"Get in!"
Jenna dove for the passenger's door. She barely had her feet off the pavement before the car squealed into motion. Armstrong, whatever his/her gender, was a maniac behind the wheel of a car. If anyone tried to follow, they ended up at the bottom of a very serious multi-car pileup that strung out several blocks in their wake. Jenna gulped back nausea, found herself checking the guns with trembling fingers to see how much ammunition might be left in them, terrified she'd accidentally set one of them off. She'd never used any guns like these. She asked hoarsely, "Aunt Cassie?"
"Sorry, kid."
She squeezed shut her eyes. Oh, God... Cassie... Carl... . Jenna needed to be sick, needed to cry, was too numb and shocked to do either.
"It's my fault," Armstrong said savagely. "I should never have let her meet you. I told her not to wait at Luigi's for you, told her they'd trace her through that goddamned call to your apartment! I knew they'd try something, dammit! But Christ, an all-out war in the middle of Luigi's... with his own daughter and sister-in-law!"
Wetness stung Jenna's eyes. She couldn't speak, couldn't think. Her hands shook where she gripped the guns Armstrong had shoved at her.
"Forget Europe, kid," the detective muttered. "They're not gonna let you get out of New York alive. They hit your apartment, didn't they? Killed your fiancé? Carl, wasn't it?"
She nodded, unable to force any sound past the constriction in her throat.
Whoever Armstrong was, he or she could out-curse a rodeo rider. "Which means," the detective ended harshly, "they were going to hit you anyway, even if Cassie hadn't met you. Just on the chance she might have mailed it to you. And they had to kill Carl, in case you'd said something to him. God damn them!"
"Who's ‘them'?" she managed to choke out, not quite daring to ask what Cassie might have mailed, but hadn't.
Armstrong glanced sidelong at her for just an instant, long enough for Jenna to read the pity in those cold grey eyes. "Your father's business associates. One royal bastard in particular, who's been paying off your father for years. And the goddamned terrorists they're bringing into the country. Right past customs and immigration, diplomatic fucking immunity."
Jenna didn't want to hear anything more. She'd heard all the slurs, the innuendo, the nasty accusations in the press. She hadn't believed any of it. Who would've believed such filth about her own father, for Chrissake, even a father as lousy as hers had been over the years? Jenna had learned early that politics was a dirty, nasty game, where rivals did their damnedest to smear enemies' reputations with whichever reporters they'd paid off that week. It was one reason she'd chosen to pursue a career in film, following her aunt's lead, despite her father's furious opposition. Oh, God, Aunt Cassie... Carl... . Her eyes burned, wet and swollen, and she couldn't get enough air down.
"Ever been time-touring, kid?" Armstrong asked abruptly.
"Wh-what?"
"Time-touring? Have you ever been?"
She blinked, tried to force her brain to function again. "No. But..." she had to swallow hard, "Carl and I, we were going to go... through TT-86, to London. Got the tickets and everything, used false ID to buy them, to keep it a secret..."
The taxi slewed around another corner, merged with traffic on Broadway, slowed to a decorous pace. "Kid," Armstrong said softly, "those tickets might just save your life. Because the only by-God way out of this city now is through TT-86. Where did you hide them? Do you still have the fake ID's you bought?"
She'd begun to shake against the cracked plastic of the taxi's front seat, was ashamed of the reaction, couldn't hide it. "Yeah, we've still—I've still—" she was trembling violently now, unable to block the memory of Carl's agonized screams. "Locked them up in... in my lock box..." The other secret hidden in that lock box brought the tears flooding despite her best efforts not to cry. Carl's ring, the one she couldn't wear openly, yet, not until she'd turned twenty-one, making her legally and financially independent of her hated father, lay nestled in the lock box beside the tickets.
Noah glanced sharply into her eyes. "Lock box? A bank box? Which bank?"
Jenna told him.
Twenty minutes later, after a brief stop at a back-alley stolen-clothes huckster for new clothes—something without blood on it—Jenna clutched the entire contents of her bank account—which wasn't much—and the false identification papers and tickets she and her secret fiancé had bought to go time-touring, a grand adventure planned in innocence, with dreams of making a film that would launch both their careers... and so much more. Jenna rescued the ring from the safe, too, still closed up its little velvet box that had once been Carl's mother's, wanting at least that much of Carl's memory with her.
She also carried a thick case which held Carl's two black-powder 1858 Remington Beale's pistols she'd kept in the vault, the heavy .44 caliber pistols Carl had carried during re-enactments of Gettysburg and First Manassas and the Wilderness campaigns, the ones he'd taught her to use, after he'd won that action-shooting match in up-state New York last month. The ones her father would've exploded over, had he known Jenna was keeping them in her bank box. Armstrong eyed the heavy pistols silently, that glance neither approving nor disapproving, merely calculating. "Do you have ammo for those?"
Jenna nodded. "In the bottom of the gun case."
"Good. We'll have to ditch this modern stuff before we enter TT-86. I'd just as soon be armed with something. How do you load them?"
Wordlessly, Jenna began loading the reproduction antique guns, but Noah's steel-cold voice stopped her. "Not yet."
"Why not?" Jenna demanded shrilly. "Just because it's illegal? My own father wrote those laws, dammit! It didn't stop..." Her voice shattered.
Noah Armstrong's voice went incredibly gentle. "No, that isn't it. We just won't be able to take loaded guns through TT-86's security scans. We can take them through as costume accessories, but not loaded and ready to fire. Tell me how to load them, and we'll do that the second we're on station."
Jenna had to steady down her thoughts enough to explain how to pour black powder into each cylinder and pull down the loading lever to seat bullets, rather than more traditional round balls, in each chamber of the cylinder, how to wipe grease across the openings to prevent flame from setting off the powder in adjoining chambers, how to place percussion caps... The necessity to think coherently helped draw her back from raw, shaking terror.
"They're probably going to figure out where we went," Armstrong said quietly when she'd finished. "In fact, they'll be hitting TT-86, too, as soon as possible." The detective swore softly. "Ansar Majlis... That's the key, after all, isn't it? After today, it's even money they'll hit her the next time Primary cycles. Part of their goddamned terrorist plan."
Jenna glanced up, asking the question silently.
"Those bastards at Luigi's were Ansar Majlis. Never heard of ‘em? I wish to Christ I hadn't. Your aunt is—was—a prominent public supporter of the Lady of Heaven Temples. So are the owners of Luigi's. And half the patrons. The bastard behind that attack back there sent a death-squad of Ansar Majlis to do his dirty work for him. You've heard of Cyril Barris? The multi-billionaire? Believe me, kid, you don't want to know how he made all that money. And he can't afford to have your aunt's murder tied to him. Or to your father. Getting the Ansar Majlis involved makes goddamned sure of that. And those bastards have lined up another ‘terrorist' hit, aimed right at the very soul of the Lady of Heaven Temples..."