I have been instructed to announce that the terrorist Susan Howell has been caught and found guilty of treason. She will be publicly executed in one hour, outside the south fence. That is all.”
Lyle looked south, as if he could peer straight through the wall and into the field beyond, and past that to the fence and the execution and Susan. Susan. Why were they killing her here? Why now? There was no reason for it.
Unless it was a ploy to reveal him.
Lyle looked down at the floor to see some of the other Lyles trying, without any tools, to clean up the mess of the jumper. The soldiers never came inside anymore, for fear of riots. Lyle crossed the catwalk to the stairs, and followed the slow trickle of other Lyles headed south to see the execution. Trick or not, Lyle wanted to be as close to the front as he could. It would be the only way to tell.
The army had set up a platform just beyond the south fence, and the yard outside was already crowded with hundreds of curious Lyles. Lyle managed to work his way to the front, wondering if each Lyle he brushed past was someone he’d talked to before, someone with whom he’d shared a meal or traded his queue number. Maybe he knew them on the outside—his neighbors from Queens, or fellow commuters from the train, or a worker in his own office.
Did they have the real Susan, or a ReBirth clone? They had her DNA. And she was, by all accounts, a real terrorist, but executing her here only made sense if they were trying to flush Lyle out of hiding. Except they didn’t know which camp the real Lyle was in. They had camps all over the country. Did they make a fake Susan to kill at every single one?
Next to the platform was a truck, surrounded by armed soldiers. Who would come out of it?
The canvas flap on the back of the truck was thrown open from the inside, and an officer stepped out, followed by … Lyle craned his neck to see. A girl. Blond. Susan’s height, Susan’s build. His breath caught in his throat. The girl stepped down and lifted her hands to brush her hair from her face—both hands, because they were cuffed together. She looked up, and Lyle saw again how beautiful she was, how young she was, how sad and tired and weathered she was. The crowd behind him was restless, shifting and craning their necks and shouting: there were catcalls, and demands to release her, and demands to kill her, and a hundred other things lost in a jumbled roar.
The officer—a general, Lyle saw, though he couldn’t read the nametag—followed Susan onto the platform. She wasn’t fighting. The real Susan would be fighting, Lyle thought, but even that he couldn’t be sure of. They were about to kill her, for goodness sake—what if her spirit was finally broken? He walked her to the end of the platform. He didn’t offer a blindfold. The general walked back to the other end and a half dozen soldiers formed a line in front him, weapons at their sides.
“Ready!”
The soldiers brought their rifles up. Lyle looked in desperation at Susan, wondering what he should do. If I say anything. I’m next.
“Aim!”
The rifles tipped forward, six black lances pointed straight at her heart. Susan faltered, her brave mask crumbling into fear, and Lyle screamed.
“It’s me!” he screamed. It was the one thing that none of the other Lyles could possibly think to say, because they didn’t know who Susan was. They didn’t know the connection, and they didn’t know this was a trap. And they didn’t know that springing that trap was the only way to save her. Lyle clung to the fence and howled as loudly as he could. “I’m the real Lyle Fontanelle!”
Almost immediately a soldier was there, grabbing his arm through the fence, and dozens of others leaped immediately into action, pointing their weapons and shouting for the crowd to move back. When the army had cleared a path along the fence to the gate, more soldiers entered and surrounded him. The general approached him, his face grim and uncertain. His nametag said Blauwitz.
“Who first came up with the idea of using ReBirth commercially?” asked General Blauwitz.
The same question Kerry used to identify him in the park. It was something only the NewYew executives would know—a perfect way to assure that he was the real Lyle, but also a clear sign that somehow, impossibly, NewYew was behind this. Lyle glanced at the truck, then at Susan, still standing on the platform with five black rifles pointed at her heart. Lyle looked back at the general.
“Jeffrey,” he said.
Blauwitz slapped a pair of handcuffs on Lyle’s wrist, and the other on his own. There was no way to lose him in the crowd now. “We got him!” the general shouted. “Pack this up.”
The general pulled him toward the gate, surrounded by their armed escort. Beyond the fence the soldiers lowered their weapons, and Susan breathed a sigh of relief. One of the soldiers unlocked her handcuffs, and she smiled.
“Was she real?” Lyle asked.
“The real Susan Howell?” asked Blauwitz. “Don’t I wish.”
They led him to a black SUV, locking the gate behind them as ten thousand screaming Lyles begged to come, too. Blauwitz unlocked the cuffs and opened the door, and Lyle climbed in awkwardly.
“You’re with them now?” asked Lyle. The door shut behind him, and they were alone.
Cynthia’s eye’s glittered. “They wanted to find you, and I knew how. I traded you for a position on their committee.”
“The Execute Lyle Committee?”
“Execute you?” asked Cynthia. “Lyle, you’re the most valuable person on the planet right now. You’re going to save the world.” She grimaced and pressed herself closer to the door. “But first you’re going to shower. You smell like somebody murdered a wrestler in an outhouse.”
General Blauwitz opened the front door and climbed in. “Everybody ready? Time to visit the UN.”
PART FOUR
REBIRTH
52
Tuesday, November 27
6:13 A.M.
Cynthia Mummer’s apartment, Upper West Side, Manhattan
17 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
Lyle knew how the lotion worked.
The Lyle with Down syndrome had been his first big clue, but the final piece that did it was right there in the papers Cynthia had given him: box after box of newspapers, net news printouts, recorded news videos, and even private government reports. The key had been in NewYew’s procedural accounts of how they manufactured the lotion. The only batches that worked, that had active cloning capabilities, were the ones that had blank ReBirth mixed into them at the factory. Just like that very first batch, way back when they’d started, where Jerry had mixed in Lyle’s sample to help match the consistency. Everything had propagated from that one tiny bottle he had mixed together in his lab. It was a random mutation in the RNA.
