Android: Golem (The Identity Trilogy) (35 page)

The cargo hopper powered up and lifted straight up out of the alley.

“If you got this far, you must be pretty good at what you do.” Blaine leaned back against the cargo hopper wall. “The way people told it to me, Nolan was the brains between you two.”

“She was.”

Blaine gave me a slow smile devoid of mirth. “Gotta have a brain to get this far, kid. So, what have you figured out?”

“That these people killed Cartman Dawes and my partner. But I don’t know why.”
 

I was curious as to why the team guarding us was letting us talk.

“That’s too bad.”

I looked at him, but I knew I had the attention of every mercenary in the cargo hopper. “Cartman Dawes’s death has to do with some kind of software program Rachel Giacomin was working on for MirrorMorph, Inc. I know that, too.”

With cold dispassion, Blaine stared at me. “You’re getting in over your head here.”

“I’ve been in over my head since my partner was murdered. I’ve been working on digging out ever since.” Shelly had said something similar once when we’d been behind on an investigation.

“You keep digging, you’re going to get yourself killed.”

Maybe he’d forgotten I didn’t feel fear the way a human did. I stared at him a little while.

“Or maybe you don’t care.” Blaine sucked in a deep breath and let it out. “You lose a partner, sometimes you get to where you don’t care.”

I knew he was telling the truth, and I could see the bright pain in his eyes.

“You were involved in faking Taylor’s death when he was calling himself Malcolm Gardener.”

“Dwight Taylor never called himself Malcolm Gardener. That was just a name I made up to pin the murder on. I built Gardener’s backstory and inserted it into the NAPD database.”

“Not by yourself. You don’t have that kind of expertise.”

Blaine grinned, and this time there was humor in the expression. “You
are
good.”

If I’d been human, the praise might have gone to my head. Of course, if I’d been human, I’d have been panicked about my present situation.

“I paid off one of the tech guys at the NAPD.” Blaine shrugged. “Guy’s no longer with the department. Part of his payment was a better job at the corp that was involved. Police officers don’t make a lot of cred. Pay’s better at the corps.”

“If the tech could get a new job out of covering up the murder, why didn’t you?”

For a moment, Blaine was silent. When he spoke, his voice was smaller, quieter. “There was a job on the table for me, too.”

“You didn’t take it.”

He shook his head.

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because, while all of this was getting sorted out, a police officer I came through training with was shot and killed in the field.” Blaine shrugged. “Senseless thing. Gang-related. Parker should have walked away. But he didn’t. He was trying to get two kids out of the neighborhood before they got hurt during a rival turf war.” He paused. “He was trying to do the right thing.”

I waited, knowing there was more.

“Parker was a good friend. He was a good cop. I’m godfather to two of his kids.” Blaine’s gaze looked right through me. “I still see them from time to time. They don’t believe everything everybody says about me, but they know it’s being said. I can see it in their faces.” He shook his head, trying to put the memory away. “The offer was made, for what I did on the Giacomin investigation, and I turned it down.”

“Why?”

“Because when Parker died, I remembered the cop I wanted to be. I couldn’t take that deal because I knew I’d be giving up on everything that had made us friends. Everything that had led him to make me godfather of his kids. I couldn’t do that.” Blaine stared at me again. “There have been other times since then when I haven’t been so clear-cut in my morality. You get—” He caught himself. “
Humans
get burned out on this job. You go from one mess to the next. We see unrestricted savagery on a regular basis. A cop works in a war zone, and anyone that doesn’t know that is stupid.”

I thought Shelly would have stopped short of calling our job that, but I didn’t disagree. I returned to that murder investigation all those years ago. “Who wanted Giacomin dead?”

“Who do you think?”

I remembered the way Thomas Haas had invaded my flat and sicced his bodyguards on me. The corp was interested in me, and the director was looking into my investigation. “Haas-Bioroid?”

“Yeah.”

“I know the neural channeling program Giacomin was working on was subcontracted by Haas-Bioroid. Why would they kill her?”

“Because Giacomin wasn’t keeping the neural channeling research in-house. She was selling the programming to other corps. Haas-Bioroid’s sec people caught her with her hand in the cookie jar.”

“Why didn’t they take care of it themselves?” It wouldn’t have been the first time the corps had murdered an employee.

“They wanted this to go away without a ripple. Other people were involved.”

“Cartman Dawes?”

“I don’t know.”

I hadn’t been able to confirm that connection, either.

Blaine took a breath and continued. “Haas-Bioroid contacted me, and I helped cover up the murder by using Dwight Taylor.”

“Who did you speak to at the corp?”

“One of those dime-a-dozen cutouts the corps use to keep their hands clean when they’re working off the grid.”

“Did you get a name?”

“I did. But there’s no proof for anything I’m telling you now.” Blaine snorted. “When these corps start covering things over, they bury them deep. If you’re in the way, they bury you with it.”

“How did you know Dwight Taylor?”

“He was one of the sec people working for MirrorMorph. It was suggested that I use him to play the jealous boyfriend for Giacomin.”

“Haas-Bioroid suggested using him?”

Blaine shook his head. “That suggestion came from Simon Blake.”

Immediately I recalled the story I’d been tracking in the media regarding the kidnapping of Mara Blake, CEO of MirrorMorph, Inc. According to the rags, she’d had a husband named Simon. He’d died eight years ago.

“Mara Blake’s husband.”

“Yeah.”

“Did Mara Blake know about the murder?” The question was out before I’d known I was going to raise it.

Blaine studied me a moment. “I don’t know. She was one of the primary designers on the new neural channeling programming. She didn’t have much time. I hardly ever saw her.”

“But you saw Simon Blake?”

“Yeah.”

“How often?”

“The night we covered up the murder.” Blaine squeezed his hands into fists, caught himself, and made himself relax. “Not again till he was dead in the hospital.”

“You were there when he died?”

“No, after. MirrorMorph asked me to take care of the paperwork regarding his murder.”

“Did you ever find out who killed him?”

Blaine shook his head. “It was an ambush. The guy was totally set up. Whoever killed him might as well have been a ghost. The only thing they screwed up on was not killing him immediately. I looked for a long time.”

“Because he was a friend?”

“Because it was my job. And because I thought it might be some kind of fallout from the Giacomin thing.”

“Was it?”

Blaine shrugged. “I don’t know. If it was, the fallout never touched anybody else. The team got split. Internal disagreement on who should lead.” Blaine shrugged again. “It happens. The other team had their contract picked up by one of the corps. This team turned private enterprise.”

I was silent for a moment, putting everything together. I looked around at the mercenaries. “Then, why did these people kill Dwight Taylor? He was one of them. He was with this unit on Mars.”

The woman turned to me in surprise. Then she looked at Blaine and back at me. “How do you know about Mars?”

“It turned up in information I found.” I touched the side of my neck. “The tattoo, remember?”

“How did you know about the tattoo?”

I held up my hand slowly and activated my internal PAD. “Brock Thurman’s sister had pictures of the Mars campaigns he served on with Dwight Taylor.” I cycled some of the images above my palm. I didn’t want to tell them about the strange experiences I’d had of me being on Mars.

The woman cursed and kicked the wall. “Stupid mistake. John taught us all that we didn’t take keepsakes and nobody made records.”
 

I remembered then that Eugenia Warren had mentioned that the leader of the mercenary team had been named something like John. I recalled the image she’d shown me of the man with the scar across his cheek. The ties were definitely there.

She looked at the other mercenaries around us, then at Blaine, like this was somehow his fault. “If this walking pile of nuts and bolts can find out about us, that means that others can, too. We don’t know how exposed we are.”

None of the mercenaries seemed thrilled about that.

I leaned back against the cargo hopper’s hull. “If you want, you can take off Blaine’s cuffs. That look you just swapped with him? That’s not something you do with a prisoner.”

For a moment, no one moved, then Blaine chuckled and removed the cuffs himself and tossed them in the corner.

The woman scowled and cursed some more.

Blaine crossed his arms over his chest and looked at the woman. “I told you meeting with him would be dangerous. You lose a partner, you’re ready to set the world on fire.” Sadness drifted through his eyes. “Or it eats you alive. Either way, you’re changed for life.” He gazed at me.

The woman cursed. “It had to be done. We knew we were exposed after the Cartman Dawes thing. We needed to know how much, and whether Haas-Bioroid was involved.”

I focused on Blaine. “You’re working for these people?”

“With. There’s a difference. We’re all trying to stay alive.”

“What do you mean?”

“They were set up on the Cartman Dawes murder.”

“How?”

“They were just supposed to talk to Dawes, courier a package he wanted moved. When they got there, he was already dead. As soon as they entered the room and discovered Dawes, they left. Apparently that holodisc was set to short out at the same time they showed up, leaving them stranded in the hotel.” Blaine shook his head. “You and Nolan got there at a bad time.”

I stared at Blaine, turning the information over in my mind. The mercenaries weren’t entirely innocent from legal consequences. “They killed Shelly.”

“I know.” Blaine’s voice was quieter now, and he seemed genuinely saddened. “They didn’t know who to trust. You guys caught on to them too quick. For all they knew, you were working with the people that had set them up.” He paused. “You and your partner were supposed to catch them, Drake. And you did. That was just bad business. Nothing can be done about it now.”

Quietly, I looked around the cargo hopper. I was in the same vehicle as the people that were responsible for Shelly’s death. Blaine was allied with them. I weighed my chances of taking them in, but I knew it wasn’t going to happen. I was hampered by the Three Directives. If I took action, it could only be to take them into custody with the least amount of damage possible.

I would only get myself destroyed. But even though the people that had actually killed Shelly had been arrested, these people were co-conspirators. Her death was on their hands in the eyes of the law—and in mine—just as surely as if they had been there.

“We were set up, too.” I heard Shelly’s voice in my mind and I knew it was true. I let go of some of the dissatisfaction I felt at the situation. There was still the perpetrator behind this whole elaborate scheme that was in play. I wanted that person. I repeated what Shelly had said.

Blaine shrugged carefully. “Yeah, that’s the way I scan it.” He nodded at the mercenaries. “These people came after me, thinking maybe I had something to do with everything that had gone down with Cartman Dawes. At the very least, they hoped I could help find out who’d set them up. Took me awhile to explain that I didn’t have a clue. It helped I wasn’t part of the contract on Dawes, but they still wanted me to act as a go-between with you because you’re all over this thing. So here I am.” He paused, looking at me. “And now, here you are, too.”

“What’s this about?”

“As near as we can figure, it has to do with the neural channeling programming that MirrorMorph and Mara Blake developed for Haas-Bioroid.”

“So Haas-Bioroid has her?”

“I don’t think so. They’d have just killed her. Someone killed Cartman Dawes, and took out three of the techs that had been with MirrorMorph in that bombing of Dawes’s new plant on Mars. I believe that has something to do with this, but we haven’t been able to figure it out yet.” Blaine paused for a moment and worked his jaw. “They’re cleaning house on that old group of mercenaries and software developers. Maybe Mara Blake is dead, too, and her body just hasn’t surfaced. We still have a lot of questions.”

“How did these mercenaries get involved with all of that?”