Foresight: Timesplash 3

by Graham Storrs

  The Tesla was picking up speed fast. She turned on the engine and ducked down, peering over the window sill. “Gotcha!” she cried as he shot past. Slamming her foot down on the accelerator, she bounced over a grass verge and a side road and onto the main road, causing a hapless shopper to swerve for her life. She pressed the pedal to the floor and kept it there. Her quarry was the type who would drive hard and fast and her own little runabout was no match for his muscle car. But, if she flogged it to death, and took a lot of crazy risks, maybe, just maybe, she could keep him in sight.

  ***

  Jay stared at his commplant display for a full minute after Sandra had hung up. Of all the times for her to go off looking for trouble, this was the worst. He called his mother. She was expecting both Cara and Sandra and didn’t know yet that Sandra had gone chasing villains through the streets of London. He asked her to call him when Cara arrived safely, saying he was worried about her traveling in the aftermath of last night.

  “Oh you don’t need to worry about that girl,” his mother said. “She’s the most sensible eighteen-year-old I’ve ever met. Reminds me of myself at her age. Funny how genes sometimes skip a generation. Anyway, she’s with her mother, and we both know Sandra can take care of herself.”

  After the call, he sat with his thoughts. Cara was probably all right. So was his mum. It was Sandra who was likely to get herself into trouble. He stared through the window at the Berlin skyline, dark against the cold, gray skies. He’d spoken to Sandra about just this scenario. She wasn’t supposed to go off tracking down anybody. She was supposed to drop everything and run. Nothing else was safe. The kind of people who might go after her were vicious killers—ex-bricks, organized crime, terrorist organizations, rogue governments.

  Any of the old timesplashers, the bricks, even the tekniks, could want her dead for her betrayal of Sniper and others all those years ago. Many of the bricks who had survived from back then had moved from the anarchic mayhem of timesplashing to the more stable pursuits of organized crime and international terrorism. Such occupations were a natural outlet for their talents. And any old criminal organization might just want Sandra for her skills as temporal engineer, a teknik, the way Polanski had when he kidnapped her to help launch his damned revolution with a bloodbath in Washington, DC. And that had been just a couple of years back.

  Now it was happening again. Some demon from their past had surfaced. Somebody was stalking Sandra—maybe Cara too. He slammed his hand down on his desk and stood up. They needed to hide. They should be lying low. He, Jay, should be over there helping them, protecting them, not standing around in this bloody office, doing nothing.

  With a start, he realized that nothing was exactly what he was doing. He sat down again at his desk and pulled up the pictures Sandra had sent. He saw a handsome, Middle-Eastern man in his early thirties. The man looked smug and arrogant and Jay detested him on sight. He ran a facial recognition program and retrieved the man’s file. Farid Hamiye, born 2035 in Lebanon. Not much known until he turned up in Europe four years earlier. Worked as a freelance bodyguard for a short while, then joined HiQua in London. His current position there was Head of Security, Special Projects Division. Clean record.

  He sat back in his chair and studied Hamiye’s face. It all seemed pretty straightforward. HiQua was doing something secret at its Special Projects Division. Hamiye had turned up Sandra’s name on a routine sweep and, because of a twenty-year-old connection between Sandra and MI5, had jumped to all the wrong conclusions about her. Paranoid about being spied on, he’d tried to find out what she was up to, and ended up on the receiving end of Sandra’s own paranoia.

  The question was, was Sandra in any danger? How far would Hamiye go to protect his company’s secrets?

  He called Sandra to tell her what he’d found, but she wasn’t taking any calls. So he put his thoughts into a voice message and sent that instead, hoping she’d listen to it before she did anything stupid and dangerous. He was about to call Cara and set her the task of calling her mum every ten minutes to tell her to check her messages, when Laura Thalman knocked and poked her head around his office door.

  “Jay? Our new consultant has arrived. I thought I’d just quickly introduce her before she and I get down to work.”

  Jay waved her in and watched as she ushered a plump woman of about his age into the room. He started to rise to greet her, but stopped in mid-motion.

  “Jay!” the woman said, beaming. “My goodness, haven’t you done well for yourself? Head honcho of all this! And Sandra didn’t say a word about it.”

  “Olivia!”

  Laura looked from one to the other in surprise. “You know each other?”

  “Oh, we’re old friends,” Olivia said. She hurried around the desk and Jay submitted to the usual over-familiar hug. He’d met Dr Olivia Bradley exactly twice before. The first time was when she was working as a teknik for MI5 in 2050. It had been Olivia who had controlled the lob that sent Sandra and him back to 1902 to save Lenin from assassination. The second was when he brought Sandra and Cara back from America. She had been Sandra’s boss at the University of East Anglia where they were running timesplashes for the Direct History Department, observing historical events with purpose-built micro-drones lobbed back through time. As far as Jay knew, she was still at UEA. Olivia had been a good friend to Sandra and his daughter and it seemed that, in Olivia’s mind, that friendship naturally transferred itself to Jay.

  He gave Laura a quizzical look, wanting an explanation. Olivia Bradley was a world leader in deep time exploration but he didn’t see the connection to what had happened last night.

  Laura understood. “Dr Bradley was my external PhD supervisor,” she explained. “We keep up an on-and-off correspondence about the latest theoretical developments in time travel. It was something Dr Bradley said a few months ago that led me to get in touch about this … conundrum.”

  “And what was that?”

  Before Laura could answer, Olivia jumped in. “Just some wild hypothesis I came across. It’s hardly worth mentioning.”

  “But you’ve been doing some work on it, haven’t you?” Laura asked, suddenly concerned at Olivia’s reluctance to talk.

  In reply, Olivia turned to Jay. “I’ve been working with the Ministry of Defence of late, Jay. I still have my chair at UAE. Did Sandra tell you I got the promotion? Anyway, I turn up there and give the odd lecture, but mostly I’m based at Aldermaston. So, anything I could tell you about the work I do there would be rather classified, you understand.”

  “Aldermaston?” Jay said. He hadn’t known about any time-related work going on at the UK’s top military research laboratory and, as the man responsible for time-travel counter espionage for the EU’s military intelligence directorate, he bloody well should have. He tried to keep the annoyance out of his voice as he said, “The MoD is running timesplashes at Aldermaston?”

  Olivia blinked at him. “Oh dear. Have I said too much? I just meant that I’d have to check your clearance before I talked about what I’m doing. When Laura asked me to come out here, I thought we’d just be talking about ordinary time-travel stuff. I didn’t know she’d be interested in … anything else. I suppose I should have guessed though.”

  “Ordinary time-travel stuff? Look, my clearance is as high as it goes, Olivia. Higher than anybody you know at Aldermaston, that’s for sure. What’s this ‘anything else’ you think I can’t be told about?” He saw the distressed look on Olivia’s face and backed off. He held up a hand. “All right. Don’t answer that. I’ll make a few calls and then I’ll come and talk to you. Meanwhile, please do not leave the building. Laura, Dr Bradley is in your care until I’ve sorted this out.”

  Olivia bit her lip. “Jay, you’re not going to get me into trouble, are you? I only came here as a favour to Laura.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t worry. Somebody’s in trouble, but it’s not you. Look, I need to make those calls right now but, before you go, can I just ask you to tell me one thin
g? Are there any applications of this classified work you’re doing that could possibly have led to what we saw last night?”

  “I—I really don’t see how. Even if … No, I really shouldn’t say any more. I’m sorry, Jay.”

  ***

  Sandra had lost him again. She’d lost him several times in the past hour but this time it seemed to be for good. She was in a dingy suburb in North London, somewhere she had never visited before and never wanted to visit again. It was mostly half-derelict residential buildings, abandoned and full of squatters. It was hard to tell if last night’s event had hit the area badly or whether it always looked like that. It seemed unlikely that this was her target’s destination but she drove around the streets anyway, hoping to spot his fancy car. If that didn’t work, she had no other option but to give up.

  Young men sat in groups around fires, watching her with sullen eyes as she passed. The recession in Europe ground on and on, with three poor harvests in a row. More global-warming-legacy crap. Likely to last another hundred years, they said, and likely to get worse before it got better.

  Jay had told her that the EU had pinned its hopes on cheap American grain starting to flow again, but that was two years back, before the new American revolution flared up. The one she had unwillingly helped to get started. Now the EU was giving arms to the revolutionaries and filling Canada with fighter drones and laser batteries to dissuade the Chinese from joining the fray, further draining the economy.

  It had seemed like a good thing to Sandra when the job at HiQua came up, testing software for robots. A lot of the machines she worked on were farmbots and, on a good day, she felt like she was contributing to the common good. On a bad day, she felt like just another cog in the gears of a faceless mega-corporation, profiteering from the distress of a continent that could barely feed itself.

  She would give up the search soon. She had listened to Jay’s message once she lost sight of the Tesla and could slow down. The majority of her pursuit had been so crazy fast that she daren’t answer his call, however curious she was. She didn’t want to think about the number of speeding fines she’d picked up. The chances were good she’d have her license suspended for this morning’s work, if she wasn’t disqualified from driving for life. Well, Cara would just have to ferry her around like she’d ferried her around to dance classes, and horse riding, and rock concerts. It might be quite nice.

  She drove out of the rat’s nest of private houses and up an approach road for the North Circular Road. There were warehouses and wholesalers, small factories and engineering works to left and right. This was hopeless. What would a man like Farid Hamiye be doing in a place like this? She needed to find somewhere to stop so she could check the map for places farther on that might be more promising. She also needed to get to a fast-charge station so she could top up her batteries. She’d been running on empty for the last quarter hour.

  The main road was in view and the decision was made. She stopped studying the passing buildings and their parking lots and put her foot down. And immediately slammed on the brake. Thirty meters ahead was a familiar sign: the world-famous interlocking H and Q on a blue background that she had seen every morning above her place of work for the past three months. It was a small sign, attached to a gatepost and, as she edged her car up to it, she could see beneath the logo the words “Goods Entrance”. There was nothing else. The wire mesh gates were closed and from them a white concrete drive led to a low, unexceptional building. A large painted board above the main entrance said, “Clarke Engineering, Ltd”. A helicopter was parked on a tarmacked area nearby—it had no logo on it but it was painted in HiQua’s distinctive blue. There was no sign of Hamiye’s muscle car but Sandra didn’t care. This was the place. It had to be.

  Chapter 8: Foresight

  Lee Shaozu was not used to being let down by his employees, least of all Hamiye.

  “We just need to neutralise the Malone woman,” Hamiye was saying. “If Waxtead were to make a call to the Prime Minister asking what the hell MI5 was up to, I’m sure that would shut down the whole investigation.”

  Lee studied Hamiye in silence. The man was waiting, hands behind his back, feet apart, gaze fixed on a point somewhere above Lee’s head. Like a soldier, standing at ease, Lee thought, perhaps something Hamiye had picked up in his years fighting endless, pointless wars in the Middle East and North Africa. It was a stance that signified deference, putting Lee in the role of superior officer, but it didn’t appease Lee at all. He disliked the implication that Hamiye was just a soldier carrying out orders. Soldiers didn’t take enough ownership of their superiors’ problems for Lee’s liking. If things went wrong with a mission, a soldier could just shrug it off and wait for new orders, pushing the problem back onto his officer’s shoulders.

  Yet, of course, Hamiye was right. The way to sort this out was for Lee to tell Waxtead to call Number 10. “But that doesn’t really help us much, does it, Farid?”

  “I … er …”

  “It doesn’t tell us why MI5 is snooping around. It doesn’t tell us what they know or what they’re looking for. You see, it could have been something completely unrelated to Special Projects. It could have been just about anything. Only now we’ll never know. Five might well get off our backs but we won’t get the chance to ask them any questions. Do you see?” Hamiye gave a reluctant nod. Lee let a little more anger show in his voice. “Worse still, the woman saw you. If she had any presence of mind, she would have captured your image through her commplant and will have passed it to Five for identification. So they now know that Special Projects was involved in trying to bug her, making it look as if we have something to hide, not just at HiQua, but here, right here, in my division. So, even if they didn’t have any suspicions before about what we’re doing here, they certainly do now.”

  “Sometimes,” Hamiye said, “on an operation, things go wrong.”

  Lee could hear his security chief beginning to push back, beginning to resent being lectured. Good, he thought, if I can’t evoke guilt in the man, at least I can humiliate him. “I don’t want to hear your excuses, Farid. You need to lift your game. There is a lot at stake. You know how close we are.”

  “I do, but—”

  Lee raised a hand. “No buts. Get back to London. I’ll see you there later.”

  Hamiye looked ready to explode but all he did was nod curtly and leave. Lee took a few moments to reflect on what had happened. He would have to get Waxtead onto this straight away. He told the personal assistant in his commplant to set up an appointment with the CEO for late afternoon. No doubt his “boss” would be terrified to hear that MI5 was involved. No doubt he would want to whine and complain about it. No doubt Lee would need to slap him down and put him in his place again. It was becoming too frequent a necessity.

  As for Hamiye, he was right. Sometimes these things went wrong. There was no need to doubt the competence of the man. In fact, it was extremely rare that Farid ever misstepped. The Malone woman must indeed be an exceptionally good agent.

  ***

  Sandra tensed her muscles against the cold. She’d waited just half an hour in the car, watching the Clarke Engineering building, but already the chill was seeping into her bones. Her breath hung in gray curls in the frigid air and the windscreen was a fog of condensation apart from the tiny rectangle she rubbed at from time to time with aching fingers. Yet she dare not turn on the heater for fear of running her battery flat. She needed to save enough juice at least to get her to the nearest garage, which, her commplant told her, was two kilometers away.

  When the cold had first reached her toes, she had started asking herself whether she wasn’t just wasting her time. Jay’s view was that it was a matter of commercial sensitivity, that HiQua had jumped to all the wrong conclusions, and so things would probably sort themselves out if she just left it alone for a few days. She asked herself again whether maybe she could have misread the situation as she pushed her hands under her legs to try to warm them up. But Jay was always t
oo relaxed about these things. He talked about the probabilities, as if it were all some big game of strategy. But Sandra thought about the consequences of someone from her past coming after her and Cara. Polanski had found her two years earlier and she and Cara had almost died. The probabilities didn’t matter. No risk was worth taking.

  And it kept bugging her that Hamiye had actually mentioned her association with time travel. It wasn’t a surprise that he knew. If he knew that she had once worked with MI5, he would know what she had been mixed up in. But it was her MI5 connection that should have been preying on his mind, not the fact that she had traveled in time. She could see that this was a very nebulous excuse for following someone halfway across the country. But even the barest mention of time travel had set alarm bells ringing. What if this was nothing to do with HiQua? What if Hamiye wasn’t worried about commercial secrets? What if it was all about time travel? What if they were hyper-sensitive to her presence on the payroll because there was a timesplash being planned—or could Hamiye even have plans to involve her?

  Even so, she told herself, it was no reason to freeze to death in her car. She should just pass what she knew on to Jay and let him deal with it, let him tell the local police, or whatever the protocol was. The idea of turning the engine on and feeling warm air around her filled her with relief as she gave the command to switch on the car. Next time she went off chasing suspicious characters, she’d take a heavy coat with her, and some gloves, and a woolly hat, and a flask of—

  She killed the engine and dropped down in her seat. Hamiye’s car was pulling out of the main gate. It turned away from her and accelerated hard up the street towards the North Circular Road. Now what? Follow him?

  She dismissed the idea. She knew where to find Hamiye if she needed to. But Clarke Engineering, Ltd, on the other hand, was a mystery. Why would Hamiye drive straight there after she outed his little plot to bug her? Why was there a helicopter parked outside a crummy little engineering works? Who was in there and what were they doing? She hesitated, thinking again about warmth and comfort. “Bugger,” she said and got out of the car.