Cherry Picking

by Tim Heath

  Walking through the Door that first time, Mark Smith felt only excitement as he took the steps through it and then all too quickly arrived back out through the first doorway. At first they thought it hadn’t worked but they quickly realised they were standing in a motor workshop, which seemed to no longer be in business. The windows were boarded and the place was generally empty. With a little force they managed to open the side door. It was then that they recognised it as the same building that had stood empty in their time for so many years, always having been described as the old garage but not once did they imagine they’d ever actually see it as it had been. To their knowledge the building had been empty for many years, maybe as many as five decades, but they could work that one out later. The main thing was that the doorways had worked, but they planned to test it further. They found a safe place to hide the food under some floor boards in the office up some steps on the back wall. Then they returned back through the door. They’d arranged to be just ten minutes and when they walked back through, they had indeed been gone ten minutes.

  The room was alive with excited and amazed chatter. Mark collected his thoughts and stayed to one side while the guys quickly started to work out how it had worked, coming to the conclusion that a fixed width was now established and that the two points in time in which each doorway now stood would always remain the same distance apart. To finally finish the experiment, they all got in a car and drove the short distance to what was now the very derelict garage, where the original door had brought them out. They worked their way through the broken fencing designed to keep people out, eager to see what remained of the food that they had only left there some sixty minutes before, though if it were true, it should look as if it had been there for years.

  Pulling up the floor boards, there was silence as they gazed at what that morning had been freshly purchased from the supermarket. The packaging, because of the darkness under the floor boards, was still quite fresh and the best before date showed up the same, going out of date in twelve months’ time. What remained of the food, though, was clearly way past its best. They dropped it into a bag to take with them, not wanting to leave it there to be found someday, raising some questions, and they all went back to the room they now rented together and which housed the world’s latest piece of breakthrough science technology.

  Mark Smith suggested they have one final party together and purchased loads of drinks before the big announcements tomorrow and the world coverage that would come with such a breakthrough. They drank hard and before long were laughing uncontrollably. Mark had by now drugged their drinks so that they would all be unconscious in a few minutes. He’d gone out to reverse a hire truck against the side door and by the time he was back in the room, it was completely quiet, all of them lying unconscious on the floor. Mark struggled to get the side door open and then to move the Wentworth Door into the back of the truck. Having done so he locked up the truck and moved it out of sight just around the corner. He walked back into the room which was still quiet, shutting the doors behind him. Picking up three of the left-over bottles of whisky and other drinks, he poured the contents all over the room, including the guys, until the bottles were empty. He then went into the kitchen and turned the gas on. On his way out, he stopped briefly in the room with the drunken men in, saying nothing but having one final look, before striking a match, which jumped into life. He dropped it onto the alcohol soaked rug, flames lapping up and spreading quickly.

  Mark Smith turned and was gone, his face expressionless. Unemotional about the fact that he had just killed the four closest people to him in the entire world. Unmoved by the fact that now he’d always be on the run. Unnerved by the thought of what he’d done. He got to the truck and started to pull away and heard the explosion as the gas had obviously reached the burning room.

  Mark drove on regardless, his face fixed with the same blank stare. He’d finally got what he wanted. It was his. It worked. After a few minutes he started to smile, the thoughts of all the things he could now do and who he could now become. The planning of the last three years and all the research he’d done would now all be worth it — the adventure was about to begin.

  Chapter 16

  Jessica Ponter had gone through a complete range of emotions over the last few days and now simply couldn’t stop thinking about seeing Tommy again. She was starting to feel really nervous about how she would react. The event was meant to be a charity dinner after all and she didn’t want to make a scene, but on the other hand she wanted to impress Tommy, to see him, to have everything back as it was before.

  To that end, she knew that she’d have to speak to him and maybe see him before the event. After all, arriving to such an event together would be far better than just leaving together. Jessica had paced around her room for a long time, then went out for a run and got home and showered before actually calling Tommy. But as soon as she’d heard his voice, all the fear was gone, melted away by the warmth that she felt, the calming voice of her Tommy on the other end of the line. They chatted for a long time, keeping to the edges of conversation by avoiding any of the meaty stuff that one day they knew they’d have to tackle but that day wasn’t now. They’d arranged to meet for dinner before they finished up and Jessica put the phone down far more relaxed than when she’d picked it up. It had been several years since she’d spoken to him and for most of those years there had just been anger and hatred there, so much so that she’d needed counselling for four months which had really helped her to pull through.

  And so she sat down in her cotton pyjamas, drinking her tea slowly, the happiest she’d been in years. And yet again, she had Brendan Charles to thank for that. Once more he’d thrown her a bone, a lifeline. Once more he’d come through for her and given her exactly what she needed, even if she had not known it herself. Brendan had become a father to her, and though he had his own children, who were all a little younger than she was, she was sure that he too felt the same by the way he looked out for her, always being there when she most needed it, when life was at its hardest.

  She went to bed early that night, taking a book to read while she finished her tea, happy that things were finally working out for her again and desperate this time to not let things go wrong.

  **********

  Robert Sandle had worked for the Agency since he was twenty-one. Having grown up in a children’s home after his parents’ deaths when he was just an infant, he worked hard at his education and was one of only a few success stories to come out of such a terrible start to life.

  Known only as Craig, he’d always battled with loneliness and the need for answers. At heart he was also an adventurer. It was while at university that Craig first met Sir Simon Allen, an old and noted lecturer who’d recently established an elite government department which became known simply as the Agency. After graduation, Simon offered Craig a role within the new organisation and with no family connections to worry about he jumped at the chance and moved away, cutting off all links that had been his troubled childhood.

  It was in his first few months at the Agency that the deaths of four male Oxford students, burned alive while they lay in a drunken huddle in their room, came to light. Due to the nature of the fire, it was impossible to identify three of the bodies but the fourth was possible and when it was established who he was, it was soon reasoned that the group who were always together had indeed died together, though the whereabouts of the fifth member, as yet unknown, meant there were questions that needed answering.

  In the age of internet research and chat-rooms, two of the men, twin brothers, had openly discussed their research and after eleven months of digging, Craig and his team had started to piece together the sinister nature of the events that had unfolded.

  Of course, without knowing it, things had started to change around them, but because they knew nothing else, these changes went unnoticed.

  The Agency realised the importance and implications of such a discovery and everything linked to it became highly classified
. Great research was done into the Wentworth Brothers and especially into the younger brother, Nathan. And in time they too found similar details of his own doorway that he had gone on to make. The timing detailed was twenty-three years later than that of the original one made by Christopher, and a skilled team was put together to go through the near complete notes detailed on the students’ own computers, their records and hard drives having been taken for analysis following the discovery of the bodies.

  With such detailed notes it was only three months before their own doorway was complete and Craig was only too eager to test it out, going through the doorway and reporting back that indeed it had worked as they had hoped it would.

  Due to the highly secretive nature of what the Agency was now doing, the whole operation was kept completely confidential and only three men knew about its success. Craig was to be the only man to use the device, taking on the name Robert Sandle in order to keep his presence secret. There was also continuous research being done on the internet by the remaining two, looking back at everything that came out from that time period in case his name cropped up in any unwanted places. Had that happened, little did they know, but it would already have been too late.

  The Agency would do all the research they could at their end, feeding Robert with as much helpful information as possible. It was only after a few longer trips of about a week each time that Robert started to notice a pattern and things started to go wrong. Having gone through the doorway, the changes made by Nigel Gamble meant that on his return things had been different. Not largely so, but different. Some companies didn’t exist, other companies were called something else, things were changing. And because only he now had memory of how things had been, having been back in time, his colleagues were totally unaware of the changes and therefore were unable to be of any further help to him. He realised that he was really now on his own, as his information was coming from a source that was always shifting, and therefore the information changed with it and so was compromised. There was nothing to determine how things were and therefore he had no way of knowing how things were different.

  The Agency was unaware of this and Robert kept it from them as he didn’t know how they’d react to him if he told them what he knew. But the longer he spent through the other side of the door, back in time as it was, the more things had changed and ultimately the more on his own he became. Rarely did he therefore report back to his team. Instead he used internet cafés where he was able to quickly find a lot of information before returning back through the door in the constant hunt for the man that had started it all, Mark Smith — the man who now, and currently unknown to Robert Sandle, called himself Nigel Gamble. Robert had known the dangers that could follow such a new scientific breakthrough and now he was experiencing first hand the damage that could be done following the murder of Simon Allen. This was the same Simon Allen who had previously mentored him after establishing the Agency — an agency that now it seemed never even got set up, never got started. And if this was the case, Robert thought, it was therefore probable that the very existence of Nigel Gamble, or Mark Smith as he had been, was now unknown by anyone other than himself.

  If his time up to now had been hard, Robert realised that from now on things could only get much worse. Having felt alone since his earliest memory, he had previously at least found a new family in the Agency and this had given him a hope and a future. Now even this was gone and he was left feeling more alone than ever. On top of that he was now a wanted criminal, with all the false publicity that had been put around about him, and not only now in this new place but even back at what once had been his home, his own time. He had nowhere to go, it seemed, no one who knew him, no one who cared. This thought sat heavy on him that evening, reaching deep into the depths of his soul, pulling at every emotion he had in his body and making him very depressed. After an hour of tossing around the bed, in which he was rather unsuccessfully trying to sleep, he gave in and pulled out a bottle of Scottish whisky that stood in the sideboard and having drunk three large glasses of the stuff, he finally dropped off to sleep not long after two.

  Chapter 17

  Brendan William Albert Charles was born in a hospital just outside Woking on the 4th March 1970, in the affluent county of Surrey, in the south of England. His parents were middle class and wealthy, they provided a happy and full education that saw him going to an expensive private boys’ school. He went to a good university on the back of the top marks he attained there. It was while studying at University, that he first met a quiet but attractive girl named Sally Anne Taylor. They quickly fell in love, getting married the autumn after he finished, though she still had two years left to go on her four year business studies degree. Brendan had always been one for business and in his early days he always seemed to have some idea on the go. He took some temping jobs between interviews to help pay the bills, waiting for the right opportunity to come along. His parents’ constantly open purse meant he wasn’t greatly motivated to do much for himself, initially anyway.

  It wasn’t until after he’d been married for three years and with the first child on the way, that Brendan decided that he alone was going to provide for his family and he took a job at a small family run insurance broker which had been offering him an opening for some time.

  In no time at all he had transformed the little firm and even had persuaded the ageing owner to buy out one of their local rivals, something his boss had been reluctant to do at the time. But Brendan had taken a loan from the bank and offered to go halves with him on the new purchase as long as they would become partners in the new merged firm. To Brendan’s surprise he had agreed, clearly taken along with the faster pace of life since Brendan’s arrival and perhaps wanting one last challenge before retirement in the not too distant future. Brendan had effectively bought into a larger company as a joint owner and when his boss did retire, Brendan agreed to buy out the remaining half, funding it by an increased loan from the bank. At the time his parents had been vocally concerned at his willingness to get into so much debt and even offered to loan him the money themselves. The newly independent Brendan saw that as taking the easy route and having just turned thirty-one, he knew it was time he stood on his own two feet.

  He put all his energy and time into the new firm and by his thirty-second birthday, he became the sole owner. Brendan was due to open his second branch and business continued to grow from then on. Over the next five years, while his second and then third children were born, he’d got a real taste for takeovers and had taken the plunge eight times, leaving himself with a market-leading insurance broker, which had also by then become the largest in the country.

  As the firm continued to find newer ways to remain competitive in a hostile international market, when an economic depression threatened to circle the world, Brendan implemented a new strategy over the next decade that was to revolutionise his business interests. Initially it had been his father handing over the family business on his retirement: a small but successful firm within the service sector. This had been a bit of a problem for Brendan, who was by now already running a multi-million pound company himself. But with conditions worsening within the insurance market, it became clear to him that he needed to expand his interests into other markets to broaden the risk and provide financial stability for his family’s increasingly luxurious standard of living.

  He discovered that similar principles to those that had guided his success in the insurance market could be applied to his father’s firm, with some tweaking here and there. The key was in getting the right people in the right places. Immediately Brendan started looking more closely at which markets he could next exploit. He handed over much of his day to day work within the insurance brokerage to his more than capable management team.

  At the close of that decade Brendan had branched out into twelve new markets, each time buying into well established but under performing companies and quickly growing them through new business practices and acquisitions. He picked up the award o
f Business Man of the Year three times along the way and became a well known person, not only in the business world but increasingly through media interviews and the occasional television guest appearance. He had been reluctant to do too much in the early days, but he soon began to understand the importance that publicity could play.

  By the age of fifty he was the wealthiest Englishman in the country and yet he did much of the hands on stuff himself because he still enjoyed it so much. He had by now become a household name, largely helped by a number of TV series that used him as an on-screen advisor, a surprising role at first but one which Brendan really grew to enjoy, seeing the chance to train up and mentor younger men and women to become all that they were capable of. He’d provided the very best education for his three children and they’d done very well, though just having the family name had meant they wouldn’t ever really have to try too hard to make it on their own. Brendan was therefore able to take early retirement at fifty-five from the day to day running of all sixty-three companies that now formed the BC Holdings Group. This had taken a few people by surprise but his oldest son was perfectly placed to take things on, which he did.

  Brendan was now able to spend lots of time travelling, something he hadn’t had much chance to do before but something he enjoyed immensely, and he spent a wonderful year with his wife going right around the world. After that he split his time between family and the media, signing up for more television work and enjoying every minute of his life.