“Stop whining. We’re on a deadline,” the doctor said, checking his Patek Philippe. “That’s why I pay you the big bucks.”
Aaron pondered this for a moment with a thoroughly depressed look on his face. Then he finally stood.
“I’m sorry, Professor, but I’m done,” he said. “You keep your fifty a bot. I can’t take it anymore. I’m done. Total toast. I’m going to drop right here.”
“Exactly, Seth,” said Shui, with an uncharacteristic defiance in her voice. “We’re not bots, we’re humans. You seem to have lost sight of that.”
“Okay, okay,” the professor said, changing his tune instantly from demanding to charming. “Sorry for being such an ass. I’m under a lot of pressure. I’ll double your pay for tonight. A hundred a bot, but only if you finish.”
Aaron looked at him and blew out a breath.
“Fine,” he said. “But we’re going to need more pizza.”
“And Red Bull,” said Gia.
“As you wish, my children. Daddy will go get the refreshments,” said Keshet as he left the lab.
His iPhone jingled as he hit the school building’s concrete stairwell.
How are we looking? the client had texted.
We’re on target, Mr. Joyce. No worries. Everything will be ready by six as you said, Keshet texted back.
CHAPTER 48
THE SUN BROKE over the top of the trees on the High Line in Chelsea as a dingy white van with the words HARRISON BROS PLUMBING on its side pulled to a stop on West 27th Street between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues.
As the van idled, a waiflike man-child in a designer business suit biked past over the side street’s half-lit, worn pavement. Then a whistling homeless man followed, towing a dirty white leather PING golf bag piled with jingling empties.
Once the men had passed, Mr. Beckett opened the rear door of the van and stepped out onto the street dressed like a plumber.
With the minibots secured, he was there to retrieve the last item on their shopping list. And it was, as the Americans said, quite a doozy.
The plumber’s getup was probably a little overkill, he thought. But his image had to be in the hands of the authorities by now, so every caution was most prudent, he knew, as he hit the buzzer of a familiar faded brick tenement building on the street’s north side.
Upstairs, Senturk, the bodyguard, was already standing in the open doorway at the end of the second-floor corridor. He wore gray slacks and nice Italian shoes and a white silk dress shirt that was just a little too tight for his soda machine of a torso.
Mr. Beckett felt a rare bead of sweat roll down his back as the green-eyed, muscular Turk wanded him with the metal detector. He knew the man had been in the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati back when the Turkish version of the CIA had been run by the brutal military. Since then, he had been a bodyguard for Middle Eastern billionaire businessmen and sultans and was a hard man of legendary reputation.
Senturk led him in through a door into the back. The rest of the building was a rotten, dusty dump, but back here, it had been transformed into a posh loft. It was the size of an indoor basketball court, with fabric wallpaper and million-dollar lighting and massive modern paintings on the walls.
Ahmed Dzurdzuk, the young man Mr. Beckett had come to see, was sitting behind an impressive, shining chrome desk that looked like it had been made out of a World War II airplane wing. Dzurdzuk didn’t bother looking up from whatever he was doing on his iMac as Mr. Beckett sat in the midcentury modern chair in front of the desk.
Mr. Beckett sighed silently at this disrespect. These kids today. He’d been doing business with the psychopathic Chechen crook for the last year. The least he could do was acknowledge Mr. Beckett’s existence, but alas, no.
Many people were afraid of the twenty-five-year-old, but Mr. Beckett—not only an experienced connoisseur of dangerous people but also a dangerous person himself—did not fall into that category.
Senturk was a problem, without question, but Ahmed was sloppy, often high, and always distracted.
He could, to borrow an expression from an American book he had once read, swallow the slight, girlish fop with a glass of water.
“Ahmed? Yoo-hoo,” Mr. Beckett finally said after a long two minutes.
“Well, my friend, what brings you by for a face-to-face? You miss me? Ha-ha…of course you do. We still have some of that beautiful new Ecstasy from Denmark. Plenty of it. All you want,” Ahmed said.
Mr. Beckett glanced to his left at Senturk standing back by the inside of the interior door, just out of earshot. Good. He slowly crossed a leg as he leaned back in his chair.
“The Ecstasy was excellent, but I don’t need that. I need what we spoke of on the phone, Ahmed. Remember that item I ordered about three months ago?”
“Come, now,” Ahmed said, frowning. “Please, I told you that that fell through, remember?”