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The Prodigal, chapter 6
Foundation for Law and Government, Las Vegas, Nevada
Kitt pulled up to the mansion, slowly, with more care than usual. He had been wondering, all through the drive back from Frye, how on earth a dead man could have made a phone call. There was a faint possibility that the voice had been a synthesized reproduction of Garth Knight's, but the probability density function Kitt calculated for that wasn't anywhere near convincing.
Two things, then. Someone was making MBS and didn't want FLAG to know; and Garth Knight still wasn't dead.
Kitt sighed. "Michael?"
"Yeah, pal? You've been awfully quiet."
"Michael, something's not right. I…"
The videophone cut him off. Devon's face was tight and drawn, even on the little dashboard screen. "Michael, thank goodness you're back," he said over the line. "Come in. We have a problem."
"What kind of problem?" Michael asked, looking in concern at his boss.
"I think Emily Jones needs your help."
Michael thumped the steering wheel. "They must've fingered her as another informant. Dammit!"
"Michael," said Kitt again, quietly. "The call. The man's voice, remember…?"
"How could I forget? He was talking about them killing me."
"I know," said Kitt, aware that Devon was hearing this too. "I know who was calling. It was Garth Knight."
Silence for a minute, then Devon frowned. "Kitt, are you absolutely sure?"
"Pal, that's impossible. Garth's been dead for years." Michael was looking at the dash in concern. Kitt sighed.
"I know that. But the voice is Garth's. I don't know how to explain it." Kitt lit up another monitor with a jagged line dancing on it; Michael recognized it as the waveform of a voice, even before the sound came through the speakers.
"This is a recording of the phone call we intercepted today," said Kitt. Another line lit up under the first one, dancing in exact mimicry. "And this is an old recording of Garth. Watch." The lines converged, forming a single waveform. "It's an exact match."
Michael let out a low whistle. "I don't believe it."
"I don't think you have a choice, Michael," said Devon. "This is more serious than we thought. The girl who reported Kyle Gerson missing called me just a few moments ago. She got cut off, but before she did, she told me that she had been summoned to some meeting or other, and she sounded frankly terrified."
"You think she's in danger?" said Michael.
"Judging by the call you intercepted," said Devon, "I think we all are. Kitt, how fast can you get back to Frye?"
"Illegally, in about twenty minutes," said Kitt. The sun was going down; they'd hit traffic, but they knew ways around that.
"Go," said Devon, and cut the connection. Kitt lit his engine again, and Michael pulled them away from the front of the house with a scream of angry rubber.
It was an unpleasant ride. Even with Kitt's advanced technology and knowledge of shortcuts, it was still closer to three quarters of an hour before they arrived back at Frye Chemical. The stink of inorganic solvents in the air was thicker now, heavier, and dusk was turning into darkness. Kitt switched off his great headlamps, rolling into the parking lot in silent mode, almost totally invisible except for the dim red glow of his scanner track.
"Kitt, can you locate Emily?"
There was a moment of silence, and then: "I believe so. Most people have left the buildings, but I am reading several humans in a room in the basement. One of them matches Emily's description."
"Is she okay?"
"Her vital signs are not wonderful, but I am not reading any major injuries." Kitt's voice was subdued; Michael heard controlled fright in his tones. "Michael, be careful. These people mean to kill you."
"Well," said Michael, "let's make it difficult for them, shall we?"
Kitt sighed. "Please. Be careful."
"I will." Michael reached out and stroked the wheel gently. "Can you disarm the security system?"
"Certainly. But you'll have to deal with two armed guards on the inside."
"What about a diversion?"
Kitt sighed again. "Just say the word."
Michael grinned. "Grease is the word, pal, you know that." He patted Kitt's wheel and hurried up to the side door of Frye's main admin building, listening for the dull click of the lock being disarmed.
Frye Chemical, Las Vegas, Nevada
In the basement, in a room redolent of multisyllabic liquids and poisonous steam, Emily Jones huddled on a metal folding chair and watched the blonde receptionist and a man in a dark and unremarkable suit discuss her.
She had gone beyond fear to a kind of dull apathy, aware of the pain in her wrists and ankles where they had been bound together with plastic cable-ties only as a distant discomfort. Likewise, the voices of the two people talking about her seemed to come from very far away, as if she was hearing them inside a conch shell instead of the ocean.
"….the boss said to take care of him if he came back."
"Well, I don't think that'll be a problem, I mean the security's on double shifts. Besides, he'll lose interest once our little friend here calls them back and tells them it's all a mistake."
"I don't think they're giving up that easy," said the receptionist, who had pulled back her hair into a no-nonsense bun and changed her slick Cassini suit for a dark coverall. "This guy looked like he was a professional."
"Well, if he does come back, his ass is ours. Now." He turned back to Emily. "What do you suppose we should do with her once she's done her job?"
The blonde shrugged. "I don't care. Just make it quick."
"You're no fun, Madison. No fun at all."
The blonde—Madison—gave him an unpleasant smile. Emily thought dully that she looked as if someone had tightened her face all over with surgical staples; her lips drew back from perfect teeth in a grin that was more of a snarl. "I'm plenty fun, Davis. But this is work, not pleasure."
Emily wondered vaguely why she seemed to have fallen into the middle of a bad thriller novel; any moment now the man would twirl his mustache and tie her to the train tracks. She slumped a little further in the chair, thinking how simple it had all been, how easy for them to find and follow her, and wondering how long they had been watching and waiting for her to make her mistake.
Madison was pacing. "When are you going to make the call?"
"Soon. I want to make sure the building is clear."
"Come on, Davis. I want to get out of here."
"All right, all right. Gosh, you're needy, aren't you?" He grinned and pulled a cell phone from his pocket, bounced it on his palm. "Miss Jones."
Emily looked up; it felt as if all the tendons in her neck had been replaced with overcooked spaghetti, and it took all her strength to raise her head.
"Miss Jones, I want you to listen to me very carefully. You are going to speak to the interfering Mr. Miles and you are going to tell him calmly and firmly that all of this was a mistake, and that your suspicions are unconfirmed, and not to worry, that you are retracting your statements. If you don't, I will kill you."
The way he said it, as if he was explaining something very simple to a dull child, made her shiver. "Why should I do what you say? You're going to kill me anyway."
"Mmm," he agreed, "but your cooperation makes the difference between a nice quick bullet through the head and a slow dissolution by any one of these lovely chemicals in these tanks behind us. Or maybe I'll put you in the sublimation chamber and replace the air with sulfuric acid. Or I could dip parts of you in sodium hydroxide, what do you think? How about a nice benzene and chloric acid cocktail?" He was very close to her now, and she noticed a faint smell of Old Spice rising from him; it was the scent she associated with her father, and it made her want to scream.
"Okay," she said in a high, strengthless voice. "Okay, I'll do whatever you want only don't hurt me, please don't do those things to me…"
"There's a good girl," said the man Davis, straightening up. He dialed the Foundation, and bent over to hold the phone to her ear, very close, the smell of sweat and Old Spice filling her nostrils. It was ringing.
"Foundation for Law and Government, Devon Miles speaking," said a faraway, tinny voice.
"Mr. Miles? It's Emily Jones." She closed her eyes so she wouldn't have to see Davis's grin and the steel tanks behind him. "I wanted to let you know that everything's all right. I was mistaken when I called earlier, and there's nothing weird going on here."
Davis inched closer.
"…nothing at all." She made her voice sound as strong and convinced as she could.
"Miss Jones, are you all right?"
"Oh, yes," said Emily. She was amazed how convincing it sounded. "I'm fine. I'm sorry to've wasted your time, Mr. Miles."
She had a feeling Devon was about to say something else, but Davis took his phone back and snapped it shut. "Not bad," he said. "Now, it's time to move on to the next round. Madison, what do you think?"
"I think you should stop fucking around and let's get out of here," said the woman in the coverall, tossing a gun in her hand. Emily wondered where she'd got it, since she hadn't been carrying it a moment before. It was a nasty gun. A Desert Eagle .50. She looked as if she would have no problem using it.
"Patience, patience," said Davis. He slipped the phone back into his pocket and straightened up. "You have no creativity, Madison, that's your problem. Come with me, Miss Jones."
Emily got up, feeling sicker than ever. "What are you going to do to me?"
"I haven't decided yet," said Davis, with a smile. "I'm sure I'll think of something."
Just then the radio crackled and spat static at them. Emily jumped, and was dimly pleased to see the other woman doing the same thing. Davis sighed in annoyance and pressed a button. "Yeah?"
"There's a disturbance on the north side of the building, sir," came the voice of a security guard. "Someone's tried to get in."
"Shit," said Madison, racking the Desert Eagle. "Davis, we gotta go."
"Relax, honey. If it's that Knight guy, we'll take care of him too." He grinned and took Emily's arm, propelling her firmly back past row after row of stainless-steel tanks, and stopped at the back wall of the room. The last tank on the left had its five-inch-thick hatch wide open, revealing total darkness.
"In you get, sweetness," said Davis, and gave her a shove. Emily stared at him in horror, back at the chemical stickers on the tank's shiny side. Davis's grin widened, and he pushed her again, hard enough to make her lose her balance and stumble against the side of the tank, and then she was inside, in the acrid-smelling darkness, and the door clanged shut behind her.
She could hear the locks slamming shut all around the hatch—like a pressure cooker, she thought helplessly—and beat her fists against the steel. "Please!" she screamed. "Please don't do this!"
Her shoes slid on the smooth steel surface of the tank, and for the first time she was aware of a dripping noise in the dark. The nose-tingling smell of chemicals grew stronger.
Emily slumped to her knees, crying, leaning against the steel wall, and knew there was not the slightest chance of anyone hearing her, or—if they did—coming to let her out. She felt a kind of dull fury at the indignity of this death, this dying like a rat in a trap, but most of her mind had shut down at the sheer horror of her situation, and she was mostly hanging in the blackness, unaware. She didn't raise her head when the dripping quickened into a steady stream, and she was unconscious by the time the rising fluid began to lap at her knees.
"Michael!" The comlink's hiss was very loud in the darkened corridor; Michael ducked into an empty lab before answering.
"Yeah, Kitt, what is it?"
"Two people are leaving the room in the basement. I distracted the other security guards, you're clear, but one of the chemical tanks is filling up rapidly, and I've detected a human inside it."
"Emily?" He was cold all over. "How long do I have?"
"At the current rate of flow, about two minutes," said Kitt tightly. "Hurry."
Michael hurried. He ran down the fire stairs, ducked into a closet as footsteps approached, cursing silently at the delay, and continued down the corridor as soon as it was clear. The door to the basement lab was locked. "Kitt! Can you open this?"
"I'm trying," said his partner, but it felt like an age before the red light on the card-scan clicked red and the door released. Michael sprinted down the row of tanks, bringing his watch up to his mouth.
"What's in the tank?"
"It seems to be relatively harmless," Kitt shot back. "Pure ethanol."
Michael skidded to a halt at the end of the row, tugged at the locks on the inspection hatch, throwing his weight against them, and managed to get the door open. The sharp scent of rubbing alcohol filled his nostrils as Emily slumped forward against him, her limp weight sending him staggering back a step or two.
He pulled her free of the tank, swung the door shut behind her to stem the tide of ethanol onto the floor of the lab, and laid her out. She was perhaps mid-twenties, her dark hair pulled back into a barrette and cascading over her shoulders, her face unremarkably pretty. Her glasses had slipped off in the fall and lay on the floor in a puddle of alcohol. Michael bent over her, and was relieved to see she was breathing.
"Kitt, can you scan her?"
"She's in mild shock," said the comlink. "Michael, you have to get out of there. Now."
"I'm on my way, pal," said Michael, gathering Emily's limp form into his arms and trotting back towards the door. "Meet me outside the side entrance."
Omega Technology, Wingate, Utah
Judy sat at her little Formica table and stared out the window into the blowing darkness. They worked forty hours a week. No overtime. If she had stayed later than five PM in the lab, someone would have come to remove her, and ask some pointed questions as to what she was doing in there after hours.
Still she couldn't help thinking of him alone there in the lab, alone and possibly in pain—her work on the voice modulator hadn't been wonderful, what he really needed was a brand-new one—waiting for them to come and install him in the car. Whatever it was. She wondered if he was as frightened as she was. If he knew more than he had been telling her.
The commissary had yielded a six-pack of beer and a couple of frozen dinners, and she ate sitting by the window and listening to the ceaseless spick-spack of alkali hitting the side of the building. It was a lonely sound. Judy couldn't remember having felt like this before, not even when her father had been in the hospital with a heart attack her senior year of college; it was sort of similar, this feeling that the world was sliding faster and faster out of her control, and all she could do was stand and watch—but now the fear was for herself, as well as for Karr. Despite her assurance to Smith….to Knight…….that she would keep what she had heard firmly to herself, she didn't really have much confidence that she would survive the next few days. And what, after all, could she do about it? If Wilson was right—and she had no reason at all to think he wasn't—then they were watching her all the time now, and any call she made out of the Wingate compound would be monitored and recorded. Call for help, and there would come a knocking at the door. Images of Stalinist Russia flickered through her head, and she laughed a laugh that didn't sound convincing even to her.
Oh God, why did I ever sign on to this fucking company? she thought, almost desperately. Why did I come out here into the middle of the desert, alone, and get myself into this in the first place?
Maybe you were meant to be here, said the calmer part of her. Maybe this isn't as bad as it seems. Remember Karr saying that there was a chance? Remember him asking you to trust him?
She did; and, strangely, thinking about that made her relax a little. The key was not to step back and take a good look at her situation, she realized. Because her situation was pretty damn ludicrous.
Judy opened another beer and sat back in the chair. Tomorrow they'd probably put Karr into his shell, whatever it might be. Wilson had said something about a sports car, but she didn't know any specifics. And she doubted she'd be able to see him again, once he was in the car. The project she had been working on would have finished, and so would she.
She raised the beer can to the unformed darkness outside her window. "Cheers," she said. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we disappear."
Judy dreamed of running down dark corridors with a light behind her, an oncoming light, and footsteps gaining behind; somewhere someone was crying, on and on, an irritating sound like a waterfall. The wind spattering sand against the building was louder, and for some reason it seemed to be coming in a rhythm, like someone knocking on a door...
She blinked, awake suddenly in the darkness, listening to the knocking. The clock-radio told her it was three in the morning. By its red light the room looked like part of her dream, but the continued banging on the door put paid to that line of reasoning. She got up, shivering fiercely in the predawn chill, and opened the door.
Two security guards in Omega Tech grey stood there, fists raised in mid-knock. For a moment cold washed through her, her heart jittering crazily in her chest, and then she registered the worried look on their faces. "Yeah?" she demanded, her voice unsteady.
"Judith McBride?"
"That's me."
"Sorry to wake you up," said one of the guards. "Um...you're working on a project in Lab Q, right?"
"Yeah."
"The boss wants all employees on that project in the lab. Right now."
Judy frowned. "At this hour of the morning? Is something wrong?" Is Karr okay?
"I don't know, miss," said the guard. "Please. Come with us."
"Can I get dressed?" she asked, a bit snappishly, and he went pink and nodded. She closed the door again and hurried into her coverall and boots, fingers trembling so hard it was difficult to do up the zipper. God, what's going on, what's wrong? Has Knight done something to him?
The guards hustled her down to a golf-cart waiting outside the apartment block, and they made the drive to Lab Q in silence.
Inside, the building seemed more impersonal than ever with the steel corridors deserted, the red lights of the security locks and the dim emergency lights providing the only illumination in a dark labyrinthine world. The guards marched her down to Lab Q and keyed open the door on a remarkable scene.
A low, sleek, curvy black car sat in the middle of the vast concrete floor, its hood up, white-coated technicians huddled around it like doctors over a flatlining patient. Thick cables led out of the engine compartment, making Judy think of the blacksnakes she'd sometimes see in the summer back home, slithering across the roads in the humid green afternoons. All the screens were lit up, not only the laptop but also the flat-panel monitor sitting next to the CPU on the bench, or where the CPU had been….
Judy went cold all over. What had they done with him? The battered black casing wasn't where it should have been, sitting on its antistatic pad next to her computers. She hurried forward, and before Garth Knight could detach himself from the wall he had been indolently leaning against, she caught a glimpse of that familiar casing sitting inside the gleaming engine compartment, snug against the firewall, in a little nest of antistatic insulation. Then Knight was upon her, that cane glittering in his hand, empty blue eyes smiling. "Ah, good evening, Miss McBride."
She nodded. "Good evening, sir. May I ask what's going on?"
"You may," said Knight, and laughed at his own wit. He turned away from her and called for one of the technicians to join them. "Ah, Mr. Branson. Take Miss McBride and tell her what is required." He lit a cigar, folding his arms, the cane hooked over one wrist. Branson nodded to her to follow him, and she did, leaning against the polished side of the engine compartment and staring down into the polished labyrinth of metal within. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Knight watching them, a little half-smile on his lips, and hurriedly turned back. Branson sighed.
"Try and concentrate on this," he said wearily. "He'll get bored and go away, he always does."
She nodded. "What's going on?"
"Well, as you can see, the CPU has been installed, but we're gonna need your help to make some of the connections. The idea is that the computer runs the car, all the systems—fuel injection, ignition, timing, electronics, steering, everything, is being controlled via this box. It interfaces with the driver through a voice panel in the cockpit. That's what we need your help for."
"What's wrong with it?"
"Nothing's wrong," said Branson with false cheer. "It just….er….needs a bit of reassuring."
Judy cursed and slipped around to the open driver's side door. A three-column LED voice panel had been set into the console just over where the radio would be in a real car, looking not at all odd among the hundreds of other instruments and gages and readouts and telltales that studded the cockpit; the whole thing made her think of fighter jets. She slid inside, perching on the edge of the seat, which was still covered in plastic from the factory that had made it. All the other techs were ignoring her, intent on making their connections inside the engine compartment. She reached out and ran her fingertips over the panel. "Karr?"
There was a soft crackle, and one or two of the LEDs lit, but nothing more. She could imagine what it had been like for him; suddenly the dark quiet lab had been full of people, people roughly undoing connections and moving him, shoving him into an unfamiliar surrounding and poking wires into the sides of his CPU….people who weren't talking to him, weren't telling him anything about what would happen….
"Karr, it's me, it's Judy," she said quietly, absently stroking the wheel. "Everything's all right….they're finishing putting you in the car…."
He gave his little cough, and she sighed; the modulator still wasn't working right. "…..Judy?" He sounded quiet and frightened and weary, but glad to see her.
She smiled a little. "Yeah," she said. "How're you feeling?"
"Odd," he said. His voice had a deeper, richer timbre through the car speakers. She liked it. "I can feel things….the engine block….the fuel system…"
"You were in a car before, though," said Judy, "right? I mean….it's not entirely unfamiliar?"
"No, and that's part of what feels so strange; it's as if part of the past has come back whole, while I've changed." He sighed. "Judy, things are moving fast."
She swallowed. "Why're they doing this in the middle of the night?"
"I don't know. Shh, here he comes."
Garth Knight leaned against the low roof of the car, grinning his empty grin. "Well, Miss McBride, what do you think?"
"It's adjusting nicely," she said, doing her best impression of a clueless girl.
"The perceptor circuits?"
Oh God, what are perceptors? she thought desperately. Karr came to her rescue.
"Miss McBride is working on them," he said in his metallic baritone. "I compute ninety-seven percent functionality."
"Yes," she said gratefully. "I need a little more time."
"Time, my dear Miss McBride, is one thing we don't have much of," said Knight.
"Yes sir," she said. "Understood, sir."
Knight nodded and straightened up, limping away. He held a murmured conference with two or three of the white coats and the guards, and left the lab. Judy sighed with relief.
The door of the car—it was grey, she noticed, a dark thunderstorm-grey, not black at all—swung shut, sealing her into the cabin. She bet it was soundproof, and she also bet that he could run his voice just through the cabin speakers rather than the exterior ones, if he wanted. "Pick up a screwdriver and look busy," said Karr in a low and urgent voice. "Something's happened. I heard one of them tell another one about how something in Las Vegas had gone wrong, someone had stumbled onto something they shouldn't have. That was just after they came in and turned on all the lights and started disconnecting me." He coughed again, the lights flickering. "Judy, be careful. Whatever's going to happen is going to happen soon."
She nodded. "I have a feeling I'm not gonna last long around here."
"Don't say that," Karr told her firmly. "Knight's not all that intelligent. Determined and persistent, but not brilliant."
"I hope you're right," she sighed, and rested her forehead against the wheel, suddenly aware of how nice it felt to be sitting in a car with him. "I really hope you're right."