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 looked through the windshield as Schwarz turned wordlessly in his swivel seat. Halfway down the block sat a brown delivery van with a popular company’s yellow logo painted on the back door. Lyons looked at the license plates. “They forgot to forge plates with the proper business coding on them. That vehicle’s only got stickers for nonperishable food delivery, not air freight.”
Blancanales shook his head. “You with the electronics, and him with the memorizing every possible type of license plate. Are you two attempting to make me feel like a fifth wheel here?”
Lyons winked. “Nothing could match your seven hundred years of experience, Methuselah.”
“We hadn’t run the plates yet,” Blancanales said, steering the conversation away from the fact that he was the oldest man in the van and on the team. “We simply tracked down the signal and I realized that there was no one on this street that had received a delivery, and no one had left that truck.”
Lyons looked along the sidewalks. “I might just make detectives out of you two jungle fighters yet.”
Schwarz sighed. “Detectives. That’s why God and Al Gore invented the Internets, Ironman. To make actual gumshoe work obsolete.”
Blancanales regarded Lyons. “Not going to tear the doors off of their van?”
“I want to see if they make a pickup instead of a delivery,” Lyons replied. “Gadgets, you have a camera focused on the undercarriage of that truck, right?”
Schwarz looked back at Lyons, sincerely offended this time by the implication that he wouldn’t have done what his leader had suggested. “You trust me to plant a bomb in a microcomputer in the space of fifteen seconds before thieves can run off with it, but when I’m sitting right behind a suspicious enemy vehicle, you doubt that I’ve already been recording it for the time it took for the CSI team to run all their fingerprints and blood-spray patterns?”
Schwarz flicked on a monitor attached to the dashboard before Lyons could answer. A high-quality view of the underside of the van was visible. “The monitor would have turned on because I have a sensor in the camera set up to activate at the first motion.”
Lyons patted Schwarz on the shoulder. “You just earned the weekends of the Consumer Electronics Show and the Electronic Entertainment Expo free. Barring end-of-the world crises.”
“Yay,” Schwarz droned, trying to seem unexcited, but Lyons knew exactly the kind of electronic geekery that went on for those two weekends. The monitor flickered, indicating a change in the ground-level camera view. “Okay, something just moved a storm grating in the shadow of the curb.”
Lyons squinted at the ten-inch monitor. “Come on, you son of a bitch, show yourself.”
The metal grille tottered, then flopped over. A bulbous, silvery head emerged from under the sidewalk. As Schwarz muttered