Tek Secret

by William Shatner

  “I was hoping, since you know her pretty well, that you might have some idea where Jimalla’d be likely to hide out,” said Dan hopefully. “It’s important to find her before those guys do.”

  Nodding, Moreno set the mug down on the reception desk. “I know a couple of places we can look,” he told them.

  “You shouldn’t have bopped me so hard,” complained Gates, who was back sprawled in his chair and rubbing at the side of his head. “I was simply manifesting what’s known as the Trapped Rat Syndrome. That involves unreasoning panic and an irrational attempt at flight even though the odds are—”

  “What say we get down to specifics, lest you next experience the wellknown Boot in the Ass Syndrome?” Gomez, stungun in hand, was perched on the arm of the bright orange plastiglass sofa.

  Gates rubbed at his head again, wincing. “The brain, you know, is a delicate—”

  “I’m deeply interested in your brain,” the detective assured him. “Especially in what it can recall about the events leading up to your rather hasty departure from Greater LA.”

  “I didn’t kill Ford Jaspers.”

  “Oh, so?”

  Shifting in his chair, Gates said, “You’re looking at me as though you don’t accept my innocence, Sid. That’s because, unfortunately, I tend to give off an aura of culpability even when I’m perfectly—”

  “So who did knock off the old ham?”

  Gates glanced up at the ceiling. “Despite my career, I have a very difficult time snitching on others,” he confided. “It goes back, I believe, to an incident in my childhood when my dear mom, through no fault of her own—”

  “Who did it, Shel?”

  “Well,” said Gates quietly, “it was Myra Ettinger.”

  “The acting CEO of Mechanix International—how did that come about?”

  Gates took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds. Sighing out air, he said, “Let me backtrack a bit so that—”

  “Not all the way to your childhood again, por favor.”

  “No, this is about why I joined Dr. Moreno’s therapy group,” he explained. “You know, it’s sad that I didn’t get into something like that long ago. I got some real insights into my own tangled—”

  “Somebody hired you to sit in, didn’t they?”

  “Right, yes. That was Myra. She knew ... well, it shames me some to admit this, Sid, but I have a reputation as an undercover operative and—”

  “A spy and a sneak.”

  “A harsh term, yet apt. Anyway, Myra approached me and arranged for me to get into the same sessions that Alicia Bower was attending.”

  “And why was that?”

  “They wanted to know what was troubling her, what she was talking about in front of the others.” He rubbed at his head yet again. “They were afraid she was going to remember something.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Well, it’s Myra for certain and a fellow I saw a couple times named Bernard Zangerly. I’m not sure, but I firmly believe it’s also her father, Alicia’s father. All of them Mechanix people, of course.”

  “What exactly were they afraid she was on the brink of remembering?”

  “I don’t know that, Sid. I mean, if they told me what it was, then I’d know, too, and be as dangerous to them as Alicia was. Right?”

  “If she was so dangerous, why not just kill her instead of spying on her?”

  “I think Myra would’ve, but her father wouldn’t allow anything like that, you see. He loved her I guess, although parental love, as I know well, can sometimes take strange and quirky turnings as it—”

  “What was wrong with the lady’s memory—amnesia?”

  Gates shook his head. “Well, amnesia in a way, except it had been induced,” he said. “At least that was my impression from hints that Myra let drop. Then it started to look, which truly upset them, as though it hadn’t taken and she was starting to remember.”

  “Is that how Tin Lizzie ties in?”

  Gates became interested in the ceiling again. “I imagine so, Sid, but I still don’t actually know who Tin Lizzie is or what that means.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “No, honestly, even though I look to you right at the moment as though I’m lying in my teeth.”

  “What part does Ford Jaspers play in this mess?”

  “It turns out, you know, you can’t trust anybody. I should’ve learned early on, because of things that occurred in my youth, through no fault of my dear mom’s, that most people can’t be relied on or trusted much. Even so, I accept Ford as a pathetic old hasbeen. Turns out, you know, that he was a longtime blackmailer and—”

  “I know about that part. Why did Myra kill him off?”

  “That night that he came calling on me, she happened to be visiting me,” said Gates, shifting in his seat. “Besides getting regular reports from me about Alicia, Myra ... Well, sometimes, through no fault of my own, older women seem to become extremely fond of me. Anyway, she was in the bedroom when Ford came to the door. Turns out he’d tumbled to me and had been tailing me. Once Alicia vanished, he figured it was time to try to collect some dough. He knew I’d been filing reports to the Mechanix people and he knew they were worried about something she knew. It was his notion that I was to persuade Mechanix to pay him a hefty sum—the old fool actually wanted $1,000,000—or he’d give what he knew to connections of his in the media. Well, at that point Myra pops out of the bedroom, still jaybird naked, and kills him with her lazgun. Right on my damn floor, if you please.”

  “Do you know where Alicia Bower is?”

  “I don’t, Sid, honestly. All I know is that after I reported to Myra that Alicia seemed close to remembering whatever it was that bothered her, they arranged for her to vanish.” He touched at the sore spot at the side of his head. “I don’t know who grabbed her, how it was done or where she is now.”

  “Is she still alive?”

  “I sure hope so. She was a very nice young woman and some of the things that had happened to her struck a familiar—”

  “You, greaseball, drop the gun and quit annoying my Shelly.” A hefty, silverhaired woman of about fifty had appeared suddenly in the doorway. In each plump, beringed hand she held a lazgun.

  “Mom,” said Gates, “I keep telling you not to call me Shelly anymore.”

  30

  THERE WAS A HOLOGRAPHIC fireplace in one corner with a heap of blazing logs within it, but the small underground room was damp and chill. Ryder stood at the foot of the brass bed, shifting from foot to foot and now and then glancing back at the doorway Georgia had left by a few minutes earlier.

  A fat greyhaired man was standing next to the bed, watching the lean, bald man lying atop the rumpled multicolored quilt. “You’ll make it,” he said.

  “I didn’t especially wish to make it,” Dr. Winter told him in a quiet voice. “Those capsules I borrowed from the Centre were supposed to—”

  “When you’re through bitching,” said Jake from where he was standing at the other side of the bed, “I want to talk to you.”

  “Who the devil might you be?” Winter propped himself up on his elbows. “Why have you been allowed to intrude—”

  “Jake Cardigan,” he said evenly.

  “Oh, of course. The aggressive private eye.”

  “Where’s Alicia Bower?”

  “Go away, Cardigan. Just tonight I finally made up my mind I can’t handle all the stresses and lies of my life,” Winter explained to him. “When I fully realized all the harm I’ve caused, I decided to get myself out of the whole bloody mess.”

  “You can, far as I care, give it another try soon as I’m gone.”

  Leaning, Jake caught hold of the front of the doctor’s shirt and yanked him closer. “Is she inside that damn Mentor setup?”

  “Yes, and, please, let go of me, damn you.”

  Jake held on. “Why is she there?”

  “It really doesn’t matter, Cardigan,” said the psychiatrist. “I thought for awhile that, with
Sharon Harker’s help, I could finally do something. When that got so fouled up, I figured I could at least get myself free and clear. Get to Europe, hide out there for a time, take on a new identity and possibly work in my field again eventually. But, I don’t know, waiting here in this dismal hole, it struck me that I really was better off just—”

  “Life’s sure sad at times, yeah,” cut in Jake, letting go of his shirt. “Let’s get back to why Alicia Bower was brought here.”

  “Actually she was returned to the Centre. By that brutal cyborg, Sam Trinity.”

  Jake sat on the edge of the bed. “How come a government agent is concerned with this?”

  “I still don’t have all the details, Cardigan. It’s my understanding, however, that Mechanix International and the Office of Clandestine Operations have been working together on something very secret and extremely nasty.”

  “And Alicia found out about that?”

  “Exactly, but because she’s the daughter of Owen Bower, everyone decided to be gentle with her,” he continued. “So she was put in the hands of Dr. Isaac Spearman and ... Winter paused, brought one hand up to his eyes and began to cry. “Oh, lord, the things I’ve been a party to, Cardigan. I went along with it initially, but, when they brought the poor girl back a second time, I simply ... He twisted on the bed, tugged a plyochief out of his trouser pocket and wiped at his eyes.

  “Spearman worked on her somehow—made her forget all about what it was she wasn’t supposed to know?”

  “Yes, that was done to her about a year or more ago,” he replied. “The trouble is, and that’s one of the chief problems with many of Spearman’s more experimental electronic therapies, that the cures aren’t always ... He laughed. “Jesus, I still sound like that bastard. Calling that awful process a cure. At any rate, Cardigan, she apparently started to remember again. That frightened Trinity and certain people at Mechanix. But since she was still the daughter of the head man, no one wanted to silence her permanently.” He laughed again. “The humane thing, they decided, was to ship her back to Spearman and let him have another try.”

  Jake asked him, “And who’s Tin Lizzie?”

  Dr. Winter frowned at him. “That’s the nickname of one of the robot nurses in the Restraint Wing, which is where Alicia is. How did you—”

  “We got trouble, folks,” announced Georgia, popping into the chill room.

  Jake stood clear of the bed. “What’s wrong?”

  “Some OCO agents have been spotted upstairs,” she answered. “It’s likely they’ll head down here eventually.”

  “We’ll have to move Winter,” said Ryder. “And get ourselves the hell out of here, too.”

  “Not before,” said Jake, “I ask him a few more questions.”

  Madame Sonja, both lazguns still trained on Gomez, had moved over beside her son’s chair. “That bump looks awful,” she was saying. “Are you absolutely sure, Shelly, that he didn’t hurt you seriously?”

  “Mom, he just bopped me on the coco with his fist. I’m okay, truly.”

  “In your offspring’s line of work, señora,” mentioned Gomez, who had dropped his stungun and raised his hands, “physical harm is one of the occupational hazards.”

  “You’ve got a hell of a nerve, greaseball,” the spa owner told him. “You break in here, hurt my Sonny Boy and then—”

  “Mom, hey, what did I tell you about using Sonny Boy in front of visitors?”

  “This shlunk isn’t a visitor, he’s an intruder—one step away from a burglar.”

  “Line of duty,” suggested Gomez. “Your Sonny Boy here happens to be a fugitive from the law, ma’am. Which means that private detectives, police officers, bounty hunters and the like are going to feel free to drop by and—”

  “I’m going to have to move on, Mom.” Wobbling moderately, Gates got to his feet. “My hideout here isn’t safe any longer.”

  “Sit.” She nudged him back down with a plump elbow. “Nobody else knows you’re here except this housebreaker. So all we have to do, Shelly, is work out a foolproof way to silence him.”

  “No, that’s not a good idea at all,” argued her son. “Killing people isn’t part of my—”

  “We don’t kill him,” she told him. “We just toss him in a storeroom for awhile. We’ll feed him now and then and make sure that—”

  “The Cosmos Detective Agency, a large and powerful, not to mention easy to get ticked off, organization, knows I’m up here in New Hollywood, folks,” Gomez pointed out. “They know for whom I was hunting and they, in turn, will come hunting for me before I’ve spent very long starving in your storerooms.”

  “Mom, it’ll be a lot simpler if I simply pack up and go someplace else to—”

  “Oof,” said Madame Sonja. She suddenly rose up on tiptoe, let go of her left hand lazgun and then the right. Dropping to her knees with an echoing thunk, she teetered and then fell forward onto the carpeting.

  “Mom!” Gates knelt beside her.

  Gomez was gazing toward the open doorway. He’d been the only one who’d noticed the hand with the stungun that had appeared there to fire at Madame Sonja while she was preoccupied in arguing with her suntanned son.

  “Honestly, Gomez, it’s an absolute wonder to me that you’ve survived in this world anywhere near as long as you have. I know you got me out of a jam earlier, but you most times, honestly, seem incapable of taking care of yourself or—”

  “How did you happen to drop by here, Nat?”

  The redhaired reporter came into the room. “Knowing you for an ingrate, I wasn’t exactly expecting a hug and a heartfelt thank-you for saving your miserable neck, yet I—”

  “Thanks. Now how did you find me?”

  “By following the signal being given off by that tiny mike I planted on your coat when we parted,” Natalie explained. “You’re really, you know, so transparent when you attempt to be cunning. I sensed at once, and I would have even were I not the crackerjack reporter that I am, since you’re that obvious when you attempt to be sneaky, that you were onto something big. I realized that this could well be the important yarn I need to save my own stymied career and get it out of the doldrums of show-business reportage so that—”

  “An interview with Carlos Taffy, chiquita, would serve the same purpose.”

  “That doink? A conversation with him is just more pap for the halfwits who follow the dreadful tripe I’ve been forced to purvey.” She shook her head, then laughed. “But this, Gomez—inside info on the Alicia Bower vanishment, this is a real story.”

  “I’m not too pleased,” mentioned Gates as he rose up and glared over at her, “to witness you standing around smirking moments after felling my poor dear mother. It smacks of the kind of callous behavior that the media these days is all too—”

  “Oh, stop your jabbering.” She swung the stungun toward him and fired.

  “Oof.” The stunned fugitive stiffened, flapped his arms once and then fell over atop his sprawled mother.

  Nodding with satisfaction, Natalie said, “Look around for something to carry him off in—a sack hopefully.”

  “Why do we want to pack Shelly, cara?”

  “Because we’re taking him back to Greater LA in my Newz shuttle,” she answered. “He’s, which should be obvious even to you, essential to my story. If I don’t miss my guess this’ll win me back my former high position in the broadcast sphere. ‘Daredevil reporter captures fugitive. Comes close to solving heiress mystery.’” She smiled, nodding positively. “Oh, and if it’s not imposing on you, and keep in mind I just now pretty much saved your worthless life, Gomez, I’d appreciate it if you’d shoot a couple of minutes of vidfootage of my standing over this fellow. I’ve found that this sort of obvious shot, involving the commentator in the action as it were, impresses the rubes and adds a whole heck of a lot to the impact of a news story. I left my vidcam hidden out in the hedge. Wait here while I fetch it, will you?”

  “We don’t really have time for a photo session. We ought to be�
��”

  “Of course we do,” she told him.

  31

  THE PIRATE MUSEUM WAS housed in an imitation galleon that was anchored in one of the Venice Sector’s old canals. The museum had suspended operations nearly a year ago, and the canal had been dry quite a bit longer than that. The night wind was worrying dry leaves along the cracked canal bottom as Dr. Harry Moreno led Molly and Dan up the rickety gangplank toward the museum deck.

  Watching them from the railing was a thickbearded pirate, who had a faded bandana over his shaggy head and a black patch masking one eye. “Welcome aboard, mates,” he called.

  The psychiatrist nodded at the android pirate when he reached the deck. “Salinas around?”

  “Aye, you can bet your barnacles he is, Doc.” The mechanical man jerked a thumb in the direction of a nearby lighted cabin.

  “Salinas has been watchman here,” explained Moreno, “ever since the place shut down.”

  The cabin door swung open with a creak. A lanky, weathered man of about thirty five emerged. He had a scruffy beard and wore a battered Brazil War army jacket. He spoke out of a small black voxbox planted in his throat. “Dr. Moreno, hey, it’s good to see you.”

  “Same here, Salinas.” The men exchanged hugs. “This is Molly Fine and Dan Cardigan, friends of mine.”

  Salinas hugged each of them in turn. “Welcome aboard,” he said.

  Dan told him, “We’re looking for Jimalla Keefer.”

  Taking a slow step back, Salinas eyed the doctor. “I take it you vouch for them?”

  “Sure, and it’s very important that we find Jimalla,” he answered. “Is she here?”

  Salinas nodded. “Down in the Pirates’ Den,” he said. “Pretty damn scared she is, too, but I can’t get her to tell me what exactly’s wrong.”

  “Somebody’s hunting for her,” said Molly. “Somebody who probably wants to keep her quiet about something she seems to know.”

  “I figured that,” said the watchman. “Jim usually only drops in on me when she’s in one kind of trouble or another—but I guess, you know that, Doc.”