“You think they met in school,” said Tanabe.
Monty had to pass several security blocks before he was admitted into the files of Paxton Polytech. “They’re about the same age, it looks like—mid-twenties.” He called up the file of Manuel Hung, the name Loveland had used in school. Loveland looked back at him from the screen. His hair, usually short and slicked back so far as Monty had seen, fell below his shoulders in a mussed tangle, but his forehead was still bared and broad…his strikingly handsome, brooding, subtly smirking features unmistakable. Society was usually too kind to such an attractive person to allow such a disturbed personality to develop.
Monty punched up a list of clubs and activities. A few—enough to fulfill expectations, but not the kind of manic overkill seen in many ambitious students. Monty asked to see a group photo of each club, which he knew would exist for the graduation book. The computer told him these photos weren’t stored within Manuel Hung’s file, but it quickly drew them from the graduation book itself for him to view.
No Westy Dwork. He had the photos enlarged, scanned each face. Loveland was there, smiling as seductively and confidently as a model. Monty asked the computer if Paxton Polytech had ever known a Westy Dwork. No, it hadn’t. Of course.
“Maybe they met at Paxton University,” Tanabe suggested, “where Loveland took Liberal Arts…”
“Wait a fucking minute,” Monty breathed, jerking forward at the screen.
“What?”
“This guy in back.” He tapped at the screen, a photo of a bioengineering club. Loveland-Hung sat in front. In the last row, looming conspicuous, stood a very tall, very thin young man. “He’s tall…”
“And?”
“Dwork is tall. Very tall.” Monty zoomed in. The face filled the screen. It wasn’t familiar.
“Is it him?”
“Not immediately.” Monty asked the computer for the man’s name. It appeared across the bottom of the screen. PILTER DE VARD.
“I know that name. Where do I know him from?”
Giddry leaned in between them. “Pilter De Vard, De Vard…shit!”
“Who is he?” snapped Monty.
“Those…those three college kids who Matt Cotton hired to develop and spread M-670…that’s one of them. Pilter De Vard—he was one of them…”
“The one they didn’t catch,” said Tanabe.
“Okay, okay, stay calm,” Monty chanted, “stay calm.” He was chanting it more to himself than to anyone else as his heart stomped heavily, eagerly up a staircase in his chest. He punched into the file of Pilter De Vard.
He bypassed the ID photo—it told him nothing. But the file itself was another matter…
“You stupid fuck,” Monty snorted, smiling, wagging his head. It hadn’t taken him long to find it. “You stupid over-confident bragging fuck.”
“What?”
Monty swivelled to his men. “For his master thesis, Westy Dwork extended the body of a living dog to sixty feet in length while keeping it alive without artificial support. Funny. Pilter De Vard did the same thing for his thesis.”
“Let’s go cuff this sludge,” rumbled Giddry.
“Shouldn’t we call the forcers?” Tanabe said.
“Now why the hell would we wanna do that?” Giddry said. “They’re on the case now…let them follow their own leads. We don’t need them to do our job for us, man…we’re health agents.”
Monty was up and slipping on his long black overcoat. The blood throbbed in his cheeks. “He’ll be at Cugok.”
“Should we give Beak a call, let him know we’ve hit it?” said Giddry.
“He’s in no shape,” said Tanabe.
Monty hesitated only a moment. “Call him.”
“Monty…”
“I can’t deny him part of this. He’ll be all right. Ring him up, quickly.”
Beak came on; Monty nudged in past Tanabe. “We’ve got Westy Dwork on a platter, man—he’s Pilter De Vard, one of the college punks who designed M-670 for Matt Cotton…the one they never found. He was also a classmate of Toll Loveland’s at Paxton Polytech. We’re going down to Cugok to take him. You think you’re up to it?”
“Meet you there,” Beak said grimly.
*
Beak leaned against the side of his car waiting for them in the parking lot, his ski hat pulled low and collar turned up against the chill of oncoming evening. He straightened up as his three partners crossed to join him.
“I’m going to stay out here ‘til you have him cuffed,” said Monty, removing his hand phone from his pocket. “If he sees me he might get spooked. I want this smooth. This bastard is directly responsible for the death of thousands…he makes Toll Loveland look like a shoplifter.”
“Unless Loveland was part of that, too,” said Tanabe.
“We’ll know just what their relationship was soon enough.” Monty lit a cigarette. “Call me inside the minute you’ve cuffed him…and I mean literally cuff him. If he resists arrest, Tanabe, drug him.”
Agent Tanabe had taken along a dart pistol. Giddry carried a professional-looking businessman’s valise containing only one thing—a powerful military ray blaster with folding stock. Monty and Beak had their plasma-loaded handguns with a spare clip each of solid projectiles. Despite Dwork’s careless bravado, they did not want to underestimate his capabilities.
“Don’t you get trigger-happy, Baf,” Monty warned Giddry.
“Hey, I’m not your traitor friend Vern Woodmere, Black. Is everybody ready now or what?”
“Go on in,” Monty told them.
He watched the three agents disappear through the company’s glass front door. Over that door, gold letters protruded from the building:
FREDRICK V. CUGOK PHARMACEUTICAL RESEARCH
AND MANUFACTURING COMPANY, INC.
He was too tense to lean against Beak’s car while he waited…
The handsome reception area featured a miniature garden with trickling waterfall. The decor throughout the office areas and cafeterias of the plant—and even in the plant proper, to a lesser extent—was in the realm of old Earth’s Art Deco. Behind the receptionist’s desk, a huge glossy sculpture filled the wall, a yin and yang portraying two stylized dolphins, one red and one black, chasing each other’s tails. By now the receptionist knew the health agents Tanabe and Giddry, and greeted them cheerily by name. She was young and plumply pretty.
“We’re sorry to come in like this without advance notice, Alise,” smiled Tanabe, “but do you think we could see Mr. Dwork for a few moments, if he’s still here?”
“Well, we’ve started our second shift, but he usually stays a few hours into it, at least. Let me page him.”
Beak glanced about the reception area. Dark austere walls with grainy lighter speckles, the floor black marble and the ceiling metallic gold. Quite an artistic interior designer they’d brought in, he thought, impressed. He looked down an off-branching hall toward office sounds, distant chatter and chuckling. The hall had gold archways spaced along it, reflecting in the marble.
“Westy Dwork, call two-nine-six, please. Westy Dwork, two-nine-six.”
“Cold out there,” Giddry said to Alise.
“Oh I know, huh? They shouldn’t let it get this cold so fast.” Her phone rang; she answered it. “Mr. Dwork? Agents Tanabe and Giddry are here from the Health Agency…they’d like a word with you?”
The screen faced Alise so the three men couldn’t see Dwork on it, but they listened to his voice, deep and resonant with his height despite his narrow frame.
“Ahh…well, I was hoping to go home soon. If it’s another tour they want, I can have someone take them…”
“Just a brief word—no tours,” Tanabe spoke up.
“Of course, gentlemen. Send them in to my office, Alise.”
Alise rose from her desk. “Do you know where Mr. Dwork’s office is?”
“Um…I don’t believe so,” said Tanabe. Previously they had interviewed the plant superintendent under Mr. Cugok, and the captains
of manufacturing beneath him.
“Okay, this way please.” Giddry watched Alise’s generous rump roll in her white dress as they followed her down the hall of arches, Beak flicking his narrowed eyes nervously from door to door. They passed an open office area partitioned into cubicles, turned down another hall. One open door showed a vast conference table within, presently deactivated wall screens. Then, at the end of the hall, a door labeled: WESTY DWORK—CHIEF OF RESEARCH. Alise rang a buzzer. They heard the door unlock by remote; Alise cracked it to lean her head in. “The health agents, Mr. Dwork?”
“Send them in,” they heard. Alise smiled, cherubic, as she passed them, left them, high heels clicking on marble.
Giddry let Tanabe and Beak go before him so that he had time to bring out the ray blaster, unfold its skeleton stock. He leaned the empty valise against the wall.
Dwork stood up smiling behind his desk to greet Tanabe first.
Alise glanced back over her shoulder. Giddry and his new friend.
“Oh my God!” Dwork heard Alise shriek in the hall beyond.
“Get him!” Giddry roared, spinning away from Alise to plunge into the room.
Tanabe fumbled for his dart pistol inside his prim jacket.
Dwork touched a button on his desk. A transparent pane slid up from the floor to bisect the room like one of the partitions in the office area they’d passed. “Shit!” Beak barked, his gun out. He aimed away from Dwork and fired. The plasma bullet exploded across the pane, but it wouldn’t hold. It quickly ran down the barrier, a glowing ooze. It did, however, melt the carpet quite nicely where it pooled.
Dwork lifted a pistol from a drawer in his desk. Giddry had his blaster leveled but didn’t dare let loose for fear of ricochets.
“Open it, Dwork!” Beak shouted. “You can’t stay in there forever…we’ll get people in here to rip the walls down if we have to!”
Dwork pointed his gun at Beak, and the health agent realized the situation in time to duck as a green ray bolt streaked from the pistol, through the barrier without leaving a hole, and into the wall behind Beak where it did leave a scorched hole. His blaster utilized a beam that could pass through the screen as sunlight passes through a window.
Giddry’s more impressive-looking weapon could not, nevertheless, reciprocate in kind, and he leaped out of the room in time to avoid a second hurriedly aimed bolt, which struck the doorframe. Giddry plastered himself to the wall outside, gulping at air.
Tanabe and Beak scrambled for the door, both for a lethal moment unprotected. One of them would be hit. It was up to Dwork to decide which.
The third emerald arrow struck Tanabe in the back of the head, at an angle which sent a raw mass of its material up over the top of his skull to hang across his face on a hinge of skin. Tanabe pitched across a chair, smoking…pulled the chair to the floor across his chest as if for a shield even in death.
Beak jumped over his legs, out the door. Giddry yanked him over by the arm. A silent green bolt struck the wall opposite the open door, leaving a smoking star-shaped impact point on the austere grain-speckled surface.
Beak tore his hand phone from his pocket. “Monty—we’re under fire! We’re outside Dwork’s office…Tanabe is dead…”
“Didn’t catch you,” Monty responded tensely, probably having heard only the last bit about Tanabe. “Repeat!”
“We’re outside Dwork’s office, man, hurry! He’s killed Tanabe! Fucking hurry!”
“Jesus,” Beak heard, and then the connection clicked off on the other end.
Alise was standing at her desk punching up a number on the vidphone when the front door opened and a tall man in a long black coat and carrying a pink handgun burst in. She screamed, and he deftly flipped open a badge—something Monty had guiltily caught himself practicing in the mirror from time to time. “Health Agency—who are you calling?”
“The forcers,” Alise whimpered.
“Good…tell them we need assistance in arresting a dangerous criminal—Westy Dwork. Which way did my friends go?”
“Down that way. Westy Dwork?”
“Sound a fire alarm or get on the intercom—get everybody out of the building, quickly.”
“Yes, sir.”
Monty bolted into the hall, cape-like coat billowing out behind him. He had come into the building too late to hear Alise call a security alert over the intercom system.
Into the pink semi-auto he’d slapped his clip of solid bullets in place of the plasma. He wanted to take Dwork alive if possible, and if he used the plasma there’d be nothing left to take. Dwork’s body and blood probably didn’t present a biohazard, and there was the risk, too, of hitting an innocent or fellow agent. Bullets it was.
Giddry poked the two-fisted blaster around the corner and let loose an automatic spray of short red ray bolts. He heard them zing off the barrier, hiss like angry insects around the room, burning some things and knocking other things over. A few came back out into the hall. “Enough!” Beak snapped.
On his hands and knees now, Giddry pressed his cheek against the wall, pushed one reluctant eye quickly past the doorframe before jerking back. Then he looked again, longer. Withdrew again. “Fuck!”
“What?”
“He’s either down behind his desk or he went through that door in the back of the room…”
“Great—I’ll give you one fucking guess. Where does that door go?”
“How the hell should I know?” Giddry peeked again.
“You’ve been here before several times.”
“They didn’t give me blueprints for the goddamn place…”
Beak held his hand phone to his bill. “Monty…”
A blue ray bolt passed through the air between Beak’s mouth and the device in his palm. The bright flash dazzled him. He turned his head to see a figure at the end of the hall, dressed in a uniform of black.
It was a security guard in an ostentatious black uniform with gold trim, a gold-trimmed black cap; he looked more like a cross between a chauffeur and a gay man in leather bar regalia. He had a blaster at the ends of his outstretched arms. And now the guard turned his head, unintentionally saving Beak’s life.
Monty recognized the man even as he was pumping two bullets into his face at point-blank range. The ridiculous cap flew off, the heavy black blaster clattered. Monty stood over the gaudy corpse.
“I’m sorry, Beak.”
“Sorry shit—you saved my fuckin’ life, man!”
“He’s one of your boys.”
“One of my…boys.” Beak then came running while Giddry kept to the door. Beak looked down now, too. “My God,” he breathed, and trembled.
The dislodged cap had revealed a blond crewcut. Even with the two leaking bullet holes, they could distinguish the white-skinned black man’s features.
“No red jacket, but…” said Monty.
“You’re dead, you worthless monster.” Beak let a glob of saliva drop onto the gaping dead man’s forehead. “How do you like it, fuck?” He almost kicked that vulnerable slack face.
“What happened to Tanabe?”
“A screen came up…it cut us off from Dwork, but he has a blaster that can project through it. He nailed Haz in the head. Now he’s ducked out a back door in the office.”
“Shit.” The fire alarm blared to life, making Monty flinch. He raised his voice above it. “The forcers are on the way and I had the receptionist pull an alarm. Dwork might slip out with the crew—we need someone outside until the forcers come. Baf!”
“Yeah?” Giddry scrambled over to them.
“Beak and me are splitting up to look around. I had a fire alarm set off; go outside and make sure Dwork doesn’t sneak out with everybody else. The forcers are on the way.”
“Let Beak go outside—I want that sludge! He killed my partner!”
“They killed my wife!”
“They killed my partner, too,” Monty snapped. “Go outside, Baf, move. He could be in his car right now!”
“Well, he’
d better come out to me.” Giddry pounded off down the hall after leaping over the sprawled security guard/part-time actor-rapist.
Monty just naturally assumed, logically or not, that the rapist’s partner must also be on the premises somewhere.
“Keep in touch,” he told Beak. “Okay—let’s make like amebas and split.”
Beak darted back toward the reception area. Monty headed toward the doorway opening into the partitioned stalls of mini-offices.
He felt potent and a little high after killing Mauve’s rapist. Lightheaded but vital. No Bum Junket doubts. There was, unfortunately, a necessary time for killing.
From the reception area, Beak found his way into the plant proper. It hummed with its hidden life…and throbbed with its dangers. He almost hesitated before embarking into its already abandoned maze.
The fire alarm droned on as Monty entered the bright offices. He saw that they extended on for quite a distance, dozens of dinky mini-offices. A sound in one nearby made him whirl with his gun; a man stepped out from the cubicle and froze, raised his hands. “Don’t shoot—please!”
“I’m a health agent—who are you?”
“Sean Ahmed…I’m the chief expeditor.”
“What are you doing, having a coffee? Get outta the building.”
“I was just securing my terminals, sir…I’m on my way.”
“Where does the door in the back of Westy Dwork’s office go?”
“Westy Dwork? Oh, ah, that would go into a hall that takes you into the Research and Development Department.”
“How do I get there?”
“A couple ways. Through the plant. From here, ah…you can’t just go through his office?”
“If I could I would, right?”
“Well…there’s another way near here. I can take you.”
Monty didn’t want to endanger the man, but Westy Dwork had proved more than a danger to thousands. “All right, quick, show me.”
While they walked Monty used his hand phone to call HAP. He asked for reinforcements to be sent to Cugok, and for Captain Nedland to be notified at home. They came to a door with gold letters projecting above it: RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT DEPARTMENT.
Health Agent Page 24