Time Snatchers (5 page)

Abbie’s facing away from me, but as soon as I step out onto the landing, her left arm rises and two fingers waggle in my direction. Her other hand pats the floor beside her.

“Hi, Cale,” she says.

“How’d you know it was me?”

“Your knee clicked.”

“Traitor,” I say to my knee and sprawl down beside her.

“How was Beijing?” she asks.

“Interesting. I didn’t have much time to explore, but there’s a great park with huge stone lions and a footbridge over a lily pond. People were hanging out and doing Tai Chi and stuff.”

I leave out the part about my rooftop encounter because I can use a mental break from all things Frank right now.

“How was the Tower of London?” I ask.

“Hot and stuffy,” she says. “We should get danger pay when we travel to time/places before the invention of air-conditioning.”

I laugh and feel some of the tension of the day’s events melt away.

“Well, I’m ready for France when you are,” I say, referring to our next mission.

“Yes, I can see that you are,” she says, eyeing me up and down. “Nice boots.”

“Thanks.”

“Let’s play a game before we go,” she says, looking up at the sky.

I follow Abbie’s glance. There aren’t enough clouds to play our favorite game: Name That Presidential Cloud.

“Why don’t we play Heels of Fortune?” she says.

A good second choice.

“Okay. Do you want to go first?” I say.

“No, you go,” she says. “I went first last time.”

We lie quietly, neither of us saying a word. I tune my ears to the sounds around me. There’s no shortage of noises—car horns, the drone of an airplane, the wind whistling through the metal stairs. I ignore all of these and concentrate on the sounds coming from just beyond the entrance to the alley. I can’t see the sidewalk from where I’m sitting, but I’ll be able to hear anyone approaching.

I don’t have to wait long before I hear a set of footsteps.

The smacking of heels on sidewalk is fairly pronounced, and I detect a slight drag on the left foot. But this game isn’t about guessing
correctly. In fact, it’s the opposite—the more outrageous you are with your predictions of who the person is and what they do for a living, the better.

“Two hundred and fifty-five pounds, male,” I begin, “with a wad of chewing tobacco that he keeps permanently tucked inside his right cheek, as a reminder of his failed dream to play second base for the Yankees. He’s wearing a crisp white shirt, plaid pants and tortoiseshell glasses and is carrying a brown fake leather briefcase with samples of a new line of scented nose warmers. Your turn.”

“His shirt
was
white,” she begins, “until about an hour ago when the ketchup from his Beijingburger got away from him a little, so now there’s a red stain the shape of Florida on his right sleeve just below the elbow. Plus, although you’ll probably never get to see it, on his lower back there’s a tattoo of a ski-jump-shaped nose inside a heart and below it the words ‘Mom Nose Best’ … you go now.”

The sound of heels striking sidewalk stops suddenly, two seconds of silence follows and then I hear a gargantuan sneeze.

Excellent. When you’re playing Heels of Fortune, any kind of bodily eruption is like found treasure in the hands of a skilled player.

“The glasses, plaid pants and briefcase are all part of an elaborate disguise,” I say. “In fact he’s no nose warmer salesman. His name is Victor Sanayovitch, and his real job is duster for FIST—Fingerprinting and Investigative Society of Toledo. He is currently on a mission of utmost secrecy … and his sneeze is no ordinary sneeze—something very special flies out of his nose. Your turn, Abbie.”

She laughs. The footsteps are at their peak now. In a few seconds, Victor will be out of earshot.

“When Victor sneezes,” she says, “what he’s really doing is spraying fingerprint dust on the pretzel handed to him by Lorenzo, proprietor of the Piping Hot Pretzel vending cart stationed at this very
moment directly in front of Headquarters. The pretzel is still warm when Victor runs the prints through his FIST mobile database and finds a match. Lorenzo is no innocent pretzel seller. When he was in kindergarten, little Lorenzo regularly traded his macaroni and cheese for Claudio Fazio’s meatball sandwich. Then he’d throw away the bread and use the meatballs as poker chips in his regular lunchtime game behind the monkey bars.”

I snort my approval.

“C’mon, let’s see what he really looks like.” Abbie takes off down the fire escape.

“Or she,” I say, clambering down the steps after her.

We race out of the alleyway and glance right. Immediately, I see two people who are the correct distance away to be our guy—one is a large woman dressed in a black spandex workout suit, and the other a short bald man carrying a poodle under one arm.

“Who do you think?” says Abbie.

“Hmmm. It must be her,” I say. “She looks like she can throw a pretzel a great distance.”

“I think it’s him,” she says.

As we watch, the man stops in his tracks and lets go with a monstrous sneeze. It’s too much. Abbie and I run back to the fire escape and collapse on the bottom step, roaring with laughter.

We recover at about the same time, but then I look at her as if I’m about to sneeze and this sends us both into another laughing frenzy. Finally we stop for good.

“That was fun. Ready for Operation Shutterbox?” she says.

Abbie likes to code-name all of our missions. She says it makes our job more glamorous.

“Ready,” I say.

Our mission is to snatch the first photograph ever taken. We’ll be
leaping to 1826 and landing just outside the village of Saint-Loup-de-Varennes in France. The snatch will take place at the home of the inventor of photography, Nicéphore Niépce. Nicéphore’s wife and son are supposed to be away visiting relatives. The only possible complication is Nicéphore’s brother Claude, who may be at the home at the time of the snatch. The file says that he’s a mad-scientist type, with the emphasis on mad.

I give a contented sigh. Apart from the tingle of excitement I always feel before a mission, there’s also the thrill of going to a time in history where no one else from the twenty-first century has ever been before. To say nothing of the pleasure of getting away from Frank and spending some time with Abbie.

From the mission data, it looks like a straightforward snatch. Who knows? Maybe we’ll even have time for some of that wonderful crusty French bread.

“I’ve got the replica,” Abbie says. “Want to see it?”

“Sure.”

She slips one hand under her long dress and pulls out a pewter plate about five inches wide by eight inches high.

The black-and-white image shows a barn, a pigeon house and a bit of the horizon.

“Kind of boring looking,” I say. Still, I can understand how owning the first photograph ever taken in the history of the world would be a thrill for one of Uncle’s customers. After all, there’s only one first photograph, and whoever ordered it probably couldn’t care less what it was a photo of or even if Niépce got his thumb in the shot.

“Have you been practicing your French?” Abbie asks, twisting her hair into a bun.

She’s big on mission preparation, which in her mind includes learning at least some of the local language spoken wherever we go.

“La plume de ma tante est sur la table,”
I say straight-faced, repeating a sentence I remember hearing from a Speak French Like a Parisian holo.

She laughs. “Do you know what you just said?”

“Yes. I said that you are my sister and that we are the children of Nicéphore Niépce’s brother Bernard’s wife’s youngest sister, and we have come for a short visit,” I say, repeating the cover story for Operation Shutterbox.

“Very funny, mister. Actually, you said that your aunt’s pen is on the table.”

“Did I really?” I say, eyes wide in mock surprise.

In truth, I don’t know much French, but with my translator implant, it doesn’t matter. As soon as someone speaks to me in a different language, not only will I understand what they are saying, but also the next words that come out of my mouth will automatically be in that language.

“Yes, really,” she says, adjusting her bonnet.
“On y va.”

“Eva? Who’s she?”

“It means ‘let’s go’ in French.”

“Oh.”

“On three,” she says.
“Un, deux, trois!”

“Quatre!”
I add, just to show off. But it’s too late. Abbie’s already gone. I touch my wrist and follow her back in time.

W
hen I open my eyes, my first thought is that they sure know how to make clouds in this century. They’re big and fluffy, with lots of character.

“Time to get up, Mr. Daydreamer,” says Abbie, standing over me.

I’m leaning back, elbows propped on a bed of soft grass. It’s so comfortable. The air smells sweet, and I make a point of taking several lungfuls.

“Uh. I can’t just yet,” I say. “Still time frozen. Hey, I think I see a new president. Well, maybe not a
new
one. I mean one I’ve never noticed before …”

“Really? Who?”

“John Quincy Adams. Look, there are his lamb-chop sideburns and his nose and bald head. It’s him. I can see him so clearly.”

“I’m happy for you,” she says, deadpan. “C’mon.”

I stand up and brush myself off. The field we’ve landed in borders a dirt road leading to a cluster of houses. That must be the village of Saint-Loup-de-Varennes. I understand now why our landing spot is away from the action. It would be hard to find an inconspicuous place to land in such a small village.

As we walk toward the snatch zone, the back of my hand brushes against Abbie’s and a warm shiver passes through me. I sneak a glance
at her, but she’s looking straight ahead and has got on her Mona Lisa smile. If she has noticed that we touched, she’s not letting on.

We continue walking, kicking up clouds of dust as we go. I can see the houses clearly now: sturdy-looking stone structures with thick wooden shutters painted in bright greens and reds. Flowerpots with yellow flowers sit on some of the window ledges. I make a mental note to stay away from them in case they turn out to be daffodils.

We stop at the last house on the left. The place is large: two stories with a tower at the rear. My eyes linger for a moment on the second story. That’s where the inventor Nicéphore Niépce has his laboratory, and that’s where the snatch object should be right now.

I knock on the door.

There’s a scraping sound, and the door swings open. Standing opposite us is a handsome man in a formal white shirt with a high collar. I judge him to be about fifty years old, which is just about the right age to be the inventor. Except that he can’t be because the holo of Nicéphore in the file shows a bald man and this guy has wild black hair sticking out in every direction. He must be Nicéphore’s brother Claude.

I’m about to mindspeak this to Abbie when she says, “Good day, sir. Our mother—”

“Hurry, the three of you get inside!” Claude orders.

I only count two of us, but who knows, maybe he’s counting himself.

The inside doesn’t disappoint. There’s a large sitting room with several comfortable-looking divans and armchairs arranged around a fireplace. Hanging above the fireplace is an oil painting of a man who bears more than a passing resemblance to Claude. I can also see part of the staircase that leads to the second floor.

“They are coming!” Claude bellows.

“Who is coming?” Abbie asks.

“Them,” he answers, staring at the door as if someone is about to come barging through. “The tricolored beings.”

The
tricolored beings
?

“Orange, blue and red,” Claude continues. “But they cannot fool me. I have something that can turn them all white,” he says in a hushed voice. With that, he takes one final look at the sky, slams the door and bars it with a stout wooden staff.

“Under the divan! And you, there,” he shouts at an empty patch of air, “get down before they see you!”

Then he jumps up onto one of the armchairs and yells, “Let them come! I will thrash the cake eaters!”

“Cale, we need to take control of this situation,” Abbie says.

She’s right. Even though we still have plenty of time to complete the snatch—twenty-four minutes by my fingernail—we might never get it done if we keep letting Claude call all the shots.

“Agreed. Remember Montevideo, 1963?” I say.

“Perfect,” agrees Abbie. “You choose.”

“Why don’t you be the tree this time?” I say.

“Done,” she answers.

Abbie crawls out from under the divan and stands up straight. She brings her palms together in a prayer position, raises her left foot and places it in the crook of her right knee so that she’s only standing on one leg. She begins in a low voice,

Wow. The Gothic poetry is a totally unexpected and nice touch. I’m pretty sure she picked it up from Uncle. When he was going through his Dark Lord phase, he used to spew out that kind of stuff all the time.