“Political levers, not shiny scientific toys.” Iris’s eyes twinkled. “That’s not to say that they cannot be the same thing, but presentation is all. Sir Adam has just led a revolution. The first successful democratic revolution in the history of this world. Forget technology for the time being: you have a crystal ball! It is your duty to bring him dismal tidings—all the myriad ways in which revolutions can come to grief. Your first job must be to produce a comprehensive report on all the failed democratic revolutions of time line two, with specific analyses of how and why they failed to achieve their objectives.
“Show him that, and then—if you can—show him a revolution that succeeded. Show him he can learn from it and use it as an object of emulation—and he’ll listen to you. In fact, if you can do that, he’ll give you everything you ask for. Which is how you go about setting up your, uh, para-time industrial development program. But before all else, you need to demonstrate your usefulness. And the easiest way to do that is to show him all the ways to fail that he has not imagined, so that he can avoid them.”
Brilliana nodded, then grinned at Miriam. “It’s the oldest trick in the book, isn’t it? Work out what they’ll get hooked on, then give them the first hit for free…”
NEW YORK, TIME LINE TWO, MARCH 2020
Hulius Hjorth was about to start his very last courier mission—although he didn’t know it yet. There was a standardized protocol for world-walking agents entering a hostile surveillance zone: the goal was to do it quietly and anonymously and stay one jump ahead of the surveillance cameras. He’d been doing it for more than twenty years, from his first teenage outing as a Clan messenger to his current status. These days he was a major in the Commonwealth’s Department of Para-historical Research—and he was good at his job. Unfortunately, the adversaries were getting better, too, and it was harder to stay ahead of the enemy every year.
Hulius entered time line two via a quiet side street in Brooklyn. It was lined with red-brick warehouse conversions playing home to start-up businesses and specialist mail-order supply shops. Few people lived here, and some of the buildings were empty, their windows boarded up as their owners waited out the slack in the business cycle. After 8 p.m., as twilight descended, a certain quiet fell. And it was then that the door of one such boarded-up building opened.
An onlooker would have seen a tall, heavily built man in his late thirties or early forties step out, glance up and down the street, and wheel a bicycle onto the sidewalk. With horn-rimmed spectacles, drainpipe jeans, plaid shirt, and knitted cardigan, he could be mistaken for a hipster. He bore a capacious messenger bag, an obscure name-brand item chosen to harmonize with the rest of his outfit. He checked carefully for cross-traffic, then locked the warehouse door and pedaled up the road, wobbling slightly.
(The warehouse itself was empty, seemingly abandoned when the business that had previously occupied it went bust. Only a rectangular area on the stained concrete floor, marked out with duct tape, would tell an informed observer that there was anything out of the ordinary about it. That, and the fact that anyone reviewing the previous day’s camera footage of the front and back of the building in search of Hulius’s arrival would have a fruitless task.)
Every stage of this type of insertion was hazardous. The warehouse might have been let to a new tenant in the week since the preliminary reconnaissance designated it as an entry point. Or some unfortunate event might have attracted unwanted police or DHS attention. Once one was out of the entry building, the risks continued. Unable to use a trackable phone or GPS device, Hulius had memorized the neighborhood—a good solution, but only effective as long as he stuck to known territory. And he had to keep moving confidently, for he couldn’t stop and consult a paper map. If his motion kinematics seemed weird, software running on the sensors embedded in the street signs on major roads would notice and call the cops. He’d then face a search for alcohol or drugs. This could not be allowed.
In this world-walker-aware city, there were cameras with motion tracking firmware at every major intersection. They were designed to spot a sudden appearance out of thin air: so transfer had to be effected inside a disused building. Hulius’s managers back in the Commonwealth didn’t think the DHS was capable of monitoring every doorway in the United States for foot traffic: only federal buildings and security zones like airports had that level of surveillance. But sooner or later the feds would start clamping down on pedestrians and cyclists who had no radio-frequency devices like phones or ID cards. It would make covert operations infinitely harder. At present it was still possible for a courier to dip into the quiet backstreets of a big city for a couple of hours without courting disaster, but the end of Commonwealth intelligence operations on US soil was clearly in sight: the USA was already a harder nut for foreign infiltrators to crack than the Soviet bloc had ever been.
At the end of the street, Hulius stopped at the four-way and diligently checked for oncoming traffic. Most New York cyclists didn’t bother—it wasn’t necessary, now that anticollision radar was mandatory on cars and trucks—but he was patient. An accidental collision with another cyclist or a hot-wired car would be a mission kill at best. If it put him in the back of an ambulance, it would most likely prove fatal: he’d have to use the suicide capsule he carried in a false wisdom tooth.
He pedaled on across an avenue and took a left, then wobbled slowly uphill along the main road for a block. A few streets later, he reached his destination and dismounted. He linked the bike to a railing and pretended to arm the bike lock, then (after looking for passersby) turned his reversible jacket inside out and put it on again. Pocketing his conspicuous glasses, he walked round the corner and straight into a cheap local diner.
His contact was waiting in a seat facing the front door, toying with the wreckage of a burrito and a bottle of juice. The bottle was positioned to the left of her plate: a simple sign that meant, I am not under duress. She was around fifty, thin-faced, her black hair scraped back in a severe bun: she looked like a tired office worker. Hulius paid her no obvious attention, and she gave no sign of recognition. Instead, he walked to the counter and bought tostadas and a root beer. He turned to casually survey the diner as if looking for empty seats, then carried his portion over to her table and sat down facing her.
“Good morning, Ms. Milan.”
She nodded politely. “Always a pleasure to see you, Mr. Jefferson. How did the ball game go?”
“We won, 4-2.” He’d noticed no sign of surveillance on his way to the meet. The set of her shoulders relaxed infinitesimally. “We have maybe fifteen minutes—no longer. It’s not safe: they’re rolling out more and more networked cameras.” The safe duration for contact was narrowing all the time.