“Who are you?”
“I’m from the Time Protection Agency. And you, as I said, are busted.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, pulling the trigger. It was funny because he shut his eyes as he did so, so with the pressure of the trigger, it pulled to the left, so had it been loaded, he would have missed me by about a foot. It just clicked, so he opened his eyes, paling perceptibly.
“You’re in stasis at this moment. Time ceases to exist until we transport you to Penal Epoch Four in the Jurassic age. All crude weapons are rendered inert by the stasis field generator, so you may as well relax.”
He dropped the gun and started to weep.
“They said you didn’t have the technology. But when Robert was killed in Paris, I knew that you were close behind.”
“Hey buddy. I knew you were due in Oxford today, so I had to bring you in,” I said, really making my accent drawl over the ‘knew’ and ‘due’ sounds, pronouncing them as ‘noo’ and ‘doo’. The accent sounded almost alien to me, as I had been so very English for so long. I felt a real twinge of homesickness, as it reminded me of the life I had and the many things I was denied here. I remembered who and what I was, so the future diminished. I smiled, recalling the baby inside me. This was where I belonged now!
“What will happen to me?” he asked, bringing me back to the current situation.
“As an illegal construct, you will be placed in stasis, so that you will not be able to return to your original body.”
He started to shake.
“How did you get here?”
“Hey, I ask the questions, but just so you know, we don’t need constructs anymore, we have the technology to send agents direct to a given moment, and return them to home in seconds.”
“I knew we underestimated you. I told them, but they wouldn’t listen.”
“Okay, what’s your real name, and when are you from?”
“I really am Steven Soames. They recruited me in 1980 in London. They promised me riches beyond my wildest dreams, but I have seen nothing but disaster.”
“Who recruited you?”
“A man in a pub. It sounds ridiculous, but that is the way it was.”
Steven Soames had been an army officer, dishonourably discharged from the service for an indiscretion with a young man he had met in a gay club in Bristol. Whilst drinking himself into a pool of self-pity the enemy approached him and gave him the offer of a lifetime.
The man who had recruited him was none other than the man that Roger had killed in Paris, so I expected him to come along any moment, as I was aware that the construct system was that manageable.
I moved slightly, so as to get a good view of the door, allowing the man to continue to talk.
His training was nonexistent, as they flung him into this era with a few jobs highlighted on his chart. (Now in my pocket.) There had been three of them originally, but one had left for America last year, and as we killed the other in Paris, he was now on his own, and hopelessly out of his depth.
I understood that their technology was similar to that of the Agency, but much more basic. They had not the resources that the Centre had, so agents were not able to re-create constructs as rapidly as the centre. Indeed, he believed that if one of their agents died, then the original body died more often than not.
He told me that he was taken to a location in the Netherlands, and it was from there that he was transferred to somewhere outside of time. The individuals who ran their equivalent of the Centre were strange in the extreme. He actually thought that they were not human. Although they looked human, they were devoid of any emotions or expression.
“They were more like robots,” he said, almost with a laugh.
He talked as if his life depended upon it. The creaking floorboards warned me that we were not alone.
I drew my pistol, moving slowly and silently into the shadows. Soames was oblivious to this and kept babbling away. The door opened very slowly, and a gun barrel pointed in, directly at Soames.
I simply raised my pistol, aimed and fired two shots. The assassin dropped his weapon, falling head first into the room.
Soames went very white, lying there with his mouth open.
I kicked the assassin over. It was the same man from Paris, yet he had both arms this time.
He was not dead, but with two .45 holes in his chest, I knew it would not be long. He looked up at me, frowning.
“You?”
“The very same. Us Time cops get to all the wrong places,” I said, American accent in place still.
“How?”
“Shit boy, it’s magic!” I said, as he died.
“He was going to kill me!” said Soames, fear causing his voice to shake.
“Yup. You’re now in deep shit with your own side now,” I said, and he began to sob harder. Then he stopped.
“If we’re in stasis, then how did he get here, and how did your gun work?” he asked.
“I lied. We ain’t in stasis, we’re still in 1816. And you’re now dead meat as far as the bad guys are concerned.”
“You have to help me. I’ll tell you everything I know.”
“What do you know, boy?”
“That man, his name is Robert Armes. He’s French but his family came over to England during World War Two, settling in London. He studied law, working in the East End of London in the 1960s. He was a bent solicitor who used to work with the Crays and several other notorious underworld figures. They recruited him just before the police were going to swoop and, from what he told me, he wouldn’t see the light of day for a long time. He’s the co-ordinator for this century. His task, our task, was to undermine the British sufficiently to enable Napoleon to win Waterloo, and then for the French to take the whole of North America.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.” I drawled.
“The other man, his name is Richard Frost. He has already gone to America, where he will try to help the French and the Spanish to take any land away from the Americans. He is also to take out a very important man.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where is Frost now?”
“I don’t know. But he had an address in or near Washington.”
“The British burned Washington. Is he still there?”
“I have no idea.”
“Where in Holland is your Centre?”
“I’m not sure. It’s near the German border, near Sittard.”
“Describe it.”
“It’s a farm. There is a silver grain silo by the farm buildings. The barn is a red colour, and the house is white with brown tiles on the roof. There is an electricity pylon very close to the barn.”
“What year was that?”
“1980.”
“So, as far as you know, your body is in stasis at that location?”
“Yes. Unless they have a way of moving it.”
“I doubt it, as that’s the trick of stasis, it’s stuck in one time/space location until switched off.”
“So, what happens now?”
“Beats me. Until we take out your control and recover your stasis field, you are theirs to do with what they will. They could kill your original body, so you’re stuck here.”
“That would be preferable to going back to my old life.”
“On the other hand, you could work for us, after serving your sentence, that is.”
“Anything, absolutely anything.”
“Okay, how do you communicate with each other and with your control?”
“The Times, we place apparently meaningless adverts in code in the personal columns.”
“What do your erstwhile employers get out of this?”
“I don’t know.”
“I want those codes.”
He nodded to a wardrobe.
“In a box on top of the wardrobe,” he said.
I retrieved the box, wondering how the hell I could get these codes to my central control.