The Mocking Program

  Dark eyes turned to look down at him. Curiosity but not suspicion showed openly on the man's face.

  "Yes, can I help you?"

  "Got a special delivery from Nogales." His hand tightened on the shocker. "For The Mock."

  Honest puzzlement further contorted the man's features. "For what?"

  "Not what—who. For The Mock." Something was wrong, Cardenas saw. "For Cleator Mockerkin."

  Plainly bemused, the tall overseer shook his head slowly. "Never heard of him. I'm Yogesh Chanay, day shift supervisor. You sure this guy works here?"

  The man's confusion was open and forthright, Cardenas saw. No competent intuit could fail to see that, and the Inspector was far more than competent. "Then I need to speak to your boss, or whoever you take orders from."

  "There's nobody like that here," Chanay informed him without resentment. "During the day, I'm in charge of the whole facility." Pushing back the brim of his hardcap, he scratched his forehead as he pondered his visitor's request. "I can get you some corporate addresses in Nueva York. Would that help?"

  "No, that's not necessary." Momentarily adrift, Cardenas mulled over his next step. "I really need to make the delivery to this particular guy. I was told he worked here."

  "Well," responded the cheerful Chanay, "it looks like somebody steered you wrong." He started to turn away, paused. "Say, maybe he works in the annex."

  Cardenas tried not to show more than casual interest. "What annex?"

  "Downstairs. Company maintains a data-processing annex. For compiling and research, that sort of thing. You know, crunch-munch? Not real exciting stuff." He grinned. "I'm not big on thick compilations of statistics, myself. Never been down there. Hardly ever see anybody go in or out. I imagine most of the operation is automated. As it should be. Got nothing to do with me and my crew up here."

  The Inspector nodded gratefully. "I suppose I could check and ask."

  "You can try." Chanay was less than encouraging. "If there's nobody down there today you won't be able to get in."

  "I guess I'll give it a shot, anyway."

  The supervisor pointed. "Through that storm door over there. There's an elevator, but you won't be able to operate it without a passkey. Fire stairs to the left. It's only two floors down. The intracoastal here isn't that deep."

  Cardenas nodded. "Thanks." Heading for the doorway in question, he cast more than one surreptitious glance over his shoulder. There was no sign of alarm or unease in the supervisor's face, nothing suggestive about his body posture. He appeared wholly oblivious to the visitor's movements.

  Chanay's remarks were as accurate as his directions: the elevator Cardenas encountered beyond the storm door did not respond to his requests. Neither did the opaque polycarbonate barrier marked FIRE ESCAPE. The electronic lock did, however, finally yield to one of the compact devices he carried. Descending the stairwell, he went through a second storm door and down plastic steps, treading as quietly as possible. At the bottom, a final door opened to reveal a dark hallway. Overhead lighting responded to his presence by fluttering to life, illuminating a hard-floored passageway that ran off to the east, toward the rocky underpinnings of South Padre. Unseen fans kept the air fresh and cool.

  Advancing cautiously, he walked perhaps thirty meters down the unadorned, bare-walled corridor, uncomfortably aware that there was nothing beyond the ceiling over his head and the floor beneath his feet but tepid Gulf salt water. The corridor terminated in a cul-de-sac boasting three doors. His hand hovering in the vicinity of the shocker, he tried the one on his left first. It opened at a touch to reveal a multistall bathroom. The second door accessed a storeroom that was a jumble of office supplies and equipment. The third—he hesitated outside the third. Licking his lips, he finally pushed on the access switch. Like its predecessors, the barrier folded inward without complaint.

  Half a dozen old-fashioned desks flanked by ancillary cabinets greeted his entrance. There were communicators, desk processors, and nondescript pictures hanging from the walls. One wall boasted a passable holovit of what looked like a snow-fed lake high in the Rocky Mountains. Synthesized sunlight dappled the clear blue water while virtual trout swam in the pellucid shallows. At the far end of the room a trio of expensive, but stock, commercial parallel compilers hummed softly as they efficiently and without human supervision processed data. As with the bathroom and storeroom, the workplace was devoid of human presence.

  He tried to access one of the compilers. Its security was minimal, and he slipped in almost effortlessly. Too easy. Nor did it appear to contain anything more than the most banal lists and records of information pertaining to the business operating above his head.

  Backing out, he stood in the hallway and speculated. The annex made no sense—unless Taieesh Import and Export was a legitimate business in which The Mock had no interest, and all the effort that had been expended by himself and the Research people at the National NFP database had produced nothing better than a false lead.

  There was much to be said for hiding in plain sight, except that nothing and no one appeared to be hiding here. Fuming silently, Cardenas resolved to conduct the same kind of thorough inspection of his surroundings that any federale would carry out. Retracing his steps, he began near the front of the office. Finding nothing insinuative, he moved on to the storeroom. How much time he had, he didn't know. It largely depended on whether or not the amiable Yogesh Chanay would remember his visitor and think to have someone check to see if he had taken his leave of the building.

  So he worked as rapidly as possible, his depression increasing as each successive room proved to be nothing more than what it appeared to be. In the bathroom, he paused to make use of the facilities before concluding his inspection.

  A small service door at the back of the room, beyond the last stall, did not even have an electronic handle. The undemanding latch yielded to a moderate tug. On the other side was a closet with shelves to left and right piled high with paper, disinfectant, soap, and other lavatory supplies. A couple of ancient mops leaned up against one set of shelves. He started to close the door, hesitated. There were no shelves on the back wall.

  Silly, he mused, but he felt he still had a little time, and he was almost finished here anyway. He fumbled at the service belt concealed beneath the waistband of his pants until he found the pouch holding the tool he wanted. Without much enthusiasm, he proceeded to run the Schlage sesame over the back wall. Nothing. Reaching the bottom, he was about to slip the device back onto his belt when a pair of telltales abruptly and utterly unexpectedly changed from red to green. Crouching, eyes narrowing, he began to slowly pan the tool over the floor near the base of the rear wall. The green lights brightened. A muted beeping began.

  Gently setting the device on the floor, he flicked a couple of switches on the front plate and stepped back. Thirty seconds passed, following which there sounded a virtuous click. This was followed by a deep-throated mechanical whirring sound.

  As he took a another step back, the floor fell away and the back wall swung up to reveal a brightly lit, downward-sloping ramp. Placing his right hand over the shocker again, he started down and in.

  FIFTEEN

  THE WELL-LIT CHAMBER AT THE BOTTOM OF THE ramp was spacious and carefully laid out, the ceiling low but not uncomfortably so. Planar walls of taupe-tinted Hitach firecoat were devoid of the animated pictures and holovit that had decorated the office on the level above. Individual Suva-Shiva box stations were alive with lights, and the floor underfoot was pebbled and cool to the touch. At the far end of the room was a plain door flanked by a two-meter-wide slash of mirrored glass.

  Movement. Off to his left. Drawing the shocker, he whirled and crouched—only to relax and drag the back of his other hand across his forehead, as if that could somehow erase the tension there.

  A pair of identical half-meter-high robot cleaners trundled into view. Ignoring him, they proceeded to sweep and vacuum the composite tile floor. Designed to operate in office environments while
work was in progress, they went about their business in eerie silence, as soundless as a pair of mechanical undertakers.

  Relieved, he started to rise, when something else made him turn. Whether it was intuition, or a sound that did not quite belong, or a hint of shadow, he was not sure. He didn't have time to analyze it. Whirling, he saw a large, winged shape diving straight for his face. At the last possible instant he threw himself to one side. Only his extraordinary reflexes, honed by decades on the force and coupled with his unique training, saved him.

  A seagull, one of the phlegmatic, roof-sitting trio that had observed his disembarkation at the passenger dock, smashed into the floor next to his feet, skidded several meters, and slammed into the wall. Rolling over just in time to witness the impact, Cardenas expected to hear bones snap and see feathers flying. Instead, bits and pieces of plastic and metal and teased glass flew in all directions as the synthetic Laridae shattered into a hundred or more pieces.

  On hands and knees, keeping a wary eye out for any other unexpected arrivals, he crawled over to inspect the ruined apparatus. It was wonderfully, even imaginatively, made. Though twisted sharply to one side, the head was still largely intact, the tiny tracking cameras located behind the eye shields still locked in scanning position. The beak was cracked open, so he could see inside the mouth.

  A sharp pinging emerged from the debris and he yanked his hand back. The extendable pressure dermic that occupied the place where a bird's tongue would be just missed making contact with his exploring fingers.

  Rising, he brought his right foot down hard on the quivering head, and applied his weight. Struts and supports molded from finely wrought composite cracked noisily. Like the stinger of a dying wasp, the dermic stabbed wildly, seeking flesh to penetrate. Only when Cardenas was certain the device was utterly defunct did he draw back his foot, and only then did the dermic, nearly as long as his hand when fully extended, cease trying to impale him.

  Breathing hard, he looked around warily, his gaze flicking from walls to ceiling, from the open doorway behind him that led to the facade of a bathroom to the darkened glass at the opposite end of the workplace. The attack had caught him almost completely off guard. Who needed human sentries? They were conspicuous, likely to draw suspicion to themselves, potentially corruptible, and expensive. The seemingly deserted annex was not so deserted after all.

  Overhead, Taieesh Import and Export provided perfect camouflage. What better cover for a center of illicit operations than a legitimate business whose employees were utterly and honestly ignorant of the unlawful activities that were going on beneath their very feet? It was akin to running a counterfeiting operation from inside a bank vault.

  His eyes continued to scrutinize the far corners of the chamber. There had been three of the birds. How the devil had they gotten in? It occurred to him that ventilators that brought in clean air could also admit other things. Things that had been programmed to navigate their way through tubes and conduits. To navigate—and to kill.

  Lights glowing dimly behind the swath of dark glass hinted at the existence of still another room, accessible through the single rear door. There was no sign of movement save for the cleaning robots. Did The Mock and his underlings do their work only at night? That would go a long way toward explaining the emptiness in which he found himself. It did not mean that Mockerkin left his principal place of business unattended, relying for defense only on the sham reality of the import-export enterprise above. The shattered remains of the wrecked aerial assassin that lay in a still crackling and popping pile at his feet attested to that.

  Standing in the middle of the room, he was too exposed. There was too much room for flying killers to maneuver. He wanted more cover.

  Something told him not to try for the passageway that led to the surface. The short ramp that led to the storage closet and the bathroom beyond would be a perfect place to stage an ambush. Anyway, he wasn't ready to leave.

  Keeping an eye on the temptingly vacant exit, he turned from where he was standing and strode briskly toward the rear door. Almost as soon as he turned his back on the exit, a second replicant gull came lunging in through the rear passage, having to turn sideways so that its wings would fit through the opening. A glance was sufficient to allow Cardenas to spot the fully extended dermic that was aimed right at him.

  Pulling the shocker from his windbreaker pocket as he ran, he fired once, and missed. With only enough time for one more quick shot before the vacant-eyed assassin reached him, he stopped running, whirled, and dropped. Taking the best aim he could as he slid backward on the floor, he fired. The bird-thing erupted in a shower of sparks less than a meter from his face as he threw up his free hand and turned away from it. He felt the warmth of a secondary explosion as it banked sharply to the right and crashed into the floor behind him.

  Panting, the shocker hanging from his fingers, he rose to his feet and assessed the damage. Thrashing and twitching like a live thing, the artificial gull spewed sparks and smoke for more than a minute before it finally stopped flailing its composite wings and lay still. He looked up.

  No voices rang out challengingly. The cleaning robots continued to run their preprogrammed routines as though nothing had happened. One was already busy sweeping up the remains of the first gull. Otherwise, the chamber was as silent as the seabed on which it rested.

  Where, he wondered as he cautiously resumed walking toward the back door, was the third bird?

  Though it boasted only an ordinary plastic handle and no visible security, the door would not respond to his tug. Expression tight, keeping a cautious eye alert for mechanical sea birds, he pocketed the shocker and removed the compact instrument he had previously utilized to access the concealed doorway in the bathroom storage closet. Starting at the top of the door, just as he had done with the closet's rear wall, he began slowly and methodically running the device over the door. This time he would not neglect to check the floor.

  "Hello there, son. Watcha doing?"

  Swapping the sesame from his left hand to his right, Cardenas fumbled awkwardly for his pistol. At the sight of his questioner, he relaxed slightly. But he kept his hand near his chest, in the vicinity of the gun, as he pretended to scratch at the front of the windbreaker.

  Framed in the entranceway at the bottom of the ramp that led to the bathroom storage closet was an old man. Too old, the Inspector knew instantly, to be The Mock. Although in an age of synthollagen injections and epidural neuron massage and skin replacement therapy it was difficult at a glance to tell anyone's age for certain, Cardenas was reasonably confident that the intruder who had surprised him was at least in his seventies, and quite possibly older.

  The Inspector would also have been surprised if the man weighed much more than fifty kilos. He was considerably shorter than Cardenas. Amerind characteristics sharpened the highs and lows of his weather-worn face, the type of environmental facial sandblasting that began early in life in the kind of small villages that were scattered all through southern Namerica. Instead of weaponry or communications gear, the service belt encircling his waist contained janitorial supplies. Both hands clutched an electrostatic broom.

  "Looking for someone," Cardenas finally thought to respond.

  The old man flipped a switch on the broom and began to work it methodically back and forth in one corner, occasionally pausing to move a chair out of the way. The idling box terminals and busy floor robots ignored him, and he them. While adding an invigorating flow of ions to the air, the broom's charged fibers silently sucked from crevices, cracks, and other hiding places the dust and debris that the tunnel-visioned robot sweepers had missed.

  "Ain't nobody here. Ain't been nobody here for a while. I reckon you belong, or you wouldn't have been able to find your way in."

  Cardenas saw no reason to disabuse the elderly custodian of this useful assumption. He fell back on the same story he had recounted to the warehouse supervisor. "That's right. I have a special delivery from Agua Pri, for The Mock." Hesi
tating only briefly, he added, just to make certain, "You're not by any chance The Mock, are you? That's not a clever disguise?" Able to tell in most cases whether someone was lying or not, he waited expectantly for the custodian's reply.

  It took the form of a quiet chuckle. "Me, The Mock? Why would you say something like that? C'mon, son; you're having fun with an old man." He flashed a smile replete with man-made teeth. "I'm Rodrigo. I do the cleaning."

  Pointedly, Cardenas indicated the still-active floor robots. "What about them?"

  "They need cleaning and maintenance, too. They are a big help to me, since the owners of this place seem to want as few people in here as possible. But they are not as good as a person. They miss some spots." He shook his head diffidently. "I don't know why. I could use some nonmechanical help, and it can get lonely down here." The smile returned. "But it pays well." And with that, he returned to his sweeping.

  Still on the alert for murderous airborne mechanicals, Cardenas walked back to the ramp and peered upward. Nothing flew in at him, nor was there a downward charge of mataros, security guards, ninjacs, or anything else. Nor were representatives of the Inzini, the Ooze from Oz, or any other malevolent organization waiting in the bathroom to monitor and sponge off his progress. Except for the old man preoccupied with his cleaning and the meticulous floor robots, he was alone in the sanctum.

  "Do you happen to know," he inquired carefully, "where I might find The Mock?"

  Halting his sweeping, the grizzled senior leaned on his broom and regarded the visitor. "I guess you really do not know. Not if you are trying to make a personal delivery to him. Siryore Mockerkin died three months ago." His elderly expression wrinkled with remembrance. "I think it was three months." With a shrug, he resumed his sweeping. "It might have been three and a half."