Down: Pinhole (48 page)

She shot her free arm upwards into Himmler’s pistol, sweeping it off her temple.

The small man’s finger instinctively jerked the trigger and the gun fired into the ceiling with a deafening blast.

At that moment, John charged.

Himmler lost all muscle tone as John hooked his neck in a chokehold.

“You all right?” John asked Emily.

She was shaking now. “Yes.”

“Are you sure this is
the
Heinrich Himmler?” he asked.

“It’s him.”

“All right then.”

John sharply flexed his powerful biceps and used his other arm for more leverage. First Himmler’s face turned red, then his eyes bulged. John kept applying pressure, his own face turning red. Finally there was a crunching sound. Himmler’s small body went into a spasm. John relaxed his grip and let Himmler slide to the floor, his body twitching, his eyes staring out in horror.

“Krav Maga,” John said. “Hear that, Heinrich? That’s Hebrew for, fuck you.”

John sat beside Emily and looked at her chained wrist.

“Is there a key for that?”

“Andreas has it.”

Antonio, Simon and Caravaggio were inside the wagon now. Caravaggio had bound Simon’s arm to staunch the bleeding. John asked Antonio to get the key.

“You came for me,” she said, putting one arm around his neck and nuzzling him.

“Of course I did. Didn’t you get my message?”

“The old man never had a chance to say more than thirty TeV. I knew someone was coming, I didn’t know who. How did you manage?”

“It’s a heck of a story for later.”

John took the key from Antonio and uncuffed her. She threw both arms around him and kissed him tenderly.

“Emily, I’d like to introduce you to three of the best men I’ve ever known,” John said. “This is Antonio Di Costanzo, Simon Wright, and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.”

The three men bowed.

“Thank you so much for helping John rescue me,” she said, standing and giving each man a kiss on the cheek.

“John,” Caravaggio said, beaming. “I was hoping for more than my cheek.”

“I did promise him a proper kiss,” John told Emily.

She laughed and planted a wet one full on his lips then whispered to John, “Not
the
Caravaggio?”

“Of course it is
the
Caravaggio,” the painter said, savoring the kiss. “You are so beautiful, like John said.”

Outside the wagon, John’s squad was assembling, the battle done, the Germans routed. The cannon fire was finished. The Italians cheered when they saw Emily.

Antonio said they had to hurry before the Russians spilled into the camp or Barbarossa returned. The horses were hastily rounded up.

Emily went over to a mournful looking Andreas and thanked him for being a gentleman.

“I will miss you,” he said.

“Please take care of yourself,” she replied, getting on her tiptoes to deliver a peck. “I will think about you.”

“I am glad,” the eunuch said. “You will be the only one to think about Andreas and I will think about you every day forever and ever.”

A horse was produced and John helped her onto it.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“You see that hill?” John said. “There’s a very special man up there I’d like you to meet.”

Garibaldi opened his arms expansively to greet Emily.

“My dear child, thank goodness you are safe.”

On the ride up the hill John had quickly told her about Giuseppe, what he had done to help rescue her, and his aspirations for rescuing the wretched masses of Hell.

“Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” she said. “I have to admit I was losing hope.”

“It is an easy thing to lose here. I so wish we had time to talk but we both have urgent business. I must fight a war and you must return to England.”

John produced his pocket watch and said, “We have four days, sixteen hours, and ten minutes to get back to Dartford.”

Her eager nodding told John she fathomed the restart scenario and she confirmed it by saying, “Yes, thirty TeV. That’s how you crossed over. And that’s how they intend to bring us back. You’ve got a pre-set time window, don’t you?”

“You’ve always been the smartest cookie I ever met,” John said with a grin. He turned to Garibaldi. “Giuseppe, is there anything else I can do for you?”

“You’ve done enough, John. Go now.”

“It was hard enough fighting a two-front war with the Germans and the English. Now you’ve got the Russians to deal with too.”

“Ah,” Garibaldi smiled, “you must not forget the French are our allies, at least for today. If you happen upon any Iberians along your route, licking their wounds from their encounter with King Henry, perhaps you could tell them that an old Italian gentleman could use their assistance.”

“I’ll do that. I hope you win, Giuseppe. You deserve to win.”

“We will try our best. Alas, it will be difficult to send a telegram to Earth informing you of the outcome but you may imagine our success if it comforts you.”

“I will.”

Simon, Antonio, and Caravaggio were standing by their horses. John went to them and began to say his goodbyes when Antonio stopped him.

“Did you think we would leave you here?” he said.

“You’ve got to help Giuseppe,” John said. “He needs you more than ever.”

Garibaldi shook his head vigorously. “No, John, they want to see this through with you. I applaud them for their loyalty to a good man. You have a treacherous journey ahead and not much time. The steam car is waiting at our camp. Take it and drive with speed.”

A shackled Woodbourne was taken from the back of an unmarked transit van at the loading dock of the MAAC facility. Trevor and Ben Wellington led the way accompanied by a phalanx of MI5 agents surrounding the prisoner.

Stepping into the elevator, Woodbourne asked, “Is this where I was before?”

“Home sweet home,” Trevor said. “Let me ask you something, mate. Why’d you kill all those people?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Says it all,” Trevor said with disgust.

“What are you going to do with me?”

“Actually, we intend to get rid of you at our earliest convenience,” Ben said.

“You can’t kill me you stupid tosser. I’m already dead.”

“No intention of killing you. We’re going to send you back where you came from. One-way ticket.”

On the dormitory level Woodbourne rattled and clanged down the hall on the way to the cell prepared for him. Just then, the lavatory door opened and an MI5 agent assigned to Duck emerged with the young man.

Duck looked up the corridor and stopped, motionless, with a rabbit-in-the-headlights expression of shock. But it was Woodbourne who spoke first.

“Is that Duck? What the hell are you doing here?”

Duck could only manage one word through his dry mouth. “Woodbourne.”

“Get him back to his room now,” Trevor said. “Hurry it up.”

Delia poked her head out of Duck’s suite and saw the look of terror on the face of her young charge.

Woodbourne called after him in glee, “Is your retarded brother, Dirk, here too?”

Trevor unlocked a door and Woodbourne was ushered inside. “You’ll be staying here for now,” he told him.

“Take the irons off then,” Woodbourne said.

“Not likely, mate. You’ll have four of these gents with you at all times and they have my permission to kick the shit out of you if you try anything, all right?”

“Well then, they’ll have to feed me with a spoon and wipe me arse, won’t they?”

“We’ll treat you right if you behave,” Trevor said. “Otherwise, they have my permission to let you starve and shit yourself. You already smell like crap so it won’t much matter.”

Delia sat beside Duck’s bed and watched him curl into a fetal position.

“You weren’t meant to see him, Duck,” she said. “I should have been more careful.”

“What’s ’e doing ‘ere?” he sobbed.

“The truth is, he came here before you but he ran away. We’ve been looking for him and now we’ve found him.”

“Are you going to try to send him back too?”

“That’s our intention, yes.”

“When?”

“You know when. It’s Monday morning, same as the last three weeks.”

“You’re not going to ‘ave me stand next to ’im, are you? ’E scares me legless.”

“I don’t know the precise plan, I’m afraid.”

“But you won’t let ’im come for walks with me, will you?”

“I think I can promise you that he won’t be extended the same privileges that you enjoy. Now, cheer up, have some supper and I’ll pop
Little Mermaid
into the player.”

There was something wildly incongruous about driving a noisy, belching steam car through the wild open countryside of Francia with Emily sitting beside him. Every time John glanced over she was looking back at him, brimming with thankfulness. In the rear, Antonio and Simon were being vigilant to the myriad threats of the oncoming night. There was the danger of running into units of the retreating English army. There were French thieves and brigands about. And there were always rovers. Caravaggio sat between them, intent on sketching on his pad before the light was completely gone.

Once clear of the Paris environs and heading almost due north, John and Emily began talking to each other over the din of the chugging boiler. She pressed him for details on Matthew Coppens’s theories on what had happened at 30 TeV and he did his best to tell her what he remembered from the post-incident meetings. He told her about the four weekly MAAC restarts and the plan to shutter the facility after the fourth, win or lose. He told her about Woodbourne. But she went quiet for a while when he described to her what her parents and sister had been told about her disappearance.

“They must think I’m dead,” she said, tearing up.

“I only know what they were told,” John said. “I honestly don’t know what they think. The important thing is that you’re going home. They’ll see the truth for themselves.”

“We’re not home yet,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about the physics. It sounds like Matthew and I agree that we’ve slipped through a graviton-strangelet passageway into a parallel universe. But we can’t know that simply reproducing the collision energies will produce the same result, time after time.”

“It happened twice,” John said. “Hopefully it’ll happen again.”

“Maybe. But there’s something else that concerns me.”

“What?”

“I’ve had to do the maths in my head but I’m worried about instabilities developing with repeated high-energy conditions.”

“What do you mean by …”

Simon called out, “To the right! Watch out!”

John braked to a stop as two men ran from the dark bushes into the road. Antonio and Simon, who were on the outside, sprang out of the car with swords drawn.

They were young, in their twenties, their English uniforms bloodied. They were unarmed.

“Please, please help us,” one of them cried, holding his hand up to shield his eyes from the bright headlights.

“Do any of you speak English?” the other said, dropping to his knees.

“We all do,” Antonio said, drawing closer, brandishing his pistol. “Of late it has been a most useful language. You are Henry’s men?”

“We are,” one said.

“We were,” said the other. “We were routed by demons with bombs in their hands and got separated from the others.”

“Those demons were us, laddies,” Simon said, coming over.

“But you’re English,” the first man said. “Yet you fight against us?”

“Against the king,” Simon said. “Big difference.”

The other man looked to his left and peered into the woods. “We’re being followed. Please.”

“Who’s following you?” John asked from the driver’s seat.

“Them!”

The rovers swarmed onto the road. John didn’t have time to do a headcount but there were between ten to twenty of them.

“Stay there!” he shouted to Emily as he leapt from the car. Caravaggio jumped out also, lustily waving his sword.

The rovers were armed with clubs and long knives.

John gritted his teeth and with the angry, mantra-like phrase, “not now, not now,” playing in his head, he slashed, stabbed and kicked at their foul-smelling bodies.

He saw a rover leap onto Caravaggio’s back and was about to help when two more came at John. Antonio and Simon were too far away to assist the painter and he was fully occupied himself. Then he heard a scream and out of the corner of his eye, he saw Caravaggio’s attacker arch his back and fall off. Emily was standing behind him holding a long rover’s knife.

Caravaggio tipped an imaginary hat and stayed with her protectively.

Simon called over to the cowering English soldiers saying, “Do you think you chaps could do a bit of fighting? It would be helpful.”

The soldiers, shamed into action, picked up some fallen weapons and joined in, and after another two or three minutes, every foul rover had been put down.

“I told you to stay in the car,” John said to Emily in a scolding tone.

“I am happy she did not,” Caravaggio said. “This woman of yours is not only beautiful, she is a warrior.”

Emily was looking curiously at her bloody hand. “I seem to have discovered a rather strong survival instinct these past weeks.”

While the others cleared the bleeding bodies from the road, Caravaggio went back to the car and tore a page from his sketchbook.

“For you,” he said, handing it to Emily.

It was a dark and dramatic rendering of her in charcoal, her hair flowing and her eyes blazing like a warrior princess.

“My God,” she said. “It’s stunning. Could you sign it?”

He took it back, wrote his name across the bottom and presented it again, waiting for the kiss that was quickly issued.

Antonio tossed the English soldiers some bread and said, “We helped you, now you are on your own. We must go.”

“You’re Italian, aren’t you?” one of them said.

“I am. Italians are the best. Please remember this.”

They reached the coast at Calais in the full blackness of night and when the noisy car boiler was switched off they could hear the waves crashing below them.

“We will shelter here for the night,” Antonio said, laying his blanket on a patch of soft grass for Emily.