“Can they save him?”
Spellman touched the keys again, then nodded at the medscreen. “See for yourself.”
“ ‘Irreversible,’ ” he read.
“I wonder now if perhaps your theory about—”
“Maybe I can still find out something.” Jake went striding to the door of the room and yanked it open.
“You can’t go in there.” The inspector hurried after him.
Jake pushed on in. He nudged aside a robot and stopped next to the bed. “Goldberg!”
“Please, stand away,” ordered the heavyset blond human physician. “This man is in a critical condition.”
Jake took hold of Goldberg’s arm. “Listen—this is Jake Cardigan.”
“I must ask you to leave,” persisted the doctor.
“Stay out of my way,” Jake advised him. He leaned closer to the dying man. “Goldberg, I’m Jake Cardigan. You’re supposed to hate me.”
The young man’s eyelids fluttered, then opened slightly. “Jake ... ”
“Who hired you? Who’s behind this?”
The young man opened his right eye wider, stared up at Jake. “Doublecross,” he said in a dry, gasping voice. “I trusted ... sun ... sun ... ”
“Who?” Jake shook him. “Who rigged this and crossed you?”
“Sands ... sun ... ” He started making harsh choking noises, his body shook violently.
The doctor shoved Jake back, bending over Goldberg. “You idiot, now this man is dying!”
“He was dying before I got here.”
“Sun ... ” Goldberg opened both eyes wide and struggled to sit up. “They fucked me good ... ”
The life went out of him. He sank back, sighing out breath and blood.
23
THE ANDROID ACTOR WAS tall and handsome. He smiled at both Gomez and the Amazing Otto, his lazgun held at waist level. “Herr Gomez, there is no need for me to kill you,” he assured him in his deep resonant voice.
“Well, I appreciate that,” said Gomez, shifting nervously in his chair. “For all practical purposes, I’m simply an innocent bystander.” He gestured awkwardly with his right hand, managing to smack the immobile android actress seated next to him. “Oops.” Laughing apologetically, he grabbed her bare shoulder and straightened her in her chair.
“Who activated you?” the magician asked the android. “No one is supposed to fool with the actors stored in this—”
“The real issue is that they don’t want you to talk about what you know,” explained the handsome android. He rested his free hand on the table top as he stood there. The barrel of his silvery lazgun was aimed at the Amazing Otto.
“What do you mean?”
“Basically, Herr Otto, I refer to certain things you’ve chanced to learn about a particular kamikaze.” The actor inclined his head in Gomez’s direction. “As soon as I kill him, Herr Gomez, you can go on your way.”
“Say, that’s really gracious of you,” Gomez told him, a nervous quiver in his voice. “Actually, as you know, since you’ve been sitting here all along, playing possum, as the saying goes, I haven’t so far learned a blessed thing from the Amazing Otto.” He made another sweeping gesture.
This time he whapped the android actress much harder. She went tilting far to the right, teetered, and then, before Gomez could catch her, fell clean off her chair.
That caused the android, as Gomez had anticipated, to glance in her direction.
Gomez threw himself backwards, causing his chair to tip over. He executed a deft somersault and then dived into the orchestra pit. He yanked out his stungun as he fell.
Rolling across the dusty floor, he popped to his feet.
Up on the stage the big andy was shoving aside the fallen actress so that he could get down to the footlights.
Gomez fired his stungun up at him.
The handsome mechanism stopped dead, swayed, staggered and then tumbled back against the banquet table. Several dishes came bouncing to the floor and then the disabled android hit and lay still.
“Bueno,” commented Gomez as he started to climb back onto the stage.
“People, you’ll find, Herr Gomez, are harder to fool than mechanical actors.” Two large men with slick cleanshaved heads had emerged from the wings stage left.
Each held a lazgun, and the huskier of the pair, the one who’d addressed Gomez, was making his way toward the edge of the stage.
“I should’ve considered the possibility of a backup,” Gomez said up at him.
“Toss your gun onto the stage, bitte,” requested the big man as he squatted and pointed his lazgun down at him.
Frowning, Gomez moved his wrist back and prepared to surrender his weapon.
Just then streamers of crackling red fire started spewing out of both of the Amazing Otto’s ears.
It took the attention of both the gunmen.
Gomez seized the opportunity to fire his stungun up at the squatting one.
The bald man gasped, sat down hard, rocked a few times and then stretched out flat and stiff.
Gomez boosted himself back up onto the boards of the stage.
The greybearded magician was just in the process of pulling a stungun out of thin air. He fired it at the still dazzled other gunman.
Stepping sideways, that one dropped his lazgun and knelt. He remained that way for roughly ten seconds before falling over face-first.
“That was very invigorating,” commented the Amazing Otto. “I haven’t, I don’t believe, performed the blazing ears illusion for nearly a decade.”
“I’m glad you decided to revive it today,” Gomez said. “Now let’s sneak off to someplace quiet where you can tell me the rest of—”
“I’ll come along, too.” From out of the wings stage right came Jenny Keaton of the Internal Security Office.
The Chief Inspector pointed at Jake. “You had no right to be here,” he said accusingly. “It is quite probable, Herr Cardigan, that you hastened the poor fellow’s death.”
They were in a stark white office, Jake, Spellman, the doctor who’d attended Will Goldberg and Chief Inspector Hauser.
Jake, who was sitting in a stiff white chair, said, “His death was arranged before he even turned himself in. Goldberg was never more than a diversion.”
“I admit,” said Hauser from behind the wide metal desk he’d taken over, “that the circumstances of his death are suspicious.”
“To say the least,” said Jake. “They wanted to sidetrack you and the other investigating agencies. Long enough, anyway, to cover their tracks some.”
“There is still the possibility, however, that the young man administered the fatal injection to himself,” said Hauser. “Making this, then, nothing more than the suicide of the guilty person.”
Jake shrugged. “Suicides usually don’t complain about being doublecrossed,” he said. “I’d bet that Goldberg was surprised by what was happening to him.”
“He apparently talked a little before he expired,” said Chief Inspector Hauser.
“This man virtually shook the words out of him,” accused the portly physician. “In my opinion he—”
“Yes, fine, doctor.” The Chief Inspector turned to Spellman. “What exactly did Goldberg say at the end?”
“That he’d been doublecrossed, that they’d fucked him,” he replied. “He also mumbled something about sun and sand.”
“What do you think he was alluding to with that?” Hauser inquired of Jake.
“Probably a dying hallucination. He thought he was out in the desert somewhere. Sun, sand.”
“The actual word he spoke was sands,” offered the doctor. “With an S.”
Hauser nodded at Jake. “Could that have been, Herr Cardigan, a reference to Bennett Sands?”
Jake shrugged again. “Bennett Sands is dead and gone.”
“Suppose, however, that the word he used was s-o-n and not s-u-n,” suggested Hauser. “Perhaps Will Goldberg tried, as he was dying, to warn you that some of Sands’ followers
meant to harm your son.”
“That doesn’t seem likely to me.”
The portly doctor said, “If Sands is a person, then the patient was talking about Sands’ son and not this man’s.”
“How does that strike you, Herr Cardigan?”
“The only problem there, Inspector, is that Sands didn’t have a son. Only a daughter.”
Spellman said, “If you’d cooperate with us now, Jake, instead of holding back, it would help.”
“I don’t know what he was trying to convey, beyond the fact that he’d been set up,” Jake told him, standing. “Are you folks going to charge me with anything?”
“Not at the present,” said Hauser. “In fact, it might be a good idea if you left Berlin now.”
“Until I got here you were all satisfied that Goldberg was the one you wanted. Now you—”
“Not satisfied, Herr Cardigan, but simply checking out the facts.” Hauser rose, too.
Jake walked over to the door of the office. “Thanks for your help, Rhinehart. I hope I haven’t screwed up your career too seriously.” Nodding at them, he left.
24
GRUNTING AND MUMBLING, GOMEZ succeeded in getting the heavier of the unconscious gunmen up over his shoulder. “A waste of time, chiquita,” he informed Jenny.
She was dragging the other stunned gunman across the stage by his armpits. “I didn’t have a very high opinion of you to begin with,” the blonde agent told him. “But I didn’t realize how slipshod you—”
“Running a check on these goons isn’t going to enlighten you.” He followed her into the wings, legs wobbling some. “Smartest thing to do is just leave them here.”
“On the contrary, I’m darn certain that—”
“They’re freelancers, hired for this one job.”
The Amazing Otto, bringing up the rear, urged, “We ought to get out of this theater as soon as possible. They may send more killers looking for me, nein?”
“I’d have fled several minutes ago,” answered Gomez. “But I’m obliged to humor Miss Keaton, since she is, in a way, my employer at the moment.”
“This is all standard procedure, Gomez.” Dumping her unconscious lout beside the rear door, she drew her stungun. Cautiously she opened the heavy door.
After listening for half a minute, Jenny ventured out into the foggy alley.
“Things are okay out here,” she called finally.
Gomez grunted and mumbled some more as he hefted his thug outside.
Jenny’s skyvan was parked across the alley, its slick black surface speckled with mist. “Toss him in,” she instructed.
“Yes, ma’am.” Gomez lugged the big man over and dumped him into the passenger compartment she’d opened.
“Would you go back and fetch the other one now, please?”
“Caramba,” he remarked as he returned for the second load.
The magician was standing in the open doorway, staring carefully out. “Are there any more of them lurking around, Herr Gomez?”
“Nary a one. Zip on over and hop into the van.” Gomez decided to drag the second gunman rather than carry him. “We’ll fly around for awhile and finish our chat.”
“What took you so long?” Jenny climbed into the driveseat. “This guy’s lighter.”
“Verdad, but I didn’t have a fractured spine when I hauled the first lout.”
He hefted the gunman up into the skyvan, got him arranged on the floor next to his cohort.
Timidly the Amazing Otto scrambled in and took a seat as far from the sprawled thugs as he could get. “I have decided, Herr Gomez,” he announced, “that what I know must be worth considerably more than $5000.”
“Possibly it is.” He settled next to Jenny in the foremost passenger seat. “Miss Keaton’s agency will no doubt make up the difference between your new asking price and the $4000 that you and I already agreed on.”
After making a rude noise, Jenny guided the skyvan up into the grey morning.
While Jake was on the vidphone with the Cosmos Detective Agency in Greater LA, the image of the staff robot he’d been talking to was abruptly replaced with that of Walt Bascom himself.
The agency head was looking especially frazzled and rumpled. “Why are you hobnobbing with a machine rather than me, my lad?” he inquired.
“Since it’s the middle of the night where you are, I figured you were safely home by now.”
“I rarely sleep. What were you calling about?”
Jake was sitting in one of the tapproof booths in his hotel lobby. “First, Walt, I want to know more about a lady named Jenny Keaton.”
“A hoyden, a tough cookie, a gadfly on the backside of polite espionage and—”
“She claims we’re working for her agency.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” admitted the Cosmos chief. “The ISO wants an impartial investigation of those Berlin assassinations.”
“Apparently they don’t trust the International Drug Control Agency or themselves.”
“People in the government get that way.” Bascom, yawning, rubbed his eyes, scratched an armpit. “There isn’t that spirit of openness, trust and fairplay that you Cosmos ops enjoy each and every—”
“Keaton persuaded Deputy Director Waugh to let her work on this anyway, according to her. Is that what actually happened?”
Bascom nodded. “She’s a tough cookie, as I mentioned earlier, and very persuasive.”
“Suggest to your pal Waugh that we don’t want her getting underfoot.”
“You’ve met her then?”
“She introduced herself to us, yeah.”
“Surely you and Gomez weren’t intimidated by someone who weighs in at about 110 pounds and—”
“Not intimidated, just annoyed,” said Jake. “Next I wanted the robot to run a thorough background check on the late Will Goldberg.”
“The confessed killer?”
“That Will Goldberg. How’d you hear about him? The Berlin police haven’t as yet released any—”
“I’m a detective, too, remember? But I didn’t know he was dead.”
“He died a few hours ago, by way of a planted timebomb virus.”
“You obviously don’t believe this lad was the real killer.”
“Nope.”
“Neither do I. Anything else you need from us?”
“When he realized he’d been doublecrossed, Goldberg managed to say something to me,” said Jake. “He seemed to be trying to warn me about Bennett Sands’ son.”
Bascom scowled thoughtfully. “If Sands had a son, I suppose the fellow might well be pissed off at you,” he said. “Before you got on Sands’ trail most of the world thought of him as a simple everyday multimillionaire tycoon. You linked the guy with the Hokori Tek cartel and sundry other—”
“Could there be a son somewhere—legit or otherwise?”
“Not that I know of, but we’ll sure dig into that,” promised his boss.
“There’s one more thing,” said Jake. “I just talked to Dan and he seems to be doing well. But I was thinking—”
“Cosmos already has a team looking after him, Jake, although your son isn’t aware of it,” said Bascom. “I initiated that myself.”
“Thanks, Walt.”
“Are you and Gomez making any progress so far?”
“Sid may be, but right now I feel as though I’m pretty much standing still,” admitted Jake.
25
GOMEZ WAS SITTING DEEP in an armchair in the parlor of their suite when Jake returned. “I’ve led a blameless life,” he said.
“Right. You’ve been an example to all who know you.”
“And yet fate keeps dumping a succession of meanminded feisty women in my path. Looney reporters, killcrazy spies, snide government agents.”
“You’re upset about Jenny Keaton?”
“Sí, she’s the latest thorn in my side.”
Jake sat on the edge of the sofa. “Run into her again?”
Gomez replied, “That I did.�
�� He told him about his tracking down the Amazing Otto, about the attempt to kill the magician and about Jenny’s intruding at the tag end of things.
“How’d she know about Otto?” asked Jake.
“She was pursuing, so she says, an independent tip.”
“Sure she wasn’t just pursuing you?”
“I know when I’m being tailed—especially by someone in a huge black skyvan,” Gomez assured him. “Anyhow, this mujer then insisted that we—make that me. She insisted that I heft these two huge lunks into her van. She’s got the damn crate crammed full of the latest in criminological gadgets.”
“She ran checks on them?”
“Sí, hooked them up to a retscan machine, got their fingerprints and DNA patterns. Maybe even took their temperatures. Sent it all to Crime Central in Washington, DC.” Gomez sank further into his chair. “Care to guess the result of all that?”
“These guys have no provable links with any of the Tek cartels. They’re well known, though, as hoods-for-hire who’ll work for anybody who pays their price,” replied Jake. “They were hired to knock off the Amazing Otto before he talked and probably have no idea who their client was.”
“Bingo.”
Jake asked, “What did the magician finally have to tell you?”
“Sell me,” he corrected. “He knows a married couple name of Boneca, Miguel and Roma Boneca. These two operate something called the Puppenspiel Roving Theatre with a cast of electronic puppets.”
“They’re the ones who built the android simulacrum of me?”
“So swears Otto,” said his partner. “The Bonecas have a flat a few blocks from the theater where he’s the caretaker. He drops in on them now and then and a couple weeks back, by chance, he discovered that they were working on this replica of you. It didn’t mean much to him then, but he thought differently after he saw the vidnews footage of ... of what happened.”
“You can say ‘footage of Beth’s getting killed,’ ” Jake told him. “I won’t rush out and hook up to a Brainbox.”
“Hey, I’m on your side, amigo,” reminded Gomez.
Jake said, “I know. Sorry.”
“The Amazing Otto also mentioned that he suspects the Bonecas have done some shady jobs like this in the past, too.”
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