TimeBomb: The TimeBomb Trilogy: Book 1 (12 page)

‘You think it’s the person Steve told us about?’ asked Kaz. ‘What was her name?’

‘Quil,’ replied Jana. ‘I think maybe you met our enemy, Dora. A time traveller who was controlling events in Kaz’s time and mine. And you say she knew your name?’

Dora nodded. ‘She did.’

‘That’s suggestive. I think …’ began Jana, but Dora was tired of listening to what Jana thought.

‘It seems to me that we are all victims of circumstance,’ said Dora. ‘Neither Jana nor I chose to cross the time bridge, and poor Kaz was unfortunate enough to witness our arrival and was taken prisoner as a consequence.’

Dora registered Jana’s surprise at her understanding. Good. She was determined to prove to this boyish future-woman that she was not as stupid as she seemed to think. She went on.

‘We have all three been unable to make decisions for ourselves until this moment. Now we find ourselves free. Nobody is hunting or chasing us, locking us up, sticking us with needles or telling us what to do. I think it is time for we three to decide what we
want
to do.’

‘She’s not wrong,’ said Kaz. He gave her a warm smile, which Dora gladly returned. She liked this man. He was kind and patient. ‘But there are too many questions,’ added Kaz. ‘Until we know more, how can we be sure that anything we do will not make things worse?’

‘I agree with Dora,’ said Jana, much to Dora’s astonishment. She tried not to look too triumphant. ‘We’ve all just been reacting. We have to take control of this situation.’

‘OK,’ conceded Kaz. ‘How?’

What Jana did next took Dora entirely by surprise. ‘Dora,’ she said, ‘what do you think we should do?’

So astonished was she by Jana soliciting her opinion that it took Dora a moment to gather her thoughts and formulate a response.

‘I believe that we should join our hands again,’ she said. ‘I will think of my home. We can cross the bridge back to my village and then we can ask Lord Sweetclover about the woman in the undercroft.’

Jana turned to the boy. ‘Kaz?’

He nodded. ‘It seems a good place to start.’

Jana clapped her hands together and smiled, although Dora thought the expression did not sit comfortably upon her normally stern countenance. ‘We have a plan.’

‘I think we do. But listen,’ said Kaz seriously, making eye contact with both of them in turn. ‘We have to trust each other, OK? We are a team. We look out for each other. Yes?’

‘I agree,’ said Dora, smiling.

‘Me too,’ said Jana. ‘But if you suggest a group hug I’ll puke.’

Before Dora could enquire what a ‘group hug’ was, she noticed something that made her jump to her feet and point into the darkness.

‘I told you,’ she said. ‘I told you I had been here before. I recognise this place.’

The murk had lightened. There was soft, dim light in the cavern now. Dora had been so focused on their conversation that she had not noticed. The far end of the cavern was swimming gloomily into view and there, exactly as she remembered, was a wall of strange cocoons.

‘Stasis pods,’ said Jana, her voice full of wonder. Dora did not think she would ever tire of seeing Jana surprised.

‘What?’ asked Kaz.

‘Hibernation units, used for long-term deep space travel,’ Jana explained.

‘That means we’re in your time, or close,’ observed Kaz.

The light, which seemed to be emanating from the very rock itself, was spreading, the edges of the cavern sketched out of shadow by its gradual progress. As the light moved, more serried ranks of the glass cocoons were revealed set into the far walls of the cavern. There were thousands of them, row upon row, stacked as high and as far to the right and left as she could see, more swimming into view with each second.

There was a bright flash of crimson in the far recesses of the cavern to their left. Dora turned to see a tiny figure in the distance, barely visible in the lengthening twilight.

‘That’s me!’ she said. ‘I remember this!’ She waved and shouted. ‘Hello, me!’

The figure waved back and then vanished in another flash of violent red fire.

Dora turned to Jana and folded her arms defiantly. ‘See, I told you I had been here before. And you didn’t believe me.’

Jana barely had chance to apologise – a muted ‘Sorry’ – before Kaz interrupted.

‘They’re moving,’ he said, pointing to the cocoons. Dora squinted and sure enough there was an impression of movement behind the glass.

‘I don’t know about you,’ continued the boy, ‘but I really, really don’t want to be here when they wake up.’

‘Me either,’ agreed Jana.

Dora’s heart sank as she realised it was time to leave. She should have been excited about going home, but she found she was more afraid of the journey itself. After a second’s consideration she decided she was even more afraid of the cocoons and their strange inhabitants than she was of another journey across the magic time bridge.

She held out her hands. ‘I shall think of my home.’

By the time the cocoons opened – all at once, with a single massive crack and hiss of released air – the three travellers were long gone.

‘You are not a very good interrogator.’ The woman leaned back in her chair, a half-smile dancing on her lips.

The interrogator, sitting across the table from her, said nothing. The woman studied him. About forty-five, she thought. Sagging chin, slight bulge at the waist, thinning hair. He wore a wedding ring, so somebody found him attractive. Or did once, anyway. His skin was pallid and grey, his teeth off-brown. He wore no uniform, preferring an anonymous grey suit, white shirt, blue tie combo that completed the picture of a man who was in every sense middling; middle-aged, middle-rank, middle-England. A functionary, a bureaucrat.

His small grey eyes, though, told a different story. They lacked all pity. He looked at her as if she were a specimen beneath a microscope. The woman harboured no illusions. The interrogator’s appearance was a façade, part of his act.

‘I think,’ she said, pursing her lips and considering him with exaggerated care, ‘that you were the kind of boy who liked pulling the wings off flies. Burnt ants with a magnifying glass. Maybe graduated to cats and dogs. Lots of pets go missing in your neighbourhood when you were young, did they?’

The interrogator stifled a yawn.

‘Oh,’ said the woman. ‘Am I being predictable?’

The interrogator inclined his head slightly as if to say ‘sort of’.

‘Sorry. I’ll try harder.’

The interrogator widened his eyes as if to say ‘go on, then, surprise me’.

‘Really? Is this the act? Sit there and let me talk? A bit of body language – that’s your big play?’

The interrogator gave an almost imperceptible shrug.

The woman shook her head. ‘I think I’d almost prefer the mind probe.’

The interrogator smiled and shook his head.

The woman cursed inwardly. He knew about her defences. Someone had betrayed her. She’d known that already, of course. She wouldn’t be stuck in this anonymous room, buried deep within a top-secret high-security building in an out-of-the-way part of an insignificant country, if she hadn’t been betrayed.

She’d known there was a chance of capture. It was an outside chance, certainly; unlikely without inside help. But the possibility had always been there. So she had taken steps. There was a device implanted deep within her brain. Tiny, barely detectable even with the strongest scans. Booby-trapped, impossible to remove. If anybody subjected her to a mind probe it would heat instantly, boiling her brain inside her skull. Keeping her secrets safe.

Whoever had betrayed her had known about it, tipped them off. That narrowed the list of possible suspects.

Not that that did her any good. Yet. She’d have to escape and rejoin her forces before she could ferret out the traitor. And right now she had no idea how she was going to do that. They would mount a rescue attempt, she was sure of that. All she could do was play for time. Which brought everything to a very simple point – she had to endure interrogation for as long as possible.

Looking into the cruel eyes of the man sitting across from her, she didn’t fancy her chances.

‘You have been betrayed,’ he said. His voice was thin and high. Punctilious.

‘No, really?’

‘I wonder, do you know who betrayed you?’

‘I could hazard a guess.’

‘I don’t think you could.’

The woman shrugged. ‘It’s academic anyway.’

‘Far from it. But we can shelve that for now. I have been given a list of questions. I am not to leave this room until I have answers to each and every one of them.’

‘Then you’ll die here.’

He actually seemed amused by her defiance. ‘Oh, very good,’ he said, smiling.

‘You have two options,’ said the woman briskly, leaning forward, folding her hands before her on the table. ‘You can torture me until I break.’

‘Not my preferred choice, but it’s on the table.’

‘I’m not an idiot. I know I would break. Everyone does, eventually.’

The man nodded once. ‘In my experience.’

‘So then it becomes a race. Can you break me before my forces track me down, storm this building, and slaughter every last one of you?’

‘Nobody is coming to rescue you.’

His calm certainty was chilling, but she refused to let her discomfiture show.

‘Your other option is leverage,’ she said.

‘A subtler approach. More reliable, I find.’

‘Which raises the question – what leverage do you think you can you bring to bear on me?’

The interrogator held his hands out wide as if to say ‘what do you think?’

‘I have no children,’ said the woman. ‘No husband or lover. No family at all. Your armies are on the run, so you can’t threaten to strike at my home. It’s too well defended. You don’t have a thing on me.’

The interrogator smiled. She really wished he’d stop doing that. ‘You’d be surprised how left-field a person’s weakness can be. I once broke a man by threatening to have his favourite singer killed. He’d never met her, didn’t know her at all. She was just a face on a screen. But he worshipped her. His apartment was practically a shrine to her. Spilled his guts the second I slapped her photo on the table.’

‘I never was a big music fan.’

‘No, you didn’t strike me as the type.’

‘So?’

‘So you are sure we can have nothing,’ said the interrogator. ‘No leverage at all. You’ve dedicated yourself so completely to the cause that there is nothing and no one you give a damn about. No one and nothing for us to threaten.’

The woman sat back in the chair and folded her arms, triumphant.

‘If that were true, it would be a pyrrhic victory, don’t you think?’ he said. ‘What would you do if you won? What would be left for you? Who would you go home to when you’ve burnt down the capitol and stuck the president’s head on a spike? Who would you celebrate with? Your generals? Oh, they follow your orders, but I don’t think they like you very much.’

‘I’m not important,’ said the woman firmly. ‘Never have been.’

‘It’s all about the cause?’

‘It’s all about the cause.’

The interrogator smiled and shook his head. ‘You are good. The best, I think, that has ever sat across the table from me. Your control is admirable. Uncanny. Even among the Godless, you are uniquely adept.’

The woman winced inwardly at his use of
that
word, but she knew it had been said for effect and did not reward him with a reaction.

‘If I did not have the evidence that you were lying,’ he continued, ‘I would swear that you were telling the truth.’

‘There is no evidence,’ she replied. ‘I’m not lying.’

The interrogator nodded slowly. ‘So how do you explain this?’

He clicked his fingers and a holo-screen flickered into life above the table between them. It took a moment for her to focus on the picture that floated before her, and when she had worked out what she was looking at her only response was confusion.

‘What’s that?’ she asked, looking through the image to the interrogator who sat beyond it.

The interrogator’s eyes narrowed. He seemed genuinely perplexed.

‘You know exactly what it is,’ he said. But he was good at his job, and he had read her reaction perfectly. He could see her confusion was genuine.

She refocused on the picture. It seemed to show her sitting at a café table, holding hands with a man she had never seen before.

‘Sorry,’ she said, shrugging. ‘Not a clue. Wherever, whenever this was taken, I wasn’t there. That’s not me.’

‘I suppose you weren’t here either?’

The picture changed. Now it showed her and the mystery man walking by a river, again hand in hand. She could see the cathedral Notre Dame in the background. Paris.

‘Or here?’

A picture of her kissing the man in the lobby of a hotel.

‘Or here?’

A picture of a far more intimate nature, taken in a hotel room.

The woman could make no sense of what she was seeing. The interrogator clearly thought these pictures were genuine. He thought he’d found out her big secret, a lover. But she knew they were fake. She had no lover. The man in the photos was a stranger. He wasn’t even her type. Did she even still have a type? It had been so long since she’d allowed herself any kind of personal connection, she was no longer sure.

Which raised the question – where had these pictures come from?

A sudden, shocking possibility occurred to her. Her mind raced as she calculated the odds, explored the possible ramifications. After a few seconds she laughed.

The interrogator did not like that at all.

‘What is so amusing?’ he snapped.

‘You think that’s me.’

‘We took DNA from the bedsheets. Conclusive.’

‘Unless she’s another Godless.’ She emphasised the word, allowing a momentary flash of disdain to show.

The interrogator shook his head. ‘No. The mark-up was yours. It’s you.’

‘Then I win,’ she said.

‘Excuse me?’

‘I win,’ she said again.

‘I do not understand.’

‘No, of course you don’t. But OK, let’s say I believe you. Let’s say you did take these photos, and the tests were right. It was me with this man doing … that stuff.’