The Reluctant Assassin

Macho-Nerds


BEDFORD SQUARE. BLOOMSBURY. LONDON. 1898

Albert Garrick sat slouched on the cold basement floor, eyes tightly closed, preserving the ghost image of the orange sparks branded on his eyelids.

Magic is real.

It was a revolutionary thought in this industrial age of logic and reason. It was difficult to maintain belief in what he’d just seen once the evidence had disappeared. It would be much simpler to dismiss the entire event as delusion, but he would not.

I am being tested, he realized. My night of opportunity has arrived, and I must find within myself the mettle to seize my chance.

Garrick’s faith had always been in bone, blood, and butchery—in things he could wrap his fingers around and throttle, substantial things. There was nothing ethereal about them, but this was something different, something extraordinary.

Magic.

Garrick had been fascinated by magic for as long as he could remember. As a boy he had accompanied his father to the Adelphi Theatre in London and watched from his perch in the wings as his old da swept the stage and kow-towed to the talent. Even then, this deference had angered the young Albert Garrick. Who were these people to treat his father with such disdain? Hacks, most of them—hacks, hags, and hams.

Among the ranks of the players there was a hierarchy. The singers were top dogs, then the comics, followed by the chorus pretties, and finally the conjurers and animal acts. Albert watched, fascinated, as the petty dramas played out every night backstage. Divas threw tantrums over dressing-room allocation or the size of opening-night bouquets. The young Garrick saw cheeks slapped, doors slammed, and vases hurled.

One particularly vain tenor, an Italian named Gallo, decided that the magic turn was not affording him due respect, and so he decided to ridicule the man at his birthday celebration in the Coal Hole public house on the Strand. Garrick witnessed the encounter from a stool beside the fireplace, and it made such an impression on the lad that he could recall the incident even now, almost forty years later.

The magician, the Great Lombardi, was built like a jockey, small and wiry, with a head that was too big for his body. He wore a pencil mustache that made him seem a touch austere, and a slick helmet of pomaded hair added to this impression. Lombardi was also Italian, but from the southern region of Puglia, which Gallo, a Roman, considered a land of peasants— an opinion he shared often and loudly. And, as Gallo was the star turn, it was understood that Lombardi would stomach the constant jibes. But Gallo should have known that Italian men are proud, and swallowed insults sit like bile in their stomachs.

On that particular evening, having treated the assembly to a raucous rendition of the “Drinking Song” from La Traviata, Gallo sauntered across the lounge to the magician and draped his meaty arm across the little man’s shoulders.

“Tell us, Lombardi, is it true that the poor of Puglia fight with the pigs for root vegetables?”

The crowd laughed and clinked glasses, encouraging Gallo to further mischief.

“No answer? Well then, Signor Lombardi, tell us how the women of the south borrow their husbands’ straight razors before Sunday ceremonies.”

This was too much: the taciturn illusionist quickly drew a long dagger from his sleeve and seemingly stabbed Gallo upward under the chin, but no blood issued forth, just a stream of scarlet handkerchiefs. Gallo squeaked like a frightened child and collapsed to his knees.

“On the subject of razors,” said Lombardi, pocketing his trick blade, “it seems as though Signor Gallo has cut himself shaving. He will survive . . . this time.”

The joke was most definitely on the tenor, who, humiliated beyond bearing, took the morning ferry from Newhaven to France, reneging on his contract and ensuring that he would never work a music hall in Great Britain again.

It was a beautiful revenge, tied together with the bow of wordplay, and the young Garrick, perched by the fire, vowed to himself, Someday I, too, will have the power to command such respect.

It took six months of fetching and carrying, but eventually Albert Garrick persuaded the Great Lombardi to take him on as an apprentice. It was his door to a new world.

Garrick thought of his vow now, sitting in the killing chamber of the foreboding house on Bedford Square.

Someday I, too, will have the power.

And that day had finally come.

Garrick dipped his fingertips in the small pool of black blood on the bedsheets, then watched the thick liquid run down his long pale fingers. The patterns reminded him of war paint worn by the savages in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Extravaganza, which he had taken Riley to see.

Someone will come to clean this mess, he thought, and daubed his cheeks with stripes of a dead man’s blood.

They will come, and I will take their magic and their power.


BEDFORD SQUARE. BLOOMSBURY. LONDON. NOW

Special Agent Chevie Savano was feeling pretty under-informed. The first thing she did when she got the strange boy under lock and key in a holding cell was to storm into the pod room and prepare to have it out with Agent Orange. Her indignation seeped out of her like water from a sponge when she saw her partner kneeling at the hatch, staring morosely at the body inside.

“It’s . . . my father,” he said, without looking up. “He must have been dead or dying going into the wormhole. The rapid energy loss might explain the multiple mutations.”

Chevie had never expected to hear the words wormhole and mutations spoken outside of the movies.

“You need to tell me everything, Agent Orange.”

Orange nodded, or maybe just allowed his head to droop. “I know, of course. But first we have to call in a cleanup team. I don’t know what my father left behind. Get me the London office and tell them to send a full hazmat team. It’s probably unnecessary, but I have to go back and check.”

“Go back where? What is that pod? Some kind of transporter? If we had that technology, surely the public would have found out.”

Orange’s laugh was hollow. “There are a thousand Web sites dedicated to suppressed technology; two have even posted blueprints of the pod. People believe what they see in the Apple store, not what some nutjob conspiracy theorist tells them.”

“So it is a transporter?”

Orange was finding these questions a strain. “After a fashion. I’m upgrading your clearance. Open my folder on the network. The password is HGWELLS. One word, all caps. Those files will tell you all you need to know.”

Chevie was halfway upstairs to her computer when she remembered why the password seemed familiar.

H. G. Wells. The Time Machine.

A time machine? she thought. That’s insane.

But then, no more insane than a monkey arm and yellow blood.

Chevie called in the hazmat team request to the London office and was given the runaround for nearly fifteen minutes until she invoked Agent Orange’s name; after that she was put straight through to the hazardous materials’ section and was assured that a team would be on site in less than an hour. No sooner had she put the phone down than a brigade of London’s finest firefighters burst through what was left of the front door, determined to hack their way through the building with large axes. They were politely but firmly turned away by a dozen black-clad Fed musclemen who had arrived considerably earlier than the hazmat team and proceeded to set up a perimeter around the house on Bedford Square.

Once Chevie was sure that the perimeter was secure, she told the chief muscleman’s mirrored sunglasses that she was taking ten minutes in the operations center.

Just enough time for me to find out what the blazes is going on here. Chevie was surprised to find that she was handling the day’s events pretty well. She had always been cool under pressure, but this was different. Something sci-fi was going on here. It seemed that the world as she knew it was not the world as it was.

Hold it together , she told herself. And read the file.

Orange’s folder had been sitting on the local network’s shared folders list since she’d arrived in Bedford Square, but she had never been able to access it until now. Chevie felt a little nervous even floating the cursor across the icon.

What am I going to find out? If there is time travel, then why not aliens? Why not vampires? I really don’t want to turn into one of those movie FBI gals who hunt freaks of nature. Those gals always end up with a limp.

Chevie opened the folder and was dismayed to find over two hundred files lined up alphabetically inside. Chevie changed the view so that the files were listed in order of date and picked one with the title “Project Orange Overview.” She began to read, forcing herself to go slowly and absorb every word. After twenty minutes of absolute concentration, she leaned back in her office chair and covered her mouth with one hand in case a hysterical giggle leaked out.

You have got to be kidding me, she thought, then removed her hand and shouted toward the door, “You have got to be kidding me!”

Orange was downstairs in the small medical room. He had wrestled his dead father from the pod’s interior and laid him out on a steel gurney, covering all but his head with a white sheet. When Chevie entered the room, he was gently sponging the old man’s forehead.

“Why do you think that kid killed your father?” “I don’t know. The Timekey video doesn’t show much. One second the boy is not there, and the next he is. More than likely he’s a thief.”

“A thief from the past. What are we going to do with him?”

Orange wrung the sponge till his knuckles were white. “Again, I don’t know. No one has ever brought back a local before. We could shoot him—I have a gun.”

“Shoot him, good one. Are you okay, Orange? Maybe I should take over as agent in charge?”

Orange smiled wryly, and Chevie thought, not for the first time, that her partner had a wide variety of smiles, none of them very happy.

“No need for that, Agent, I am perfectly fine.”

“But that’s your father.”

“In name only. I haven’t seen this man for a long time. The Bureau is my family.”

“Wow. I think that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Another smile, this one rueful. “I think you may be right.”

“Do I still have to call you Agent Orange?”

“No. Professor Smart will be fine. Or just Felix.”

“Professor Felix Smart. Son of missing Scottish quantum physicist Charles Smart. You have the same nose.”

“But not the same blood, thank goodness. Yellow blood sets off the scanner at airports.”

Chevie ignored the feeble attempt at humor. “So what happened to your father? I didn’t get that far in the files.”

Felix Smart gazed at his father’s face as he spoke. “My father discovered that Einstein’s quantum theory was essentially correct and that he could stabilize a transversable wormhole through space-time using exotic matter with negative energy density.”

“I knew someone would get around to that eventually,” said Chevie with a straight face, then wished that she could activate the WARP pod so that she could go back five seconds and not crack a funny when her partner’s father was lying dead and mutated on the table. “Can we talk about this outside?”

“Of course.” Felix Smart led her into the corridor, talking as he walked. “The university in Edinburgh funded my father for a few years, then he moved to a larger facility in London in conjunction with Harvard Research. By this time I was already with the FBI in Washington. Once it became clear that to me that Father was getting somewhere, I persuaded my section chief to take a look. You wouldn’t know it to listen to my accent, but I lived in Washington with my mother after my parents divorced. The Bureau consultants loved the concept and threw money at Father, and I was appointed as project liaison. We saw real results, really quickly. We sent through cameras first, and animals. Then death-row prisoners.”

Chevie was not shocked. She knew that it had been common practice for government departments to offer testing deals to condemned prisoners in the last millennium. The government had tested everything from rubber bullets to telepathy pills on convicts.

“The tests were pretty successful. There was a small number of aberrations, usually on the return trip, but less than one percent, so acceptable in a scientific sense. Then some bright spark had the idea that we could stash valuable witnesses in the past.”

Chevie raised a finger. “Just say that last part again. I want to nail it down in the real world.”

“Even John Gotti couldn’t have put a hit on someone in the nineteenth century, right? We sent the witnesses back into the past with a handler and then we would bring them home to testify.”

“So, the FBI does witness protection in the past?”

“Yes. Would you like me to say it one more time?”

“No. I got it.”

“Of course it’s incredibly expensive, and the power needed for a single jaunt is enough to light a small country, so witnesses were always huge security risks and involved in trials that were tied up for a few years. In the ten years that WARP actually functioned, we only sent four witnesses back to various periods. Certain high-ranking intelligence officers felt the government was being short-changed, and so it was strongly suggested by a Colonel Clayton Box, a very enthusiastic specialforces type, that the tech be used for black ops.”

“Wet work? Assassinations?”

“Exactly. Imagine if we could go back and take out terrorists while they were still in high school. My father did not like that idea and, no matter how much I tried to reassure him, he grew more and more paranoid. He saw conspiracies everywhere and was convinced that his research was being stolen, so one morning he simply disappeared into the past, taking all programmed Timekeys and the access codes with him. Father could come back if he wanted to, but we couldn’t go after him. Not without the precise algorithms and codes that my father kept in his brain. He invented the language that the pods speak, so without him WARP was finished. My father was the key, and even after all this time we haven’t been able to hack his machines. We lost Terrence Carter, the key witness in a huge corruption case. And his bodyguard was stranded with him. Not to mention the fact that there are millions of dollars’ worth of WARP pods lying around wormhole hotspots like so much scrap. The irony was that Colonel Box and his entire team disappeared during an operation a few weeks later, so the threat to WARP was neutralized.”

Chevie took a long moment to absorb this deluge of information, then asked a sensitive question. “So the yellow blood and the simian arm were two of your aberrations?”

Felix Smart answered calmly, as though having a dead father with ape parts were an everyday occurrence. “The odds against two aberrations were steep. Wormhole mutations happened a few times with some of the prisoners. Father’s theory was that the time tunnels had memory, and sometimes the quantum foam got muddled. Molecules were mixed up. Our test subjects made it through without any significant mutations over ninety-nine percent of the time. But we saw extra limbs, extrasensory perception, a dinosaur head once.”

Chevie found it a struggle to keep a straight face. “A dinosaur head?”

“I know—insane, isn’t it? Velociraptor, I think. We never found out for sure.”

“The dinosaur died?”

Felix Smart frowned. “Technically the velociraptor committed suicide. There was enough of the scientist still inside there to realize what had happened, so he grabbed a gun and shot himself in the head. Terrible mess.”

Chevie felt a sensation something like jet lag settling around her mind.

It’s mild shock, she realized. My brain doesn’t believe a word it’s hearing. Still, might as well play along; it will all be over soon.

“So, what’s next, Orange . . . Professor?”

Before he could answer, Felix’s phone buzzed with a message. He drew a flat silver communicator from his pocket and read the screen. “Hazmat is here. So, next we clone my father’s Timekey to go back to wherever he was hiding out, and maybe find some notes and clean up whatever mess he left behind. We don’t want some local finding one of my daddy’s designs and building super-lasers a century ahead of schedule. You stay here and review the video evidence on the original Timekey’s video log.”

Chevie watched her partner/boss as he strode toward the stairway, back in action mode less than an hour after stumbling on the body of his estranged father.

Cold, she thought.

Riley lay on a low bunk in the holding cell. He held his hands before his face and clenched them into fists to stop them trembling.

I am in another world was his first thought. His second was Garrick. He’ll be coming for me, you can bet your last shilling on that.

Riley tried to think about something else.

He’d never had a friend, as far as he could remember, and he was used to bolstering his own spirits. But sometimes, in his dreams, he saw the tall boy with red hair and a wide smile, and he had developed a habit of talking to that boy in his head as a way of calming himself.

I’m alive, ain’t I, Ginger? And maybe this prison is far enough away. Far enough to flummox Garrick himself.

But Riley didn’t believe that, no matter how many times he repeated it.

Riley tried to stop thinking about Garrick, but it was hard to cheer yourself up when Garrick’s mug was the main image in your brain.

So think of something else, then.

What about the yellow blood busting from that old geezer’s ticker? And didn’t he have monkey parts? And what about that shameless lass in the black undergarments? This was indeed a confusing new world, and a strange-looking prison cell.

But every cell has a door and every door has a lock.

Garrick’s words.

Undeniably those words had a wisdom to them. Riley forced himself to stand and walk the half dozen paces to the door. If this was indeed a prison, then it could be escaped from, just as Edmond Dantès had escaped from the dreaded Château d’If in one of Riley’s favorite novels, The Count of Monte Cristo.

In recent years, books had become Riley’s passion and had helped him through the long, lonely hours in the Holborn theater that he and Garrick used as their digs. It was Garrick’s custom to disappear for days on end, and on his return he expected a clean house and a hot dinner. And while the assassin sat in the kitchen, blowing on his beef stew, his knees knocking on the underside of the table, he would twirl a spoon regally, which was Riley’s signal to begin the evening’s entertainment. Riley would then regale his master with an approximate summary of whichever novel he had been tasked with reading.

Lively now, son, Garrick often called. Make me believe that I’m in between the pages my own self.

And Riley would think, I am not your son, and, I wish I was in between these pages.

When Garrick had initiated this storytelling practice, Riley had hated it and grew to resent the books themselves; but The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes changed all of that. The book was simply too fascinating to be despised. Riley could no more hate Arthur Conan Doyle than he could hate the parents he could not remember, though Garrick reminded him often that they had left him hanging in a flour bag on the railings of Bethnal Green workhouse, where the magician had found him and rescued him from slum cannibals.

I could certainly do with some advice from Mr. Holmes at this present moment, thought Riley, rapping on the door with a knuckle. A genius detective is exactly what the doctor ordered—that or a housebreaker.

The cell door itself was standard prison issue, heavy steel with a window of sufficient dimensions for a medium-sized dog to squeeze through were it not glazed.

Or an escapologist.

Riley knew he could wriggle through that gap if there was a way to get the glass out.

Garrick has forced me through tighter holes.

But the glass extended into the door itself on all sides and was well milled, with no warps or bubbles.

These people know their glass, Riley had to admit. The lock, then?

The lock was of a design that baffled Riley. There was no space for even the narrowest pick to penetrate. Riley tested the keyhole with his fingertip and felt a nail crack for his trouble. The door had no visible hinges, and there wasn’t enough room for so much as a draft to squeeze through underneath.

This would be a challenge, even for Albert Garrick.

Then again, Garrick would be coming in, not going out. And getting in was always easier, especially if you could knock off the person with the key and take it from them.

Riley shivered. He swore that he could sense Garrick drawing closer, and his approach seemed to chill the air.

The door clacked and swung slowly inward, and Riley held his breath, so convinced was he that Garrick had come to tuck him in for a Highgate nap. But it was not the magician; instead the half-clothed lass who had locked him in stood framed in the doorway.

“Step back from the door, kid,” said the girl. “Lie on the bed with your hands behind your head.”

Her tone was amiable enough, but there was a large pistol in her delicate fingers, and in Riley’s opinion, this particular pistol seemed capable of shooting the bullet and perhaps digging the grave as well. This was not a pistol one argued with, so Riley did as he was told and looked sharp about it.

The girl seemed satisfied and stepped inside the room, leaving a tantalizing wedge of freedom on display behind her. Riley briefly considered bolting for the outside world, but then light glinted on the gun’s barrel, and the boy decided he could wait for the next opportunity.

“Miss,” said Riley. “Have I come to rest in a traveling Wild West Show? You appear to be a savage Injun.”

Chevie glared down at the boy along the sights of her weapon. “We don’t use the term savage Injun anymore. Some people take issue with being described as savages. Go figure.”

“I saw Buffalo Bill’s Extravaganza a while back. You have the look of an Apache.”

Chevie half smiled. “Shawnee, if you have a burning need to know. Now, enough small talk. There’s a bar behind your head; grab it with your right hand.”

Riley did was he was told, and having an inkling of what was coming, spread his grip to widen the span of his wrist, but to no avail.

“Sure, kid. Oldest trick in the book. What? You think I graduated from Idiot College last semester?”

“Why do you refer to me as ‘kid’? We are of the same age or thereabouts.”

Chevie leaned across Riley and snapped a metal cuff over his wrist.

“Yeah? Well, I’m seventeen, actually. And you don’t look a day over twelve.” She ratcheted the cuff tight, hooking the other end on the bed railing.

“I am four and ten,” retorted Riley. “And due a stretch any day. This time next year I’ll be towering over you, miss.”

“I am thrilled to hear that, kid. Until that great day dawns, you’ve got one hand for eating and scratching your behind, though I recommend you eat first.”

Now that the boy was secured, Chevie wedged the door open with a chair so she could keep an eye on the pod room, just in case something else decided to come through.

Riley jerked his chain a few times to test its strength and Chevie grinned.

“Everybody does that, but let me tell you, those cuffs have a tensile strength of over three hundred and fifty pounds, so you are wasting your time.” Chevie shook her head. “There’s a lot of time wasting going on around here today; you have no idea.”

Riley suddenly felt like crying, and almost as suddenly felt ashamed of himself. Crying would not get him away from Garrick; backbone was the order of the day.

“Miss, you need to let me loose before he gets here.”

Chevie pulled up a steel chair, spun it on one leg, and sat, leaning her elbows on the back.

“Oh, yeah. He. Death, right? He is Death, and Death is coming. The bogeyman.”

“No, no bogeyman. Garrick is flesh right enough. He done for old yellow-blood, and he’ll be doing for us soon if we don’t get a little wind under our sails and leave this place, wherever it is.”

Chevie almost pitied this filthy urchin until she remembered the first time she’d laid eyes on him. “Tell you what, kid. Why don’t we forget this Death character for a minute and focus on why you killed the old man?”

Riley shook his head. “Not me, miss. I never did. It was Garrick.”

Chevie was pretty good at reading people, and this kid’s face was wide, with heavy brows, a pointed chin, and a mop of hair that could be any color underneath the dirt. His eyes were a startling blue, at least the left one was; the right eye seemed to be mostly enlarged pupil. In short, an innocent kid’s face, not a murderer’s face. Unless he was a psychopath.

“Oh, yes. Garrick. Mr. Death. Or perhaps Mr. Nobody.”

“You’re mocking me, miss. You think I’m a liar.”

Chevie scowled. “Stop with the miss stuff, kid. You’re making me feel like a grandmother. Call me Agent Savano. Don’t go thinking we’re friends, now; I’m just being civil, and I don’t want to judge you until all the facts are in. And, to answer your geographical query, we are in London, England.”

The boy was obviously disturbed by this news. “London, you say? Is it true? But then he is already here. There is no time, Agent Sa-van-o. We must get away from here. Can you summon the orange magic?”

Orange magic. Agent Orange, thought Chevie, hearing the penny drop at last. Now I get it.

“Listen, kid. If this Garrick person does exist, and he is stuck on the other end of the orange magic, there is no way in heaven he’s going to show up here. Understand?”

The boy’s odd eyes grew no less wide or wild. “No way in heaven, but perhaps a way in hell.”

Chevie snorted. “You Victorians are pretty melodramatic, aren’t you? What’s your name, kid? I can’t go on calling you kid all day.”

“I am called Riley,” said the boy.

“Something Riley? Or Riley Something?”

Riley shrugged. “I don’t know this, Agent Savano. Garrick never knew either. One name was all that was needed. The note left with me simply read, ‘This is Riley, a waif in need. Look after him.’ I was on the point of being boiled up by cannibals when he found me. Killed the bunch of them, he did, made the last one chew on a hunk of his own leg as a lesson.”

“I am totally not liking this Death, magician, one-name calling, alleged time-traveler killer.”

Riley sighed. This lady was not giving Garrick his due, but how could she? Garrick was a unique creature, and his wrath could not be appreciated without being seen or experienced. Riley would have to grind a plan from his own brain, and perhaps distract his captor for a moment to buy time to think. Riley raised himself a little and nodded at a tattoo on Agent Savano’s bicep.

“What is this arrowhead marking, Agent? Are you a sailor?”

Chevie tapped the blue mark. “This is the Chevron, and I was named for it; but that’s a story for another day, when I visit you in prison, maybe.”

The lady had not fallen for his ruse.

“I am innocent, miss . . . Agent. You must let me go.”

Chevie stood up, twirling the chair under her palm. “I’ll have to get back to you on that, once I review the video. I’ll bring you some McDonald’s in an hour. Until then, don’t go anywhere, time traveler.”

Riley watched the door close, thinking, Time traveler?

And, What is a video?

And, Why would she bring me Scotsmen? What help would that be?

The hazmat team was unlike any hazardous materials team that Chevie had ever seen. There was no sign of the white virus overalls, or wi-vi suits as the federales had nicknamed them; instead the four agents were dressed in what looked like synthetic rubber, and they seemed pretty ripped for a science squad.

Chevie jogged along the basement corridor to Agent Smart, who was strapping a crossbow across his chest.

“What are these guys? Chemistry ninjas? And why are you bringing that bow?”

“So many questions, Agent Savano.”

“Yeah, well I’ve been a little out of the loop around here. Nobody mentioned time-traveling witness protection even once before today. Now everyone’s jumping into the past except me.”

“You don’t have hazardous materials training, Chevie. This squad does, plus they have serious combat skills, too. As for our outfits and equipment, our clothes are hemp-based and will biodegrade in the open air, and the weapons are high-end design but not too sci-fi for the locals, should we meet any. We go back, clean up, and beam home. And if something does get left behind in the field, then there’s no domino effect.”

“With respect to the . . . er . . . domino effect, why don’t you go back a little early and rescue your father? Now that you have his Timekey and know exactly where he was.”

Agent Smart shook his head. “You didn’t read the entire file, did you, Chevie? Wormholes are a constant length to the nanosecond. Think of them like straws; you move the front and the back moves too. So, if an hour has passed here, then an hour has passed there. This particular wormhole measures just under a hundred and twenty years, so that’s how far we’re going back.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“Not long. Ten minutes, tops. Any more than that and we’re dead, and you’re to shut this thing down, dismantle the pod, and go home to California.”

“Way to think positive, Agent. What are we going to tell the fire brigade this time?”

Smart pulled a full face mask over his head. “Not a problem. I’ve powered up the dampers; no blackouts this trip.”

Chevie surveyed the time squad, clad head to toe in padded black body armor, bristling with blades and bows.

“You guys look futuristic, even with the old hardware. What happens if you get caught before the hemp melts? The boy, Riley, swears there’s some kind of magical killer back there.”

Smart’s voice was muffled by the filter over his mouth. “Ah, yes. The bogeyman. It’s classic transference, Savano. Blame Mr. Nobody. Even if there is some Fagin person back there, I think my boys can handle him.”

Chevie thought so too. These guys looked like they could take down a small country.

“What if there’s an earthquake, and your boys are stuck in the rubble?”

“Well, that’s what the red button is for, though these suits have been in storage for fifteen years, so I hope the mercury switches still work.”

This statement brought the gravity of the situation home.

“Self-destruct?” said Chevie. “You are kidding me? This isn’t an episode of The Twilight Zone.”

Agent Smart’s shoulders jerked as he chuckled. “Yes, it is, Chevie. That’s exactly what it is.”

Chevie did not chuckle; she had a sense of humor, but selfdestruct jokes were not to her taste.

“So I gotta just twiddle my thumbs here while you machonerds are off straightening time dominoes?”

Smart froze. “Macho-nerds? Straightening time dominoes? Do you know something, Agent Savano? I think you have grasped the essence of what’s going on here, and I never really thought you would. Some people’s biggest muscle is in their trigger finger, but you have held it together admirably during this stressful time, and without shooting a single person.”

Chevie stared. Was Smart taking the time to make fun of her? Or was he simply a robot?

“Are you sure you should be heading up this operation? Maybe I should relieve you?”

Suddenly the four ninja-nerds pulled their sidearms from holsters on the coat hanger.

“Don’t say the R word, Chevie,” advised Felix. “This mission is pretty important. Nobody wants to end up not existing because my father polluted the timeline.”

Chevie backed down not one inch. “Yeah, well, you tell your boys that when they get back, I’ll see them in the gym, two at a time.”

The hazmat team lowered their guns, gazing at Chevie, heads cocked in surprise, like lions challenged by a little mouse.

“They don’t say much, your lab buddies.”

Smart opened a series of laptops on a metal table; thick cables flopped onto the floor from the rear of the computer bank and wound their way across to the WARP pod. He quickly tapped in long code sequences.

“That’s why I like them, Agent. They just do their jobs, no small talk.”

The laptops were old and chunky, with raised letters on the keyboards that glowed green and were not in the usual qwerty order. Chevie tapped one casing, to check whether it was actually wooden.

Smart slapped her hand away. “Don’t poke the equipment, Agent,” he admonished. “This stuff is ancient alternative tech. We don’t even have the parts to repair this anymore.” “Shoot, I got some wood in my room.”

Smart ignored her comment and continued his systems check. As he typed, the pod shook itself awake, vibrating and venting steam like a very old fridge. The banks of square lights flickered in complicated patterns, and the fat power lines buzzed with barely contained megawatts of electricity. In spots, the rubber melted, exposing fizzing wires.

The entire setup reminded Chevie of old sci-fi series she had seen on cable reruns.

This is how people thought the future would look on last-century TV. Cheap and flashy.

Laser beams shot out from several nodes on the pod, connecting to form a lattice around the ship.

Lasers? thought Chevie. It’s a time machine, all right. I feel like I’m going back to the seventies.

It took several minutes for the WARP pod to warm up. It shrugged, coughed, and hummed into life, six electric motors clattering into action at its base. Chevie was quite glad that she was not among the group waiting to step into its belly to be dematerialized. Eventually the pod hovered maybe half an inch above its trailer and the various lights flashed in perfect harmony, except for the ones that popped and crackled.

“Okay,” shouted Smart above the electrical din. “We have ninety-seven percent stability. That’s good enough.”

Ninety-seven percent? thought Chevie. I bet those hazmat guys didn’t see the monkey arm, or they’d insist on waiting for a hundred percent.

The black-clad hazmat team climbed through the hatch into the vehicle and sat on a low bench that ran around the wall. They were a cramped bunch in there and suddenly looked a little less tough, in spite of their scary suits and weapons. Chevie was reminded of her little foster brother and the night he and his buddies had camped out in the backyard, and were all tough as nails until something brushed against the tent at 2 a.m.

Smart gave Chevie the Timekey he was holding. “I’ve cloned keys for me and the team, but this is still the prime key with all the access codes. In fact, the entire history of the project is on this key. Don’t lose it.”

Chevie hung the key around her neck. “I’ll keep it under my pillow beside my photo of you.”

Smart lowered his face mask, and Chevie saw that for the first time in nine months, he was genuinely smiling. “I’m going to miss you when this is all over, Savano. None of these guys ever gives me lip. Having said that, if you foul this up, I will have you stationed in the Murmansk office.”

“We don’t have a Murmansk office.”

“Oh, we’ve got one, but it’s really deep under the ice.”

“I get the message. Don’t worry, Felix. The boy is secure, and I won’t let anyone else touch this Timekey.”

Smart fixed his mask. “Good. Then in ten minutes, you get to go home early with a commendation and a clean record. But if any strangers come through that pod, remember your training: always go for the chest shot.”

“I remember,” said Chevie. “Chest shot. The biggest target.”

They shook hands, something that Chevie did not particularly want to do, not because of any germ phobia, but because in the boredom of the last nine months she had developed a fondness for action movies—and as any film buff knew, when two cops develop a grudging respect for each other, then the supporting cop is about to die.

And if anyone’s a supporting player around here, she thought, it’s me.

Smart ducked into the pod, squeezing onto the bench beside his teammates.

He counted down from five with his fingers, then the entire team reached into the middle and overlapped hands. As they all touched, Smart tapped the pendant around his neck, the pod bloomed with orange light, and there was a loud whoosh, which immediately collapsed in on itself, creating a vacuum that Chevie could feel even from her position behind the computers.

The noise rose to hurricane level, and Smart’s crew jittered as their molecules were torn apart. They turned orange, then split into orange bubbles, which spiraled into a mini-cyclone that spun faster and faster in the center of the pod. Chevie swore she could see body parts reflected in the bubbles.

Reflected from where? Sub-atomia?

The wormhole opened like a drain of light, a little smaller than Chevie had expected, if she was honest, yet it was big enough to slurp down the atoms of the hazmat team and their leader. The bubbles spiraled down, forcing themselves into the pulsating white circle at the pod’s base. It shone like a silver dollar, then spun as though someone had flipped it, each revolution sending a blinding beam across the basement.

Chevie closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the wormhole had closed, leaving behind a wisp of smoke in the shape of a rough question mark.

You and me both, Chevie thought, stepping forward warily, around the bank of computers, and peering into the pod’s belly. It was cold in there, and blobs of orange gel shivered on the steel walls.

I hope those blobs weren’t important body parts.

Smart and his team were gone, there was no doubt about it.

I didn’t believe Orange’s story until this moment, Chevie realized. Not for a second. I am not sure if I believe it now.

But there was no denying that her partner had disappeared, whether into a wormhole as planned, or boiled to jelly by old-school laser beams.

I can worry about all of this when I am home in Malibu. Until then: act like a professional.

Chevie decided to use the ten minutes to check through the video on Smart Sr.’s Timekey. See if there was anything more she could add to her report. And, you never know, there was always the ghost of a chance that Riley was telling the truth. But even if he was, there was no way the bogeyman he was so afraid of could make it to the future.

Chevie suddenly saw a flash of Riley’s face: blue eyes wide, soot-blackened brow.

No way in heaven, but perhaps a way in hell.

She shivered. Maybe that boy was lying, but he sure believed he was telling the truth.