Time Snatchers (3 page)

“Don’t be late for supper tonight,” he says. “I’m cooking Peking duck. My girl’s favorite.”

It takes all of my concentration to keep my expression neutral, but inside I’m fuming. I know he means Abbie, and the way he said that, it sounded as if he wanted me to think there was something going on between them.

Just then there’s a deafening noise. The helicopter blades are slicing the night air right overhead. A powerful search beam shoots out, sweeping the roof only feet away from where Frank and I are standing.

Frank glances up, but at the same time he’s tapping away at his wrist. No point holding back now. I tap furiously at my own wrist. As soon as Frank has both hands free, he waves them in the air like crazy, and screams at the top of his lungs. It sounds like he’s shouting “stop thief,” but then again it might be “roast beef”—it’s impossible to tell with all the racket of the helicopter. Anyway, I can’t very well ask him because the next moment he disappears.

Which is what I should be doing. But for some reason I’m not. I’m still here.

Just then, I’m caught in the search beam.

“
Bú yaò dòng
—do not move!” says a voice over a loudspeaker. Nice of him to translate for me, but I could have managed it on my own. I’ve got an implant that instantaneously translates all words I hear into English.

I try tapping again at my wrist. Pounding footsteps and shouts are getting closer.

I look up to see three guards running toward me. One of them has his gun drawn.

Nowhere to run—I’m already backed up to the edge of the roof.

I step behind the U.S. flag and hold it up in front of me, as a kind of shield.

They wouldn’t shoot the U.S. flag on the first day of the Great Friendship, would they?

I close my eyes tight and brace myself.

The guards are only feet away now. The one in the lead reaches for me.

But all he grabs is air.

I
land between two parked cars on the north side of Franklin Street, right across from Headquarters.

It’s now eight minutes past four, local time, which means I was away for thirty-two minutes: exactly the same amount of time that I spent in the past. All of our time patches are preprogrammed that way for missions. It makes sense when you think about it. With time travel, you can spend a half hour in the past but choose to return to the present with only two minutes having gone by. Do that often enough, though, and you’ll soon be falling asleep in your soup.

A yellow rickshaw speeds by, missing me by about six inches. Since the city went China-crazy, most of the cabbies have traded in their Fords for these oversized tricycles with seating for two in the back. They’re not much to look at, but they sure get great mileage.

One thing that hasn’t changed, though: it’s still impossible to find a cab in New York. Correction: New Beijing. That’s what the mayor says we have to call New York City for the next year. It’s not so bad, I suppose. The people of Beijing have it worse. They’ve got to call their place
Dà Píng Guˇo
, which in Mandarin means “the Big Apple.”

I’m drowning in a symphony of horns and curses. The second I stumble onto the sidewalk, someone’s yelling at me to move and someone else is trying to sell me a fake Rolex watch. Normally I’d
happily agree with at least one of those suggestions, but there’s nothing I can do. My time freeze hasn’t thawed all the way.

Finally, my body starts listening to my brain and I take a few more steps, scattering some pigeons clustered around a guy who’s flicking wontons at them.

Something crunches under my feet. It’s the partial remains of an Indian dinner. But that’s just the appetizer. There’s trash strewn everywhere. You have to wonder at some of the things people throw away. For instance, not more than three feet from me, there’s a perfectly good coffeemaker, an only slightly used Chinese/braille keyboard and a burgundy love seat that might be a bit faded but otherwise looks in great shape.

The stench is awful. If the garbage strike doesn’t end soon, I’m going to have to spring for one of those pine-scented face masks that are fast becoming a fashion accessory in New Beijing. I really shouldn’t complain, though. If it’s a choice between walking down a stinky sidewalk in New York and a close encounter on a rooftop with gun-wielding Chinese soldiers, I’ll pick stinky every time.

A huge advertisement for EastWest Jeans purrs, “Hello there, handsome. Come on. Try a pair close to your skin,” while another shouts, “Hey, guy, need a caffeine fix?” Call me antisocial, but I’m not crazy about having a conversation with billboards.

I’m not eager to arrive at Headquarters. Any way I look at it, it’s going to go badly for me. So why hurry back?

Instead of crossing, I make a beeline for the Chi Break booth up the street. These booths started springing up all over Manhattan minutes after the U.S. and China inked the Great Friendship. I don’t know many words in Chinese, but
chi
means “life energy.” The point of the booths is to provide pleasant, calming experiences that will
restore your chi so that you can get on with the rest of your day feeling all fresh and relaxed. Of course, like everything else in New Beijing, restoring your life energy doesn’t come cheap—a half-hour session will set you back a hundred bucks. Luckily, in addition to being a thief, I’m also an expert at bypassing security systems and tinkering with payment records.

I step into the telephone booth–sized unit and shut the door behind me. With a few choice voice commands, I disarm the security system and convince the automated administrator that I’m all paid up.

Within seconds, a vanilla smooth voice comes on and says, “Welcome to Chi Break, Robert. May the breath of the winds speak softly in your ears. What is your selection today?”

Robert is the name I use when I’m out in public or doing something slightly illegal. Abbie chose it for me. She says I look like a Robert, whatever that means. I have to admit it’s growing on me. I just hope no one takes liberties with it and starts calling me Roberto or, even worse, Robbie.

For a second, I consider trying something different this time. After all, how much Mountain Meadow can one person stand?

“Mountain Meadow, please,” I say.

“An excellent selection. Enjoy your Chi Break, Robert,” the machine responds. The lights blink out, and suddenly I’m inhaling fresh air and the fragrance of wildflowers. It’s all an illusion, of course, but everything looks, sounds and feels so real, right down to the drops of early morning dew on the tips of the long grass sweeping the meadow. Give me another hour of this, and I’ll be totally relaxed.

Except that I don’t have an hour. I’ve only booked ten minutes, which is just enough to take the edge off. I’d stay longer, but I should be getting back to Headquarters and reporting in. If I’m really late,
Uncle will kill me. Well, maybe not actually kill me. He might only torture me. Yes, that’s it. A good old-fashioned Chinese water torture in honor of the Great Friendship.

I will my shoulders to relax.

A memory takes hold. I’m a toddler walking with my mother, a carpet of soft grass beneath our feet. “Smell this one, Caleb,” she says and holds a purple flower under my nose. I scrunch my nose and sneeze. She laughs. My mother’s laughter is the sweetest part of the memory. I try desperately to hold on to it.

“Your Chi Break is over, Robert,” announces the machine’s simulated voice. My mother’s laughter slips away like smoke.

I sigh, exit the booth and head home. Soon, 179 Franklin Street comes into view. It’s a nice-looking building: six stories, red brickwork and wood trim over a funky entranceway. Most of the tenants are what you’d expect to see in Tribeca: a decent Greek restaurant on the ground floor, an artists’ co-op on the first, a canine dental surgeon on the second and a law firm specializing in entertainment law on the third floor. Nothing out of the ordinary.

You’d never guess that the fourth and fifth floors are the headquarters of Timeless Treasures, a company that provides unique goods for the ultrarich: special-ordered hard-to-get items from the past.

The way I heard it, the army had secretly tried for years to develop a prototype for time travel but could never quite make it work. So they shelved Project Chronos, as it was called, and destroyed all the records. Or at least they thought they had destroyed everything. The truth was that a certain truck driver for the waste disposal firm got it into his head to deliver the documents to a warehouse that he had secretly leased. After two years of late nights picking through a hundred boxes of documents, the truck driver (who, by the way, also
happened to have a degree in quantum physics) pieced together enough information to build his own time travel system—and unlike the army’s versions, his worked.

“Truck Driver Builds Greatest Invention of Twenty-First Century” is what the newspaper headlines would have said if they had ever found out. But they never did. The truck driver never told anyone, including the army. He quit his job, became “Uncle” to a handful of adopted children and, when he decided they were old enough, sent them out into the world to steal stuff for wealthy clients who didn’t ask too many questions. The rest, as they say, is history.

For a company that doesn’t advertise, business sure is booming. As a team, Abbie and I are averaging four snatches a week, and so are the other teams. Throw in a few solo snatches, and that translates to about fifty a month. Abbie, who along with her other skills has a natural talent for intelligence gathering, found out that Uncle’s clients pay on average a hundred thousand bucks for each little memento from the past. So we’re talking a cool five million dollars every month … tax free. That’s a nice piece of change.

It doesn’t take me long to get to work. I live in a dorm on the fourth floor with the other male time snatchers, Frank and Raoul. Lydia, who is Frank’s snatch partner, shares the other dorm room with Abbie. The kitchen, lounge and Nassim’s office are also on four. Uncle’s office and our workstations are on five.

I mostly use my workstation to research local customs and other things that might come in handy when I’m on a mission. It’s amazing what you can find online—stuff like what the cave dwellers in the Pecos River Valley of Texas ate for breakfast in 9,500
B.C.

One of the things Uncle taught us early on was that the more you know about the way people lived in the time/place you’re going to, the less you’ll stick out like a sore thumb. And when your job is to
steal things from under people’s noses, blending in is a must. I have to admit though, unlike Abbie, who can sit at her workstation for hours on end, after twenty minutes my legs start doing drum solos, and I have to get up and do a few karate kicks. So I don’t spend as much time on research as I probably should.

I glance up to the dorm window. There’s no sign of activity. Good. I don’t think I could deal with Frank right now.

Climbing the stairs to the front entrance, I’m fully aware that my every move is being recorded. Uncle likes to know who’s coming and going.

On entering the lobby, I notice that the artists’ co-op has a new exhibit: a hologram of pink bowling balls orbiting what looks like a teapot with spouts at both ends. Each time a ball passes by one of the spouts, an image of the Arctic flashes on an overhead screen and the temperature in the lobby drops by two degrees. Nice.

As I press the Up button for the elevator, I don’t feel anything other than a slight chill due to the bowling ball exhibit. But a dozen different sensors are checking me out, confirming my identity. It’s all part of Uncle’s elaborate security system to keep out certain undesirable types, like the police or Internal Revenue Service. Of course they wouldn’t have any problems visiting Cohen and Chen, Attorneys-at-Law, on the third floor or bringing their dogs in for a teeth whitening on two, but as soon as they ask for four or five, they’ll get an “out of service to those floors” message.

The inside of the elevator is pretty much like any other old-fashioned elevator in New York, oops—New Beijing: a steel cage that feels like a prison once the door clanks shut.

“Four,” I say.

“For what?” a voice squawks, and Phoebe’s elevator attendant persona appears on the wall screen: smart royal blue pantsuit with
red piping on the arms and legs and a double row of silver buttons up the front. A matching pillbox cap completes the picture. I have to admit, she looks fairly sharp for a computer.

Of course, if you called Phoebe a computer to her face, she’d be highly insulted. She likes to think of herself as a regular person. It’s true that Phoebe’s operating system is sprinkled with human DNA (which allows her to do a trillion calculations a second without breaking a sweat), but it’s a real stretch to talk about her as a real person. On the other hand, she’s gotten quite good at mimicking certain human personality traits and can do “annoying” better than any real person I know.

“Not that kind of
for
, Phoebe,” I say and take a deep breath. But it’s too late. The feeling of calm from my Chi Break is quickly evaporating.