For King & Country (7 page)

He tried to recall who'd left the pub and in what order—and when. Significantly, Brenna McEgan had left first, pleading weariness. Cedric Banning had followed shortly thereafter, leading Stirling to wonder who might be sleeping with whom. A couple of computer techs had left early, as well, and Zenon Mylonas had called it quits a quarter of an hour after that. A whole laundry list of potential suspects.

He took the turning onto the access road on two wheels, drawing a sharp gasp from Miss Dearborne. They thumped back down and sent gravel flying. Lights blazed in most of the on-site cottages. Beckett's windows were a notable exception, dark as the night itself.
Poor bastard won't be needing them ever again, will he?

He skidded to a halt in front of the door, having made the drive in three minutes flat. The main lab door stood open, held by an ashen Blundell. The man gestured frantically. A sharp babble of voices greeted Stirling. The senior scientists were clumped together, faces shocky and pale, voices shrill. Several of the grad students were crying. So was Indrani Bhaskar. Brenna McEgan was missing. So was Cedric Banning.

"Where?" Stirling asked tersely.

Blundell pointed, hand shaking violently, toward Beckett's office.

The death inside that room was nearly too terrible for such a small space to contain. Terrance Beckett had died hard. His equipment lay in smashed profusion, his files scattered across the floor where violent struggles had swept them off his desk. Blood had pooled beneath the body, with splashes across the files, the front of the desk, the broken document trays. Given the placement of the wreckage, Beckett had been tempted out from behind his desk before the attack was launched, taking him by surprise in the middle of a conversation. He'd been knifed repeatedly and his skull crushed for good measure. Stirling didn't have to use guesswork on the type of knife. It lay on the floor beside its victim, all twenty-two wicked centimeters of it.
Commando fighting knife,
he catalogued the weapon automatically. American-made, high quality, and even easier to smuggle than firearms.

Not a woman's choice of weapon.

Or was it? It wouldn't take much strength to inflict fatal damage with a knife like that, and a woman attacker might explain the prolonged struggle. Beckett could easily have fought his way from one side of his office to the other, if his attacker were female. Less upper-body strength, weaker grip, and the women members of the research group were decidedly petite, compared with Beckett. Might explain the crushed skull, afterwards, as well.
Hell hath no fury...

"You said there was worse," he turned abruptly, nearly running Blundell over in the process.

"Yes." The project liaison had to swallow twice before his voice would hold steady. "There's—that is—"

Fairfax Dempsey, Beckett's grad student, snarled, "It's Brenna bloody
McEgan,
that's what! She's set up the equipment and transferred through time!"

Oh, dear God...

"Show me."

They led him into the transfer room, as they'd dubbed it. A row of padded tables, looking much like ordinary medical examination benches, lined one wall. Two of the five were occupied.
Two?
Brenna McEgan was closest to the far corner, a psychological choice indicating, possibly, subconscious fear of being caught. A bruise discolored her cheek, evidence of the struggle with poor Beckett. The other traveler was Cedric Banning.
His
table was the one closest to the door—the position of pursuer, or perhaps just plain haste. Both of them were soaking wet, from the storm or from attempts to remove blood from clothing or both. McEgan's clothing was badly bloodstained; so was Banning's. He must've come in and discovered Beckett, tried to reach the poor bugger, slipped and fallen in the gore...

"Banning left a note," Dempsey said, eyes reddened from the attempt to hold back tears. "She'd killed Beckett before he got here, set up the equipment to transfer herself. Banning plugged his headset into her coordinates and went in pursuit, to stop her..." Dempsey was clutching a crumpled sheet of graph paper, torn from a notebook.

Stirling smoothed it out, frowning over the hasty scrawl.

McEgan's done it, the bloody bitch, the note read, Banning's handwriting nearly illegible. Must have known I was on to her, and the SAS showing up spooked her into jumping. Found out last week she's Cumann Na Mbann, although I couldn't prove it. Came in here to warn poor Beckett, slipped and fell in the blood, trying to get to him, but it was far too late. Have to stop her before she wrecks British history and kills off the whole bloody world. For God's sake, send through a backup to help me with this!

Stirling lifted his gaze to find himself at the still-point center of an invisible, all-too-real sphere of terror. It radiated like a living heat source in the confines of the lab, pushing him up against invisible walls. With creditable calm, he asked, "Why don't we just pull the ruddy plug?"

"You can't!" Mylonas cried, pupils dilating in naked shock.

"Why not?"

"You'd kill them both instantly! Systemic shock, disrupted energy transfer lines, and God knows what the resulting flux in power would do to the fractural planes involved; the system's set on a timer, you see, to taper the power levels off gradually, so there's no possibility of an energy embolism! She's set the bloody timer for a
year,
and if we try to override it, I can't answer for the consequences! We can plug someone else into the system, send another traveler at the power level she's set, which is what poor Dr. Banning's done, but we can't possibly disengage the system in an emergency shutdown! If we could do so safely, Cedric Banning would have shut it down at once!"

"All right, I get the bleeding picture," Stirling muttered, mopping his face with one hand. Christ, he'd needed more sleep before facing this.
Cumann Na Mbann,
that was the last thing he'd wanted to hear. The women's arm of the IRA, the most secret part of the whole terrorist organization and the most efficient as well, damned near impossible to infiltrate.
Cumann Na Mbann
members had done everything from courier jobs, running guns and messages in their babies' prams, to blowing up Protestant social clubs and gunning down British dignitaries. A more ruthless, clever opponent, Stirling could not imagine.

Just his stinking luck...

"Right, then. I'll have to go after them."

"
You?
" Indrani Bhaskar gasped. "But you're not trained! You don't know the first thing about the time period—"

"And those two
do
?" Stirling shot back. The too-still bodies of McEgan and Banning lay shrouded beneath the wires of their time-transference headsets. "They're not exactly historians, Dr. Bhaskar. Although I suppose it wouldn't take a great deal of historical training to assassinate Henry II before he has the chance to invade Ireland."

The uneasy silence puzzled him. Then Dr. Bhaskar gave him the rest of the bad news. "They didn't go to the same time Dr. Beckett did. They're not at Henry II's court, not anywhere close to it, in fact."

"All right," Stirling grated out, "where
have
they gone?"

Her eyes, still wet from her shocked weeping, reflected a fear of not being taken seriously. "Well, Captain, you see... They've set the equipment for this region, right here in Scotland."

"This region?" Stirling echoed. Uneasiness stirred, worse than before, in the pit of his stomach. "Granted, Scotland's been the site of a number of historic battles, but major enough to upset all history? What could McEgan possibly be after,
here,
that would benefit Northern Ireland?"

Indrani's lips worked. The answer came out as a ragged whisper. "King Arthur."

The unreality of it tried to crash down across him. Sleep-deprived, off balance, badly shaken by the possibilities for mass murder, that was the last answer he'd expected to hear. "King Arthur?" It came out flat, disbelieving. "Dux Bellorum Artorius? Sixth-century Briton war chieftain, fighting Saxons?"

"And Picts," Indrani whispered. "And Irish invaders. A very large number of Irish invaders, in fact. She's gone to the year 500 A.D. The height of Artorius' power. If the Irish were to kill him before his resounding victory over the Saxons at Mount Badon, the Irish clans could drive the Britons
and
the Saxons straight into the sea."

The whisper of air conditioning from the laboratory's vents raised a chill along Stirling's neck. Go back to the very beginning of the Irish invasions of western England and Scotland, rewrite history so the
Irish
took possession of the entire island, instead of the Saxons, so that later Anglo-Saxon kings would never exist, so that William of Normandy wouldn't be strong enough to wrest England from the weak Saxon monarchy, which meant Henry II would never exist to invade Ireland and murder its culture or set in motion Elizabeth I's centuries-long nightmare of colonizing Northern Ireland as a Protestant colony. And Brenna McEgan would destroy billions of lives in her own future, trying to give the Irish a victory over Artorius and his Saxon enemies.

It was exactly what he would expect of a
Cumann Na Mbann
agent. Subtle. Cunning. Utterly ruthless.

Cedric Banning, Aussie playboy scientist, had about as much chance of stopping a fanatical terrorist like McEgan as the alley cats in Belfast's scarred neighborhoods had of stopping the bombings.

"I see." It came out ragged. "Very clearly, in fact. Which makes it absolutely imperative that I be the one to transfer after them."

"But—"

"I speak Welsh and Gaelic, Dr. Bhaskar."

"But do you speak Latin and Brythonic?"

"Latin, no. Brythonic, that's early Welsh, isn't it?"

"Yes. And as much like modern Welsh as the Old English of Beowulf is like the language you and I are speaking now!"

"Nevertheless, I'm still the best-qualified agent you have. I majored in military history at Edinburgh University. Cut my milk teeth on both my grandfathers' stories about the glorious King Arthur, and I'm familiar with all the legendary sites, in Scotland, England,
and
Wales. And I'm a trained counterterrorist officer. Frankly, you haven't
got
a better agent to send after them, not anywhere in Britain." He resolutely refused to think about the consequences to any mistakes he might make, that far back in history. He could easily destroy the future he was trying to protect, with one ill-timed blunder. He refused to consider it, because he'd spoken the simple, stark truth. There wasn't anyone better qualified to go. God help them all...

And a whole year to screw it up.

"I want an outside phone line," he said through clenched teeth.

"To phone the police?"

"No. To phone my commanding officer." Colonel Ogilvie was going to spit nails, when he heard, which certainly wouldn't do Stirling's own career much good. What the Home Office would do, once Ogilvie finished notifying the Minister, he genuinely did not want to contemplate. Pity was the overriding emotion he felt for the scientists left to face the authorities.

His conversation with Ogilvie was brutally short. "Stirling here. Beg leave to report full infiltration, sir, with casualties. Initiating pursuit, within the quarter hour."

"Geographical?" Ogilvie asked carefully, his voice a rasp through the telephone wires.

"No, sir."

"I see."

"Better run a complete security check on Brenna McEgan, Colonel, and Cedric Banning, as well. I'd like to know how Banning found out McEgan's
Cumann Na Mbann.
"

"Bloody hell. Home Office won't like that."

"No, sir. They'll like what Dr. Mylonas has to say even less. Better get a full team up here, sir. I daren't say more over the telephone. I'll leave a complete situation report for you, before I go after them. Time is far more critical than you think."

An understatement, if ever he'd made one.

"Do what you must, Stirling."

"Yes, sir."

He was on his own. With all of history waiting.

Brenna woke slowly, through a dim and dreamlike confusion of images, sounds, and stenches. How long she'd been out, she had no way of measuring. She was quite sure she'd returned at least partway to consciousness at some point, for she retained memory of a throbbing pain in her jaw and cheekbone, of clothing plastered wetly to her body and the stink of blood from somewhere close by. She remembered terror at finding her coat and gun missing. She remembered, too, lying paralyzed on a padded surface, stretched out as though for sleep or a doctor's examination. And she remembered hearing him breathing, somewhere very close by, above the background of lab noises—computers and their cooling fans and the almost subliminal hum of expensive equipment brought to life.

Her final, fragmented memory was awareness of the electrical leads taped to her skin and a wavery image of his face, smiling merrily into her foggy eyes, the paisley scarf looking jaunty at his throat—a sick in-joke the other scientists had dismally failed to comprehend.

"Hello, love," he'd said with a laugh that froze her blood. "You've my undying gratitude for providing the perfect scapegoat. And don't worry, I'll be joining you shortly. Catch me if you can."

He'd thrown a switch—and her reality had shattered.

Leaving her... where? Or—more chilling—
when
? She was lying down, or at least her borrowed body was. When she struggled to focus her awareness, she felt a fluttering at the back of her mind, the frantic beating of a terrified bird trapped on the wrong side of a window glass. Thoughts not quite her own flickered like heat lightning, as though she had become someone else with a very different set of memories. The presence howling through her awareness was thinking in a language Brenna could not at first make out. It sounded a little like Gaelic. A very little. More like... Welsh? Not any Welsh she'd ever heard spoken. This had a very ancient sound to it. Why would Cedric Banning have chosen a time and place where archaic
Welsh
was spoken?

At first, she thought Banning might have marooned her in a time different from the one where he planned to attack, but a moment's further thought convinced her otherwise. Once the computers had locked onto a destination and activated the transfer, the system could not be reset. It was a simple matter of the computer's data storage capacity, processor speed, and power drain. Not even the grandson of the Cray supercomputer, an immensely fast and powerful machine used for the time-spanning jump, could have handled two temporal destinations at once.