“You want to go out there and face a baker’s dozen of those things?”
Peterman’s hand disappeared into his jacket pocket and came out with a small leather wallet. He flipped it open with the fingers of one hand and held it out to me with practiced ease. I looked at a passport-sized photo of him and a small card of information with a signature—Touch Daley’s—at the bottom.
“I’m still a DORL agent—which means I’m still an IA agent.”
“Events seem to have progressed,” I said. “You think that will work?”
Peterman slapped me on the shoulder. “One way to find out,” he said, and before I could stop him he dashed out of the alley and headed toward the gang of one. I watched him for a couple of moments as he was surrounded by the identical men in black and then I turned around and I looked for another way out.
I checked my fresh memory tape. I had twenty-three hours and change.
Suddenly a day didn’t seem like a very long time at all.
21
I had twenty-three hours and ten minutes left by the time I found my exit strategy and all the way back to Hollywood I lamented the time wasted.
Playback Pictures was in Studio City and that was too much of a walk back to Hollywood, especially with my personal countdown clock ticking away in my chest.
I had found a small fleet of vans and trucks parked in a lot behind another of the outbuildings. The vehicles were all big and slow but any would have done in a pinch had their tires not been flat. Even if I had been able to start any of them, the sound of a disused diesel motor firing into reluctant life would have brought six brace of Touch Daleys tearing around the corner before I’d gotten into second gear.
With time being of an essence I decided to trust that Fresco Peterman knew as much about being a double agent as he did about setting up the neutron flow polarity reverser inside my chest. I doubled back around to where the new arrivals had parked their cars.
I was in luck. The four cars were parked in a row and their occupants were nowhere to be seen. I didn’t waste a single kilocycle as I hoofed across the lot and opened the driver’s door of the car nearest and got inside and got it hotwired and got it pointing in the right direction and got the accelerator pushed all the way to the floor.
I drove it to Hollywood and I kept an optic out for trouble along the way, but nothing happened en route to the Cahuenga Building except someone ahead of me changed lanes without indicating and someone else showed his annoyance by leaning on the horn for a good deal longer than he needed to. But followed from Playback Pictures, I was not. Peterman had thrown the others off the scent, at least for now.
Why I headed for the office I wasn’t sure but I knew Peterman was going to get in touch and I hoped soon. He had the tapes. He had the answers.
I had to admit there was a good deal of hoping going on there.
I rolled down Hollywood Boulevard and kept on going past the office. Los Angeles was already baking under the late morning sun and as I looked around me I could see nothing in particular going except life on Earth. There were cars and there were people and both of these things were either moving or were parked. The office building sat back on the corner like it had sat for the best part of the last century and that was all there was to it.
I went on for another block down the street and then I pulled the car parallel to the curb and brought the thing to a halt. I turned it off. I sat in the driver’s seat. I kept my optics on the rearview mirror and I asked myself what I expected to see. I didn’t have much of an answer.
Then I glanced down at my right hand and I found the fingers reaching for the telephone that wasn’t there, which was the strangest thing because I could hear a telephone ringing.
I turned around in my seat and looked out the back like maybe the rearview mirror hadn’t been showing me a true picture. Then I looked out of both sides of the car and then I looked through the front windshield and then I knew where the telephone was, which was in the car parked in front of me.
My car.
I got out of Daley’s government-issue boat and closed the door and I looked at the car in front of it and I read the license plate. It was mine, all right. There was desert dust around the tires and even some leaves, and when I walked around to the front I saw there was a ticket under the windshield wiper. The telephone was still ringing so I left the ticket where it was and I opened the driver’s door and I got in and I closed the door and I picked up the telephone.
And I paused, because while I wanted to speak to the party I knew was on the other end, I didn’t want to have to confirm what I had learned.
That the boss of International Automatic was my target.
That the boss of International Automatic was Ada.
The telephone clicked in my ear. I didn’t speak.
Then someone cleared their throat and a male voice asked: “Ah . . . hullo?”
I paused some more.
“Sparks?”
“Peterman?”
“Sparks, buddy, for a moment there I thought I’d got the wrong number.”
“Where are you?”
“What? Where do you think? Come on, use that electronic loaf of yours.”
I turned around in the driver’s seat. There was nobody around. Farther back, down at the lights, stood the Cahuenga Building and inside it was my office.
I turned back around. “They left the phone plugged in, then.”
“They sure did.”
“Which means they have it tapped.”
“That also occurred to me, Sparks. I’m no amateur—I swept the place. It’s clean.”
“It may be at that end,” I said, “but who knows where else they might be listening.”
I heard Peterman sigh. “Listen, come up. We can talk, mano a . . . well, roboto, or something. I have the tape analyzed and all the answers you need.”
“Analyzed already? How?”
Peterman snickered into the phone. “Let’s just say I have a very capable acquaintance.”
“I’ll be right up,” I said, and then I hung up.
And then I sat in the car and the traffic moved on the street. I looked in the mirrors—all of them. There were no men in black suits coming for me and the office building back on the corner was quiet.
I wasn’t sure who Peterman meant when he said he had a very capable acquaintance, but I added that question to the long list that was already heating up my rhetorical analysis capacitors.
I got out. I closed the door. Then I saw the parking ticket on the windshield again. I peeled it out from under the wiper and took a look. A six-dollar fine. Then I checked the date, and then I opened the car door a crack and slid the ticket inside and then I turned and headed to the office to meet Peterman.
I’d been kept inside Playback Pictures a whole month.
Now it was time for Peterman to tell me why.
22
I went up to the office the only way I knew how, which was via the elevator and then along the corridor and then through the door. My circuits did a pretty good simulation of a nervous sweat as I headed up but the lobby was empty along with the elevator and the hallway. This wasn’t unusual. That the building was quiet and the tenants kept to themselves was one of the reasons Thornton had selected it as the home of the Electromatic Detective Agency. But with the hoo-ha a month ago and the place filled with federal agents and their unsmiling demeanors I wondered whether there was anyone left in the building to meet or whether the landlord had been saddled with a whole lot of lease-termination notices.
The main door was unlocked as it usually was. From the hallway I could see nothing in particular through the frosted glass, but I was glad it was intact. I imagined the men from DORL would have been rough when it came to dismantling the place.
I stepped through. Everything was where it should have been. The rug. The hatstand. The desk with the comfortable chair behind it and the less comfortable ones in front. There were two low bookcases lined with books and there was a filin
g cabinet filled with files. Both looked unmolested.
Fresco Peterman was leaning on the side of the desk closest to the telephone and when I walked in he pushed himself off.
“Ray, good to see you.”
I closed the door. I walked toward him across the rug. A quarter of the way there I glanced at the door that connected the outer office to the computer room, and when I hit the halfway mark I looked over to the wall opposite, where the hidden door led to the tape archive.
Peterman watched me. “Yeah, they did a number,” he said. “Take a look.”
He led the way to the hidden door and opened it and then he stood back with his arms folded. I walked past him and walked inside and then I stopped because there wasn’t much reason to go any farther.
The room was empty. Oh, sure, there were shelves in there. Lots of them. And there was even a light with a bulb and a shade. But that was it. I didn’t remember how many tapes were stored here and what time period they represented—according to my sensory inputs this was the first time I had ever laid optics on the place—but the room looked like it could fit a lot.
Touch Daley had them all. I wondered whether that meant he had handed them to the Department of Robot Labor or International Automatic, but then I stopped wondering because the question was irrelevant.
The two organizations were one in the same.
Which made the present whereabouts of Ada an interesting conundrum. She was the boss of IA. Someone had made damn sure they didn’t have her. I turned around in the room and I looked at Peterman standing in the doorway with his lips puckered like he was waiting for a kiss and I thought about his very capable acquaintance. I didn’t know who that was but I was starting to get an idea. Because Peterman’s only other employer, at least as far as I knew, aside from DORL/IA, was Ada herself.
I left a reticulated logarithmic pattern analysis manifest cooking on that one as I walked out of the storeroom and headed to the computer room. On the way across I turned up my audio receptors but all I could hear was the tick of the clock that was above the door on the other side. I stopped there and counted the ticks and then opened the door and stepped through.
The computer room was empty. Somehow it looked smaller, now that Ada was gone. All that was left of her were a series of outlines, formed by faded paintwork, that crawled across the walls. She was there, but in silhouette only. My alcove was gone. They’d even taken the little round table and the chair.
I walked around the room. I counted the power outlets, of which there were a great deal, and the other sockets as well—telephone, telex, and a few I would have needed to look up. They’d disconnected everything and taken her away in pieces and had left not a single stray wire in the place.
I completed my third orbit and then I stopped. Peterman was standing in the doorway with his arms folded and a look on his face that was ever so slightly satisfied.
I knew why, too.
“They don’t have her,” I said.
Peterman unfolded his arms and he clicked his fingers with both hands. “They most certainly do not.”
I turned to the window and looked out. The brick building was there. In the gap below, the alleyway from which I’d watched as my boss was transported away.
I turned back to Peterman. “You do.”
“Not me. We. I mean, not you and me, we, but me and her, we. Listen, don’t worry, Ada is as safe as houses. Just don’t ask me where she is, exactly, because I’m as in the dark on that one as you and our friend Touch Daley and his numerous successors.”
I nodded. “So as soon as Ada found out they were coming to get her—or rather, that Touch Daley was coming to get her—she made plans for her own escape. And you arranged it?”
“I did,” said Peterman.
I pointed in the general direction of the storage room. “What about my memory tapes?”
Peterman bobbed his head side to side like he was trying to pick out a stuffed toy prize from a fairground attraction. “Well, no, the tapes, we don’t have. I got Ada out but that was a stretch as it was. The tapes went into another van and that van reached the original destination.” Then he clicked his fingers on both hands and he pointed two index fingers at me along with a smile that I was sure had a tendency to make the front row of a cinema swoon into their popcorn. “But don’t worry,” he said. “They have your tapes but they can’t do anything with them. Ada was no slouch. Those tapes are encrypted, my friend.”
“Encrypted?”
“Totally scrambled without the right decoding key,” said Peterman. He tapped the side of his head. “And that key is locked up inside your cranium, Ray. You’re the only one able to decode them. Not even Ada can crack it.”
“Another safeguard,” I said.
“Hey,” said Peterman, “Ada is one smart cookie.”
I nodded, then I returned my available processing time to the issue of Touch Daley.
Touch Daleys, plural.
“Touch Daley is head of the Department of Robot Labor,” I said. “Or he was. The real Touch Daley. Until IA took him out and swapped in their own version.”
Peterman nodded. “To get their robot revolution on track, IA needed to infiltrate the DORL and gain access to their files on the original robot program.”
“And DORL was never disbanded, just, what, forgotten?”
Peterman spread his hands. “Hey, there’s a lot of government departments and most people couldn’t name half of them.”
I started another turn of the computer room. “IA’s replica of Touch Daley gets to work inside DORL. They watch me and Ada. They don’t do anything and then something happens and they take action. They go to grab Ada. They pack her up and ship her out only she goes missing and then Touch Daley has a problem.”
Peterman stuffed his hands in his pockets and he leaned in the doorway at an angle that didn’t look at all comfortable. “I was recruited to DORL years ago, long before IA was on the scene. I was a senior agent, undercover—DORL were still keen to keep their operation quiet, in case someone higher up realized the department was still spending money.”
“How did you find out when Touch Daley was substituted?”
“That part was Ada. After that business with the Ruskies, she got in touch. Seems your line of work had been intersecting with IA’s more than a little. They’d been getting closer and she knew that eventually they’d make their move.”
“So she hires you and we go robot hunting together,” I said. “We eliminate Touch Daley, only IA send in a new one. We repeat this sixteen more times. By then IA has had enough and they move on Ada.” I paused. “What about my memory tape? Ada called you, didn’t she?”
Peterman nodded. “She knew I was on the scene and that I’d be right there to help. It was the only way to save you from your tape running out. We had to get you to a facility, and quick, while I went to work to stabilize your memory.”
“Playback Pictures,” I said. “You own the whole studio, right?”
“Right, Sparks, right!” Peterman clicked his fingers again. “After the Russian thing it stayed shut. The whole place has been deserted for years. I got it for a song.”
I looked at Peterman. He looked at me. Then he made an O shape with his mouth.
“Oh yeah, right, you don’t remember.” He looked at the floor like a kid who had just lost his balloon from the funfair.
I had to hand it to him. The plan was neat. A closed studio lot was a great place to hide something. Together the amount of real estate in Hollywood and environs that was taken up by the movie industry was a not-insubstantial slice. Playback Pictures on its own had several acres and a lot of very large buildings and none of them was used for anything except city tax revenue. A perfect place for Touch Daley to take me for a month of interrogation. The perfect place to hide the first sixteen versions of him from the hunting expeditions Peterman and I had apparently been conducting.
“How long have we been working together?”
Peterman snapped his head u
p and he blinked like he was coming out of a dream, and then he pursed his lips. I took a note of the technique.
“A few months now.” Then Peterman laughed. “I’ll tell you, Sparks, having a partner without a memory was not the most fun I’ve ever had on a job.”
I nodded. I thought back to the black hat on the passenger seat of my car—the hat that belonged to Touch Daley Sixteen.
“I guess I got a little excited after the last one,” I said.
Peterman laughed again. “Oh, Sparks, you bet you did! I mean, sure, your reaction each time was a little different, but, buddy, pal, you went off the rails on that one. You took his hat and you screamed straight off back home to have it out with Ada. But then later you came to my place and you made me look after your little book for you. You said it was too dangerous to keep hidden in the car or the office.”
“I was right,” I said. “When Touch Daley—Touch Daley Seventeen—came to the office he knew exactly where I kept the book. He must have had me under surveillance and saw me making notes.”
Peterman rubbed his face and nodded as he took in it. “He was trying to flush you out. Me too. That explains why things suddenly got moving so fast. You must have spotted the tail outside my place when you came by. That’s why you told yourself to come find me at the fencing club.”
“Which also means,” I said, “that they knew what we were doing. IA had gotten through sixteen models of their pet agent and they needed to end it.”
A handful of complex algorithms tripped through my logic gates and microswitches and I felt the ebb and flow of voltage over my feedback suppressor rods.
I was holding on to an important fact and for the moment I wanted to keep that fact to myself, because I may have been a private killer but I was also a private detective and I wanted to be very sure about what was going on before I jumped to any kind of conclusion I was going to regret.
The fact was that Ada had called me and given me a new job. It was the usual kind of job and I had no argument against it. The only problem was that Ada didn’t know who the target was.
I Only Killed Him Once Page 12