Bio-Strike

themselves from this wicked nation and form a North American state governed by and for themselves, they will continue to wear the chains of enslavement that brought them to its cursed shores. I have come to believe anything short of complete separation of the races is futile and will bring on their mutual destruction. And as to the comments you’ve mentioned, I emphatically and unapologetically stand by them.”

Grover’s single modification, which had jumped right off the top of his head, was that he would be willing to consider the state of New Jersey and sections of Pennsylvania and Ohio as components of an exclusivist black territory, should the southern states prove somehow unobtainable.

It went without saying that Grover’s interview had made a huge splash in the ratings. It also went without saying that he’d for sure kissed his ticket to mainstream U.S.A. good-bye, along with any frequent flyer offers that might have come along down the line if he’d held his temper. But he had refused to worry about what might’ve been if he’d done this or if he’d said that, because he’d done what he’d done, said what he’d said, and none of it could be taken back.

And besides, look what it had led to.

Just look.

The day after the program aired — the very next morning, in fact — was when the E-mail arrived. Who it came from was a surprise; Grover hadn’t done business with him for ages, since he’d agreed to wash some dirty money through the movement’s tax-free charitable accounts in exchange for a percentage, which had gone toward subsidizing his first Liberty Uprising March. And before that, it had been the ecstasy distribution deal in Los Angeles… but the e thing was years ago, a lifetime ago far as Grover was concerned, when he was just a few shaky steps out of Rampart and needed the green to make sure he didn’t fall flat on his face. These days, he practiced what he preached, damn well did, and would never again under any circumstances help put poison into the bodies of black youth.

No way he was going to do that again.

Out of curiosity, though, he’d opened the E-mail before any of the others on his queue.

That was when Reverend Nate Grover learned about the Sleeper bug.

If the message had been from anyone besides the man who’d sent it, Grover would have dismissed it right off as a weird prank. But he’d known that man didn’t play games. That his bulletin about the super germ he’d developed, customer satisfaction guaranteed, was something that could be taken dead seriously, wild as it seemed.

Grover had awaited the actual offering ever since. Hoped it would appear each time he switched on his computer. And today, now, at last, it had:

AWAKEN THE SLEEPER

FEE: 50 MILLION

INSTRUCTIONS TO FOLLOW WITHIN ONE WEEK

Suddenly, items one through one hundred on Grover’s wish list could be his for the asking.

Wild as it seemed, for the asking.

The North, the South, the Midwest… to hell with grabbing slices of the American pie when he could have the whole thing laid before him in shiny gift wrapping, like the best and biggest present under the tree on Christmas morning.

At fifty million dollars, Murdock Williams considered it a bargain. A first grader could calculate the profit- versus-loss margins easily enough; he wasn’t talking quantum physics here but simple checkbook arithmetic.

Williams’s lawyers had already offered that elderly couple on the Upper East Side, what, two, three million dollars to relinquish the lease to their rental apartment and vacate, guaranteeing them a two-bedroom elsewhere in the city. This was far more than the building’s other occupants had gotten — Williams believed the highest any of them had been paid was 1.5 mil — and they’d all jumped at the offer. You were talking about handing over a pot of gold, giving them the chance to strike it rich by ordinary standards, how many people wouldn’t?

Well, those two fossils Mr. and Mrs. Bognar, obviously. Husband something like eighty, wife only a few years younger, living in the same York Avenue apartment for half a century, you’d think they might appreciate a change of scenery before God lowered the boom. Instead, they were sticking like old wallpaper.

It wasn’t that Williams harbored any personal animosity toward them — would he have upped the buyout offer if he did? In fact, there was some sympathy in him. Some understanding. His own great-grandparents had been from Russia, fled the pogroms, arrived in America with next to nothing. He was sure he still had a photograph, or daguerreotype, whatever, of Fred and Erna Waskow, bearers of his pre-Ellis Island family name, hanging on a wall somewhere in one of his homes. The Bognars, they’d come over as refugees when the Russkies pushed into Budapest in ’56, so there was a definite feeling of kinship in Williams’s heart. But no real estate developer ever reached his level of success by shying away from the bottom line, sympathy and understanding aside.

The Mews was what they called those East Side apartment houses, erected around wide, gated courts and area-ways in the late 1800s. Williams could see how historic-minded types found them appealing, although history didn’t cut it for him personally. Occupying big hunks of river frontage, they had started out as sanatoriums where moneyed tuberculosis patients could come for the then fresh air, and thirty or forty years later were converted into dwellings for the city’s growing middle class — predominantly Hungarian and German immigrants displaced by one overseas conflict or another. In the 1980s, the addresses became fashionable, attracting droves of yuppies from hither and yon, but a sizable number of Europeans from yesteryear had clung to their rent-stabilized apartments throughout the neighborhood transition.

When Williams acquired the properties from their former owner, he’d paid top dollar, knowing full well that the purchase price would represent only a fraction of his eventual expenses. But his bean counters estimated his long-range profits to be in the hundreds of millions, possibly over a billion dollars, way off the board like that, the real value being in the airspace above the existing structures.

Just six stories tall, they were a colossal waste of prime living space as they stood. Because the row of four contiguous buildings included a corner lot, Manhattan zoning regulations allowed them to be torn down and replaced with a single high-rise skyscraper that would dominate almost an entire square block and soar at least ninety-five stories above the city, surpassing in height the residential tower that Williams’s famous rival was raising opposite the United Nations… the very same competitor-slash-mogul who was always getting his picture on the front pages, and who had presold penthouse units in his building for upwards of ten million dollars apiece before so much as a single drop of concrete was mixed for its foundation.

At stake, therefore, was a staggering bundle and also the posterity Williams would finally achieve by owning the largest residential structure in New York City, ergo the country, ergo the world.

With the t’s crossed and the i’s dotted on his owner- ship papers, Williams had lost no time making lavish buyout offers to the residents of the buildings, about 75 percent of whom had happily taken the deal. A smaller group of tenants had waited for him to sweeten the pot, which he’d done by somewhat upping the dollar amount and in some cases tossing in the free relocation proviso.

It wasn’t long before the remaining holdouts cleared the premises — except for the Bognars, who refused to budge from the Mews to which they were sentimentally attached. The Bognars, who would not change their minds regardless of how much cash was shoved at them, be it over, under, or around the table. The Bognars, who, despite their advanced age, appeared to be in sufficiently good health to stay put in their apartment for years to come before finally giving up the ghost.

And years was longer than Williams intended to wait.

After having his last buyout offer snubbed, he’d instructed his attorneys to start eviction procedures against the Bognars, but even the Legal Aid interns they got to represent them had possessed the savvy to call his bluff. The rent-control laws were ironclad when it came to validating their current lease and giving them a renewal option once it lapsed. Moreover, as sitting tenants, they were by the same legislation entitled to renew indefinitely.

Blown out of the courtroom, catching heat from senior-citizen advocacy groups that had salivated over the chance to make the Bognars a cause celebre, Williams in desperation got in touch with certain admittedly shady operators about providing what might be called extralegal recourse. He was thinking that these operators — who had their hands in the construction industry among many others around town, controlling the unions, drywall suppliers, plumbing and electrical companies, you name it, from behind the scenes — might be