Tek Net (15 page)

“Is something wrong, Jake?”

He was sitting in a comfortable chair on a sun-bright patio. Beyond the oval of simulated red brick stretched a broad slanting lawn. Then came woods, tall trees and deep shadows.

Far off, down near the edge of the forest, there were people. Five or six of them, small in the distance, blurred. Walking some of them, one sitting slumped in an electronic wheelchair.

“Jake?”

The woman was sitting a few feet away from him, in a less comfortable chair. She was thin, pale blonde, wearing a buff-colored skirtsuit. Jake had never seen her before.

“I'm sorry, Dr. Weatherford, I didn't quite catch your question,” he said to her.

She smiled. “Nothing to be sorry about.” She was sitting very straight in the metal chair, hands folded in her lap. “I was simply complimenting you on your decision to come to The Institute—voluntarily—and begin to work on your problem.”

Far downhill one of the tiny figures left the group and went running toward the forest. He suddenly hit some invisible barrier, seemed to hang in the air for a few seconds before dropping to his knees on the bright green grass.

Jake nodded. “Yes, I realized, doctor, that it was time to do something. My obsession with the death of Beth Kittridge was interfering with my work.”

“With your entire life,” added the doctor.

“Exactly, yeah. And, I feel, in the time I've been here at The Institute I've started to make progress.” Jake couldn't seem to remember exactly how long he'd actually been here. He wasn't, he now realized, sure where
here
was.

Dr. Weatherford leaned forward, resting her hands on her knees. “I know you have very strong feelings about Tek,” she said. “Strongly negative attitudes.”

“Getting hooked on Tek screwed up my life.”

She nodded with sympathy. “I can understand that, Jake,” she said. “However, I think a technique we've developed here at The Institute might very well help you to distance yourself from Beth's death.”

He frowned. “This new technique—it involves Tek?”

“It does,” replied the thin doctor. “You have my word, however, that we only use it in a well-controlled and completely safe manner.”

“I don't,” he said, “know.”

“Dr. Allensky has had a great deal of success recently with Tek therapy.”

Jake couldn't remember who Dr. Allensky was. “Well, if he says it works, I suppose it's okay.”

“That's the sort of positive attitude I'm pleased to see you adopting, Jake.”

“I came here to work on my problem,” he told the therapist. “I'll go along with whatever you and Dr. Allensky suggest.”

Smiling, she rose from her chair. “That ends our session for this afternoon,” she informed him. “If we can arrange it, I'd very much like to have your first Tek therapy session this evening after the shift one dinner hour.”

“That would be fine.” He eased up out of his chair and turned away from the doctor.

This wing of The Institute was constructed chiefly of opaque plastiglass panels and silvery metal struts.

He said goodbye to Dr. Weatherford and went walking toward a door marked
Patients' Entrance 6
.

Jake felt that he shouldn't have any notion where his room was. But he did seem to know.

He crossed over to Ramp 3, let it carry him up to Level 5. His room was #5R, and as soon as it scanned his hand print, it let him in.

He crossed the threshold, entering the blue and white room. The door shut behind him.

A concealed voxbox announced, “This is your mantra for this afternoon, Jake.”

He sat down in a comfortable blue chair.

The voxbox continued, “Say this one hundred times, Jake. ‘I am
not
responsible for the death of Beth Kittridge.'”

Jake nodded. “I am
not
responsible for the death of Beth Kittridge. I am
not
responsible for the death of Beth Kittridge. I am
not
responsible for …”

25

Sir Denis pointed a fat finger skyward. “Blimey, it's them,” he cried, turning a paler shade of grey.

“
Vámonos
,” suggested Gomez, eyes on the dark blue skycar that was dropping down through the smog-heavy afternoon.

Pivoting, Gomez went running along the alley toward the rear entrance to the Hotel Chesterton.

“Bloody hell! They must know you made me shoot off my mouth.” The flabby man began a waddling run toward the safety of the hotel.

But he moved much too slowly to escape what the men in the rapidly descending skycar had in mind for him.

The beam of a lazgun came sizzling down. It found him easily, swiftly slicing him clean in half, from left to right, across the middle.

Sir Denis had been able to cry out a few words to express the brief, intense pain he felt. He used his own voice, all trace of British accent gone.

“
Dios
.” Gomez dived into the hotel as the remains of the fat man slapped and spilled all across the narrow alleyway.

The detective was in a small, dingy foyer. He spotted a down ramp and ran for it.

At the bottom of that he found the entryways to three forking corridors. He took the middle one, jogging into dim light and borders of deep shadow.

“Let's see if we can,” he urged himself, “avoid getting dismantled.”

“Well, it's the greaser.” Sitting slumped in an alcove, with a dented Brainbox resting on her narrow lap, was a skinny red-haired girl in her teens.

He recognized the emerald and crimson snakes tattooed on her thin bare arms. “
Chiquita
,” he said, stopping. “We met the other evening at the Hollywood Starwalk Park. What are you doing in this—”

“Hey, this is another one of my hangouts.”

He pointed his thumb in the direction from which he'd come. “You know another way out of this joint?”

“Sure.”

“Show me?”

She made a chuckling sound and, swaying slightly, started to stand. “Hell, sure, you saved my ass the other night,” she said. “Who's after you?”

“Some homicidal
hombres
.”

She quickly stowed her Tek gear in the raggedy backpack strapped to her narrow back. “C'mon, greaser,” she invited. “I'll get your butt clear of here.”

A lot of unsettling noise was starting to come from above.

“You some kind of cop?” she asked him as they ran, side by side, along the twisting corridor.

“Private.” He looked back over his shoulder, saw that, thus far, nobody was following.

“My name is Snooky.”

“I doubt that.”

“No, asshole, I mean it's my nickname.”

“Pleased to meet you, Snooky.”

“So who the frig are you?”

“Gomez.”

“Typical greaseball name.”

“It is that,
sí
,” he admitted. “Still, to me, it has more zing than Snooky.”

“Up yours then.”

“
Gracias
.” He took another backwards look. “Damn, one of them is tailing us now.”

About two hundred yards back in the shadowy corridor a big bald man was trotting. He swung a lazrifle in his right fist.

“Relax, Gomez,” advised Snooky. “We're almost safe.”

“Stop right there,” called the bald man. “Else you're both dead and done for.”

There were seven other patients seated around the dinner table in Patients' Commissary 6. Jake had no recollection of ever having seen any of them before.

But they all, apparently, knew him and as he seated himself in his assigned chair, they nodded or voiced greetings.

“Hi, Bob,” he said to the big grey-haired man on his right.

“Better,” Bob said.

“How's that?”

“Better,” repeated Bob.

“He means,” explained the lean blond man on Jake's left, “that he's feeling a lot better. I'm not hearing that, but why argue? Even though Bob seems worse.”

“And how are you doing, Mike?” inquired Jake.

“No worse.”

One of the two women in the group was a thin redhead in her late fifties. “I looked up your first name, Jake, and do you know what it originally—”

“Holy Jesus, not that what-your-name-means crap,” complained the heavyset black man opposite her. “She does that with every new guy who comes along the pike.”

“I simply feel,” said Ann, “that people like to know stuff like that. It's interesting.”

“It is,” Jake assured her.

“Here comes the first two courses,” observed Mike.

A pair of servobots had come rolling into the small, yellow-walled dining room. One was pushing a cart that held a large plastiglass soup tureen, the other carried a tray with eight small bowls of salad upon it.

“Bet it's cream of tofu tonight,” said the black man.

“Naw, this is Sunday,” reminded Mike. “Sunday is always, eternally, meatless chowder.”

The black man frowned. “You sure, absolutely, that this is Sunday?”

“Didn't we begin the day with church?” Mike reminded as the bot ladled out a bowl of soup. “Yep, it's chowder.”

“Chowder's always lousy,” mentioned Bob, picking up his soup spoon.

“Your salad, sir.” The other robot was bent close to Jake. “You'll be having a visitor right after dinner,” it informed him in a thin whisper.

Not acknowledging the message, Jake tried his salad.

A faint humming began coming from the blue wall of Jake's room.

He stopped repeating his evening mantra and moved free of his chair.

Very quietly, a panel in the wall slid aside.

There was a middle-sized man in his early sixties standing in the recess behind the panel. “Don't worry, Cardigan,” the visitor said as he stepped out of the wall. “I've rigged the secsystem. Nobody'll know about this little visit.”

He came closer, walking with a slight limp.

Jake eyed him. “You I don't know,” he told him.

“Right, because they didn't rig your brain to recognize me and think you've known me for a while.” Sitting on the edge of Jake's cot, he tugged up his left trouser leg to rub at the polished chrome leg beneath. “Souvenir of the Brazil Wars. I'm Andrew Simmonds.”

Jake frowned, rubbed at the spot between his eyebrows. “Most of today,” he said slowly, “I've been getting the feeling that my memories of this place are—well, false.”

“They did a rush job on you, Cardigan. And it doesn't seem to be taking that well.”

Jake said, “Andrew Simmonds. Sure, I never met you but I know you're with the Office of Clandestine Operations. You are, aren't you?”

His visitor answered, “Very good, Cardigan. You weren't supposed to remember that either.”

“They did some kind of mindwipe on me, huh? To make me forget what I was working on—to convince me I was a voluntary patient here.”

Simmonds told him, “As I say, they did it in a hurry—in the field. I'd guess it'll wear off before too long.”

“Why did they—”

“They want you out of the way for a week or so,” he said, massaging his metal leg. “But since you're an important Cosmos operative, they don't want to risk killing you.”

“Who are we talking about, Simmonds?”

“A combine of extremely influential people. I'll give you the details when we have more time,” he said. “Oh, and I'm not with the OCO any longer. In fact, I'm supposed to be a patient here.” He smiled. “But I've been able to modify my situation some.”

“Where exactly is The Institute?”

“Connecticut. That forest you may've noticed outside is Wilderness Preserve number seventeen.”

Jake eyed him for a few silent seconds. “And why this visit?”

The former government agent held his voxwatch to his ear. “They'll be coming to take you to your Tek therapy session any minute now, Cardigan,” he said. “What I want to know is simple. If I help spring you—will Bascom pay me a fat fee?” He swung off the bed, limped toward the opening in the wall. “Enough for me to buy myself a new identity and lifelong safety?”

“Sure,” said Jake. “When can—”

“Later.” Simmonds stepped back into the wall and the panel slid shut.

26

The bald man with the lazrifle stopped in the corridor. Standing wide-legged, he brought up the gun and aimed it at the running detective.

“C'mon, we'll leave now.” The red-haired girl gave Gomez a sudden shove with shoulder and hip.

“
Chihuahua
,” he said as he slammed into a neometal panel.

Snooky threw herself against the same wide panel, also slapping it high up with the palm of her hand.

The wall clicked, the panel flapped open inward.

Behind them the lazrifle crackled.

Gomez, the girl clinging now to his arm, tumbled into darkness.

He regained his balance as the wall shut behind them.

“Hold it a sec, greaser,” the girl advised.

Her backpack made some rattling noises and then a small literod clicked on in her skinny right hand.

There was a dirty ramp twisting downward just in front of them.

“We'll scoot along here,” she explained, tugging at him. “I know a place we can come up about two frigging blocks from here.”

They ran.

It was a cold grey morning in Berlin and Beth Kittridge was alive again.

Slim, pretty, she stepped out of the landcar near the side entrance of the World Drug Court on Potsdamerplatz. She was accompanied by Agents Neal and Griggs of the International Drug Control Agency.

There were ten armed guards, human and robot, lining each side of the long passway from the curb to the narrow entry gate. All around them, huddling under dark umbrellas, a small crowd of curious onlookers had gathered.

Beth was only a few steps from the car when she saw Jake.

He was pushing his way through the bystanders, waving, trying to attract her attention.