The Reluctant Assassin (9 page)

The cab pulled up outside the Garden Hotel slightly more than three minutes later and disgorged a very unlikely couple onto Monmouth Street.

One seventeen-year-old FBI agent in Lycra, and an assassin’s apprentice from the nineteenth century, thought Chevie. We must be quite a sight. At least both of my eyes are open now.

Monmouth Street itself was quiet, in spite of its proximity to Covent Garden, with only a few tourists cutting through to Seven Dials or Leicester Square and the faint echo of carnival music. Most of the street was fenced off for street repairs, and the taxi driver was forced to reverse and go out the same way he had come in.

The Garden Hotel was one of those establishments that prided itself on the discretion it guaranteed its very select clientele. There was no sign, no doorman in a top hat, and only a tasteful awning to show taxi drivers where to stop. Chevie had stayed here once before, when Orange had commandeered her apartment during a routine pod service, and she had treated herself to a massage that had worked out muscle pains she’d suffered from overstrenuous workouts.

Chevie tucked her holstered Glock under her arm and hustled Riley into the lobby before he had time to throw up again. Special Agent Waldo Gunn was waiting for them by the reception desk.

“Two minutes?” he said testily. “That was closer to four.” Waldo was not anybody’s idea of an FBI operative, which was probably why he had survived so long in his semi-undercover capacity as liaison at the Garden. Waldo stood five feet four in Cuban heels and had a bushy gray beard that made him seem about a thousand years old, a look that had earned him the nickname
Gimli
in the Bureau. If Waldo was aware of this nickname, he was not sufficiently bothered by it to invest in a razor.

Waldo scowled. “What’s up, Agent Savano? What’s up is that you should have requested an escort through the service entrance. We try to maintain a low profile here in order to avoid raising suspicion, and yet here you stand in tattered training gear with a chimney-cleaning midget in tow. Hardly low profile. That is what is up, Agent.”

At least he called me Agent, thought Chevie.

Waldo turned on his heel and strode through the small lobby furnished in late Victorian style, which was a huge relief to Riley, whose head was bursting with revelations.

“Should we follow the elf?” he asked Chevie.

Chevie smiled. “We should, or he gets really annoyed.”

Waldo translated his irritation into a quickstep, so Chevie and Riley had to hustle to keep on his tail. He led them around the front desk and into a small steel elevator, which he summoned with a remote control fob on his waistcoat.

Riley tried to appear blasé. “It’s an ascending room, no great shakes. I saw ’em at the Savoy years ago when Garrick sent me to suss out some swell’s gaff.”

Waldo raised an eyebrow at Chevie, who knew exactly what the unasked question was. “Yes, he talks like that all the time. It’s all
Strike me blind
or
Cor, luv a duck
with this little gent.”

Waldo took a smartphone from his pocket and typed a note. Chevie would be willing to bet that the word
delusional
was in the note somewhere.

They took the elevator to the fourth floor, with Riley holding grimly onto the rail.

“You can’t be overcautious,” he told Chevie. “I heard about one of these things snapping its cable in New York City. It dropped quicker than a shirkster at closing time. Made jam of the passengers.”

“I’m getting a headache listening to this cockney speak,” said Waldo. “Please God there won’t be any rhyming slang.”

Riley literally jumped from the elevator when the door opened, then they pushed through a fire door and climbed some back stairs up two more flights.

“Here we are,” said Waldo, indicating a nondescript gray door with the sweep of his arm, as though it was the gateway to a palace of wonder. “Room seventeen seventy-six.”

He pressed another button on his remote and the door swung smoothly open.

“In you go, Agent. You can hole up here until a field team arrives. It shouldn’t be too long, though head office tells me that our team has already been deployed to deal with a suspected terrorist hive, in Devon, of all places. False alarm, as it turned out. So I’m guessing it’ll take an hour for them to make it back here. Plenty of time for
you
to get some clothes on, and for the Artful Dodger to take a bath.”

“Cheers, guv’nor, you is a proper swell,” said Riley innocently, and Chevie guessed that he knew exactly who the Artful Dodger was.

Waldo frowned suspiciously but continued his briefing. “We have a range of clothes in the closet, so you should find something to fit. And there is a fridge with cold food. Don’t open the door to anyone but me, and if someone comes through that door who is not me, then feel free to shoot them. While we are not in the embassy and so technically not on American soil, this suite is attached to the embassy, and so a strong case can be made. In any event, jurisdiction over these rooms is a gray area, which should be enough to get you back Stateside if anything goes wrong.” Waldo opened a drawer in a writing desk. “In the event you are out of ammunition, we have a selection here, behind the stationery.”

“Ooh,” said Chevie. “Stationery. Cool.”

Waldo bristled. “I would have thought, Agent Savano, that after the Los Angeles foul-up, you would take this job a little more seriously.”

“I am being serious,” said Chevie. “One of my foster moms collects stationery.”

“I shall be writing a full report,” continued Waldo, “and your attitude will be both underlined and in italics.”

Chevie selected a clip for her Glock. “Sorry, Waldo. I get a little giddy under pressure. There’s someone after us. Someone a little out of the ordinary.”

Waldo was not impressed. “Well, your
someone
won’t be coming in here without an assault team behind him. And even then he’d need the door remote, which is paired to my biometric readings.”

Riley took his nose out of the fruit bowl. “Thanks for the grub and everything, mate, but none of you Yankees knows what you’re talking about. Garrick will come for me.”

Chevie opened her mouth to disagree, but all that came out was a soft sigh. Garrick had come through a wormhole to find Riley. He had overcome Smart’s ninja hazmat team. It seemed unlikely that a hobbit and a locked door would keep him out.

She checked her watch. “So, Gim— Waldo. Fifty-nine minutes, right?”

Waldo made a sound that was very close to an actual
harrumph
, then composed himself and smiled sweetly before extending his left hand, palm up.

“Tell me you are not looking for a tip,” said Chevie in disbelief.

Waldo’s smile disappeared and he closed his fingers tightly, as though crushing the soul of an enemy.

“Force of habit,” he said, and beeped himself out of the door.

Chevie and Riley spent the next half hour trying to relax somewhat, but neither of them could shake a feeling of frosty foreboding. And it wasn’t one of those vague feelings that something bad was on the way; it was the very specific belief that any second Albert Garrick was going to burst in through the reinforced door and shoot them both in the head.

Chevie wondered if she should call someone, and if she did call someone, what would she tell them?

The FBI have a set of secret time machines that we use to hide witnesses in the past.

Or,
A death-dealing magician has come from the nineteenth century to kill an urchin.

Or,
The world’s greatest scientist has been turned into a dead monkey by a wormhole.

It sounded pretty insane, whatever way you presented it. Better to wait until reinforcements arrived and hope that the agent in charge would have some previous knowledge of what was going on—otherwise Chevie was going to look guilty of something.

Riley emerged from the bedroom all dickied up in what looked like a school uniform, taken from Waldo’s stash. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and seemed surprised by his own features.

“That’s an excellent looking-glass, Agent. I never saw myself so clear. Look, my hair has both brown and black in it. There’s a turn-up for the books.”

The boy studied himself for a long moment, pulling at the skin of his pale face, sweeping his long dark hair back from his forehead. In the mirror he caught sight of the flat-screen television on its bracket.

“What is that device bolted to the wall? Is it a work of art, perhaps? A cloudy night, or some such? Toffs will buy any old rubbish if they believe it was scribbled by a master.”

“It’s a television, actually, Riley. Moving pictures on a screen.”

Riley turned to stare at the TV. “Moving pictures.” A thought struck him. “When I woke this morning it was the year of our Lord 1898. How far have I traveled?”

“More than a hundred years,” said Chevie softly.

Riley sank deep into a sofa, eyes downcast, and hugged himself.

“A hundred years? That far. Everyone I know is dead, and everything I know is gone.”

Chevie didn’t know what to say. She tried to imagine herself in the boy’s situation, but couldn’t. The shock must be incredible.

“I feel lost at sea,” Riley admitted. He pondered, then said, “But Garrick doesn’t. He is somehow different. Something has changed him. He has knowledge of your weapons and codes. Who’s to say he does not already have the codes for this gaff?”

Chevie sat on a low glass coffee table, facing the boy. “Garrick would have to be crazy to come here. He’s got all of London to get lost in. Why would he even bother tracking down a kid?”

“His reasoning is difficult to explain,” said Riley, frowning. “He calls me his son, to save or drown as he pleases. But I ain’t his son, and I hate him. I have bolted before, and he has followed me across the whole of the city.” Riley pointed to his right eye. “I ran away to Saint Giles last year. Squared myself away down with the guttersnipes, but Garrick’s snouts informed on me. That devil rooted me out and gave me a sound thrashing. The eye was never the same, but I can see out of it clear enough. Now Garrick has even followed me here, like Mr. Wells’s Time Traveler.”

“Well, Mr. Garrick has no
snouts
here,” said Chevie. “And, just for your information, people have being trying to find the outhouse for years. People from
this
century—if they couldn’t find it, neither will he. You have no idea how things have changed since your day.” Chevie thought of something. “But I can give you an idea. Sit there.”

Chevie pointed to the deep purple sofa in front of the flat black TV. She logged on to the Internet and navigated to a Web site that had a series of videos documenting major political, scientific, and cultural changes. She chose one and played it.

“Now sit there and learn something,” she instructed the Victorian boy.

Riley had been dumbfounded so often already this evening that he did not remark upon the HD graphics, but the site’s music almost moved him to tears.

“It’s like sitting beside the entire orchestra,” he said softly. “A music machine with pictures.”

Chevie walked toward the bathroom. “A music machine with pictures. I like that. Okay, you absorb whatever you can while I clean up a little. Just don’t touch the screen.”

This time Riley did look away from the TV. “Why not? Would I be transported to the land of the magic machine?”

Chevie was tempted to say yes, but the kid had been through enough for one day. “No, this ain’t
Tron
. But you would smear the screen, which would freak out the elf.”

Riley returned his gaze to the screen.
Freaking out the elf
sounded like a terrible thing indeed. He would look but not touch.

At first Albert Garrick was mightily angered by being trapped in Bedford Square, but such were his new powers that a dozen solutions to his problem soon flowed like a balm across his spiky mood. The magician calmed himself and sat in front of his laptop in the ground floor office.

No, not my laptop. Felix Smart’s laptop.

Though that more or less amounted to the same thing. Felix Smart’s mind was inside his own, leaking information like a cracked gourd.

And there is more. The explosion inside the wormhole has changed me. I am more than human now. I am the universe’s first quantum man. The rules of normal space do not apply to me anymore. My very appearance is fluid, and my mind is chock-full of useful nuggets.

It took Garrick mere seconds to lift the lockdown from Bedford Square, and he listened with satisfaction as the shutters rolled back from the windows.

The magician cackled aloud.

Computers! Wonderful machines.

He was free now to leave and wreak havoc on this new age, with no one to stop him or even understand what they were trying to stop.

So, why don’t I abandon my hunt for Riley and disappear into the multitude?

Garrick now understood his need to track the boy down. Garrick’s father had deserted him in dramatic fashion when he was ten, so he had a deep fear of desertion.

You is sorted proper now, my son
, his father told him one morning.
And I cannot live sober with what my hand was forced into doing to secure your future. I slit the throat of my best mate and a few more besides to keep you in a bed away from the Old Nichol.

The ten-year-old Garrick noticed his father’s belongings tied in a pillowcase at the foot of their room’s small bed.

Are you leaving me, Da?

Tears flowed down his father’s ruddy cheeks as he answered,
I am, boy. You know I have struggled with a grog habit all my life. And now, with dreams of blood and your poor brothers and sisters occupying my mind, I can’t fight no more. So it is my intention to return to the Nichol and drink myself into the grave. Shouldn’t take more’n a month. Don’t try to find me, as I plan to be drunk and violent. I will shout hello to your mother on my way past the pearlies, and keep an eye on you from the devil’s shoulder.

And he was gone, stumbling through the doorway, half blind with tears. Albert never saw his father again but heard rumors that he had died from a fractured skull following a crack on the head from a peeler outside the Jerusalem Tavern.