The Messiah Choice

2. JIGSAW

The entire beach area had been covered with a huge patchwork of tarpaulins so that it resembled a sports stadium field being protected from the rain, though it was in bright sunshine.

Security officers stood at all access points to the beach area, extending from the trail above all the way to the point at which the body had struck the sands. The body itself had been photographed and then removed, but all else was as undisturbed as it could be considering the circumstances.

Two men walked down the beach from town: one a short, burly man built like a barrel with flaming red hair and an unkempt beard to match, the other tall, athletically built, with a long, lean, angular face and sharp nose. His long hair was turning a premature dark gray.

“Lucky you were so close and could get here on short notice,” commented Constable Julius “Red” Mathias, the shorter and older of the two men. “I mean, this is the cushiest job in law enforcement up to now—nothing to enforce and plenty of tropical breezes and really good pay to boot—but this thing would drive anybody nuts.” Mathias had a pronounced Midlands accent tempered only a bit by being away from Britain so long.

Gregory MacDonald chuckled sourly. “Luck had something to do with it all right, Red, but it was all bad and all mine.”

“Ain’t as unlucky as Sir Robert, you might note,” the other quipped, sticking an unlit, half-smoked cigar in his mouth.

MacDonald noted it. “Thought you were going to quit those.”

“Y’don’t see me smokin’, now do you? Call it me pacifier.”

They reached the scene and MacDonald was impressed. “Have ’em roll it back a ways, Red,” he instructed. “I want to take a look at what we’re really dealing with here.”

Red gave a sour laugh and spat. “Oh, this is a winner. A classic, lad. The sort of thing that makes up all at once for a century or two of crime-free living here.”

At the constable’s order, the crew began to slowly but professionally roll up the tarps one at a time, exposing the death scene first.

“Where’d you get all these people, Red?”

“Oh, they’s mostly security staff from the Institute. The place is crawlin’ with ’em, so why not use ’em? The others doin’ the heavy work are mostly men from the town. Those security fellows fought like hell my bringin’ in the others, but when you see what we got you’ll understand why I didn’t feel right just leavin’ this all to the Institute boys.”

It didn’t take long to see what the old cop meant. One look at the tracks with their great stride told anyone that either this was the most elaborate hoax in criminal history or something was loose on the tiny island that couldn’t possibly be hidden.

“You made casts of the footprints?”

Red nodded. “Yeah. Wait’ll you see ’em, Gregory my boy. If that thing’s for real, I for one sure as hell don’t want to meet it.”

In spite of the sand and the disruptions and, of course, the weight of the tarp, it was clear from just looking at the things that the old boy was right. MacDonald got out his tape measure and discovered that the damned things were more than two feet long. He measured the stride, not once but at almost every point back to the cliff and found them very consistent. Whoever or whatever did this was very thorough.

Equally revealing was the impression it had made jumping from the top of the trail to the beach below. MacDonald examined it all and then stood up and shook his head. “Whatever it is, I’d put it at somewhere around fifteen feet tall and weighing maybe two or three tons. How the hell does it stand upright without a tail or some other counterbalance? There weren’t any drag marks around, were there. Red?”

“Nope. What you see, allowin’ for the necessaries, is what you got. Other than Sir Robert’s own footprints goin’ first to the beach and then to the water over there, and the footprints of the pair that found it all, there was nothin’ whatever on the beach but what you see. Of course, there’s a lot of prints now, but they was to lay the tarp and photograph the scene, and it’s pretty consistent.”

“And one way,” MacDonald noted. “This monster—how did it leave? The tracks are clear from here, then they go almost to the water’s edge, walk along it for a bit—I assume that area of no prints is a high tide mark—and then… what? Sir Robert gets into the water, the thing doesn’t enter but tracks him, and then suddenly it gets Sir Robert and flings him a good ten feet inward of the breakers. So we assume that Sir Robert wasn’t far enough out, or somehow came in to where this thing could reach, and it plucked him out.”

“You’re soundin’ as if you think it was a real creature.”

“For now we’ll stick with it, but that leaves me with a real problem. Okay, so the thing gets its claws on Sir Robert, lifts him up, does him in, and drops him on the beach. Now what does it do?”

“Huh? Um, yeah, I see what y’mean. No return footprints.”

“It doesn’t fly away—some of the prehistoric monsters bigger than that could do it, but they’d take a mile of runway at the minimum and really mess up the beach. If somebody hoisted it out, in broad daylight, such a ship or derrick large enough would be seen by the town or by the whole damn island and sure as hell couldn’t be broken down in—what was the gap?”

“No more’n two hours between death and discovery, or so Doc says.”

The younger man nodded. “All right, then. So the only place it might go is into the water—its stride and the high tide might mask that. But if it could stomach the water, then why didn’t it just wade in after Sir Robert? Why play cat and mouse and then wait to hoist him inland?”

“Maybe it’s perverse. Cats like to play with mice and rats a long time before they kill ’em. Who knows what somethin’ like this’d be like?”

MacDonald sighed. “I wish I could have seen the body as it was, but I’ll look at the pictures. Never as good as the real thing, but it’ll have to do.”

“Couldn’t be helped, lad. What would y’have me do? Leave Sir Robert there? I mean, it’s one thing if it’d been some janitor, but this was the boss!”

“I understand. You did what you could. The two that found the body—no chance of complicity in the affair?”

“I’d doubt it. Low-level clerks workin’ in the supply system in town, not even Institute folks. Comin’ out here on a slow day to enjoy a few hours beach time on the boss and maybe a little nookie. Besides, their only prints, to and from, cross a high tide mark after the high tide, so they couldn’t have been here until at least ten thirty, and that’s too late.”

“Just checking. Anybody who notices something like that doesn’t need me, though. You’re a good cop, Mathias.” They stopped at the base of the cliff trail. “Okay, they find the body, run back into town, fetch you and a few others, and you all come running up the beach and see the scene. Then what?”

“I checked the body and ordered everybody back from the scene. It was some time before I could tell whose body it was for sure, although I knew from the clothes who it had to be. I sent me gal Friday, Sandy, back to ring up the Institute and give ’em a tentative I.D. Warned ’em to come only by the main road and then to the beach, too. They didn’t listen. The whole place up there erupted with security about five minutes later, but I yelled and cussed a blue streak at ’em and threatened to shoot any one of ’em that came down.”

“You don’t carry a gun. Even most of them don’t.”

“Yeah, but in the shock and all they didn’t remember that. Otherwise we’d have had a bloody mess out here instead of a near perfect reconstruction. Those photos, by the way, were done by the Institute but I doubt if there’ll be any funny business with ’em. Took ’em in three dee, so they should be good’n gory. Got top shots of the whole scene, too.”

“Uh huh. But—after you’d gotten all you wanted, did any of them make their own investigation? I didn’t see much sign, although it’s hard to tell around the body site.”

“Nope. Bunch of ’em spouted stuff into their walkie-talkies and the like, but they didn’t even act all too curious. Of course, I was doin’ all the procedures right and they’ll have copies of the photos—probably have sent ’em to everyplace in creation by now.”

Together they walked up the trail to the top, trying to retrace the path of the victim. At the top stood a tall, tanned man in a loud shirt, jeans, and dark sunglasses, a walkie-talkie on his belt. MacDonald recognized him. “Really nice operation you’ve got here, Ross,” the younger man said tauntingly. “You’re so thorough that nothing less than a fifteen foot prehistoric monster could chase and kill the boss in broad daylight without anyone seeing. Real secure.”

Ross didn’t seem pleased. He was an American with a hard New York accent and he looked like a bad tourist loose in the tropics. “All right, can the sarcasm, MacDonald. We were penetrated and we blew it.”

“Penetrated! I’d say you were invaded!”

“Oh, you don’t believe this horse shit about a monster any more than I do and you know it. I don’t know how they did it, but somebody’s drinking vodka toasts right now and laughing at us as we run around looking for sea monsters.” His tone dropped and sounded icy and threatening. “I will know, though. My ass is more on the line than yours.”

MacDonald sighed. “Well, let’s see what you didn’t manage to muck up in your zeal to get here. Want to come along?”

Ross did, and the three of them started back along the trail. “Not my fault we jumped to get here,” the security man said defensively. “Hell, man, we get word of a gruesome death on the beach and some preliminary indication that it’s Sir Robert. You’d have done the same thing in our place and you know it. Beats me why you’re here anyway.”

“I spent several years at homicide back home. You know that. As soon as the identity of the victim was confirmed the boys at headquarters ran everybody in the company with any sort of background like that through the computers and came up with a number. Then they matched them to where they were and my name came up, my being at that time somewhat drunk and disorderly as befits a vacation about three hours flying time from here. I’m not happy with this, either, Ross, but the buck got passed to me and I’m it.” He stopped and examined the foliage hanging overhead. “Anybody in your organization tall enough to break those limbs?”

Ross looked up and saw what the company man meant. The trail had been cut with a hand saw and was kept open the same way with weekly trims, but the area was otherwise overgrown and the trail had been cleared only to a height of eight or nine feet, the reach of the man with the saw. From all the signs, something a lot taller and wider than any man had come through here.

“If there ain’t no monster they sure as hell went all the way,” Red noted.

They reached the junction to the road, but MacDonald followed the signs even though the foliage was thinning and those signs were getting fewer and fewer and walked up towards the glen. The ground was hard there, with much exposed rock, and not well suited to footprints.

The glen, however, was a different story. Although the grass had begun to recover, the huge impressions in the ground of the clearing were still evident, even with a horde of security men running through. The men didn’t weigh two or three tons.

Ross sighed. “There aren’t any prints beyond the altar stone,” he told the other two resignedly. “We checked.”

MacDonald examined the massive stone carefully, checking all the points where it intersected the ground. He hadn’t paid much attention to the place in previous visits, but it was clear that if that stone was hinged or moved in any way it had been covered by experts beyond his ability to expose.

Gregory MacDonald felt quite at ease in what he always thought of as his Sherlock Holmes disguise, but it had been a long time since he’d had any chance to use it on a real crime. In the three years since resigning from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, his powers of deduction had been mostly put to use in testing and designing corporate security plans for the company’s many worldwide enterprises, many of which were security sensitive, and many more of which were exposed to terrorism and other criminal threats beyond the ability of any single nation’s law enforcement or security apparatus to thoroughly safeguard. Sir Robert had always suspected and believed that the best policemen were of the same mentality as the best criminals, simply restrained by moral codes, culture, or nature from working the wrong side of the law.

MacDonald enjoyed his job, but he hadn’t expected to be on or near Allenby again for some time. Although company owned, the island was well defende,d by a multinational professional security force. Red was basically the company cop, a retired desk sergeant who had served with Sir Robert in Korea long ago. He took care of white-collar crimes, such as embezzlement, pilferage, fraud, and the like, having jurisdiction over the twelve hundred men and women on the island who were company employees and performed the mundane tasks that kept the operation going. This was really more up Ross’s alley than Red’s and more in the security force’s jurisdiction, and that fact bothered MacDonald. Why had they so meekly allowed Red to control the entire investigation? That wasn’t like Ross or Jureau, men who loved to be in charge unless they were ordered otherwise.

Clearly Ross was simmering at being essentially second to MacDonald, whom he hadn’t liked since the company man had taken a small team and penetrated all the way to the Lodge almost a year earlier. Clearly, too, there was some resentment that the company thought it necessary to dispatch their own expert to the scene; it suggested that they didn’t trust the security force.

MacDonald didn’t trust them, either, for it was never clear from whom their orders came or even from what branch of whose security forces. He couldn’t help but wonder if their seeming lack of interest in this affair didn’t indicate a more sinister role in all this. He certainly dismissed Ross’s own idea of the culprit or culprits; Sir Robert, caught alone on that beach, would have been far more valuable alive than dead.

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.”