Fourget drew a gun Cara hadn’t realized he was carrying and straightened up from his crouch. “Wait here,” he said, keeping his eyes on the house. “Run those plates.” He raised his gun in a two-handed grip, sighting along it. He kept the gun along his line of sight, she noticed. When he looked left or right he turned his body from the waist, so the gun always pointed at what he saw. He crossed the drive, then went up to the house and in through the open door.
Run those plates? Just like that. Fourget gives the orders and the team follows them! Unbelievable. And how am I supposed to “run those plates”, mon General? Then she remembered telling him that she had resources and that it was actually true. She phoned Dominic. He answered with a big smile, pleased to see her, and began asking about her mother.
“Dom, not now,” she said, cutting him off. “I need you to run some plates.”
His face fell. “You need what?”
“Can you do it?”
“Run some plates? You mean find information about a vehicle registration?”
“If you can’t do it, just say so.”
He blustered for a moment, presumably trying to find a way to tell her how illegal it was and how much trouble he’d get into. Then he stopped, closed his eyes and said, “Yes. What’s the number?”
She read off the registration of the Merc. “How long will it take?”
“I don’t know. A few minutes maybe.”
“Good. Call me back.”
She hung up. She left her hideout behind the bush and walked over to the house, arriving just as Fourget re-emerged. He was staring at the ground and when she followed his gaze, she saw the trail of blood. It was just a few drops here and there, not even a trickle, but her stomach turned. “Oh God,” she said. Fourget said nothing but walked out onto the drive. For several seconds, he stood still, looking back and forth across the gravel.
“Is it Mum’s?” Cara asked. It was all she could think.
Fourget raised a hand for her to be silent and a bolt of anger shot through her. Before she could say anything he walked briskly away back towards the house, this time, to the other side. He disappeared around the corner and she ran after him. She found him kneeling beside a young Asian man in a black suit, touching his throat. The man’s face looked dark and puffy. Fourget got up quickly and stood between Cara and the body.
“It’s a bit bloody late to go all gallant on me. Who’s he?”
“The driver of the car, I think.” He motioned for her to go back to the front of the house and she started walking.
“Is he dead?”
“Oh yes.” He looked at her, his expression grave. “You have seen a dead man before.”
She could see them now if she closed her eyes. All of them were always with her. But she had grown skilled at not letting them haunt her. Except in her dreams.
They rounded the house and came to a halt in the drive. “So?” she asked. He raised an eyebrow. “So what’s the story? I saw you Holmesing the place. What happened? Where’s Mum? And where are we anyway?”
All he said was, “We should get back to the car.”
She felt a scream boiling in her chest. “Just fucking …” She took a deep breath. “I really need to know, so just … please … tell me.”
Their eyes met and she thought he looked genuinely confused by her outburst.
“Eh bien,” he said. “In the house, there is a room where a prisoner was held. Your mother, I think. In the room also, there was blood. Someone had been stabbed there with a plastic spoon. Farid Hamiye, we must suppose. It would make no sense for him to stab her with such an implement.” He looked at her as if seeking agreement, but Cara’s emotions were all over the place—pride in her ingenious mother, horror that there had been violence, fear for her mother, confusion about how the Asian man in the bushes fit in.
“If we assume that is true, and not that for example Hamiye stabbed Ms Malone and dealt with this chauffeur alone, or that while he was fighting with the chauffeur Ms Malone, injured, escaped her prison and came out here to surprise her captor, then the rest follows sensibly.” Fourget glanced at Cara and hurried on. “I mean that the first scenario is the most, perhaps the only, likely one. The gravel of this drive is kept neat, you will see,” he said, nodding towards an expanse of smoothly raked driveway. “But over here, the gravel is kicked up and disturbed. I think someone had a fight here. My guess is it was your mother—I know she is skilled in these arts, while Hamiye’s file suggests he would prefer other methods—and the driver of this car,” he flicked his head towards the black Merc. “I say this because whoever fought the man in the suit probably knew well how to kill a man with her bare hands.”
“But if Mum won the fight …?”
“Where is she? I think she was taken away, perhaps by Hamiye. It was he who escaped, injured, and surprised the fighters. There is a trail of blood from inside the house to where the fight took place. Then there are drag-marks and blood leading from there to where I found the dead man. The driver was pulled there by Hamiye, who continued to drip blood as he went. Then there are other drag-marks from the fight that end up at the garage, where another car might have been waiting.”
“But if Mum won the fight …?”
Fourget shrugged. “She may have been injured or she may have been unconscious. I do not know. But Hamiye took her away in a car, so she is most likely still alive—or why would he not have dumped her with the other body?”
It was cold comfort, but Cara clung to it. “So Mum stabbed Hamiye, ran for it, met some Asian guy, fought with him, killed him, but Hamiye came out after her and dragged the dead guy out of sight and put Mum in a car and drove away?” Fourget nodded. “So she’s still alive but Hamiye might be bleeding to death?”
“Not bleeding to death. There would be far more blood.” He gave a small wry smile. “Very annoyed though, I would think.”
“So where has he taken her?”
She’d been so impressed with his deductions so far that she was genuinely surprised when he said he didn’t know.
“But I know where we should look,” he said.
Before she could ask him, her phone rang. She answered it, staring at Dominic’s smiling face for a long moment before remembering why on Earth he’d be calling her. Fourget stepped up and touched her arm. He tapped his ear and Cara patched him into the call, sound only, his touch being all that was needed to establish a link between their two commplants.
“It’s a black Mercedes, right?” Dominic asked. She nodded. “Good, then it belongs to Lee Shaozu, Senior Executive Manager, Special Projects Division, HiQua.” He put on a shrewd expression. “That’s your mother’s company, right? No coincidence, eh?”
“Thank you, Dom, you’re a—”
Fourget interrupted her. “We need to track Hamiye. Can your friend do that?”
“Did you hear that, Dom?”
“Hear what? Is someone with you? Who’s there?”
“It’s no-one. Dom, I need you to track a guy called Farid Hamiye. He’s another HiQua employee. I think he’s kidnapped my mum.”
“Kidnapped? Look, Cara, this is all getting really heavy. Don’t you think you should go to the police?”
“Let me talk to him,” Fourget said.
“It’s all right, I can handle—”
“Let me talk to him. We don’t have time for this.”
Tight-lipped, she gave him full access. Fourget’s face appeared on the call. “Dominic, I am Lieutenant Pierre Fourget of EDF Military Intelligence.” Dominic swallowed hard but said nothing. “I need your assistance in tracing that car. Serious crimes have already been committed and we need that information in a hurry. Cara says you are some kind of genius. She has faith in you. So if you can do it, do it quickly. If not, tell me right now.”
Cara jumped in with a quick summary of where her mother had been and where she might be now.
Dominic looked terrified. “I—I don’t know —”
Fourget cut him off. “My friend,
a woman’s life is at stake. Now give me your answer.”
“Er, yes. Yes, I can do it, but —”
“Good. We’ll await your call.”
Fourget hung up. Cara scowled at him. “I never said he was a genius.”
“But you do have faith in him. Let’s get back to the car.” They set off at a jog up the drive. Casually, he said, “He seems like a nice boy. You could have done worse.”
Cara narrowed her eyes at him, hoping he was just teasing her and didn’t really think Dom was her boyfriend. Perhaps she liked him better when he was silent.
***
They were weaving through dense traffic by the time Dominic called back. Several times they had encountered police diversions, although they had seen nothing to explain them.
“Aren’t you watching the feeds?” Dominic asked when Cara complained about it. “Big demonstrations all over the city. All over the country. That guy, whatshisname, is talking in Hyde Park about the whatsit, the tempocalypse. You know, end of the world stuff. All the God-botherers are out waving placards.”
“Why? What do they want?”
“I dunno. They say the government should stop messing about with time, or something. Anyway, it’s all pretty peaceful so far but I wouldn’t want to be out driving around London today.”
Cara didn’t want to think about religious protests. After Washington, her views on organized religion were unprintable. “Did you find the car, Dom?”
“No, but I did the next best thing.” He waited, as if expecting her to ask.
“Don’t play games, Dom. Just tell me.”
“We know the engineering works had a suppressor jamming your mother’s comms signal, right? And it never appeared again, even when they took her away. So I reckoned she must have the suppressor on her, attached to her somehow.”
“How does that help?” How would they ever find her?
Dom was grinning. “I just had to look for comms outages.”
“But the country’s got outages all over the place.” The disappointment was threatening to choke her.
“Yes, but the one I was looking for was moving. All the rest were standing still.”
Of course! She breathed in pure relief. The boy really was a genius. “But …”
“But how could I track nothing, even if it is moving?” She let him take a moment of triumph. “The national roadNet. It’s a system of sensors that covers all the main roads and a lot of the minor ones too. They report to a central database using the comms network. They send signals just like a commplant does. Each time your mother’s car passed a roadNet node, it went offline and the SCADA system—don’t worry what that is—reported a fault. All I had to do was track the faults.” He grinned. “And where do you suppose they lead?”
Cara shook her head.
“Right back to the engineering works!”
“Oh God, Dom, you’re amazing! Thank you, thank you, thank you!” She hung up on his beaming face. “They’ve taken her back to Clarke Engineering,” she told Fourget, remembering, even as she spoke, the giants that guarded it.
“Good,” the Frenchman said and continued his brooding silence.
“Good? Why is that good?”
His blue eyes swiveled to look at her. “Because that’s where we’ve been heading all this time.”
***
After a couple of false starts, Jay eventually found himself speaking to a Colonel Forrester at Aldermaston. He was a round-faced man in his thirties, with a cherub’s mouth and eyes that would have liked to twinkle had not the occasion been so serious. “So you’ve been chatting to Olivia,” he said. “I don’t suppose I need remind you how highly classified her work is.”
“You’ve seen my clearance, Colonel. I’m sure you wouldn’t be taking this call if it wasn’t sufficient.”
“All the same, we try not to let this kind of information spread any farther than is necessary.”
Jay was impatient to get down to business. “Colonel, would you rather I asked my boss to call your boss and smooth the way for this conversation?”
Forrester’s little mouth turned down at the corners. “I’m just being cautious, Mr Kennedy. Setting the scene. I’m sure you understand.”
“Call me Jay.”
“Very well. Robert. Bob, if you like.”
Whatever name might suit such a chubby face, Bob was definitely not it. “So, Bob, tell me about Project FORESIGHT.”
Forrester shifted and pursed his lips, as if the mere mention of the name made him want to hide under his desk. “What do you want to know?”
“Is it possible to travel to the future?”
“Not at the moment, no.”
“But you believe it can be done?”
“That’s what Olivia and the others tell me. I’m an administrator, not a physicist.”
“So you haven’t done it yet?”
“No.”
“Has anybody else?”
“Anybody else?”
“Olivia mentioned a Dr Hong. Has he done it?”
“Hong is reported to have died. All we really know is he went missing three years ago. It’s possible that the Chinese have him under arrest—or that they executed him.”
“Or that he’s working for them somewhere in secret?”
“It’s possible.”
“So, have the Chinese managed to travel forwards in time?”
Forrester pursed his lips. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Where do you get your information, Bob?”
“MI6, mostly.”
Jay nodded. Six was supposed to share any time-travel-related intel with K Section, but Jay had never seen anything about Hong. He tried another approach. “Bob, if you ever get FORESIGHT working, what will the side effects be?”
“Side effects?”
“The consequences of creating temporal anomalies. Is there an equivalent of a timesplash?”
“We won’t know until we’ve done some experiments. The future is terra incognita I’m afraid.”
“But you’ve done risk assessments.”
“Yes.”
“And what did they turn up?” It was like pulling teeth.
Bob hesitated and Jay could see as clear as day that the man had something to hide.
“Look, Jay. FORESIGHT is long-term speculative stuff—like uploading minds into robots and star travel using Alcubierre warp drives. We might not have a result for years. Decades. The risk assessments we’ve done are little more than our tekniks sitting around in a meeting room brainstorming wild ideas.”
“Do any of those wild ideas sound like what happened two nights ago?”
Forrester’s face set hard. “I’m sorry, Mr Kennedy, but that’s all I’m prepared to say on the subject without explicit orders from my superiors.”
“Come on, man, we’re on the same side here.”
“Maybe. I’d rather someone else made that decision, to be honest.”
Jay pressed him again but Forrester had shut up inside a shell that was particularly well plated across his arse. He did give Jay the name of a two-star general he could approach if he wanted to take his “information request” any farther.
They hung up and Jay swung back in his chair to stare at the ceiling. Forrester was hiding something—but, if his people hadn’t actually got FORESIGHT to work, why would he need to be so secretive about its possible side effects?
And where the hell is Sandra?
The thought surprised him, popping into his head without any warning. But, on reflection, it shouldn’t have been such a surprise. He knew Fourget was pretending to be unconscious—despite the call that morning from Cara, who was a surprisingly convincing liar. Which meant the Frenchman was in the wind and on the trail again. And Jay would have been very happy to collude in the feeble subterfuge except he knew that, whatever Fourget did or said, his headstrong daughter would stick to him like a limpet until she found her mom. Which meant Cara was still in danger too.
He stood up and paced ab
out. He should go over there. To hell with this useless investigation. His family needed him. Commercial flights were just about back to normal. He could be in London in a couple of hours. He was wasting his time in Berlin, chasing half-arsed leads about future time travel. At the very least, he could catch up with Fourget and hog-tie Cara to get her out of the man’s hair.
And yet … What if FORESIGHT, or something like it, really could work, and really could create the havoc and the weirdness the world had witnessed the other night? Was any other agency following this line of investigation? Would they all miss it if he let it drop? He had to face it: the event had been something like a backwash. It had also been nothing at all like one. How many people investigating this would see that, would know it from personal experience?
“Jay?”
He turned sharply to find Kadan Dudding standing in his office doorway.
The Chief Analyst pulled a comic face that clearly asked if it was a good time. “I can go away if you like. Only I’ve got a few things that might be adding up to something.”
Jay waved him in and Dudding closed the door after himself.
“Whatcha got?” Jay was more than ready for some hard facts and a theory that didn’t involve impossibilities like traveling to the future. He sat down and so did Dudding.
“We’ve been looking at timings. The sunspot data was extremely valuable there. In fact, I reached out to a few observatories and got some very interesting stuff.” He paused for effect but probably saw the impatience on Jay’s face and so hurried on. “There was an increase in sunspot activity—a massive one. While we were experiencing quakes down here, the Sun was experiencing the same kind of thing. So was the Moon. So was Mars.”
“How do you know?”
“There are working seismometers up there still. In fact, the astronomical data was fantastic. It’s all timestamped to the tiniest fraction of a second and there are observatories—on Earth and in space—looking at almost everything in the Solar System all the time—and at stars in our galaxy and at other galaxies. Huge amounts of extremely precise data.” He seemed very happy about it but Jay was beginning to worry about where all this was leading.
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