Tek Power (11 page)

From his pocket Jake took the scrap of newspaper he'd found in Alicia's bedroom. “This is a longshot maybe, but it seems likely this came from down there.” He handed it across to the bearded man. “Someone I'm interested in was grabbed. It's possible that she was taken by somebody from the Catacombs. I want to look for her down there.”

After wiping his large, flattened nose on his coat sleeve, Quatermain took the scrap between stained thumb and forefinger. “1960s,
New York Times
,” he said after a few seconds. “Likely came from the Newspaper Wing.”

“I know a rich assortment of marginal citizens live down there in those tunnels and storerooms,” said Jake. “Including various gangs and hoodlums for hire.”

“Plus a hell of a lot of independent, creative folks,” added Quatermain, scowling as he tossed the fragment in Jake's direction. “I'd hate to think you were implying that I'm a thug, pilgrim.”

“You're too sweet tempered to be a thug.” Putting the scrap of paper away, Jake started to slide out of the booth. “Timecheck, I'll have to find another guide. Your friend's got too many problems for—”

“I don't have problem one,” Quatermain told him. “You want a guide, I'm the best there is. Just because I won't be insulted or—”

“Jake, trust me, he's just in a grouchy mood tonight,” put in Timecheck. “Nobody knows the layout down there as well as Quatermain.”

“Why'd they grab this ladyfriend of yours?” the shaggy man inquired.

“Not sure. Probably to keep her from talking to me.”

“What motive?”

“I'm investigating a murder, one with politics and maybe Tek involved.”

“There are several gangs down in the Paper Archives Catacombs who specialize in that sort of work.”

“Can you get us safely there for a look around?”

“Can you pay me one thousand dollars?”

Jake said, “Okay, but only half now.”

“All now,” countered Quatermain. “If you get knocked off down there, I may not have time to frisk your body for the rest of my face.”

16

G
OMEZ WAS ON
his second ale when the unexpected opportunity arose. He had, keeping a safe distance, been trailing Karla and her party through the War Museum. Norm, who Gomez concluded must be some sort of bodyguard for the communications heiress, threw him a few nasty glances but nobody had thus far tried to eject him.

It was on the second level that the incident took place. The room was devoted to robot warriors of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries. There were fifteen formidable examples on display, each standing stiff and still atop a low pedestal.

Gomez was in conversation with a young woman who was a First Lieutenant in the Military Service. “That's an interesting point of view,” he was saying to her, casually watching Karla Maxfield across the room.

“Oh, but it's absolutely true,” the lieutenant told him. “Hand-to-hand combat is always much more exciting than—”

“
Chihuahua
,” exclaimed Gomez, turning away from her.

The large gunmetal robot soldier on the pedestal nearest Karla had suddenly come to life. He swung out with his heavy left arm and slapped at Norm.

The force of the blow was enough to send the black bodyguard sailing hard into the wall six feet away.

Then the robot soldier started to raise his right hand, which had a lazgun built in, and aim it at the young woman.

Gomez had yanked out his stungun. Planting his feet wide and gripping the gun in both hands, he fired at the robot.

The beam hit him in the side and the big mechanical warrior gave a spasmodic jerk.

After firing a second blast, Gomez went running toward the robot.

The robot's arms dropped to his sides. He took two wobbling steps ahead, swayed and started to topple from his pedestal.

Sprinting, Gomez grabbed Karla around the waist and dragged her out of the path of the falling mechanical soldier.

The robot smacked the floor with a resounding, rattling thump, his heavy head just missing her left foot.

Karla tried to speak to Gomez, but ended up coughing instead. Finally she was able to say, “You seem to have saved my life.”

He nodded. “Apparently so.” He let go of her. “Maybe now, out of gratitude, you'll do me a favor,
señorita
.”

“I owe you at least one, Gomez.”

“I'd like to talk to you about your brother and Eve Bascom.”

Norm was back on his feet, bracing himself against the wall. “Get the hell away from her, Gomez,” he warned.

“Come by my place at eleven tonight.” She leaned close, whispered her address and kissed Gomez on the cheek.

“Damn it,” shouted Norm. “That's only going to encourage him.”

T
HE
P
APER
A
RCHIVES
Catacombs had been established back early in the twenty-first century, expanding from underground space originally intended to serve as living and office space for essential government officials in the event of a nuclear attack. Gradually the underground rooms and passways had been expanded and extended, converted to store the paper ephemera of Washington. Official memos, financial records, newspapers, the spillover of the Library of Congress and tons of other paper documents all ended up beneath the city.

Sparsely patrolled by a scattering of rundown security robots in recent decades, the Catacombs had long been used as residence and refuge space for all sorts and conditions of people—vagrants, runaways, outlaws, artists and eccentrics.

With Quatermain guiding him, Jake began his descent by way of an entry hole in Potomac Park.

The metal ladder rattled as they climbed down and their footfalls echoed hollowly. A chill dampness quickly closed in around them.

“Guard on this entrance has been flooey for a year or more,” explained the shaggy man, dropping from the last rung to the dirty stone floor.

As Jake followed him into a long, dimlit tunnel, he noticed a battered robot slumped against a black-stained tiled wall. One arm was missing and a plump grey rat was perched on the guardbot's lap, dozing.

Other rats, some fat and some lean, went scurrying along the murky tunnel ahead of them. On each side of the damp passway rose bundles of ancient memos, boxes of faxcopies, plyosacks stuffed with shredded documents. The rats had been at most of the sacks and twists and tatters of long-ago secret communications lay scattered thickly underfoot.

In a niche that had been hollowed out between tottering stacks of official records, a gaunt old woman, wrapped in what might once have been a rug, was slumbering, hooked up to a dirty Tek Brainbox.

“Tekheads,” commented the bearded guide scornfully. “What do they see in that crap? Reality is what you have to face in this world.”

The tunnel sloped and then forked.

Quatermain indicated the righthand branch, which was somewhat warmer and better illuminated. Man-high bundles of twentieth-century newsmagazines were stacked along one side of the downslanting tunnel.

“Wineheads coming up next,” announced Jake's shaggy guide. “Nice oldfashioned vice, this is.”

Several large cluttered storerooms branched off the tunnel. In one of them, huddled around a fire made mostly of burning magazines, ten or so people in tattered clothes were passing around a plastiflask of purplish liquor.

“They like to keep together,” observed Quatermain, stepping across a young woman who lay sprawled in their path, snoring vigorously. “Shared interests.”

Jake paused, carefully lifted the slumbering girl and carried her over to the doorway of the storeroom. Leaving her propped at the doorway, he followed his guide deeper underground.

Q
UATERMAIN HELD OUT
his arm to block Jake's progress. “We'll make a stop here,” he said quietly.

Up on their right about a hundred feet was a large storeroom labeled BookBin 19. Bright yellowish light was spilling out of its open doorway, along with the smell of meat cooking.

“Who hangs out here?” asked Jake.

“They call themselves the Bookworms,” answered the big bearded man. “Mostly in their teens—runaways and raiders. Thing is, they roam all through the Catacombs and they know just about everything that's going on.”

“Then they'll know if the young woman I'm hunting for was brought down here.”

Quatermain nodded his shaggy head. “And, for a fee, they'll tell us,” he said. “You'll handle the fee, sport.”

All at once from up ahead came a cry of pain. It sounded like a young woman.

Scowling, Quatermain pulled Jake over to a narrow tunnel that ran alongside the bookbin. “Could be something's going on wrong in there,” he whispered. “We'll take us a gander before we go barging on in.”

Midway along the dark passage glowed a circle of light, about the size of a plate, in the stone wall of the building.

Quatermain shuffled up to the hole, hunched and chanced a look inside. After a half a minute, he nodded and stepped back. “Take a peek.”

At the center of the booklined room five young people were standing, stiffly, around a cookfire over which a small animal was roasting. A large chromeplated robot was holding a sixth youth, a thin redhaired girl of about seventeen, by the back of her jacket, dangling her about a foot above the stone floor.

A short thickset man in a dark suit was covering the rest of the youths with a lazgun.

“Nate Anger and Sunny,” said Jake.

The silvery robot slapped the dangling girl across her face, which already had two red welts showing on it. She cried out again.

“One of you kids sure as hell better tell us what we want to know,” suggested Anger. “Now then—where is Alicia Bower?”

17

N
ORM THE BODYGUARD
was sitting, big arms folded across his broad chest, on a delicate silver chair in the foyer of Karla Maxfield's small waterside villa in an exclusive and highly secure section of New Baltimore. “I'm not absolutely certain,” he was saying to Gomez, “that you're Gomez.”

“I am,” Gomez assured him, “the one and only.” Two hefty security robots, each painted an eggshell white, were holding the detective by his arms.

“I tell you,” continued the large black man, “I think we better run a full check on you. I mean, for all we know, you're really an android. Possibly one of those kamikazes the Teklords are so fond of using. Stuffed full of dangerous explosives and primed to go off and destroy Miss Maxfield.”

“It is possible,
pendejo
, that they really are out to do her in,” said Gomez. “But hassling me is only going to—”

“A strip search, too, may be called for.” Norm smiled. “We can't be too careful, considering an attempt's already been made on her life tonight.”

“Too bad you weren't this clever when that bot soldier whapped you in the
cabeza
,” said the detective, trying unsuccessfully to free himself from the metallic grasp of the two guardbots.

“I feel unhappy about that, which is why I intend to be extra careful with—”

“That's about enough, Norm.” Karla's angry voice came flaring out of an overhead voxbox. “Mr. Gomez is
my
guest. Send him in here at once.”

“Well now, Miss Maxfield, this might not be the actual Gomez. I suggest that—”

“Send him in.”

Norm sighed, shook his head, unfolded his arms, stood up, sighed again. “Okay, very well. It's on your head, dear lady.” He made a dismissive gesture at the bots. “Let 'im go, guys.”

Moving free, Gomez made a slight bow in the bodyguard's direction. “
Hasta luego
,” he said amiably.

He strolled up a floorlit ramp. At its end a hologram door of seeming intricately carved brass shimmered away to nothing. After Gomez crossed into a large oval living room, the door reappeared behind him.

Karla, wearing a raspberry-colored slaxsuit, was sitting in a Lucite wingchair in front of a high, narrow window that showed night and stars. “Ignore Norm,” she advised. “He's something of a dwork.”

“I deduced that.” He settled into a plastiglass chair that was filled with pale blue water and dozens of flickering tropical fish.

“I want to thank you for what you did this evening,” she told him. “And to apologize for being so rude to you earlier.”

“Being rude is one of the perks of your class,” he said. “Have the police or your security people determined who rigged that bot?”

“Not yet,” she answered. “And really, Gomez, I'm not your ordinary rich bitch.”

“Not at all ordinary, no.”

“You're still ticked off at me, aren't you?”

He reflected on the question. “Maybe I am,
sí
.”

“Would you like a drink? You were drinking ale as I—”

“
Gracias
, but not yet,
señorita
.”

“Why, by the way, do you sprinkle your conversation with—what would one call them? Mexicanisms?”

He smiled. “Growing up as a Latino in SoCal,” he answered, “was not exactly endless joy. I suppose one reason is that it's a way to thumb my nose at people.” His smile widened. “You're the first person to ask about it.”

She smiled back. “How'd you like to come to work for MaxComm? I think somebody like you would—”

“No,
señorita
. I'm more than content with my present station in life,” he told her. “Let's get back to this attempt to do you in.”

“What do you suspect?”

“That it, obviously, ties in with the death of your brother,” he replied. “And the murder of Eve Bascom.”

“That awful woman.” She gave an angry shake of her head. “Do you think she's responsible for what happened to Arnie?”

“Other way around,” he said. “Whilst he was in Managua, Nicaragua, he found out something that certain folks didn't want him to make known.”