by C. B. Lewis
Still, the woman must have gone to him for a reason.
Temple accompanied him to the man’s office, a second pair of ears. They were greeted by his secretary, who took them up to Harper’s office on the top level of the building. It was grandiose and over-the-top, with expensive furnishings and artistically placed photographs.
Patrick Harper was seated behind a wooden desk, which almost dwarfed his bulk. He had clearly enjoyed the spoils of his success, judging by his tailored suit and his girth. Everything about the man was large: his waistline, his broad hands, his wide shoulders. Only his features looked too small for him, close together beneath a high, round forehead, as if they had been designed for a much slighter man.
He rose, walking with that careful gait Jacob had seen in many large people, and held out a pink hand to Jacob. “Detectives,” he said, and Jacob could hear the way his breathing was rasping in his voice. A rich man, yes, but also a very unhealthy one.
“Mr. Harper,” he said. “We’ve come to ask you some questions about the woman from the news bulletin.”
Harper returned to his seat, subsiding down into the chair. “Ah. Yes.” He motioned for them to sit and nodded. “I barely spoke to her myself.” He poured himself a glass of water. Taking a moment to catch his breath, Jacob thought. “My people said she insisted on delivering a package to me personally. Security were… wary, but agreed to let her in.” He shrugged those wide shoulders. “She came in. Saw me. Said she had made a mistake.”
“A mistake?” Temple frowned. “What kind of mistake?”
Harper spread his hands. “That, I can’t tell you. She left as soon as she realized. One of my receptionists recognized her on the news and thought we ought to call in.”
“Did she tell you what she was trying to deliver?” Jacob asked.
Harper shook his head. “She told reception it was from someone called Sanders, but I don’t know anyone by that name.” He tilted his head, watching them thoughtfully. “Isn’t that the man who disappeared a few weeks ago?”
“Yes,” Jacob replied.
“And this woman was involved?”
“That’s what we’re presently trying to ascertain.” Jacob leaned forward in the seat. “Mr. Harper, I expect you have top-of-the-line security equipment in this building? Cameras? Even a few microphones in public areas?”
The man’s pale eyes glinted. Something about them caught Jacob’s attention, something familiar that he couldn’t place. “If you’re after my footage, Detective,” Harper said, bringing him back to reality, “we’ve already got it downloaded for your attention.”
“And your other members of staff who encountered the woman,” Temple put in. “We would need to speak to them as well, in case she provided any other information.”
“Of course, of course.” Harper motioned for the secretary to come in. “Marco will take you to one of the meeting rooms and arrange for the relevant people to be brought along.” He frowned. “It won’t take all day, will it? I have a business to run after all.”
“We’ll keep it as short as possible,” Jacob promised.
It would have been quicker and easier if they’d just left with the security footage. They learned next to nothing from the staff. Sometimes, it irritated Jacob just how little attention people paid to their surroundings. The most that anyone could tell them was that the woman wasn’t local. Her accent sounded more southern, definitely the Home Counties. It wasn’t much to go on, especially when she hadn’t given a name, but it was something.
“Maybe the footage will have something more,” Temple said as they made their way back down to the pod outside.
“I doubt it,” Jacob murmured, glancing back at the building.
Temple darted a look at him but knew better than to ask until they were back in the pod and the doors were closed. “You think he was lying?”
“I think there’s something he didn’t bother telling us. The rest of it was probably true, but I get the feeling there’s more to her seeing him.”
Temple pinched the bridge of her nose. “Just once, I would really, really like it if we were dealing with people who weren’t unfamiliar with the concept of complete disclosure.”
Jacob smiled. “If everyone was honest, we would be out of a job pretty quickly.” He opened up the files on his slate, dispatching them ahead to Anton back at the station. “I’ll leave you guys to go through them. Maybe have Anton skim through Harper’s records. He has a good eye for anomalies.” He shut down his slate. “I have an appointment at the TRI. Again.”
“You really think they’ll say anything new, sir?”
Jacob considered his conversation with Kit the night before. “This time? They have to.”
Temple sighed. “I hope you’re right.”
He dropped her at the station before inputting the TRI address into the pod nav. He sent a message to Kit to let him know he was on his way, then leaned back in the seat.
The case was a mess of loose ends. If he was right—and the TRI weren’t bullshitting him—then Sanders’s attackers came from the future. If that was the case, then the missing woman was either from the future as well, or was an innocent witness, but innocent witnesses didn’t tend to carry packages from missing men who were presumed dead.
He closed his eyes, wishing there was some way to stave off the impending headache.
The ride to the TRI wasn’t a long one, but long enough for him to push down the fatigue and look as professional as he could when he walked into the building. His shirt wasn’t ironed. His suit was rumpled from too many hours in the office. He was bloody tired.
Kit was waiting for him in the lobby. A brief, tight flick of a smile crossed his face.
“Hey.”
“Mr. Rafferty.”
Kit held out an ID pass to him. “Mariam is waiting for us upstairs.”
Jacob let his fingertips brush against Kit’s. Whatever they were going to tell him, it was the line in the sand: either they were honest and they moved forward, or they would lie again and he would have no choice but to bring in warrants and tear the place open by force.
The ride up in the elevator was made in silence. Jacob didn’t know what he could say, and Kit spent the whole ride staring up at the tiles on the roof, as if it would stop him thinking about the drop below them.
“Kit.”
Kit pulled his eyes down from the ceiling. “Mm?”
Jacob straightened up from the wall. “Whatever happens, this isn’t personal.”
Kit almost managed a convincing smile, then skimmed his hand over the scanner. He led Jacob along the hall, but instead of going to Ashraf’s office, he was taken to the conference room once more.
“Why here?”
“They’ll explain,” Kit said, then opened the doors.
Ashraf was sitting at the table and rose as he entered. She wasn’t alone. Nagy was there too, and another man Jacob didn’t know. He was slender, with bleached hair, bloodshot eyes, and a guarded look on his face. He had to be around the same age as Nagy.
Behind Jacob, the door slid closed.
“DI Ofori.” Ashraf motioned to the table and the vacant seat opposite the two men. “Please, take a seat. You know Janos Nagy. This is Dieter Schmidt.” The blond nodded. “They both need to be here for this.”
Kit was still standing by the door, arms folded and staring at his shoes.
Jacob sat down. “You have something you need to tell me.”
Ashraf looked at Nagy, who nodded. She sat back, and Nagy glanced at the man on his right, who took a shaking breath. Schmidt’s lips were trembling.
“Just fucking tell him already,” he whispered.
Nagy’s right hand was under the table, and from the way Schmidt’s arm moved, they had reached for each other’s hands. “Kit says you know what the TRI do.”
“I believe Sanders successfully created a way of moving backwards in time,” Jacob said, getting it out before he could change his mind. “I believe this is how you do your re
search. I believe that the people who attacked him used a similar system to come back from a point further in the future. And I believe you have suspected this all along, and have kept it from us to protect your agency from public scrutiny.”
Ashraf closed her eyes, a muscle in her cheek twitching.
Nagy’s expression was placid and unreadable. “You are correct.”
Jacob leaned back, breathing out as steadily as he could. Christ. It was true. He’d half wondered if he was going nuts, but no. They confirmed it. They were serious. It was all true, and time travel was real.
Nagy tapped his false fingertips on the tabletop. “Only employees of the TRI know about the technology. How did you come to this conclusion?”
“I ask the questions.” Jacob propped his elbows on the arms of the chair. “How long has this been going on?”
“Around seven years,” Ashraf replied. She didn’t look at him. “Sanders was working on teleportation for years before that, and it led to temporal experiments. He never explained how he made the leap. He… wasn’t exactly good at sharing.”
“So, you’ve been time-traveling for seven years?” It felt strange to say it. “This incredible leap in technology and Sanders kept it restricted to just your select group to make a quick profit?”
“He had his reasons,” Ashraf said evasively.
“His wife.” Kit spoke quietly from behind him. “He lost his wife. He needed the money so he could afford to keep developing his tech to try to find her.”
Jacob felt like he’d swallowed a lump of ice, and he looked over at Ashraf. “Lost while traveling. That’s what you said.”
She met his eyes. “I just didn’t specify what kind of traveling.”
Shit.
He looked back at Nagy. “And what’s your part in all this? Are you some kind of computer genius? Is that why he brought you in without papers or genuine documents?”
Nagy met his eyes. “You are a clever man, Detective Inspector. You know what I told you. Think for a moment.”
Jacob frowned. Yeah, he knew that Nagy had come to the country on false papers, and had never come through border control at any of the sites around the country. He hadn’t even had paperwork until three years ago, when he just….
The thought hit him like a hammer.
He stared at Nagy, open-mouthed. “When?” he asked hoarsely. “When are you from?”
Schmidt made a small, shrill sound of distress. Nagy turned to him and murmured something in what had to be Hungarian. He slipped his hand free of Schmidt’s and put his arm around Schmidt’s shoulder.
When he looked back at Jacob, he looked older, tired. He touched the sensors on the tabletop with his false hand, and the walls around them illuminated with images, security feeds and footage: a filthy man stumbling through a doorway of light into a room that looked like an industrial tank. He was bleeding and armed.
Jacob watched in silence as a man—Schmidt—entered and managed, despite the gun to his head, to calm the furious Nagy. Another frame: a woman joined them in another chamber, uncovering Nagy’s wounds, the mutilated limb, the ragged knife wound in his side.
Beside Nagy, Schmidt had his eyes closed. He was white as a sheet.
Bad memories, Jacob guessed.
“I was a soldier in the Second World War,” Nagy said quietly. “All of my story is true. The only part I did not tell you was when I came from. It was an accident. I saw the gateway, when the TRI were on a mission. I was dying.” He swallowed hard. “They hunted me, my comrades. They would have killed me. I came here. I was saved.”
“Why kill you?” Jacob asked, though he already knew the answer.
Nagy looked at Schmidt, who had silent tears rolling down his face. “Because I looked at men.” He looked back at Jacob. “Because I loved a man.” He took a steadying breath. “I tell you this now so you understand why Mariam and Kit have lied. They did not lie to stop you. They lied to protect me.”
Jacob nodded slowly.
If the TRI was put under public scrutiny, and the world found out that some soldier from World War II was living and breathing, he would become a living museum artifact. He would be dragged into the spotlight and displayed, forced to relive horrific events from his past. For a man almost murdered for his sexuality, he would become a symbol for people, a token icon. He would be an exhibit, and that would be his life.
No wonder Ashraf and Kit had tried to keep it—and him—under wraps.
“You know your operations can’t remain secret anymore,” he said finally. “If there are people using time travel to commit crimes from the future, we need to bring this to public knowledge now. It needs to be controlled, regulated, managed.”
Nagy nodded stiffly. “Mariam is preparing a statement. We know this must happen now.”
Schmidt leaned into Nagy. He was trembling and breathing hard, his face wet. “We can go somewhere else,” he whispered. “Fuck it all. Let’s go and find an island somewhere, get out of the way, go where no one will ever know who we are. Let them deal with this.”
Nagy pressed his cheek to the man’s hair. “You know we cannot. I cause these problems for everyone. I cannot leave people with my mess.”
Schmidt said something in Hungarian, short and shaking, and Nagy gathered him in his arms, murmuring comfortingly to him.
Jacob ran a hand over his mouth, watching them. There could be no mistaking the genuine emotion between the two men, and he could remember all that Nagy had told him, about his better life, about what he had left behind. No man deserved to have years of abuse and violence dragged back up.
He glanced back at Kit. He looked unhappy, his lips pressed together in a tight line. He didn’t meet Jacob’s eyes. No wonder. This was what he had really been hiding. Schmidt and Nagy had ended up together, despite war and violence and being born a century apart. It would be brutal to knowingly tear them apart.
“Ashraf.” Jacob turned back to the woman. “You control all the files here?”
She nodded tersely. “We have a lot of paper and digital records.”
“What about his records? Reports into his arrival?”
Ashraf thought for a moment. “Most of the details of his arrival were restricted to a couple of machines. There were a few paper files, but the rest of it, you’ve seen: his documents, his medical records, all that stuff.”
Jacob nodded. His heart was pounding, and Jesus, if anyone from the force found out what he was about to do, it wasn’t just career suicide. He would most likely end up behind bars. He didn’t dare to look at Kit. They had only just started out. If he ended up locked up, Kit wasn’t that attached to him anyway. Nagy and Schmidt, on the other hand….
“Destroy it,” he said. “All the digital data. Anything that shows his arrival. Anything that might make people question his origins and compromise his current identity. Get all digital copies and wipe them, then smash the hard drives.”
“What?” Nagy’s voice was a whisper.
Jacob looked at him. “Everything on your records you provided checks out. As far as anyone knows, you’re an upstanding modern citizen. I don’t see why you should be punished for something out of your control, not knowing what will happen.”
Nagy’s eyes were wide, and his false hand rose, pressing, shaking, to his lips.
“You’re serious?” Schmidt’s voice broke. “You’re not fucking with us?”
Jacob nodded. “Full disclosure on everything else. That’s the condition. You give us everything else. No lies. No cover-ups. As far as anyone will know, Janos Nagy came here three years ago from Hungary. No one needs to know anything more about him.”
Schmidt started laughing, wrapping his arms around Nagy.
Nagy wasn’t even moving. Tears were spilling down his cheeks, and his lips were bleached white where his false fingers pressed against them. Shock, Jacob guessed. Relief too. Having his life handed back to him.
“Thank you,” Schmidt said. He was running his fingers through Nagy’s hair and hugg
ing him tightly. He was crying too. “Thank you.”
Chapter 36
JACOB AND Mariam had left the conference room to go to Mariam’s office.
It was Mariam’s suggestion, to give Janos and Dieter a little time, and Kit dithered in the doorway, unsure where he was meant to go. He wouldn’t be any use to Mariam or Jacob. But then, he didn’t know what he could do for Janos and Dieter, and if he went anywhere else in the building, people would grill him about what had happened.
He glanced at Jacob, who didn’t meet his eyes.
Not Mariam’s office, then.
That left lurking around in the conference room and trying not to be a creepy, overemotional bastard.
His eyes were still wet, and he didn’t have any right to that. It wasn’t his life that had been on the line. Of all the people in the room, he was the one with the least claim to relief, but he couldn’t help feeling it.
He’d wanted to run to Jacob and hug him in gratitude. He’d wanted to kiss the man senseless for such a kindness. He’d wanted to do a hundred and one things that would probably get him fired if he did them at work.
And then he remembered that Jacob was covering up evidence.
It felt like a lead weight settled in his belly.
No wonder Jacob hadn’t looked at him when he left the room.
Janos had barely moved since Jacob gave Mariam the order, and Dieter was wrapped around him, holding him tightly.
Their whole morning had been spent together, in the belief that it was the last chance they would have. Kit had been the one to fetch them down from the roof. He had found them sitting in the garden there, not even speaking, just holding each other’s hands.
Silently, Kit went across the room to the drinks machine and filled two cups with tea, adding milk and sugar to both of them. First aid training, many moons ago, told him warmth and sugar was good for people in shock, and from the look on Janos’s face, he needed it.
He carried the tea over to the table, setting it down in front of them.
Dieter looked up at him, his smile lighting his face. It was the first time Kit had seen him without makeup, and despite the lack, and the sleep-shadowed, bloodshot eyes, his happiness made him look better than he ever had. “Thanks.”
