Foresight

by Graham Storrs

  “But …”

  “Good night, Jay. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  She walked away briskly, leaving Jay in a whirl of logical conundrums and emotional turmoil.

  Surely if the future affected the past but the past was really the present, it wasn’t the same as if you went back from the present to change a past that had already happened—even if, from the point of view of the future, what Jay thought of as the present was really the past. He shuddered with the mental effort of trying to make sense of it.

  Tomorrow, he would make Laura set it all down in a report for him. If Laura were still speaking to him.

  The first pang of regret hit him. God, what an idiot you are, he told himself. If Laura had been any clearer about wanting to start something with him, it could only have been by carrying a placard around saying, “Here I am, you dumb bastard: do something about it!” And yet, when it had come to the moment when he should have acted, he’d gone all obsessive workaholic on her and driven her off.

  He drank down the last of his beer and stared into the empty glass. It wasn’t his fault! He felt an urge to go after her and explain. It was just bad timing. In fact, now he thought about it, it was a pretty stupid time to suddenly come on to him. There was a crisis going on for God’s sake. What was he supposed to do, drop all his responsibilities and take a roll in the hay? It was the worst possible time. What was the woman thinking? This was the moment to keep a clear head and sort things out, not …

  And then it hit him and made him feel even worse.

  Not a time to be reaching out to someone you liked, looking for comfort and companionship to help dispel your anxiety and fear.

  He slammed his glass down hard and people glanced quickly round at him. “God! God! God!” he cursed softly between clenched teeth. Could he have been more stupid if he’d tried? Just because she seemed so relaxed and self-possessed didn’t mean Laura wasn’t as scared as everyone else about what had happened. Of course this would be the moment she would reach out. The whole world had been shaken to its foundations by a force no-one understood. There had been ghosts and apparitions. Only a complete fool wouldn’t be holding out his hand for a bit of human comfort.

  A fool like him.

  He snatched up his coat and got to his feet. He’d try to catch her. She might still be outside waiting for a taxi. If she wasn’t, he’d call her and try to apologise for being such an unspeakable jerk.

  But he’d only gone two paces before his phone rang. He saw Cara’s name on the caller ID and took the call.

  “Dad!” She was distraught, sobbing into the phone. “Dad, you’ve got to help. Everything’s awful.”

  ***

  Wind blasted in through the shattered windscreen, whipping Cara’s hair around her face. The suited man who had saved her was slumped in the driver’s seat. The car was driving itself at high speed along the almost empty motorway. Before he’d passed out—or died—the man had given it some kind of override command that made it take off like a bat out of Hell. It had ignored her demands that it stop.

  Her commplant was synced with the car’s systems so that her father’s face looked at her from the dash display, given there was no longer a windscreen. Beside her, the suited man’s head rolled from side to side as the car swerved along the road. The metalglass visor was cracked, having taken a machine-gun round at close range. By some miracle, the round had not penetrated. Pale discs on the suit’s black fabric showed where he had taken three more direct hits in the chest.

  “It’s all right,” Jay said. “I think I know who that is.” He said something to the car, quoted a badge number, gave a clearance code, and it slowed down and parked itself on the hard shoulder. Cara was panting from the exertion of trying to breathe against the gale that had been pummeling her.

  “Can you get his helmet off?” Jay asked. “There should be a couple of studs just under his ears.”

  Reluctant to touch what might be a dead man, Cara felt under the rim of the helmet until she found the catches. She pressed them and pulled. There was a click as the neck seal opened and the helmet came away. She tossed it in the back and looked at the injured man. He was beautiful, younger than she had expected, with a strong, clean jaw and a broad, unfurrowed forehead. He looked as if he’d fallen asleep, peaceful and at ease. In his armor, his soft hair falling across his brow, he might have been a knight in a pre-Raphaelite painting.

  “It’s Fourget,” Jay said. “One of my men. I sent him to look for Sandra. What the hell is going on, Cara? No, wait.” He gave the car instructions to drive to the nearest hospital. As soon as it stared moving, he said, “All right. Let’s hear it.”

  ***

  Fourget opened his eyes then squeezed them shut against the bright hospital light. He tried to sit up and fell back down against the soft pillows, dizzy and nauseated. He heard someone move—quick, light steps across the room. He opened his eyes a crack, expecting a nurse, and saw Cara Malone, dishevelled and anxious.

  He tried to ask how long he’d been out. He needed to reorient himself, assess the situation, but his throat was dry and the words were a croak.

  “It’s all right. You’re safe.”

  He brought a hand up to his throat and it trailed tubes and wires. “How long …?” he asked and this time managed a dry whisper.

  “Ah, that’s good. We’re awake at last.” The new voice was a telepresence robot. It trundled up to the bed and tilted its “head” down to look at Fourget. The label under the face said Dr M Singh. “You took quite a battering, young man. Lucky for you you’re even tougher than that remarkable suit you were wearing.”

  “Is he going to be all right?” Cara asked.

  “And you are?”

  “I’m his sister.”

  Fourget turned to look at Cara; even as someone who was trained in lies and deceit, he was surprised at how quickly and easily that had tripped off Cara’s tongue.

  The doctor gave a forced smile. “Ask a silly question,” he said. “It’s all right, I’ve already had the Men in Black read me the Riot Act. I’ll just stick to the medicine from now on. Now then, let’s take a look at you.”

  The robot unfolded a couple of arms and used a variety of scanners and other sensors to explore Fourget’s body. As he watched the delicate appendages move around him, he saw that his chest was bandaged and remembered the impact of the bullets. Everything after that was a blur. To Cara, he said, “How did we …?” but his voice gave out again.

  “There’s water on the table there,” the doctor said, “if you’d like to give your, er, brother a drink.”

  Cara fetched a bottle with a bent tube and helped him drink from it. The water was warm and tasted of chlorine but the relief was wonderful. He made her keep squirting it into his mouth until the bottle was empty.

  “I want you to stay here for twenty-four hours just to be on the safe side, but it looks as if you got away with little more than a bit of bruising. Those ribs will be sore for a week or two, but nothing that a bit of rest and recuperation won’t cure. I’ve given you a sedative to help you sleep and I’ll pop by in the morning to check on you.”

  At the mention of the word “sedative” Fourget struggled to sit up. “No, I have things to do.” He grabbed at the cannula on the back of his left hand and tried to pull it out. He couldn’t fall asleep now. His mission was nowhere near complete. The room darkened as if the lights had been dimmed. He still had not found Sandra Malone. With a jolt, he snapped awake, realizing he was lying on the pillows again, the cannula still in place.

  Blackness swarmed in on him.

  Chapter 13: Forwards

  Hamiye had tied Sandra hand and foot and gagged and blindfolded her before driving her through the city. Still, she’d had worse rides—at least she’d been warm. And sitting in the interior of her captor’s luxury car was way cosier than some car boots she’d traveled in.

  Her commplant was useless. Blocked, somehow. She reminded herself to search her clothing for a portable ja
mmer when she got the chance. She had tried to keep track of the route, counting the turns and listening for telltale sounds, but long before they arrived, she had given up. The journey seemed to take hours. At last, they swung off the road, down a ramp, along a gravel drive. The car crunched off the gravel onto a smoother surface and stopped. As the whine of the engine died away, Hamiye pulled off her gag and her blindfold. She was inside a garage. He pulled a knife out of his pocket and flicked out the blade.

  “OK, I’m going to cut your legs free,” he told her in a conversational tone. “If you try anything stupid, I’ll bury this knife in the closest body part I can find and then tie you up again. There is no way in the world I could take you to a doctor, so you’d just have to hope I didn’t stab anything important. You understand the situation, don’t you?”

  She gave him a cold stare. “Do all women scare you this much, or is it just me?”

  He grinned. “Trust me, it’s you. I’ve seen all kinds of killers in my time, but there’s something in your eyes that gives me the creeps.”

  He bent over and cut Sandra’s bonds. She didn’t break his jaw. She didn’t crush his windpipe. She thought she could have. The knife was a deterrent, but she was also thinking about what he’d said. It was true that she’d killed people. But only out of direst necessity. Did that make her a killer? Was it something people could see in her? Did Cara see it? Or Jay?

  She let him lead her out of the car. She noticed that he kept the knife handy, blade out.

  “This is your house?” she asked. She’d expected to end up in another HiQua facility.

  “Safest place to keep you for a few days.” They walked in silence from the garage into the main building. It was a big house, one of those renovated farmhouses in the Home Counties, she guessed, rough-plastered and white-painted walls inside, with exposed beams and leaded windows.

  “What, no horse brasses?” she asked.

  He didn’t reply but carried on in silence to the kitchen. It was of a piece with the rest, slate floor, a huge wooden table and an imitation Aga range that was really a state-of-the-art central-heating boiler. No doubt one of the distressed wooden cupboards hid the food printer and similar mod cons.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” he asked, showing her to a wooden chair at the table. She watched him fill the kettle and fetch teacups and saucers. After he had put leaf tea into the bone china pot, he stopped, as if he’d forgotten the next step in his little performance.

  He turned to face her, grown suddenly grave. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “I’ve got a room I can lock you in. I can put a folding bed in there and get you a heater. You’d be OK. You heard what Lee said. I’m supposed to hold you for four days and then dispose of you, so it doesn’t really matter what state you’re in at the end.”

  Sandra watched him in silence, wondering where this was going.

  “But I’m not going to do what Lee wants. Yes, I’m going to hold you, but after that, you’re free to go. I’ll be leaving the country then. So will Lee and Hong and anyone else who has anything to do with this.”

  Sandra waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. “So? What are you suggesting? That I cooperate? That we play house in your little mock-gentry hideaway? Do you want me to be grateful?”

  He studied her intently, his soft brown eyes looking for something which, in the end, he couldn’t find. “There’s another way to do this,” he said. “I could send some people to pick up your daughter.”

  A wild rage burned away all thought, yet she fought the urge to jump up and tear his throat out with her teeth.

  He must have seen the sudden tensing of her muscles, the snarl on her lips, because his eyes widened in alarm and his hand darted to his shoulder holster. A couple of heartbeats passed before he decided she wasn’t going to attack him after all and relaxed. “You really are a very scary woman. All right, you get to spend the time locked up.” He looked as if he regretted it.

  “You know I’ve got friends who will come looking for me?”

  He put a cup of tea down in front of her. “Oh, really? You think I should get a few of my hamsters to come and watch the house?”

  “Is that what you call those muscle-bound apes guarding your lob site?”

  A little frown crossed his brow. Then it cleared. “You saw the platform through the window, of course, and jumped to the wrong conclusion.”

  “I know a lob site when I see one.”

  “Do you really?” He sipped his tea and studied her. Then he put it on the table and drew his stunner and walked round behind her. She felt a tickle between her shoulder blades as she imagined the weapon’s targeting laser dancing there and anticipated the fifty thousand volt jolt to follow. Instead, she felt the hard plastic of a handcuff on her left wrist. “I’m going to free your hands now so you can drink your tea,” Hamiye said in his ridiculously correct English. “If you struggle, I will stun you.” She said nothing, resigned to her captivity for the time being.

  When he’d fastened the other end of the handcuffs to the bulky kitchen table, he put away his gun and went to sit opposite her with his tea. “That’s better.”

  “If this is about money,” she said, “it’s not worth it. They’ll track you down and put you away.”

  “Who? MI5? I don’t think so.”

  Sandra couldn’t decide if it was better for her to let him go on thinking she was MI5. Probably not since he seemed to have no respect for them and the first time they’d met he effectively told her his boss could shut down any investigation. The only time she’d been involved with Five was back in 2050 when Jay was working for them. At that time MI5 almost failed to save London from Sniper because they’d been infiltrated by the bad guys. If she were Hamiye, she wouldn’t have any respect for them either.

  She decided to try another tack. She picked up her tea and took a drink. It tasted like tar but she pulled an appreciative face. “You’re just about what I expected from your file. Between the lines, I saw some Lebanese street kid who reckoned there was no future fighting stupid tribal wars and decided to get out. A bigger, tougher thug than all the rest, who fought and clawed his way to the top of one small dung-heap, then a bigger heap, and then a bigger one still, until he was in a position to bully and bribe his way out of the whole stinking mess and come here.”

  Hamiye smiled. “That’s my glorious homeland you’re talking about.”

  “Which you love dearly, of course. Which is why you shook it off your boots as soon as you could and started acquiring all the trappings of a civilized life—the rather-too-posh accent, the kind of home a car-dealership executive would die for, not to mention a car that makes other men feel small and shrivelled when they see it. How am I doing?”

  “Not bad. Did you ever work as a profiler? You seem to think in stereotypes.”

  “But you were greedy, weren’t you? You wanted all this yet you couldn’t see a way of getting it if you stayed on the right side of the law. Which is why Mr Lee was such a godsend. He had all kinds of shady little things he needed doing and you no doubt showed yourself willing and able.”

  He was still smiling but the amusement had gone from his eyes.

  “But here’s the thing I don’t get. Lee’s current project is a nasty, vicious, mass murder. When he unleashes that timesplash he’s planning, thousands will die. You know what happened to Beijing, Mexico City, Washington.” She watched his eyes for a reaction and knew she was heading the right way. “I can see you’re comfortable with a bit of threatening and bullying. I bet you’ve slapped a few people around for Lee, possibly even worse. But despite the life you’ve led, despite how keen you are to do what it takes to get right away from all that, here you are, helping plan an unimaginable atrocity. Just like the good old days, watching some damned imam urge some shit-scared kid to put on his suicide vest and walk into a Beirut coffee shop. The very opposite of everything you want.”

  He stood up angrily and crossed the room. She raised her voice. “Civilization isn’t abou
t Italian shoes and Royal Doulton tea sets. Those things are a by-product, a side effect. Civilization is about putting down the Lees of this world, not propping them up. It’s about believing there are more valuable things than money and power.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are? A spy? A sneaking rat? Giving me lectures on civilization? You don’t know a damned thing about me. Or Lee.”

  “I’m not a spy, you stubborn arse. But I know what you’ve got in that building in Enfield. I know what it does. If Lee has fed you some crap about how no-one’s going to get hurt, you’re a bigger fool than you look.”

  “It’s not what you think. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh yes? Which one of us has the degree in temporal engineering? Which one of us has built displacement rigs from the ground up? Which one of us has actually traveled in time—three times—and survived it?”

  He pulled the stunner again. “Get up. You’re going in your hole.”

  “While Lee and Hong kill half of London?”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “How the hell would you know? You’re just the hired muscle.”

  “Because I’ve seen it. Hong sent a man forward two years ago and not a damned thing happened. It’s different from a lob. Is that why the spooks are sniffing round HiQua, ’cause you think we’re timesplashers? Terrorists? Jesus!”

  Sandra’s world seemed to stop. In the echoing silence of the kitchen, she looked into Hamiye’s scowling face. “Forward?” she asked.

  ***

  “You did what?”

  Crystal wasn’t exactly angry, Jay decided, more incredulous.

  “I sent Fourget to find Sandra Malone.”