As she worked, memories started to slide into her mind unbidden. Waking up a prisoner in Duvalle’s house in Washington; her mother face down on the floor of Polanski’s lob site; a dead FBI agent lying on top of her as machine-gun rounds zipped past like angry wasps. A shudder went through her and she gritted her teeth. It wouldn’t be like that. Not this time. She’d just go and get her mum and it would all be over. She fought the clenching of her stomach, the tightening of her throat. She had to go get her mum, no matter what. If it had been the other way round, her mum would take on any odds to save her. She knew that for a fact because she’d seen it. Now it was her turn.
She wished she were just a bit more like her mother—fearless and strong and capable. “Well I’m not,” she said aloud, angrily. “I’m just me and that’ll have to do.”
“Cara?” Dominic was looking at her anxiously. “Is someone else with you?”
“What? Never mind. I’ve got the documents. What do you need?”
***
Jay stared at the wall for a long time after the call with Cara. His relationship with his eighteen-year-old daughter was complicated. He still felt a vague guilt about having missed the first sixteen years of her life even though it had been Sandra who had kept their daughter’s existence a secret all that time. Which meant that along with the vague guilt was a very focused anger. He had been furious with Sandra.
Yet, for Cara’s sake, he and Sandra had maintained what little relationship they had and even built on it over the past two years as Jay tried to spend as much time as possible with his daughter. He still felt the anger. It still came between them. But, truth be told, sometimes he needed to deliberately fan the flames these days. Now he had to fight the urge to forgive and forget, to let go of his feelings of betrayal, the grief for a loss he had not even known he’d suffered. His therapist—and without that support he felt he might have gone mad these past two years—told him to let go of his anger and move on with his life.
Jay looked down at his hands, clenched into fists on the desktop. What his therapist didn’t seem to understand was that, without this anger he knew he would forgive Sandra anything—even keeping Cara from him—and go running to her like a doting puppy. His love for Sandra was a weakness, a mental aberration. It had blighted his life, and he would not give in to it like an addict begging for another fix.
For his own peace of mind, he sometimes wished he might never see Sandra again—but there was always Cara. She wasn’t a child any more, yet he still felt she needed him, needed both of them, and needed them to be friends. That dreadful time in Washington had set their relationship on a strange and, he thought, precarious footing. She thought of him as a hero, the man who had flown halfway across the world to rescue her mother and who had succeeded in getting them both out of an insanely dangerous situation. But Jay knew he was no hero. He was no braver than the next man and his rescue of Sandra and Cara from Washington had been simple good luck. It could so easily have gone the other way.
So he’d been at pains to disabuse Cara of the notion, to emphasise the dullness and routine of his life, his own ordinariness. And now, maybe, she might believe him at last, now that he’d refused to come to her aid, refused to take her concerns seriously, acted like the craven bureaucrat he wanted her to believe he was. The last thing in the world he wanted was for Cara to see his world as glamorous. He wanted her future to be safe and stable and very, very dull. That way she might live to a comfortable old age.
He should be feeling good about it, he supposed, and yet he felt awful. He felt as if he’d stabbed himself in the heart. The idea that his lovely Cara might stop seeing him as her white knight was surprisingly painful.
He pulled up the file on Farid Hamiye again. His search agents had added more information about the man’s past. It seemed he had fought in several of the internecine wars that plagued his native Lebanon but had moved beyond that to become a mercenary for hire across the Middle East. When he moved to Europe a few years ago, he had been a genuine refugee, with a price on his head offered by at least three Islamic militias—one of which had since formed a government in part of the old Saudi Arabia. He sounded like a dangerous and ruthless man. He looked it too.
Jay got up and went to the lift, taking it down to the first basement level where Lieutenant Pierre Fourget and his team had its office-cum-gym-cum-firing range. Fourget was there, sitting at a virtual display, moving his hands through the sensor field. There was almost no-one else around in the large, open space. On seeing Jay, the Frenchman raised his eyebrows and grunted a greeting.
“Pierre.” Jay pulled up a chair and sat facing him. “I need you to do me a favor.”
Fourget settled back and regarded Jay with his steady blue eyes. It used to unnerve Jay that the lieutenant spoke so little, but he had gradually come to appreciate the man as a calm and peaceful soul. He needed no pleasantries, offered no gossip, stuck to the point and said only what he knew to be true. In their way, the two men had become friends. Others in the office thought it was odd. Fourget was stocky and solid where Jay was tall and slender. The younger man was taciturn to the point of rudeness, while Jay was friendly and polite to the point of deference. Fourget was a soldier, a trained and effective killing machine. Jay was the contemplative, almost intellectual type. Then there was the French and English thing. It was hard for people to see what the two men had in common. But Jay saw it and so did Fourget. On the day they met, Fourget had said, “You look like an academic, but I have read your file, Monsieur. Welcome to K Section.” Jay had shaken the proffered hand and the two had never looked back.
“I want you to find a friend of mine and make sure she’s all right,” Jay said.
A small frown creased Fourget’s broad brow.
“It’s not entirely personal,” said Jay, “but it’s nothing to do with the current crisis. I’d have trouble explaining this to Crystal, but my friend believes she has stumbled onto someone in London who may have something to do with timesplashing. Now she’s gone missing and I can’t raise her by phone. So I want you to check that she is all right. You don’t have to go yourself, but send someone good.”
Fourget’s blue eyes did not flicker. “Your friend, she is Sandra Malone, oui?”
Jay took a breath. This would look bad if Sandra was just being paranoid and Crystal ever did hear about it. He reminded himself that he’d promised Cara he’d do something. The poor girl was probably sitting at home trusting that he had things in hand. “Yes, it’s Sandra.”
Fourget nodded. “Then I will go myself.”
Jay had a sudden attack of conscience. “I don’t want to jeopardise your work here. This has to be our top priority.”
“My teams do all the work. I merely coordinate. I can coordinate from London just as well. Besides, we are not finding anything.” His shrug was eloquent. He might as well be out there doing something useful.
“Thank you, Pierre. I’ll send you everything I have. When can you start?”
Fourget stood up and grinned. “I just did.”
Chapter 10: Precipice
The voices were not loud but, even with her eyes closed, Sandra could tell a lot about the three speakers. One was an older man with a Chinese accent. He was anxious, frightened even, and very unhappy about what was going on. The second was younger, more confident, angry. He also had a hint of Chinese in his accent. This one is the boss, she told herself. The third was also a man, young, vigorous and larger than the others. His cultured tones were also confident but she could hear the irritation behind the overblown English politeness. She knew their names too, having listened to them for a couple of minutes, pretending to be unconscious still. The old one was called Hong, Dr Hong, the boss was Lee, Mr Lee to the others, and the young man was her old friend Farid Hamiye.
“No,” Hong was saying. “You can’t keep her here.” He’d said the same thing in various ways several times now. “This is a research establishment, not a prison. Mr Lee, you must understand. My staff are alrea
dy jumpy. They think … Well, you know what they think. How do you suppose it affects them to see …” he hesitated “… this person carrying an unconscious woman through the building?”
“What was I supposed to do with her, Doctor? Throw her in the recycling bin?”
“I do not care what you do with her! Mr Lee, you must see that this is intolerable.”
There was a silence as they waited for Lee’s pronouncement. Eventually, he asked, “Whatever made her come snooping around here? Does it make sense to you, Farid?”
She could hear the smile in the big man’s voice. “Why don’t we ask her? She’s been conscious for at least the past two minutes.”
It sounded as if Hong swore in Chinese while Lee gave an exasperated tut. Sandra opened her eyes and gave Hamiye a baleful glare. She could see now what she had only felt so far, that she was duct-taped to an office chair. She turned her gaze to Lee, a tall, good-looking man, impeccably dressed, who regarded her with an expression of distaste. “Would you mind telling me,” she asked, “what the hell you think you’re doing?” Her eyes flicked towards Hamiye. “Your pet monkey drew a stunner on me and shot me without provocation. Now it seems I have been kidnapped and tied to a chair. I insist you release me this minute or I will call the police.”
Lee looked across at Hamiye, who said, “It’s OK, this facility is shielded. No-one can call in or out except through the comms gateway. I set it up so we could keep an eye on the staff.”
Lee nodded, satisfied. He turned back to Sandra. “Why are you spying on us, Ms Malone?”
“You should call me Sandra. I think it’s really creepy when the evil gang bosses get all formal like that. Besides which, it was your bad boy here who started it. He sent some clowns round to my house to bug it.”
“We know you work for MI5, Sandra,” Lee said.
“You don’t know shit, fancy pants, and your pal Farid just brought down a ton of trouble on all your heads. Hong?” She turned to the scruffy physicist. “Do you have any idea how illegal it is to build a displacement rig? Since what happened to Washington, the new laws would put you and your fellow conspirators away for life. And quite rightly too. Are you all insane?”
Hong put his head in his hands and sat down heavily on the edge of his desk. He said something plaintive in Chinese and Lee snapped back at him in the same language. Then Lee turned to Hamiye. “Hong’s right, she knows too much. You need to take care of this.”
Hamiye’s face was very still as he asked, “What did you have in mind?”
Hong was on his feet again in a hurry. “No, no! You cannot kill her. I won’t have that. There will be no killing.”
Sandra didn’t like the way this conversation was going. She should have called Cara before she came in—or Jay. Now she wouldn’t get a chance. She heaved at the tape binding her but it didn’t give at all.
“Don’t worry, Hong,” Lee said. “We could not kill her now if we wanted to.”
“Why not?” Sandra and Hamiye asked at the same time.
“Because half an hour before you brought her in, I called Waxtead and told him the woman’s name. I made him call his friend, the Minister of State at the Home Office, and complain about how MI5 had sent her to spy on us. I imagine that, by now, the head of MI5 will have the name Sandra Malone ringing in his ears. If she turns up dead, there will be a chain of suspicion pointing right back to me, personally. If she merely disappears, there will also be suspicion, but at least there will be no body and I won't be under arrest.” He said this last part with a meaningful look at Hamiye.
Hamiye’s face remained blank.
Lee went on. “But that is all right. We have two more trips planned. One for tomorrow and one in two weeks. Tomorrow’s trip will go ahead as planned. The final trip will be brought forward. Can you do it two days after the next one, Doctor?”
Hong blustered and shook his head. “Absolutely not! We need to recalibrate after tomorrow’s shot. There may be reengineering. Reprogramming … I would need a week at least!”
“Three days,” Lee said.
“No, it can’t be done so soon. It would mean—”
“Dr Hong!” It was the first time Lee had raised his voice and it shut the doctor up at once. Sandra studied the dapper executive more carefully, trying to see what it was about him that could scare the old man so much. “Could you do it in three days if your life depended on it?”
Without speaking, Hong nodded.
“Farid,” Lee said. “You will keep the woman locked up somewhere—here if you like—until after the second trip. Four days, that’s all. Hong will set aside a secure room for you. Do you think you can do that without screwing up?”
Hamiye was clearly offended by Lee’s tone but he directed his anger at Sandra. “Yes,” he said, glaring at her. “Of course.”
“Good. After the second shot, this whole operation is over. There will be a fire at this facility that will destroy all evidence of our involvement. You understand? Not that it matters, because we will all have left the country by then. You can do what you like with the woman once I’m gone.”
***
Dominic’s grinning face appeared in the display. Cara grinned back, guessing he had good news. “Well?” she asked.
“Your mum’s commplant is off the grid.”
“What?”
“Either she shut it down, or she’s somewhere with no signal at all.”
“That isn’t possible.” There was nowhere in the whole of Europe that didn’t have net coverage. It was a well-known fact. But then, the infrastructure had taken a beating the night before and there might still be places with no signal. No—she’d just seen a newsfeed item about the government launching thousands of comms balloons and drones to make sure every inch of the UK was covered during the reconstruction.
“It’s as if she’s left the country, or is being jammed,” Dominic said. He was still grinning and it was starting to annoy Cara.
“So?”
“So I hacked into her location log. Every commplant keeps a record of where you’ve been for the past forty-eight hours. It’s required by the 2053 Detection of Crimes Act.”
“So you traced her movements?”
“Yes, to a place called Clarke Engineering in Enfield. That’s where the signal stopped.”
Cara was already pulling up a map of the area. Enfield was a suburb in North London, just inside the M25 motorway. If she had a car she could be there in an hour or so. She looked at Dominic, who was still grinning, waiting for his pat on the head. “Where do you live?” she asked, but she got his profile up quicker than he could answer. He was miles away in Preston, Lancashire. “That’s no good. OK, thanks Dom.” She cut the call just as his grin began to waver.
She checked the time. Early evening. Was there such a thing as a twenty-four-hour car-hire service around where her gran lived? She queried her search agent. If she couldn’t find anything, she’d call a taxi. She’d use the emergency credit line her mum had set up for this kind of situation and hang the expense. It could be life or death.
It was only as she started to call the car-hire company that she had her first misgivings. If her mother was a prisoner at this Clarke Engineering place, they must have guns, or plenty of hired muscle, or something. She’d seen Sandra fight and no-one could have taken her without a major struggle. So how was she going to get her out of there?
In her running-away bag she had a stunner and a hunting knife. It would have been enough for her mum to storm an enemy stronghold but not Cara. Sandra had tried making her take karate lessons with that old fraud Tom in the high street but that kind of thing had never interested her. “I’m the brains of the family,” she’d said. “I’ll leave the rough stuff to you.” She’d stuck with the firearms training long enough to learn how to use a handgun and to hit the target most of the time but, again, it had not held her interest.
Truth be told, the violence Cara had seen in Washington still filled her with fear, still haunted her dreams. It ha
d been shocking, stomach turning, and she had a dread of it ever happening again. She’d seen a man beaten to death, two men shot, her own mother beaten senseless …
Fighting was something she wanted no part of. Learning to fight seemed like inviting the violence back into her life.
And yet, here she was again, with her mother missing, probably in danger, needing to do something about it, and being hopelessly feeble and helpless. She felt her stomach clench and tasted bile in her throat. “Oh no,” she said aloud. “No, no, no. You’re not going to pieces while Mum needs you.”
She finished the call and ordered the car. It would take almost an hour to drive itself to her because so many London roads were designated non-automatic until the worst of the debris had been cleared away and damaged roadside beacons had been repaired. Cara didn’t mind. She had lots to do. She needed to study this Clarke Engineering place and find out what she could about it. She should maybe call her father again and try again to persuade him to help. Then she had to talk to her gran and either explain everything or make up a really good lie.
***
They waited in the hotel bar while Olivia went up to her room “to freshen up” as she put it. Jay looked around at the luxurious furnishings and fittings, the brass and chrome, the deep carpets. “I hate hotels,” he said.
Laura smiled. “They are all about mitigation,” she said. She seemed cheerful, in contrast to Jay’s mood. “The people who run this place know you don’t want to be here. So they try to make it as painless as possible by giving you as little as possible to complain about. I suppose you are trying to say that you have traveled too much and stayed in too many places like this.” She sipped her drink and smiled again.
“You’d never think there’s a global crisis going on beyond these walls.” It seemed immoral somehow that there was muzak playing and he was sitting there, warm and comfortable, sharing a drink with a charming woman.
“Do you ever relax, Jay?” She was being playful, teasing him, as if they were on a date or something. And the idea rekindled the memory of the night before and all the implications of what Cara’s doppelgänger had said. It was as if he’d walked into a parallel universe in which Sandra was dead and he was finally free to enjoy the company of another love. He looked at Laura looking quizzically back at him. She was attractive, intelligent. Again he wondered what it would be like to spend his days with a woman like her.
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