TekLords, page 15
“There are a few people, mostly scientists, I know in Japan. I’ll get in touch with them, too,” she said. “You still haven’t eaten anything.”
“I haven’t,” he agreed.
Gomez was underwater, deep under the sea rushing toward Tokyo on one of the highspeed Transpacific Tunnel trains. The nonstop trip took just under ten hours and toward the end of the second hour he started to feel restless.
Though his compartment replicated exactly the atmosphere of life above the water, he couldn’t keep from thinking about the fact that tons of ocean were pressing down on him.
The faxbook printer in his First Class compartment offered a list of twenty bestsellers. Not one of them sounded interesting. The vidwall was ready to show him any one of fifteen current hit movies. He’d already seen fourteen of them and had shunned the fifteenth.
“I’d hate to be caught watching that turkey if the Pacific broke through and flooded the train. That’s not what I want to be doing during my last moments on Earth.”
He got up, opened the door and went into the corridor. The train shot along the tunnel silently and with no indication of movement at all. That was one of the things about it that annoyed Gomez.
He strolled along, glancing up at the pale blue ceiling now and then.
A robot was playing romantic tunes on a chrome-plated electric piano in the cocktail lounge. For some reason most of the patrons were seven- and eight-year-old children. There was at least a dozen of them scattered around at several tables, drinking soft drinks out of cocktail glasses and carrying on loud, intricate conversations between tables.
Gomez continued on into the dining car.
The smiling blond android in the pale blue suit greeted him, “Joining us again, are you, sir?”
“That’s right,” remembered Gomez. “I just had breakfast a half hour ago, didn’t I?”
“Twenty minutes ago actually. But it’s very easy to lose track of time on one of these tunnel trains.”
“I’ll come back later.”
“We won’t start serving lunch for another two hours, sir.”
“Well, that gives me something to look forward to.” Gomez went back through the cocktail lounge, dodging a lemon slice one of the kids tossed at another. He started along the corridor toward his compartment.
Halfway there he heard a woman in one of the other compartments cry out, faintly, “Help.”
“Bueno,” he told himself. “This might liven things up.”
Then he recognized the voice.
30
GOMEZ KNOCKED AGAIN, MORE forcefully, on the compartment door. “Do hurry and answer, miss,” he said loudly in a voice he hoped would pass for that of an amiable android. “I have an awful lot of passengers to call on.”
A few more seconds passed. Then a gruff male voice on the other side of the door suggested, “Scram.”
“Oh, but I can’t very well do that. I’m obliged to hand out one of these lovely gift baskets to every single passenger.”
“We don’t want one. Beat it.”
“I’m afraid, sir, it’s not as simple as that,” persisted Gomez in his android voice. “My very position as social director of this train will be seriously jeopardized unless I personally distribute a basket of fruit and cheese to each and—”
“We hate fruit and loathe cheese. Get the hell away from here.”
“Actually, sir, the railroad management doesn’t really care if you eat the fruit and cheese or toss it down the dispozhole.” Gomez drew out his stungun. “But you must sign this form indicating that you’ve received your basket. Until I get that squared away, I’m really afraid I cannot move along. And, you know, I still have to sign up people for the ElectroBingo tournament this afternoon after I distribute all these—”
“Shove the damn receipt under the door and I’ll sign it. You can leave the basket out there.”
“No. Oh, no. I simply couldn’t do that. You see, the Second Class passengers aren’t entitled to baskets this large. If one of them came along and spotted this one and took it, well, that would cause no end of trouble.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll open the damn door and you can hand me the damn paper to sign and the damn basket. Then you better clear out of here, buddy.”
“Yes, fine. That will be just dandy.” Gomez jumped, flattened himself against the wall next to the compartment doorway.
The door rattled, then slid open a few inches. “Okay,” said the man from inside, “where the hell are you?”
Gomez remained silent, waiting.
“If you’re so antsy about me signing your damn...Awk!”
A large shaggy man had thrust his head out into the corridor to look around for the social director and the basket of fruit and cheese.
The second Gomez saw him, he fired his stungun.
The beam hit the big man square in the left temple. It rendered him unconscious and he fell to his knees with a considerable thunk. Then he toppled forward, sprawling half into the corridor.
Gomez stayed where he was, gun ready.
A full minute passed, then another. No one else came out of the compartment.
Taking a deep breath, Gomez risked a look inside.
Slumped across the seat, hands bound behind her and a towel stuffed into her mouth, was the redhaired Natalie Dent.
Tucking away his gun, Gomez bent and dragged the big man back inside the room. “Fate is a funny thing, cara,” he remarked to the Newz reporter. “It keeps throwing us together.”
The dark green Customs robot blinked, made a faint whistling noise and pressed Jake’s plas passport card to the scanner in its forehead once again. “Ah,” it said.
“Something?” asked Jake.
“Ah,” repeated the emerald robot as it rose up from behind its crimson desk.
“So you said.” Jake was alone in this Customs cubicle. Beth and Agent MacQuarrie were being processed in other cubicles in a long string of tiny offices.
“You’re Jake Cardigan.” The robot tapped its index finger on the passport card.
“I am, yeah. Is there some problem?”
“If you’ll wait here a moment, Mr. Cardigan.” Leaving its red desk, the green robot walked out of the small Kyoto airport office. It took Jake’s passport with it.
Jake, reminded of his interview with the assistant dean of Dan’s school a few days ago, wondered if the Japanese authorities also thought he was a Tek dealer.
A slender Japanese in a white suit stepped into the office and coughed once. He was now holding Jake’s passport card. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Cardigan.” Moving behind the robot’s desk, he sat down.
“I don’t know if I’m pleased to meet you or not,” admitted Jake. “What’s going on?”
“I’m Inspector Hachimitsu.”
“Kyoto Police?”
The inspector nodded. “With the Murder Division.”
Jake straightened up in his chair. “You’re working on a case?”
“I am,” answered Hachimitsu. “Do you know Norman Itoko?”
“Know his name. He’s the operative with the Senuku Detective Agency who’s going to...But he isn’t going to be meeting me, is he?”
“No, Norman was killed a little over an hour ago.”
“How?”
“Two assassins using lazguns killed him outside his home,” said the inspector. “For good measure, they killed his wife as well when she came running out of the house.”
“You knew him?”
“We were acquaintances. I was aware he was to contact you this morning.”
“It’s a Tek killing. Itoko must’ve found out something.”
“If he did, he didn’t confide in me.” Inspector Hachimitsu held out Jake’s passport. “I’d hate to see you killed as well, Mr. Cardigan. Especially in Kyoto. For your own protection, therefore, I’m seeing to it that you will be denied entry into our country and sent home to America at once.”
31
GOMEZ HAD MADE A quick, thorough search of Natalie’s train compartment before he untied her. “Tell me what happened, chiquita,” he requested.
The angry reporter tugged the towel out of her mouth, spit lint and scowled up at him. “Don’t think I’m not appreciative of your assistance, since I truly am,” she said. “You might, however, in any future situations along this line, release me from bondage and then do your snooping around my—”
“Nat, I wanted to make certain you weren’t harboring any other louts.” Kneeling beside the big man he’d stungunned, he started searching him. “As suspected, no trace of an ID packet. Any notion who this clunk is?”
“A safe assumption is that he’s in the employ of one or more of the Tek cartels.” She rubbed at her wrists. “He didn’t, though, bother to introduce himself to me. He simply came barging in, slapped a hand over my mouth and started to truss me up. I managed to utter a faint cry for help, which I imagine you must have heard while lurking around outside and possibly contemplating some sort of electronic eavesdropping or—”
“I didn’t even know you were aboard,” he assured her as he extracted a lazgun from the unconscious hoodlum’s shoulder holster. “For generations, however, the Gomez clan has been noted for rushing to the rescue of damsels in distress. Hearing a plea for succor, I automatically sprang into action.”
“Oh, I see. I suppose, correct me if I’m wrong, that had you realized it was I who was being manhandled in here, you’d have continued on your way, whistling one of those inane ditties you’re so fond of—”
“Nat, I recognized your distinctive tones in a matter of scant seconds.” He located a stunrod in the thug’s coat pocket, an electroknife strapped to his calf. “But so ingrained is my impulse to help the helpless, that I popped into the fray, at great personal risk, to help you, even though you and I haven’t always been the best of—”
“Popped right in? Good gravy, you dawdled out in that corridor nattering away in the offensive impersonation of a pansy for an inordinate length of time.”
“Androids can’t be pansies. It was only a couple of minutes.” He stood, bent and caught hold of the lout by the armpits. “It was a pretty clever diversion, since it allowed me to deck this goon without any bloodshed whatsoever.”
“I suppose, all things considered, you did do a fairly competent job of saving me from this bruiser.”
Gomez opened the closet, worried the heavy unconscious man inside and managed to shove the door shut on him.
“You’ve dumped him right in on top of my suitcase,” complained Natalie.
“He won’t feel a thing, since he’s out for at least twelve hours and by—”
“I really do hate to carp at every single thing, but I don’t like the idea of that heavy hooligan crushing my dainty suitcase from here all the way to Tokyo, Gomez.”
Sighing, muttering in Spanish, he reopened the closet, tugged out the small tan suitcase from beneath the slumbering thug, pushed him and prodded and got him shut in once again.
“I happen to speak Spanish very well, Gomez.”
“Muy bien.” He dropped into the seat opposite her, smiling.
“I point that out now, since I would prefer that you don’t continue to call me a streetwalker and a goat and other insulting names under your breath every time you get miffed over nothing at all.”
His smile became more beatific. “Another thing that’s genetically built into me is the ability to keep on being sweet and cordial to ladies even when they fail to pass along even so much as a small, pitiful thank you.”
“I already thanked you.”
“I missed it.”
“If you’d do less whistling and talking to yourself, in my opinion, you might hear more of what’s going on around you, especially in the area of gratitude.” She brushed at her red hair. “Has anyone made an attempt on you since you boarded the train?”
“Not so far.”
“Perhaps you were next on his list.”
“We’ll keep alert, in case he was traveling as part of a team,” said Gomez. “Why would he want to do you any harm?”
“Somehow they’ve found out why I’m going to Tokyo.”
“And why are you going to Tokyo, Nat?”
“Really now, you don’t have to keep playing these silly games, the way you tried to do when our paths crossed enroute to The Casino.” She gave a disappointed shake of her head. “Give me credit, since you know what a capable investigative reporter I am, for having found out about Dr. Hyaku on my own.”
“Oh, yeah—Dr. Hyaku.” Gomez had never heard the name before. “So you’re working on that angle, too?”
“I already knew Hyaku was one of the top neobiologists in Japan as well as a former student of Dr. Chesterton,” she said. “And I knew that Hyaku had disappeared a few months ago. But until I learned that Chesterton had vanished from the Freezer at almost the same time, I didn’t see the significance.”
“You know about Chesterton’s being sprung, too?”
“Honestly, Gomez, do you think they give out top journalism prizes to nitwits?”
“Not usually, no,” he said. “Are you suggesting, Nat, that we collaborate again—pool our resources in the hunt for the missing Hyaku?”
“We might as well, since that’s the wisest course in the long run. And we did function fairly smoothly together during our recent collaboration aboard The Casino,” she said. “But, please, don’t try to ditch me again the way you did the minute we got home to Greater Los Angeles. I actually had quite a few more questions I wanted to ask you.”
“Dear lady,” he lied, “I’ll stick to your side throughout our stay in Tokyo.”
Jake said, “We can do this two ways, Inspector—easy or hard.”
“You’re not in a position to threaten me, Mr. Cardigan.”
“I am, though.” Jake grinned. “That’s, see, where you’ve miscalculated. Maybe because you didn’t get enough information from Itoko.”
“Are you saying that—”
“I’m saying the Cosmos Agency has a great deal of influence, which I’ll use if I have to.”
“Perhaps in Southern California it has some influence, but I assure you that—”
“We can sit around here and trade insults and flex our muscles,” said Jake. “But it’ll save a hell of a lot of time if you just call the head of the Senuku Detective Agency. He can fill you in on all the strings my agency pulled before I came over here, all the palms that were greased, all the—”
“Is this how you usually operate? By making shady deals behind the scenes?”
“If I have to, I do,” he answered. “And Bascom, my boss, almost always works that way. He says it’s a hell of a lot more efficient.”
Hachimitsu dropped Jake’s passport card on the red desk. “Norman Itoko didn’t provide me with all the details on your proposed investigation in Kyoto,” he said. “What were you intending to do?”
“I hope to find Dr. Gordon Chesterton.”
“Hope is an odd word for a hardbitten detective to use.”
“You’ve heard about the plague that’s hit San Francisco. My former wife happens to be one of the victims,” said Jake. “I suppose that gives me a personal reason along with all the professional ones.”
“You believe Chesterton is in Kyoto?”
“A few months ago he was smuggled off the Freezer. It’s possible he was shipped here, still in a suspended state. The proposed destination was the Arashi Warehouse Complex.”
The inspector frowned. “We’ve long suspected, but have been unable to prove, a connection between Arashi and several major Asian Tek cartels.”
“What about Tora Hokori?”
Hachimitsu didn’t immediately answer. “The Tiger,” he said finally. “She is supposed to have died.”
“I don’t think she did.”
“Neither do I.”
Jake asked him, “Could she be in Kyoto?”
“There have been rumors that she was headquartered in several cities including ours. As yet we have nothing tangible as to her true whereabouts,” the Japanese said. “You suspect that Dr. Chesterton is working with her?”
“Sonny Hokori is probably the one who arranged to have Chesterton smuggled clear of the penal colony. That was so he could produce a new supply of his synthetic plague virus. After Sonny died, Tora must’ve carried on.”
“You had a hand in his death, didn’t you?”
“Not exactly, but I was there when it happened. Tora probably includes me on her list of those responsible.”
The inspector said, “This manmade plague is being used for more than just terrorism.”
Jake nodded. “They haven’t issued any of their demands yet, but the Teklords are going to withhold the antidote unless all the countries of the world drop their campaigns against Tek,” he said. “They’ll use it on other cities, all across the globe, until they get what they want.”
“They’ll have to be stopped.”
“I’m not the only one working on this, obviously,” Jake told him. “But I want to try to find Chesterton and the antidote.”
“Very well.” Inspector Hachimitsu stood. “You can remain in Kyoto, but I’d like you to keep in close contact with me.”
“Thanks, I will.”
The policeman held out his hand. “It wasn’t, let me mention, your threats that persuaded me. But rather the logic of your position.”
“I thought I’d better try both,” said Jake, shaking his hand. “One or the other usually works.”
32
JAKE SLOWED ON HIS way to the vidphone alcove. “Who’re you waving at?”
Beth turned away from the wide sliding glass doors of the living room. “Agent MacQuarrie’s already taken up a position out there amidst the foliage.”
“A dedicated fellow.”
They were staying at an inn near the Kamo River and their living room faced on a large terraced garden. The early afternoon outside was blurred with mist.
“I’ve thought of an angle I’d like to work on,” she told him.
“Sure, what is it?”
“If Chesterton was still in a state of suspended animation when he was brought here, then they’d need special equipment—and some uncommon drugs—to revive him.”
