“Are they still in Berlin?”
“They’ve been touring Switzerland since the day of the killings. I have a copy of their itinerary.”
“You better get over there soon as you can.”
“Aren’t you coming along?”
“I want to stay in Berlin a little longer, see if I can trace Goldberg’s activities.”
“The local cops may frown on that.”
“Yep, they may.”
Gomez sighed. “In a moment of lunacy, I agreed to let Jenny Keaton work alongside us on this next phase of things,” he confessed. “I didn’t know I’d be alone with her amidst the snowcapped—”
“I checked her out with Bascom. He says she’s exactly what she claims.”
“You find out anything else about the lady?”
“She weighs 110 pounds.”
“At least I outweigh her.” Gomez sighed again.
The fog had given way to rain, a light prickly rain that drifted down across the afternoon.
Jake, hands thrust deep in his trouser pockets, walked once again slowly along the stretch of Unter den Linden across from the American Embassy chapel.
The sidewalk over there was thick with people, a noisy tangle of mourners, officials and gawkers. Uniformed city police were trying to get them sorted out.
Hovering over the rainswept street were three news camvans, the largest from Newz, Inc. Jake had spotted at least two dozen reporters, both human and robot, working on the ground.
Slowing, he halted next to a decorative linden tree that was made of neocon.
Skycars were gliding down, trying to land and let out passengers. The air above the row of grey embassy buildings was cluttered with more vehicles, some attempting to reach the ground, others simply hovering to catch a glimpse of what was happening down below.
Jake, he realized now, felt colder than he should have. It was a deep coldness that seemed to come from within him.
“There’s no need,” he decided, “for me to go in there.”
He didn’t want to say goodbye to Beth this way.
From out of the chapel now spilled the mournful sound of amplified organ music. The memorial service was about to start.
“I lost her twice,” he was thinking.
Down in Mexico when the android replica of Beth had sacrificed herself to save him. And again now—the real Beth this time.
“Jesus,” he said aloud.
A wedge of people went surging forward, trying to force their way inside the already crowded chapel.
“A mistake to come here.” He started walking away.
A thin young man in a long dark overcoat, bareheaded, came running over from across the way. “Herr Cardigan?”
“Yeah?” said Jake, tensing.
The young man handed him a folded slip of paper. Then he backed, spun on his heel and went hurrying away through the misty rain.
Jake unfolded the note.
There was a single line printed on it—“She’s still alive.”
26
GOMEZ, CARRYING A SINGLE suitcase, made his way through the crowded main building of the Berlin Skyport. He was whistling softly, smiling now and then at a narrowly avoided collision with someone.
He was a hundred or so yards from Gate 227, when the overhead speakers announced, “Last call for Skyliner Flight S-09 for Bern, Switzerland. Boarding at Gate 227.”
Kicking up his pace, Gomez hurried to the gate in question. “Good afternoon, chiquita.”
Jenny Keaton, arms folded, blackbooted foot resting on the smallest of her three suitcases, was standing close beside the gate. “Didn’t I mention earlier, Gomez, that I really don’t like to be kept waiting?”
“You did, sí,” he acknowledged while showing his ticket to the silverplated robot at the gate. “The reason I remember that is—because I treasure every single word that falls from your lovely lips and I preserve them in the scrapbook of my memory.”
“You truly are full of crap,” observed the Internal Security Office agent. She nodded down at her luggage. “Could you, maybe, lend a hand with some of this?”
He grabbed up two of them. “I had assumed you were too fiercely independent to want help of any kind.”
Following him up along the boarding ramp, Jenny said, “Why are you making those annoying groaning noises?”
“Oh, it’s nothing, bonita,” he replied. “Ever since I strained my back lugging around those dazed goons for you, the lifting of several hundred pounds of superfluous baggage tends to cause me dreadful pain. But don’t let it bother you.”
“You’re worse than the reports say.”
“I strive to be, sí.”
A pair of pretty blonde android attendants welcomed them aboard and guided them to their seats midway in the skyliner.
After the luggage was stowed, Jenny settled into a window seat. “There’s something I’d like to discuss with you, Gomez.”
He was rubbing at a spot low on his back. “Go ahead.”
“It’s about Cardigan.”
“If you have any questions about Jake, ask Jake.”
“I simply don’t think the man should be working on this case.”
“The way I understand it, you don’t think I should be either.”
“But you’re simply an annoying nitwit,” she told him. “Cardigan, though, is much too emotionally upset to be at all objective about—”
“I’ve worked with Jake, off and on, for a long time,” he told her. “He’s got a temper, sure, but he’s a damn good investigator and—”
“You know it’s standard practice to take an agent off a case that has anything to do with someone he was closely involved with.”
“That’s not the way the Cosmos Agency does business,” he said. “And now, in the interest of smooth sailing, I suggest that you quit nagging and change the topic.”
“I’m not a nag,” she argued. “Anyone with more than a peanut for a brain would realize that. Making useful suggestions doesn’t—”
“Cease this,” said Gomez quietly.
Jenny eyed him for a few seconds, then turned away to stare out the window.
The gaunt young man in the long black overcoat stumbled.
Jake, the slip of paper clutched in his hand, was a half block behind him. He slowed now, waiting for the young man to regain his balance and continue on his way.
The rain was growing heavier and immediately ahead of him a heavyset blonde woman clicked on her forcefield umbrella.
Jake’s quarry was moving again, hurrying in a longlegged, jittery way. The skirt of his black overcoat flapped and billowed.
From a sausage shop on Jake’s right a plump man came hurrying. He clutched a large plyo-wrapped parcel of soywurst, and engraved on his bald, polished head was a bloodred swastika.
Up ahead the thin young man went scurrying around a corner.
Jake opened his hand and read the note again. “She’s still alive.”
He wanted that to be true. And if Beth were alive, he had to find her.
“But she can’t be,” he told himself.
He’d seen her die, seen the damn explosion on the damn vidscreen.
“That could’ve been faked,” he reminded himself inside his head.
Unlikely, though. Just because you wanted something to be true, that sure as hell didn’t mean it was. Beth’s murder and the deaths of the others had all been investigated. By the Berlin police and by several United States agencies.
“But they haven’t been investigated by me.”
The young man in the black overcoat had entered a small park. A rundown, weedy square with a rusted metallic arch rising up at its center. Spelled out on the arch in dim, dusty plazbulbs was UNTERGRUNDSTADT.
Jake could hear the rusty metal gate creak open from across the way.
The man he was following pushed through the old gate, headed down the shadowy stairway beneath the arch.
When Jake reached the staircase, he heard footsteps come echoing up from un
derground.
Easing his stungun out of his shoulder holster, he slipped it into his jacket pocket and kept his fingers around the grip.
The metallic steps were part of a nonfunctioning escalator system that descended deep under the streets of Berlin. Every few yards a pale ball of yellow light floated, barely pushing back the surrounding darkness.
There was a thick smell of damp earth all around and a prickly chill hanging in the air.
Halting after he’d been climbing down for a few minutes, Jake listened. He could still hear the footfalls down below him as someone moved deeper into the rundown underground town.
After he’d dropped one more level down, he heard noise and saw lights off beyond the stairway. People were laughing, a robopiano was playing. The German words for food, sausage, beer and sex floated in the air, spelled out in twisted tubes of colored light.
He caught a glimpse of the young man as he ducked into a narrow saloon. The name scrawled over the neobrick entrance in glo-chalk was MAULWURF CLUB.
His right hand clutching the stungun in his pocket, Jake pushed the swing doors open with his left.
The room beyond was small, cold, smelling of mold and decay. All but one of its ten small tables were empty and behind the bar stood a large robot bartender who’d long ago been painted crimson.
There was no sign of the young man Jake had been trailing.
Occupying the table nearest the doorway was a pinkfaced moustached man in a grey suit. His feathery blond hair was parted neatly in the middle and he wore a pair of rimless blue-tinted spectacles.
Raising his copper tankard, he smiled at Jake. “Welcome, Herr Cardigan. We have some good news for you,” he said. “Ja, some very good news.”
27
THE DAY HAD DAWNED bright and clear in the Santa Monica Sector of Greater Los Angeles. The skybus let Dan Cardigan off at the edge of the five acre campus of the SoCal State Police Academy and went climbing back up into the brightening morning. Since it was so early, Dan was the only cadet to disembark.
He showed his ID packet to the robot guard at the high plastiglass gates and was admitted. Dan strode along a wide pathway that cut up across a stretch of fakegrass, passed the dorms and took him finally to the domed Reference and Research Wing.
The chromeplated guardbot at the entrance made an amused sound. “Exams are still two weeks off, Cadet Cardigan,” he pointed out.
“You can’t do too much studying, Casey.”
Inside the early morning building Dan hurried up a ramp to the second level. He paused at a door marked BACKGROUND & ID, glancing around. He had the corridor to himself and, after taking a slow, careful breath, he entered the large room.
A big copperplated robot was sitting, huge feet resting on a packing crate, in a wicker rocking chair. “Geeze, here comes more trouble,” he observed.
“Nope, I just need a small favor, Rex.”
Rex/GK-30 swung his metallic feet to the floor. “Do you know how many strings I had to pull to get a soft job like this one, Daniel? If I keep letting you sneak in here to use the—”
“This won’t take more than five minutes. Especially if you quit arguing about it and help.”
“My problem—one of them anyway—is that I’m too darn amiable.” The rocker creaked as he rose up out of it. “I knew your dad back when I used to work over at—”
“What I’d like is all the information you have on a man named Larry Knerr,” Dan told him. “Currently he’s working for the GLA Fax-Times.”
“That rag.” Rex/GK-30 went lumbering over to the bank of infoscreens on the righthand wall of the high, wide room. “They don’t even run a challenging crossword puzzle. I can always finish it in under three minutes.”
“What’s important about Larry Knerr?” inquired a young woman’s voice.
Turning, Dan saw a slim darkhaired girl standing in the doorway and grinning in at him.
“Get in here, Molly, and shut the damn door,” Dan said. “What the hell are you doing—”
“Well, I saw you go sneaking by my dorm window,” explained Molly Fine, who was nearly a year older than Dan. “Slipping into my cadet uniform, I followed you. Curiosity.”
“Go away,” he suggested.
“You just now invited me in.”
“Actually I was inviting you to stop hollering Larry Knerr’s name up and down the hall,” said Dan. “I’m not supposed to be using these—”
“It’ll be my toke in a sling if anyone tumbles,” added the robot. “If I wasn’t such a softie, I’d give you both the old heave-ho.”
Molly eased closer to Dan. “Who exactly is Larry Knerr?”
“Someone I’m interested in.”
“Someone you met down in Brazil?”
Dan turned away from her. “Why do you keep nosing into my—”
“I’m your good friend, is why. Your pal, a helping hand in time of need. Stuff like that.”
“No, you’re not. I don’t much like you and you don’t much like me.”
“I see through your act, Dan,” Molly assured him. “You pretend not to care for me because you feel obliged to go on acting as though you were still smitten with Nancy Sands. But, honestly now, she’s at school way the heck over in France and you’re here in GLA. She hasn’t even communicated with you in any shape or form for nearly two and a half weeks either.”
He scowled at the darkhaired girl. “How do you know that?”
“I’m a detective.”
“You’re a police cadet. One with a morbid interest in my personal business.”
She shrugged, then rubbed her hands together. “Let’s get to work, shall we?”
“Okay, shooing you off is too much trouble and I’m in a hurry.” He crossed over to the robot. “Rex, see what you can dig up about Knerr.”
The big robot nodded at one of the chest-high screens. “While you two lovebirds were bickering, I located his file.”
The lefthand side of the screen showed a selection of head shots of the silverhaired Knerr. On the right printed information was crawling by.
“Now there’s a coincidence for you,” remarked Molly, touching the button that halted the crawl and then tapping a line of the copy on the screen. “This Knerr, before signing up with the Vargas news empire, used to be employed by the highly successful Ampersand Vidpix Studios.”
“So?” asked Dan.
She shook her head and made a disappointed sound. “Don’t you know who used to own most of Ampersand?”
“No, nope.”
“The late Bennett Sands, father of your uncommunicative girlfriend, noted business tycoon and notorious Teklord cohort,” said Molly. “Sands wasn’t exactly a chum of your dad’s either.”
Frowning, Dan read over the information on the screen. “Sands is dead, but ... ”
“We’re going to have to dig a lot deeper in Knerr’s background,” decided Molly. “Might also be a good idea to start tailing the guy. I’m not sure if we’re ready to try any electronic surveillance, but—”
“We aren’t going to do a damn thing,” Dan informed her. “I’m going to work on this, you’re going to quit as of now and leave me entirely alone.”
Molly laughed. “No, I’m not.”
28
THE PLUMP PINKFACED MAN gestured at the other chair at his table. “May I buy you a beer, Herr Cardigan?”
“No.” Jake sat, placed the note on the table top. After smoothing it out, he slid it over toward the man. “You sent this?”
“Ja,” he replied, smiling.
“Who were you referring to?”
“We are both aware that I meant Beth Kittridge. You certainly wouldn’t have come to such a disreputable sector of Berlin if you hadn’t known I—”
“Okay, enough bullshit,” cut in Jake, leaning forward. “Who are you—what do you know?”
Smiling more broadly, he answered, “I’m Ulrich Kreuz. The journalist?”
“Haven’t heard of you. Sorry.”
Kreuz sighe
d. “Apparently I’m not especially well known outside my native land.” He paused to sip at his tankard of foamy beer. “I’m a reporter with the Zeitung Agency and—”
“If you suckered me here just to get an interview about Beth, you—”
“Nein, you don’t comprehend. My news service represents the more conservative factions in Germany, factions that are currently out of power,” explained the reporter. “I brought you here to pass along some information, Herr Cardigan.”
“Why?”
“So that in pursuing the truth, you’ll stir things up and cause the current administration considerable grief. That in turn ought to provide me with material for a first rate exposé.”
Jake studied the reporter’s plump pink face, which had begun to perspire. “Tell me what you know about Beth Kittridge.”
“What I suggest you had better do is contact a gentleman named Horst van Horn. He—”
“Wait now, Kreuz. Van Horn is the Director of the Berlin Forensic Medicine Center.”
“Ja, exactly.”
Jake said, “He headed the team that ... that performed the autopsies on ... on the victims. I ... ” Jake cleared his throat. “I read copies of his reports.”
“Have a drink, please. It’ll do you good, mein herr. “
“No, thanks.” Jake rested an elbow on the table. “What about van Horn?”
“According to my sources, which I believe to be quite reliable, Doctor van Horn resorted to fakery in the case of the autopsy report dealing with Fräulein Kittridge.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have, you must realize, no proof of this,” explained the reporter. “Yet I am convinced that there is a strong possibility that the woman we saw coming to such a violent end was not Beth Kittridge at all.”
Jake felt a sudden pain spread across his chest. Grimacing, he reached out and took hold of the other man’s wrist. “They ran a DNA test on ... on the remains. I saw the results,” he told Kreuz, his voice no longer sounding exactly like his own. “There can’t be any doubt that—”
“You’re missing the point.” The reporter pulled his arm free. “I have been informed that van Horn falsified his report. Don’t you see?”
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