“Before you try to bluff, we found your fingerprints all over this device. Trespassing is one thing, but spying on an armaments factory is something else again. If I were you, I’d think very carefully before telling me any lies: we are willing to be lenient if you cooperate fully.
“So. Which agency of the United States government do you work for?”
IRONGATE CENTRAL POLICE STATION, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020
The time Rita had spent in the FBI leadership course hadn’t been completely wasted: it had given her some insight into how high-flying cops thought. Now, sitting opposite Inspector Morgan in an interrogation room on the upper floor of a police station, she couldn’t fool herself: I am so screwed. In theory, she knew, she should give the appearance of cooperation while keeping her mouth shut and waiting for an opportunity to escape. But Inspector Morgan showed every sign of being one step ahead of her all the way. Commonwealth Transport Police. Did than mean she was in charge of fining fare-dodgers, or was it an antiterrorism role, like the investigative arm of the TSA? Guess right, Rita, she told herself uneasily. She won’t give you a second chance …
“What’s that?” Rita said brightly, and pointed at the webcam.
“I was hoping you could tell me.” The inspector’s expression was mild. “What’s your name again?”
“Rita.” There’s a fine line between disclosing operational intelligence and building rapport, her trainers had told her. Building rapport was good. It looked like cooperation, and evidence of cooperation reduced the probability of beatings.
The door behind her opened and a flimsy aluminum tray landed on the desk. There were two oddly bulbous mugs of coffee on top of it. Ceramic mugs, she saw. Odd.
“Take your coffee,” said the inspector. “Rita who?”
“Rita Douglas.” Rita took the indicated mug, and the cop who’d brought the tray removed it. Thoughts piled up in a train wreck as she raised her mug and took a preliminary sip. It was coffee all right. So they’re going to good-cop me first, huh? (It beat sleep deprivation or waterboarding any day of the week, but was no less an interrogation tactic. For one thing it helped build rapport, loosening the tongue. And when the coffee got to her bladder, a skilled interrogator could use the liminal leg-crossing unease to speed her along for a few minutes, then trade it in for more sympathy by allowing her a toilet trip.)
“Well, Miss Douglas.” Inspector Morgan leaned toward her. “You’re a very lucky woman. Unlike the driver of Streetcar 411 on the number 18 circuit, who I gather has been signed off sick for the rest of the week from the shock of nearly running you over.”
“Shit.” Oops.
“I’ll take that as a nondenial,” Morgan said drily. “The driver also testified that you were there one second, then vanished the next. Which, along with the gadgets found on your person—and the spy devices you distributed around the switchyard—tell us exactly what kind of person you are.”
Rita took a mouthful of coffee, desperately trying to buy a few seconds to get a handle on a situation that seemed to be spinning out of control. “What kind of person would that be?” she asked.
The inspector’s expression froze for a split second. “An evasive one. I suggest you start answering my questions, Miss Douglas. We know you are a world-walker sent by the United States government, and now that we’ve caught you we know how to keep you. All we have to do to neutralize your ability is keep you on an upper floor, or in a basement, or blindfolded. The question then becomes one of whether you cooperate willingly, or whether we have to do this the hard way.” Morgan took a mouthful of coffee. “The hard way is easier for us, you know. We just do it by the book. Charge you with espionage, try you, lock you up, and throw away the key. Case closed. If you really want to spend the rest of your life chained to the wall of a cellar, we can make it happen.”
Rita dry-swallowed. Her tongue felt like parchment and her heart was pounding. To stop her hands from shaking visibly, she wrapped them around the coffee mug. “What’s the alternative?”
“You answer my bloody questions!” Inspector Morgan leaned across the table toward her, voice strident. Rita recoiled against the back of her chair. Morgan settled back, her tone moderating: “I don’t care how you justify it to yourself. I don’t care if you tell yourself you’re worming your way into my confidence to gather intelligence before you escape and report home. Your motives are immaterial. All that matters is that you answer enough of my questions that I can tell my superintendent that you are in a cooperative frame of mind.” She paused. “Do you want a minute or two to make your mind up?”
Rita knew enough to translate from cop-speak: There’s no pressure, this isn’t a boiler-room operation, I just want you to do as I say right now. But although she felt a mulish urge to throw it back in Morgan’s face, the inspector really did hold all the cards. Unless Rita was willing to world-walk from the top floor, her only options were the ones Morgan was offering her. Life in a hole, or full cooperation … whatever that meant.
“Ask away,” she said hoarsely, wondering if she’d be able to live with this numbness afterward. “What do you want to know?”
The inspector stared at her with unreadable eyes. “Let’s start with: which agency do you work for, and when are they expecting you to report back next…”
PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020
FEDERAL EMPLOYEE 004930391 CLASSIFIED VOICE TRANSCRIPT
AGENT O’NEILL: So our asset is now past her deadline. Gentlemen, ma’am, do we have any comments?
LIAISON, STATE DEPT: Colonel, is there any prospect—in your opinion—that she’s defected?
COL. SMITH: What? No, absolutely none whatsoever. If you’d asked me three months ago I’d have said it was a low probability outcome, but since then she’s seen the Gate and acquired a partner. She’s solid, in my view.
LIAISON, STATE DEPT: So, she’s either dead or captured?
COL. SMITH: (slowly) Those are the likeliest reasons, yes.
DR. SCRANTON: Have we had any signals since insertion? What about the switchyard?
AGENT O’NEILL: According to these transcripts, the last pop-up drone got nothing. It looks like they went through the rail yard with a fine-toothed comb—nothing answers when we ping it; all the relay nodes are unresponsive. Air Force sent another pop-up over the downtown station, but it got nothing from Rita’s inertial mapper or the bug in her left shoe. They’d have had to get lucky to find her, but it’s still worrying. The silence, I mean.
DR. SCRANTON: What else are we seeing over there?
AGENT O’NEILL: The drone we had overhead when we inserted Rita picked up her beacon in the central station. A few seconds later it disappeared and reappeared just outside the building. It’s possible something inside spooked her, but not enough to abort the mission. Since then we’ve had zip. The five-minute restriction on how long we can leave a drone in the air over there means we have huge holes in our coverage. Rita disappeared in the middle of a ninety-minute blackout with no assets in place to track her.
COL. SMITH: I’d like to draw your attention to the ground activity around the station at that time. And in the downtown area in general. Lots of cars, lots of people on foot—too many for six a.m. She could have walked straight into a dragnet.
AGENT O’NEILL: What kind of dragnet could stop her jaunting?
DR. SCRANTON: There is a very unpleasant case that I’d like you to consider. We know that this, this Commonwealth entity, has extensive technological capabilities. Maybe they’re not up to our level, but they’re advanced enough to be extremely dangerous. We also know that they’re one topological shift away from time line two, where we made hard contact with the Clan world-walkers—
LIAISON, STATE DEPT: Oh no, please don’t—
COL. SMITH: No interruptions, please. Ma’am, if you’d continue?
DR. SCRANTON: Thank you. Our threat posture for the past seventeen years has been based on the assumption that, although we whacked the Clan hard, we had no conc
lusive proof that we got them all. And we’ve had indications of anomalous false positives in the national surveillance infrastructure that might be caused by visiting world-walkers. Not to mention recent evidence of a world-walker-assisted espionage operation in a major city. So the precautionary principle dictated that we conduct operations as if they were out there. Hence Rita, hence DRAGON’S TEETH, and hence a bunch of other contingency plans you don’t need to know about.
I think we have to assume that the Clan—or other world-walkers—are definitely known to the Commonwealth, and that the authorities there know exactly what they’re looking at when they see signs of world-walking. Just like us, in other words. The worst-case scenario is that the surviving world-walkers from the Clan are working for the Commonwealth. By repeatedly trialing a JAUNT BLUE asset at the same location we inadvertently alerted them to the presence of a world-walker, and they saturated the area with bodies who knew what to expect. We’ve gotten inexcusably sloppy: we need to relearn all the tradecraft we’ve forgotten since the Berlin Wall came down. And unless Rita shows up in the next couple of days we must assume the worst—that she’s been captured and is being interrogated by people who know what she is. At which point I’ve got to have a revised plan ready for briefing that takes into account—Colonel?
COL. SMITH: There’s a worse-than-worst-case scenario, I’m afraid.
DR. SCRANTON: What?
COL. SMITH: You asked, what if world-walkers from the Clan are working for the Commonwealth. But turn it on its head. What if they’ve got Rita and know everything she knows—and the Commonwealth are working for the Clan?
END TRANSCRIPT
IRONGATE CENTRAL POLICE STATION, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020
Even though Rita was cooperating fully with the inspector’s line of questioning, it was clear that her answers weren’t satisfactory. After a couple of hours, Inspector Morgan called a toilet break. But Rita’s respite was short-lived. The inspector grilled her until late in the evening, then consigned her to a top-floor cell. She spent a bad night on a hard bunk, trying not to notice the periodic rattling of the inspection hatch. The next morning, everything started up again.
“So, let me see if I have this straight. You are Rita Douglas, age twenty-six. Previous occupation: thespian.” (The inspector’s language was weird—English, but with enough variant usage thrown in to suggest centuries of divergent evolution.) “You were inducted by an autonomous group within the Department of Homeland Security, in the wake of a kidnapping attempt by your long-lost world-walking relatives. The Unit is headed by a Colonel Smith, who reports to a Dr. Scranton.” She paused. “What is a medical practitioner doing in this Unit, Rita? Do you have an explanation?”
“I don’t think she’s an MD. Nobody told me what her doctorate was in.”
“Yet she uses the honorific—”
“That’s not uncommon for people with higher degrees, is it?”
“I see.” Inspector Morgan frowned, then stared at her with narrowed eyes, as if trying to recall the precise offense that applied. “Forget it.” Morgan’s lips thinned as she added another note to the book before her. The pen she used seemed to be a ballpoint of some kind, Rita saw, but everything here was a subtly different shape. “Back to the kidnapping. When and where exactly did it happen? Do you remember the date and time? I’d like you to walk me through it in detail.”
“Um, yeah. Uh, it was March the twenty-first, a Friday evening in Boston. I’d just flown back from Seattle—”
“‘Sea-attle’? Is that a city? Where is it?”
Oh God. “Um, it’s on the West Coast? Between Vancouver and Portland—”
“How do you spell ‘Vancouver’? Is that another city?”
“Yes.” Rita spelled it, then spelled “Seattle.” “It’s on Puget Sound, a deep bay way up the coast near the border with Canada.”
“‘Can-ada’? What is ‘Canada’?” A five-minute detour taxed Rita’s knowledge of eighteenth-century history to the utmost, before the inspector caught herself. “Let us pass over this for a while—it is of low significance. You were on the ‘west coast,’ and you flew to the ‘east coast.’” The inspector sounded skeptical, as if flying was something too exotic to associate with the woman before her. “What happened then?”
“Oh, I caught the T—sorry, the commuter train—to the garage where I’d left my car. It was about eleven o’clock at night when I got there, and the place was nearly deserted, so I paid my parking ticket and went to my car when some guy tased me—”
“‘Tased’?”
“A taser is, uh, an electric dart gun. Hurts like f—like a snakebite. Worse. It paralyzed me and I fell over and two men picked me up and rolled me into the trunk of my car and—”
“A trunk is a baggage compartment, isn’t it?”
A buzzer sounded from deep in the guts of the odd-looking desk telephone, rescuing Rita from a hellish spiral of ever-converging footnotes that served only to make her dizzy and irritable, highlighting the conceptual gulf separating this world from her own.
“Morgan here. Yes?” Inspector Morgan picked up the headset and listened attentively. Rita tried to overhear, but the speaker wasn’t very loud. “Yes, I’m in the process of—no, you can’t. I’ve already charged her and am interviewing the accused.” (Rita sat bolt upright at that. Charged? she thought. But she hasn’t—) “She’s in Transport Police custody. No, you can’t. This is a matter for the Police. You clearly have no standing in this case and I will thank you for not interfering in an ongoing Police investigation. Good day.” She slapped the handset down with sufficient venom to rattle the table.
Rita cleared her throat. “I couldn’t help overhearing. You told whoever that was that you’d charged me. Are you supposed to read me my rights, or let me ask for a lawyer, or something?”
For a moment the inspector looked as if she was about to explode. She took a deep breath and shook her head. Then she looked Rita in the eye: “You didn’t hear that conversation. You must have imagined it.”
“Uh, I don’t understand?”
“Because if I had not in fact charged you already, I would have been lying when I told the Specials to piss up a rope.” Morgan looked past Rita’s shoulder. “Jerry, I do not believe our guest here has made the delightful acquaintance of the Special Counter-Espionage Police.”
The cop behind her shuffled nervously. “No, ma’am.”
The inspector flashed him a toothy, indefinably uneasy smile. Then she turned back to Rita and explained: “The Specials are not a real Police force: they’re a branch of the Inner Party apparatus. Politicals. The Commonwealth Transport Police is a national organization, working for the people. Our hands are bound by the law and the constitution of the Commonwealth. The SCEP men are not so constrained…”
Constable Jeremiah cleared his throat pointedly.
“Yes, well,” Morgan said briskly, “Miss Douglas: by the authority vested in me as an Inspector of Constabulary in this force, I am officially charging you with trespassing on the permanent way, within the meaning of section forty-nine of the Public Transportation Regulation Act. I also intend to charge you with eight counts of littering, to wit, leaving objects all over the southern switchyard. And, ah, of being present on the platform of Central Station without a valid ticket. Witnessed, Jerry? As of an hour ago?”
“Oh good,” Rita said weakly.
“You do not need to say anything. The charges mean that I can now hold you for up to a week for questioning. More importantly, they mean that Mr. Pierrepoint can’t get his hands on you without first obtaining a bench warrant. Which he will no doubt hasten to do, but because I have both you and the evidence he would need to bring charges of treason and spying against you, we have a few hours’ breathing space in which to prepare my report and get it in front of the right people.”
“Who are…?”
“The people who want to negotiate with your bosses before they do anything stupid, Miss Douglas.”
IRON
GATE CENTRAL POLICE STATION, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020
Meanwhile, ten floors down, the sergeant on the station front desk was having a bad morning.
“Please tell Commander Jackson that Olga Thorold is here to see him,” the woman in the wheelchair repeated firmly. This time she added: “Immediately.”
The sergeant, flustered, stared over her head. “The Commander is very busy—”
“If I don’t see him within the next five minutes he will be even busier, boy!” The cop looked to be only a few years younger than Olga herself, but she was determined not to let him regain authority in this situation. “I’m here on official business of the Department of Para-historical Research. Call the Commander’s office at once. It’s urgent.”
The word “urgent” seemed to galvanize the man: or perhaps it was the way Olga’s attendant shifted his balance. She hated the wheelchair, but it gave her an excuse for bringing a bodyguard into places where bodyguards caused raised eyebrows, such as Police stations and military bases. Jack wasn’t in uniform, but his posture bespoke his background—and the desk sergeant finally made the connection. “Who did you say you were, madam?”
“Olga Thorold, from the Department of Para-historical Research.” A thumb over her shoulder: “He’s with me. Commonwealth Guard, Security Section. Show him your warrant card, Jack.”
Jack flipped a card wallet open and held it before the desk. The sergeant swallowed, then picked up his telephone receiver and dialed, hastily. “Front desk, visitor asking for Commander Jackson’s office? A Missus Thor-old … Yes, sir, right away.” He stared at her as if she’d grown a second head. “You’re to go right on up. Sorry ’bout this—nobody said you was expected and you’re not on the list—”
But Jack had already backed up and set Olga’s chair rolling toward the elevator in the corridor beyond the front desk. She clung to the armrests. I hope I’m in time, she told herself. Her office had received the eye-opening transcript of Inspector Morgan’s first day with the suspect late enough that Olga had been asleep when the phone jangled, pulling her straight into crisis mode. The arrest of a world-walker from the United States would have been sufficient to trigger a political earthquake on its own, even without the horrifying questions hanging over the identity of the spy in question. What little hope she had that the intruder was merely a common or garden-variety spy dwindled with every update.
Empire Games Series, Book 1 Page 32
