Gladiatrix (11 page)

‘No, I don't think so. Ruttle's been saying the portal is too dangerous for years. That this facility shouldn't be in the middle of the city. But we don't have enough funds to move. We have just enough each year to keep performing the minimum number of missions to keep Congress happy.'

‘But why not take this all to Congress and make a case for a better deal?'

‘It won't work, they're not interested. We're like the Space Program, just a vestige of another time and
other priorities. The next century on, Kennedy's New Frontier doesn't seem so new any more. Now, the politicians don't want to fund us because they're limited in the way they can use us. And the public's jaded. We're old news.' He checked himself. ‘Except for Victoria's mission of course. The politicians, and everyone else, are too interested in that.' He'd emphasised ‘too'.

Hmm. And that could explain why the NTA had let itself be involved in Victoria's mission in the first place. They must be panting to make themselves seem useful.

The waiter arrived with our food. The sight and smell of it replaced my curiosity with something more primal. I needed to eat. And sleep. But at the moment food was the best I was going to get.

‘But tell me something about you, Kannon. How have you survived all this time?'

I talked in between bites, ‘Yuki, the woman who found me, and Des Carmichael, the detective in charge of my case, basically became my family.'

‘What are they like?'

‘Yuki's the strongest person I've ever known. Born in Japan, to a Japanese mother and British father. Very calm, very good. She had to be, to stick with me as she did. And Des, well he just never gave up on my case. When his wife died he moved down south to help Yuki look after me.'

‘What does Yuki think about you coming here?'

I hesitated. He'd stuck his neck out for me so I answered. ‘Yuki died last year. She was killed in a hit-and-run accident in Sydney.' It was a terrible way to lose someone. And the driver had never been found.

‘Hit-and-run. Oh my dear.' He touched my hand. ‘But you're here now.' He didn't say more. We both
knew he couldn't make any promises about outcomes. He changed the subject instead. ‘Kannon? Is that a Japanese name?'

‘Er yes. But an unusual one.'

‘So there's a story behind it?'

‘Ah. Yes.'

He noticed my hesitation. ‘Tell me.' I didn't really want to go into this. He waved a fork loaded with pasta at me. ‘Go on.'

‘Well. I was a mess when I was first found. Couldn't sleep or eat. So the hospital pumped me full of sedatives. Des said I was like a little zombie. When they finally let Yuki take me home, she had to wean me off the drugs. She used to hold me all night. And when I woke up with nightmares she'd tell me stories, sing to me, anything to calm me down.'

I stopped. This was getting a bit too personal for my comfort zone.

‘Go on.' Constan prompted me again.

‘Well. Because Yuki was brought up a Buddhist, when things got really bad she prayed to Kannon, the Japanese Bodhisattva of Compassion.'

‘Bodhi …?'

‘A bodhisattva. An enlightened being who stays on Earth until all souls achieve liberation. “Kannon” literally means “the one who hears all cries for help”. Anyway, in the end I thought my name was Kannon.'

Constan sat in silence. Unsure of how to respond.

‘Constan, do you know anything about the case?' I needed more concrete information, more substance to back my decision to come here. Mertling wouldn't answer my questions, so that left Constan.

‘I know the basics, but nowhere near as much as Mertling.'

‘Well I still don't know how I fit into this whole
picture. I feel I'm right to be here, but I don't know how it all fits together.'

‘I'm sorry. I can't really help you.'

I searched for another angle to try. Another way in. He must know something. Anything that could give me the link to another continent. ‘Mertling said Victoria thinks Celeste is dead. That Celeste died in that fire. Do you know if that's true?'

He was uncomfortable, trying to frame some difficult words.

I knew what he was going to say. ‘So Victoria believes Celeste is dead?'

‘I'm sorry, Kannon.'

‘Why?' I started to sweat a little. If Victoria had truly accepted her daughter was gone she'd have had good reason to think so. ‘Was it the fire? Was she convinced by the witness who saw her daughter's face at the window?'

‘No …' Constan wasn't hard to read. The word had come out tight, but long, as though he was trying to move five sentences ahead of our conversation while he said it. Which meant he was trying to hide something.

I said dryly, ‘So she had other evidence that convinced her. But you don't want to tell me about it.'

That startled him. ‘I can't talk about it. I'm sorry.'

‘Constan, if you know something relevant, I want to know about it.'

He tried to dodge my challenge. ‘Look, Kannon. It's Victoria's story. Her own personal business.'

That tipped me off. ‘She went looking for Celeste after the fire, didn't she? By herself. Who did she go after? The drug dealer? It had to be …'

Constan threw his hands up in surrender. ‘Okay. Okay. I'll tell you. Yes, she went after the man who ordered Cruz's death.'

‘That was his old boss from the Colombian drug cartel, the guy he'd embezzled from.'

‘That's right, Eliecer Uribe. It was his cartel. You may have even heard of him, in those days he was pretty famous for getting rid of judges who disagreed with him.'

‘What about the San Francisco PD? Didn't they go after him too? It seems clear everyone knows he killed Cruz and kidnapped Celeste.'

Constan shook his head. ‘They couldn't. They knew he ordered the payback on Cruz, but there was no direct evidence linking him to either crime. They not only didn't have the killers, they couldn't even identify them. And then, of course, they couldn't do anything even if they did have proof. He couldn't be extradited. Things were pretty dicey back then in Colombia. Half the government was in the pay of the four big cocaine cartels, the Fuentes, the Uribes, the Medellin and the Cali. The rest were too busy just trying to pull the country out of chaos without being blown up in a car bomb.'

‘So Victoria decided it was up to her.' God, I could just imagine the risk involved. ‘What did she do?'

He glanced around as though judging the hearing of those closest to us, then leant in. ‘After Celeste was taken, they gave her leave of absence. Extended leave of absence, time to grieve.'

I waited. The woman I'd seen in that news piece would never have accepted the fire as the end of it.

He phrased his words carefully. ‘Victoria basically dropped off the radar for two years. She'd left a letter for her family telling them what she was going to do and asking them not to contact the police. But after they hadn't heard anything for six months they got worried and hired a detective. He tried to follow her
credit card trail, but discovered she'd withdrawn all her funds before she disappeared.'

‘She didn't want Uribe to be able to find her, so she set up a false identity.'

He nodded. ‘She spent the first year in Bogata, studying his operation. All his main people, all his trade routes into the US, the location of his cocaine factories.'

‘She was looking for Celeste,' I said, ‘where they could've taken Celeste if she was still alive.'

‘Yes. Victoria thought that they may have kept her, maybe even adopted her into one of their families.'

‘You mean like the military did in Argentina during the junta?'

The story was notorious; rock stars had even written hit songs about the tragedy. When the military had taken over in Argentina in the 1970s, they'd ruthlessly crushed any opposition, but kept the children of their enemies. Changed their names. Brought them up as their own. The children had disappeared, just like the parents, but into the families of the murderers. Children were valued in South America, even those with the wrong bloodline.

‘That was what Victoria hoped.' Constan shuddered, ‘I hate to think of the other possibilities she had to live with while she searched. But there was absolutely no sign of Celeste. After the first year Victoria started stalking Uribe himself. She figured he'd know exactly what happened and, by then, she was desperate to know at any cost.'

My body tightened in response. ‘She went after Uribe himself?'

‘It wasn't too hard to find him. Uribe used to visit his house on Lake Geneva at the same time every year. He'd combine it with monitoring his accounts with the
Banque de Fribourg. Victoria used his passion for antique guns to lay a trap for him. Arranged for him to be offered the pistol that'd been used to execute Nicholas the Second. You know, the last tsar, the one murdered by the Bolsheviks? Then she separated him from his guards.'

My God! ‘What did he say?'

‘That was the problem. He wouldn't tell her what really happened to Celeste.'

I sat for a moment, taking it in. ‘He wouldn't tell her anything? Nothing at all?'

‘Oh, getting the malignant toad to talk wasn't hard. He wouldn't shut up. Went on and on about having Phillipe Cruz and his wife killed. Said he was proud of it. Boasted to Victoria that he'd upheld his manly honour, and extracted his due revenge before Cruz died.' Constan snorted. ‘Honour? The psychopath had the man and his wife tortured to death then held a public fiesta in Cruz's own home town to celebrate.'

‘So … what are you saying? Did he tell her what happened to Celeste or not?'

‘Uribe said he couldn't, that he had nothing to do with the kidnapping.'

‘What!'

‘That's what he said in the end. He played some vicious mind games with her first. Told her what his men would do to her when they finally found them. Asked her if she had any other pretty family members he could collect. But when Victoria stuck her gun in his mouth, he was offended instead of intimidated. Asked her why he'd try to cover up murdering Cruz, something he was proud of? So why would he need to kidnap Celeste?'

‘Really!' My heart started to pound. ‘That's what he said?' This could be the break I needed. ‘Did Victoria believe him?' If it was not Uribe, then maybe it was someone with ties to Australia.

‘No, not at all. She said he was just trying to sabotage her will to keep him hostage. His men found them before she could shake his story. But she said she knew he'd done it, he just didn't want the US police hunting him.'

‘Oh.' The hope sank back as quickly as it had risen. ‘But Victoria got away okay?'

‘Yes, just. The funny thing was that in the end Uribe started to like her. Called her his “little soldier”. Even offered her a job.'

‘But what about reprisals? Surely he came after her.'

‘No,' said Constan, with a great deal of satisfaction. ‘The day he arrived back from Geneva, the Fuentes cartel made its move. They wiped out all of his lieutenants before they could work out what was happening, then took most of his factories and burnt the rest. It was a fast, efficient bloodbath. Uribe never made it home from the airport.'

Hmm. The Fuentes had probably saved Victoria's life by erasing the Uribe cartel, but they also destroyed her ability to find out what'd happened to Celeste. ‘So that was that?'

‘Sort of.' Constan gave me a curious look. ‘A month later Victoria turned up back at San Francisco police headquarters and asked for her old job. Then she spent the next few years shooting up the PD ladder. From there she leapfrogged into the Time Marshal program. Made it in record time too, I'm told. She was the first woman into the program.' He searched my face for understanding. ‘She was very focused on getting a place here.'

It dawned. I sat for a moment, stunned. Of course. This was the only way she could see her dead child again.

‘You're saying Victoria became a Time Marshal in the hope that one day she'd be able to go back and find out what happened to Celeste?'

A new voice said, ‘So this is where you're hiding out?'

We both flinched. Caught in the act of discussing Victoria's deep, dark secret. A man in a T-shirt and jeans was standing over us, waiting. Brown hair, grey eyes. Early thirties maybe. Nice arms. Good-looking, and he knew it.

‘Er, Marshal Rous?' said Constan, off-balance.

Rous smiled pointedly at me.

Constan just stared up at him. ‘Did you need me for something?'

Rous replied by pulling up a chair and saying, ‘Relax, Constan, I had to meet the person that put Mertling into orbit.' He offered me his hand. ‘I'm Brandon Rous.'

‘Kannon Jarratt.' We shook. It was a bit too firm, as though he was making a point of not holding back just because I was female.

He looked at Constan again. ‘Did you know the Chief has told Scolette to prep for the Isiac mission?'

‘What?' Constan's eyes bulged. ‘He can't do that.'

‘Scolette's going to replace Victoria if she wants to stay and do the DNA test. Mertling doesn't want to risk any more delays.'

Relief flooded me.

Then just as quickly ebbed. Maybe Victoria was going to hate having choices made for her. ‘How can Victoria be replaced? Hasn't she been working on this for a long time? I thought she was building a specific identity in Rome?'

‘No. It doesn't work like that,' said Rous. ‘Once we leave the past it snaps back to the way it was. So far Victoria has managed to gather a lot of background information, but not yet completed the central mission objectives.'

‘Don't get your hopes up, Kannon. They won't allow Scolette to replace her,' Constan warned me. ‘That's what I think, anyway. The best that could happen is she gets a short delay before she returns to Rome.'

‘Maybe.' Rous seemed less convinced. ‘We'll see what happens later tonight.' He gave me an appreciative once-over. ‘You do look like Victoria. And yet you don't.'

‘Bet you don't talk to her like this.' Sure he was cute, but he was also irritating.

He grinned, ‘You're right, Victoria scares me too much.'

‘So what's your mission right now?'

Constan answered for him. ‘Marshal Rous has just come back from five months in the Amazon.'

‘The nineteenth-century Amazon, actually,' said Rous. ‘I had to retrieve the DNA print of an extinct plant. One needed for its pharmaceutical properties. I joined the British expedition that discovered it.'

‘So you had to survive dangerous wildlife and all?'

Rous brushed off the opportunity to bask. Which surprised me and made me like him a little more. He
said, ‘So what are you two doing until she arrives? Why don't you come up and check out the portal?'

‘We can't do that!' said Constan, sitting bolt upright. ‘That's completely against all protocol. Neither of us has clearance to the top floor. Mertling would scream blue murder …'

‘No, that's all right. I can fix it. He's already gone off for dinner with the Governor anyway. Won't be back until Victoria's due … Kannon?' He made it a challenge. ‘Do you want to see the portal?'

I had hours to kill, and no desire to sit and count each second. ‘Let's go.'

We went through to the lifts and up to the third floor. ‘The portal and the marshals' offices are on the top floor. We can only access them from this level,' explained Constan.

Rous used his identity card to activate the security system next to the dedicated lift. A security guard surveyed him without comment. Constan watched the guard nervously, as though expecting to be challenged at any moment. Guess the marshals got to take up visitors. I shook my head, this was all a bit too trusting for me. For a government installation, this place was easy pickings.

‘So how many marshals are there?' Now that I'd achieved what I came for, I felt like asking some questions. The food had helped too. Life was starting to look pretty good for the first time in a year.

‘It varies,' said Constan. ‘But at the moment there are only two besides Victoria and Marshal Rous. Karl Armstrong is away on another mission and Emmaline Scolette is …' He grimaced at the roof. ‘Upstairs prepping.'

Rous jabbed a sequence on the keyboard and the lift doors opened. We got in.

‘So how do the marshals prepare for missions ranging from ancient Rome to the Amazon? Do you have standard training?'

‘Well, we're all selected from law enforcement agencies,' answered Rous. ‘Victoria was police homicide, I was FBI …

I cut in. ‘I thought the NTA and the FBI …'

‘Hate each other?' drawled Rous. ‘Yes, and that's why I'll never be working for them again.' He gave me a toothy grin. ‘But luckily the NTA will always accept the best …' Rous punched the sixth-floor button, the doors shut again and we moved upwards.

‘What were Scolette and Armstrong?'

‘Scolette was FBI too. Armstrong was in Justice somewhere …' He paused.

Constan filled in with, ‘Armstrong and the Chief were both US federal marshals in the Department of Justice.'

‘So that means you all came in with a certain amount of common knowledge,' I said. ‘Investigative techniques, profiling …'

Rous nodded. ‘Yep. But we all still had to go through the NTA basic training program at the centre in Menlo Park. Cultural anthropology, psychology …'

I shook my head. ‘But still …'

‘Oh they don't work alone. It's a team effort,' interjected Constan. ‘The fourth and fifth floors here hold their core support services: researchers, technicians, wardrobe and language experts. And anything they can't do we contract out to a network of professionals.'

‘But even so, it's not enough.' Rous leant back into the shiny steel wall. ‘Mertling's trying to use the Isiac mission to garner political support to increase our budget. If that happens then we're going to be doing some really amazing stuff.'

The lift pinged and the doors opened into the middle of an empty corridor. ‘The portal is that way.' Rous pointed to the right.

On cue one of the doors opposite the lift jerked open. Constan sucked in his breath. A blonde woman, hard-faced with an equally hard body, stepped out. She was wearing a sleek skirt-suit and a jaw-breaking scowl.

‘Kannon Jarratt,' Rous did the introductions, ‘this is Marshal Emmaline Scolette.'

She completely ignored me to bark at Constan, ‘Valdestiou, I need the latest report for the meeting with the Governor tonight. Mertling gave me the wrong one.' She slapped a yellow folder onto his chest. ‘Go down and get it.'

He frowned, and checked inside the folder. ‘No, this is it. This is the right one.'

She didn't like that at all. ‘In that case get in here and explain why the conclusion hasn't changed.' Scolette swung back into her office without waiting to see if Constan was going to follow.

Constan tensed, and said, ‘Er, excuse me for one moment.'

The door shut behind him with a snap.

‘Hmm. Guess it's just us now,' flirted Rous. ‘Shall we …?'

‘Are you like this with everyone?' Like I said, cute, but irritating.

‘Nah.' We started walking again. ‘Just any of Victoria's daughters. I'm going for a promotion and I need her support.'

The laugh burst out of me. It felt good. Reminded me I could loosen up now that I was going to actually see her.

We stopped in front of a door with another security panel next to it. It had to be the portal. Out of the
corner of my eye I caught the name Dupree. Victoria's office was diagonally opposite us. Hmm. She'd be in there soon.

Rous used his identity card again, and then positioned his face so a beam could flash across his left eye. The lock clicked open. Inside there were computer stations on the right and stainless steel benches with equipment laid out on them on the left. The room was separated from the next by a thick, transparent wall. The connecting door, made of the same material, had a vacuum seal around it. Rous opened it and we walked through. He said, ‘This wall's in case anything extra comes back through the portal.'

‘Like what exactly?' Visions of Roman soldiers charging with swords held high flashed into my mind.

‘Mainly we're concerned about viruses.'

‘Ah. Ones we've lost immunity to?'

‘Yep, that's right. The computers monitor who's arriving, and whether they've brought back anything foreign to this time. We do have disease control contingency plans, but that's another reason we need more money. We want to move operations out of the city and into a better quarantined facility.'

That made sense. ‘Yes. I'd wondered why this was in the middle of San Francisco.'

‘That choice was made in the early days of the program. A long time ago now.'

We stopped in front of a large glass square sitting on a thin metal base. I'd seen pictures of the portal when I was in high school. It was well over ten feet square with a rectangular door made of the same material.

‘The Delta portal,' announced Rous. ‘The only fully operational time travel portal in existence.'

I walked around it. ‘I thought this place would be full
of people monitoring screens. Like a Cape Canaveral space mission.'

‘No. It's a lot simpler than that. And a lot harder to control. The portal is a giant transmitter that sends and retrieves matter waves. The marshal is sent back in time by the portal, they then control their return trip through a transponder that links them to the frequency of the portal. They activate the transponder and the portal retrieves them.'

‘That's right.' I was starting to remember the stuff I'd looked at on the plane. ‘The marshal is broadcast like radio waves.'

‘Matter waves,' he corrected.

‘And the transponder is the ticket home?'

‘Sure is.'

‘So, how do you cope with the foreign languages?'

‘Translators, which operate through contact with our skin. I'll show you.'

I followed Rous back into the other room. He opened a small metal box on top of one of the steel benches. ‘This is the combined translator/transponder that Victoria will use when she returns to Rome.'

Sitting in the bottom of the box was a plain collar made of a single piece of curved metal. There was an infinity sign engraved lengthways on the front of it.

Before I could speak he said, ‘Don't ask me to explain exactly how they work. My graduate degree's in botany, not neurology. All I know is that we can understand the programmed language and English at the same time. It's exactly like being bilingual. Hearing, reading, speaking, the works … The NTA linguists often go through first to do preparatory work, but it's still not perfect.' He shrugged. ‘You get used to second-guessing any glitches.'

It was a pretty plain piece of metal. ‘How's it activated for the return home?'

He pointed to the engraving. ‘The infinity sign. You simultaneously press both loops three times, pause for three counts and then repeat. The infinity sign is ridged so it's easy for the fingers to slip into. The first three pushes activate the portal, the last three confirm the message and start retrieval.'

‘But what if another marshal signals at exactly the same time?'

‘Don't worry. The portal lines the orders up sequentially and doesn't allow the next one to arrive until the box is clear.' He seemed a little miffed at my question. ‘Look, we've been doing this a long time. The technology works. And it's safe.'

Safe? The list of articles from the StopWatch site came to mind. ‘What about how time travel may affect the present?'

‘Oh here we go.' Rous crossed his arms. ‘So are you anti-time travel?'

Actually the thought of it was pretty damned exciting. I stared back at the portal. The possibilities were truly infinite. Forget archaeology! Forget digging up dried old bones. To meet the living person … breathe the air of another time … witness the greatest events of our history …

Rous' frowning face brought me back. I coughed. ‘Calm down, Marshal. I just want some answers, that's all.'

‘So did Congress. And our NTA scientists proved to them that the risk was non-existent. They showed that it's actually impossible to change the past.'

Yeah right. Their own in-house scientists? That would've been an objective finding. I tried to be diplomatic, ‘Yeah. Yeah. I know you must think it's safe, but why put up with the possibility of any risk at all?'

Just because I was interested in time travel didn't mean I'd shut down all critical thought.

‘Because,' his tone was extremely defensive now, ‘of the incredible benefits that time travel can give us. The plant DNA I just brought back from the Amazon may help us find a cure for Alzheimer's. You have no idea what is possible … We can retrieve lost knowledge. We can unlock mysteries that seemed buried beyond answer to any previous generation …'

Then he cocked his head on one side, as though he'd just figured something out. ‘Kannon, are you telling me … that if you had the chance, you'd really reject the opportunity to see what's on the other side of that portal?'