TekLab Read online

  3

  THE BIG MAN WITH the lazgun said, “We don’t necessarily have to kill you, Cardigan.”

  “That’s comforting.” He came a few steps farther into the room. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Just a messenger boy.”

  The telek, sitting hunched on the suitcase, snickered.

  The big man continued. “The message is this—you and your greaser partner don’t want to go to Paris. No, shit, no. You guys want to stay right here in GLA where it’s safe.”

  “Who’s sending me this advice?” He took another step ahead, coming nearer to the sprawled white-enameled robot.

  “Oh, just somebody who’s interested in your health and well-being,” he answered. “If you ignore this friendly warning—then trust me, you’re probably going to have an accident.”

  “Yeah, an accident.” The telekinetic thief snickered again.

  “You might for instance lose an arm.” The gunman gestured with his weapon. “I might, you know, slice the damn thing right off. That’d be painful, but it would sure as hell keep you from wandering off to Paris. So what we have—”

  “Hey, I’m not anxious to shed an arm.” Jake sounded uneasy, a little frightened. “C’mon, we can talk this over and work something out.” He started, nervous eyes seemingly on the gunman, toward him.

  “Look out for the bot, asshole!” warned the telek.

  Jake tripped over the spread-eagled attendant. He fell, turned in midair, landed on his left side, and went scuttling across the slick white floor in the direction of the row of silvery sanair nozzles.

  When he came to a stop, his stungun was in his right hand.

  He fired and the beam took the gunman square in his broad chest before he could swing his lazgun all the way around to take aim at Jake.

  The big man made an angry gulping noise, started shivering violently. His gun fell to the floor as he went toppling backwards. Unconscious, he slammed into the swinging door of a toilet cell. He fell back into the cubicle, his head cracking against the metallic seat of the unit.

  The telek jumped to his feet. Using his psi power, he lifted the suitcase up off the floor and was about to send it hurtling into Jake.

  “Naw, don’t do that, cabrón,” advised Gomez, who’d come quietly into the room with his stungun ready.

  He shot the telek.

  The skinny man gasped, stiffened, sat. The suitcase fell, landing with a thump in his narrow lap.

  “It’s muy triste,” said Gomez, glancing around and then sliding his gun back into his shoulder holster.

  “What is—getting ambushed in a toilet?”

  “No, amigo. I mean it’s very sad being set up by that sweet little niña downstairs. She looked so innocent.”

  “They usually do.” Nodding, Jake added, “Let’s turn these goons over to the cops. We have a skyliner to catch.”

  “Any notion why they wanted to maim you?”

  “Somebody doesn’t want us in Paris.”

  Gomez laughed. “They don’t know you very well,” he observed. “Warning you to stay away is the surest way to get you to go there.”

  A robot in a Santa Claus suit was circling the satphone lounge of the Paris-bound skyliner, handing out eggnog. When he reached Jake’s alcove, he said, “Merry Xmas, sir. Compliments of TransNip Skyways.” He held out a steaming plazmug.

  “Scram,” suggested Jake, returning his attention to the ball-headed robot whose fuzzy image was flickering on the phonescreen he sat facing.

  “Ho ho ho.” The robot Santa moved on.

  “Ah, here’s the problem,” said the bot on the screen, giving himself a whack in the temple as he arrived at an insight. “Miss Kittridge, you see, has a government monitor on her vidphone and therefore we—”

  “I already gave you the bypass code number.”

  “Right, yes, so you did.”

  “So put through the damn call.”

  “Xmas season got you down, too? You’d be surprised how many customers we get this time of year who are grouchy and—”

  “The call.”

  The robot vanished. Blackness replaced his image, then random spurts of rainbow light.

  All at once Beth, slim and pretty, appeared with great clarity. “Jake—where are you?”

  “En route to Paris,” he explained. “Didn’t have time to call you until now.”

  “You’re working on a new case for Cosmos?”

  “Yeah. And according to Bascom, an important one. Otherwise I’d be in Berkeley now instead of midair.”

  She smiled gently. “I miss you, too,” she told him. “This duty stuff can really foul things up. What sort of job is it?”

  “You’ve heard of the Unknown Soldier.”

  “Wait now, Jake,” she said, frowning. “Your client must be Madeleine Bouchon.”

  “She’s the one. You know her?”

  “Yes, I do. Her husband was a top official with the International Drug Control Agency for the past five years or so.”

  “Six years. I just read the Cosmos file on him,” said Jake. “You’ve met him?”

  “Yes, sure. Because of my father’s work, we got to know quite a few people connected with the IDCA.”

  “Before he joined the agency office in Paris, Bouchon was the French ambassador to Rio,” said Jake. “He was there during the final months of the last war.”

  “Which means he could possibly have done something that caused the Unknown Soldier to put him on his list.”

  “That’s true, but—”

  “But there are also lots of people in the Tek trade with reasons for wanting him dead,” Beth said, finishing Jake’s thought.

  “Madeleine Bouchon apparently thinks this was a copycat kill, with somebody using the Unknown Soldier’s style to cover their murder.” Jake slouched some in his seat. “It’s possible I’m not the right operative for this case, since I suspect the damn Teklords of being responsible for almost everything that goes wrong around the world.”

  “A good deal of the time I suspect they’ve also corrupted my father.”

  “Things aren’t getting any better now that you’ve been working with him again?”

  “Ever since what happened down in Mexico—well, I simply don’t trust him completely anymore,” she replied. “But when those various and sundry government agencies started pressuring me to rejoin him so that the last phase of his work could be speeded up—Jake, I just found it impossible to say no.”

  “I know, since I went through most of it with you.”

  “Most of it but not all,” she said quietly. “Lots of my most difficult debates went on inside my head. Anyway, I finally let myself be persuaded. You know that the hardest part was leaving you and GLA for a while and moving up here to work at the lab they’ve set up for my father. Tek is a dreadful thing, and if I can help wipe it out—well, that’s an accomplishment.”

  “How close is his anti-Tek system to being ready to use?”

  “We’re very close,” she said. “It should be soon.”

  “I’d better sign off now, Beth,” he said reluctantly. “This doesn’t look to me my best Xmas.”

  “We’ll make up for it,” she promised him. After her image had faded from the phonescreen, Jake sat in the alcove watching the dead phone for nearly a minute.

  The robot Santa returned, started to offer him a mug of eggnog and then thought better of it.

  In England the snow was real.

  All across Barsetshire a thick, silent snow was falling. By dawn the moorlands surrounding Maximum Security Prison #22 lay under a foot or more of fresh snow and a sharp wind was whistling around the high neostone walls.

  One of the forcefield barriers that isolated the hospital wing from the rest of the prison buildings was malfunctioning slightly. It sputtered every now and then, making harsh crackling sounds in the thin gray dawn.

  A door in the slick gray wall of the Hospital Complex hissed open to let three squat, wheeled robots come rolling out. They sped to
the nearest forcefield transmitter and began making repairs.

  In the second-level doctors’ lounge two android medics were sitting silently in straight-back metal chairs, absently watching the repair work.

  The only human in the gray room was a lean, dark-haired woman of forty. Wearing a two-piece medsuit, she was standing near one of the high, narrow viewindows with a plazmug of nearcaf clutched in both hands. After taking a sip of her nearcaf, she again glanced up at the floating clock.

  Nodding to herself, she finished drinking, tossed the empty cup into a bin. After checking the time once more, she crossed the quiet room and stepped out into the corridor.

  A white-enameled nursebot was going by, carrying a yellow plaztray with two doses of medication on it.

  The lean woman caught up with the robot and casually patted her on the side. “Keep up the good work, Sophie.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Dumler, ma’am.”

  The nursebot continued along the hall, then walked up a ramp to the next level of the prison hospital. When she halted in front of the door to Cell 302, the scanner mounted above the number tag looked her over thoroughly.

  “ID code,” requested the voxbox.

  “30/203/083.”

  The door slid open.

  “Ah, Sophie.” Bennett Sands was sitting in the cushioned chair beside his bed. “As usual it’s a pleasure to see you.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Sands, sir.”

  Sands was thin, thinner than he’d been a year ago, and his face was pale. The deep shadows under his eyes were dark and sooty. He had one arm. “You make this hole almost tolerable,” he said as he picked up one of the small cups from the tray and drank down the sea-blue liquid it contained. “Ugh. Never can get used to the foul taste.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Sands, sir.” For less than thirty seconds, as Sands took the bright orange stuff in the second little cup, the nursebot leaned closer to him. In a voice pitched so that only he could hear it she told him, “Bouchon dead. Stand by.”

  The parasite disk that Dr. Dumler had attached to the robot’s side now disintegrated. It became a fine dust that would dissipate as the mechanical nurse continued on her rounds.

  After the nursebot left his cell, Sands brought his only hand up to his face. Masking his mouth for a few seconds, he allowed himself a brief, unseen smile of satisfaction.

  4

  GOMEZ WAS RELAXING IN their compartment when Jake returned from phoning. He was sipping an eggnog while he studied a yellow faxgram. “Is all well with Beth?”

  “As well as can be expected.” Letting out a disgruntled sigh, Jake settled opposite his partner. “Where’d you get the drink?”

  “A robot decked out like Santa Claus came around giving them away. Even had a white beard. Very festive.” He waggled the faxgram. “Bascom sent us some info on that pair of louts who tried to sandbag you. Care to guess?”

  “Let’s see ... They’re free-lance hoods,” said Jake. “Got long criminal records. They don’t know who hired them.”

  “Bingo.” Gomez let the faxgram drop to the neowood table next to his chair. “Except you missed one point—they, both of them, have prior connections with Tek dealers.”

  “Yeah. I’ve been nurturing a hunch that there was going to be a Tek angle to this case.”

  “Whilst you were romancing Beth via satphone,” said Gomez, “I’ve been rereading all this stuff the agency gave us on the Unknown Soldier murders.”

  “Commendable. Any insights?”

  “Es posible,” replied his partner. “Of the nine known victims so far there are three, including our Joseph Bouchon, who were currently tied in with anti-Tek activities of one sort or other.”

  “But they also had prior links with the Brazil Wars?”

  “Si, that tie-in is also there.” Gomez paused to sample his drink again. “The fellow who was victim number 4—Colonel W. T. Reisberson, killed in Washington, D.C., late this past October—had trained jungle combat troops for the First Brazil War. The thing is, Jake, this hombre turned into a very vocal critic of the wars, started a stewpot of peace movements, and was eventually put out to pasture by the Army. At the time he was knocked off, he was managing an anti-Tek research facility just outside Baltimore. In fact, two of his top technicians were transferred out to Berkeley to assist on the Kittridge Project.”

  “Another connection with Beth’s father,” said Jake. “Joseph Bouchon and his wife were both friends of the professor and Beth.”

  Gomez took a long, thoughtful sip. “The sixth victim was Dr. Francisco Torres, who got himself bumped off in Madrid the middle of November,” he continued. “Now Torres did serve on the staff of a United Nations field hospital during the Second Brazil War, but that doesn’t exactly make him a war criminal.”

  “Not to you, but a madman might look at it differently.”

  “Verdad. But this Torres had been running a scatter of rehab centers for Tek users since back in 2116. Initially, and until he fell from grace, none other than Bennett Sands provided about sixty percent of the operating funds for those centers from the impressive profits from his various legit business enterprises in Europe.”

  “Sands ... Kittridge,” said Jake slowly. “Okay—were there any discrepancies on any of these three killings? Details that don’t exactly match those of the other Unknown Soldier murders?”

  “The message tagged to Colonel Reisberson was worded exactly like all the others, and you know that the law boys around the world have never released the exact context of any of the notes. But—”

  “We found out the exact wording, so could a copycat.”

  “That’s what I’m coming to, amigo,” said his partner. “The lettering on the Reisberson note wasn’t done by the same person who did the others. Wait, let me amend that. The other notes look to have been lettered by some mechanical means—by a robot, an andy, or a secretary machine. None of them showed the characteristics of a human hand at work.”

  “Maybe the copycat didn’t know that when he killed the colonel.”

  “Sí, but he found out sometime before he knocked off Torres,” said Gomez. “If he did knock him off.”

  “Okay, suppose three of these damn killings are fake,” said Jake. “If that’s so, then we’re talking about something much more complex than someone’s killing Bouchon and trying to mask it.”

  “And behind that complexity, amigo,” said his partner, “the Teklords are probably lurking.”

  The highly polished bellbot carried their luggage into the second-floor hotel suite. “The Louvre Hotel has quite an illustrious history, messieurs,” he explained, placing the three suitcases on a valet stand. “Though completely up to date in its modernity, it dates back to the twelfth century. Before the Louvre became a first-rate hotel, it was—”

  “We know.” Gomez wandered over to a wide window to gaze out at the simulated Tuileries Gardens that stretched away below in the overcast afternoon.

  “Oui, this splendid place was once a famed museum,” continued the robot, moving around the living room to flip on switches and push buttons. “Then came the dread Panic of 2093 and our esteemed government was forced, alas, to sell all the art treasures it held and convert it into this—”

  “We know.” Gomez turned away from the arched window.

  One of the things the bellbot had turned on was the vidscreen that occupied one wall. Three people were sitting in uncomfortable chairs and arguing with each other on the huge screen.

  “That’s none other than Professor Joel Freedon on the left there,” Jake noticed. “The guru of the pro-Tek cause.” He nodded at the thin man with the long, dead-white hair.

  “I recognized him, sí.” To the lingering robot Gomez said, “You can turn up the volume on that and then take your leave.”

  “Very well. Adieu.”

  “... Tek simply is not addictive,” Freedon was saying. “In point of fact, Tek is a harmless liberating agent that frees the imagination, soothes the psyche that’s been ravaged by the scourge
s of our so-called civilized mode of—”

  “Repetition doesn’t make lies any truer, Mr. Freedon,” interrupted the heavyset woman sitting two seats over from him. “You know full well that Tek is indeed dangerously addictive. That in a far too high percentage of cases it also causes severe and irreversible brain damage. The incidence of epileptic seizures among Tek addicts has been growing—”

  “Folk tales and fancies purely,” dismissed the professor. “There does not exist one shred of reliable research to—”

  “Perhaps,” cut in the nervous young man in the middle, “if we were to return to some semblance of coherent debate we might—”

  “This man is incapable of coherence.”

  “If Doctor Lance would simply attend to what I’m saying, and listen with her heart and her supposedly brilliant mind, she’d perhaps hear something new and wise. She might come to realize that she has simply been mouthing International Drug Control Agency propaganda and pap rather than—”

  The three of them suddenly vanished. Replaced by a scene of fire and confusion.

  “A special news bulletin,” said a deep, excited voice. “Just moments ago here at the Central London Skybus Station an alleged major British Tek dealer—as yet unidentified—was assassinated. In addition to the alleged Tek kingpin, five apparently innocent bystanders were also killed. And fifteen—no, we’ve just been informed the toll has risen to seventeen—others were seriously injured. Police believe a kamikaze was used. As you know, a kamikaze is an android loaded with explosives. When the kamikaze makes physical contact with its intended victim, a tremendous explosion follows. In this tragic—”

  Gomez turned off the wall. “Those Tek lads never grow tired of their tried and true tricks,” he observed. “Yeah, and they don’t mind killing bystanders.” Gomez glanced around the living room. “I believe I’ll freshen up and change before we drop in on our client,” he announced. “Don’t let in any exploding andies while I’m away.”

  The snow continued to fall in Barsetshire, England.