Tek Net (5 page)

“Some goon just made an intruder call to my number two home number,” he said. “Find out how they managed that—and who.”

“Coming right up. Will you wait?”

“Nope, call me again in fifteen minutes.”

Jake shed the pajama top he slept in, took a quick liteshower and dressed. He slipped the stungun into his shoulder holster.

When he stepped out onto the deck of the condo, his son was sitting there drinking a plazcup of citrisub.

“A person your age, Dad, really needs more than two hours of sleep.” Dan, a lean young man of sixteen, was wearing his SoCal Police Academy uniform.

“I got an unexpected wake-up call.” Walking to the rail, he scanned the surrounding beach.

“What's wrong?”

“Oh, just some lout trying to dissuade me.”

“You on a new case?”

Nodding, Jake told him about the disappearance of Jill Bernardino and what he and Gomez had accomplished thus far in trying to find out what had become of her.

“One of Gomez' wives, huh? Did I ever meet her?”

“Years ago, yeah.”

“She's the redhead, right?”

“No, that was Georgine, Gomez' third wife.”

Dan shook his head. “Then I don't think I remember her.”

The deck phone buzzed.

“Yeah?” answered Jake.

The Cosmos bot smiled. “The phone call in question was made from a landvan in the Long Beach Sector of Greater Los Angeles,” it reported. “The vehicle was found abandoned a few moments ago. Listed as stolen from the Altadena Sector late last evening.”

“And how'd they break through my screening system?”

“What was used, Mr. Cardigan, was one of these new gatecrasher phones.”

“I'm supposed to be resistant to gadgets like that.”

“So we thought, too,” replied the bot. “Your entire security system is being reevaluated from here. We'll get all the kinks out of it, never fear.”

“Great, that gives me enormous peace of mind.” He hung up.

“Some of the Teklords are unhappy with you again,” observed his son.

“I'm on the permanent shit list of a lot of the cartels.” Jake looked out toward the brightening Pacific. “But this particular warning was prompted by our hunting for Jill.”

“It's possible, isn't it, that Gomez' ex-wife is doing something illegal herself? From what you've told me about her Tek habit and all.”

“Supposedly Jill is no longer hooked on the stuff,” he said to his son. “She's clean, upright and gainfully employed.”

“Sure, but she's not faithful to the guy she's married to now,” Dan pointed out. “That means, to me anyway, that she can't be trusted.”

Jake grinned a thin grin. “I sure as hell wouldn't trust her, no.”

Dan stood up. “How are you and Bev Kendricks getting along?”

“We have ceased to be a romantic twosome, I'm afraid.”

“That's too bad. She's a terrific person—and you can trust her.”

“That you can,” his father agreed. “The problem is that she thinks I'm still moping too much over Beth Kittridge's death.”

“Well, you are, you know.”

“I am, yeah,” he agreed. “I'm probably going to have to talk to somebody—somebody professional—about it.”

“When?”

“Right after,” he promised, “we clear up this case.”

8

There was nothing but darkness.

She awakened to it.

The blackness was warm and impenetrable and Jill Bernardino was sprawled in the center of it. Very tentatively, she felt around her.

She seemed to be lying facedown on a smooth surface, probably a metal floor.

Her head ached, but she was feeling much more pain than that. Her hands, arms, legs, were pulsing with pain and her ribs hurt. Breathing, now that she was aware of doing it again, was painful, too. Her lungs didn't feel as though they were working properly anymore.

“Stungun,” she murmured.

They'd used a stungun on her last night.

Was it last night, though?

She realized she had no clear idea of how long she'd been unconscious. No notion of how long she'd been here.

Wherever here was.

There'd been two of them who'd caught up with her at that run-down park. One was a big, hulking robot—dented, painted a milky green—who walked with a lurching, wobbly gait. The other was a short, ugly man, bald with a smear of whiskers on his chinless face. He was the one who'd shot her.

“Want to try to run for it, love?” he'd asked, chuckling, pointing the big silvery stungun at her from across the room.

Jill hadn't moved, but he'd used the gun anyway.

She shuddered now, remembering the brief, intense wave of pain she'd felt as the beam from the silvery gun touched her just below her left breast.

Jill pushed at the floor with her palms, struggling against the aches that produced. She managed, eventually, to sit up.

The surrounding blackness was as thick as ever. She could see absolutely nothing.

Leaning forward, she began, very slowly, to crawl on her hands and knees. She didn't think she was ready to stand up and walk just yet.

After crawling about ten feet, pausing frequently to feel at the darkness in front of her, she came in contact with a wall.

A smooth metal wall that felt very much like the floor.

Breathing through her mouth, still experiencing considerable pain in her chest, she turned and sat with her back to the wall.

She, for some reason, remembered Gomez then.

Yes, she'd called him just before they'd run her to ground.

Jill and Gomez hadn't had an especially happy or calm marriage, but she'd liked him. Trusted him, too, which is more than he'd have been able to say of her. He'd helped her out of a lot of bad situations.

“Terrible situations,” she said softly. “And too damned many of them.”

She still had faith in him. If anybody could find her, find her and get her free of this, it would be Gomez.

Her husband was all right, but she knew he'd never be able to handle anything like rescuing her. That was why she'd turned to Gomez.

Jill decided to attempt standing.

She was only halfway to her feet when a door suddenly slid swiftly open and a large glaring rectangle of harsh yellow light blossomed in the opposite wall.

The village of Ralfminster was in the Somerset district of England. And the quaint thatched cottage, surrounded by a picturesque low stone wall, sat on the outskirts with nothing but rolling hills and hedgerows stretching away all around it.

Early on that clear spring afternoon a heavyset man, wearing a thick coat sweater, came shuffling out of the back door of the cottage. He was in his middle seventies somewhere and the tufts of hair that showed beneath his checkered cap were white.

Following close behind him came a younger man. He was carrying a folding chair, a folded metal easel, a partially done canvas, a realwood box of paints and brushes and a palm-size black control box. “Same spot as usual, Mr. Anzelmo?”

“What do you think, peckerhead?” Anzelmo halted on a patch of green lawn.

There was a large blond man sitting on the fence a hundred or so feet away. He had a stunrifle resting in his lap.

“Hey, Toby,” called Anzelmo, “am I paying you to sit around on your fat ass?”

“No, Mr. Anzelmo. Sorry, sir.” Toby hopped free of the wall and started pacing along it.

The man carrying all the painting gear had opened the chair and placed it on the lawn. He was now concentrating on arranging the easel.

“The chair belongs two feet to the frigging right, Julie.” The older man was gazing out at the fields and the stand of oak trees just beyond the wall.

“Right you are, sir.” Julie moved the chair. “That about it?”

“What do you think, shitcan?”

After studying the chair, Julie bent and nudged it an inch and a half to the left. “Looks about perfect now.”

“Nothing you had a hand in could come anywhere near to being perfect.” Anzelmo lowered himself into the seat. “But it'll do.”

Nodding, the younger man put the canvas in place. “There we are,” he said while setting the box of painting materials on a small shelf attached to the left arm of the chair.

Anzelmo was scowling, looking from his painting to the oak trees. “Julie, how many trees do you see in my painting?”

He hunched, squinting at the picture. “Six, Mr. Anzelmo.”

“Okay, and how many are there by the wall?”

After a quick count, Julie answered, “Five, sir.”

“What can we do about that, jerk-off?”

The younger man grabbed up the control box from where he'd left it on the grass. He touched at the keys.

Three new holographic oaks sprouted next to the others.

“Oops. Too many. Sorry.” His fingers touched the keys again and two trees vanished. “There.”

“I'm thinking maybe seven would be better,” reflected Anzelmo. “Put in another one and I'll add them to my picture.”

“Yes, sir.”

A fresh sturdy oak returned to join the rest.

Julie inquired, “Anything else?”

The older man was eyeing the nearest meadow. “I'm pretty darn good at painting sheep.”

“You're very good. We've all commented on your ability to—”

“Horseshit,” cut in Anzelmo. “I can just see you bunch of wankers sitting around of an evening talking about my painting. Anyhow, I want some sheep up there in the goddamn meadow.”

“How many, sir?”

“You decide.”

Julie swallowed once, then again. He used the control box and a flock of white holographic sheep materialized up in the sloping meadow. Some slept, some roamed, some munched at the grass.

After a moment Anzelmo said, “Count them, will you.”

Julie counted. “Thirteen, sir.”

“Thirteen is unlucky. Are you trying to put a jinx on me?”

The keys were worked again. “How do you feel about eleven?”

“They'll do. Now get your skinny butt back inside,” ordered Anzelmo. “I'm going to paint for exactly forty-five minutes and I don't want to see you anywhere near me until then.”

Julie hurried away.

“What a kiss-ass,” murmured Anzelmo as he selected a brush.

Less than ten minutes later Julie came hurrying out of the thatched cottage. He was carrying a palmphone. “Mr. Anzelmo?”

The older man continued to paint, ignoring him.

Stopping next to the chair, Julie held out the phone. “This is a call you had better take, sir.”

Anzelmo continued to ignore him, concentrating on rendering the wool on one of the sheep.

“It has to do with Jill Bernardino, sir.”

Very slowly and carefully, Anzelmo lowered the brush and scowled up at him. “What about her?”

“Kaltenborn out in Greater LA will explain. But it looks like things have gone wrong.”

Anzelmo grabbed the phone. “What in the hell are you bothering me for?”

The husky black man who was looking, uneasily, out at him from the tiny phonescreen said, “We don't have her, sir.”

“Did you ever have her, shitcan?”

“No, somebody else got her.”

“Who?”

“We aren't sure as yet,” answered the black man. “When we moved in to take Jill Bernardino—well, it turned out someone else had gotten to her first.”

Anzelmo asked him, “Who runs the biggest, most powerful Tek cartel in England?”

“You do, obviously, sir,” answered both Kaltenborn and Julie.

Leaning forward in his folding chair, Anzelmo asked the phone, “Then who the hell in America—in frigging Greater Los Angeles of all places—has the balls to go up against me?”

“We're in the process of finding out. Until we—”

“You're going to be in the process of attending your own damned funeral,” promised the Teklord. “Unless you locate that bitch and shut her up for good and all.”

“That's what we're trying to do, sir.”

“Could the SoCal cops have grabbed her—or somebody from the International Drug Control Agency?”

“We don't think so.”

“Well, find her.” He killed the call. “Help me up out of this chair, Julie. I'm through painting for today.”

9

By midday there was a thin yellow haze covering most of Greater Los Angeles. Jake's skycar was rising up through it, climbing away from the Visitors Lot at the Venice Sector Campus of the University of California, when the voxbox announced, “Important communication from Timecheck.”

“Put him through.”

The lean Chinese popped up on the phonescreen. He was checking one of the watches built into his metal arm. “Geeze, Jake, your response time is really drag-ass,” the informant told him. “Twenty-three seconds. Not so good.”

“Excuse it.” Jake guided his car up to an altitude of 5,000 feet. The further you got from the artificial canals of the Venice Sector, the less woebegone they looked. “I was on the verge of getting in touch with you myself.”

“Let me pass on my bulletin first,” requested Timecheck. “I'm a little reluctant, since you may get the notion that I'm no longer a reliable source of—”

“Some of what you told me last night turns out not to be true?”

Timecheck paused to tap one of his watch faces with his forefinger. “Tokyo's quit ticking again.”

“Get back to what the hell it is you're apologizing for.”

“Listen, Jake, every word of what I passed along is the absolute and unvarnished truth,” assured Timecheck. “However, subsequent data I've been collecting leads me to believe that I probably, through no fault of my own, nudged you along a wrong path.”

Jake grinned in a bleak way. “Explain.”

“Okay, it is still God's own truth that a pack of Europe-based Teklords sent out orders to pick up this Jill Bernardino lady,” continued the informant. “The thing is, Jake—well, sir, somebody beat them to it.”