The Reluctant Assassin

by Eoin Colfer

  Ninety-seven percent? thought Chevie. I bet those hazmat guys didn’t see the monkey arm, or they’d insist on waiting for a hundred percent.

  The black-clad hazmat team climbed through the hatch into the vehicle and sat on a low bench that ran around the wall. They were a cramped bunch in there and suddenly looked a little less tough, in spite of their scary suits and weapons. Chevie was reminded of her little foster brother and the night he and his buddies had camped out in the backyard, and were all tough as nails until something brushed against the tent at 2 a.m.

  Smart gave Chevie the Timekey he was holding. “I’ve cloned keys for me and the team, but this is still the prime key with all the access codes. In fact, the entire history of the project is on this key. Don’t lose it.”

  Chevie hung the key around her neck. “I’ll keep it under my pillow beside my photo of you.”

  Smart lowered his face mask, and Chevie saw that for the first time in nine months, he was genuinely smiling. “I’m going to miss you when this is all over, Savano. None of these guys ever gives me lip. Having said that, if you foul this up, I will have you stationed in the Murmansk office.”

  “We don’t have a Murmansk office.”

  “Oh, we’ve got one, but it’s really deep under the ice.”

  “I get the message. Don’t worry, Felix. The boy is secure, and I won’t let anyone else touch this Timekey.”

  Smart fixed his mask. “Good. Then in ten minutes, you get to go home early with a commendation and a clean record. But if any strangers come through that pod, remember your training: always go for the chest shot.”

  “I remember,” said Chevie. “Chest shot. The biggest target.”

  They shook hands, something that Chevie did not particularly want to do, not because of any germ phobia, but because in the boredom of the last nine months she had developed a fondness for action movies—and as any film buff knew, when two cops develop a grudging respect for each other, then the supporting cop is about to die.

  And if anyone’s a supporting player around here, she thought, it’s me.

  Smart ducked into the pod, squeezing onto the bench beside his teammates.

  He counted down from five with his fingers, then the entire team reached into the middle and overlapped hands. As they all touched, Smart tapped the pendant around his neck, the pod bloomed with orange light, and there was a loud whoosh, which immediately collapsed in on itself, creating a vacuum that Chevie could feel even from her position behind the computers.

  The noise rose to hurricane level, and Smart’s crew jittered as their molecules were torn apart. They turned orange, then split into orange bubbles, which spiraled into a mini-cyclone that spun faster and faster in the center of the pod. Chevie swore she could see body parts reflected in the bubbles.

  Reflected from where? Sub-atomia?

  The wormhole opened like a drain of light, a little smaller than Chevie had expected, if she was honest, yet it was big enough to slurp down the atoms of the hazmat team and their leader. The bubbles spiraled down, forcing themselves into the pulsating white circle at the pod’s base. It shone like a silver dollar, then spun as though someone had flipped it, each revolution sending a blinding beam across the basement.

  Chevie closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the wormhole had closed, leaving behind a wisp of smoke in the shape of a rough question mark.

  You and me both, Chevie thought, stepping forward warily, around the bank of computers, and peering into the pod’s belly. It was cold in there, and blobs of orange gel shivered on the steel walls.

  I hope those blobs weren’t important body parts.

  Smart and his team were gone, there was no doubt about it.

  I didn’t believe Orange’s story until this moment, Chevie realized. Not for a second. I am not sure if I believe it now.

  But there was no denying that her partner had disappeared, whether into a wormhole as planned, or boiled to jelly by old-school laser beams.

  I can worry about all of this when I am home in Malibu. Until then: act like a professional.

  Chevie decided to use the ten minutes to check through the video on Smart Sr.’s Timekey. See if there was anything more she could add to her report. And, you never know, there was always the ghost of a chance that Riley was telling the truth. But even if he was, there was no way the bogeyman he was so afraid of could make it to the future.

  Chevie suddenly saw a flash of Riley’s face: blue eyes wide, soot-blackened brow.

  No way in heaven, but perhaps a way in hell.

  She shivered. Maybe that boy was lying, but he sure believed he was telling the truth.

  Alt-Tek

  BEDFORD SQUARE. BLOOMSBURY. LONDON. 1898

  Albert Garrick hummed a nursery rhyme he’d learned on the knee of an Irish woman who had nannied for half of the Old Nichol back in the dark times. If there was one truth that Garrick held like iron in his core, it was that he would never return to the Old Nichol, not even to dodge the noose.

  “I would swing before I’d go back to that cesspit,” he vowed quietly through clenched teeth, as he did most nights.

  And in this case the term cesspit was not simply a storyteller’s exaggeration. The Old Nichol Street rookery was bordered by the common sewer and had been spared by the Great Fire, but the area had not seen refurbishment for its pauper residents since that time. A true cesspit. A great ditch of putrefaction, dotted with sties, hovels, and dung heaps, where the air sang with the sharp tang of industry and the lusty howls of hungry babes.

  Hell on earth.

  As Albert Garrick hummed, the words fluttered from the dark shadows of his past and the assassin sang them in a sweet tenor:

  One little babby, ten, twenty,

  Only last week I had wages plenty

  Then Nick came a-stealin’ my babbies away

  Now I begs for me supper every bloomin’ day.

  Garrick gave a dour chuckle. A cholera nursery rhyme, hardly the subject to soothe a little one’s fears, and more often it would keep him awake than send him to sleep, but then Garrick had lost a family of nine to the disease, and it would have claimed him and his father had clever Papa not slit the Adelphi Theatre’s caretaker’s throat in an alley one night, then turned up to claim his place the following morning. The caretaker had been Father’s bully chum; but it was life or death, and the Thames was chockfull of best friends. Barely a tide passed without someone’s bosom pal washing up on the mud banks at Battersea.

  For over a year the father and son slept in a secret space behind the Adelphi’s green room until they could afford digs far away from the Old Nichol.

  Garrick knelt on the elaborate fleur-de-lis rug in front of him, banishing memories of his past and concentrating on this night’s business. Carefully he placed the tips of his blades on the central petal of the pattern. Six knives in total, from stiletto to shiv to four-sided bo-shuriken throwing knives; but Garrick’s favorite was the serrated fish knife that had lived under his pillow since childhood.

  He tapped the wooden hilt fondly. It was true to say that Garrick held this blade in higher regard than any person of his acquaintance. Indeed, the magician had once risked prison by dallying to reclaim the blade from a mark who had snarled the knife in the farrago of his entrails.

  But I would sacrifice even you for a taste of magic , he admitted to the knife. In a heartbeat and gladly.

  Garrick knew that men would come to this place when their own magician was returned to them a cold corpse. The old man had promised as much—if you harm me, men will come to make sure you didn’t take my secrets—and Garrick believed those words to be true. The old man’s secrets were magical ones, and the men would come, because magic was power, which in turn was knowledge. And he who controlled knowledge controlled the world. Knowledge was a dangerous thing to have skittering around loose, and so men would come.

  A hanging circle of bats clattered in the broad chimney flue, wings slapping like a tanner’s brush.

 
Perhaps they sensed something? Perhaps the great moment was upon them?

  Come, gods of magic. Come and meet Albert Garrick’s steel, and we shall see if you die like men.

  Garrick pocketed his blades and melted into the basement shadows by the grandfather clock. When a traveler emerges from a wormhole and the quantum foam solidifies, there are quickly forgotten moments of clarity when the time traveler feels at one with the world.

  Everything is all right and outta sight , as Charles Smart quipped in the famous talk at Columbia University during his U.S. lecture tour. When those little virtual particles annihilate, a person gets literally plugged into the universe.

  Of course this was just quantum-jecture, another of Professor Smart’s terms. There could never be any proof of these brief moments of oneness, as they dissipated almost instantly and were all but impossible to record. Nevertheless, Professor Smart was correct: the “Zen Ten” does exist and was being experienced by the hazmat team as their bodies solidified and left them standing in short-lived awe, like kids at a fireworks display.

  The team stood on the bed, which Charles Smart had rigged as a receiver, wreathed in a wispy curtain of orange light that jerked back toward the wormhole that hovered behind them like a floating diamond.

  “Hey,” said the point man, crossbow dangling loosely from his fingers. “Do you guys see the parallels between Einstein and Daffy Duck now? That duck knew what he was talking about.”

  There would have followed another eight seconds or so of cosmic wisdom had not Garrick realized intuitively that fate would never again drop such a ripe opportunity in his lap. He attacked like a death-dealing dervish, springing from his hiding place onto the four-poster bed, where his opponents stood like cattle in the slaughterhouse pen.

  Use yer bows now, my boys , he thought.

  Garrick’s arrival on the receiver bed smashed the cocoon of bliss, and the hazmat team was instantly vigilant—all but Smart, who was still shrouded in quantum particles, which caused his extremities to warp and shudder as though underwater.

  Garrick’s first strike was the sweetest, as it drew hot red blood. He had been anxious that his steel might encounter armor of some kind, but though the material was exceptionally hardy, it could not resist the singing sharpness of his trusty fish knife. The man who had spoken of ducks sank to the sheets, his heart popped in his chest. A second black-clad newcomer arranged his fists in an approximation of a boxer’s stance and delivered a lightning hook to Garrick’s solar plexus.

  The assassin grunted in surprise, not pain. These dark demons were fast, but not magically so, and it would take a sight more gumption in a blow to penetrate the flat boards of muscle on Garrick’s torso.

  Garrick had studied many of the fighting arts, from Cornish wrestling to Okinawan karate, and chosen what he wanted from each one. These skills he augmented with his own speciality: sleight of hand. His was a style that could not be clinically recognized and defended against, as there was only one master and only one pupil.

  The magician engaged his unique skill and palmed the blade across to his left hand. The second man in black followed this move with a tilt of his head, but he did not cotton to the throwing spike that sprouted in Garrick’s right hand as though growing from the vein.

  By the time the man in black caught the deadly glint from the corner of his eye, it had already begun the flashing flight toward its target. Not toward the second man, but toward a third while the second was distracted by Garrick’s left hand, which held the fish knife.

  The second man realized this too late and had barely time to watch the throwing spike puncture his comrade’s chest before the fish knife slashed across his own jugular.

  So much blood, thought Garrick. An ocean of blood.

  Three of the hazmat team were down. The fourth opted to attack rather than be slaughtered where he stood. This guy was a real bruiser, who was famous in the FBI for having punched out a world boxing champion in a Vegas bar fight. He sent out a lightning right cross that would have floored an elephant and mentally mapped out his next three punches.

  He would not need them. Garrick ducked under the punch, rolled the man across his back, and met him on the other side with a prison shiv. The agent did not die immediately, but he would not tarry long.

  One left now, the one clothed in magical light. The man with true power. Garrick felt himself salivate.

  How to steal the magic? What was the technique? An incantation, perhaps? Or did they need a pentagram? Everything Garrick had tried in the past to suck even a spark of power from the ether now seemed garishly jokish. Candles and weeds, animal sacrifices. He had been a mere child scrabbling around in the dark. Here was true power in front of his eyes, if he could take it.

  Garrick pocketed the blade and dipped his icicle fingers into the orange light until he found the man’s neck. The tendons looked taut as gibbet ropes, but to the touch they were softer than butter. Garrick saw his own fingers somehow merge with the stranger’s body, and with the merging came a sharing of souls.

  I know this man, he realized. And he knows me.

  With his free hand Garrick ripped off the man’s mask, to demand the knowledge that he could not find in the man’s mind.

  “Tell me how to take your magic,” he demanded. “Give me your secrets.”

  The man seemed in a stupor. He saw but did not see, his gaze soft and blotted, a look Garrick had seen on the faces of soldiers emerging from chloroform.

  I know you, Albert Garrick, said the man, though his mouth did not move. I know what you are.

  It seemed to Garrick, as he listened to Felix Smart’s thoughts, that he had joined utterly with this man. Smart’s entire life was compressed into a bitter capsule and shoved down his throat. Memories exploded inside him, more vivid than his own. He tasted blood and sweat, smelled gunpowder and rotten flesh, and felt his own secret shames and regrets that he had never dared acknowledge.

  This is the magic, he realized, even as his past life crawled into his gut like a worm. To see, to know.

  “Give it to me,” he said, tightening his grip around the man’s neck. “I want it all, d’you hear?”

  “They sent you to Afghanistan,” gasped the man, the words grunting out of him.

  So surprised was Garrick to hear this that he actually engaged.

  “Not many know that, Scotsman. I took up the queen’s rifle, killed my share, and came back a hero.” Garrick shook his head, dislodging the orange man’s probes. “Quiet with your talk, man, unless it is to divulge secrets.”

  The man closed his eyes—sadly, it seemed to Garrick. “I can’t. And I know what you intend to do, so . . .” His hand moved toward a red button on his belt, and Garrick gripped the wrist in his fingers.

  A quantum circuit was completed and information exchanged on every level. Knowledge, secrets, and the very essence of being—all whipped between the two men, locked in grim combat. Garrick struggled to hold on to himself in this blizzard of awareness. He saw and understood everything, from amoebas to microwaves. He felt his own self as a collection of jittering neutrons and understood the concept. He saw the surface of the moon, an earth ruled by dinosaurs, matchbox-sized computers, the Scottish man of science, the little Shawnee lass, and the boy Riley.

  Riley, he thought, and the thought skittered away from him on a tide of quantum foam. He cocked his head to follow it, and the Scotsman used the distraction to press the red button on his belt.

  Garrick felt mercury shift and smelled the explosives and knew that there was only one way to perhaps escape death. He crushed Felix Smart’s barely solid windpipe in his fist, then tumbled them both into the tiny pulsing circle of light that lay in the center of the mattress.

  It did not seem possible that two grown men could fit into that tiny space, but the wormhole was pure physics and so did its work, dematerializing the battling pair just as the tiny suitbomb exploded.

  Charles Smart, the godfather of time travel, had speculated in his famous Columbi
a lecture that if a spontaneous energy shift were to be introduced into the quantum stream, then the effects on local travelers could be spectacular, producing, in theory, a being imbued with all the powers not yet granted to humanity by evolution. Or, as he put it, Clark Kent could indeed become Superman.

  The world could see superheroes.

  Or supervillains.

  BEDFORD SQUARE. BLOOMSBURY. LONDON. NOW

  Chevie Savano plugged Charles Smart’s Timekey into the weirdly pronged socket on the bank of antique computers in the pod room.

  A message appeared on the screen: warming up. Warming up? What was this? A photocopier?

  Alt-tech was a term Felix liked to bandy about. Alternative technology. What he meant was old junk that didn’t work properly anymore.

  Warming up? The next thing you knew, this contraption would ask for more gas.

  Eventually a menu shuddered into life on the small convex screen. The kind of screen nerd grandpas collected to play Pac-Man. The operating system was unfamiliar to her, a set of consecutive menus that reminded her of a family tree.

  Well, I guess even Apple and Microsoft can’t control the past, she thought, smiling.

  It did seem as though everything was on this Timekey. The entire history of the project, including previous jumps, personnel files, pod locations, and, of course, Professor Smart’s video diary.

  Chevie selected the proximity-alert recordings with an honest-to-God wooden mouse, and scrolled through to the last couple of minutes.

  It was a grainy picture, colors muted by the darkness, but she could clearly see the boy Riley approach stealthily, eyes and teeth shining out of his blackened face. The blade in his hand was visible too, just the top edge where the soot failed to cover it.

  Suddenly the screen glowed green, and Riley’s features were underlit like a Halloween campfire storyteller. The boy looked pretty guilty, it had to be said: sneaking into an old man’s house in the dead of night, armed with a wicked-looking blade. The alert changed from green to red as Riley drew closer, and the view flipped as Professor Smart sat up.