Time Lost

by C. B. Lewis

  Kit pulled his slate back toward him, to return to the task at hand. “I don’t know.”

  “You let me worry about such things.” Janos offered him a brief smile. “I am used to it.” He nodded to Kit’s slate. “You have had any luck?”

  Kit rubbed at the middle of his forehead with his thumb. “I think I’m getting somewhere, but it’s taking a while.” He shook his head. “I need to try and remember what I was doing before he got here.”

  Janos was silent for several moments. “He was blushing when I came back, I think.” Kit peeped tentatively over the edge of his slate. Janos raised his eyebrows.

  Kit felt his cheeks warming again and ducked down.

  To his mortification, Janos chuckled. “Ah. Not so parted as you thought?”

  Kit shook his head. He glanced up warily. “Did Mariam tell you what happened when we got back yesterday?”

  “Mm.” Janos wasn’t looking at him. “You were upset. She was upset. It does not go well.”

  “I was upset,” Kit agreed quietly. “I asked Jacob if he’d done what she’d said.”

  “And you did not mind his answer?”

  Kit set his slate down, frowning at it. “He admitted it was part of it, but he….” He looked over at Janos. “He looked after me last night. I was in a mess. He made sure I wasn’t left on my own with it. I wanted to be angry with him, but he… shit.” He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. “He was kind. He didn’t have to be. Why was he kind?”

  “Because he is a good man,” Janos murmured, and all the teasing was gone from his voice.

  “Yeah.” Kit couldn’t deny it. “He is.”

  “And he is the man who knows if you have freckles on your ass.”

  Kit’s hands dropped from his eyes. “You what?”

  Janos was serenely sorting through files. “Oh, it is no matter. Only I have a wager with Dieter.”

  “Over my bum?”

  Janos shrugged. “We all have questions that need answers.”

  Kit stared at him in disbelief until Janos slanted a look at him, and one side of his mouth tilted up.

  Kit couldn’t help releasing an explosive laugh. “Oh, you bastard! You’re messing with me, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe a little,” Janos admitted. “You look like you could use laughter.”

  Kit smiled. “I never realized you were such a sarcastic git.”

  Janos laughed, then put his finger to his lips. “Is secret.”

  Somehow, it broke the tension that had been weighing on Kit since he’d arrived. He picked up his slate again and took a deep breath in, then released it. “I won’t tell anyone if you won’t.” He ran his fingers over the screen of the slate. “You mind if I get back to this?”

  “Pretend I am not here,” Janos replied. “We both have much to do.”

  Kit turned his focus back to the code. Remembering where he left off was the tricky part, but once he found his place and resumed the rhythm of the unscrambling, it became much easier, although not what anyone would consider “easy” by any stretch of the imagination.

  His eyes and mouth were both dry when an unfamiliar voice echoed out from the slate.

  “You did it?”

  Kit stared blankly at the screen. “I think so.”

  Janos pushed his chair back and came around the table, leaning over him. “Play it.”

  It started at the same place as it had before: the owner of the eye walking into the makeshift temporal chamber. Kit knew there was something off about that, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

  “—hopefully within five miles. You know what you’re looking for?”

  Their John Smith spoke. “Yes, sir.” He turned, glanced down at a hand held out to him.

  “Good luck,” the owner of the hand said.

  John Smith nodded, then turned and the gate blazed to life.

  “I stopped it here,” Kit murmured, as John Smith emerged from the gate. “Everything from here is new.”

  Smith turned, scanning the surroundings. They were in a field at the edge of a forest, lit by the early morning sun. The camera that served as his eye tracked the area, identifying structures, and a mapped outline appeared, showing the lay of the land. The man turned on the spot as the map pinpointed landmarks, then paused, zooming in on a faint glimpse of red showing between the trees.

  “There. Less than three miles,” he said and turned to his unknown companion, the missing attacker. And there she was.

  “Freeze it,” Janos said at once.

  Kit nodded, capturing the image, and flicked it onto the wall projection. She was brunette, Caucasian, around the same age as Smith, so that could make her anywhere from midtwenties to midthirties. She was the kind of person who would be an ideal TRI agent: someone who could blend in by virtue of being average.

  “Okay.”

  Kit set the recording to play.

  “If we’re lucky, it should be too early for anyone to be around. The house should be empty anyway.” John Smith turned around, and where there would normally be the trace outline of a gate, there was nothing. “We’re on our own for now.”

  “You might want to….” He looked at his partner, who tapped beneath her eye. “It’s glowing. It freaks me out when it does that.”

  John Smith laughed. He sounded so young. “Fine. We don’t need the maps just now anyway.” He blinked and the feed went blank.

  Kit stared at the blank screen. “They thought the house would be empty. Do you think they just meant to steal the data? Maybe Tom caught them in the act?”

  Janos was frowning at the image of the woman.

  “Janos?”

  “Maps.”

  “What?”

  Janos reached down, dragging the video back several seconds, and hit play again.

  “We don’t need the maps just now, anyway.”

  Kit shook his head in confusion. “I don’t understand.”

  “The gate they came through was closed behind them.” Janos looked back up at the image of the woman on the wall. “They travel as a team. He carried the data for their mission in his head.” He nodded at the picture of the woman. “She took the hard drives, but where did she go? He had the maps.”

  Kit’s heart skipped a beat. “You mean she’s still on the loose somewhere?”

  “If she does not know where to go, then maybe yes.” He sank down to sit. “Your policeman, he could put her face into his computer and search for her in all the cameras in the city.”

  “But if we do that, we have to admit what you’ve done.”

  Janos nodded. “We can send anonymous tip for them. Say we saw this woman fleeing the scene.”

  “You think they’d believe that?”

  Janos sighed. “You think we should take the honest choice?”

  Kit looked back at the image of the woman. “If we can get an angle that looks like an image from someone’s pod camera, it might work.”

  “I can create an e-mail account for this.” Janos reached for one of the other slates. “Send it directly, with no name, through different IPs in different places. Too many for them to trace back to a source.”

  Kit glanced at him. “Think it’ll work?”

  “It is anonymous tip. They have to look into it.” He was silent for a moment. “Kit, you will see DI Ofori again soon?”

  Kit’s mouth was dry. “I don’t know. We had talked about it, but I don’t know. Maybe it would be better if I don’t for now.” He frowned at the slate. “I don’t like lying to him.”

  “But maybe he will suspect something is going on if you change your mind.” Janos reached over and touched his wrist. “He is a good man, and we are helping him. Don’t forget. We are helping as much as we can without compromising the TRI.”

  “Doesn’t mean we’re not lying to him.”

  “Keeping the whole truth from him,” Janos corrected.

  Kit rubbed at his forehead. “Same difference.” He turned his attention back to the slate and flicked seve
ral more screen captures onto the wall. “Okay. What now?”

  Janos dragged one of them down onto his screen. “You leave this to me.”

  “And what do I do now?”

  Janos didn’t look up from his screen. “Go. Find your policeman. Take what pleasure you can. Life is too short not to.”

  Kit hesitated. “I don’t—”

  “Kit,” Janos interrupted quietly. “You like the man. He likes you. It may not last long. Enjoy it while you can.” He looked up from his screen. “Trust me, you will regret it if you do not.”

  “What about you? Shouldn’t you be with Dieter?”

  Janos smiled. “Once I am done here, I am going back to him and we will do things I will not discuss with you.” He set down his slate, then offered Kit his hand. “Good luck.”

  Kit stared at him blankly as he shook his hand. “You’re going to be fine.”

  Janos didn’t meet his eyes. “I know. Now, go.”

  Chapter 31

  JACOB WAS bloody tired.

  His day had gone from all right first thing to downright ridiculous.

  After his discussion with Kit and Nagy, he couldn’t help but feel like he was being slowly and steadily wound up.

  It only got worse when he returned to the station.

  As soon as he entered, Temple was on her feet. “Sir.”

  “We have something?”

  “A few things, actually,” she said, following him to his office. She held out a slate to him as he hung up his jacket. “The technicians were able to salvage some data from the computers in Sanders’s basement….”

  He looked around, startled, then snatched the slate, staring at it. It was an unbroken stream of numbers. There seemed to be no pattern to them. He sank back to sit on the edge of the desk, scrolling back through them. “Do we have any idea what this is? Is it coded?”

  “It could be, but I have a theory.” She leaned alongside him and tapped the screen. Red lines broke some of the mess of numbers up into eight-digit clusters. The breaks were erratic, and he could see no pattern otherwise.

  “Dates?” He frowned. Some of the numbers would have been centuries earlier. “Maybe he was using it to research projects for his work?”

  “It’s only a vague theory just now,” she replied, “but we’re looking into the code option as well. It could just be a case that all the text was scrambled when the computers were smashed, but it’s better than nothing.”

  “We’ll see.” Jacob rubbed his eyes tiredly.

  “The TRI was that bad?”

  Jacob grimaced. “If what they told me is to be believed, Sanders was either a genius or a lunatic. I can’t decide which.” He rested his hands on the edge of the desk. “You said you had something else.”

  “Potentially.” She hesitated. “We’re double-checking it, because it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “How so?”

  “We have a match on John Smith’s DNA.”

  Jacob stared at her. “And you didn’t think you should have let me know this as soon as you had an ID?”

  Temple looked uncomfortable. “That’s the problem, sir. The ID. It’s impossible.”

  Jacob sighed impatiently. “The DNA matches?”

  “It matches exactly.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “He’s a fortnight old.”

  Jacob blinked slowly. It had been a long day already. “What?”

  “The DNA was flagged after a call went out for blood donors for the baby. He has a rare blood type, and no familial donors.”

  “And you’re sure it’s a match? Not a system glitch? Or maybe just a mismatched sample?” Temple gave him a look and he held up a hand. “No, I know. You checked already. You sent someone to get a new sample for a comparison?”

  She nodded. “I thought it would be better if we had it from the source in case of contamination when they registered it on the system. It’ll be sent to the lab as soon as Singh gets back with it.”

  “Let me know as soon as it’s in.” He sat down and rubbed at his temples. The warning twinges of a headache of epic proportion were already there. “Did you manage to dig up those files on Sanders’s thesis on teleportation?”

  “On the incident board.” She studied him. “Did they tell you what the gateway did, sir?”

  “Apparently,” he said, wondering how ridiculous he sounded, “Sanders thought the problem of teleporting could be resolved by sending people forward a couple of seconds in time.”

  Temple’s mouth opened, then closed. Her expression was a picture. “He was trying to build a time machine?”

  “So they say, but according to Rafferty, it wouldn’t have worked.”

  Temple shook her head. “Well, no, because the future doesn’t technically exist until it’s the present, so you can’t really go there until it’s… well, there.”

  Jacob had to smile at that. “That’s what Rafferty said.”

  She looked pleased. “Oh?”

  “Mm.” He closed his eyes, kneading at his temples. “Nice in theory, not possible in practice.”

  “It’s a shame,” she sighed as she headed back toward the door. “It would have explained a hell of a lot about this case, wouldn’t it?”

  Jacob’s eyes flew open.

  It would.

  Maybe the machine wouldn’t work for going forward, but maybe some time in the future, it would work to go back to a time that had already happened.

  He sat up in his chair, reaching for his slate and flicking through the most recent data. In addition to the DNA, Temple had also managed to get ahold of a copy of the baby’s medical record. The parents must have been too exhausted and distracted to mind that the police were looking into their newborn.

  There was already a lot in it, despite the baby being only days old. Jacob scanned through the information, most of it about blood tests and transfusions.

  His mother had gone into premature labor the same day Sanders had disappeared. He was seven weeks early and had been in a critical condition since birth. A full transfusion was a necessity now. There were notes that his parents and siblings had been checked for a match, but were unsuitable.

  A couple of words leapt out at him, and Jacob looked them up. His heart was pounding, and if he was right, if he wasn’t completely losing his marbles, he had proof of a scientific leap that no one believed possible.

  Baby Robertson was presenting with a severe coloboma in his right eye, and showing early symptoms of micropthalmia. Both conditions could potentially cause blindness, one due to damage to the retina and optic nerve, and the other due to an underdeveloped, undersized eyeball. Sometimes, the eyeball would even be removed and replaced with a synthetic.

  He sat back in his seat, staring at the slate.

  It had to be a coincidence.

  It couldn’t be the straw he was tentatively grasping.

  He pulled up the images of the gate parts again: the fragments from Kit’s apartment, the image from the video, CSU photographs from Sanders’s basement. John Smith—Baby Robertson, if his blood was to be believed—had come through one of those gates.

  He tapped open the file of Sanders’s teleportation research to find out if there was any sign Sanders had moved into a far more advanced mode of transportation.

  It was only when he was halfway through the file that a thought crept up on him: the TRI verified historical events. They found information and evidence somehow overlooked by historians and scholars.

  A quick search of the database brought up details of the Potiorek conspiracy.

  The official report was issued by a university somewhere down south, but there was no mention in it of the TRI. There were hundreds of websites about it in dozens of languages, some supporting the theory, some denouncing it. A good number of them were querying the source of the new information.

  Jacob frowned, staring at the screen, then pulled the TRI files up again. They had an extensive client list, but few mentions online. They weren’t cited as sour
ces or given credit for information. In a story as big as the Potiorek conspiracy, it could have had their name in lights and made them a fortune, but instead, they had stayed on the sidelines and out of sight.

  That was… odd.

  Unless….

  Unless you were using time travel to find your evidence, and rather than letting people look too closely at what you were doing and how, you sat on your hands and kept your company quietly on the peripheries.

  Jacob laid down his slate and dabbed at his eyelids with his fingertips.

  It was insane.

  Even if Sanders had been able to stabilize teleportation to the point of transporting people, how on earth did that transition into time travel?

  The office door chimed a moment before sliding open.

  Jacob looked up. “Yes, Anton?”

  “Got something.” Anton approached the desk. “This just came into the digital helpline.”

  Jacob sighed, reaching out, and took Anton’s slate. “You could have just sent it to me.”

  Anton beamed at him. “Not this, boss. Good news needs a courier.”

  Jacob turned the slate around. It was a photograph of a woman glancing over her shoulder, half turned away from the camera, with a message with a place, time, and date. No name. No details. “What am I looking at here?”

  “The coordinates are from the road leading to Sanders’s house.”

  Jacob raised his eyes to the man. “A witness?”

  “Anonymous tip,” Anton replied. “I’ve set one of the techs to find where it came from, but so far, it was a public ISP, which means it’ll be tricky to narrow down.”

  Jacob looked at the photograph. It was difficult to say how much use it would be, from the angle of her face, but they had a glimpse of her clothing—high-collared shirt under a dark jacket—and her coloring, which was something.

  “Interesting,” Jacob murmured, studying her.

  “Could be she was just waiting for a lift,” Anton said.

  Jacob shook his head. “Look at her coat.”

  Anton took the slate back. “Looks fancy.” His eyebrows rose. “Kind of like John Smith’s.”

  Jacob rose, circling around the desk. “We may well have been given the face of our second assailant.” He strode through to the incident room. All eyes turned to him at once. “Everyone, we have a lead.” He nodded to Anton, who flicked the image onto the incident board, scaling it up. “We just received an anonymous tip. This woman was seen at the road leading to Sanders’s house on the morning he was attacked.”