Less Than Human

by Maxine McArthur

  His eyes lit up. “No. Soon we will be able to move along livelines using our brain’s power. Of course, only that of trained, sophisticated minds. And wireless frequencies,” he added. “Our next task is to create a liveline-high-frequency converter.”

  It sounded unlikely. But pushing her hand into a hole and transferring her thoughts to a computer network also sounded unlikely. And what would happen when a reliable, renewable source of power was developed? Akita wouldn’t need his human body anymore. Immortality.

  She crouched in front of him and took his human hand in hers, staring into his eyes and willing him to listen. “Look, you’ve made an outstanding discovery. You could be hailed as the greatest computer genius of the twenty-first century. Patent this and develop it properly. I can help you if you like. But please don’t use it to hurt other people, even if they don’t believe what you believe.”

  “I use it to save people.” Akita’s voice rose on the word “save.” He reached over with his artificial hand and grasped both her wrists. The long tongues, smooth and cool, bound her as effectively as chains. Akita thrust his face into hers. His bloodshot eyes saw things she didn’t want to know about. For a horrible moment she thought he was going to kiss her, but instead he pushed hard on her hands, forcing her down on her knees.

  “Soon you will feel enlightenment as I do. You do want to join me, don’t you?” he pleaded.

  Or what? Or he might get rid of his foreign toy as Samael and Fujinaka obviously thought he should.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice muffled. “Of course I do.”

  She heard voices in the corridor, then the door opened, to admit a man carrying a tray.

  Akita released his hold on Eleanor’s wrists. “Iroel, thank you. The wants of the body are as intrusive as ever.”

  The man called Iroel wore a silver robe like Samael. A gangly man, his limbs swung like a puppet with loose strings. Below his smooth, bald head, his forehead was corrugated with worry lines like a tin roof.

  He put me tray on the bottom step of the dais and folded himself beside it in a kneeling bow. “Adam-sama, your meal.”

  Akita pressed a button on his throne. A board shot out of the arm and snapped onto the opposite arm, giving him a table on which to set the tray.

  He obviously didn’t believe in ascetic mortification of the flesh. The tray was crammed with bowls: clear soup, paper-thin puffer fish sashimi, delicately cut radish and carrot flowers, a huge bowl of steaming rice, and morsels such as sea urchin roe and steamed aubergine with sweet miso.

  Eleanor’s dry throat closed in revulsion. Akita wasn’t going to listen to her. He was set on his mad scheme, whatever that might be, and she had to find a way both to stop him and to make sure Mari was safe.

  She stood up, slowly because her joints ached. “I want to see my niece.”

  Akita, his mouth full, waved at the door with his chopsticks.

  “I will take you,” said Iroel. He waved her ahead of him out the door almost eagerly. They left Akita eating alone on his throne.

  The screen cleared. A cartoon figure stood against a flat orange background. From the neck down it wore white robes like a Buddhist statue, but the haloed head was that of an old manga star, Ishihara had forgotten the name.

  “Greetings, my children. I am Adam.”

  The notes at the bottom of the screen said the voice was synthesized and that the word used for “my” could also be interpreted as “our.”

  “Blessed are we who have been reborn into this Third Age, for to us is given the gift of Ascension.” The manga head’s lips didn’t open; it merely stared out of the screen.

  “You who are receiving this message are doubly blessed, for to you is fallen the duty of guiding others to the right path.”

  “Thanks for nothing,” muttered Beppu beside him. His eyes were red-rimmed, and he needed a shave. Ishihara knew he looked the same.

  “As you have seen today, the Third Children and myself are ready to assume our rightful position as leaders in the Great Ascension.”

  Third Children, gods knew where that came from. The police profilers upstairs might work it out.

  “My humble role is to be your guide and savior. I will help your human souls escape their prisons of desire and rise up to be divine.”

  Very humble, yes.

  “You will make the necessary arrangements to hand over leadership of government to us. The prime minister may send confirmation on a public broadcast at 11:00 A.M. today.” The figure placed its palms together and bowed. The image froze.

  It was after ten on Friday morning. They had just come back to Osaka after helping the fire crews pump out the last of the gas at the Zecom Betta.

  “Touched in the head,” said Beppu around a yawn.

  The message had been sent to the National Police Authority at six in the morning on a delayed-action timer from the system manager’s office in the Zecom Betta. The message must have been sent just before the attack started, but the senders could have left much earlier. Fire crews had also found timers in the containers of rescopal placed in key positions in the duct system of the Betta. Secure doors had been opened without a trace of forcing. Why bother with breaking in when the systems manager will let you in?

  Forensics hadn’t finished with the blackened remains of the systems manager’s office and the main control room. Ishihara swallowed his fear of what they might find inside. He hadn’t told Tanaka the whole story, merely that they believed his wife was still with Akita, wherever he was.

  “What else have they got?” Beppu cleared the screen and called up more reports.

  A farmer in the hills north of the Zecom Betta saw two twelve-seater vans and one eight-seater driving fast along the old north road before the alarm went off. All stations in their radius of travel were alerted, and there was a possible satellite ID from the Defense Department.

  Beppu yawned. “Looks like the country boys get more action this time. Once the satellites zoom in on those vans, they won’t be able to escape.”

  Ishihara shook his head dubiously. The idea of the Silver Angels hiding out in some abandoned farmhouse seemed wrong; no electricity, no computers, surrounded by all that dirt and decay Gen said they disliked so much …

  “I’d like to know what they really want. ‘Hand over government’ is pretty vague.”

  “According to the report …” Beppu scrolled down the screen. “Our basic strategy is to keep them talking while we find out where and who they are. The first is HQ’s job, as they’ve got the hardware. The other is our job, as we have access both to the database and the street.”

  He looked around the incident room. Only two other detectives sat hunched over computers. “We better tell Funo we’re briefed. She said she’d be upstairs with the profilers.”

  “You go,” said Ishihara. He’d prefer to avoid McGuire’s husband. “I’ll call Mikuni and see what he’s got.”

  Beppu left.

  Yui might know more about Akita’s Silver Angels’ connection than he admitted. The police could now charge him under Internal Security Laws, for supporting a terrorist group—maybe that prospect would be enough to make him spit out any conveniently forgotten facts.

  Ishihara hadn’t spoken to Mikuni since they parted during the chaos at the Zecom Betta earlier that morning. When he called now, Mikuni was eating noodles at his desk. He had shaved and changed his smoke-stained shirt, but he ate with a dogged care that told Ishihara how tired he was.

  “What’s Yui been telling you?” said Ishihara.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Funo. Career inspector on the Silver Angels case.”

  “This damn gas stunt has messed up a promising homicide investigation, you know that?” Mikuni stared as Ishihara laughed. “I’m serious.”

  “That’s what’s funny.”

  “Yui says he didn’t know Akita had a connection with the Silver Angels or any other group,” said Mikuni. “I don’t know how we’re going to prove otherwise.” He f
olded his chopstick wrapper into a neat bow, slid the chopsticks through it, and balanced them on top of his empty bowl.

  “It doesn’t matter from the prosecution’s point of view. He’s guilty under the Antiterrorist Act.” Ishihara quoted, “‘Anyone who supplies terrorists with weapons, funds, or other assistance with or without knowledge that they are terrorists.’” Yui must have given Akita something in payment for the research. Akita was associated with the Angels. Which means Yui supported the Angels.”

  Mikuni lit a cigarette wearily. “If he knows anything, I think he would have tried to bargain with the knowledge by now. You saw him—the only thing he’s fanatic about is his frigging company.”

  Ishihara lit a cigarette, too.

  Mikuni stared at something to one side of the monitor. “That’s why he did it, he says. To make sure the company stays ahead. It wasn’t the money that he resented so much from Nakamura, you know. He was mostly pissed off because Nakamura wanted to work on the new project. Yui thinks Nakamura was bloody useless.”

  “What did he say about Akita?” said Ishihara.

  “All he’s said is that Akita approached him for a reference when Akita applied for the job of systems manager at the Zecom Betta. He gave a false name and history, but Yui recognized him from when he worked there before. He then showed Yui some hardware, a prosthetic I think, which persuaded Yui it was worth keeping Akita around. Yui’s been buying information off him ever since.”

  “Yui definitely said ‘buy’?”

  “Yes, in cash. Convenient for him that we can’t prove it.”

  “Hang on,” said Ishihara with a grin. “Yui must have got Akita to fake the Betta records to show he went home at 7:35. There’s your connection.”

  Mikuni’s eyes lit up, then he grimaced. “I know that. You know that. But we can’t prove it, not with the Betta’s systems in such a mess.”

  The Silver Angels had covered their tracks well.

  “Nakamura must have found out about the Silver Angels’ connection; otherwise, there’d be no blackmail. But Nakamura’s dead, so we’ll never know.” Ishihara stubbed out his cigarette. “It’s nearly eleven. They have to reply to the cult by then.”

  “I’ll be down at the Betta, cleaning up the mess.” Mikuni flexed his shoulders painfully. “We’ve got most of our manpower keeping the blasted media in line.”

  “They’re camped out around Prefectural Office here, too.”

  Beppu was still upstairs. Several other detectives reported in and exchanged developments in the case. The geography club tutor Harada had been found dead. His body was discovered in a bamboo thicket on the outskirts of Takamatsu, in the north of Shikoku. He’d been poisoned with the same chemical that was released in the Betta. Inoue/Samael was the prime suspect.

  They all gathered around the monitor tuned to the public broadcast to see what the answer to the Silver Angels’ message would be. Instead of the prime minister, the head of the National Police Authority in Tokyo read a few lines that said the government was taking the Silver Angels’ threat seriously but that they needed to talk details.

  Would the group reply?

  The balance of opinion in the incident room wavered between those who thought the prime minister should have made the announcement, as requested, and those who thought the police chief should have refused any cooperation outright.

  Ishihara called Forensics again. Yes, they’d got a positive DNA analysis from the blackened mess that had been Akita’s apartment. The only human remains were some bones and skin, of Akita himself.

  Ishihara felt some of his tension dissolve. McGuire hadn’t been trapped by the fire. But if Akita was dead, where did McGuire go and why?

  “Is that the only human residue?” he asked the technician, a middle-aged woman with a distracted air.

  “Yes,” said the technician testily. “Our teams do check, you know.”

  “I suppose you couldn’t have missed another person’s remains?”

  She glared at him. “Of course not. And if you’d read the report instead of bothering me, you’d see that the remains we did find weren’t a whole body.”

  “What?” Ishihara slid his chair forward in surprise and hit his knee with a crunch on the edge of the desk.

  “We found a hand that had been surgically severed at the wrist.” She seemed to be enjoying his expression.

  Ishihara blinked. Maybe Akita wasn’t dead, after all. “If the man chopped off his hand, wouldn’t the trauma be disabling?”

  “It would be at the time,” she said smugly. “But it wasn’t done recently. This is an old wound. The limb was probably frozen for a while.”

  “Thanks,” said Ishihara humbly. “I’ll read the report.” He did, before taking the information to Inspector Funo, who had retreated to her office.

  “A severed hand?” Her eyes widened. “Done before the fire?”

  Ishihara pointed to the screen. “More like surgically removed, then preserved, probably frozen.”

  She wrinkled her nose in distaste. “Could it be some ritual? Sacrifice?”

  Ishihara hoped for McGuire’s sake that the Silver Angels did not engage in human sacrifice.

  “I don’t know. But that’s all there is. I’m wondering if the fire was a smokescreen.”

  “Literally.” She glanced at him, one eyebrow raised.

  “And figuratively. So we’d assume Akita was dead and concentrate on putting out the fire. Not notice other things.”

  “Such as the vans going north.”

  Ishihara said nothing. He couldn’t find the right, tactful, words.

  Funo rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand. She wore a crisp, clean white blouse, but her face looked younger in tiredness. He wondered if she’d slept at all. “Do you have some new evidence about that, too?” She rose from her desk and walked around to stare up at him.

  Ishihara gave up on tact. “It’s too obvious.”

  Funo folded her arms and waited for him to continue. “‘Obvious’ doesn’t tell me much, Assistant Inspector.”

  “I mean, as far as we know, all of the group’s connections are with the city. They don’t have a commune in the country, they don’t own land …”

  “As far as we know,” she repeated. “You think the vans are a decoy, too? Like the fire.”

  “Could be.” He stared straight ahead. He never managed to put these feelings into words properly.

  “The thought did cross my mind.” She unfolded her arms and slowly returned to her chair behind the desk. “All the metropolitan police are on high alert, too. I expect soon that someone will come forward with information about the chemist, Inoue. Unless you’ve got another lead, I don’t see what else we can do.”

  She paused before sitting down. “Do you have another lead?”

  “No.”

  “Ah.” She lowered herself in the chair with an exhausted thud. The interview was finished.

  “What about McGuire? She could be used as a hostage.”

  Funo fixed him with a stare from red-rimmed eyes. “Until we get a demand from them, we don’t know that. And frankly, Ishihara, we have only McGuire’s call to her husband as evidence that she isn’t part of this whole thing.”

  Ishihara’s jaw set stubbornly. “Yui didn’t say anything about her.”

  “Yui didn’t know about the Silver Angels.”

  “You’re wasting time suspecting her.”

  Funo opened her mourn, probably to remind him who decided what was a waste of time, but shut it again. She sighed, and her voice was kinder.

  “McGuire links it all together, you know. The Zecom case, that accident you investigated in Minato Ward, the Silver Angels. And where is she now?”

  Ishihara found the idea of McGuire as a criminal mastermind so preposterous that he was genuinely lost for words. Funo took this as resignation.

  “Concentrate on reviewing the information we have. Correlate it again with the national database. I’m sure we’ll find McGuire when we find the
Silver Angels.”

  I know that, thought Ishihara as he shut the office door. I’d prefer to find her alive, that’s all.

  The Silver Angel Iroel stopped in a swish of robes opposite the alcove with the stairs. Eleanor found that she knew now that the stairs led upstairs into a two-story building. In the interface she must have seen the layout of the place. The basement consisted of a rectangular block of rooms surrounded by corridors on three sides. There was no exit except for the stairs.

  She could hear the murmur of voices in the rooms, but there was nobody else in the corridor.

  “Where is this place?” she said.

  “It’s an old factory.” Iroel looked uneasily over his shoulder. “You should have seen it when we arrived. Machines and junk all over the place.”

  She thought of the covered equipment in Akita’s room. It must be pretty obsolete to have been left behind. And how could the Angels get an old factory livelined? That required money and official permission.

  “Kneel down,” said Iroel

  “Why? You said you’d take me to see my niece.”

  His forehead wrinkled further with concern. “There are cameras. I’m trying to help you,” he whispered when she didn’t move.

  She sighed and bent stiffly to the concrete. What now?

  Iroel stuck one hand out over her head, palm upward, and half closed his eyes.

  “I have a proposition for you, McGuire-san,” he said softly, then intoned louder, “Myo-ho-ren-ge-kyo-ny-orai …”

  “That’s the Lotus Sutra,” muttered Eleanor to the floor.

  “I know, it sounds good … ji-ga-toku-butsu-rai …”

  Two acolytes rounded the corner and skittered past, their eyes down. Iroel waited until they went in one of the doors.

  “If you help me, I will help you and your niece get out of here,” he said softly.

  Eleanor looked up sharply. His face, scored with downward lines like a worried bloodhound, seemed quite sane. “How can I help you?”

  “You can enter the Macrocosm. We want you to bring us some information. My partner and I have readied a download point.”