Monique pulled them both to a halt by grabbing his upper arm. She kept staring at his face as if decoding hieroglyphics etched into the walls of The Great Pyramid. “You’re thinking, if you can get your hands on that technology, redirect it, see that the baby isn’t stillborn, or comes out of the womb as some monstrosity…”
“Yes, then my worst nightmare becomes my best insurance against all possible future nightmares.”
“A bright day indeed. And me thinking the sunny sky was not at all symbolic, merely good fortune.”
He grabbed her and kissed her. “Want to do it right here, on the grass? So people think I have a thing for chicks wearing RPGs. Fuck ’em. Let them judge me how they want.”
She smiled the most gently condescending of smiles. “As much as I’d like to share in your joy, that’ll have to come later.”
They resumed their walk. The silence between them granted the space they needed to decompress after two quick shocks to the system.
The first: turning Central Park into ground zero for a vicious terrorist attack engendered by our own country. Not that that was anything new. After seeing a video documentary on 9/11 showing how there was no way for those towers to fall straight down without having explosives precisely placed, the way buildings are typically brought down, and that 747s running into them would not have done it, Adrian had become convinced the event was little more than a conspiracy to steal democracy away from Americans and rob them of their citizenship rights and to proper protection under the law.
The second: the info Monique had delivered into his hands meant they were about to wrap up this case. But more than that, he’d been handed the key to a bright future that seconds ago seemed all too elusive.
Moments later they were at the duck pond. Both had stopped to stare at the homeless man feeding the ducks out of a large dark green plastic bag he’d snagged from one of the light posts boasting a garbage can, either in the park or around the perimeter of the park. “Why is it that guy has a far more enviable life than the two of us?” Adrian said.
“He got his priorities straight early on. So he didn’t have to spend the last twenty years undoing karma from the twenty before that.”
Adrian grunted.
“You sure you have enough time to track down these leads, Adrian? Maybe it would just be better to do what Altreman wants, kill somebody who doesn’t deserve killing? Hell, kill a dozen of them. No jury on earth would convict you. People at our level have to look at the numbers. If ten good people die so a million more may live, that’s no decision at all.”
He snorted his half-hearted concession, his resistance to the idea blocking the unimpeded exhale of breath. “It may come to that. But before I’m too far gone, I’d at least like to see if I can avoid the inevitable.”
“Our job descriptions down to just three words: Avoid the Inevitable. What kind of madness is that?”
“Divine madness.” He kissed her on the forehead. “Thanks for coming through for me in the clinch, doll, as always. God help anyone trying to get through life these days without an international spy, an assassin, a highly-paid shrink, and a forensics expert in their back pockets.”
“I’ve framed enough innocent men who got too close to the truth to attest to that truism.” She kissed him back then headed toward the edge of the park. She only took a couple steps before stopping and looking back.
“Adrian, it occur to you that Altreman wants you to become a killer to make you a better fit for him?”
“I don’t follow.”
“If he doesn’t like any of the robot or hybrid body options for downloading his consciousness to, or they just aren’t ready, he could be planning to download his consciousness into you. Maybe he’s making sure you aren’t so hard-wired against killing that some part of your mind or body rejects him, even after he’s done what he can to flush all that is you out.”
Adrian grunted. “No, it hadn’t occurred to me. Seems far-fetched.”
“Compared to what? Certainly not to the rest of your investigation.”
She had a point. His face must have said as much, because she didn’t await further acknowledgement, just headed towards the edge of the park.
Monique hadn’t gotten too far before a band of thugs accosted her, four all in all, wearing balaclavas. They could have been vigilante heroes who’d seen what had happened earlier, and in case they failed to subdue and capture her for being a public menace, figured they didn’t want to get marked for death by exposing their faces. That or they could have been late arrivals to the scene, hoping to find an easy mark and with most of them gone… Either way…
Adrian chuckled. “God help them,” he said, turning to exit the park the opposite direction, never looking back once at Monique.
TWENTY
“You’re not going to believe this,” Ed said through the car speakers as Klepsky was driving uptown. The voice coming out of nowhere startled him so much he nearly caused a three car pileup, braking at the last second.
“Ed!”
“Um, sorry. I’ll wait for you to pull yourself together. Forget that you get lost in your head sometimes.”
Klepsky took a couple snorting power breaths as he’d been trained to do for a former wife’s Lamaze class. In truth, it was Ed’s highly excited energy bursting through the loudspeakers in such stark contrast to his dark grey mood that had probably jarred him more than anything Ed said. “What is it, Ed?”
“There’s an exhibit passing through town at the Met. A Golem exhibit.”
“You’re kidding?”
“I know, right? How suspicious is that? And the curator touring with the exhibit, I tell you, this guy has Nosferatu written all over him. If you ask me, he’s a golem come to life, and he’s trying to figure out how the master created him before he passes from this mortal coil.”
Klepsky smiled the way he would with a child bringing his favorite bedtime story to him before jumping in his lap and insisting on a read. “There was a time, Ed, when I would have said it’s a pity reality is never as colorful as fantasy. But times have changed, and now it’s the other way around. So who knows, maybe this guy is everything you say he is. Alright, I’ll swing by the Met.”
The next sounds were the wheels squealing as Klepsky pulled a U-ey right in the middle of a four-way intersection to join the traffic headed the opposite way. His dramatic if brief overture was followed closely by the orchestra horn section kicking in. Every automobile as far away as the Bronx gave him a piece of their mind. “Yeah, yeah. You all only have a future on account of me, you hear? You’d think it’d earn me some gratis.”
The horns finally quieting down enough for Klepsky to resume his conversation, he said, “How are you coming with the internet search for matching images to the pics on Celine’s scanners, Ed?”
“A lot of DARPA hits. But that follows, being as they have several ongoing research projects dedicated to making super-soldiers. Same for the matching agencies across the world. Nothing really jumps out. Let’s hope it’s not one of those people. That’s a needle-in-a-haystack-of-needles search if there ever was one. We’ll be stuck on this case forever, which isn’t an option. So he may as well be The Invisible Man. Which, as cool as it sounds for the title of our next investigation, kind of pales in comparison to The Unkillable Man, you know?”
“What about those poor first year futurists happy to brush my teeth if it gets them some face time with me?”
“Well, they went over the Spiderman scene pretty well, like white-coated cockroaches come out to play as soon as the major leaguers were out of the ballpark. They bagged the axe used on Spiderman, a.k.a. Puzzle-Piece-Paul, a.k.a. Randy Reardon, checked for prints, dusted the sides of the aquariums in search of same. They even managed to get their hands on one of the spiders for Celine to go to town on.”
“Judging from the monotone, you’re not too optimistic about anything useful bubbling up from the outer perimeter of our floor at 1 WTC.”
“Nope.”
&nb
sp; “That’s three crime scenes now, Ed. Surely…?”
“Remember the smoldering cigarette from the first crime scene? Even the saliva left on the cigarette had no DNA markers. My theory, this guy’s DNA breaks down the same way the DNA of his golems breaks down. Though why he’s alive still and they aren’t is a question for Adrian. I need my extra brain cells.”
“Okay, Ed. I’m at the Met. I’ll take it from here.”
“Ed, over and out. Over and out, get it? A reference to me lying ass up on the floor of our boxing ring, passed out cold after one of our sessions?”
“Hilarious, Ed. You’re really giving Adrian a run for his money with those cheeky one-liners.”
Klepsky got out of the car thinking, with his life entirely dependent on his brightest techies, it was also entirely subservient to their weird fetishes. And they collected them the way neurotics collected neuroses in a jar. Why couldn’t Ed be into obscure superhero comics no one else knew about, or manga-porno, something suitably geeky and suitably harmless?
***
The three grand archways that fronted the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art were just the first Klepsky was presented with. Once inside, the high arches theme continued throughout the building. Between the high ornate ceilings, the Grecian pillars, and the awe-inspiring expanses, he was left breathless. All in all, the architecture was grand enough to make him wonder how the hell the artwork was going to upstage it.
Klepsky wasn’t much on museums, but he had to admit, he found the Golem presentation at the Met, when he finally managed to locate it, entirely engrossing. That would have been the case even if it weren’t possibly related to his investigation in some way. There was an entire wing on one floor dedicated to it.
He was currently frozen hang-jawed before the ants erecting a golem right before his eyes. The curator Ed warned him about stopped by his side to stare at it with him. “Marvelous, aren’t they?” Nosferatu said. Ed was right, this guy was a dead ringer for the original take on Dracula: bald head, long bony fingers with even longer talons, hunched back, looked two hundred if he was a day, skin pulled tight over skeletal features.
“How’s it done?” Klepsky asked.
“The inside of the Plexiglas case is bombarded with sound frequencies that change to inform the building of each layer of the golem from the ground up. The ants themselves are genetically engineered to respond in a different manner to each of the sound frequencies. They remain in a state of fevered agitation until the sculpture is complete.”
“Sounds cruel.”
“It’s been my experience that often you have to be cruel to be kind,” Nosferatu said, rubbing his hands as if he couldn’t get warm. “They’re no longer merely ants. They’re a hive-mind version of Kandinsky.”
“I have a guy who’s creating golems out of real life people,” Klepsky said, turning to face him and flashing his FBI badge in the same movement, hoping to catch him off guard. “What can you tell me about that?”
Nosferatu nodded. “A bit retro, but not entirely without interest.”
“Retro?”
“Oh, yes. We have quite a few of them on display here. Come, I’ll show you.”
Nosferatu took him on a tour of his human patchworks, also erected out of human body pieces. “We got the people who handle the BODY WORLDS tour to help us out with them, of course, so we were compliant with all the appropriate laws governing human remains. Not to mention preventing further tissue decay and decomp and the assorted smells. Some of these go back several hundred years.”
“You’re kidding.”
“We haven’t had a killer with this m.o. in a while. Perhaps you’d like me to consult on the case. I consulted on the last two golem cases.”
“The last two?”
“Yes, one in Chicago about ten years back, and one in Los Angeles. I think the latter was twenty-five years back, give or take. My memory hasn’t started failing me yet as regards the details pertaining to my first love, but most everything else is going by the wayside.”
Klepsky was frustrated because he couldn’t get a read on this guy. “Maybe building human golems is a way for you to keep your mind sharp regarding the thing you love most, going into the future. A kind of memory aid, if you will, like mnemonics.”
Nosferatu laughed a cancerous, hollow, echoing laugh, more sinister sounding than mad sounding. Klepsky couldn’t believe he was becoming a connoisseur of these things.
“Maybe if I was a younger man or a better sculptor.” Nosferatu gestured for him to follow to the next exhibit. “Here’s the real reason I’m not your guy, FBI man.”
They stared at the exhibit together.
Inside the glass case was a 3D printer responding to a computer’s orders to print up a human. The transparent feeder tubes against the wall were marked, “blood,” “muscles,” “bones,” “organs,” “hair,” “fingernails,” “eyes.” It was like a weird Andy Warhol exhibit meant to expose the crass commercialism of 3D printing.
“It’s too much like real life, is that it?”
“Precisely,” Nosferatu said. “I’ll have you know that real human tissue cells are being used to erect this golem, again supplied with the help of BODY WORLDS. “The 3D printing is still crude. The body still has to be glued together and kept refrigerated. But it will walk and talk when it’s done. Entirely robotically. The hope is to inspire kids’ imaginations to go out and build the real thing, of course.”
“Of course,” Klepsky said sarcastically. Though Nosferatu caught none of the sarcasm.
“Imagine if we could replace our aging bodies with fresh, in-peak-of-health replacement bodies with just the push of a button on our 3D printers.”
Klepsky grunted. “Yes, imagine.”
They played a game of chicken with staring one another down before Klepsky gasped, surrendering the win to Nosferatu. “You won’t mind if I keep you under around-the-clock surveillance all the same, will you? Until our investigation is complete, of course.”
“Very kind of you. I’m an old man now. I’m afraid of walking the city alone anymore, of possibly falling and not being able to get up, of being mugged. Pity your budget can’t condone keeping them around me even after your investigation is complete.”
Klepsky forced a smile.
Nosferatu had this way of playing with his fingers and the long nails at the end of them as he walked, as if fingering an imaginary keyboard, and in so doing, throwing ominous shadows. Klepsky suspected he was arthritic and it was a way of maintaining mobility in his hands.
They continued their walk through the exhibit. “Tell me, has anyone approached you of late on how to make a golem out of human flesh?” Klepsky asked.
Nosferatu reached into his jacket and pulled out an iPhone for him. “These are all the suspected serial killers to have crossed my path over the years with very alarming questions, and the kind of eerie vibe that led me to suspect them. The list goes back over fifty years. It’s been updated at least twenty-two times this year. Started it the first time you guys came around with questions for me as a person of interest. Been keeping it up ever since, as sort of a hobby.”
“Thank you,” Klepsky said, taking the iPhone. “I’ll make sure to get this back to you after we’ve checked everybody off the list of interest to us.”
“You can sync it to your phone if you like. No need to take it with you.”
“Ah-hem, yes, well, I knew that.”
Nosferatu handled the syncing for him as Klepsky got his phone out of his pocket.
“One more thing, doc, what do you know about bringing people back from the dead, for real?”
“You mean, if we were to try and do it today? Only what I know of the fringe sciences, the study of the paranormal, zombieism, exorcisms of the demonically possessed, things of that nature.”
“We believe whoever is making our golems means to use them as a kind of magic talisman, a charm, connecting the physical and spiritual realms.”
“Well, traditionally a cha
rm is used to animate the bodies, a kind of magic spell, at least as far as the mysticism end of things go. But I’ve never heard of the golem itself used as a talisman. What would it be used to summon into being?”
“Another serial killer.”
Nosferatu nodded the way professors do as they bounce an idea about inside their heads. Then, he did this weird stretching routine, in the same manner that Balinese dancers perform their dances, showing off finger dexterity, as they bent their fingers and joints in directions they were not meant to bend or stretch in. For a brief while he looked next like a puppet moving unnaturally in response to a puppet master pulling at the strings. Then he settled back down. Klepsky suspected this was yet another routine he’d devised to ward off advancing arthritis. Perhaps by working out some kinks and reducing the pain he was experiencing in his body, he felt he could concentrate more on finding some context for Klepsky’s insight.
Standing in repose again, Nosferatu said, “For the spell to have any meaning, the person to be turned into a serial killer would have to believe that the person he was killing too would come back to life. If, as you say, he sees himself as the charm, the purveyor of magic. Hence, no harm, no foul. Presumably the whole point of the exercise is to get the rational mind to stand down long enough for the monsters of the Id to run wild. Something the would-be killer might well be inclined to do if the consequences of such an act were negated by the magic of the golem.”
The words fell like Thor’s hammer on Klepsky’s brain. “That helps, doc! Thanks.” He would have shaken the doc’s hand, but he looked too frail. Klepsky was afraid he’d come unglued, just like his golems.
Turning so fast and so sharply he practically did a pirouette on the overly-polished floor, Klepsky ran for the exit, his cell phone in hand. He dialed as he ran.
Celine picked up on the third ring.
He put the phone to his ear. “Celine, I need you to figure out why the formula for the Golem Guy isn’t working.”
Unkillable (The Futurist Book 1) Page 19