True Path

by Graham Storrs

  He looked a little deflated. “You don’t remember me, then? But I remember you. You were on the Ommen splash in the Netherlands, and then on the London splash when Sniper died. I read about it in the papers.”

  She felt anger boiling up inside as the man spoke.

  “Even though I had to get out of Europe when they started rounding up all the players from the old days, I kept tabs on you,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it when you became a teknik. When Zak asked who I knew who could help with this project, you were the obvious choice. You were perfect.”

  So it was this little shit who had set Polanski onto her, who had dragged her into this nightmare and left her daughter at home probably going crazy with worry. Before she had even completed the thought, her fist shot out and hit the man in the face. His eyes boggled and he brought his hands up, blood bubbling between his fingers. His eyes rolled back but before he fell, she hit him twice more in the ribs, happy to feel one yield and crack.

  Reacting far too late to do anything, a couple of Polanski’s men grabbed her arms and she let them. Polanski organized someone to get the injured man to a doctor and then turned to Sandra. She could see he was angry but also perplexed. This wasn’t part of his plan. He probably intended Sandra to work with the creep she’d just put down. Just so that he had no illusions on that score, she said, “If he comes near me again, I’ll kill him.”

  Polanski tensed as if he might hit her, but she saw him fight the urge and slowly relax. It was an impressive display of self-control. Even so, when he spoke, he was almost snorting with rage. “I’ve made a lot of allowances for you, because I need you on this project. But you need to consider this: the day I decide you’re not going to be of any use to us, is the day your body is found floating in the Potomac.” His face jerked into a snarl and he looked away from her. Perhaps it was to hide his self-disgust at having let himself off the leash, or maybe for letting the desperation show in his eyes.

  He took two long, deep breaths. When he looked back, he was under control again. “I was hoping you’d get some sense of how this nation is suffering under the present government. I was hoping that you’d feel some sympathy for our cause, despite what we had to do to get you here. But maybe you can’t see past your own hurt feelings, your own sense of injustice at the inconvenient situation we’ve put you in.” He stepped away from her, on his way out. “They’ll give you a cot and someone will bring you food. You’ll sleep here until the job is done. There will be an armed guard with you at all times.” He raised his voice to a shout and looked around the room. “No-one goes close enough to her to let her take his damned gun away from him. Do you hear me?”

  -oOo-

  They left her to brood alone for a couple of hours. Alone, that is, except for the guy who brought in a chair, placed it close to the door, and sat watching her with a gun in his lap. After a while, she almost forgot he was there. She had more important things to worry about.

  It was clear to her that she could not help them build a lob site and kill half of Washington. Whatever the government was like, whatever crimes they had committed—or were still committing every day for all she knew—a timesplash in a crowded city could never be the right solution. Two million had died in Beijing and over a million in Mexico City. Even in London, where the splash had been relatively small and the city center partially evacuated ahead of time, thousands had died. Polanski and his people had to be fanatics even to consider such a monstrous action.

  Yet Polanski didn’t seem fanatical. He didn’t rant or yell. He seemed pretty normal for someone who went about kidnapping people. A little bit intense maybe … In fact, despite everything, she’d grown to quite like him. He’d taken a fair bit of crap from her and had only lost his temper with her one time, just then, when she’d beaten up his slimeball teknik. Mostly, he’d been apologetic for snatching her and dragging her halfway around the world. It didn’t make sense that he was willing to put millions of lives at risk. On the other hand, she couldn’t deny that he seemed genuinely committed to his cause. Maybe he wasn’t quite as sane as he looked. Maybe “freeing his people” was an ideology that justified anything for him, the way his enemies’ theology seemed to justify anything for them.

  Whatever made him tick, she could not doubt that he meant to make her help him and, if she wouldn’t, that he’d have her killed. Well, that wasn’t going to happen. She had a daughter at home who needed her mother to come back alive.

  Sandra wondered how Cara was getting on with Jay. It was a hell of a way for her to meet her father. A hell of a way for Jay to discover he had a daughter. But that couldn’t be helped. She’d followed Jay’s career over the past sixteen years. She knew he was a big-shot cop now, running the whole show at the Temporal Crimes Unit. He could look after Cara and keep her safe until Sandra got back. Meanwhile, he’d be going all out to rescue her. She knew he would, even if he was furious with her for keeping Cara a secret. Jay was like that. He couldn’t help himself.

  One thing—the only thing, in fact—she felt good about was having been cautious enough to keep Cara out of sight for all those years. Olivia was the only one at the university who knew Sandra had a daughter. She was really the only person who knew Sandra, and who also knew about Cara. Olivia had claimed that Sandra was being paranoid. She said her behavior worried her. But now Sandra felt completely vindicated. If Polanski and his thugs had known that she had a daughter, they’d have taken her too and used her as leverage. It was exactly this kind of scenario that had plagued Sandra from the day she first learned she was pregnant.

  While she pondered, people brought in a makeshift bed with a musty old mattress and a couple of blankets that Sandra wouldn’t have given to a dog. They were poor people, with stooped shoulders and rickety legs, bad teeth and bad skin. She felt a vague anger that, even here among the revolutionaries, it was the women who did all the work while the men held guns and acted important. She hoped their revolution would bring these women a better life, but she wouldn’t help them if it involved committing mass murder. Besides, she had only one priority: to get home to her daughter.

  They brought her a bowl of stew and a hunk of gritty bread. She ate the food quickly and climbed into the bed, keeping her clothes on. She had been famished and now she was exhausted. Tomorrow she would watch them and talk to them and find out how to break out of the rat’s nest they held her in. If she could sabotage the time travel equipment along the way, she’d do that too.

  Chapter 14: Mueller

  Jay brooded in the limo on the way back to the hotel. Sitting opposite him, the ever-present Simmons stared out of the window, having learned, at last, not to start idle conversations. Jay regarded him under hooded eyes as the day’s resentments projected onto his FBI minder.

  “You guys will never find Polanski,” Jay said, breaking the long silence.

  “You should have more faith, Chief Inspector.”

  “In God?”

  “In Deputy Director English.”

  “Well, I don’t. His only tactic seems to be rounding up Polanski’s suspected associates and torturing them.”

  “It will work. It always does.”

  “Really? That’s not the impression I’m getting. The more I speak to people, the more I realize that Polanski has a huge organization spread across the whole country.”

  Simmons smiled. “They like to make out they’re heroic freedom fighters but they’re just petty crooks and terrorists. If we crack enough heads together, somebody will give up Polanski. He’s got them all pretty scared of him, so we just need to make sure they’re more scared of us.”

  Jay wasn’t very sure about that. He’d sat in on as many “interviews” as he could stomach and had spoken separately to half-a-dozen prisoners. Simmons was wrong. These people did not sound like self-aggrandizing criminals to him, they sounded like ordinary people swept up in a police dragnet so broad that he believed most of them to be completely innocent. As much as he wanted the FBI to find Polanski in time to save
Sandra, there had to be a better way than this.

  “Deputy Director English seems to think we’re on the wrong track,” said Jay. “He told me not to worry about a timesplash. He said the real danger was a dirty bomb.”

  “Really?” Simmons looked shifty.

  “He said that there was a slight possibility that ‘atheistic elements’ had acquired quite a lot of weapons-grade plutonium.”

  “I’m surprised he mentioned that,” said Simmons, who seemed to be making an effort to act nonchalant. “It’s really just a rumor and most likely completely explained by an accounting anomaly. The Deputy Director worked on the efforts to clear up the confusion. I expect he was discussing worst-case scenarios.”

  Jay nodded, not wanting to pursue it. Whatever the state of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal was these days, he imagined that many American lawmen had plenty of sleepless nights about it. He would probably have a few himself after today’s revelation.

  “What about the route into the States? Any more news on that side of the investigation?”

  “Dead end,” Simmons said, reflecting a widespread indifference to good procedure that was driving Jay crazy. “The Mexicans drew a blank. They could have arrived at a dozen airports on scores of flights. Once they’re in Mexico, the Texas border is wide open. No way to say where they might have crossed.”

  “And the Texan police? Any leads from them?”

  Simmons gave him a look that said, “You’re kidding!”, which turned up Jay’s frustration another notch.

  All day long he had been biting his tongue, making helpful suggestions, trying to get lines of investigation going that might actually lead somewhere. All day long he had been rebuffed, put down, even ridiculed by arrogant, opinionated agents who told him that he didn’t understand the way “these people” thought, that he didn’t understand how the law worked in the U.S., and that he wasn’t in Europe now “with AIs and implants and God-knows-what kind of infernal technology.” One of them even told him that, if he wanted to be really useful, there was a chapel down the corridor and he might try praying to God for help.

  Jay had told the Deputy Director that he had been a first-rate analyst in his day and, if he could just sit down with the data mining team, he might be able to add some value. The man had looked at him oddly and said, “All the files are in the archives, Chief Inspector. Feel free to take a look.” The archives turned out to be a set of rooms in a lower basement containing countless cabinets full of paper files. Standing down there and staring at that useless mass of information was probably the low point of Jay’s day.

  “Science is a dirty word, here, isn’t it?” he said to Simmons.

  “Jesus didn’t need science,” came the rote answer. “Science won’t get you into Heaven.”

  “Do you really believe that? I mean, that science has no value? Not even just for the sake of material comforts, healthcare, engineering …? Just practical stuff?”

  Simmons shrugged. “Of course, it would be nice to have polio vaccines and virtual TVs as big as a cinema screen, and all that tech you guys have over there … but it’s really just a snare to trap the unwary and lead them into error.”

  “How does a polio vaccine lead anyone into error?” It was hard not to sound tetchy.

  If Simmons heard his tone, he magnanimously overlooked it. “Well, it starts with medicines and healing and people seem to think that’s all good, but it ends with announcing that people are just biological machines, programmed by their DNA. It starts with understanding human anatomy and great new surgical techniques that save lives, but it ends with comparing human anatomy to chimps and concluding that we all evolved from monkeys. You see where I’m going with this? You look at the stars and ask how the Universe works and pretty soon you’re trying to convince people that it all came from a big bang, billions of years ago. Heck, the Bible tells us as plainly as it can that the Universe is six thousand years old, but even harmless-looking sciences like geology and archaeology get people declaring the Earth is billions of years old and that human beings have been around for hundreds of thousands of years!” He looked pleased that he had made his point. “If God chooses to take a few children to his bosom early with polio, isn’t that better than the whole nation going to Hell with their arms full of vaccine?”

  Jay didn’t know what to say. He had to remind himself that everyone he had met in the FBI was ordained or was taking holy orders. It was a prerequisite of the job. This was not a typical group of people. So he nodded as if Simmons had made an interesting point. “You’re a man of strong beliefs, Zeke.”

  -oOo-

  Simmons said goodnight to him in the foyer and went off to speak to another FBI agent who seemed to be there for the night shift. Jay tried his commplant again but there was no signal. He had been issued with a compad, the kind of thing that might have been used back home fifteen or twenty years ago, but he didn’t want to use it to call his office. The device was almost certainly bugged. So was the limo he’d just been in, and so was his hotel room, he was sure. What the FBI made of his conversations, he had no idea, and he cared even less. How they reconciled their use of surveillance technology with their general anti-science stance was another mystery he couldn’t be bothered to ponder. Probably some guff about the lesser of two evils, he supposed.

  He took the lift up to his floor and was anxious over meeting Cara again. She’d be grumpy and frustrated by her day just as he was. He cringed at the thought of facing her complaints. Long-lost daughter or not, he was too miserable to face a whining teenager right now. Which immediately added guilt to the list of the day’s woes. Here was a child whose mother was in mortal danger, who had been forced to run for help to a father she didn’t know, and who was now in a foreign country—foreign in so many ways—and being watched by strangers. It was a miracle she wasn’t in pieces. She was Sandra’s daughter all right, beautiful and tough. But she was still only a child and he—as strange as it still seemed—was her father. He needed to be the grown-up. He needed to be strong for her.

  All the same …

  Taking a deep breath, he opened the door and went inside. Cara was on the sofa, her long legs hidden by voluminous skirts, as she read from what looked like an ancient tablet device. The minder, Mrs. Mueller, sat across the room in an armchair, watching some kind of entertainment on a wall-mounted display. Cara turned to him and smiled, giving him a cheerful hello. Mrs. Mueller switched off the display and stood up, black dress rustling. She collected her bag and her headscarf.

  “May I have a word, Chief Inspector Kennedy?” she said, tying the scarf tightly under her chin. “About our arrangements for tomorrow?” She headed for the door and he was forced to follow.

  “I assume I should arrive at the same time tomorrow morning,” she said, opening the door and stepping into the hallway. Jay followed her out. “And can I expect you to be home at the same time tomorrow evening?”

  She kept walking down the corridor, towards the lift. Jay stayed with her, odd as it seemed. She reached the lifts and stopped, stepping around Jay to stand behind him, making him turn right round in order to face her.

  “Please don’t say anything,” she said. “And don’t look up. There’s a security camera over my left shoulder. No doubt they will have lip-reading software.”

  Jay almost shook with the effort not to look.

  “That’s fascinating,” he said, trying to look relaxed. His brain was suddenly fizzing as he tried to guess what might be going on.

  “Your daughter said you are looking for Polanski.”

  “Yes,” he said, as if the woman’s statement was not pregnant with possibilities. “That’s right.”

  “Reach across me and press the lift button. I’m going to give you an address.”

  Casually, he did as he was asked and felt her slip something into his jacket pocket.

  “Good night, then, Chief Inspector. I will see you tomorrow.”

  “Good night.”

  He walked back down t
he corridor to his room. As he went, the lift arrived and the doors opened. He did not look back but went inside and locked the door.

  Cara was still on the sofa, watching him. “Did you have a nice day?” she asked, pleasantly.

  “Yes, thank you. Did you?”

  “We saw the Lincoln Memorial,” she said. “Why don’t we go down to dinner and I’ll tell you all about it?”

  So Cara was in on whatever the hell was going on. Which was why she was being all “Stepford Wives” with him. She jumped up and went to her bedroom.

  “I’ll get my shoes. Can we go out? There were some lovely little restaurants just down the street.”

  “Of course. I love the new outfit by the way.”

  She reappeared, smiling tautly. “It’s the latest fashion for the Washington young set. I have a matching headscarf. Very chic. I think I’ll wear it next time I’m in London. I think it might just turn a few heads.”

  They went down to the lobby and out onto the street. Their FBI man fell in discretely behind them.

  “OK, what the hell is going on?” Jay asked when they were out and moving on the busy street. It was possible the Feds were listening with parabolic mikes or had microdrones in the air around them, but he couldn’t see why they’d go to so much trouble. He was supposed to be on their side, after all.

  “Mueller stared acting funny as soon as I mentioned Polanski,” Cara said. “While we were out sightseeing, she took off her brooch and dropped it. She said they’d had her wired but we could talk now.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said Polanski is a bad man, an evil man, a godless atheist, all that kind of stuff, and that Mum is in great danger if he has hold of her.”

  “We pretty much knew that already. What’s Mueller’s angle?”

  “She says her friends can help us rescue Mum, but not if the Feds are involved. She hates the FBI as much as she hates Polanski.”