There ahead was the door to the street. One more hurdle to leap: a man at a desk. He nodded to her and said something in Spanish. She gulped. "I'm sorry," she said in English. "I haven't had an implant for your language. Do you speak mine?"
"Yes, I do," he said in perfect British English, the kind the EU used. "I asked if you enjoyed yourself on your, ah, holiday."
While you were a slave, he meant. Annette made herself nod and started for the door. "Got to get back to the real world," she said. She was even with the desk . . . past it. She could run now and have a chance—or she could fling this guy into the middle of next week if she had to.
And she might. He rose, a frown on his face. "Won't you get your everyday clothes from the storage locker?" he asked.
She looked down at herself. Her blouse and long skirt were the only clothes she had. They weren't impossible to wear out on the street, not when the slavers had brought them to the manor from the home timeline. But they were kilometers away from the height of fashion. Well, too bad.
She had to answer him. "At the hotel," she said, and walked faster. Let him worry about what she meant.
His frown got deeper. He glanced toward the monitor on his desk. "What is your name?" he asked, holding up a hand. "When did you begin your holiday?"
"Gwyneth Paltrow," she said—the first old-time actress whose name popped into her head. "I began my vacation tomorrow." If she could just keep him confused until. . . the door slid open for her. She hurried out onto the sidewalk.
And then she realized she had a problem she hadn't counted on. Without even a dollar or a euro to her name, without a credit card in her pocket (she didn't even have a purse), she couldn't take the subway or a bus. But she could flag a cab. There was one, a little gold Honda. She waved frantically.
The driver cut across two lanes of traffic to get to the curb. Angry horns blared. Traffic here seemed as berserk as it was in Rome. She didn't know anything worse to say about it. "You speak English?" she asked the cabby.
"You bet, lady," he answered—his implanted language was pure American, or maybe he was. "Hop in. Where to?"
"Crosstime Traffic main offices," Annette said as she jumped into the back seat.
"You got it." The driver zoomed away while she was still fastening her seat belt.
Just in time, too. She looked back over her shoulder to see the man behind the desk come running out onto the sidewalk. He stared at the taxi, clapped a hand to his forehead, and dashed back into the building.
"That guy bothering you?" The driver must have seen him through the rear-view mirror.
"Not now," Annette said. Then she found something brand new to worry about. The slave ring had to be full of Crosstime Traffic people. How did she know she wouldn't run into one here? How did she know the local office wasn't full of slavers? She didn't know, and that was all there was to it. But she had to start somewhere, and that seemed a better place than the police. The police would need too many explanations.
She didn't even know where in Madrid the Crosstime Traffic offices were. They turned out to be near the train station, and near the memorial to the people killed in the terrorist bombings of 2004. That was a long time ago now—back when Gwyneth Paltrow was acting, in fact—and a lot of even worse things had happened since. Pigeons perched on the monument. People walked past without looking at the inscription. Like any old memorial, it was just part of the landscape.
Annette faced her own crisis when the cab stopped. "That'll be twelve and a half big ones," the driver said. A big one was a hundred euros, the same way a benjamin was a hundred dollars. Inflation had added enough zeros to the old currencies to make them clumsy to use.
"Please come in the office with me," Annette said. "They'll pay you in there—I promise they will."
Why do these things happen to me? the cabby's face shouted. "I didn't think you were a deadbeat," he said reproachfully.
"I'm not," Annette answered. "I don't have any money, that's all." It made perfect sense to her. The cab driver didn't look any happier. He got out of the Honda, muttering to himself in Spanish—the English did come through the implant, then.
"If they give me a ticket for parking here, that's yours, too," he said. Annette nodded. She would have promised to pay for the whole car just then.
Into the Crosstime Traffic offices they went. A receptionist spoke to them in lisping Spanish. "Do you understand English?" Annette asked.
"Of course," the woman replied. Her accent was British. After the man in the building with the outlaw transposition chamber, that made Annette antsy. The receptionist went on, "What can I do for you, Miss ... ?" She waited for a name.
"I'm Annette Klein," Annette said, wondering what would happen next.
The receptionist's eyes widened. She called up an image on her monitor and looked from it to Annette and back again. "You are Annette Klein!" she exclaimed. "What are you doing here?"
"Trying to pay this nice man his cab fare, only I haven't got a euro or a dollar or anything," Annette said. "Could you please give him fifteen big ones?"
"Of course," the receptionist said again. She handed the driver a thousand-euro bill and a five hundred. He gave Annette a nod that was almost a bow, then hurried out to his car. The receptionist started to ask questions.
Annette beat her to it: "Are my mother and father all right?" That was the most important thing in her mind just then.
"Yes," the woman said. She looked back at the monitor to get her facts straight. 'They were taken to, uh, Marseille, and some of our other people bought them there. They're in the USA now." She checked the monitor again. "The report was that you were taken to Madrid in that alternate, but nobody could find you there. You might have fallen off the face of the earth."
"I did," Annette said grimly.
"I'm sorry, but I don't understand," the receptionist said.
"I'm sorry, too, for a whole lot of things." Annette's mind was racing a million kilometers a minute, working out what she needed to do. Knowing her mother and father had come back to the home timeline made it easier. "Please take me to your chief administrator here. And I need to talk to the head of security. And please call my parents—here are their numbers." She wrote them down. "Set up a conference call in the administrator's office, please. That way, I can tell everybody everything at once." And somebody outside the office will be listening when I do, too.
The receptionist nodded. "I will take care of it." She got on the phone, where she spoke in Spanish. When she hung up, she smiled at Annette. "Mr. Olivo's secretary will arrange the call for you. And a messenger will take you to his office." A young man—only a couple of years older than Annette—hurried up. "Here's Jorge now."
"Hello," Jorge said. "Come with me, why don't you?"
"Okay." Annette wished she could clean up beforehand, but maybe looking—and smelling—the way she did would help persuade the officials that something inside Crosstime Traffic had gone dreadfully wrong.
People stared at her as she went by. She heard her name mixed in with a lot of Spanish. A man clapped his hands. A woman walked over and kissed her on the cheek. They were glad she'd made it to the home timeline. That was good. If their bosses had anything to do with the slavery ring, they would have a harder time fixing up an accident for her.
PEDRO OLIVO, said a sign on a door. Below the name was CHIEF ADMINISTRATOR in the six EU languages, Spanish first and bigger than the others. The man at the desk in front of the door grinned at Annette and spoke in English: "I have the conference call set up, Senorita Klein. Your parents will be glad to hear from you."
It would still be in the wee small hours back in Ohio. Phone calls at that time of day were rarely good news. Dad and Mom must have had their hearts in their throats till they found out she was all right. "Thank you," Annette whispered.
"My pleasure." The secretary opened the door to Pedro Olivo's office. "Go right on in. The head of security is already in there with Mr. Olivo. Her name is Luisa Javier."
&
nbsp; "Luisa Javier," Annette repeated so she'd remember. "Thanks."
Pedro Olivo looked like a man who ran things. He was in his fifties, with gray hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, and an expensive suit. Luisa Javier put Annette in mind of a schoolteacher. She was thin and dark and looked clever. Annette gave them only a glance apiece, though. Staring out of a big monitor were her parents. Sure enough, they looked as if they'd just got out of bed.
"Annette!" Dad exclaimed when the camera in Mr. Olivo's office picked her up. "Are you all right, sweetheart?"
"I'm not too bad," Annette answered. "I'm awful glad to be back in the home timeline again, I'll tell you that."
"What happened, darling?" Mom asked.
"Yes—what did happen?" Pedro Olivo sounded like a man who ran things, too. His voice had a let's-get-to-the-bottom-of-this tone to it. He leaned forward behind his desk.
Annette spoke to her parents: "Mom, Dad, I hope you're recording this."
They looked at each other, there on the screen. Mom reached out and flicked a switch. "Now we are," Dad said. Annette eyed the Spanish Crosstime Traffic officials. Neither of them flinched. The phone connection with the USA didn't suddenly and mysteriously break, either. She took those things as good signs.
"What happened?" she said. "You know I got caught when my folks did, right? And you know I got taken to Madrid instead of Marseille." She waited for everyone to nod. "I got sold there," she said, "and when I did. . . ."
After using their deadly toys against the locals, the guards went out to clean them up. Some of the men in mottled clothes were on foot, others on horseback. Jacques wouldn't have wanted to try to stand against them, and his countrymen knew a lot more—a lot more—about the art of war than these people did.
Because the fighting was going on, he needed a while to realize the guards and the masters had other worries, too. He found out the hard way. A guard came up to him, pointed a musket at his belly, and said, "You—come along with me."
"I didn't do anything!" Jacques squeaked—a slave's automatic protest when he got in trouble with the people in charge.
"Ha!" the guard said, and then, "You were friends with that Khadija, weren't you?"
That told Jacques what kind of trouble he was in. He wished it told him how to get out of trouble, too. No such luck there. "What if I was?" he said—he couldn't very well deny it, not when they knew better.
"That's what we're going to find out." The guard's words held a grim promise Jacques didn't like. He couldn't do anything about it, though. The guard gestured with the musket. "Come on. Get moving." Jacques went. He was sure the guard would shoot him if he tried anything else.
The man took him to a room near the masters' quarters. He'd never been there before. It had no windows, which worried him. One of the lamps that gave light without fire or smoke glowed in the ceiling. Three other guards waited there. They didn't have any torturer's tools that he could see, but he didn't think they'd invited him over to share a roast chicken and a pitcher of wine.
"Tell me everything you know about Khadija," said the guard who'd brought him there.
He told everything he knew about Khadija as a merchant's daughter from Marseille. She'd made it plain she didn't want the guards knowing she was from wherever they came from. In the telling, Jacques also told a good deal about himself.
"So you're not even a Muslim, then?" a guard said.
"Jesus and Henri, no!" Jacques said indignantly. He made the sign of the wheel. "I am a good Christian, or I try to be."
They went back and forth in the language that sounded like English—the language Khadija said was English. One of them returned to Arabic: "So how did she get away, then?"
"Why ask me?" So she had got away, then! Jacques didn't laugh in the guards' faces. Heaven only knew what they would have done to him if he had. He did add, "If she got away, I didn't have anything to do with it. You know where I was all the time. You must be the ones who let her go."
Sometimes the worst thing you could do to somebody was tell him the truth. The guards all started shouting. A couple of them shouted at Jacques. The rest yelled at one another. Then one of them outshouted the others. He told Jacques, "I am going to poke you in the arm with a needle. It won't hurt much, so hold still while I do it. If you try anything stupid, you'll be sorry. Understand?"
"Yes," Jacques said, though he didn't really. If they wanted to torture him, they could do much worse than that. He'd seen worse done when men from his kingdom captured Muslim prisoners. The Muslims weren't gentle to Christians they caught, either. Were the guards trying to see how brave he was? He'd show them!
The man in mottled clothes wasn't even lying. Jacques had known fleabites that troubled him more than the needle. He sat there as if carved from stone. Then the strangest thing happened. Within a few minutes, he began to feel woozy, almost dizzy. It reminded him of the way he felt when he drank too much wine. But he hadn't drunk anything at all. He didn't understand it. Before long, he was too woozy even to want to try to understand it.
"What is Khadija's real name?" a guard asked him.
"It's Khadija, as far as I know," he answered. The guard swore, first in Arabic—which sounded like ripping cloth—then in what Jacques supposed was English, and then in a language that sounded like German. How many tongues did the guards speak? Jacques was too woozy to worry about that, too.
"Have you ever heard of a transposition chamber?" another guard asked.
He wanted to say no, but what came out of his mouth was, "Yes."
"Ha!" the guard said. "Now we're getting somewhere. Who told you about one?"
"Khadija did." Again, Jacques wanted to lie, but found he couldn't. Did it have something to do with the needle? He didn't see how it could, but he didn't see what else could make him stick to the truth, either.
"What did she tell you about transposition chambers?"
"That they were how we got from Madrid to this place. That funny room that didn't move, but when it opened we were somewhere else."
"How did Khadija know about transposition chambers?"
"She said she was from the same place you people were, wherever that is."
"She told you that? Somebody fouled up somewhere." "She told me." Jacques answered the question. He ignored the comment. He couldn't do anything else, not the way he felt. "How could she? Wasn't she a slave like Birigida?" "No. She thought Birigida was disgusting for wanting to be a slave. She came here because she got caught and made a slave, just like I did."
They didn't ask him any more questions after that. They started shouting at one another again, in languages he didn't understand. He was too woozy to care. Later on, when he could think straight, that made him sad.
"—and that's how I got back," Annette finished. She'd been talking for hours, telling as much as she could remember about the manor and everything that went on there. Several cans of Coke stood in front of her. The Crosstime Traffic people had wet her whistle while she talked. Since she hadn't had any caffeine for months, the soda hit her much harder than it would have if she'd been drinking it every day.
Pedro Olivo's face showed nothing as he turned to Luisa Javier. "What do you think?" he asked.
"I think this office has a big problem," the head of security answered. "I think Crosstime Traffic has a big problem."
Were they going to try to sweep it under the rug? They couldn't get away with that, not when Dad and Mom had a recording of everything she said. A couple of commands and it would be on the way to every news outfit in the United States. If that wasn't a recipe for stirring up a scandal, Annette couldn't think what would be.
But she'd underestimated the Spaniards. "I think you're right," Olivo said. "And I think we'd better get to the bottom of it as fast as we can, before it gets worse."
"Where exactly was the building you left, the building with the transposition chamber?" Luisa Javier asked.
"It was on Calle Rodas," Annette answered. "That's all I can tell you. I've never been in Madr
id—this Madrid before. No, wait. The building across the street belonged to Petrokhem." The Russian company had offices all over Europe—and several in the eastern states in America, too.
"That's enough to go on." Luisa Javier pulled out her cell phone and made a call. As she dialed, she told Annette, "The chief of police." Then she started talking into the phone: "Antonio? Luisa. We have some troubles here. . . . Yes, I'm using English so the person who ran into the trouble can follow me. . . . No, worse than smuggling. . . . No, worse than terrorism, too. . . . Slaves, that's what could be worse."
Annette heard the howl the police chief let out. She would have felt the same way even if she hadn't just escaped herself. Since she had . . .
"On Calle Rodas, across from the Petrokhem building," the Crosstime Traffic security head was saying. "Yes, an outlaw chamber . . . No, I don't know how they got it. That's one of the things we'll have to run down. ... A lot of time, a lot of computing power. . . We'll get to the bottom of it. ... Gracias. Hasta luego."
"Thank you," Annette said.
"Don't thank us yet. We haven't done anything," Pedro Olivo said. "But we will. You can count on that. We will."
"You may want to monitor your computers for people dumping data," Dad said. "You may want to do that as soon as you can, too."
"Yes." Luisa Javier nodded. "A lot of people will be scrubbing their systems, won't they? Well, they can try." There was a never-ending race between programs that erased and overwrote data and ones that read what had been erased and written over. Annette didn't know which side was ahead right now. Someone like Luisa Javier would have to.
"Some of the people involved in this—this filth will be in high places." Pedro Olivo looked as if he wanted to spit. "To try to save themselves, they will say you are lying."
"If you move fast enough, you can catch them," Annette said. "They have a base in Madrid in the alternate where my family was working. You should be able to get evidence there. And they've got the manor in that other alternate. I don't think there are any proper Crosstime Traffic people in that world. If you go there, though, take lots of people, and take guns."
In High Places Page 20