One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

  “I think the feeling’s pretty much mutual. Does that mean I’m under arrest?”

  “We tried to, but you escaped.” He smiled and removed the plastic cuffs with a flick knife. “Now go before Flanker gets here.”

  It was too late. A group of blue-suited individuals had arrived, brandishing Goliath IDs and a lot of attitude. Their leader I recognized from the description I had in the series—Commander Flanker, once head of SO-1, the police who police the police, now presumably answering to Goliath.

  “Thank you, Officer Stoker,” said Flanker, “for securing our prisoner.”

  “You can have her once we’re done,” said Spike, pulling himself up to his full height—he was well over six feet six. “Miss Next is charged with the illegal possession of a firearm, and I need to process her.”

  “The charge of crimes against humanity has precedence, Stoker.”

  “Your bullshit charge is bigger than my bullshit charge?”

  “We could argue this all night, but the outcome remains the same. She is coming with me to be interrogated at Goliathopolis.”

  “Over my dead body,” said Spike.

  “I’m sure that can be arranged.”

  They growled at each other, but there was little, it seemed, that Spike could do. Within a half hour, I was in the back of a large automobile being driven to the Clary-LaMarr Travelport to be put on a private bullet train to Goliathopolis.

  I took a deep breath. Being Thursday was exciting and was certainly distracting. I’d hardly thought about Whitby at all.

  24.

  Goliath

  Perils for the Unwary #16: Big Martin. A large catlike beast who is never seen but always leaves a trail of damage and mayhem in its wake. A Big Martin event can always be avoided, due to the ample warning given by a series of cats that gradually increase in size. The universal Rule of Three should be adopted: Simply put, the third Big Martin warning should be considered the last, and it is time to leave.

  Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (2nd edition)

  Well,” said Flanker as we sat in the plush interior of the bullet train, “we’ll be at Goliathopolis in an hour, and your debrief can begin.”

  “Mr. Flanker, sir,” said one of the accompanying heavies, a small man with a rounded face and a crew cut like a tennis ball, “have you checked she’s not one of ours?”

  “Good point,” said Flanker. “Would you be so kind?”

  The two heavies needed no extra encouragement, and while one held me down, the other clasped my upper eyelid and peered underneath. It wasn’t painful, but it was undignified. Plus, the agent looking at my eye had been eating an onion sandwich not long before, and his breath was pretty unpleasant.

  “She’s not one of our Thursdays,” said the agent, and they released me.

  “I’m delighted to hear it,” I said—and I was. There were now only two possibilities for who I was: me or Thursday. “Potblack killed them all,” I added, “and had them buried in the Savernake.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” replied Flanker airily. “Goliath no longer conducts experiments into synthetics. It’s against the law. Oh,” he added, “I forgot. We are the law. Shall I come straight to the point? We’ve been contracted to complete Phase One of the Anti-Smite Strategic Defense Shield by the end of the year, and the penalties are severe for noncompliance. We’re not in the business of paying out severe penalties, so tell us where the secret plans are and we can release you and drop all the charges.”

  It felt like covering for a character in a book without being told what the book was about, who was in it or even what your character had been doing up until then. I’d done it twice in the BookWorld, so I had some experience in these matters. But at least I was beginning to understand what was going on.

  “The plans are in a safe place,” I replied, assuming they were, “but if you think you can simply ask questions and I’ll simply answer them, you’ve got another think coming.”

  “Oh, this is just the preamble,” said Flanker in an unpleasant tone, “so I can tell the board that I did ask you and you refused. We can cut the information out of you, but it’s a very messy business. Now, where are the plans?”

  “And I said somewhere safe.”

  Flanker was quiet for a moment. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you have caused Goliath?”

  “I’m hoping it’s a lot.”

  “You’d be right. Just getting you off the streets is a small triumph, but we have other plans. The Goliath Advanced Weapons Division has been wanting to get hold of you for a long time.”

  “I won’t help you make any weapons, Flanker.”

  “It’s simpler than that, Thursday. Since you have been so devastatingly destructive to us over the years, we have decided that you would make the ideal weapon. We can create excellent visual copies, but none of them have the unique skills that make you the dangerous person you are. Now that we have you and that precious brain of yours, with a couple of modifications in your moral compass our Thursday Mark V will be the ultimate killing machine. Of course, the host rarely survives the procedure, but we can replace you with another copy. I’m sure Landen won’t notice. In fact, with a couple of modifications we can improve you for him—make the new Thursday more . . . compliant to his wishes.”

  “What makes you think that I’m not already? If he were only a quarter of the man he is, he’d still be ten times more of a man than you.”

  Flanker ignored me, and the bullet train moved off. We were soon zipping through the countryside, humming along thirty feet above the induction rail. When another bullet train passed in the opposite direction, we gently moved to the left of the induction wave, and the opposite train shot past us in a blur.

  I stared at Flanker, who was sitting there grinning at me. If he could have started to laugh maniacally, he would have. But the thing was, this didn’t sound like the Flanker in my books. Pain in the ass he might have been, but Goliath lackey he most certainly wasn’t. His life was SpecOps, and although a strict rules man, that’s all he was. I had an idea.

  “When did they replace you, Flanker?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This isn’t you. Shit you might have been, evil-toady Goliathlackey shit you most definitely weren’t. Ever had a look at your own eyelid? Just to make sure?”

  He laughed uneasily but then excused himself to the bathroom. When he came back, he looked somewhat pale and sat down in silence.

  “When was I replaced?” he asked one of the heavies.

  I’d not really given them much thought, but now that I looked at them, they also seemed to be vaguely familiar, as though they’d been described to me long ago. There were plenty of Goliath personalities in my book, but the litigious multinational had always insisted that no actual names could be used, nor realistic descriptions—they went further by denying that anything in the Thursday Next books ever took place, something that Thursday told me was anything but the truth.

  “This morning,” said one of the heavies in a matter-of-fact tone, “and you’re due for retirement this evening. You’re what we call a day player.”

  Flanker put on a good face of being unperturbed and picked up the phone that connected him to the central command for the bullet train. Before he could speak, the other heavy leaned forward and placed his finger on the “disconnect” button.

  “Even if I am only a day player,” said Flanker, “I still outrank you.”

  “You’re not the ranking officer here,” said the other heavy. “You’re just the friendly face of Goliath—and I say that without any sense of irony.”

  Flanker looked at me, then at the heavies, then out the window. He said nothing for perhaps thirty seconds, but I knew he was going to make a move. The trouble was, so did the heavies. Flanker reached for his gun, but no sooner had he grasped the butt than he suddenly stopped, his eyes rolled upwards into his head, and he collapsed without a noise. It was as though he’d been switched off. The Goliath heavy s
howed me a small remote with a single button on it.

  “Useful little gadget,” he said. “All our enemies should have one. Boris? Get rid of him and then fetch Miss Next a cup of tea.”

  The synthetic Flanker was unceremoniously dragged from the compartment by Boris, and the first heavy came to sit in Flanker’s old place.

  “An excellent move,” he said with the air of authority, “to pit one of your foes against another. Worthy of the real Thursday. Now, where is she?”

  “I’m her,” I said, suddenly realizing that while this whole Goliath adventure was kind of amusing, it wasn’t helping me find out where Thursday had actually gone. The sum total of my knowledge was that she’d been gone a month, was not dead, and had said that Lyell was boring. Goliath didn’t have her, so I was wasting my time here. I needed to get back to Swindon.

  “Are you a day player as well?” I asked.

  “No,” said the man, “I’m real. I check every morning. I know better than most that Goliath can’t be trusted. Now, where are you from and where’s Thursday?”

  “I’m her. You don’t need to look any further.”

  “You’re not her,” he said, “because you don’t recognize me. It surprised me at first, which was why I had to make sure you weren’t one of ours gone rogue. They do that sometimes. Despite our best attempts to create synthetics with little or no emotions, empathy tends to invade the mind like a virus. It’s most troublesome. Flanker would have killed you this morning if I’d told him to, and by the afternoon he dies trying to protect you. It’s just too bad. Now, where’s Thursday?”

  Finally I figured it out. The one person at Goliath who had more reason to hate me than any other.

  “You’re Jack Schitt, aren’t you?”

  He stared at me for a moment, and smiled.

  “By all that’s great and greedy,” he said, staring at me in wonder, “what a coup. You’re the written one, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  But he knew I was lying. Unwittingly, I had revealed everything. Jack Schitt wasn’t his real name—it was his name in the series. I didn’t know what his real name was, but he would certainly have known his fictional counterpart. He pulled the phone off the hook and punched a few buttons.

  “It’s me. Listen carefully: It’s not Thursday, it’s the written Thursday. . . . Yes, I’m positive. She could melt back any second, so we need to get her Blue Fairyed the second we’re on Goliath soil. . . . I don’t care what it takes. If she’s not real by teatime, heads will roll. And no, I’m not talking figuratively.”

  He hung up the phone and stared at me with a soft, triumphal grin. “When are you due back?”

  I stared at him, a feeling of genuine fear starting to fill me. My actions so far had been based on the certainty that I would return. The idea of staying here forever was not in the game plan.

  “What happened to the Austen Rover, Next?”

  “The what?”

  “The Austen Rover. Our experimental transfictional tour bus. The real Thursday traveled with it on its inaugural flight and never returned. Where is it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and besides, the Blue Fairy is fictional and lives inside Pinocchio. She doesn’t do any actualizing these days. The Council of Genres forbade it.”

  “Better and better,” he said, waving away the second heavy, who had returned with my tea, and closing the compartment door. “So you are from the BookWorld. And I was bluffing—we don’t have a Blue Fairy. But we have the next best thing: a green fairy.”

  “I’ve never heard of the Green Fairy.”

  “It’s a concoction of our own. It’s not so much a fairy—more like a magnetic containment facility designed to keep fictional characters from crossing back. I understand that the first few hours can be excruciatingly painful, and it gets worse from there. You’ll talk—they always do. How do you suppose we managed to get the inside information necessary to even begin research into the Book Project? Perhaps we can’t make you real, but we can keep you here indefinitely—or at least until such time as you can’t bear it any longer and agree to help us. Make it easy for yourself, Thursday: Where is the Austen Rover?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You’ll tell us eventually. A few hours of Green Fairy will loosen your tongue.”

  “Goliath wouldn’t last twenty minutes inside fiction,” I said, but I wasn’t convinced. If this “Jack Schitt” was even half as devious as the one written about, we were in big trouble. Thursday had spent a great deal of time and effort ensuring that the Goliath Corporation didn’t get into fiction, either to dump toxic waste, use the people within it as unpaid labor or even just to find another market to dominate and exploit.

  I said nothing, which probably was all he wanted to know. It was rotten luck that he’d been the one to figure me out. The real Thursday had once imprisoned the so-called Jack Schitt within Poe’s “The Raven,” so here was a man with some experience of being in the BookWorld.

  “What’s your name, then?” I asked. “If not Jack Schitt?”

  “It was a ridiculous name, not to mention insulting,” he snorted. “I’m Dorset. Adrian Dorset.”

  25.

  An Intervention

  Places to Eat #28: Inn Uendo, 3578 Comedy Boulevard. Made famous as the meeting place of the Toilet-Humor Appreciation Society, most of whose motions are passed while members are seated at the bar. The Double Entendre Bar and Grill is also highly recommended, and if you require satiating, the friendly waitstaff will be able to offer relief at the table.

  Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (5th edition)

  Adrian Dorset?” I said. “Are you sure?”

  “No, I’m not sure at all.”

  “What’s your name, then?”

  “You’re not as smart as her, are you? Of course it’s Dorset. I think I know my own name.”

  “The Adrian Dorset who wrote The Murders on the Hareng Rouge?”

  He looked surprised for a moment. “The worthless scribblings of a man who was fooling himself that he could write. It was following the death of Anne, but I don’t expect you’d know anything about that, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Anne was my wife,” he said. “Head of the Book Project. She was on board the Austen Rover’s inaugural journey. Thursday told me what had happened to her and what she’d done before she died. I don’t blame Thursday. Not anymore. Revenge is for losers, cash is the winning currency. I burned the book a month ago. I didn’t need it anymore. I’m over her.”

  He looked down at his feet, and I suddenly felt sorry for him.

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you.”

  He said very little for the rest of the journey, and I watched out the window as the English countryside zipped beneath us at breathtaking speed; we had nothing as fast as this in the BookWorld—not even in Sci-Fi, where they were a lot more conservative than they made out. As we approached Liverpool and the Tarbuck International Travelport, the traffic became more intense as other bullet gondolas joined the induction rail and clumped around for a while before moving off in separate directions. At all times the small, bullet-shaped craft, each no bigger than a bus, kept well spaced from one another, moving apart and together as congestion dictated.

  The intercom buzzed, and Dorset picked it up, looked at me, then said, “Security override seventeen,” before listening for a while and then saying, “Bastards. Very well.”

  “Problems?”

  “Nothing to worry your sweet fictional head about.”

  We glided to a halt on Platform 24 at Tarbuck International. The doors hissed open, but we didn’t move, and a few minutes later a small, meek-looking man arrived. He was wearing a dark suit and a bowler hat, and he was carrying a small briefcase. When he spoke, his voice was thin and reedy, and his nose was red from a recent cold.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Meakle,” said my captor, without getting up.

  “Good afternoon,” said
Meakle, who looked strikingly similar to someone who had played a bit part early on in my series. “You will release Miss Next to the custody of a federal marshal.”

  He indicated several marshals who were all standing on the platform outside the bullet.

  “I’m afraid not, old chap,” said Dorset or Schitt or whoever he was. “Miss Next is under arrest for crimes against humanity, which effectively trumps anything you might have in store for her.”

  “You’re right and wrong,” said Mr. Meakle. “She is under arrest, but house arrest, and will remain there until the government decides the best course of action. National heroes are not treated as common prisoners, Mr. Dorset.”

  “I have the authority of the police and SpecOps,” replied Dorset coolly, “an authority given to us under mandate from the minister of justice.”

  The bureaucrat opened his case and took out a sheet of paper. “I repeat, Miss Next is to be taken into custody by a federal marshal. Here is an executive order signed personally by President Redmond van de Poste. Need I say more?”

  Dorset took the document and stared at it minutely. I could tell from his expression that all was very much in order. He handed it back, looked at me and told me the game “was far from over.”

  I was taken across the concourse to where Meakle had his own private bullet with the presidential seal painted upon it, and within a few moments we were skimming back south across the countryside.

  “Thank you.”

  Mr. Meakle seemed distracted, as though this were just one of many jobs he had to do in a single day. It looked, in fact, as though he worked from the bullet.

  “My pleasure,” said Mr. Meakle. “Where can we drop you?”

  I asked for Swindon, and he relayed the instructions through the phone.

  “I know I speak for the president when we say how fortunate it is to see you back,” he added. “NSA officials and SO-5 will be briefed to protect you from Goliath. Can I schedule a meeting with the president anytime soon? We are eager to receive the secret plans as soon as we can, and we hope that the security arrangements are to your satisfaction.”