TimeSplash

by Storrs, Graham

  “Yeah, I know. Look, I’m going to go and sit down for a while.”

  “Yeah, I could do with a break myself.”

  She put a hand on his chest to stop him from following. “I’ll be all right. I’ll see you later, okay?”

  He watched her go with a puzzled frown.

  As soon as she was out of sight, Sandra changed direction and headed for where Zaphod had gone. It took her several minutes but she finally located the gangly youth sitting beside a girl and shouting sweet nothings in her tattooed ear.

  “There you are, Stevie,” she gushed, rushing up to him and kissing him on the cheek. He turned a blurry expression of surprise her way that quickly reverted to his normal sloppy grin when he realised who it was. But Sandra had already turned her attention to the equally surprised girl next to him. “And who are you?” she demanded, hands on hips.

  The girl gave them both a seriously disbelieving look then got up and stalked off without a backward glance.

  “Let’s go somewhere where we can talk,” Sandra said. She had to tug at him quite hard to get him to his feet, but he eventually got the message.

  She led him out of the club and into the quiet, late-night streets. He kept up a constant stream of chatter to which she contributed the occasional “Uh huh?” and “Yeah, right,” until they were well clear of anyone who might see them or hear them.

  “Don’t you miss the old days?” she asked him as they settled into a deeply shadowed doorway. He was fumbling at her and trying to kiss her in a clumsy, ineffectual way. She pulled him close, partly to make him feel he was getting somewhere, partly because she was freezing cold in her skimpy dance gear. “Are you still in touch with any of the old gang?”

  “Oh yeah,” he mumbled. “See ’em all the time.”

  “You mean, like, Buzz and Snoopy?” Buzz was the nearest thing to a hard-core brick she had known back then, and Snoopy had been his best friend.

  “Snoopy’s around. Dunno about Buzz. God, you’re so beautiful. I always liked you, you know?”

  “I always liked you too, Zaphod. Where does Snoopy hang out these days?”

  He was slobbering on her neck and had a hand inside her short skirt and if he didn’t give her something useful in a minute, she told herself, she’d have to do something to cool him off.

  “Remember the old Night Creatures Club?”

  “Yes! Is that where he is?”

  “Nah,” he said, taking a firm hold of her left breast. “Pulled it down. You know, I feel like we really connect. Y’know what I mean?”

  She felt like thumping the spaced-out moron, but instead she nibbled his earlobe. “So where’s Snoopy then, if they pulled down the club?”

  “Oh, that’s nice,” he breathed.

  “Wonderful,” she agreed through gritted teeth. “What about Snoopy though?”

  “Built a new club in the same place. Snobby sort of place. That’s where he goes now.”

  She wriggled free of him and pushed him back against the door. “Sweetie, I’ve just got to go for a pee. Okay? I’ll be right back.” He looked at her as if she were speaking Icelandic, the combination of strong drugs and lust having left him more than usually out of it. “You wait here for me, all right? I’ll be back in a few minutes. Don’t go away now.”

  He managed a grin. “No worries. I’ll be right here.”

  “Sorry about this,” she said and ran off. She picked up her coat and bag from the club where she’d stashed them and rushed straight out to the main road to hail a cab. One more step up the food chain, she told herself. One step closer. Being out here, among people who knew her, was scary and dangerous, not because the cops might find her—she really wasn’t worried about that—but because Sniper might. Every night her old boyfriend hunted her in her nightmares. Every night the ground sucked her down, buildings fell and rose again, oscillating on the edge of destruction, and Sniper, his cold grey eyes fixed on her, struck people down as he made his way toward her. She had no doubt he was hunting her in the daytime too. Now that he could make a backwash that could level a city, she would never be safe from him. He would find her and turn her world into a bedlam of destruction and chaos. She would be caught again in the madness of causal anomalies and temporal switchbacks and this time it would destroy her body and soul.

  She couldn’t face it. She couldn’t live with the knowledge that Sniper was out there, plotting to rain this destruction down on her—down on everyone. So there was only one thing she could do. Only one way to save herself from this gnawing, terrible fear. She must find Sniper and kill him.

  * * * *

  “Next,” said Jay, wearily.

  The display flicked up yet another rap sheet. Some minor teknik who had been arrested for shoplifting in Norway. All morning he had been working through intelligence files, setting his filters broader and broader so that by now they were displaying just about anything from anywhere in Europe that was even remotely connected with timesplashing. In the absence of anything real to do, this was the best he could think of.

  “Next.” This time a news item about a researcher at CERN who thought he might have a way of detecting a lob by triangulating its effects on nearby comm nodes.

  “Next.”

  “Busy?” Joe appeared at his elbow.

  “What do you want?” Joe was not Jay’s favourite person at the moment.

  “I just thought I’d say hello, but I see you’re keeping yourself occupied checking out the babes online.”

  Jay turned back to the display to see what Joe was going on about and did a double take. There was a headshot of an incredibly beautiful girl. He stared hard, not just because she was gorgeous but because he had the feeling he knew her. His first thought was maybe she was a vid star and he’d seen her in something. He scanned the text. It was a wanted poster for someone called Sandra Malone, an escapee from a mental institution in the UK.

  “You stand a chance with her, my friend,” Joe said, grinning. “She is nuts, after all.”

  Jay rounded on him. “Did you come here just to annoy me or are you warming up for a bear baiting?”

  Joe obviously didn’t get the reference but was happy to let it pass. “I came to invite you to join me and some of the others to go for a drink after work tonight.”

  Jay shook his head in disbelief. “You think I’d go anywhere with you after what happened last time?”

  “You make no sense, my friend. You were in trouble and I rescued you. How can you blame me for that?”

  “Look, I don’t want to talk about it. In fact, I don’t want to talk to you about anything. So, can I get back to my work?”

  Joe shrugged, clearly irritated. “Sure. Be like that.” He took a last look at the picture of Sandra Malone and walked off to join a couple of others, calling to them as he went, “It’s no good, he is still sulking.”

  Gritting his teeth, Jay returned to his display. It struck him again how beautiful the girl was, but this time he saw something more in her face. There was a tension there, a hint of pleading. Her eyes had a haunted look, her slightly parted lips, a suggestion of fear. He scanned the report again, more carefully, looking for some clue as to why the filters had thrown this item up. Could it just have been a random false positive?

  He was about to request more information when a call came through on his compatch.

  “That you, Jay?” the voice at the other end asked. He recognised it immediately as that of Holbrook. The “secure channel” indicator was on, Jay noticed.

  “Yes, sir.” He unconsciously sat up a little straighter in his chair.

  “Keeping you busy, are they?”

  “Well…”

  In fact, after all the officers had been closeted with Bauchet for a couple of hours yesterday, the work had started picking up. Yet there still didn’t seem to be enough to go around. The team was still growing, with new people arriving every morning, and there was a general feeling of preparation and getting organised prior to the real work starting.

>   “Thought so,” Holbrook said. “Good, good.” It was his way of saying the chitchat was over and they should get down to business. “We’ve been following up on those trucks we found the other day. We drove them on to their destination, you know. There was nobody there to receive them except a very confused shoe factory owner who thought he was getting a shipment of leather hides. Seems the whole thing was a distraction.”

  “But…”

  “Aye, they were real F-Twos all right. Worth millions. These people have obviously got more money than Alexei Gurovitch.” The famous Russian entrepreneur was reputed to be the world’s richest man.

  “So we traced them back along their route,” he went on. “Lost them in a cloud of obfuscation and misinformation along the way. Fact is, we have only one good lead. A chap in Poland—

  currently helping the local police with their enquiries—who may have been one of the early middlemen. Not much of a lead I’m afraid, but I thought you might like to follow it up from your end. I’m sending the files across as we speak.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Jay checked his display as it tracked the receipt of the data. “Got it.”

  “Good. Nice to talk to you again, Jay.”

  “You too, sir, but can I just ask…”

  “Yes?”

  “Why are you passing this to me, sir? Why not have your own people do it, or go through channels?”

  “No mystery there, lad. I just thought it might be a good idea to make sure you’re front and centre in your new team and that you don’t get overlooked. We’d all like it best if you were in the thick of things, if you see what I mean. In with the in crowd, so to speak.”

  “Yes, sir. I see.” And he did. All too well. “I’ll try not to waste the opportunity, sir.”

  “Best not. Cheerio. And let me know how you go with this Polish thing.”

  They hung up and Jay stared into space for a long while, mulling over what had just happened. With a sigh, he turned back to his display. “Whoever you are,” he told the troubled girl on the screen, “I can’t stay to chat.” He saved her details and pulled up the new files that Holbrook had sent.

  He read through the Polish Internal Security Agency reports and the transcripts of several interviews they had put their man through. The last was time-stamped just a few hours ago. They seemed to contain very little hard information. The man they had caught was a small-time crook called Janusz. He had been contacted by a man who spoke Polish and who asked him to deliver some hardware, no questions asked. They agreed on how the shipment would be handled and on a sum, and that was about it. Janusz didn’t actually handle the shipment but used a subcontractor. He did not know his customer except by the name Kapitan Kloss—which a quick search by Jay revealed to be the name of a Polish comic-book hero.

  Janusz had met Kapitan Kloss just once, at Warsaw’s Frederic Chopin Airport, Terminal 2, Janusz having insisted on being paid in cash. They met in a bar at the airport so that Kloss could hand over the money. Kloss was already there when Janusz arrived. Janusz described him as “ordinary” and “a bit weedy.” They exchanged very few words. Then Janusz showed Kloss the travel documents for the shipment, took the bag with the money and left. He never saw or heard from the Kapitan again.

  Jay ran the Polish documents through a second translator, to check the accuracy of the unit’s default software, but the result came up almost identical to the first. For a while, he stared at the Polish Ministry of Internal Affairs and Administration logo on the coversheet, his mind blank. There didn’t seem to be anything at all useful in the interviews or the police investigation that could take the trail any farther.

  A curl of anxiety turned in his stomach. After just a few days in his new job, he had already let down his new boss and now he was about to let down his old boss too. He got up and walked about, too agitated to sit still. He was surprised to find that the rest of his shift had gone already and the night shift had moved in. He supposed they’d all be at the bar by now, with Joe the life and soul of the party as usual. Maybe they were all talking about the English kid with the attitude problem and having a good laugh.

  He kicked a nearby chair, angry with himself for caring so much what people might be saying about him. Heads popped up and turned toward him all over the big office. He lifted both hands in a gesture of apology and went back to pacing about the room. At one end, near the senior officers’ glass-walled offices, was a floor-to-ceiling display with a network of mug shots all over it. The wall featured all the major European bricks who were still at large, their known associates and their tekniks. A number of key players from the rest of the world were also included—alive and dead. Each mug shot was the centre of a radiating set of labelled links to other mug shots. A software algorithm adjusted the lengths of the links to show the closeness of the association between each person. What emerged were tight clusters, mostly centred on the bricks. By pointing at the faces, it was possible to drag them around the display—their network of linked faces trailing after them. Other gestures enlarged the pictures or added textual detail.

  For a moment, Jay stopped to study it. There were the bricks he knew from his work with Five: Flash, Sting, The Doctor, Daneel and the rest. There was a lot of detail on the French bricks, brought over with Bauchet’s team: Asterix, Tin Tin, a dozen others. There were quite a few Asians—including Jimmy and his team, all dead now.

  He was about to move on when the picture of Sniper caught his eye. Immediately the memories came back. Once again, he was looking at his friend’s dead body among the wreckage of the Ommen intensive care unit.

  He dragged Sniper’s image close and expanded it. This was what he needed, a reminder of why he was here, a fresh dose of motivation. It was still an open wound and it galled him all the more because Bauchet thought he was a dilettante, had accused him of not being serious about stopping all this. He should go and tell the Superintendent, make it clear to the man that—

  An image leapt out from the rest. He pulled out Klaatu’s picture. Sniper’s uberteknik. “A bit weedy.” The words he had just read in the transcript could have been written to describe just this image. He studied the thin face, the mousy hair. “About one-point-seven metres,” Janusz had said when pressed. “Greasy hair.”

  He dredged up Klaatu’s data file. Not much was known but the physical description matched. And there! Real name: Gomółka, Dobry. Date of birth: 2039. Country of origin: Poland. Jay gasped as the excitement hit him. He’d made the connection! It was Klaatu. It had to be. Which meant Sniper was the one sending false shipments of F2s all over Europe. Sniper! One of the biggest names in the game two years ago and now considered one of the bricks most likely to attempt a gigarange timesplash.

  He wanted to rush through to Bauchet’s office and shout out his discovery, but Bauchet was not in the building. Anyway, he knew better than that. He needed to get this down in a report, marshal his facts, make the connection as solid as he could. Then the proper thing to do would be to take it to Detective Inspector Ostenstad, his immediate boss. Let him pass it up the line to Bauchet. He needed to show some professionalism here or his reputation would be completely trashed. He walked around for a moment then went back to his desk. He was so excited by what he’d found that he could hardly bring himself to sit down and start putting a report together. When at last he did, he almost jumped out of his seat again. Why did they meet at the airport? They were both Poles. Did that mean Klaatu flew in from somewhere to meet Janusz? If it did, then knowing the time of the meeting might tell him what flight Klaatu was on. Klaatu had already been there when Janusz arrived and was still there when he left. If Klaatu had suggested the meeting time, would he have chosen it to be just after his flight arrived or just before the return flight departed?

  Jay was pretty sure it would be the latter. Less chance of a cock-up. More chance for Klaatu to check out the venue before the meeting. Less time after the meeting hanging around, in case he needed to get away.

  Jay burrowed into the doc
uments again. The meeting was at ten in the morning, but it didn’t say who picked the time. He looked up the netID and placed a call to the Internal Security Agency office in Warsaw. It took him half an hour but he eventually spoke to someone there who could put the question to Janusz. It was another half an hour before the answer came back. Klaatu had picked the meeting place and the time.

  During his long waits on hold, Jay had pulled up the scheduled flights into and out of Warsaw Airport on the morning in question, looking for an arrival and departure destination that would put someone in Warsaw well before ten, but leave not long after. Then he’d checked the passenger manifests for all the possible flights, looking for someone who had flown in and out at the right times. And he’d found him. And now he knew where he was.

  Berlin.

  * * * *

  Sandra looked up groggily. For a moment panic clutched at her. Where was she? What was going on? Then she remembered. She was on a train.