Tales of the Red Panda: The Android Assassins (14 page)

The sun streamed in through the thin white curtains and
settled into bright beams that might have been painted in a fresco somewhere
settled on the head of some particularly beneficent saint. August Fenwick was
neither, but the chairs had been arranged in this vast, airy room so that the
beams would fall on his head anyway. It was the next morning, and the Red Panda
had celebrated his second escape from custody with a lie-in and a slap-up
breakfast, surrounded by papers that proclaimed
August Fenwick Innocent!
He felt he needed only one thing to make
the morning complete.

“I wish you'd sit down and have breakfast with me,” he said
to the girl in the immaculate grey driver's uniform who stood at the ready,
waiting for him to finish up.

“Sure,” she drawled, “that'd go over big with the other
servants.”

“There's no one else around,” he cajoled.

“There's no one else around until the second I sit down,
that's how it would happen,” she insisted. “Besides, you think they'd notice
when you ordered an extra plate of eggs?”

“I don't see why we can't sit and eat,” he sulked.

“
You
can,” she
said, “and
I
did before I came in.
Those are the rules.”

“The rules are silly,” he said. “Sit down.”

“No,” she said plainly.

“I'm sorry, I didn't catch that part,” he blinked.

“I said no. This is who we're supposed to be, and just
'cause nobody's ever given you a hard time in your life doesn't mean I get off
as easy. I get enough grief from the butlers as it is.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Does the new butler need sending away
already?”

“Stop it,” she said, “you'll run out of flunkies.”

“Never been a problem so far,” he said, taking a bite from
some really excellent bacon in spite of the fact that he felt guilty doing it
in front of her.

“Just finish up, then we can talk,” she said, standing in a
military at-ease posture and trying very hard not to smile.

“We've had breakfast before,” he said.

“We have not!” She quickly checked the doors to make sure
her outburst had not drawn attention.

“After the Sloane caper,” he said, “we had bagels on the
roof of the bank and watched the sun rise over Bathurst.”

She smiled. “That
was
nice,” she said grudgingly.

“Have some coffee at least,” he said.

“No,” she said with another look over her shoulder. “I'll
follow you into a pit of flaming snakes, but I won't be made a fool of. You
don't hear the things they say, and they don't say them about you, they say
them about me. So stop being such a spoiled brat and eat your breakfast.”

“Did you just call me a spoiled brat?” he said, astonished.

“Sounds like something I'd say.”

“No one's ever called me that before,” he said.

“No, Boss,” she said, more gently, “everyone you've ever met
has called you that. They've just never said it to your face.”

“Fair enough,” he said rising quickly and casting his
smoking jacket aside. “Let's get a move on, we can talk in the car.” He grabbed
the jacket of his suit where it lay, but she raised her hand.

“Finish your eggs, or I
ain't
takin
' you anywhere,” she said simply.

“You're my sidekick, not my mother,” he said sternly.

“If I was your mother,” she said, narrowing her eyes, “you'd
have been called worse than a brat. And often.”

He stood and looked at her a moment. She really was quite a
lovely thing, and given how hard he worked to avoid noticing, he wondered why
it should come up just now. He laid his jacket over the seat next to him and
sat down again.

“Fine,” he said.

“Good boy,” she said, looking over her shoulder again.

“If it helps you to relax,” he said, “I've just cast a
mental projection that will cause anyone who gets within ten feet of this room
to feel an immediate compulsion to turn and walk the other way.”

“Good,” she said, relaxing her stance slightly.

“So you'll sit down?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I don't win enough arguments around here to
throw them away that easy. What was the third clue?”

“The third clue?” he said, having lost the thread slightly.

“The one you didn't tell
O'Mally
,”
she said.

“I didn't really tell
O'Mally
any
of them,” he said. “I just made certain that he had the same opportunity for discovery
that I did. Anything else would seem suspicious. Besides, it isn't really my
job.” He took a bite of his toast, which had a particularly nice marmalade
spread liberally upon it.

Kit ignored most of what he was saying. “You found a weak
spot in the lower abdomen that makes the mechanical men vulnerable to
hand-to-hand attack,” she offered.

“Hand-to-hand by you or I,” he corrected, “or by someone
else who was almost as good, and if I may be so bold, there aren't that many of
those. But throw in a few exploding bullets in just the right spot, and it
still plays pretty nicely.”

“As you say,” she agreed. “And the second thing you
discovered was the lousy shielding around the network of circuits that makes up
their brains.”

“I wouldn't say it was lousy,” he said with eggs in his
mouth and a napkin discreetly placed, “just insufficient when faced with a
particularly clever concentrated electrical attack.” He smiled and reached for
his coffee.

“You're full of beans today, I tell you that yet?”

“What if I am?” he said, his eyes dancing over the rim of
his cup.

Kit Baxter could feel the color rising in her cheeks and
refused to give in to it. He must just be giving her a taste of her own
medicine with all this sass. She had no idea why, but she was determined to
show that she could take it as well as she could give it out.

“So what was the third clue?” she asked again. “The one you
thought was so interesting that you've been dancing around it all morning.”

“Have I?” he asked, spearing the last of his eggs with his
fork.

“We got no bad guy, no clever plan and for all we know there
are still more tin men out there than we can shock to death in a month of
Sundays, but something's got you this cheerful,” she said with a shake of her
head. “Was it the
tele
-vision monitors?”

He smiled. “It was.”

“
Somethin
' you saw?”

“Something I didn't see.” He indicated his fairly clean
plate as if requesting permission to
rise,
then did so
without really waiting to receive it.

“For Aunt Fanny's sake, Boss,” she said, “you saw
O'Mally's
office, the Mayor's, judges, prosecutors, private
offices… so what
didn't
you see?”

“The room at the Club Macaw where the Committee meets,” he
smiled.

“And?” she shrugged.

“Clockwork knew about the secret test of Quincy Harrison's
armored transport,” he said. “Not just that it was happening, but what steps
were being taken to protect it. He knew that the James Lab's power plant was
opening and exactly how much it would mean to the company. And he knew that
August Fenwick had begun to do just what he had feared: prop up businesses in
danger of collapse from the Viper's attacks.” He looked at her. Her eyes were
wide with wonder. He felt pleased.

“But… but, couldn't he have learned all those things some
other way?” she asked.

“One of them, maybe. Two I'd accept. But all three?” The Red
Panda shook his head. “I can't believe that. Besides, he let a telling little
tidbit slip. Something about my turning out just as my father had feared. A
wastrel.”

“Boss, I–,” she began.

“He didn't like me very much, Kit. I've dealt with it. In
rather spectacular fashion as fans of local
superheroics
might tell you if they only knew.” He smiled and picked up his coat again.

“I know,” she said with eyes that were suddenly quite smoky.

“Yes, you do,” he smiled, stepping closer to her than was
his usual habit and wondering why he did so. “So what does that all mean?”

She raised an eyebrow and tried very hard to think about
crime-fighting
. “It means that Captain Clockwork is somebody
in that Committee Room!”

“Right first try,” he said. “The ultimate robber baron.”

“So… why exactly didn't you tell
O'Mally
this?” she asked.

“Too many leaps of faith,” he said breezing out into the
hall on his way to the waiting car, his trusty driver close behind. “Too much
deducing for
O'Mally
. He suspected one wealthy man
rather publicly and barely lived to tell the tale. He'd be skittish about doing
so again, and he might blow the whole mess in the process.”

“That's tough, but fair,” she said, hurrying to keep pace
with his long strides. “So which one is it?”

“No idea,” he said. “Interesting, don't you think?”

“Too interesting, if you ask me,” she said.

“Why is that?” he asked with a Socratic gleam in his eye.

“The papers are full of the whole story. Including what
entrance you told the cops to use when you called them,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“But the odds that it was the same entrance the robots
brought you in aren't very good, are they?” she asked.

“Based on the angle they carried me away from the Club on,
I'd say it's about one chance in fifty.” He threw the front door open and
trotted down the steps.

“So Captain Clockwork knows that you got out, found another
exit, then called the cops and went back and waited.”

“Yes, he does.” He slowed down as he reached the car and she
opened the door for him. “But he already knew that.”

“How?” she practically shouted.

“The robot double I crippled and left in my cell wasn't
there when I got back,” the Red Panda smiled. “Clockwork must have found it and
beetled out of there before the police arrived.”

Kit was flabbergasted. “But… Boss! You don't think he's
gonna
wonder about all this? About
the whys or even the
hows
?”

“I'm sure he will, Kit,” Fenwick smiled before getting into
the car. “It's interesting, isn't it?”

The great mahogany table in the Club
Macaw's conference room was again surrounded by a grave assembly
. As
Gilbert MacKinnon brought the meeting to order, there were congratulations
offered to one of their number whose recent brush with the enemy had resulted
in the only setback the fiend had suffered to date, a point that seemed to be
directed at Police Chief
O'Mally
, who squirmed
slightly in his chair.

August Fenwick brushed aside the compliments with a casual
air. “Not a bit of it, MacKinnon,” he said. “The newspapers have made much of
the bravery or cleverness involved in my escape. I imagine that they do so in
the hopes that I will elect not to sue them as a body.” The small group
chuckled at this. “I assure you, gentlemen, that only a most fortunate accident
permitted me to call for help at all, and surely that was more an act of
motivated self-interest than bravery. I scarcely felt a moment's courage from
the time that I was taken until Chief
O'Mally
and his
men came to the rescue.”

O'Mally
was pleased at this and
chided himself again for his suspicion of August Fenwick, who was starting to
seem like not such a bad fellow after all. Certainly the papers had made much
of Fenwick's escape, even to the point of relegating the battle on
Yonge
Street to secondary status. As Fenwick suspected, it
was most likely in the interests of making the most public retraction possible
of their earlier accusations of villainy, but it did not displease Chief
O'Mally
at all. The story of Fenwick's rescue made much of
the involvement of his police force, while the routing of the mechanical men
who savaged downtown seemed to have been the work of an outside force, and not
even the papers had much in the way of detail. MacKinnon harrumphed and moved
on.

“Of course we are, regrettably, without one of our company
today,” he said, indicating the chair usually occupied by Ian James. “James'
son Wentworth was, as most of you know, injured in the blast that destroyed the
power plant he had designed and much of the complex it was meant to support.”

“Is he hurt badly?” Arthur Welles asked with some concern.
Welles was roughly of an age with Fenwick and the younger Mister James, though
he had not known them well at school.

MacKinnon brushed aside Welles' inquiry. “No, no,” he said,
“
the
boy is fine. His father refuses to leave his
side, is all. Given the free-fall that his company is in, it strikes me as most
irresponsible.”

August Fenwick elected not to voice his disagreement, or to
mention that for the first time in his life, he felt envious of his old friend
Wentworth. Ian James was not a warm man, but perhaps this accident might bring
about a connection between father and son. To Fenwick's knowledge, the two had
never been close, and the younger James' devotion to science and research had
not impressed his father though it had certainly saved his company once
already. Perhaps the young man's injury in the recent blast would touch some
paternal nerve within Ian James now, before it was too late.

Fenwick himself felt only mildly guilty that, after their
meeting the other day, he had briefly toyed with the notion of Wentworth James
as
a possible
Captain Clockwork. Certainly his old
schoolmate was clever enough and arrogant enough, as few knew better than
Fenwick. But now that he had met the fiend in person, disguised as Clockwork
had been, he had dismissed the idea. Even if you were prepared to overlook the
damage done to his father's company and Wentworth's own research, and even his
own minor injuries, now that the Red Panda knew Clockwork was motivated solely
by greed, it did not seem to be in Wentworth James' nature.

Still, Fenwick thought, there might be some reason for the
younger James to work against his own father. And yet Captain Clockwork had
allowed the captured August Fenwick to observe his technical plans, believing
him to be too great a fool to comprehend them. Whatever his former schoolmate
might think of Fenwick's supposed pursuits, James knew better than that and
would never have made such an error.

But every other man in this room surely thought as little of
the Red Panda's alter ego as he was intended to. If one is serious about
devoting one's public life to an elaborate lie, it is a simple matter to
convince people of just about anything, especially if one wishes them to hold
one in slight regard. It occurred to Fenwick, as the men talked and planned
around him, that one of these men was likely playing a very similar game. And
however obvious a secret identity may seem once it is known, it still is a
powerful shield if maintained by an intelligent man with strength of will.

Both Byron Page and young Arthur Welles had been pushed to
the brink of ruin by supposed accidents caused by Captain Clockwork as the
Viper. Or had they? Such calamity would be a convenient cover for Clockwork's
villainy. If either man had hidden wealth, it might not be an easy thing to
discover, but the Red Panda had agents who were ideally suited to such
research. He decided to set just such an investigation in motion, in case a
fortunate discovery might make further deduction unnecessary.

Quincy Harrison might very well have the same sort of
reserves. Indeed, drawing the attention of the committee to the tests of his
armored transport could have been nothing more than engineering his own cover
story. The small and mousey Harrison hardly seemed like the
supervillain
type, but if he had, as Fenwick had, created a public mask to hide his secrets,
he could hardly have picked one better. Fenwick raised an eyebrow as he
contemplated Harrison sitting in his oversize tweeds, trying to get a word in
edgewise. Certainly he possessed significant technical knowledge. And while the
publicly traded shares of Harrison Arms Manufacturing had plummeted in value
since the accident that wrecked the transport, it was also possible that
Harrison himself might be buying them up at cut rates, regaining total control
over his own company in the process. If it were done cleverly, that might be a
very difficult thing to prove, but the Red Panda felt sure that he had just the
man for that job as well.

Stanley Church sat with his
bald head
in his hands as the arguments continued. Of all of the wealthy men at the
table, Church had kept the closest connection to the real work done by his
company. The collapse of the Masterson Tower had been such a public humiliation
for the proud Mister Church that the Red Panda found it difficult to credit
that Church himself might have been the cause of it. Still, he admitted, if he
found it necessary he would willingly destroy August Fenwick to keep the Red
Panda's secrets and goals intact.
An examination of Church's
financials were
also in order.

Marcus Bennett was the only person besides Fenwick himself
who had spoken with this fiend, albeit in his third identity as the Viper, when
the threats had come against the New York Special. Fenwick paused. That had to
be significant. The crash of Bennett's plane was still the only time that
Clockwork had announced his intentions, and his claims of authorship of the
other recent misfortunes had all come on that one occasion. But now that
Fenwick had spoken with Captain Clockwork directly, such an announcement seemed
almost counterproductive to the arch-criminal's plan. Was it pure ego that made
him unable to simply take over the city's major companies without a whisper? Or
did he realize his mistake afterwards, and that was the reason for the launch
of the terror campaign of the mechanical men? In any case, something must have
provoked that call to Marcus Bennett.

Perhaps, the Red Panda thought, it was Bennett's own
presence on the plane that necessitated the call. Was this fiend unwilling to
kill the men that he would subjugate? Was he willing to murder strangers, but
not those whom he had known for years? Certainly he had held August Fenwick
prisoner rather than kill him, at least briefly. Perhaps it was remorse that
prevented him, the same kind of remorse that Ian James was feeling as he sat by
his injured son's side. The Red Panda sighed quietly. The list of suspects was
not slimming down by much, and so far he had little to show for this outing beyond
a new list of research assignments for certain agents.

He was drawn back to reality by the booming voice of Gilbert
MacKinnon. Not by what the man was saying, which seemed to be another
imperative call to unspecified action, but by the man's demeanor. He stood at
the end of the table acting as unelected chairman to the proceedings, yet as
far as the Red Panda knew, his interests had not yet been touched by industrial
accident or swarm of killer robots. No one would deny his right to be involved
in the direction this committee took, but was he not perhaps protesting a bit
too much?

MacKinnon ended his speech and noticed Fenwick's gaze.
August Fenwick nodded at the older man and thumped his hand upon the table in
agreement with whatever had been said, prompting just such a chorus from around
the table. It occurred to him that what he had not felt since sitting down was
any man at the table considering
him
,
how he had managed to cripple an android and escape from his cell, or why he
had not shared that information with police. He sensed no hidden knowledge, no
deception at the table at all, and could not press a hypnotic spell against
such a degree of mental discipline without tipping his hand.

On the other hand, he thought, perhaps he was on entirely
the wrong track. He had to admit, his failure to narrow down the list of
suspects might just mean that none of them was a particularly likely candidate
for villainy. August Fenwick took a small sip of a cup of coffee that had been
put before him at some point, quite some time ago to judge by the temperature.
After the last several days, it had little effect. What he really needed, he
thought, was a nice run over the rooftops to unwind.