by Glenn Cooper
“Why there?” John asked.
“I know those waters from my sailing days,” he said. “It’s a good beach, not the least rocky, nice straight shot to Dover and from there into the Thames estuary.”
“I’m all right with that,” John said.
“How will you find a ship?” Garibaldi asked. “Guy, are there any French vessels in those parts?”
Forneau shook his head. “Robespierre was not a proponent of a vigorous navy. The Duke of Bretagne commands a small fleet of galleons at Brest but he is hardly in our sphere of influence. We have no ships at Bulogne-sur-Mer but there are many fishermen. We will give you silver to buy your way across.”
“Well, I guess this is goodbye again,” John said reaching for Garibaldi’s hand. “Your accomplishments have multiplied but so have your challenges. I wish there was more I could do.”
“You have done much. Fare thee well. Get Emily back home. Get Arabel and her sweet children back home. Get all these fine men and women back home.”
Earthers and Hellers exchanged hugs and handshakes. Trevor was cradling one child in each arm and Garibaldi patted both heads at once. When it was Emily’s turn with Caravaggio he kissed her on both cheeks and handed her a rolled paper.
“It pained me greatly to make this but I thought you would like it,” he said with a sly smile.
She unrolled the paper; it was a heroic portrait of John driving a steam car, his jaw resolute.
She kissed him again. “I do love it.”
A voice piped up from the circle. “I’m not going with you.”
It was Alice. Simon had her hand.
“What are you saying?” Tracy asked.
“I’m saying I’m staying here,” Alice said, “with this good man. I’ve come a very long way to a very bad place to find the man I love. I can take the coward’s way out and leave him behind or I can be courageous for once in my life and stay with him and join his cause.”
Martin said, “Alice, you must know that you will age and Simon will not. You will die one day and Simon will live on.”
“Thank you, Martin. You’re a wonderful doctor and a good man. I have no reason to doubt you. But back home I will grow old and I will die too with only my cats for company.” She sniffed back some tears. “God I will miss my cats, but I will miss little else.”
“I will try my best to find you a cat,” Simon said.
She tenderly touched his arm. “Who knows,” Alice said, “maybe one day I’ll even be able to ply my trade as an electrician here.”
“We will be honored to have you join our ranks,” Garibaldi said.
“Last chance to change your mind,” John said.
“My mind is set,” Alice replied.
Stalin was not a heavy drinker in life and death had not changed his habits. As his caravan bounced along on the bad road he held his small glass of wine with an extended arm to prevent spilling any on his uniform. General Kutuzov sat on the opposite bench trying to fill his own glass for the umpteenth time. Stalin watched the burgundy stain spreading on the old fellow’s knee with contempt.
“So, comrade, you disapprove of my tactics?” the tsar said.
“Not disapprove, nothing as strong as that. I merely wonder whether it is ever wise to break a single mighty force into two smaller forces.”
“Technically this is what I have done but eight in ten men are with us, two in ten with the other group. Pasha, what do you think?”
Loomis was on a smaller bench at the rear of the caravan. “I am not a military man,” he replied.
Stalin clucked at him, “You are not a military man, you are not a weapons man, what kind of a man are you then?”
“I am a broken man.”
“Such a maudlin soul,” Stalin said. “You must have Russian blood.”
“Let us drink to Russian blood.” This came from the newly promoted chief of secret police, Vladimir Bushenkov, another man who served Stalin in life. He was blind in one eye from a drunken fight and wore a leather patch to hide the disfigurement.
“No, let us drink to our Pasha,” Stalin said, raising his glass. “He informed us that they would take the children back to Britannia in hopes of returning to their own time and place.” Stalin suddenly and explosively raised his voice. “I want these children back. I want all these people back. The children give me pleasure. The others are useful. This Emily can work with you, Pasha, scientist-to-scientist. John Camp is a good soldier, I think. And this Trevor Jones too. This Brian fellow, they say he is a movie star! I want all of them to work for me. I will not punish them for escaping but I will crush this Garibaldi thug, that’s for sure.”
“I hope we don’t catch them,” Loomis said.
Bushenkov reacted with fury and perhaps to demonstrate his bona fides for his new position he drew his pistol.
“Sit, sit, Vladimir,” Stalin said, “Put your gun away. In my day, I would have had a man shot for saying this but Pasha can get away with treason, can’t you, Pasha? In the past I could liquidate a scientist and have a hundred more to take his place. Not here. So go ahead, be maudlin, be a traitor, more power to you. We will continue north through the friendly low countries and we will outflank them. They will have to cross the channel and it will be done from friendly soil in Francia, somewhere between Calais and Bulogne-sur-Mer. I am sure of this. On Earth and in Hell, this is where the English invade France and where France invades England. And we, my drunk general and my maudlin scientist, we will be there waiting for them.”
35
Trotter was angry with everyone but himself.
The headline in The Guardian was: Assassination.
Why had their science editor, Derek Hannaford, and a bursar from an English language college named Lenny Moore been gunned down by long-range sniper fire in central London? Why were the men meeting? There had been nothing in Hannaford’s diary, no known connections between the two of them. The police had no leads other than to suggest that the murders were not amateur jobs. There had been no robbery, no known history of threats. Both men had spotless criminal records.
Trotter had his off-the-books operations man, Mark Germaine, across the desk from him. He had the envelope his team had snatched from Lenny Moore’s pocket. The note inside was from Giles Farmer to Hannaford: Sorry to muck you about but feel safer if you would go to Bow Street in front of the Opera House. Just in case they listened to our phone call. Giles Farmer
“So he got the better of you with some schoolboy tradecraft,” Trotter said.
“Apparently,” Germaine said.
“And you took out this Moore person by error.”
“He looks remarkably similar to Farmer. You’ve seen the pictures. Through a scope at night from a rooftop two hundred yards away, well, I can’t fault my lads too much.”
“Can’t you? Here’s what I can’t do, Mark. I can’t get the DG to squash the Met’s investigation because I can’t tell him about the op.”
“The police will come up empty. Our lads used non-traceable 9mm ammo and Russian VKS sniper gear. The three CCTV cameras covering their points of entry and egress were, how shall I say, conveniently offline that night. We’re blameless.”
“That’s not the correct word, Mark. We are not blameless, but hopefully, for your sake, we will not be found out.”
“My sake?”
“I’m too valuable. Things going on.”
“What was behind the op? If my balls are in the ringer I should know why.”
“It’s above your pay grade. Know your place. The only way to make things right with me is to get the correct man next time.”
“Where is Farmer?”
Trotter stood, signaling the end of the dressing-down. “Unfortunately, I have no idea.”
Giles had been drinking. Heavily.
He had always been fond of beer in a laddish sort of way, but for a solid week he had been anaesthetizing himself by means of Ian Strindberg’s abundant liquor cabinet. Conveniently, he found out that he was a quiet a
nd mournful drunk. He kept to his guest bedroom and made no noise, broke no furniture or object d’arts. Ian was too busy at work and too non-empathic to intervene beyond asking, the few times their paths crossed, “All right, mate? Sure there isn’t anything I can do?”
Giles felt adrift and increasingly desperate. One of the bullets had been meant for him. He should be the one dead and buried, not Lenny Moore. In his boozy fog he wondered what non-existence felt like. He didn’t pay heed to notions of the afterlife but he’d never considered himself an atheist either. Not even an agnostic. He had simply never thought about death and its aftermath on a personal level before. Did the lights just go out? Did one have any sense of non-being?
People were disappearing. Emily Loughty was missing. Eight people from South Ockendon were missing. Tracy Wiggins’s husband had been told she was dead but the story behind it, her remains returned in an urn, all of it smelled rotten. People were disappearing and at the same time unknown people were appearing. Two intruders at the Iver North waterworks that were too special to be handled by the police. Multiple intruders on a quiet estate in South Ockendon, tagged as bio-terrorists, yet there were no arrests or cogent updates about the investigation. Three points on a map: Dartford, South Ockendon, Iver. Connect the dots and all of them ran over the great MAAC oval.
What happens when you die, Giles thought?
If there’s an afterlife, where is it?
Does it exist on a spiritual plane?
What if it wasn’t spiritual; what if it was tangible?
He began to cry. Goddamn MAAC. Goddamn it! What secrets were so devastating that the government was willing to kill to protect them? What Pandora’s box had MAAC opened?
He looked at the bottle of gin and then Ian’s laptop, unopened since the murders. Both were on his bedside table. His hand wavered between the two.
He knew what he had to do.
He reached for the computer.
To cover their tracks Rix and Murphy stole three cars the night of the Hoxne massacre, one after another. They drove south without much purpose until daybreak when they found themselves on the outskirts of Reading. Then they wandered another hour before Murphy spotted a sign for an Internet café, then treaded water for another hour waiting for it to open. Christine had passed Rix some money before they parted and they used it to buy access from a suspicious clerk who sniffed at them then showed them how to log onto the Internet from one of the booths.
“Never done this before?” the clerk asked, curious about their utter lack of savvy.
“Does it look like we have, sunshine?” Murphy said.
Five minutes later they were done.
“You’ve got fifty-five minutes left,” the clerk said, looking up from his magazine.
“Yeah?” Murphy said. “What’s our refund then?”
“No refunds for unused time.”
“Tell the bloke who owns the Internet that he’s a scumbag,” Murphy said.
Rix knew the way. He’d been to Poole for bucket and spade holidays when he was a boy and Lyme Regis wasn’t much farther down the coast. In three hours they were there.
Crawling down Broad Street, rubbernecking for street signs, they came to the Rock Point Inn. Beyond, the sea was tranquil and shimmering in the midday sunshine.
“Wouldn’t half like a pie and a pint,” Murphy said.
“No way, Murph,” Rix said. “Let’s get done what needs doing. I’m going to ask that lad.”
He opened the window and asked a boy if he knew where Kingsway was. The boy pointed the way and soon they were driving down a street lined with white and pastel semi-detached houses.
“There it is,” Murphy said, pointing at the number on a mailbox.
“My heart’s beating out of my chest,” Rix said, pulling to the curb.
“It’s hate that’s goosing it along, not nerves,” Murphy said.
Rix went to the front door of a pale yellow house, took a big breath, and worked the knocker.
He heard a television playing and a man calling out, “Yeah, yeah, hang on.”
The door opened. He had to be in his mid-eighties but he looked good for his age, robust and beefy with a ruddy complexion from baking in sun and marinating in booze. His hair was pure white but he still had all of it and it was parted the same way that Rix had remembered.
“Hello Jack,” Rix said. “Remember me?”
The man looked at him blankly for a moment.
Then his face contorted in horror.
He fled from the door, heading toward the back of the house, saying to himself, “It can’t be, it can’t be.”
He reached the door to the back garden and flung it open.
Murphy was standing there, blocking his way.
The man’s ruddy complexion turned the color of the nice cream door and he fainted dead away.
36
The tension was making everyone mute.
The South Ockendon eight had dwindled to four. They rode together in one of the covered wagons. The absence of Alice was weighing on all of them, especially Tracy who had come to rely on her strength. Charlie had forced himself to pick up some of the slack by playing the clown but his heart wasn’t in it. By the first night of their journey he dropped the act and became sullen. Martin and Tony sat across from them, exchanging worried looks.
The best road from Paris to the coast was also the most dangerous one. John had put everyone on rover alert. He had tempered his warnings with the reassurance that their protectors, a hundred Italian soldiers chosen by Garibaldi, were capable of dealing with threats from all manner of predators roaming the countryside. But all of them knew that an attack could still happen. They also knew time was running short. They had five days to get to Dartford and it would take almost two more days to get to Bulogne-sur-Mer. That left three days to make the crossing and they didn’t even know if they could find safe passage across the channel. John had considered taking steam cars to shave a day or more from their timeline but without armed soldiers keeping pace, the women and children would be far too vulnerable.
At their last brief rest stop in a glade, Martin had told Tony, “I just want to tell you, I’ve made a decision.”
“About what?” Martin had replied.
“If we don't make it back in time, if the whole MAAC thing doesn’t come off as advertised—basically if we’re stuck here, then I don’t want to carry on. The thought of being trapped here is beyond impossible.”
“I don’t want you talking like that.”
“I’m sorry, but I have to. You’re a doctor. You’re also my rock. I don’t think I’ll be able to do it myself so I want you to do it for me.”
Martin’s stoicism had cracked a bit and he hid his wet eyes with a hand. “Would you please stop!”
“Just tell me you’ll help me,” Martin had begged.
Martin lowered his hand and showed his red eyes. “I will help you and then I’ll do it too.”
The rest of the Earthers were in the other covered wagon. The children slept on the floor at their feet and the six adults took the hard benches.
“Look at those angels,” Delia said, adjusting their blanket. “Dreaming peacefully without a care in the world.”
“Sam wants a sword just like Trevor’s,” Arabel said.
Trevor was chuffed. “Did he really say that?”
“He did. This morning.”
“What did you tell him?” Emily asked.
“That he was too young.”
“Good,” Emily said.
“I’ll buy him a plastic one when we get home,” Trevor said.
Arabel’s mood turned. “If we get stuck here, he’ll have to learn to use a real one.”
“Don’t even think that,” Emily said.
Arabel asked, “What are our chances of getting home? Tell me please while the children are asleep. I want the truth.”
Enough eyes fell upon John that he felt obliged to answer. “We’ve overcome a lot of obstacles to get as far as we’ve g
otten. If we get a few lucky breaks we’ll make it.”
“Seems to me the biggest problem is finding a boat,” Trevor said.
Brian had been quiet for hours but he piped up, “Bound to be one. Boats and the sea go together like tea and milk.”
“God, I’d love a cuppa,” Delia said. “And a plate of jam-filled biscuits. And … Oh, I’ll shut up. No more talk of delectables, but if we get back I’m never going to complain about the canteen at work again.”
Yet once triggered, the ever present food conversation took wing. They traded favorites and revised their first- thing-I’m-going-to-eat list.
Emily stopped the flight of fancy with a non sequitor that had been weighing on her. “Paul said he knew how to fix this.”
“There’s a lot of smart people working on the problem back home,” John said. “Didn’t you say they were the best minds?”
“They are and I hope they have an answer,” Emily said. “I only know that I don’t have one and I’ve done little else than work through thought experiments. Paul was the expert in strangelets. Not in MAAC, not in the UK, but in the world. No one had his depth of theoretical knowledge. It’s a tragedy I didn’t have a chance to talk with him.”
The wagon stopped abruptly, waking the children.
John quickly sidestepped them on his way out. Trevor and Brian followed, gathering weapons just in case.
“Want a bow?” Brian asked.
“I’ve been getting on pretty well with a sword lately,” Trevor said.
“Whatever works, mate,” Brian said. “Whatever works.”
In the other wagon, Charlie hopped out too and ran toward John’s group.
The wagon driver pointed to the halted column twenty yards ahead. He spoke no English and by way of explanation offered an exaggerated palms-up shrug.
The captain of the Italians, one of Garibaldi’s trusted underlings rode back to the wagon. It was dusk and the woods lining the narrow road seemed to press against their column.