Made to Kill (21 page)

“Who was that in the car?” I asked. “Because it sure as heck wasn’t Eva McLuckie.”

“I don’t know her name,” Eva said. “She’s one of the Russian agents. I try to keep her under control but the drugs required to boost mental resistance are pretty hard to handle.”

She was shivering. Not just from the cold.

I looked up at the Hollywood Sign. Then I looked out toward the city. Then I looked back at Eva.

“Give me something to work with.”

“The Soviet cell at the Temple of the Magenta Dragon is an advance force. They’ve been here for years, establishing a foothold by quietly taking over the movie studios.”

I nodded as I got the idea. “Starting with Playback Pictures. Rockwell’s studio.”

“Yes,” said Eva. “Chip Rockwell was in deep with a criminal gang—mafia, most likely. The Russians got him out of it but then they owned him. That was all they needed to get started. From there they got contacts at the other studios, and then they could begin seeding their agents across the whole town.”

“Seeding?” I didn’t like the sound of that much.

“The Soviet advance force is led by a military scientist called Bobrov. He brought over an elite unit headed by a commander called Rokossovsky. They came first to get the transfer operation up and running. Once that was in place, the shipments began.”

“Phases one and two, right?”

Eva nodded.

“Keep talking,” I said.

“Bobrov has developed a technique that allows him to transfer the mind of one person into the body of another.”

I let that sit there for a while on the cold hillside. The Hollywood Sign ran through a few rounds.

Eva said: “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“Lady, I’m the last robot in the world. I can believe a lot of things. These shipments, for instance. They wouldn’t happen to consist of crystal cubes, about so big?”

I held two hands up and did my best to make a shape with my fingers. Eva looked up and nodded.

“Each cube holds the mind of one agent.”

“How many cubes are there?”

“The first shipment was just a few. Bobrov still had work to do to get ready for phase three. It wasn’t until he had the full operation running that the rest came in.”

“Okay,” I said. “So Bobrov and his crew get here first and set up shop. Then the initial seeding was Bobrov replacing the minds of Hollywood film execs with Soviet agents, allowing him to take over the town?”

Eva nodded. “Film executives. Directors and producers. All the top brass. They’d started on actors too. That’s when we were recruited.”

“We? You and Charles David.”

“And the others too. The Agency got wind of the Soviet infiltration and Bobrov’s process but the studios were already under Soviet control, and that control was spreading, fast. So the agency began recruiting actors to get into Bobrov’s inner circle.”

“You’re telling me you volunteered to get taken over by Soviet agents?”

Eva shook her head. “The Agency developed a drug cocktail to help a subject resist the mind transfer. They work, but only for a time.”

“Is this transfer process permanent?”

“It is if you aren’t prepared,” said Eva. “But the original mind is still there, trapped in the body while the replacement takes it over.”

“Charles David had pills. Anti-radiation drugs. The agency gave you those too, right?”

“The transfer process exposes the subject to gamma rays,” said Eva. “We needed protection from that too.”

“And the mind cubes themselves are hot.”

Then I paused. I found myself scratching my chin. I wondered if Thornton used to do that too.

“In the basement, you guys all wore protective gear. I assume that was because Chip Rockwell was himself radioactive. I followed a trail out of the Temple and down the street to the theater.”

“I’ll take you word for that,” said Eva. “I don’t remember anything once my hitchhiker takes over.”

I stepped a little closer. The light from the sign behind me cast my shadow long and deep over the movie star sitting on the ground in front of me. Her expression was set, her lips a perfect level, like she was resigned to the fact that just sometimes she wasn’t in control of her own body and there wasn’t a damn she could do about it.

“How do the mind cubes work?”

Eva shrugged.

“Okay,” I said. “What about the original Soviet agents? If they get their minds sucked into glass boxes, where does that leave them? Empty shells?”

Eva shrugged for a second time and said: “I don’t know.”

I paced around a bit.

“What is it?” Eva asked.

I stopped pacing. I looked at Eva. I paced a little more.

“Chip Rockwell is a problem,” I said. “His accident three years ago.” I tapped my chest. “That accident was me. I had a contract to kill him, so that’s what I did. And believe me, I made sure he was dead. Or at least I thought I had, until I saw him yesterday in the Temple basement.”

Eva pulled herself to her feet and stepped toward me. Her mouth hung open a little, maybe in surprise, or maybe because she was thinking the same thing I was.

I kept talking.

“So what if he
is
still dead. That thing in the basement didn’t look much like a person. So what if it isn’t?”

“You mean—?”

I nodded. “What if the only thing that survived Chip Rockwell’s death was his
mind
? A mind that now exists inside one of these radioactive cubes.”

The sign above us pulsed on as we stood there looking at each other. I turned and looked up at it.

HOLLY.

So I had a handle on Chip Rockwell.

WOOD
.

Maybe, anyway. It seemed academic for the moment.

HOLLYWOOD.

There was something a little more pressing going on.

HOLLYWOOD.

Like phase three.

HOLLYWOOD.

“Eva,” I said. “How many cubes were smuggled into the country in the phase two shipment?”

“We’re not sure, exactly. But it’s in the thousands,” she said.

“They’ll be taking up a lot of space. Where are they being kept?”

“We’re not sure of that either. Presumably a studio backlot. Storage space isn’t a problem.”

I looked up at the sign. “Phase three. Simultaneous transmission,” I said. “Nationwide. They’re not just beaming
Red Lucky
into movie theatres, are they? They’re beaming Soviet agents into the minds of the audience, right?” Thousands of people, all taken over at once. Possessed by the enemy like
that
.”

I snapped my fingers but all I got was metal sliding silently over metal.

“Yes,” said Eva. “Simultaneous transmission. The perfect invasion.”

It was enough to make a robot whistle, if a robot could whistle. Instead I let a circuit spark and I made a sound more like the failing brakes of a steam train heard from the next valley over.

Charles David’s suggestion that I put a stop to phase three sounded pretty good right about now.

How exactly, I didn’t know. I was just about to Eva if she had any ideas but it was around then that she yelled something. I couldn’t make out what it was, but it sure wasn’t English. Then she stumbled backwards. She didn’t fall over but she nearly did.

The woman looking at me from those dark ringed eyes wasn’t Eva anymore. It was the agent. The
Soviet
agent. Whoever she was.

Then the agent screwed those black eyes shut and grabbed her bangs with both hands and pulled so hard I thought she was going to scalp herself.

Shouting something that might have been English or Russian or something in-between she spun on her heel and tripped in the dirt. I went to help but she was scrambling away from me already.

“Come on!” yelled Eva.

My
Eva.

I followed.

We stood behind the Hollywood Sign, lit by the four-phase flashing of the bulbs. They were bright. Really bright. Bright enough that the two seconds between each part of the sequence plunged the whole hillside in darkness as deep as the ocean.

Eva stumbled around. She was fighting it—
her
—and it was a hell of a fight. I wanted to help but all I could do was stick close and grab her in case she took a fall. We were okay where we were but the hill was damn steep and that steepness was very close.

She was muttering under her breath while trying to hold her head onto her shoulders. I kept up. She was looking for something.

“What is it?” I asked. She kept muttering and she kept looking.

I looked up at the back of the sign. There were ladders on the back of the big poles and the whole thing looked so absurdly thin and fragile. It was just a set of thin tin panels set with the light bulbs, those panels bolted to the back of a frame made of telegraph poles. The whole thing looked like it could have blown over in a breeze that you might not even need to call stiff.

Eva turned and fell onto her backside. She sat there, eyes closed, puffing like she’d run a marathon. I got closer but she waved at me with the hand holding the gun and then she waved the gun at the sign.

I looked back at the sign. I knew two things about it.

One, that it had been refitted for the premiere tomorrow night, practically rebuilt after decades of neglect, the lighting rig alive again after more than forty years of darkness.

Two, that the machine behind the screen at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre was connected to the machine on the roof of the same building and that machine was pointed right at the sign.

It didn’t take my rusting detective skills to put two and two together. The machines at the theatre were part of phase three.

So was the sign.

I looked around. The back of the sign was home to ladders and it was also home to cables. Lots of cables, strapped to the poles with shiny metal cuffs. All those light bulbs took some juice to light.

And all that juice was powering something else to. Had to be.

I turned back to Eva. She still had her eyes closed and her chest still went up and down at quite a rate but she looked better. She pointed again without looking.

“The sign. Local area effect only. Probably wide enough.”

She sighed and put her head on her knees. I wished her well in her own battle before I turned back to the sign.

There was my answer. The sign was an amplifier. It was meant for the signal, the one being broadcast from the theater. But local area effect only? It was wide enough for what? And why only “probably”?

I moved around and stood between the letters and looked down into the valley. From up here you could see nearly all of Los Angeles. Hollywood, certainly, and downtown LA, and a lot more besides. And from down there, with the sign lit like it was, you’d be able to see it for miles and miles.

And miles and miles and miles.

Local area effect. Probably wide enough.

I looked up at the sign and said something that I was sure Ada wouldn’t have approved of.

I turned back to Eva. She was a bundle of nothing lit in a flashing sequence.

“The broadcast isn’t just going to movie theaters,” I told her, although I had a feeling she already knew what I was about to say. “They’re going to flood Los Angeles with the signal too. Broadcast from here. It’s the sign itself—big enough to take in the valley, but not much more.”

Eva wasn’t talking so I turned back around. I looked at the backs of the panels and at the cables. That’s why the sign had been re-electrified. The whole thing was a local area transmitter.

It seemed phase three—or at least a part of it—was going to be a little easier to solve than I had first thought. Because I was up here alone with Eva and the sign and all I had to so was cut the sign’s power. The premiere wasn’t until tomorrow but if I could find the power box, maybe the transformer, and do as much damage as possible, that would put the kybosh on this part of the Soviet mind control plan.

Easy.

Except I wasn’t alone with the sign and Eva.

I turned around. Eva was standing up. She had the gun pointed right at me.

Only it wasn’t Eva, not anymore. It was someone else driving Eva’s body around while Eva’s own mind swam around in the pool, looking for the ladder out.

The Russian agent barked an instruction I didn’t understand but got the drift of. I stepped away from the sign as she stepped closer to it. I didn’t know what that gun was but I didn’t want to test it out.

While we danced I scanned the sign. I was looking for junction boxes, fuse boxes, anything I could tear out with my own bare steel hands. That was why my Eva had brought me up here, after all. She needed me and those hands to do what she couldn’t and sabotage the sign. With the local area transmitter disabled we could then focus on the works at the theater.

“Hey, Eva, you in there?” I asked.

The Russian agent crinkled her nose. I didn’t like the expression. Eva wouldn’t have pulled it. It made me sick to the stomach to think there was someone else in charge.

If I had a stomach, of course.

Then the agent wearing a movie star’s body rocked on her heels. She closed her eyes. The gun went down.

I saw opportunity knocking so I opened the door. Diving fast, I almost got it too but the agent was faster.

The Russian agent looked out at me with a firm hold on her piece.. She screamed and then I saw it in her eyes.. Eva was back. Back and fighting and not winning that fight.

“The top!” she yelled. “There’s a master control box. Come on!”

She turned and headed for the ladder nearest and began climbing up the giant letter “O” that stood next to the giant letter “H.” She climbed fast. By the time I hit the bottom rung she was nearly halfway up and then soon enough she disappeared from view as she reached the summit ahead of me. I kept climbing.

I stopped once I was at the top, because I could hardly go any farther, because there was nothing for me to stand on, just a narrow wooden pole that formed the top of the letter.

Farther along that letter, Eva crawled along on her hands and knees. She was making good time towards a big box I could see at the other end of the letter. I had to figure out a way of helping her but crawling along the sign didn’t look like much of an option for a robot of my proportions. I looked back down the ladder. Maybe I was better off killing cables at ground level.