The Reluctant Assassin

Alt-Tek


BEDFORD SQUARE. BLOOMSBURY. LONDON. 1898

Albert Garrick hummed a nursery rhyme he’d learned on the knee of an Irish woman who had nannied for half of the Old Nichol back in the dark times. If there was one truth that Garrick held like iron in his core, it was that he would never return to the Old Nichol, not even to dodge the noose.

“I would swing before I’d go back to that cesspit,” he vowed quietly through clenched teeth, as he did most nights.

And in this case the term cesspit was not simply a storyteller’s exaggeration. The Old Nichol Street rookery was bordered by the common sewer and had been spared by the Great Fire, but the area had not seen refurbishment for its pauper residents since that time. A true cesspit. A great ditch of putrefaction, dotted with sties, hovels, and dung heaps, where the air sang with the sharp tang of industry and the lusty howls of hungry babes.

Hell on earth.

As Albert Garrick hummed, the words fluttered from the dark shadows of his past and the assassin sang them in a sweet tenor:

One little babby, ten, twenty,

Only last week I had wages plenty

Then Nick came a-stealin’ my babbies away

Now I begs for me supper every bloomin’ day.

Garrick gave a dour chuckle. A cholera nursery rhyme, hardly the subject to soothe a little one’s fears, and more often it would keep him awake than send him to sleep, but then Garrick had lost a family of nine to the disease, and it would have claimed him and his father had clever Papa not slit the Adelphi Theatre’s caretaker’s throat in an alley one night, then turned up to claim his place the following morning. The caretaker had been Father’s bully chum; but it was life or death, and the Thames was chockfull of best friends. Barely a tide passed without someone’s bosom pal washing up on the mud banks at Battersea.

For over a year the father and son slept in a secret space behind the Adelphi’s green room until they could afford digs far away from the Old Nichol.

Garrick knelt on the elaborate fleur-de-lis rug in front of him, banishing memories of his past and concentrating on this night’s business. Carefully he placed the tips of his blades on the central petal of the pattern. Six knives in total, from stiletto to shiv to four-sided bo-shuriken throwing knives; but Garrick’s favorite was the serrated fish knife that had lived under his pillow since childhood.

He tapped the wooden hilt fondly. It was true to say that Garrick held this blade in higher regard than any person of his acquaintance. Indeed, the magician had once risked prison by dallying to reclaim the blade from a mark who had snarled the knife in the farrago of his entrails.

But I would sacrifice even you for a taste of magic , he admitted to the knife. In a heartbeat and gladly.

Garrick knew that men would come to this place when their own magician was returned to them a cold corpse. The old man had promised as much—if you harm me, men will come to make sure you didn’t take my secrets—and Garrick believed those words to be true. The old man’s secrets were magical ones, and the men would come, because magic was power, which in turn was knowledge. And he who controlled knowledge controlled the world. Knowledge was a dangerous thing to have skittering around loose, and so men would come.

A hanging circle of bats clattered in the broad chimney flue, wings slapping like a tanner’s brush.

Perhaps they sensed something? Perhaps the great moment was upon them?

Come, gods of magic. Come and meet Albert Garrick’s steel, and we shall see if you die like men.

Garrick pocketed his blades and melted into the basement shadows by the grandfather clock.

When a traveler emerges from a wormhole and the quantum foam solidifies, there are quickly forgotten moments of clarity when the time traveler feels at one with the world.

Everything is all right and outta sight , as Charles Smart quipped in the famous talk at Columbia University during his U.S. lecture tour. When those little virtual particles annihilate, a person gets literally plugged into the universe.

Of course this was just quantum-jecture, another of Professor Smart’s terms. There could never be any proof of these brief moments of oneness, as they dissipated almost instantly and were all but impossible to record. Nevertheless, Professor Smart was correct: the “Zen Ten” does exist and was being experienced by the hazmat team as their bodies solidified and left them standing in short-lived awe, like kids at a fireworks display.

The team stood on the bed, which Charles Smart had rigged as a receiver, wreathed in a wispy curtain of orange light that jerked back toward the wormhole that hovered behind them like a floating diamond.

“Hey,” said the point man, crossbow dangling loosely from his fingers. “Do you guys see the parallels between Einstein and Daffy Duck now? That duck knew what he was talking about.”

There would have followed another eight seconds or so of cosmic wisdom had not Garrick realized intuitively that fate would never again drop such a ripe opportunity in his lap. He attacked like a death-dealing dervish, springing from his hiding place onto the four-poster bed, where his opponents stood like cattle in the slaughterhouse pen.

Use yer bows now, my boys , he thought.

Garrick’s arrival on the receiver bed smashed the cocoon of bliss, and the hazmat team was instantly vigilant—all but Smart, who was still shrouded in quantum particles, which caused his extremities to warp and shudder as though underwater.

Garrick’s first strike was the sweetest, as it drew hot red blood. He had been anxious that his steel might encounter armor of some kind, but though the material was exceptionally hardy, it could not resist the singing sharpness of his trusty fish knife. The man who had spoken of ducks sank to the sheets, his heart popped in his chest. A second black-clad newcomer arranged his fists in an approximation of a boxer’s stance and delivered a lightning hook to Garrick’s solar plexus.

The assassin grunted in surprise, not pain. These dark demons were fast, but not magically so, and it would take a sight more gumption in a blow to penetrate the flat boards of muscle on Garrick’s torso.

Garrick had studied many of the fighting arts, from Cornish wrestling to Okinawan karate, and chosen what he wanted from each one. These skills he augmented with his own speciality: sleight of hand. His was a style that could not be clinically recognized and defended against, as there was only one master and only one pupil.

The magician engaged his unique skill and palmed the blade across to his left hand. The second man in black followed this move with a tilt of his head, but he did not cotton to the throwing spike that sprouted in Garrick’s right hand as though growing from the vein.

By the time the man in black caught the deadly glint from the corner of his eye, it had already begun the flashing flight toward its target. Not toward the second man, but toward a third while the second was distracted by Garrick’s left hand, which held the fish knife.

The second man realized this too late and had barely time to watch the throwing spike puncture his comrade’s chest before the fish knife slashed across his own jugular.

So much blood, thought Garrick. An ocean of blood.

Three of the hazmat team were down. The fourth opted to attack rather than be slaughtered where he stood. This guy was a real bruiser, who was famous in the FBI for having punched out a world boxing champion in a Vegas bar fight. He sent out a lightning right cross that would have floored an elephant and mentally mapped out his next three punches.

He would not need them. Garrick ducked under the punch, rolled the man across his back, and met him on the other side with a prison shiv. The agent did not die immediately, but he would not tarry long.

One left now, the one clothed in magical light. The man with true power. Garrick felt himself salivate.

How to steal the magic? What was the technique? An incantation, perhaps? Or did they need a pentagram? Everything Garrick had tried in the past to suck even a spark of power from the ether now seemed garishly jokish. Candles and weeds, animal sacrifices. He had been a mere child scrabbling around in the dark. Here was true power in front of his eyes, if he could take it.

Garrick pocketed the blade and dipped his icicle fingers into the orange light until he found the man’s neck. The tendons looked taut as gibbet ropes, but to the touch they were softer than butter. Garrick saw his own fingers somehow merge with the stranger’s body, and with the merging came a sharing of souls.

I know this man, he realized. And he knows me.

With his free hand Garrick ripped off the man’s mask, to demand the knowledge that he could not find in the man’s mind.

“Tell me how to take your magic,” he demanded. “Give me your secrets.”

The man seemed in a stupor. He saw but did not see, his gaze soft and blotted, a look Garrick had seen on the faces of soldiers emerging from chloroform.

I know you, Albert Garrick, said the man, though his mouth did not move. I know what you are.

It seemed to Garrick, as he listened to Felix Smart’s thoughts, that he had joined utterly with this man. Smart’s entire life was compressed into a bitter capsule and shoved down his throat. Memories exploded inside him, more vivid than his own. He tasted blood and sweat, smelled gunpowder and rotten flesh, and felt his own secret shames and regrets that he had never dared acknowledge.

This is the magic, he realized, even as his past life crawled into his gut like a worm. To see, to know.

“Give it to me,” he said, tightening his grip around the man’s neck. “I want it all, d’you hear?”

“They sent you to Afghanistan,” gasped the man, the words grunting out of him.

So surprised was Garrick to hear this that he actually engaged.

“Not many know that, Scotsman. I took up the queen’s rifle, killed my share, and came back a hero.” Garrick shook his head, dislodging the orange man’s probes. “Quiet with your talk, man, unless it is to divulge secrets.”

The man closed his eyes—sadly, it seemed to Garrick. “I can’t. And I know what you intend to do, so . . .” His hand moved toward a red button on his belt, and Garrick gripped the wrist in his fingers.

A quantum circuit was completed and information exchanged on every level. Knowledge, secrets, and the very essence of being—all whipped between the two men, locked in grim combat. Garrick struggled to hold on to himself in this blizzard of awareness. He saw and understood everything, from amoebas to microwaves. He felt his own self as a collection of jittering neutrons and understood the concept. He saw the surface of the moon, an earth ruled by dinosaurs, matchbox-sized computers, the Scottish man of science, the little Shawnee lass, and the boy Riley.

Riley, he thought, and the thought skittered away from him on a tide of quantum foam. He cocked his head to follow it, and the Scotsman used the distraction to press the red button on his belt.

Garrick felt mercury shift and smelled the explosives and knew that there was only one way to perhaps escape death. He crushed Felix Smart’s barely solid windpipe in his fist, then tumbled them both into the tiny pulsing circle of light that lay in the center of the mattress.

It did not seem possible that two grown men could fit into that tiny space, but the wormhole was pure physics and so did its work, dematerializing the battling pair just as the tiny suitbomb exploded.

Charles Smart, the godfather of time travel, had speculated in his famous Columbia lecture that if a spontaneous energy shift were to be introduced into the quantum stream, then the effects on local travelers could be spectacular, producing, in theory, a being imbued with all the powers not yet granted to humanity by evolution. Or, as he put it, Clark Kent could indeed become Superman.

The world could see superheroes.

Or supervillains.


BEDFORD SQUARE. BLOOMSBURY. LONDON. NOW

Chevie Savano plugged Charles Smart’s Timekey into the weirdly pronged socket on the bank of antique computers in the pod room.

A message appeared on the screen: warming up. Warming up? What was this? A photocopier?

Alt-tech was a term Felix liked to bandy about. Alternative technology. What he meant was old junk that didn’t work properly anymore.

Warming up? The next thing you knew, this contraption would ask for more gas.

Eventually a menu shuddered into life on the small convex screen. The kind of screen nerd grandpas collected to play Pac-Man. The operating system was unfamiliar to her, a set of consecutive menus that reminded her of a family tree.

Well, I guess even Apple and Microsoft can’t control the past, she thought, smiling.

It did seem as though everything was on this Timekey. The entire history of the project, including previous jumps, personnel files, pod locations, and, of course, Professor Smart’s video diary.

Chevie selected the proximity-alert recordings with an honest-to-God wooden mouse, and scrolled through to the last couple of minutes.

It was a grainy picture, colors muted by the darkness, but she could clearly see the boy Riley approach stealthily, eyes and teeth shining out of his blackened face. The blade in his hand was visible too, just the top edge where the soot failed to cover it.

Suddenly the screen glowed green, and Riley’s features were underlit like a Halloween campfire storyteller. The boy looked pretty guilty, it had to be said: sneaking into an old man’s house in the dead of night, armed with a wicked-looking blade. The alert changed from green to red as Riley drew closer, and the view flipped as Professor Smart sat up.

There was a little chitchat, which was impossible to make out, then Riley struck and everything went orange. End of story. QED, the check’s in the mail, the prosecution rests.

Or does it?

Chevie freeze-framed the moment when Riley lunged. It seemed a little weird. Chevie knew all about knife fights, and the boy’s stance seemed off to her. He was leaning backward while moving forward. This was not an easy thing to do. Also, the look on his face was pure horror.

Either this kid is schizophrenic, or he had a little help.

But there was no one else in the dark room. No one that she could see, at any rate.

Chevie was tempted to pound the ancient hardware.

Alt-tech, my butt. I can’t even clean up the image a little.

Then Chevie had an idea: maybe she couldn’t clean up the image on this box of bolts, but if she could transfer it . . .

Chevie pulled her smartphone from her waistband and took an HD shot of the screen. Simply transferring the image to her phone seemed to sharpen it up a bit, but it was still dark and fuzzy.

Dark and fuzzy, not a problem.

Chevie had no fewer than four photo manipulation apps on her phone, and she selected one to run the picture through.

In a way it was therapeutic to have such a mundane task to perform, which could momentarily help her to pretend she was working on a normal case.

She ordered the phone to sharpen, lighten, and boost color.

It took a few seconds, then another person appeared from the shadows, behind Riley to the right. A tall man, slightly bent, with dark, close-set eyes that were devoid of expression, like those of a corpse. The face was bland, made more so by the soot smeared across his features, and Chevie couldn’t imagine ladies ever swooning before this guy, but the eyes gave him away. Chevie had seen those dead eyes before, on the faces of serial killers in the Quantico files.

Chevie shivered.

So that’s what it feels like when your blood runs cold, she thought. I’ve heard the expression but never understood it.

This was the man Riley had spoken of, no doubt about it. Death, the magician. This guy looked capable of anything.

Yet it was Riley holding the knife. The boy was still guilty.

But . . .

Chevie double-tapped the image to enlarge it, then centered the crosshairs on Riley’s knife arm, enlarging again. It seemed conclusive. A hand holding a knife, a forearm, wrinkle shadows at the elbow.

Wrinkle shadows . . .

Chevie enlarged again until the pixels blurred and saw that the shadows were not shadows.

Not unless shadows have knuckles.

There were four long fingers gripping Riley’s arm, forcing his hand.

The boy is innocent! she thought, releasing a breath that she’d not realized she was holding.

Looking into that blackened face, with those flat eyes, Chevie was glad that this man could not, contrary to what Riley believed, make his way into the future.

All the same, she thought. Maybe I will stand guard over the pod with a round in the chamber. Just in case.

Chevie tugged the Timekey from its socket and hung it around her neck for safekeeping.

Just in case.

Special Agent Lawrence Witmeyer, her boss in the L.A. office, was a man with a parable for every occasion. Many involved a made-up Fed called Agent Justin Casey, who was always prepared and never got himself shot because he forgot to follow protocol.

Chevie snorted. Agent Justin Casey. A helluva guy.

And if she hadn’t been a little distracted by her reminiscing, she might have noticed an angry blister of red energy boiling at the heart of the WARP pod and had time to duck before the explosion.

Unfortunately she was distracted and didn’t see anything until the computers set off a warning alarm. By then it was already too late.

Garrick and Smart tumbled into the wormhole together, but as separate people. Once inside, Garrick held on to his consciousness, but Smart’s heart had already stopped beating and his brain was winding down. The effect of the self-destruct bomb was to excite some particles that were not meant to be excited and corrupt the transition, in effect merging Smart’s last neurons of consciousness with Garrick’s and some of his physical characteristics too, which the WARP pod would rebuild around his altered DNA.

A new being with accelerated evolution. All the gifts that millennia of adaptation would bring.

For a length of time that was immeasurable and yet instant, Garrick felt himself disembodied in the wormhole. He could not see anything and spent the time flicking through Smart’s memories.

I have killed both father and son, he realized, and wished that he had received payment for the second murder.

This thought of payment set Garrick thinking about the shady cove who had contracted him for the murder of Charles Smart.

Did he know, Garrick wondered, about all of this magic?

On a normal outing there would have been no complications. Garrick would have slid in and out like a gust of wind, but Riley had been along for his first kill. It had been a trial run for the lad, plain and simple. Garrick had kept an eye on the comings and goings for a few days, then sent Riley in through an upstairs window. He would never have risked his reputation or purse taking the boy along had there been even a smell of peril.

All of these magical happenings are luck or fate.

Though Garrick could not now believe in either magic or fate. Atoms collided or they did not, simple as that. Atoms, thought Garrick, delighted with the new understanding that the merge with Felix Smart had brought him. I can see their systems in my mind’s eye.

Garrick was not anxious or ill at ease over this curious transition. He knew now exactly what was happening and what awaited him in the future. Nor was he disappointed over the absence of “real magic,” for was this not magic all around him now? Wasn’t this new knowledge power without measure? Garrick was too enchanted by his new state to take to brooding.

The future awaits and, with my new awareness, I will be master of it.

These were issues to be decided in a future Garrick knew well.

Three-D movies and pocket-sized computers. Automatic weapons and Japanese robots. My oh my.

On this occasion there was no gentle materialization in the house on Bedford Square, no wisps of ethereal mist or shuddering passengers in the pod. This time a red ball of liquid appeared, maybe the size of an apple, and then it exploded in a grisly mess, vomiting sheets of blood into the basement, accompanied by a sonic boom and wave of concussive force. The ring of dampers set around the pod exploded like fireworks at a rock concert.

Chevie was lifted like a leaf before a hurricane and tossed backward the length of the basement corridor. She touched down a couple of times before crashing into a stack of her own packing boxes under the stairs, which she had been meaning to fold flat since she’d arrived. The boxes tumbled on top of her, leaving a triangular tunnel for her to keep an eye on the pod. And it was only one eye; Chevie’s left eye closed on impact and her senses longed to desert her, but she held on long enough to see what else came out of the pod.

What came out was a sac of flesh and bone, lurching across the blood-slick floor, fighting with itself. Chevie saw a hand punching through the membrane and a face pressing against the viscous surface.

“Smart,” called Chevie weakly.

Then the face bubbled and changed, becoming that of the man on the screen.

I am in a nightmare. Wake up, Chevron Savano. On your feet.

If this was a dream, it was incredibly realistic, engaging all of her senses, even smell.

I can’t remember smelling in a dream before.

Chevie knew it was no dream. The tiles that smooshed her jaw and cheek were too slick with lumpy blood and ichor.

The jumble of body parts clicked and rattled with labored breaths, drawing bolts of energy from the pod. It shook like a wet dog, shaking off globs of its cocoon until the figure of a man emerged. The man oozed into a standing position, then spread his arms wide, flexing his fingers as though they were wondrous inventions.

Chevie felt her legs piston weakly as they sought traction on the floor, but even that effort made her head spin.

Riley. I need to save that boy.

The figure seemed to hear the thought and shrugged off the remains of the distended bubble of sloppy substance, transitioning from solid to gas and floating in clouds toward the ceiling.

Clothes grew on the man, literally appearing stitch by stitch, crawling like worms along his solidifying skin. The garments were a curious blend of hemp, hazmat leggings, and a Victorian gent’s overcoat, topped off by a bowler hat that seemed as out of place as a bow tie on a shark.

“Riley,” said the man, as if testing his mouth. “Riley, my son. I have come for you. I know where you are incarcerated. The futurist Smart showed me.”

Smart showed him, thought Chevie, and she knew in her gut that the hazmat team was gone.

Chevie remembered having a gun, which was possibly in its holster at her side, but that seemed like an impossible distance for her hand to travel. It was all she could do to keep one eye open. She saw the magician fondly tap the keyboard on one of the old computers, then his gaze turned on her.

He sees me, Chevie realized, feeling the cold from the basement’s floor seep into her body.

His gaze lingered on her a moment, then the magician made his way with determined strides toward the lockup door.

It’s okay, she thought. That door is reinforced steel. The devil himself is not getting in without a card or a code.

The demonic figure came to a halt in front of the security keypad, cracked his knuckles theatrically, then punched in the code.

“Abracadabra,” he said as the holding-cell door yawned open.

I am sorry, Riley , thought Chevie. You told me the truth, and I left you there to die. Forgive me.

Garrick doffed his hat, as though entering a church, then ducked inside the cell.

Chevie closed her eye. She did not want to see what happened next.

Albert Garrick had literally become a new man when he emerged from the sac and stepped into the future.

Everything was different: his DNA, his vocabulary, his range of expertise, his stance, muscle development, comprehension. He had even studied Shakespeare, or at least Felix Smart had.

To be or not to be, my little Riley. In your case, I am undecided. It occurred to Garrick that there might be some danger lurking in this facility in which he had materialized, though Smart’s memories assured him that the sole sentry was a young girl, a slip of a thing who one would imagine to be relatively harmless. And yet Smart’s memories told him that she was an accomplished combatant who had performed most admirably in the City of Angels.

And she wears the last Timekey, he remembered. Even though Smart’s memories had emerged from the wormhole intact, his Timekey lay like a cinder on his chest.

Do not underestimate the girl, Garrick told himself, or unto dust will be your own destination.

Garrick planted himself firmly in the real world and cast his eyes around. This was a strange place; windowless walls were lined with colored ropes and wall-mounted machinery.

Cables and servers, the electricity flowing between his new nerve endings informed him.

The gory evidence of Garrick’s passage from the past was evident: blood striped the walls and lay in congealing splashes on tabletop machinery.

“Riley,” he said, testing his voice. “Riley, my son. I have come for you. I know where you are incarcerated. The futurist Smart showed me.”

Garrick headed toward the machinery. This is a laptop, he thought, tip-tapping the keyboard. How charming.

There would be time for such fancies later, but for now he must release Riley, retire to a safe crib, then let the boy bask in his master’s new glory.

There was no obvious sign of Miss Savano. Perhaps the violence of his arrival had done her in?

Or perhaps she lies in wait?

Garrick forced himself to concentrate. He moved to the wall, squinting through the smoke and flashing lights down the red-bricked hallway to the jumble of containers.

There. Look!

An arm was sticking out from the crawl space below the boxes. The fingers twitched spasmodically and the head resting on that arm wasn’t moving. One eye was fully closed, the other glazed and swollen.

That little periwinkle is a shade from death. I will nab my boy, then extinguish her final spark on the way out.

Garrick moved quickly down the corridor, feeling better than he had in decades. The trip through the wormhole had purged his system. He felt like a giddy whelp about to shinny his first drainpipe.

Another challenge lay before him, a challenge for the old Albert Garrick that was. Not the new model.

Version 2.0, he thought, then pinched the skin on his own forearm to force concentration.

The challenge was a keypad for the electronic lock.

This machine can be fed with numbers or cards. I don’t have the card, but the codes to everything in this house are in my head somewhere.

Garrick cocked his head while his brain supplied the numbers. He cracked his knuckles, then tapped the code into the pad. The light winked green and the door popped open.

“Abracadabra,” he said with satisfaction.

Garrick doffed his hat and ducked inside, smiling at the thought of Riley’s amazement.

Oh, my son. We have much to share. So much.

The cell was spartan, with only a narrow cot, a single chair and, of course, a camera crouched like a spider on the ceiling. But that was all.

No boy.

Riley had gone. His son.

Garrick would not allow himself to roar the boy’s name. He had once been a celebrated illusionist, after all, not a simple player of dreadful melodrama. Instead he contented himself with a resounding slam of the door on his way to interview Miss Savano.

How fortunate that I did not kill her before, he mused. Now she may help me find Riley before she dies.

Chevie’s world was spinning in a kaleidoscope of dull colors. Concrete gray and streaked brown. She had been thinking, The boy is dead, over and over, but now she couldn’t remember if that was a snatch of a song lyric or an actual thought she should be concerned about.

Something was happening outside her head to one of her body parts. A shoulder, maybe? Yes, her shoulder. Why was someone shaking her shoulder when all she wanted to do was sleep?

“Miss, wake up,” said a voice urgently. “He’s coming.”

Wake up? No, thanks. This was her day off. Maybe a little surfing later on down at Malibu.

“Miss, on your feet now, or Garrick will kill both of us.”

Garrick.

An image flashed through Chevie’s mind of a bloody body emerging from some kind of cocoon.

One of her eyes fluttered open; the other was still swollen like a pink beetle in her eye socket. The boy leaned over her, hoisting her by the lapels.

“Riley?”

“The one and only, Miss Savano. We have to quit this place right now.”

Leaving? But I thought you were dead. I’m just going to close my eyes for a second.

Riley grabbed the agent under her armpits, and hauled her upright.

“Come along now,” he grunted. “Upsy-daisy.”

Chevie’s good eye flicked open. “I am not a child.”

At this moment Garrick appeared in the corridor, his face set like alabaster and streaked with blood.

He is angry, Riley realized, and the sight of his master’s cold expression nearly paralyzed him with fear.

His survival instincts took over. He grabbed Chevie’s pistol, placed it in her fingers, and, clasping her hand in both of his, he aimed the gun at Garrick’s chest.

“Shoot, miss,” he said. “Now!”

With Riley’s help, Chevie managed to squeeze off not one but two shots, both pulling high, but the second slug struck close enough to give Garrick pause. The magician snarled like a cornered street mutt and changed his pattern of movement entirely, becoming fluid, but also erratic, never arriving where his body language forecast he would be. When it seemed as though he was committed to a sidestep, his body would make an impossible diagonal lunge forward.

The gunshots jarred Chevie back to reality, and she noted that this Garrick person moved in a way she had never seen. She blinked her good eye.

“What? This guy is like a cat.”

“Misdirection, a magician’s ploy,” said Riley, grunting as he hauled Chevie backward up the stairs. He could explain more about Garrick’s unique style later, when they had escaped this death house, if escape were possible.

Chevie backed up the stairs, keeping her gun trained as much as possible on Garrick. The magician hissed now, like a vampire, and jammed his bowler hat down to his brows so he would not lose it.

He’s getting ready to spring, thought Chevie.

“Yeah, that’s right, fella,” she called down to the magician. “You come a little closer. Let’s see how well your disco moves work in a narrow stairwell. I will drill you right through your eyeball.”

The warning seemed to work, possibly because there was a lot of truth in it. If Garrick set foot on the stairs, he would be boxed in by the wall and bannister. But if Chevie thought the nineteenth-century man would be cowed by her futuristic weapon, she was wrong.

“You cannot escape me, Chevron Savano,” he said, head cocked to one side. “I will have my boy back and the secrets of the Timekey.”

Chevie’s blood ran cold. This guy knew an awful lot for a Victorian.

“Take one more step,” she said, keeping her weapon as steady as possible, “and we’ll see who escapes.”

All this time Riley muttered into Chevie’s ear and dragged her backward toward street level.

“Step and retreat,” he said, trying not to catch Garrick’s eye, for that glacial gaze would freeze and shatter his resolve. “Step and retreat.”

They were near the top step now, while Garrick lurked at the bottom, flexing his fingers in frustration, wishing for a throwing knife. Chevie had an idea.

I have this guy pinned down. Backup can be here in two minutes.

“It’s okay,” she told Riley. “We’ve got him now. He’s going nowhere. There’s a phone in my waistband—pass it to me.”

Garrick also had an idea. The magician suddenly withdrew from the foot of the stairs and hurried along the subterranean corridor to the computer banks.

That’s okay. That’s fine. All he can do with the computers is slap the keyboards. No password, no access, Chevie thought. Then: Really? The holding-cell door didn’t slow him down much, remember?

“Phone, Riley. Get my phone.”

“Unless it’s a weapon, Agent, forget your bloomin’ phone. Aim your gun and fire off another shot.”

“No, don’t worry. He’s contained down there.”

Riley understood that Miss Savano believed she had gained the upper hand, and his eyes watered with frustration.

“You don’t understand, miss. Garrick is a devil. He ain’t no bludger nor simple broadsman. Didn’t you see him delivered from the pit with your own two gawpers?”

Chevie had seen it, but she refused to relinquish the rules of her world entirely. “Maybe, if he could get into the weapons locker, he could do something, but that’s protected by a code.”

From below came a double bleep and ka-chaak, which Chevie recognized as the weapons locker keypad turning off its alarm and swinging open.

Riley knew without being told what the noises were. “That was your locker, wasn’t it, miss? That was Garrick outfoxing your code?”

Again, thought Chevie.

“That was our cue to go,” she admitted, hitching herself over the top step and into the hallway. “What you said about leaving? You were right.”

“Praise the Lord for good sense,” said Riley, and he ducked under Chevie’s arm so he could drag her more efficiently.

Garrick appeared, cradling an AK-47 assault rifle, which had probably been new when Chevie was in grade school.

The gun’s age won’t slow down the bullets, thought Chevie, forcing Garrick to duck as she sent three more rounds humming down the stairwell. That should buy us five seconds at least.

Five seconds was about three seconds more than she got. Before the echo of her final shot had faded, Garrick’s head appeared once more around the corner of the first flight of stairs. This time he had the AK’s stock expertly wedged between cheek and shoulder.

Riley knew then that Garrick had come out of the metal transporting machine with knowledge and abilities he had not previously possessed. He was somehow improved.

“Now, little girlie,” Garrick called, “let us see if what I dreamed about this contraption is true.”

Garrick pulled the trigger, sending a stream of bullets into the ceiling over Chevie’s head. The kickback got away from him for a second, but he soon recovered. The noise was deafening in the confined space, like overlapping thunderclaps. Riley and Chevie hunkered on the floorboards, unable to tell if they had been shot or if they were screaming.

Riley had no combat experience like Chevie’s, but his entire life had been one long trauma, so he was accustomed to getting on with living even when death was close at hand. He grabbed Agent Savano by the collar and dragged her backward like a sack of coal.

“Come on,” he cried. “We must get to the streets.”

They stumbled along together, with the threat of Garrick like a wind at their backs; and in a ragged moment they were at the front door, which was secured by three bolts set into a steel frame.

Swipe the security card and we’re out, thought Chevie.

Chevie felt for the tiny reel clipped to a pant loop where her card normally hung.

No card. Must have lost it in the explosion. Unless . . .

Chevie glared at Riley. “Give me my card, thief.”

Riley already had it out. “You leaned a fraction close doing the manacles. And I opened them with a pick from me sock that came out of the machine with me. Sorry, Agent. Life or death.”

They could talk about this later. Chevie swiped the card as bullets bounced around the hallway, shattering glass and blasting a crystal chandelier. It crashed to the ground, showering Riley with glass shards and blocking the stairwell.

“Riley!” called Garrick. “Kill her, boy. I know it’s in you. I will wipe the slate, my word on it.” All this while climbing the stairs and changing magazines.

The door popped open a slice, and Chevie put her final bullet into the control pad.

A red light flashed on the alarm pad and a peeved voice said: “control pad tampered with. lockdown in five seconds. lockdown in four seconds.”

Garrick hopped nimbly over the twisted remains of the chandelier, raising his knees unfeasibly high to the level of his ears, carrying the automatic weapon overhead.

“Strike, Riley.”

In case Riley chose not to strike as ordered, Garrick fired another burst at Agent Savano, but he was too late. The door had closed behind his quarry, all three bolts engaging automatically. Simultaneously the rear entrance locked itself, and bars dropped over every window in the house. The security system was the best federal dollars could buy, and in under three seconds the house on Bedford Street was locked down tighter than the average Swiss bank.

Chevie rested with her back against the door, feeling her pulse drumming inside her swollen eyelid.

“Okay, we have a breather now. That monster may have beaten the weapons code out of Smart, but he’s not getting out of that house without FBI clearance.”

Riley tugged Chevie away from the door.

“We must keep moving, miss. No building can hold Albert Garrick for long,” he said.

Chevie allowed herself to be tugged through the cordon of emergency tape tied across the railing. She was starting to believe that maybe this Garrick character was just as dangerous as Riley claimed him to be.