by Matt Hilton
‘Yes, like I said, when he was murdered, the blame was cast on the Soviets.’ Rembrandt’s amnesia was acute, yet it only affected his memory prior to the point where he was severely injured and fell into a feral state. He could recall most things with pinpoint clarity after Guvnor Semple had coaxed him back to health, and that included everything he’d learned from his fellow survivors about the events that led to the declaration of war. He’d already gone over this a number of times during debriefing, but was willing to do so again. ‘Gorbachev was deposed from power via a military coup and President Valentin Pavlov wasn’t the type to take the USA’s threats or posturing. He employed his nuclear arsenal, and the West retaliated in kind.’
Semple and Doherty nodded along with Rembrandt’s potted history lesson, both wearing faint smiles. He halted, realising he had just told himself the detail behind his mission.
‘Wait a minute…is that it? Reagan wasn’t killed here?’
Semple said, ‘On March twenty-first, nineteen eighty-one, Reagan was shot but survived. The would be assassin was identified as John Hinckley, Jr, a crack pot, who targeted Reagan due to an infatuation with the actress Jodie Foster. He emulated a scene from the Foster film “Taxi Driver” where the De Niro character, Travis Bickle, decided to assassinate a US Senator running for the presidency. Hinckley apparently did so in order to show Foster he would do anything to protect her, as Bickle did in the movie for Foster’s character.’
‘The same as back where I came from,’ Rembrandt confirmed. ‘But what about the second attack when he was touring the UK?’
Doherty went on as if Rembrandt hadn’t spoken. ‘Thankfully Reagan survived the attack by Hinckley. He went on to complete two terms as President and alongside Gorbachev, and our own Mrs Thatcher, brought about a stabilization of the arms race and a lasting peace. Here there was no assassination attempt during Reagan’s latter years, or if there had been it was thwarted before it took place, and there were no discernible connections to any communist plot reported. It seems those events were particular to your dimension and not ours.’
‘I see,’ said Rembrandt, even though it was obvious to the others that he was stunned by the revelation. The assassination of one man had caused the total annihilation of the world, and now it was down to Rembrandt to ensure that President Reagan survived.
But he hadn’t stayed in the bewildered state for long. Steeling himself, he’d reared his head. ‘Do you think it’ll actually work? I save Reagan, save my world, and by rights, save this one too? It’s a big ask, like you said.’
‘It is.’ Semple patted him on the forearm. ‘But we have faith in you.’
Rembrandt’s eyelashes flickered in the only visible sign of emotion. ‘How am I going to do this?’
‘Let’s see if my theory is workable before we load you down with too many details,’ Doherty said. ‘If I’m wrong, and what’s set is set, then it’s pointless talking about it now. Go bring out your team, show that the present can be altered by changing the past and we’ll take things from there.’
Now, sitting at the mess hall table, Rembrandt was beginning to worry that another crazy-arsed loop might kick-start when his team came back with a desire to return to their own time and place. He checked his watch again. Two minutes past twelve. Where the hell were they?
His unspoken question was answered a few seconds later as the doors opened and in trooped all five of his team. They were dressed in black t-shirts and combat trousers, rubber-soled boots. Kwolek had her hair hidden under a baseball cap. Walker also wore a cap, but he’d reversed it on his head. They were showered, shaved where necessary, their wounds dressed. Walker barely limped. They posed a formidable sight and caught more than one inquisitive glance from some of the military personnel in the mess hall. Spotting Rembrandt, Dhand pointed him out, and they all trooped across the room in single file, wending their way between tables. Rembrandt was glad to see that their tread was light and more than one of them held smug grins. Relief flooded him. As a unit they’d elected to stay.
In the next instant he felt a cold hard rock form in his gut.
How was he going to tell them what they had just signed up to?
Chapter 16
April 5th 2018
Tempus Facility, England
For the briefing with the team, Semple had opened the doors to his gallery room, and now the large table was practically surrounded. They were all there, Rembrandt’s team of six, Governor Semple, Elizabeth Heller, Professor Doherty and Major Vincent Coombs. There were two new additions to the assemblage, a lab tech called George Fox, and a MoD official introduced only as Mister Sterling. Sterling, Rembrandt, assumed, was Semple’s link to Prime Minister Drake. The bespectacled man had little to say, but listened acutely, and made frequent notes on a handheld gizmo called a “Blackberry”. It stood to reason that the Prime Minister would demand constant updates, and Rembrandt wondered how long it would be before he personally descended upon the Tempus facility. Then again, he wondered just how much of the secretive nature of Semple’s experiments with time manipulation had been released, even to the government. Semple was a man with an agenda, and even Mr Drake did not necessarily know it. More than once, Rembrandt had noted a faint sneer on his lips when the governor addressed the MOD official.
Jugs of water had been supplied as refreshments, both still and sparkling varieties. Rembrandt’s team took great satisfaction in quaffing the water, and he’d caught more than one of them studying the clarity of the liquid in their glasses. The simplest of things – clean water – brought the greatest of pleasures, and the fresh ice was coveted as if the chunks were nuggets of gold. Clean water and ice were commodities people would kill for back where they came from. It was so long since any of them had tasted water that hadn’t been through purifying processes that left the water flat and tinny that this pure spring water was manna from the gods.
Governor Semple held a snifter of brandy, and though he’d offered the decanter around, no one else had partaken of the alcohol. Rembrandt knew his lads were tempted beyond reason, but one brief shake of his head had been enough for the others to abstain politely. This was a time for clear heads and he doubted any of them would think straight if they were half-cut.
George Fox was in charge of the projector this time. The lab tech was an aid that shuffled between Heller and Doherty, but ultimately answered to Terrence Semple, depending on the task at hand. Yesterday, he’d assisted the doctor and her team of medics, while a tracking implant was administered intravenously to each of the team, and he’d tested each signal by way of a small, portable computer pad. Though he couldn’t put his finger on why, Rembrandt didn’t like the young man. Perhaps it was because he toadied around Semple too much. Credit where it was due, Fox was skilled with all the contraptions at his disposal, and handled the projector with more speed and accuracy than Semple had a few days ago.
On the screen was a satellite image, digitized numbers ticking off by the tenth of the second, and calibrated exactly to Greenwich Mean Time. The satellite feed was live. It showed a huge swathe of tropical terrain blighted by ash, the flora and fauna scoured to the newly embittered earth. Fox zoomed in the image, and paused the scene over what amounted to a series of mud flats that sloped towards a frothing, bile-tinged shoreline.
‘Take a look, people,’ Semple said, bringing the meeting to order. ‘What you’re looking at is the coastline of northeastern Brazil. We experienced another touchdown at twenty-two nineteen hours yesterday. More than one hundred square miles of forest were devastated soon thereafter, a terrible loss. Worse when you consider that the mud flats on screen are all that remain of the town of Jericoacoara and an estimated population of seventeen thousand. We cannot at this time confirm exact numbers because the town and adjacent beaches are very popular with wind surfers and such, so we can probably add a couple thousand more lives to that estimate. The eyes of the world are descending on the location, along with the three previous sites -’ Semple glanced sourly a
t Sterling ‘- and as is expected in such incidents, governments are beginning to apportion blame. As of now we are on a raised alert level, and Prime Minister Drake demands immediate and successful results.
‘Chief Rembrandt, your team has been fully briefed on the nature of your mission?’
‘Yes, sir, we’re ready to go,’ Rembrandt said, aware that this latest breach was as a result of him pulling his team out of Old City and keen to put things right. ‘Major Coombs has supplied some of the intelligence required to allow us to engage the assassins, and we’re only waiting on the equipment and wardrobe to be delivered and we can be underway.’
‘How soon can we expect the tools that Chief Rembrandt requires?’ Semple inquired of the Major.
‘Not my department,’ Coombs said. ‘I deferred to Elizabeth on the task of sourcing retro clothing: I think that shopping’s more her area of expertise than mine.’
Rembrandt watched the slow but spiteful smile grow on Heller’s lips, and realised that there was an undercurrent of animosity between her and the major. She directed her words at Semple. ‘I am having bespoke costumes readied as we speak. I’ve a team of tailors and seamstresses working on authentic, but new, clothing based upon the popular fashions of the time. They are designing only the items necessary for a successful transvection; the team can source further clothing on arrival.’
‘I reiterate my first question,’ Semple said. ‘How soon?’
‘I fully expect the clothing will be ready now, but I will check.’ She nodded at George Fox, who took out a mobile phone as he stood – another marvel of the age that Rembrandt’s team was unfamiliar with. The tech moved to the back of the room, with a couple of quick glances at Semple, checking for his approval, and conversing in tones unlikely to disrupt the meeting.
‘Did you have any trouble sourcing weaponry from the period, Vincent?’
Coombs shook his head. ‘No problem.’
‘Then is there anything else to discuss before we get this underway?’
Rembrandt raised a hand.
‘I need to run recon before we all take the jump back.’
‘A separate transvection?’ Semple asked, and his eyes strayed to the screen and the signs of devastation such might mean.
‘Don’t worry, where I’m suggesting jumping to won’t have the same effect here as the last times. It’s going to assist and speed up our mission, and won’t slow down the timescale before the full team jump by more than a few hours. That’s the beauty of time travel, isn’t it? We can use it to our advantage.’
‘What’s on your mind, Rembrandt?’ Coombs asked.
Rembrandt waved a hand at his team members. ‘Everything I know about the nuclear war was what I was told by my friends and other survivors. Their memories of the events that led to the assassination of Ronald Reagan are sketchy, and based very much on what they were told after the event, and I don’t doubt that much of it was speculation. Don’t forget, with the exception of Jamal, they were all youngsters when the president was murdered, and their recollections of the event are primarily based on what they discovered in hindsight. By his own admission, Jamal was out of the country when the event occurred and only learned of the assassination from the news that filtered to him in the field. We know the date and location Reagan was killed, but do not have exact timings, or any useful intelligence on the people responsible, other than the rumour that they were a communist sponsored terrorist group. If I were to be jumped to the location just prior to the time of the president’s murder, I can gather valuable information we can then use to thwart the shooting when my entire team makes the subsequent jump.’
‘I understand your logic,’ Semple said, ‘but the risks of capture are too high. If you’re on the scene when the president is murdered you’ll most likely be rounded up with everyone else, detained for questioning, and I’m not sure you could fully convince anyone that you are there under innocent circumstances.’
‘If it happens you can pull me out.’ Rembrandt looked for Fox, who was returning to the table. He nodded at Heller to confirm that the tailoring was finished. ‘You checked my new tracking implant; it’s in fully working order again; you can pinpoint my location from it can’t you?’
Fox, caught out by having missed the last minute or so of the conversation, paused in thought. But he was quick to catch on. ‘I can pull you out at any point and time you wish.’
‘That’s a neat trick of the prof’s theory,’ Rembrandt said with a nod to Doherty. ‘Even if I’m grabbed and interrogated, I can be pulled out, and travel to a time previous to that where the events will not yet have occurred. I can avoid capture a second time, warn my team of their impending capture and those future events will no longer exist. Then we can have another crack at saving the president.’
‘Things get weirder and weirder every time the subject of time travel comes up,’ Coombs grunted under his breath. ‘But even I’m beginning to understand that our manipulation of time could prove limitless.’
‘It’s not limitless. This is all conjecture and we may well be off the mark. The Tempus Project is a fascinating tool,’ Doherty said. ‘If it weren’t for the problem the breaches cause us here, we could try sending Rembrandt and his team back time and time again until a successful resolution occurs, but that idea screams in the face of logic. If ever we were successful it would manifest in that timeline and make it unnecessary for Rembrandt to do further trips. Has no one heard of the ‘Kill Hitler’ theory?’
The others looked at him blankly.
‘OK, what I’m saying is that people have wondered if by time-travelling they could send someone to kill Hitler and avert World War Two and the Holocaust, but by the very fact that we are aware of Hitler and World War Two only means that any attempt was unsuccessful.’
It was a similar paradox to the grandfather theory that had already been bandied around, and a contradiction to what Docherty had claimed when talking with Rembrandt a couple of days ago about the consequences of a time traveller’s memory.
‘I showed that by saving Jamal and pulling out my team things could be changed,’ Rembrandt pointed out.
‘Yes. There are other versions of the same theory, one concerning a paradox loop. Imagine this: having saved Reagan, the nuclear war doesn’t occur, meaning your present self has no reason to go back to change time, but because you don’t go back, Reagan is assassinated and the nuclear war does occur, meaning you would have to go back and save him again, and so on into infinity. It could be the same here.’
‘Except that we aren’t talking about our past,’ Rembrandt reminded him. ‘We’re intending altering it in a separate dimension, probably causing a splitting of that dimension’s future where, yes, the president is still murdered in one version, but is saved in the other and puts it back in line with ours.’
Doherty could only shrug. ‘Sci-fi writers have argued about the rules of time travel for years. The truth is no one knows, because before now it was all hypothesis based upon what science tells us. By its very nature, the Tempus Project bucks pretty much everything we’ve ever believed before. But you’re right in that most theories have been based upon Einstein’s version of time being a straight line. In this multi-verse we’ve come to realise exists, there is possibly no end to how time can be manipulated. Sadly, the paradox here is that we simply do not have the time to find out.’ He aimed a finger at the screen, and noticing what the professor was indicating, Fox pulled the zoom out a fraction and all in the room watched as the ash coloured area on the coastline of Brazil seemed to expand and pop, sending out splashes of destruction in a starburst of flames. From the high altitude position of the camera, it was like watching the embers of a cigarette burn in a green blanket burst into flame and race outward in a widening circle.
Chapter 17
January 28th 1988
Piccadilly, London
Regretting his third glass of Sauvignon Blanc Barry Miller jogged across Piccadilly while the stoplights were on the turn. An imp
atient taxi driver was on the move and swerved around Barry with a blip of his horn in admonishment. His face flushed from the wine, Barry waved an apologetic hand, before stumbling up onto the pavement and heading past Fortnum and Mason for the underground car park where he’d left his Jaguar. Lunch hours for him were often like this, too much rich food and too much wine, and of late his wife, Marjorie, had been warning him to slow down a bit on both. At forty-eight he looked a full decade older, his skin sallow, hair thinning, and eyes shot from too many hours studying the small print under dim lights. He fully suspected that by age fifty-five, if a heart attack hadn’t taken him the stress of burning the candle at all ends would frizzle him out and he’d be a dried up cinder.
A cold drizzle came from nowhere. Barry pulled up the collar on his navy blue Crombie, ducking his head and feeling the cold sting of rain on his balding pate. He swore softly under his breath and picked up his pace, trying not to get his new brogue shoes marked by the splash of water. He cut through a narrow road to Jermyn Street and onto a road at the end of which he could see St. James Square. A quick right took him to the car park and he delved in his pocket for cash to pay his way past the barriers. Coins tinkled on the ground, tens and fifties, and he crouched to gather them up. Anything with less value than those and he wouldn’t have stooped his back. He jogged on, the fumes of alcohol setting off a pounding in his skull with each step. The rain pummelled down harder, but he made it under the overhang in time, and walked down the ramp shaking moisture off his Crombie coat. He fed the machine and took his ticket back.
