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Cyberbooks

Ben Bova

MURDER ONE

The first murder took place in a driving April rainstorm, at the corner ofTwenty-first Street and

Gramercy Park West.

Mrs. Agatha Marple, eighty-three years of age, came tottering uncertainly down the brownstone steps of

her town house, the wind tugging at her ancient red umbrella. She had telephoned for a taxi to take her

downtown to meet her nephew for lunch, as she had every Monday afternoon for the past fourteen

years.

The Yellow Cab was waiting at the curb, its driver imperturbably watching the old lady struggle with the

wind and her umbrella from the dry comfort of his armored seat behind the bulletproof partition that

separated him from the potential homicidal maniacs who were his customers. The meter was humming to

itself, a sound that counterbalanced nicely the drumming of rain on the cab's roof; the fare was already

well past ten dollars. He had punched the destination into the cab's guidance computer: Webb Press, just

offWashington Square . A lousy five-minute drive; the computer, estimating the traffic at this time of day

and the weather conditions, predicted the fare would be no more than forty-nine fifty.

Briefly he thought about taking the old bat for the scenic tour along the river; plenty of traffic there to

slow them down and run up the meter. Manny at the garage had bypassed the automated alarm systems

in all the cab's meters, so the fares never knew when the drivers deviated from the computer's optimum

guidance calculations. But this old bitch was too smart for that; she would refuse to pay and insist on

complaining to the hack bureau on the two-way. He had driven her before, and she was no fool, despite

her age. She was a lousy tipper, too.

She finally got to the cab and tried to close the umbrella and open the door at the same time. The driver

grinned to himself. One of his little revenges on the human race: keep the doors locked until after they try

to get in. They break their fingernails, at least. One guy sprained his wrist so bad he had to go to the

hospital.

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Finally the cabbie pecked the touchpad that unlocked the right rear door. It flew open and nearly

knocked the old broad on her backside. A gust of wet wind flapped her gray old raincoat.

"Hey, c'mon, you're gettin' rain inside my cab," the driver hollered into his intercom microphone.

Before the old lady could reply, a man in a dark blue trenchcoat and matching fedora pulled down low

over his face splashed through the curbside puddles and grabbed for the door.

"I'm in a hurry," he muttered, trying to push the old woman out of the taxi's doorway.

"How dare you!" cried Mrs. Marple, with righteous anger.

"Go find a garbage can to pick in," snarled the man, and he twisted Mrs. Marple's hand off the door

handle.

She yelped with pain, then swatted at the man with her umbrella, ineffectually. The man blocked her

feeble swing, yanked the umbrella out of her grasp, and knocked her to the pavement. She lay there in a

puddle, rain pelting her, gasping for breath.

The man raised her red umbrella high over his head, grasping it in both his gloved hands. The old

woman's eyes went wide, her mouth opened to scream but no sound came out. Then the man drove the

umbrella smashingly into her chest like someone would pound a stake through a vampire's heart.

The old lady twitched once and then lay still, the umbrella sticking out of her withered chest like a sword.

The man looked down at her, nodded once as if satisfied with his work, and then stalked away into the

gray windswept rain.

True to the finest traditions ofNew York 's hack drivers, the cabbie put his taxi in gear and drove away,

leaving the old woman dead on the sidewalk. He never said a word about the incident to anyone.

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ONE

IT was a Hemingway kind of day: clean and bright and fine, sky achingly blue, sun warm enough to

make a man sweat. A good day for facing the bulls or hunting rhino.

Carl Lewis was doing neither. In the air-conditioned comfort of the Amtrak Levitrain, he was fast asleep

and dreaming of books that sang to their readers.

The noise of the train plunging into a long, dark tunnel startled him from his drowse. He had begun the

ride that morning inBoston feeling excited, eager. But as the train glided almost silently along the New

England countryside, levitated on its magnetic guideway, the warm sunshine of May streaming through the

coach's window combined with the slight swaying motion almost hypnotically. Carl dozed off, only to be

startled awake by the sudden roar of entering the tunnel.

His ears popped. The ride had seemed dreamily slow when it started, but now that he was actually

approaching Penn Station it suddenly felt as if things were happening too fast. Carl felt a faint inner

unease, a mounting nervousness, butterflies trembling in his middle. He put it down to the excitement of

starting a new job, maybe a whole new career.

Now, as the train roared through the dark tunnel and his ears hurt with the change in air pressure, Carl

realized that what he felt was not mere excitement. It was apprehension. Anxiety. Damned close to

outright fear. He stared at the reflection of his face in the train window: clear of eye, firm of jaw, sandy

hair neatly combed, crisp new shirt with its blue MIT necktie painted down its front, proper tweed jacket

with the leather elbow patches. He looked exactly as a brilliant young software composer should look.

Yet he felt like a scared little kid.

The darkness of the tunnel changed abruptly to the glaring lights of the station. The train glided toward a

crowded platform, then screeched horrifyingly down the last few hundred yards of its journey on

old-fashioned steel wheels that struck blazing sparks against old-fashioned steel rails. A lurch, a blinking

of the light strips along the ceiling, and the train came to a halt.

With the hesitancy known only to New Englanders visitingManhattan for the first time, Carl Lewis slid

his garment bag from the rack over his seat and swung his courier case onto his shoulder. The other

passengers pushed past him, muttering and grumbling their way off the train. They shoved Carl this way

and that until he felt like a tumbleweed caught in a cattle stampede.

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Welcome toNew York , he said to himself as the stream of detraining passengers dumped him

impersonally, indignantly, demeaningly, on the concrete platform.

The station was so big that Carl felt as if he had shrunk to the size of an insect. People elbowed and

stamped their way through the throngs milling around; the huge cavern buzzed like a beehive. Carl felt

tension in the air, the supercharged crackling high-stress electricity of the Big Apple. Panhandlers in their

traditional grubby rags shambled along, each of them displaying the official city begging permit badge.

Grimy bag ladies screamed insults at the empty air. Teenaged thugs in military fatigues eyed the crowds

like predators looking for easy prey. Religious zealots in saffron robes, in severe black suits and string

ties, even in mock space suits complete with bubble helmets, sought alms and converts. Mostly alms.

Police robots stood immobile, like fat little blue fireplugs, while the tides of noisy, smelly, angry,

scampering humanity flowed in every direction at once. The noise was a bedlam of a million individual

voices acting out their private dramas. The station crackled with fierce, hostile anxiety.

Carl took a deep breath, clutched his garment bag tighter, and clamped his arm closely over the courier

case hanging from his shoulder. He avoided other people's eyes almost as well as a native Manhattanite,

and threaded his way through the throngs toward the taxi stand outside, successfully evading the

evangelists, the beggars, the would-be muggers, and the flowing tide of perfectly ordinary citizens who

would knock him down and mash him flat under their scurrying shoes if he so much as missed a single

step.

There were no cabs, only a curbside line of complaining jostling men and women waiting for taxis. A

robot dispatcher, not unlike the robot cops inside the station, stood impassively at the head of the line.

While the police robots were blue, the taxi dispatcher's aluminum skin was anodized yellow, faded and

chipped, spattered here and there with mud and other substances Carl preferred not to think about.

Every few minutes a taxi swerved around the corner on two wheels and pulled up to the dispatcher's

post with a squeal of brakes. One person would get in and the line would inch forward. Finally Carl was

at the head of the line.

"I beg your pardon, sir. Are you going uptown or downtown?" asked the man behind Carl.

"Uh, uptown-no, downtown." Carl had to think aboutManhattan 's geography.

"Excellent! Would you mind if I shared a cab with you? I'm late for an important appointment. I'll pay the

Page 4

entire fare."

The man was tiny, much shorter than Carl, and quite slim. He was the kind of delicate middle-aged man

for whom the word dapper had been coined. He wore a conservative silver-gray business suit; the tie

painted down the front of his shirt looked hand done and expensive. He was carrying a blue trenchcoat

over one arm despite the gloriously sunny spring morning. Silver-gray hair clipped short, a toothy smile

that seemed a bit forced on his round, wrinkled face. Prominent ears, watery brownish eyes. He

appeared harmless enough.

The big brown eyes were pleading silently. Carl did not know how to refuse. "Uh, yeah, sure, okay."

"Oh, thank you! I'm late already." The man glanced at his wristwatch, then stared down the street as if

he could make a cab appear by sheer willpower.

A taxi finally did come, and they both got into it.

"Bunker Books," said Carl.

The taxi driver said something that sounded like Chinese. Or maybe Sanskrit.

"Fifth Avenueand Eighth Street," said Carl's companion, very slowly and loudly. "TheSynthoilTower ."

The cabbie muttered to himself and punched the address into his dashboard computer. The electronic

map on the taxi's control board showed a route in bright green that seemed direct enough. Carl sat back

and tried to relax.

But that was impossible. He was sitting in aManhattan taxicab with a total stranger who obviously knew

the city well. Carl looked out the window on his side of the cab. The sheer emotional energy level out

there in the streets was incredible.Manhattan vibrated. It hummed and crackled with tension and

excitement. It madeBoston seem like a placid country retreat. Hordes of people swarmed along the

sidewalks and streamed across every intersection. Taxis by the hundreds weaved through the traffic like

an endless yellow snake, writhing and coiling around the big blue steam buses that huffed and chuffed

along the broad avenue.

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Ben Bova - Cyberbooks.pdf

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