The Tin Man

by Dale Brown

  “Incredible,” said Patrick. “Just incredible. Congratulations!”

  “I wish Dr Heinrich were here to hear this,” Paul said. As he spoke, the technician put a device up to his throat and made some fine adjustments. The results were even more startling-Paul’s voice, although obviously artificial, sounded remarkably lifelike, like a medium-quality tape recording of his natural voice. “Dr Masters said you had an accident yesterday?”

  Patrick kept his eyes averted. “Another experiment that didn’t go as well as we wanted,” he said. Paul didn’t press; he could see they weren’t volunteering more. But when Patrick looked up, he found his brother staring at him, and knew he had sensed what he needed to know.

  While the technician went on working on the electronic larynx, a nurse brought in a stack of mail. In the first weeks after the shootout, letters had come in by the bagful; they had only recently dwindled down to a handful a day. The letter on top had been delivered by messenger, the nurse said, and Paul signaled Patrick to read it for him. Patrick’s mouth dropped open. All eyes were on him. The technician stopped his adjustments. “Patrick? What is it?” Paul asked.

  “It’s from the department-the personnel office,” Patrick said blankly. “Paul… you’ve been retired.”

  “Retired?”

  “It says they considered light duty, but after consulting with the doctors, your injuries have been considered too serious. You will receive full pay and benefits for two months after you leave the hospital, then go on full medical retirement. Full medical and survivors’ benefits, half your base salary tax-free for life. Your personal gear has been sent to your home.”

  Paul fell back against the pillow. “They cleaned out my locker already?” he exclaimed. “I only used it once!” He turned his head away, fighting back tears. “Man, I can’t believe this. Not in person or even by phone-they sent me a letter telling me I’m out.”

  The room was silent for a long time. Then Masters broke the strain: “This is good, Paul, because now we have time to work on the second phase. The next project, if you’re ready for it, is to start work on your shoulder and arm. I don’t think we’ll be able to do much here. We should consider transferring you to our facility in San Diego.” Paul said nothing. “Problem, Paul?” Masters asked.

  “I don’t know,” Paul said. “Leaving Sacramento, getting a…” He moved his good right arm, then glanced at the emptiness to his left.

  “It’s a little intimidating, I know,” Jon said. “But check this out.” He reached into his briefcase, withdrew a videocassette, inserted it into the VCR in the television set, and closed the curtain over the door panel so no one in the corridor could peer in. “It’s yours if you want it.”

  What they saw on the screen astounded them. It was a human arm, or at least it looked and moved like one-but it was mounted on a metal stand. It was extraordinary in its detail, with a realistic human shape, dark hair on the forearm, a normal-looking hand with healthily pink fingernails. As they watched, the arm reached down and picked up a pen sitting on an adjacent desk, held it between the thumb and fingers, and began to “write” in midair.

  “It’s amazing,” Paul said. “It looks so-so real.”

  “It took three months of work just to get the mechanics down to pick up a pen,” Masters said proudly. “Almost two years of research and development. It contains over three hundred individual microhydraulic actuators ranging in size from twenty-five millimeters in diameter to less than two millimeters. The joints and fittings-the artificial cartilage and tendons-are fibersteel. The arm, hand, and fingers have a much greater range of motion than normal appendages, but it would take a conscious act to make it perform unnaturally. Same with physical strength. The actuators are hydraulic, so they’re many times more powerful than human muscles, but we didn’t design the system to give you superhuman strength.”

  Masters went on with more of the arm’s features until he realized Paul was staring into space. He shut off the TV, rewound his tape, took it out of the VCR, and put it back in his briefcase. “Maybe you want to think about it some more,” he said, nodding to the technician to wind up his adjustments. “Give me a call when you’re ready to talk. See you later.”

  When they were gone, the two brothers sat in silence. Patrick saw the tears in Paul’s eyes. “It’s going to be all right, bro,” he said.

  “What is happening to me?” Paul asked, his electronically synthesized voice a startling reflection of the sadness in his heart. “I don’t feel human anymore.” He looked at his older brother and added, “And you… you don’t feel human either. What is happening to us?”

  “Paul, all you have to worry about is getting well,” Patrick said. “Everything else is…”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit, Patrick!” Paul exploded. “You’ve been treating me like your kid brother for too long now. You don’t have to protect me or spare me any grief. You told me everything was going to be okay when Dad died; you told me everything was going to be okay when you left Sacramento and I hardly ever saw you again; and I get my arm and my throat shot to shit and you’re still telling me everything’s going to be okay. Everything is still a secret with you, Patrick. I can feel the pain you’re feeling, bro, but you’re still shutting me out.”

  His face turned dark. “I am turning out to be the thing I most hate, Patrick. I am turning into a machine! I have lasers for vocal cords, microchips for a larynx, and now Jon wants to give me hydraulic actuators for muscles and fibersteel for bones. I am turning into the thing I hate most in the world.”

  He scanned Patrick’s face with a strange mixture of sadness and pity, and went on: “But the worst part, bro, is that I feel like I’m in danger of turning into you. I feel like my soul is being replaced by a machine. And the only thing I get from you is, ‘Don’t worry. Accept it. Everything will be all right.’

  “I’m scared, dammit! I’m scared because I’m turning into a damned contraption, a collection of composites and microchips, and when I reach out to you for support and guidance and love, all I sense is another machine, an even more terrible machine, sucking me down even more.” He stopped, waiting for his brother to speak, but there was only silence. “Talk to me, goddamn you! Talk to me or get the hell out.”

  “Paul, I can’t talk about it,” Patrick said. “It’s all…”

  “Don’t tell me ‘It’s classified’ or ‘It’s top-secret’ or any of that nonsense,” Paul shot back. “Something is driving us apart. We want to be together, connected, supportive, but we can’t. We’re both hurting. I know what hurt me, Patrick. What in hell has hurt you?” He closed his eyes, fiercely trying to establish the psychic connection that had once bound the brothers tightly together through vast differences in time and distance. Then he shook his head in resignation. “All I get from you is a ghost, Patrick, a gray ghost. Talk to me, Patrick! What happened? What’s going on?”

  There was still no reply. Paul threw his head back on the pillow. “God, first my real family splits up; and then my new family, the police department, kicks me out. Now you’re pushing me away. Happy fucking New Year!”

  It would have felt so good, Patrick thought, so right, to tell Paul everything. Not only about bugging the SID offices, or trying to find Mullins in the Bobby John Club, or about his failure with the Ultimate Soldier project. Everything, going way back: starting with Brad Elliott and Dreamland, the secret bombing missions, the top-secret projects, all the times the world almost went to war and his role in preventing it.

  But most of all, he wanted to tell Paul about the people, all those souls he’d encountered, good and bad, over the past eleven years. So many times, so many battles, so many lives that touched his and then were gone forever, while he lived on. He wanted to tell him everything…

  “I’m sorry, Paul,” he heard himself say. “I can’t tell you. I wish I could but I can’t.” Paul turned away. “Believe me, bro, everything is okay. The most important thing is for you to get better. Get some rest, and later I’
ll…”

  “Save it, bro. I’ll be fine. Go and do whatever the hell it is you do.”

  Patrick stepped toward Paul, reaching out to him… but the connection was severed. The person in the hospital bed before him might as well have been a stranger.

  He turned and left the room, pushing his way through the reporters swarming around him clamoring for a statement. He’d had enough of this damn town. Time to take his family and go home.

  Wilton, California

  the same time

  The next meeting between Gregory Townsend and Sandman Harrison and his Brotherhood bikers was brief and to the point: “The chief says yes,” the Sandman said. “Thirty meth cookers, ten grand each, charged against our first payments. You provide the training and keep ‘em running and we pay one grand per pound. How will it happen?”

  “Good,” said Townsend. “Next week, barring any unforeseen complications, we will deliver a hydrogenation unit to a location that you will advise me of while en route, in order to preserve total security. Each time, your men will pick up the unit, at which time a deposit of one hundred thousand dollars on each will be collected by myself or Major Reingruber.

  “Your men will take the hydrogenation units to your clubhouses or safe houses or whatever you call them,” Townsend went on. “One of my men will accompany each unit. Once at the clubhouse, my man will instruct your chapter members present on the operation of the unit. After the instruction period, you will deliver two hundred thousand dollars as our final advance deposit, to be applied against our share of the first batches prepared by each chapter. Agreed?”

  “What about the chemicals?” Harrison asked.

  Bennie the Chef answered this. “The units will have enough chemicals on board for the first test batch, a little over twenty-five pounds. The colonel is supplying the chemicals just for the test batch. You want more, come to us.”

  “Like hell we will,” Harrison said. “We got our own connections.”

  “We only guarantee the purity of the product and the safety and efficiency of the hydrogenators if you use our chemicals,” Townsend said. “If you use inferior ingredients, we cannot be responsible for the outcome.”

  “The cookers better work, asshole, or we’ll use them as coffins for you and your men-after we get through chopping your sorry asses into little pieces,” Harrison snapped. His angry glare rested on Reynolds, then Townsend, then Reingruber. “Don’t fuck with us, Townsend. You say your cookers need certain chemicals in certain amounts and concentrations, fine. Tell us what they are, and we’ll get them. If we need to buy from you, we will, but you sell at cost-you’re already making a shitload of cash on this deal and you’re not taking any of the risks.”

  Townsend spread his hands and nodded. “Very well. Chemicals at cost. Bennie will supply you with all the specifications you need for the chemicals. If you fail to follow the specifications, of course, the risks are entirely your own.”

  “You just hold up your end of the bargain, limey, and we’ll take care of the rest,” Harrison said. Townsend held out a hand to seal the deal with a handshake, but Harrison ignored him. “Have the cookers ready to go next Friday night, and we’ll call and tell you where to go.”

  As Harrison and the bikers headed for the door, one of them glanced into the kitchen-turned-communications-center, where several TV sets were tuned to the morning news on the major Sacramento-area stations. He stopped in his tracks and pointed to one of the screens. “That’s him!” he shouted. “It’s him!”

  “Who in bloody hell are you talking about?” Townsend asked.

  “The guy in the bar, dammit!” the gangster said. “The guy who said he was looking for Mullins.”

  “Did he say why?” Townsend asked.

  “He said he wanted to ask Mullins about the Major,” the biker said. “He said the cops were watchin’ us. He said he was the brother of one of the cops that got shot and he wanted to kick Mullins’s ass.”

  His face stern, Townsend turned to Harrison. “It would seem that you have a leak in your organization, Mr Harrison,” he said. “Either you have an informant in it, or the police targeted one of your members for special surveillance.”

  “Mullins,” Harrison said. “It had to be fuckin’ Mullins.”

  “For your sake, you had better hope it was Mullins. I tolerate no security breaches in my organization.”

  “Screw you, Townsend,” Harrison said. “My boys know if they rat on the Brotherhood, they’re dead.”

  “Good. Be sure it stays that way.”

  Gregory Townsend shook his head as he watched the Satan’s Brotherhood gangsters drive off. “Bloody bastards,” he said under his breath. “They don’t deserve this deal. They don’t deserve my time one bit.”

  “If you want a piece of the meth trade, Colonel,” Bennie Reynolds said, “you gotta deal with Harrison and Lancett. But once you got them in place, they’ll fight night and day to keep the business going.”

  “Bloody unlikely,” Townsend remarked. He turned toward the back of the room and saw Bruno Reingruber watching the television screens. He was writing something down on a piece of paper. “Was ist es, Major?”

  “McLanahan,” Reingruber read from the paper, then went on in German: “The TV has identified the police officer who wounded my men with his car. McLanahan. He is still in the hospital, alive. Not dead, as Sergeant Chernenkov reported. He survived.”

  “And his brother was in the bar seeking revenge on his attacker. How touching,” Townsend answered him. “Never mind him, Major. This is not important. We concentrate on setting up delivery of the hydrogenators.”

  “I lost four men in the robbery-during your robbery,” Reingruber protested. “You hired Mullins, and he turned on us. Two of my men were killed and two have been under arrest. It says on the TV they are being freed from jail, but what if this McLanahan can identify Corporal Schneider and they arrest him again? To kill a policeman is an automatic death penalty in this state. This is unacceptable. McLanahan must be killed immediately!”

  Though Bennie did not understand German, there was no mistaking the sense of that fierce “sofort!” Townsend chose to ignore it. “Major, we are not going to expend our energy and talent on making war against one or two insignificant individuals,” he said. “Forget about McLanahan.”

  “Please consider my request, Herr Oberst,” Reingruber answered. “We pledged together to begin a reign of terror in this country not seen since Henri Cazaux, your former commander and mentor. Let us begin that reign of terror now. Our target must be McLanahan. The police officer injured two of our soldiers. His brother dared to track us down, pursue us, and even threaten us. We cannot be seen to tolerate this. My men will fight to the death to avenge their own.”

  Townsend considered Reingruber’s proposal. He had not planned on a full frontal assault in this city. Eventually, he knew, the police would be augmented by stronger and stronger forces, too much even for Reingruber’s well-trained and fierce troops. By that time, they had to have this state in a firm grip of terror if they had any hope of surviving. But he also knew that Reingruber was right about his men’s total commitment to vengeance.

  “Very well, Major,” Townsend said. “Present a plan of action for me, including complete surveillance and intelligence reports, and we shall see. But this operation had better be much more than just a killing, Major. If it does not advance our plans to dominate this state, then it will not happen.”

  “Ich verstehe, Herr Oberst. Vielen Dank,” Reingruber said with a satisfied smile, clicking his heels together and bowing his head in thanks. “You will not be disappointed.”

  UC-Davis Medical Center,

  Stockton Boulevard and Forty-Second Street,

  Sacramento, California

  Friday, 6 March 1998, 1027 FT

  A police sketch artist can usually tell when the composite drawing begins to match the witness’s recollection. The witness’s eyes narrow, the lips pinch, the body tenses, and the skin turns pale whe
n that critical nuance appears on the sketch. Finally, and usually suddenly, the sketch seems to leap to life, bringing suppressed memories to the fore, painting images of the incident across the face of the witness. And that was what the Sacramento Police Department’s sketch artist saw as he put the finishing touches on the computerized composite drawing.

  “That’s him,” Paul McLanahan said. “That’s the guy I hit with the shotgun.”

  SID Captain Thomas Chandler got up from his seat in the corner of the hospital room and took a look at the laptop computer screen. Patrick McLanahan came closer to take a look too, hoping that the sketch matched one of the men he had seen in the Bobby John Club. It did not, and he moved away. Chandler scowled at him. He didn’t like Paul McLanahan’s brother, and he disliked him even more today. “You sure, Officer McLanahan?”

  “Positive,” Paul replied. “He was illuminated perfectly in the streetlight.” Chandler nodded-his investigators had been out to the scene of the shooting several times, and the positioning of the lights along the K Street Mall would have made them shine directly on the attacker.

  “Any chance at all you can identify any of the assailants you hit with your car, or the one who shot you?” Chandler asked.

  “Sorry, Captain,” Paul replied. “They all had gas masks. I might be able to estimate height and weight, but not enough to make an arrest. A good defense attorney could blast me off the witness stand with ease.”

  “You let us worry about the trial-let’s get as many of these creeps as possible behind bars first,” Chandler said. He remembered that Paul McLanahan was an attorney as well as a policeman, and he was now thinking more like a lawyer. “But you’re absolutely positive about the guy in this sketch?”

  “Yes, sir,” Paul said. “Absolutely positive.”

  “Good,” Chandler said, nodding to the sketch artist. “We’ll circulate the composite and send it to the FBI and Interpol. We’ll also bring in more mug books for you to look at. We might get lucky.” He turned to Patrick to include him in the discussion. “Now explain to me where you’re going again?”