The Doomsday Box

by Herbie Brennan

  The door of the apartment slammed back with a crash. “All right,” a gruff voice said in English. “This is the CIA. We have the building surrounded. Lie down on the floor with your hands above your head!”

  Chapter 38

  Danny, Moscow, 1962

  Danny stared up thoughtfully at the building. It was obviously an apartment building with pretentions of style. Oddly, he was familiar with the architecture, which didn’t look Russian at all, but was the sort of thing he’d seen often enough in London during his thieving days. Except that in London the apartments usually had that grubby, seedy look buildings get when they’re half a century old, whereas this one looked nearly new. “You sure this is the place?” he asked Fuchsia.

  “Definitely,” Fuchsia told him. She looked worried. “We can’t get in, can we?”

  “Wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Danny murmured. In fact, the security was pretty primitive. There was a high wire-mesh fence around the courtyard that surrounded the building, but there was no electrification or razor wire to stop you climbing it. Heck, there wasn’t even barbed wire—probably somebody thought it was too unsightly for the posh inhabitants. The entrance gate was secured by a heavy-duty lock—nothing electronic or coded, no fancy swipe cards or iris recognition or any of those problems. He could probably pick the lock, given a bit of time, although with people coming and going he didn’t fancy his chances of not being caught. His best bet, he thought, was to forget the gate altogether and use the big ornamental tree growing at the far end of the parking lot. The dense growth of branches meant he could climb it unseen, and there was an overhang that would give him access to the far side of the fence. He could drop down and be on the ground in seconds.

  He doubted the building itself would present too many problems. The front doors might even be open. You’d be surprised how often that happened in an apartment building. Tenants were in too much of a hurry, or just couldn’t be bothered, to close them properly. And if they weren’t open, there was always some idiot who’d leave a window unlatched on the upper levels. If you weren’t afraid of heights—and Danny wasn’t—you could always crack in somewhere. The old window latches from the sixties weren’t up to much either. You could usually persuade one to open with a credit card and a bit of patience, not that there were many credit cards then—now!—but Danny had brought some neat little gimmicks he could use.

  He had only two real worries, and one was guards. You’d never find them in modern London. Minimum wage was far too high and besides, everybody relied on technology for their security: CCTV and all that sort of nonsense. But Soviet Russia was a different kettle of fish. If this was a KGB building—and he strongly suspected it was—armed guards were a real possibility. He hadn’t seen any, admittedly, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  His other real worry was Fuchsia. Danny had no doubt at all about his own ability to get into the building, but he wasn’t at all sure about taking Fuchsia with him. He wasn’t even sure she could climb a tree, let alone follow him up a drainpipe, which was one of the possibilities facing him. Not that he’d want her to follow him up a drainpipe. Two people on a wall meant twice the chance of being spotted. At the same time, he didn’t want to leave her behind, partly in case some busybody found her, partly because that time line thing she had was proving so useful.

  “Fuchsia,” he began, then decided on a compromise. If he took her into the courtyard and found someplace where she could hide, he could try his hand at breaking into the building, then come back for her; open a window on the ground floor or something. “How are you at climbing trees?” he finished.

  Fuchsia turned out to be very good indeed at climbing trees. Maybe a bit better than Danny, if he cared to admit it. She didn’t balk at dropping down the far side either and landed like a cat. She even murmured, “This is fun, Danny,” when he caught her arm to help her with her balance. In fact, she only started to give him trouble when he tried to find somewhere for her to hide. “I’m going with you,” she said firmly. “I don’t trust you on your own.”

  “But I don’t know how to get inside yet!” Danny hissed. Beyond the fence, a car pulled up, and a couple in evening dress got out. The man looked distinctly the worse for vodka. So did his companion, a pretty, younger woman.

  “Can’t we just try the front doors?” Fuchsia asked.

  “What, ring the bell and say we’ve come to get our friends? In English?”

  “You’re doing it again! You know I hate sarcasm. I thought you might pick the lock. They told me at the Project you used to be a cat burglar.”

  “Used to be a lot of things,” Danny growled, “but a nutcase wasn’t one of them. Have to be mad to stand picking a lock on a door people use to go in and out all the time. Don’t know when you’ll be interrupted, do you?”

  “Oh,” Fuchsia said, abashed. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  The couple in evening dress were through the gate and in the courtyard now, heading toward the entrance doors of the apartment building. Danny and Fuchsia were only yards away, but standing in the shade of the overhang so there was little chance of being spotted, especially given the state the couple were in. Danny pulled back a little, then stopped. “Are you game for something really scary?” he whispered.

  Fuchsia nodded enthusiastically. “What are we going to do?”

  “I want you to keep quiet; don’t speak under any circumstances, whatever happens. Just follow me and do as I do.”

  “I can do that,” Fuchsia whispered back.

  Danny took her hand and walked boldly toward the entrance doors. They fell in step behind the drunken couple. Through the reinforced glass doors, Danny could see a uniformed doorman. (He hoped it was a doorman and not a military guard.) If the doorman knew the couple, he would open the door. If he didn’t, he might ask for ID. In which case Danny planned to find out if Fuchsia could run as well as she could climb. It was just as scary as he’d predicted, but the fear was like the old days when he’d robbed houses, the sort of fear you paid for on a roller-coaster ride.

  The doorman recognized the couple! The door was swinging open. And to Danny’s horror, he wasn’t a doorman but an armed and uniformed guard. But too late to worry now: it was these little problems that made life interesting. He pressed close behind the couple in evening dress, saw the guard snap to attention and salute. He gave the guard a cheery grin and a nod. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Fuchsia unleash one of her own most dazzling smiles.

  In Danny’s experience, if you looked relaxed and confident, as if you belonged somewhere, people accepted you at face value. Maybe not Soviet armed guards, admittedly, who were obliged to ask for your papers, but Danny wasn’t aiming to look as if he belonged in this building, he was aiming to look as if he belonged with the drunken couple—young guests, maybe even young relatives. If the guard didn’t demand ID from the couple, he wasn’t about to ask for it from their guests.

  The guard stood aside. The couple staggered through. Danny and Fuchsia followed, grinning dementedly. They were so close to the drunken couple now, they were almost bumping into them, but just as Danny had calculated, the couple were in no fit state to notice. In moments they were all out of the foyer and out of sight of the guard.

  “Time to split,” Danny whispered. “Don’t suppose you know exactly where in the building Opal and Michael ended up?”

  “Fourth floor,” Fuchsia whispered back promptly, and Danny could have kissed her. The girl was incredible.

  The couple stopped by an elevator. Since Danny was unwilling to risk riding with them, he pushed the nearest door, gambling that it must be a stairwell. The door was locked.

  “Oy,” shouted the man in evening dress, then added something in Russian. He was gesturing furiously with broad, angry sweeps of his arm. The woman beside him added a flood of Russian and pointed. Danny’s nerve almost broke, and he grabbed Fuchsia’s hand to make a run for it. Then he realized the couple were gesturing toward a door on the other side. P
resumably they didn’t want company in the elevator either. Danny smiled his gratitude and pushed the other door. It opened onto a stairwell.

  “Do you know the exact apartment?” Danny asked as they reached the fourth floor.

  “Yes,” Fuchsia told him. “I can still see a trace of the time line—I’m getting good at this.”

  “You’re getting brilliant at it,” Danny told her excitedly. “Let’s reel them in.”

  “Just a minute,” Fuchsia said, suddenly sober. “What are we going to do when we get there? If they’re still with the KGB, we can’t very well burst in and threaten to call the police. They are the police.”

  Danny had his own ideas about what they were going to do, but the last thing he wanted was to share them with Fuchsia at the moment. “Whatever about the KGB,” he told her carefully, “you said there was just one of them. There are four of us when you count Opal and Michael. Between us, we should be able to overpower him. Especially since we’ll have the element of surprise. But before we get into that, all I really want to do is scout around and try to find out exactly what we’re facing. There may be some way to look into the apartment. Ventilator shaft or something.”

  “Okay,” Fuchsia said uncertainly.

  “Take us to the apartment,” Danny said.

  He knew something was wrong the moment they reached the door of 289 and found it ajar. Every other door that they’d passed was tight shut. Exactly what you’d expect in Soviet Russia, where trust wasn’t exactly thick on the ground. Why was this one open? “Stay back,” he whispered to Fuchsia, then moved cautiously forward to listen.

  The sound of voices carried clearly, and he recognized one of them as Opal’s. The other was unfamiliar to him and the accent was American, which wasn’t as it should be at all. Although he couldn’t catch many of the words, the conversation seemed to be in English and sounded angry. If Michael was inside, he wasn’t speaking.

  None of it added up. Opal and Michael had been taken here in a black car by a KGB man, according to Fuchsia. What he was listening to was just Opal and some good old boy who should have been drilling for oil in Texas, not lurking in a Soviet apartment. A sudden, chilling thought occurred to him. What if Fuchsia had got it wrong? She’d be the first to admit she was learning the precog business as she went along. What if she’d missed something, or got confused?

  Danny swallowed hard. It was stupid to get paranoid at this stage. She’d said Opal and Michael had been taken to this apartment in this building, and now he was listening to Opal’s voice in this apartment in this building. Of course Fuchsia hadn’t got it wrong. Michael was in there too; it was just that Michael didn’t talk much—Michael never talked much. And the American might even be the Russian KGB man, who’d learned English in America and got himself an American accent in the process.

  Actually, the more he thought about it, the more it sounded likely. Chances were, what was inside the apartment was exactly what Fuchsia had predicted: a KGB man who was holding Opal and her strong, silent boyfriend. Just one KGB man. Which meant a rescue was possible.

  Before he could talk himself out of it, Danny shoved his hand into his jacket pocket, two fingers pointing forward to create a satisfactory bulge.

  “What are you doing?” Fuchsia whispered.

  “Pretending I have a gun,” Danny told her.

  Fuchsia blinked at him, her face a mask of bewilderment. “Why?”

  “To get Opal and Michael out of there,” Danny said grimly. He pushed the imaginary gun forward in a threatening manner, the way he’d seen cops do in the movies. His heart was beating furiously, but it was a matter of self-confidence. If he convinced himself the bluff would work, then the bluff would work.

  “You can’t threaten people with an imaginary gun!” Fuchsia’s voice was rising. “They’ll never believe you.”

  “Yes, they will,” Danny told her firmly. He set his jaw. “It’s the only way.” Women, he thought, never understood these things. He dashed forward, smashed the door in with his foot, and barked gruffly, “All right, this is the CIA. We have the building surrounded. Lie down on the floor with your hands above your head!”

  Chapter 39

  Danny, Menshikov’s Apartment, Moscow, 1962

  Danny?” Opal’s mouth dropped open. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

  Michael was with her. He was seated on a couch, looking very much the worse for wear. The man with them (the one with the American accent?) was wearing half a KGB uniform—the jacket was slung over the back of a chair, probably taken off when he was beating up Michael. Incredibly, there was a gun on a table near Opal—a real gun, which had to be a lot more threatening than two fingers jammed into a pocket. “Get the weapon!” Danny shouted excitedly. “We’ve come to rescue you!” He glared at the KGB man. “You! Down on the floor! I’ve got a gun trained on your head!” He jerked his pocketed hand. “The CIA has this whole building surrounded. On the floor! Now!”

  “Ignore him,” Opal said to the KGB man. “He doesn’t have a gun.” She turned back to Danny. “This is Agent Cobra,” she told him.

  “Yes, it is,” Michael confirmed.

  Danny kept his pocket hand—why had Opal told him?—pointed at the KGB man who wasn’t Agent Cobra, as Opal well knew, because she’d seen Agent Cobra; they’d all seen Agent Cobra, and he looked nothing like this clown. And what was Opal doing telling a KGB man about Agent Cobra anyway? Their mission was supposed to be a secret.

  Fuchsia came up behind him. “Danny, this is silly,” she said quietly. “You’re going to get yourself killed. He knows you don’t have a gun. Everybody knows you don’t have a gun.”

  “Of course I have a gun!” Danny said. “You may have formed the mistaken impression—” All the same, his hand was wavering. After a long, glaring moment, Danny took his empty hand out of his pocket. Fat chance he ever got to play the hero. He wondered why they were pretending the man with them was Agent Cobra. Perhaps being tortured by the KGB had driven them both mad. As a theory, it made about as much sense as anything else that was happening just now.

  Half an hour later, with the apartment door firmly locked and chained, they were seated round the table, all five of them.

  “Let’s get this straight,” Cobra said. “You’re telling me that sometime in twenty years or so I’ll be involved in a CIA program of time travel?”

  Opal, who was doing most of the talking as usual, nodded. “Yes.”

  “And I’ll do something that will release a plague on America that will wipe out millions?”

  “Not just America,” Opal said soberly. “We left before it spread fully, but given the speed of modern air travel, you would have to calculate on a worldwide pandemic.”

  “And you know this because you and your friends here are”—he hesitated fractionally—“time travelers?” Before she could answer, he added, “You have to admit it’s not exactly likely.”

  “Yes,” Opal admitted. She had the good sense not to push it further. She’d already given him the pitch, including the personal details Mr. Carradine had supplied. In Danny’s experience, it was best to lay things out bluntly, then leave them. The more you tried to convince people, the more resistant they became.

  It seemed to work. Cobra said, “You definitely know a lot of things you shouldn’t know. I don’t mean just for a bunch of kids, I mean for anybody. Then you tell me the man who told you this stuff is my own son, the baby born a week ago grown up.” He shook his head slowly. “Know what? That’s the bit I buy. It’s so crazy, nobody in their right mind would make it up.” He straightened his back. “That and a rumor. The Philly Experiment was the talk of the Company at one time, and some people still think we’ve been playing around with electromagnetic fields and mind control and, yeah, even time travel. So it hangs together. Sort of. So let’s say I believe you. For now. What exactly do you want from me?”

  “We want you not to send plague samples back from the Middle Ages,” Opal said. She thought about it, then
added, “Or anywhere else.”

  “Okay,” Cobra said.

  Opal blinked. “Okay?”

  Cobra shrugged. “Sure. I won’t send back any samples. Anything else while you’re here?”

  Opal said angrily, “Look, you need to take this seriously. People are dying in our time. It was only a matter of hours before the whole—”

  “You really haven’t thought this through, have you?” Cobra said soberly. “You’re asking me to make a pledge about something that only happened a couple of days ago so far as you’re concerned, but it’s more than twenty years in the future from my perspective. Sure, you’re right: from what you told me, there’s no way I’d think of sending through those samples now. But that’s now. In twenty years I could have information that would change my mind. I could have decided not to believe you. I could have a mental illness that stops me from behaving rationally. Something’s not right here. You’re trying to tell me an experienced CIA agent—my son, in this case, but that really doesn’t matter—would send you back in time to get me to promise not to do something twenty years later? I don’t believe that. There’s not an agent in the Company who would take that sort of risk—or miss thinking it through, even in an emergency. Which means that part of your story doesn’t hold together.” He pushed his chair back from the table. “Which means I’m not sure I believe any of it.”

  Danny said quietly, “Your son told me to kill you if I had any suspicion at all you might still send the samples through. He was worried about exactly what you’ve just been talking about.”

  Cobra stared at Danny. “How were you supposed to kill me? Shoot me with that imaginary gun you were waving around earlier?”

  Danny shook his head. “Poison.”

  Cobra’s expression changed. “What sort?”