Nomads

by Dave Hutchinson

  At this point, everything moved to the next folder, the one I presumed would result in a life sentence if it was leaked to the Press. The cover was covered in stripes and stamped with dire warnings.

  Mr Oxley’s body and the Machine, and a few other odds and ends from his home, vanished into a government research unit on the outskirts of Watford. The Machine was a bust; it just sat there and didn’t react to anything. But the scientists had more luck with Mr Oxley, who was progressively disassembled and subjected to intense analysis.

  A parallel investigation was going on into Mr Oxley’s background, and for several decades it seemed entirely blameless. Beyond that, though, it began to throw up anomalies, little things which a cursory – or even a moderately stringent – check would have either overlooked or dismissed as clerical errors. There were paper documents – difficult to insert into the record – missing, school photographs which should have included a happy smiling young Oxley but which did not. I recognised those signs, and so did the Security Service investigators. Andrew Graham Oxley was a legend, a fable, a man of paper.

  The obvious conclusion was that he had been a sleeper, an officer of a foreign intelligence agency placed in Britain against future need. If so, he had been here a very long time, and that made people sit up and take notice because he probably wasn’t alone.

  The spectre of a cell of long-term agents-in-place didn’t last long; it was superceded by an even worse nightmare.

  Which took me to the final folder. This one, judging by the stamps and stripes on the cover, required me to shoot myself immediately after reading it.

  The final scientific report on Andrew Graham Oxley concluded that, although he had presented as a human being, he had actually been quite some distance from baseline. Although his mods had decompiled when he died, there were enough structures left behind for the pathologists and researchers to identify a number of what they originally thought were deformations or mutations.

  I read the final page of the report, the one where the researchers came to the unwilling and frankly outrageous conclusion that Mr Oxley had not been human, that he had in fact been an extraterrestrial, then I tidied up all the papers notes and memos and photographs and put them back into their various folders. I put the folders back in the briefcase and I went to look for the others.

  “Well,” I said, “the first thing is that he didn’t kill himself, at least not with sleeping pills. He would have had all the standard medical nano and you can’t turn that stuff off or modify it; it would have detoxified him whether he wanted it to or not.”

  “You think he was murdered?” asked Sachs.

  “I don’t know. There’s too much in the pathology that’s inconclusive – he was pretty far gone when he was found.” I looked at the briefcase sitting on the table in front of Sachs. “I can tell you he was here a long time. This wasn’t the first time he’d cooked up an identity.” I watched Regis and the others as I said this, but no one stirred. “He was good at it,” I went on. “He knew his way around databases and he knew what to do once he was inside them. If he hadn’t died, nobody would have been any the wiser. Eventually he’d have decided to leave his job, he’d have moved away, altered his appearance, and started again somewhere else.”

  Sachs made a note. “Cary Grant?”

  I shrugged. “I can’t even begin to guess. Maybe he compiled an avatar to do some work for him somewhere, maybe he just wanted someone to talk to.”

  “So Oxley’s a dead end?” Sachs said. Then she winced. “Sorry. Bad choice of words.” This time I saw Regis smirk.

  “Unless there’s a clue in his Machine,” I said, looking at Jan Tyrian.

  He seemed to take a moment or so to realise I was addressing him. He looked around the table. “I’m afraid it’s locked,” he said. “Powered down, completely inert. I couldn’t get it to respond. Sorry.”

  “It should have crumbled and blown away,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, that may be significant, but without diagnostics I can’t explain it.” We looked each other in the eye for a few moments, then he looked away and started to doodle on the notepad in front of him.

  “I suspect he’s not relevant,” Regis piped up. “An unfortunate coincidence.”

  “A bit too fucking unfortunate, considering where we’ve ended up,” I said.

  “We were advised there could be some suicides,” he pointed out.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, we were.” I remembered a briefing from a creepy little psychiatrist. Loneliness, survivor guilt, all the happy problems I had to look forward to. He’d said there was an expectation of maybe one or two percent suicides, a slightly higher percentage of psychological problems. These were, though, he said, people with strong egos, people with a high survival instinct; suicide wasn’t expected to be a major factor. What he’d actually meant was that we were about to send the cream of the apex selfish back to the twenty-first century and they couldn’t give a shit about anyone but themselves. At least three of the people around this table fitted that description.

  Later that evening, there was a discreet knock on the door. Andrew, who was babysitting me that week, went to answer it, and a few moments later Sachs came into the living room.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hello,” I said, putting aside the Arthur Hailey I’d been reading.

  “I wondered if you’d like to go out to dinner.”

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “No occasion,” she said. “I thought you might feel like getting out of here for a couple of hours.”

  “Did you have somewhere in mind?”

  “There’s a little Italian place I go to in Marylebone sometimes. I thought we could try that.”

  I sat there looking at her for a few moments, thinking, then I said, “Sure. Why not?”

  The little Italian place turned out to be tucked away down a mews off Marylebone High Street, and it was almost deserted. Andrew and one of the other minders walked us there and then went off to a nearby pub because they weren’t cleared for any conversation Sachs and I might have.

  The owner seemed to know Sachs, kissed her on both cheeks and led us to a secluded table near the back of the restaurant, away from the half-dozen or so other diners. There were just enough people here, the background music just loud enough, that no one would be able to overhear us. I wondered what Sachs was playing at.

  In the event, she kept the conversation unclassified until we’d got through our starters, chatting about the weather, current events, how I was finding life in the flat. When our main courses arrived, though, she said, “Why did you do it?”

  I looked up from my coda alla vaccinara. “Do what?”

  “You didn’t actually go anywhere, did you,” she said. “The way Regis describes it you all travelled back in time, but it’s more like you just took a lot of selfies and emailed them somewhere.”

  “Oh.” I took a mouthful of food. It was really good.

  “Please tell me if you don’t want to talk about this,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s just hard to explain.”

  “What I don’t understand is why you’d do it,” she went on. “It must have cost a fortune. All that time and effort, and you’d never know if it had worked or not.”

  “Some of us thought Regis had got a message from his earlier self,” I said. “A postcard from the twenty-first century. ‘Hi, wish you were here, but you won’t be unless you build this device.’ And he talked a lot of very rich people into funding it, in return for being sent back themselves.” I shrugged. “We were desperate. We had nothing to lose.”

  “That’s not an answer,” she pointed out. “‘We were desperate, we had nothing to lose.’ How many people have you arrested who tried that argument?”

  I chuckled. “Not as many as you’d think.”

  She poked at her timballo Alberoni with her fork. “I was watching you earlier,” she said. “When you told us that Oxley might have been here for a v
ery long time. You were watching the others to see how they reacted.”

  Well spotted. I thought about it. “It sounds counterintuitive, but although we all arrived at the same time, we didn’t all arrive in the same time,” I said. “We were given a choice of destination and most of us decided to cluster around now, the first quarter of the twenty-first century. I don’t know why, it’s hardly regarded as a golden age.” I saw the look on her face. “Sorry, but it’s just not.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Some people decided they wanted to arrive later, twenty-second, twenty-third century. So they won’t be here for a while. But some – maybe a dozen or so – wanted to arrive earlier. Two or three hundred years earlier.”

  “So they’ve already been here for two or three centuries.”

  I nodded. “I don’t know why they’d want to do that; I can’t see any particular advantage in slogging your way through life for a hundred years or so before you even get to the Industrial Revolution. But assuming they managed to survive that long they’d be the oldest people on the planet. Very old and very private and very, very wealthy. Not people you’d want to mess with.” And probably, I thought, just a little bit weird by now. “I’ve never met any of them, but back in the early days, when I’d just arrived and I was still getting my bearings, I used to hang out with a couple of people who’d heard of them. They called them Elders and they had a lot of wild stories about them, how they were running everything from behind the scenes, how they were richer than God, wiser than Zeus. You know the kind of thing. Illuminati stuff.”

  “And you think Oxley was one of them?”

  “I don’t know. Seems unlikely, a hugely-rich, hugely-old, hugely-powerful person living in a terraced house in Cardiff and working as an accountant, but you can never tell. I thought I’d throw it into the conversation, see what happened.”

  “And nothing happened.”

  “Not a dickybird. I thought I’d at least get a raised eyebrow but it was as if hadn’t said anything at all.”

  “Which in itself is suggestive.”

  “Yes, I’m just not sure how. I’m still working on it. There’s something. Something wrong with the way Oxley died, something wrong with the way his Machine didn’t self-destruct when he died. Something connecting him and the Hallams. Something’s going on.”

  She smiled. “Copper’s intuition?”

  “Something like that.”

  We finished our meals, decided to skip dessert, went straight to coffee. I said, “There was a bit of an atmosphere in the room today.”

  Sachs was spooning sugar into her cup. “Was there?”

  “Yes, Sachs, there was, and you know it.”

  She stirred her coffee. “Things aren’t progressing as well as my superiors would like,” she said, setting the spoon down in her saucer. “They’re talking about moving you all to a secure facility somewhere.”

  “That’s not going to work,” I said.

  “No, I told them that. And Regis told me that. But they want solid results and everything’s been a bit…fuzzy so far, so they’re thinking about putting you somewhere that will help you concentrate.”

  “That sounds quite unpleasant,” I said.

  “It doesn’t have to be.” She took a sip of coffee. “But it might. Anyway, I gave Regis the bad news this morning, before you turned up.”

  “Good of everyone to share the tidings with me.”

  “The group dynamics are your business, not mine.”

  I sat back and crossed my arms. “It might be advisable,” I said, “not to trust Regis too much. Or the others.” She started to say something, but I went on, “I know you don’t trust us already, and there are good reasons for that. But Regis in particular. Keep a very careful eye on him.”

  “You think he’s planning something?”

  “He’s always planning something.”

  “That’s another thing I don’t understand,” she said. “Regis saved your life – at least, he gave you a second chance – but you can’t stand him.”

  “He thought I’d be useful to him; that’s the only reason he offered me the chance to come back. It’s the only reason any of us are here. None of us could have afforded the fee. Pep’s his bodyguard, Jan Tyrian’s his expert on Machines and nanotechnology. I was supposed to run his computer security. Fuck that.”

  “Seems… ungrateful.”

  “I’ve known him a lot longer than you have,” I said. “Trust me, it’s not.”

  “So you ran off and joined the police service.”

  “So I ran off and joined the police service,” I agreed. “I kept my head down, made myself useful. Dammit, Sachs, I liked being a police officer. And now that’s all over. So if I get a bit grumpy and cynical about all this from time to time, you’ll have to forgive me.”

  She finished her espresso and returned her cup to its saucer. “Know what I think? I think you have a chip on your shoulder. Poor boy rescued by a rich man’s charity. You know you couldn’t turn him down but you hate him for making the offer.”

  I’d already spent some time talking to shrinks brought in by Sachs and her team, so this wasn’t quite the devastatingly stinging insight she’d probably intended it to be, and I rolled with it. I said, “You’re lucky I am here. I get the feeling I’m the only one telling you anything useful.”

  She pursed her lips, then she picked up her phone and checked the time. “We’d better get you back before you turn into a pumpkin,” she said, signalling the waiter for the bill.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” I said. She gave me a level, calculating look. “Joke,” I said. “Or maybe not.”

  “You want to watch that sense of humour, Frank,” she told me. “It’ll get you in trouble one day.”

  In the event, Sachs’s threat of a move to some government bunker or other never materialised. Things went on as before, an endless round of meetings and interviews and debriefings and flat-out interrogations. Pep was starting to look bored because she hadn’t hurt anyone for a while, Jan Tyrian was starting to look bored because he was basically having to deal with a primitive species and he was tired of having to use baby language to explain things. Regis wasn’t starting to look bored. He was in his element, manipulating everybody, pointing them in the right directions in order to get whatever it was he wanted. He looked like a man whose plans were going just the way he wanted them to.

  I was bored because… well, everything was boring. The interviewers asked me the same questions and I gave them the same answers, or not depending on what the four of us had agreed we could tell the natives. I sat in the flat reading novels of varying awfulness. I went for walks. Even the walks were getting boring.

  “Can we not go somewhere else?” I asked Andrew one day as we walked up the steep path up Parliament Hill. “I have this view memorised already.”

  This obviously gave him pause. The routine was well-established by now; Andrew and I walked from the flat, through Regent’s Park, and up to the top of the hill. Two more minders flanked us at a discreet distance, with a third following, while another waited in one of the SUVs on the road at the bottom of the hill. It was always the same.

  “Well, I’ll put it to the boss,” he said amiably. “See what she says, okay?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  It was a bright, breezy day and the top of Parliament Hill was covered in tourists and kids and picnickers and lovers out for a stroll. It was never this busy in films. We found a space on one of the benches and sat down, and a few moments later a stout middle-aged woman in a worn-looking sun dress and sensible shoes sat down beside me and made us hutch along to make room. She took out her phone and started to take photos of the quite startling view down into central London.

  Myself, I’d had enough of this view quite a while ago. I could draw it from memory; the only value of these outings was to get some fresh air and not sit in a room somewhere for a while. I wondered idly whether this was what my life would look like from now on, shuttl
ing between interrogations and pretty views until I went completely out of my mind.

  “You can call me Christine,” said the woman beside me.

  I turned my head. She wasn’t looking at me; she was still photographing the view. “Beg pardon?”

  “Christine,” she said. “You can call me Christine.”

  “Okay,” I said, bracing myself for a stream-of-consciousness recitation of her gripes with the government, the social services, the NHS, the Secret State, her neighbours, Transport for London, whatever.

  Instead, she said, quite calmly, “I’ll thank you not to mention us to the Security Services again.”

  I glanced at Andrew, but he was looking into the distance, hands folded in his lap, smiling a little. He seemed to have forgotten I was there, and I felt an icy finger go up the back of my neck.

  “You read Sachs’s report, then,” I said.

  “As you thought we would,” she said, lowering her phone. “That was cute, Francesco. Irresponsible, but cute. You couldn’t be sure one of us would see that report.”

  “I thought it was worth a try,” I said. I looked around for the other minders, but they were nowhere to be seen.

  “Well, it’s made some work for us; we’ll have to tidy things up. But to be honest it was about time one of us had a little chat with you.”

  If I’d given the stories any credence at all, I supposed I’d imagined the Elders as a shadowy cabal of ancients, not dumpy middle-aged women in cheap sun dresses sitting on benches on Parliament Hill. I said, “I have some questions of my own.”

  She turned and looked at me, and there was a serene agelessness to her eyes that was quite scary. She was probably as thoroughly modded as it was possible to be and still look human. “Perhaps it would be best if you just listened, Francesco.”

  “Yes,” I said, chastened. “Yes, perhaps it would.”

  She looked at the view and I saw her smile faintly. “In pursuit of his own convoluted and no doubt nefarious agenda, Regis has decided to take advantage of a situation on your old beat,” she said. “It took us a long time to find the Hallams, and now he’s put them to flight it’ll take us a long time to find them again, and that’s annoying.”