The body parts couldn’t even be lost. Throw them into the deepest ocean, and somehow they’d make their way back to land. They might be swallowed by some bottom-feeding eel who’d then be swallowed by a squid who’d then be swallowed by a whale who’d then wash ashore with bronze fragments in its belly. The process might take decades, but always the body parts resurfaced.
It was part of their magic . . . or if you preferred scientific explanations, it was a programmed function of the nanotech—or whatever—that made up the metal man. Even in pieces, the high-tech/sorcerous components displayed an ability to make astonishing comebacks.
They also displayed raw power. Wherever the body parts came to people’s attention, shamans and priests, magi and monarchs recognized the pieces as potent talismans. High priestesses wore them as amulets; chieftains carried the bronze fragments into battle or placed them in shrines where blood was spilled in sacrifice. Wizards found ways to draw energy from the metal chunks—prodigious amounts of energy, used in arcane rituals that could make humans immortal or twist humble animals into monsters.
Was it mystic enchantment or radioactive mutation? Father Emil couldn’t say; but it worked. Much of the magic performed in bygone days could be attributed to scraps from the man of bronze.
Naturally, these mighty bronze talismans were prized in the ancient world. They were also kept fiercely secret. In time, though, word leaked out . . . until one night on neutral ground, the Greek oracle from Delphi met with Persia’s high priest of Zoroaster and the two hesitantly showed each other the sources of their power: a bronze skull and a bronze eye. When the two metal pieces were brought into contact, they fused seamlessly. The result was more mystically powerful than the two separate pieces and supposedly bestowed greater material blessings on the cultures involved.
Thus was born the Order of Bronze—a secret society of people from different religions, devoted to tracking down more bronze bits and uniting them into a whole. By the first century B.C., as the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire, the Order finally assembled the complete head. That was when Bronze gained his voice; when enough of his spirit—or his logic circuitry—was restored that he could finally speak.
His first words were, “I must fight evil.” Through the ensuing centuries, he’d cared about nothing else.
He was only sporadically active: the bronze head sometimes went dormant, neither moving nor speaking for years. Then it would suddenly awake, demanding to be told of “evildoers” who had not been brought to justice. The members of the Order would brief the head on whatever evil deeds they knew about—anything from major wars and royal assassinations to street crime and spouses cheating on each other. The bronze head would listen . . . sometimes asking questions, sometimes assigning people to obtain more information or to bring back evidence to be examined . . . and in the end, Bronze would explain what had to be done to “achieve justice.”
He had, for example, laid out foolproof plans for the murder of mad Emperor Caligula and the removal of Emperor Valerian (who sponsored a vicious pogrom against innocent Christians in the third century A.D.). Often though, Bronze ignored large-scale problems and spent his time tracking down sneak thieves or merchants who shortchanged their customers. He had a knack for finding the guilty party, no matter how confused the evidence might be; in Roman times, Bronze was even thought to be clairvoyant. Father Emil, however, had a more mundane explanation. He believed Bronze relied on standard forensic science—fingerprints, DNA, etc.—which would have seemed like magic at the time.
Bronze occasionally managed feats of analysis that were still beyond the capacity of twenty-first century technology. He could break any code—even modern computerized encryption—and could often predict a felon’s actions with uncanny accuracy. No doubt, the metal man just extrapolated from past patterns of behavior . . . but it was easy to see how the bronze head had gained a reputation for prophecy.
I interrupted to ask, “So he’s basically a mechanical Sherlock Holmes?”
“That’s an oversimplification,” Father Emil replied. “One could equally suggest he’s an agent of divine justice created by long-forgotten gods: a spirit of vengeance made manifest. But,” the monk went on, looking a little sheepish, “you’re not the first to perceive Bronze as a glorified RoboCop.”
Father Emil continued his story, describing how the Order of Bronze had devoted itself to two activities: helping Bronze apprehend evildoers and procuring the remaining pieces of bronze anatomy. Reassembling the body parts went slowly, hindered by difficulties of travel and lack of information—in days of yore, an expedition might take decades chasing rumors of a magic bronze artifact in the jungles of Southeast Asia, only to find that the stories were hokum. But once the Industrial Revolution created telegraphs and steamships, the process of reclaiming bronze fragments sped up . . . to the point that Bronze was now almost entirely restored.
With each new body part, Bronze increased in strength and intelligence. His periods of dormancy grew shorter; he worked almost constantly, tapping into the data banks of Interpol and other law enforcement agencies. The Order could no longer track everything Bronze did. He was constantly e-mailing Scotland Yard and the FBI, offering psychological profiles of suspects or forensic analyses of obscure evidence. Bronze operated under dozens of different identities, pretending to be police officers, criminology consultants, and even secret informants. This chapel contained the most sophisticated forensic analysis equipment in the world.
I interrupted again. “So why didn’t it detect the bomb in the statuette?”
Bronze snapped his head toward me. “Because you didn’t bring the statuette to me. Did you?” His voice actually sounded angry. “Father Emil boasts of the power of my equipment. He’s wrong. The generators that provide this monastery with electricity may be state-of-the-art, but to me they’re unbearably inadequate. My best sensor devices can only guarantee safety within this chapel. The rest of the monastery grounds are only lightly scanned . . . and the statuette bomb was well enough disguised that it wasn’t detected. If you’d ever brought the bomb within range of my high-security grid, things would have turned out differently. But you didn’t.”
“So you’re saying it’s my fault?” I asked.
The bronze man didn’t answer. He’d turned away again. I took a step toward him, but Father Emil placed a hand on my arm. “No, Ms. Croft. Bronze is correct. We should have submitted the statuette to a detailed scan. We let our concern for Reuben’s injuries override normal security precautions.”
“I thought we were being scanned,” I said. “All that fuss at the gate . . .”
Father Emil shrugged. “Our sensors at the gate are not as sophisticated as the ones here in the chapel. As Bronze said, we don’t have the resources to scan every millimeter of the grounds in fine detail. Only this chapel is truly secure.”
“So Bronze makes sure he’s good and protected, but the rest of the Order just take their chances?”
“It’s not like that,” Father Emil said. “For one thing, this is the first time in recent memory we’ve been attacked. The Order’s secrecy keeps us safe. And of course, Bronze keeps watch for potential threats. Under any other circumstances, the bomb would never have been allowed inside the walls. But not even Bronze is perfect.”
“He’s made that abundantly clear.”
I took another step toward the metal man, sitting smugly in his chair like a king on a throne, but once again, Father Emil restrained me. “Please, Ms. Croft. Don’t distract Bronze from his work. At this moment, he might be ferreting out a serial killer in Amsterdam, arranging the downfall of a corrupt business executive, or thwarting the latest computer virus.”
“You mean you don’t know what he’s up to?” I asked. “If he really is stopping serial killers and corporate crooks, then hip, hip, hurrah. But how do you know that’s all he’s doing? What if he’s burning witches and stoning adulterers? What if he’s overthrowing governments that pass laws he doesn’t like? He’s ov
er ten thousand years old. His morality predates the Dark Ages. Don’t you think he needs to be watched?”
“Bronze has an infallible sense of justice,” Father Emil said. “Our Order wouldn’t support him if he didn’t.”
I was too flabbergasted to answer. How could Father Emil think a machine was infallibly just, when no two people on the planet could agree what justice was? What about actions that were perfectly acceptable in one culture but crimes in another? Whose morality did Bronze follow? If he was the original Osiris, might he believe in ancient Egyptian ethics, where commoners were executed for looking a king in the face? Did Bronze consider that justice?
But there was no point debating the issue with Father Emil. The monk was a true believer: a faithful member of the Order. Which brought up a pertinent question. “Why monks and nuns?” I asked. “I can see how your Order might start from religious priesthoods—people who considered the bronze pieces were sacred relics—but things are different now. Assuming that you’re a devout Dominican . . .”
“I am,” Father Emil said.
“. . . then how does Bronze fit with your churchly duties? Dominican vows don’t say anything about helping androids track down criminals.”
Father Emil smiled thinly. “Dominicans have always served justice. You might recall, we were the ones in charge of the Inquisition. Those were ugly times, but my predecessors found it useful to have a bronze bloodhound tracking down sinners.”
Outraged, I said, “The Inquisition used Bronze to find heretics?”
“Yes . . . though he refused to go after harmless people who simply disagreed with church doctrine.”
“The Inquisition killed a lot of harmless dissenters, Father.”
“Yes, but Bronze didn’t help with that part of the Inquisition’s activities.” Father Emil suddenly grinned. “It annoyed the inquisitors no end. Bronze absolutely refused to participate in ‘defending the faith.’ But, Ms. Croft, there were plenty of heretics who weren’t harmless: murderers and violent insurgents. As I said, those were ugly times. Bronze helped inquisitors clean up a great deal of viciousness—including corruption within the Inquisition itself.”
“How did inquisitors get along with other members of the Order—the Buddhists, Essenes, and all? ‘Defenders of the Faith’ weren’t noted for cooperating with ‘heathens.’”
“There were unfortunate incidents,” Father Emil admitted, “but Bronze himself dealt with the culprits. Bronze wanted the Order to embrace different creeds—‘for balance,’ he said—and those who couldn’t coexist were expelled. Eventually, my Dominican predecessors decided they couldn’t let Bronze become the sole property of ‘pagans’ so they learned to behave themselves. They arranged for this monastery to become Bronze’s permanent home, and they made sure Bronze always had a Dominican in his retinue. I am their latest representative; and I fully believe I’m doing God’s work, helping Bronze any way I can. Buying him equipment. Serving as an intermediary with police agencies. Hiring people like you to find Bronze’s missing pieces. Call me old-fashioned, but isn’t it righteous to punish the wicked?”
Spoken like a true spiritual descendant of the Inquisition. Father Emil didn’t question Bronze’s goodness or wisdom . . . and I’d be wasting my breath trying to persuade him otherwise. Besides, I knew nothing about Bronze; maybe he was as pure and noble as Father Emil thought. It didn’t matter. I was only here for one reason.
I strode to the bronze man and rapped sharply on his chest with my knuckles. It was like knocking on a solid metal statue: no hollow echo, just a dull thunk. “Hey, you,” I said, “if you know so much about crime, you should know who killed Reuben. You’ve had a full five minutes to look into it, right? So who made that bomb?”
Bronze lifted his gaze to meet mine. “Lancaster Urdmann.” Then he turned away as if he found me boring.
Lancaster Urdmann. I barely stopped myself from choking at the sound of his name.
Urdmann embodied everything that had given the British Empire a bad name: a sweaty, arrogant man who flaunted his upper-class breeding and despised all foreign “wogs.” He’d made a dirty fortune selling guns to mobsters and terrorists, then “retired” to a more genteel life—trafficking in stolen antiquities, blood diamonds, ivory from freshly killed elephants, and other such plunder.
Recently Urdmann had taken up smarmy social climbing, winning public attention by donating priceless jade carvings to the British Museum. No one in the fawning museum crowd knew that Urdmann had stolen the carvings from a placid Sri Lankan retreat, slaughtering dozens of peaceful worshippers in the process. Urdmann had painted Down with the Government slogans at the scene of the crime, making it look like the massacre was committed by local rebels; but in my brief stint as errand girl for the CIA, someone at the agency had told me about an intercepted phone conversation in which Urdmann bragged of how easy it had been to kill the “little brown blighters.”
Repugnant man. Most galling of all, he called himself a “tomb raider” and fancied himself an expert on ancient treasures. I grudgingly admitted he had a decent knowledge of archaeology . . . but that just made it worse. Instead of finding lost artifacts on his own, he stole them from defenseless monks. Urdmann was no tomb raider; he was nothing but a murderer and thief. Two hundred years ago, his kind plundered Asia and Africa, shooting native people for sport. As far as Lancaster Urdmann was concerned, not much had changed.
“How does Urdmann fit into this?” I demanded. When the bronze man didn’t answer, I turned to Father Emil. “Do you know anything?”
“I know Urdmann bid on the Osiris statue. Our agent at the Omónia auction gave me a complete report. Mr. Urdmann was apparently most upset when our Order outbid him.”
“Urdmann has always been a poor loser.” In fact, Lancaster Urdmann must have been furious at losing the auction—furious enough to steal the statuette that he believed was rightfully his and plant a bomb on the Order as payback for the insult. Urdmann couldn’t stand being beaten. “But why did he want Osiris in the first place?”
“As I said,” Father Emil answered, “the statuette is a map: a map telling where the pieces of Bronze can be found. It was created by a secret order of Egyptian priests dedicated to Osiris—people who knew that, contrary to the usual myths, Osiris had never been completely reassembled. They spent years performing divinations, casting spells, having dream visions until they determined precise locations for each missing body part. We know their predictions were accurate, because they recovered several fragments themselves.
“Unfortunately for the priests,” Father Emil went on, “most of the bronze pieces were too far away to retrieve—in the Far East, Northern Europe, the Americas, Australia. It was 1250 B.C.; no one from Egypt could possibly travel so far. The pieces that were within reasonable distance belonged to other powerful cultures . . . like Assyria, Mycenae, and Babylon, who wouldn’t give up their sacred treasures without a fight. Eventually, the Egyptians might have acquired additional fragments despite the difficulties; but they ran afoul of more orthodox priests, who preached that Osiris had already been fully restored. The priests who made the statuette were denounced as heretical and executed by royal decree. All their possessions, including the statuette and the bronze pieces they’d found, vanished into the pharaoh’s treasury.”
“If that happened around 1250 B.C.,” I said, “the pharaoh was Ramses the Great.”
“Correct,” Father Emil replied. “The statuette was stored in one of the temples Ramses built during his reign. It was stolen sometime afterward, disappeared for many centuries, and finally turned up again in 1622. By then, Egypt had been conquered by the Ottoman Empire, and the statuette was presented as a gift to the local viceroy. It stayed with the viceroy’s family for many years until they fell on hard times and had to sell it. From there it passed through the hands of various collectors until it ended up at the Omónia auction.”
“Where Lancaster Urdmann tried to buy it,” I said. “Do you think he knew what it was
?”
Father Emil shrugged. “I don’t know. Our Order works hard to keep Bronze’s existence a secret. But there were so many bronze pieces, and the pieces were so powerful . . .” The monk sighed. “Legends abound, Ms. Croft. They’re usually dismissed as folktales, but the stories are out there: whisperings about strange bronze body parts possessed of mystic energies.”
“And Urdmann is such a power-mad thug,” I murmured, “he’d want such things for his own.”
“Even if Urdmann didn’t know about the bronze pieces beforehand, he’ll learn about them soon enough. The inscriptions on the Osiris statuette explain the whole story. They’re in code, but a good Egyptologist could decipher them.”
“Urdmann knows his stuff,” I said. “He’ll probably decode it on his own. And if he can’t figure it out, he’s rich enough to hire people who can. As soon as Urdmann realizes he’s found a map, he’ll use it to track the remaining bronze pieces.”
“Exactly,” Father Emil replied. “Which is where you come in, Ms. Croft.”
“You want me to find the missing parts before Urdmann does.”
“Yes. Our Order will pay your expenses, plus a generous finder’s fee. We have ample financial resources.”
“How do monks and nuns acquire ample financial resources?”
Father Emil smiled. “Bronze knows we need funds to operate. From time to time, he uses his predictive powers to suggest profitable investments . . . and over two thousand years, Ms. Croft, the revenues build up significantly.”
Lovely, I thought, an agent of divine justice who gets rich from gaming the market. I had nothing against making money by guessing at good investments; but if Bronze had high-tech/mystical superintelligence, it seemed like shooting fish in a barrel. Still, it’s no crime to be smarter than everyone else. “If Urdmann has the real statuette,” I said, “aren’t we out of the game? We’ve lost the treasure map. How can we find the missing pieces?”
“We were close to finding them, even before the Osiris went up for auction,” Father Emil told me. “Reuben had been researching the problem off and on for years. The statuette would have given precise positions, but even without that information, Reuben had narrowed the locations down. You shouldn’t have trouble finding what we want.”
The Man of Bronze Page 9