Android: Golem (The Identity Trilogy) (32 page)

We hit the ground and bounced, came up again, and slammed into what I believed was another hopper. Carbosteel screeched and screamed from the contact. We skidded for a short while longer, then came to a sudden stop against an immovable object.

The taxi hopper’s nose hatch blew free and the pressure from the airbags went away as they spilled out of the craft. I knocked more of the bags out of the cockpit and glanced over at the woman. She had a bloody lip and a cut on the side of her nose, but otherwise appeared to be unharmed.

She looked at me groggily. “We’re alive?”

“Apparently.” I forced my way to a standing position, then stepped over the hopper’s side onto the street. The hopper had smashed against a casino. A crowd had already started to gather, and I was aware that not all of them might be neutral. Our pursuit from the hotel had been dogged.

I reached back into the hopper and helped the woman out of the vehicle. My side was soaked with blood and I knew the wound was still bleeding. Some clotting was starting to take effect, though, because the flow was diminished.

Or maybe I was running out of blood. I wasn’t familiar enough with being inside a human body to know.

Dazed and not at peak efficiency, I took the woman by the arm and headed into the casino. Safety lay in small places, environments that I could control, until I worked out our escape.

But I didn’t have the first clue about how I was going to escape from Mars.

Faces bearing colony tattoos drew back from the woman and me as we staggered into the casino. A trio of sec men approached us with weapons drawn. I reached into my coat pocket for the pistol I had there.

“Don’t! Get back! They’re with us!”

I glanced toward the voice and was intrigued to learn who it was.

Dwight Taylor, clad in lightweight street armor and carrying an assault rifle, shoved through the crowd.

Seeing him there, when he’d died in my arms only three days ago, was mesmerizing. I stared at him, noticing how much better he looked. He appeared relaxed, not frantic.

Not bloody and dying.

He grinned at me confidently.

I raised my pistol and pointed at his face.

Taylor came to an abrupt stop and lifted his hands. “Hey. Hold up, brother. We’re all friendlies here.”

Brother
? There had been no mention of a brother in Dwight Taylor’s files. He’d had three sisters. He’d been the youngest child in the family, the one his father had continued to hope for. He’d followed in his father’s military footsteps even after his father had died fighting the Martian terrorists.

“Just chill, man. Take a breath. You’re going to be okay now. We’ve just got to get you fixed up. Do you scan me?”

The woman reached over and placed her hand on top of my pistol. Gently, she forced the weapon down. “It’s okay. He’s a friend.”

I sagged and the casino revolved around me. I barely maintained my footing.

Dwight Taylor pulled one of my arms across his shoulders to lend support. We headed toward one of the elevators. “I told you, man. I told you that Haas-Bioroid would turn on you. You can’t play hardball with that corp unless you’re holding a lot more than we have.”

I listened to his words and struggled to make sense of them. Then the world faded to black.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Someone is in your house. Someone is in your house.

I became aware of my flat’s surroundings at the same time the premises’ security protocol kicked the warning through my mind. I was seated in the only chair in my living room, exactly where I’d been when I’d been reviewing Dwight Taylor and Rachel Giacomin’s files.

A man lounged on the windowsill opposite me. “Are you awake now, Drake 3GI2RC?”

“Bioroids don’t sleep.”

The man smiled. I’d recognized him at once, not just from Haas-Bioroid, but from the rags as well. Thomas Haas was a media darling and solid cred for any nosie smart enough, or lucky enough, to ride the coattails of one of his escapades.

Nineteen years old, he was medium height and thin, but with broad shoulders. His features were Asian, from his father, but his mother, Director Haas, was Caucasian. He had the same honey-colored red hair as his mother, but his was longer, trailing down to his shoulders. He’d also had it lightened in streaks. His brows were artificially darkened, drawing attention to his olive eyes behind pink-lensed sunglasses. He was smooth and sleek, with a fashion model’s body, and he was proud of it. He was wearing an umber-colored jacket with fur trim over a mauve shirt. Low-cut leather pants hugged his hips. Two strands of gold chains hung from his throat and onto his chest, left bare by the unbuttoned shirt.

He attended Levy University. During his extended tour there, he’d caused a lot of trouble. He’d been kicked out of three fraternities, but the others were all eager to accept him to their ranks because Thomas Haas came with a black credaccount provided by Haas-Bioroid.

“I know bioroids don’t sleep.” Thomas Haas crossed his ankles and smirked at me. “I know a lot about bioroids.”

Of course he did. He was majoring in computer science, and he had access to some of the best minds at Haas-Bioroid.

He hadn’t come alone, either. Three men, obviously bodyguards, stood in the room as well. What was normally a very empty space suddenly seemed crowded.

“What I don’t know is what makes you so interesting.” Thomas reached under his jacket and took out a narc-stick that provided a mild hallucinogenic to the smoker.

“I’m not interesting.”

Thomas lit the narc-stick with a small gold lighter with an embossed nude on it. Once it was lit, he waved the smoke away. He made a show of looking around the flat. “Based on your inferior living conditions, and your recent career path at the New Angeles Police Department, I don’t think you’re interesting, either.” He paused. “But my mother does.”

That was news to me. I sat forward in the chair, resting my elbows on my knees in a move designed to show interest and encourage further discussion.

The three bodyguards shifted and their hands touched their hidden weapons. None of them spoke, but the message was clear: if I moved toward Thomas Haas in any way, they were going to take me out.

“So, I had to ask myself what makes you so interesting to her.”

“Have you figured it out?”

“No.” Thomas blew a stream of smoke.

“How do you know she’s attentive to me?”

Thomas smiled. “Because I spy on my mother. It’s a survival skill.”

I waited.

“Tell me why you think she’d be concerned about you or what you do.”

“The only thing that comes to mind is my job at the NAPD.”

“Which you don’t seem to have at the moment.”

“I’m going back on the schedule in two weeks.”

Thomas grinned and shook his head. “Nah. She’s never been a fan of police work. She tends to avoid it.”

“Have you ever heard of someone named Rachel Giacomin?” I didn’t like revealing my cards, but Shelly had sometimes demonstrated the value of tossing a pebble into a body of water and watching the ripples. I was intrigued by the woman’s murder, and why Dwight Taylor’s death had been faked. It would have been simple, more streamlined, to have killed them both.

Then again, Dwight Taylor was dead now, and I still had no idea what he’d been doing on Mars. If he’d really been there, because I knew I hadn’t been.

Thomas took out his PAD. “How do you spell that name?”

I told him, wondering if his inquiry was going to trigger more ripples from yet another pebble. I had no way to control all the variables or outcomes at the moment. This was different than how things usually went in an interview room or during an arrest. It was an intriguing way to work.

After only a moment, Thomas looked up from his PAD. “Dead woman. Worked as a subcontractor for Haas-Bioroid.”

“Yes.”

He shrugged. “I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“Because you can get deeper into Haas-Bioroid than I can.”

“How did you get this name? You hadn’t even been created at the time the murder occurred. I was just a kid.”

“Rachel Giacomin’s name came up in an investigation I’ve been working on.”

“The one involving your dead partner?”

I nodded.

Thomas took another drag on his narc-stick. “How?”

“You know I was gunned down in an underground supply chamber a few days ago.”

“I got the memo. My mother wanted to scrap you. Her public relations team said no, that if she allowed you to go down like that, she was admitting that her big detective bioroid program was a loser. She couldn’t have that.” Thomas smiled. “You’re turning out to be embarrassing.” He pointed the narc-stick at me. “I like that about you. We have something in common.”

I didn’t want anything in common with Thomas Haas. The young man was a social predator, judging from his arrest record.

“The man I was with, the one that was killed? He was the one believed to have murdered Rachel Giacomin.”

“Sounds like someone should have given you a medal.”

“I didn’t kill him. Other people did.”

“I heard they were after you and he just got in the way. Or so a little birdie at Haas-Bioroid says in her report…”

I shook my head. “They were after him.
I
got in the way.”

“They tried to kill you, too.”

“I was just collateral damage.”

Thomas smiled. “Maybe you’re wrong about that.”

“I’m not.” I thought about telling Thomas Haas that Dwight Taylor had been Malcolm Gardener and that Gardener was supposed to be dead and gone, but I didn’t want to give him everything. If his search of his mother’s files had revealed that, I was confident that he would have said something.

Thomas shook his head, dropped the narc-stick butt to the floor, and crushed it out underfoot. “Nope. That’s not why she’s interested in you. There’s something else.” He grimaced. “Probably something you don’t even know you know. My mother has a habit of doing things like that. She creates her own walking data banks in bioroids. That way, her files are constantly moving and people can’t find out all her secrets. She just ferrets away data in the backs of some androids’ minds. I’m thinking that you’re one of those.”

I sat there, not knowing what to do. I was curious about what Thomas Haas planned to do to scratch the itch he had.

He looked at the bodyguards and nodded. “Do it.”

They approached me as a unit, surrounding me immediately and giving me no chance to escape except by hurting them. Since they weren’t doing anything illegal and hadn’t stated an intent to destroy me, the Three Directives were firmly in place and I couldn’t do anything.

They bound me to the chair with zip-strips at my wrists and my ankles. As I sat there, Thomas Haas tossed an external computer drive to one of them. The bodyguard slapped the matchbook-sized device to my forehead and powered it up.

Vertigo fell over me like a tidal wave. I could no longer access the Net and I was cut off from most of my senses. My vision remained hazy and was shot through with images of the last few days. Dwight Taylor died in my arms again. Shelly fell over the side of the building. Cartman Dawes lay torn and bloody on his hotel room floor. Lieutenant Ormond yelled at me.

None of the images were from Mars. Somehow, those stayed locked away. I was curious about why that was so when the rest of my life was an open file to the external drive.

Nothing that was mine was safe. My memories of visits to Shelly’s house, my time with her children, the conversations we’d had about casework and little things she’d wanted to discuss all got sucked into the device.

Finally, it was over. My vision returned, and I watched as the bodyguard took the external drive from my forehead and tossed it back to Thomas Haas. They removed the cuffs.

I sat there in the chair and felt more like a
thing
than I had in a long time. What Thomas Haas had done to me was invasive and demeaning. I knew the definitions of those words, but I had never felt them before. Now…I did. And that surprised me because I didn’t think I would ever know emotion like that.

I remembered Dwight Taylor’s words on Mars.
“I told you that Haas-Bioroid would turn on you. You can’t play hardball with that corp unless you’re holding a lot more than we have.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew it was true. And somehow I’d gotten looped into something the corp was trying to keep secret.

Thomas Haas pocketed the drive and smiled at me. “It was good meeting you, Drake 3GI2RC. If I don’t find what I’m looking for on this drive, I’ll probably be back.” He winked. “And then I’m going to take you apart until I do.” He turned toward the door.

One of the bodyguards stepped in front of him to lead the way, and the other two flanked him. They didn’t even bother to close the door after they departed. I was just left there, alone and vulnerable.