by Gregg Taylor
Perhaps, the Red Panda thought, it was Bennett's own presence on the plane that necessitated the call. Was this fiend unwilling to kill the men that he would subjugate? Was he willing to murder strangers, but not those whom he had known for years? Certainly he had held August Fenwick prisoner rather than kill him, at least briefly. Perhaps it was remorse that prevented him, the same kind of remorse that Ian James was feeling as he sat by his injured son's side. The Red Panda sighed quietly. The list of suspects was not slimming down by much, and so far he had little to show for this outing beyond a new list of research assignments for certain agents.
He was drawn back to reality by the booming voice of Gilbert MacKinnon. Not by what the man was saying, which seemed to be another imperative call to unspecified action, but by the man's demeanor. He stood at the end of the table acting as unelected chairman to the proceedings, yet as far as the Red Panda knew, his interests had not yet been touched by industrial accident or swarm of killer robots. No one would deny his right to be involved in the direction this committee took, but was he not perhaps protesting a bit too much?
MacKinnon ended his speech and noticed Fenwick's gaze. August Fenwick nodded at the older man and thumped his hand upon the table in agreement with whatever had been said, prompting just such a chorus from around the table. It occurred to him that what he had not felt since sitting down was any man at the table considering him, how he had managed to cripple an android and escape from his cell, or why he had not shared that information with police. He sensed no hidden knowledge, no deception at the table at all, and could not press a hypnotic spell against such a degree of mental discipline without tipping his hand.
On the other hand, he thought, perhaps he was on entirely the wrong track. He had to admit, his failure to narrow down the list of suspects might just mean that none of them was a particularly likely candidate for villainy. August Fenwick took a small sip of a cup of coffee that had been put before him at some point, quite some time ago to judge by the temperature. After the last several days, it had little effect. What he really needed, he thought, was a nice run over the rooftops to unwind.
Twenty-Five
The wind roared in Kit Baxter's ears as she unfurled the gliders in her costume and turned her dive into a soaring flight path high above downtown. She had elected to take the high ground on their rooftop patrol knowing that she could easily catch up with the Boss once she was in flight. But he must have covered an enormous amount of territory in the time it took her to run up the side of the tower, as it was several minutes before she could see him from afar, leaping from roof to roof with enormous strides.
She arched her back to increase her speed and quickly closed the distance between them but maintained her altitude, watching him. With every leap over the city streets he threw himself into the air with abandon, manipulating the controls within his gauntlets and using the powerful Static Shoes to repel himself away from the first rooftop, then draw himself towards the next. It all appeared effortless to the untrained eye, as though he was possessed of inhuman strength and agility, but Kit had watched him make this run often enough to know that something was different tonight. He was pushing himself harder, challenging himself as he only did when he was trying to work something out. The Flying Squirrel knew him well enough to know when to hang back and give him space to think, and when he was ready to think aloud.
He made the long leap over Bloor Street and Bay and hit the side of the high building at full stride, running up the wall as if it were a flat plain. Only the occasional sparks from the soles of his feet betrayed the device that helped to propel him forward. In seconds he reached the roof and stopped, looking south over downtown with a proprietary air. This she took to be her cue. She circled around the rooftop several times on the way down, preserving the energy of her flight in case he changed his mind and bolted, but when he kept his position she pulled the gliders close to her body and descended rapidly. At the last moment she dropped her feet and spread the gliders to increase her drag, firing her own Static Shoes and landing softly and silently. He did not turn, but he cocked his head slightly, and she knew that he was aware of her presence.
“Quiet tonight,” she offered.
“Even the criminals are afraid to walk the streets tonight,” he said grimly. “Just as well. We really don't have time for them.”
“I'm always willing to make time,” she said gamely.
He smiled and looked at her as she moved to stand beside him. The city below was as bright and shining a thing as it was on any night, but the streets were almost empty, devoid of the happy, busy energy that a summer evening such as this ought to bring. They both knew that the city could only bear this kind of coiled tension for so long. Before too much time had passed, it would explode of its own accord and Toronto would tear itself apart. It was not human nature to live in fear, and in time that could turn even decent men into animals. Somehow they had to release the city from this bondage of terror and they knew it.
“So,” she opened, “anything shake loose at the meeting?”
He shook his head. “Not a thing. So little that I'm beginning to doubt my own theory.”
“But in the absence of anything else…”
He shrugged. “Any port in a storm, I suppose. It is still the best notion we have to work with, but let's not get so wedded to the idea that we become blind to other possibilities.”
“Yes, Boss,” she nodded. “I still think you're right about this being a rich bird.”
“Explain,” he said simply. It sounded like an instruction, but she knew him well enough to know that he was hoping for a little encouragement.
“Getting power by taking over companies? Driving their stock down so he can buy them up? This isn't the crime you come up with if you grew up in a tar-paper shack,” she said with her arms folded before her. “A poor super-genius would just want a room full of gold coins that he could swim around in and say 'Bwa-ha-ha'. That's what I think, anyway.”
He considered this for a moment and nodded, looking pleased. “It isn't exactly Sherlock Holmes, but I'll take it,” he said.
“Good,” she said happily. “So what happens now?”
He turned his gaze back out towards the city, the blank eyes within his mask shining as he scanned the horizon. “He's out there somewhere, Squirrel,” he said. “He's lost his headquarters and his routes below the city. But O'Mally wasn't wrong when he said that those mechanical men weren't built in that underground complex. Somewhere he's reorganizing, rebuilding.”
The Flying Squirrel shook her head. “The last time we beat Captain Clockwork back, he went to ground for so long we'd thought he'd quit the business, remember?”
He nodded, his brow furrowed. “You're right, Squirrel,” he said. “But he's invested so much in his dual plans. Do you think he'd be willing to wait?”
She pursed her lips and tried not to look like she enjoyed being asked quite as much as she did. “If he does,” she said, “we've got problems. He might figure out how we smashed his army and make improvements. Then we've got trouble, don't we?”
He nodded and looked at her, impressed. That hadn't occurred to him either. “So we need to motivate him to resume his campaign now, perhaps catch him ill-prepared.”
The pair were silent for a moment. At last he spoke again. “Thus far the papers have been silent on the connection between the Viper and Captain Clockwork,” he said.
“Sure,” she agreed. “I don't think the Viper has made the papers at all. All of his crimes were reported as accidents and the killer robots have kind of monopolized the headlines.”
“Which was rather the point,” the Red Panda agreed.
“Right,” she said, feeling like they were on to something. “So right or wrong, maybe Clockwork is publicity shy, at least where his master plan is concerned.”
“Could be,” he nodded. “But if we could find a paper willing to take a chance on breaking the Viper angle wide open, it might just rattle his cage.”
“I think we know darn well what paper that is,” she grinned. “Jack Peters is gonna owe us something special for this story.”
He broke a wide smile back at her. “Jack Peters already owes us tonight. Didn't you see the evening edition?”
“It's been kind of a long few days,” she said. “I had nap and took a long bath.”
It was dark out, and she was still wearing her flying goggles, but she was almost certain that his ears turned the deep crimson of his mask when she said the word bath, but it didn't seem quite the time to press the point.
“The dailies exhausted the 'August Fenwick is Innocent' story in the morning edition,” he said, quickly changing the subject. “They are now quite full of detailed reports on the war on Yonge Street last night.”
“There weren't a lot of witnesses to get details from,” Kit snorted. “By the time we got there, most of the locals had run for the hills. We didn't even see a lot of cops, except when the fight got close to the roadblocks they'd set up.”
“Yes,” the Red Panda smiled, “that's why the evening Chronicle is selling so well. Seems Jack Peters found a number of eyewitnesses who could describe events in great detail. Particularly where a certain mystery man is concerned.”
She blinked at him and lifted her goggles at last. “Say that again in my good ear,” she said, offering one of the small ears on top of her cowl. “Are you saying you took credit for that?”
His reaction suggested that this hadn't really occurred to him. “I promise you, Squirrel, I had no intention of stealing your thunder. But by morning every paper in town will have picked up the story, and it will be an established fact that the Red Panda was battling tin soldiers downtown at the exact same time that Captain Clockwork knows he had August Fenwick in his custody.”
“And since he already knows there's somethin' fishy about your story…,” she had the thread now.
“It seemed the best way to make sure he didn't put two and two together,” the Red Panda nodded. “But I am sorry to upstage you. It was awfully good work on your part, and I'm sorry if I've been too distracted to say so.”
“It's okay,” she purred. “Jack owes us something special, and you owe me.”
He looked down at her, mischief shining in her eyes. He was certain she was only teasing him and he ought to tell her to behave herself, but something in him resisted the idea. “What did you have in mind?” he asked.
Her eyes grew wide and she stammered slightly at the response. “I'll make a list and get back to you,” she said. “So where does that leave us now?”
He looked back over the city. “With what I hope will be a very lucky guess,” he said.
Twenty-Six
The evening sun was sinking low, hanging just above the horizon and casting the day's last light at that impossible angle it only can in mid-summer. The MacKinnon shipbuilding yards were abuzz with activity as shift change approached, and the men were milling about, talking excitedly. Their latest project was due to launch in less than a week, and the atmosphere always became more charged as a ship neared completion. The mighty lake freighter still lay in her cradle, but soon she would be loaded with goods and carrying the MacKinnon name and fortune with her.
High above, hidden within the growing shadows atop a disused industrial crane, two dark shapes watched the hubbub below keenly.
“You think it'll be now?” the Squirrel asked.
“If it be not now, yet it will come,” the Red Panda said absent-mindedly, staring intently at a small device with a long antenna in his hand which he moved slowly to pan over the crowd of men.
“What?” she asked.
“What?” he replied, suggesting that he hadn't really been listening to himself either, which happened sometimes. “Sorry, Squirrel. I'm a little absorbed in this device.”
“You sure you're using it right?” she asked, leaning over to see the small lights in the control panel blink in no apparent sequence.
“Not really,” he said, “hence my preoccupation.”
“You still haven't told me what it does,” she grumbled.
“I still haven't entirely established that it does much of anything,” he smiled, continuing to vary the direction of the antenna.
“Then maybe this isn't the very best time for a field test,” she offered.
“On the contrary, it strikes me as the only time,” the Red Panda said, adjusting his position to try and get the device's antenna further away from the steel of the crane. “Today's Chronicle did an admirable job of linking the crimes of Captain Clockwork to this rash of industrial accidents. Jack got quite a bit of mileage out of two unnamed sources in the police department, and his promises of more revelations to come should light a fire under our foe, if anything does.”
“So what makes you so sure that he'll hit the MacKinnon shipyards?” she asked. “I thought Gilbert MacKinnon was on your list of suspects.”
“Sadly, that's hardly an exclusive position,” he grimaced. “But it does stand to reason. That ship represents a very large investment on the part of MacKinnon Shipping, and its destruction would certainly cast public doubt upon the company's stability. That strikes me as more than enough to make it a target. In a week it will be on the open lake and be much more difficult for Clockwork's killers to interfere with, but today it lies helpless.”
“And if the Chronicle makes things too hot for Captain Clockwork he can crawl back under his rock and work from the shadows, as long as the company takes a bad hit before he does,” she offered. “But what if MacKinnon's guilty?”
The Red Panda grinned. “I'm hoping that he would be so concerned about new revelations linking a wealthy suspect to the case that he would feel compelled to make sure that his company was not the only one never to suffer an attack.”
“Geeze Louise, Boss!” the Flying Squirrel exclaimed. “You think he'd really hit his own company?”
“MacKinnon is the last member of the committee to remain unscathed by the campaign of the Viper,” he said. “One way or another, if this ship is targeted, then Captain Clockwork will have done exactly that, whomever he may prove to be.”
“That's cold,” the Squirrel said. “I thought we had agents looking into the books of all these birds.”
“We do,” the Red Panda nodded, “but they'll be days, perhaps weeks, sorting that out. In the meantime we need to stop Clockwork from destroying more lives and property, even if he is just covering for himself.”
“Wait – that means that whatever happens here, we won't really have learned a thing?”
“Not exactly,” he said, playing with the device some more. “We'll have learned if this detector works or not.”
“What does it detect?” she asked suspiciously.
“Robots,” he said, grinning at her wide-eyed response. “At least I hope it does.”
“How did you manage that?” she asked, angling for a better look at the device. “Send in a boxtop to Mad Scientist's Weekly?”
“More or less,” he said as the machine began to whir at last. “Aha!” he said appreciatively, playing with the device's switches in order to get a more precise reading. “Captain Clockwork used Fenwick Industries' parts in the construction of his mechanical army. He's certainly had no time to change his stripes.” He was momentarily lost in the clicking of the detector, which seemed to be registering most strongly towards the bow of the ship as it sat in dry-dock.
“So?” she prompted at last.
“So the problem with buying off the rack is that the components have specific properties, and some of them are already known. Particularly to the manufacturer,” he smiled. “Captain Clockwork used a type of actuator in the main joints that emits a small burst of interference on a high-band radio frequency when they power up. Nothing that would normally matter in the slightest, unless you prefer that certain very cunning superheroes be unable to detect your devices in operation.”
“Am I crazy or is it pointing towards the nose of the boat?” she asked.
>
“C,” he said, “both of the above. And it's called the bow.”
“You think maybe a nice big bomb near the front of those dry-dock doors would throw a wrench in the works?” she said, preparing to move.
“I think it would be the most dramatic spot, do the most damage and take the most lives,” he offered.
“Then it's unanimous,” she said, leaping into thin air.
The heroes moved quickly, following the beacon of the detector until it cried out in a continuous signal, and then dropped suddenly to the deck of the ship. There was a general cry of alarm all around them and the Flying Squirrel could instantly see that they had another problem.
“Um, Boss?” she called above the din.
“Yes?” he asked, sweeping the crowd of workers circled around them with the device, to their greater alarm.
“Any idea which of these thirty guys is our metal man?” she called.
“None,” he said, noting which of the crowd had picked up blunt instruments, and who looked most likely to use them. “At this range the device is going crazy.”
The group of men closed their ranks. Several of the more aggressive looking stepped forward.
“I kind of assumed I'd be able to tell,” the Flying Squirrel said, “but I really can't.”
“Gentlemen!” the Red Panda called to the crowd. “We have good news and bad news. The good news is that we mean you no harm. The bad news is that one of you is most likely a walking bomb.”
The crowd grew more agitated and closed ranks still tighter. They looked ready to strike, if only someone would move first.
“These boys know we're good guys, right?” the Squirrel asked, settling back into a Squirrel-Fu stance and preparing for the worst.