TimeSplash (29 page)

For the second time since he’d met her, she looked young and frightened. Her armour of bravado had fallen completely away and she was vulnerable and weak. No, that wasn’t quite true. That first day, in Ommen, he’d seen it as she struggled to free herself from the cage. Nameless emotions surged in Jay’s chest. He didn’t know what to do or how to help her. He thought he might cry himself. “I love you,” he said, offering to suffer with her. Wanting to suffer for her if he could.

She frowned at him, perplexed, as if he had spoken in a language she didn’t understand. He couldn’t stand it that the counter was between them. He moved quickly to her and stood there, close but not touching, not daring to touch. For a moment she went on looking at him in pain and consternation, then she grabbed for him and buried her face in his shoulder, crying, wailing as though all the hurt in all her life had found her right there and then. He hung on to her while the passion wracked her body, while she howled into his shoulder, wetting him, scaring him, sagging against him. He bore the onslaught of a suffering that blasted through him, shredding his own emotions, until, at last, the crying subsided, the howling faded to sobbing and then to exhausted, ragged breathing.

He led her to the sofa and they sat down. She kept her head in his chest and climbed onto him, curling against him like a wounded animal.

It was hours later, in the middle of the night, that she said, “I know the target.”

“Wha…” He was half asleep, not sure what he’d heard.

She looked up at him, eyes red and cheeks blotched, and smiled. “I know the splash target. Exactly where, exactly who, and exactly when.”

Everyone was tired. T-800 and Edna went out and brought back some folding beds and sleeping bags so that Klaatu’s workers could take short naps when they needed to. People grumbled about the arrangements but, for the money they had been promised, they were willing to rough it. Klaatu worked miracles. By the time the trucks had reached the new warehouse and the equipment was unloaded, he had arrived with a vanload of new recruits. He took Sniper aside and spoke to him in a hushed voice.

“I don’t know all these people,” he said. “Some of them are recommended by people I know. One or two of them found me because they heard I was recruiting.”

“You’re saying you don’t trust them.”

“I used the Bedford to bring them here.” It was a van they had used often to move equipment, with covered windows so nosy people could not stare into the back. Equally, anyone inside was unable to see out. “I took the E.M. suppressor so no one could use their compatches and so any bugs would be neutralised. I’ve got it running now in the warehouse. We shouldn’t let any of them go outside. Just in case.”

Sniper nodded and put a hand on his teknik’s shoulder. “Trust me. No one leaves here before the lob except in a body bag.”

A young man came up to them. They fell silent and turned to look at him. He glanced nervously at Sniper, then addressed Klaatu. “We need you to come and help with the displacement field coil alignment. None of us really knows how to do it.”

Klaatu gave Sniper a last glance and went off with the young man. “You shouldn’t be doing that yet, not till the cage assembly’s complete…”

Sniper watched them go. He looked around the warehouse. The rig was already taking shape. The F2s were being cabled to each other, to the big switches and to the capacitor arrays. People crawled over them and between them. The cage was being carried across the floor by six people—

including the other two bricks—to where it would be bolted onto the platform above the field coils. The control console was still a pile of computer junk, reels of optic cable, and a comms rack, but Sniper wasn’t worried. Progress looked good and he could see how close they were to completion.

* * * *

“No, we can’t tell them.”

Jay and Sandra were in a café near his flat, empty breakfast plates between them. The place was stuffed with early-morning commuters, and loud with clattering dishes and people talking over the noise of the cappuccino machines. Canary Wharf tube station was just out of sight along the busy road. Sandra was growing annoyed.

“You don’t know what I went through to get that information.”

“Maybe not, but it doesn’t make any difference. If we give them the spacetime coordinates for the splash, what do you think they’ll do with them?”

“Go back and stop Sniper. You said yourself, they’ve got an SAS team on standby for this very thing. Why on Earth should we not tell them?”

Jay could hardly believe she was being so thick. “You just said it. If we tell them, they’ll send a squad of trained killers storming through central London armed to the teeth and looking like the Devil himself to the people back then. They might as well just go back and shoot Lenin themselves and have done with it. In fact, shooting Lenin in the crossfire as they try to take out Sniper is the most likely scenario to my mind. And do you know who else was around in London in 1902?” Sandra made a face, but Jay went on. “Well, I do. I spent ten minutes on the net this morning and came up with a few names—names of people who might just be in Bloomsbury that day, might even be visiting the British Museum or the Round Reading Room for all we know. I’m talking about people like Winston Churchill, Alexander Fleming, Lord Kitchener, Asquith, Marie Stopes, E. M. Forster, Bertrand Russell… Shoot any one of them and you’d have a major splash on your hands!”

Sandra frowned at him. “I don’t even know who half those people are.”

Jay sat back with a sigh. “Well, neither did I until this morning, but I tell you, back in 1902

London was packed to the rafters with brilliant people just starting on world-changing careers. If we send a bunch of soldiers back there and they start a shoot-out, who knows how bad the splash could be?”

“Not as bad as shooting Lenin, I bet.”

“I suppose. But how bad is acceptable? If they shoot Lenin—before he founds the Bolshevik Party and leads the Communist Revolution, before he elevates Stalin to a position of power—it changes the lives of hundreds of millions of people in Russia alone. Hell, it probably changes everybody’s life. What if the revolution had never happened? What if it had but they didn’t have the mass exiles and executions? What if there never was a Cold War?”

“You really have been doing your research, haven’t you?” Sandra looked as if she was fed up with being lectured to.

Jay kept on, anyway. “A splash like that could wipe out all of central London. But what if it had been Chamberlain who was walking along by the Round Reading Room that day?”

“Who?”

“He was the Prime Minister when World War Two started. He had a policy of appeasement of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. ‘Peace in our time’? You know?” Sandra just stared at him looking mildly irritated. “If someone else had been Prime Minister, maybe it would have changed the way the war went. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened at all. Not like it did, anyway. The point is, that would be a bloody big splash too. A whopper. Not as big as Lenin, probably, but big enough.

“Even the smaller fry, Marie Stopes, how many lives has she affected over the past hundred and fifty years? How big a splash would that be? Hundreds dead? Thousands alive? Who knows?

And what about…”

“All right! All right!” Sandra held up her hands in surrender. “So doing our own lob isn’t a great idea. I don’t think it’s as dangerous as you say, but I agree, there’s a risk. But so what? If we don’t stop Sniper before he lobs, what else can we do?”

Jay opened his mouth to give his answer, but realised he didn’t have one. “We just have to stop him. That’s all.”

“No. It’s not good enough. What if we can’t? Whatever the risk is, they’d have to send someone back. It’s got to be better to take a chance than the absolute bloody certainty that London is wiped off the map. Christ, Jay, it’s six months since this happened to Beijing and they’re still clearing away the rubble. When Mexico City went down it started a civil war!”

They sat in silence for a moment, Jay staring at the table, Sandra glowering at Jay. With a big sigh, Jay raised his head. “Okay. We give it to them. You’re right.”

Sandra smiled at him. A warm, admiring smile that made his heart skip and confused him utterly.

“What?” he asked. “What’s that for?”

She kept on smiling. “’Cause you’re really, really nice. That’s all. ’Cause you looked after me last night and because you want to look after all of London today.”

He wasn’t absolutely sure she wasn’t joking but he started to smile back all the same. Then her smile was gone in a flash and his with it.

“Don’t look round,” she whispered quickly, staring past him toward the entrance. He twitched, almost unable to stop himself. “Two men just came in. One of them’s the guy we fought off at your place.” She snapped her eyes away and ducked her head toward the table. “They’re looking this way. They must have seen me by now.”

Jay looked around at whatever he could see without turning his head. There were no other exits, except maybe behind the counter, and access to that was near the till, beside the entrance. He glanced at the street through the big plate-glass window. If he could smash that… But the chairs and tables were all bolted to the floor.

Sandra risked a glance up at the two men. “One’s coming toward us. The other stayed by the door.” She reached for her gun.

Jay’s eyes widened in alarm. He shook his head emphatically and she reluctantly put her hand back on the table. Not knowing what else to do, Jay got up and stood in the aisle between the tables, facing the man. The last thing he wanted was for people to start shooting in such a crowded place. The man was about Jay’s height, in his mid-thirties and solidly built. He looked intelligent and serious. His pale eyes flicked across Jay’s body in a quick appraisal. When he was within arm’s reach he stopped and said, “Don’t give me any trouble. I want you and the girl to come with me right now. No fuss.” His voice was low but people around them noticed the confrontation and began to look around uneasily.

Jay stood his ground. “Who are you? Five? Private? Who wants us?”

“Shut the fuck up and start walking. No one said I had to bring you back alive.”

Jay wondered what Sandra was doing. There was no way she’d just sit still and let herself be taken. This could soon turn into a bloodbath. If only he had something to throw through the damned window.

And then the man reached out and grabbed Jay by the lapel and solved his problem. Moving with all the speed he could muster, Jay swung around under the man’s extended arm, pulling him forward, bending low to get the man’s body above him, reaching up to grab the arm and pull it round as he continued to turn. The man toppled forward onto Jay’s back. Jay pushed up under him, putting all his strength into it. The man flipped over Jay’s back as if they’d been practising their tumbling routine all week. Someone screamed just as the man flew across Jay’s table and into the window.

With a bang like a gigantic barrel being hit with a sledge hammer, the window took the impact of the flying man. A collective gasp burst from the people inside the café as the window wobbled on the edge of destruction but did not break. For a frozen moment there was silence. The man on the table, pressed against the trembling window, his face screwed up against the shattering impact that hadn’t happened, opened one eye to take a tentative look.

“Look out! She’s got a gun!” The shout and the shots were simultaneous. Jay saw Sandra at the edge of his vision, firing two rounds into the window. There was screaming and shouting and a general panic. The window exploded into a million fragments and the man on the table rolled through it into the street, glass cascading down onto him.

It seemed to take an age for the storm of glass to smash down onto the pavement around the cringing, bellowing man underneath it all. The instant it did, Jay and Sandra jumped through the empty window almost in unison, skidding on the shattered glass. Jay noticed two men down the street, obviously friends of the guy on the pavement, reaching for their guns and heading toward them.

“Bandits at nine o’clock!” he shouted to Sandra but she had already grabbed his arm and was pulling him the other way. Shots rang out behind them, coming from inside the café. The second gunman was fighting his way through the panicking breakfasters. But they were down the street and round the first corner before the pair in the street had managed to draw their guns and get a better shot at them.

The streets were relatively empty once they were off the main road. What people there were jumped aside in alarm at the sight of two people running for their lives, one of them with a gun in her hand.

“Where are we going?” Sandra asked as they turned another corner.

“I don’t know. Away from here.”

“Come on. You live round here. Where do we go?”

Jay found it hard to think that far ahead. Picking the next side street to hide in was as much as he could manage. He looked around. He and Sandra had already reached unfamiliar streets. His local knowledge extended to the route to the tube station and the shops and no farther. But a glimpse of open space at the end of a long street to his right gave him his bearings.