Made to Kill

by Adam Christopher

  I didn’t say anything.

  She said, “I don’t expect a robot to understand.”

  Was she telling the truth now? I thought about the basement meeting I’d been an eyewitness to, though I didn’t remember it.

  “If you want me to believe that, then you’re going to have to explain a great deal more about what you and Charles were doing. Remember, I saw you at the Temple. You and the others. You were all speaking with Russian accents.”

  Eva didn’t answer straight away. When she did, I didn’t like it.

  “I don’t remember,” she said.

  “You don’t remember what?”

  “The basement. I don’t remember the meeting.”

  “Don’t tell me—nervous exhaustion?”

  I watched the road. We’d been driving a while and it felt like most of that driving had been in circles. Eva was making sure we weren’t being followed.

  “So what happened to Charles David?” I asked.

  Eva shook her head. “Charles was a good agent, but he cracked under the pressure. Things weren’t right—I don’t know what it was, but he started questioning everything we were doing. Then it got worse, he started with these theories and ideas. The wrong ones. By the end he accused me of collaborating with the enemy—not as a double agent, but like they’d somehow ‘got’ to me. He was getting out of control.”

  “And then he vanished.”

  “Yes,” she said, and then Eva looked at me. Her big eyes were wide. The black rings around them made them look bigger. “I had to find him. He was going to blow everything. Months of work. The safety of our nation was at stake.”

  She turned back to the road ahead.

  “I had no choice,” she said. Then she wiped a tear from one eye and didn’t say any more and she kept driving.

  I sat in the passenger seat with a bunch of ideas. I guess I believed Eva, but the more I thought about the contract that had been taken out on her, the less it made sense. If they—the Soviets—had suspected Eva of being an enemy agent, one who had borrowed their stash of untraceable gold, then they could have found her and taken her out themselves, surely? My profession and the skill set that went with it were hardly unique.

  But no, they had come to me.

  I thought about Artem Rokossovsky, the Russian agent posing as Charles David’s gardener. If he was in the United States, then it was not unreasonable to assume his boss, Vitaly Bobrov, was here, too.

  Bobrov.

  The robotics expert.

  Oh.

  That’s why they had come to me. Two birds with one stone, perhaps. I could find the girl and their gold, and they would know exactly where I was and what I was doing. And they wanted a tab on me because I was part of their plan. I was, in point of fact, phase four.

  I would have frowned if I could have, honest to God. Instead I turned to face Eva. The seat leather underneath me creaked.

  “Phase three is the transmission of Red Lucky,” I said. “But tell me about phase four. Do you even know what it is?”

  “No,” said Eva with a shake of her head that swung her bangs side to side. “I don’t know anything about it, other than the fact that you play a starring role.”

  “So I’ve been told. Don’t tell me—that’s why you came to me about the problem of Charles David. Sure, you needed to find and remove him, but you needed to keep your own eyes on me.”

  Eva nodded. “But whatever phase four is, phase three is the more urgent problem.”

  “Charles David told me to stop phase three. So again, what is it, apart from a movie show? It has something to do with the transmission.”

  We took a left. Then we took a right.

  “Yes,” Eva said. “A simultaneous transmission, nationwide.” She sighed again and shook her head. “Those clever, clever bastards.”

  We were out of Hollywood now and crawling up the hills. The car slowed as the road began to wind.

  “Simultaneous transmission of what?” I asked. I thought about the big machine behind the cinema screen at Grauman’s, and I thought about the smaller version of the same on the roof. I thought about the way it was pointed at the Hollywood Sign.

  Then the car yawed. Eva McLuckie groaned and slumped right over the wheel. Her hands stayed where they were but their grip was loose and she planted her face in the middle of the wheel.

  The car moved to the left, quickly. I reached over and corrected just as fast. The car jerked as Eva’s feet slid off the accelerator and onto the brake and then off of it. We began to coast. Given we were pointing uphill, that wasn’t going to work. We began to slow. We were going to go backward pretty soon. I looked around but couldn’t see any kind of hand brake. It must have been over on the other side, out of my reach.

  “Eva! Come on, wake up now!” I guessed that the shock of everything had finally hit her, right at the wrong moment.

  Then she jerked her head up and took a whoop of breath, and jerked her head again as she realized she was in charge of a car. She elbowed my arm and gasped in pain as her bones rolled against hard metal. The jab didn’t do anything to move my arm of course, but I took my hands away from the wheel and gave her some space.

  Back in control, she slid her hands around the wheel and then changed gear and we were on our way again. I turned in the passenger seat. There were headlights coming up behind. We were lucky they were pretty far away and the road was mostly ours. The hillside we were on the side of was steep and I didn’t much like the idea of the car going over it. I would probably be okay but I didn’t think Eva would fare so well.

  Then Eva spoke. To my audio receptors it sounded something like “Shto ty dielaesh’?” and there was a rising intonation at the end, so I guessed it was a question.

  Then again, I didn’t speak Russian.

  Eva turned her head to look at me. She had a lip curled in disgust and the dimples were long gone. She seemed to be holding her forehead in a completely different way from before, if that was even possible.

  It was like there was someone else behind the wheel now.

  Someone who wasn’t Eva McLuckie.

  “Derr’mo!” she said.

  I watched her. She even drove differently—she held her hands lower down and she’d sunk back into the seat, giving up the birdlike perch on the edge that Eva had preferred.

  And then a telephone rang.

  I glanced into the well between the passenger seat and the driver where I had expected the hand brake to be. It still wasn’t there. There wasn’t a telephone there either, not like in my car.

  Russian Eva growled. It was deep in her throat and when I looked at her again her eyes were narrow as she drove. She—whoever she was—was annoyed. I didn’t blame her. I knew what it was like to wake up with no idea where you were or what you were doing. Occupational hazard for a robot. Less so for a person, I would have said, at least until now.

  The telephone kept ringing. The sound was coming from the dash, right in front of me.

  Glove compartment.

  I reached for it and Eva reached for it too, but I was closer and got there first and all she could do was slap my hand before returning her own to the wheel. She said something in Russian, pretty loud. She was not a happy customer.

  My own patience was starting to run thin, too.

  I put the telephone against the side of my head. The glove box lid hung on its hinge, bouncing as we cruised up the hillside. The telephone in my car was a special feature, which meant the telephone in this car was, too. It was just in a different place, built into the glove box to be more discreet when you were a double agent gadding about town.

  “Hello?” I said into the receiver. I had a fair idea who it was but I second-guessed myself at the last minute and thought I’d better check it was for me. That would have been embarrassing.

  “Your dinner is getting cold and I’ve let the cat out for the night.”

  I turned to Eva. She was half-watching me, half-watching the road as she wound the car up like a tightly
coiled spring.

  “I’m in the middle of something of a situation here, Ada.”

  “You and me both, Chief,” said Ada. “I got a bead on the client who took a professional dislike to Eva McLuckie. Took a lot of digging through sham corporations and overseas accounts, but I got there in the end.”

  I wished that Ada would program herself a sense of urgency. It might come in useful sometimes. Like now.

  “Ada,” I said. “I’m in a car with Eva. Only I’m not sure she’s driving.”

  “You mean you’re driving from the passenger seat? That’s some trick, Ray. You should work in movies.”

  “I’m just along for the ride, trust me. Who’s the client?”

  “You’re not going to like it,” said Ada.

  “Try me.”

  “Vitaly Bobrov.”

  “I had a feeling.”

  “It all goes back to him, Chief. He’s got funding. Lots of funding.”

  I lowered the telephone and looked at Eva and she snarled and muttered something under her breath. Inside my head Ada laughed.

  I lifted the telephone back up. “Oh, such language,” she said. “And I thought she was such a nice girl.”

  “I think I’ve worked out why Eva doesn’t remember the meeting in the basement.”

  “Because sometimes she’s not Eva, right?”

  “Right. So Bobrov has backing. Government backing, right?”

  “Feels like it,” said Ada. There was a sound, like she’d got up out of a big office chair and was walking around the desk in hard shoes. Then there was the sound of paper shuffling, like she was going through a pile of notes.

  At least that’s what I thought I heard but I couldn’t really be sure so I ignored it.

  “So that clinches it,” I said. “Bobrov is here and he’s here on business.”

  “And we know what that business is, Ray,” said Ada.

  “Phase three,” I said, “to be followed in short order by phase four.”

  “We have to stop them, Ray.”

  “Working on it,” I said. I put the phone back in the glove box. I was careful to keep the coiled cord straight but it tangled anyway. I pressed the glove box closed but the catch didn’t stick the first time so I pressed it again. Then it stayed put.

  Somehow we were still curling up the Hollywood Hills. The car pushed around the next bend and finally the Hollywood Sign came into view. It was big and bright, the sequence of flashing bulbs guaranteeing a bad night’s sleep for anyone living within view.

  I turned to Russian Eva. I didn’t know what to say but it turned out that she wanted to speak first anyway and what she said was, “Don’t try anything,” in an accent that was fairly heavy. Like we were back in the basement, when she and her Russian friends had been forced to speak English for someone else’s benefit. For someone who was there but didn’t speak Russian.

  Someone like Chip Rockwell, perhaps.

  She had one hand on the wheel and the other was holding the gun Touch Daley had dropped. It was pointed in my direction.

  I frowned on the inside and I didn’t try a single thing.

  29

  It had gotten cold up on the hills. That didn’t bother me, but I pulled the belt of my trench coat a bit tighter anyway and pushed my hat down about as far as it would go. I couldn’t tell whether Russian Eva was bothered by it. She had a face like a storm and she kept pushing the Egyptian bangs that belonged to someone else out of her eyes with the hand that wasn’t holding Daley’s special gun.

  We’d parked in a dirt lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. There was a hut in the lot made of corrugated steel. It had three small, dark windows in the side facing us. The lot and the hut were on a flat piece of ground that had been cut into the hillside. Over the lip of the plateau were some tall structures of metal and wood that were blasted into sharp relief as four thousand lightbulbs on the front of them blazed their infinitely repeating sequence.

  We were behind the Hollywood Sign. I had a terrible feeling of déjà vu that I wasn’t sure was a genuine memory fragment or me just expecting there to be one.

  A moment later my memory tape wound on and the feeling was gone.

  We walked down to the sign via a steep and dusty path. Russian Eva was behind me. At the sign itself there was just enough space to walk around in front and behind without taking a tumble down to Hollywood. The hills in front of us were dark shapes punctuated with a scattering of lights, some bright but most faint. Beyond that, Hollywood and the suburbs of Los Angeles were a matrix of yellow and white and red lights. It looked a little like a printed circuit. I tried to pick out the roof of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre but everything was as far away as another galaxy.

  I turned around to face my captor. Russian Eva seemed as entranced by the view as I was. The gun was still pointing in my direction but there was little effort in it. I didn’t know if it was the breeze or something else, but the possessed movie star was swaying on her feet.

  “Eva?”

  She coughed and looked at me and blinked and coughed again. The gun arm went down.

  “We’re here,” she said in a voice that was most certainly hers.

  “What the hell happened?”

  Eva pushed the bangs to one side and rubbed her forehead. Her eyes closed in the middle of those big black rings of makeup and they stayed closed. She looked a little spooky at night.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She winced. I took a step forward then stood still. “It’s hard to fight it,” she said. “The drugs help, but they become less effective over time. At least that’s what it feels like.”

  Then she sat down, quickly. I went to help but she seemed okay sitting on the ground. She rested the gun beside her but kept her hand wrapped around the grip.

  “Who was that in the car?” I asked. “Because it sure as heck wasn’t Eva McLuckie.”

  “I don’t know her name,” Eva said. “She’s one of the Russian agents. I try to keep her under control, but the drugs required to boost mental resistance are pretty hard to handle.”

  She was shivering. Not just from the cold.

  I looked up at the Hollywood Sign. Then I looked out toward the city. Then I looked back at Eva.

  “Give me something to work with.”

  “The Soviet cell at the Temple of the Magenta Dragon is an advance force. They’ve been here for years, establishing a foothold by quietly taking over the movie studios.”

  I nodded as I got the idea. “Starting with Playback Pictures. Rockwell’s studio.”

  “Yes,” said Eva. “Chip Rockwell was in deep with a criminal gang—mafia, most likely. The Russians got him out of it but then they owned him. That was all they needed to get started. From there they got contacts at the other studios, and then they could begin seeding their agents across the whole town.”

  “Seeding?” I didn’t like the sound of that much.

  “The Soviet advance force is led by a military scientist called Bobrov. He brought over an elite unit headed by a commando called Rokossovsky. They came first to get the transfer operation up and running. Once that was in place, the shipments began.”

  “Phases one and two, right?”

  Eva nodded.

  “Keep talking,” I said.

  “Bobrov has developed a technique that allows him to transfer the mind of one person into the body of another.”

  I let that sit there for a while on the cold hillside. The Hollywood Sign ran through a few rounds.

  Eva said, “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “Lady, I’m the last robot in the world. I can believe a lot of things. These shipments, for instance. They wouldn’t happen to consist of crystal cubes, about so big?”

  I held two hands up and did my best to make a shape with my fingers. Eva looked up and nodded.

  “Each cube holds the mind of one agent.”

  “How many cubes are there?”

  “The first shipment was just a few. Bobrov still had work to do to get ready for phas
e three. It wasn’t until he had the full operation running that the rest came in.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So Bobrov and his crew get here first and set up shop. Then the initial seeding was Bobrov replacing the minds of Hollywood film execs with Soviet agents, allowing him to take over the town?”

  Eva nodded. “Film executives. Directors and producers. All the top brass. They’d started on actors, too. That’s when we were recruited.”

  “‘We’? You and Charles David.”

  “And others. The Agency got wind of the Soviet infiltration and Bobrov’s process, but the studios were already under Soviet control, and that control was spreading, fast. So the agency began recruiting actors to get into Bobrov’s inner circle.”

  “You’re telling me you volunteered to get taken over by Soviet agents?”

  Eva shook her head. “The Agency developed a drug cocktail to help a subject resist the mind transfer. They work, but only for a time.”

  “Is this transfer process permanent?”

  “It is if you aren’t prepared,” said Eva. “But the original mind is still there, trapped in the body while the replacement takes it over.”

  “Charles David had pills. Anti-radiation drugs. The agency gave you those too, right?”

  “The transfer process exposes the subject to gamma rays,” said Eva. “We needed protection from that, too.”

  “And the mind cubes themselves are hot.”

  Then I paused. I found myself scratching my chin. I wondered if Thornton used to do that, too.

  “In the basement, you guys all wore protective gear. I assume that was because Chip Rockwell is himself radioactive. I followed a trail out of the Temple and down the street to the theater.”

  “I’ll take your word for that,” said Eva. “I don’t remember anything once my hitchhiker takes over.”

  I stepped a little closer. The light from the sign behind me cast my shadow long and deep over the movie star sitting on the ground in front of me. Her expression was set, her lips a perfect level, like she was resigned to the fact that sometimes she wasn’t in control of her own body and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.