TimeSplash (10 page)

The Institute was a low-security establishment and its patients were allowed many freedoms and comforts. Sandra, for instance, had her own small room, with a bed, chest of drawers, wardrobe, and tiny en suite bathroom. It was a humane and well-run establishment and Sandra had been planning to escape from it since the day two prison officers had brought her there from the juvenile remand centre in Plymouth.

She brought a chair up to the wardrobe and opened the doors wide. Taped to the inside at the top were the things she would need: a torch, a craft knife, two folded-up plastic bags, a length of string, a wire coat hanger bent into a hook, and an envelope stuffed with money. She pulled them all free and unfolded the plastic bags.

She didn’t have many clothes, but she put on what she could—it was November and bitterly cold—and stuffed the rest into the bags. She put some of the money into her pockets and the remainder into one of the bags. The Institute gave all of its patients an allowance each week with which to buy things from the vending machines, and from the little shop that sold stationery, makeup, magazines and such. Each week, Sandra hid half and spent the rest. No one had noticed, and, after eighteen months, she had accumulated a thick wad of Euros. Enough to get away, she hoped.

Next she moved her chair to the corner of the room, beside the window, and climbed up. The curtains were drawn, so no one outside would see her. Her room was on the top floor and that had made the planning so much easier. She had long ago worked out where the rafters were in the ceiling above her by looking for the subtle indentations the nails made in the plasterboard from which the ceiling was made. Now she used her craft knife to cut through the plasterboard between the rafters. The board cut easily with the sharp, thin blade and it took her barely ten minutes to make an opening almost a metre long and as wide as her shoulders.

Carefully she pushed the rectangle of plasterboard up into the roof space and slid it over to one side. A shower of dusty, grey granules came raining down on her, making her gasp with surprise and breathe some of the stuff in. Choking, she smothered her coughing and tried to stay calm. It was only the roof insulation. The fine, light, paper-based material was nothing to worry about. It was so lightweight it barely made a sound, although masses of it had rained down on her and the floor. She took a deep, steadying breath and pulled herself up into the blackness above. Once inside the loft, she turned on the torch. She was in a huge space, so large the torchlight revealed only her immediate surroundings. It was cold up there above the deep insulating layer of grey granules. Wooden beams arched overhead, receding into the darkness on either side of her in neat, parallel ranks. Thick cross-members braced them at chest height and they in turn were braced by diagonal struts that tied them to the joists and rafters. Above her head where the roof was, there was a layer of tarred, papery stuff between the roof joists and the tiles. She hadn’t expected that, but she reached up and scratched at it with her fingers and it tore to reveal the dark slates beyond. She breathed again in relief.

She made her way along the inside of the loft, staying close to the edge of the roof, having to move doubled up to avoid the joists. She could barely make out where the rafters ran, buried as they were under all that insulation, but she knew she must step only where they were. If she stood on the plasterboard ceiling between them she could fall straight through. Several times she had to stop and push aside the paper granules, digging through them with her hands to find the wooden beam that would take her next step.

As she moved, she counted the rafters. She had carefully measured the distance between rafters by examining her own ceiling. Then she had paced out the distance on the ground outside between her own window and the point she needed to reach. Crouching and creeping through the dark loft, she hadn’t expected it to take her so long to get to where she was going, but then she hadn’t realised how hard it would be to move around in the chilly blackness of the roof space. When she arrived, she looked back at the patch of light that marked the hole in the ceiling of her room. It didn’t seem far away at all and she counted the roof joists between the hole and where she stood twice more before she could convince herself she was in the right place. She took out the craft knife again and cut away a big section of the tarred paper, revealing a series of wooden strips running horizontally between the joists, on the outside of which the tiles had been hung. Carefully, dreading that someone might hear the noise she was making, she pushed and twisted and eased one of the tiles until it came loose. Holding it as firmly as she could with her cold fingertips, she turned it and pulled it in, then set it down gently beside her. Through the small rectangular hole, she saw nothing but blackness. No stars. No moon. It’s cloudy, she told herself. Yet she poked a hand up through the hole into the unobstructed space beyond, just to make sure.

One by one, she removed more tiles until she had made a hole wide enough to get her shoulders through. The thin wooden laths were still in place, running across the hole, but they broke easily and she soon had them out of the way. The whole process could have taken five minutes, but it took Sandra more than half an hour as she strove to minimise the sound she had to make. Gingerly, she poked her head out of the hole and looked around. It was hard to make out much of the lawns and the walls of the Institute, but the street beyond had orange streetlamps, and beyond that were other streets and a handful of houses. Her hole in the roof was at the back of the building. To the front, there were lights around the porch and down the long gravel drive. There would also be the lights of the village and the main road beyond. She could hear no sounds at all except a gentle sighing of the wind in the big elms that dotted the lawns. Below her, a metre and a half away, the roof ended abruptly, and she could just make out the edge of a black iron gutter. She was about nine metres above the ground and a brief vertiginous awareness of all that empty space beyond the gutter made her catch her breath. Come on, girl, she told herself. Let’s get this over with.

She tied one end of the string to the handles of the plastic bags with a slipknot and the other end she tied securely to the wire hook. She lowered the bags out of the hole onto the roof, letting them slide along as she fed out the string. They hung down close to the gutter and lay there white and glistening, obvious to anyone who happened to be outside who might glance up. She suffered a moment of profound self-doubt. She should have thought of that. She should have made sure her bags were a dark colour. She should have used cloth bags that weren’t so reflective. If she could make such a stupid mistake as this in her planning, what other mistakes might she have made?

But it was too late. She was committed. Besides, she had to go tonight. She couldn’t just sit there at the Institute while the world went to pieces. The very idea of being trapped there spurred her into motion.

She writhed up through the hole, carefully avoiding touching the slates around the edges, any of which could come loose and slide, clattering down the roof, bouncing off the gutter with a clang and sailing into the air to crash to earth like a bomb. She took a deep breath, steadying herself. Stepping out onto the roof was an agony of anticipated failure. She had planned for this, too, spending hours in the gym working on her flexibility and strength, studying tai chi chuan until she could move like a hunting cat, with slow precision and unwavering balance. Even so, and despite the icy wind, sweat trickled inside her clothes by the time she had extracted her legs and was crouching safely on the roof.

She moved silently down to the gutter and peered over, relief surging through her as she saw the fire escape, just three metres below. Exactly where it should be. And, for the first time that night, she felt a curl of excitement. She was out. Soon she would be down on the ground. There would be a nerve-racking run from the back of the building to the wall but, once there, it would be an easy climb to reach the street and freedom.

Pulling on the slipknot to release her bags, she flattened herself along the gutter and swung a leg out. Slowly, carefully, she let her body swing down. Gripping the cold, slimy gutter with halfnumb fingers, she lowered herself toward the metal floor at the top of the fire escape, dropping the last half metre to a near-silent landing.

He walked from the plane into a cold and miserable night but, even so, Klaatu was glad to be off the aircraft that had brought him in from London. He hated flying. The big Airbus Electroprop 320 whined and rumbled on the wet concrete as if it were keen to get back into the air, while Klaatu and his fellow passengers queued to board the coaches that would take them to the warmth of the terminal building.

It had been a wasted trip. Those idiots in London hadn’t a clue how to run a timesplash—

especially one of the magnitude they wanted. Yes, he could have helped them, but why should he?

He had plans of his own, right here in Berlin.

Their lead brick—a tall, handsome Brit called Flash—had taken him aside when the negotiations were clearly getting nowhere.

“So why did you even bother to come over here then, man?” Flash challenged him, smiling.

“You invited me.”

“Why aye, to talk about you setting us up for a big ’un. But you don’t seem all that interested.”

“What is that accent of yours?”

“What, have you never heard a Geordie before? And what’s yours then? Czechoslovakian, I’d guess.”

“I don’t think your team is ready.”

“Aye, and that’s why we need you, man. My tekniks can’t get their heads round the new gigarange formulas. They’ll screw it up. But you… Well, you’re the best, right? And I’ve told you already, money is no object. We’re well connected.”

Klaatu had looked the big Brit in the eye and said flatly, “None of your team is good enough. You won’t make it.”

At that the Geordie’s smile had switched off and Klaatu had left him and gone back to Berlin. Even at ten o’clock at night, Berlin-Brandenburg International airport was crowded, with hundreds of people swarming around the check-ins and milling aimlessly in the concourse. Klaatu had only hand luggage so he marched straight past the luggage carousels and out into the main concourse. A driver he recognised took his bags without a word, and they walked together out into the cold November air. A large black limo was waiting and Klaatu quickly got into the back while the driver stowed his luggage.

“Good flight?” asked Sniper, grinning maliciously.

“Wonderful.”

“Drink?” Sniper was sprawled across the back seat with a large whisky in his hand. Klaatu ignored the question. He didn’t drink. Most of Sniper’s politeness was designed to irritate, and Klaatu had long since learned to let it run off him without effect.

“The London gig’s going nowhere,” he told Sniper. Small talk, for whatever purpose, was not something Klaatu indulged in. “Their main guy’s a dick. Their tekniks don’t know their arses from their elbows.”

“So you weren’t tempted to stay over there?”

Klaatu eyed him carefully. “What do you think?”

Sniper’s tone was breezy and light. “I like London. It’s so decadent. Berlin is so prissy these days. Maybe we should go and show them how it’s done?”

Klaatu fought down his irritation and stifled the angry response that sprang to his lips. Ommen had changed everything. Until then, timesplashing had been on the fringes of legality, against the law in most places but not rigorously suppressed as it was now. Bricks were considered glamorous cult heroes then. Now they were seen as dangerous criminals. The whole splashparty scene had died out and the money had dried up. Sniper cursed the kids that had once idolised him, calling them cowards and traitors. It had made him bitter and hard but also fickle and moody. Dangerously so. But why would kids go to a splashparty when there was a good chance they could be arrested? What would be so attractive about an event where people could be killed in the backwash?

It was that damned exponent in the displacement function! The further back you went, the bigger the anomaly you could cause and the bigger the backwash. The past righted itself. Nothing could change that. However hard the splash hit the timestream it would flow back and set itself right eventually. It was just the backwash—where the disturbed timeflow hit the present—that caused any permanent damage. And that was where the exponential effect of going back farther caused all the problems. Go back thirty, forty, even fifty years and you were okay. The backwash was trippy but not deadly. But go back sixty or more years—as they’d demonstrated at Ommen—and the backwash could destroy buildings and kill people.

And now there were the new gigarange formulae, brilliant work that had extended the length of a lob indefinitely—as long as you had the huge energies required to create the displacement field. Now every brick they knew wanted to go back a hundred years, break the record set at Ommen that night, push Sniper and Klaatu off that pedestal they’d been on for over two years now. But a gigarange splash was a guaranteed nightmare when the backwash hit. Klaatu’s own calculations predicted exactly what the world had just witnessed in Beijing. If he and Sniper were going to pull this off in Berlin, it would require meticulous planning and a lot of money.

“Fucking Chinese!” Sniper’s thoughts had obviously been running along similar lines to Klaatu’s.