The Reluctant Assassin

  Before Chevie could wonder why the strange accent had her brain singing “Consider Yourself,” the cloud dissipated, revealing the figure of a boy huddled over an old man.

  The boy was alive but the man was not, probably because of the knife jutting from his chest. Being dead was not the only thing wrong with this guy: the blood congealing on his torso was yellow, and one of his arms seemed to be that of a gorilla.

  Don’t think about it now. Do the job.

  “Okay, kid. Move away from the dead . . . thing.”

  The boy blinked, searching for the source of the orders. “I never done it, miss. We need to leave this place. He’ll be coming for me.”

  Chevie made a split-second decision, reaching into the pod and yanking the kid out by his collar.

  Chevie held him on the floor with the palm of her free hand.

  “Who’s coming, kid? Who’s coming for you?”

  The boy’s eyes were wide. “He’s coming. Garrick. The magician. Death itself.”

  Great, thought Chevie. First a monkey guy, and now Death itself, who is also a magician.

  Chevie felt another presence in the room and looked up to see Agent Orange in all his gray glory moving down the corridor toward the pod.

  “That’s a good way to get yourself shot, Orange. What are you doing here anyway? I never pressed the panic button.”

  Orange pulled off his silver sunglasses and surveyed the devastation. “Well, Agent Savano, when half of London blacked out, I guessed the WARP pod might have been activated.” Orange hesitated six feet from the hatch. “Did you look inside, Chevie?”

  “Yes. I looked. Am I gonna die from radiation poisoning now?”

  “No, of course not. Is there . . . a man in there? Is my father in there?”

  Orange’s father? This posting cannot get any weirder.

  Chevie returned her gaze to the restrained boy. “There were two people inside. This boy and a man. I really hope the man is not your father.”

  But the way this day has been going, I just bet that monkey guy is Orange’s dad.

  Chevie realized that she had never really trusted Agent Orange, but at this moment she actually felt sorry for him.

  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 unnecessa
ry, 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 wante
d 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?”