Rita splashed water on her face, then took the tissues with shame-faced thanks.
“Don’t apologize, girl.” Angie leaned against the countertop. “You weren’t to know.”
“Oh God, I had no idea.”
“Do you think your—employers—knew?”
“That’s—” Rita wadded up the sodden tissues into a ball and threw them, underarm, through the open doorway of a stall, then she turned to Angie. “You think they knew about her? About the adoption thing?”
Angie nodded. Then she took Rita in her arms and hugged her. She was shivering. “Triggery issue, huh?” The point of Rita’s jaw dug into her collarbone. “Well, it was a really fucking weird coincidence—if it was a coincidence, hmm? And the kidnapping. A cynic might wonder if they set you up. To set her up. She’s something important in the, the BLACK RAIN time line’s government, isn’t she?”
Rita hugged her back, painfully hard, then let go abruptly. “Let’s t-talk to Kurt,” she said, wiping her eyes. She wasn’t wearing mascara or eyeliner, Angie noted: she hadn’t been when she’d picked her up, hadn’t put any on for this outing. Almost like she’d unconsciously been expecting to lose her shit.
“Can you face him?”
“Not his fault.” Rita hugged herself. “That woman. What I did to her, without understanding—”
“You were set up to push her buttons. Weren’t you?”
Rita’s expression hardened. “I wonder how much they know about her? And why they didn’t tell me? Yes, it smells like a setup. And Grandpa taught me never to assume coincidence when enemy action is possible.”
“Now you’re thinking like a Wolf…”
Back in the food court, they found Kurt poking at the wreckage of his pizza with a plastic fork. He turned a world-weary face toward his granddaughter. “I am sorry: I do not think about things from that angle.”
“It’s not just you.” Rita took his right hand and squeezed his knuckles. “I sometimes lash out. When I see her again I’ll find it hard to look her in the eye.” Angie made eye contact with Kurt. He nodded, slowly. “What?” asked Rita.
“Your employers recruited you straight into a sandbox,” said Kurt. “They faked an abduction. They fed you lies about the woman who is your birth mother. That is not how you handle a friendly, Rita. It stinks. They are playing a deep game, and you are the pawn who is sacrificed to keep the other side’s queen locked down.”
“But I— What can I do?” She looked at her grandfather, then back at Angie. “What am I going to do?”
“Nothing yet. You must orient, observe, and decide before you act.” Kurt nodded to himself, then reached a decision. “But it is time to start a new game of Spies, just like when you were little. Only this won’t be a learning game. Rita, you will be the Double. Your mission is to learn everything you can about these people—”
“Which people?”
“Both your DHS controllers and the New American Commonwealth. Everyone who is not us, who is not a Wolf. Our first loyalty is to our own: you are ours, and we are yours, and everyone else may be a threat. Angie will play the part of your Resident: you will brief her on everything that happens. Angie: I am your Control and you will keep me informed. We will discuss protocol later. I will handle threat assessment and provide analysis. For now, we can expect no significant developments until your next jaunt to see your, your birth mother. I don’t expect the Colonel to expend you as a weapon against her until your utility as a source is exhausted, which gives us at least one, more likely three or four, visits to BLACK RAIN. Thereafter, though … thereafter I may have to ask you to give me a piggyback ride across to this Commonwealth. I think your birth mother and I will have much to discuss.”
IRONGATE, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020
“Sir?” The Transport Police sergeant on the front desk in Irongate looked worried as he covered the mike of his telephone handset with one palm: “I’ve got a call from the front desk—a Mr. Pierrepoint is askin’ to see you.”
“Tell him I’m busy—” Commander Jackson stopped in mid-speech, then mouthed two monosyllables. “Wait. Pierrepoint? Is he official?”
The sergeant on reception nodded vigorously. “Says ’e’s from the Special Counter-Espionage Police.” He raised the handset and spoke into it, briefly. “With an escort of doorbreakers from the Revolutionary Defense Force. Living it large in our lobby!” He looked indignant, as well he might. The RDF were far from popular with the official police forces of the Commonwealth.
“Shit.” Jackson took a deep breath. “Tell the front desk to send Mr. Pierrepoint up to see me. Alone—he leaves his heavies downstairs or he doesn’t get his toe in the door. I’ll be in my office.” Jackson stood and looked round the suite. “You’ve had your show. Get back to work,” he said curtly. The heads that had been paused in motion, listening in on his instructions, bent back to their desks. Once again, the clatter of teletype keyboards filled the room.
Richard Jackson closed his office door behind him and leaned against it for a moment, eyes closed, composing himself. He hadn’t risen to Commander in the Transport Police by virtue of being easily rattled or having a thin skin. He got there through being good at managing the daily legwork of lifting fare-dodgers and deterring wreckers and royalists from messing up the permanent way. But to attract the attention of two competing factions within the Party inner circle was disturbing. Pierrepoint’s remit included internal affairs and counter-espionage, and his minions included the SCEP men. Bad enough that Olga Thorold had showed up in person to whisk the hapless chit of a world-walker girl off to some dungeon in the capital, without Adrian Holmes’s personal fixer ringing the doorbell a couple of hours later with a squad of black-uniformed political thugs for backup.
By the time the expected knock on the door came, Jackson had found his center again. “Come in,” he called. Sitting behind his desk, using his uniform as a shield, he focused on the job in hand: convincing this bastard to piss off back to New London as rapidly as possible.
“Sir.” One of the front-desk sergeants opened the door, then stood to attention and saluted.
Well, isn’t that wonderful, Jackson thought as he stood and bowed minutely. “Mr. Pierrepoint, do come in. I apologize for the wait: we’ve been quite busy today.”
Pierrepoint entered the room. A thirtyish man, skinny and with a diffident air, he walked like a pigeon: stiff-legged and with swiveling eyes, as if he was on the lookout for enemies of the revolution who might leap out from behind police station filing cabinets, twirling their suspiciously French mustachios while brandishing poisoned daggers sheathed in Royalist propaganda tracts. He looked harmless enough at first sight: a misleading impression, of course. “Ah, you must be Commander Jackson.” Pierrepoint unfolded a rumpled smile from the pockets of his cheeks. It didn’t extend to his eyes. “Shall we skip the preliminaries?”
“I’m sure you’re a very busy man,” said Jackson. “Why don’t you have a seat and tell me what you want?”
“The world-walker. Why did you hand her over?” Pierrepoint remained standing.
“Well, sir, as you doubtless already know, all world-walkers are the responsibility of the Ministry of Intertemporal Technological Intelligence. They’re subject to the Elite Conscription Act of 2003, and as such any adult world-walkers who are not already assigned to duties by the Ministry may be construed to be draft-dodgers. When a duly accredited director of said Ministry arrived here with a warrant for the world-walker’s arrest, I had no choice but to hand the prisoner over.” Jackson frowned. “Despite having brought prior charges against her, I had no alternative, sir. Trespassing on the permanent way and riding without a ticket are minor offenses covered under the bylaws, while evading the ECA—if that is indeed what she was doing, as was alleged—would be a serious felony.” He crossed his arms.
“Ah. And it never occurred to you that a world-walker from a hostile para-time power might fall within the remit of the Special Counter-Espionage Police?” Pierrepoint lo
oked amiably quizzical, in much the same way that the gape of a venomous snake might resemble a grin.
“I saw no evidence of espionage,” Jackson said, minding his words carefully. “She’s not French, and the, ah, United States of America is not listed in the schedule to the Espionage Act that identifies designated hostile powers.”
“That’s an oversight! She’s a damn foreigner—”
“And the Act was drafted rather tightly, was it not, lest it be used as a convenient bludgeon by the overenthusiastic?” Jackson mirrored Pierrepoint’s unfriendly smile. Both of them had been young head-breakers during the street fighting that followed the revolution. Only the First Man Adam’s turn away from revenge and toward cautious reconciliation had prevented a widespread bloodbath. God alone knew what had motivated his change of heart, but in Jackson’s view the Commonwealth had dodged a bullet—a bullet to the head, self-inflicted. Some, like Pierrepoint’s master, hadn’t forgiven the Royalists for the atrocities they’d committed back in the day. They still bided their time, holding a torch for the witch hunt they hoped might someday erupt again. “Mr. Pierrepoint, it is my job to enforce the law. I can’t simply bend it on a whim. So on the basis of legal advice, I handed the suspect over to the agency responsible for dealing with her kind.”
He half-expected Pierrepoint to swear petulantly, but the man had more self-control than he expected. Pierrepoint merely nodded. “Your point is taken, Commander, as, I trust, is mine. I understand your inability to keep her from falling into the tentacles of MITI, but I submit that MITI marches to a different drum, as it were, to a different beat from the other organs of this fine Commonwealth that we both serve. It might have been the lawful thing to deliver her into their grip, but it wasn’t terribly clever. So I have two requests to make of you—mind, these are merely polite requests: I have no right to order you around. Firstly, should the woman—or any others of her kind—come into your custody again, would you please notify my office immediately? It would save an inordinate deal of annoyance later. And secondly, for the record, would you mind giving me a copy of the charge sheet laid against her, relating to the transport offenses you mentioned?”
BERLIN, TIME LINE TWO/THREE, AUGUST 2020
For an illegal agent in a foreign country, the third most risky activity one can undertake is to go about in public. To visit a land where one is a stranger, with speech and mannerisms that set one apart as an alien, is to constantly invite scrutiny. And in an empire which requires its subjects to carry internal passports; where informers hang out in every café or beer hall; where everyone inhabits a pervasive media fog of warnings about the need for vigilance against spies and revolutionaries: in such an empire, to invite scrutiny is to risk arrest, purely as a precautionary measure.
But if there’s an equal risk to being seen in public, it’s avoiding being seen in public. Normal people don’t huddle in hotel rooms from one week to the next. Normal people don’t shy away from contact. There is a fine line to be walked between courting the risk of scrutiny and drawing attention to oneself by furtive behavior.
Hulius followed a protocol designed to deflect the wrong kind of attention by providing a semblance of public interaction, while not giving much away. Early each morning he rose and ate breakfast in the coach house’s barroom. Then he walked and caught the tram to the furrier’s warehouse, within which he locked himself away for most of a working day. He only surfaced to return to his room in mid-evening. At lunchtime he sometimes visited one of the neighboring beer halls or restaurants: if asked, he freely discussed his business. He’d been hired, he told anybody with ears to listen, to do a thorough stock-take and audit of the warehouse. The absentee purchaser was a cheapskate who was only paying for one auditor, and the work was going slowly: the place had been allowed to fall into disarray and chaos, the former owner a compulsive hoarder who allowed bales of waste scraps and low-value rabbit pelts to pile atop valuable arctic fox or ermine. Hulius’s crib-notes were copious and detailed. They were also a fiction, generated by a team of back-office busybodies, and updated regularly via e-mail to a tablet which he kept in the doppelgängered premises in time line two. His listeners’ eyes tended to glaze over rapidly once he got his head of steam up, and after he ignored their halfhearted attempts to engage him in political debate or illegal gambling, instead turning the subject to an enthusiastic tutorial on the various grades of commercial cowhide, the local police informers filed him under “annoying but harmless” and learned to ignore him.
This suited Hulius just fine, because most days he went home with a splitting headache.
World-walking too frequently was a recipe for disaster, but he had established a pattern of working long hours and had built himself a doppelgängered hide in the forest in time line one. He now had the luxury of an hour to rest up and recover between jaunts. If anyone had broken into the warehouse during the long afternoons they might have wondered at finding it deserted, but Hulius considered it a low risk. Every morning he returned to the warehouse, locked the door, then world-walked first to the forest hide and then to the apartment in the Berlin of skyscrapers and Internet access. And he only returned to the capital of the imperial province ten hours later, grimacing and dry-swallowing a cocktail of painkillers and antihypertensives.
In between, he worked on mission prep and took flying lessons.
Hulius was not a professional pilot, but years ago, back in the early days of the Clan survivor’s exile, Rudi had drafted him into a scheme to train world-walkers as aviators. World-walking while flying turned out to be a bad idea—nearly as bad as playing drinking games behind the steering wheel. Air pressure, humidity, wind direction, and weather all varied semi-randomly between time lines. Even if the pilot wasn’t trying to cope with a blinding near-migraine experience, simultaneously losing thirty millibars of pressure, most of your visibility, and thirty knots of headwind made for a flying experience which could euphemistically be described as exciting. It went a lot better with the aid of an autopilot, an up-to-date weather report from the target time line, and either several thousand feet of extra altitude or an aircraft that had multiple engines or was lighter than air. Such as the Continental Bombardment Force’s high-altitude strategic bombers, or the DPR’s airship fleet. Single-engined light planes need not apply.
But despite the conventional wisdom, the DPR planners had dreamed up a scheme that relied on it. Somebody probably thought it was a Really Neat Idea: somebody who wasn’t expecting to fly the maneuver themselves but secretly wanted to be Jason Bourne when they grew up. Hulius, when he first heard about it, used a variety of choice expletives.
The Cirrus SR22T was a modern, single-engined light aircraft. A four-seater made out of carbon-fiber composites and equipped with a glass cockpit, its principal claim to fame was the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System: a ballistic rescue parachute able to soft-land the plane vertically if all else failed. (The airframe would probably be totaled, but the passengers should walk away from the crash uninjured.) Hulius was to exfiltrate the Princess from time line three into time line two, the Germany of ICE trains and lasers, by way of a short world-walk into time line one and out again. (There was no direct route between time line three and time line two.) He would then drive her to an airfield, take off, and fly due west across the Atlantic. Once over the designated recovery area, he would world-walk to time line one, make sure his transponder was squawking, pop the chute, and world-walk again to time line three—all in under a minute. The Commonwealth Navy would then do the rest, including rescuing the ditched plane and holding the bucket for him to throw up into.
Advantages: the Princess would simply vanish from the French Empire’s territory and reappear in the Commonwealth, as if by magic. There would be no need to procure a valid passport for her in time line two, or to coach her past airport security in an unfamiliar world. By flying her out via time line two the pilot would have access to positioning satellites, air traffic control, METARs, and the full panoply of support for general
aviation that was absent from the howling wilderness of time line one. Nor would he run the gauntlet of the French Empire’s air defense network and Atlantic Fleet in time line three. He would be able to guarantee his arrival to within a mile or two of the designated pick-up point. And if he had to abort the mission partway, well, there were contingency plans.
In practice … Hulius had learned to fly in the Commonwealth, where glass cockpits and ballistic recovery parachutes were the stuff of magazine articles about the white heat of technology rather than part of the curriculum of flight schools. Nor was he entirely sanguine about world-walking twice in mid-air, then parachuting into the North Atlantic in autumn with a frightened princess as a passenger. The phrase “crazy-ass James Bond stunt” had been uttered more than once when the plan was explained to him. Certain points had been criticized scathingly, and the plan amended accordingly. Not dropped: merely changed. For one thing, there was now a boat with a weather station in mid-ocean in time line one, with a courier standing by to give a meteorological update by short-wave radio before he attempted to world-walk. And for another thing, Hulius was currently driving out to the nearest general aviation field three or four times a week, for a couple of hours of touch-and-go landings and cross-country hops under visual flight rules as he cross-trained on the Cirrus. Not to mention hours spent cramming meteorology and navigation refresher courses, and renewing his instrument rating.
Not even the most starry-eyed of the DPR’s mission planners were so impractical as to ignore the agent in place’s impassioned demand for a training work-up before he attempted to put into practice a story line stolen from Mission: Impossible.
The identity the DPR had supplied for Hulius—an Indonesian passport showing him to be of Dutch extraction—was getting a real workout this month. Luckily Germany had managed to cling to its constitutional aversion to surveillance (which was itself a hangover from the downfall of a far nastier police state than the one currently waging the Global War On Para-time). While his identity would be disclosed to the police and security agencies every time he filed a flight plan, it wouldn’t—shouldn’t—be exported to the USA unless he filed a plan with North America as his destination, or did something else to attract the direct attention of the Bundespolizei. Consequently, Hulius was punctilious in his behavior. Using taxis and public transport, refraining from alcohol, tobacco, or narcotics, paying bills and filing all the necessary paperwork correctly. He was even at pains to maintain his cover with the flight school, chatting with the instructors and letting it be known that the Cirrus was his personal obsession, one he’d been saving for over a five year period. After completing his current job he was going to fly it home to Bandung in one of those epic international vacation-adventures any plane owner daydreamed about: across the Atlantic via the Azores and the Caribbean, across Central America, island-hopping all the way home across the Pacific and Australasia. It was great cover for the preparations for his upcoming real mission.
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