Made to Kill (24 page)

I felt like pointing out the difference between eternity and a very long time but this didn’t seem to be the moment. The disc hanging over my chair didn’t have a cube in the claw behind it because that cube was in my chest, and I had an inkling that any moment now I was about to be pushed out by the man seated opposite.

The disc spun on the machine above us. It spun pretty fast. The whine was picking up too, turning into a tornado howl that someone was going to notice.

There was a thud from somewhere next to me, and then I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. It looked vaguely like a tree falling.

I glanced sideways and saw Artem hit the deck, his eyes closed and his expression less surprised than a little disappointed.

There was a tugging on my arm. I turned my head and saw wavy hair that looked wet. Then Fresco Peterman looked up at me from behind his dark glasses.

“Quick, Sparks, time to go.” There was no doubting his accent now. He could have sung
The Star-Spangled Banner
at the opening of the World Series with a voice like that.

I looked down. He was working at the strap holding my left wrist to the armrest. I glanced at Bobrov but the glow from his crystal was pretty big and I wasn’t sure he could see us. I don’t even think he’d seen his old army buddy go down.

My hand came free. Fresco reached around to the other one and released the buckle and then he stood back and looked at me. After a couple of seconds he gave me the hurry up by waving his hands.

I tried to move but the emergency override was still in place. I had a poke around in the log to see if I could override the override but it was going to take a little bit of time. I told Fresco the same and then I said: “Forget me. Evacuate the auditorium, quick smart.”

Fresco shook his head and his hair didn’t move an inch. “Already taken care of. Eva has everyone outside. The other theatres are clearing out too.”

“Eva?”

Fresco patted my shoulder. “She’s fine, Sparks. Don’t worry about it.”

Then he looked up at the machine with the spinning disc. I followed his gaze.

“But we’re still transmitting?” I asked.

Fresco nodded. Then he grabbed for something inside the thing he was wearing that he thought was a dinner jacket. He pulled out Agent Daley’s strange gun and he aimed it at the machine.

Bobrov was on him in an instant. His exit from his chair had been hidden behind the pink glow but the way the old man roared when he tackled Fresco suggested he was none too pleased with his interference. The two of them went down and began wrestling on the floor. Fresco was a big guy and had managed to surprise Artem with a knockout punch, but his footballer physique was matched for now by the weaker Bobrov’s sheer desperation.

Then an alert rang around my head like a church bell and I was a robot in control of his own body again. I stood from the chair and I went to help Fresco but just as I moved something grabbed me around the wrist with a grip like a damn vice. Then I was pulled around with more than a little violence.

Bobrov wasn’t the only one who had found a hidden strength.

Rockwell stood before me, one of his clamp hands around my wrist. He pulled it down and I had no choice but to go with it. Sure enough I was on my knees in two seconds flat.

I looked up at his face. The bandages were unraveling and tangled around his metal frame legs. The glasses were still there. I had a feeling I didn’t want to see what the bandages hid.

Then I saw something else. He had a power lead, a fat one with a corrugated rubbery surface, jammed down the front of his shirt. The lead ran to the console behind him. I could see dials on that console and all of them were redlining.

It seemed he was going to take a little of that extra energy flow for himself.

Rockwell stared at me with those dark glasses and his voice buzzed at me like saw blades going through lumber. If he was shouting real words or just screaming in rage, it all sounded the same to me.

I screamed in rage myself. I pushed myself up. Rockwell was strong but he was still a fragile thing that lacked poise and balance. I was big and bulky, solid as anything and twice as heavy. I pushed up with my legs and out with my arms and something broke in Rockwell’s arm. It levered upwards and he staggered backward.

I turned and went for Bobrov and Fresco. The gun was still in Fresco’s hand but keeping a hold of it was impeding his fight.

Two clamps around my neck this time. I grabbed at them and tried to pry them off. I was working hard at it but they had good leverage. Rockwell got his face against my ear and buzzed and buzzed and buzzed.

There was a bang and a flash and the clamps were gone. I fell forward against my chair. I spun and got back to my feet.

Eva McLuckie was standing there in her red dress and those dark glasses, holding the thick black cable that used to be plugged into Rockwell sparking in one hand and Rockwell shuddering on his feet in front of her. I wasted no time, sending a punch toward his glasses with enough force to stop a bus. As soon as it connected his buzzing stopped and he flew backward, landing against the machine. Eva cried out in surprise and I grabbed her, throwing myself around so I was between her and Rockwell.

There was a distant explosion. Whatever Rockwell had broken with his fall, the big machine was spinning out of control. It rocked in the frame, enough to shake the theater to its foundations and send dust and debris raining down on us. With Eva in front of me I hunched around her for protection and pushed the pair of us forward toward Fresco. He got free of Bobrov and scooted toward me, wrapping his body around Eva from the other side.

I looked up. Bobrov rolled to his feet. He had blood on his face and his smock was torn. He looked at me. Then he noticed Artem unconscious on the floor and he started yelling something in Russian.

There was another bang from behind us and I saw the lick of flame reflected in Bobrov’s eyes before I saw the fire itself.

I put my head down and pulled Fresco and Eva in tight, hoping it’d be enough.

Then there was a lot of light, and a lot o
      
f heat.

Another bang.

I was pretty sure that this time, it was me.

I was upright. So far so good. I felt cold. That was a little alarming in that I knew I couldn’t feel cold. Or hot, for that matter.

Actually, that wasn’t true. I could feel hot and cold. I could sense them and measure them. But they didn’t bother me, not usually. My operating range was pretty wide.

But the fact was I was cold. Cold and tired. I had circuits shorting all the way down one side and my logic gates were flipping like a casino croupier shuffling the decks.

And I hurt. A lot. This too was nonsense. A scientific impossibility. Didn’t stop it from being the truth, though. Of course it wasn’t real pain. I figured out that much. It was an echo, a template of pain taken from the template of a man.

The template of Professor Thornton, my creator.

I heard the ticking of the second hand of a fast watch. I smelled cigarettes and bad coffee and the smell of pine-scented furniture polish filling a hot and stuffy office.

I closed my eyes. I opened them. Made no difference. My optics weren’t working. Or maybe they were, but all I could see was the flashing afterimage of a woman with big hair dressed in tight slacks and a tighter sweater holding a steaming mug in one hand and a cigarette between the first two fingers of the other hand. The cigarette was held up in the air like she had to an important message to tell the world. Her hair was blonde and her makeup was too thick but I liked her smile.

She pointed at something and then she was gone, dust on the wind, a dream half-forgotten.

There were people near. Specifically, two people.

“Like this?” said the first. A man’s voice. Familiar but I couldn’t place it. A good, strong voice. The kind of voice that could sell you soap on the TV and you’d like it.

“Careful!” A woman. Young. Young but confident.

“No, honey, you’re doing it wrong. Look, try again, only this time…”

Three people, not two. This one was a woman too. Older. Her voice deeper, the result of a twenty-a-day habit.

Ada.

I felt a tugging sensation. I felt hands on me. Four hands, rocking my chassis, trying to get something plugged into my front.

“He’s leaking,” said the man. “Oh, dammit, my jacket!”

“It’ll come out,” said Ada. “I’ll give you the name of my drycleaners. Just down the street. They’re good too. Maybe you can slip them some extra and they’ll lose it for you.”

“Almost got it,” said the young woman.

“Steady,” said the man. “And what’s wrong with my jacket. I like my jacket!”

“I can recommend a therapist too,” said Ada.

I checked my clock. It was late. Too late.

And it didn’t bother me. I could remember.

“Ready?” asked Ada.

I could remember everything.

“Hey,” said the man. Maybe I’d moved. It was a little hard to tell. “Just hold on, Sparks, one thing at a time.”

“Here goes nothing,” said Ada.

And then my alarm went off and I woke up to another beautiful morning in Los Angeles.

They stood in front of me, the pair of them, he in a hound’s-tooth jacket that looked like a TV screen tuned to thin air and her in a black dress. The big black rings of makeup were gone from around her eyes. I thought she looked better that way.

Fresco must have seen I was awake. He didn’t move any except to crack his famous smile. “Hey, Sparks, welcome back to the land of the living.”

I smiled on the inside and I looked at the ceiling while I tried to figure out what was what. We were in the computer room back at the office.

“What happened to our privacy policy, Ada? I really don’t want to have to kill these two.”

There was a sound like someone taking a long long drag on a cigarette, then a sort of dull popping sound like someone blowing out a lungful of hot smoke.

“The exception proves the rule, chief,” said Ada.

“I’m not sure that means what you think it means.”

“They’re fine. I cleared them.”

“Oh,” I said.

I looked down. I was in my alcove. I was missing my suit. I was also missing my detective’s shield, which should have been on my chest. In its place was a metal plate a different color than the rest of me. It bulged a little more, making my front rounded instead of flat.

I tapped at it with a finger.

Fresco’s smile dropped and he looked sideways at Eva and she looked back at him. For the first time I noticed they were holding hands.

Then Fresco turned back to me, seemed to hold his breath, and he tapped his own cheek with a finger.

I reached up to my own face and felt it. There was a scratch under one eye. Not very deep, not very long, but a scratch all the same.

Seems there was something that could ding the special bronzed steel alloy that Thornton and Thornton’s bosses had been so pleased with.

Something like a building falling on top of me, for instance.

Fresco looked like he was about to cry. Then Ada laughed.

“Relax, Peterman. Ray’s just being a big baby. Aren’t you going to say thanks, Ray?”

I looked at the ceiling. “I was getting to it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Would help if I knew what I was saying thanks for, of course.”

Fresco didn’t move. Eva sighed and let go of his hand and reached for the newspaper on the table behind them and handed it over to me.

I turned it over and unfolded it so I was back at the start. The headline caught my eye. It was hard to miss.

FIRE AT NATIONWIDE PREMIERE

GAUMAN’S CHINESE THEATRE SEVERELY DAMAGED

EXPERIMENTAL BROADCAST SYSTEM BLAMED

I read the article. There had been a fire at the theatre. It had started about thirty minutes into the premiere of
Red Lucky
, forcing the cancellation of the nationwide simultaneous transmission, but fortunately everyone had got out thanks to the efforts of one of the movie’s own stars, one Eva McLuckie, who had reappeared on the red carpet after months away from the public eye to the rapturous adoration of the assembled press and gathered fans alike.

I lowered the paper and looked at Fresco.

“A fire, huh.”

Fresco’s smile returned. “Hey, you saved us back there, big fella. The whole damn roof came down, crash!” He mimed the roof coming down, with both hands no less. “If it weren’t for you we’d be flattened.”

That explained a few things.

“What about the transmitter?”

“Destroyed in the fire,” said Eva. “We have a cleanup crew at the theatre sifting through the wreckage.”

“They’re up at the sign too,” said Fresco. “They’re dismantling the amplifier.”

I nodded. The two of them stood in front of me with expectant expressions. Like I was in charge of something.

“Rockwell and Bobrov?” I asked.

“Rockwell’s body was recovered at the theatre,” said Eva. “There’s not much left of him.”

“And Bobrov?”

Fresco answered. “Missing at the moment, but we’re pretty sure he was caught in the roof collapse. His assistant too, Rokossovsky. We were right in the middle of it.”

“What about the Soviet cell? You weren’t all CIA agents, were you?”

“No,” said Fresco. “But they’re being taken care of. The Agency has cooked up a way to de-process anyone who went through the Soviet mind transfer. They’ll all be back to normal soon enough.”

I smiled on the inside. “That’s a lot of cases of nervous exhaustion.”

“
The Daily News
is going to have a field day,” said Fresco. He frowned. “Vampires, the lot of them.”

“And how about you two?”

“We’ve had one round already,” said Eva. “One more and we’ll be cleared.”

Fresco nodded. “But we’re still going to be taking a lot of pills for a while.”

“Seems a small price,” I said. “What about Bobrov’s gang? The crew he brought over with him from the Motherland?”