‘Let’s not do that again,’ Demus said.
I nodded and stood trembling, my body still echoing with whatever that had been. The world blurred around me again, but differently this time. Just two overlaid versions of it, seemingly the same image but seen from slightly different angles. ‘Weirdness . . .’
Both of them looked at me and I saw myself from the outside, too thin, too white, hunched around my poisoned blood. I tried to shut their minds from mine and my own singular vision returned, the product of my eyes and mine alone.
‘You OK?’ Eva made to reach for me, then pulled back, remembering.
‘All good,’ I lied. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
CHAPTER 20
‘So you’re just going to casually break into a nuclear power station and take over operations?’ I asked Demus as he pushed me along.
‘They’re not that complicated.’ Eva was walking beside my wheelchair. Demus had bought this one rather than stolen it, like she had.
‘Any time traveller wanting to get back to when they came from is going to require a very large amount of controlled energy. A nuclear power station is the best option as it can generate the required current, and they’re so automated you can achieve most of what’s necessary from the control room,’ Demus said. ‘So, yes, we’ve both done our homework. And I’ve got a dozen what you might call “hired goons” on the case. We’re taking half of them up with us, and I’m meeting the rest in Bradwell.’
‘You can trust them?’ It seemed to me that anyone you picked up for a job of this kind would be as likely to turn you in as to turn up, and this was the sort of case that government undercover operatives lived for. ‘I mean, how long have you known these guys?’
‘A few weeks.’ Demus grunted as he tilted my wheelchair back to take a curb, then hefted the big rear wheels up. ‘And also most of their lives.’
‘Uh?’
‘I checked their credentials before I left. I know they’re who they say they are and that they all have a reputation for loyalty. Also none of them were recorded as being involved in breaking into a nuclear site. So that tends to indicate that it worked in my past and should work in this one. Be prepared, Nick, be prepared! Things in this game may not always be what they seem. It pays to have people you can call on in case of unexpected spanners in the works.’
‘Even so . . .’ I shook my head. ‘It just can’t be that easy to break into a nuclear power station, surely?’
Demus shrugged. ‘The only people who the government think might target power stations are terrorists. And they aim to stop those in the planning stage by infiltration and intelligence, not at the doorstep. Onsite security isn’t that tight at this time. There’s no record of an incident at Bradwell, so I think the government are going to hush it up and put extra measures in place afterwards.’
We crossed a few more streets, the busy London traffic showing no special consideration for the invalid in a wheelchair, and came to the backstreet where Demus had parked.
‘This is us.’ He stopped beside a white panel van.
‘What happened to the BMW?’
‘There’s going to be nine of us, that’s what happened.’ Demus looked around. Half the street lay in shadow, the other half still dazzlingly bright. ‘They should have been here already.’
‘Reputations for loyalty,’ I said. ‘Not for good timekeeping.’
Demus helped me into the front while Eva manhandled my wheelchair into the back of the van. The plastic seat cover felt searingly hot, even through my trousers. The van smelled of feet, and the footwell was littered with Fruit Pastilles wrappers. I loved those. Twenty-five years hadn’t lessened Demus’s sweet tooth any.
The back doors shut with a bang.
‘Hey!’ Eva called out, surprising me by still being inside the van. She rattled the doors and both Demus and I looked over the back of our seats to see what the problem was. ‘I’m locked in!’
‘I’ll go round and let you out.’ Demus turned and tried his door. ‘What the—’
My yelp of fear cut him off. Standing at my door and favouring me with a narrow smile while he did something to the lock was Charlie Rust.
I started to wind the window down, then thought better of it. Even so, before I’d got it completely closed Rust slipped a small rubber wedge between the glass and the doorframe, holding it in place.
‘I thought you’d like to know the results of that DNA test I was telling you about the other day.’ Rust’s voice came through the half-inch window gap. ‘The good doctor assures me that the John Doe found dead with my brother is a perfect match for you, Nick.’
‘You’re lying,’ I called back. ‘You don’t even have any of my DNA.’
Rust pursed his lips. He had to shout to make himself heard over Eva’s attempts to force the back doors. ‘I had enough of your skin under my fingernails to make a new you, Nick.’ He shielded his eyes and pretended to peer at Demus. ‘And this gentleman looks remarkably like our John Doe, only with hair.’
I noticed that in his other hand, Rust held a red plastic container with a yellow spout like the ones people use to carry petrol to cars. He swung his arm, splashing the stuff across the bonnet.
‘We need to get out of here!’ I told Demus, my blood running cold.
‘Find something to break the windscreen,’ Demus told me. He had a cell phone to his ear, rather like Eva’s.
I dug into the compartments in front of me, finding only an A-to-Z map book, cloths and a plastic ice scraper. ‘Eva, I need something metal, fast!’
Rust continued sloshing petrol liberally over the bonnet and windscreen. The chemical stench of it filled the van and immediately started me heaving.
‘They don’t tell me much, Nick, but I make it my business to find stuff out. And it seems to me that the fellow next to you must be you, just like the one who killed my brother was you, too.’ He vanished around the car, still sloshing petrol. ‘Don’t suffer a witch to live, they used to say.’ He was still shouting, though Eva had stopped banging. ‘And it seems to me that time travellers are much more dangerous than witches.’
‘Use your shoe!’ Eva said.
‘I’m wearing socks . . .’ Next to me were the black shoes that Demus had brought for me. I grabbed one off the seat. Demus kept talking into his phone, one finger in the other ear.
‘But,’ said Rust, reappearing, ‘this is really about my little brother.’ He took out a cigarette lighter.
I started hitting the windscreen with the heel of my shoe. Desperation lent me a strength I hadn’t thought the drugs and disease had left in me. Even so, the damn thing refused to shatter.
‘Never liked him, but the thing is,’ Rust said, trying to get a flame, ‘the thing is that we can’t have chaos in the world. There are debts and obligations. A man’s not a man unless he keeps to his own set of rules.’
In panic I started to pound at the windscreen with both fists but found no give in it. Demus was now hammering at his side window, also wedged by Rust and also resisting his strength.
A dark shape hit Rust from the side, moving fast. Somehow he managed to twist and throw the man, not only keeping his feet but also managing to keep his cigarette lighter in hand. And now it sported a flame.
‘I—’ Rust’s triumph proved short-lived as two more men jumped him. He sprawled across the bonnet, the lighter flying from his grip and arcing across my field of vision. For one heart-stopping moment it seemed impossible that it wouldn’t hit the windscreen and send us all up in the same fireball, but it flashed by and was gone.
‘Use this!’ Eva pressed a short screwdriver into Demus’s grasp. He stabbed the windscreen, once, twice, three times and in the next instant it was through, the whole sheet of glass now a milky assembly of tiny cubes held together beneath laminate.
Eva vaulted through from the back and struck the shattered windscreen with both heels, throwing it out of its frame. Rust rolled clear just in time to avoid being hit, taking one man down with him an
d leaving blood smears all across the white petrol-blistered paint.
‘Come on!’ Demus led the way, reaching back for Eva’s legs.
I scrambled out. Even with the adrenaline pounding through my veins it felt like climbing a mountain.
Demus caught hold of me as I rolled out. He began to lead me away down the street, Eva helping to support me.
‘Are those your men?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘All six?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why are we running?’
Demus glanced back. ‘They seem to be losing.’
‘More importantly, where are we going?’ Eva asked.
‘Right here.’ Demus held out his car key in his free hand and seemed to be trying to squeeze the plastic part between finger and thumb. ‘Damn, keep forgetting that . . .’
‘What?’
He released me and went forward to the black BMW parked a few yards ahead. ‘No remote unlocking back here in the Stone Age.’ He unlocked the door. ‘Get in, quick!’
I fell in on to the passenger seat, stinking of petrol. Eva got into the back. ‘Who was that madman? I saw him stab a man in the neck just now!’
Demus’s only answer was a squeal of tyres as we shot out into the road.
‘Jesus, that was close. He almost burned us all up.’ I found my hands shaking.
‘We’re going to have to deal with him somehow, if we survive this evening,’ Eva said.
‘Survive this evening?’ I asked. ‘Balls don’t traditionally have a high mortality rate.’
‘Well, there’s the small matter of the time hammer.’
Demus turned a hard left and joined the traffic heading out of London. ‘Our calculations do indicate a modest chance of disaster.’
‘Disaster?’ I strapped my seatbelt on, somewhat belatedly.
‘Well, centring a severe blow to the space-time continuum inside a nuclear power plant does carry some inherent risks,’ Demus said.
‘And there may be unforeseen consequences for both the timelines we’re trying to untangle,’ Eva added.
‘Like?’
‘Like instabilities or . . .’
‘Or?’ I turned to look back at her.
‘Well, there’s a non-trivial chance of changes to the strong and weak nuclear force, leading to the destruction of matter.’
‘Matter as in, all matter everywhere? Like all the atoms in the universe unzipping?’
‘Yup. But as far as I can tell, that’s quite unlikely.’
‘Well, that’s all good then.’
For a moment I saw myself through Eva’s eyes again, sick and worried. I shook her vision out of my head, wondering what she thought of this father she had come back to see.
Half an hour passed in silence.
‘Has it occurred to you, Demus, that here we are running from Rust again, a Rust at least, ready to break into a technical facility again, there’s a party to go to where I’m hoping to kiss the girl, again, and oh yes, I’m in chemo again?’
Demus glanced away from the road for a second. ‘Well, you do have the whole statistical outlier thing going on.’
‘Temporal cross-resonance,’ Eva said.
‘What?’ Demus beat me to it.
‘It could be an echo between the two fused timelines,’ she said. ‘Yours and mine, fuelled by the building paradox energy. The same issues still trying to resolve themselves. Echoing back and forth between the timelines until we separate them or they overload.’
‘Ah.’
‘Or just chance!’ She laughed. ‘It’s easy to come up with conspiracy theories if you only look at the evidence that supports your idea.’
On the drive north, Eva continued to check her calculations, spreading papers across the back seat. I would have offered to help but I felt too ill. Besides, she was probably too old to need her dad to help with her homework. Instead I asked Demus how he planned to deal with Rust, who would without doubt be coming after all of us. And while Demus could escape into last January and Eva could hurl herself back into 2007, I was left time travelling into the future at the same steady sixty minutes an hour that Rust and everyone else on the planet could match.
‘Well. I could give you a lot of money and you could pay someone to—’
‘Because that went so well just now, with those half-dozen heavies of yours,’ I said. ‘And besides, you might know where and how to rent thugs, but that’s a skill I’ve yet to acquire. Plus I think it might take a contract killer to do for Rust. Maybe three.’
‘We need to play to our strengths,’ Eva spoke up from behind us.
‘We calculate him to death?’
‘We go back in time and sort the problem out,’ she said.
Neither Demus or I said anything for a long moment, puzzled both by the fact we knew you couldn’t change things in this timeline by going back into the past, and by the fact we knew Eva wasn’t stupid. When we did speak, it was both at the same time to say the same thing. A weird feeling. ‘You’d just start a new timeline. Nothing would change.’
‘Normally, yes,’ Eva explained. ‘But this particular timeline is lousy with paradox, and it will have just been hit with a time hammer, putting everything into flux. In addition, if the individual going back is an integral part of the paradox, then I calculate that a small change could propagate through.’
‘How small?’ Demus beat me to it.
‘Well, if I just went back twenty years and killed him as a baby – and I’ve no intention of killing anyone, baby or otherwise – or if, for example, I interrupted his parents having sex, then the change would probably be too big. However, for a smaller change then the conditions we’re engineering, combined with the paradox issues, will be able to allow bundles of closely related timelines to mix. By which I mean reality will become unstable.’
‘And you don’t think destabilising reality is taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut in this case?’ I asked.
‘He was about two seconds away from burning all three of us alive,’ Eva said.
‘Point taken. I’ll do it.’
‘You’ll do nothing but stay here and play your part. It has to be me that goes back. Demus has an appointment in January to keep. I can go back and then sort out my own return. As long as I don’t go further back than the Manhattan Project, I’ll still have access to nuclear energy and should be able to build something to send myself home.’
‘Should?’ I asked.
‘The whole plan is built on a solid foundation of shoulds, maybes and probablys. I’ve only just come to the end of my time jump – I’m relatively easy to return to my original time. It’s the sending me and Demus further back in time that’s difficult, but doable given the equipment Demus will have on site. Demus’s jump is only six months. He can do that in one go. For me to go back decades it will have to be a non-conventional solution. The best we can do is drive a spike back through time, fracturing it. I have equipment that will let me track the fractures, but I’ll have to race through time and space to the various splinters and let each carry me on. Also, because I’ll be aiming to cause a low-grade paradox, I’ll have some of the same sorts of problems you’ve been having. The universe will do its best to stop me.
‘Anyway, if I do get stuck in the 70s, I’ll just start a new timeline and make myself Queen of the World! Shouldn’t be too hard with all the stuff I know.
‘When Demus provides the juice, I was already going to return to 2007. The only change here is that I’ll head in the other direction, into the 70s instead, and see what I can get done on the Rust front before going home. Between us we must have some information that I can use to pull his fangs. So tell me everything you know about him.’
So we did. It turned out Demus had been researching the man for years, having had other issues with him. He knew a lot more than I did, and pretty much all of it was scary.
CHAPTER 21
It took the best part of two hours to reach Bradwell, and that was with Demus driving like a
maniac the whole way. Occasionally my perception would hop into his head, an effect lingering from when the three of us had first touched back in the hospital. Experiencing his driving first hand didn’t make it any less scary. With a little effort, though, I could drag my focus back into my own head.
We had to skirt London and reach the coast. There wasn’t enough time for them to take me to Cambridge and then get back to the power station, so Demus dropped me off in the town closest to it, Bradwell-on-Sea. He left me with another fat roll of tenners and the assurance that there was no place that any taxi driver shown a sufficient number of the notes would not agree to take me.
We pulled into a carpark behind the marina and abandoned the BMW. I stood there, sweating and shivering in my dinner jacket, nauseous and barely able to stand. I watched as Demus and Eva unloaded electronic equipment from the trunk of his car. Behind them the masts of several dozen yachts wagged gently against a paling sky.
‘That’s them.’ Demus hailed a lone man smoking with his back to a panel van identical to the one we’d left behind in London. He turned to me. ‘This is it, Nick. Nothing we do here matters unless you play your part in Cambridge.’
‘You know this is all crazy, right?’ I lowered my voice as Eva busied herself digging more stuff from the boot. ‘I mean, you’re me . . . how good are we at picking up girls? And I’m supposed to be able to leave this ball with either Mia or Helen, both of whom are way out of my league . . . and I’m supposed to do that while smelling of petrol, trying not to puke and seriously feeling like death . . . with both their boyfriends there?’
‘Yup.’ He offered me what I knew from my mirror to be my best attempt at an encouraging smile. ‘Anyway, better go. Coming, Eva?’
‘Ready.’ Eva struggled around the car with a heavy-looking holdall in each hand.
‘I guess this is it, then. We won’t see each other again.’ I felt slightly peeved that neither of them were taking this as hard as I was.
‘Well, I’ll be seeing you in January,’ Demus said.
‘Yes, but I’ve already done that, and forgotten most of it, on your instructions!’
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