by Malhar Patel
The crystals were incredibly expensive and prone to burning out after repeated usage, especially the smaller ones. That was why the cost of time travel increased exponentially the further back you wanted to go, and also why there was a two-month cap on travel.
A typical machine used only nine or ten crystals of different sizes and calculated the correct combination to send the traveller as far back as they needed. The problem was that cutting a crystal shattered it internally so only crystals in their naturally occurring size could be used.
That placed a limit on how far back one could time travel since very few naturally occurring crystals were small enough for travel of more than a month.
The machine Green was building was totally different from the others. Built into it was some kind of synthetic crystal and it let you go back in time and actually alter the future. If somebody planned it correctly, they could pretty much change the world in any way they wanted.
Anisha weaved her fingers through her perfect black hair and her face contorted into the same worried look as Jack's. They were one step closer to finding out what was going on, and yet again everything had become even more complicated.
Anisha ventured the first theory. “Okay well if Green is building this thing to alter the world forever, then that means he's going to destroy the world as we know it now. So whoever wants to stop him, must be a good guy right?”
Jack liked the logic in theory. It made him out to be the force of good, stopping the evil Green from destroying the world. But whoever was blackmailing him into killing Green definitely wasn't any force of good; he knew that for sure. He was about to start brainstorming his own ideas when he got a video message from Frank, telling him about Russell Mason.
The self-preservationist inside Jack told him to withhold the information that he had just learned, but he resisted. Frank was making a serious effort to get to the bottom of whatever was going on, and he knew that he had to help him if he wanted to find out the truth.
Green senior sat with Pete watching the football game. They had spent the whole morning racking their brains and going over the scheme. This football game was their way of relaxing: it distracted their troubled minds from the danger ahead.
Pete yelled at the screen as a freckly brunette hit the ground to a referee's whistle. Mixed football was great as a show of social equality but in practise it didn't work properly.
When the men tackled them, the women would always take a fall and claim a fowl, which the referee normally gave them because the men were bigger. As a result, many players now resisted hard tackles. It was annoying for Pete to watch, since subtle brutality was always one of the things that lured him to the beautiful game. As he and Green senior sat there drinking cheap beer, he felt slightly guilty. Jack's life was at stake and he was watching a football match that he didn't really care about.
Each of the group had their own reason for helping out Jack. Anisha was a friend, Green was trying to save his own life and Gina felt she owed him for saving her life. But nobody's reasoning was as simple as Pete's. He simply saw a chance to save a human being's life, and he was willing to do whatever it took to do it. Jack was important to Anisha and Anisha was important to Pete. That made Jack important to Pete.
Green senior heard the sound of something being squeezed through the letterbox and heaved himself off of the couch to investigate. There weren't many postmen who worked at this time. Pete came over and stood behind him as he opened his mail. It was a dirty brown envelope with nothing written on it and inside was a folded sheet of brown paper.
Green senior read aloud the message. “Time is running out.” Instinctively, Pete poked his head through the doorway and whipped his eyes around in both directions. There was no one in the entire building. He walked out into the hallway and began running down it, still looking out all around him. Nearing the elevator, he saw an arrow-shaped light dimly luminescing. The lift was coming back up and he had missed his chance to catch whoever delivered the envelope.
Disgusted with himself for letting them get away, he slowly walked back to Anisha's apartment. Green senior was still in the doorway, waiting to lay his eyes on the culprit. When Pete walked in alone and shook his head, Green senior just sighed, closed the door shut and dropped the letter on the rack.
Gina was on her afternoon break. It was only fifteen minutes but it was enough for her to pop into the back room and lay out her map. After her prank call, the durations of all the subsets of her plan were co-ordinated, but she still had to find a location to stop the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Somewhere quiet and with as few people as possible but also a place which was easy to get to.
The problem was that the three best candidates for the task in their group would all be at Green's house. There was no way they could also ambush the ambulance as well. This was the only weak part of the plan and it had to be resolved if Monday was going to work out properly.
Gina scratched her head, deep in thought. No one had prepared anything yet to deal with the more important event of all: the one where Jack was going to be shot. She looked down at her slender silver watch and saw that her break was nearing an end. She would have to finish up when she got back home.
As she left the room she walked over to the front of the shop, onto the gravely driveway for a few breaths of fresh air. Turning around to walk back to her desk, she failed to see the small red laser light dancing over her back as her tight, slender body lined up with the crosshairs of a sniper rifle.
It was another late night in London and another cloudy sky. Grimy rain was firing down on the pavement, and what few people remained on the streets, were running wildly from the hammering assault. A large Negro man sat on a bench in the park, water dripping off of his short black hair. His thin eyebrows were arched downwards and his eerie eyes helped give off a menacing aura.
He was wearing a casual jacket, which looked dark grey because of the rain but was actually a shade lighter. He heard a shuffling sound and turned to find Michael Green sat next to him.
Green pulled out a pale beige document folder from inside of his coat and handed it to him. It was waterproof and the raindrops trickled off of it. The man took it and just held it in his hand, giving Green a dark stare.
The rain was getting really heavy now, and in the blackness of the night, conjured up images of some urban dystopia. Green reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out an envelope. He passed it over to the man who placed it in his lap with the folder.
Green was a stone-cold businessman but even he was shocked at the stoic, clinical nature of his contact. The man picked up a black leather briefcase, opened it and tossed the folder in, followed by the envelope. They both knew that there was no need to check it. Green had a history of being reliable with his payments. If the money didn't balance, the job would just be called off.
The man turned now and spoke for the first time. His voice was deep and brooding, but also clear, even over the rumbling sounds of the sky above.
“Is everything in the file?”
“Everything you need to know. It's a standard job. Find the defector in my organisation, and terminate them. Then retrieve the specified items.”
“You want the termination so it looks like an accident?”
“Yeah. Shoot him and throw him in one of the energy chambers until he cooks.”
“A set-up costs ten above the cut.”
“It's in the envelope.”
The man simply nodded and walked off. After a few seconds, Green did the same. By Monday the lab would be ready for work and Leeroy should have worked out who had taken his items. Little did Kim realise, that with this meeting her fate was all but sealed. On Monday somebody was coming to kill her.
Chapter 22
Even with yesterday's phenomenal downpour to wash the city clean, the streets of the capital still looked as rancid and filthy as usual. The air was filled with that smell that comes after a shower, and it left a fresh sting on Frank's nostrils.
&nbs
p; Everyone else seemed to be slumbering but he was awake and alert, ready to handle the same case that had kept him guessing all week. Tony's program had made out some poor quality video feed and he had spent yesterday tracking down the correct clip and convincing the tech boys to re-master it. He was assured it would be on his desk this morning and there would be hell to pay if it wasn't.
Frank walked into the burnt out old precinct building and took the lift up to his floor. Walking to his desk he was meant with whispers and several glances from the young shift workers, confused as to why someone would be choosing to work on Sunday.
Frank just smiled as he went past, and eventually reached his desk. He was dressed in his usual dark coat, with a dark blue sweater and black trousers on. The weather had started getting nippy recently and he worked best when he was warm and toasty.
Frank saw the disc on his table and smiled, making a mental note to thank the guys later on. Slotting it in the drive, he loaded up the segment of picture and was amazed at the vast improvement in quality.
Having traced back the cash machine involved, he could now make out a clear face taking out a withdrawal. Starting up another program now he went back to the video and played it through frame by frame until he had the best shot of the man's face. He dragged it into the facial match constructor and it began scanning the archive.
The process always took several minutes at least because of the complicated nature of facial mapping. While the machine hummed busily, Frank felt something was missing: his morning coffee.
He had the hankering for an espresso from the new shop that had just opened near the station, but it was closed today. Instead he went to the office machine and poured himself a plastic cup full of what could only be described as brown water. Frank took a sip and immediately grimaced as the awful taste insulted his tongue.
Walking back to the computer he saw that there were three possible matches. He looked at each resulting in photo turn, and found the final photo was a match: MARIO ORTEGA.
As Frank skimmed through the profile he saw connections to organised crime all over the world. Shaking his head, he pulled out a pad of paper and a pen from his drawer, and began to read more thoroughly.
Kim woke up and was met with an unusual view. Her eyes were bloodshot and blurry, encrusted shut by sleep. Pulling herself up she realised that she had turned around one hundred and eighty degrees in her slumber, and she was now facing where her feet should be. She laughed, thinking about what a rough night's sleep it must have been.
Her body seemed to be programmed to lie in at the end of the week and as she looked at the small antique Disney clock on her bedside table, she saw that it was nearly eleven already.
That alone began to wake her up and she looked across at her phone. There was a message from work and as she read it her face fell. The laboratory was free of radiation and she had to start work again on Monday. Her short vacation was over and once again she would have to venture into the belly of the beast.
Getting out from beneath the bed covers, she felt a chill run down her body, beneath her red tartan pyjamas. She rubbed her hands together to warm herself up and went off to brush her teeth.
There was nothing on the agenda today: she had already completed her main task of working out what the machine did. But just because her end of this nightmare was starting to resolve, didn’t mean Jack’s was. Wanting to be useful, she decided to phone him after lunch to see if he needed any help with Monday’s plan.
Gina sat there and proposed her theory while the group listened attentively. She finally had a viable plan involving the ambulance. “I'm going to go over to the hospital and pull out some wires in the vehicle, so it doesn't work properly. My garage did the last service on it so they should call us up to sort it out. My guess is that since this ambulance is so important to the hospital to save lives and stuff, they're going to ask us to give it emergency priority and the mechanics are going to be called in today to work on it.”
The others nodded, following so far. “Once it's in the shop and they've managed to fix it up, instead of phoning the hospital to say it's ready, I just get somebody like Jack to come down, dressed as a hospital volunteer, and he’ll pick it up and move it somewhere. Then I tell my Boss the hospital collected it, and I tell the hospital it's not done yet.”
“Okay,” said Jack, “so we get the ambulance. Then what?” Gina smiled like a schoolgirl who couldn't wait to show off her work.
“Right, well at the garage we keep some of this chemical for rapidly cooling engines. It's like an extra potent derivative of chloroform; it'll knock you out completely. It’s meant to be used on Oxygen/Oil hybrid engines but if you use it on hydrogen engines, it cools them down so much they stop working. So if I steal some of that, then when you guys get the ambulance all you have to do is install a system which will releases it by radio signal.” Green began to look worried and finally said,
“How do we do that though?”
“Well the chemical becomes like vapour straight away so all we need is to break the bottle it's in. I thought about it and I worked out an easy way we can do it. All we need is a radio-controlled toy car. They sell them at most classic toyshops and they're not that expensive.”
“I get it,” chimed in Jack. “We install this chemical releasing contraption then return the ambulance to the hospital. Then on Monday night when they take Green we turn it on, knock them out, stop the ambulance and then take the body.”
They both smiled as the final piece of the puzzle slipped into place but Anisha was quick to cut the celebration short.
“There are a few problems though. We need a safe location to do it.”
“I found one yesterday.”
“Okay but I have another query. Don't we need the coroner or a doctor to pronounce him dead so that everyone in the room hears it? We can't just steal his body before everyone knows or else it won’t be clear whether we killed him or not. And say we do steal his body from the ambulance. Surely the people watching us will realise we’d only be stealing it if he was actually still alive. They’ll know we’re trying to trick them.”
The mood was dampened as everybody realised she was right. Gina hung her head. The plan had seemed so perfect to her just a few moments ago. Then Jack had a spark of inspiration.
“Okay I think we're going about this all wrong. Here's what we have to do...”
Frank's face crinkled up into a look of confusion as he stared at the computer monitor. From what he was reading, Mario Ortega wasn't nearly as bad as he had first assumed. His organised crime syndicate had once been the most powerful distributor in New Chicago for arms and virtual reality drugs. However, several years ago his known fronts seemed to have moved into legal operations, mainly law offices fighting for human rights. According to the file, his peers hadn't appreciated his change of heart and a bout of street violence had erupted.
Mario was on record as having gone to the police, agreeing to testify against any gang leaders he could in return for protection and immunity from arrest. When police protection failed to stop somebody beating him to a bloody pulp, he fled the witness program and it was the opinion of the relocation officers assigned to the case, that he left seeking protection from other, illegal sources.
With the terms of his contract having been breached, he was effectively still a criminal. Frank sat at his desk pondering. It was an interesting life story for a man so young. The main question was what he was doing associating with Green?
Frank only had limited access to data and records from America, but to obtain further clearance he would have to present his theory, and he certainly wasn't going to alert international authorities about this yet. His gut told him something very sinister and was going on and he would need a lot more proof and a lot more facts before he could form any kind of case.
It had only just crept over one o'clock and Frank yawned, already tired from being at a computer so long. This wasn't the kind of detective work he liked, but he had to admit that th
e morning had been useful. If he could connect Green and his time device to Ortega, then all of this might start making sense. The problem was that the device was so powerful that anyone might want it for more or less anything.
Tony walked up the small winding stairs, swerving his body to avoid falling over. The bus was already speeding along by the time he slumped into the back seat of the top deck. Looking down, he saw he still had crumbs and pastry flakes from the pub lunch loitering on his jeans.
He brushed them off and from the corner of his eye, noticed somebody near the middle of the bus staring at him. He was a white man in his mid thirties, with a receding hairline. His short pale brown hair was spiked just enough to give him a menacing air, and his eyes trained on Tony like a cheetah staring at its prey.
As Tony looked more closely the man pretended to look at something else and turned away. Tony frowned slightly, but it didn't really bother him. Every time he took the bus, there was at least one person acting strangely. In Tony’s experience, London was full of weird people: it always had been and it always would be.
As the bus halted for the traffic, he saw the familiar yellow sign of the laundrette from his window and knew that the next stop was his. Using the railing to pull himself up, he shakily made his way to the stairs, again trying to counteract the motions of the vehicle. He hated the bus but his car had a dead engine and there were no trams running in his area.
Once off the bus he began walking straight away. He'd promised his girlfriend he would be home in time to escort her to a fashion show and he was already a few minutes late. He couldn't understand why she wanted to go to the event.