Sins of the Father (28 page)

Incongruously, she had noticed the third man was wearing a hospital issue nametag pinned to his jacket. His name was Prendergast. She had glanced at it only a moment, but the name had an unusual, old world quality that caused it to linger briefly in her mind. His nails were neatly trimmed and manicured. His suit was expensive. His hair was immaculately styled. He had the look of some high-level business executive rather than a bodyguard, though she supposed that was entirely the point. In the years to come these facts would haunt her. She had noticed all these details with barely a glance, yet somehow missed the most important one of all.

The cyborg bastard was still breathing.

She had walked past and her back was turned towards him when he suddenly came back to life. Her first and only warning came with a shout from Lang behind her.

"Anderson! Look out!"

She had turned, too slowly, and seen the cyborg rise to lift his gun towards her. The microcircuitry grinding in his spine as it tried to compensate for his damaged vertebrae, his lolling head jerking with rag doll slackness at every movent of his body, the gun an extension of his arm as he was compelled with one final desperate effort to adhere to the commandment hardwired into his nervous system. She had tried to bring her Lawgiver to bear, a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach as she realised she was as good as dead.

It happened so quickly. The cyborg fired. Lang leapt forward into the path of the bullet. Anderson unleashed the remainder of her magazine on rapid fire, sending the cyborg careening back into the wall in a mad puppet dance of blood and splintered bone.

By the time the gunsmoke cleared the cyborg was dead. Anderson was on her knees beside Lang's fallen body. She saw Lang's eyes staring up at her blindly, a finger's-width hole in the centre of her forehead.

A bullet in the head.

It was over very quickly.

Leonard squeezed, tightening his hold on the old man's neck. The body began to jerk and spasm beneath his grip. He was choking the life out of the man while Daniel, for once, watched it happen in silence. The boy looked down at the face of the man he hated above all others, observing his death throes with detachment. The old man's spasms grew wilder. A rattling noise came from his throat. Then, the sounds and the movements stopped. Nearby, a machine began to make a continuous trilling tone. Leonard had done his work.

The old man was dead.

Eleven years old. She is Myrna Lang and she is eleven years old. She hears voices in her head. Worried, her family take her to a doctor. The doctor calls the Judges. They take her from her family. They tell her she is special. They tell her she is psychic. One day she will be a Psi-Judge.

She doesn't want to be a Psi-Judge. She misses her family. She is lonely and unhappy.

The years pass. Her Psi-Tutors try to counsel her, but her feelings do not go away. She begins to hate her own powers. She resents them. If she didn't have psychic powers, she could have a normal life...

"I need a doctor!" Anderson yelled, her voice a lonely echo across empty hallways. Her hands were at Lang's chest, performing compressions, her mind awash with Lang's memories as the physical contact provoked a sudden psychic transference. Blood dripped from an unseen wound hidden by the hair at the back of the rookie's head. Lang's eyes stared blankly up at the ceiling, chillingly lifeless and vacant.

"I need a doctor now!" Anderson yelled again. She continued the compressions, not daring for a moment to stop long enough to either check the woman's pulse or use her own radio to call for assistance. Right now, she suspected her hands were all that was keeping Lang's heart beating.

"C'mon, Lang," she said. "I know you can still hear me. You've got to stay with me!"

There was no reaction. Lang's eyes seemed as empty as the corridors around them.

"C'mon, Lang," the words first became a mantra, then a prayer. "C'mon, Lang."

By the time a doctor finally arrived to help her, Lang's body had started to grow cold.

Thank you, Leonard
, Daniel said. In the aftermath of the old man's death, he wore a contented smile.
Thank you for everything. I'm sorry we ever argued. You've been a good friend. The best friend I ever had
.

The moment the old man had breathed his last, something weird had started to happen to Daniel. The boy seemed to fade away before Leonard's eyes, as though he was gradually becoming just as invisible to Leonard as he was to everyone else.

"Daniel?" Confused, Leonard watched the boy continue to fade until he could almost see right through him. "Is there something wrong? Are you all right?"

I'm fine, Leonard
, Daniel's smile was calm and peaceful.
I've just found a place where I can be happy. You mustn't be sad. And I remember my promise to you. I said I'd help you find your mother. I know where she is. I've always known, really. But I couldn't tell you before, not until you had helped me
.

Daniel was almost gone now. Even his voice had begun to fade, the sound like the gentle rustling of a breeze through long grass.

Before Leonard knew what was happening, Daniel disappeared. But, with his last words the boy kept his promise. He told Leonard who his mother was and where she lived. Most importantly of all, though, he told him her name.

Grace. His mother's name was Grace.

TWENTY-ONE

REUNIONS, GOODBYES AND UNFINISHED BUSINESS

"We'll do our best," the doctor told Anderson as they wheeled Lang into surgery. "You have to understand, though, there's a limit to what we can do. Even if we manage to stabilise her condition and remove the bullet, there's every chance she's suffered irreparable brain damage."

There were some words which seem final when you hear them from doctors. Watching as Lang was taken into theatre, Anderson realised she felt as helpless in this situation as an ordinary citizen might feel in dealing with a Judge. Nor could she do anything to improve Lang's chances by sitting around the hospital waiting for news. All she could do was head back to the streets.

Besides which, there was the matter of unfinished business.

The mutant, Lenny, had managed to escape from the hospital in the midst of the confusion while Anderson and the other Judges dealt with the threat posed by Roderick Lowe's bodyguards. The irony was the extreme measures Lowe had taken to protect his life had worked against him. While his guards responded to the override command to go on a pre-programmed killing spree, Lenny had broken into the operating theatre and strangled the old man.

Still, irony was a sword that could cut two ways. In this case, it seemed as sharp on one side as it did the other.

For while Lenny the mutant had killed an old man, he had not killed Roderick Lowe.

"It's almost like it was some kind of providence," a twitchy, nervous surgeon named Langstock had told Anderson when she interviewed him in the immediate aftermath of the carnage. "I mean, I'm not a religious man. But, well, if that monster had come into the operating room a few minutes earlier, he would have killed Mr Lowe."

Roderick Lowe was not dead. He had been undergoing a Total Body Transplant when Lenny had attacked him. What the giant could not know, however, was that the procedure had been a success. By the time Lenny entered the operating theatre, Lowe's consciousness had been successfully transferred to his new body. The old man Lenny had strangled had been nothing more than an empty and discarded shell.

As lucky escapes went, it was right up there with the guy who had fallen off the roof of a two-hundred storey housing block, only to land safely on a window washer's platform suspended outside the one-hundred-and-ninety-ninth floor. Anderson found it difficult to feel any great joy at Lowe's escape, though. From what she knew of the reasons behind the boy and the giant's murder spree, and given Lowe's age, it was likely he was involved in some way in the fifty-year-old child abuse case. That, and the matter of his cyborg bodyguards' rampage, would leave him facing a lengthy list of charges when he recovered from the transplant. It turned out Lowe was a wealthy man. It took more than deep pockets, however, to deter the Judges of Mega-City One. There was every chance Lowe would spend a great deal of the extra years he had bought himself inside an iso-cube.

Or not.

In the weeks following his transplant procedure, it became clear that irony cut three ways in its dealings with Roderick Lowe. Despite an initially positive prognosis, over time it became apparent something had gone seriously wrong with Lowe's transplant. Whether it was through some unforeseen surgical error, or simply bad luck, Lowe did not regain consciousness. Instead, he remained locked in a permanent vegetative state, trapped inside his new body and unable to communicate. He lived for another fifty-seven years; a drooling basket case, kept alive by machines, with one tube to feed him and another tube to take away his waste. The various charges against him were held on file, but he was not sentenced nor was he ever arrested. Financially, it made little sense for Justice Department to go to the considerable expense of imprisoning a man who was already a prisoner in his own body.

The general consensus was that Lowe had already suffered a fate worse than death. Some even saw it as a sign that Grud really did have a sense of humour.

Still, if the Almighty did indulge in the occasional joke, He liked to play them straight.

For Dr Richard Langstock, the events at the Siegel Medical Centre that day heralded the end of a promising career. Generally, in the years that followed, he traced the beginning of his misfortunes to a short conversation he had had with Psi-Judge Anderson in the wake of the Lowe transplant.

"You realise there's a reason why Total Body Transplants are so heavily regulated?" Anderson had told him. "Justice Department likes to make sure the body donors are legit and no one is going around murdering people to steal their bodies. I take it all your paperwork is up-to-date?"

"Of course," Langstock had found himself unable to prevent his voice from trembling as he answered her. He was a fine surgeon, but a very poor liar. "We're very careful about these things. I'm sure you'll find everything is in order."

"I'm sure we will," Anderson had smiled at him. "That's why I've ordered there to be a complete audit made of your records for the last ten years. We'll also be sending a couple of Judges from the Accounting Division to take a look at your personal finances. After that, you're booked in for interrogation at your local Sector House. We'll send you to see the Dream Police. PSU have pulled all the records of your recent movements. Who knows, maybe when they're finished with you, they'll send you back to me for a full telepathic probe. That's the thing about Justice Department; we don't like to leave any stone unturned."

In the fullness of time, other matters were resolved. Although Operation Lazarus quietly folded its tents within a few days of its inception, the investigation into the operations of the Organizatsiya and the remains of Konrad Gruschenko's criminal empire continued for years. Over time, arrests were made. Arthur Whittaker, AKA Peter Arkady, tentatively identified as Gruschenko's successor as head of the Organizatsiya, was killed in a shootout with Judges while resisting arrest.

At least, that was the outcome recorded in the Justice Department casebooks. For years afterwards rumours would occasionally surface in the underworld that Arkady had followed the example of his one-time leader, faking his own death so he could resume his criminal activities under a new identity. There were a number of claims made of sightings of him over the years.

The sightings were never confirmed.

As for the decades-old child abuse cases whose existence had been revealed by the discovery of the meme-encoder among the effects of Joseph Kapinski, they were diligently investigated by the relevant Justice Department divisions. It became clear that Roderick Lowe had been a prime mover in the crimes, alongside a number of other wealthy and distinguished members of Mega-City One's high society - most of whom had long ago succumbed to old age and were, thus, beyond punishment by earthly powers. Arrests were made where they could be, while the now-adult victims of the crimes were offered counselling.

With the investigation completed, the records were filed away. But while it was the end of one particular case, elsewhere in the city children continued to be abused. With the best will in the world, the forces of Law could not be everywhere, nor could they see everything. For every single case of abuse that was brought to light, it was estimated as many as ten went unreported.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

There was one unexpected development, however. The investigation into Roderick Lowe and his associates uncovered evidence linking them with the previously unsolved disappearances of at least thirty-seven children over a period of several decades. A number of sets of human remains were found, all but one of which were eventually claimed by grieving relatives once forensic tests had established the identities of the deceased. The one exception was the skeleton of a young boy, estimated to have been approximately eight years old at the time of his death, which was discovered buried beneath the basement of a derelict factory in Sector 45. Despite exhaustive tests by Teks and Med-Judges, the boy's identity could not be confirmed.

In a curious side-note, it was Judge Anderson who came closest to being able to identify the boy. Once facial reconstruction software had been used to create a computer-generated Tri-D portrait of what the boy might have looked like in life, she realised he bore an uncanny resemblance to the ghostly child she had seen clinging to the mutant giant's shoulders in City Bottom.

Despite this, the boy's name was never discovered. As for the child ghost Anderson had encountered, he was never seen again.

All of which left only the matter of Lenny the mutant.