The Messiah Choice (1985) (3 page)

Once the trio walked back to the main road they had no trouble tracing the victim back to the Lodge. Many had seen him and spoken to him, and all had been questioned and their interrogations recorded.

The Institute itself never failed to impress MacDonald, although it was neither pretty nor natural-looking. It sat atop the highest point of the ancient Caribbean volcano, almost two thousand feet above the sea. At the far point was the Lodge, a hotel and restaurant for everyone who worked there, an imposing structure looking much like a British manor house, huge and imposing. Arranged in a semicircle just in front of the Lodge were six identical two-story buildings where much of the actual work went on, three on each side of the circle. These were mostly of red brick with red slate roofs, and all looked rather drab.

The road circled around this complex, forming a center island in front of the Lodge, and here one could see that something extraordinary was going on. There were seven of them, all facing southwest, seven enormous dish-shaped antennae with massive feeder and transmission horns pointed at their cream-colored middles. These were the eyes and ears of the Institute, putting them in instant two-way communication with six major defense agencies in six countries, as well as with the Magellan Corporation's own headquarters and far-flung enterprises. More impressive even than the antennae, though, was what was beneath them.

The town and the Lodge had come first, built by an eccentric British millionaire back in the days when that term meant something. It was technically under the sovereignty of the Mornkay Federation, a tiny group of former British-owned islands that together formed one of the smallest and poorest nations in the world, let alone the Caribbean. Allenby was, in fact, their major tax base and primary source of revenue, and Magellan ran it as if it was an independent little kingdom, which for all intents and purposes it was. No Mornkay citizens even lived on the island, and rather liberal payments that were all that kept the government from complete collapse kept it that way. The Queen, and perhaps the Governor General didn't need permission to set foot on the place, but the Prime Minister did.

In front of the Lodge, which had been renovated and turned into its comfortable hotel-like present existence, there had been a monstrous excavation, and within that hole had been placed a building no less than two hundred feet tall, lead-shielded and practically bomb-proof. In there, too, had been placed the most technologically advanced, state of the art supercomputer, the System for Artificial Intelligence Networking and Telecommunications, or SAINT for short. It was so advanced, so new, so radical, that it was the latest word in artificial intelligence computing. Some said it could think for itself, although that was denied. Certainly it was like nothing else on earth, able not only to sift through enough transmitted data to fill a library as high as the moon every day, but to actually evaluate and flag what its operators considered important enough to warrant human attention.

Access was through the six research buildings and tremendous layers of security and a series of complex, mostly automated booby traps. SAINT was its own master security force, and it was formidable indeed.

MacDonald went immediately to the building just to the right of the Lodge and then back to the small but efficient hospital area. Dr. Brenda Andersen was expecting him.

Andersen was a tough, no nonsense sort of woman, a Dane employed by the company who was, in title, "Resident Surgeon," but was actually a fancy general practitioner, mostly setting an occasional broken bone and giving out pills for a variety of aches and pains. She and two medics, one a trained nurse and the other an x-ray technician, handled the medical chores for the entire island from this small clinic and from a similar one in town. They had provided her with facilities and equipment sufficient to handle even major surgery, but for anything serious she usually had patients airlifted by jet helicopter to far more elaborate facilities in one of the nearby friendly island nations. The doctor was in her mid-forties, no beauty but with strength and character in her face and manner. She was there, as she herself admitted, as "a refugee from socialized medicine."

"So," she said quietly. "I had some feeling that they would send you." She had a thick accent, but her command of the language was absolute.

"Bad pennies always return," he responded lightly. "You've done the preliminary autopsy?"

She shrugged. "As much as can be done. The remains are pretty much of a mess. You want to see them?"

He nodded. "And your conclusion?"

"A wine press could not have done a more complete job," she told him. "Except, of course, it vas no press, but an encirclement or constriction around the whole of the torso." She reached down and picked up a blood pressure pad. "More like one of these things the size of a man's torso that you wrap around and then squeeze until it almost all meets. Or, perhaps, as if crushed to death by two gigantic, powerful hands."

He nodded soberly. "What the hell have some of you people been
experimenting
with up here?"

He meant the comment in jest, but she took it seriously.

"Look, you may find that someone here did the job, you may find it was all some sort of fancy trick, but there are no monsters here. This is a think tank, as you would say, not a place for mad scientists to build some sort of Frankenstein. Oh, some of these people might well be mad, and some might even set out to design and build such a thing, but there is no place for them to do it here. From here they would get the blueprints; it would be built elsevere, far away from this island."

He put up a hand. "All right, all right. But they
do
have both a biological laboratory and a robotics lab here, do they not?"

She nodded. "But the bio lab could not create anything of such size and force, and as for—oh, I see! You are thinking perhaps a machine."

"It's a possibility. It might not need to be so tall, it might be designed to make absurd tracks with precision, and it might weigh two or three tons. It also might well be remotely controlled and would not work well in the water."

She walked over to a cabinet and-opened a door. "Well, it would have to be one very strange machine to make tracks like this and only this." She took out a huge, heavy plaster cast and laid it on her desk. "One of the first casts from the beach, brought down here at my instruction."

He gaped at the thing. It was one thing to see the impressions in the sand, another to see what was made from them. It was a huge print, rather rough and malformed, but still clearly representative of the shape that made it. It was monstrous, resembling the sort of feet that must have been on
tyrannosaurus Rex
or some other bipedal dinosaur of the primeval past. It was certainly unlike anything either he or the doctor or perhaps anyone else had ever seen before.

"So, what do you think now?" she asked him, sounding a little smug. "Tell me the robot that could make
that.
"

"Oh, if it was a robot, I'll know it soon enough. I'm running every supplies list for the last three years past a bunch of clerical assistants. You couldn't hide the physical components needed to build it, and you could hardly smuggle it in in your suitcase." Still, he thought, there
was
a way, a fairly easy way, to have done just that. When one has an experimental prototype computer that's several stories by a couple of square blocks large and always is being fixed, modified, or upgraded, who would even notice a few tons of sheet metal and machinery? Only one man might notice, and he was certainly high on MacDonald's suspect list.

For the moment, though, he put such things aside, and with the doctor went to view the remains.

"Very little has been noticeably disturbed by the autopsy," the doctor assured him. "When your subject is already turned almost inside out it is not difficult to do the examination. The experts that are supposed to be coming in later today will do more to it."

The sight was not a pleasant one. As Andersen had said, the victim had been crushed to death by persons, mechanisms, or creatures unknown. The lower calves and feet remained reasonably intact, and the torso was a mess, but it was the head that was hardest to look at. The eyes had nearly popped out of their sockets, the veins all at the surface, the tongue nearly bitten through—

it was a sight that no one who saw would ever forget. Although he'd seen hundreds of corpses, including strangulations and mutilations, in his career, MacDonald felt his breakfast in his throat.

Still, he was undeterred and professional about it, forcing it all back for later nightmares. He was quite well aware that this was the case of a lifetime, the sort of thing that, if solved, would make him an international celebrity and almost a worldwide legend among detectives in his own time.

This sort of thing fell into the lap of very few detectives, and he knew it.

He was having the time of his life.

He made a slow, methodical examination of the body. "Any sign of foreign material on the surface or in the wounds?"

"Quite a bit, although nothing that I can not account for in other ways. After all, the contents of his clothing were also crushed. Still, I assume that the professionals will send everything through the labs. Nothing remotely resembling lizard scales or metal filings from a killer robot, if that's what you mean."

He sighed. "Listen, Doc.
Something
killed this man here, on the beach, less than twenty-four hours ago. Every single shred of evidence suggests that it was a great prehistoric sort of beast that suddenly appeared in the meadow, chased Sir Robert down the trail to the beach, then caught and killed him there and vanished. Now, either such a beast exists, which means it should be easy to find considering it roams the existing trails in broad daylight, or someone made it seem as if it exists. If the latter is the case, it would mean that damned near every person on this island had to be in on it or else it involved some high level of technology right out of science fiction. And that kind of technology is just what the folks who come and stay here are in the business of dreaming up. Now, you tell me: which of the three theories would
you
pursue first? Or do you have another?"

"I do not," she admitted, "unless you mix in black magic of some sort. If you find the method you will find the murderer, that is true. But if it is someone who can do this sort of thing, what defense will you or any of us have if you get close to it?"

"Because," he said, "anybody smart enough to do it is also smart enough to realize that if
I
go, an infinite number of replacements will arrive. My main concern is motive. Why do it in such a flashy way, certain to attract a tremendous amount of attention?" He thought a moment.

"Magellan is a privately held corporation chartered in the United States. Sir Robert owned about half the existing shares, and as far as I know he never married. I wonder who gets those shares?

They're almost certainly worth billions."

The doctor shrugged. "His heirs, I presume, whoever they may be, unless he left it all to some home for stray cats. Whoever they are, I wonder if they even know?" She paused a moment. "You will be here for the funeral?"

"Of course, and beyond that, too. Wouldn't miss it. After all, I'm going to be here for the formal autopsy." He looked one last time at the remains. "Closed casket ceremony, I bet. The mortician who could make
that
even halfway presentable wouldn't be doing cadavers—he'd be painting the Sistine Chapel at the very least."

3

THE DAMSEL IS DISTRESSED

The two men stood at the edge of the helipad just down from the Institute and watched the helicopter come in. It was the company's fanciest model, with all the luxuries and amenities of the very rich and well connected and jet powered, too.

"Well, here she comes." John Medford Byrne sighed. At fifty-three he was director of the Institute, a post which also placed him on Magellan's board of directors. He more than coped on his U.S. $157,000 annual salary with all the fringes thrown in. Tall, distinguished, gray-haired and tanned, he looked in his fancy tailored brown business suit like he should be on the cover
of
Business Week.
In truth, he was by all accounts a genius at administration who earned every dime he made and then some, but he was uncomfortable now. At the moment, Magellan was running smoothly as usual, but eventually, when Sir Robert's will was fully probated, there would have to be a board and stockholders' meeting at which control would be passed.

"She's the eight-thousand-pound gorilla, MacDonald," Byrne added. "Anything she wants she gets, including me dressing up in a suit in this climate. You remember that."

MacDonald, who was less formally dressed and far more comfortable, having not brought a suit or tie or anything resembling them when pulled to the island, nodded. Byrne had been after him on and off for several days on this. He was a little sour on the whole thing himself.
I'm expected
to save all their fat corporate asses,
he thought,
and if I do they might give me a thousand dollars
bonus for Christmas, if they remember at all.
If not—well, his job, low as it might be, was as vulnerable if not more so than theirs.

The thing that made them all uncomfortable was that not one of them had known that Sir Robert had a daughter or, for that matter, any other immediate living relatives. A long lost brother they might have at least accepted, but Sir Robert was always rather cold in all sexual matters, and those who had known him had considered him sexless or perhaps a self-repressed homosexual.

All that anyone really knew about her was that her name was Angelique Montagne, that she was just barely old enough to inherit to the full without a conservator. They also know she was crippled in some way, for the company advance information warned them to provide for a wheelchair and a nurse.

That, and a couple of other things, not the least of which was that Sir Robert had made her sole and unequivocal heir to everything he had, including the controlling interest in Magellan. Lots of attorneys in many nations would be gearing up to contest or otherwise stall that part, but Sir Robert was a great businessman with the best attorneys money could buy. In the end, the will would stand, everyone seemed confident of that, and when it did anyone who contested would be on a particularly nasty enemies list. Nor would she be likely to be simply removed, even for the money at stake. Should she die before making her own arrangements, the will provided for such nasty things that all their jobs would go and it was quite likely that Magellan would be carved up and possibly dissolved.