and pumped twenty thousand volts through his body. The Justice Department crime scene techs had collected the contents of two Taser cartridges that had been loaded into the robot’s head section. There might have been more in the mechanism, in case the mechanism had encountered multiple opponents. A security officer, assigned to protect the DoE offices, approached Lyons, his step cautious as he caught the grim darkening of the big ex-cop’s face.
“No sighting of the robot?” Lyons asked, putting aside his rage to speak with a fellow lawman.
“No,” the security officer said. “It’ll take us a while to get our own camera-mount robot here, and even then, it might not fit into the air vents.”
Lyons’s brow furrowed. “I’d get a bomb-sniffing dog team here, just to be safe. If the device did have a self-destruct mechanism, it wouldn’t do much damage to the infrastructure of this building, but it could harm a mainframe or more personnel.”
“We’ve thought of that possibility already,” the officer replied. “But thanks for confirming that we’re not completely paranoid.”
“My teammates think otherwise, but I appreciate the sentiment,” Lyons returned.
The office door opened and a covered body on a gurney rolled into the hallway. The coroner walked beside the body of Hirtenberg, having claimed the corpse for release. The Justice Department medical examiner met Lyons’s gaze for a moment before the brooding Stony Man warrior looked down at the remains of a woman whom he’d befriended over the past few days.
“Cause of death was fairly obvious,” Alicia Khan said softly. Her dark, elfin face was serene and sympathetic, large and soulful brown eyes steady in the path of Lyons’s disquiet and angry grief. “Exsanguination due to laceration of the throat by an unknown weapon.”
“I saw it in action. It was a metal wire spun on an electric-motor-powered spool,” Lyons said. “The crime techs picked up trimmings of it with blood transfer from her.”
Lyons didn’t want to give in to the queasiness in his gut at the description of a friend’s agonizing murder, especially in front of someone as sympathetic and empathic as Khan. He swallowed his disgust at how clinically he spoke of her end. “You might find traces of the wire on her vertebrae, since the wire cuts flesh and thin aluminum easily, but might have been stopped by heavy bone.”
Khan nodded. “I’ll run an X-ray in that area. Metal from garrote wires or knife wounds often transfers to heavy bone. You going to be all right?”
Lyons took a deep breath. Khan, a gorgeous woman in her mid-forties, was no stranger to Lyons. She was one of a team whom Hal Brognola, director of Stony Man Farm, kept on hand to deal with the aftereffects of a domestic operation undertaken by Able Team, Phoenix Force or even the Executioner. The Justice crew kept traces of Stony Man’s covert operations well out of the public eye, but kept data on hand in case there was a prosecutable case left in the wreckage of Stony Man’s cleansing flames.
For a woman who interacted with the dead, her empathy was outstanding. She could endure even the worst of Lyons’s legendary rages, never steering away from providing him with a bridge back to humanity. Lyons managed a smile for her. “Thanks, Alicia, I can deal with the grief.”
Khan nodded. “Catharsis is one thing, baby. Just don’t hang on to the pain for too long.”
Lyons nodded. “Then get to testing, Alicia. I have murderers to track down.”
Khan stroked his cheek, a brief touch of tenderness from tigress to lion. They were both hunters, different predators in the same ecosystem, tracking criminals. While the medical examiner took to her chase with microscopes and spectrometers, Lyons’s tools of the hunt were measured in twelve gauge and .357.
“Good hunting,” she told him and returned to escorting Hirtenberg’s body to the coroner’s wagon.
The Able Team leader glanced one last time at the receding gurney, then left the hallway to meet up with his partners, Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz and Rosario “Politician” Blancanales, also fondly referred to as Pol. Able Team had gone from investigation and paper-pushing mode to full-on pursuit.
T HE DOOR PANEL on the side of the van rolled open and Hermann Schwarz felt the mass of Lyons’s muscular form tilt the vehicle. He opened his eyes after receiving a slap on the shoulder from his best friend, Rosario Blancanales.
“Look busy, the boss is here,” Blancanales said.
“Carl knows that I’m a slacker,” Schwarz replied.
“A slacker who calculates quantum physics equations the same way most people do Sudoko,” Lyons mentioned. “Actually, no. You don’t even need pen or paper. Do you need a description of the murder-bot one more time, Gadgets, or have you already cobbled one together out of soda cans and twist ties?”
Schwarz looked over his shoulder and looked back at his commander, attempting to imitate Lyons’s moments of annoyance. “Oh, fecal discharge, Rosario, my good man. The honorable Mr. Lyons just paid me a compliment and we haven’t even blown anyone up yet.”
“Gadgets, I’m being sweetness and love right now because I am under the delusion that you will put my hands around the throat of the scumbag who took out a fellow cop,” Lyons explained. “Do you want me to return that anger back toward you and your snarky attitude?”
Schwarz pivoted in his seat and handed over a clipboard. “No. I did not build my own copy of the robot. Seems we were out of guitar picks necessary for the stegasaur-style ridge plates. But I do have technical drawings that hypothetically reconstruct the device based on your description of its movements and external dimensions.”
Lyons rewarded Schwarz with a tight-lipped smile as he accepted the stack of papers with twenty pages of sketches of motors and circuits. He leafed through until he came to a page depicting himself, clad in a bearskin, wielding a massive thigh bone, ready to smash the robot that had escaped him. Scrawled in a cartoon word balloon were the words, “Carl smash shiny worm!”
“Can I keep this for my fridge?” Lyons asked Schwarz.
The Able Team electronics whiz raised an eyebrow. “Sure.”
Lyons carefully ripped out the page, removed the sketch of the robot, then crumpled the rest of the page and hurled it out the sliding panel door, where it landed in the gutter. Lyons stuck it under the front clip as an impromptu cover for the robot design notes. “Do you know who built it?”
Schwarz looked out the door of the van, even though the wadded sketch was long gone. “Attempting to narrow down the original designer of a robot is next to impossible. There are entire schools of kids who build these things, not to mention countless amateurs who enter them into battle-bot competitions.”
Lyons nodded. “I’m growing disappointed.”
“Ah, but Mr. Lyons, you asked for a designer, while I applied my mental powers to a more productive course of action. I thought outside of the box,” Schwarz said. “There is room in the robot for a 5.8-gigahertz transmitter that can maintain a remote link.”
Lyons smirked. “You’ve been monitoring that signal?”
Schwarz rolled his eyes. “But of course. Unfortunately, I’ve only narrowed down the broadcast to a nearby relay module.”
Lyons
