Broken Hero (10 page)

Hermann shakes his head. “They have done nothing except listen and make a promise they cannot keep. I see nothing to thank here.”

I make a mental note that when we find a cure, to think twice before providing it to Hermann. Inorganic and devoid of a functional digestive system or no, the guy is still an arsehole.

Volk and Hermann step onto the elevator’s platform. Its steel floor creaks ominously under their combined weight.

And then the elevator starts to rise. The two Uhrwerkmänner being borne away. And it’s just us all standing around in a cold storage room, with their mess in our laps, and wondering how the hell to fix it.

“OK,” I say, even though it’s not. It’s a way to buy time, to focus attention. All I need to do now is be able to follow it up with something actionable.

Eyes turn toward me.

My brain scrambles to hit top speed. And getting there I realize that not so much has changed yet. We know more, but we still have to fill in the full picture about what’s going on.

“Breadcrumbs,” I say. “Leading forward and back.”

“What?” Tabitha looks like she thinks I’m finally having the stroke she’s been hoping I’ll have for so long, except the whole thing is now taking too long and is generally inconvenient. “This morning,” I say, “hell, less than an hour ago, we were trying to find out about these robots. These Uhrwerkmänner. We had two leads, one in the present, in Scotland, one in the past—Lang’s apartment. We needed to follow the breadcrumbs forward and back to see where they joined up.

“But now these guys have shown up on our doorstep so we know where the breadcrumbs from Scotland lead. We know they go back to World War II. We know all that they have to tell us.”

“About German clockwork doomsday devices and mad robots trying to activate them?” Hannah asks.

“Exactly,” I nod as if she hadn’t sounded incredibly skeptical. “Lang is still in play, though. This is
his
doomsday device. So we still need to check out his apartment. Find out what there is to—”

“Wait,” Hannah cuts in. “Really? Like actually, genuinely take their word for this shit and run off to have giant mechanical people beat us up while they hunker down and do whatever it is they’re actually doing?”

Oh good. We’re less than thirty seconds into the assignment and already Hannah’s challenging my authority. That’s just marvelous.

“Is there a problem?” I ask her, as patiently as I’m able.

“If I’m the one being beaten up by giant robots then, hell yes there is.”

“Girl’s got a feckin’ point,” Kayla adds.

“You,” I point to Kayla, “lost all credibility when you started showing people pictures of men you want to impregnate you.” I switch the finger to Hannah. “You—”

“Are showing a healthy amount of skepticism.” Felicity cuts me off. She smiles at us both. It is not one of those nice, warm, reassuring smiles I’ve heard so much about. It’s the other kind.

I really do have to try harder to be nice to Hannah. She’s the new girl. She will say the wrong things. Felicity has asked me to be nice. And just because I keep on having flashbacks to almost dying yesterday, that is not an excuse to be mean.

“Look,” Felicity steps toward Hannah, “while this is still military intelligence, what we do here is significantly different to what you’re used to. There are far fewer angles, and the threats can be much, much bigger. We don’t just protect this nation, we protect the planet it exists on. And there is often not much time to operate in. Follow Agent Wallace’s lead,” she smiles at me. “He usually knows what he’s talking about, even if he avoids the best way to say it. For now, the best approach is to treat what we’ve heard as true, but it’s also best to be looking for angles that are being used against us. We won’t see those unless we get out in the field and start searching for them. Does that make sense?”

Hannah looks as if she’s chewing through a lemon, but she smooths out her features and nods. “All right then.”

Felicity steps back and the floor is mine again. “OK,” I say. “Now that’s out of the way, let’s go toss this guy’s apartment.”

Clyde and I take his Mini to the apartment. Kayla and Hannah share Hannah’s Renault Turbo, because fitting four people who aren’t clowns into Clyde’s Mini breaks some fairly fundamental laws about physical space and the volume of my stomach.

Music plays for the first quarter mile or so, but then, as we’re navigating our way around the fifteenth roundabout, he says, “So Hannah seems nice, I think.”

It’s not bait, so I try not to rise to it. Clyde is a decent human being and I should follow his lead. So, I say, “Yes,” and try to leave it at that.

Except then I say, “Well…”

I immediately regret it. And for a moment I think Clyde is going to ignore it, but then he flicks his eyes off the road and to me.

“Well, what?” he asks.

Damnit. Don’t encourage me, Clyde.

“I don’t know,” I lie. “She feels… off.” I have no better words for it. “I mean, I don’t think it’s her. I think it’s the whole dynamic. We have a groove now, MI37. We know what we’re doing. This seems like a bad time to throw someone new into the mix.”

Clyde nods as Clyde is wont to do. “Have you talked to Shaw about it?”

I shake my head. “I don’t think Felicity’s going to be amenable to that line of reasoning. I think she’s quite positive about Hannah being part of the mix.”

“Well, Shaw does know what’s best much of the time. Not that I have to tell you that. I’m not the one moving in with her.” Clyde smiles happily at that thought.

My palms are sweaty again. I close my eyes. All we have to do is go and get some notebooks and whatever else the insane German thaumatophysicist left lying around. Holiday snaps or whatever. This is simple. It doesn’t matter how much experience Hannah does or doesn’t have. We are essentially moving men. No one tries to kill moving men.

Oxford doesn’t really do run-down. Or at least, when it does, it’s a very genteel version. The architecture is less crumbling, more just eccentric. Buildings gently sag against each other like friends worse for wear after an evening out. Windows are cracked but never truly broken. Drainpipes look like hazards on a snakes and ladders board. There are modern urban vices of course. But even the graffiti is grammatically correct.

Lang’s apartment has all these problems and more, but it is still standing at least—a dilapidated house at the end of a narrow, dead-end street.

Clyde pulls up halfway down the street, behind Hannah’s Renault. No reason to get too close, give away to any casual observers what house we’re interested in.

Hannah leans on her car door, wearing a lopsided grin. “What took you so long?” she asks, as I unfold from the car.

I try to imagine Felicity’s reprimanding face and ignore the jibe. “OK,” I say instead, “let’s go in, get this stuff.”

I head toward the front door, which was once painted red, but is now mostly exposed wood and pale pink flakes. A dented letterbox is positioned at its center like a mouth in need of dentures.

“Wait,” says Hannah. “What about, you know, standard sweep and clear? We’re doing that, right?”

I clench my teeth. The constant nagging is not really appreciated.

“Kayla,” I say vaguely. I always assumed she did that sort of thing.

“Figured you’d finally feckin’ notice I did that,” is the response.

Felicity’s reprimanding face.

I approach the door, test the latch. The door swings slowly open revealing a dark corridor of the variety usually located in fairground haunted houses.

Someone seems to have installed a hair trigger on the sweat glands in my palms. Even this has them going. This is getting ridiculous.

Kayla takes off. Thirty seconds later she’s back at my side. “Clean,” she says.

I am—probably rather pettily—quite pleased to see Hannah’s mask slip for a moment. Hardened MI6 field agent or not, it is quite the thing to see Kayla hit something like Mach one coming down a set of stairs. I half expect to see the cloud of her sonic boom still dissipating in the hallway.

“All right,” I say, “let’s give the place a proper once-over.” I lead the way in, flicking the hallway light to no effect. I reach into my pocket and fish out a flashlight—indispensable government agent tool no. 1—and an ear mic that will connect me back to Tabitha in the office—possibly dispensable government agent tool no. 2. I push the ear mic home. The others do the same, Clyde handing a spare to Hannah.

“OK,” I say, “we’re in. Any suggestions on the sort of thing we should be looking for?”

“Clyde’s there, right?” Tabitha’s antipathy is tinny in my ear.

“Yes.”

“Ask bloody him.” Apparently Tabitha has left Felicity’s earshot.

As I look to Clyde I can’t help but notice that Hannah’s brow has furrowed.

“Excellent point,” says Clyde, even though it isn’t. “Basically on the lookout for anything with writing on it. Paper pads. Spare sheafs of paper. Notes in the margins of books. Even toilet roll. I mean, I realize it’s not exactly hygienic, but it’s not as if one has used the paper already, it’s clean paper, and sometimes a thought does come out of nowhere at an inopportune moment and it’s just too good to let it go, and that’s just what you have to hand. It’s simply practical, I say.”

There is a little bit of a silence after that.

“Clyde,” Tabitha says into our ears, “share less.”

“What?” Clyde looks around, slightly panicked. “I was just… hypothesizing.”

“Mmm.” Hannah looks dubious enough to demonstrate that she does at least have rudimentary detective skills.

“Kayla,” I say, “you see anything resembling an office on your sweep?” That seems like a good place to start.

“Up the stairs, on the left.”

I nod. “All right, let’s go grab everything that’s not nailed down.”

We ascend. The stairs creak. The runner is more holes than whole, its original pattern is lost to time. Spider webs tangle with our hair. Our footfalls raise clouds of dust that billow in the beams of our flashlights. Ratty paintings hang at obtuse angles, the occasional glimpse of oil paint catching the light from beneath the layers of filth.

As we hit the landing, I lean on the banister. The wood crunches, rotten, and a chunk breaks away spilling down into the hallways below. Staring down, getting my balance back, I wonder if there really might be something to the contaminated ether theory Clyde dismissed earlier. This place is genuinely creepy.

“Over there.” Kayla points to an open doorway.

The room beyond is surprisingly spacious, a couch against the near wall, the others lined with bookcases. Near the room’s far end is an imposing desk that seems to have spent the past seven decades resisting the rot that has reduced the area rug that once lay before it into a few moldering strands of cotton.

“All right,” I say. “Clyde, you do the desk. The rest of us, start hitting the bookshelves for margin notes.”

“Read me the titles,” Tabitha cuts in. “I can cross-reference. Look for patterns. Research indicators.”

I smile. Sometimes we really can look professional.

I pick a spot, and grab my first book. “
The Origin of Species
,” I intone. “Darwin.” Tabitha grunts. I flick open the cover, and go to thumb through the pages. They start to dissolve as soon as my fingers hit them, crumbling to dust that spills through the room. I back up, coughing, dropping the book, which lets fly more flakes of brown paper. By the time the whole thing is over, more than half the book is lying in pieces on the floor.

“Erm,” I say. “No notes in that one.”

From Kayla’s disgusted choking, I think she’s having a similar experience.

“What’s this?” Hannah is standing by Lang’s desk holding something vaguely oblong and odd-looking. She is noticeably not checking the books on the shelves like I asked her to.

And this is the moment. Do I lay down the hammer, and try to force her into line, or do I just let it go and hope it doesn’t add up, doesn’t reach the point where I say go left in a fire fight and she goes right and one of us ends up with an extra hole in our cranium?

It would be better if I’d come from a military background. This is
military
intelligence. Then I’d have a better background in shouting and being obeyed. But usually when I shout I’m just self-conscious, and people look at me as if this is the first time anyone has ever shouted in their presence and they’re not sure what to make of the whole deal.

So, in the search for a middle ground, I go with, “No clue. Sort of why I let Clyde handle those things.” It sounds more pointed than I’d hoped it would. Sometimes I worry that I’m becoming better at the shooting-things part of my job than I am at the herding-cats part. That is not the career progression I was hoping for.

That said, there is still the throb of a hangover at the back of my head and the vague fear of PTSD.

Behind Hannah, Kayla disappears in another cloud of fragmenting book particulate.

“This is feckin’ useless.” Whether Kayla’s frustration is based on the problem itself or the fact that the problem can’t be solved through the application of a sword blade, I’m not totally sure.

“Come on,” I say, “this is hardly kicking a clockwork robot’s arse. We can do this.”

Clyde at least has the decency to chuckle.

And for a moment we really do work together. Like a team. “
Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development
by Francis Galton,” I read off a spine to Tabitha.

“Well, I’ve got
Mein
feckin’
Kampf
over here,” says Kayla before there is the sound of a book detonating. “Oops.” She doesn’t sound sorry.

“You know,” Clyde says from the desk, “this thing actually is very weird.” I glance over and he’s holding the oblong Hannah was wielding a moment ago. “There are seams and I think…” he tugs on it. “I can’t get it apart.”

This is usually Kayla’s cue to break something, but instead she’s standing very still, her head cocked to one side. “Why,” she starts, “would three feckin’ trucks pull up outside?”