Yesterday's Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  I laugh. It sounds worryingly bitter. “I’m starting to think you’re right,” I say. I don’t know how much I’m joking.

  Still, what about the crowd I’m with now? I could lose my job over this. Felicity told me not to do this.

  Felicity is smart and sensible.

  Felicity also just watched as I got put on probation.

  Felicity also slept with Coleman.

  I look at Aiko across the table. She’s looking right at me, open eyes, clear face. A little bit of concern. A little bit of a smile. Some secret joke I’m not sharing. I need to work out what I’m doing, how big a mistake this is. And how do I broach this delicately?

  “Clyde says you’re a conspiracy theory nut.”

  Probably not like that.

  But she smiles as she rolls her eyes. “You know,” she says, “they’re only theories if you don’t have evidence.”

  I laugh. Because she’s making fun of me, and she’s doing it pitch perfect.

  But she doesn’t laugh with me. She doesn’t even crack a smile.

  “You’re serious?” I say.

  “What do you mean by a conspiracy theory?” she says.

  “Well…” I shake my head. It still feels loose with all the drugs. I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. “The moon landings,” I say.

  “First one’s totally fake. You can smell the epochal fear coming off Kennedy through the tapes. They were showing TV images of that come hell or high water. But they got the third Apollo mission up there, for sure.”

  “Nine-eleven?” I ask.

  “Perpetrated by the US government. Because of oil money. Obviously.”

  Oh Jesus, she’s serious. She’s totally serious. “The assassination of JFK?” I try.

  “You think I’m going to say the CIA did it, don’t you?” She’s smiling. I’m not though.

  “It was actually organized by the Gnomes of Zurich,” she says.

  She can’t have just said that. She can’t. Not to my face.

  “The who?” I ask.

  “Cabal of financiers living in Switzerland. They control about ninety percent of global wealth. JFK was a destabilizing factor for them. See they were heavily invested in Nixon. So they worked with him and the CIA to take JFK out. Actually, it’s funny, but it was actually the elder George Bush who was the trigger man. He denies it now, but he was secretly working for the CIA at the time. Which, I mean, totally set him up for the legacy presidency.” She squints off into the distance beyond my shoulder. “The US is really messed up with shit like that.”

  She’s serious. She’s totally dead serious. “You really believe all this don’t you?” I say. I put my head down on the table. And Clyde was right. Felicity was right. They’re all right. Even Coleman. I’m such a fucking imbecile.

  “Belief implies faith,” Aiko says. She’s taking my skepticism pretty well. On the other hand this is probably not the first time she’s gotten this reaction. “Faith implies a lack of evidence.”

  “Evidence?” I say, not quite managing to look up. “Don’t you think if there was evidence to support all this then we’d know?”

  “Arthur.” Her tone brings my head up. She looks at me as if I’m a child. “There’s about a thousand documentaries on the internet demonstrating how nine-eleven was an inside job. It’s out there. It’s just people don’t listen. They don’t look. They take the accepted cultural view.”

  “I don’t…” I shake my head. I have no idea what she’s talking about. I don’t know why I’m talking to her.

  “Do you believe in gravity, Arthur?” she asks me.

  “What? Yes. Of course.” I’m not sure if it’s the non sequiturs or the drugs, but this is getting hard to follow.

  “Why?”

  I blink at her. “Why?” I repeat. I’m not sure I understand the question.

  “Because it’s the best explanation for events, right?” she continues, careless of my confusion. “Things fall down. A force attracts objects with mass. It makes sense. Doesn’t it?”

  And yes, of all the things we’ve covered so far, that is the one that does make sense. So I nod.

  “Have you ever read Newton’s paper on gravity? Have you ever read any papers on it at all?”

  I think about it. Mr. Carper teaching me physics. Me sitting by the window and fantasizing about Sandra Watkins in the row in front of me. Not many primary sources involved in any of that as far as I can recall. I shake my head.

  “Then you’re a believer in gravity, Agent Arthur.” Aiko fixes me with a dead-on stare. The sort Kurt Russell gives the bad guy just before he pulls the gun and blows the man’s stone-cold heart out his back. “You’ve accepted a common cultural belief. You don’t know, no matter how deeply you believe you do. You’ve taken gravity on faith.”

  I feel like I should have issues with that argument but I’m having trouble finding them through the fuzzy edges of my thinking.

  “I’m not criticizing you, by the way.” Aiko lets her face soften as she watches me try to puzzle through her logic. “I’m with you. I’m not hunting down the original paper. I’ll accept the popular theory. Maybe if I was into quantum physics or some such then I’d be motivated, but I’m not. But when one of these big cultural beliefs looks like it’s really having a serious effect on my life, on my ability to live the way I want to, then I’m motivated to go and find out the truth. I’ll do the research, look at the evidence, be open-minded. And I’ve seen proof. And I don’t believe in anything. But I know a whole number of things that don’t agree with those common cultural beliefs.”

  It’s a good speech. It’s delivered with conviction. It’s delivered calmly. She’s a rational girl who happens to subscribe to a bunch of theories people have labeled as irrational. And considering what I’ve seen maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to judge.

  “Shall I tell you why I think you’re here, Agent Arthur?” says Aiko.

  She’s taking charge, I notice. The way Felicity does.

  I bat that thought away. It seems errant and ill-advised. Instead I just nod again.

  “I think you’re here, Agent Arthur,” Aiko says, leaning in and pilfering a handful of my crisps, “because you’ve got proof that a cultural belief is wrong, and you’re bumping heads with people who don’t want to hear it.”

  She snarfs the fistful of crisps and leans back, a satisfied expression on her face.

  I on the other hand just look generally perplexed.

  Aiko rolls her eyes. “Time magic,” she says. “Conspiracy theories. I’m making a comparison. Creating common ground.”

  “Oh!” The penny drops.

  “Are you really high right now?” She seems genuinely interested.

  “Just a little,” I say. “I think. Mostly painkillers.”

  She smiles. “You’re kind of fun when you’re high, Agent Arthur.”

  “You can just call me Arthur, you know.”

  “I know.” She’s still smiling. I’m being toyed with. The mouse while she’s the cat. And, as I understand it, the mouse rarely comes out of these things well. Time to change the subject. Get back to why I’m here.

  “Time magic,” I say.

  “Of course.” Aiko smiles. She still resembles a Cheshire cat.

  “So,” I say, “and as a caveat I really shouldn’t be telling you this.”

  “Understood.” A nod from her. She finally lets the smile fade, playing the attentive student.

  “The Russians were in Trafalgar Square today,” I say.

  “I know that.” She looks as if I just revealed to her the great and wonderful secret that the sky is blue.

  “You do?”

  “I’ve just gone on and on about how I am relatively adept at navigating to the truth and avoiding cultural misdirection put about by such things as government-sponsored mass media. I’m perfectly capable of working out what’s a set of demands by magical terrorists and what’s a publicity stunt gone awry.”

  In some ways it’s reassuring to
know that our cover stories are seen through. I always feel more effort should be dedicated to duping the public. When it’s easy, I lose a little bit of faith in my humanity.

  “Alright,” I say. “Well the Russians and MI37 also had a bit of a disagreement. It got physical.” She rolls her eyes. “I know you know,” I say. “I’m just giving background. Anyway, I became…” I hesitate over the wording, “separated from the main fight.” She raises her eyebrows but I plunge on, ignoring her. “I came across two more Russians,” I say. “They were hanging back. They were talking about events in Trafalgar Square being a distraction. The whole thing about nuking London being a distraction.” And now I do have her attention. “They were talking about a woman called Katerina being at Big Ben—”

  “Where the Chronometer is,” Aiko interrupts me.

  And that was it. That’s what I’d been talking about. Clyde and I. The Chronometer. Located in Big Ben. Protected by an anti-magic field and ninjas. I remember now.

  Time magic. Again. Around and around it goes. And I still can’t find my way to the center of it all.

  Which brings me back to why I’m here.

  “There’s more,” I say. “This,” I wave at my battered face, “happened because of a fight with one of them. And I’m not the world’s greatest fist-fighter, but normally I don’t suck this bad.”

  Aiko looks more doubtful than I think is kind.

  “I look this way,” I say with gravitas, “because he was a teleporter.” I let that word hang there.

  Her eyes go wide. And she gets it. She gets the significance of that word.

  “You saw it?” she says.

  I nod. And this is the reaction this sort of news should get. This is appropriate. And even though the pain is starting to cut through the drugs, I smile.

  “They’ve done it.” Aiko is nodding to herself. “They’ve actually done it. Intradimensional magic.” She’s wide-eyed with wonder.

  “You realize,” I say, because I need to check, “that that’s not a good thing, right?”

  “No, no, of course not. I know. But still… Christ.” She bites her bottom lip.

  And this is it for her, I realize. This is what it’s all about. Where her involvement in this supernatural world circles back to her love of conspiracy theories. Hidden knowledge. That’s her personal crack, and I just gave her a hit off the pipe.

  “You believe me?” I ask, just to double-check. I feel I should partly because now I know her personal issue with belief and partly because I’m decreasingly familiar with the experience and some verbal confirmation would be good.

  “Well.” Aiko looks up at me, bites her lip again. “I haven’t seen it with my own eyes, but let’s say you’re a credible source. I don’t see why you’d just come here to mess with me.”

  I smile again, a small one, but it runs deep.

  We sit there silently for a while, she basking in her newfound knowledge, me in my newfound believer. A cult of two.

  “You going to eat those?” She indicates the crisps.

  “All yours.” She takes the pack, pounds down another fistful. “You know what I don’t get?” she says. I shake my head. “If they’ve worked out how to bend time and space, why would they be interested in the Chronometer? They don’t need it. Why go to the bother of luring you guys to Trafalgar Square just so one of them can sightsee?”

  I shake my head. Try to think through the fog of fading drugs and blossoming pain.

  “There has to be some limit to what they’re doing,” I say. “They have to need the Chronometer instead. Maybe they can’t travel so far, or…” I stare into the depths of my coke.

  “When would they want to go back to?” Aiko asks.

  “Chernobyl?” I venture. It’s the vaguest of guesses. It just seems like it has to be the answer to something.

  No response from Aiko. I look up from the coke to see if she’s looking at me like I’m an errant child again. Somehow it’s both an aggravating and an endearing look at the same time.

  But she’s not giving me a look like that. Instead she’s giving me wide-eyed fear.

  “Oh my God,” she says.

  “What?” I glance over my shoulders looking for Russians, for a pissed off Coleman with a shotgun. There’s nothing there.

  “Chernobyl,” she says. She’s seeing something I don’t. “The space-time experiment. The definitive one. The one that would have allowed the USSR to win the cold war. They know how to do it right. That’s what we’re saying, right? That they figured out how to do space-time magic.”

  And it hits me then, the fullness of it.

  “They want to go back,” I say. “Back to Chernobyl. They want to do it right. They want to rewrite twenty-five years of history.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  We spend the rest of the evening stress-testing the idea. Double-checking ourselves for paranoia.

  But it holds water. It makes sense. No matter how we come at it, the facts actually tally with this theory. There’s only one last objection I keep butting my head against.

  “They can’t do it,” I say.

  “Why not?” Aiko looks a little frustrated at this blanket statement after three hours of solid discussion and napkin diagrams.

  “Because they’ll be killed. There’s about a hundred soldiers in there.”

  “So they just teleport past them. Go right to the Chronometer itself, wind it back, and goodbye goes today.”

  “They can’t,” I say, remembering the conversation with Clyde clearly now. “There’s an anti-magic field of some sort around the Chronometer.”

  “An anti-magic field?” Both her eyebrows bounce up.

  “Not my words.” I wave my hand.

  “And I’m the conspiracy theory nut?”

  We’re off-topic. “They can’t teleport in,” I repeat. “They have to face the guards. And several hundred or so of them. Special forces ninjas or some such. And I don’t care how good the Russians are, they won’t get past several hundred guys,” I catch her look, “or girls.”

  “So why was this Katerina at Big Ben today?” she asks. “Why give you guys a deadline of the seventeenth? I mean, that’s only eight days away now. Why go public at all?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know.” I shake my head. I genuinely feel like crap now. I slump against the booth and regret the platter of fish and chips.

  “You OK?” Aiko asks me.

  I shake my head.

  “You want me to give you a lift? My car’s not too far from here.”

  “No.” I shake my head again. “If I’m seen with you…” I trail off, not sure if the imagined repercussions will really be worse than the actual ones.

  “Agent Arthur,” Aiko says, “are you cheating on MI37 with me?” That cat-and-mouse smile is on her lips again.

  I smile too, despite myself. But I’m stopping things right here. I’m still pissed at Felicity, but I’m neither angry nor high enough to get stupid. “I should catch a cab.”

  She comes out and helps me flag one down. It’s still raining, but I’m rapidly losing the use of my arms.

  “We should talk more about this,” she tells me as I climb into the car.

  “Yes.” I nod. We should. But… “I’m going to have to run this past the others at MI37,” I say. Aiko deserves to know. Because when I tell them I won’t be able to mention her. And I don’t know what will happen to her role in things after that.

  “Sure.” She nods, like she was expecting it.

  “I’m not trying to shut you out of this.”

  She nods, resigned to the fact. “They won’t believe you,” she says, “just so you know.”

  She thinks the worst of them, and I can’t truly blame her. But maybe I know them better. “They’re not bad people,” I tell her.

  “You’re not a bad person, Arthur,” she says, “but do you believe me that powerful financiers in Switzerland organized JFK’s death?”

  She’s got a point.

  “You pla
nning on actually going anywhere tonight, mate?” asks the cabby.

  I make my apologies, say my final goodbye to Aiko. “I’ll call you,” I say.

  “I know,” she says. Again, the cat-and-mouse smile is back.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Not enough hours later

  “Wake up, Arthur. Wake up.” Soft but insistent words. Each one like a velvet-wrapped brick trying to cave in my skull.

  I crack an eyelid. Light lances in and tries to spear my brain.

  A silhouette—the only patch of blessed darkness—resolves itself into Felicity. She gives me a quick, tight smile. “We should talk,” she says. “But you needed sleep, so I let you go as late as I could. You’ve got ten minutes.”

  “Uuh,” I reply, and roll off the bed.

  The previous night slowly resolves out of the pain of waking. The beating. The conversation with Aiko. The startling wisdom of sneaking into my hotel room and going to bed without discussing the day’s events with Felicity while crashing off a potent cocktail of drugs.

  But now I’m sober, what do I say to her? I’m in no state for a fight.

  Felicity touches my arm as I find my feet. “Just…” she stops. Complicated emotions move beneath the surface of her skin. “You’ll do better today, Arthur. I know you will.”

  MI6. October 11th. Three minutes after nine.

  “What the hell is this, you tardy fucks?” Coleman eyes the collected mass of MI37 as we file into a conference room deep in the bowels of 85 Vauxhall Cross, the home of MI6.

  I feel my blood pressure climbing. My head is still thundering. But I need to roll with the abuse. I need to make nice and convince this gargantuan arsehole that what he believes to be impossible is real.

  Flop. Flop. Flop.

  That’s not helping.

  The MI6 conference room is nicer than the one we have in Oxford. There are no coffee mug rings on the table. There is, to my wide-eyed disbelief, a window.

  “Alright, alright,” Coleman blusters. “Shut up. Listen. Big waggly things on the side of your head. Better-looking on some than on others.” He winks at Devon. “Use them.”