by Jana Oliver
“She is,” Alastair responded just as curtly, not inclined to be polite.
“We need to speak to her.”
“And you are?” Alastair asked, eyeing the other man warily.
“Wilfred Arnett, Crown Prosecutor,” was the tart reply. “I am in charge of the case against Detective-Sergeant Keats.”
“I see. Come in, gentlemen.”
Jacynda was still staring at the fire. When she looked up at the men, her eyes went wide.
“Do be cautious, she is not of sound mind at present,” Alastair warned.
“Wescomb said something to that effect,” Hulme replied. He moved forward only a few paces and then stopped as she physically shrank from him.
“Miss Lassiter, I need to ask you a few questions about Sergeant Keats.”
“Who?” she asked, eyes darting from him to the other man in bewilderment.
“Keats. You know him.”
She shook her head.
“Now see here, Miss Lassiter—”
She skittered off the couch and ran to Alastair’s side, hiding behind him like a toddler would when confronted by a big dog.
Arnett stepped forward, frowning. “What’s this, then?”
“Miss Lassiter was assaulted,” Alastair informed them. “She sustained a head injury and lost her memory. She has no idea who Keats is, or I, for that matter. All your questions are a waste of time and will only frighten her further.”
Arnett looked down at her. “What are those marks on her neck?”
“Someone tried to strangle her.”
“Who?” Hulme demanded. Jacynda did not answer. “If this is a trick, I shall file charges,” the inspector threatened.
“It is not,” Alastair replied hotly. “Have your own physician examine her. He will concur.”
Arnett sighed. “No need. She was a better witness for the defence in any event. Let’s go, Hulme.”
Then they were gone.
“Well, that went better than I thought it would,” Alastair remarked, closing the door and bolting it.
He found Jacynda back on the couch, clutching the ferret tightly to her chest. She jumped when he re-entered the room.
“They’re gone.”
“Not nice.”
She has that spot on.
He knelt in front of her, taking her hands, his depression deepening. What if she never regained her full faculties? What if her people did not come for her? How would he care for her?
Jacynda pulled her hand free and tugged playfully on his pocket watch chain. He unclipped it and handed it to her. A pleased expression settled on her face as she began a deliberate winding pattern with the stem. He remembered the sequence from when she communicated with the future. She repeated it over and over, peering at the watch face, as if expecting something to happen.
“Not right,” she said, giving the watch a sharp shake, as if it were malfunctioning.
I wonder…
Alastair hurried up the stairs, two at a time, and then extracted her own watch from the bureau drawer where he’d hidden it. As he clattered back down, caution rose. Maybe he shouldn’t let her touch it. What if she accidentally sent herself somewhere unpleasant?
He sat on the couch and watched her repeated efforts, then copied the winding pattern. Nothing happened.
I was a fool to think otherwise.
He dropped the watch in amazement as a red glow appeared above it. When Jacynda’s hand reached out to touch the dial, he pulled it back.
“Best not. I don’t want you disappearing on me.”
She glared at his interference. It was the first sign of anger he’d seen in her. When she pointed at his lap, he issued a gasp. The watch had generated an illumined grid of letters. It reminded him of the keys on the typewriters the clerks used. He stared at the image above the pattern of letters. It hung in the air without any visible means.
“Incredible.”
He gingerly moved the contraption, placing it on the seat of a wooden chair and then drawing the chair closer. There was a slight noise and a word appeared in the air without any prompting.
Password?
Of course, they would want some security for this remarkable technology. A wild notion leapt into his head—perhaps he could communicate with Jacynda’s contemporaries and they could tell him how to treat her.
This time when she reached toward the watch, he didn’t stop her. She didn’t attempt to touch it, but instead pressed one of the illuminated keys. An F appeared in the air.
“Go on,” he urged. “Don’t think about it, just put in the letters.”
She looked down at the stuffed animal and frowned. She tapped the stuffed animal’s head and gave him a distressed look.
“Fred?” Alastair prompted. A shake of her head. “Weasel?” Another shake. “Ah, ferret?” he tried. A quick nod.
Her finger typed an E, then an R. The letters appeared one by one. Then she stopped, bewildered.
“Ferret has two r’s,” he informed her. That just confused her. “Let me.” He tapped on the red square and an R appeared in the air.
“How remarkable,” he murmured. He typed an E, followed by a T. “Now what?”
She cuddled the stuffed creature closer, rocking back and forth in agitation. Alastair resisted the need to swear openly. They were so close.
“Fred,” she said.
Not knowing what else he could do, he typed in the word. Nothing.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what to do.”
The words tore through him. He was supposed to help her, but he was powerless, an infant in the face of such advanced science. It was agonizing. He had long worshipped technology; now he only felt the need to curse it.
Alastair peered at the board, trying to sort through the keys and what they might mean. When he’d been in the bank setting up his account, he’d watched a clerk using a typewriter. It had fascinated him. When the fellow reached the end of a page, he pressed a lever that returned the carriage to the other side of the paper. What if this device required something similar to send the message into the future?
With a nervous wince, he pressed the key with a reverse arrow, praying it didn’t make the watch disappear.
Another odd noise.
“Is that good?” he asked.
The air screen typed Logged On.
More letters, typed rapidly now. Cyn? Where have you been?
“Ah… ah….oh my God, it worked!” Hands shaking, he began to type, praying that whoever it was wouldn’t grow tired of waiting for him to reply and shut down the connection.
jacynda very ill need help
Nothing happened.
Cyn?
Alastair remembered the strange key and pressed it.
Who are you?
montrose
A long pause. As each second ticked off, Alastair’s panic rose tenfold.
“Come on, talk to me!” he pleaded.
Dr. Montrose?
yes. “This is good. They remember me.”
Jacynda leaned against him, staring at the words in the air.
“Pretty,” she said, waving her hand through the letters.
“They’ll help you,” he offered, trying to sound reassuring.
She gave a firm nod that bolstered his spirits.
Send her here.
It was what he’d feared from the moment he’d seen the strange mark.
promise to treat her, he typed.
You have our word.
They’d given their word before, and it had been like gold. He had little choice but to comply.
He did as the typed instructions required, closing the connection, securing the watch to her wrist and then placing it in her hand. She looked at him inquisitively. The trust in her eyes was like a bayonet to his heart. What if he were sending her into the arms of her enemies?
There was no other option. “You’re going home,” he informed her solemnly.
“Home?” she repeated, looking puzzled.
“Your
friends will help make you better.”
He threw her possessions into the Gladstone at a furious pace, snapped it shut and set it on her lap. Right before he closed the watch cover to trigger the transfer, he brushed her cheek with a kiss. Her innocent smile made tears bloom in his eyes.
“Even if…” he nearly choked on the words, “even if you never remember me, I will always care for you.” He snapped the watch cover closed and staggered away a few paces, fists knotted.
She studied him with a sober expression, as if she knew how much this hurt.
The halo effect was brilliant, nearly blinding him. He saw her mouth open in astonishment, and then she was gone. He knelt, touching the floor where she’d been. Nothing of her remained.
Yet Keats thinks this is just nonsense.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the stuffed ferret. It had fallen on its side, misplaced in the rush. He scooped it up, tucking it under his chin and letting his tears fall with abandon.
Chapter 14
2057 A.D.
TEM Enterprises
Cynda landed hard, the wind knocked out of her. Her chin was resting on a chilly surface. It wasn’t wood like the floor in the nice man’s house. She inched a hand out. Flat…bump…flat…bump. Like mountains and valleys made out of solid metal. She kept moving her fingers farther away, touching the elevations and the depressions, trying to make sense of them. Then she encountered an obstruction. White, something hard. She tapped the end of it.
“Cyn?” a voice called.
The sound rattled around inside her head. She kept tapping the tip of the…shoe. A hand appeared and touched hers. She yanked hers back.
“Miss Lassiter?” another voice sounded, this one filled with authority.
She raised her chin to find two men staring at her. One had a long, gray-streaked ponytail that draped across a shoulder. His round glasses reflected the bright lights in the strangely shaped room. The other was dressed in black, with a dash of silver at his temples.
She focused on the one with the white shoes. He looked familiar. A name came to her tongue, but then it darted away.
“Is this a crazy place?” she asked through cracked lips.
“What?”
The other man cut in. “This is TEM Enterprises, Miss Lassiter. We were told you were ill. What is wrong with you?”
She shook her head, which made things worse. Shapes floated in front of her eyes like half-formed ghosts. Maybe they were ghosts. Where was the man who’d taken care of her in the old place? He would help her.
“Not right,” she said, trying to rise to her knees. Hands caught her a moment before she sank into the welcoming oblivion.
~••~••~••~
Senior Agent Klein didn’t fit the surroundings, but then few people did. Theo Morrisey’s private solarium was a reflection of its owner: unique. Stocked with rare tropical plants and butterflies, skittering geckos and a small colony of hummingbirds, it was not the ideal place for a senior Government spook to interrogate someone.
Which is exactly why Harter Defoe had chosen it.
“Talk to me,” Klein ordered, unconsciously tracking a hummer as it zipped mere microns over his head. “Tell me what’s going on so I don’t feel tempted to throw your ass in jail.”
Defoe carefully spread his hands, mindful of his healing chest wound. “On what charges?”
“Removing your ESR Chip, for one. That’s a Class 3 Felony. Traveling with a cloaked interface, a Level…hell, you know the regs better than I. You created them.”
“Some of them,” Defoe corrected. Time Rover One, as they called him, had not been responsible for the Essential Subject Record Chip rules. He detested the notion that someone knew where he was at any given moment because of a piece of hardware imbedded under his skin. “So what do you want to know?”
“Let’s start with your chest wound. Who gave it to you?”
“Someone who works for the Time Protocol Board.”
Klein perked up. “How do you know that?”
“Lassiter told me. When I got the drop on him, he was about to kneecap her.” He grimaced. “Unfortunately, he scored the final shot.”
Defoe altered his position in the chair to ease a cramp in his back. It didn’t help. He’d been in the Thera-Bed too long. He wished the spook would wrap up the questions and leave.
“TPB hasn’t said a word about the shooting,” Klein remarked skeptically.
“They might not know. Lassiter bashed the guy on the head and sent him home before he knew he’d hit me.”
Klein frowned. “Why would a TPB goon risk shooting you just to get Lassiter?”
“Perhaps he did not recognize me,” Defoe offered.
The senior agent’s frown deepened. “Or he thought he was looking at someone else.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Defoe replied. He wasn’t about to confirm that he was a shape-shifter to a senior agent of the Government.
“Yeah, you do, but we’ll leave it at that for the moment.”
Klein leaned forward, unaware that a yellow-throated day gecko was eyeing him like he was a savory snack. “Here’s the situation: TPB is hiding something. Something big. They circled the wagons when Davies moved up to the chairmanship position. We need to find out what they’re up to.”
Defoe let out a slow breath, trying to short-circuit his anger. “You got Morrisey’s nephew killed over some damned interagency rivalry?”
“Nothing that petty. Stone was the third one we’ve lost.”
“I haven’t heard a thing about this.”
“You haven’t been around to hear it,” Klein shot back.
Defoe huffed in frustration. “The lag was getting to me. I needed some time off.”
“We figured as much. When one of our people said they’d caught a reading of your ESR Chip in 1888, we decided it was time to let you know what was going on.”
Should have removed that damned thing years ago.
Klein rocked back in his chair, causing the gecko to sprint away. “To some extent this is a private battle between Guv and TPB, but there are bigger implications.”
“That isn’t comforting,” Defoe grumbled. The Time Protocol Board was stocked with ambitious politicians. The Guv folks were the spooks, answerable only to themselves and the current administration. It was a toss-up as to which was worse.
As if reading his mind, Klein said, “I know you don’t like us. No one likes us. But right now we’re the lesser of two evils.”
“Not a very compelling sales pitch.”
The agent shrugged. “It’s the way things are. What we know for sure is that people are in the time stream who aren’t on record as being there. TPB is looking the other way. We want to know why.”
“Like Chris Stone’s killer?”
“Dalton Mimes is a good example,” Klein acknowledged. “He hitches a ride along with his psychiatrist brother to 1888, but no record is made of his journey. TPB doesn’t blow a cork about that when it comes to light. Why?”
“Morrisey said it was some deal Time Immersion Corp. cooked up to save themselves from bankruptcy. Once they went under, TPB didn’t care.”
“TIC wasn’t the only one hiding the transfers,” Klein informed him. “Time In Motion is doing the same thing.”
“They’ve always been a front for the Board’s behind-the-scenes deals,” Defoe replied.
“Too easy of an explanation.” Klein glared at the dragonfly perched on his arm. He shook it off. “Why the hell are we in here? There are things flying all over the place.”
“They don’t bother me,” Defoe fibbed.
Klein’s eyes narrowed. “I spent some time with Mimes. Nutty bastard. He says he was in ’88 to frame some Victorian for the Ripper murders and make a freakin’ fortune. He’s very pissed that someone hasn’t sprung him from the asylum. It’s as if he thought that was a forgone conclusion.”
“So he got stiffed. That’s life,” Defoe replied, wondering where this was headed.
“Mimes’ attempt to screw with history isn’t the big story here. What’s troubling me is that he was willing to leave his brother behind in an asylum.” Before Defoe could say a word, Klein cut him off. “I know he was bagging his sister-in-law. Still, it doesn’t wash for me. Not everything boils down to sex and jealousy.”
“Precious little in my experience.”
Klein looked him straight in the eye. “What bothers me is that quid pro quo Mimes was expecting. When he realized I wasn’t there to bail him out, he blew his cork. He claims he wasn’t the only person involved in the death of Morrisey’s nephew.”
Defoe’s chest tightened. “He could be lying.”
A shake of the head. “Chris Stone’s watch registered an ESR Chip right before he died. It took some doing, but we finally tracked the reading back to someone under contract with TPB. Ex-military prick named Copeland.”
Defoe froze. “Tall, arrogant, dark-haired?”
Klein nodded.
Oh yeah, he remembered the bastard. Too busy trying to shoot Lassiter, Copeland hadn’t seen him coming. There were advantages to being invisible. Unfortunately, TPB’s hired gun won the round anyway. But not the next.
“He’s the one who shot me,” Defoe said.
Klein nodded. “I suspect he’s good for the other deaths.”
“So why isn’t he in jail?”
“TPB denies it all, refuses to recall him.”
“Then turn one of your people loose on him.”
“I’ve lost enough already,” Klein answered bluntly.
“But you’re willing to put Lassiter and me on the firing line?”
“I judge it’s worth the risk.” Klein dropped the attitude. “We know you’ve had some contact with the Futures.”
How the hell do you know that? Morrisey wouldn’t have told them. Buying time, Defoe hedged his reply. “Futures?”
“Don’t go coy with me. We know they’ve been snooping both in our time and in ’88. I don’t trust them. We have no idea of their agenda.”
“Their agenda is simple: keep us from fornicating their future.”
