by John Barnes
But that had been before Chrys, before the birth of our son … before a certain bitter fight on a blazing airship, when I had faced a version of myself from another timeline, a version that had gone to work for the Closers—and seen that hatred was their weapon, not ours, and that when you got down to the last moment of choice and the last ounce of will, it wasn’t a match for plain, ordinary courage. I had seen the kind of broken, poisoned thing I could become, and turned away.
Mostly. The old feelings came back now and then, and if I occasionally found myself enjoying a battle with the Closers a bit more than was good for me, well, so it goes. Nobody changes overnight.
So I was more than a little surprised to realize that Chrys’s ideas had gotten into me to that extent. I, too, could imagine a future where you could visit the thousands of beautiful things and places that exist across the many parallel timelines. There were timelines out there where Beethoven didn’t go deaf, where Marlowe didn’t die young and lived to be Shakespeare’s great rival, where the great library at Alexandria was never burned.
There were dozens of different Parises, Athenses, New Yorks, Saigons—all beautiful in their different ways. There were timelines where there had never been human beings, where you could still find herds of buffalo that stretched farther than the eye could see, great herds of elephant and rhino in Africa, flocks of moas and dodoes. Worlds where elegant white cities shone in the wilderness, where you could walk from the equivalent of the Met right out into the equivalent of Yellowstone.
All of that was out there, just a quick flip of the time machines away—but every time a traveler crosses, the pulse can be registered in many other universes. Cross often enough, and the Closers get a fix on that timeline—and then suddenly they’re there, vast armies pouring in out of nowhere, and another world falls beneath their iron heel, only to be won back at a cost of millions of lives and vast destruction. So travel between timelines is restricted, as much as we can, to timelines that they already know the location of, and those timelines are defended as heavily as can be managed.
Of all those wonderful doors, only a few can be opened … and only for emergency military purposes.
I knew how she felt; so much wonder, hardly any time for it. We could go anywhere and any when, but we had to spend all our time jumping into places where rude strangers shot at us.
“Well,” I said, though the joke was feeble, “we’ll just have to hurry up and win the war.”
“Yeah, right.” One great advantage of the ear gadgets is that you only have to move toward speaking the language gradually, but you don’t make any mistakes on the way. Chrys’s English was now as good as her Arabic and Attikan—and mine were equally good—and she said, “Yeah, right,” with the true Pittsburgh spirit, the way that lets the world know that no one is going to fool you.
I stepped into the bathroom for a second, and when I came out she was removing the little black dress very slowly, which pretty much killed discussion for that night. Ever had a fantasy about sleeping with a beautiful female agent? I do every night—though there was a period of sharing responsibility for two o’clock feedings in there as well. The job’s risky, but there are fringe benefits.
On a New York weekend, you’re always running out of cash, which is probably why New York is so fond of tourists. So after breakfast in the Wellington’s coffee shop, we went around the corner to a bank to get more. It was a pretty typical Saturday morning—everyone looking bored and a lot of huge-haired tellers with bright blue eye shadow desperately trying to pretend that they had a date for Saturday night, in order to keep away the guys who might figure the girl at the bank was the last possible chance. The security guards were a couple of bush-league rent-a-cops rather than off-duty NYPD, so the bank could save a few bucks on a time when there weren’t likely to be many robbers.
I wondered about that idly. In our line of work, jumping into all sorts of violence all the time, you get such a habit of casing the joint that it’s easier to do it than not to.
Maybe they figured all the robbers would be at home watching cartoons or something, because this place was really pretty wide-open. There was one amiable guard, a very young-looking man with a big nose, pasty white skin, and black hair, who was trying to talk to the rightmost teller, a girl whose hair was dyed platinum blond and piled into a huge meringue. The other guard was middle-aged, a black man with gray hair and mustache, and a distinct gut; the way he stood and shifted his weight suggested he also had a bad back, but at least his eyes were on the door and the customers. As I scanned him, he yawned. I noted also that I’d been looking at him for a while and he hadn’t looked back or noticed he was being scanned.
This was one of those modern, friendly banks that have a lot of low tables and just a counter for the tellers, not one of the old 1920s ones that looked like a tough prison or maybe a fort, or one of the more recent ones that looked like a biolab where they expected every customer to be infected with something deadly.
“You’re really checking the place out,” Chrys muttered to me as we stood in line.
“It’s something to do.”
“Have you checked the four that just came in?” she muttered. “I know you see everything in New York, but it looks like a new flavor of everything.”
What was coming in was one woman with thick butt-length red hair and the kind of body that men turn and stare at, wearing a tiny little sprayed-on white dress and heels halfway up to the sky, and with her were three dignified older guys in three-piece suits.
“Ha. They threw a party with the little lady last night and came up short on cash; now they’re going to get some additional so they can pay her, probably so nobody comes around to threaten them. No big thing—”
As I said it, the girl turned from the men and clattered over toward the younger security guard and the teller he was trying to pick up. The teller had a clearly displayed CLOSED sign in front of her window and had been counting bills very slowly.
That was the first warning bell that went off in my head. If this was a high-priced good-time girl collecting from a bunch of Johns, the last thing she was going to do was move away from them, until they paid her. Nobody heads for an obviously closed teller, not when the line is already long. And besides, she took two big clacking steps and deliberately shook her shoulders before she started out.
Which, aside from letting everyone in the room know she wasn’t wearing a bra, also got almost everyone to stare at her, the women because most women stare at someone who is really overdoing it, the men because … well, you can imagine.
Anyway, she made enough noise for a cavalry troop on a tap-dance floor as she crossed over to the guard and the teller. The teller looked up in obvious relief, clearly glad to have anything get the guy away from her, and the guy was busy staring holes in the woman’s little white dress.
“Hand on your NIF?” I muttered to Chrys.
“Always. Ready when you are.”
It so happens Chrys and I were both the kind of nasty kids for whom magicians hate to work birthday parties. You know how stage magic always works by getting people to look in one place while you do something somewhere else? Well, we were always the kids who were saying, “He’s really putting it in his sleeve,” “He moved it while he was waving the flowers,” or “That’s not the one you started with.” And this woman’s little routine was screaming, “Hey, look over here!” so naturally we were looking everywhere else, as unobviously as we could.
What I saw was one of the guys in the three-pieces stopping to tie his shoe by a potted plant—and getting into a perfect position to draw a pistol from an ankle holster and blow the younger guard away.
On the other side, she told me later, Chrys was seeing one of them heading over toward the manager’s desk, and number three approaching the other guard as if to ask him a question, but also reaching into his jacket.
“Excuse me,” their woman accomplice said, with that loud, cutting New York accent that goes right through crowd noise,
“but I really need sex right now.” The corner of my eye showed me that she had whipped the dress off and was now naked except for the heels. “Would anyone like to—” It was quite a list, but I was too busy to listen.
I put a NIF round into the wrist of the one I was looking at before he quite got the pistol out of the ankle holster. Chrys nailed the guy with his hand in his jacket, and he hit the floor with an extrahard double thud—his head and the pistol. Then she got the one approaching the manager (who had just gotten up to deal with the disturbance, and appeared to be pretty perturbed by it, at least to judge from the way she strode toward the naked young woman) with a clean shot in the back of the neck, and he fell over, but he’d actually had time to draw his pistol.
NIF stands for Neural Induction Fléchette, which is the projectile it fires. The fléchette is a self-guiding dart, so small that on a sheet of white paper it looks like a dust grain or a gnat, that homes on body heat and flies at just below supersonic speeds. When it connects, it finds its way to a nerve, and does whatever it’s programmed to do. Chrys and I usually set ours to knock the person unconscious for a few hours and then let him wake up slowly with the mother of all hangovers, but a NIF could do anything from making you itch all over to stopping your heart right then to giving you strong enough convulsions to break every bone in your body.
The projectile itself would dissolve in a few minutes, leaving no evidence that a doctor in our timeline would recognize. This was going to make News of the Weird for sure.
There was a long pause; the robbers’ distraction had been so good that no one was noticing three unconscious men with guns just yet, because everyone was still gaping at the naked woman. She really wasn’t all that pretty, I decided, just big in the chest and very made-up, and from the way the hair had slipped, I knew it was a wig.
I considered whacking her with the NIF, too, just for tidiness and that aesthetically important sense of completion, but I figured it was too amusing to see what she’d do now.
The NIF is almost silent—it makes a noise like an electric drill, but just for the instant that the tiny fléchette it fires is going out the barrel, and only about half the volume. Since we’d fired just three single shots, very fast, and gotten them back under cover, no one had noticed the three brief squeaks, or even the three men going over.
“Miss, you’re, uh, going to have to leave the bank,” the manager said, still unaware of the man, collapsed and motionless, on the floor behind her, a gun still held in his limp fingers.
“That’s not a bad idea,” Chrys said to me. “We could go up the street to a bank-card machine. Might be a lot faster than hanging around here—there are going to be cops all over the place soon.”
“Yep,” I said. We turned and went, doing our best to look like any middle-class couple whose day has been mildly disrupted by something that they will talk about for weeks afterward—but that fundamentally doesn’t matter.
Just as our cash came out of the automatic teller machine, the screen began to flash at us. Abruptly, it glowed with three words of Attikan that were the current password, and a PRESS ENTER in English below that. With a sigh, I did.
The screen lit up like a full-fledged video screen, and a grainy image of Ariadne Lao said, “Please acknowledge. Report to the mid-Manhattan gateway immediately. Please acknowledge.”
There wasn’t any microphone on the automatic teller machine, so I figured she couldn’t hear us; I nodded my head at the security camera and pressed the ENTER/YES button.
“She doesn’t look happy,” I said.
“We aren’t supposed to use ATN ordnance on local events,” Chrys pointed out. “So I guess we compromised security. Probably we’re just going to get chewed out.”
“Very likely.” It was the kind of thing that could spoil a day but not more than that; and at least we would be returned to the same time and place we had departed from. That was in our contract.
We were almost there when my beeper went off. “Damn. Just a minute, Chrys, it’s probably nothing much—”
I found a working public phone—always a small miracle in Manhattan, and it took me about five minutes—dialed the private line to my bodyguard agency, and waited a long second for the connection to Pittsburgh.
Mark Strang Bodyguards is a real agency—it was my real business before I started working for ATN, even if it was never a particularly lucrative one. Nowadays it was actually making much more money than it used to, but I didn’t do much work in it; it served as a cover for the large payments that came in from my real employers, and, to maintain the fiction, my two assistants, Robbie and Paula, now ran the place. They’d built the above-ground part into quite a respectable business. It helps to be obviously affluent and have a reputation for being exclusive. People think you must be guarding a lot of celebrities, and they’re willing to pay accordingly.
Paula answered the phone, as I expected. “Boss, it’s Porter. She was attacked after her Oslo concert. She wasn’t hurt, but Robbie was—it wasn’t serious, but they’ve got her in the hospital for observation, in case it’s a concussion. I’ve made sure your Dad and Carrie are covered, and I’m going over there as soon as I can.”
My gut sank like I’d swallowed a frozen brick. “Right,” I said. “What’s the situation on coverage for Porter?”
“Three reliable backups are on it, and as soon as she’s over into Germany we have full police security. She got on the chartered plane because Robbie insisted, so she’s in the air right now.”
Not great but better than nothing. “Okay,” I said, thinking furiously. “Tell Robbie to get better fast, or she’ll have to answer to me. Do you know what the injuries were?”
“Just a bad beating, it sounded like. No kidney damage, one cracked rib for sure. They want to hold her for observation. I think she’ll be okay.” Paula and Robbie have been the closest of partners since I’ve known them, and that’s some years now. Paula must have been frantic, but she didn’t let it show in her voice.
“Well, get over there and make sure,” I said, completely unnecessarily. “And you be careful, too, you hear? I want both of you up and well.”
“Probably you should know, too, boss,” she said, very slowly and carefully, “that Porter is why Robbie is alive. She, uh, made use of that .38 you trained her with. Took down two of them while they were busy beating Robbie.”
“Is Porter okay?” I asked.
“As okay as you can be, I guess.” I could hear the resignation in Paula’s voice. “She’s not one of those people that enjoys killing, boss, I suppose you’d say. And she didn’t damage her hand either. She’s planning to play tonight. If I can get Robbie transferred or released, I’ll cover Porter at that concert myself.”
“Don’t hesitate to wave agency money around if it helps,” I told Paula, “but it’s a shame we’re dealing with this in Norway—too many honest civil servants, and they’re too well paid.”
“Yeah, one more complication. I’ve got to get on a flight, boss, I’m most of the way out the Parkway West to the airport right now, and if I get the commuter flight to Kennedy, I can make a Concorde if that’s okay.”
“Of course it is! Use whatever money you have to. We can always get more.”
That was one difference between them; Robbie is a small woman, very strong for her size but mostly just fast as a whip, and when there’s action of any kind, she moves too fast to worry about what the rules are. Paula’s nearly my size and probably stronger, and if it were up to her, we’d have a manual of procedures for everything. (“Terrorist attack: 1. Agency personnel are to avoid getting shot …”)
“Thanks, boss. We’ll get it under control.” It was more from the gratitude in Paula’s voice than from anything else that I understood how worried she was. “Got to run—just turning off the Parkway now.”
“Take care of yourself. Bye.”
I hung up the phone and turned to Chrysamen. “Bad news, and I think we better get to the gate right away.” I summarized it qui
ckly as we rounded two corners and entered one of many midtown office buildings.
“Shit,” Chrys said. “What did Al Capone say? ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence—’”
“‘Three times is enemy action,’” I said. “But I’d bet on it already. Two of those robbers were in great positions to whack us—I think we’d each have taken the round after the guard did.”
“Good thing you’re not the ogling kind,” she said, with a little smile.
“I’m a speed ogler. Got her all ogled before I had to do any shooting. Not that there was much to ogle—all packaging and no product. Anyway, here we are.”
It’s one of those anonymous midtown buildings with offices on the lower floors and apartments above, the kind of place where you always wonder if you saw it in a movie sometime, and you never did. There’s an automatic elevator that goes up a few floors and dumps you into a space where you are facing a glass door with a bunch of names in white on it that looks vaguely like an architect’s partnership, a brokerage, or a law firm. No lights are ever on, so you wonder if it’s closed.
The door unlocks only when an ATN agent, like Chrys or me, or the Special Agent for our timeline, approaches it; just where the gadget that recognizes us is, I’ve never figured out. I never know how any of this stuff works, I just use it. Think of me as a caveman with a VCR; I like the show, but that’s all I can say.
The door clicked open as we stood in front of it, and the lights came on as we opened the door. We closed and locked the door behind us and went down the hallway where, in a normal set of offices, the private offices and the conference room would be. Instead, there was just a blank wall, which turned gray and faded as we approached it, like a perfectly smooth, backlit fog. We walked into it.
It was dark as a deep cave, we were as weightless as you are in orbit, and there was no sound at all, not even the ringing of ears or nervous system. For a time I couldn’t define I couldn’t feel that my body was there.
