The Reluctant Assassin

  “. . . constant interference from a juvenile agent who is completely out of her depth.”

  Garrick allowed the thought to flash through his mind that perhaps this FBI-style body shot was the most satisfying he had ever fired, in spite of Felix Sharp’s attempts to interfere with his conscience, or perhaps because of that.

  I am in control of myself once more.

  Chevie was knocked backward by the impact, lifted onto the tips of her toes, and almost somersaulted into a pile of blankets behind her.

  Garrick, ever the professional, decided that he would savor the moment fully later, once he was safe in the Orient Theatre. Now was the moment to put the final nail in this coffin.

  “Riley, boy,” he said, his voice honeyed and sonorous, as seductive a tone as was ever heard on the West End stage. “Stop running, son. Let me end your pain.”

  Riley was facedown on the bed, his body heaving with sobs.

  At the end he was just a child. Perhaps better to die in innocence.

  Garrick pocketed his weapon, for it was important that this killing be more personal.

  Two quick steps brought him to the bed.

  I shall choke off the air from his windpipe, watch his eyes glaze, but out of respect for our shared past, perhaps I shall speak kindly as he goes.

  Garrick reached for Riley’s neck.

  My fingers are so slender, yet strong, he thought. I could just as easily have been a pianist.

  Riley was too beaten to attempt escape and simply lay on the bed, waiting for Garrick’s fingers to close around his neck.

  “No fight left in you, son?” whispered Garrick. “Perhaps it is time to sleep.”

  Garrick sprang catlike onto the mattress, but his fingertips did not land on Riley’s soft neck, as expected. Instead they somehow clinked against cold glass, and the assassin’s head followed, smashing into a pane of unseen mirror with a dull crunch, sending cracks racing across the glass.

  “But . . .” he said, baffled, blood pouring into one eye. “But . . . I see.”

  Riley turned over and looked through the cracks in Garrick’s direction, but not at him. “What do you see, mighty illusionist?”

  Garrick’s fingers tapped the looking glass, and he realized that he had been hoodwinked with his own magical apparatus; but the throbbing in his head grew louder than his thoughts. “Angled lights. A series of mirrors. Misdirection. But why?”

  “To get you on the bed,” said a voice behind him.

  Garrick turned dully, foundering in the goose down, and there, impossibly, stood Chevron Savano, hale and hardy, some form of throwing missile already flashing from her fingers, spinning in his direction.

  Not so easy, thought Garrick, and he snatched the object from the air. Even when dazed, I will not be struck down by the likes of you.

  The magician was irritated that he had been injured by one of his own mirrors. But what had the illusion accomplished, except to delay the inevitable? He was a little bloody, nothing more.

  Garrick’s hand tingled, and he saw orange sparks buzz around the fingers that held the missile. Sparks buzzing like quantum bees around honey. Puzzlement heaped upon puzzlement.

  Orange sparks? How?

  Garrick opened his fingers and saw a Timekey, and for a moment he thought it another illusion, until Felix Smart’s experience assured him that it was real.

  The hazmat team I tackled earlier. Of course, they had Timekeys and body armor. This is one of their keys, as was the one I smashed on the stairs. Dropped deliberately as a ruse. Riley allowed me to see him enter the house. Chevron simply donned a bulletproof vest in the minute before my arrival.

  The Timekey’s digital readout was divided into four quadrants, and the top two were flashing.

  Garrick waited a nanosecond for the information to come to him.

  Top left activates the wormhole. Top right is the countdown, which already reads zero. The lower quadrants activate the reentry beacon. They are not active.

  “That’s right,” said Chevie. “You’re going in, but you ain’t coming out.”

  Garrick pawed at the Timekey controls with his fingers, but they had already become insubstantial; he was like a ghost trying to make contact with the real world. The Timekey slipped from his grasp and landed on the goose down, a vortex of light opening at its core.

  “What?” said Chevie. “No last words? How about, The world hasn’t seen the last of Albert Garrick? That’s a good one.”

  Riley appeared at Chevie’s side and his eyes were wet with tears. “You murdered my family. You stole me from my bed.” He shook Garrick’s own cloak at him. “So that I could be your audience.”

  Garrick had bigger things on his mind than dealing with a boy’s accusations. He felt himself slipping away.

  I am nothing, he realized. There may have been comfort in this thought for many, but for Albert Garrick it held only terror.

  I shall be nothing for all eternity.

  The orange sparks spread like magical locusts along his limbs and torso, leaving a bare outline behind. Ghostly innards wobbled inside transparent flesh, and Garrick saw it all happen.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound emerged, so Riley said the words for him.

  “Unto dust,” said the boy, and he spat on the floor.

  For an instant Garrick flashed silver, as though transformed into thermite powder, then he was sucked down into the Timekey, which stood on its point, spinning like a top.

  A bolt of lightning shot from its tip, scorching the ceiling, then it too disappeared.

  “Okay,” said Chevie, grabbing Riley’s shoulder and hustling him toward the steps, “I know where this is going.”

  Without an aperture at the twenty-first-century end of the wormhole, the time tunnel craved energy to sustain the matter conversion. The first things to go were the barrel batteries, which were grabbed with lightning fingers, squeezed dry, then tossed aside like dead husks. Then the lightning burrowed deep into the earth itself, siphoning geothermal energy until the soil cracked and split.

  Chevie pushed Riley upstairs and toward the front door, hearing the earth itself open behind her with thunderous booms and sharp snaps. She could feel Bill Riley’s Timekey buzz sympathetically against her chest.

  “Run,” she called, wholly unnecessarily. “The house is going to collapse.”

  Riley did not need any urging. He raced toward the door, thinking that this was the second time he had fled this house in fear of his life.

  The house collapsed around them as they ran, sinking into the basement’s maw, as the structure itself fed the wormhole with kinetic energy. Glass shattered and stone was crushed like sand. Chevie kicked Riley hard in the rump to shunt him past a falling chandelier.

  Garrick had bolted the door behind him, but this didn’t delay them, as most of the front wall had collapsed. The fleeing pair dived through a hole in the wall onto the pavement and scrambled quickly from the maelstrom of destruction behind them.

  Streams of people flowed from the doors of adjacent houses, and screaming and howling rose up in the square as the wormhole gulped and swallowed the entire building, excising it from its neighbors with surgical precision. When at last the dust settled and the cacophony faded, the house had been removed, like a rotten tooth from a gum, leaving the others untouched save for a score of broken windows and a spiderweb of superficial cracks.

  Riley and Chevie leaned on the park railing, as caked in dust as any victims of Vesuvius, but intact and uninjured.

  Riley spat a ball of brick dust to the ground. “Did you know that the entire house would be consumed?”

  Chevie touched the tender spot on her chest where Garrick’s bullet had struck the body armor she had stripped from a fallen member of the hazmat team. “I knew there was a chance, but it was worth taking.”

  There was chaos on Bedford Square as bobbies’ whistle blasts filled the air and the bells of an approaching fire engine clanged across from the West End. Some people had fainte
d dead away, and young lads clambered over the rubble heap, calling for survivors.

  “We should run,” said Riley. “The police will question everyone in a posh gaff such as this.”

  Chevie tore off her bulletproof vest and took several breaths. “Yeah, okay, Riley. I make the strategy decisions, remember? Anyway, we should get out of here before the local police blame us for something.”

  Riley tucked the magician’s cloak under his arm. “A good strategy. Lead on, Agent Savano.”

  The pair trudged to the corner of Bedford Square, against the flow of the crowd straining to see the collapsed foundations of what the London News would call the “House of Hell.”

  Riley and Chevie left a trail of dust behind them. They did not speak for a while, both engrossed in thoughts of the future. Eventually they realized that they had linked arms as they walked.

  “We are like a couple off to the opera,” said Riley.

  Chevie laughed and a puff of dust escaped her throat. “Yeah, a zombie couple.” Her laugh petered out. “You could have died back there, fighting Garrick. That was not part of the plan.”

  “I thought of him, leaning over my dear ma,” said Riley, “with his knife ready to do its business, and I couldn’t help myself.”

  Hooves clattered alongside as a hansom cab slowed, the driver sniffing a fare, despite of their appearance.

  “We’re content on foot,” Riley called, without glancing upward. “Move on down the avenue.”

  “Perhaps I am content to ride beside my mates,” said a familiar voice.

  It was Bob Winkle, who had somehow kept a grip on the stolen carriage.

  Winkle stood on the driver’s seat, peering down toward the corner of Bedford Square. “You pair had a right knees-up on that gaff,” he commented. “A cove might expect a life of high adventure partnering with such a duo. Like Holmes and Watson, ye are, but with extra munitions and explosions.”

  Chevie shook herself like a dog and something resembling a teenage female emerged from the dust.

  “That’s a nice face, princess,” said Bob Winkle. “If you gave it the lick of a wet cloth, I might lower meself to kiss it.”

  They breakfasted like royalty on grub purchased with sovereigns found sewn into the lining of Garrick’s cloak. They ordered coffee with toast, oatmeal with brown sugar, fried eggs and sausage, curried chicken with potato, a platter of bacon, with extra grease for strength. All finished off with beer for the boys in spite of Chevie’s health warnings.

  They sat at a street table on Piccadilly after breakfast, watching the avenue fill up with the day’s business.

  Bob Winkle flicked a penny at the first beggar to approach their table and set him guarding their little space so they could talk uninterrupted.

  Riley sighed and rubbed his distended belly. “I am full as a prince on his birthday,” he declared.

  Chevie was less stuffed, having ignored ninety percent of what was offered to her.

  I cannot stay here, she thought. My cholesterol count would kill me in a week.

  “Okay, gents,” she said, slapping the table with purpose, “we should draw up our plans before you guys get blind drunk.”

  Bob Winkle snorted. “Drunk on beer? I ain’t been beer drunk since I were ten.” He grabbed the rest of the black bread from the plate and shoved it into his pockets. “I better go and look to the mare. You two do your good-bye cuddling, and I’ll be back to bring whoever’s going to the Orient. I suppose there ain’t much more than splinters left of that conjuring equipment me and the boys ferried over earlier.”

  Winkle dodged down the street, eyes and ears open for bluebottles.

  “That guy will land you in trouble,” warned Chevie.

  “Well, he won’t be spending his waking hours trying to murder anyone, or his sleeping hours dreaming of death.”

  “Maybe so. But I still think you should come back with me. A part of you belongs in the twenty-first century.”

  Riley sighed. “But a part of me is here. I have a half brother still living somewhere. Perhaps in Brighton? With Bob Winkle’s help, maybe I can find him.”

  “You can afford Winkle’s help?”

  Riley shrugged. “For the time being. I know where Garrick kept his cash. I suppose the theater is mine too.”

  “So you will search for your brother?”

  Riley pulled the magician’s cloak tight around his shoulders. “I am a magician now. I shall put a troupe together and enjoy the theater life until I find Ginger Tom. Perhaps he knows my Christian name.”

  Chevie’s eyes were downcast. “Yeah, I bet he does.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out the final Timekey left behind by the hazmat team. “The team and their gear went down with the house, but I had Bob’s boys collect their Timekeys while they were setting up the mirror trap, so, if you ever change your mind . . .”

  Riley hooked the lanyard around his neck. “Thank you, Chevie. But this is my century, and I belong here.”

  Chevie wagged a finger. “Never say never, right?”

  “Yes, you are correct. There may come a time when I need to escape.”

  “It’s preprogrammed, set up already, so all you have to do is press the button. Make sure the four quadrants light up, or you’ll end up stuck in the wormhole with you-know-who.”

  “I will be certain to check.”

  Chevie sipped her coffee, which had the consistency of mud and tasted like cough syrup. “I feel there should be more, you know. We’ve gone through hell, and now I’m just gonna walk away?”

  “We will always be close, Chevie. I know the secret of your tattoo, remember?”

  Chevie patted her own shoulder. “My tattoo? Yeah, well. I’m afraid I got sold a turkey on that one.”

  “Sold a turkey?” said Riley, frowning.

  “A crock. A bowl of bull. A heap of lies.”

  “Your father lied to you? And you lied to me?”

  “Afraid so, but I’m telling you the truth now, on account of all the bonding we’re doing. Dad loved telling that story, but the whole Chevron thing came about because my father had a falling out with the owner of the local Texaco.”

  “Tex-a-co?”

  “Yeah. A fueling station for automobiles. So, just to annoy this guy, and because of his beer problem, he gets a tattoo and then calls his firstborn Chevron, which is a competing gas station.”

  Riley pushed his tankard away with the tip of one finger. “So, no noble warrior?”

  “No. And I based my whole life on that story, got the tattoo, told anyone who would listen, became an agent. Last year I meet the Texaco guy, who is broken up that my pop died, and he tells me the truth. I am named after a gas station.”

  “Wow,” said Riley, who had heard the word used in the future and liked it.

  “Wow? That’s it, huh? No magical wisdom from the Great Riley?”

  “We have both built our lives on lies,” said Riley. “I was not abandoned to slum cannibals, and your ancestors were not great warriors; but the lies did their work, and we are who we are. I think you are the youngest agent in your police force for good reason. Perhaps in spite of the name Chevron.”

  Chevie smiled. “Yeah, okay, Riley. That’s not bad. I’m gonna go with that.”

  They abandoned the cab and walked to the house on Half Moon Street. Bob Winkle was doing his utmost to decipher the limited facts he had been given.

  “So, princess. You plan to enter this house and stay there for a hundred years?”

  Chevie patted his shoulder. “Something like that, Winkle. I would say See you around, but it’s probably not going to happen.”

  “So we should kiss now?”

  “Of course,” said Chevie and gave him a peck on the cheek that he would have to be content with.

  “Next year I will be fifteen,” said Bob Winkle, emboldened by the kiss. “We could be married. I could make fair chink off a battling Injun maid at the fairgrounds.”

  “Tempting as that offer is, I think I’ll pass.?
??

  “Very well, princess. But now that I am part owner of a theater, the ladies will be all over Robert Winkle. Six weeks I will wait for you, not a minute more.”

  “I understand,” said Chevie, smiling. “It’s the best you can do.”

  Riley walked her to the front step, while Bob perched on a neighboring set of stairs, watching for constables’ helmets.

  “Be careful, Chevron Savano,” he said. “The future is a dangerous place. It is only a matter of time until the Martians arrive.”

  “Yeah, I’m gonna watch out for anything with tentacles.”

  “Hurry yourselves,” called Bob Winkle. “This is a posh road. Two more minutes and our collars get pinched.”

  The boy was right. It would be a shame if this affair were to end in a prison cell.

  Chevie hugged Riley tightly. “Thanks for everything,” she said.

  Riley hugged her back. “Thanks to you, too, Chevron Savano, warrior and fuel station. Perhaps one day I will put our story into words. It would rival the tales of H. G. Wells himself.”

  “Maybe you already did,” said Chevie. “I’ll Google it when I get home.”

  “Googling sounds like a painful procedure,” said Riley.

  Bob whistled loudly. “I see a helmet, Riley. Leave her be, now.”

  There was no more delaying it. Chevie kissed Riley’s cheek and squeezed his hand, then closed the door behind her. The basement room was dark and dank, just as Chevie remembered it from that brief moment before the sack went over their heads. She saw chicken bones in the corner with rats huddled over them like tramps around a bonfire. The rats did not seem concerned by her presence; rather they looked her over for the meat on her bones.

  Being stared down by large rats was a good way to focus a person on getting to someplace with smaller rats, so Chevie pulled out Bill Riley’s Timekey and walked briskly to the metal pad.

  No time like the present.

  She punched the Timekey’s control pad and made very sure that all four quadrants lit up.

  After a second’s dry vibration, the key began sprouting orange sparks like a Roman candle.