Донна Эндрюс - Click here for murder

Holding the gun in her right hand, she took a deep breath, and grabbed the knob with her left.

It turned. She flung the door open, stepping in as she did, and putting her left hand back on the gun.

“Freeze!” she shouted as she stepped across the threshold, shifting the gun to aim at the man inside.

It was Nameless. He was bent over, doing something at a computer keyboard.

Not just a computer—the robot. Turing’s robot; the one that had disappeared from Ray’s apartment.

“Get away from the computer!” she shouted.

He turned, began moving away from the computer—but he was reaching for a gun. Paintball or real, she wondered

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briefly, but she couldn’t tell, and she didn’t let it stop her reflexes as she steadied her hand, aimed the gun, and pulled the trigger.

The first shot knocked him slightly sideways when it hit him in the shoulder, the shoulder of the hand that was still reaching for the gun when the second shot hit his throat, spraying blood. She wasn’t sure the remaining shots hit anything, but she tried to keep the gun aimed at him as she emptied it.

Then everything was quiet. A little too quiet.

“Hello?” she said, and could hear the sound through her body, but not through her ears. She realized that the shots had temporarily deafened her. Her ears hurt slightly.

“Turing, call the police,” she said, though if KingFischer was right, maybe Turing wasn’t listening. Maybe no one was listening.

Nameless wasn’t moving. She stepped closer—she didn’t want to get closer to him, but she wanted to see the computer. And the gun. Yes, it was a real gun.

Did she hear sirens in the distance, or was it the ringing in her ears?

She looked at the robot. Yes; definitely the robot. She not only recognized it, but flexed her hand at a sudden, vivid sense memory of how some of the parts had felt in her hand while they were building it. But parts were missing. The camera that was Turing’s eyes. The microphones that were her ears. Turing would be blind and deaf in that computer.

But not helpless. Maude could see the cable that connected it to the Internet. “Attack on Turing originates from IP address there,” KingFischer had said. If it was King-

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Fischer. What were the odds that someone else had her phone number, and knew enough to fake that message?

No way to tell.

She was definitely hearing sirens. And not that far away.

Her hands fumbled as she reached behind the computer to unplug the cable.

Then she searched the office to make sure there weren’t any other computers running.

By the time she had finished, the sirens were outside, and she could hear footsteps coming up the stairs.

She unfastened the tiny microphone attached to her collar, took the small receiver out of her ear, and dropped both in Tim’s moribund pothos plant. She leaned against the wall, trying to hold her hands above her head, and not quite managing. They suddenly felt so limp. She held them away from her body, where they could be seen, and called out as the footsteps came nearer:

“Be careful! I just shot an armed burglar! I don’t know if he’s alive or dead.”

Although if I had to put money on it, I’d pick dead, she thought as two police officers burst through the door. The one who went cautiously over to check on Nameless seemed to agree. Maude was perversely pleased at how brusquely the other one ordered her to hit the floor and put her hands behind her head. Good, she thought. I just killed a man; I don’t want to be treated like a harmless middle-aged lady.

“Maude?”

She looked up. Standing in the doorway was Dan, Arnold Burns’s taciturn friend. His windbreaker was open, revealing

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an FBI T-shirt, and from the bulky look of it, he had some kind of body armor underneath.

“It’s him, sir,” one cop said.

Dan walked in, glancing over briefly at Nameless, and stood over Maude.

“Ms. Graham, you have a lot of explaining to do,” he said.

Tim glanced from El Lobo to the kids- The

kids were bright-eyed, excited. They probably thought this was just part of the game.

Tim didn’t think El Lobo was playing. And El Lobo now had Tim’s gun as well as his own.

“Pick up the zapper,” El Lobo said.

“The what?” Tim asked.

“Not you, stupid,” El Lobo said. “Pick it up, jimmy.” One kid reached down and picked up the strange device lying at his feet.

“Okay, now it’s your turn,” El Lobo said to Tim. “Give him the zapper, Jimmy. And then stand over there by him.”

Jimmy walked over and handed the device to Tim. Okay, not a weapon, Tim thought, or he wouldn’t give it to me.

“Okay, how do I work this?” El Lobo said. “I don’t suppose I could convince you to use that thing, could I?”

Tim looked at the object in his hand.

“What does it do?” he asked.

“It’s an electromagnetic pulse generator,” El Lobo said. “You point it at something like a computer, and it’s supposed to zap all the data.”

“Why would you want to do that?” Tim asked.

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“Why not?” El Lobo said with an incongruous giggle. “This is where they keep all the dossiers, man. If we zap all the data in these machines, they’ve got no record of us, and we’re home free. Do it.”

Turing’s in one of these, Tim thought. There must be a couple hundred of them; if I just knew which one she was in, I could maybe talk him into zapping some of the others. But I haven’t a clue.

“Listen, you’ve got the wrong place,” Tim said. “This isn’t some secret police headquarters—it’s the Universal Library, for heaven’s sake. They don’t keep dossiers in there; it’s just books.”

“I’m talking about the game, stupid,” El Lobo said, stamping his foot with impatience. “Zapping this stuff is my game objective. And who cares what all this crap is in real life. Just a bunch of books, right? They’re a big corporation; they’ve probably got a ton of insurance.”

“No,” Tim said, backing up slightly. “I won’t let you.”

“Oh, you’re no fun,” El Lobo said. “Oh, well. The zapper’s got your fingerprints on it now, anyway. And Jimmy will do it, won’t you?”

The kid nodded eagerly.

“And then I can shoot Jimmy with your gun and make it look like you tried to stop him, only a bit too late.”

Jimmy didn’t seem so pleased with that idea.

“And then I shoot you with this gun, and put it in Jimmy’s hand, and that takes care of both of you.”

The second larper made some small noise at that. Stupid thing to do. El Lobo focused on him again.

“Stand over there with the others,” he ordered.

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The terrified kid obeyed.

“Look, you’ve won the game,” Tim said. “I’ll vouch for that; just tell me who to tell and I’ll do it. You’ve had plenty of time to do it; you don’t have to actually do anything for real—”

“Oh, shut up,” El Lobo said. “Obviously the big guy wanted this place knocked out—that’s why he made it a game objective. So I’m not going to score any points with him if I don’t actually do something.”

The kids, Tim noticed, had inched slightly behind him. Jimmy had grabbed the tail of Tim’s shirt, apparently for comfort. Great, Tim thought. I’m a walking security blanket.

“But it’s just a game,” Tim said. “It’s just pixels on a screen and data in a file.”

El Lobo shrugged.

“What makes you think you’re anything more than that to me?” he said. “Pixels on my eyeballs and data in my brain. For all I know, I could just be imagining that you’re standing here talking to me.”