Sparrowhawk

by Thomas A Easton

  “There?” The Count pointed toward the other end of the windrow. The Mack driver’s bloodstained seat rose from the rubble, surrounded by the crumpled metal of the cabinets that had housed the Mack’s control circuitry.

  The cushions of the seat had been shredded by the same flying shards of plastic that had killed the driver. On them, Bernie found the bloody model truck that had hung from the Mack’s collar. The blood was dry, so that when he picked it up, his hands remained clean.

  “You should take it home,” said Lieutenant Alexander. “Great souvenir.”

  “I think I will.” He set the truck down again, turned his attention to the cabinets, and rummaged until he found what he thought might be the right one. He pried at what had been access ports with his hands, but he accomplished nothing but a creak or two of protest from the distorted metal.

  “Help me.” The other two leant their strength to his, and the metal gave. He reached in, felt, and pulled out a circuit board. He examined it, set it aside, and drew out a second.

  “There.” His grunt of satisfaction told Lieutenant Alexander and Dr. Addering that he had found what he sought. He pulled the photo of the Sparrow’s chip from his pocket and held it beside the chip he had found on the board. He held both to catch the best light he could, and then he grunted again. “Same part number,” he said. “It’s a PROM, all right. And the serial numbers are even sequential.”

  Later, after a technician had dusted the Mack’s circuitry for fingerprints, Bernie held the chip in the palm of his hand and stared at it. There had been no fingerprints, of course, just as there had apparently been none in the Sparrow. He didn’t need them to know, as surely as if he had been present at the scenes, watching the installation of the chips, that one person was responsible for them both. And if they had been installed by different hands, then certainly the same mind had been behind them both.

  The warehouse had become an oven in the time that Bernie had been in it. Sweat dripped from his hairline, and he breathed cautiously through his open mouth. The Mack lay in pieces now, its skin removed, the gases of heat-hastened putrescence escaping to the air.

  One person, one man, behind both the Sparrow and the Mack. But he could see already that there were differences. The Sparrow had gone to a specific place at a specific time and there engaged in specific behavior. And that behavior had been perfectly normal, peaceful feeding, at least from the Sparrow’s point of view. If the person behind the Sparrow had had a particular target, the method had been haphazard. It could have worked only by luck.

  The Mack, on the other hand, had seemed to have a specific target in its mind. He had been convinced at the time that it had been coming straight at him, or Emily, or both of them. It had, like an Assassin bird, been programmed to respond to a specific image with a direct, unhesitating, straight-line attack. If he had been unarmed, he and Emily would now both be dead. Instead, there was the Mack, surrounded by the department’s butchers, while porters hauled the first bins of meat to the dumpster backed up to the warehouse door. Both butchers and porters wore gas masks; Bernie wished he had one too.

  The Count had left shortly after Bernie had found the chip, though not before telling him to find whoever was responsible. There was no hint that he should restrict his investigation in any way. Neoform would be fair game, and he could spend as much time with Emily as he wished. Not that the Count knew anything about the aftermath to the Mack’s attack, but even if he did that might not matter. The Mack had attacked when Bernie had been with her, and that might well mean that Bernie was doing something very right in seeing her. He grinned at the thought that he might find his next clue in bed.

  The vet had lingered to examine the Mack, patting its side as if it were not lying dead in a vast tomb, but merely ill and the warehouse a kennel of suitable size. Bernie had read of ancient chieftains, whose followers set them at their deaths in their vessels of trade and war, surrounded by weapons, goods, even servants and pets, and then covered all in a barrow of earth and stone. Watching Addering, he had turned his gaze upon the warehouse. There was stone and earth enough in its structure. And there, in the tiers of cartons were goods enough for any ship-grave. The Mack was the trading vessel. All they needed was the chieftain who had directed it.

  The vet had not left when the technician arrived to search for fingerprints. That had not disturbed him. But then the meatcutters had come to dismember the Mack. He had vanished as soon as he saw the first of their blades and bonesaws. He had, thought Bernie, known what was coming.

  In cooler weather, those workers would be wrapping the meat they removed from the enormous carcass, packaging it as future meals for the police department’s Hawks and other genimals. They would do the same for a dead Sparrow, a Roachster, a Tortoise, whatever came their way. Few owners wanted the meat for themselves, and insurance companies were all too willing to write off the value. It saved the cost of towing and disposal. But part of the deal was that in hot weather, when the meat spoiled overnight, or when the carcass must be examined and delays allowed the meat to rot, the department would handle the disposal.

  Bernie tossed the chip in his palm. There was no reason why he should stand the stench a moment longer. Besides, he needed a phone. He wanted to ask Alan Praeger how he had managed to read the Sparrow’s PROM chip.

  The glass and concrete computer science building had been built many decades before. Most of the buildings on campus were a century older still, their gothic lines and ornamental gargoyles speaking of an age that had vanished more centuries before that. Tradition lay thick beneath the massive trees, though the people who strolled the paths, often with electronic or paper books in their hands, were mostly young.

  Bernie Fischer parked the Roachster in a no-parking zone shaded by an American chestnut, a heritage of those early days when gengineers had defeated the blight that had nearly destroyed the species. There had been little money in the cure, he once had read, but students had needed a research project. Students had also been responsible for potsters and the first simple pumpkin houses.

  He emerged from the Roachster and patted the vehicle’s side. The chestnut tree seemed a slender sapling beside the ancient oaks that adorned the campus, but its shade was dense and cool and would protect his vehicle from the sun while he was gone.

  He walked around the beast, comparing it with the Hawks he vastly preferred. The genimal’s thoracic shell, mottled brown and greenish blue and orange-red, swelled to create a bubble equipped with seats, controls, windows, and doors. The doors were plastic blazoned with the department’s emblem. The Roachster’s head and mouth parts were protected by a steel bumper bolted to the shell. The creature’s legs ran backward atop the wheels to propel them. Its antennae, at rest, curled back over the thorax. The massive claws, missing in the civilian models, projected forward, long arms of the law. They were the features that had first sold police departments on these genimals. General Bodies had given the first ones away, and as soon as a cop had used those claws to tear the wall out of an apartment building and seize a screaming, flailing kidnapper, the market had begun to boom.

  In its way, Bernie thought, it was as marvelous a product of the gengineer’s art as a Hawk. But he loved Hawks. Roachsters he could barely stand, though he could drive them when he had to, as he had today for the short trip to the city’s south side and the university.

  He entered the computer science building to find air-conditioned coolness and a wall-mounted, glassed-in board that listed names and office numbers. Minutes later, he was in the second-floor office of the man he had come to see, and Henry Narabekian had plugged the Mack’s chip into a circuit board wired into his workstation.

  Narabekian wore a thick mustache as if to compensate for the near hairlessness of his scalp, but every hair was black and glossy. He was one of those who go bald when young. He was also very obviously a busy man, for his desk, bookshelves, even the antique Apple computer that adorned the top of his filing cabinet, were smothered in piles of pape
rs and disks that threatened constantly to tip and wash both Narabekian and his visitor out the door. But he was also willing to help.

  “There,” he said as lines of program code began to scroll up his screen. “It took me an hour to get into the other one. But this is just the same. Except in the program itself. There…” He froze the screen and pointed. “Activates the territoriality circuitry in the hypothalamus. It saw you as a severe threat.”

  Bernie grunted. “But why us?”

  Narabekian scanned the program further. “There. That tight block of binary code is a stored image.” He tapped commands into his keyboard, and an inset on the screen blossomed into a face, Emily’s. “Pretty lady. Not both of you then. Just her. Introduce me? She doesn’t look dangerous.”

  “She’s married.” He did not mention his own interest in her. Nor the fact that his heart sank at this confirmation of his fear. He had never really suspected that the Sparrow had been aimed at her. But there had been no question about the Assassin bird. And now this. The pattern was indisputable. Someone clearly wanted Emily Gilman dead.

  But why?

  Narabekian shrugged. “If it sees a match, bang. Push the turf button. And go for the throat.”

  “I thought it would be something like that.”

  “Have they caught whoever buggered the Sparrow?”

  Bernie shook his head.

  “Same guy then.”

  “But…” Bernie shrugged. “We have to find him.”

  Neither one of them was looking at the other. She was staring at the walls. He was scanning the restaurant’s other patrons. Both were too aware of what they had done two days before. He at least—he couldn’t speak for her—wondered if…

  “Isn’t that Chowdhury?”

  Emily craned her neck to look where he was pointing, two tables to his right and a bit behind her. “It’s lunchtime, Bernie. And our people eat all over this neighborhood.” In other words, there was nothing alarming about seeing him here, in the dining room where they had been unable to eat after the Mack attack and before…

  Then why was he watching them so intently from behind those flat, reflective panes? He stared, even while the waiter took his order. He leaned forward. He did not blink, even when Bernie met his gaze, and Bernie thought of a cat watching a bird it intended to have for lunch. All that was lacking were the erect, cocked-forward ears and the twitching tail.

  Bernie was the one to look away, returning his eyes to the menu in his hand. When Emily said, “We didn’t pay much attention to the decor before,” he looked up again. The decor lived up to the Bed & Buggy’s name: The ceiling lights were mounted on imitations of old-fashioned, wooden wheels, too narrow-rimmed to be wagon wheels. From each wall projected a relief molding of a four-poster bed. On one wall, the bed contained a Roachster; on another, a Beetle; on the third, a small, rounded antique automobile. On the last wall, the bed’s covers bulged, and a horse’s head, eyes shut, lay upon the pillow; behind the bed was the shadowed outline of wooden wheels and a high, fringed buggy-top. The dessert cart, waiting near the kitchen’s swinging door, was another four-poster, high-canopied and on wheels.

  He grunted. Then, as they ordered, he resolved to ignore Chowdhury. Emily had tried to refuse his invitation to lunch, but he had told her he had some information about the Mack and its chip. Finally, he looked at her. Her pupils were wider than the restaurant’s dimness could account for. Was she worried? She should be. Or was she simply nervous about their return to the scene of their own crime?

  “Someone,” he said. “Someone is out to get you.”

  “I know that,” she said quietly. “The Assassin bird had to be aimed. But yesterday…That was just random, wasn’t it? Like the Sparrow?”

  He shook his head. “The Mack was aimed too.” He fished the Mack’s chip from a shirt pocket and laid it on the table in front of her. She picked it up and studied it while he told her of the image Narabekian had found, and of what the Mack had been programmed to do if and when it found a match for the image. “The chip was identical to the one in the Sparrow,” he added.

  For her, he didn’t need to spell it out any further. “Then they’re trying harder,” she said. She passed the chip back to him.

  “I wish there were more clues.”

  Their food came, and they picked at it. “Are there any?” she asked.

  “A few,” he said. “Enough to let me suspect a particular person.”

  Her face brightened. “Who?”

  He shook his head. “But not enough to let me say his name out loud. Or to arrest him. I need more evidence.”

  They finished their lunch in silence. Eventually, while they sipped at coffee, Bernie took a paper bag from the seat beside his own. Something in it clanked against a plate when he set it on the table.

  “What’s that?”

  “The Mack had it around its neck.” He pulled from the bag the model truck. He had washed away the blood to reveal the gleaming chrome. “I thought your boy might like it.”

  “Would he ever!” Her grin was as wide and enthusiastic as he might have wished. But at the same time she was staring blankly at the truck. Finally, she stroked it once with her fingertips, slid it back into the bag, and drew the bag to her side of the table.

  Bernie stared at her until she finally met his eyes. Then he asked her, “Would you like to lie down for a while?” He realized that he was wearing a grin that an onlooker might take for a fatuous smirk, but he didn’t try to change it.

  She looked away from him for a long time before she finally let her head jerk in a single abrupt nod.

  Neither noticed that Chowdhury had left, his meal just half eaten.

  * * *

  Chapter Fifteen

  ANDY WAS DELIGHTED.

  Weeks before, his father had set a wading pool up in the backyard. But he had never sat down in it with Andy, never sailed a boat, sunk a submarine, spouted a whale, never splashed.

  Now his mother had come home from work, changed into her bathing suit, and climbed into the warm water. She didn’t leave much room for him, but he didn’t seem to mind. He pushed a boat toward her. She pushed it back. He wound up a whale and let it loose to thrash its tail. She bent, took a mouthful of water, and sprayed it into the air so that it showered down on both of them. He splashed her. She splashed him back.

  They both hooted with laughter. And when she moved to a towel spread upon the lawn, to sun herself dry in the declining rays of the afternoon sun, he sat down beside her, blissfully ignoring the stickiness where skin met skin.

  “What did that Mack truck look like, Mommy? When it was trying to get you?” She hadn’t told him about the incident. When she had come home Monday, he had met her with the news that she had been on the veedo. She hadn’t noticed the reporters and their cameras, although it did not surprise her to learn they had been there.

  “All teeth, honey. All teeth.” She made a face at him. He squealed. “It wore a collar,” she added. “Just like a real dog. And on that collar…”

  “What?” He bounced on the edge of the towel.

  “It’s on the front seat of the Tortoise. Go see.”

  He jumped up and ran. In a moment, he was back, in his fist a brown paper bag that sagged under the weight of something heavy. “Is this it?”

  She nodded. Slowly, as if he were trying to draw out the special occasion, he spread the top of the bag, peeked in, and exclaimed, “Wow! The collar ornament!”

  The door to the kitchen opened, and Nick stood there, staring toward them. She waved, and he said, “The wine’s ready.” He was not smiling.

  “You play with that for a while, Andy,” she said. Then, scooping up her towel and the empty bag, she went inside.

  “What’s wrong, Nick?” She was in tan slacks and plaid blouse now, her wine glass in her hand, watching her husband chop vegetables for a stir-fry. His motions were abrupt, reined-in, tense. His wine was untouched.

  When he finally spoke, she could sense the effort it co
st him to keep his voice calm and quiet. He lay down the knife, raised his glass, and took a hearty swig. “You don’t give a damn, do you?”

  She said nothing. Another swig. “You come home. You say hi. You go off with the kid. You don’t even ask about my day, or say anything about your own. I’m just a fucking cook! And where the hell did you get that truck? It’s off that Mack, right?”

  She nodded. “Bernie got it for me. We had lunch…” She felt herself beginning to turn pink as she thought of what she had done. She wished desperately that her blouse would camouflage her guilty blush and he would fail to notice.

  “Bernie!” he exploded. “You’re seeing too damned much of him!”

  “The investigation…”

  “I don’t give a shit about the investigation!” He stopped, looked at his glass, and realized that it was empty. Shoulders slumped, he went to the fridge, stared at the wine carton, and reached instead for a handful of ice. He found the scotch in the cupboard under the sink and poured as if it were amber wine. She said nothing.

  “Yes, I do,” he said more quietly. “I don’t want a Mack to get you.” His control was back. “But this Bernie…He’s drawing you away from me. Isn’t he?”

  She shook her head, but still she said nothing. What could she say? Nick was jealous, but not without reason. They had their problems in his joblessness, in the fear of losing his wife to a murderer. And he was right about Bernie. The detective had drawn her from the start, and the Mack had weakened her, allowed her to step over the line. Or was it that their narrow escape had triggered some basic urge to affirm or celebrate or simply reproduce once more her life? She had never believed that such a thing could happen, but…And she had succumbed a second time as well.