Tales of the Red Panda: The Android Assassins (8 page)

“In any event, we have learned one or two things along the
way,” the Doctor said brightly. “And I haven't even told you the good part.”

The Panda and Squirrel exchanged a look. “Oh swell,” she
said. “I was waiting for the good part.”

“Last time, Captain Clockwork crafted all of his creations
from hand-rendered components, nearly impossible to trace.” The Doctor sounded
very pleased with himself indeed. “But in order to make an army this large, he
has been forced to buy off the rack. Every major component in this unit came
from a single source.”

“Doctor
Chronopolis
, that's
marvelous!” the masked man cried. “Tell us where!”

“Fenwick Industries!” the little man said proudly.

There was a moment of stunned silence.

“Trap?” she asked.

“Trap,” he agreed.

Philip Norfolk was not a man accustomed to hurrying, nor to
playing fetch-and-carry. It did not suit his disposition or his demeanor. As a
corporate head of one of the many divisions of Fenwick Industries, Norfolk was
responsible for the direction taken by a multi-million dollar business and for
the working lives of thousands of men. In the course of a day he did not
normally carry boxes of paperwork and company records, and he only very rarely
took any sort of order from anyone.

But this was not a normal day. Today Chief
O'Mally
and his band of clerks had come to call, with a
warrant in hand for an audit of paperwork related to the movement of certain
items of
high-technology
. Norfolk knew that he was not
only answerable for the lives and livelihoods of his workers, but also for the
good name of the company. He had begun his career under the late Thomas Fenwick
and was just as loyal to the interests of the son as he had been the father.
And though his new employer took a much more relaxed attitude towards anything
that smelled like work, Norfolk took that as his cue to be even more proactive
on his behalf. Thus to keep the presence of the police as quiet as possible,
Norfolk himself, together with a dozen senior managers, had spent the day
bringing the requested files to the large conference hall that the police had
commandeered for their search.

He opened the door and came face to face with Chief
O'Mally
. “These are the last of them,” Norfolk said,
holding out the box.

O'Mally
went so far as to uncross
one of his arms to point at the table with the stem of his pipe, but he said
nothing and gave no sign of thanks to Norfolk. This was not Chief
O'Mally's
kind of police work. The small army of
well-scrubbed young men the department used for investigations of this sort
struck him more like actuaries than policemen. And this was a bad business,
coming into the offices of one of the city's wealthiest men with a warrant.
Bound to get complicated, but
O'Mally
felt he was too
close to the answer to take any risks, to have any records hidden. Captain Clockwork
had built his technological terrors out of Fenwick Industries' parts, that much
was certain, and somewhere in this unholy mess of shipping manifests, orders
and receivables there must be a clue that would lead him to the mastermind
behind the senseless slaughter of innocent people.

But it had been hours now, with nothing for him to do but
stand and wait. He watched Norfolk brush himself off and mop his brow.

“Surprised we haven't seen Mister Fenwick himself,”
O'Mally
said. “You have called him, I assume.”

“Young Mister Fenwick can be surprisingly difficult to
locate,” Norfolk puffed, “when he takes a mind to be. The operation of the
company does not require his day-to-day involvement. Still, I can only imagine
what he will say when he hears of this.”

“August Fenwick is as keen as anyone for Captain Clockwork
to be brought to justice,”
O'Mally
said sternly.

Norfolk bristled. “If you are so certain of that, what was
the need for the warrant?”

O'Mally
turned away from Norfolk
and watched his men shift through the piles of paper. “True or false, Mister
Norfolk: if I had asked your permission, I would still be standing in the car
park while you were trying to locate Mister Fenwick.”

Norfolk was silent for a moment. “Will there be anything
else, Chief
O'Mally
?”

“If there is, Norfolk,”
O'Mally
said without looking, “you will be the first to know.

A moment later
O'Mally
was alone
with his men. He regretted his demeanor for a moment, if only because it had
deprived him of any distraction from watching his squad of accountants in
action.

“Chief
O'Mally
, do you have a
moment?” It was Green, the head of the team at work on the books.

“I have any number of moments, Sergeant Green,”
O'Mally
said, “and not much more. What have you found?”

“I don't know exactly, sir,” Green replied over the rims of
his glasses.

O'Mally
sighed. “Green, this is a
fairly simple question, isn't it? Have there been unusual movements of certain
articles of high technology, or haven't there?”

“There certainly have, sir,” Green replied. “But I'm not at
all sure that I even begin to understand them. And I'm almost certain that was
the point.”

O'Mally's
mustache bristled. “You
have my attention, Sergeant.”

“We began by looking for unusually large orders of specific
items, as identified by the experts that examined the mechanical men,” Green
began. “We had no luck at all.”

“Why the devil not?”
O'Mally
thundered. “We know that Captain Clockwork had the parts, he must have got them
somewhere!”

“Yes, sir,” Green said, “but if he isn't a fool, and we
suspect he is not, it would be a fairly simple matter to hide those purchases
within a series of seemingly unrelated orders. Or he may have a connection
within Fenwick Industries that allowed him to steal some or all of what he
needed. They are not uncommon parts, from what I have been given to
understand.”

O'Mally
sighed. “So we learned
nothing?”

“I wouldn't say that, Chief
O'Mally
.
I wouldn't say that at all.” Green looked uncomfortable. “But I can't even
begin to guess what it means.”

“Guess what
what
means, Green?”
O'Mally
was
losing his patience.

“You have to be looking for it, Chief
O'Mally
,”
Green began, “and even then it isn't easy to see. But there is a very definite
pattern of items of high-technology being… moved.”

“Moved?”

“Yes, sir,” Green stammered. “Diverted might be a better
word.
From one corporate division to the next.
It all
seems perfectly proper, except at the end of the line, they continue to end
up…”

“Yes?”
O'Mally
said, exasperated.

“Nowhere, sir,” Green said.

“What do you mean,
nowhere
?”
O'Mally
snapped.

“I mean exactly that, Chief
O'Mally
,”
Green said. “In every instance, the trail simply ends. Long after any
reasonable person would have stopped following it. The items in question are
incredibly diverse, enough to equip and maintain a top level laboratory and a
great deal of equipment, the nature of which I cannot imagine.”

O'Mally
was staggered. “And these
are items on our list?”

Green shook his head. “No, sir,” he said. “I can find
nothing that suggests an obvious link to the mechanical men. But it is more
than a little curious. There is no evidence of anything improper, no fraud of
any kind committed. But it is damned unusual, if you don't mind my saying so,
sir. Given the nature of the crimes involved, I'm not certain that we can afford
to overlook it.”

“Well, what do you suggest, Sergeant?”
O'Mally
asked. “Where do we begin looking for items that ended up
nowhere
?”

“By starting with the one thing they have in common, Chief
O'Mally
,” Green said. “At some point in the process, every
one of these shipments was signed for by August Fenwick himself.”

“Fenwick?”
O'Mally
roared. “What
in the devil do you imagine a man like August Fenwick would do with a secret
laboratory?”

“I have no idea, Chief
O'Mally
,”
Green said mildly. “But if I were you I would ask him.”

“Oh, marvelous,”
O'Mally
said, and
then was struck by a sudden thought. “That son of Ian James, the scientist, he
said that there was more to Fenwick than he let on. In fact he said that he
used to be quite clever, though I can't imagine it myself.”
O'Mally
looked at his team of auditors,
all hanging
on his
response. “All right, Sergeant, bring your notebook. Let's go have a quiet word
with the suddenly mysterious Mister Fenwick!”

August Fenwick walked in the main doors of the Club Macaw
and sighed to himself. He really didn't have time for this.

Leading any sort of double life is complicated enough, even
if neither of those lives involves wearing a mask and handing out your own
brand of two-fisted justice. There are always traces, clues that can be
followed by the industrious or the curious. However skilled you may be at
hiding them, and the Red Panda fancied he had done fairly well, sooner or later
someone trips over something that you've swept under the carpet and it has to
be dealt with. That was why, with at least two crazed
supervillains
terrorizing the city, he was stopping in at his gentleman's club.

The very real problem was learning just exactly what Captain
Clockwork was playing at, and why had he chosen to make August Fenwick the
object of suspicion. There certainly were more convincing Captain Clockwork
candidates out there, and a plethora of Fenwick Industries components was
hardly damning proof that Fenwick himself had a role in the creation of these
mechanical monsters. It was a bad
frame which
either
meant he would soon be in the clear, or that Clockwork wasn't done yet.

Fenwick traipsed up the heavily carpeted steps, casually
acknowledging those who greeted him, and made his way into the reading room
where a few dozen members sat quietly with various newspapers from around town
and hopelessly out-of date journals from farther afield. Really, he had no idea
how fellows without hypnotic powers managed it, he really didn't. Granted, not
every mystery-man had the large personal staff that came with the August
Fenwick identity – that would simplify things somewhat – but even
if you didn't count the small army of chauffeurs, butlers and the like whose
memories he had altered before sending them to another job, it was still complicated.
The president of the Empire Bank had once discovered the network he used to
channel funds to the Red Panda's operations, but that was a fairly quick
hypnotic modification. The poor little man would much rather have never made
such a discovery, so inducing him to forget it again was child's play.

Chief
O'Mally
was another matter,
Fenwick thought to himself as he settled into one of the plush chairs and
looked out the large picture window at the city beyond. Much of how he played
this would depend upon how far news had spread. The Red Panda had to assume
that the police experts had discovered what it now seemed likely they were
meant to find, that his companies had sold the parts used to make the robotic
killers that had slaughtered innocent men and women.

He knew from discreet calls from Philip Norfolk's junior
clerk, an agent of the Red Panda under orders to report anything suspicious
from within Fenwick's own company, that the police were conducting an audit of
items of
high-technology
. The Red Panda considered a
visit from
O'Mally
inevitable at this point, and it
was simplest to allow himself to be found in the most obvious place. If his
activities had not been too widely analyzed yet, it would be a simple enough
matter. Erasing
O'Mally's
memory would cause too many
problems, but soothing his suspicions, making him accept a thin story as the
gospel truth, would be easy. In many ways it was the least of his problems, but
it was a cat that he could still keep in the bag.

Both Fenwick and his partner were holding out hope for
another explanation, but if one of their enemies was targeting August Fenwick,
there was a solid possibility that the Red Panda's secret identity was blown.
And it wouldn't take a great deal of imagination to guess that Fenwick's pretty
red-haired driver, with whom he was famously a little too familiar, fit the
bill for the role of Flying Squirrel.

Undercover agents with no idea of the true nature of their
mission had been dispatched to quietly guard the house in
Cabbagetown
where Kit's mother still lived. And prior to setting out for the Club, the
heroes had returned in haste to their underground lair to disable all of the
man-sized pneumatic travel tubes that led to the Fenwick mansion.

“No sense taking chances,” the Red Panda had said. “I prefer
not to be taken by surprise in the Lair.”

“How're you supposed to get home?” she had asked.

“The tubes can be reactivated from down here,” he had said,
“but not at the other end. If need be you can shut it off again after I leave
and then take the open tube back to your neighborhood.”

“I got a bathtub you can sleep in,” she had grinned. “You'd
look real cute in it. It barely fits me.”

He had tried very hard not to picture Kit in the bathtub,
without much success, but had covered his discomfort fairly well. “Not sure how
much time either of us is going to spend in our mild-mannered alter egos for
the next few days,” he had said, “at least until we have some idea what
Clockwork knows and what he doesn't.”

“If we have to invent new secret identities, can I be the
billionaire this time?” she had asked, batting her long lashes. She'd been
doing that a lot lately, and he had been searching in vain for a clever quip
about it, but the call from Norfolk's clerk had mercifully interrupted and an
hour later here he was.

There was a stir in the reading room of the Club Macaw, and
August Fenwick looked up to see the Chief headed his way accompanied by an
earnest-looking young man in plainclothes whom Fenwick did not know. The second
man was carrying a notebook, and there was a dearth of blue uniforms elsewhere.
They had plainly not come to arrest him. Fenwick smiled.

“Hello,
O'Mally
,” he said quietly.

“Mister Fenwick,”
O'Mally
practically whispered and still drew angry stares from other club members, “I
wonder if there isn't somewhere less quiet where we can talk.”

A few moments later they were on their way to one of the
Club's private
sitting-rooms
, speaking as they walked.
At
O'Mally's
urging, the earnest-looking young man
who he identified as Sergeant Green began to outline their discoveries, and
Fenwick did his best to seem quite baffled by it all. In fact, everything was
going quite well… right up to the moment when the window of the sitting-room
shattered like a bomb had hit it and a tall, metallic-skinned horror burst in
waving its
whiplike
arms in every direction as it
took in its surroundings with unblinking red eyes.

Instinctively, the Red Panda settled into a combat-ready
stance, a deep crouch that had him ready to move in any direction at an instant.
But before he could blink, the mechanical monster was past him, charging at the
two policemen.

O'Mally
dodged the electric whips
with surprising grace, but the bookish Sergeant Green was not so lucky. He
shrieked in agony as the burning energy coursed through him. Men began to rush
from every corner of the club, only to retire in horror at the sight that
confronted them.

Before the Red Panda could react, much less consider what a
display of martial arts prowess was likely to do for August Fenwick's reputation,
he felt a sharp, sudden pain in his back and then brief agony as the metal
tendril of a second robot he had not seen delivered a stunning charge of
energy. It was nothing like the prolonged torture suffered by the young police
sergeant and went completely unobserved by the panicked crowd within the club.
But as the Red Panda slumped forward and felt two cold, metal arms wrap around
him and lift him from the ground, he knew that Captain Clockwork's frame-up was
complete. He was being “rescued” from police questioning. In the moments before
he lost consciousness, he was vaguely aware of the machine's legs extending out
the window, telescoping into long, spider-like appendages more than two stories
long. The robot lifted Fenwick easily out the window into the rear courtyard of
the Club Macaw, and August Fenwick knew no more.

Chief
O'Mally
saw the mechanical
beast which had crippled his junior officer begin to retreat to cover the exit
of the second machine. Seeing Fenwick being carried away offering no resistance,
O'Mally
leapt to the exact conclusion that the master
fiend who commanded these creations surely intended that he should.

“Stop that man!” he shouted to no one in particular. “August
Fenwick is Captain Clockwork!”
O'Mally
got several
shots away with his service revolver, but they ricocheted harmlessly off the
metal skin of the guard unit that quickly followed the second robot out the
window and was gone.

O'Mally
thundered down the
stairway of the Club Macaw, brushing the curious and terrified wealthy members
aside without a second thought in his race for the front door and a last chance
to stop the master fiend before his quarry could retreat to safety.

In the front courtyard of the Club, Kit Baxter dropped her
morning
Chronicle
at the sight before
her eyes. She stared, unbelieving, at the advancing forms of two enormous
mechanical monsters, walking with astonishing strides over the rooftop of the
club. And to her greater wonder, one of them was clearly carrying the Red
Panda!

“Boss!” she shouted in amazement and back-flipped over the
hood of the limousine to throw the driver's door open. She had no more than
started the mighty engine when
O'Mally
burst past the
amazed doorman, looking aloft with his mouth agape.

“Miss Baxter!”
O'Mally
shouted at
her. “Stop that car!”

But Kit had already thrown the enormous vehicle into gear,
executed a stomach wrenching turn that ought to have been impossible and
thundered off after the retreating robots. Kit Baxter was a wonder and a terror
behind the wheel of any car, and the limousine was one she knew well and had
modified
herself
for greater performance. She only
knew of one car that could beat it: the sleek, black wonder that the press had
dubbed the “
Pandamobile
,” and Kit cursed that she did
not have it to command at this moment.

She raced through the streets, always just a step behind the
rapidly moving metal monsters, but they were traveling by rooftop and not bound
to the grid pattern of streets as she was. Kit knew the rooftops of the city
better than almost any other person living, but in the end, the advantage was
not enough. One moment she had them in her sights, and at the next turn, the
clockwork kidnappers were gone.

Kit Baxter slammed her fist against the steering wheel in
rage, her eyes filling with tears of frustration. Their enemy had taken August
Fenwick for reasons still unknown and whether or not Captain Clockwork knew
it,
in the process he had taken the Red Panda off the board
and left the Flying Squirrel alone. All that was to his advantage. In the
process he had made only one mistake: he had made Kit Baxter angry.

He was in serious trouble.