True Path

by Graham Storrs

  Sandra realized she knew almost nothing about American politics. She hadn’t even heard that Texas had left the Union. For all she knew, other states had seceded too. All she knew was that, when the Adjustment hit in the mid Thirties—the biggest global recession ever—the U.S. had suffered badly, worse than almost any other country. She remembered a teacher telling her about it at one of the many schools she had been thrown out of as a kid. “While Europe turned left,” the woman had said, “America turned right.” Meaning that, while socialist, even communist governments were being elected all over Europe, the U.S. had voted in a hard-right Christian fundamentalist coalition—the Lord’s True Path Party. The new government had almost immediately declared a state of emergency and then suspended the Constitution. The move had saved America from going under. Other nations had been far less fortunate. What once had been Russia was now an anarchic mess of tribal warlords. Africa and the Middle East had gone the same way. Parts of India had hung on to democracy. China had stayed strong and had annexed dozens of countries in Southeast Asia—including Australia and New Zealand—most of which had welcomed the move.

  But, while the Lord’s True Path Party had kept America together and mitigated the worst of the decade of starvation and chaos that had characterized the Adjustment, it had been reluctant to return to an open and free democracy. A number of constitutional amendments ensured that Lord’s True Path Party became the only legitimate political party. Soon its extreme brand of Christianity became the official State Religion. The FBI became the new government’s feared enforcers, and religious and political dissent became capital crimes.

  All in all, it wasn’t the holiday destination of Sandra’s choice.

  “So you guys are, what, CIA? Some kind of special ops team?” The Jeep crossed the minefield between the fences. They passed the other two men running back to close up the gap behind them.

  Polanski laughed. “No, nothing like that.”

  “Then what?”

  “We’re the good guys.”

  “Right. The good guys who kidnap people and sneak across borders.”

  “We’re the resistance.”

  “The what?”

  He sighed and climbed out to help the others cover their tracks.

  The resistance? It was about as bad as Sandra could imagine. She’d been kidnapped by self-righteous jerks who wanted to overthrow the government, or whatever, and they wanted her to help them create a timesplash to do it. It was crazy on so many levels.

  “Look,” she said when they all got back in the car. “I’m sure you’re all terribly oppressed and you want the good ol’ US of A back like it was in the glory days and all that, but a timesplash is not the way to get it. A timesplash is not the way to get anything. Shit. Do you even know what a timesplash is?”

  Polanski didn’t reply, which she took to mean that he didn’t have much of an idea. “It doesn’t change things. You know that don’t you? If you go back and shoot … whoever the hell is in charge now … when he was a baby, it doesn’t mean he’s gone. You create an anomaly, sure, and all hell breaks loose, but the timeline restructures itself. Think of it like this.” She paused, wondering if they’d get it. “Every event is a ball connected by elastic strings to every event that led to it and that leads from it. Everything’s pulling on everything else and it all holds itself taut and firm. You can go back in time and kick those balls around, even break a few links here and there by shooting your own grandmother, or whatever, but no matter how much you distort it, everything soon snaps back into place. You can’t change the past. It’s happened. It’s done.”

  “We don’t want to change the past,” Polanski said. “Just the future.”

  “Well that’s easy enough. You make a big enough splash, far enough back, and you’ll change the future all right, but not in a good way. The backwash from a big splash ripples forward like a tsunami until it hits the present, and then it breaks. And all you’ve got left of your future are smashed cities and piles of dead bodies. Trust me. I’ve been there and seen it. It’s not the future you want.”

  Polanski glanced at her, his expression grim. “Why don’t I show you a bit of the present before you start telling me what kind of future I want?”

  Chapter 8: Shit Storm

  “So what was your tag?”

  “What?” Jay was staring into his fridge wondering what on earth he could give his daughter for breakfast. It wasn’t a problem he’d had in mind when he last went shopping.

  “In the old days, when you and Mum were cool dudes in the splash scene.” Cara grinned and made a funny voice when she said it, as if the very idea were a joke. “So what was your tag? I know Mum’s was Patty—after Patty Hearst, some brainwashed terrorist chick. What was yours?”

  “Luke. After Luke Skywalker.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s really old now. Was old then. But we were all into the late twentieth century, because that’s where most of the bricks went to make their splashes, I suppose. It sort of made sense at the time. What do you usually eat for breakfast?”

  She shrugged. “I dunno.”

  He shut the fridge. “We could go and find a café.”

  “Can’t we just get on with finding Mum? Do we have to go traipsing round in the rain looking for food? I’m not even hungry.”

  OK, so no breakfast. “Did you sleep all right?”

  She looked at him, seeming vaguely irritated. “Is this some kind of bonding thing? ‘Cos if it’s for my sake, you don’t need to bother. I’d rather just get on.”

  He wanted to snap at her. Having a fifteen-year-old daughter you never knew existed just turn up out of the blue was a hell of a big deal. The least they could do was exchange a few pleasantries. But he kept his mouth shut and got himself ready to go out. He noticed her staring as he strapped on his shoulder holster with the Department-issue stunner. “No, you can’t have one,” he said.

  She gave him a startled look. “How did you know …?”

  “Because I saw one of your mother’s expressions on your face. The one that says, ‘Me want big gun!’”

  For an instant she tried to look affronted, but then cracked a grin. “That’s Mum all right. But, really, wouldn’t it be better if I had one too, just in case?”

  “You’re perfectly safe with me.” And she’d be safer still after he sent her back to the UK.

  -oOo-

  They reached his office as Cara was explaining for the third time, and just as vaguely, what she thought it was her mother did at work. Sandra’s job was the only reason Jay could think of as motive for kidnapping her. Yet archaeological experiments were hardly a reason for international kidnap dramas. It’s true, Dr. Bradley had made breakthroughs and was operating at energies hardly ever used before—he’d spent half the night researching her and the whole field of direct history—but the technology for lobbing a couple of kilograms back two thousand years wasn’t unique to her research group. And why pick on Sandra, the lab technician, when they could have had Dr. Bradley herself?

  Cara’s knowledge of her mother’s work was dismally incomplete. It was as if the girl just wasn’t interested. Yes, she thought it was vaguely cool, but she’d have been much more impressed if Sandra had been a pop star or a footballer. So Jay had been making phone calls at two in the morning, waking people up, demanding answers.

  He’d spoken to Dr. Bradley herself.

  “If they’d wanted to use our rig, they had access to it right there and then,” she said. “We had a payload being yanked back when they grabbed me. Everything was fired up and ready to go. They might not have made two thousand years, but they could have sent a man back five hundred or so. It would only have been open countryside back then, but if they’d managed to find even a stray farm worker to shoot out in the fields, the splash could have been enormous.”

  “So it wasn’t just mayhem for the sake of it, then,” Jay said, rubbing tired eyes. “If they’re planning a lob, it’s something spec
ific, somewhere important to them.” Or not. The people who took Sandra could still be leftover relics from the glory days of timesplashing, planning the big one, the party to end all parties. In many ways, he hoped he was dealing with the egomaniacal bricks he knew so well. The idea that these might be government agents planning an act of war terrified him.

  “Nahrees—I mean—Dr. Bradley—”

  “Call me Olivia,” the woman at the other end of the line said.

  “Right. Olivia, I’m sending Cara back in the morning. She says you’re a family friend. Will you be able to look after her until …?”

  “Of course. Do you really think you can find Sandra?”

  “Honestly? It’s not looking good. But I’ll try.”

  Afterwards, he had looked in on Cara, sleeping soundly in his bed. He didn’t know what to feel about this beautiful young woman being his own child. She was so much like her mother that she’d brought back all the pain of losing her. And yet, in her vulnerability, her childlike innocence, she was also so unlike the woman he had fallen in love with. Long before she’d reached Cara’s age, all the innocence, all the trust, had been knocked out of Sandra.

  It hurt to think about Sandra, even after all those years. And now he was angry with her. Fuming that Cara had been kept a secret. He felt his anger surging inside him. He was shaken to the core, as if the pillars that held his world in place were toppling and everything would soon come crashing down around him. But he was also awed and amazed by this gift that Life had given him. His child. His daughter, Cara. Right here, real, and wonderful.

  “So, what do we do now?” Cara asked, standing in the middle of his office with her arms spread, deliberately breaking his reverie.

  He sat down at his desk. “First I check my—”

  At the top of his prioritized messages, an urgent communication from the FBI was blinking, followed by two others from Interpol and one from his own boss.

  Cara hurried round to see what had startled him but his displays were all virtual and she did not have the necessary security access to see them. “What is it?” she asked. “Let me see.”

  He grunted a response, scanning quickly through the messages. The first was the FBI responding to a request for information on the older of the two men who had kidnapped Sandra. His image seemed to have set alarm bells ringing all over Washington. The man had been identified as Zadrach Polanski, Public Enemy Number One, a terrorist of such importance Jay could almost hear the U.S. authorities slavering in their eagerness to get their hands on him.

  The second message was a report from Interpol. The freight from the Cambridge flight had been scattered to various locations. Every box and bag had been found and opened by the Amsterdam police, but there was no sign of the missing English woman. They were currently following a possible lead. Security footage of two men moving a crate from the general vicinity of the Cambridge flight towards another part of the airport, possibly towards an Argentinian aircraft bound for Mexico. The recording was low resolution—no faces recognized, no license plates from the van they used—and the Mexico flight had already departed and landed before the police had flagged it as suspicious. It was a long shot and also a dead end. The trail had gone cold.

  After that was a request for clarification from Interpol concerning the involvement of a high-profile U.S. terrorist in the Sandra Malone kidnapping case.

  Finally, there was the message from Superintendent Kappelhoff, asking Jay to report to his office immediately to explain why the Commissioner and the British Home Office had been on the phone asking him about an international incident that was brewing.

  “I’ve got to go,” he told Cara. “You stay here and don’t touch anything. If you want a coffee or something, go ask the constable outside. I’ll be a little while.”

  “Hey!” He stopped halfway to the door. “You can’t just run off and not tell me anything. It’s about Mum, isn’t it?”

  He almost made some wisecrack about how the sheer scale of the shit storm would definitely suggest Sandra’s involvement, until he saw the anxiety in the girl’s face. “Yes,” he said. “The Americans may know who kidnapped her. I need to go and talk to some people about it. Until then, I don’t really know much.” It didn’t seem to settle Cara’s anxiety at all. “I’ll be right back as soon as the meeting is over.”

  He hurried away, knowing he couldn’t ease her mind until he knew more and, probably, not even then.

  -oOo-

  “You know this woman?” The Commissioner seemed to be taking Jay’s reluctant confession as a personal affront.

  Superintendent Kappelhoff stepped in, as he had done several times already in the past few minutes. “Ms. Malone assisted the Temporal Crimes Unit in bringing down the splashteam that attacked London in 2050. Chief Inspector Kennedy was working for MI5 at the time and they formed a relationship.”

  “Did they indeed!”

  “Yes, sir. We fell in love.” Jay felt like a complete idiot saying it in that room. The two senior officers stared at him as if he’d just put on a silly hat.

  “They were both very young,” the superintendent explained.

  “And you still have a relationship with this woman?” It was clear that the fact that one of his subordinates was tied up in a case of such career-threatening proportions did not sit well with the commissioner.

  “No, sir, not since after the London attack.”

  “So how come this case landed in your lap instead of being handled by the British police?”

  Jay grimaced, not wanting to say the words. “Ms. Malone’s daughter came here to seek my help.”

  The commissioner stared at him angrily while the superintendent sighed. “Why would that be, Jay?”

  “Because, sir, she appears to be my daughter as well.”

  “Appears to be?”

  “Is, sir. She’s my daughter. I only found out yesterday.”

  “Congratulations,” the commissioner said, his face set. Jay could see a vein throbbing in the man’s temple. “Are you running a police department, Kappelhoff, or a soap opera?”

  Kappelhoff did not react. He turned to Jay and said, evenly, “Chief Inspector, please tell us the whole story, from the beginning.”

  Jay did, leaving nothing out. As he told it, the commissioner grunted and huffed but did not interrupt.

  “And you’re convinced this man Polanski has taken Ms. Malone back to the U.S.?” Kappelhoff asked.

  “No, sir, not convinced. It just seems like the only possibility. They may have flown to Mexico from Amsterdam. We know the Texas-Mexico border is one of the easiest ways to smuggle people in and out of the U.S. It just … adds up.”

  The commissioner was doing sums on his fingers. “It’s more than twenty-four hours since the woman was grabbed. They could easily be in Texas by now—in the U.S. even, if they had transport at the other end. How could Interpol just let them slip out of the Union like that?”

  “The question that puzzles me,” said Kappelhoff, “is why this girlfriend of yours is so important to Zadrach Polanski.”

  Jay found it hard to think with these two staring at him, demanding explanations. “I just don’t know, sir. I haven’t spoken to her for sixteen years, remember.”

  “But you must have some idea,” the commissioner insisted, no doubt anticipating the same question from his political masters.

  Jay took a stab at it. “Well, she’s a capable teknik these days, I gather. Works for a UK university, building rigs for very long range lobs. I don’t think there’s anything special about the project she’s working on, although it no doubt has plenty of military applications. Dr. Bradley, Ms. Malone’s boss, tells me her work would need years of additional research to develop it as a weapon. I got the impression that’s exactly what the Ministry of Defence is planning, but terrorists wouldn’t kidnap someone to help them run a research program, they’d steal a completed weapon, or at least someone who could build one. Besides, there are other groups with similar capabilities all over
Europe—all over the Chinese Hegemony too—why pick someone as obscure as Sandra Malone?”

  He was thinking aloud, going over the same ground he’d covered again and again during his sleepless night, but his two bosses seemed happy to let him ramble. “It must be either purely for her skill in building long range rigs—which would suggest they’re planning a major timesplash, probably in the U.S.—or it’s connected with Sandra’s past. My past, too.” He realized he’d made a gaffe in calling her Sandra but stumbled on. “She was involved with several splashteams back then. She was Sniper’s girlfriend for a while and she worked with Flash in the UK.”

  “Sniper? Flash?” The commissioner turned to Kappelhoff for clarification.

  “Big name bricks who were operating when the TCU started up. Go on, Jay.”

  Jay had no idea where he was going with this train of thought but he went on. “The point is, she knew every important brick back then. Many of them swore to kill her when she helped us take Sniper down. But it all blew over. Many of the people who might have borne a grudge are either dead or behind bars.” He made a mental note to check whether any of them had been released recently. “It could be that something she knew then would be worth grabbing her for. It could be that someone she knew then is taking his revenge. We don’t have much to go on, sir.”

  Meaning, can I go now and get on with tracking her down, and will you stop asking me to speculate in a vacuum, please? Jay was getting antsy. Kappelhoff seemed to take the hint.

  “Thank you, Jay. If that is all, Commissioner?”

  But the commissioner had other ideas. “No, that is not all, Superintendent.” He turned his scowl on Jay. “Chief Inspector Kennedy, I’m sending you to Washington. The FBI has asked for our cooperation in capturing this Polanski fellow. More importantly, the Chair of the European Parliament’s Standing Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs has told them we will do everything we can to help. So we’re going to give them you. You know the victim, you’re familiar with all the details of the case. You know more about timesplashing than any man in Europol. I want you on the next available flight.” He stood and picked up his hat, a gesture that seemed to block the option for any objection. To Kappelhoff he ordered, “Charge it all to Special Projects. If you want to send more people, I’ll leave that to your discretion. Let my office know the flight times and such. The UK’s Department of Foreign Affairs will be all over this, as well as our own standing committee. I’ll appoint one of my people to liaise. I’m sure Interpol and the British will want a finger in the pie too. Let me sort that out. The rest of the details I’ll leave to you.”