‘Okay?’ The voice comes out, as though the person on the chair is shouting towards them. Miri scrapes her shoe on the rough floor, creating noise.
Emily watches. Taking it in. Trying desperately to keep up with Miri’s mental agility and understand not only what she is seeing, but what it means and why she is being shown it.
A squeeze on her wrist. The torch comes back on as Miri leads her back to the stairwell and up the metal steps to the corridor bathed in blue. Emily follows. Stunned and silent. They go through the portal into the bunker as Emily sighs heavily.
‘Why did you show me that?’
‘Not here. Wait,’ Miri says. She picks up the tablet, turns off the blue light, keys in another destination, then activates it again. The light comes back. Miri nods at Emily to follow her and once more steps through.
The frustration and confusion return, but Emily dutifully goes through and immediately squints from the harsh daylight blinding her. A hand comes up to shield her eyes as she makes out Miri wearing sunglasses and lighting a cigarette in a huge, open field of thick grass. A blue sky overhead dotted with clouds. Powerlines in the distance. The rumble of heavy traffic somewhere far off. An old shed behind them, the portal shining in place of the open doorway.
‘Where are we?’ Emily asks, looking round, then back to Miri. ‘You smoke?’
Miri looks at her and lifts an eyebrow. ‘Obviously.’
‘I mean . . . Okay,’ Emily says, trying to order her thoughts. ‘What’s going on, Miri?’
‘Do you need more confirmation on what you just saw?’
‘What? No . . . I saw it . . .’
‘It hasn’t happened yet.’
‘What?’
‘Time machine, Tango Two,’ Miri says, blowing smoke into the air. ‘Damn, I shouldn’t smoke,’ she adds in the first really human thing Emily has heard her say. ‘Bad for you,’ she says, looking at the cigarette in her hands. ‘They banned yet?’
‘Er, yes. Yes, they are,’ Emily says weakly, her mind spinning.
‘Good. Black market strong?’
‘Yes,’ Emily says again. ‘Why am I here? Am I being released?’
‘Ben was right. Hell, I think he knew before me, or damned well suspected. He’s got a grasp on this. Your side tried to kill you because they saw you outside Cavendish Manor with us. Mother used a satellite to monitor the event. The time now is two days after that. You can leave. You can say you were held captive for two days and escaped, or be honest and say I let you go. I don’t care which.’
Emily moves closer, mesmerised by the words spilling from Miri.
‘If you are still concerned that your side saw you outside with us, you can disappear and start a new life, but if you walk away, then you’re on your own. I can’t protect you.’
‘But . . .’ Emily blinks and rubs her head. ‘Miri . . .’
‘If you go back to your side, you tell them what you saw just now. Tell them what you know. It will change the timeline, but I do not care. Time is not fixed, and I will bend it to my will. I will bend it to fix this. If you leave now, there is a very slight chance Mother will not kill you. At the very least, you will be tortured, but you know that. Damn, I love smoking. You ever smoke?’
‘No,’ Emily whispers, unable to take her eyes off Miri.
‘You want to go, then go,’ Miri says, nodding in the direction of the traffic noises. ‘But you tell your side that Maggie Sanderson says hi.’
Emily staggers back, her mouth open. Her stomach flips, heaves and twists. Everything fits. Everything makes sense. ‘You?’ she whispers.
‘Finally,’ Miri mutters. ‘Yes. Me,’ she adds with the bitterness of the years all showing on her lined and weary face.
‘Your son . . .’
The look comes; Miri’s head snaps up. Fury of a kind Emily has never seen before.
‘You have a time machine,’ Emily says, the words a gasp.
‘I am a professional,’ Miri spits.
‘You have Harry Madden, Miri. You have Safa Patel and Ben Ryder . . . You have me . . .’
‘You know shit, little girl. You know nothing of what an agent is. You play at it. What we did, we did first. Where we went, we went first. Go beg in a public square in Yemen for two months with camel shit smeared on your face so no man looks at you for a chance at a shot that some politician never green-lights. You do not speak of my son. You do not ever speak of my son . . . Mission first. Professional. Take an oath and stand by it.’
‘Miri, I . . .’ Emily falters, too many things in her mind at one time. Miri is Margaret Sanderson. Maggie Sanderson. The original Mother. The first. Undercover. Covert. Kill missions. Cold War. Africa. The Middle East. Harry Madden. Safa Patel. Ben Ryder. Maggie Sanderson. Every trick learnt, every practice, every policy, procedure and training package refers back to Maggie Sanderson because she did it first. She died in 2010 at her home in California. A multiple hit from forces working together that had spent years tracking her down. It only came out a few years ago, but her body was never recovered.
‘It was on the landing.’ Miri forces the anger from her voice, which resumes the dull, hard, emotionless state she has perfected over a lifetime of service. She winces as she drops to a crouch to stub her cigarette out and puts the butt in a small plastic bag taken from her pocket. Her body hurts. Everything hurts. ‘You’re the Brits. The good guys, right?’ she stands slowly, looking up to see Emily still hanging off every word said and the look of almost comic shock etched on her face. ‘Someone has a time machine. The Brits have to secure it because they’re the good guys, right? You were fine with that. You go to the house and commence the attack. You were fine with that.’ She turns to face Emily with utter, vicious power dripping from every word spoken. ‘You find opposition and you are fine with that, but at some point during that fight, you stopped being the good guys.’ Miri points at her. Holding her entranced. ‘You had so many. We had so few. You had gunships. We had pistols.’ She runs her fingers over the top of the bag, securing the ziplock. ‘When that flash-bang was thrown, you saw an old man and an old woman trying to get a young man away from dozens of armed attackers. You realised it was wrong. Do you remember you stopped attacking us before the order to kill you was given? Maybe you had it in mind to go through the portal and try and work from within. Maybe negotiate. Maybe spy. Maybe cultivate. Maybe hell knows what. Damn bullets flying everywhere. Who can think in that chaos? I never could, and sure as dammit nobody else can. Maybe Ben. Ben is rare. I do my thinking after. That’s what I always did. I think. I plan and I execute to make sure that shitstorm can’t happen again.’
She pauses, before looking back at Emily. ‘At some point in every agent’s career, they start an ethical debate within their own mind. Black and white becomes grey. The agent thinks it is the world that changes. It never is. The individual evolves. Seen it. Had it. You are younger than average, but that’s all it is. Damn.’ She takes another cigarette and lights it. She coughs from the smoke, her face flushing from the exertion.