In his mind Josh could see her standing in a dimly lit nightclub. Her blue dress shimmered in the single spotlight, and her eyes were closed as her red lips trembled over every word.
His consciousness reached into the event, using the timeline that expanded from the sounds of the music, and suddenly he was inside Mister Kelly’s club, could smell the cigars and the whisky. He was so surprised to find that he could enter the moment without any physical object that he pulled back. This was something new, an ability that none of the others had ever told him about, and he wasn’t sure whether he was even supposed to be able to do it.
An hour later there was a knock at the door. Josh woke with a start, not realising that he had fallen asleep on the sofa. Assuming that Caitlin had forgotten her key, he jumped up in total darkness and fumbled blindly for the light switch as he went in the hall.
There was a package on the doormat. The knock had been someone posting it through the letterbox. Josh picked it up and turned it over. It was badly wrapped in the torn pages of a Dark Knight graphic novel. Batman stood high above the cityscape of Gotham. Written over the sky were the words ‘open me’ in a thick black marker.
He tore off the packaging to find a cheap Nokia phone nestling in bubble wrap. It was already powered up, and there was a message waiting for him.
‘WE HAVE UR MUM. U OWE ME 20K. L.’
Josh read the message twice before chucking the phone at the wall. It bounced off a stack of newspapers and landed in one piece on the floor.
He went over to stamp on it, but then thought better of it. The colonel had no landline — he was convinced that they were continuously monitored. Josh picked up the Nokia and went back into the study and dialled the hospital. It was a number he’d memorised a long time ago.
‘Neuro,’ the ward sister’s voice crackled through the crappy speaker.
‘Hi. My name is Joshua Jones. Can I talk to my mother, please?’
‘One moment.’ There was a click and the line hissed a little. Josh looked at the bars on the display; the signal was weak. He moved closer to the window.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Jones, your mother has been transferred. Her notes say it was processed this morning.’
Josh was looking out into the garden as he listened to the woman’s voice. A flash of lightning lit it up, and for a split second he saw the silhouette of someone standing with what looked like a gun pointed straight at him. Josh dropped the phone and ran for the back door, grabbing a carving knife from the drawer as he went.
By the time he got down into the garden, whoever it was had gone. The rain soaked him to the skin as he searched the bushes, shouting and slashing at anything that moved.
When he finally came back into the house, he was drenched. He grabbed a towel, threw more coal onto the fire and sat down in front of it, trying to rub some warmth back into his hands.
The discarded phone lay on the mat, and he picked it up carefully, his hands shivering. He swore under his breath as he read Lenin’s message once more, then hit ‘reply’ and typed: ‘Where? When?’ and hit ‘send’.
Josh found that there was less than a thousand pounds in legal currency in the colonel’s petty cash. He’d always assumed the Order had some kind of bank account, although he’d never seen the old man with a credit card or go anywhere near a bank — let alone a cashpoint. There was probably some kind of treasury at the Chapter House, but he had no chance of getting near that.
It was the middle of the night, and Josh was so tired his eyes ached. Neither the colonel nor Caitlin had returned — which they guessed might happen. She’d been away without permission so he was sure they had grounded her again.
The Nokia sat inert on the desk. There had been no reply from Lenin and, no matter how many times he checked, it refused to give him the answer he needed.
Josh tried not to think about where his mother was or what they were doing to her. There were hundreds of places Lenin could have hidden her. He had a network of empty flats all over the estate, evictions or sublets — the kind the council had given up trying to work out who should be the legitimate occupier. Every one of them would be a damp, squalid hole with no running water, heating or electricity. Josh just had to hope that Lenin would keep her warm, that he still had some remnant of decency.
Josh went into the curiosity collection looking for something valuable — anything he could trade or sell. As he went from one cabinet to the next, he realised that most of the objects were just everyday things, old and well loved, but not especially valuable in their own right. It was as Mrs B had said: they were only priceless to those that had owned them.
There were, of course, items such as Blackbeard’s sword, but that would need a specialist buyer, and he really didn’t have time to find one of those.
Josh thought back to the treasure that Selephin had taken off the Roman galley and cursed the fact that he hadn’t thought of keeping any for himself. It wasn’t like him at all; he’d spent too much time with these people, and it was making him soft. He needed to look after his own now — no matter what the cost.
Then he remembered the key that Marie Antoinette had given the colonel. Hadn’t he said something about the treasure of her children? He tried hard to recall the old man’s exact words. Something to do with Bourbons, which he thought was odd at the time — he had always thought of that as a biscuit.
He began looking through each cabinet carefully, trying to remember what it had looked like; it had not been a big key, but it had been ornately carved with a motif in the fob. The letter ‘M’ and an ‘A’ were intertwined, the insignia of the Queen of France.
It took a long time to find it. The colonel hadn’t actually labelled it as yet. In his usual disorganised way, it had been thrown into a tin box with a dozen other random mementoes from 11.792.
Josh took the key out and felt the history radiating from it. Patterns of energy arced around his hand. He knew Caitlin would say this was wrong, but he had no choice. His mother needed him, and the only thing Lenin understood was money. He would have to get enough to pay him off and set them up somewhere far away from London. There were a lot of new advances in MS treatment in America, he thought. Anywhere that was far enough away from his old life.
As he turned the key over in his fingers, he watched its history unfurling: Marie Antoinette locking the chest in front of her children, a nobleman taking it away towards some kind of church in the middle of nowhere. Then years of darkness, watching the stones around it age and crumble to ruin. No one had ever found it. The crypt in which it had been hidden had collapsed over the centuries. He wound back to a point a few days after the courier had left it in the crypt and let himself step into that part of history.
53
Orval
[Orval, France. Date: 11.795]
The crypt smelt of rotting wood, or so he told himself.
The chamber was damp, moss coated the crumbling stone walls and water dripped down on hair-like roots that had penetrated the roof where it had begun to sag and crack. There were tombs on either side with the illegible names of dead French nobles slowly fading from the crumbling surface of the stone. In another hundred years there would be nothing left to identify them — time and nature were erasing them from history.
The crypt was pitch black, and he had to step carefully between the rubble that was strewn across the flagstones using the glow from his tachyon to light the way. He swept it slowly across the room, looking for any sign of the chest.
The beam found the base of an iron-bound wooden box, but as he moved the light up to the lid he found that there was a foot placed squarely on top of it.
Josh jumped back, nearly dropping the tachyon. Someone switched on a torch and he found Phileas staring back at him.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Josh said in a whisper, as if trying not to wake the dead.
‘I was about to ask you the same question,’ Phileas replied.
Josh’s mind ran through a whole list of lies and excuse
s and then settled on a simple one.
‘The colonel, Rufius I mean, he sent me to collect the treasure.’
‘Caitlin said you might say that.’
‘And how would she know?’
‘I’m afraid that was down to me,’ said another voice from the shadows.
Josh jumped again and turned towards the second voice — it was Sim.
‘Jesus! You’re going to give me a heart attack! Is there anyone else in here that I should know about?’
‘Only little old me.’ Lyra appeared next to Sim and winked.
There was only one person missing.
‘The Protectorate has put her under house arrest,’ Lyra answered his unspoken question, ‘while they investigate what happened in Greece.’
Lyra always made Josh a little uncomfortable. Her eyes always had that look, like she knew all his secrets.
‘It took me a while to calculate your next move,’ Sim added apologetically. ‘We couldn’t be sure whether it would be the warehouse or one of your previous missions.’
‘So you KNEW I was going to do this? I thought you guys couldn’t see into the future.’
‘But we do know about your past,’ Lyra said with that look again.
‘And we did some digging,’ Phileas added more seriously. ‘My department has to do background checks on every candidate. It’s nothing personal.’
Josh couldn’t think of anything more personal. The thought of them knowing about his past, all those stupid mistakes he had made — the way he used to be. He was ashamed of that life, and he realised that wasn’t who he was, nor ever really had been — he had just been trying to survive any way he could.
‘So I’m guessing you’re not going to let me borrow a little of the treasure?’ Josh half-joked as he kicked the chest. It was made of a thick, dark wood and didn’t move an inch.
‘I’m afraid not,’ Phileas replied. ‘Its fate is best served here. The Antiquarians will archive it in another hundred years or so.’
‘Why? If no one is going to ever use it?’
‘Because,’ Sim answered, ‘there is a ninety-seven-point-three per cent probability that it would end up getting you killed.’
Josh knew better than to argue with Sim’s statistics.
‘Fine. So I am guessing Caitlin has another plan?’
‘Funny you should say that,’ Lyra replied.
54
Contact
The professor was sitting at a desk in a half-built laboratory — one that the university knew nothing about. Fermi had bought a secure industrial warehouse specifically to work on the device that Joshua had left behind. He sat amongst a chaotic collection of cardboard boxes as white-suited technicians were busy constructing complex machines and computer systems, all following his carefully planned instructions.
‘So he’s made contact?’ the professor said into his phone. He was using an encrypted VOIP app which he’d bought a significant stake in a few years before the NSA had starting monitoring everyone’s communications.
‘Yeah. Just as I said,’ the voice of Lenin replied through the speaker. ‘He wants to know when and where.’
‘Let’s say midnight tomorrow. Where do suggest?’
‘I know a place. What about the money?’
He liked the directness of the boy. He was ambitious and smart. In other circumstances he would have made a great politician or general, but the fates hadn’t been kind. Drugs were a one-way street to disaster. Lenin would probably be dead within five years.
‘You will be compensated once I have him.’
Fermi ended the call. A few seconds later, a map location appeared in the message tab.
One of the technicians came over with an iPad held out in front of him. There was a technical schematic displayed on its screen.
‘The magnetron needs a 400amp supply. We’re pretty sure this place doesn’t have the capacity for that kind of load.’
Fermi put his phone away and ran his fingers through his hair.
‘Che cavolo! Do I have to do everything around here?’ he said, taking the tablet from the man.
55
Clockmaker
[Naxos, Greece. Date: 9.913]
The clockmaker’s old hand trembled as he placed the last bronze gear into the mechanism — this was to be his masterpiece, his finest work. Vikardis had imagined creating such a device since he was a young apprentice, a machine that could plot the transit of the sun and other heavenly objects across the sky.
There was a precise logic to its design, one that could only be realised in the angles of Euclidian geometry. It was a manifestation of mathematics that had no equal and it would ensure that his name would be revered alongside those of Pythagoras and Plato.
The fact that it wasn’t his idea was something that history would forget. The traveller who’d visited him so many years ago, who’d sat for days with the young apprentice as he memorised the workings and gearings required, was now nothing more than a ghost. He was a stranger who’d asked for nothing in return for the knowledge, stating that his motives were ‘for the good of mankind and science’.
Putting the last piece in place, Vikardis sat back and admired his invention. As he kneaded his aching shoulders, unravelling the knots that the hours of painstaking work had created, he knew there was nothing left now but to send the work to Rome and wait for the summons to the senate.
His reverie was disturbed by a noise in the outer courtyard — a cat most likely chasing a meal. Before he could rise to investigate, he realised there was a man standing in the doorway.
Vikardis quickly covered the device with a cloth and stood up. ‘You are welcome stranger,’ he said, bowing his head and assuming a benevolent tone to mask his irritation at the unannounced interruption.
‘Ave, Master Vikardis,’ the stranger said, bowing low. ‘I have come to talk to you about your latest commission.’
Suspicious of the stranger, who wore the robes of a senate official, the old clockmaker moved in front of the device.
‘My humble apologies, master, but how do you know of my work?’
The stranger smiled and produced the seal of the Consul Lucius Cornelius Sulla.
‘Sulla was most interested in your last report and are very eager to see a working model. “Go to Vikardis”, he commanded. “See how he advances!”’
The old clockmaker bowed his head deferentially. ‘Sire, this is most timely — I have just recently completed the only working prototype.’ He proudly removed the cloth from his invention.
The stranger came closer to the object, his eyes wide with amazement. ‘It’s a wondrous thing. A veritable masterpiece — you truly are a master craftsman.’
The old clockmaker glowed with pride — this was all he’d dreamed of, to be brought to Rome, to live the good life. He offered the stranger a seat and poured them each a cup of dark, rich wine.
The stranger sat down opposite the watchmaker, took a sip from the cup and scratched his beard.
‘Now tell me about the man that showed you how to make this.’
56
The Plan
‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ exclaimed Josh, ‘I thought that was forbidden. Don’t you have rules about messing with your own timelines?’
They were sitting in the colonel’s kitchen, Sim was busy cooking something Lyra had caught in the grounds of the Abbey at Orval and Phileas and Lyra were pouring over a collection of time maps and notebooks spread out on the table.
‘Literally hundreds of them,’ agreed Sim, ‘but Caitlin is convinced an intercession is the only chance of resolving the crisis.’ He crushed some herbs into the steaming pot of stew. ‘She made me run the numbers — they do look rather good.’
Josh wasn’t sure he could believe what they were asking him to do — something he’d spent most of his life wishing he could.
They wanted him to go back and save Gossy.
‘It’s not as if you would be directly interacting with your own timeline anyway,�
� said Lyra, pointing to something on one of the lines on the map.
Josh didn’t need to be convinced, but he remembered how the colonel had reacted when his other self had shown up. ‘Isn’t there some kind of temporal law that could wind up with me just disappearing?’
The others smiled as if sharing some kind of in-joke.
‘What?’ asked Josh.
‘That’s what they tell all the new recruits. It’s supposed to stop them playing the Grandfather Paradox,’ said Lyra.
‘Going back and killing your grandfather, so your dad never existed,’ Sim added. ‘It’s classic Novikov self-consistency conjecture.’
Josh looked at him blankly.
‘The universe seems to have a few built-in safeguards to stop that kind of thing from happening,’ Phileas interrupted, trying to sound reassuring. ‘All we’re going to do is make a small adjustment to the outcome of one particular car crash. The effects of which will be so localised as not to have any impact on the broader timeline.’
‘It may not seem like a big thing to you —’
‘But we know that it will change your life and those around you,’ Lyra interrupted.
‘Will I remember how it was before?’
Sim put the lid back on the pot of stew and sat down next to Josh.
‘The truth is, we don’t know, and neither will you until we do it. These kind of changes are strictly off the books, and therefore don’t tend to be well documented.’
‘So tell me again how this is going to help resolve the problem with Lenin?’
Sim went to grab one of the drawings.
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