And now Jay was back in the UK and someone else was on secondment to Europol. When Jay had asked to stay with the Temporal Crimes Unit, Holbrook had been flattering about what a good job Jay had done and how his talents were needed “on the home front.” Jay had tried to argue that he was of more use staying in Brussels, but it didn’t get him anywhere and here he was, home again.
He heard voices approaching through the house; a man was talking to his mother, a deep-voiced man who must be flattering her atrociously judging from the way she was giggling. Then they emerged into the garden and Jay jumped to his feet immediately.
“Superintendent!”
Bauchet turned his aquiline face to Jay and smiled. “Your charming mother has been telling me all about what a good boy you used to be when you were little.” Jay goggled in alarm at his mother. “I assured her that she can still be just as proud of you.”
Embarrassment grabbed Jay by the throat and left him open-mouthed and speechless. If the sky could have fallen on him right that minute, he would have considered it a blessing. His mother didn’t help matters by standing there beaming at him as if he was her chubby little baby once more.
“Now, if I may, Mrs. Kennedy,” said Bauchet. “I need to have a few words in private with your son. It is important police business, you understand.”
Jay’s mother all but simpered as she assured him it would be all right and bustled away to leave them alone in the garden. Bauchet thanked her profusely and went over to sit opposite Jay. He folded his long body into the wicker chair as if it were something he had never done before and regarded Jay with his usual sombre expression, all smiles gone. Jay felt much more comfortable to see those deep-set eyes regarding him without a twinkle in them. Cautiously, he sat down too.
“Can I get you a drink, sir? Or something?”
“Your mother and I have just had that conversation—at length.”
“Ah. Then…”
“I am sorry for coming here, to your parents’ home, but I needed to talk to you somewhere private, where there would be no bugs. You understand?”
“Bugs? No, I’m afraid…”
“It is important to stop the bricks from launching more attacks,” Bauchet said. “It is the most important matter facing humankind at the moment. Do you not agree?”
Jay tried to weigh it against curing cancer or stopping poverty, ending the Sino-Indian war or beating the latest flu pandemic, but quickly gave up. It was well up there with the rest, wherever its exact place in the running order was. So he said, “I suppose.”
“In the last six months, two major cities have been reduced to rubble. Tens of thousands are dead.” He waited while Jay nodded. “So it is a rather odd time to be taking experienced staff—like you—away from the TCU, is it not?”
“Well, yes. But I was told…”
Bauchet raised a hand. “Yes, yes. It is possible, I suppose, that national governments are becoming scared and they want their people back home, protecting their more narrow interests. But you and I know that this is wrongheaded. This kind of terrorism has worldwide networks of financing and support. The bricks are mobile and flexible. They choose their targets from all over the world and they go where the work is. National intelligence agencies cannot hope to mount adequate defences without strong, effective international coordination and collaboration.”
He paused, meaningfully. “So why am I losing my people, Jay? Why are my new secondees stupid third-rate people who couldn’t find their arses with both hands?” For some reason, Bauchet’s French accent seemed exaggerated and exotic in the context of Jay’s parent’s garden.
“I still don’t…”
“Jay, you know I have had a small team reporting directly to me that has been chasing the money.” Jay nodded. The Super’s right hand man, Colbert, had been running it. “The trail goes round and round in circles and never ends anywhere! We are not looking at criminal gangs and religious nutcases.” He waved his hand as if to dismiss such naïve notions. “I believe only the most sophisticated of organisations could have set up such clever and elaborate paper trails.”
Jay blinked, suddenly realising where this was going. “Governments? You think there are rogue governments behind all this?”
“What they used to call state-sponsored terrorism.”
Jay’s mind was racing. During the Adjustment, many governments collapsed. There were coups and revolutions, sometimes long periods of anarchy. If you were looking for rogues, there was a long list to choose from. “America?” he asked, shocking himself as the possibility dawned.
They had traced the money behind Sniper’s team to a number of religious groups—some of them quite legal or at least tolerated in the USA. Were they just a front for an American government agency, the CIA perhaps?
Bauchet shook his head. “I don’t think so.” Then he shrugged. “Who knows? We have no evidence and I doubt that we will ever have any either way. But we must keep an open mind and not jump to any obvious conclusions. Such a revelation would start a war. It is not something to speculate about idly.”
Jay sat back in his chair, letting the implications go round in his head. Bauchet sat back too, letting him take a moment to adjust to the idea.
When the Frenchman spoke again, it was in a much lighter tone. “You know, when the Unit first started up, all you young Turks from all over Europe were the last thing I wanted. Your governments had forced me to accept representatives of their intelligence agencies so that you could all report back on our progress, give them first-hand intelligence, as it were. It used to drive me crazy, I’ll tell you. But it hasn’t been so bad. There has even been a little competition among you and among the people who sent you that has been to our benefit.” Jay wondered if Bauchet knew about the tip-off Five had given him about Klaatu’s visit to Poland. There was no sign of it in Bauchet’s face, but then how do you read the expression of an eagle?
“Now, I wonder if we might be able to get the same process working in reverse.” He looked hard at Jay as if he’d said something very significant. Jay was struggling to see where the conversation was going. “You know, all you ex-TCU people out there in your national agencies, gathering intelligence, sifting and analysing, hearing this and that. Perhaps now and then you would call your old friends at the Unit and let us know how things are going. It would help everybody in the long run, don’t you think?”
Jay was shocked all over again. This was turning out to be quite a conversation.
“You want me to spy on my own department?”
Bauchet held his gaze steadily and said nothing.
Jay shook his head. “I can’t do that. I’m not a traitor—or a mole, or whatever that would make me.” He stood up, too agitated to stay still. “Anyway, what would be the point? Europol gets whatever we find. There are regular channels, standing protocols. Surely you’re not saying Five is withholding intelligence? What would be the point? Everyone would be losers. It doesn’t make any sense.”
He turned away from Bauchet’s silent gaze, feeling pinned by it, and began to pace the garden. The only advantage Jay’s intel could give Bauchet would be to cross-check it against what was coming down the official channel. But the only reason he would want to do that was if he suspected the official channel was being manipulated somehow. But what reason might the government have to hide anything when it came to information like that?
“Oh my God,” he said, stopping and turning back to Bauchet. “You think the Brits are funding splashteams. You think my government is behind this.” It was outrageous. Impossible.
Bauchet shook his head. “No, that is not what I think. I do not even have any reason to suspect it. But I would like to know who I can trust. As I told you, the money trail suggests a level of skill and organisation well beyond the reach of the groups we have heard about so far. If there is a government—or several governments—behind this, we need to know which ones.”
It all sounded so sane and reasonable when Bauchet said it, but Jay’s h
eart was pounding and something inside his skull was shouting at him to get the hell out of there and run for cover.
“I can’t,” he said, shaking his head again. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”
Bauchet sighed and rose to his feet. “And I’m sorry to ask you, Jay. It is only because I trust you that I offer you this burden.” He took a card out of his pocket and laid it on the table beside the cakes and lemonade. “This is a secure netID. Think about it and call me when you are ready. I’ll be in London for the next couple of days and then I go back to Bruxelles. I would not ask you if this were not so important.”
He left, passing through the house. Jay heard him saying good-bye to his mother. Slowly, he reached out and picked up the card. He stared at it for a long time before putting it away in his pocket.
Chapter 14: Another Invitation
Jay touched the lock on the run-down Canary Wharf apartment block where he lived, and his compatch negotiated with the building security system to let him in. The lock chimed and the door clicked open. The mechanism said, “Welcome home, Mr. Kennedy. You have had—no—visitors. No—messages are waiting for you. Have a pleasant evening.” He barely heard the machine’s chirpy voice. Lost in thought, he shook the rain from his coat and got into the lift. Bauchet’s visit had left him edgy and confused. A long walk had seemed like a good idea, but instead of clearing his head and helping him think, it had just left him cold and wet. The clear skies of the morning had slowly given way to thick cloud and a chill northerly wind. Now his only thought was to get into his flat, turn the heating up full and fall into a hot bath with a six-pack of beer. If he could find something mindless to watch on the vid later, he’d watch it. When he touched the lock to his own door, it opened immediately. It had, after all, been expecting him. Inside, the flat remained in darkness although the lights should have come on. Normally, he would have dismissed this as yet another fault in the building’s ageing systems, but not tonight. His talk with Bauchet had him wound up tight and he was in a mood to distrust anything and everything.
Drawing his gun and flipping off the safety, he ducked low and moved away from the doorway, where the light from the entrance hall made him a perfect target. He was in a short hallway that opened onto bedrooms to his right and left and a large sitting room with a kitchenette at the end. His heart was racing, but he made himself wait while his eyes got used to the dark. If there was somebody in there, he didn’t want them to have all the advantages. Steadying his breathing, he moved slowly up the hallway toward the sitting room. From a crouch, he peered around the corner into the room.
“Lights,” a woman’s voice said, and for a moment he was half-blinded as all the lights came on at once.
“Don’t move,” the voice said again. “I have a gun.”
Jay froze, then turned his head carefully toward the voice. Sitting in his armchair, pointing a large 9mm Enfield at him, was Sandra Malone. Apart from astonishment, his main emotion at seeing her was relief.
“Drop the gun,” she told him.
He rose slowly to a standing position, careful to keep his own gun pointing downwards. “Or what?” he asked. “You’ll shoot me?”
The girl’s face set. “If I have to.”
Jay smiled. “I’ve seen the way you shoot, Sandra. I don’t think I have anything to worry about.”
“Very funny. Well, for your information, I’ve been taking lessons. Lots of them. Next time I use this, I won’t miss. So just put the gun down. I want to talk to you.”
Jay relaxed a little more. “Okay. If you want to talk, put your gun down first. I only talk to people who aren’t trying to kill me. It’s one of those rules I try to live by.”
Sandra scowled at him. “You’d probably live longer if you had different rules.” The gun did not waver.
Jay felt a surge of irritation. Being ambushed by beautiful young women was all well and good, but he’d had a difficult day and there wasn’t a lot of fun left to be squeezed out of this situation. Enough was enough.
“Look,” he said, turning his back on her and walking to the kitchenette. “I’m bloody freezing and I’m going to get myself a hot drink. You might have turned the heating on when you came in.”
He put his gun down on the kitchen worktop and picked up the kettle. As he filled it, he looked at her again. “Do you want something? Tea? Coffee?”
She stood up, looking cross. “I don’t know what you think you’re—”
“Sandra,” he interrupted her. “I’m making a cup of tea.” The kettle sorted, he crossed the room to turn on the heating. “My mum warned me about teenage house guests just this afternoon.”
He took off his coat and threw it over a chair, then went back to preparing the tea. Sandra glared at him for a moment longer, plainly feeling like a complete idiot and not liking it one bit. Reluctantly, she lowered her gun and put it away in a bulky underarm holster. Jay watched her and shook his head. “You know, that gun is way too big for you. You’d be better off with a nice little Walther PPK or a Heckler-Koch HK45C. You can still get them both.”
Sandra went back to the armchair and sat down. “It was a present from a friend.”
“Nice friends you have.”
“He’s dead now. How’s your friend? The guy Sniper shot.”
“His name is Joe. The bullet missed his heart by two centimetres, but took out his left lung. He’s got a desk job back in Barcelona now while they grow him a new one.” Jay had been to see him once since the shooting. Joe had been recuperating at home at the time, trying to pretend he’d soon be back on active duty and back in the field.
Sandra interrupted his reverie. “You saved his life.”
“What?”
“If you hadn’t charged at Sniper like a madman, he’d have hit your friend bang on target. You were very brave.”
Jay was unexpectedly embarrassed. “Yeah? Tell it to my boss.” He busied himself with pouring the tea, thinking he’d rather tackle Sniper again any day than face another bollocking like the ones he got from Kappelhoff, Bauchet, and the Bundespolizei once he got out of hospital. He brought two drinks over in mugs and gave one to Sandra. “I put sugar in it,” he told her and took a seat opposite her. She put her hands around the cup to warm them and he noticed how pinched and cold she looked. “The heating’ll kick in in a few minutes,” he said. “You didn’t have to sit here in the cold.”
She shook her head. “All the electrical systems are tied to your netID. They only work when you’re around.”
“Ah. Right. Do you mind telling me how you got in?”
She took a sip of tea, steam curling into the air around her eyes. “Bedroom window. I had to break it.” He must have looked as confused as he felt because she added, “I came down on a rope from the roof.”
“Jesus!”
She smiled for the first time since he came in. “I couldn’t exactly call for an appointment, could I?”
“No, not really.” She was wanted by every police force in Europe, and Interpol was looking for her worldwide. He suddenly remembered Bauchet saying, “I needed to talk to you somewhere private, where there would be no bugs. You understand?” He jumped out of his chair, holding a finger to his lips. If his apartment were bugged, he could expect his colleagues to come and kick down his door any minute now. Sandra set down her drink, got up and followed him as he ran to the bedroom and dragged a small electronic device out of a box in the wardrobe. He ran from room to room, waving the device around, watching its display. It was a full five minutes later before he stopped and relaxed. The scan revealed no bugs—none that were transmitting anyway. There might still be ones passively recording, and there were other ways to eavesdrop—a laser targeted at one of his windows, for instance, sensitive to the tiny vibrations that voices would make in the glass—but his moment of paranoia was over and he settled back into his chair with a sheepish grin.
“You never know,” he said.
Sandra remained standing, blinking at him. It had clearly just dawned on
her what he had been doing. “Shit,” she said.
TimeSplash Page 16
