Portals in Time 3

by Michael Beals

  “Rostock?” she inquired, as if she wasn’t sure who he was. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Rostock’s gaze shifted to each of them in turn, finally settling on Lily. “So you did come to 1866.” He turned to Kat. “I’m here on orders.”

  Kat blinked at him. “You’re kidding. You’re admitting that you’re here on McInnes’s orders? Grantham will probably vaporize you if he ever claps eyes on you?”

  “I realize that.” Rostock’s gash of a mouth seemed about to become a sneer, but then he sneezed. “Ughh! Damned flowers. McInnes sent me here to warn you.”

  “About what?” she asked, trying not to laugh.

  “Grantham’s a very dangerous man. The last people who went looking for him never came back. But I mean never came back. They didn’t arrive in Hell either. They just vanished.”

  “Maybe they’re now working for Grantham.”

  “That’s not what McInnes thinks.”

  Kat glanced at Giselle, hoping for confirmation, but Giselle just shrugged. “How would McInnes know?”

  Rostock scratched at his scaly neck. “McInnes teleports into the real world every two months. He knows Grantham.”

  “So you’re here out of the goodness of your heart.”

  Rostock snarled, which looked decidedly bizarre on his half-human face. “I’m not enjoying this. I’m following orders. We saw Persephone fly over a few days ago, and we realized it had something to do with you. McInnes wants to mitigate his teleporting operation.”

  She gazed at Rostock. It was odd to hear him use a word like mitigate. The last time she’d seen him, his brain had been addled by alcohol. He was sober now, but she could still see the venom in his eyes. He’d probably still kill her if he got half the chance.

  “So what are you suggesting, that we should just give up and tell Hades it was too difficult?”

  “You might have to anyway. Grantham’s living so far in the future, he’s practically untouchable. Even if he’s committed murder and goes back to Hell, all Hades can do is turn him into a demon.”

  She glanced at Dore. He was hooking a thumb towards the hotel and tapping his watch.

  “You think we’re in danger?”

  Rostock looked around as if he thought he was being watched. “You’re not the first people to go looking for Grantham; he has security watching him at all times. If you get too close to his operation, you too could… just disappear.”

  She glanced at Dore again. He was now pacing back and forth and looking decidedly annoyed. He wasn’t happy about her talking to Rostock.

  “You say we’re not the first people to go looking for Grantham. Did you ever meet the others?”

  “I knew the others,” he said, looking slightly uncomfortable. “They were all Gypsies. But as I said, they all disappeared, never to be heard from again… On Earth or Hell.”

  She thought about it for a moment. One way or the other, she had to get rid of Rostock. “OK, Rostock, go back to Hell and tell McInnes you warned us. But don’t come back to Earth again. I’m here to stop all these unauthorized departures. If I see you again, I will use the glass barreled gun.”

  They left Rostock standing there beneath the streetlight. This was the second warning they’d had. First, it was Grantham, and now Rostock, or McInnes, if Rostock had been telling the truth. Kat had been through six years of war, lies, and deception. Even Commander Fleming, who was supposed to be her boss, tried to have her killed. It might have been Fleming who sent the CIA to greet them in Virginia. Now she was supposed to believe Grantham, who had every reason to discourage her.

  “This is all bullshit,” she whispered, as they strolled through the hotel lobby and headed for the stairs. “I think Grantham’s scared. If he’s got spies in the Elites, he probably knew we were involved when Lily disappeared. That’s why McInnes had helicopters out looking for us.”

  “But how could he know who we were?” Giselle asked.

  “I don’t know, Ellie, but Grantham knew my name, which means that the Gypsies or the Elites had let it slip.”

  “Or Jonathon Steel?”

  “Oh my God, I’d forgotten about Steel. D’you think he’s involved with Grantham’s operation?”

  Giselle grimaced. “I don’t know. It was Steel who helped us get to West Fork. He even helped us with our fake identities, but he could be a ruse. We would probably have to go to West Fork anyway, but if he revealed who we were, it would have allowed McInnes to keep up appearances. Do you remember how blasé McInnes was about shooting Rostock, but now he’s sending him as an envoy.”

  “Wow! That’s really clever. Steel even got us to teleport him to the real world as a thank you. I wonder where he is right now, because if he’s in the future with Grantham, he won’t be going back to Hell. He’ll simply have disappeared.”

  “Or he’s back in Hell, watching out for Grantham. Maybe Steel is the missing link.”

  When they reached the room, they saw that the hotel had left two bottles of complimentary wine on the table, and Dore wasted no time in opening one of them. He’d stopped giving Giselle intimate looks. Maybe their meeting with Rostock had changed his mood.

  She sat down in one of the comfortable chairs. “So, Jock, I know this thing with Rostock is bugging you. Come and talk to me.”

  When Dore had handed everyone a glass of wine, he sat down in an adjacent chair. “I’m worried about Rostock knowing too much. He had lots of time to memorize everyone’s faces. He knows who we all are now. Which means he can pick us off, one by one. He might have sounded friendly, but he works for McInnes, who works for Grantham. Maybe he wasn’t waiting for us. Maybe we simply caught him red-handed, and he didn’t know what else to say.”

  “What are you saying, that he might still try to kill us?”

  “Better we’re killed in 1866 than get the chance to follow Grantham again. And one thing we do know, and perhaps Rostock does, is that we can’t teleport from the hotel. We’ve got to teleport from the park, where we’re vulnerable. We have no idea where Rostock’s staying. He might be living in the park.”

  Kat shrugged. “We can’t do much about that, Jock. I gave him ample warning. All we can do is comb the surrounding area before we teleport. Can we talk about Grantham?”

  “Oh yeah, Grantham. We should be grateful to him. He’s the only reason we’re all alive again.”

  “I know he is, but I agree with Hades, we can’t have thousands of dead people wandering around. It’s positively freakish. At the moment, they all want to live in the past, but the past eventually becomes modern day.”

  “What a horrible thought. It makes me wonder about your stepfather and why Hades made him the Elite police commissioner.”

  Kat shuddered. “I wish you hadn’t said that. It makes me wonder if that’s why he was always so ahead of the game.”

  Dore sipped at his wine, made a sour face, and put it on the table. “Yeah, he was, wasn’t he? And he’s still ahead of it. Maybe you should ask Hades about him.”

  “I’d rather not think about it. Can we carry on discussing Grantham?”

  Dore sighed. “Well, if Grantham’s living beyond 2025, how do we find him? When we followed him to Old Westbury, no one tried to stop us, but I think that’s because Grantham held them back. If he and his people have all got cell phones, he’s probably in constant contact with them when he’s traveling. If they warned him that he was being followed, he probably made his car disappear because he had no choice.”

  “You think he knew?”

  “Yes, I do. If you had a multi-billion dollar empire that you couldn’t operate it by proxy, wouldn’t you have guards every step of the way?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose I would. But we were driving a stolen car. How could he have known it was us?”

  “McInnes. Also, Old Westbury’s about 25 miles from Central Park. That’s quite a distance. If he had cars following him, they’d have picked up on us before we even left the highway.”

  “OK, so it was obv
ious. So how does this help us?”

  “It allows us to deviate from the obvious. First, we find out where Grantham lives, using the DMV. Then, instead of following Grantham, we drive to Old Westbury before he gets there and lie in wait for him. Of course, it will mean switching cars. He’s got to park that Aston Martin somewhere safe before he travels further into the future, and I’ve got a theory about Grantham.”

  “You have a theory? Already?”

  “Yeah, I formed it when he came to The Loeb Boathouse. He said he likes where he’s living. He also said he was married, but didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “And?” she said, wondering where Dore was taking this.

  “Grantham doesn’t age. What would he do if he was married to someone who got too old for him?”

  “I don’t know. Divorce them?”

  “He doesn’t need to divorce them. He only needs to replace them, but what he doesn’t want to do is replace the house. Most women don’t start to change until they’re about forty-five. That would give Grantham about twenty years. That makes it easy for us. It means that if we can find the house, we can surf the years in thirty-year gaps. We could probably find his final resting place, in three or four hits.”

  She did a quick calculation. “That’s only 120 years. You don’t think Grantham would go further into the future than that?”

  “Why? Why would he need to?”

  “But he’s been doing this for two hundred years.”

  Dore stared at her for such a long time; she could almost see his brain working. “That still works. It takes us back to 1754, but if he jumped 200 years in the first place, that gives him a starting point of 1954. One hundred twenty years forward from 1954 takes us to 2074, which is probably why his clothes looked normal, but were actually very different.”

  “Do you think he’s still living in the same house?”

  “It’s just a guess, but yes, I do. It may not be the same house, but it will be on the same plot. How much future money have we got?”

  Getting up, Kat pulled the moneybag from a draw and sifted through the bundles of future money. “About $30,000. Why?”

  “I think we should move. We can always come back here when we need to go back to Hell, but I think we should book into a hotel in 2025. Then we don’t have to worry about Rostock trying to kill us; we can hide the cars in the hotel parking garage and then teleport from the hotel.”

  She tried to imagine a future hotel, perhaps on 5th Avenue, or Madison Avenue. It would be very different from the Fifth Avenue Hotel in 1866. They might even demand a credit card. There would be elevators, televisions in the rooms, room service by telephone. “OK. I guess I’m fine with that. When do you want to move?”

  “First thing tomorrow morning. We can scout the park to make sure that Rostock is gone, then we can go straight to 2025. The only thing I don’t know is which hotel to stay at.”

  “We saw a swanky hotel when we were shopping on Fifth Avenue,” Lily said

  “What was it called?” Kat asked.

  “I think it was called The Langham. I don’t know how much hotels cost in 2025.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Even if the rooms cost $500 a night, we only need to stay there for a couple of nights.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The road outside the hotel was alive with horse-drawn carriages and carts when Kat, and the team, made their way down to the park. It was 6:30 in the morning, but the sun was already warm, and they were relieved to find the park deserted. Kat doubted if Rostock was still around; if he’d been living in the park, he’d probably left at first light. Nevertheless, they scouted the nearby pathways and undergrowth before preparing to teleport. Grantham knew where they were now, and he could easily have posted a sniper. It would be catastrophic if any of them were killed at a moment like this. But they’d also made an early start because it was hard to know who’d be in the park in 2025. The only problem they might face was booking into the hotel, but they’d just have to deal with that.

  Making their way to the patch of lawn where they’d waited for Giselle and Lily when they went shopping, they took off their long dresses, then stood there for a moment, soaking in the silence. They could see the lake from here, and the curve of the bay where, in 2025, The Loeb Boathouse would stand. In 1866, parts of the park were still under construction, so it was shaded with silver birch and young horse chestnut trees. There were giant boulders that in 2025 would be ringed with lawn or shrubbery, dirt tracks that in later years would become busy footpaths. Kat would have loved to surf the years and watch the park mature. Maybe she would one day, if she was still a resident of Hell and still had a time machine.

  “Well,” Dore said, scanning the distant trees, “there’s no sign of Rostock, and there don’t seem to be any snipers, but let’s not stay here too long, just in case.”

  “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” Kat said. “Girls?”

  When Giselle and Lily both nodded, Dore said, “By the way, we don’t need to divide into pairs. All we have to do is link arms. We’re all going to the same place.”

  So they formed a tight circle and linked arms, Lily muttering about not sleeping well and hoping it would be better in 2025, Giselle giving Dore sideways glances after what had probably been a torrid night.

  “On the count of three,” Dore said.

  Kat nodded. “I’ll count. Are we ready?” When Dore raised an impatient eyebrow, she said, “OK. One, two, three.”

  Time travel never ceased to amaze Kat. One moment she was standing on newly laid lawn and breathing in the smell of horses, and then her senses were assaulted by the dull rumble of traffic, the tooting of horns, the smell of gasoline. She looked around as a morning jogger passed only yards away, and then two more people on their morning run. Kat could see The Loeb Boathouse, someone rowing on the lake, and she could also smell flowers. The park had matured in the last 159 years. The foliage was thicker, the trees considerably taller, the buildings of Midtown Manhattan barely visible. But more than anything, she felt safe. She was alive and beyond Hell’s reach. They were free again, and she could understand why Grantham wanted to live here.

  They had a busy day ahead of them. They had visited their new office, call the DMV, bought two cell phones, and, worst of all, they had to steal two more cars. It wasn’t difficult, but it wasn’t exactly easy either. They had to choose two different gas stations, preferably not too close to each other. And then she had an idea. Kat and Giselle both had driving licenses; Harper had given them one each when they picked up the era outfits and currency.

  “Hey, Guys,” Kat said, as they made their way across to 5th Avenue. “We don’t have to steal any cars.”

  “We don’t?” Lily said, looking noticeably relieved.

  “No, of course we don’t. We’re staying at an expensive hotel, Giselle and I both have driving licenses, and we’re not exactly poor. We can rent the cars through the hotel. Even if Grantham’s people got suspicious while we’re scouting Old Westbury, we’d look like tourists.”

  They all looked at Lily, who’d been married to a wealthy businessman and probably knew about hotels in New York.

  “Don’t look at me, guys. I don’t come from 2025. I only know what I saw when we went shopping in 2024. But things have certainly changed since 1954. You should see how many people talk on their cell phones. It’s like an epidemic. And the hotels look really swanky. What we need is a credit card. Nobody seems to use cash anymore. The sales assistant at Macy’s looked at me like I was crazy.”

  They were on Fifth Avenue now, and Kat was amazed by how clean everything was and how expensive all the cars looked. Even the taxi cabs looked like new cars. On the other side of the road, a street café had been erected at the end of a block, but it was like no café she’d ever seen. A low hedge and parasols had been positioned to surround and shade the tables, and waiters in uniform were serving the customers. Further up the street, bread was being delivered to a restaurant on glistening trays. It was only 7:0
0 in the morning, but already, people were crowding the sidewalks. Children were chattering as they crossed into the park, elderly residents buying a morning paper, early office workers carrying paper cups of takeaway coffee. New York had definitely changed.

  But the Langham Hotel was the biggest surprise. Kat had stayed at some of the most expensive hotels in Europe, but the Langham Hotel had been stylized to the nth degree. Cadillacs and Bentleys lined the drive. Exotic potted plants and ultra furnishings, marble floors, and a large droplet chandelier were in the reception area. The check-in desk was as wide as the floor area, large modern paintings decorated the walls, and the receptionists, bell boys, and porters seemed more numerous than guests.

  In other circumstances, Kat would have asked Dore to check them in, but Dore had a broad Scottish accent and was hard to understand at the best of times, and the only person who seemed to be free at the reception desk had a Louisiana twang to her voice. It could make for a difficult conversation.

  “Good morning,” Kat said in a breezy fashion. “I’d like to book a suite for four people.”

  “A suite?” the young woman queried. “You mean with four separate bedrooms?”

  “If it’s possible, yes.”

  The receptionist shook her head. “We don’t have suites with four bedrooms. The best we could do is two inter-connected suites with queen-size beds. Do you have a booking?”

  “I’m afraid not. We weren’t expecting to be in New York.”

  The young woman scanned her computer screen. “Well, we have two inter-connected suites that are free, but they’re on the top floor, and they’re $800 per suite per night.”

  “That’s fine. We’ll take both.”

  Kat handed over her fake California driving license and gave her address as the ranch in Virginia. At least it was a real address, better than giving the invented Hollywood film studio that Steel had concocted in Hell. Everything seemed to run smoothly until the receptionist asked for a credit card.