Frenz stood for a moment, gazing around the room in disbelief. Will could only imagine what it must be like to see the place that he and so many friends and colleagues had worked now reduced to ruin.
‘You okay?’
Frenz startled slightly. ‘Oh yes, I’m fine. It’s just so strange seeing it like this. Barely a week ago this place was bright and clean and full of activity’ – Frenz shrugged – ‘a week for me, at least.’
‘Look, I gotta ask: was this all a waste of time coming here?’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Well, those doors back there have been closed for a long time. And just look at this place. If this Ben guy is here, what are the chances that he’s still alive?’
Frenz shot Will an amused look. ‘Whatever gave you the idea that Ben was a man?’
‘Wait, what? You, Avy and Madame Izri talked as if…’
Frenz cackled heartily, barely able to contain it. Will was glad to see the warmer side to his otherwise cool demeanour, even at his own expense. ‘Oh my, I haven’t laughed that hard in years.’
Will looked sheepish and his cheeks were flushed with red. ‘I take it that Ben isn’t a woman either then?’
Frenz chuckled a little more. ‘No, no. Ben isn’t a person at all. Ben is right over there at the far end of the atrium. Follow me.’
The two of them weaved their way through the discarded desks and fallen chairs and came to a halt at the far end of the chamber in front of four immense rectangular metal pillars. They spanned the full height from floor to ceiling and likely beyond. Each pillar was lined with bolts and rivets and painted with dozens of layers of glossy black paint. The pillars were interconnected with metal wire grates on the back and sides, forming an open-fronted cage. A half-dozen wooden steps led up to the base of the pillars, and towards the back wall several flights of metal stairs ran between each metal pillar, stopping just below the ceiling.
Inside the cage was an impressive-looking piece of mechanical engineering. Centred between the four large pillars was a smaller, but still extraordinary, cylindrical pillar made from solid brass. Like the other pillars, it also spanned the full room height but seemed to pass up through a round opening built into the ceiling. Unlike the four surrounding pillars, however, it was spinning almost imperceivably slowly. Constructed around the base of this central column was something that at first appeared to be a brass-framed computer terminal of some description, although it lacked a screen. Instead, rows upon rows of dials and gauges covered its top half, with a series of button inputs below. To the right of the control panel was a tall glass window with stacks of brown paper, each no larger than a business card, behind it. At the bottom of this strange glass window was a thin slit with a small brass box protruding from it. Behind this complex façade, an array of iron cogs, gears, pistons and pulleys were visible. The contraption was like a cross between Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine and a mechanical clock.
Will took in the giant machine and said, ‘Oh you’ve got to be kidding me. This is Ben?’
‘Yes, this is Ben,’ Frenz pronounced. ‘Ben here constantly monitors and records all usage of the Timepiece.’
‘Hold on a sec. Where exactly are we right now?’ Will pointed to the glass skylight in the ceiling between them and the vault door. ‘If that’s the Thames flowing above us’ – he then turned to point at the machine – ‘and this thing is called Ben then –’
‘We must be below Westminster,’ Frenz said. ‘That is correct. And this here is the base of the Elizabeth Tower. More fondly known as Big Ben.’
‘But…’
‘Yes, yes, I know. When the bell at the top of the tower became known as Big Ben, we started to refer to this monstrosity ironically as ‘Little Ben.’ After a while he became just Ben.’
Frenz smiled and exhaled through his nostrils, still quietly amused by Will’s misunderstanding of the whole situation once again. He then approached the large machine and began pressing, sliding and twisting a dizzying array of buttons, levers and dials. He did this naturally, his hands seemingly moving independently of his mind, talking freely as he did so. ‘This machine hasn’t been operated manually for some time. Nikola Tesla upgraded the transmission range of Ben in the late 1800s so that it could be accessed remotely. That’s likely how Cillian has been able to track the Timepiece without actually coming down here. We’ll have to make do with cards and ink, the old-fashioned way.’
The large machine began to slowly come to life as cogs and pistons woke from their long slumber.
‘What exactly does Elizabeth Tower have to do with the Timepiece?’
Frenz continued to frantically work various levers and dials as he spoke. ‘In order to properly track the Timepiece and for the Mimic Watches to function, the agency needed an antenna, and a large one at that. They used their contacts in government to have the tower built in the mid-1800s after a fire, which, between you and me, may or may not have been an accident. However, an antenna alone wasn’t going to be powerful enough for the agency’s needs, so the bell was installed. But you see, it isn’t just a bell; it’s an inverted receiver and relay dish, pointed towards the earth rather than the sky.’
‘If it was right there in front of us this whole time, why didn’t we just go to Big Ben and come in through the roof? That’s what the stairs are for, right?’
‘There is access to the ground floor of the tower yes, but only from inside. Those stairs lead to an emergency exit and that’s also our escape route. Just as soon as we have what we came for.’
‘Well, you’d better be quick. Cillian Gander and his two cronies will be on us any second now.’
‘Almost there, one last step. Will, you still have my ID card? The one you found in my safe?’
Will began rooting around in his pockets until he found his wallet. He began looking through, pulling cards and loose bits of paper free until he found what he was looking for. ‘Yeah, I got it!’
Frenz then pulled an identical, albeit slightly less faded card from his own pocket, held it up and said, ‘This machine requires two ID cards to be inserted to output data. Let’s hope it doesn’t object to two identical cards.’
‘Here’s hoping,’ Will said.
‘Ready?’
Will nodded his head yes. ‘Ready.’
Both of them inserted their cards perfectly synchronised with each other. The moment the cards slid home, the machine fell quiet, all aside from a low humming sound emanating from within. Will looked at Frenz, who could only shrug helplessly and said, ‘I don’t understand. It should have worked.’
‘Shit. Now what?’
Just at that moment a shot rang out, reverberating loudly through the large chamber. The bullet’s meaty impact with flesh was followed by a fine spray of blood and then a thud as Frenz collapsed in a heap on the floor.
CHAPTER THITY-SIX
May 19th, 1984, 11:02
The bullet had torn clean through Frenz’s leg just below the knee. His body’s pain receptors hadn’t quite relayed the message to his brain by the time he attempted to put weight on his wounded leg. As further shots rang out, he took a step to his side to find cover. Immediately his leg collapsed under him and he was momentarily bewildered to see the floor rushing towards him. His pain receptors soon did their job as agonising pain rippled up his leg. The feeling was worsened as he tumbled backwards down the wooden steps and clattered onto the stone floor at the bottom. The impact winded him and he let out a guttural rasp of breath. His attention soon returned to his leg, which felt hot, wet and numb all at once. He didn’t initially feel pain in the wound itself; the worst of it came as sharp daggers shot up through his knee and into his thigh. He gritted his teeth, fighting back against the natural urge to scream out.
Will called out Frenz’s name and moved to the aid of his fallen companion when an unsettling voice bellowed out from across the room. The voice stopped him in his tracks before he’d even reached the top of the steps. ‘Don’t you dare take ano
ther step!’ it said. Will looked up in the direction of the command and the inevitability of their situation was suddenly realised. At the far side of the room, calmly weaving his way through the desks and upturned chairs, was Cillian Gander. He had a smoking gun in his hand. The light refracting through the Thames above swept across his face as he walked. As he closed in, the sharp creases in his skin became even more apparent. Will found something chilling about the way he moved; he seemed to drift through the tangle of wood and paper as if he were a ghost floating hauntingly above the floor.
The low hum from deep inside the machine to Will’s left continued, appearing to build in intensity as Cillian approached.
He was already halfway across the atrium, accompanied by his corpulent henchman, Agent Wigmore, who was gracelessly waddling in tow. Just then there was a commotion at the far end of the room as the maimed Agent Tyke stumbled into view, clumsily kicking a metal wastepaper bin across the floor. He attempted to steady himself on a desk, sending papers flying in the process. He was doubled over with pain as he walked farther into the room, cradling his severed left arm in a blood-soaked rag. The man looked pale and not long for this world. The sight of what Will had done to the man, murderer or not, sent a sickening feeling through his stomach.
Gesturing to the frail Agent Tyke, Cillian said, ‘Well, well, well, Mr. Wells, we meet at last. And you have been a busy boy. Just look at the harm you’ve done to my man Tyke over there. How marvellously malevolent of you.’ Pointing towards the stricken Frenz with his gun, he continued, ‘My former colleagues used to paint me as something of a monster, but compared to you I really do seem rather reserved in my methods. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Belingi?’
‘Hey, it wasn’t me who cut his hand off, it was your damn wall,’ Will said in a steady voice, which surprised even himself.
‘You know, I did always wonder what had caused my filing unit to collapse my wall in the way it had. It is such a thrill to discover something new about your past, is it not?’
‘Look, old man, I’m not the one who executes innocent men and women. I’m not the one with the torture chamber in my basement.’
Cillian Gander rolled his eyes and held his arms outwards in an exacerbated manner. ‘This is always the problem with you Yanks, so melodramatic.’ Just like flipping a switch, his tone changed. The mock jovial manner evaporated, replaced with a stony, cold stare, and he raised the gun. ‘Now, please stop your bloviating. Give me the Timepiece and I shall show you a kindness by making your death a quick one.’
Will’s options were limited so he did what he could to buy some time. He started with a frank act of defiance, by saying, simply, ‘No.’
‘No? What do you mean, no?’
‘No, I’m giving you nothing,’ Will said once more.
‘Don’t be absurd, I have a gun. Give me the Timepiece now and I will shoot you in the head, quick and painless. Refuse and I will begin shooting little pieces off you one by one.’
‘If you start shooting me, then you could hit the Timepiece. Then you’ll leave with nothing.’
This possibility gave Cillian pause. He lowered the gun a fraction and whipped his head to the side, with his chin almost touching his right shoulder. Without looking directly at him, he said, ‘Wigmore. Go over there and bring Mr. Belingi to me.’
‘With pleasure, sir,’ Wigmore said, grinning menacingly.
Wigmore shuffled over, breathing laboriously through his mouth, something he seemed to do in perpetuity.
Meanwhile, the hum from the machine to Will’s left became more regular, more rhythmic.
At the back of the room, Agent Tyke had settled into a chair and was awkwardly hunched against a desk, motionless. His hair was slick with sweat, his skin clammy and deathly pale.
By the time Wigmore reached him, Frenz had succeeded in using his belt as a tourniquet for his leg. He was drowsy and clearly in quite some pain but unlike Tyke was still conscious. Frenz resisted Wigmore’s manhandling as best he could, but from his position on the floor and with only one functioning leg and a badly sprained wrist, he was no match for a man the size of Wigmore. He was dragged across the room towards Cillian, leaving a striped trail of blood, the edges of which quickly thickened as they absorbed the dust on the floor. Wigmore propped Frenz up on a desk to Cillian’s right, something for which Frenz was actually quite thankful. He swung his leg into an elevated position, which relieved the pressure building in his thigh.
Cillian turned to Frenz and said, ‘Frenz Belingi. It is so peculiar to see you after all these years looking no different than the last time I saw you.’
Frenz spoke through gritted teeth. ‘No such feelings for me, I’m afraid to say. You look just as old as you ever did.’
Cillian grinned a hideous smile. ‘You know, I’ve been searching for you for a long, long time. Everyone else in the agency gave up so quickly, thinking you dead, but not me. I knew you were still out there somewhere. We’d tracked you to the 1940s.’ Cillian paused a moment and reached into his inside jacket pocket, pulling out a small brown card identical to the ones stacked behind the tall glass window of the humming machine at the back of the room. ‘I’ve had this card for almost thirty years. This is where you went, isn’t it?’ Cillian turned the front face of the card to Frenz and he saw, printed in faded red ink, the date and time:
04:21, 5TH SEPTEMBER 1940
Cillian continued, ‘And do you know what we found?’
‘I’m sure you’re going to tell me,’ Frenz said.
‘We found nothing but a record of a man – matching your description – who was arrested after he inexplicably found himself in the middle of a military training complex. The report offered no explanation as to how this man managed to infiltrate the facility. He was dealt with and thrown in jail. However – and here is where it gets very interesting – only two days later, that jail was struck by a Luftwaffe bomb, destroying the cell where this man was held.’
‘It sounds like a tragic end for the man, whoever he was,’ Frenz said.
‘Oh, but things get even more interesting than that. A brilliant researcher of mine investigated this incident even further. A diary was uncovered, only in the past year or two, written by a prison guard who had worked at the jail. He recorded a vivid memory of the incident. He talked about the voices that haunted him for the rest of his days after that night. The voices he heard coming from the cell just before the bombs hit. He claimed that he could hear not one but two different voices. He also claimed that one of those voices was quite distinctive. His colleagues told him he was imagining it because, as far as everyone else was concerned, they hadn’t arrested an American man.’ Cillian then snapped his head around to lock his piercing deep-set eyes on Will.
‘Is there a point to all this?’ Will said.
‘My point is that you seem to be a bad omen for our dear Frenz Belingi here.’
‘Oh yeah, how’d you figure that?’
‘I’ve been looking for him for years and now you’ve delivered him to me twice in just under a week.’
Will frowned in confusion. ‘Twice?’
‘When we followed you to that ghastly shop, we had no idea that you would lead us to Frenz, but you did.’
‘Following me? Why?’
Cillian turned to Frenz and said, ‘I must admit that the first time I found you, my men acted somewhat hastily in killing you, slow and painful as they made it.’
A look of shock and confusion swept across Frenz’s face, while a sickly grin crept across Cillian’s. Cillian turned back to Will and said, ‘Wait, you didn’t tell him, did you? Oh, this is so delightfully macabre.’ Cillian returned his focus to Frenz and said, ‘That’s right, Frenz. Tyke and Wigmore here shot you and let you bleed out. And despite the slow agony you must have felt before your death, you protected young Will here. Meanwhile, your friend Will watched them do it. And he did nothing. He didn’t even call the police. Did you know that?’
Frenz glanced up at Will, who could only lowe
r his head shamefully.
‘And now he can stand by and watch you die once again.’ Cillian raised the gun in his right hand and pressed it to Frenz’s temple. A bullet slid into the chamber after a series of metallic clicks. Will shouted out, ‘Wait! Wait, you win. Okay?’
‘Will, what are you doing?’ Frenz said.
‘Time’s up, Frenz,’ Will said.
The low, steady hum from the machine that had been increasing in intensity for the past few minutes had reached a crescendo. The stack of brown cards behind the tall glass window shuffled slightly. An ear-splittingly shrill bell rang out, cutting through the otherwise quiet room.
The sound momentarily startled the normally cool and collected Cillian Gander, giving Frenz the chance he needed. He arched his left arm sluggishly through the air and batted Cillian’s gun from his grasp. It skittered across the floor, some ten metres away. In the same movement, Frenz’s arm completed its arc, wrapping around the neck of the dumbfounded Agent Wigmore, who was standing in front of him with his back turned. Frenz clasped his right hand tightly around his left wrist, squeezing his forearm into the flabby, fleshy skin surrounding Wigmore’s windpipe.
Frenz then screamed, ‘Will! The stairs. Run!’
CHAPTER THIRY-SEVEN
May 19th, 1984, 11:09
The gun had spun through the air in an arced trajectory, hitting the floor and sliding under a toppled bookcase and out of sight. As Will watched the gun as it left Cillian’s hand, he shifted his weight from his heels to his toes, preparing to move. The gun lay closer to Cillian than to him, but for a moment he thought he could get to it first. For a man of such advanced years, Cillian had shown himself to be surprisingly mobile and nimble. This gave Will pause and his thoughts quickly turned to running as Frenz had instructed. As he looked at Frenz, the guilt he felt for fleeing his shop when all this started came racing to the surface once more. How could he now, in good conscience, do the same thing again?
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