Made to Kill (22 page)

“Eva! I’ll got back down and see what I can do—”

Eva stopped crawling and managed to rotate herself around without falling off the sign. She got herself up onto her haunches. She looked at me. Then she closed her eyes and she rubbed her forehead. There was pain there. Real, physical pain. Her fight with the Soviet agent trying to wrestle permanent control of her body had pushed her to her very limits.

I didn’t like the way she looked. The breeze picked up and she swayed in it. She looked out across a view that was to die for. The wind gusted and her body moved with it. Anything more and this movie star was going to have just the wrong kind of Hollywood ending.

I had to get her back to safety and we could smash something up at a safer altitude.

“Okay, just hold on,” I said, all the while calculating the possibilities. The top of the letter “O” was narrow, but maybe if I crawled like her I could get across. I adjusted my footing on the ladder and got ready to move.

Then she snapped out of it and she nodded and turned back to me. She returned to her hands and knees and took a slow and careful movement toward me.

I waved her an encouragement. “That’s it, back you come. Easy does it.”

Eva stopped crawling and curled her head into her chest. Then she looked up at me and she snarled, her nose and forehead creasing in anger. The Soviet agent was back in charge. She yelled something at me and then she fumbled with something in the pocket of her dress.

She lifted out Special Agent Touch Daley’s special gun.

I assume she fired it too, but I didn’t remember that part. What I did remember was a flash of light that seemed brighter than the blaze of the lights of the sign and when I tried to move I found there was nothing for me to move against—no ground, no ladder, no sign, nothing but thin, thin air.

Then I saw shapes that looked like giant letters spelling out the name of a famous place as they flashed in a sequence of bright light.

HOLLY

The word seemed to get smaller and smaller

WOOD

and it was then I realized I was falling

      
HOLLYWOOD

      
and quite a long way too

      
      
HOLLYWOOD

      
      
and I had a feeling this was going to hurt

      
      
      
HOLLYWOOD

      
      
      
      
and probably hurt quite a lot.

I opened my eyes. It was dark but the darkness was moving, like it was raining at night. A real hurricane, the kind that blew palms trees clean out of the ground when the wind made landfall on small islands. The rain was sideways, which made sense given the wind, which roared like a jet engine in my ears. There was light from somewhere because the rain drops were glittering in red and blue.

There was a flash of lightning. I tried to move and found I couldn’t. I was lying on something and I was strapped down. Something must have been up with my gyroscope because it felt like I was, if not entirely upright, then leaning back only by degrees.

The lightning flashed again and then the rain seemed to change direction and change color. There was a click in my audio receptors, loud enough to be heard over the storm, and then the storm was gone as that part of my sensory input array reset itself.

I checked the time. I checked it twice and I still didn’t believe it.

It was Friday night.

Except it couldn’t be. I checked again. It was. Maybe my chronometer had taken a knock because if it was Friday, that meant I’d been awake for a long time. Too long. Beyond my battery life. Beyond the length of the memory tape in my chest.

Both impossible.

Maybe I was deactivated and dreaming in my electric sleep.

What I heard next was the sound of a crowd in a large room with great acoustics. It was a steady mumble, soft and not unpleasant to listen to.

Then the lightning flashed again as my optics came back online.

I opened my eyes and I looked around and I said: “This is quite the welcoming committee.”

They were standing in a semi-circle in front of me and I figured out what my gyroscope had been trying to tell me. I was strapped to something made of three separate pieces, padded but only thinly. My feet were sitting on a rest. There was a big leather band around my legs and each arm was likewise attached to an armrest each.

A super-duper dentist’s chair, like the one in the honeymoon suite of the Ritz-Beverly Hotel. It was folded out and tilted up so I was nearly but not quite standing.

From my left to my right stood the A-listers, the big guns of Hollywood, the rich and the famous. The crowd was three deep and while all of them were done up to the nines they were all also wearing the big heavy protective glasses. The black smocks were absent.

The first row was full of stars I recognized. Alaska Gray with her long white hair blending into the silver furs draped around her shoulders. The one and only Rico Spillane and his two friends, Parker Silverwood and Bob Thatcher. Behind them were others were mugs I didn’t know but I had a feeling were probably on display at the ice cream parlor. Only Charles David didn’t seem to be there, on account of him being dead.

But I did know the two celebrities standing front and center. One in a long red dress, her black hair bigger than ever, the eyes behind the dark glasses I knew to be circled with thick makeup like two black shotgun barrels. Next to her, a man with a stiff wave in his hair and a jacket you see from space and it still wouldn’t be far enough away. He was smiling so much it pushed the big glasses up his face.

Eva wasn’t holding the gun anymore. It had packed quite a punch, although I guessed the fall off the Hollywood Sign hadn’t done me much good either.

Fresco Peterman fiddled with a cufflink and he was looking at me with his head tilted in a way that told me he was acting out the grand finale of his latest picture. Once an actor, always an actor.

I ignored him. I looked at Eva. She didn’t speak either, which was a shame, because I wanted to hear if she had a Russian accent or not. Her expression was hard but it was difficult to tell if it was her or not. If I’d ever really been able to tell anyway.

I pulled on the straps holding me to the chair but it was no use, which was a surprise given a leather strap, even a fat one with a big buckle, shouldn’t have been much of a problem. So I pulled again and was rewarded with an alarm ringing somewhere inside my head which told me to sit still while my system ran through an emergency diagnostic. For my own safety, said the alert, my primary motor units were disengaged. I couldn’t have moved even if I had wanted to, which was really quite a lot.

Something else had happened to me, something after being shot with the weird gun and falling down a mountain. Something unexpected.

Because when I queried the emergency diagnostic I was told that my battery was at one hundred percent charge. And when I queried the reading again and asked for voltage and capacity, I got back numbers that were different to what they should have been.

I was at running at full power from batteries with twice the capacity as before.

New
batteries.

Someone had been busy.

I looked around. The room was big, the ceiling too high. It was all black and lit with fluorescent strips that seemed to be straining. The rumble of the audience was somewhere behind me.

Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. I was backstage, behind the cinema screen itself. The premiere was due to start in—

Thirty
minutes.

Oh boy.

My diagnostic continued to fly and there was no way I could override it. All I could do was sit tight. At least I was still awake. Awake and thinking and—

And I could remember yesterday. I remembered it all. Where I went. Who I spoke to and what I said.

The ride up the hill. Eva McLuckie fighting the parasite inside her mind.

The fall off the letter “O.”

My batteries weren’t the only thing that had been replaced.

Ada. I had to talk to Ada. She would be looking for me. I had a built-in tracker and I hadn’t got back to the office so she would be looking for me. She would have organized something. A search party. She had contacts. Plenty of them. Hell, she could just call the authorities. Thornton might have been long dead but there must have been some part of the government still keeping an eye on us, even if Ada had to hide what we were up to. Someone had to keep her maintained. Me too.

I thought for a moment about Special Agent Touch Daley and his classified department. I thought it would have been really good for him to come bursting into the theater with a whole lot of other agents, special or otherwise.

Any.

Minute.

Now
.

The A-list row was still watching me. Touch Daley had failed to burst in anywhere. I had another look through the transcript the emergency diagnostic was spewing onto my new memory tape and saw my tracker had been disabled. Deliberately, of course.

Someone really had been busy. Someone who knew exactly what they were doing.

Fresco took a step closer to me and leaned in over my semi-reclined face. He finished fiddling with his cufflink and leaned on the side of my chair.

“There’s someone here who has been looking forward to seeing you for a long time, Sparks,” he said in heavily accented English. He smiled and his Hollywood teeth shone.

The semi-circle of A-listers parted straight down the middle. Through that middle came a trio made up of two men and a third in a wheelchair. The man doing the pushing was young and strong and his hair was short. Military short. He was not only wearing a black smock fastening high at the neck but he had on the big protective glasses and the big protective gloves too. The gloves went up to nearly his elbow.

Artem Rokossovsky. I remembered him.

The other man was older, smaller, thinner, sunken cheeks and a pointed chin and a gray pompadour that looked too big for his head. He was the only person not wearing protective glasses, but he was dressed in the black smock like his pal. He wasn’t smiling but his expression told me everything I needed to know about how he thought the night was going and in whose favor.

Vitaly Bobrov himself. Robot scientist, Russian military. The brains behind the Hollywood Reds.

I also knew who the man in the wheelchair was. His lower half was covered with a thick woolen blanket in equally thick plaid. His upper half was wearing a dinner jacket and bow-tie, like he’d gone to the effort to dress up for the occasion even if Bobrov and his assistant hadn’t. Above the dinner jacket was a head wrapped in bandages with a pair of dark glasses stuck onto the front.

“
RAYMOND ELECTROMATIC
,” said Chip Rockwell with a voice that sounded like someone kicking over a beehive. “
I HAVE BEEN JUST DYING TO SEE YOU AGAIN
.”

I didn’t speak. I just looked.

Then Rockwell spoke again.

“
DR. BOBROV, PREPARE OUR GUEST FOR PHASE FOUR
.”

Bobrov’s thin and old face cracked open and he laughed, and he laughed for a long, long time.

Fresco Peterman and his pal Rico Spillane wheeled me around and I found myself facing another of the chairs, this one set up on the other side of the big machine with the silver disc that sat behind the cinema screen. The other chair was, like mine, folded flat and tilted upright. The chair was empty. I wondered who was going to be strapped into it for phase four.

Whatever phase four was.

There was more gear here than before. Some consoles on wheel and panels with lights and buttons that wouldn’t have looked out of place back in Ada’s computer room. The other chair was hooked up to it and the folk who had wheeled me in ducked down behind my chair and began hooking it up too while Artem wheeled Rockwell around to a spot between the two chairs. Bobrov meanwhile had got over his fit of hilarity and walked over to the empty chair. He swung the jointed arm with the miniature disc and claw device on the end of it around so it was above the headrest.

With everyone apparently minding their own business I ran through my diagnostic log again. There were reports and feedback from circuits and systems I didn’t recognize. I had no idea what the hell had been done to me during my missing day but I didn’t count on it being good.

And yet, here I was. Alive and kicking but for the fact that the former was never going to be true and the latter was not a currently available option.

But while I couldn’t kick I could move my head a little so I lifted it and looked down at my chest, where I knew my magnetic memory tape was supposed to spinning away but which the diagnostic log told me was missing. I saw that wasn’t the only thing missing.

I wasn’t wearing my shirt or jacket. My chest hatch was gone too, leaving my innards exposed. I couldn’t see too well from this angle, but I could see enough.

Where my tape would sit was something else. It was glassy and glowed a faint pink. All I could see was the upper edge, but it was enough.

There was a buzzing sound mixed with the sound of a detuned radio. I looked up after I realized that the noise was Rockwell laughing.

“What have you done to me?” I asked. I had a pretty good idea I knew the answer.

“
YOU HAVE BEEN UPGRADED
.”

That’s why I’d been out for more than a full day. After my fall from the sign they’d picked me up and switched me off.

And installed one of their magic cubes, replacing my memory tape.

“
AN INFINITELY LARGE MEMORY STORE
,” said Rockwell in his buzz-saw monotone. “
A DIGITAL CRYSTAL EMBEDDED WITH A BINARY MATRIX IN THREE DIMENSIONS AND DECODED BY A LASER BEAM READER
.”