Tek Power (8 page)

Seagrove wiped at his nose. “They don't know I have the damn cassette, do they? Megan doesn't know, so I don't see how they—”

“Look, I'm not sure yet of all that's going on,” cut in Jake. “But I do know we're dealing with folks who'll kill to get what they want. And apparently they'd like to have the cassette.”

“Okay, allright,” he said. “Suppose I hand it over to you? That should stop them from hunting for me. That sounds right, doesn't it? It makes sense.”

“Some sense, yeah. What's on the cassette?”

Seagrove shook his head. “I don't know,” he swore. “I have, you know, a general idea, but honest to god, Cardigan, I never actually looked at the cassette itself, never played it. Never, not once. That way nobody can say, ‘That asshole Seagrove knows what she knew, let's ice him, too.'”

“Eve gave you the vidcaz?”

“Yes, right. The day she found out that Junior—Arnie Maxfield, Jr., that toad—that he was dead. That night she stopped by, said she'd put a message on tape. It was important and I was to keep it for her.”

“In what way important?”

“Okay, this is all, really, I know,” began Seagrove. “Eve was down in Managua on Larson-Dunn business. The manager of the Mechanix International operation in Nicaragua was in some sort of mess and, since we have the MI public relations account down there, she was assigned to make him look like less of a crook than he is.” He paused to fish out a handkerchief. “I've had this damn cold for a week. Can't seem to shake it.”

“What happened in Nicaragua?”

“It had, far as I can tell, nothing to do with the client.” He blew his nose, then balled up the handkerchief in his hand. “Arnie, though, was down there on some business or other for his father—that's MaxComm, you know—and he found out something. After he was killed, Eve got very upset and she told me it wasn't an accident. She was certain someone had killed him.”

“What had he found out?”

“I'm not sure, but it was sure as hell something he wasn't supposed to know.”

“Did Eve tell you who she suspected had killed Maxfield?”

“No, but she was afraid they were going to come after her.”

“Which means he'd shared what he knew with her.”

“Exactly. That's why she was so scared.”

Jake asked, “Why couldn't she go to the police?”

“She didn't want to risk that,” said Seagrove, sniffing. “My feeling is, you know, that Eve wasn't too sure who she could trust. She put what she knew on the vidcaz and she told me, if anything happened to her, to give the thing to her husband.”

“She probably told somebody else about the cassette, told them that it existed.”

“As insurance, but that didn't work.” Seagrove blew his nose. “She told me her husband would know what to do. His old man is—but, hell, you know that since you work for the old bastard.”

Jake took a step back. “But you didn't do what she asked you. You didn't hand it over to her husband.”

“I decided to look after my own ass, Cardigan. Lie low for a while.”

“You phoned him, though.”

“I was drunk,” he explained. “Well, I'm drunk quite a lot these days. I wasn't going to risk passing the thing to him or even trying to send it. But I thought, you know, I ought to at least give the poor guy a hint. Let him know it was bullshit about her being in an accident.”

“How'd you know Eve was dead before her husband did?”

“What?”

“You phoned Richard, told him she'd been murdered,” said Jake. “That was before the police had contacted him to tell him about the accident.”

“That's because I heard it on the vidnews,” Seagrove told him, sniffling. “Listen, Cardigan, I'm not that big a shitcase. If I'd known in advance that they were going to kill her, I'd have gotten her a warning somehow.”

“I'll take your word.”

“I loved her,” he said quietly. “More than that anemic husband of hers, more than Arnie—more than any of them. The trouble is, she quit loving me.”

“Where's the cassette?”

“Here. Up in the bedroom I'm using,” answered Seagrove.

“Let's,” suggested Jake, “go get it.”

11

T
HE LARGE COPPERY
robot was wearing a star-dotted robe and a turban of similar material. He shut the door, activated the electronic safety barrier and shook his head at Gomez. “Why'd you rile those lunkheads?”

The detective found himself in a small reception parlor. A computer terminal, decorated with the signs of the zodiac, sat on a small round table in the center of the room and there were four straightback chairs lined up against the lefthand wall. At the back of the room velvety black drapes masked a doorway.

Outside in the street he could hear the Axis Brotherhood troopers go stomping by, shouting threats. They'd apparently lost his trail.

“Something about my impressive Latino heritage seems to have set them off,” he explained to the robot. “Outside of that, and shooting one of them down, I really didn't do anything to annoy the lads.”

“The Street Commandos will take care of them.”

“Street Commandos?”

“That's a local group dedicated to keeping them on their side of the border.”

“Do people get killed during these skirmishes?”

“Sometimes a few.”

The drapes parted to admit a thin young woman of about eighteen. She, too, wore a black robe. “You don't seem to be, if you'll excuse my pointing this out, very bright,” she observed. “The sensible thing to do when these rowdies make one of their propaganda raids is to get the heck off the street. Shooting them willy-nilly, to my way of thinking, isn't the best course of action at all.”

“I only felled one.” He held up a forefinger. “Who are you, by the way, and why did you haul me in here?”

“I'm Princess Carmelita, the well-known mystic and fortune-teller,” the girl answered. “This is Professor Zingaro, my business associate.”

“Did the stars foretell I'd come racing by your doorstep in need of help, Princess?”

“I have a monitoring system that's extremely effective, Señor Gomez.”

His eyebrows rose. “Ah, you know me, huh?”

“I learned you'd be dropping in on that old rascal, Charley Charla, and I got curious,” she said. “I've heard about you before, that you were an exceptional detective and something of a womanizer.” Her small nose wrinkled and she gave a quick dismissive shrug. “You're nowhere near as impressive as your reputation led me to expect.”

“Well, my appeal is to more mature minds,
cara
,” he informed her. “Tots, suckling babies and those with the brain capacity of an onion, don't cotton to me as well as do—”

“You're also hotheaded and impetuous. You shouldn't have stungunned Otto out in—”

“Palavering with goons carrying lazrifles, Princess, and calling me names isn't too bright.”

She smiled at the big robot. “What did I tell you, Professor?”

“Yep, you were right.”

“I appreciate your saving me from the pursuing hordes,” said Gomez with a smile. “Now—is there any way to get clear of your establishment without going back onto the street?”

“There's an intelligent remark for a change,” said Princess Carmelita. “Follow me, Gomez.”

She led him through the draped doorway, along a dimlit hall and up to an unpainted neowood door.

“Take this tunnel to its end—about a mile from here—and you'll come to another door. That'll put you on the street in a safe area.”

“
Gracias
.” He put his hand on the doorknob. “Why do you folks put up with these Axis Brotherhood raids?”

“We don't. That is, as a community we don't,” she said. “The Street Commandos take care of them when they stray over into Spanish Harlem and there's a similar, very efficient group, over in African Harlem.”

“Too many fragments,” he commented. “What you need to do is—”

“Let me give
you
a piece of advice.” She put her hand against his back and gave him a gentle shove into the tunnel. “Don't trust Charley Charla completely.”

Gomez laughed. “Princess, I don't trust anybody completely.” He started, carefully, away from her.

A
LTHOUGH THEIR HOTEL
was in the safe half of Central Park, it gave a view of the unsecured, wild half. From the windows of the tower suite Gomez and Jake were sharing, you could see down across the overgrown parklands, the tangles of trees and brush. Far off on the West Side a portion of the forest was on fire. Grey smoke was pouring up into the coming dusk.

“Ain't nature grand?” remarked Gomez as Jake returned home.

“I tracked down Larry Seagrove.” He took the videocassette from his pocket, hefted it on his palm. “He had the caz.”

“What did he have to say?”

“Not that much.” He told his partner what he'd learned out in Connecticut.

“He doesn't sound like a very admirable
hombre
,” observed Gomez when Jake had finished. “You'd think if Eve was going to fool around, she'd have picked somebody who's an improvement on her hubby. Trade up, is my motto.”

“Let's watch this.” Crossing to the vidwall, Jake slid the vidcaz into the slot.

Eve Bascom appeared on the screen. She was dressed in a simple tan slaxsuit and was sitting in a straight metal chair in the living room of their apartment. Her face was pale, shadows underscored her eyes and her cheekbones.

“She looks,” said Gomez, “like she knows she's going to die.”

Eve coughed into her hand, then lowered her head for a few seconds. Straightening up, she took a deep breath and looked directly into the camera. “What I'm going to say must be important,” she began, running her tongue over her upper lip. “Arnie said it was and … I think that's why they killed him. He didn't, Christ, really tell me all he knew. But I'm afraid it's enough … enough probably to get me killed. There's something going on … something important. It involves the Nicaraguan government, including General Alcazar and the junta, and the American embassy down there is mixed up in this, too. Arnie didn't go into all that … I'm talking about Arnold Maxfield, Jr. I guess I ought to get his whole name into this. I forget, Richard, if you even knew that I knew Arnie.” She coughed again, held both hands up over her mouth for several seconds. “You'd think, being in the line of work I'm in, that I'd be able to keep all these lies straight. Anyway, some of the big Tek cartels—particularly the Joaquim Cartel, which operates in Nicaragua and Florida—are involved as well. Something is going to happen … maybe part of it has already happened. Arnie was cagey about the details. You'd have to know him to understand what I mean.” She took another deep breath, exhaled in a sighing way, took in another breath. “Allright, it all centers around something called Surrogate 13. ‘That's what they call it, babe,' he told me. ‘Surrogate 13. Knowing about that is going to make me very … well, you'll see.' He wasn't exactly the smartest or most diplomatic man in the world. Nowhere near as clever as his father. I think that when he tried to parlay what he'd found out … well, things went wrong for him.” She leaned back in the chair, briefly closed her eyes. “Surrogate 13. It doesn't seem fair, really, to get killed over something I know so little about. Richard, if you ever see this … I'm sorry. I really do love you, but … but everything just …” She gave a faint, sad shrug.

The wall went blank.

12

B
ASCOM LOOKED TWICE
as rumpled as he had the last time they saw him. And nearly all the clutter had returned to his desktop. His saxophone was there, too, sprawled across stacks of memodiscs.

“Surrogate 13,” he repeated, shaking his head slowly. “Nope, that means not a damn thing to me.” His image, up from lifesize, nearly filled the vidwall of their living room.

Gomez was perched now in the window seat, watching the skywagons trying to control the park fire far to the west. “A substitute for something,” he suggested. “A stand-in.”

“The thirteenth substitute,” said the agency chief. “Or it could just as easily be a substitute for a drug, a product … Hell, just about any damn thing.”

Jake was straddling a straight chair. “How about an android?”

“Another possibility,” conceded Bascom out in his Cosmos Detective Agency office. “Is that just a hunch?”

“Eve was down there in Managua trying to smooth out a mess involving the guy who runs the Nicaraguan office of Mechanix International,” Jake said. “Mechanix makes andies.”

“Follow up on that,” said the chief.

Gomez said, “Before we venture into Central America,
jefe
, I think we better make a stopover in our nation's capital.”

“From what you've reported, I agree,” said Bascom. “Find out who in the Nicaraguan Embassy hired those thugs to smash into Eve's skycar. I'd like something nasty to befall that lad.”

“He's just a cog,” said Jake.

“I'm aware of that, but I want the bastard smashed all the same,” said Bascom. “This thing, however, is shaping up as something bigger than just a oneshot murder tricked up to seem an accident.” He rubbed his fingertips together. “I want to bring down everybody and anybody who had anything to do with killing my son's wife. But if we can uncork an international conspiracy—well, that can be damned lucrative. In terms of both fees and favors and rewards.”

Gomez said, “
Chihuahua
, it's the old original chief emerging. I was starting to fear that warm familial feelings had overcome his crass innerself for good.”

“You knew that couldn't last,” said Jake.

“Enough, you two,” warned Bascom. “My main concern is still my son. But I want you to follow this wherever it leads.”