I am Automaton 3: Shadow of the Automaton Page 10

  He left the kitchen. Peter followed.

  “I think they’re right.”

  “About what?” Barry asked absent-mindedly as he stepped out the front door and locked it with an old-fashioned metal key from his new set. Peter noticed the old-fashioned mechanical lock his father must’ve retrofitted recently.

  “OIL is up to something.” He wanted to tell his father about Kafka’s message, but now wasn’t the time. He had to figure out what he was going to do about it.

  “Well, I hope you’re wrong,” said Barry as they walked side-by-side down the path to his car. For this, he had to use his phone to unlock it. “But I wouldn’t be surprised. These terrorists never really go away.”

  They got into the car. Barry started the ignition. “We pound them, they quiet down for a while, but they always regroup.”

  Peter sighed heavily. “So you’re saying that they are an inevitability?”

  Barry thought about this for a moment. “I am saying that it is difficult to slay a hydra. You kill one terrorist here and there and several more pop up to take his place.”

  Peter remembered learning about mythology in grade school. He always hated the subject, but his father’s reference wasn’t lost on him.

  Carl loved it. He loved the creatures and their powers. It was ironic really. Carl had simultaneously become two figures of myth. The mighty Automaton and the nefarious Kafka. Hero and villain. The savior of freedom, the defender of democracy, and the most dangerous man alive.

  Peter chuckled bitterly to himself as he pondered the paradox. Barry took note of his son’s odd disposition but decided to ignore it for the time being. He put the car in gear and pulled out of the driveway.

  ***

  Fort Bliss

  Texas

  09:00 HRS

  Colonel Betancourt was striding down the hallway to General Ramses’ office. There was an update about the search for Tronika, the seditious blogger and notorious computer hacker. They had been collaborating with the FBI and Assistant Director Wolff of the NSA. Wolff and Ramses had made it a top priority, asserting the girl had terrorist connections.

  Betancourt had concluded it to be a waste of time, but after the Kafka sighting in Tijuana, Ramses and Wolff appeared emboldened in their crusade.

  The retinal scan on Ramses’ door registered Betancourt and opened. He stepped into the office where Ramses was standing behind his desk looking engrossed.

  Betancourt stepped forward, removed his headgear and saluted. Ramses saluted back. “Have a seat, Colonel.”

  Betancourt sat and took in Ramses’ desk. It was aflutter with papers and digital files. He had never seen the General’s desk in such a state of disarray.

  “Sir, I assume you have some new information on the seditious blogger.”

  Ramses gawked at him perplexed for a moment, and then he sat waving a dismissive hand. “Oh, yes, her. She’s a college student at the University of Texas at Dallas. Elicia Corti. We’re going to pick her up tonight.”

  “I assume we are using the local authorities on this one, sir. She’s just a kid.”

  “And Adolf Hitler was just another Austrian artist,” said Ramses sarcastically. “We aren’t doing anything. I have something much more important for you, Colonel.”

  “Oh?”

  “It would appear that Kafka is back across the border and he has made contact with his big brother, the ex-Major Peter Birdsall.”

  “That’s unbelievable. He just contacted him out of the blue on an open frequency?”

  General Ramses regarded him with what Betancourt could only surmise to be suspicion.

  “As unbelievable as it may appear to you, Colonel, the NSA picked up the message via RGT. It would appear that the program is working as designed.”

  “What was the content of that message, sir?”

  “He wants to meet—get this—at Frisky’s, some shithole dive bar in their hometown.”

  “That seems rather bold.”

  “Or rather clever,” added Ramses. “Hiding in plain sight.”

  “But he had to have known we would’ve picked it up.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Ramses. “He knew about RGT, but I don’t think he fully grasped the extensiveness of the program. Besides, the communication was hidden in a reverse transmission picked up by our brethren in the NSA. I don’t think he expected us to find it. To our obvious advantage it would seem.”

  Reverse transmission? This was the first time Betancourt had heard anything about reverse transmissions through the RGT network. Ramses slipped up. “Yes, so it would seem. So what are we going to do?”

  “I want you to put together a team. If he is in Texas, we are going to grab him and bring him to justice.”

  “Sir, this man is clever. I don’t think it is going to be that easy. In fact, this whole thing reeks of a set-up.”

  “What are you saying, Colonel?”

  “I am saying that this man has set us up time after time. He set us up at Guantanamo Bay, and he set us up in Siena, Italy. Every time he has been one step ahead of us and every time, it has ended in the death of innocent people and good soldiers.”

  “You think this is a trap?”

  “I know it is, sir. He is picking a public place. I’m sure he’s going to have the bar stocked with OIL operatives. As soon as we move in, he’s going to start killing innocents. It is going to be yet another fiasco.

  “Besides, why contact his brother? Why now?”

  Ramses was quick to answer. “Kafka could’ve killed him in Tijuana and he didn’t. Why do you suppose that is, Colonel? In his message, he talked about keeping Peter Birdsall and their father safe and explaining what was happening to him. He wants to help his brother. Recruit him, even. And we are going to exploit his sentimentality and box him in.”

  “Why do I get the sense that Major Birdsall’s dishonorable discharge was all part of a plan to use him as bait for his little brother?”

  “You know darn well, Colonel, that in operations we sometimes have to sacrifice smaller fish to catch the big ones.”

  “But never with our own men, sir.”

  “He was a liability. Too many failures surrounding that man. We have a chance to catch this Kafka. Why not take it?”

  “At what cost, sir? Kafka may be sentimental, but he’s not stupid?”

  “What do you propose?”

  “We go to the bar first. We install a metal detector at the door. We replace the management and staff with ours. If anybody asks, we’ll say there have been some fights at the bar recently and the detector was installed recently for security. I want facial recognition of everyone that walks through that front door. We’ll cross reference the faces with known terrorists in the FBI and Interpol databases. If an OIL operative sets foot in that bar, I want him unarmed and I want to know about it.

  “I want a security perimeter in place around the area as soon as we confirm he’s in the bar. I want roadblocks in place manned by local authorities. I want the whole thing buttoned up good and tight.”

  Ramses was smiling. “Good. This is all good, Colonel. This is why I want you in charge of this operation. Elicia Corti is small potatoes. I need you to handle this personally.”

  Betancourt found it interesting that he brought up the girl again. “Yes, sir. I have to get started right away.”

  Ramses stood up, and Betancourt followed suit.

  “Get to work, Colonel. Dismissed.”

  They both saluted each other, and Betancourt left the office. Ramses sat back down behind his desk and dialed his phone.

  “Assistant Director Wolff…yes, it’s Ramses. Tell the Alpha that the sheep are coming to his den.”

  He hung up the phone and grinned to himself. That nosey do-gooding bastard Betancourt was a problem. Ramses was well aware of his slipping Peter Birdsall the antidote serum, which meant that Betancourt was well aware that he couldn’t trust Ramses.

  Betancourt suspected him, which made Betancourt dangerous, and now Rams
es had to put him away. After tonight, he would no longer be a concern.

  Chapter 5

  10:37 HRS

  Marina watched her husband from the living room as he tinkered away furiously in the kitchen. He stumbled through the door at around 8 am after having been out all night, and now he refused to sleep.

  She wiped the sweat off her brow, the simple motion making the room spin. Luka occasionally looked up from his work on his strange apparatus to ask her if she needed anything. He had already brought her tea and Tylenol to bring down the fever that raged inside her skull and made sure she was comfortable.

  This work of his, the machine he was tinkering with, was no doubt an assignment from this great man, Kafka. And it was no doubt an important assignment, as Luka has been working on it like some kind of deadline was approaching.

  She pondered what this Kafka must’ve looked like. He was important, so she figured he must be tall…and strong. Yes, if Luka feared him so, he must possess the strength of several men. The more she thought about Kafka, the more she felt she knew him.

  She wasn’t sure if it was the fever, but she found her hand and her fingers straying towards her lap and creeping towards her nether regions, when Luka looked up at her. She slid her hand back onto her knee.

  Luka wiped his brow, but his sweat was from his labor, his fever having already passed. He glanced up from his work, his eyes magnified by his work glasses giving him the appearance of a large insect.

  He felt awful about Marina. It wasn’t just his aggression towards her last night. He couldn’t help but feel that he made her sick with whatever he had. He brought home Kafka’s gift, and now she too felt his bite.

  It was bad enough that he had been violated, but now he had introduced something terrible to his wife. This after he took great pains to keep what he did with the Order a secret from her.

  To be honest, he didn’t do it to protect her. He did it to protect himself. If the authorities were to apprehend her and interrogate her to get to him, using deportation as leverage, she would have nothing to tell them.

  Except for the name of Kafka. For some unknown reason he had allowed that name to escape his lips. It was the only thing she knew about what Luka did outside the house. That and the portable RGT headset that he had been working on. She wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails out of that. To her it was some kind of equipment. That was all.

  After what Kafka did to him, and now what he spread to his wife, he didn’t much care about the authorities tracking him down. Although he labored under Kafka’s direction for the Order, for the Cause, he resented Kafka.

  He dared not show it, for Kafka would kill him on the spot. Luka harbored no illusions about who would win in a fight. He knew that Kafka was more than his match, with his Outworlder powers.

  There were a few who initially challenged Kafka’s leadership. One, a brutish man named Hamidi, who mocked Kafka’s talk about Outworlders to his face. One night, during a heated discussion about the new direction of the Order, Hamidi jumped across the table and lunged at Kafka trying to sink a rather large knife into his heart.

  Kafka moved like he already knew Hamidi was coming, dodging the knife by mere millimeters and smashing Hamidi through the table. Everyone seated stood up suddenly and backed away.

  Hamidi stood up, dusting himself off, as Kafka laughed at him. This only enraged the mountainous Hamidi, who rushed Kafka only to find the knife that he held only seconds before plunged into his gut.

  Kafka clicked at him like a large cicada in apparent delight, all four eyes gazing into Hamidi’s two, and he flung Hamidi across the room. The back of Hamidi’s skull smashed against the cinderblock wall, and as his body slid down there was a large red mark left behind with bits of skull and grey matter clinging to it.

  That was the first, but not the last attempt on Kafka’s life. The would-be assassins recognized Kafka’s speed and apparent precognition in hand-to-hand fights, so the attacks became sneakier.

  One man, Hassan, a bomb-maker, planted one of his creations in a room full of Kafka and his supporters. He made sure he left enough time on the timer so that he was out of the building and in his car before it detonated.

  Hassan reached his car, opened it, and got in. He turned on the ignition and waited, but to his profound disappointment, Kafka stepped out the front door and waved to Hassan. Kafka waved and then turned his long hand over, raising a protracted middle finger.

  Hassan did not have a chance to register the gesture when his bomb detonated in the back seat sending him to hell in many little pieces.

  The third and final attack came from a man named Malik, who was a chemist for the Order. Malik took the liberty of slipping a potent poison into the water supply. He didn’t want to take the chance of getting caught slipping the poison into Kafka’s cup, so he poisoned the supply from a distance.

  When he stormed into Kafka’s quarters, he found Kafka and his guard all lying dead on the floor. Malik, being a thorough man, took out his gun and fired eight shots into Kafka, two of which were a double tap into his skull. He then dragged Kafka’s body outside into the dirt, doused him with gasoline, and lit his body on fire.

  Satisfied that the deed was done, he went home, made love to his woman, and slept like the dead. Malik was later woken in the middle of the night to find a charred Kafka standing over his bed clutching his woman by the hair. It was her screaming that woke him.

  He tried to turn and reach for his gun on his side table, but his wrists and ankles were bound to the bed frame. Kafka flung the woman across the room and demanded that she watch. She crouched in the corner, whimpering in horror.

  Kafka took a funnel and pried Malik’s mouth open. Malik kept pushing the funnel out with his tongue and tried to turn his head, so Kafka punched him in the mouth, knocking out his front teeth.

  Kafka then jammed the funnel through the space and grabbed a large gas can on the floor next to him. He poured gasoline down Malik’s throat as the man writhed on the bed in pain from the gasoline burning his esophagus.

  As the gasoline began to poison Malik’s body, Kafka shoved a long rag down his throat. He then produced a lighter and lit the rag. He backed away and stood next to Malik’s trembling woman as Malik’s body burst into flame from the inside.

  Kafka began to walk out, and then—as if just remembering—he took out his pistol and shot Malik’s blazing corpse eight times. He took the woman and made her recount everything she saw about the way Malik died to the members of the Order.

  From that point on, Kafka’s leadership was not questioned. Each assailant was murdered with their own methods, and Kafka’s Outworldly powers were no longer questioned.

  It was at that point that Kafka began to talk about Order members “getting some skin in the game.” Luka didn’t quite know what the expression meant, but Kafka announced that there were going to be some sacrifices made and lieutenants chosen. All for the Cause.

  That was what Luka wrestled with. He did not agree with using Outworlders to further the Cause. It was not their cause to push, but after being bitten—he had heard about Ramses’ bite and what he now was—was Luka now an Outworlder? Was he to become an Outworlder, or have a part of him become such?

  He turned the portable companion unit, slid the RAM home into its slots, and adjusted the heat synch. The processors would generate a good amount of heat. If Kafka wasn’t careful he would set himself on fire.

  Maybe not such a bad outcome.

  No, he would take care that such an outcome wouldn’t happen. He remembered what Kafka had said about Belmont and what he said right before he died at the hands of an army soldier in Italy.

  As Kafka cradled Belmont in his arms, Belmont passed the torch—the Order and all of its operations—to Kafka with very specific instructions. Belmont himself entrusted Kafka with their mission, and it was Belmont who wanted to enlist the help of the Outworlders.

  Or so Kafka said.

  Belmont knew about the UFO crash site in the Co
ngo, the origin of the RGT, and the undead that surrounded the craft.

  I know the war you are fighting against the oppression of the world’s great superpowers, said Kafka. But you cannot win this war with sporadic attacks of terror. You cannot topple society with bombings and shootings. The Outworlders have provided us with soldiers for the Cause. I am their general, selected by the Outworlders, and I in-turn have chosen you to be my lieutenants.

  Kafka went on about how special they now were, and how after the destruction of the world they would inherit the earth. Kojic thought about Marina…

  Maybe by infecting her with Kafka’s poison he spared her life. If Kafka’s plan worked and society indeed fell, Luka wondered how Marina would fit into the picture. Would she have been spared because of his sacrifice?

  Either way, the question was now moot. She was now in on it, like it or not. He guessed that she now had “skin in the game.” He had saved her life from what was to come, and she would share a special place with him in the new world order.

  “Are you all right, my sweet?” he called to her from the kitchen.

  “Yes, Luka.”

  “Do you need anything?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you take a bath? It will help with the fever.” He stood up and walked into the living room. He gently took her by the hand and lifted her up to standing. He gently guided her through the kitchen and into the bedroom.

  He opened the bathroom door, turned on the light, and began to run her a tepid bath. She slid off her robe and stepped gingerly into the bathtub, wincing from the aches and pains stabbing her body like daggers.

  Luka helped her lower herself into the tub, as she was dizzy and light-headed, and she rested her head on the back of the tub.