Dopplegänger
VIII
Inspector McClane pushed a chair over to Mustachio. "OK, sit down and spill the beans." He said sternly. "What do you know about Astro and Tobio!"
"First of all," Mustachio said, "Tobio is dead. That boy I saw with Astro must be a look a like. When I saw him the first thing that came into my head was that it was Dr. Tenma's deceased son with Astro, but that makes no sense."
"That's what I was told too." McClane replied, "but the results of my investigation seem to lead the facts in a different direction." The inspector pushed a photograph towards the Tokyoite. "Do you recognize this woman?"
Mustachio stared at the photograph in disbelief. "That's Dr. Tenma's late wife Hoshie."
"Who's very much alive." McClane said. "I was able to uncover her trail from Japan to America. She's involved with a known international art thief named Kin Sankaku who I'm now trailing for another reason. And now you just tied Astro and her son together. It sounds to me like the professor's kidnapping was a means of getting hold of Astro. But why?"
"How much do you know about Astro?" Mustachio asked.
"The professor told me he's and advanced robot." McClane said. "He's certainly human enough to fool most people into believing that he's not a robot."
"That's all?" Mustachio asked.
"Well, also that the kid was some kind of national secret. I gave the old man my word that I wouldn't reveal his existence on my official reports, if he wasn't involved in any crime."
"Yeah, well I guess I'll have to tell you just how secret Astro is." Mustachio sighed. "I know who this Kin Sankaku is, and he's one of many criminals in Japan whose plans have been foiled by Astro."
"The kids worked with the Tokyo police?"
"Let's say he's done some of the work that they should have."
"Astro's a vigilante?"
"No, I wouldn't call him that." Mustachio laughed. "But he is a kind of superhero."
"Don't make me laugh," McClane said, "You mean like Robin the boy wonder?"
"No, more like Superboy," Mustachio said.
"What, he can fly and bend steel bars in his bare hands?"
"As a matter of fact, yes he can!" Mustachio said. "Astro is powered by a 100,000 horse power miniature nuclear reactor. He's armed with laser cannons and machine guns. He could lift a skyscraper off the ground. The kid is a one man army, when you get down to it."
McClane's jaw dropped, along with the cup of coffee he'd been holding on to. "Oh my God!" he face palmed. "I think I know what Sankaku's up to!"
"Perhaps you'd better fill me in." Mustachio said. "I used to be a detective in my younger days in Tokyo. Two of my best friends are involved in this caper of yours, I want to help."
"OK, now I'm going to have to have you swear to keeping this secret." McClane said. He locked the door to his office and pulled down all of the window shades. "I've been put in charge of a task force that is in charge of security for a federal gold transfer that takes place tomorrow. They are using the facilities of a local bank to cover this up. Ever since 9/11 the US government has kept huge parts of the national gold reserve outside of the usual expected places such as Fort Knox. They've made secret deals with many private banks to enlarge their vaults, or create new ones deep under the existing ones. Recently a sizable shipment of bullion has been placed in a downtown bank for delivery to a foreign power. I couldn't find anything wrong with the security, but yet something was bugging me."
"You think Kin Sankaku is moving up in the world to try and heist this?" Mustachio laughed.
"Can you think of a better reason why he'd mastermind the kidnapping of your professor friend?"
"How do you know it was him?" Mustachio' asked.
"First of all the Fed's found his name mentioned in a communication they intercepted from some Korean terror cell they've been keeping tabs on. The Fed's know this cell has been after gold shipments, and so far they've been able to distract their attention. The FBI has been keeping a tail on Sankaku and they've got at least one photograph of him and Hoshie meeting in the street. Then there was this museum heist that the kid pulled off. Finally, Ochanomizu's kidnapping and the fact that Astro is a dead ringer for this Tojo kid, who we now know is Hoshie's son who's very much alive. Now take a look at this."
McClane looked around by instinct before accessing his computer. He brought up a schematic of part of the downtown area and zoomed. "Here are the plans for the bank where the gold shipment is stored. Not in the vault that the customers would see, but here."
The detective clicked on the mouse to access a second page. "Several stories under the bank, deep underground is a secret vault that isn't on any official blueprints. The police and fire departments don't know of its existence, these plans are only in the federal record."
"You think Kin Sankaku knows about this?" Mustachio asked.
"I'm sure of it." McClane said. "The feds think that their database has been hacked into. They can't prove it, but they're worried enough to increase security. That's my headache. This Tojo kid, he's been in trouble before hacking into computers. I've uncovered his handiwork checking into that museum robbery. Just how do you think he knew how to disable their alarm system?"
"That part makes sense." Mustachio said. "Tobio was a genius working with robots, a real chip of the old block."
"I've saved the best part for last." McClane said. He clicked on the mouse, and typed on his keyboard. A second set of plans appeared and he overlaid them on top of the first.
"This is part of the uncompleted subway extension that was abandoned years ago." The Inspector said. "Notice how this tunnel goes right under the bank. It connects to another tunnel that leads toward the Hudson river. They were going to connect the Manhattan subway with either the Staten Island system, or the Path, but it never happened."
Mustachio watched as McClane zoomed the view in. "It would still take a tunnel boring machine to make the connection between the bank vault and that abandoned tunnel, but if you did break though with a connection, you'd be able to make off with the bullion via the river." McClane said.
"Yeah, but that gold is heavy." Mustachio said "It would take a small army to carry it."
"Or a small, robot with 100,000 HP." McClane answered.
Astro sat in the back of the deuce and a half truck. He was blindfolded and his arms and legs were bound by heavy chains. "You sure that robot won't break free?" Kin Sankaku asked Tojo.
"I doubt it." the Asian boy replied. "He knows what will happen to Ochanomizu Hakase if he causes us any trouble. Besides, those restraints are highly magnetized. Their magnetic field is strong enough to upset his motor controls. He's not going anywhere till I release him."
"Very well." Sankaku replied, looking at his watch. "It's almost time. I hope we can keep on schedule."
The army surplus M35 truck entered the mouth of the tunnel and and headed east. "According to the blueprints we'll be able to go a few miles before the passageway gets too narrow to allow us to turn around and reverse course." Tojo told Kim. "We'll have to drive backwards for about a mile, and then walk the rest of the way."
It took them about an hour to reach the point where the tunnel was too narrow to go any further. The last twenty minutes were spent creeping along in reverse. Tojo had pulled the blindfolds off of Astro's head and ordered him to light the way using his eye searchlights. Astro grumbled, but obeyed out of fear for Ochanomizu's well being.
Tojo carried an iPad which he had loaded with the data from the blueprints they had stolen. He carried a high powered location receiver that could pick up the signals from certain government satellites even this far underground. Astro followed behind the boy, his hands still bound together by the magnetic manacles. Sankaku followed behind him carrying an EMP gun which he kept aimed at Astro's head. They walked for another ten minutes when Tojo stopped and carefully looked around him for land marks. He examined the tracking device that he had built, and cross checked its data with the information he'd stored on the iPad. "This is the spot." He told Sankaku. About 200 yards to the north, and then straight up for a few hundred more."
"Very good." Sankaku said. "OK Astro, you know what to do. We're going to release you from those magnetic constraints and you're going to tunnel up into the vault. Don't try anything funny."
"Wait a second." Tojo said, walking towards Astro. "Open your chest panel."
Astro reluctantly complied. Tojo reached inside of Astro's chest and grabbed at the cabling to his central nervous system. He inserted a small device into Astro and attached it to one of the cables leading to Astro's optical cortex. "This little gizmo will tap into your vision. Everything you see will be relayed to my iPad here." Tojo explained.
"Excellent!" Kin Sankaku said rubbing his hands together.
"I'll be able to talk to you as well, without anyone else hearing the conversation." Tojo told Astro. "This transceiver is wired directly into your electronic brain." The Asian boy removed a key from his rear pocket and unlocked Astro from the handcuffs.
Astro flew upwards to the ceiling of the tunnel. He clawed at the roof with his hands and dug while propelling himself forward using his leg jet engines. Like a tunnel boring machine he drilled his way into the bedrock and quickly disappeared from sight, though his progress was obvious from the sound and the pulverized rock that flew out of the opening in the ceiling he'd created.
Astro lit up his searchlight eyes so that Tojo and Sankaku could see the result of his labor on the boys tablet computer. It took the boy robot only a few minutes to reach the hardened steel floor of the vault. Astro used his digibeam finger tip laser to burn a hole though the chrome steel and popped his head up though the opening. The inside of the vault was dark except for the powerful beams of light from Astro's eyes which reflected a golden color back.
"YES!" Sankaku cried out. "He's done it!"
"OK, Astro." Tojo relayed though the iPad. "Start carrying the gold bars down here and load up the back of the truck."
A few minutes later Astro returned carrying the first load of solid gold bars. Tobio watched Astro's every movement on the tablet computer. Astro flew down down tunnel toward where the truck was sitting and put the load of bullion down neatly in the bed of the truck. The springs on the vehicle hardly gave way, but this was only the first layer of cargo. "Are you sure that truck will carry the load?" Tojo asked.
"I've had the suspension reworked, the transmission modified, and special tires filled with nitrogen mounted." Sankaku replied. "It will be able to carry as much gold as I require. We'll probably leave some behind, but that doesn't matter."
Astro returned and re-entered the vault to pick up a second load. He quickly returned with another armful of bars and laid them down in the truck on top of the first load.
"Looks like he'll be finished in under an hour." Sankaku said, looking at his watch. "We'll be ahead of schedule. Excellent!"
Astro re-entered the vault. Anger burned under his skin, he hated being used like this, but he couldn't do anything, at least not yet. Why hadn't he set off some kind of alarm? Surely the government would have put some kind of security measure in place. Astro quickly scanned the inside of the large room while he gathered up another large pile of the heavy bricks. There was only one way into this vault, though the heavy steel doors at the far side of the room that were still securely locked shut. The walls, ceiling and floor were all made of a several inches thick chromium-tungsten steel alloy that would have required a diamond studded saw blade to cut into. Even an electric-oxygen cutting torch would have a tough job on the material and have taken hours of work to penetrate. Of course his own high powered laser had no difficulty melting though, just as Kin Sankaku had known it would.
Still, it didn't make sense that there wasn't some kind of motion detector. What security expert would have been so smug in their dependence on a locked door and 'impenetrable' walls alone? Unless …. Of course, Tojo had been busy hacking on his computer before they left, had he deactivated some level of security just to make sure? Astro scanned the walls of the vault, zooming in closely to get a good look. Astro did it quickly so that it would appear as a blur to Tojo if he were monitoring his vision at the moment. Sure enough, there were several IR emitters and detectors lining the walls. The detectors were of two kinds, some were tuned to the emitters being a 'break beam' kind of motion detector, others were passive detectors designed to pick up movement of living bodies. The passive units couldn't detect robots, their internal power sources operated at a different heat signature than living beings. The break beam detectors would find him if he'd have interrupted a beam.
Astro switched his vision into the infrared. He could detect no emissions from the security devices, they had been shut down. But wait! Tojo had smugly left the passive detectors on! Astro could see the activity indicators glowing on those! Tojo must have known that they were useless against robots and would ignore him, so he didn't bother to deactivate them. Perhaps there was also a method to his madness here, leaving part of the security system active might not clue someone at the other end where they were being monitored that the system had been compromised.
As he gathered up the final bars for this load, Astro had an idea. He opened his chest panel and felt inside, being careful not to disturb the modification that had been added to him by Tojo. He found the thermal device that Don Tay had implanted within him, and he adjusted the setting. The device had come from the evil robot 'Thermo' that the renegade scientist had created. It could cause Thermo to glow with heat, hot enough to nearly melt steel. Astro had been given the device to protect him from the tremendous cold from a freezing bomb he used to extinguish a volcano. He quickly adjusted it to mimic the thermal output of a human. On his next trip into the vault, he would set off a silent alarm.