Avenging Angels (Bad Times Book 3)

by Chuck Dixon

  Her provincial guest picked up the thirty-two-card game quickly and was playing well after only a few hands. They talked of trifles, the child asleep in a wheeled bassinet in the corner. The conversation and brisk play kept Mme. Villeneuve’s mind from the tremors that shook the house from time to time, as well as the suffering of her son still asleep in his room above. She was grateful for this unexpected company. Without Caroline’s companionship, she might have grown despondent and even been tempted to indulge further in wine fortified with laudanum. And what aid might she have been to her son then?

  Caroline won the last trick on the last hand of this deal and wound up with the high score surpassing her host’s cumulative score for the first time.

  “You are remarkably skilled for a beginner,” Mme. Villeneuve said and gathered the cards to shuffle them for a new hand.

  “My brother won’t play any games with me anymore. He thinks I cheat,” Caroline said.

  “Difficult to cheat in a game you have only become familiar with this afternoon. You have siblings?”

  “Only one. An older brother. He’s a watchmaker in Ottawa.”

  Mme. Villenueve caught the suggestion of a smile at the corner of Caroline’s mouth. This young woman had more than a few secrets.

  “Have we eggs, Mother?”

  It was Jeannot, standing in the archway to the foyer. He was dressed in a clean shirt and trousers and a brocaded robe. He needed a shave, and his eyes were red-rimmed, with drooping lids as a result of the heavy dose he’d imbibed the night before. Mme. Villeneuve saw only the tousled-haired boy, bright-eyed and smiling, who had greeted her each morning during his earliest school years.

  “We have not, my dear. But Anatole tells me he still has bacon, flour, and butter. I’m certain he can make you something to satisfy you,” his mother said. “I am pleased to see you have an appetite.”

  “Famished. Good morning, Madame Rivard,” Jeannot said with a bow of his head.

  “Afternoon, I’m afraid.” She smiled and nodded her head in return.

  “Is it?” he said in an absent tone and left them for the kitchen.

  Mme. Villeneuve riffled the cards together, allowed her guest to cut, and then expertly dealt the cards by twos to each of them for the start of play. She won the next two deals with scores that placed her well ahead of her opponent to take the game. The baby stirred, then cooed in his bassinet. The widow made her apologies and left Mme. Rivard alone to feed her waking child while she repaired to the kitchen to watch her own son devour one of Anatole’s creations made from the shrinking stock in their larder. Jeannot ate with relish, and she was pleased.

  That evening, by the light of an oil lamp, because the gas lines had been cut by Prussians weeks ago, Mme. Villeneuve sat for the first time that week to record the events of the past three days in her journal. She wrote of her concerns for her son, the anxieties of living in a city under siege and meeting Caroline Rivard and her infant Stephen and taking them into her home at 33 Avenue Bosquet.

  By penning those words, she invited into her home guests most unwelcome. The musings of the widow called down upon her house a terror from out of time.

  The search program was named for Visvamitra, a Hindi demigod born of the thoughts of the god Brahma.

  Visvamitra was a seer, a prophet of future events, so exacting in his predictions that his words of truth were feared by kings and commoner alike. The program attempted to live up to the mythology of its namesake for preciseness and exhaustiveness. It was powered by a vast global network of servers belonging to various embodiments of Sir Neal Harnesh’s numberless holdings.

  Its only task, and the purpose for which it was created, was to monitor Harnesh’s enormous personal library of handwritten texts. It was not a security system. It was something far more complex than that. Visvamitra actually watched the physical copies of the texts in the library. Each and every page was scanned on a regular rotation to alert Sir Neal to any changes made to the pages themselves.

  The nature of anomalies in time was not a constant as theoreticians would have us believe. The Butterfly Effect was, so to speak, not in effect in the main. So many alterations in the timeline were localized in nature. Though untold millions of copies of Les Misérables, to choose an example, were in print in hundreds of languages, none of these copies would be altered in the slightest if, by chance, M. Hugo was caused to spill ink upon a page of his manuscript while at the task of writing his novel and be forced to rewrite a few passages using slightly different wording than he intended. Those changes, those rewrites, would not be reflected in any modern print version of his classic. Only by reading the actual written page would one observe that change.

  And so, by theft and purchase and other means, Sir Neal collected the world’s most extensive collection of manuscripts that had only one thing in common; they were the very first iterations of their forms written in the hand of their creators, and they were all non-fiction in nature. Histories, essays, biographies, treatises, and papers written by some of the most famous, and, in the majority, the most obscure, authors from the dawn of written language until the beginning of the twentieth century. There were journals and diaries penned by everyone from the most famous personalities in history to the least known and common. From the personal memoir of a certain Egyptian queen to the daily journal of a certain Mme. Villeneuve of Paris.

  Many of these volumes, like the former mentioned, were thought to be lost or never to have existed. But Sir Neal’s fortune, combined with his unique mechanism to break the rules of time’s inexorable forward passage, allowed him to send agents into the past to pluck literary treasures from libraries, schools, and privates homes with impunity.

  To the horror of any connoisseur of such things, each bound volume was unbound and its pages secured permanently within UV protected Lexan sheets to allow them to be seen from both sides. Ancient papyrus and vellum scrolls were unrolled and sealed within the clear plastic substance. These were carefully cataloged and stored in a zero-humidity environment kept just above freezing temperature and shielded from any direct light. Though they were stolen from history and the eyes of academia, they were preserved for the ages with great care. Uniform sheets containing the handwritten works were in safekeeping within a protected subterranean warehouse carved from limestone rock.

  These sheets were fed from great ordered stacks into a mechanized system that carried them along to banks of scanners where Visvamitra “read” each page of the millions of volumes once every twenty-four-hour period. The sheets would flash by at dizzying speed under the low-light lenses of the search program whose only purpose was to find differences, even the slightest alteration, from the previous scan.

  If changes to the written words were found, the volume would be separated from the rest and an alert sent to Gallant Informational Solutions Ltd in London where copies of the original text and the new altered text would be brought to Sir Neal Harnesh personally. These would be examined by him, and any actions taken based on his appraisal of their significance would be ordered by the man himself.

  It is thus that an unknown widow writing of her relief at her son’s survival and her gratitude for the comfort brought to her by a visiting Canadian was brought to the attention of man nearly two centuries later and deemed significant enough to require swift and bloody action.

  40

  Stone Soup

  Jimbo kept the stretcher team at a steady walk-trot changeup, walk six paces and trot six. The terrain allowed for it, they were moving through the wooded hills to the west of the Roman road following the low ground. They were taking care not to skyline themselves against the falling sun. When one team would tire, another would take up the burden of Boats.

  Bruce, the Dead Sea surfer dude, assumed leadership of the bearers. After the first few rotations, he took over calling the changes. But he never gave up his own place at the head of one of the poles. The compact guy was tireless, and kept up a constant string of encouragement and directions to t
he other bearers that Jimbo assumed was rife with profanity.

  The Ranger knew a hardass drill instructor when he heard one. Bruce was Army all the way.

  It was a mile-consuming pace, but they couldn’t keep it up indefinitely. At some point, they’d slow and then need a rest stop. Experience told the Pima that once it got dark, a few of their volunteers would melt away. They were making good enough time to put distance between them and any pursuit by heavy infantry. If the Romans had cavalry, they’d be fucked. Same result if the Romans let loose more of those little archers. Boats was slowing them down. They’d probably need a rearguard action. If they could just get through the night without any unexpected encounters or detours, they had an even chance of slipping away.

  The woods were rich with game. All around them, Jimbo could hear hooves crashing away into the underbrush on their approach. A few times, he spotted tiny deer in the second between their ears perking up and their rumps bounding away into the lattice of tree boles and tanglefoot. He heard the high yipping barks of foxes in the distance. Black squirrels leaped from branches overhead, sending down a silent rain of needles.

  A knot of partridges with orange crests atop their heads exploded out of a copse of scrub before them. Two of the freed slaves they’d picked up brought down a few birds with thrown stones. They grinned as they plucked the birds clean while they walked along. Jimbo was impressed. The two men downed five birds inside of a span of less than two seconds. No one back on the reservation could have done that well, not even Jimbo. And he’d brought home dinner stunned by thrown rocks many times growing up.

  James Smalls was once again filled with the feeling of being truly alive in a place and time not his own. The men running with him were as different from him in culture as it was possible to be, yet he felt an affinity with them. For all the miracles and comforts of the twenty-first century, he could never feel the freedom there that these men felt. Earlier today, they were slaves. Here, only a few hours later, their separate fates were waiting to be discovered. A man could reinvent himself here if he had the nerve and the will.

  Back in The Now, most men were on a path set for them before they were born. He’d left the rez and gone to war and survived. For what? To work a job where some shithead with a gun could take him out during a routine traffic stop? Or live to retire at fifty-five and wait until cancer took him? Even his missions into the past were only brief respites from a life that felt like it was already planned for him. Coming back from prehistoric Nevada and the ancient Aegean had left him with a longing for a world that no longer existed, a world where a man was challenged every day by forces beyond his control. There was no conserving risk in the places he’d seen. You went balls-out every minute and fuck the consequences.

  Maybe he was crazy. Most men would be reduced to PTSD cases by the shit he’d been through since Dwayne asked him to join Team Tauber. Jimbo found that instead, it gave him peace. It made everything seem more real. Every breath he took was like an invigorating drug washing his lungs and heart and brain clean. It wasn’t just thrill-junkie euphoria either. That was the kind of thing Lee Hammond lived for. Maybe, he thought, it’s like I belong here in the past. Maybe it was in his blood. He was just a red-skinned savage deep down inside and little more than a century from the last time his people lived the old way. Well, if that was it, then he could get behind that. There might be one of these times he’d just stay behind to make his own history.

  Bat, trotting behind him, said something. Jimmy Smalls came out of his own thoughts. “Yeah?” he said, stopping.

  “We need to think about resting these guys,” Bat said again.

  “Past time we took a look at Boats’ condition, too,” he said.

  The sun had sunk low over the hills now. They’d moved out of the tree line to a lower elevation of a broken country of ridgelines marching in descending order to the coastal plain. Jimbo waved the stretcher-bearers to halt and lower their passenger. The other tag-alongs stopped as well.

  “I’m going to run ahead to Lee and let him know,” Jimbo said and pointed up a slope to a grassy peak atop a hillock. “How about you move the unit up to where we can keep watch on our six from that high ground?” Bat nodded and spoke to the few men she knew understood Hebrew.

  They made camp on the slope of the hillside below the peak. Hammond took a prone position at the crest to watch the ground around them. It was a nasty badlands that terraced away down to the coast three days hard march from their current position. The land here was riven with shallow gullies that could hide an army in its shadows. These furrows could also hide their unit from sight so long as they found ones they could follow westerly. They’d take a short break and move on to increase their lead on any pursuing force.

  Bat and Chaz tended to Boats. The SEAL’s skin was hot to the touch, the wound area inflated and angry-looking. Boats was in and out of consciousness. Bat managed to get some water into him while Chaz strapped a Mylar blanket over him. They shot him up with a new infusion of antibiotics and antipyretics close to the wound site. Now it was up to time, the power of prayer and the sailor’s dogged will to live.

  Jimmy Smalls was handing out protein bars after showing the tag-alongs how to peel off the wrappers. He rationed out water from their shrinking supply. He shot a half-second stream from his CamelBak into the open mouths of the men around him. They’d need to find water soon. He’d take over point from Hammond when they resumed their march and sniff out a tank or an open spring.

  The little militia began gathering kindling for a fire until Jimbo waved them off. He kicked the pile of sticks aside. The two men with the game birds protested. They held up the stripped and gutted birds and shook them in Jimbo’s face until he held up a hand to them. Bruce interceded and grumbled something that made the men stand down. The Pima undid his pack and pulled out a chemical heat stick. He unfolded a PVC half-gallon camp pot and filled it with three inches of water from his reservoir system. He gestured to the hunters to hand him a game bird.

  Jimbo tore the legs and wings from it and dropped it in the water. He split the breast and added that as well, followed by a liberal splash from his trusty Tabasco bottle and a dash of salt. The gang of men gathered around and watched in rapt fascination. Jimbo activated the heat stick and inserted it in the folding pot. Within thirty seconds, there was steam rising from the pot. Bruce clapped his hands on his thighs and babbled to the others, who simply stared at this everyday wonder in dumb amazement.

  Jimbo left them watching the pot. Bat was sitting by Boats, dribbling water on his lips from the straw of her CamelBak.

  “Can you make sure they give that bird at least thirty minutes?” he asked.

  “Sure. Where are you heading?” she said.

  “I’m going to go back aways the way we came. I want to make sure no one’s closing the gap on us.”

  “You know those guys think you’re a miracle worker.” Bat nodded toward the ring of men staring at the steaming pot with mouths open.

  “That’s how rumors get started,” Jimbo said and slung his Winchester over his shoulder.

  Bruce rose to follow, but Jimbo waved him back down with a smile. He descended the slope after a high sign to Lee Hammond, who was lying invisible in the dark at the top of the hill.

  Bat turned back to Boats and used her fingers to moisten his dry, cracked lips. In addition to the wound to his leg, he had a lump to the back of his head that was swollen with fluid. One of his eyes was puffed shut, and a dark purple bruise was spreading from his jaw to his right ear. The man had taken an epic beating but was still hanging in. She took a thumb and pulled up one of his eyelids, and was startled when he spoke to her.

  “We in the clear?” His voice was a wet rasping sound.

  “Not yet, Boats,” she said, keeping her voice level and calm.

  “What’s the situation?”

  “We’re making good time. We’re three days, maybe four from extract.”

  “I’m holding you up.”

&
nbsp; “We’re managing. It’s good.”

  “No bullshit.” He locked hot, red-rimmed eyes on hers.

  “No bullshit, sailor,” she said levelly.

  Then he was gone again.

  Jimbo was downslope and nearing the tree line they’d left at twilight. The temps were dropping. His sweat-soaked tank top felt chilly against his skin under the armor. The woods were quiet but for the distant sounds of a high, truncated yelping. Bat Jaffe had told him it was jackals that made those sounds. She said they were a common sight outside the kibbutz she’d lived on when she was younger.

  He stopped dead on the slope and scanned the trees. He raised the rifle to his shoulder and scanned the shadows through the scope, the night vision on and wide open for maximum contrast. The eidetic memory that he honed as part of his tracking skills was telling him to look closer.

  Something was wrong. Something was different.

  Something was here that had not been here when they passed earlier.

  A fluttering shape at the edge of the wood, moving in the breeze.

  The Pima crept down the hill, the rifle traversing back and forth. The eyes looking for movement in the shadows.

  He approached and took the shape in his hand.

  A bit of tattered red cloth tied with a knot to the end of a scrub branch.

  Jimbo turned and ran full-out back to the camp.

  Bruce’s name was actually Byrus.

  Bat learned this by questioning him through one of their Jewish tag-alongs who also spoke Greek. Byrus was a Macedonian. He’d been a slave as long as he could remember. “Born in chains,” as he colorfully put it. He spent years as a pit fighter before being sold by his owner into the quarry. How many seasons ago, he was not sure.

  She asked what he would do now that he was free. The man only shrugged and returned to watching the mystically boiling pot.