by Malhar Patel
Jack stirred and finally gathered up the courage to open his eyes. They immediately began to sting, just as he'd expected. After the weather yesterday, suddenly the sun was scorching down in all its golden glory, and Anisha's drapes were whole-heartedly failing to keep the sun out.
He heard the rustle of people getting ready for their day jobs and guessed it was between seven and eight o'clock. With a little effort, and a little more yawning, he got up just in time to see Gina walk out the door. Green Senior was still fast asleep and Pete had gone, so only Anisha was left. Jack slowly approached her and after trading “good mornings,” asked when she was off to work.
She told him she was leaving in around an hour and Jack knew that basically gave him an hour to get ready if he was going to follow her. Hopping into the bathroom as fast as he could, he emerged promptly wearing a mint green shirt and blue denim jeans. Walking downstairs, Anisha smiled and made a lewd joke about how quick he was.
Jack felt divided. On the one hand he hated her for the way she'd betrayed him and plunged everyone around him into this perpetual nightmare. But when he looked at her he couldn't believe that she was capable of it. She looked so sweet and innocent, and talking to her, Jack could almost feel the goodness in her heart.
None of it made any sense. Jack pondered it over for a moment and realised that he wasn't trying to catch her red handed; he was following her because he wanted her to be innocent.
Wolfing down his omelette he stared at her from across the room, slipping on her shoes and now holstering her gun. The next piece of egg stopped dead in its tracks, hovering between the plate and his mouth. If she was holstering her gun, then how could the one tucked in his bag also be hers? She didn't have an ankle holster and he knew where she kept her spare gun: it was still there inside the glass case on her night-stand.
With a final look in the mirror, Anisha said a cheery goodbye before heading out the door. Jack virtually threw his plate in the sink as got up to follow her. Seeing senior still asleep, he grabbed a sheet of paper from by the phone and wrote a quick note instructing him to try and get the drug today. No obstacles were getting in his way today.
There was a loud, repeating knock on the door and Jack opened it to see a haggard-looking Caucasian man. A younger, sharply dressed black man stood next to him. “Hello, can I help you?”
“I'm detective Wilkinson, this is Detective Slade”
“Hi, erm how can I help you?” asked Jack, simultaneously taking a bite from his doughnut.
“We're just investigating a case which lead us here,” began Frank cagily, “and we were wondering if we could see your mobile phone.” He noticed that the man seemed perplexed by the interruption.
“Here it is,” he said carefully, taking a cheap-looking phone from his pocket. “I haven't had my other one with me for over a week now, so I'm using my SIM card in this disposable instead.” Tony diligently collected it. “So what's this about?” he asked bluntly.
“Your brother.” Jack's face fell immediately.
“What about my brother?” Frank discerned the note of worry in his voice.
“I'm afraid your brother was involved in a shooting yesterday but he's stable now and expected to recover.”
“Oh God.” Jack's face fell, his composure lost instantly.
Frank had seen a good many liars in his time, and he would have bet his badge Jack wasn't one of them. He seemed genuinely worried about his brother.
“If you contact the hospital on this number, they'll tell you more.” He passed him a small slip of paper, which Jack absently took while delivering an auto-pilot thank you for the news. Frank and Tony turned and left, for the time being having reached a dead end. As they headed back to their vehicle, Tony quietly said, “I think he's telling the truth.” Frank merely nodded.
Following Anisha on the tube had been annoying, not least because he was no expert at tailing people. Having to peep at her through the window joining the carriages at each stop had hardly helped either. With its slow, hot, sweaty carriages and grubby decaying walls, the Underground was a throwback to the old days of London.
It was a time that was looked upon with disdain: a time where people were content living in their dilapidated city and progress was slow; a time that the new generation were now paying for. Jack looked around at his carriage. It was grimy and rusting, and as he rode on it there was an ever-growing part of him that worried for his safety.
More bodies were flooding the train now and Jack's view was becoming more and more obscured. Eventually he couldn't see anything and had to hope Anisha got off at the same stop as usual. Luckily she did. Following her again, his mind began to wander to Pete.
She had already mentioned that they had a relationship, which didn't work out, and he wondered how close she now was with him.
Realising he was veering off topic, he regained focused just in time to see her disappear behind the main door to a huge towering building. Stealthily approaching it, he could see that engraved on the plaque by the entrance was the government surveillance insignia. She was at work after all. Unfortunately though, this didn't actually prove innocence. With her access codes there was plenty that she could be doing. Files she could be deleting, people she could be watching. Jack suddenly realised that if she had already reached her cubicle and logged on, that she could be watching him right now. Although he knew it was unlikely, the thought left him unsettled,.
Time dragged on as Jack watched the only door to the tower to make sure she didn't leave. There wasn't much else he could do. The more time he spent staring at the door, the more he thought that something wasn't quite right with this situation. First Pete was placed in suspicion's spotlight, and now Anisha? Plus in both cases, it seemed that further probing exonerated both of them. It was enough to make one paranoid. Jack looked up high at the office windows and wondered if he was just wasting his time.
After a long, exhausting morning running another errand, Green sat in his study, munching away on a low fat pasty. Crumbs and flakes lazily drifted from his mouth, all over the desk and down his trousers, scattering over his documents and forming transparent smudges on his papers.
It was just over a month until the next election and the party was experiencing a pressure-cooker of responsibility, with everyone taking up the slack for everyone else. He'd been lumbered with some simple paperwork and having done the difficult part, was taking the time to consider how his plans were going. He still had to finalise his address at the Royal Hall, and the prospect of sitting down yet again with his speech-writers was too much for him to bear. They were either overzealous or archaic and stuffy, and none of them seemed to care what he actually wanted to say.
He reached over to his desk drawer and pulled out a small folded piece of A4 paper. Carefully unfolding it, it revealed a list of names written in his handwriting.
MAX LEVINE
DR DANES
MARTINO GOMEZ
HUGO TYLER
KLAUS Scholz
DR RUHBAKER
DR LEWIS
ARNOLD POCKLINGTON
KRISTIN CHE
Green scanned down the list and spotted Dr. Lewis. As casually, as a man altering a shopping list, he whipped out a fountain pen from his shirt pocket and crossed off the name. With a semi-melodic hum he returned the pen to the desktop before folding and placing the paper back into the drawer. There was no time to waste lazing around- he still had to finish off this work and rearrange his schedule to free up time to see his cousin.
It was nearing lunch and nothing. If she did have plans to meet her conspirators, surely she wouldn't waste several hours first. While he waited he decided to look up the name he had found in Bob's house, using his phone. Wireless internet access was so much slower than Jack was used to but thankfully, even though he wasn't aware of it, it was also much harder to trace.
Tapping a few buttons he accessed what Bob hadn't been able to. The program on Bob's phone was designed for ease of use and Jack was easily able to
cross reference the list of finance transfers with department heads. The phone vibrated, returning four matches.
Examining the information Bob had sent a little more closely now; he saw that there were two special identity labels for each of the four matches, with TT written on each. At first he ignored it but then mulling it over, something clicked in his mind, and Jack smiled as he worked it out.
Bob had labelled the list for those who had time travelled. With a glimpse at the help file to show him how, he searched for flat rentals over a time of nearly thirteen months ago. If they had time travelled, these people must be living somewhere. He smiled as both names came up, each with an address.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Anisha leave the building and walk across to the sandwich stand right opposite. He tucked the phone away and instantly became alert again. Working her way through the short queue she got a small toasted sandwich in a surprisingly greasy bag and, after some chat to her co-workers, returned to the building in an anti-climax.
Jack was running out of time to plan this fabricated assassination and find the party responsible. He didn't want to waste another day, and so far that's what this seemed to be. Assuming Anisha wasn't going anywhere, at least not today, he began walking back to the underground station, having now decided to pay a visit to the first name on his list: Kim Bexley.
Abruptly, the small room became saturated by a loud warning alarm: an unpleasant whining and waning similar to an ambulance. Green heaved himself up from his chair and over to his jacket, which he had callously dumped on the brown leather couches.
Knowing the alarm well, he thrust his hand into the inside pocket to pull out his palmtop, which was blaring away. His eyebrows furrowed as he saw that there was a message flashing across his screen in large, red capitals. SECURITY BREACH. He quickly sprawled across to his laptop on the desk and began hammering on the keys, his hands slightly unsteady now. Accessing his security log he also simultaneously activated his audio messenger.
He could feel his lip tearing as he nervously bit on it, and he began drumming his index finger on the desk while impatiently waited for the connection. Finally it activated. “This is Mr Gr-,” he paused just in time to remember his alias. “This is Mr Walsh-Robbins. Can you check the security of my package. It's in the south west terminal, Locker 180204. It's urgent.”
The voice on the other side didn't even reply and instead Green could hear him barking orders at people. After a nerve-racking pause he heard the words, “I'm sorry. The locker has been cleared.” Green uttered profanity so obscene that the operator shivered icily. Even with an alarm system installed, someone had managed to break into his locker.
By way of an apology the airport worker offered to send him the video feed of the locker over the last few minutes, which Green accepted without appreciation. Pulling up his video player he began to watch the file in double speed. He slowed it down as he saw a man approaching his locker and whacked the pause button to freeze it.
On his screen was a grainy image of the perpetrator stealing a small palmtop. Green rubbed his eyes, and began to feel light-headed. His face drained of all colour, projecting the visage of a ghost; which also appeared to be what he was looking at. The man who had just stolen his access-code-files was the lab report deliveryman, Klaus. The same Klaus he thought he'd killed in the car explosion.
Chapter 11
Kim stood motionless, a statue's body with a ghost's complexion. In front of her was a glistening silver monstrosity. A perfect interlocking of different pieces of machinery, spanning all imaginably sizes and shapes, and leaking wires every colour of the rainbow. She felt a sharp tugging and her shoulder yanked backwards.
It jolted her concentration back to the present and for a fleeting split-second she saw a spark protrude from the spinning cone shaped piece of equipment in front of her. Turning around she was greeted by Beppe, sporting a look of concern. “Are you alright?”
“Erm yeah thanks, I must've just zoned out for a second or something. You know how boring this job is.” She let out a small, forced laugh and trying her best to flash her corporate smile. “Erm thanks again.”
She turned around hurriedly to get back to the experiment, despite being wholly aware of what she was doing. She had fallen asleep last night in front of the schematics and she was surprised that the police hadn't stopped over this morning.
Her head was still reeling from what she had found out. She was helping to build some kind of time weapon she wasn't even aware of. Could she go to the police? Or would she be implicated in whatever was going on? The police idea hadn't really appealed to her, given her involvement in the events at the museum.
She kept wondering who the person was that had been killed yesterday. A shudder ran down her spine. No matter how many times she thought about it she couldn't get used to it. Closing her eyes, she could still visualise it in crystal detail, from the deafening shot to the point where she looked over as his body just lifelessly sank to the ground, dropping without dignity.
She was convinced that whoever it was had worked at the lab, but so far she hadn't had a chance to check who wasn't in for work today. Once she knew that, maybe she could work out who it was that had given his life to help her expose the truth.
Her lunch break had been severely put back today so that the lab could finish their electrochemical experiments. They still had to run a second simulator afterwards and lunch would have meant wasting time setting up the same machines again. Looking down at her pad of scrap-note and the datasets on her laptop, she deliberated on if she should doctor her results, to try and sabotage this weapon if possible.
It was probably too late to make any difference by now, after having delivered five months of results to pinpoint accuracy. She decided to save the real data for now. She could always alter it later before she sent off the report. With a final pull of a lever, that was it. All her work was done. She could finally take an hour off. Quickly skulking out of the lab, she headed straight to the front desk to check employee turnout.
With surveillance and monitoring specialists now in higher standing than the police, it was imperative that they followed protocol to the letter. Every action was double and triple checked by random workers from any random office, especially with anything regarding video files. It was extremely difficult to abuse your power in the surveillance sector, and as a result it was almost unheard of for Internal Affairs to find a mole in the organisation. Green was a well-connected person but even he didn't have a man on the inside.
He frowned now, not sure what to do next. He could report the crime to get his machine back, but that would mean the police capturing Klaus, which would expose him to all sorts of problems. The alternative was to do nothing, which wasn't an option. Those access codes were vital to his plans, and without them he had nothing.
In Green's view there was only one logical way to proceed. He had to find Klaus himself. Without video feeds, he knew that it would be a far from auspicious task. Getting out his palmtop again, he logged onto the messenger service.
>>> It's Mr. Walsh-Robbins. I need a containment scenario.
A beat went by as he waited for the reply
>>> Outline
Green thought about it. He didn't want to give away too much and his web of conspiracy was already a little too large for comfort.
>>> Fifteen minutes ago, a package was removed from Gatwick airport locker 180204. Target is Klaus Scholz. Request location or vector of package and log of target's movements.
>>> You will be contacted in an hour. Send the payment to the same account.
The machine blinked to show the connection had been severed and Green began rubbing his goatee. The group he hired to plan through various scenarios were generally very good at what they did. The problem was they weren't very hands on. They provided contacts, connections and a strategy to overcome whatever problem you gave them, but it was up to the client to actually go ahead and do everything. That meant that once again, Green was going
to have to get his hands dirty.
Jack was looking back through the papers for Green's security when Green senior hobbled his way through the door. Jack smiled at how easily the old man grew weary, but as he remembered how cagey Green senior was being with vital details, the smile was quickly replaced by an expression of agitation.
Here was a man who had travelled through time just to help them, whose health looked to be fast deteriorating but remained determined to provide assistance. Nonetheless, he was wouldn't tell Jack the most important thing he needed to know, the details of his death. He didn't understand a word of that excuse he had given, but what he did understand was the basic rules of leverage.
Green was looking out for number one, ensuring that they didn't try and kill his younger counterpart, and therefore himself in the process. The only way to do that was to by having something they wanted, and dangling it in front of them like the proverbial carrot. It was basic power politics and Jack was getting tired of it.
As Senior walked up to him he could see a smile hovering over the old man's face. “Guess what I got?” Jack was surprised but couldn't resist a smile himself.
“You got the Dextro- whatever it is?”
“Dextrafizene. I managed to get some. Firstly I had to meet my contact in private and negotiated what favours we owed, what to wipe et cetera. I pretended to be a representative of Michael Green and eventually he agreed to use one of his test labs to make a small batch of the drug as a one-off fabrication. Since I had all the R&D notes it wasn't even as complicated as I thought. They had the technology to do it there and then. The tablets I got are over ninety percent pure.” He seemed overly eager to explain how laborious it had been, and Jack concluded he was fishing for some sort of praise.