‘I hope so. Rebhorn found three partially assembled nuclear devices at that facility. If they abandoned those in place, it’s likely that Tom was telling me the truth when he said that they took a suitcase nuke with them when they fled through the mirror. If we don’t catch them, Bruce, they’ll change history. Strictly speaking, they may have already done it.’
Stone was jittery and exhausted. When he lifted his cup of coffee, the disk of black liquid inside it shivered and shook.
‘Let me bring you up to speed on what’s been happening here,’ Bruce said. He was sitting in the leather chair behind his desk, his back straight, his hands folded on the blotter in front of him, the creases in his uniform sharp enough to draw blood. ‘Most of the people we arrested at the facility on this side of the mirror aren’t talking, but we managed to convince a few of the smarter ones that they wouldn’t have to face the most serious charges if they made statements right away. We’ve heard a lot about the time key, but no one seems to know anything about the operational side. It seems to have been rigorously compartmented. Research here in White Sands; black ops run from the facility in the wild sheaf.’
‘How about Victor Moore?’
‘We have his wife. She told us he left home in the early hours of this morning, and she isn’t saying anything else. We’re trying to bargain a plea, but our lawyers think we have a pretty weak case because we can’t prove that she had anything to do with this. We’re examining the documents we rescued from the facility, and the documentation you took from Dr Barrie. And although most of the people we arrested seem to be pretty low in the pyramidal organisation of this thing, it’s possible that they’ll lead us to bigger fish. The DCI’s office is sending teams to continue the interrogation process, and to investigate every square inch of GYPSY’s facilities. They’ll want to talk to you, too.’
‘We don’t have time for that, Bruce.’
‘I’m sorry, Adam. It’s out of my hands.’
‘There is something you could do for me. One more big favour, my last. You remember what I told you about Susan Nichols? What happened to her - what might happen? She and her son have to be moved from her farm in the First Foot sheaf and placed in a safe house in the Real. I can’t do it myself because I have to do this thing with Tom—’
‘I wish I could help,’ Bruce said. ‘I really do. But the DCI’s office is in charge now, and I can’t do anything without talking to them first. I do know that they’re taking this extremely seriously, Adam. I’m sure your friend and her son will be looked after.’
‘The guy in charge. It’s Ralph Kohler, isn’t it?’
‘You know him?’
‘Yeah. I met him a few days ago, two weeks in the future . . .’
Bruce studied Stone, then said, ‘I think you need to get some rest, Adam. You’re going to need your wits about you when you talk to his people.’
9
Bruce Ellis’s aide escorted Stone to a bleak little room in the unmarried officers’ quarters. He stretched out on the narrow bed, convinced that he wouldn’t sleep, and woke six hours later. He was still tired, but his thoughts were moving more easily now.
He used the phone beside the bed to call Bruce’s office, hoping to get an update. The man who answered told him that the general was away from his desk, and that two men from the DCI’s team wanted to talk to him.
‘I guess they know where to find me,’ Stone said.
He did several sets of crunches and sit-ups. There was still some stiffness in his left leg, but the exercise eased it. He took a shower, and was eating a hot meal in the mess when the two Company officers found him.
They interviewed him in his room. One of the officers was tall and pale and not much older than Linda Waverly; the other had a cool, hooded stare and a Brooklyn accent that could score glass. Stone told them at the outset that he wanted protection for Susan Nichols and her son, and they assured him that measures had already been taken.
The officer from Brooklyn, Bradley Cramer, said, ‘We’ve locked down the Turing gate to the First Foot sheaf. No one can get in or out without passing through two layers of security.’
His partner, Preston Echols, said, ‘We have people watching the New Amsterdam ferry too.’
‘For all you know, some of the officers on the security detail could be part of GYPSY,’ Stone said. ‘And the people behind GYPSY definitely know I’m involved in this - one of them recognised me after I took him down at the El Dorado Motel. It puts my friend and her son in immediate danger. You should move them out of First Foot and put them in a safe house.’
‘I agree we don’t yet know how many people are involved in this thing,’ Cramer said. ‘We’ve discovered links to cells in every part of the Company, and we’re still tracing contacts, trying to work around cutouts and other precautions. Those names you and Waverly gave us are a big help in that respect. So far none of them are talking, but we think that the ex-Marine, Buddy Altman, is close to telling us what he knows. We’ll bring this whole thing down, I guarantee it. Meanwhile, we have army units stationed either side of the First Foot gate in addition to our own guys. Every train that goes through is checked out top to bottom. The same goes for the ferry.’
Echols said, ‘Even if we took Mrs Nichols and her son to a protected facility, it’s possible that some sleeper will get to them. They’ll be safer where they are, Mr Stone. And so are you - or rather, so is the earlier version of your good self.’
Stone said, ‘Does he know about this?’
Thinking about this other version of himself, two weeks younger but otherwise identical, made Stone feel like a ghost haunting his own life.
‘He knows that there’s a situation, but he doesn’t know about you,’ Cramer said. ‘And neither he nor Mrs Nichols wants to move out.’
Stone smiled a little. ‘I don’t suppose they do.’
‘We’ll look after Mrs Nichols and her son,’ Echols said. ‘And we will be taking very good care of the doppels of Dr Barrie, too.’
Cramer said, ‘We’re going to do our level best to make sure that this loop or circle of whatever it is doesn’t swallow its own tail. For that, we need your help.’
‘To begin with, we need to know everything you know,’ Echols said, and opened his briefcase and took out a small video camera and a folding tripod.
‘I’ve already made a deposition,’ Stone said.
‘Then you won’t mind making another,’ Cramer said. ‘You can start at the beginning, and take it from there.’
It took three hours to get through the entire story. Stone bottled up his impatience and anxiety and answered every one of the two officers’ many questions and requests for clarification. At the end, he spoke straight to the camera. ‘Colonel Rebhorn found three nuclear devices at the facility. I believe that the people in charge of GYPSY escaped through one of the Turing gates and took with them a fourth, functional device. I believe that they intend to use it, and I believe that Tom Waverly knows when and where. I am willing to go with him and do whatever is necessary to stop them.’
‘Duly noted,’ Cramer said, and Echols switched off the camera.
Stone said, ‘Where will that go?’
‘We report directly to the DCI,’ Cramer said.
‘Promise me he’ll see that last part.’
‘He already knows about it,’ Cramer said. ‘That’s why we’re here. You rest up now. Take it easy. You can bet we’ll be wanting to talk to you again very soon.’
Although Stone wasn’t under arrest, he couldn’t leave the compound, and was dogged by two large men in black suits everywhere he went. An army doctor treated the fading bruises and minor burns inflicted by Walter Lipscombe’s goons. He was interviewed by a Company psychiatrist, and briefed four frighteningly young civilian advisers who planned to use game theory to predict GYPSY’s next move. He ran laps around the track in one corner of the compound. He had dinner with Bruce Ellis in the officers’ mess and they talked about everything but Tom Waverly and Operation GYPSY, and did their best to ignore Stone’s bodyguards at the next table. At last, two days after the assault on GYPSY’s clandestine facility, Cramer and Echols paid him another visit.
‘Tom Waverly wants us to help him get his daughter back,’ Echols said.
‘The cocky son of a bitch knows we have to go along with his goddamned story about a suitcase nuke,’ Cramer said.
They were on the running track. Stone, in a khaki T-shirt, khaki shorts and running shoes, was blotting sweat from his face with a towel.
‘We’d like to investigate it thoroughly before we decide what to do,’ Echols said. ‘Unfortunately, there’s a time factor.’
Stone felt a chill at the back of his neck. ‘He’s dying, isn’t he?’
Echols nodded. ‘He received a bad dose of radiation when he secured the nuclear reactor.’
‘How long has he got?’
‘At the moment, he’s recovering from severe bouts of nausea and diarrhoea,’ Echols said. ‘Once he’s over that, he’ll appear to be quite healthy for a few days. But then he’ll begin to experience bleeding of his gums and his intestinal lining. His teeth will loosen in their sockets, his hair will start to fall out, and his skin will bruise as his blood vessels began to degenerate. He’ll lose his appetite, and then his motor control. He’ll suffer uncontrollable internal bleeding—’
‘
How long?
’
‘Maybe a week, maybe two,’ Cramer said. ‘Three at the outside.’
‘It sounds about right,’ Stone said. ‘It took him fifteen days to kill six of Eileen Barrie’s doppels.’
‘It must get confusing,’ Echols said, ‘waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with what you already know.’
‘I don’t know everything. Things aren’t exactly the same this time around. But I do know that we can’t afford to sit on our hands and hope it will come out right. My offer to help still stands, gentlemen. I hope that’s why you’re here.’
Stone had spent the last two days working out angles in his head. He was determined to do everything he could to make sure that the loop didn’t close.
‘You have to understand that we’re the tip of the iceberg,’ Cramer said. ‘Everyone is going balls-out on this thing. We have a team that’s trying to reconstruct half a ton of shredded documents. Another team is trying to retrieve data from smashed computers. We even have people down at Lompac trying to question Knightly. The guy is the next best thing to a vegetable, no way he had anything to do with GYPSY after his stroke, but he was in at the beginning and there’s a faint chance he’ll tell us something useful.’
‘A committee of experts chaired by Richard Feynman is trying to work out the implications of Waverly’s story about time travel and changing history,’ Echols said. ‘Feynman won the Nobel prize for physics. If anyone can make sense of this, he can.’
‘But Tom knows you won’t be able to find where that suitcase nuke went without his help,’ Stone said.
‘We did try to interview him while he was under the influence of truth drugs,’ Cramer said. ‘It didn’t go anywhere useful.’
‘We were trained to resist interrogation,’ Stone said. ‘And in any case Tom knows that he’s dying. He knows that he has nothing to lose.’
Cramer nodded. ‘Bottom line, the clock’s ticking. Waverly’s got us, and he knows it.’
‘He said that there would be no discussion about or variation of his terms,’ Echols said. ‘He was very calm about it, laid it right out and sat back and let us think about it.’
‘He wants to use the time key to chase after the people who have kidnapped his daughter,’ Cramer said. ‘I’ll say this for him, the guy has big balls.’
Echols said, ‘He doesn’t have long left, and we can’t wait for the scientists to get around to building a Turing gate that can do this trick with time. We have to go now. And we wouldn’t ask this if we hadn’t exhausted every other option.’
Cramer said, ‘What my partner means, Mr Stone, is we’re going to accept your offer to help.’
10
Tom Waverly sat at a metal table in a brightly lit interrogation room, bare-legged in a green gown. A plastic sack of clear fluid hung on a steel pole beside him, connected by a line to his left forearm.
Stone watched from the other side of the room’s mirrored window as Cramer and Echols told Tom that they were willing to let him go after the people who had kidnapped his daughter, but only if he would tell them now where the bad guys were hiding.
Tom considered this, taking his own sweet time, grandstanding in front of the two weary interrogators. At last he said, ‘Take me to Brookhaven. Then we can talk some more.’
He smiled at the mirrored window: smiled straight at Stone.
11
They flew to New York in an executive jet. Tom Waverly was secured in the bedroom at the rear with three doctors working to stabilise his condition with a cocktail of drugs and a whole-blood transfusion; Stone sat in the lounge area with Cramer, Echols, and the four young civilian advisers. Once the plane was in the air, Echols handed Stone his palmtop and played a video clip from the interrogation of one of the technicians who had been arrested at GYPSY’s White Sands facility.
Stone watched the little screen as the man talked about time travellers. ‘That’s more or less what Eileen Barrie told me,’ he said.
‘There’s more,’ Echols said. He took the palmtop from Stone and jumped to another video clip and handed the palmtop back.
‘. . . didn’t know that the device was self-aware at first,’ the technician said.
He was a small man in a loose-fitting orange jumpsuit, his face and bald scalp as pink as a boiled shrimp. His hands shook when he extracted a cigarette out of the packet on the table in front of him, and he flinched when one of the interrogators leaned across the table and snapped a flame from a lighter.
‘We found out when we were doing lab tests,’ he said. ‘We started out by sending clocks a little way back in time. We used clocks because they showed the time when they were sent through. A clock would pop out of the mirror, an exact duplicate of one of the clocks we had in the laboratory. We’d note the time it arrived and the time it displayed, which gave us the time it had been sent through, and then we’d wait until that exact second, and send the original clock back. Completing the loop, you understand? One day, all kinds of objects started popping through, and we had to scramble and find out where they came from, so we could send the originals back. It was like playing hide-and-seek with the future. And then we got more ambitious. We started doing experiments that could split the sheaf in two. By, for instance, receiving an object from the future, but refusing to send it back to the past.’