Déjà Vu: A Technothriller (33 page)

She touched a button on the dashboard. The doors locked. She touched another and the engine sprang into life. She looked up. Brandt and her companion were closer.

She said, “Computer –” but she did not finish her sentence. She could not look away from Brandt’s companion. He bore an astounding resemblance to her father.

The man caught her stare and smiled.

Jennifer’s mind cartwheeled away.

A summer’s day in Oxford. They were walking down Broadstreet, close to Balliol College. The sky was blue. It was August; most of the students had gone. She was six or seven years old. They had been walking down Broadstreet, just the two of them, students gone, and Jennifer had announced to her father, “Daddy, did you know that the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body?”

Her father stopped short. Passers-by were forced to walk around them. He frowned in concentration, as though he was checking her question against a mental database of brain facts. Then, tentatively, he reached up and touched right side of his head. Suddenly, his left leg flailed into the air behind him, seemed to rise up past his shoulder, and finish in front. Jennifer clapped her hands and giggled. Her father, who was so tall, looked down. His expression was utterly serious. “Do you know – I think you’re right.” Then, he reached up with his left hand and prodded the other side of his head. His right leg swung around just as the left had done. This foot landed in front of the other. “Jennifer,” her father said, “you are right.” Jennifer began to laugh. Her father began to walk. One leg at a time, he goose-stepped down Broadstreet, crash crash crash, Jennifer running circles around him. She laughed so much it began to hurt. When she saw the expressions of those around her, she laughed even harder. They continued until her father began to giggle as well. Finally, he removed his fingers from his wavy black hair and took her hand. He said, “Jennifer, your father’s a fool,” and Jennifer had beamed.

She had wanted to say that she loved that about him, but couldn’t find the right words.

She unlocked the door.

Her father was standing outside. His face was older now, an impressionistic sketch of man who had goose-stepped down Broadstreet thirteen years before. He was trying not to laugh. Jennifer opened the door and stepped out into his arms. She could not cry. She wanted to hold this man but didn’t know what it would do to her. There was no feeling that his proximity – his physical presence – meant that everything was fine…but it meant that, perhaps, some day, it would be.

David clung to her. She squeezed the breath from his lungs. She had grown. She was as tall as him. He closed his eyes and inhaled slowly. Her ear brushed against the stubble on his cheek. Her hair blew across his face – he could smell her shampoo – and he realised, with some sadness, that his girl had become a woman.

The hair blew away and he opened his eyes. The Valley of Fire had gone.

It was the late 1970s. He was seven or eight years old. He lived with his mother and father on a farm in Kent. That autumn, he had wandered into his father’s garage. The garage was a place of power. It smelled of sawdust, black paint and oil. His father had looked up from his workbench and asked him what was wrong. Nothing was wrong, David stammered. He would like a rabbit. Thomas, his best friend, had one, and he wanted one too. His father set down his drill and reached for a cloth to wipe the oil from his hands. They were always oily. “What does your mother think?” he had asked. She said it was OK, David replied. He was looking at the floor.

That same week, David and his father bought the rabbit from a gruff farmer in the neighbouring village. They put it in a hutch and David promised to feed it every day and clean it out once a week. He named it Bugs Bunny. His father wrote Bugs’s name on the hutch with a gold pen. The autumn came and went. Near Christmas, David began to do well in school. He became absentminded. At the back of his mind he knew that he had not been taking care of Bugs as he should, but he knew that his father would. After all, Bugs lived in the garage, his father’s work place.

On Christmas morning, before he could open his presents, David’s father told him that they had to see something the in garage. David could not help but smile; he guessed it was a new bike like Thomas’s.

David knew something was wrong when he saw that the garage was the same as ever. There were no presents. He glanced, puzzled, at his father. Before he could ask a question, his father clipped him around the ear. He was a big man with hands like shovels. David fell onto his knees. He landed on the wooden planks of the car pit. The edges of his vision to sparkled.

“Look at Bugsy,” his father said quietly.

David climbed to his feet. He was too surprised to cry. He was too surprised to think very much at all…but he was sure that he did not want to look at Bugsy.

“Look at Bugsy,” his father said again.

David took a deep breath. It shuddered into his chest. It was awfully loud. He didn’t want to cry. He turned and looked at Bugsy.

Bugsy’s hutch was in shadow. He stepped forward and peered. Bugsy was in a corner and David began to cry. The wood shavings that made Bugsy’s bed had been pushed into one corner. They were bloody. There was blood on the meshed window, and blood too on the straw of his water-feeder. Bugsy himself was in the corner. He was stretched out. His grey-white hair had yellowed. He was lying on his side, lying on weeks of his own shit. David could see his ribs. His belly shuddered just as David’s did right then. Bugsy’s face was pinched. Red-coloured spit bridged the gap between his nose and his front paws.

Bugsy sensed David was there. It was the first time they had seen each other for three weeks. One transparent, reddened eye rolled towards David. It fixed on him for a single moment and then, with gravity, assumed its original position: staring at the roof of its little hut. That was last time David saw Bugsy. A week later, Bugsy had been carried away by the dust men.

“See what you did, David?” his father asked. His voice had become quieter.

David turned towards his father. He knew that should stand up to this man. He should shout and scream that he was a kid – he couldn’t be expected to look after a whole rabbit on his own. As an adult, his father should have helped him. He wanted to shout that this wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.

Instead he turned away and walked inside.

They spent the rest of the Christmas morning opening presents. Superman slippers, a wallet, and Abba cassettes. They were all very expensive. Under the feeble gaze of his mother, who dared not ask him why he had been crying, and his father, who seemed impassive, he tore paper after paper. His expression was blank.

When he opened the final present – a plastic model of the Millennium Falcon - his mother clasped her hands to her chest and said, “Isn’t he pleased?”

His father said quietly, “He isn’t pleased.”

Saskia opened the rear door and pushed David inside. It would be best to have him in the back and Jennifer in the front. Otherwise, he would sitting chatting to her and Saskia would never have her answers. She walked around to the passenger seat and jumped in. She searched for a button that would stop the engine. She found it on her second attempt.

She could see that Jennifer was shocked. The girl sat, almost fully turned, gazing into the eyes of her father. Her father was smiling. Saskia was not touched by the scene. Not under these circumstances. Not with Frank unconscious in the other car.

“Do you speak French?” she asked, in French.

The girl ignored her. Saskia reached across and turned her head by the chin. “We are under surveillance,” she said again, this time in German.

Jennifer stared at Saskia’s hand. Saskia withdrew it. In German, Jennifer said, “I know.” Saskia looked at David expectantly. He nodded. He understood. No English.

“Your German is good,” Saskia said.

“Yes, I learn it in school.” Jennifer spoke from far away. For a moment, Saskia wondered what she was thinking. But only for a moment. There was no telling how much time they had.

“Hello, papa,” Jennifer said.

“Hello, Jennifer,” David replied. Saskia glanced at her watch. She remembered the emails that she and Scottie had examined in Edinburgh: documentary evidence of a father and daughter drifting apart. She would give them two minutes.

“Why are you here?” Jennifer asked. Her voice was emotionless.

“For you.” David slapped is hands together in frustration. His German was worse than his daughter’s. “I returned to Scotland. Thunder and lightning in the building. I killed Bruce Shimoda. Now Saskia Brandt hunts me. She is the police. She wants to return to Britain with me.”

“Bruce Shimoda is not dead,” Jennifer said quietly. Her eyes had fallen to the floor.

David shook his head. “I am sorry, Jennifer. He is dead. He was in the computer. He was dying. He asked.”

“Why did you come here?”

“I do not know. I have…Saskia…I mean, Saskia déjà vu. Understand?”

“No.”

“I think Saskia travelled…over, no, through…” he trailed off in exasperation. He tapped his watch.

“He means time,” Saskia interjected. “He’s got this crazy idea that I travelled through time. He thinks he saw me in Scotland a few days ago. I told him that time travel is impossible -”

Jennifer shook her head and, with that, her eyes began to clear. “Time travel is possible.”

Saskia said, “Ah.” She composed herself, avoided David’s face, and tried to focus on her questions. “Jennifer, what did Frank tell you about me?”

“He told me you were an independent agent. He said that you wanted to talk to me and that you were…”

“Dangerous? Listen, Jennifer, I’m not. I was assigned to find your father. Nothing more. Isn’t that right, David?”

“Yes,” he replied, though he not really listening.

“Jennifer, Frank Stone lied to you. He needed to find me through you. But I need to ask you a question: How did he know where I was? Did he mention anything?”

Jennifer stared at the ceiling. She closed her eyes. “No. I remember the conversations in total. He said nothing.”

Saskia turned to David. “But he didn’t know about you. That means he wasn’t told. If he wasn’t told, then he didn’t need to know. Why didn’t he need to know? Simple: because his only task was to collect me. Somebody told him where I was. Now, who else knows that I am here?”

“Also simple,” David said. “Your boss. He wants to find you. Get you back in your office.”

“But I haven’t done anything wrong. This is the job I was asked to do. I’m still in the process of doing it. And what about you, David? Frank was never told about you. You are, however, the reason that I’m out here. It makes no sense. Why would my boss let you off the hook? He gave me the specific task of doing that, and now he just gives up. No sense.”

David said evenly, “Sense, yes. Your boss thinks you have performed badly, he wants you back. He sends out an agent.”

“The same agent who gave me misinformation earlier this week. Quite a coincidence.”

“You do not know that the information was bad. Perhaps you are too…suspicious.”

Saskia stared at Met Four. “Suspicion is what I’m paid for. I’m a detective.”

Jennifer looked at Saskia for the first time. “Detective –”

“Saskia,” she corrected.

“– Saskia, do you still want to take David back?”

Saskia smiled bitterly. “My life depends on it.”

“I can prove that my father is innocent.”

“How?” asked Saskia and David simultaneously.

Their footsteps echoed on the wrought-iron stairs. They walked in single file. Jennifer led, followed by Saskia, then David. Saskia had needed convincing. The chances of getting into Met Four security was low. He rolled the dice one more time. Saskia had to reach the time machine somehow. If the universe itself would conspire to keep her appointment, perhaps they could all ride her luck.

They reached the top. The wind was so strong that it was an effort to breathe. David surveyed Met Four. There were two buildings, old and worn. Atop the second building was a clutch of antennas. Two flags rolled in the wind. Immediately before him was a high wire gate with an inset door. Jennifer swiped her card through the box near the handle and the gate opened. She stepped through and closed it behind her. Saskia repeated the procedure with her stolen blue-clearance pass.

David watched them go through. His card was least likely to succeed, because his card was Ego, which had read the magnetic code from the Saskia’s blue card. After a few seconds of analysis, Ego had announced that the code was a several-billion digit prime number. Jennifer suggested that Ego pick the next-highest prime and present the number to the lock. Ego found it seconds later on a university website.

David swiped it through the reader. Nothing happened.

John Hartfield shouted, “If Proctor makes an entrance, I want him to be allowed in. Did you get that?”

He strained to hear the reply over the thump of the rotor blades. The helicopter banked. They were twenty minutes from Met Four.

“Hold on, sir,” said the pilot. Another gust of wind turned the aircraft. They began to fly sideways.

The Mojave washed by. Banks of sand rolled beneath them. The voice on the mobile phone finally replied to Hartfield’s question: “Copy that, sir. Updating the computer now.”

The lock sprang open. Jennifer was numb to the surprise she had every right to feel. She had not thought clearly since Frank’s arrival that morning. Now she watched her father close the gate behind him. He was dizzy with relief.

And where was her anger? When she had argued for extended lunch privileges at a committee meeting the day before, she had ridden it hard, as always, and she knew its source. She had not shouted at the chairman but at her father. At her father, who had left her in a school in New York and returned to England.

She looked at him. He shrank. He shrank like a rebuked little boy. Her fury, too, shrank to nothing. Perhaps she had passed into its eye. Her father had given her the best education in his power.

For him, the pursuit of education – the mind, science, truth – was the noblest of causes. It was the one true aspiration. He had put that aspiration above their relationship. He was a principled man. But for others who did not share those principles, what was he?