Tek Power (19 page)

The professor said calmly, “Child, unless something is done, very soon, your brother and many another will almost certainly die anyway.”

“Yes, I know that, but—”

“Calm down,” Gomez advised her. “The professor apparently has a plan worked out.”

Sitting back down, but on the edge of the chair, the young woman said, “It won't succeed. People have tried to spring prisoners from Isla Chanza before. Every damned one failed.”

Gomez nodded at the man in the wheelchair. “How are you going to work it?” he asked. “And, more important, how are you intending to avoid ending up dead?”

“I'll explain,” said Mentosa.

29

T
HERE WAS A
Red Angel on the second level of the building. Jake, coming up carefully from below and staying in the shadows at the ramp edge, spotted the lookout before he was spotted himself.

Easing out his stungun, Jake aimed and fired.

The man at the top of the ramp made a surprised gasping sound, muffled by his plastiglass mask, as the stunbeam jabbed into his midsection.

He took one jerking step backward, elbows snapping against his sides; his lazgun dropped from his gloved hand and started to slide down the steep ramp. He tumbled over onto his knees, went lurching over and began sliding down in the wake of the weapon.

Already moving, Jake grabbed up the skidding gun. He took hold of the unconscious Red Angel and propped him roughly against the wall.

“I'll just,” he said quietly, “borrow a few things from you.”

B
EV
K
ENDRICKS SAID
, “You fellows aren't being smart.”

“Shut up,
puta
,” advised one of the masked Red Angels.

“I'm an American investigator,” she told them, rubbing at the fresh bruise on her cheek. “Treating me badly is going to cause a stewpot of trouble for—”

“He was a
gringo
, too.” The other masked man, taller and broader than his colleague, jerked a thumb in the direction of the bloody remains of Cleve Shannon. “That didn't do him a hell of a lot of good,
señorita
. Now,
por favor
, tell me why you came here.”

“I already did,” said the blonde detective. “I'm in Managua working on a case for an American client. I dropped in on Shannon to see if I could hire him to help on some local angles in the—”

“Quit the
mierda
.” The large Red Angel slapped her, hard, across the face again. “Your client happens to be Arnold Maxfield, Sr. He would never authorize your employing of a
cabrón
like Shannon.” He kicked at the part of the dead man that lay on the floor near his booted foot.

“Trouble!” announced Jake from the doorway. He was wearing the borrowed crimson beret and the darktinted face mask.

“What is it, Carlito?” asked the one who was questioning Bev.

“Cardigan is downstairs.”

The other man laughed. “That
mariposa
won't make any trouble,” he said. “Rudy, you and Carlito go down and take care of the bastard.”

“I think you're underestimating him,” said Jake. Bringing up his right hand, he fired his stungun at the bigger man.

While the large man was making a gagging sound, one hand clawing at this mask, Jake spun and shot the remaining Red Angel.

Both men hit the floor hard, sending blood splashing up.

Jake tilted the mask up off his face. “Nice running into you again, Bev,” he said, grinning.

“J
UST TRUST ME,
okay?” said the blonde, putting both hands against the edge of the dead detective's heavy desk. “Help me shove this damned thing aside.”

“There's a safe under there?” inquired Jake, joining her in shoving. “You're sure about—”

“C'mon, Jake. I had a headstart on this end of things, remember?”

The desk moved, skidding and wobbling some when it hit a thick spill of blood.

“Are we,” inquired Jake as Bev dropped to her knees, “going to share this cache of information?”

“Hush a minute, you're distracting me.” Head low, she was scanning the plaztile squares that covered the floor where the big desk had been. Yanking a plyochief out of a pocket of her tan slax, she wiped away a splatter of blood and bile. “This one.” She tapped the square she'd just scrubbed, then frowned up at him. “Yeah, I suppose I'll have to share whatever's here with you, since you, more or less, saved my life just now.”

“More or less? Hey, those louts were about one step from—”

“I had a contingency plan. I was just about to use it when you came barging in.”

“Oh, so? What the hell was it? Looked to me like—”

“I may want to use it against you sometime.” Resting on her haunches, she glanced around the office. “We need Shannon's right hand now.”

“It's a print recog safe?”

“Obviously.” Bev rose up, frowning around at the scattered sections of the detective's body. “Nope, that's his left hand there next to Rudy.”

“You know, I've been carrying around this image in my head of a sweet, demure detective,” remarked Jake. “But now I'm wondering if I—”

“Bullshit,” she countered. “I was tough when we were both cops years ago in Greater LA, Jake. I'm, if anything, even tougher now that I'm on my own.” She located the right arm and grabbed it up. Crouching, she slapped the dead detective's righthand palm down on the designated square of tiling.

She ran her tongue over her lower lip, concentrating, as she adjusted the placing of the dead fingers on the square that served as the hidden cover for the safe.

“Some of these gadgets also require body heat,” mentioned Jake.

“Not this one.” She placed her own hand over the dead one and pressed down hard.

After ten seconds came two metallic clicks and then a low whirring hum.

The square of tile slid aside to reveal a deep open storage bin below, packed with vidcassettes, audiobytes and bundles of papers.

“Get rid of this chunk of Shannon, so I can dig out what we need,” requested Bev, giving the dead hand a shove.

“Yes, ma'am.” He took care of the job. “How'd you find out about Shannon and what he was up to?”

“The same damn way, I imagine, that you did, from an informant,” she answered. “I've got a secure hangout where we can go to look over this stuff. You can come with me or you can go to hell—I won't come anywhere near a Cosmos setup.”

Jake grinned. “I accept your invitation.”

30

B
EV TOUCHED THE
control pad and the wallscreen abruptly quit showing them the naked images of Eve Bascom and Arnold Maxfield, Jr. “What's the matter?” she asked.

The light in the small techroom came up slowly.

Blinking, Jake asked, “Why'd you stop?”

“You made a sound. Sounded like you were in pain.”

He was sitting in a black metal chair, a few feet from her. “Sorry, I didn't realize I'd said anything out loud. Go on, let's see the rest of this sequence.”

The infocomp system Bev was using had assimilated all the material they'd taken away from the private detective's file of dupe surveillance material. After swiftly scanning and sorting it all, the system had pulled all the vid footage that contained any mention of the Surrogate 13 project.

Jake and the blonde detective had been watching footage of the couple in the communications heir's hotel suite in Managua for the past ten minutes or so. Apparently they'd done quite a bit of their talking while in bed.

“They're both dead and gone,” said Bev. “Is that what's unsettling you?”

“Seeing them making love.” He shook his head. “Seems like that's something nobody else ought to be watching.”

Leaving her chair, she moved to his side. “When you're betrayed, sometimes it's better just to imagine what went on,” Bev said quietly. “Actually seeing what happened, the specifics of everything—that can be rough.”

“I didn't know Eve Bascom, never even met her,” he said. “She was dead before we—”

“I was thinking of your wife.”

After a few seconds Jake said, “I guess I was, too.”

“That's all over and done with.”

“Yeah, and the people my onetime wife and I used to be—we're as dead as Eve Bascom and her lover.”

Bev squeezed his shoulder, then returned to her chair. “We're getting some useful stuff,” she said. “Want to continue?”

Jake nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I promise, no more outbursts.”

C
APTAIN
D
ACOBRA PUT
on his pants. He'd left them, neatly folded, on the fat pink armchair nearest the wide oval bed. Barefoot and shirtless, he crossed to the one-way viewindow and gazed out into the rainy night. The lights of the city below were blurred and seemed to blend together to make huge abstract smears of color across the blackness. “I have some bad news about your lover,” he said.

“Which one?” Izabel Morgana was sitting, naked, on the far edge of her bed.

Smiling, Dacobra returned to the pink chair to reclaim his neosilk shirt. “Forgive me, I should have been more specific,” he said as he began putting on the shirt. “I mean Dominic Hersh.”

A thin, dark woman with shortcut black hair, Izabel shrugged her bare shoulders. “Someone wants him dead?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“Who suggested this?”

“Our friend to the north, Vice President McCracklin,” replied the captain of the security police.

“Poor Dominic.” Izabel stood, slowly, up. “He's been assuming that, since he betrayed President Brookmeyer, he'd made himself wealthy for life.”

“He did,” said Dacobra. “What he didn't anticipate was that his life would end tonight.”

“Has it already been set in motion?” She walked toward the partially open doorway of her pink bathroom.

Dacobra nodded. “One more loose end taken care of,
cara
.”

Izabel stopped in the doorway, framed by pale pink light. “I want Jake Cardigan dead,” she said, her left hand resting on the doorjamb. “Along with Sid Gomez and that Kendricks bitch.”

“Gomez's death is, as you know, in the works,” he reminded.

“You should have been able to get rid of both Cardigan and that woman at Shannon's office this afternoon.”

“Izabel, I don't control the
Angeles Rojos
as completely as you seem to think,” he told her. “Sometimes they go astray and botch a job.” He seated himself on the fat chair, began pulling on one sock. “Keep in mind that Gomez will be dead before morning. You'll have to settle for that for the moment.”

S
HOULDERS HUNCHED, EYES
nearly shut, Walt Bascom was standing in the middle of his tower office in the Cosmos Detective Agency building and playing his saxophone. The lights were down low and he was working on his version of a twentieth-century bop tune titled “Perdido.”

The overhead voxbox broke in to inform him, “Cardigan on Holostage 1, chief.”

The agency boss's eyes snapped open and he ceased tootling. “Great, put him on.” He crossed to his desk, tossed the sax down atop the sprawl of clutter.

Jake, straddling a straight chair, materialized on the platform. “Still in the office, huh?”

“Been trying to get hold of you. I have … You're looking exceptionally glum, Jake. Something wrong?”

“No, must be the transmission,” Jake assured him. “Before I report what I know, tell me why you've been trying to reach me.”

Bascom dragged a wingchair over closer to the holostage. “I was contacted by Kay Norwood, your pal Alicia's lawyer chum—and, I might add, a handsome lady indeed,” he commenced. “Before I assisted her in scramming to a place of relative safety, she passed on some information that pertains to the whole Surrogate 13 mess.”

“That's why Eve was killed,” Jake said, shaking his head. “Certain bastards were afraid she knew what was going on. She didn't actually, but it was simpler just to kill her and not take chances.”

“No, she didn't even know much about the original plan,” said Bascom. “That involved substituting an android ringer for that buffoon President Brookmeyer.”

“Yeah, so he could sign himself up for a Tek cure and not be missed while undergoing the treatment.”

“Typical halfassed government duplicity and flimflam,” observed the agency chief.

“Unfortunately Junior Maxfield got wind of that original switch plan, which was being staged out of the American Embassy in Nicaragua,” said Jake. “A diplomat-OCO agent name of Dominic Hersh was running that, with the cooperation of several local thugs. Maxfield got the notion he could finance his independent communications operation with dough extorted from Hersh and other officials.”

“Stupid yunk. That's what got him killed,” said Bascom, scowling. “He's no loss, but Eve …”

“There are vidtapes of the two of them together, Walt,” said Jake, his voice low. “He confided in her some of what he found out and what he was planning. That's how the others found out.”

“There's no need for my son to see any of that footage.”

“He won't,” said Jake. “Maxfield and Eve were killed to keep them from talking about Surrogate 13. But, as I see it, that was because somebody worked out a variation on the original plan. That second plan is the dangerous one.”

“That's what I figure, too,” Bascom told him. “Whoever's behind it isn't going to let the real Brookmeyer come back from his cure. They're going to run the country from here on out with the sim.”

“That could be very lucrative,” said Jake. “The biggest Tek cartel down here is tangled in this as well. They must figure an android Brookmeyer will be more sympathetic to their point of view.”

“Okay, there's a lady down there in Managua who can give you a lot more details,” said the chief. “I got her name from Kay Norwood. She was cozy with this Hersh schmuck and now she's lying low for fear of—”