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  Jay had no idea what to make of that, but filed it away for future reference. “Any idea what it was?”

  Harnois gave his best Gallic shrug. “The backwash from the mother of all timesplashes? What else could it be? Someone went back in time and shot Alexander the Great in his cradle. It was bound to happen, no?”

  Jay shook his head. “It didn’t feel like a backwash. I mean, there were some slight similarities, but it wasn’t right.”

  Again, Harnois shrugged. “You should know.” Within the temporal crimes community, Jay was famous for having survived the world’s biggest backwash: the one that had destroyed the Washington Metropolitan Area two years earlier and sparked the revolution that still raged in the United States.

  “If it was a timesplash,” Jay insisted, reacting to the doubt in the Frenchman’s tone, “where’s the centre? You’ve seen the modelling that CERN did on major events. There should be one area of massive destruction with less and less as you move away from ground zero. If they shot baby Alexander the Great, northern Greece would be a molten caldera, the rest of Greece, Bulgaria, Albania would be wiped off the map. Beyond that, southern Europe, Turkey, North Africa would be wrecked, but there’d be survivors. Farther out, the damage would be less and less. The Americas, China, Australia might not even feel it. I get the impression it wasn’t like that at all. It’s more … evenly spread—and a hell of a lot milder than such a massive event should be. Do we have satellite imagery?”

  “We’re putting it together now. We may have lost some satellites and we can’t reach all the tracking stations we’d like to. You know, it might have been centred on Northern Siberia, or Antarctica.”

  “It might.” If someone had jumped back ten thousand years and shot an elk or a penguin crucial to the history of the world. “Anything else I should know?”

  “You’re off to see the Ice Queen?” By which he meant the Director of Military Intelligence, Dr Barbara Crystal.

  “I’m sure she’s been asking for me.”

  Harnois smirked. “There isn’t any more to tell you. We’ve barely begun, really, and comms everywhere are a mess.”

  Jay nodded. “When I get back, I want Thalman ready to brief me. Is she here?”

  “Came in ten minutes before you did.”

  “Good.”

  Jay went up to the top floor. He had to pass another checkpoint with human soldiers and then present his credentials to a door guarded by two robot sentries. The director’s office, like the rest of the building, was buzzing with activity. Crystal was surrounded by her staff and, from the way she was scowling at them, Jay supposed she was not in a good mood. As soon as she saw him approaching, she waved everyone else away and focused her scowl on him alone.

  “There he is,” she said. “The man of the hour. Care to explain how the whole world just got clobbered by a timesplash while K Section was taking a quiet nap?”

  “I don’t think it was a timesplash,” Jay said, trying not to let his irritation show. The woman’s management style involved metaphorically poking her subordinates with a sharp stick to get them jumping. Normally, Jay didn’t let it bother him, but today he was not in the mood.

  She regarded him with a curious expression. “Interesting move, Kennedy. Of all the things I thought you might say, that was not one of them. What’s your evidence?”

  “We’re still assembling it. Things are a bit chaotic. This … event … does not have the characteristics of a backwash.”

  Her expression changed subtly. He saw her swallow. “I saw some strange …” She stopped. There was hurt in her eyes. “I spoke to my father.” Jay waited for her to say whatever it was. She swallowed again. “He died eighteen months ago.”

  “And after you spoke he just faded away, didn’t he?”

  Her gaze snapped onto his. “I’ve read the reports. I’ve heard of these ‘echoes’. Is that what it was?”

  “No, Ma’am. This is something new. We’ve only ever seen echoes during the splash itself, never in a backwash, and then only of the bricks, not of random others.”

  She was still watching him intently. “You saw one too, didn’t you?” He nodded. “How can the dead come back to life, Jay? Is it the tempocalypse?”

  Tempocalypse was the title of a very popular book that predicted the end of the world coming after repeated timesplashes irrevocably screwed up spacetime until causality was no longer reliable and chaos overcame the Universe. It was the kind of book that used biblical passages as evidence and could justify anything at all by saying “quantum” and “uncertainty principle” often enough.

  “I don’t normally approve of book burning,” Jay said, “but in that case, I’d make an exception. You know it’s complete rubbish.”

  “I did before my dead father dropped by for a chat.”

  “We’ll work it out, whatever it was.”

  Her moment of vulnerability was over. “Do that. And do it quickly. I’m making a presentation to the Defence Standing Committee tomorrow at zero nine hundred. Make sure I’ve got something solid to offer them.”

  Chapter 3: HiQua

  Lee Shaozu didn’t like being summoned, especially by that prick Waxtead, and especially when he knew exactly what the fool wanted to whine about. He glanced down at his Armani suit and found not a single speck to mar its elegant lines. He entered the lift. Its digital display said it was seven forty-three AM. Lee’s Rolex app, running in his commplant, said seven forty-two. Typical sloppiness, he thought. They can’t even get the building’s clocks set to the right time. He reached out to select the floor from the touch panel and his manicured finger hesitated briefly over the thirty-six before pushing it firmly. No sense worrying about being on the top floor of the HiQua London headquarters. If last night’s disturbance happened again, it probably wouldn’t matter where he was. People had died in their cars, in restaurants, out walking the dog. It was luck, that’s all. And Lee had always had good luck.

  “You’re late,” Waxtead complained as his PA showed Lee into his office. “I said seven thirty.”

  Lee ignored him and crossed the broad room to a sideboard on which a buffet breakfast of breads, cheeses and cooked meats had been laid out. He took a piece of melon from the fruit platter and swallowed it.

  “Anyway, you’re here now, so let’s get started.”

  Oh how Lee despised the man. He poured himself a cup of black coffee and went to sit down. He took a sip and looked for the first time at Waxtead. The HiQua CEO was a pasty-faced Englishman in his late twenties, a few years younger than Lee but already running to flab. Not half the man his father had been. When he took over the company five years earlier on his father’s death, the share price had tumbled. Since then, it had slid a little more each year.

  “They’re saying it’s the tempocalypse,” Waxtead said.

  Lee closed his eyes, trying to control his temper. He’d seen the headlines too. “Tempocalypse Now?” “Boffins Baffled!” The usual rubbish.

  “Morons,” he said.

  Waxtead watched him, clearly plucking up the nerve to say something. “What if it was because—?” he began, but Lee jumped on it, fast.

  “It wasn’t. Whatever happened last night was nothing to do with that.” He looked the CEO in the eye and said, “You’d better stop thinking like that and pull yourself together. Yesterday was a big day for us. Payday. The first of many. HiQua made millions. You, personally, made millions. And so did I. We’ve got a good thing going here and you are not going to screw it up by listening to tabloid newsfeeds and their doomsday pseudoscience crap.”

  “I spoke to Hong.”

  “You did what?” Lee was really angry now. “I run the Special Projects team. You have no business going round me to talk to them directly.”

  Waxtead bristled. “It’s still my company. You have no right to speak to me like that. I need to know what’s going on.”

  Lee let his lip curl into a sneer. “I tell you what’s going on,” he said. “Yesterday should have demonstrated
what an excellent arrangement we have. Do you think you could have pulled that off yourself?” He gave Waxtead a chance to say “yes” but nothing came. “You will leave the Special Projects team to me. Do you understand? If you screw this up …” He let the threat hang.

  “I only asked him what he thought about last night,” Waxtead whined.

  “And what did Dr Hong tell you?”

  “He said he didn’t know.”

  “And you asked him if he thought it was our fault, didn’t you?”

  Waxtead managed a spark of defiance. “He said it was a worrying coincidence.”

  Lee clenched his jaw, not trusting himself to speak for a moment. “If he chooses not to proceed, the project goes with him. You understand, don’t you? And if he talks to the newsfeeds, can you imagine how much jail time you’ll serve? And that’s notwithstanding any spurious connection between our work and the so-called tempocalypse.” He stood up and put his coffee cup on Waxtead’s desk. “Insider trading is one of those crimes where nobody has any sympathy for the perpetrator. The public hates you for ripping off their pension funds and the establishment hates you for getting caught and making us all look bad. Fraud is an ugly word in the mouth of a prosecution QC. You should try and remember that.”

  He left the room, leaving Waxtead looking dumbstruck behind him. HiQua had been a valuable instrument so far—it had funded the project and bankrolled the investments. And now it was too late to find a new home for his team. Waxtead was weak and stupid, which had of course been a good thing, but now it threatened to become a liability.

  “Can I see you for a moment please, Mr Lee?”

  Farid Hamiye’s stubbled jaw and broad chest were the first things to greet Lee as he left the lift at the fifth floor. He stopped and regarded his Head of Security for a moment. Hamiye was a handsome man, and built like a rhinoceros. As ever, his expression was blank and his eyes inscrutable. But Lee didn’t need to ask if this was important: Hamiye knew better than to annoy him with anything less.

  He gave a quick nod and led the way to an empty meeting room. “Yes?” he asked when Hamiye closed the door.

  “You asked me to keep a scan going for suspicious activities, unusual recruits, staff meeting with government agencies and so on.” Lee waited. Hamiye gestured towards a display at one end of the room. A picture appeared of an extraordinarily beautiful woman in her mid thirties. She was walking across the foyer of an office building and, although plainly dressed, she would, Lee imagined, stand out in a crowd anywhere she went. “The analysts flagged this one,” Hamiye said. “Sandra Malone. She joined the company three months ago as a low-grade tech in the software-testing division in Oxford. She’s over-qualified for the job: has a degree in physics and a masters in temporal engineering.”

  Lee raised an eyebrow. Definitely interesting.

  “It gets better,” Hamiye said. “Two years ago, she was in the U.S. when the revolution began. My friends in the Met say she had been kidnapped by Zadrach Polanski, the rebel leader. He’s believed to have died in the timesplash that took out Washington, although that’s not confirmed. So I dug a little deeper.” Lee smiled. Hamiye was unstoppable when he scented trouble. “Sandra Malone is said to have been instrumental in bringing down a brick called Sniper eighteen years ago.”

  Lee knew that name. “The Big Splash? That Sniper? The one who almost destroyed London?”

  “The very same. Press speculation at the time said she was working for MI5.”

  Lee looked at the woman in the picture and shook his head. “She would have been a child.”

  “Seventeen. So probably not officially on MI5’s payroll, but they used a lot of kids back then to infiltrate the splashteams.”

  “And you think she’s still with Five?” Lee sat down, staring at the woman on the screen. This might be bad. Very bad.

  “I don’t know. I need more time to follow up and nail down her activities, find out who her associates are.”

  “You’ve got it. Use whatever resources you need. From now on, this woman is under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Agreed?”

  “I already have a team out there bugging her house, her car, her place of work, her phone, and her person. We’ll know everything she does, starting in an hour or so.”

  “Good. Make this your top priority. I want a report every three hours.”

  Hamiye nodded and left. Lee remained in the meeting room, alone with his thoughts.

  A potential MI5 agent, known to have been involved in at least two of the world’s most notorious timesplash incidents, suddenly turns up as a HiQua employee? That couldn’t be a coincidence. Could it? HiQua employed three hundred thousand people worldwide, thirty thousand of them in the UK. Even so, why would a woman with qualifications in physics and temporal engineering be working as a software tester? On the other hand, why didn’t she lie about her qualifications? Or, if she were still working for MI5, why didn’t she invent something less unlikely?

  He used his commplant to drive the display, delving into the company structure and employee records. The Oxford office she’d joined made software for factory robots. It was a tiny cog in the HiQua machine. How could it benefit a spy to be located there? He pulled up Sandra Malone’s picture again. It seemed incredible that a woman who looked like that was a software tester. Spy, he could believe. Supermodel, definitely. Software tester? Well that just seemed far fetched.

  He killed the display and stood up. There was no point in speculating until he had more information. If there was anything going on, Hamiye would find it. Right now, he needed to see Hong.

  ***

  The Special Projects Laboratory was also on the fifth floor of the HiQua headquarters building, but that was just the admin areas and a few show projects to dazzle the press with. The real work took place on an industrial estate in North London, in a long, low building with shuttered windows and a sign outside saying, “Clarke Engineering Ltd”. Because of the traffic chaos all over the city, Lee took a company helicopter—the unmarked one. He was met by Hong’s assistant at the helipad and escorted inside to the scientist’s office.

  Hong stood and greeted him. Lee regarded him with distaste. A shambling man of about sixty, Hong had unkempt gray hair, a paunch, and looked like he bought his clothes from church jumble sales. All of which was ridiculous given how much HiQua paid him. Hong could have afforded gene treatments to keep his hair black and stop his skin sagging, a personal trainer to eradicate the paunch, and, if he had no taste in clothes, could at least have hired a style consultant to dress him. What on earth does he do with all the money? Lee wondered. He made a mental note to ask Hamiye to check if Hong had a weakness for gambling, drugs, or women.

  “Waxtead called me,” the scientist said without preamble. They spoke together in English even though Mandarin was the first language for both of them. It was one of Lee's rules. He wanted Hong to draw as little attention to himself as possible. Speaking excellent English was a part of that.

  “I’ve told you not to speak to him.”

  “But he called me direct. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Use your common sense. What you’re not supposed to do is babble to him about how we might have caused last night’s catastrophe. You have to remember the man has no sense of perspective. He’s practically a child.”

  “I didn’t say that. He kept asking me if we’d caused it. All I said was that it was quite a coincidence.” As he spoke, Hong held his right hand in front of him, flicking his fingers as if to emphasise or illustrate what he was saying, but in fact, quite randomly. Lee tried not to watch them. It was another of the man’s infuriating personal quirks.

  “So, do you think we caused what happened?”

  Hong reared back. “No, of course not. How could we possibly? It’s just … Well, the coincidence is unsettling.”

  “But that’s all it is?” Lee pressed him.

  Hong didn’t seem as certain as Lee would have liked. “Yes, yes. What else could it be?”

&nbs
p; Neither man had sat down since Lee walked into the room. “Don’t talk to him again. Do you understand? If he gets it into his head that we’re causing some kind of backwash, there’s no telling what he might do. If he calls again, just say everything’s fine and that you’ve left a test-tube boiling or something. Then tell me at once.”

  Lee studied Hong’s face. The old man was blinking his eyes and looking unhappy. “Don’t worry,” he said, making an effort to sound soothing. “It’s nearly over. Yesterday’s result was a triumph. You should be very proud. We have one more scheduled for tomorrow and, if your device is ready, the big one two weeks later.”

  Hong nodded, looking distracted. “Yes, yes, everything is ready. It will be perfect. But you’re forgetting the first trial.”

  Lee frowned. “What do you mean? The first trial was a success. We didn’t get any data but it went well. Yesterday’s success was proof of that. From what the first trial taught us, the recalibration was spot on.” He smiled encouragingly. “It’s also made us all rich. What are you talking about?”

  Hong looked away, agitated. “I don’t know. I don’t like coincidences. Something’s not right.”

  Lee had spent enough energy coddling the old fool. It was time to be firm. “I don’t like that kind of talk, Doctor. If I hear it again from you or your team between now and the final run, there will be consequences. Just make sure your machine works and keep your staff quiet. I will not tolerate a leak from this facility. Especially now that we are so close.” Hong’s nervous twitching and pacing was beginning to irritate him. “In fact, I’ll be sending a few more security personnel, just to ensure things go smoothly.”

  “There’s no need for that. My team is not a security risk. Most of these people have been with me for over three years now. They are dedicated to the project and they are all eager to see their work rewarded.”

  “Then keep them in line. I don’t want you to lose anybody at this late stage.”

  “What do you mean? What are you saying?”