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  Sandra tried to sound offended, as if that were the last thing she would ever think of doing. “No. I’m just going to watch them, see what they do next.”

  “Sounds boring.”

  “Yeah. Oh, I spoke to your dad. He’s fine. I told him where you were going. I expect he’ll call later. He’s being Mr Important today, trying to work out what happened last night.”

  “Doesn’t he know?”

  “Seems not.” A small, gray van with the words “B & T Security” on the side pulled out from the back of the building. There was one driver: the man who had called at the house. He was driving manually—essential with the roads in such a mess and net coverage so patchy. “Gotta go, honey. Talk to you later.”

  “Mum, be careful.”

  “You too.”

  Sandra considered her options. The choice was either watch the building or follow the van. In her opinion, action won out over inaction every time. She slid down in her seat so she couldn’t be seen as the van went past, then bobbed back up to watch where it went—back onto the A40 heading for London. It looked as if she had made the right choice. Someone had paid these local guys to bug her house and now it seemed the boss wanted to give them fresh instructions. She started the engine and did a U-turn. She glanced at the battery level. There should be enough juice to get her to London if the gray van didn’t take too many detours. She drove slowly, letting the van get a good lead. There was no need to be close behind him until they reached the capital. Then it would get tricky, but for now she could relax.

  ***

  Jay was scowling when he walked into the conference room. He scanned the half-dozen team leaders to check that everyone was there. Laura Thalman nodded to him as his gaze touched her and he nodded back, reflexively.

  “All right,” he said. “I won’t keep you long. I want progress reports. Keep it brief. We’ll go round the room. You first, Pierre.”

  Lieutenant Pierre Fourget was a stocky man in his late twenties, square jawed and intense. Career military, he ran the two special-ops teams assigned to Jay’s section. The young lieutenant and his men were the sword in Jay’s hand. They also often heard things as they hunted through the sewers of Europe’s festering underground political movements. He looked Jay in the eye and said, “Rien.”

  Jay nodded. “Nothing at all?”

  Fourget shook his head. Well, he kept it brief, Jay thought. “Keep looking, Pierre—all of you—this is your number-one priority. Donata?”

  His head of counter-espionage, Donata Sismondi, was a heavy-set Italian in her fifties. Intelligent and calculating, she seemed to consider every question a potential trap. “You want to know if we have found who made last night’s timesplash?” she asked.

  “We don’t think it was a timesplash,” Jay said. “But, whatever it was, yes, I’d like to know who caused it.”

  She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. “If it was not a timesplash, why is K Section looking into it?”

  After two years of working with this team, he knew Sismondi well enough to know she wasn’t challenging him, merely clarifying the parameters of his request. “Our remit is not just to prevent the Union’s enemies using temporal displacement technologies against it, but also any other techniques for using time as a weapon.”

  “So you don’t think it was a timesplash, but you think it was to do with time?”

  “Until someone can rule it out, we’ll treat last night’s event as an attack with a new kind of temporal weapon. What do you think, Donata?”

  She shrugged. “You are probably right, eh Laura?”

  Jay cut in before Laura could reply. “Did your operatives find anything?”

  Donata shook her head. “It is early days. These things take time.” She smiled. “No pun intended.”

  “Any leads that look promising?”

  Again, the shrug. “We will see.”

  So damned cagey! Why can’t the woman just say “no”? He moved on. The head of Jay’s analysis team had the most to say. The analysts had classified and categorized the various phenomena that had occurred during the event. “There were quakes,” Kadan Dudding said in his crisp, Oxbridge accent. “At least two hundred of them above magnitude five, spread all over the major fault lines. Only four above magnitude eight, thank goodness. We believe something like one percent of all people saw an apparition—either of someone who should have been somewhere else, or of someone who is dead. Some of these appearances were quite public,” he was clearly referring to the ex-Pope’s impromptu speech, “and some seemed to involve physical manifestation. In one case we had a wife return from the dead and stab hubby five times with a kitchen knife. Lots of witnesses.” He paused for effect. “There were a number of displaced objects—including a half-built housing estate that turned up in a field near Barcelona. Almost everything else that happened last night can be attributed, more or less directly, to one of those three causes—including the many traffic accidents.”

  “Any pattern to what we’re seeing?”

  Dudding winced. “We really don’t have enough data yet. Union-wide communications is still a little bit patchy.”

  “Any hints of a pattern?”

  Dudding considered for a moment. “Nothing we’ve heard so far is inconsistent with the hypothesis that these phenomena are completely randomly spread. We’re trying to get precise timings, to see if there is a point of origin, but no luck so far.”

  “What about the sunspots?”

  “Sorry, what sunspots?”

  “Someone told Captain Harnois there had been a report of extra sunspot activity.”

  “Really? I’ll look into it.”

  There were a couple more reports before Jay finally turned to Laura. “Do your people have any ideas yet, Laura?”

  She shook her head. “No, nothing at all.” She smiled sadly. “As things stand, I don’t think we can even rule out sunspots. However, remember that consultant I mentioned? She’s already airborne. Should be here in an hour or so.”

  Well, let’s hope whoever it is can read tea-leaves, Jay thought, because solving this looks like it'll take psychic powers. He thanked Laura, let people ask a few questions and throw out some wild ideas, then sent them all back to doing what they were trained for, gathering intelligence.

  And what do I do now? he wondered, watching his staff file out of the room. It wasn’t even lunchtime and he already seemed to have exhausted every possible avenue of investigation. He felt his chest tightening, felt the weight of the challenge on him. He had to keep things moving forwards, had to direct everybody’s efforts as efficiently as possible, keep the big picture in mind and guide his team towards a solution. But in his mind there was no picture, just the image of Cara turning to mist beneath his hands.

  He went to his office and sat at his desk. All around him he popped up virtual displays. European Defence Force Military Intelligence had countless Petabytes of data it could lay at his fingertips, right there in that room. He knew the answer was out there, somewhere. All he had to do was ask the right questions. He moved his hands into the sensor fields. Tentatively, he began to explore.

  ***

  Farid Hamiye was a big man, long limbed and deep chested. He dressed expensively but casually and enjoyed the knowledge that his handmade Italian shoes cost more than most of the people around him would earn in a month. He sat at a table in a café in the great mall, one arm over the back of his seat, one leg stretched out beside the table, long fingers touching the espresso in front of him. He also enjoyed the way that women stole glances at him as they passed. Unlike the shoes, that was not a gift of his new-found wealth. Even as a boy in Lebanon, the girls had looked at him like that.

  His gaze wandered around the brightly-lit space, across the faces of the shoppers, past the doorways and stalls. He was a businessman, perhaps, idling away a few minutes between meetings. He saw nothing suspicious. No-one was watching him. He was in a blind spot for the mall security cameras. He checked the time. Birdman was late. He was
about to call him again when he spotted the little weasel making his way through the crowd, scanning for Hamiye. The “security consultant” was out of place among the lunchtime shoppers, shabby and nervous. Hamiye supposed Birdman’s business was not doing well. Hardly surprising, when he made himself so conspicuous.

  At last, Birdman spotted him and came over. His gaze twitched around the mall as he sat down. “Are we all right to talk here?” he asked in a whisper.

  Hamiye ignored him and signalled to the waitress. She, of course, was being unusually attentive. “Another espresso,” he said, “and one for my friend.” When she left, he turned to Birdman. “You wouldn’t think a little shithole like this would serve good coffee, but you will be surprised. Now, tell me how you managed to screw up such a simple job.”

  Birdman made his hands into angry claws and shook them. “I don’t know. Either she’s the most paranoid woman I ever met, or she’s some kind of red-hot professional and she made me in ten seconds flat. I’ve never seen anything like it in twenty years doing this job. She must have a lot to hide, that one. Even her daughter wouldn’t let me in.”

  Hamiye cocked an eyebrow. There had been nothing on Ms Malone’s employment file about a daughter. Her next of kin was given as Jason Kennedy, a man he had yet to track down. “You really are an incompetent little rodent, aren’t you, Birdman?”

  The security specialist bristled, but his eyes were shifty and cautious. “I didn’t do anything wrong. As soon as she got too nosy, I just made an excuse and cleared off. No harm done.”

  “Really? So you’d be surprised to hear that Ms Malone is just fifty meters away, pretending to look at bedding?” He shot out a hand and grabbed Birdman’s arm as the man’s head twitched sideways. “And if you try looking over your shoulder, I will break your neck.” He smiled pleasantly as the waitress brought their coffees. She simpered when he thanked her, then moved on.

  “All right, Birdman, you can go. Go now. She won’t follow you. It’s me she came to find.”

  Birdman stood up. He made a last rally to protect his dignity. “What about my fee?”

  Hamiye regarded him with an amused contempt. “You will not be hearing from me again, Birdman, and I will not be hearing from you. Do you understand?”

  The smaller man looked as if he had more to say, but he managed to keep his lips pressed shut and left without another word.

  Hamiye studied Sandra Malone. For an MI5 spy, she stood out like a sore thumb. Tall, slender and extremely beautiful. Even in casual clothes she looked magnificent, upright and athletic, poised and elegant. He had rarely if ever seen such an attractive woman. Dressed well and wearing makeup, he imagined she would be breathtaking. The idea of her posing as a software engineer in a provincial town was ludicrous. He studied her for so long that, as she assessed him in shop window reflections and with surreptitious glances, it must have become obvious to her that he had seen her. With a look of annoyance, she turned to face him. He smiled back at her and gestured for her to join him.

  The briefest of hesitations was all that gave away the fact that she was not completely fearless. She strode over to his table and sat down.

  “All right,” she said. “What’s all this about?”

  He found her accent a jarring disappointment. His own was impeccably upper-class English, something he had worked hard to achieve. Hers was really quite commonplace.

  “I’m very pleased to meet you, Ms Malone,” he said. “I haven’t met an MI5 agent before. That is who you work for, isn’t it?”

  “I work for HiQua. In their software-testing division. Who are you and why are you trying to bug my house?”

  “I’m pretty sure you know exactly who I am. Your colleagues back in Vauxhall are probably feeding you my résumé right now—what little they know of it. Or have you already seen it?” He sipped his espresso and waited for her to speak.

  “You’re quite an arsehole, aren’t you? What the hell makes you think I know or care who you are except that you’ve just had your hired moron try to bug me?”

  The woman’s attitude was so contemptuous he felt his temper rising despite his customary discipline. “All right, let’s stop playing games. I know who you are. You know who I am. What I want to know is why you’re spying on HiQua. We have some extremely confidential projects underway and we don’t like minor civil servants poking their noses into our business. Do I need to remind you that our CEO, Sir Roger Waxtead, is a personal friend of the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary?” He waited for a reaction but got none. “So you might want to pull your horns in—and I hope your superiors are listening to this—because there’s an awful lot of shit about to roll downhill onto their pointy little heads if you don’t. Am I making myself clear?”

  Hamiye’s irritation grew as he searched for any sign of intimidation or even concern in the woman’s face. All he saw was anger and stubbornness. It was bad enough that her ridiculous department thought they could run a covert surveillance operation on a company like HiQua, but it was worse that there were real secrets such an operation might stumble upon. Worse still was the fact that he had to confront the woman openly like this instead of shutting everything down quietly behind the scenes. But worst of all would be if the woman were stupid enough not to back down and let her superiors handle the matter. That could get messy.

  When she said, “Let me make something clear to you, Mr Whoever-the-hell-you-are,” he groaned inwardly. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You must have me mixed up with someone else because I don’t work for MI5 and I never have done. I’m not spying on your company—whose major crime, as far as I can tell, is the coffee they provide in my office—and if I find you or your people sneaking around my house again, I’m going to the police.”

  For a moment he felt a stab of uncertainty. Her act was so convincing he actually began to doubt what was so obviously true. This woman was no software engineer. She'd sussed Birdman in a heartbeat and then trailed him here with no difficulty at all. Not the behavior of an innocent person but that of a skilled agent who was trying to take him for a fool.

  She stood up to go and he let some of his growing anger show. “I will take whatever counter-espionage steps are necessary to protect my employers’ intellectual property—even from the government. If it comes to a pissing contest between Europe’s third-largest corporation and some jumped-up department and its time-traveling Mata Hari, you will lose. I promise you. Don’t say you weren’t warned, Ms Malone.”

  She walked away, but not before leaving him with a parting sneer. He watched her disappear into the crowd then took a long, deep breath. Stupid, stupid woman! He forced his anger to subside, forced himself to relax. She would report back and her superiors would tell her they were closing down the operation. Her cover was blown. What else could they do? Still, it galled him that she had been so completely unafraid of him. It made him want to threaten her more, do something that would really scare her, if only to knock that cocky look off her face. And his own anger also irritated him. He rarely let anybody get to him like that. He wasn’t that man. He let his eyelids fall closed, then opened them again. It had been a stupid, pointless encounter and he would almost certainly never see the woman again.

  He called Lee, saying he wanted to come in and report on their spy. Neither of them spoke about anything important on the phone. Lee was still at the Special Projects office—not the one at HiQua head office but he real one. They arranged to meet there and Hamiye turned his mind to how he might spin the morning’s bad news to his boss.

  Chapter 7: The New Consultant

  Sandra studied the map of the mall and its parking lots. There were two exits but they fed into the same road. If she parked in the right spot, every vehicle that left the mall would have to pass by her. She ran to her car and raced to get into position. She assumed that her quarry would head straight for his own car and leave. He didn’t seem the type to loiter unnecessarily. While she waited, she called Jay again.

 
“What do you mean, you need an ID?” Jay asked.

  “Why do you always have to ask stupid questions?” She knew he wasn’t really that slow, he just liked to stall while he worked out his responses. It was his most infuriating trait.

  “What do you mean stupid?”

  She clenched her teeth to stop a scream of frustration escaping. “Look, some bloke came to the house today pretending to be from the electric company but he was really there to plant bugs.”

  “What?”

  “Shut up. Cara wouldn’t let him in and neither would I. So he buggered off and I followed him. He’s from some one-man-and-his-dog security company in Oxford, but he led me to a mall in London where he met someone else.”

  “You followed him?”

  “This other bloke is a player, built like a brick shithouse, looks Arabic, dressed in designer casuals, very sure of himself. I’m following him, now. I want to know why I’m being targeted.”

  “Targeted?”

  “I haven’t got much time, Jay. He’ll be on the move any minute now. Listen, he seems to work for HiQua. He thinks I’m MI5 and I’m spying on the company. There’s obviously something fishy going on.”

  “Fishy?”

  “Jay, he mentioned time travel.”

  At last, Jay was silent. “You should cut and run,” he said. “Get Cara and come to me. Whatever’s going on, you can’t handle it on your own—and I’m too busy to come and help. I can arrange transport for you both. Just tell me where and when.”

  “Jay, doesn’t it strike you as a bit of a coincidence?” Her chest tightened just thinking about what it might all mean, this big fat scary coincidence. She knew Jay was right and she should get out of there. But what if this guy was really up to something? What if he knew who was behind last night's catastrophe? She couldn't just walk away from that, could she?

  She saw a car turning out of the mall onto the road. It was a flashy antique Tesla Roadster, looking like it had just come off the assembly line. “I think I see him. Jay, just get me an ID on those pictures I took of him. That’s all I need you to do. Cara’s safe at your mum’s place. Gotta go.”