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The FBI agent yelped in shock, started to run, but stopped herself seeing her son in Drake’s power. Her dark eyes went wide. Drake could practically see the connections being made. The FBI knew about him, Tom Peaks had said as much. They had begun to realize that he was the person behind a string of gruesome, sadistic attacks from Palm Springs to the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona.
“Aren’t you going to ask who I am?” Drake said.
The FBI agent was pale, eyes scared, but she didn’t panic. “I know who you are.” She made no effort to hide her contempt. “Put my son down.”
“Good, that makes it easier that you know who I am. You know what I’ve done. You know what I can do to your kid, here, and to you.”
The agent’s lip was trembling, but Drake had to almost admire her strength. Most people took one look at Drake and ran. They didn’t get away, but they always tried. Not this woman.
Pity he had other things on his mind, or it would have been fun to break her slowly, over the course of days. Weak people were no challenge to break, but Drake sensed this woman would be.
He sighed inwardly. Business before pleasure.
“You’re going to hop on your computer and get me an address.”
She shook her head. “I can’t access FBI files from home.”
Drake smiled. He dropped the boy onto the floor, took a step back, and heard the agent scream as he brought his whip hand down hard on the boy’s back. The howl of pain was delicious; the mother’s scream of “No! No!” was even better.
Ten minutes later, Drake had the address.
Thirty minutes later he was back in his car.
Eventually someone, perhaps the husband if there was one, or worried coworkers, would find a baby crying in her crib, and two mutilated dead bodies. He’d had no choice but to kill the woman—she would have warned Astrid. The boy he’d killed mostly because he wouldn’t stop crying and yelling, “You’re bad! You’re bad!” Which had struck Drake as being almost an insult. Bad? Bad? I’m not bad, I’m the living embodiment of evil, you little monster.
“Coming for you, Astrid,” Drake said, laughing. “Coming for you.”
CHAPTER 24
Coup
A SWAT TEAM assembled out of ICE agents and a couple of New York state troopers had assaulted Bob Markovic’s apartment at two in the morning. And now, with the sun rising in the east, Markovic was distracted and annoyed by incessant cries of pain and fear from seven black-clad, heavily armed men and women in the hallway outside his apartment, and three more inside. The cries for mercy, the pleas for death, made it very hard for Markovic to concentrate. He had to plan for the future, for this new and amazing future. And he had to do it with the incessant, looming presence of unseen, unheard creatures watching his every thought and action from inside his own head.
Not that he had a head, per se.
What was it, that sense of being observed all the time? Was it some aftereffect of becoming what he now saw as his enhanced, superior self? Small price to pay for power. Still, it was an irritant, and it made him feel vulnerable.
Markovic had quickly realized that his lifelong habit of pursuing profit, of accumulating great piles of money in various off-shore tax havens, was no longer the right game to be playing. Money was an artifact of civilization, and civilization was dying. Civilization had made power abstract by inventing money and government, but this was the Wild West now. And in the Wild West, what had mattered was actual, real, brutal power.
Markovic had that power. In fact, his power was growing. His component elements—the bugs—had tripled in number, and he had learned how to dispatch groups of them. He could send a hundred of his bugs across town and still see what they saw and hear what they heard. And he could control them. The only limitation he had discovered was that he could not dispatch single bugs; there seemed to be a need for his component parts to move in swarms of hundreds or thousands. But this wasn’t much of a handicap. That, and cold definitely slowed him down. It didn’t stop him, certainly didn’t kill him, but out on the cold streets his bits felt slow and sluggish.
Good thing it’s not winter.
The ability to send portions of himself out on missions was very like being a drone pilot. He could sit (well, hover) comfortably and safely in one location and reach out and destroy anyone, anywhere. Or at least anywhere within the city—he hadn’t yet tried to go farther.
Markovic was one of a new breed of oligarchs, he decided, an oligarchy not of money but of raw power. In the time before his rebirth as Vector, he had measured himself annually by the Forbes list of richest people. He’d risen as high as number eighty-two. Mostly those people, the super-rich, had ignored him. Markovic wasn’t “cool.” What he did for a living made right-thinking people squeamish, like bankers were any better. And he wasn’t part of the old-money establishment, either, so he was dissed by the old bluenoses and by the tech bros as well.
He had never been invited to the big annual ball for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He’d even donated some money to cancer research and still had not been invited to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Spring Ball. He’d bought a mansion in Palm Beach and done a little better there at easing into “society,” but still he had few friends and far too many people who thought they were better than he.
But now? Now he had something even better than money. The power to terrorize and destroy. Which was good, but it did not define a goal for him, really. He’d known how to measure success in the money game, but this was a different game. All he knew for sure was that this was an opportunity, and whatever the game was, he intended to win it.
Markovic knew Simone had gone to join the Rockborn Gang. Stupid girl no doubt thought she could keep them from killing him. What nonsense—sooner or later Markovic would destroy the Rockborn Gang, or they would destroy him; there was no avoiding that reality. He’d have sought them out and killed them off already but for a fading concern for Simone. But Simone’s involvement with them meant that he might, sooner or later, have to deal with his daughter, and that was not a pleasant thought. He could never do to Simone what he’d done to the men and women screaming and begging for death in his entryway. Not that.
But, that said, he couldn’t wait passively for the young mutant killers to come for him, could he? Next time they might just find a way to succeed.
He had built his strength. He had learned the many ways to use his new body. The time had come for a demonstration of his power. Time to lay down the law and make New York understand that the city was his now.
Mine. All of it. Mine!
