Walken grunted. "Not as bad as the last one, but not how I'd want to go."
Karen snorted. "Yeah, but look at this." She gestured to the wrist and the detached limb spun around obediently and rose above the rest to display it clearly. The flesh about the wrist was ringed in a corona of purple. "I had the computer clarify these bruises for you," she said. Her tone had descended from what was up to now intellectual detachment to something grim. "Look at this."
Walken looked on as she waved her hand over the holographic bruises. They began to clear up until only the darkest spots were revealed. Immediately, his eyes screwed up in confusion. "But wait," he said, "They look like—"
"Mmmhmm." Karen drew a deep breath. The bruises that had revealed themselves were made by fingers too small to be a man's, or even a woman's. They looked as though they belonged to a child.
"Jesus Christ," Walken breathed. "The Dolls?" He shook his head. It was clear now that whatever rode in the coffins with the other Doll was evil, wearing the skins of children. He found the familiar Wonderland horror rush down his spine, as harsh and cold as ice water.
But Hammond shook her head. "I don't think so. Their skeletons are too weak to accept the infrastructure necessary for those kinds of prosthetics; you need adult skeletons for that. Maybe it was a combat prosthesis. I've seen people come in here with tactical limbs armed with pistons. Hell, maybe it was even some kind of robot with small manipulators — but Dolls? Not a chance."
Silence stretched between them for long moments before he spoke again. "All right," he said after taking a deep breath. "And Stadil?"
"Brain-burnt. Totally." She nodded at the body he had originally come to, Stadil's own. "All of them went the same way. I'm guessing they had some kind of deadman unit in their skulls that went off after they destroyed the core."
"It wasn't a feedback effect?" Walken asked, brows arched.
"A feedback effect wouldn't do this. This isn't your standard hacker's case of brainfire, Agent. There's really nothing left inside their skulls, save for traces of brain tissue, plastic and some trace metals. Something was put in their heads, along with their neural hardware, to take it out. Most likely it was when they completed whatever it was they were doing up there."
Walken frowned. His morning had officially turned to shit, he had no real idea as to what the hell was going on and it was starting to damage his calm. "All right. Did you find anything else? Any other implants?"
"The bodyguards were your standard crushers," Karen said. "Muscle grafts, amped nerves, that sort of thing — nasty, absolutely top-of-the-line nasty, in fact — but nothing that speaks directly of Wonderland."
Walken nodded. "All right," he said, more to himself than to her. "All right. Well, that's something at least. Thank you, Doctor. I'll look into it."
She looked at his face for a moment, concern written in her eyes. "When are you going to start calling me Karen like everyone else does?" she asked. "You know I don't stand on ceremony."
He flashed a thin smile. "Never, because you've earned it."
The smile she returned was incandescent.
Walken's smile had evaporated the moment he made his exit from the medical bay. This was one of those mysteries he dreaded, the kind that just got more confusing as more information was uncovered. The mystery of the how and the who had been solved, or at least progressed greatly, but the why still entirely eluded him.
He crossed the office floor to Kelley's cubicle. The redheaded tech was bent over his battery of screens, apparently lost in the flashing array of data that was assembled there. He cleared his throat, took a deep breath and closed his eyes. "All right," he said. "Hit me."
"Eh?" Kelley looked up, blinking at him owlishly. "Oh. All right, well... okay. You talked to Karen, right?"
"Yeah," Walked replied with a faint nod. A frown lined his lip. "I don't like it at all."
A slight bark of laughter from Kelley at that. "Well, no shit you don't," he said as he gazed into the legion of displays. "It's your ass on the hook, isn't it?"
"I mean the way they all died." Walken's frown deepened a little. "C'mon, Art. This isn't something to laugh at, you know?"
Again the shadow that Walken had seen earlier flickered over Kelley's face. "Yeah, I know," Kelley said, sobering with that flicker before returning to his usual cheery self. "I'm just trying to lighten the mood, man, that's all." He shrugged. "Definitely got a hell of a mystery on our hands, that's for sure."
Walken stared at him a moment. He wondered at the flicker he had seen. Perhaps Kelley was as affected as he was by the business — if he was, it would be the first time he'd seen it in the young agent. "So what do you think?"
Kelly glanced up at him. "What do you mean?"
"Well..." The voice in the back of his head stirred. Whispered. "I don't know, honestly. It seems to me that whoever got them was kitted out with some kind of heavy combat bionics." Somehow, the thought seemed much more appropriate. Better they be fighters than victims. He didn't know why he felt that way. "Hammond said the dolls can't be fitted out with bionics."
"I'd have to agree." Kelley shook his head. "As you know, biocomputer technology isn't that advanced as of yet. There's a barrier between simple programming — which sexual activity tends to be for these Dolls, once you account for the fact they're tailored specifically to the owner's kinks — and more complex activities. Combat has too many variables. I don't know, man. Maybe it's been breached, but you'd think that we'd have seen it in more important products by now."
"Maybe these are prototypes," Walken ventured. "It'd be an innocuous way to test the programming under the guise of a next-generation sex toy, wouldn't it?"
Kelley shook his head and looked back at his monitors. The shadow flickered over his features again. "Christ, I hope not," he sighed. "Zombified little girls giving blowjobs to rich perverts is bad enough. Imagine what horrors those fuckers could put together with that kind of technology."
"Same as what we've already got, I figure," Walken said with a grunt. "Just harder to detect. We'd have to put sniffers on every city block to sweep them."
"You're forgetting artificial intelligence," said Kelley. He squinted into his floating screens, his pale face drained even further of color while lit up by their bluish cast. "Conventional technology can't replicate intelligence to any dangerous degree, but autonomous systems based on nerve tissue? Biocomps might make it possible. Can you imagine a Wonderland AI?"
Walken grunted now, looking down at his feet. "You're gonna give me nightmares, Kelley," he rumbled. "What about this report? What did you get from the cores we took over at Stadil's?"
Kelley's face screwed up in a wince. "Nada."
"'Nada?'" Walken glanced back up. "What do you mean, 'nada'?"
Every word he uttered now seemed to give Kelley a twinge of pain. There seemed to be no end to the bad news. "Unfortunately," he said, looking pained as he turned in his chair to face Walken, "It looks like they were fried as well."
Walken gave him an incredulous look. "Cemsys Sevens are triple-insulated against thermal shock," he said, his tone scrawled all over with disbelief. "They should be able to sit comfortably in a goddamned chemical fire." What the Hell kind of means could have been used to destroy a machine with that kind of strongboxing? Or three, for that matter? "Was there some kind of product tampering? Incendiary gel in the casing, something like that?"
Kelley's expression had become something more akin to what Walken was used to; a sort of grim excitement, like seeing some particularly interesting bit of mechanism present in a family tomb on funeral day. "That's just it," he said. "I don't know how they did it, but it looks as though they all connected to the terminal upstairs and Stadil interfaced with the triple core — and then... poof!" He spread his hands for impact. "He triggered some kind of failsafe and it all just went up. Fried the cores, fried their brains, everything. I still haven't figured out how they did it. Some kind of feedback loop, I figure. It more than did for the circuitry a
nd I very much doubt that I'll get much out of storage. The crystals are little more than gravel."
"But you'll try," said Walken, hopeful.
"Well, yeah," said Kelley with a shrug. "I'm just saying, don't get your hopes up."
It was comedy that he'd think Walken would even try at this moment. "You just see what you can do," he said, "And let me know what you get off the plane's security data, all right?"
"No go, there." Kelly shrugged again. "That camera wasn't active apparently. No data fed from it into the security bank."
"Are you shitting me?" Anger flared as Walken dragged his palm down his face with a sigh. "Well what the fuck, man?"
"I have no idea," Kelly replied. "Must've been done by whoever was arranging the transfer overseas. I'm sorry, Tom."
Walken took a deep breath. "It's all right," he said and reached over to give Kelley's shoulder a reassuring squeeze. "I appreciate it. Good man."
Kelley's grin turned slightly goofy and he turned back to his work.
In the end, all Walken had was half a theory that fell apart under the slightest scrutiny. He was sure that Stadil was responsible for the Dolls being in the country and that the Koreans were the intended recipient — but after that? No idea. And what was more, the records... what the Hell could be on those machines that would drive a man like Stadil — and his lieutenants — to suicide in order to cover it up? Organized crime? Terrorism? Frustration bloomed hot and searing in his heart.
Now it was time to brave the Chief. Walken drew a deep breath, collecting himself for whatever wrath that Wolsey had to levy and headed for his office.
Wolsey sat behind his slab of a desk, his still-heavy features set in a black frown. His office looked very much like a vault with its walls of corrugated armored plastic and its lack of windows. Wolsey was framed by a large holographic monitor taking up the back wall, tuned to display the view from outside the building. Walken recalled the same setup in Stadil's office and shivered.
"Agent Walken," he announced as Walken stepped in. "Good afternoon. Have a seat."
"All right," said Walken, curiosity rising in his throat. He moved to sit in one of the large leather and steel chairs that were set up like lesser thrones before Wolsey's office altar. "Something the matter, Chief?"
Wolsey looked at him for a long moment. He was not an attractive man; his watery blue eyes were large and staring and his face had succumbed to the sagging of age so that he looked more like an angry old bulldog sitting behind that desk. In the days of cheap plastic surgery and regeneration provided by gene therapy, Wolsey's ugliness was a predator's display. A warning. Don't fuck with me, kid, it seemed to say. I've already been there. He leaned back after a moment and his thick lips pursed, almost as if he were holding back particularly nasty invective, before he finally spoke.
"I suppose you've talked to Hammond already." Wolsey's thick arms folded over his broad chest. "She's told you her conclusions?"
"Yes, sir," Walken replied. He shifted a bit in his chair, his face kept carefully neutral.
"And what do you think?"
"I don't know what to think, honestly." Walken leaned back in his seat, lips pursed. "It looks like there were assassins involved, but..."
"But you aren't convinced," Wolsey rumbled. "All right, what do those famous instincts of yours say?"
Walken drew a deep breath. His eyes squinted a bit as he shifted, crossed his legs in a futile attempt to get comfortable. Wolsey's eyes seemed to threaten to split open his skull with their gaze and take his secrets for themselves. "It's true that it looks that way," he says. "But something isn't right. It's not that I think that the Dolls are involved, but all this talk about how they can't be involved bothers me. That doesn't really mean anything where Wonderland is concerned." He spread his hands. "We've been proven wrong before."
"That's a good point," replied Wolsey with a nod. "But then, if we are looking at a new advance in biocomputer technology, that makes securing the Dolls even more of a priority. They'll have to be secured, dissected, studied --"
Walken grunted. "Crack 'em open and see what's inside, huh," he muttered. "Is that it?"
"Yes, Agent." Wolsey's voice was hard. "That's exactly it. I've never understood your softness where these things are concerned, but I've tolerated it. They aren't little girls, you understand? And I have no problem sending you to round them up so they can be 'cracked open' and studied — Hell, I'll stand there with Hammond and watch her do the work myself. We need to know what Wonderland's doing. If it is possible that biomechanisms capable of this degree of independent activity — killing, fleeing and surviving in the city on their own — are possible, that opens a whole new world of trouble for us. I want to know exactly what they're capable of.
"That's assuming, of course, that this is what we're looking at. Let's also remember that up until now, the human body hasn't been able to support extensive bionic augmentation without severe biological problems or system failure."
Wolsey shook his head and consulted his terminal. "If they were somehow able to be augmented to the point that they could take those Jopok boys apart..."
This keeps getting better and better, Walken thought and he snorted. "...you have a whole new range of problems," he finished.
Wolsey nodded. "Precisely," he said. "So you can see why I'm pushing you so hard on this. If you can make this, it'll put us ahead of the curve in keeping these things out of the country." His brows arched a bit. "To say nothing of what it will mean for your career. You pull this off and you might outrank me in a few years."
"You flatter me," said Walken, who now frowned down at his hands at the thought of it. "But all right. What are our other alternatives?" He looked back up at Wolsey, brows arched, wanting very much for there to be one.
For a long moment Wolsey stared at Walken with his clear, hard eyes; the younger man shrank even more before them. "Well, it's like you've already said — the assassin scenario is certainly not impossible. We're still working on the variables."
Wolsey allowed for another pause while he adjusted his collar and tapped a few keys on the terminal sitting on his desk. The thing was a dinosaur. It still had a physical monitor, a clear mark of antiquity, but it was still capable of interfacing with the Bureau's systems. The Fed had always been big on backwards compatibility, but these days it didn't seem happy unless its systems could link up with the goddamned Pyramids. "Tell me again what you think about last night. Specifically, what you think about Stadil."
Walken blinked. "I think he's the one responsible for this whole thing, Chief. I think he pulled the strings to make it happen and has probably been working to bring in Wonderland goods for some time. Our job might have gotten a lot easier with him dying."
Wolsey's heavy brows arched. "Is that all?"
"...no." Walken squared his shoulders. "Obviously someone else is involved. Angry clients, perhaps, if not someone over him. It's one thing to take great pains to destroy his own data, but himself? His men? Who the Hell does that?"
"Scorched earth tactics," Wolsey murmured in disgust. He seemed as if he were going to say something more on the matter, but his expression changed; his disgust deepened, shifted into some new flavor that Walken could not identify. "Do you know what I hate about this country, Tom?"
Walken flinched a bit. Wolsey never used his first name. "Sir?"
Wolsey leaned forward a bit more so that his forearm lay entirely on the desk, bracing him. "We are living in a nation where any fool with a press badge thinks that they can take information about a Federal investigation and turn it into next day's headlines so that they can profit off it. They feed off the fruits of our labor like goddamned parasites."
Walken said nothing. He wasn't honestly sure where Wolsey was going with this particular diatribe. He waited for him to continue, his expression growing neutral.
"I got a call just a few minutes ago from Cleo Lovejoy over at the Times. You know, that editor we got a lock on." Lovejoy was caught a few years ago wit
h six vials of extremely illegal nootropics derived from altered human tissue and only the fact he gave up his broker, who clearly had Wonderland ties, got him out of Federal prison. Now he was deep in the pocket of the Bureau. "He told me that one of their reporters got a block of data from an unknown source around the time you were heading out to intercept the Koreans — a secure file. He saw it in her data account before she put it on a memory cell."
Now Walken spoke. His brows arched and he sat up a bit straighter. Hope and alarm mingled in the back of his skull. "Stadil dumped his data to the press?"
"Maybe, maybe not. Either way, we can't let the press have that sort of data on hand. The people think we're the best line of defense against those deviants, Agent. If Stadil did give her data and she was able to read it..." Wolsey sat back, letting that hang in the air.
The two of them knew precisely what it meant. If Hunt were to publish that data, whatever it actually turned out to be, it would be a big stab in the eye for the Bureau in the court of public opinion. A lack of confidence in the Bureau could mean its dissolution. What would that mean for the country then?
Though Walken didn't like his sentiments, Wolsey was right. This could mean a disaster. It wasn't the politics that Walken cared about, of course, but he knew very well of its importance. All this would do is make the Bureau look bad. "What do you want me to do, Chief?" Walken asked him, sagging in his seat again.
"I want you to get that memory cell," he replied. The corners of Wolsey's mouth twitched into a faint, unpleasant smile. "Anyone who'll broadcast that trash in the public forum is potentially an enemy of the state in my judgment."
Walken managed not to blink; he forced his expression into impassivity again. "Who am I looking for?"
Wolsey's thick lips pursed. "Annika Hunt."
Walken very barely held back a curse. Annika Hunt was one of the best investigative reporters for the Times and therefore a major pain in the ass. As good as she was at digging things up she should have been on the Bureau's staff as an Agent rather than some newsfeed grunt, but she had no love for the Fed in any of its forms. 'Less government means more room for the truth' was her battle cry. She was a champion of the free press, which was rare these days in the land of overwhelming political and corporate interests — Walken would have admired her if it weren't clearly done just for the ratings. Altruism, like spirituality, was a bloody corpse at the bottom of the bay.
Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle) Page 9
