TimeSplash (27 page)

Jay glanced at his compatch. It was already early evening. He imagined the undercover agents already out there, cruising the bars and clubs, trying to let it be known they were splash tekniks looking for work, hoping to connect with Sniper’s recruiters, possibly even Klaatu himself. He wondered what Sandra was doing. Had she gone back to the safe house in Barnes? Should he go there too after the meeting? If he did, what would he say to her?

“Finally,” Overman said, “the third part of the plan is a fallback in case the raids go pear-shaped.” He glanced at Holbrook and received a discreet nod. “I’d like you all to follow me, please. There’s something I’d like to show you.”

He led them out of the meeting and down the corridor to the lifts. He ushered them inside and took them down to the ground floor. They went down another corridor and then another until they reached a steel door.

“From now on,” he said, “you each have access to this area.” He put his finger into the DNA sampler. When he got a green light, he pushed the door open and led them inside. There was another short corridor and then double doors that opened onto a large room that was mostly empty.

Jay looked around. There were steel cabinets lining the walls and a long bench of workstations with banks of displays facing the handful of people working there. Fat cables crossed the floor from several places and ended at a three-metre-square platform at the centre of the room. The platform had a handrail and black and yellow tape marking its edges, but was otherwise unremarkable.

A woman at one of the workstations stood up and crossed the room to greet them. She looked young, not much older than Jay. She wore jeans and a red blouse and seemed unreasonably casual beside the suited men and women who had just entered her domain.

“This is Nahrees,” Overman told them, “and she runs this facility.”

Jay did a double take. Wasn’t that a minor character from an old Marvel comic book? In which case, “Nahrees” was a tag. In which case… He looked around the room again, more carefully this time.

“What we have here—” Overman went on, but was interrupted by Jay.

“It’s a lobsite!” Jay couldn’t contain himself. “You plan to go back and intercept Sniper at the splash target before he can cause an anomaly!”

“Give the man a coconut,” said Nahrees, amused at his excitement. “We haven’t met, have we?”

Jay looked at her, not really taking in what she said. He was shocked at the audacity of the plan. His head was whirling, thinking through the consequences. “Oh, this is a really bad idea,” he said. “You’re going to lob the SAS back to fight Sniper and his guys on the streets of old London. That’s just…”

As Jay searched for a word that expressed the full extent of the stupidity of the idea, Overman spoke up. “As I said, this is the third part of the plan. The fallback. If all else fails, Colonel Davidson’s team will jump back to the splash target and neutralise Sniper and his crew.”

Holbrook was looking at Jay with a curious expression. “Why is that such a bad idea, Jay?”

Overman pursed his lips, clamping down on an angry retort. Jay saw it and it gave him an unexpected moment of satisfaction. “A timesplash works when you create a paradox in the past. You kill your own mother, or you stop Einstein inventing special relativity or whatever. The anomaly sends spacetime wild but the timestream flows back into place. I don’t know the physics of how that works…”

“Metatemporal pseudodimensionality,” Nahrees said.

Jay shook his head as if there was a gnat in his ear. “Whatever. The backwash from all this eventually hits the present and that’s what brings down the cities.”

“Is this going somewhere?” Overman asked.

Jay took a breath. “The thing is, if you go back to, say, the early nineteen hundreds, in central London, and start a shoot-out with armed maniacs, you don’t know who might get hurt. Just think of the people who were around at that time and place!” He closed his eyes. “I can’t think of anybody offhand, but there’s bound to be loads of scientists, philosophers, writers, politicians, inventors, industrialists, philanthropists… If any one of them is killed, it could be just as bad as whatever Sniper is planning.”

“My men are trained to avoid collateral damage,” the SAS colonel said.

“But that’s all that Sniper lives for. Once you get him cornered, he’ll take out as many random passers-by as he can. Would you risk the lives of maybe two million people on the chance that you’ll get all Sniper’s people before they have a chance to spray the streets with machine gun bullets?”

“As I said,” Overman repeated through clenched teeth, “this is our fallback. We know the risks. It’s better than letting Sniper just go ahead and do what he wants.”

Nahrees spoke to Jay. “He’s right. We’ve run the simulations. The chances of our guys shooting someone really important are thousands to one.” Jay turned to her feeling vaguely betrayed, as if she should have been supporting him.

“Look at it this way,” she went on. “If we leave Sniper alone, the probability that he’ll kill someone important is one. Certainty.”

Overman had his irritation under control again. “It’s good that you’re raising these issues, Jay, but you have to trust that we’re not going into this blindly.” He spoke as much for Holbrook’s benefit as for Jay’s. “We’ve done our sums. The very fact of a shoot-out in central London with modern weapons—even if no one but Sniper’s team and our own people get killed—will create an anomaly big enough to cause some pretty serious damage. But, if all else fails, this is a calculated risk we have to take.”

Jay backed down, unwilling to argue any more. He still thought it was a crazy, dangerous plan. In fact, just the kind of plan that an MI5 mole would come up with to make sure that the timesplash succeeded—one way or another. He eyed Overman with the growing conviction that this was the traitor.

Sandra didn’t go back to the safe house when she left the SIS Building. Instead, she went to Waterloo Station and caught the first train she could get to Godalming in Surrey. It was a slow train and she had to change at Woking, but by the early evening she was in a taxi heading south-east into the gentle hills and open farmland of the Surrey countryside. She paid off the taxi and walked the last couple of kilometres. She had done this before many times over the past two months. At a point under a low ridge, she left the road and crossed a field, climbing to a spot at the other side where she could follow the line of a hedge into the trees at the back of Sniper’s house.

The light was beginning to fail, but the evening was warm. The big house looked peaceful. She did a circuit of it, keeping well away. One of Sniper’s Mercedes was missing. So was the big black all-terrain vehicle his guards liked to travel in. That was good. There might only be a couple of guards in the house. Sniper liked lots of them with him when he travelled. She had bought herself a sandwich, a chocolate bar and some bottled water from a kiosk in Waterloo and settled now to her evening meal as she waited for night to fall. Once it was dark, she could approach the house. Until then, she would wait and watch. The interview with Overman had been a strange experience. Almost from his first words, he had treated her with an intense, almost hostile, disdain. Her retaliation was automatic. She flirted with him—and not just a little, but the full-on, no-holds-barred, seduction routine. She told herself he deserved it. She told herself she’d teach him a lesson. Yet, even at the time, she had felt a powerful thrill, an excitement that made her skin tingle, and her heart race. Sitting in the cool evening air, watching the darkness gather around Sniper’s house, she ran over what had happened, letting her mind drift back to the interview that morning.

“Okay. How long have you been following Sniper?” Overman asked.

“What’s your name?” she asked back at him. “I can’t keep calling you Mr. Overman.”

“Yes, you can. How long were you following Sniper?”

She shrugged. “Since I escaped from the Institution. The day Beijing was destroyed, whenever that was.”

“Why?”

She looked at him sweetly. “Why what, Mr. Overman?”

“Will you stop pissing about? It was your idea to come in here, so let’s just get on with it, shall we?”

“You don’t seem very friendly. I don’t see why we can’t be friends.”

“Why are you following Sniper?”

She looked him in the eyes. “He’s a good looking guy. Strong. I like strong men.”

He slammed his hand down on the desk so hard she jumped. “If you really want to fuck me, we can do it later. No problem. All right? Until then, you’re going to stop this little game and you’re going to tell me what I want to know.”

A smart-aleck response sprang to her lips, but she suppressed it. The excitement she’d been feeling flipped over into anger. She wanted to tell him she wouldn’t fuck him if he was the last man left on Earth. But she bit that down too.

“If that doesn’t suit you,” he said, his eyes boring into her, “ we can use other means to get information out of you. They won’t be much fun.”

As she pondered her memories of the day, a light came on in one of the downstairs rooms and Sandra realised how dark it had grown. Her sandwich was gone so she started on the chocolate.

Overman had known exactly how to handle her, she realised. He hadn’t let her get away with any nonsense. He’d even played her at her own game and won. And that was despite the fact that he did want her. She could see it. He even admitted it. But it wasn’t important to him. He could take it or leave it. She’d only ever seen that once before, when Dr. Mason at the Institute had removed himself from her case. But even then, she’d won, got what she wanted, beaten him. He’d had to run away, confess his weakness to the others. How humiliating it must have been for him! Odd that. She’d never considered before that she had humiliated him. Not Overman, though. He was hard as nails. He’d have made a good brick. She wondered where Jay was. She wondered what he must be thinking. She should probably call him, try to explain, but what could she say?

Another light came on in an upstairs window. It would soon be time to take a closer look. She checked her compatch. Any minute now a guard would come out and do a circuit of the house. There! A man with a submachine gun in his right hand and a torch in his left stepped through the door and stood on the back veranda breathing the air and looking around. Letting his eyes adjust to the light, Sandra thought. Then he set off, walking slowly. Time to go.

Crouching low, she moved quickly and quietly toward the house, keeping close to the hedge, staying behind the guard. She let him round the corner of the house before she went to the windows. It was a big rambling place with several wings in a haphazard arrangement—the main house, an extension at each end coming off at right angles, and a huge garage that used to be stables, coming off one of the extensions. The guard would take several minutes before he was back again. She went to the door he had come out of, turned the handle and pushed. It was unlocked. Once she was inside, she pulled her gun and looked about her. She was in a utility room as big as her last bedsit had been. There was a big sink in one corner and a bench with wooden slats. Coats hung on the opposite wall and Wellington boots were lined up beneath them. She moved on, through a wooden door, into a carpeted corridor. She knew the layout of the ground floor. She had observed it often enough and long enough to be thoroughly familiar with it. Sniper spent most of his time in the big sitting room or in the home theatre. There was a woman who drove a bright red sports car—also missing, she realised—who had an office in the conservatory. She seemed to do all Sniper’s admin. If what she was looking for was anywhere, it would be in that office.

It was easy to move silently on the carpet and listen to the sounds from the conservatory as she drew closer. A man’s voice spoke in harsh, clipped phrases. A woman answered him in monosyllables, her voice low and half-sobbing. As Sandra reached the door, the man raised his voice in anger. She heard two quick footsteps on the conservatory’s stone tiles and a slap. The woman cried out, a gasp of pain and shock.

Not waiting to think about it, Sandra burst through the door, gun high. A burly, overweight man was standing over a woman. The woman was tied to an office chair with tape. Her blouse was ripped open and her hair was awry. Blood ran from a cut in her lower lip. They both looked at Sandra in surprise, but neither spoke.

“Untie her,” Sandra said, taking aim at the man’s big chest.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked, sounding more irritated than scared. His eyes flicked to the big desk nearby. Sandra looked too. A submachine gun was lying there, almost within his reach.

“Don’t be stupid,” Sandra warned him.

He reached slowly into his trouser pocket and pulled out a penknife. Sandra watched him carefully as he unfolded the blade. He reached down to the woman’s feet and cut her ankles free.

“If you’re lookin’ for Sniper, he ain’t here, love.” He had a strong London accent. He moved to the side of the chair and cut loose one of her arms. Then, in a movement unexpectedly fluid and swift, he grabbed the chair and hurled it along with its human passenger toward Sandra. Keeping low, staying behind the chair, he reached for the desk.