Down: Trilogy Box Set (69 page)

“What are your names?” Ben asked, as they were led up the loading dock stairs.

One of the men strained at his plastic restraints but didn’t answer.

“Do you speak English?”

The man spit at him and said, “Sod off. What’s ’appened to us?”

“Put spit masks on them and take them down the corridor to the intake personnel,” Ben said to his men. “I’ll deal with them later. Much later.”

Once they were cleared by medical and fed, Ben had Rix and Murphy brought into an interview room. In an adjoining room his officers were set up to monitor the proceedings, do research on the fly, and communicate with Ben via an earpiece. The men wore freshly pressed jumpsuits and slippers.

“No need for restraints,” Ben said to the agent who led them in.

The prisoners sat and rubbed their unbound wrists.

“First things first,” Rix said. “Explain to us how this happened.”

Ben smiled. “It’s true then.”

“What is?”

“That you were police officers. You’re trying to control the interview.”

“But you’re not going to let us, are you?”

“I’ll be happy to engage in some give and take, so let me try to answer your questions. Then I’d like you to answer mine.”

He told them about the MAAC and provided his own simplified version of how a channel might have opened between their two worlds. Both men listened attentively and when he was done Ben asked if they were satisfied.

“When I was alive,” Rix said, “I had no interest in Heaven or Hell or anything other than the here and now. I was mightily shocked when I wound up in Hell but I got used to it. I suppose I’ll get used to being back on Earth.”

“All right,” Ben said. “May I please have your full names?”

Murphy raised his hand. “’Scuse me. My mate got to ask his one burning question. What about me?”

“Fair enough,” Ben sighed. “Go ahead.”

“Do we get to stay?”

“There’s no easy answer to that. Our aim will be to send you back in one month’s time but our ability to make that happen is uncertain. Now, your full names, dates of birth, and dates of death, if you please.”

Rix went first: Jason Rix, born 8 January 1949, died 25 October 1984.

Then Murphy: Colin Murphy, born 16 June 1941, died 25 October 1984.

Ben’s eyes narrowed. “You died on the same day?”

“Isn’t that what best mates do?” Murphy said.

“Do?”

“Kick the bucket simultaneous like.”

In his earpiece Ben heard, “That’s confirmed. A Colin Murphy and a Jason Rix both died on that date in Romford. Accessing police databases.”

“Were you both police officers at the time of your deaths?” Ben asked.

Rix replied, “We were. We were both with the Met. We were detectives.”

“Ranks?”

“I was a DI,” Rix said. “He was a Detective Sergeant.”

“He had the rank but I had the looks,” Murphy added.

“And what station were you working from? Romford?”

“Brick Lane,” Rix said.

“Were you on the job at the time of your deaths?”

Murphy laughed. “We might have been on the clock but we were hardly on the job, if you know what I mean?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

Murphy leaned forward. “We were bent, weren’t we?”

“I see,” Ben said. “Illegal activities while on duty.”

“You got it, sunshine,” Murphy said.

Ben made a show of jotting notes while he received a blast of data in his ear.

A minute passed. He looked up at them then began reading from his pad. It was clear he was laboring to remain impassive. “On twenty-two October, 1984 you kidnapped one Jessica Stevenson, aged six, from her family home in Knightsbridge. You held her for ransom. You may have been unaware she had a medical condition. She died in your custody. On the night of 25 October both of you were found in a car in a lay-by in Romford, shot dead, along with your wives, Christine Rix and Molly Murphy. An accomplice of yours, one Lucas Hathaway, was later that same night killed in a shootout with armed police. It was established that his gun was the weapon used in your murders.”

Rix had already noticed that Ben was wearing an earpiece. “In our day it would have taken someone a fair old while to come up with all that information. You’ve got someone in your ear who’s done it in seconds. How’s that possible?”

“Never mind about that. Is it correct?” Ben asked.

“Yeah. It’s correct.”

“Earlier, when you materialized inside the house in South Ockendon, you asked if we had your wives, Christine and Molly?”

“Well, do you?” Murphy asked.

“We do not. But we believe they are here.”

Rix rose from his chair and Ben had to demand he sit back down.

“Where are they?”

“I asked you to please sit down.” When he complied Ben continued, “We don’t know where they are. We think five men who came here with them are holding them against their will. It’s possible they are making their way to Nottingham.”

“What men?” Rix asked, his fists clenching and unclenching.

“I believe you call them rovers.”

Murphy and Rix exchanged glances. “How do you know about rovers?” Rix asked.

“This passage between our dimensions—it’s happened before. Some of your lot have come here. Some of our people have gone back and forth. We’ve had debriefings.”

“If you’ve got rovers here, you’re in for a world of hurt,” Murphy said.

“So I understand.”

“Tell me why you think they’ve gone to Nottingham,” Rix asked.

“We captured one of them, a man named Mitchum. Do you know him?”

“We don’t know those scum by name,” Murphy said.

“I believe you do know one of them by name. Lucas Hathaway.”

Giles Farmer’s bedsit in Lewisham was too small to swing a cat. From his bed he could touch his chair and from his chair he could touch the fridge. Sponsored ads on his
Bad Collisions
website and odd editing jobs for technical journals paid his rent and broadband service and kept him in Ramen noodles, but not much more. His career, if one could glamorize what he did with that label, had begun shortly after dropping out of Leeds University where he had been a restless student at the School of Physics and Astronomy.

Anthony Trotter’s operatives at MI6, who had purposely strayed onto the domestic turf reserved for MI5, had been acquiring a dossier on Farmer. His tutors at Leeds had a somewhat different version about his leaving than his. On the biography section of his blog he wrote about his unconventional mind, his quest for “big answers to big questions.” His tutors spoke of a highly irritating young man given to conspiracy theories who regularly disrupted lectures with absurd and off-the-mark comments. Though bright enough to complete his course, they strongly encouraged him to take time off to collect himself.

The year he found himself cut loose was the year the MAAC was scheduled for completion and commissioning. He threw himself into the blogosphere, taking up the cudgel of skeptics who saw a path fraught with waste and peril, and when the inaugural collider start-up was marred by an electrical fault causing a magnet quench and a helium explosion and fire, he had his platform. He spent two years railing against the huge cost of replacing the damaged superconducting magnets and warning of existential dangers to the planet should the project continue.

Farmer wasn’t much of a drinker but the night before he had drunk four pints at a pub in Brixton where he had met his mate, Lenny Moore, who enjoyed his gadfly rants. And Lenny, gainfully employed, had been buying. This morning his head was thumping and while the kettle went on the boil he checked his email and Twitter. As soon as he was caffeinated enough he planned to finish the post he had been composing for a week.

It was the big one, the one he had been building toward for over a month when he began to notice telltale signs of weekly MAAC restarts registering on the power grid following the one publicly announced startup. To his mind he was nearing the critical mass of data accumulation that would force the government to come clean. He went searching for his bottle of aspirin to quiet his headache.

His laptop was on the small table by his chair and as he reached for it, he made his hand stop in midair. Farmer was particular in his habits. Although the bedsit was tiny and not scrupulously clean, it was meticulously tidy and organized. By habit, after using it, he always left the computer pinned to the far left corner of his tray-top table.

But now the laptop was a quarter-inch from the left side.

He stared at the machine for a few seconds then picked it up, shook off his sense of unease, and began to work. He scanned his work-in-progress, flitting from paragraph to paragraph. It went further than his previous posts, much further. After reminding his readers of the theoretical hazards of high-energy supercolliders that included the formation of microscopic black holes and strangelet production, he had laid out the sequence of recent unusual activities at the MAAC. The security breach for which a suspect allegedly had never been apprehended. The successive weekly power dips affecting the London grid, all compatible with MAAC firings that had never been acknowledged. The “bioterror” incident at South Ockendon that was subject to a severe information blackout. The lack of availability of Dr. Emily Loughty, a scientist who had been willing in the past to speak with him. The unwillingness of Dr. Loughty’s father to be forthcoming. And now, the smoking gun, as he saw it. Amidst another London power grid dip, Farmer had turned on the police scanner app on his phone and heard a curious exchange between dispatchers and Buckinghamshire police units, directing them to respond to intruders at the Iver North waterworks, only to be waved off and informed that “other agencies” were responding.

Farmer began to type where he had left off the day before.

What, you may ask do an estate in South Ockendon, the Iver North Water Treatment Works, and the MAAC laboratory in Dartford have in common? I’ll tell you: all three are located directly above supermagnet components of the MAAC and all three have now been the scene of “intruders.” Would you know what I think, dear readers? I think that…

His screen froze.

He couldn’t move the cursor with his track pad and none of the usual maneuvers could unfreeze it.

“Bugger, bugger, bugger,” he muttered before re-booting.

The computer failed to properly reboot, landing him on a blank blue screen, not once or twice, but three times.

Alarmed he stood and began searching around the room for anything to corroborate his earlier observation about the out-of-position laptop.

“Are you fuckers watching me?” he said out loud. “Well are you?”

He whipped out his mobile phone and got a friend, Laurence, on the speaker.

“Laurence, Giles here. Listen I think I’m being hacked or watched or both. By whom? By them, of course. Listen, I need you to just stay on the line while I use my mobile as a signal detector. Yeah, just be quiet until I come back on the line.”

He began systematically moving the phone around his tiny flat, listening for telltale clicks produced by the electromagnetic interference of a bugging device. Other than his friend’s breathing, the phone was quiet until he passed it in front of the ventilation hood over the cooker.

Click, click.

He slowed down and repeated the maneuver and reproduced the clicking with each pass.

“Laurence, I’ve got to ring you back. Actually, I won’t be ringing you back. They’ll have your number now. If I go missing, go to
The Guardian
with the stuff we talked about. They’ll be the most sympathetic.”

Six miles away, an operative at MI6 working on an upper floor of the Albert Embankment, watched and listened on a monitor while Farmer unscrewed the vent cover and cursed the camera when he found it. When the bug went dead, the officer picked up a phone and rang upstairs.

“Sir, this is Evans in Special Surveillance. We’ve got a situation with Giles Farmer.”

“What kind of situation?” Trotter asked.

“Farmer has found and neutralized our device in his flat.”

“That’s not very good, is it?”

“No sir. Fortunately, we wiped his blog before he could post an incriminating entry. I’ve just sent you a screen grab.”

Trotter read it and grunted. “Well, keep following his telephone traffic and keep eyes on him.”

“We don’t have eyes on him, sir.”

“Why the hell not?”

“The lawyers were concerned about using physical assets on a domestic target.”

“Bugger the lawyers!” Trotter shouted. “This is a matter of high national threat and we’re listening to the lawyers? You get eyes on him immediately and leave the bloody lawyers to me.”

Farmer pocketed the tiny camera, took his wallet and keys and left his mobile phone behind. Ten minutes later he was catching his breath, his head buried in a newspaper, on a train from Lewisham to Charing Cross station. He looked up furtively every so often, wondering if any of his fellow passengers were onto him and if his life would ever return to normal.

Hathaway steered the Hyundai through the dark and largely deserted streets of Nottingham, trying to square his memory of the roads and architecture with what he was seeing.

“The streets are all mucked up,” he mumbled.

“Easier for you, I reckon, than for me,” Talley said, waking from another brief nap. “This whole land is mucked up. Makes my head spin.”

“Would do,” Hathaway said. “I’m foxed by thirty years of change. You’ve got three hundred years to square with.”

“All these infernal machines and high buildings,” Talley said, “I can’t get on with it.” He was about to perform a characteristic spit to mark his displeasure but remembered the car window.

“You saying you’d rather go back?”

Talley rubbed at his eyes. “No, I think I’ll give this a go. Good grub, good molls. We almost arrived?”

“If I can find it.”

“Who’s the fellow?”

“My brother, Harold. If he’s still about he’d be in his sixties.”

“Likely to be any molls about?”

Hathaway didn’t answer.

He eventually found his way to Sneinton, the neighborhood where he had grown up and where his parents were living at the time of his death. If he knew Harold, the shiftless, school-leaver he was, odds were he’d be right where the acorn fell, in the same house, on the same road, in the same neighborhood.