“I don’t know what’s going on here,” I said—truer words had not been synthesized—“but I get the feeling there’s more than a little urgency to the matter, so shall we?”
Carmina nodded and walked toward the doors. I followed her. Then she stopped and turned around. The doors remained closed.
“I’ll take them from here,” she said. “Do you have them?”
There was a hint of fear in her voice, like after all this I didn’t have what she wanted after all. “Where are they?” Her words tumbled out.
I took a step back and undid my coat. Then I undid my jacket. My shirt was already unbuttoned from when I’d been back at Thornton’s. I pushed my tie over one shoulder.
When I had enough room I thought about undoing the locks on my chest unit.
And then I paused.
“I’ve got them,” I said, and Carmina’s hands moved up to touch me. It might have been an involuntary movement, the way her eyes got wide at the same time. “The components are all here but they’re hot.”
“Hot?” Her hands dropped away. Her brow creased.
“Radioactive,” I said. “Not a lot, but enough. You’ll need protective gear. Maybe a lead-lined box if you have one.”
Carmina shook her head. “There is no time. I will be fine. I will not be exposed for very long.”
“What about the old man?” I nodded toward the doors. “Either he’s in there wearing a radiation suit or there’s something you’re not telling me. I don’t know why he wanted me to go and get these components but I have the strangest feeling you know exactly what they’re for, don’t you?”
Carmina flinched like someone had slapped her. She looked at me with narrowed eyes.
“Don’t be a fool,” she said. “Of course I know what they are. Who do you think wrote out the list?”
“So what do you want them for? The way I see it, there are only two things these components are good for. One is building a computer. The other is repairing a computer. The old man must have quite a calculator locked away in that big desk of his.”
Carmina sighed and waved her hand at me. “There is no time for this now! Please, give me the components. You can see Mr. Falzarano later.”
“Or a robot. Because that’s what a robot is. A computer, just one that can move around and wear a hat.”
I watched her for a moment. She stood with her head level to my chest unit. Then she snapped her fingers. “There is no time for this. Give them to me, quickly.”
I sighed. It sounded like the brakes failing on an eighteen-wheeler.
Then I unlocked my chest unit. It opened. I reached in and took out the three components I’d taken from the lab.
“Neutron-flow reversal coil, gamma combine array, triode condenser.” I handed them over.
Carmina took the objects in both hands. She held them gingerly, but I guessed they were a little warm from being inside my chest. The radiation she wouldn’t be able to feel. Not immediately.
I turned my Geiger counter up and I counted the ticks as the hallway was slowly flooded with atomic energy like a ship that had just struck an iceberg.
“Don’t hold onto them too long,” I said. “And when you’re done you might want a trip to the hospital. I’m sure one of Falzarano’s boys will be happy to help out.”
Carmina’s jaw snapped shut with an audible click. “I told you, I know what I’m doing.”
I believed her.
And then she opened the door to the study and went through. The doors closed and I was alone in the corridor. I stood there calculating in my loafers and then headed back the way I had come. I had a few questions for Alfie, and I was determined to get them.
And I was just as determined to find out exactly what it was that Ada wasn’t telling me.
That was when the sound came again. A deep hum, the sound of a generator straining, the lights in the corridor dimming in sympathy before going back to full brightness.
And then a moment later it happened again. I turned my Geiger counter back on and listened to it tick away. I checked the reading twice.
It was lower than it should have been. The doors to Falzarano’s study were not lead-lined and the room beyond should have been warming up.
It wasn’t.
I headed to the doors. I opened them. I stood in the doorway. I looked around.
The office was how I remembered it. The piano was there along with all the books, the easy chairs, the big desk.
Carmina wasn’t. Neither was Falzarano.
The room was empty.
33
Falzarano’s office was a dead end. The room was buried at the center of his country pile and there were no windows. There was only one door and right now I was standing under the frame. Yet the fact remained that Carmina was not present. Nor her boss, Zeus Falzarano.
No, not her boss. Her patron, the old mobster funding the continuation of her robotics research after secretly extracting her from Colombia under the cover of a conveniently placed civil war.
I did a circuit of the shelves. There were a lot of books and I wondered if anybody ever read them or if they had whether they would ever read them again. If a book was a souvenir of a journey, there were a lot of postcards in this room.
Including Falzarano’s own magnum opus. A whole case of them, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, in pride of place behind the desk.
Except it wasn’t a bookcase. It was a door. A buzzing in my circuits told me I already knew that, but when I queried my data tape a subroutine threw me an error 66.
Error 66 stung like all hell. I stumbled as my master program slipped its clutch, my positronic central processor trying very hard to keep me away from an emergency system restart. That explained the twelve-hour gap on my tape. Whatever error 66 was, it had caused an emergency restart before. Several times in fact. As the office bucked like a bronco in front of my optics, my diagnostic subroutine very kindly showed me the system log, as if to say I told you so.
Ten program breaks, ten errors 66, ten restarts.
I fell against the piano, arm wheeling for purchase while I regained control of my system after the ill-advised query. I made a note to myself not to do that again. After three seconds I felt normal enough to adjust my hat and tie. I used my reflection in the glossy surface of the piano to help. Someone sure looked after the thing. I supposed that someone was Carmina. I hadn’t heard her play it in a while but I guessed she was a little too preoccupied now, having gone back to her old job with the lab coat.
Then I noticed a curious fact. The lid that hid the keyboard had been left open. I had knocked the ivories with my hand when I’d gotten dizzy. I didn’t really know anything about the anatomy of the thing. I wasn’t musical, which I guessed meant Thornton hadn’t been musical either.
Neither was the piano, because the keys hadn’t made a sound.
I frowned and pressed the keys again. Now I could hear the dull thudding sound they made and I could feel the vibration of the hammers inside the piano hitting something. If it was the strings they were being muted. I looked down at the pedals but there were three of them and none of them gave any indication of what they might do.
I tried more keys with more fingers. Nothing at all. Which was mildly interesting in that the piano had been working before and it wasn’t working now and that had nothing to do with my spell of electronic vertigo.
Another fact about the piano was that it was big, a grand of the concert variety, and must have posed a few problems of a logistical nature during installation. It was less an instrument, more a piece of furniture. One with a lid and a big space inside.
A pretty good place to hide something of a not insignificant size.
I lifted the top of the piano. I held it at an arm’s height and I stood there and thought long and hard about what I found underneath.
Someone had had the same idea as I had.
There was a body inside. It was lying face down, diagonally across the strings. It was a tight fit but fit he did.
I didn’t need to turn him over to see who it was. I recognized the round head and the halo of brown hair that curved around the sides.
Emerson Ellis, late of Ellis Building and Construction. Last seen drowning his sorrows in Falzarano’s expensive scotch and presumed to have reached freedom after shimmying down the trellis outside his room. Assumed to be guilty of the unlikely killing of one of Falzarano’s boys.
He’d escaped, all right. But just not in the way he had anticipated, I’m sure.
I glanced around the body. There was no sign of injury, although I would have to turn him over to make sure. But there didn’t seem to be any blood in the piano.
I lowered the lid. I looked at the piano and I looked at my reflection in the lid.
The piano was a good place to hide the body only if the piano was never played. But it was played, by Carmina. She’d make the discovery soon enough, although she was a little busy with Falzarano for the moment.
Unless she was the one who had killed him. She was the only one who touched the piano, as far as I knew. Maybe she’d used it as a hiding place knowing that nobody else would touch the damn thing. It was a good spot until she could find a better one.
Except she would have needed help to get him into the instrument. And to get him out. One of Falzarano’s boys perhaps. Falzarano was her patron, but in her time in exile from Colombia, hidden in Falzarano’s Hollywood castle, Carmina had wrangled power away from the old man. Falzarano’s boys would do anything she told them to do.
Would that include staging his room, breaking the trellis? Perhaps. But killing one of their own kind?
That I was less sure of.
I pulled myself away from the piano and sailed across the rug to Falzarano’s desk. I walked around it and I considered the wall of books that hid a door. I turned my Geiger counter up to maximum. My head was filled with the pink and white and brown noise and as I stood there and scanned the wall I listened to the pops and crackles and snaps that broke out from the rush of sound. Then I looked around the rest of the room, just quickly, just to be sure. I was. Because when I looked back at the shelves in front of me they popped and crackled a whole lot more than the rest of the room.
I pulled one of the books off the shelf. Behind the book was more wood. I pulled off another copy. And then another. And then another. And then I kept going until Falzarano’s masterpiece was scattered all over the floor around his desk and the shelves were three-quarters empty. It wasn’t until I got to the end of the fourth row down that I found it.
A button. Easy to find if you knew where to look. I pressed it and there was a click and the bookshelf moved, swinging out away from me on a silent and well-oiled hinge. It moved about an inch and then stopped right where it was.
I didn’t need another invitation. I pushed the bookcase open like the door it really was. Beyond was another passageway. More thick carpet. More wood paneling. More gold light fittings with pink shades.
And a sound. Sounds, plural. A hum not unlike the sound of something using a high voltage. A whirring sound that was rhythmic, a pattern repeated. Just like the clicking of something switching in sequence, automatically.
These sounds were coming from the door at the end of the new passage. And they were all familiar to me. They were the sounds of reel-to-reel tapes spinning, of microswitches flipping, of hot electronics humming.
The sound of the computer room back at my office. The sound of Ada.
And underneath it all, the buzzing of my own circuits, telling me what I already knew.
That I’d been here before.
I stepped up to the door, and I opened it, and I went inside.
34
The walls and floor were white. The ceiling was a darker blue. The room was roughly square and up against the walls were computer banks and mainframes and consoles with keyboards and buttons and switches and levers, and what space wasn’t given over to controls you could touch was covered in lights you could read, lights that flashed in sequence, lights that flashed at random, and lights that stayed lit. There were reel-to-reel tapes that spun around and around. The room buzzed and hummed and ticked and burbled like the computer room back in my office. That was because that’s just what it was—a computer room, almost identical to Ada’s, right down to the alcove in the wall across from me.
Alcoves. This computer room had more than one. There were three, side-by-side. Two were occupied.
Only not by robots.
I stepped closer.
In the first alcove on my left was a young man with oiled hair slicked back from a clean-shaven face that was square-jawed and heavy-browed. He wore a dark suit and his tie was narrow. He had sunglasses on his face, just like the rest of Falzarano’s boys, but unlike the others I knew this one’s name.
It was Stefano, and when I’d last seen him—according to Ada’s pickup—he’d been shot at virtually point-blank range by Alfie Micklewhite as the three of us had stood in front of Falzarano’s desk. Stefano still wasn’t breathing as his body leaned back at a small angle in the alcove, but his suit was new and free of bullet holes. I had half a mind to check his torso for wounds, but I was a little distracted by the occupant of the third alcove along on my right.
That occupant being Zeus Falzarano.
Like his deceased former employee, Falzarano lay back at a small angle. His arms were by his side. His mouth was closed, as were his eyes. And like Stefano, he wasn’t breathing, but I had a feeling he didn’t need to. Because from between the buttons of the shirt over his chest extended a fat cable, a thing of soft corrugated gray plastic that snaked out of him and into the console beside the alcove.
I recognized that kind of cable. It was the same as the one I was attached to each and every time I went to the office and settled in for the night.
Zeus Falzarano. Sicilian import, career criminal, master of his domain, former kingpin of the West Coast. A man who looked younger than he was, according to some. A man who had locked himself away from the eyes of the world. A man who wanted to build a robotics factory and who was hiding a roboticist to help him.
A man who was old and vital, until he was suddenly old and weak. A man who had retired from his perpetual position behind his big desk and had slipped into something a little less comfortable than the big leather chair. A man with a cable plugged into his chest just like a—
I stood there and felt the voltage tick up in a modular somewhere in the back of my head. As I looked at Falzarano’s face I reached around under my jacket with one hand and I pulled at my shirt and ran my steel-titanium fingertips over the seams that crisscrossed the small of my back where my batteries were housed. The seal was still tight and I counted as many rivets as I could reach with one hand and then I felt it.
The alloy I was made out of was hardly indestructible but difficult to scratch. I had a noticeable mark on my cheek from something I had no memory of and after the little adventure down at the Bacchanalian I figured my chest plate could probably have done with a polish, but other than that I was factory-fresh.
All except for the line I could feel on my back plate. I couldn’t very well see it but I could feel it. It was nothing, a hairline an inch long, running at an angle from a seam to a rivet.
The mark left by someone trying to get the panel off without the proper tools.
I withdrew the hand and I tucked my shirt into my pants and I looked at Falzarano and then I looked at the computer room. Sure, there were tools here, but this was a computer room, not a laboratory and certainly not a factory. No, the factory would come later, along with the industrial equipment needed to open up a robot like myself.
But that hadn’t stopped somebody trying. I stopped looking around the room because I knew I had seen it before. I’d been in here. I might even have been in one of the alcoves, perhaps facing the wrong way while someone tried and failed to crack my shell.
I looked at Falzarano. Then I looked at Stefano. The boss, perhaps I could understand. He had a cable comi
ng out of his chest. That was a clue at the very least. But the dead gunman lying in the other space posed more of a question.
I leaned in. He was dead, of that I had no doubt. His skin was pale and when I rested the back of a finger on his cheek I could feel it was cold too.
And then I saw it. This close and Stefano’s secret was revealed.
I stepped back and reached forward and took Stefano’s sunglasses by one corner and pulled. The sunglasses stayed just where they were and I pulled some more and I could feel the resistance, something elastic, something that felt like it would break if I pulled any harder.
Which is exactly what I did. There was a click, and the glasses came away, but not very far. I stepped back in and took in the view from a side angle.
The back of the sunglasses were nothing but a nest of wires, a cat’s cradle of filaments that stretched out from Stefano’s empty eye sockets.
That explained why Falzarano’s boys—some of them, anyway—wore their glasses all the time, even at night, on account of the fact that they couldn’t take the things off. They weren’t glasses, they weren’t even eyes—they were optics.
“Oi, Charlie, hello?”
Alfie.
I turned at the voice, but Falzarano and Stefano were still alone in the computer room. Alfie called out again. He was out in Falzarano’s office. I’d left the bookcase door open.
I slid Stefano’s glasses back into place and motored out of the computer room, closing the double doors behind me. I headed down the passageway and met Alfie just as he stepped through the door.
“Stone me!” he said. “What’s all this, then? Secret passages and priest holes, eh? I tell you, the old man gets ten out of ten for authenticity, eh, Charlie?”
I ignored the question and ushered him back into the office. Alfie tripped on some of the books scattered around the big desk but by the time he’d righted himself I had the bookcase closed behind me.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Here, look. Bloody balloon’s gone up and all.”
I processed this and came up with nothing.
Killing Is My Business Page 17