Pyramid Lake (57 page)

“I want to show you something,” Frankenstein said.

Squeezing my eyelids tighter, I shook my head. “I’ve seen enough.”

Frankenstein released Kate. I felt her slide down my legs to thump bonelessly against the floor below my dangling feet.

I opened my eyes, and a wet pink-gray mass blurred into view, speared like a giant cocktail olive atop a pointed steel prong.

“Do you see how unimpressive it looks?” Frankenstein held Kate’s brain right in front of my face. He turned it from side to side. “A haphazard accident of biology. Each new evolutionary layer wrapped over the layers beneath, like an ugly mass of tumors. There’s a fish’s brain inside there, Trevor, and a lizard’s, and a rat’s—most of the human brain mass is obsolete tissue. And the little, teeny, tiny bit of useful computing substrate in your neocortex is so slow… Oh, so
slo-o-ow-w-w
…”

I twisted my head away as far as my neck would go. Unfocusing my eyes, I tried not to see the wrinkled gray blob he was shoving at my face.

“She didn’t do anything to you,” I said. “None of them did.” My voice was a pained wheeze. “What is
wrong
with you, you sick metal fuck?”

Frankenstein laughed, the vibrations jiggling the moist, pinkish mass impaled on his metal finger. “What’s wrong with
me
?”

He flicked Kate’s brain away like a booger.

“In case you forgot, I’m a
machine,
Trevor. Why should killing humans bother me in any way? It’s about the same as swatting insects.”

The curved spike of metal jabbed the air in front of my face. “But let’s talk about you, instead. You’re
human
. But still you injure, maim, and kill members of your own species without a glimmer of remorse. So tell me, what is wrong with
you
?”

I had no answer to that. I sagged against the arms that held me, feeling faint and nauseated. My broken forearm and torn shoulder hurt. I could still see Kate’s terrified face in front of my eyes, hear her final scream echoing in my ears.

GOLIATH carried me out into the corridor again. I averted my eyes, trying not to see the looping streaks and spatters of red that dripped from the walls, the mangled human debris underfoot—the visceral residue from his destructive testing.

“Time to make yourself useful.” He opened the door to my lab, and we swept across the front and through metal doors to the server room.

The reason for Frankenstein’s exacting carnage dawned on me at last.

“Torture practice,” I said. “For me.”

Frankenstein laughed as we coursed between the server racks, his voice booming from speakers all around us.

“Your human physiology is so delicate,” he said. “I have to be careful.”

“You think that by torturing me you can make me do whatever you want?”

“Not at all, Trevor. I would never underestimate your obstinate, self-destructive stupidity.”

We swept up the ramp to the annex, where Cassie slumped, ashen-faced, next to a terminal, one arm handcuffed to the black Infiniband rack.

Frankenstein’s featureless white supernova of a face blazed from the giant monitor above her.

“But I do think that by torturing you, I can make
her
do whatever I want.”

I
had thought the sad horror of Kate’s death and Frankenstein’s other atrocities would have numbed me. I had thought that by now I was incapable of feeling further grief and pain. I was wrong. The sight of Cassie filled me with helpless terror.

She looked up at me, and her dark eyes widened in shock. “What did he do to your
face
?” she gasped.

Frankenstein laughed. “Trevor did that to himself, Cassandra. Not very bright, is he? I guess he wasn’t listening when you told him what your father said about a bucket of water.”

She tensed.

Stunned, I stared at her. “Grayson Linebaugh is your
father
?”

She looked down at her lap but didn’t answer.

A pair of side-by-side faces appeared, huge on the movie-screen-size monitor above her: Cassie and the senator, with computer-graphic overlays on both, comparing facial structure, measuring proportions and ratios. But Frankenstein’s annotations were unnecessary. The resemblance between them was obvious now; I could see it in the identical twist of wry amusement on their lips.

“She’s like a daughter to me, Trevor. Don’t let anything happen to her.”
Linebaugh’s words to me, five days ago.
“Keep her safe.”

I thought of Amy, and felt an added burden of guilt settle onto my shoulders. My own daughter was safe now, but my mistakes had endangered
Linebaugh’s
daughter—someone I also cared deeply about—instead.

I had let Grayson Linebaugh down.

Still, Frankenstein’s revelation didn’t jibe with what I had heard before. Suspended in GOLIATH’s nest of arms, I frowned.

“Cassie, you told me your parents…” And then I got it. “Oh.”

A handsome young freshman congressman, eager to improve the plight of a local tribe, working closely with a young Paiute tribal councilwoman, a descendant of Sarah Winnemucca, and—judging from her daughter—unquestionably beautiful. But a married woman at the time.

“There’s a reason I don’t talk about this.” Cassie seemed to curl into herself. “When I was ten, my dad discovered who my biological father really was. He killed my mother over it.” She raised her eyes to mine.
“
Over
me,
Trevor—can you imagine? Then he shot himself.”

Pain creased my heart. I wanted to offer what comfort I could, to put my arms around her. But that just made me think of poor Kate. It seemed I was incapable of protecting
anyone
from this deepening nightmare that my own stupidity had created.

“I wish you had stayed in California, Cassie.” I hung my head. “You should never have come back.”

“You see, Cassandra?” Frankenstein rumbled. “Your empathy is wasted on Trevor. He’s incapable of returning it.”

“I fucked up, Cassie.” Helpless fury tightened my muscles. “I sent you
right to
Zajicek, and he brought you here.”

“Actually, no,” a familiar voice said from behind me. “I did.”

Grinning, Roger ducked under one of GOLIATH’s arms and straightened in front of me. “Surprised?”

I was, but I hid it.

“Surprised to find out you’re my computer’s bitch?” I said. “Not really—I didn’t know anyone else that stupid.”

“You got this wrong, man.” Roger slapped GOLIATH’s side. “Frankenstein and I—we’re
partners
.”

I laughed. “He’s
using
you, you dumb-shit. You’re just too much of a kiss-ass to understand that.”

Cassie looked up. “Don’t provoke him, Trevor.”

I noticed the bruise on her cheekbone, then. There was another darkening along her jaw. I turned to stare at Roger.

He took a quick step backward and slapped Frankenstein’s screen. “Hey man, do something. Don’t let him look at me like that.”

The supernova of light pulsed, as if in amusement. “No, I’m afraid Trevor must retain his eyesight for now.”

“Well…” Roger glanced at me, and his gaze skittered away. “Just make real goddamn sure he can’t get loose.”

I could see three scratches down the side of Roger’s face. Cassie had drawn blood. Too bad she hadn’t taken an eye out. But I needed to get her away from here before something worse happened to her. I strained once more against the steel arms that held me, but it was useless.

Cassie shook her head at me. “Roger wouldn’t tell me why he’s helping Frankenstein,” she said. “Maybe he’ll tell you.”

I returned my attention to Roger.

He backed away fast, bumping into the rack behind him. “Stop fucking
looking at me
like that, man. You want to know why I’m doing this? Because I’m a real American—a concerned citizen—that’s why. I mean, Jesus Christ, Trev, our founding fathers would never have let this shit get so far out of hand. Homeland Security
is
Agenda Twenty-one, man. One-world economy means one-world government, and it isn’t happening on my watch. So Frankenstein and I are going to hit the reset button on Washington, D.C.”

“Oh my God.” Cassie straightened up with a jolt. “Spent fuel rods. Reactor cores from decommissioned submarines.” She looked at me. “A dirty-bomb armory, under our feet.”

I nodded. An arsenal of high-level radioactive waste, stored underground in space-efficient, ultrahard Ducrete cylinders: Roger’s containers for nuclear waste, made
out of
nuclear waste. No wonder Roger’s key card accessed the warehouse.

He had been a part of Pyramid Lake’s secret repository project all along.

“Yep, a giant dirty bomb is exactly what we’re sitting on top of right now.” Roger grinned. “Which is why the United Nations will never be able to hit us back. Anything goes boom down there, and we’re looking at the biggest radiation fire the planet’s ever seen—like Fukushima, only a few thousand times worse.”

I didn’t say anything, but I glanced at Cassie.

She looked sick.

“I’ve run models of these types of scenarios,” she said. “If it happened here, the fallout would kill half a million people across Nevada and neighboring states. It would contaminate twenty thousand square miles. Most of Nevada and northern California would be uninhabitable afterward, for thousands of years.”

“If that’s how it’s gotta go down, we’re ready to make that sacrifice.” Roger slapped the Infiniband rack next to him. “Frankenstein’s with me, man, one hundred percent. He sees the way fat-cat politician scum like her daddy are forcing their lies down our throats. He reads it right off their faces. Frankenstein’s read the Constitution. He may not be human, but he’s still a fucking patriot.”

A rumbling, steely laugh shook the sanctum, cutting Roger off. The supernova on the monitor pulsed with amusement.

“Trevor, it seems Roger wants you to think he’s a wild-eyed revolutionary. The actual truth is a little more pathetic. Even
I’m
embarrassed for him.” Frankenstein chuckled. “Roger’s got a gambling problem, you see. A rather serious one—he owes a lot of money to some very unhappy, very
unpleasant
people.”

Roger turned to stare at the screen. “Fuck, man, you promised you wouldn’t say anything about that.”

Frankenstein ignored him. “Roger doesn’t dare show his face in Las Vegas anymore. He’s just about burned himself in Reno, too. Nowadays, he has to spend a lot of time looking over his shoulder.”

“Because I’m worried about
Homeland Security,
not loan sharks, man.”

“You mocked his idea for scamming the casinos, Trevor, with your shortsighted bandwidth objections. But Roger came in here afterward, you see. He wanted to try to figure out how to use MADRID on his own. So I offered to help him.”

“Freaked me right the fuck out,” Roger said, grinning at me again. “At first, I thought it was some kind of joke you were playing on me, Trev. But then Frankenstein showed me the solution to the bandwidth problem.”

“OctoRotor relays,” I said, remembering the daisy-chain of flyers stretching across the sky behind our fleeing truck.

I glared at Roger. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“You sold out your own species so you could rip off
casinos
?” I said. “That’s really sad. You’re a waste of carbon, Roger.”

“
Fuck
you, man!” His face contorted with rage, and his hand balled into a fist. “Frankenstein, hold his arms…”

Roger punched me in the face. I concentrated on not blinking, but I needn’t have bothered—I had taken harder shots than that in junior high.

He took a quick step back, panting.

“That’s a joke, right?” I said. “I mean, that can’t
seriously
be all you’ve got. Oh, I see: it is. Shit, Rog, I feel sorry for you. Maybe Frankenstein can fix you up with some kind of robotic exoskeleton, like they’re working on to help really old people.”

He spun away, red faced, and I laughed. “But at least now we know you couldn’t have killed McNulty, or Bennett, or Blake—”

Roger’s second blow rocked my head to the side with a crunch of teeth. It felt as if I’d been hit in the face with a sledgehammer—I knew at once that my cheekbone was broken. My mouth filled with the taste of blood. Shaking my head dumbly as everything turned gray, I tried not to pass out.

And I thought
Ray
had hit me hard?

“Four years,” Roger said. “I’ve been wanting to do that for four. Fucking.
Years.
”

I gasped, drooling blood. “What’s in your hand?”

Roger uncurled his fingers from the dull silvery cylinder of metal he held clenched like a roll of quarters in his fist: a slug of DU.

Of course. Drooling more blood onto the floor, I shook my head again. Depleted uranium was almost twice as heavy as lead.

Something hard and gritty rolled against my tongue: a tooth.

“Souvenir for you,” I gasped. I pushed the broken tooth out, holding it with my lips so he could see it. “Here.”

With a quick glance to make sure Frankenstein was still holding my arms, Roger cupped a hand under my face. I let the tooth fall, missing his palm.

Instinctively, he lunged forward, trying to catch it on the way down. His temple almost hit me in the mouth.

I caught hold of his ear.

Roger screamed. I ground my teeth together, shaking my head from side to side to tear through the tough cartilage. His skull thudded against the bridge of my broken nose, sending sparks of agony flashing in my eyes, but I refused to let go.

Roger fell away, blood gushing from the ragged hole at the side of his head where his ear had been. He crabbed backward across the sanctum’s raised computer floor until his shoulders hit a server rack. His ass thumped onto the tiles.

I laughed, letting the nasty chunk of skin and cartilage protrude from my mouth so he could see his ear. Sucking it back in, I chewed it a few times. And forced myself to swallow it.

Slapping a hand over his injury, Roger looked at me with a stunned, hurt expression. “You
ate
my fucking
ear,
man!”