Killing Time (14 page)

14

Knox glanced down at Nikita as she lay in the seat so no one could see her leaving his house. She would be seen eventually, of course, but he didn’t want her appearance to be right on the heels of her
disappearance
as an FBI agent. He’d tell whoever asked that she hadn’t found any connection between Taylor Allen’s murder and the ones she was investigating, and left. She was a federal agent; local cops wouldn’t expect her to do things the way they would. Put a day or two between one leaving and the other arriving, and people would be less likely to make a connection between the two.

Something about her bothered him, and not just the fact that she was from two hundred years in the future. She was either very calm about almost everything, or she was virtually emotionless. The only time that he’d seen a real reaction from her was when she’d killed the other agent from the future, Luttrell. For a minute he’d thought she was about to puke her guts up. Then she’d pulled it together, and functioned with almost robotic calmness.

Robotic.

His head suddenly tingled, as if his hair were standing on end.
No way.
What he was thinking was impossible. She felt like a real woman; she smelled like a real woman. Her skin was warm, she breathed—or she appeared to breathe, at least. He was abruptly tempted to stick his hand under her nose to see if he could feel the rush of warm air.

She had eaten two hamburgers, french fries, soup. Could robots eat? Why would anyone invent a robot that could eat, anyway? Wasn’t that a waste of technology—not to mention food?

Depends on what the robot was used
for,
he thought. If, for some reason, a robot needed to infiltrate a group or army and had to appear human, then it would have to go through the motions of eating.

But she
kissed
like a woman, all soft lips and warm, moist mouth. No sooner had that thought brought some “What was I thinking?” relief than he remembered the movie
Blade Runner
and its replicants. The replicants had been human to all appearances, but they had been machines, programmed to “die” at a certain age. Could that technology exist in her time? Could it have progressed that far, that fast?

His common sense said, Why not? The space mission, after all, had gone from nothing to landing on the moon inside thirty years. The last fifty years of the twentieth century had seen such an explosion of technology that new change happened before the previous change had been completely absorbed. Another burst of creativity and inventiveness could have happened in her time, bringing God-only-knows-what.

In two hundred years, man had developed the means to travel through time. That had to be tougher than building a human-looking, human-functioning robot.

He tried to think of one reason why she couldn’t be a robot. She had blushed; he remembered her cheeks turning pink. To blush, a person had to feel embarrassment. Could emotions be programmed? Or was it more a matter of programming to show certain physical reactions to certain events?

Other than when she’d killed Luttrell, she hadn’t shown any strong emotion. She had been mildly exasperated, mildly amused, mildly annoyed. Considering how eventful the day had been, her evenness of temperament was either soothing or downright scary, and he didn’t know which.

He couldn’t believe he was actually wondering if he’d been trying to make love to a machine.

For Knox, wondering something immediately led to asking questions, because he couldn’t stand not knowing. “What are you?”

“What?” she asked from the seat, twisting her head to stare up at him. Her brow was furrowed in puzzlement, but he got the impression she was abruptly wary. “Are we going to go through that again? I’m an FBI agent.”

“That isn’t what I meant. I mean, are you a human?”

To his surprise and stomach-clenching alarm, she didn’t burst out laughing or act shocked, or do anything that would have reassured him. Instead she paused briefly, then in a measured tone said, “Why do you ask?”

“The way you act. No one can be that even-tempered. It’s as if you have a baseline of behavior and never vary from it very much in either direction. You get annoyed, but not angry. You get amused, but you never really laugh. You get sort of turned-on, but not to the point of breathing heavy. Does your heart rate ever speed up, or are you some sort of robot?”

Again there was that telling pause, the even voice. “Do you mean ‘robot’ figuratively or literally?”

“You tell me.”

“I’m human,” she replied, still in that controlled tone. “So that takes care of the literal question.”

“And figuratively?”

“You tell me.” Deftly she threw his words back at him.

A trap yawned at his feet, and he realized that if she was totally and completely human, he had just fucked up big-time by telling her that her sexual responses were robotic. Even the most calm-mannered woman in existence would get upset over being told that. Some women, when they got upset, let the whole world know. Others just got even. It was the getting-even type that he was afraid of.

When he remained silent, she sat up in the seat and stared straight ahead. “I’m sorry,” she finally said. “I didn’t realize I was acting inappropriately.”

He had expected anger; what he sensed, instead, was fear. And that was the most alarming thing of all.

Nikita felt oddly frozen. She had done something wrong, obviously, but what? She tried to think what she should say, what she should do, what would be the normal reaction, but in light of what he’d just said, she obviously had no idea what “normal” was. When there was such a large gap in time, with a great deal of information either corrupted or lost outright, training could accomplish only so much. There were nuances she lacked, subtleties she didn’t understand. In her job, such lapses could get her killed.

But what hurt was that he found her lacking. She had done something that repelled him, but she didn’t know what. He had enjoyed kissing her; she wasn’t mistaken about his physical response. So what had she done in the fifteen minutes since that had brought this on?

The frozen sensation ebbed, to be replaced by a burning sense of shame. She had always tried so hard to be as she should, to not let any difference be seen, to fit in; her legal standing at home was tenuous at best, so she had tried to never upset that delicate balance. Some of the others like her had been rebellious, but she had spent her entire life trying to please those in authority. The rebellious ones hadn’t been destroyed, but they had been locked away, and the understanding had always been that when all the legal issues were decided, if opinion came down against them, they would be destroyed.

And if the bad ones were destroyed, how long would it be before public opinion demanded that all of them must be destroyed?

She wanted to ask what she’d done wrong, but she had spent her entire life blending in, not telling even her best friends about her situation; the inclination toward secrecy was so strong and reinforced over the years that she found it impossible to broach the subject with Knox. He already thought she might be a robot; it was best not to confirm any of his suspicions.

She sat rigidly and silently until they reached the courthouse. Knox once again pulled into the protected area where controversial prisoners were brought in, out of the public eye. “Let me have your car keys,” he said, and she handed them over without a word.

“You won’t have any problem driving this car, will you?” he asked, and she focused her attention on the controls.

“I don’t think so,” she said after looking them over for a moment. “Everything crucial seems to be in the standard position.”

“Wait here five minutes. By then I’ll already have left in your rental. Go back out the same entrance we came in, and turn left. Three blocks down there’s a small grocery store on the right corner. I’ll wait there for you.”

Obviously he would be taking a different route, checking to see if anyone was following the rental car, though if the car was being watched, then whoever it was would see that a man was driving off in it, instead of a woman. If so, then the supposition would be that he was taking the car to her. Either way, the car would be followed. He evidently thought five minutes would be enough time to evade any followers.

He got out of the car and she slid across the seat to take his place behind the wheel. The first thing she did was slide the seat forward, so she could reach the pedals.

“If by any chance I’m not there waiting, don’t panic,” he instructed. “Just stay put. I’ll be there sooner or later. And one more thing: When we get to my dad’s place, just stay in the car. It’s dark, he won’t be able to see you; he’ll think you’re one of the deputies.”

Then he was gone, striding into the courthouse building. He would exit the building nearer the parking lot, walking boldly and openly, as if he had nothing to hide.

Nikita turned the car around, so she was sitting facing the exit, and watched the digital clock in the dash. The numbers seemed to change so slowly that she began silently counting off the seconds to herself, trying to exactly match her pace to that of the clock. What an odd thing time was, counted in the same sequence of numbers over and over again, never changing, and yet the quality of time was the subject of intense philosophical and scientific discussions and explorations. It wasn’t just an artificial schedule people used to regulate their lives; it was a dimension unto itself, as real as the earth beneath them. But as complicated as time was, thinking about it was easier than thinking about herself.

At last the numbers showed that five minutes had elapsed. She buckled her seat belt, looked over the dials and controls one more time, then carefully put the gear in the “drive” position and pressed the pedal that fed gasoline to the engine. The car moved smoothly forward.

She didn’t let herself hurry. She didn’t see any other traffic, either motorized or pedestrian, in the parking lot. There were a surprising number of vehicles parked there, but then nights were always busy in the law enforcement fields.

She reached the parking lot entrance, and turned left. All the way to the store she checked her rearview mirrors for any cars that might be following her, but there was literally no one behind her for the entire three blocks.

As soon as she turned in to the convenience store parking lot, she saw Knox in her rental car. He gave one brief nod, then pulled back out into the street, and she sedately followed him.

Pekesville wasn’t a large town, but it sprawled in the valleys between a jumble of mountains, seeking all the geographical cuts and crevices like water in a lake. It was a long, narrow town, with only two main roads and a warren of secondary streets running in all directions from and across them. That meant there was a traffic light at every corner, slowing their progress, so that it took them fifteen minutes to go about four miles. At last they were outside the city limits, though, and traffic thinned considerably. Streetlights faded behind them, and only their headlights illuminated the road.

Nikita fiercely concentrated on her driving, keeping a steady speed, not getting so close to Knox as to be unsafe, not letting him get so far ahead she might lose sight of him. That was how she had conducted her entire life: safely, staying within certain boundaries, finding expression in other things such as her work, where she not only was allowed to risk her life but in special circumstances was even expected to do so.

Not that she
wanted
to risk her life, she thought in muted agony. She simply wanted to be free to make mistakes, to maybe yell in public, to lose her temper without people wondering if some glitch had made her uncontrollable. She wanted to do silly things that had no reason other than she simply felt like doing them. She didn’t want to live in fear of what might happen if she made someone uncomfortable.

Maybe being destroyed was better than the way she’d lived her entire life. Maybe the rebellious ones had the right idea, that it was better to live a short, real life than a long one in a prison of her own making.

By the time Knox turned off the highway onto a secondary road, she felt as if she could barely breathe, as if the air were too thick to pull into her lungs. She was drowning, had been drowning all her life, and only now had she realized it.

Are you a robot?

Why, yes, evidently I am. Thank you for pointing that out.

Knox’s taillights loomed in her vision and she slammed on the brakes, shaking. He had let his speed drop, but she hadn’t been paying attention, and she had almost collided with the back of the rental car. Damn him, why had he said that? And why did he have to be so observant and curious about everything?

He put on his brakes, slowing even more, then turned left onto a long driveway that curved up a small hill, where a one-story house sat among some tall shade trees. Several lights were on inside. Knox didn’t stop at the house, but she heard him give one tap on his horn as they went past. Behind the house was a fence, and to one side was a barn. Knox drove directly into the barn. Nikita stopped and put the gear in “park,” her headlights shining inside the barn.

An older man approached from her right—Knox’s father, from the looks of him. They both shared that tall, broad-shouldered, slightly lanky build; even their heads were shaped the same. He turned on a light inside the barn, a single bulb that dangled from a rafter. Together he and Knox pulled a large tarp over the rental car so that even its tires were covered; then he turned out the light and they closed the double doors to the barn. Knox’s father pulled a chain through the handles and secured the chain with a padlock.

Mr. Davis glanced at her, and though she knew he couldn’t see her with the headlights shining at him the way they were, she felt his curiosity. Impulse seized her and she turned off the engine, then fumbled until she found the switch that turned off the headlights. Getting out of the car, careful not to stumble in the darkness, she walked up to the two men.

She didn’t need to see his face to know Knox wasn’t happy about his father meeting her, but sometime in the past half hour she’d stopped giving a damn about whether or not Knox was happy.