Tek Power (21 page)

In a cleared space near the arched doorway of the low, dusty room, a small folding table and three chairs had been set up. A celamp resting on the table provided a thin whitish light. There were a thermoflask of nearcaf and a half a soyloaf sandwich next to the lamp.

“Do you think about death much?” Gabrielle asked. “Your own death, I mean. I've never been especially morbid, yet since I've been hiding out down here, I—”

“Let's look at the more practical aspects of death,” Jake cut in to suggest. “Who's trying to kill you, ma'am?”

Sighing, she reached for the thermos. “Want any nearcaf?”

“No,” said Bev.

“I suppose I'm avoiding answering. It's such an unpleasant thing to talk about.” She poured herself a half cup. “It was Dom. That is, he's the one who instigated—”

“You're talking about Dominic Hersh?” asked Jake.

“Yes.” She glanced at Bev. “I keep picking the worst sort of men. None of them as bad as my last husband, but … Sorry, forgive me. Being on the run, living down here among all these dead people … Dom … Dominic Hersh, after I told him I couldn't put up with what was going on and refused to see him any longer … well, he apparently arranged for my death. Fortunately, I was warned in time to—”

“Suppose,” said Jake, “you tell us what it is you know.”

“I thought that was what I've been doing. No, I guess I'm babbling. Dom was always criticizing me for—”

“We know about Surrogate 13,” said Bev.

Jake added, “But not about the switch in the original plan. Tell us how Hersh figures in that.”

Gabrielle sipped at her nearcaf. “I really hate the taste of this stuff,” she said. “Allright—that wasn't his idea, sabotaging President Brookmeyer's original plan. You see, McCracklin, who's a dreadful man under all that smiling—Anyway, the vice president got to Dominic. He promised all sorts of things. Including, you understand, a great deal more money than Brookmeyer ever talked about.”

“They're not going to switch back from the android stand-in,” said Jake. “Is that the idea?”

“Yes, exactly, Mr. Cardigan. Right now the President Brookmeyer who's doing that idiotic Cracker Barrel Express tour is the simulacrum provided by Mechanix International,” she said. “Modified somewhat, so that McCracklin can control it. That android will simply replace Brookmeyer for good, meaning that McCracklin and his cronies will control the country.”

Bev asked her, “What are they planning to do with the
real
Brookmeyer?”

“Well, once they're certain the android is working effectively and fooling everybody, they'll … President Brookmeyer simply won't leave the medical center.”

“Where is he now?”

“At the Bergstrom Clinic. That's in Florida, in the Miami Enclave.”

Bev stood up. “Was Hersh involved directly in the killing of Arnold Maxfield, Jr. and Eve Bascom?”

“There was a group of them who worked all that out,” replied Gabrielle. “Dr. Izabel Morgana, Captain Dacobra and Dominic. There was also someone from the Joaquim Tek Cartel, but I never found out who. Once they'd decided to keep that android dupe in office, they couldn't afford to allow Maxfield and his mistress to run around alive. It was while they were planning Maxfield's death that I ended things with Dominic.”

“But you didn't warn Maxfield,” said Jake.

She shook her head. “No, I wasn't strong enough to do that,” she admitted. “You see—My god!”

An enormous rumbling had begun beneath the stone floor.

The floor seemed to jump, great jagged cracks came crackling cross it. The walls shook and a wooden coffin leaped from a shelf to crash down on the swaying floor.

The lid cracked, popped off. A yellowed skeleton, wound in a tattered grey shroud, came rattling out of the casket and jumped toward Gabrielle. Its bony right hand brushed down across her skirt.

“Quake!” she cried, stumbling back. “Earthquake.”

Jake leaped free of his swaying chair, put an arm around Bev and headed them for the doorway.

The lamp hopped, skidded and smashed on the jittery floor.

Darkness took over.

T
HE THICKSET GUARD
saluted as Captain Dacobra came striding into the chill room.

“This is
muy triste
,” the captain said, nodding in Gomez's direction. “I am most sorry.”

The small green-walled room was on the second level of the Detention Station. Its windows gave a view of the choppy night waters of Lake Managua and a scattering of supply boats docked at the metal pier.

Gomez was slumped in a metal chair, his face streaked with drying blood. He got, swaying some, to his feet. “Where do I go to lodge a formal complaint, Cap?”

The captain smiled thinly. “I am truly unhappy that my men treated you in an unkindly manner, Señor Gomez.”

“Unkindly? Hey, they stomped on my
cabeza
with their damned boots.”

Dacobra nodded sympathetically. “Their behavior while escorting you up here from the tunnel is unforgivable,” he said. “And how are you faring, Señorita Garcia?”

“
Maricón!
” Rita rose up from her chair, fisting her right hand and raising it high. “
Lambioso!
”

Dacobra gave her a sad look. “It is, after all, your fault that he's in this serious trouble. You ought to have realized, when you persuaded him to help on a raid of a government facility, that—”

“We can skip all this crapola,” suggested Gomez. “You had your pet andy lure us into a trap. So what next?”

“The pretty
niña
is a citizen of this country and a known revolutionary. She will be executed as a traitor,” the captain explained. “You, Señor Gomez, will be detained for a trial. I must warn you, however, that your chances of ever—
Dios!
”

An enormous thumping had started. The floor bounced, the windows exploded, jagged shards of plastiglass came flickering into the room along with gusts of night rain.

“
Temblor!
” cried Rita, gripping Gomez's arm. “It's a quake, a bad one.”

The walls of the room kept shuddering. Then, amidst considerable roaring, the ceiling broke into great ragged fragments and came cascading down on them.

34

J
AKE BECAME AWARE
of a pained sobbing.

He was lying flat out, surrounded by thick darkness.

When he tried a slow deep breath, he discovered there was something heavy pressing down on his back. Ragged hunks of stone were shoving into his midsection.

There was a literod in his jacket pocket. But his right arm was pinned down by what felt like a large wooden beam. His left arm felt numb, wouldn't respond to his control.

“I'm hurt,” complained a weak voice nearby. “My ribs are cracked, I think.”

“Gabrielle?” he tried to say. The name came out a rusty croak.

Jake remembered he'd been trying to get Bev to the protection of the heavy door archway. Then he was going back for Gabrielle Kastle.

But he hadn't accomplished that. He'd been bashed on the head.

By what?

Part of the ceiling probably, or maybe a falling coffin or a stray stone angel.

“I'm over here,” said Gabrielle. “I'm under some ceiling beams, I think.”

“Going to take a while to reach you,” Jake told her. “I'm stuck, too. Is Bev okay? Bev?”

Light blossomed a few feet ahead of him. “I'm in pretty good shape.” The blonde detective was holding a literod of her own, playing the beam along the rubble on the floor of the corridor. “You managed to push me ahead of you when part of the roof came tumbling down.”

“What's it look like up ahead? Are we going to spend the rest of our days in this crypt?”

She used the light to show him. “Roof held in this passway here,” she said. “And the stairway to the ground level looks safe. No way of telling what the situation is up in the church.”

“Okay,” said Jake, struggling again to free his right arm. “Think you can dig me out, Bev? Then we'll unearth Gabrielle and try to work our way outside.”

“I wish,” said Gabrielle, “you wouldn't refer to us as though we were dead and buried.”

“Sorry, must be the surroundings,” said Jake.

Resting the literod on a fallen wood beam, Bev said, “I didn't figure our collaboration was going to include excavation.”

G
OMEZ MUTTERED
, “
D
IOS
mio
.”

Gingerly, not yet certain all of his inner workings were intact and functioning, he pushed against the debris-thick floor. Dust and mortar fell away from him.

Teetering, he stood up and took a look around. Most of the ceiling had come falling down, but nothing heavy had fallen directly on Gomez.

Captain Dacobra hadn't been as lucky. He was sprawled a few feet away, partially buried under great chunks of plaster and hefty fragments of plastibeams. His skull had a new shape and there was blood easing away from his broken body and mingling with the debris on the buckled floor.

Gomez squatted, spotting the barrel of the late captain's lazgun protruding from under a twist of metal rod and a tangle of shorn wiring. He carefully began to extract the weapon.

“That will do, Señor Gomez!”

The Professor Mentosa android had appeared in what was left of the doorway. Out of his wheelchair, standing with a lazgun aimed directly at Gomez.

“
Comemierda
,” suggested Gomez as he dropped flat out and tugged the gun completely free.

Rolling over rubble, Gomez fired twice at the andy.

The first blast went wild, but the second scored.

The sizzling beam of the gun cut across the fake Mentosa's chest. The chest exploded, spewing out wires, cogs, tiny tubes and broken circuitry, all mixing with shreds of his shirt and jacket.

“
Bueno
.” Gomez rose up, scanning the room again. “Rita? Did you survive,
chiquita?
”

From the far side of the ruined room, just under the great gap where the windows had been, came a faint moan.

Crunching plastiglass fragments underfoot, avoiding stepping on anything that looked dangerous, he made his way closer to the sound. “Rita?”

“
Aquí
,” she murmured.

“Okay, take it easy and I'll extricate you,” he assured her. “You've got a goodly portion of the ceiling decorating you.”

A small hand pushed free of the rubble. “
Gracias
,” she managed to say.

Gomez took the hand in his, bent and kissed it gently. Then he went to work.

A
CROSS THE DARK
waters of the lake you could see fires burning, more than a dozen of them, flaring up all across the city. Flames climbed high into the predawn sky.

“The pier looks to have survived,” announced Gomez. “We can venture out onto it.”

He and Rita were standing at its land edge. There were four medium-sized supply boats moored there, bobbing in the water.

The young woman glanced back at the ruins of the Detention Station. Her face was bruised, scribbled with lines of dried blood. “There are others trapped in there,” she said quietly. “I heard cries and groans while we were getting ourselves out, Gomez.”

“So did I.”

“Don't you think we ought to try to—”

“No, there's no time for that.” He took hold of her arm. “Pretty soon some of the guards are going to be digging themselves out. And the secret police will be sending a rescue crew over here anytime now. None of them will hand us medals for being humanitarians—they'll just cut us down. We were prisoners, remember?”

“But there are other prisoners still trapped inside, lots of them. We can't just—”

“We have to leave or we'll get recaptured ourselves,
cara
.” He walked out onto the swaying pier, taking her along by the arm. “C'mon or we'll end up in worse shape than Dacobra.”

“I think we must—”

“No, we're departing for elsewhere.” Grunting, he scooped her up, carried her onto the nearest boat.

“What good does it do to believe in a just cause if you let people die?”

Setting her on the cabin floor, Gomez studied the control panel. “Ah, I can job this with no trouble,” he decided.

“You're being an—”

“Listen, I saved your ass and mine tonight.” He began fooling with the controls. “That's as far as it goes. Saving the other survivors of the quake is somebody else's responsibility.”

“You're very cynical, Gomez.” Folding her bruised, scratched arms, she backed against the cabin wall, frowning at him.

He got the engine going in under two minutes, pushed the automatic castoff button and started guiding the craft away from the island.

“Unfortunately,” he said when they were aimed for Managua, “you met me about twenty years too late.”

35

T
HE PRIVATE SKYLINER
left Managua at a few minutes past two the next afternoon. Several of the quake-caused fires were still burning and the craft climbed through a rainy sky that was thick with sooty swirls of smoke.

Gomez, wearing one small bandage on his forehead and another on his cheek, was reclining in a very comfortable chair in Compartment A. “There's something to be said for wealth and influence,” he observed.

Jake nodded in Bev's direction. “Thanks again for inviting us along.” His left arm, from elbow to wrist, was enclosed in a plasticast.

She was seated near one of the oval windows, looking down at the retreating city. “Maxfield didn't say I couldn't invite a few friends along,” she said. “I don't think any of you wanted to hang around Nicaragua just now.”

Jake frowned. “Trouble is, most of the people responsible for the murders of Eve and Junior got killed off in the damned quake. It—”