The Clown Service (14 page)

I made myself a coffee, checked the tapes in case I’d missed anything (I hadn’t) and then began to run over my plan for the night’s mission. It being an embarrassingly simple plan, this occupied me for all of ten minutes. I was stir crazy by the time the clock slouched towards midnight.

It sounded as if the residents across the road had gone to bed. There was no indication that they had left the building. One of them had shuffled his flatulent way past a microphone earlier. I hoped they were settled in for the night.

I left the house with a small holdall carrying tools and a change of clothes for once I reached Shad Thames. A young man on his first covert mission.

‘Look at you,’ said O’Dale once I’d pulled my balaclava into place. ‘Mole out of Wind in the Bloody Willows.’

‘If I’m as quiet and attentive as him, you’ll have no cause for complaint.’

‘This is a covert mission, not scrumping for apples.’

‘No need to worry about me,’ I insisted. ‘I’m capable of keeping my end up.’

‘You’d better be. With something like this, you’re only as strong as your back-up.
You
buckle and I’m up to my neck in it before you can say Borsht. Show me your gun.’

‘Erm …’ This was awkward. I hadn’t thought to sign one out. ‘I haven’t got one.’

O’Dale rolled his eyes and dug around in the pocket of his duffel coat. He pulled out a heavy ex-service revolver. ‘I came with a spare. Look after it – I brought that back from Egypt after the war.’

I held the thing in my hand. It weighed a ton.

‘Please tell me you’ve had some firearms training,’ he begged.

‘Of course I have.’ A rainy afternoon in a stately home in Kent, a bored instructor working his way through a magazine about cars while myself and two others hurled bullets ineffectually at a set of targets twenty feet away.

‘That’s something.’

We were bobbing along in a small row boat requisitioned – from the River Police. Given the location of the warehouse, if we wanted to avoid the front door, our only alternative was the river.

‘Hopefully,’ I said, ‘we won’t see a soul in there anyway. We can just get in, have a snoop around, plant a few recording devices and get back to our beds.’

‘Hopefully,’ O’Dale agreed. He sounded far from convinced.

We had pliers, bolt-cutters and the cover of darkness on our side as we worked along the short row of warehouses towards our destination.

There was a narrow jetty behind the warehouse and I tied our boat up before climbing out and joining O’Dale at the chained-up doors.

‘Give me the bolt-cutters,’ he whispered, having obviously decided that the manly business of cutting through chains was quite beyond me. I didn’t bother to argue.

I held the end of the chain as he cut, to stop it from falling to the jetty or clashing against the door, then slowly uncoiled it and put it to one side.

O’Dale tried the door. ‘Still locked.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ I said, pulling out a set of lock picks from my jacket pocket.

‘Seems you’re a little more prepared than I gave you credit for,’ he acknowledged.

‘Thank you.’ I didn’t enlighten him that I’d bought the set five years earlier when going through a phase of wanting to be Harry Houdini. I might not have fully mastered the arts of escapology but I was more than a match for the door lock.

I opened it and we stepped inside.

It was completely silent. So, either it was as empty as we had
hoped, or Krishnin’s men were lying in wait for us. Either way, I decided we might as well turn on our torches.

The open space revealed was all but identical in size and shape to the warehouse I had investigated earlier. But this one was in use. Forty or so crates were stacked against one wall, a set of tables laid out in front of them where someone had stood to pack whatever the crates contained. In the centre of the room there was an operating table. It was rough and dirty, the sort of thing you imagined being knocked up in a war zone. Shining the torch onto its surface, I blenched at the sight of two lotion bowls, stained with dried blood, a pair of scalpels, a syringe and a couple of depressors congealing inside them. ‘Not the healthiest approach to surgery.’

‘Who says they were trying to heal?’ asked O’Dale, looking over my shoulder.

He popped open one of the crates. ‘Some sort of chemical,’ he said, lifting a small bottle out. He unscrewed the cap and took a sniff, the scent making him flinch. ‘No idea what. Alcohol base of some kind but beyond that …’ He screwed the cap back on and slipped the bottle into his pocket.

A set of stairs led up from the ground floor and I was just starting to climb them when there was a clicking noise from above me. My face was suddenly hit by the light from someone else’s torch.

‘I’ll hear the end of this if it kills me,’ Toby sighed, Shining’s story having been interrupted.

They had decamped to a coffee house.

While Toby had queued for the drinks, Shining had made a quick phone call, the result of which was responsible for the interruption.

‘Hello, Leslie,’ a man said, reaching over to shake Shining’s hand. ‘Long time no see.’

He was a giant. Cramming his physique into the tight frame of one of the cafe’s metal seats was like forcing a potato into a thimble. When he leaned forward or back, the chair moved with him, tightly clasping his body.

He mopped at a sweating brow with a neatly folded handkerchief, a strangely delicate object within his oversized fist. ‘Sorry,’ he said, tucking the handkerchief away into the pocket of his coat, ‘I came in a rush as you asked, and I’m not as fit as I once was.’

‘It’s appreciated,’ said Shining, who gestured to Toby. ‘This is my colleague, Charles Berry; he’s working with me on this.’

‘Good to meet you,’ the man said, extending his huge hand towards Toby. ‘Derek Lime, formerly known as the Big Dipper on the professional circuit. I’ve helped Leslie out a few times.’

‘You can say what you like to Derek,’ said Shining. ‘His background check’s as clean as a whistle.’

‘Did a lot of information drops during the seventies,’ said Derek, ‘while touring on the wrestling circuit. I may not blend into the background, but sometimes that’s to a man’s advantage. Who’d think I was a spy, eh?’

Toby smiled but said nothing.

‘Of course, I haven’t worked as a wrestler for thirty years now. I had a rather dramatic career change back in the early nineties.’

‘Security?’ Toby asked.

Derek looked somewhat pained. ‘That’s the thing with being a big lad, see. People can’t imagine you doing anything that doesn’t involve throwing your weight around.’

Toby winced. ‘Sorry.’

‘No problem, everyone does it. Actually I work on the Underground, you know – maintenance and stuff. My main passion though is physics.’

‘Derek’s an inventor!’ said August with a big grin.

‘Aye, I mess about with electronics and that, you know – high-end stuff.’

‘Indeed?’ Toby was still trying to imagine this ageing Hercules working his way through Underground tunnels.

‘Yeah.’ Derek made to stand up, forcing the chair off his hips like a man removing a pair of shorts. ‘But I need to get a bit of
a wiggle on if you want to be finished by the start of my shift. Time machine’s in the car. I’ll see you out there, shall I?’

‘Time machine?’ asked Toby once the man had left.

‘You’re the one that said anything goes for Section 37,’ Shining replied.

‘I may have spoken too soon.’

‘Anyway, it’s not really a time machine, not in the sense you’re thinking, so you don’t have to worry.’

‘What is it then?’

Shining held up his hand so that he could concentrate on counting out his change to pay for the coffees. ‘You’ll see soon enough,’ he said, putting the money on the table. ‘Derek explains it much better than I ever could.’

Outside, Derek stood at the rear of a large van, devouring an apple.

‘Can I park outside?’ he asked. ‘It’s a pain lugging the equipment any distance.’

‘We’ll manage,’ said August before pointing out where Derek should drive.

‘We’ll walk round,’ he said. ‘See you there in a minute.’

‘Any excuse to avoid helping with the gear.’

‘So, “Leslie”,’ said Toby, ‘how did you first meet the heavyweight physicist?’

‘Well, “Charles”, it was during an operation in Berlin. He got me out of a tight scrape with a weaponised pack of Tarot cards.’

‘Of course he did. And now he builds time machines for you.’

‘Not for me – I’m just the one that convinces him not to patent. As he’ll no doubt tell you, his equipment has very unfortunate side effects, and while I trust him to use it with sufficient caution not to tear the universe in half, I don’t extend that same
confidence to anyone else. So, I pay him an annual fee out of expenses that keeps Section 37 as his sole business partner in temporal matters.’

‘We’re patrons of the sciences as well, are we?’

‘We are when it comes to avoiding the destruction of reality, yes.’

They walked around the corner to find Derek pacing up and down behind the van.

‘Can’t find the address,’ he said. ‘I was just about to ask in the shop.’

‘Don’t do that,’ said Shining, ‘we’re being far too visible as it is. Give me your keys.’

‘Eh?’

‘The keys to the van. I’ll park.’

‘I don’t know about that, Leslie. I mean, I’m not covered with the insurance …’

‘Oh, come on, I’m only going to park it. What’s the worst that can happen?’

Derek sighed and handed the keys over. Shining took them, grinning from ear to ear, and climbed into the driver’s seat. With a rev of the engine, he performed a rather aggressive three-point turn until the van was pointing towards the gap between the shop and Cinnamon Wharf.

‘What did you say about your insurance again?’ Shining asked before hitting the accelerator and, as far as Derek could tell, aiming the van right at the wall.

The big man gave a cry of panic and waved his hands in the air as the van suddenly vanished, the air rippling around it then resolving itself into the old warehouse. Shining had driven the van through the open double doors.

‘You bastard!’ said Derek.

‘Come on,’ said Toby, laughing. He guided the big man into the warehouse before anyone spotted them.

‘You’ll be the death of me,’ Derek moaned as Shining climbed out of the van. ‘One of these days I’ll just keel over – a heart can only stand so much.’

‘I make your life interesting,’ said Shining. ‘Of course, if you were Chinese you would take that as a curse. Or not, depending on whether you choose to believe they ever said it.’

‘
Interesting
I can live with. It’s the bloody terrifying that cripples me.’

‘You and me both,’ said Toby.

Shining closed the large double doors leading to the street. ‘I hope we haven’t drawn too much attention to ourselves. It’s all very well three men and a van moving around the area but if they keep popping in and out of thin air, eyebrows are likely to be raised.’

Derek opened the back of his van and began to pull large, plastic crates out. ‘If we can get this set up on the far side of the room, we should be OK. It’s a pretty narrow field, but I can cover the majority of the downstairs.’

‘Cover it with what?’ Toby asked. ‘Leslie said you’d explain.’

‘Leaving it to the experts, eh? OK, well, are you familiar with the Stone Tape theory?’

‘Probably best to assume I’m not familiar with anything beyond basic school physics.’

Derek nodded and began unpacking his equipment. ‘Drag that desk over, would you? I need somewhere to set all this up.’

Toby did as he was told.

‘The Stone Tape theory,’ Derek continued, ‘maintains that
an environment soaks up things that happen in it. Strong emotions create psionic energy that is then stored in the matter surrounding it. That psionic energy can then be accessed, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, by a person who visits that environment. It’s a popular explanation for ghosts. What we’re seeing is not the spirit of someone who has passed over; it is merely a psychic recording, an after image. Residual Haunting as opposed to Intelligent Haunting.’

‘Right. And that works does it?’

‘There have been arguments on both sides for years. Some say it provides a believable scientific explanation for otherwise unexplained phenomena; others claim it’s pseudoscience, dressing the impossible up in apparently convincing yet strictly meaningless terms. Various experiments have been carried out trying to test it, most concentrating on brainwaves and dopamine levels, trying to isolate what it is about certain people’s biological make-up that might make them receptive to the psionic information around them.’

‘Any of those experiments fruitful?’

‘Not for most people. Because the trick lies not only in optimising the receptiveness of the witness but also strengthening the broadcast.’

‘And that’s what
you
do?’

‘It’s part of it. This equipment comes at both sides simultaneously. It creates a sonic wavelength that affects and focuses the brainwaves of those in the room and …’ He looked up from the mess of wiring he cradled in his fists. ‘This part is right tricky to explain in terms of school physics.’

‘Small words.’

‘Are you familiar with Close Timelike Curves?’

‘No.’

‘How about Postselection? The observance of probability?’

Toby sighed. ‘Does the thing make time go backwards?’

‘It allows us to observe history, yes.’

‘Let’s leave it at that. Leslie told me it was dangerous.’

‘If you push at physics it tends to push back. The longer we leave it active, the further back we view, the greater the risk.’

‘And the risk is?’

‘Twofold. We’re playing with probability in a manner I’ve specifically designed to limit paradox issues, the emphasis is on observing rather than interacting. That said, I’m creating a window of temporal fluctuation – and that is always open to interference. If we stray too close to it, we could end up influencing it. That would be bad. The other problem is more complex.’