Tek Money

by William Shatner

  “Up, take me away from here,” he told his skycar, punching at the controls. The car didn’t respond. “Good Christ.” Marx grabbed at the door handle, trying to pull it shut. The door remained stubbornly wide open.

  “It’s only a robot lion.”

  Marx jerked in his seat and gazed to his right. “How’d you get in my car?”

  Bascom appeared to be sitting in the passenger seat. “It’s a holoprojection, Jabb, my boy.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Santa Monica Sector ElectroZoo. Don’t you ever come here?”

  “Just because you run a hotshot detective agency, Bascom, doesn’t give you the goddamned right to—”

  “I wanted to have a little conference with you.”

  The lion stopped beside the open door and began sniffing curiously at Marx’s left leg.

  “Go away, get the hell out of here,” he told the furry mechanism. “They’re built not to attack people, aren’t they?”

  “Sure—unless somebody’s tampered with this one.”

  “I’m getting some nice stuff for a lawsuit against you,” warned the big man. “It’s illegal to take over the control of a skycar in—”

  “Yeah, but the notion appealed to me so much,” explained the head of the Cosmos Detective Agency. “Since you used the same gimmick on Dan Cardigan and Molly Fine only a few hours ago.”

  Marx raised his hand to swat the lion, then thought better of it. “I don’t know any—”

  “After Dan told me what had happened, I started doing some digging,” the projected Bascom said. “Wasn’t too difficult to trace the whole operation to you.”

  “You can’t establish a damn—”

  “Skull faces, Jabb? C’mon now, really.”

  “I didn’t threaten those kids and I had nothing to do with sending their skycar out over the damned Pacific Ocean.”

  “No, my sources aren’t wrong this time, Jabb,” Bascom told him.

  “Take a jump for yourself, Bascom.”

  Snarling, the lion reared up and plopped both heavy paws in Jabb’s wide lap.

  “Get away, go.”

  Bascom continued, “You were hired by some of your OCO chums to throw a scare into the kids, persuade them not to keep trying to find out if Devlin is truly dead.”

  “I have nothing to do with the Office of Clandestine Operations,” insisted Marx. “Until that bastard Cardigan screwed me up with Bev Kendricks, I was a private—”

  “I’m in the process of seeing to it that nobody in Washington bothers Dan or Molly again,” cut in the image of Bascom. “But I wanted personally, or almost personally, to suggest to you that you leave them alone, too. Best course for you to follow, my boy, would be to resettle in some other state. Learn a trade and forget about being a toady for the intelligence boys.”

  “You can’t order me to—”

  “Take a couple of days to mull this over.” Bascom vanished.

  Across the night field came two more lions.

  44

  JAKE WAITED FOR roughly two minutes after Janine had slipped away. Then he took out his palmphone and tapped out a number.

  Gomez, surrounded by darkness, appeared on the tiny screen. “Is all well, amigo? I’ve been chilling my favorite portions while lurking out here watching the villa and covering the backside.”

  “It’s okay, yeah. Janine is leaving here, but the guns are supposed to be stored below.”

  “Supposed? You allowed that multifaceted mujer to escape before you made certain about the weapons?”

  “It wasn’t a question of allowing, since she was carrying a Devlin Gun.”

  “Ah.”

  “And I decided to trust her.”

  “I tend to trust armed women, too.”

  “Contact Bascom from the skycar vidphone, Sid,” suggested Jake. “Arrange for the local branch of whatever Washington agency he’s in cahoots with to get here fast and gather up these damned guns. Then come on in here. I’ll be down in the subbasement.”

  “What’s the status of Santos?”

  “He’s gone to his reward.”

  “Thanks to you?”

  “Nope, Janine arranged that.”

  “Hallelujah, I find out a new talent of hers each and every day,” said Gomez. “She’s an inspiration to a youth such as myself.”

  Jake pocketed the phone, then headed downstairs.

  He located the guns where Janine had told him they’d be found, far beneath the villa in a large room that had been cut out of the mountain. The Devlin Guns were in unmarked plazcrates, six guns to a box, stacked all along one rough stone wall.

  Some remnants of the days when the underground room had been a dungeon remained. There was a wooden stretching rack, a brazier for heating hot irons, a scatter of chains and manacles.

  Jake lifted one of the stubby, off-white guns out of its box, hefted it in his hand and then put it back.

  Behind him a boot scraped on the stone floor.

  Not turning, he said, “You’re getting impressively swift, Sid.”

  “He won’t be joining you, asshole.”

  Almita was in the old dungeon with him.

  “Where is he?”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know exactly where he fell after I shot him.”

  “This is, and I hate to be critical of the guy after he almost literally plucked me from the maw of destruction, typical of the way Gomez can let me down in moments of need.”

  “Jaws,” corrected Sidebar. The cambot was sitting in an armchair with his large metallic feet up on a hassock. “It’s jaws of destruction.”

  He and Natalie were sharing an office in the Madrid offices of Newz, Inc.

  “To someone who’s chock-full of clichés maybe.” The reporter, wearing a mint-green skirtsuit, was sitting on the edge of a Lucite desk with a talkwriter mike in her hand. “He promised to contact me here soon as he and Jake had news about the Devlin Guns.”

  “You should have tagged along with them.”

  Natalie sighed. “It’s astounding how I’m surrounded by a sea of ingratitude,” she mentioned. “I came back to Madrid to find out if you were okay. My concern for you, however, doesn’t seem—”

  “You need a good cameraman. It wasn’t my well-being that—”

  “And, though this may not make sense to you since they didn’t build any human feelings into you, I was very anxious to shed that dreadful hospital garment those goons at the clinic had decked me out in,” continued Natalie, spreading her arms wide. “Does this outfit look all right for an important newscast, Sidebar?”

  “To someone without any human instincts builtin, it looks okay.” The robot leaned back, locking his hands behind his metal skull. “You also persuaded the Newz, Inc., dimwits to let you do a special vidwall broadcast tonight.”

  “Well, it’s a heck of a big story,” she reminded, smiling. “It’s certain to throw a scanner in the works of Janeiro Martinez’s planned revolution.”

  “A spanner is what people toss.”

  “I doubt they’ll try the coup now, so Garcia, who seems to me to be the lesser of two evils, although he is a very short and unattractive man, but that doesn’t much matter in politics, I suppose, will stay in power for a while,” said Natalie. “And I’m betting that the Office of Clandestine Operations will be forced to clean house again. On top of which, Sidebar, the reasons for the murders of Peter Traynor and that Flanders fellow will come out in the open. Traynor’s wealthy ex-wife and her two kids will be safe from—”

  “The power of the press is a wonderful thing.”

  Pointing the mike at him, Natalie said, “I know what’s gnawing at your innards. They’re letting me go out and simply sit there and look the viewers right in the eye and tell them all the news I’ve dug up. Without any of your distracting vidfilm to get in the way. You hate to admit that I can hold millions of well-informed viewers in my spell without a single—”

  “A mongoose can do the same thing with a snake.”
/>
  “Exactly, and they don’t need video footage either.” She tapped the talkwriter mike on her knee, then set it aside and dropped from the desk. “Darn, I’m due to go on worldwide in sixteen minutes. Pinpointing the location of the Devlin Guns will make such a terrific tag for this report.” She frowned at the vidphone atop the desk. “C’mon, Gomez. Call me, darn it.”

  The phone remained silent.

  “You’re Nada. You didn’t count for anything,” Almita told Jake. “Martinez is still going to get these Devlin Guns and everything will go just the way Carlos Zabicas wants.”

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  “Why not, asshole? I figured out where the guns must be once I heard they were gone from the clinic,” she said. “I’ve got them now and, once I fix you for good and all, I’ll phone Carlos to send a crew to—”

  “In a shade less than ten minutes there’ll be a Newz, Inc., broadcast going out.” Jake took a step to his right. “They’ll outline the whole damn plan that your boss and Martinez and the OCO worked out. That’s really going to make it difficult for you folks to do a damn thing.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “What you really ought to be doing is packing,” he suggested. “You’re going to have to hide out, because President Garcia is going to crack down even more on the Tek cartels now.”

  “We’ve got the guns. We can still make a lot of trouble.”

  “Maybe, but you’ve sure as hell lost the element of surprise.”

  She shook her head from left to right twice, angrily. “No, I don’t believe you.”

  He pointed a thumb at the low, beamed ceiling. “There’s a vidwall up in the living room of the villa,” he said, taking another step to the right. “Let’s go up there and watch the Newz show when it comes on. After that, Almita, you’ll probably decide to—”

  “You’re just stalling, hoping someone’ll get here to save your miserable ass.”

  “It’s your ass you ought to be worrying about.”

  She lowered her gun hand, eyes narrowing. “All right, cabrón, we’ll watch TV together.” She nodded at the doorway.

  When Jake started to move, his feet seemed to get tangled with a spill of chain on the old dungeon floor. He stumbled, fell to one knee.

  He came up clutching a length of the heavy rusty chain and swung it at the young woman.

  Almita brought up her lazgun and squeezed the trigger.

  The end of the chain hit her wrist and the barrel of the gun tilted up. The sizzling beam cut one of the wooden beams in two.

  Jake snapped the chain again, knocking the gun from her hand. Diving, he grabbed it up from the floor.

  “Cochino!” she said, rubbing at her wrist.

  “Upstairs,” he advised, gesturing with the gun.

  Gomez was tiptoeing across the living room when they got up there. “Ah, I’m too late for the festivities,” he complained.

  Jake grinned. “Glad to see that you aren’t dead,” he said. “Almita was under the impression she’d knocked you off, Sid.”

  “The señorita is far from being a topnotch marksman, especially at a distance,” explained his partner. “It seemed wise to dive into a handy gully and pretend to be defunct until she’d moved on. Then I headed for here.”

  Almita made an angry spitting noise. “I thought I’d taken care of at least one of you assholes.”

  “Alas, no, angelica,” said Gomez sympathetically. “And this was the last chance you’re ever going to have, too.”

  45

  GOMEZ STEPPED OUT of the skyport vidphone booth, shaking his head forlornly. “Nada,” he reported. “Sister Feliz hasn’t been able to find out a damn thing about the girl. And the op from Soberano’s Maravilla detective agency hasn’t found a trace of her either.”

  Picking up his suitcase, Jake asked, “How important is this?”

  “I don’t know,” his partner answered. “She’s just a kid who helped me when those hunter bastards were trying to turn me into a trophy. I don’t know—I’m just concerned about her.”

  “Want to stay in Madrid and find her?”

  Gomez sighed. “Nope, I guess not,” he said. “This isn’t a romance thing, amigo. What it really is—well, I’m getting old. I feel paternal toward her and I’d like to be sure she’s going to do okay.”

  “Soberano’s likely to locate her before too long.”

  Bending, Gomez gathered up the bag he’d set down next to the booth. “Sí, and when he does, I can do something to improve her lot.”

  Jake reminded, “Our skyliner for Greater LA leaves in twenty minutes.”

  “Paternity at a distance is more in my line anyway.” He started heading for their departure ramp.

  Holocommercials for nearcaf, wine and botsoccer floated overhead.

  “Hey, wait up, Gomez!”

  He hunched his shoulders and halted. “Ai, it’s the telltale cry of my nemesis.”

  Natalie, dodging around passengers and baggagebots, was hurrying toward them along the tinted plastiglass ramp. “Hello, Jake,” she said when she caught up with them. “Gomez, I’m glad I found you, and I won’t even take precious time, since the liner’s about to depart, to criticize you for scooting out of your hotel without so much as a fare-thee-well or—”

  “You’re not booked on our flight, cara?”

  “How could I be? I have to remain here in Madrid for at least two full working days to follow up on this whole business. The failed revolution, the locating of the stolen guns, the sinister links with the OCO—the whole complex mess. I’m doing a nightly broadcast and a whole slew of minireports and a summing up for Newz’s weekend service.” Reaching out, she put both arms around him and hugged him enthusiastically. “I really appreciate your help and particularly your taking the time, after you’d been about as close to the brim of death as you could possibly be, to vidphone me at our studios just forty seconds before airtime to confirm the location of the Devlin Guns and, honestly, I won’t even mention that in the future I’d really appreciate it if you could get me information like that at least five minutes ahead of broadcast so that I can make sure it gets into my script in the polished yet breezy style that my millions of viewers—”

  “Chiquita,” cut in Gomez as he extricated himself from her enthusiastic embrace. “We have to take our leave.”

  “Certainly, don’t let me detain you,” she said. “I simply took time out from my impossibly crowded schedule to rush down here to wish you a heartfelt bon voyage, Gomez.”

  “Gracias and adiós.”

  She caught hold of his arm, pulling him back toward her. “Oh, and, Gomez, I’ve been thinking about that strange and awful Tek-induced nightmare I had, the one, as I believe I mentioned, where you expressed a deep passion for me,” she said. “While you’re winging your way homeward, you might want to think about that notion and, as repellant as it is to me, determine if perhaps there’s a grain of truth in it. It would explain some of the odd aspects of our long-running relationship.” She kissed him on the cheek and let him free.

  “I’ll give it my unswerving attention,” he promised, taking off at a trot up the ramp.

  The afternoon sky over Greater Los Angeles was a sooty golden color. Jake, alone in his skycar, was flying inland.

  On the dash phonescreen Bascom was saying, “Concentrate on the bonus. It’ll be substantial for both you lads.”

  “The Devlin angle is a loose end.”

  “For now,” conceded the head of the Cosmos agency. “I’ve already assured you that nobody is going to bother your son or Molly Fine over this.”

  “But is this guy alive?”

  Bascom said, “Thus far I haven’t been able to find out. However, Jake, it occurs to me that I may be able to persuade certain interested parties in our nation’s capital to finance an investigation.” He held up his hand. “That will be another case. This one is officially over.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh, and I’m curious about an item that just came in from
Madrid. Why am I still being billed by Soberano’s agency in Madrid?”

  Jake looked away from the phonescreen. “It’s all part of the case.”

  “Says here Gomez authorized these further investigations,” said Bascom. “Can I deduct these charges from his bonus?”

  “It would not,” advised Jake, “be a good idea, chief.”

  “All right, benevolent patriarch that I am, I’ll forget about the matter. Unless it goes on beyond the end of the week.” Bascom ended the call.

  Jake tapped out a landing pattern and the skycar began drifting down toward a simulated nature preserve in the Pasadena Sector.

  Bev Kendricks was waiting at the edge of the landing lot. Holographic redwood trees rose up behind her, with mossy trails winding through them. “Most of what I said to you when you got into that fight with Jabb Marx I didn’t really mean,” she began as he came toward her.

  He put his arms around her for a moment, then stepped back. “But some of it you did believe.”

  “You’ve been hanging on to your anger over Beth’s death a long time,” she said.

  He said, “I’m not ready to give it up yet.”

  She hesitated a few seconds, then took his hand. They walked into the deep shadows of the forest.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the TekWar series

  1

  LATE on the night of February 3, 2122, she saw them murder her brother.

  Saw it clearly inside her head while she huddled, hugging herself with her thin arms, in the deep armchair in the big domed redwood-and-plastiglass bedroom where she spent most of her time now. All the long days and nights.

  When the vision, sudden and unbidden, hazy at first, started, Susan Grossman jerked upright. Pressing her right hand hard to her left breast, she inhaled sharply. As her slim body began shaking, the dark-haired young woman could hear her heart thumping in her ears.

  Susan had been hoping she wouldn’t have any more of these seizures or whatever they were.

  “Not another one,” she murmured in a low, sad voice. “Please, no more.”

  She shut her eyes, even though she knew that wouldn’t help. She’d have to suffer through the painful, unwanted vision anyway. That was always the way it was.