Sandra turned to Jay, looking cross. “If he’s going to talk to me like a patronising jerk, I’m leaving now.”
Instantly, Overman’s manner changed. He stepped up to Sandra and glowered into her face. He was only a little taller than her, yet his physical presence was completely dominating. “All right, so you’re a hot streetwise little bitch. We all get it. Now sit down and stop trying to impress me.”
For an instant, shock, then anger, flicked across Sandra’s features, then something else—curiosity, mingled with recognition. She smiled sweetly and took a seat. “Anything you like,” she simpered, keeping her eyes on Overman’s, crossing her long legs deliberately. Overman did not seem even slightly mollified by her sudden compliance. He took a seat opposite her and tapped the desk. A virtual keyboard and display appeared and he busied himself setting up the recording equipment.
“Thank you, Jay,” Overman said to him. “Close the door on your way out.”
“Ah, yeah. Okay.” He turned to Sandra. “I’ll see you later.”
She looked at him with distant eyes and gave him a vague acknowledgement, then turned back to Overman.
Jay stumbled into the corridor and leaned against the wall. His stomach clenched and he felt hollow inside. Whatever had just happened between Overman and Sandra, he could not begin to understand except on a visceral level. All he knew was that he hated it. This sophisticated and flirtatious woman was nothing like the Sandra he thought he knew. She was playing a game with Overman in which Jay had no part. Some kind of offer was being made, a relationship established. It was an aspect of Sandra that Jay had never seen, that he felt excluded from. That look she had exchanged with Overman was one he knew instinctively would never be turned on him. For all the feelings for her he thought he had, he was shockingly reminded that he didn’t know her at all. He wanted to get out into the air. He needed to be alone to nurse his pain.
* * * *
Sniper was at the airport again, in a hired limo. This time, Klaatu was in the back with him. The driver was armed, and so was the man riding shotgun. The limo was armoured. More paranoia, Klaatu thought. A third security guard arrived with two other men in tow. They waited outside the car until Sniper had scrutinised them through the tinted windows.
“That’s the correct package,” Sniper said into his compatch and the guard opened the door to let the two men enter, closing it after them and moving away to put their luggage in the boot. Inside the car, there was the sound of reunion.
T-800, as dark and saturnine as ever, cracked a smile Klaatu had rarely seen. “Man, I’m glad to see you again!” he told Sniper, gripping the German’s hand with both of his. “I am so looking forward to this!”
“Me too, mate,” said the man beside him. Even in those three words, his Australian accent was obvious. He grabbed Sniper’s hand as soon as T-800 released it. “Glad to see you again, you crazy bastard.”
Sniper turned to T-800 and grinned. “I take it you’ve met Edna. We go back a long way.”
The Aussie answered for him. “We met on the plane. Had a good old chin-wag.”
Sniper laughed. “Yeah, right. And this is my uberteknik, Klaatu.”
T-800 nodded in Klaatu’s direction. Klaatu nodded back.
Edna looked from one to the other. “Jeez, you two make more noise than a two dollar radio!”
He laughed at his own observation. Then he put out his hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you, mate.”
Klaatu shook it briefly. “Of course, most of it was from this lying bastard, so I don’t believe a word of it.”
Klaatu tried not to let his smile waver too much. These were the bricks Sniper had recruited for the splash. They didn’t need to be intelligent, he told himself, just physically robust, and crazy enough to cause as much mayhem as possible at the other end. The Aussie certainly looked tough. The girl’s name puzzled him, but bricks weren’t like normal people. Maybe he picked the name just to get into fights.
“Okay, Sniper,” T-800 said, cutting through the geniality of the moment. “Let’s hear about the target. What’s your plan?”
Sniper waved his question away. “Tomorrow. We’ll talk plans tomorrow. In fact, I’ll take you both to the target site. It’s still here. But, tonight, we party!” His compatch chimed and he glanced at it in annoyance. “Get that will you, Klaatu.”
Klaatu gave the commands to route the call while Sniper described the venue and the entertainments he’d arranged for his friends. Klaatu listened silently for a while, then said, “It’s the investors.”
“Tell them to fuck off.”
“I think you need to hear this.”
Sniper gave him a look that said he’d better be sure, but Klaatu remained impassive. Eventually, Sniper took back the call. He snapped at the voice on the other end, he told it he didn’t want to know, but, after a short while, he shut up and listened. When he hung up, he glanced around at the others. His face was rigid with anger. He hit the limo’s intercom. “Forget the house,” he said.
“Take us to the engineering works. And make it fast.”
Chapter 17: Plots and Plans
“The plan has three parts,” said Overman. He was in the same meeting room in which he had interviewed Sandra that morning, but Sandra was long gone. Now Holbrook, Porterhouse, Jay, and three other MI5 officers were his audience. There was also a well-built stranger with a visitor’s pass to whom Jay had not been introduced.
“The first is to infiltrate Sniper’s operation with a teknik from our staff. If they’re in the building phase, they will be recruiting. There’s a good chance we can get someone inside. We have several undercover operatives already in the field attempting to make contact. The successful agent’s main priorities will be to identify the target for the splash and to sabotage the work where possible. They will also provide intel on the movements of the principals so that the second part of the plan can be put into operation.”
Jay eyed the man surreptitiously. Overman had been locked away with Sandra most of the day. Was it possible he had done more than just interview her? After all, the way she had looked at him…
“Currently, we have a home address for Sniper and the address of an engineering works in Deptford.” The information appeared on their desk viewers. “If we are unsuccessful with the first part of the plan, we will raid both these locations. I have invited Colonel Davidson here from The Regiment, which will undertake the raids.” Jay knew that meant 22 Regiment, Special Air Service. Overman nodded at the SAS colonel as if they were old acquaintances. “However, I’m hoping we can get an officer inside and gather as much intel as possible before we need to take this step.”
Jay glanced at his compatch. It was already early evening. He imagined the undercover agents already out there, cruising the bars and clubs, trying to let it be known they were splash tekniks looking for work, hoping to connect with Sniper’s recruiters, possibly even Klaatu himself. He wondered what Sandra was doing. Had she gone back to the safe house in Barnes? Should he go there too after the meeting? If he did, what would he say to her?
“Finally,” Overman said, “the third part of the plan is a fallback in case the raids go pear-shaped.” He glanced at Holbrook and received a discreet nod. “I’d like you all to follow me, please. There’s something I’d like to show you.”
He led them out of the meeting and down the corridor to the lifts. He ushered them inside and took them down to the ground floor. They went down another corridor and then another until they reached a steel door.
“From now on,” he said, “you each have access to this area.” He put his finger into the DNA sampler. When he got a green light, he pushed the door open and led them inside. There was another short corridor and then double doors that opened onto a large room that was mostly empty.
Jay looked around. There were steel cabinets lining the walls and a long bench of workstations with banks of displays facing the handful of people working there. Fat cables crossed the floor from several places and en
ded at a three-metre-square platform at the centre of the room. The platform had a handrail and black and yellow tape marking its edges, but was otherwise unremarkable.
A woman at one of the workstations stood up and crossed the room to greet them. She looked young, not much older than Jay. She wore jeans and a red blouse and seemed unreasonably casual beside the suited men and women who had just entered her domain.
“This is Nahrees,” Overman told them, “and she runs this facility.”
Jay did a double take. Wasn’t that a minor character from an old Marvel comic book? In which case, “Nahrees” was a tag. In which case… He looked around the room again, more carefully this time.
“What we have here—” Overman went on, but was interrupted by Jay.
“It’s a lobsite!” Jay couldn’t contain himself. “You plan to go back and intercept Sniper at the splash target before he can cause an anomaly!”
“Give the man a coconut,” said Nahrees, amused at his excitement. “We haven’t met, have we?”
Jay looked at her, not really taking in what she said. He was shocked at the audacity of the plan. His head was whirling, thinking through the consequences. “Oh, this is a really bad idea,” he said. “You’re going to lob the SAS back to fight Sniper and his guys on the streets of old London. That’s just…”
As Jay searched for a word that expressed the full extent of the stupidity of the idea, Overman spoke up. “As I said, this is the third part of the plan. The fallback. If all else fails, Colonel Davidson’s team will jump back to the splash target and neutralise Sniper and his crew.”
Holbrook was looking at Jay with a curious expression. “Why is that such a bad idea, Jay?”
Overman pursed his lips, clamping down on an angry retort. Jay saw it and it gave him an unexpected moment of satisfaction. “A timesplash works when you create a paradox in the past. You kill your own mother, or you stop Einstein inventing special relativity or whatever. The anomaly sends spacetime wild but the timestream flows back into place. I don’t know the physics of how that works…”
“Metatemporal pseudodimensionality,” Nahrees said.
Jay shook his head as if there was a gnat in his ear. “Whatever. The backwash from all this eventually hits the present and that’s what brings down the cities.”
“Is this going somewhere?” Overman asked.
Jay took a breath. “The thing is, if you go back to, say, the early nineteen hundreds, in central London, and start a shoot-out with armed maniacs, you don’t know who might get hurt. Just think of the people who were around at that time and place!” He closed his eyes. “I can’t think of anybody offhand, but there’s bound to be loads of scientists, philosophers, writers, politicians, inventors, industrialists, philanthropists… If any one of them is killed, it could be just as bad as whatever Sniper is planning.”
“My men are trained to avoid collateral damage,” the SAS colonel said.
“But that’s all that Sniper lives for. Once you get him cornered, he’ll take out as many random passers-by as he can. Would you risk the lives of maybe two million people on the chance that you’ll get all Sniper’s people before they have a chance to spray the streets with machine gun bullets?”
“As I said,” Overman repeated through clenched teeth, “this is our fallback. We know the risks. It’s better than letting Sniper just go ahead and do what he wants.”
Nahrees spoke to Jay. “He’s right. We’ve run the simulations. The chances of our guys shooting someone really important are thousands to one.” Jay turned to her feeling vaguely betrayed, as if she should have been supporting him.
“Look at it this way,” she went on. “If we leave Sniper alone, the probability that he’ll kill someone important is one. Certainty.”
Overman had his irritation under control again. “It’s good that you’re raising these issues, Jay, but you have to trust that we’re not going into this blindly.” He spoke as much for Holbrook’s benefit as for Jay’s. “We’ve done our sums. The very fact of a shoot-out in central London with modern weapons—even if no one but Sniper’s team and our own people get killed—will create an anomaly big enough to cause some pretty serious damage. But, if all else fails, this is a calculated risk we have to take.”
Jay backed down, unwilling to argue any more. He still thought it was a crazy, dangerous plan. In fact, just the kind of plan that an MI5 mole would come up with to make sure that the timesplash succeeded—one way or another. He eyed Overman with the growing conviction that this was the traitor.
Chapter 18: Night Time
Sandra didn’t go back to the safe house when she left the SIS Building. Instead, she went to Waterloo Station and caught the first train she could get to Godalming in Surrey. It was a slow train and she had to change at Woking, but by the early evening she was in a taxi heading south-east into the gentle hills and open farmland of the Surrey countryside. She paid off the taxi and walked the last couple of kilometres. She had done this before many times over the past two months. At a point under a low ridge, she left the road and crossed a field, climbing to a spot at the other side where she could follow the line of a hedge into the trees at the back of Sniper’s house.
The light was beginning to fail, but the evening was warm. The big house looked peaceful. She did a circuit of it, keeping well away. One of Sniper’s Mercedes was missing. So was the big black all-terrain vehicle his guards liked to travel in. That was good. There might only be a couple of guards in the house. Sniper liked lots of them with him when he travelled. She had bought herself a sandwich, a chocolate bar and some bottled water from a kiosk in Waterloo and settled now to her evening meal as she waited for night to fall. Once it was dark, she could approach the house. Until then, she would wait and watch. The interview with Overman had been a strange experience. Almost from his first words, he had treated her with an intense, almost hostile, disdain. Her retaliation was automatic. She flirted with him—and not just a little, but the full-on, no-holds-barred, seduction routine. She told herself he deserved it. She told herself she’d teach him a lesson. Yet, even at the time, she had felt a powerful thrill, an excitement that made her skin tingle, and her heart race. Sitting in the cool evening air, watching the darkness gather around Sniper’s house, she ran over what had happened, letting her mind drift back to the interview that morning.
“Okay. How long have you been following Sniper?” Overman asked.
“What’s your name?” she asked back at him. “I can’t keep calling you Mr. Overman.”
“Yes, you can. How long were you following Sniper?”
She shrugged. “Since I escaped from the Institution. The day Beijing was destroyed, whenever that was.”
“Why?”
She looked at him sweetly. “Why what, Mr. Overman?”
“Will you stop pissing about? It was your idea to come in here, so let’s just get on with it, shall we?”
“You don’t seem very friendly. I don’t see why we can’t be friends.”
“Why are you following Sniper?”
She looked him in the eyes. “He’s a good looking guy. Strong. I like strong men.”
He slammed his hand down on the desk so hard she jumped. “If you really want to fuck me, we can do it later. No problem. All right? Until then, you’re going to stop this little game and you’re going to tell me what I want to know.”
A smart-aleck response sprang to her lips, but she suppressed it. The excitement she’d been feeling flipped over into anger. She wanted to tell him she wouldn’t fuck him if he was the last man left on Earth. But she bit that down too.
“If that doesn’t suit you,” he said, his eyes boring into her, “ we can use other means to get information out of you. They won’t be much fun.”
As she pondered her memories of the day, a light came on in one of the downstairs rooms and Sandra realised how dark it had grown. Her sandwich was gone so she started on the chocolate.
Overman had known exactly how to handle her, she re
alised. He hadn’t let her get away with any nonsense. He’d even played her at her own game and won. And that was despite the fact that he did want her. She could see it. He even admitted it. But it wasn’t important to him. He could take it or leave it. She’d only ever seen that once before, when Dr. Mason at the Institute had removed himself from her case. But even then, she’d won, got what she wanted, beaten him. He’d had to run away, confess his weakness to the others. How humiliating it must have been for him! Odd that. She’d never considered before that she had humiliated him. Not Overman, though. He was hard as nails. He’d have made a good brick. She wondered where Jay was. She wondered what he must be thinking. She should probably call him, try to explain, but what could she say?
Another light came on in an upstairs window. It would soon be time to take a closer look. She checked her compatch. Any minute now a guard would come out and do a circuit of the house. There! A man with a submachine gun in his right hand and a torch in his left stepped through the door and stood on the back veranda breathing the air and looking around. Letting his eyes adjust to the light, Sandra thought. Then he set off, walking slowly. Time to go.
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