Made to Kill

by Adam Christopher

  It seemed like a nice place to hold a film premiere.

  I was alone in the auditorium. There didn’t seem to be much to set up in here, after all. The curtains were closed. The lights were on but their glow was swallowed by the soft velvet depths of the place. As I walked forward my footfalls sounded dull and far away underneath the ever-increasing rattle of my radiation detector. The acoustics in the place were impressive.

  I turned around to get the full view. There was a big star-shaped chandelier right in the middle of the high ceiling and what I’d thought was the circle was actually a couple of boxes flanking the windows of the projection room.

  There were a couple of people in one of the boxes. One was bent over a chair and was hammering something. The other had his back to me.

  I didn’t want Walter to find me and I didn’t want the two workmen to see me so I tap-danced down the aisle and found an unmarked black door next to the stage.

  Chip Rockwell was close.

  I let myself through.

  * * *

  Backstage at Grauman’s reminded me some more of the Temple of the Magenta Dragon. Out of public view, the whole place was an endless matte black that did strange things to the light and it had a smell that was like the inside of a hot air cupboard.

  I tiptoed down a few tight corridors. There was nobody around but I could hear hammering and voices from somewhere.

  And, in the darkness, the pop and fizz of my Geiger counter. The signal got louder and denser the farther I went, so I went farther. After only a short time I came to a set of short black steps that led up into a black space lit by a pale light that had a greenish tint.

  I went up the steps and found myself in the wings at the back of the stage. About twenty yards to my right was the actual back of the silver screen. It shone in the dim light like quicksilver.

  The screen only got some cursory attention. What really caught my eye was the machinery behind it.

  It was black metal, and lots of it, all girders and struts arranged into a series of sharp angles. At first I thought it was a scaffold, something temporary or maybe even permanent to allow staff up to the back of the screen or to something equally high. I looked up and there was nothing there. No lighting rig. No high-altitude walkways and ladders hanging from chains from the ceiling like you might find in other theaters.

  The big metal thing had a disk on the front of it and that disk was pointed at the back of the movie screen. The disk, like the screen, was silver. It was twenty yards in diameter and in the center was a pointed cone, the point aimed at the movie screen’s bull’s-eye.

  I moved again, looking up.

  Behind the big disk was a fat cylinder, from which sprouted cables that were fixed to the scaffold by metal straps and led away down to the floor and then down the steps on the opposite side of the stage. The fat cylinder had a curved rear end and there was a protuberance sticking out of the back, like the end of an axle.

  Which is just what it was. The fat cylinder was a motor. The big silver disk was built to turn.

  I didn’t know what it was but I knew it wasn’t the kind of standard equipment you’d find in a movie theater. Maybe it was part of the fancy new transmission system, the exciting wizardry that was going to beam every frame of Red Lucky straight into cinemas all over the country.

  Or at least that’s what I would have thought, had it not been identical in every way but scale to the gadget I’d found in the honeymoon suite of the Ritz-Beverly Hotel.

  The greenish tint to the light backstage was cast by a green light on the side of the machine’s base, next to a control panel. I looked it over and took some readings from my Geiger counter. They were high, but this wasn’t the source. As with Fresco and Eva, the thing had been exposed to radioactive material but was not itself radioactive.

  The source being Chip Rockwell.

  I checked my bearings and then looked at the fat cable coming out of the bottom of the control box. It was heading off in the right direction, so I decided to follow it.

  27

  I followed the cable all the way to the roof, my Geiger counter in complete agreement. On the way I’d only had to hide twice to avoid workmen. The place felt like everything was ready and there was just a skeleton crew left to tidy up. I didn’t know what had happened to Sparks and his boss Walter. Maybe Walter had told him to get back to work after Sparks had told him there was a robot in a hat waiting for him in the lobby and they’d gone to the lobby and found nothing.

  That didn’t bother me.

  What did bother me was what the cable led to on the roof, and what that was was certainly not Chip Rockwell. It was another disk fitted to another machine. This setup was smaller than the one downstairs but bigger than the one on the dental chair rig at the hotel. The disk of this one was maybe six feet across and it was pointing at the Hollywood Hills.

  More specifically, it was pointed at something on the hills. It was getting dark and as I stood on the roof and watched the dusk settle like a foggy blanket I saw the whole show.

  First it lit up HOLLY.

  Then it lit up WOOD.

  Then it lit up HOLLYWOOD. And if you hadn’t got the idea yet, HOLLYWOOD flashed twice more before the cycle started again.

  Ada had told me about what I’d found up there. The sign hadn’t been lit in more than forty years. And all this in honor of the Red Lucky premiere. They’d done a good job.

  Why the disk of the rooftop machine was pointed at the Hollywood Sign, I didn’t know. It all had something to do with the transmission. Nationwide, a hundred theaters, Red Lucky beamed into every one of them.

  The transmission.

  Phase three.

  “Okay, hold it right there.”

  I froze. I stared at the Hollywood Sign. I wondered whether I should put my hands up or not. Then I tried to think of any gun I knew short of a howitzer that could actually scratch my chassis. I came up blank, so I just stood there and left my hands right where they were.

  “Turn around,” said the man’s voice. “Slowly,” he added. They always tell you to do it slowly. Sensible enough, I supposed.

  I obliged the man and turned on my heel. He was standing by the side of the stairwell block, a silhouette against a sky that was a bruised orange purple. His outline was that of a man in a hat and a long coat. He had that hat on at an angle you might call jaunty—if the guy wearing it wasn’t holding a gun on you.

  I took one look at the gun he was holding and revised my list of dangerous weapons. I decided to hold my hands up after all.

  The gun was silvery and shaped like a pinecone, with a body that looked like it was made out of blown glass and that came to a point rather than the usual kind of open barrel. There was some business inside the blown-glass body but I couldn’t see any details and I wasn’t in the mood to zoom in. Behind the body was a grip the man held like a regular pistol and there was a trigger he had his finger on.

  I’d never seen anything like it. It looked very interesting and very dangerous at the same time.

  As I stood in the dusk-light on that rooftop I considered the strange gun and considered that it was clearly the kind of gun that was made for just this sort of occasion and for just this kind of target.

  That target being me. A robot. The last one.

  “Don’t move,” said the man.

  “Do I look like I’m moving?”

  The man waved the gun. Changeable fellow, but I took the hint and I sidestepped away from the machine on the roof while the man sidestepped toward it. When we’d completed one half turn of this circular dance he quickly glanced at the machine and then he looked back at me.

  “I didn’t touch your machine,” I said. “I was just taking a look.”

  The man glanced back at the contraption and his eyes stayed there for a moment. The way they moved over the object told me all I needed to know: he knew even less about it than I did.

  “So, you going to tell me what this is about?” I asked.

  The
man’s attention returned to me and he frowned. He began to move sideways, back toward the stairs. He kept the gun on me and I kept my front to him.

  “Because,” I said, “you’ve been following me all over town. And not very well, either. I mean, you’re a good driver but that car sticks out like a sore thumb. You want to tail someone, you need to blend right in.”

  “Of course,” said the man, “and you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Detective?”

  He knew I was a detective. Didn’t mean a thing. I was the last robot and if people knew about me then they knew I was a detective. That was the cover story. Said very much the same in gold lettering on the door of my office.

  I gave a noncommittal shrug with my hands still up around my ears. “You’re Charles David’s handler. From the Agency. Right?”

  “I’m Special Agent Daley. Touch Daley.”

  “My condolences.”

  He ignored me. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you for quite a while, machine man.”

  “I know the feeling,” I said. “You’ll be wanting to know what happened to your asset.”

  “Asset?”

  “Sure. Charles David. Movie star. Part-time CIA agent. Tell me, I thought you fellas weren’t supposed to operate on American soil?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, in that case, you should have called my office. I have a secretary. You could have left a message instead of trailing me all over town.”

  Daley chuckled, and by chuckled I mean his upper body convulsed just once and one side of his mouth went up. It mirrored the dip of his hat brim on the other side.

  “Of course,” he said. “Ada the miraculous supercomputer.” He waved the gun. “I’m not sure she’d like to be called your secretary, though.”

  This was a new one. That I was supposedly a detective was a matter of public record, if anyone cared to look me up. But this guy, he knew Ada. Nobody knew Ada except me. And …

  The government.

  Oh.

  I lifted my steel chin. Touch Daley watched me.

  “So you’re not CIA. Which department, then?” I asked.

  The special agent’s chin went up, his posture matching mine. “I’m afraid that’s classified.”

  Huh.

  “But you know about me, and about Ada,” I said. “So what do you want to talk to me about? I really want it to be about a little cell of Soviet secret agents operating in this fair city, but so far I’m not hopeful.”

  Daley cocked his head. “Sounds like a handful.”

  “I sense a but coming.”

  Agent Daley lifted that chin of his again. “Not my department.”

  “Like you said,” I said. “And that department would be…?”

  He ignored me. “There was a break-in at a locked-down government research facility recently. Some equipment was stolen. Very advanced, very specialized, very heavy equipment.”

  I would have frowned if I’d been able to. Instead I said, “And?”

  “The facility was run by one Professor C. Thornton, PhD. You may remember him.”

  I shrugged again. “If you know about me and Ada, then you know about Thornton. You’re telling me you trailed me all over town just to ask me if I knew my own creator?”

  Daley smiled under his hat. His lips were thin. “Thornton’s laboratory has been sealed ever since the prof disappeared three years ago.”

  This was news to me. I said as much and I asked the reason, too.

  “A radiation leak,” the agent told me. “The whole place is red hot.”

  This was also news to me. There seemed to be a lot of radiation in this town. Too much to be coincidental.

  Daley cocked his head. “To go in there you’d need to have a death wish. Or…”

  “Or not be bothered about radiation and strong enough to carry something heavy out,” I said. “I get it. But it wasn’t me.”

  At least I didn’t think it was. I really didn’t know. Was there something Ada hadn’t told me? Maybe that explained why Agent Daley here hadn’t called the office. He didn’t want to talk to Ada, which meant he didn’t want Ada to know he was talking to me.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about the prof’s disappearance, now would you?”

  I frowned, or at least it felt like I did on the inside. From Agent Daley’s point of view I was as still as a statue.

  “Can’t honestly say,” I said honestly.

  Agent Daley’s eyes narrowed and I thought he might have tightened his grip on his special gun but it was hard to tell so I turned up my optics. When I saw what was behind Agent Daley I still didn’t speak, though I knew what was about to happen.

  Out of the shadows of the stairwell block a smaller person appeared, lifting something rectangular and heavy up over their head before bringing it down in one quick movement on the back of the agent’s neck. Daley dropped the gun first, his fingers opening like a man dropping a cobra, then he groaned and hit the deck. His hat lifted off his head and landed gently beside his body.

  Eva McLuckie panted heavily, her feet planted in a wide V, her upper body limp from the waist, her arms hanging. The quarter of a cinder block was still held in both hands and she let it fall to the roof with a clink.

  I lowered my hands. I opened and closed the steel fingers of both steel hands. They made a clinking sound not entirely unlike the sound the cinder block had made when it hit the roof. Eva McLuckie took a deep breath and she looked up at me. Her eyes seemed to light up from the depths of her dark makeup.

  “Aren’t you going to say thanks?” she asked.

  “Thanks,” I said. I moved forward and so did she, kneeling down to feel the side of the agent’s neck.

  “He’ll live,” she said, and then she moved quicker than I did and scooped up the agent’s weird gun. I didn’t say anything. She held it with her fingers around the bulb-shaped body, which hadn’t even cracked when it had been dropped. She didn’t seem to be interested in pointing it at me.

  My logic gates flipped. My processors spun. My electromatic brain sparked. I crunched numbers like a kid crunching cornflakes in front of Saturday morning cartoons.

  I waved at the slowly breathing body on the ground between us.

  “You know this guy?”

  “Never seen him,” said Eva. She slipped the gun into the pocket of her red coat and then walked over to the machine that was pointing at the Hollywood Sign and she looked in the same direction.

  I watched her.

  “Where’s Chip Rockwell?” I asked.

  She turned around.

  She said, “Let me show you something.”

  She walked to the stairs.

  And dammit if I didn’t just turn and follow her.

  28

  We drove through the streets of Hollywood in her big silver car. She had that look again, that posture, leaning forward in the driver’s seat, balancing on the edge, both hands on the wheel. She turned the wheel slowly, this way and that, this way and that, working just to keep the boatlike car going in a straight line down Sunset Boulevard.

  We had left the theater behind us. The clicking of my Geiger counter faded away like smoke drifting from a chimney. Wherever she was taking me it was apparently away from Chip Rockwell.

  The lights of Hollywood streamed past in the windows. We made good time. Good time to where, I didn’t know.

  I thought of the job I was contracted to do. I thought of the different ways I could kill her. It would be easy.

  Except I had no intention of carrying out the job. Eva McLuckie had said she wanted to show me something and I wanted to see what that something was. I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to know what the Soviets were planning.

  I wanted to know what had happened to Chip Rockwell.

  I glanced at Eva as she drove and saw she was smiling now but the smile was fake and unmoving and didn’t turn on those famous dimples that made hearts pound and movie audiences swoon t
he world over.

  Killing her would be easy. So very, very easy.

  “I suppose you’re asking yourself whether Charles David ever got back to his people,” I said. “Considering you and your buddies are part of a Soviet cell determined to disrupt America, I mean. Sounds like a lot of work. Would be a shame for the U.S. government to take an interest.”

  I thought about the agent from that very same government we’d left unconscious on the rooftop. He didn’t fit into the picture. He wasn’t interested in Soviet infiltration of the Hollywood movie business. He was interested in me and Ada and Professor Thornton.

  I had to tell Ada about this other agent, and soon. But at the moment we had something else to worry about.

  Phase three. Red Lucky.

  I turned in the passenger seat to ask Eva about that but then I saw she was trying very hard to suppress something that was either a howling gale of laughter or an awful lot of tears or maybe even both at once.

  “I’m not a Communist,” she said. “You were right about Chuck being my partner. I’m working with the CIA. We both were.”

  She took her eyes off the road for longer than I felt comfortable with and she looked at me and she said, “We are trying to stop them.”

  I looked back at her and I wished as hard as I could that she would look where she was driving us. Eventually she did and I let out a breath I didn’t even know I was able to hold.

  “And you couldn’t have told me this earlier because…?”

  Eva slapped the steering wheel. “Goddammit! Charles was my partner, don’t you get that, machine man? A partner I had to have killed to stop him breaking our cover.” She hissed and shook her head. “So you’ll forgive me if I’ve been a little … I don’t know, reticent.” She served that last word up with a healthy side of sarcasm. “This is difficult, dammit,” she said. “This whole thing is difficult. I’ve had to do things—make decisions—I will never be able to live with.”