by Allen Steele
They knew exactly what they had created: their baby was a Frankensteinian monster that had to be kept locked in its dungeon until it could be trained to behave in a social manner. In turn, as the parents of this potentially destructive creation, they attempted to be responsible in its upbringing. They had fed it only select bits of data, made careful notes as it slowly grew and taken pride in every step it mastered, but nonetheless they made sure that Ruby didn’t cross the street until it was properly toilet-trained.
Yet, despite all their precautions, the inevitable accident happened. This occurred on May 17, 2012—the same day an inevitable accident happened throughout the rest of St. Louis County.
“The earthquake hit the company pretty hard,” Hinckley said. “You can’t tell it now, but four people were killed when the cryonics lab collapsed. That was bad enough, but a lot of other people got injured because of ceilings and shelves falling in. None of my team were hurt, though, thank God … we were in the commissary having a late lunch, and the worst thing that happened was that I got a sprained shoulder when a light fixture nailed me … but our lab was almost totaled.”
She paused, looking nervously again toward the restaurant’s front door. I glanced over my shoulder; the lunchtime crowd was beginning to filter out, and our waitress looked as if she was wondering whether she would get a decent tip from two people who had taken up a booth but ordered nothing more than coffee. Other than that, though, nothing seemed unusual; no ERA troopers, no police cars, no mysterious men in trench coats lurking near the cash register.
“Go on,” I prompted. “The lab …”
Her gaze returned to me. “The lab was busted up pretty badly,” she continued, “and the company didn’t want any valuable employees going back inside until it had cleaned things up … hot wires, unstable walls, things like that. So we were sent home for the next several days while Tiptree brought in a general contractor from Chicago to restore everything—Science Services, some firm that specializes in laboratory restorations, that’s what we we’re told. Don’t worry about it, they said. Come back Monday and everything will be fine … and, you know, that was all right with us, because we had our own messes at home to clean up. Po lost his house, Dick’s cats had been killed, my car had been crushed by a tree …”
She sighed as she settled back against her seat, rubbing her eyelids with her fingertips. “Well, to make a long story short, some college kid was responsible for straightening up the a-life lab. I can’t really blame him, because things were scattered all over the place and no one had kept any reliable charts as to what went where … but when he uprighted the Ruby Fulcrum computer and found the loose telephone prong leading from the modem, he figured it was another loose wire and slipped it into the jack.”
“Oh, shit …”
Hinckley’s face expressed a wan smile. “Yes, well, that’s one way of putting it. After he did that and he was assured that the phone lines were operational again, he switched on the computer to give it a quick test … and, of course, being a conscientious Science Services employee, he tested the modem by dialing into a local BBS to see if the patch was solid.”
And, without anyone’s realizing what had happened, Ruby was allowed to crawl through the bars of its playpen. Frankenstein’s monster had been let loose to roam the streets of the global village.
“We didn’t know what had happened until we came back to the lab on Monday,” Hinckley went on. “Dick flipped out, of course, and the first thing he did was to try and figure out where and how Ruby had slipped through our fingers. To do this, he had to access the company’s mainframe and backtrack all its incoming and outgoing phone calls, including e-mail and fax records.”
She stared at me directly, meeting my gaze over the tabletop. “When he did this,” she said, very quietly, “he managed to penetrate company files none of us had ever seen and discovered something none of us were ever meant to know—”
At that moment, the door slammed loudly. We both glanced up; no one but a pair of salesmen, swaggering in for a late lunch as if they owned the place. One of them yelled for our waitress to seat them; the other tried to stroke her ass as she flitted by. A couple of slimers, nothing more, but their rude entrance made her more aware of our surroundings.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “I don’t like this place.”
“C’mon,” I said. “Just some yups cruising for burgers.”
She continued to stare uncertainly toward the door. “There might be ERA people out there,” she said. “They don’t always wear uniforms or carry guns, you know.”
She was scared and had every right to be, but that didn’t matter right now. I wanted to get the rest of the story out of her before she went down the street to the courthouse. “Don’t worry about the feds grabbing us,” I said quickly. “Remember what I told you about Barris, the local ERA honcho? He gave me a card I could use to get us past checkpoints.”
“Card?” Her gaze wavered back toward me, only slightly distracted. “What sort of card?”
“Umm … this one.” I reached into my jacket for the laminated card the colonel had given me the night before. I hadn’t looked at the card since Barris had handed it to me; in fact, this was the first time all day I had thought of it.
“See?” I said as I produced the plastic card and showed it to her. “It’ll solve any problems with—”
“Oh, hell,” she whispered. “Let me see that.”
Before I could object, Hinckley whisked the card from my fingertips and examined it closely. She bent it slightly, held it up to the light … then reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out a Swiss Army knife, unfolded its miniature scissors, and made a deep cut into the center of the card.
“Hey!” I snapped. “Don’t do …”
Then I stopped as she pulled open the card a little more and revealed it to me. Within its plastic and cardboard lining lay wires as fine as cat whiskers, leading to tiny wafer-thin microchips and miniature solenoids.
“It’s a smartcard,” she breathed. “Like the smartbadges we’ve got at the company … only this one can emit a signal that can be traced through cellular bands.”
“Aw, shit …” I couldn’t believe I had been such an idiot. The bastards had set me up and I had fallen for it. “Can it … could it listen to us?”
She shook her head. “Uh-uh,” she said quietly. “It’d have to be larger than this … but it can signal our location to anyone who’s paying attention. That’s bad enough.”
A frigid current ran down my spine. “Does this mean—”
“I don’t know what it means,” she shot back at me. “You brought it here, so you tell me.” Hinckley gently lay the card on the table and slid it against the wall, placing a napkin dispenser on top of it for good measure. “One thing’s for sure, and that’s the fact we’ve been here too long.”
“Hey, I didn’t know—”
“I know you didn’t know,” she murmured as she slid out from her side of the booth. “If you’d been working for them, you wouldn’t have been so stupid as to show it to me. That’s not the point.”
She dug a few dollars out of her pocket and put them on the table. “When we get to the courthouse and I find a judge, you’ll get the rest of the story … but we’ve got to get out of here.”
I was just starting to clamber out from my side of the booth. “But I swear I didn’t—”
“Now, damn it!” Hinckley was already heading for the door by the time I crawled out of my seat. I scrounged a handful of loose change out of my pocket, dropped it on the table, and gave an apologetic shrug to the waitress, then hurried to catch up with her.
17
(Friday, 12:57 P.M.)
I CAUGHT UP WITH Beryl Hinckley just outside the restaurant. The crowds were beginning to thin out on the sidewalk as office workers hurried back to their desks and cubicles, clutching half-read newspapers and foam cups of coffee. There was still plenty of traffic on the street, however, and the metered
slots along Central Avenue were filled with parked cars.
“Walk fast,” I murmured as I took her right arm and began marching down the sidewalk. “Whatever you do, keep an eye on the cars. If you see anything—”
“I know,” she whispered back. “Run for it.”
I glanced at her; she nodded her head, her face grim. She knew the score: both John and Kim Po had been shot from a vehicle, and although a van had been spotted leaving Clancy’s, no one was certain if this was the automobile the killer was driving. The only thing we had going for us was that it was a blustery afternoon, and most drivers were keeping their windows up. According to what Cale McLaughlin had told me, the laser rifle the sniper was using was capable of firing through nonreflective glass, yet if the killer wanted to get an unimpaired shot, he might want to lower the window first.
We shied away from the street, but I walked next to the curb. Old-fashioned chivalry, just the way my dad taught me, but this time it was for more practical reasons than to keep the lady I was escorting from being splattered with mud from passing cars. If she was the killer’s primary target, then I would be shielding her a little more this way. Of course, if she was right, it didn’t really matter what I did, because the bastard might try to nail me first. It wasn’t a comforting thought.
“You have any idea which judge you’re going to find?” I asked as we walked. Only one city block left to go; I could already see the small plaza across the street from the intersection of Central and Carondelet. Directly beyond the plaza was the five-story white concrete box that was the county courthouse.
Hinckley hesitated, then shook her head. “I don’t keep up with the judges around here,” she replied, her eyes locked on the street. “I was just planning on going in there and finding someone’s name on a door.”
I sighed and shook my head. Glancing down at the sidewalk, I noticed for the first time that she wore knee-length calfskin boots; the laces on her right boot were loose and were beginning to drag the ground, but I wasn’t about to remind her to stop and retie them. “It’s a little harder than that,” I said. “They keep office hours like everyone else … and on a Friday afternoon, if they’re not in court, then they’re probably out on the golf links.”
I thought about it for another moment, trying to remember the names of judges whose cases I had covered in the past for the paper. “We might try Swenson … Edith Swenson,” I added. “She’s supposed to be pretty honest, at least. I don’t know if she’s in, but we could always …”
Her breath suddenly sucked in as I felt her arm go rigid in mine. I followed her gaze and saw a van turning the corner of Carondelet and heading our way. A white Ford Econovan, late eighties vintage—a rusted-out old gashog, pale gray fumes farting out of its exhaust pipe, probably on the last weeks of its expiration sticker—but what caught her attention was that it was moving very slowly toward us. I looked closer; I couldn’t see the driver, but the passenger window was lowered.
The doorway of another restaurant was just a few feet away, beneath an ornamental canvas awning. “In there!” I snapped.
Hinckley didn’t need any urging. We scurried under the awning and into the doorway. I grabbed the door handle and was about to pull it open when the Econovan rumbled past.
Both of us froze and stared at the van; an old black gentleman was behind the wheel, and he didn’t seem to be paying a bit of attention to us as he tooled down Central away from the courthouse. I caught a couple of bars from a vintage soul number blaring from the stereo as the clunker rumbled past: “Nutbush city limits! … wahwahwahwah-waaw-waaw … Nutbush city limits!”
False alarm.
Beryl sagged against the doorframe, her hand against her chest. “God,” she whispered as she let out a hoarse laugh. “I never thought I’d be so glad to hear Ike and Tina Turner.”
“I’ll find a copy for you when we get out of this.” I pulled her out of the doorway.
“Oh, hell …” She stopped suddenly and looked down at her feet. “My boot’s untied.”
I thought again about letting her take care of her laces, but I let it pass. The next vehicle to pass us might have more than classic Motown tunes blasting through its side windows. “Don’t worry about it now,” I said as I tugged at her arm. “Just keep going.”
We walked past an alley entrance and the last building on the block, a condemned midcentury office building with windows boarded up with plywood: another victim of the earthquake, whose owner had apparently decided that demolition was less expensive than renovation. By now we were almost directly across the corner from the courthouse, a block-size building nearly as homely and featureless as the adjacent county jail and the Government Center highrise. All three buildings suffered from that peculiar form of governmental architecture a friend of mine had once described as “Twentieth Century Post-Gothic Paranoid”: no windows in featureless walls on the ground floor, the narrow casement windows on the upper floors resembling the archer slots in medieval castles. Trust us, we’re the government …
“Fine with me,” I muttered, “so long as you can repel laser beams.”
“What?” Hinckley asked.
“Nothing. Just thinking aloud.” As I said this, another thought occurred to me. “What about the two other guys … um, Dick and Jeff? When do I get to meet them?”
She shot me a glance that spoke volumes. She was placing enough confidence in me to hear out her story and witness her surrender to a judge, but she wasn’t quite ready to entrust her friends’ lives to my hands. After all, I had already confessed to her that Barris was counting on me to track down Payson-Smith for him. Even though I had obviously been surprised by the cellular smartcard Barris had given me and I had willingly left it behind in the restaurant, there was still no guarantee that I wasn’t playing stool pigeon for ERA.
“I’ll let you know when the time’s right,” she said softly. “They already know about you, don’t worry … but we need to take this one step at a time. All right?”
“Yeah. Okay. Whatever.”
We arrived at the corner of Central and Carondelet. No other pedestrians were in sight; no cars violated the No Parking signs in front of the courthouse and the jail. So far, so good; all we had to do was cross the street, make it through the postage-stamp plaza with its rows of empty cement planters, and the side door of the courthouse was wide open to us. Walk-through metal detectors had been established in all the courthouse entrances some twenty years ago after some lunatic had opened fire in a courtroom and killed a few people, and there were always a couple of cops stationed at the checkpoints. Once we were through the side door, we were home free.
I gave the area a quick scan, then I grabbed her hand and pulled her off the sidewalk, leading her out into the street. “Okay,” I said, “let’s go.”
We jaywalked through the wide intersection, not running but not sightseeing either. Halfway through the intersection, she dropped my hand. We stepped onto the curb, walking beside each other, and began to stride into the plaza. I could see people walking or seated at desks behind the courthouse windows. The side door was only seventy feet away.
She made a slight grunt, as if she had tripped on her bootlaces, but I paid no attention. I was beginning to relax. You asshole, you’re running from shadows …
“I think I can find that Turner CD at a place down on Delmar,” I said. “You ever been to Vintage Vinyl? It’s got the best …”
No answer. She wasn’t walking beside me anymore. I turned around, half-expecting to see that she had finally stopped to lace up her boots.
Dr. Beryl Hinckley lay sprawled on her face across the concrete sidewalk just a few feet from the curb, her arms and legs still twitching slightly as what remained of her brain told her that it was time to run like hell.
Not that she had been given much chance to run; the silent beam that killed her had burned a thumbhole through the back of her skull.
The moment stretched, became surreal. Cars moved by on the street. Pigeons wandered ar
ound the edge of the plaza in search of infinitesimal scraps of food. A commuter ’copter moaned overhead, heading for the municipal heliport several blocks away. A dead woman lay at my feet, and all around me the world was going about its normal day-to-day business. One second you’re talking to someone about buying secondhand CDs; the next second, that person is cold meat on the street corner, shot down by a …
Laser beam.
I yanked myself out of my stupor, began looking around. No cars were in sight, but all around me were high-rise buildings. Countless windows in a half-dozen towers, and the sniper could be lurking behind any one of them, even now drawing a dead bead on me.
Move, stupid!
The nearest of the plaza’s tree-planters was directly behind me, a large round urn about three feet high and eight feet in diameter. I dove behind it, crouching in its shadow as my heart triphammered in my ears. There were seventeen more planters just like it behind me, artfully arranged in three rows of six each, leading down the plaza until they ended near the courthouse door. The planters were empty, but they might provide enough cover for me. If I could keep dodging behind them as I made a run for the side door …
Yeah, right. The next planter in the row was at least ten feet away; the sniper could pick me off easily as soon as I raised my head. I’d be dead before I knew what hit me.
I hugged the side of the planter, trying to remember what McLaughlin had told me about the nature of laser rifles. Silent. Invisible beam. Flat trajectory. Almost infinite range … but big and clumsy, about the size of a rocket launcher. That meant whoever was using it would have to remain fixed in one place. And there was something else …
A couple of well-dressed women, probably trial lawyers returning from lunch down the street, appeared from around the corner of the Government Center building. They were still chatting it up as they began to cross Carondelet, until they saw Beryl Hinckley’s body lying on the opposite sidewalk.
They froze in the middle of the street, gazing in confused shock at the corpse, then one of them looked around and spotted me. Before I could say anything, she screamed bloody murder, then turned and ran back the way she had come. The other one stared at me in gap-mouthed fear for another second, then she followed her friend as they fled back around the corner.
