BZRK

disembodied voice said. “The next hour will not be very pleasant for you, I’m afraid. But it is necessary.”
    *
    Noah was in a yellow cab heading from JFK International to an address in lower Manhattan.
    He had never been to America. He’d never really been anywhere outside of London.
    He was tired and excited. And scared. And wondering if he was caught up in some elaborate practical joke.
    He’d been given an iPad with a video briefing, which he had watched on the plane. And now his head was full of horrors. But also excitement. Because his life was school and a shabby room barely bigger than a closet and a mad hero of a brother and a sad, gray wraith of a mother and a nearly invisible, beaten-down father, and a beaten-down life with nothing really on the horizon but a job he would hate and more of the same, thus and forevermore.
    So maybe he was a fool to enlist with scarcely a question in some mad enterprise to stop an even madder enterprise. But the alternative was the grind that would grind on until it had ground him down.
    That’s why Alex had gone off to war. Because why the hell not? His exact words when he’d told Noah he was enlisting: “Why the hell not? Get a job in a pub or an office and have the same shit life as mum and dad? Why the hell not enlist?”
    Now Noah had enlisted. Because why the hell not?
    And because somewhere out there in this absurdly tall city, there was someone who called himself Bug Man. In Noah’s imagination he saw himself going to see Alex again someday and telling him, “I did for the Bug Man, brother.”
    Noah knew that fantasy was pathetic. He didn’t fool himself much, Noah; he was hard and honest with himself. He never told himself the stories other boys would, nonsense about growing up to play professional sport or winning
Britain’s Got Talent
and having money and girls and toadies.
    He wasn’t going to university; he wasn’t going to become a rich banker or whatever; he was destined, aimed, targeted like a smart bomb at a life of drudge work in a mind-numbing job and damned lucky if he could get that much and hold on to it.
    He had passed Pound’s test, and he had seen the greedy gleam in Pound’s eye. For the first time ever, probably the last as well, Noah had something valuable.
    He had five hundred nice, crisp dollars in his pocket, dollars with their obscure mystical symbolism and compact shape. He had an address on a slip of paper. And he had, by way of inheritance, a mission.
    “First time, kid?” the cabbie called over his shoulder.
    “First time,” Noah said.
    “I gotta pull over to take a whiz.” The cab rolled to a stop in front of a blearily overlit store with neon beer signs and posters in the grimy, barred glass front.
    The driver stepped out, leaving the meter running. Seconds later the door of the cab opened and a girl slid into the seat beside Noah. She was an odd creature, dressed in a style that might be called post-Goth or thrift-shop chic. She had a tattoo of dripping flames beneath one eye. Her features were unrefined, like any girl Noah might see back in his own neighborhood. Somehow he’d expected all New York girls to be models.
    “This cab is taken,” Noah said. “We haven’t stopped, the driver just—”
    “Yeah, the driver took a hundy to let me in. All set up in advance, blue eyes. Speaking of which, you have a little schmutz on your eye.” She peered closely at him, reached across the seat, and with one finger appeared to wipe something from the corner of his eye.
    “A hundy?”
    “A C-note. A hundred-dollar bill. A hundy.” She waited, obviously expecting something more. “You’re not going to ask what schmutz is?”
    “I guessed it was crumbs or something.”
    “Good guess, English Boy.”
    Noah frowned. She didn’t seem the least bit threatening, but she was definitely unsettling, and he supposed, given that she was somewhat provocatively dressed and very forward, that she might be a prostitute. “Excuse my asking, but are you a tart?”
    “You mean a hooker? Nah. Although . . . if I was, what would you pay?” She had a grin that was more on one side of her mouth than the other and bordered on crazy. And when she laughed it was a sound like, “Heh-heh.” Not mirthful, more like a verbal placeholder for a real laugh.
    Noah did not have an answer, and this widened the girl’s grin.
    “Relax, English. I’m all up in your eyeball checking you out. Looking for bugs, looking for bugs. You’re