TimeSplash (18 page)

In Brussels, Jacques Bauchet and several others were being briefed by a CIA agent. They were in a windowless room at the heart of the Berlaymont Building and the American woman was talking in a slow, nasal voice that was at once soporific and grating. Surveillance vids of various degrees of quality and interest flickered on the big display at the end of the room as the woman described the movements and probable activities of the blurry people in the images.

Bauchet had Colbert with him and a couple of his senior officers. There were also four Belgian intelligence officers, two police officers from Interpol, and an Assistant Director from Britain’s MI6 who just happened to be in the neighbourhood, she said, with a couple of hours to kill.

“And this is Carmody Delacroix,” the nasal American said as the image of a portly man in a white suit and a big white hat strolled across the screen. “A.k.a. Stephen Winston, a.k.a. Stephen McGarry, a.k.a. Mansfield Sinclair, a.k.a. Jonathan Douglas…” The litany of aliases droned on and Bauchet looked at his compatch.

“Delacroix works for a banned fundamentalist group called the Measurers of the Temple,” the CIA agent said at last. “He does little jobs for them. We believe he left for Europe two weeks ago but his whereabouts over here are unknown.”

“Why does Delacroix matter?” one of the Belgians asked.

The American blinked at him for a moment. “We know the Measurers have been looking at timesplash technology lately and we know they are cashed up and looking for projects. If they’ve sent someone over here, it is possible he is scouting for bricks to do a job for them.”

“Why over here?” the Belgian asked. “Plenty of targets back home, aren’t there?”

The woman looked at him with calm eyes. “Many Americans feel that Europe represents something of a haven for the ungodly, a place where atheists and Satanists are allowed to congregate and prosper. It is a natural target for those who would like to cleanse the planet. Spiritually, I mean.”

A stillness fell over the room. Bauchet studied the woman, noting the high-buttoned collar and long plain skirt, the little gold crucifix, and the complete absence of other jewellery or makeup. Of course, the CIA had strict “moral criteria” for admission these days. That is, you needed to prove your Christian credentials. It wasn’t quite the FBI, which had become a much-feared arm of the U`SA’s Department of Religious Affairs, but the CIA had steadily changed its role since the Adjustment from serving American political policy abroad to serving American religious policy. In fact, religion and politics had become indistinguishable in post-Adjustment America thanks to the twenty-ninth amendment to their constitution, which repealed the first amendment and instituted Christianity as the official State Religion.

“I imagine there would be lots of support for such views in the American government,” the woman from MI6 said, casually.

“I couldn’t comment on that, ma’am.”

“Well, in the CIA then?”

The American gave a taut smile but said nothing.

One of the Interpol officers spoke up. “So how many fundamentalist religious groups are your people tracking over there who might be interested in blowing up this little nest of vipers we call home?”

“I couldn’t say, sir. Quite a few.”

“Quite a few,” the Interpol man echoed. “Is that ten? Twenty? More?”

“Definitely more, sir. Possibly a couple of hundred all told, but most of them don’t have the resources to pull off something like this.”

“But the Measurers of the Temple have the resources?” Bauchet asked.

“Yes, sir. They most certainly do.”

The briefing lasted another thirty minutes, after which, the CIA agent left the room and the meeting broke up.

“It’s a pity the CIA isn’t a bit more proactive with its intel,” the Interpol man who’d been asking the questions said when only he, Colbert and Bauchet were left, standing together outside the room.

“You didn’t find the briefing helpful?” Bauchet asked.

“Too little, too late, if you ask me. All those people she listed as having possible ties to timesplashing, I don’t suppose one in ten of them is of any real interest.”

Bauchet smiled. “And it would have been nice to be told when one of them gets on a plane for Europe, yes?”

“Right. Instead of hearing about it two weeks later.”

“Your people have access to security camera records for the period when our visitors might have arrived?” Bauchet asked. The Interpol man nodded. “It will be hard to spot one face when we don’t have dates and times.”

“And we don’t know which of a hundred airports he might have arrived at.”

“But it is the software that will do all the hard work, fortunately.”

“Yeah.” The man still looked glum, but he gave Bauchet what he wanted. “I’ll let you know if we find any matches.”

“You will keep looking beyond the point of entry?” Bauchet asked. “It would be nice to know where everybody is right now, would it not?”

“It would,” the Interpol man agreed. They shook hands and he left. Colbert took the opportunity to ride his favourite hobby-horse as they headed for the lifts.

“Damned Americans give me the creeps.”

Bauchet shrugged. “You can’t judge a nation by the people who govern it, thank heavens!”

“They voted them in.”

“The Germans voted for the Nazis too. It was the Depression in the nineteen-thirties that helped Hitler to power, just as it was the Adjustment in the twenty-twenties that got the religious right into power in the US. You’ve got to remember how badly hit the US was when the petrol dried up. They were lucky to hang on to any kind of government at all for a while there.”

Colbert grunted as they stepped into the lift. “They might have been better off.”

It was a popular view. The inquisitions and mass executions that had taken place under the Lord’s True Path Party when it seized power were horrifying to contemplate. Many said they were still going on, but it was more likely that all effective opposition had long since been crushed and the LTP—established by the twenty-eighth amendment as the only legal political party in America—no longer needed to be as ruthless as it had once been.

“The important thing for us now,” Bauchet said, ignoring Colbert’s comment, “is to decide to what extent organisations inside the USA are directly involved in exporting terrorism to our patch.”

“I don’t think I trust that CIA woman,” said Colbert. “She could have been feeding us pure Texas bullshit. Even before the LTP, the CIA was never especially shy about screwing around with foreign governments to protect American interests.”

Bauchet sighed. He liked Colbert, he was a good police officer, but this sniping at the Americans was getting them nowhere. “It is possible she was leading us astray, but I don’t think so.” The lift doors opened and they stepped out into the corridor. “The CIA may not care too much what happens to us atheists and Satanists, but I can’t see any advantage to them in deliberately destabilising European governments. We provide more aid to the USA than anyone else—than all the rest put together! It would jeopardise their own government if they lost that. They have almost no science base now, very little high tech, no software industry. All their great universities were turned into theological seminaries. They need us. Why would they try to harm us?”

They had reached Bauchet’s office and Marie was clearly hovering, waiting for them to finish talking before handing Bauchet a sheaf of messages.

“You assume that they are thinking rationally,” Colbert said. “The LTP are first and foremost religious zealots. Only second are they politicians.”

He went off to his desk, and Bauchet watched him go with a heavy frown. Like most people, Bauchet believed America was a fundamentally democratic nation. If it could just get back on its feet, its people’s natural tolerance and common sense would reassert themselves. Then the LTP would be booted out and become a footnote in history.

Nevertheless, the prospect that other countries were behind the funding of splashteams in Europe could not be ignored, even though it was almost too frightening to contemplate. It elevated what was so far merely criminal activity, beyond terrorism, to outright acts of war. Bauchet could not bring himself to suspect the US, but the Chinese had made a very dangerous speech in the UN Assembly just days ago. They said they believed “foreign agents” were behind the Beijing disaster. And then there was Russia, still just a squabbling gang of warlords from the Urals to the China Sea. Yet some of those warlords had nuclear warheads under their control. Since the Adjustment, the world had become a far more dangerous place.

* * * *

As night fell, Jay found himself in the back of a German police van with several others from his team. He hadn’t done more than say hello to most of them and now he was about to risk his life with them on a full-scale armed raid. He looked at the men and women around him. They were laughing and joking, the usual pre-raid tension making it sound a little strained. He hoped they’d all be coming back together.

Joe, of course, held centre stage, as loud and cheerful as ever. He seemed to have picked a good-looking female officer as the focus of this evening’s charm offensive. She was too old for him, Jay thought, but that didn’t stop her lapping it up. Watching the young Spaniard perform, Jay couldn’t help smiling. There was just something infectious about his good humour, however big a jerk he was.

Jay hadn’t been smiling a few hours earlier when Joe had dragged him into Kappelhoff’s office and told the Chief Inspector how he had solved the case. It looked for a while as if the Chief would kick them both out and keep kicking till they reached Brussels, but he took them seriously—despite Joe—and pretty soon the whole staff was in an uproar, with the Chief firing off orders faster than anyone could even write them down, and everyone glued to their compatches and terminals, chasing down information.

Jay got the job of liaising with the Stadtspolizei as they searched security vid and toll event databases trying to spot the stolen truck. They had a major piece of luck with that when someone turned up a European Space Agency satellite that had been taking pictures of the region as part of a biodiversity survey. The data included two clear shots of the truck, one in the lay-by and the other as it made a turning off the motorway. With an idea of where the truck was heading, the search was narrowed down enormously. Once they had correlated the satellite images with ground-based cameras, they even came up with a shot of the white-haired driver.

“Sniper!” Jay shouted when he saw the picture, making everyone turn and look at him.

“Jesus, we’ve got him!” People grinned as they turned back to their own work. Jay wasn’t smiling though. He stared at the angular features of the man he had admired so much just a couple of years ago. Another world, he now realised. A simple, innocent world. A place where you felt free and safe, no matter what damned fool thing you were doing. A place where Spock was still alive, still fresh-faced and young, grinning fit to split his head in half over some idiotic joke, or just because it felt good.

The image on the viewer swam and his Adam’s apple seemed about to burst in his throat. Sniper was the one who had killed Spock. Sniper was the one who had changed Jay’s life, who had yanked him out of that simple, easy world and dropped him into a darker, more dangerous place. It was long ago and so much had happened since then, yet the sight of that face brought the old pain right back to stab at his heart.

The positive ID from Jay, verified a few minutes later by the computer, earned them a warrant for the raid. The Bundespolizei ran the show, with the Stadtspolizei in support, and Europol offering intel and tactical support. The fact that a vanload of Europol officers was present on the raid was a courtesy the Bundespolizei had grudgingly extended. A grim-faced officer with “BPOL” stencilled on his body armour had made it very clear that they were to keep out of his way and not even to think of drawing their weapons unless expressly ordered to do so by him personally. Jay hoped and prayed he’d get the order.

The truck had been traced to Neukölln-Südring, an old industrial district close to the city centre. It was half-derelict, with close-packed industrial units and decaying warehouses lining the broken roads. Berlin, like all the world’s big cities, had plenty of spots like this left over from the Adjustment, places where industries had collapsed and died and no one had yet bothered to carry away the corpses.

The vans pulled into a particularly dismal area and disgorged their human and robotic cargoes. Jay saw two squads of sweepers being herded into the shadows by their handlers while human spotters and snipers were deployed to the target site to observe and contain whatever might be there. BPOL and SPOL troopers set off at the double to take up their positions. They looked dark and mean, and Jay wished he was with them, not sitting it out in safety beside the command and control truck.

* * * *

“I’m off for a sausage,” Klaatu said, wiping grimy hands on his grimy overalls. The work was going well but the hours were long and Sniper was pushing him hard. He was tired and unhappy. The big German grew more restless and unstable every day, and Klaatu worried more about what Sniper might do than whether the police might find them. That stunt with the RWE.ON truck was madness. They could have got the parts from other, more discreet sources. Stealing the truck, killing the driver, were just Sniper being impatient, needing some excitement. Like a big kid. This was going to be Klaatu’s last timesplash.