Tales of the Red Panda: The Android Assassins

by Gregg Taylor

“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!”

  Twelve

  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.

  Thirteen

  The door to the holding cell opened with a clatter that would have woken the dead, but Tank Brody did not look up from the hard bunk where he lay.

  “Company already?” he asked. “I was just getting used to having the place to myself.”

  “I could leave if you like,” a voice said, “but you'd sit here an awful long time.”

  There was something familiar in the voice that made Tank sit up, fast. It was hard to see in the dim light with the comparative brightness of the hallway behind his guest, but Brody knew at once who it was.

  “You!” he said in astonishment. “You're that cop from Spiro's place!”

  “Andy Parker,” the man said quietly, “since you can't say 'cop' without looking like you want to spit.”

  “Yeah, well,” Brody lay back down on the bunk, “maybe I got reasons.”

  “Maybe you do.” Parker stepped into the cell a few feet, just enough to see that Brody's face was still black and blue in places. Given the number of officers it had reportedly taken to bring the big man down, Parker thought he had made out all right.

  “Why are you here, Parker?” Brody asked, looking at the ceiling.

  “Promise to a friend,” Parker answered. “A couple of them in fact.”

  Brody was quiet for a minute. “Spiro?” he asked.

  “That's one,” Parker replied. “The other one would take some explaining, and I'm not quite sold on it yet.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?” Brody asked.

  “Heard you slugged a cop, Brody,” Parker said seriously.

  The big man sat up quickly, dropped his feet to the floor and stood, just inches away from Andy Parker, towering above him. The young officer never flinched, even when Brody made one of his great, ham-like hands into a fist and held it before Parker's face. The knuckles carried more bruises than Brody's face, and were still swollen besides.

  “That wasn't no cop, Parker,” Brody said calmly. “Punching that thing in the face did this to my hand. It was like hitting a wall. And whatever it was, it was gonna gun down innocent women and children,
and I don't care if you believe me or not.”

  “Nobody else does,” Parker said. “They figure you just heard about the other folks that were killed that night and made up a story.”

  “Somebody in that alley must've seen something,” Brody insisted.

  “Nobody was close enough to tell what was happening,” Parker shook his head, “except for one little girl, and her mother won't let her testify.”

  Brody snorted and sat down heavily on the bunk. “They saw,” he said. “They're just too scared to call a cop a liar in front of a judge.”

  “Maybe so,” Parker said flatly. “But it's a funny thing about that.”

  “What?”

  “Nobody can find the cop you hit,” Parker said. “He just disappeared.”

  “I told you,” Brody said, “it wasn't no cop.”

  “Leaving aside for the moment that I believe you,” Parker sat down, “it leaves the law with a little problem. If you assaulted an officer, they want you charged with that, not just resisting arrest. Petty stuff like that nobody's got time for right now. So they want to find the guy. From what I hear, a couple of uniforms have offered to step in and play the part.”

  Tank snorted again. “Cops look after cops,” he said.

  “Maybe they do, Brody,” Parker said, “but if they do it's 'cause they spend every day surrounded by people that look at them the way you looked at me when you found out I was a policeman.”

  Brody had nothing to say to that.

  “Why don't you like cops, Morris?” Parker asked.

  “Nobody calls me Morris except my Ma,” Brody said.

  “Answer the question,” Parker insisted.

  “Or what?” Brody looked at Parker with a challenge in his eye.

  Parker said nothing for a moment, then he stood. “It may interest you to know that your file has been lost,” he said.

  “What?” Brody asked.

  “Not just here,” Parker continued. “In the prosecutor's office, downtown, everywhere that it once existed, it now does not. That's why you'd sit here a good, long time if I left. Officially, you don't actually exist. Or at least you're not here, and you never were. And don't look at me like that, I didn't make it happen. Not directly.”