The Prodigal 7
Disclaimer: Knight Rider, its characters and related indicia are the property of Glen A. Larson. I'm just madly in love with Kitt and Karr, is all. Don't bother suing me.
Foundation for Law and Government, Las Vegas, Nevada
Emily Jones, having been looked at by the FLAG doctors and given a government-subsidized bath and a set of Bonnie's clothes to wear while her own were cleaned, sat in Devon's office and tried to remember the details of her experience. Michael was perched as usual on the edge of Devon's desk—she thought perhaps his aversion to ordinary chairs was something to do with his extra-long legs—and looked at her thoughtfully.
"There were two of them," she was saying. "The woman...the receptionist in the front office. Madison. She was wearing this black military-looking coverall thing and she had a gun. A Desert Eagle." She paused and tucked a strand of dark hair behind one ear. "The other one was a man called Davis. I don't remember ever having seen him before. Young, maybe late twenties, darkish hair, square jaw. Looked like a bit-part actor in an 80s crime show. He was wearing Old Spice..." She trailed off and looked away; Devon raised an eyebrow at Michael and Bonnie.
"Can you remember anything else, Miss Jones?" he asked.
"They were talking about 'the boss,'" she said. "Some guy who would kill...the guy who came snooping around. I have to assume that was you, Michael."
"Yep." Michael folded his arms. "Kitt traced a call made from Frye just after we left the first time, to a man called Garth Knight. That name mean anything to you?"
"Knight?" Emily frowned. "No. The only Knight I know is you."
They watched her, thoughtfully. The only expression on her face, besides weariness and the barely repressed shock of her recent experience, was confusion. If she was lying, she was very, very good at it.
Devon nodded. "Well, Miss Jones," he said. "You'd better stay here at the estate until we can bring this situation to a close. Bonnie will show you to a room."
Bonnie nodded and got up, leading Emily out of the office and upstairs into the residential section of the mansion. Left alone, Michael and Devon shared a long look.
"Well?" Devon said.
"We're waiting on the call trace," said Michael. "Kitt's going through every decryption coding he can imagine. When we find it, we're gone. Garth Knight's got something huge in the wings, Devon. Something with MBS."
Devon sighed. "I know." He looked very far away, and something about the faraway look made Michael pause.
"You don't think...."
"Well, what can it be? I mean, he tried once, with Goliath. Didn't work. Goliath wasn't sentient, couldn't take over once the human driver had failed, couldn't act on his own. He's not stupid, Michael. Not brilliant, but certainly not stupid. Once something's failed, he doesn't try it again without major modifications." Devon ran a hand over his face. "I have to wonder if he's found a different way to achieve his goals."
"Devon, we killed the KARR. It's dead. It's scattered."
"Garth Knight was dead too," said Devon, quietly. "Go on, Michael. It won't be long before Kitt finds us an address. And Michael?"
"Yeah?"
"Do be careful, won't you? We have no idea what we're up against."
"Hey," said Michael, with his trademark grin. "It's me, remember?"
Devon merely sighed.
Red Desert, outside Wingate, Utah
Judy, sitting in the back of one of the Omega Tech security cars, watched the desert scroll by outside the windows, and shivered. It was just past dawn; the colours in the distance were lightening from Payne's grey and burgundy through powder-blue to the dusty red she was accustomed to. No one had explained a thing to her: they'd merely extracted her from Karr, bundled her and a basic toolkit, plus laptop, into the security car, and set off in a convoy. If she twisted around she could just make out the first rays of the new sun twinkling from the windscreen of the semi truck behind them, which she had to assume was hauling Karr.
She wasn't sure what was going to happen to him, unlike herself; this was the sort of setup one saw in the flashback sections of CSI, right before she got yanked out of the car, thrust ignominiously to her knees, and shot through the back of her head. She just hoped Karr would be able to escape from them, when they'd done her.
The part of her mind she really hated sometimes, the part that noticed details she didn't want to notice, pointed out helpfully that there were no inside doorhandles in the rear of the security car. No chance for making a break for it: and even if she did manage to get out of the car, where would she go? They were in the middle of the desert. If by some miracle she evaded being shot by Knight's people, she'd die of dehydration and sunstroke anyway.
Thanks, mind. Much appreciated. As if I wasn't already miserable enough.
Her gaze fell on the black nylon laptop bag. The driver of the security car wasn't paying attention to her: his eyes were on the road, keeping the car exactly ten miles over the speed limit. A stupid idea flickered into her head as if someone had just turned a Stupid Idea switch on, and she looked away hurriedly and stared out the window at the distant hills.
That machine's got wireless internet. I know it does: all the Omega comps do. If I could just get a connection for a few minutes....just long enough to send an email...maybe I could let someone know about this. Maybe I could warn someone. Let them know that bad shit is going to go down...that a madman with a sentient car is planning something huge.
Yeah, and who'd believe you? That might fly at Weekly World Newsbut no one is going to pay any attention to it in the real world. No one out there would believe this even if they saw it with their own eyes.
I wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't been there when he came online.
She stared firmly out the window, watching sagebrush blow in the wind of the car's movement, convincing herself.
Ah, what do I have to lose?
"Hey," said the driver. "What're you doing back there?"
She was very glad of the sunglare which was making her squint. "Checking this machine over. The laptops sometimes seize, and I want to make sure there aren't any problems."
"What?"
Judy fell back on her knowledge of incomprehensible technicalese. "The switchover from mains to battery power sometimes causes a fatal exception at OE 35.2, which initiates cascade failure in the main metaprocessor logic circuits. I'm just booting it to run DOS Shell setups and make sure there aren't any seizure loops." She was jolly glad her MIT profs hadn't heard that: they'd have beaten her soundly with hanks of USB cable.
"Uh, right," said the driver, who was a security guard and could probably tell her the minutiae of Nascar specs and the measurements of the current Playboy centerfold but was not exactly a technophile. "Hurry it up."
"Will do," said Judy, frowning in concentration. Come on, come on, come on, give me a signal...damned cell towers aren't exactly common in the middle of the desert....
Ah. Thank you, somebody. God of Transmission, perhaps. She logged on, using one of her forbidden web-based accounts, and typed in a very brief, very terse message, after glancing at the compass on the dashboard and doing some rough calculations.
I haven't got anything to lose, she thought, and hit Send.
From the air, the convoy resembled a silver bracelet stretched on a narrow ribbon of black velvet, made up of five cars and one semi, between the wide rust-sand expanse of the playa and the distant humps of the mountains. With choreographed precision, the lead car turned left off the road, pulling the bracelet in a long sweeping curve as the convoy followed; in the dustcloud kicked up by the wheels, the vehicles themselves disappeared, as if they had passed through some strange cloaking field on leaving the highway. When the dust settled, there was no trace of them: the desert had wrapped itself around the cars entirely. No one saw them go; no one noticed they were gone, or where they had gone to.
No one was there to see.
tbc