Triptych (33 page)

His eyes felt puffy and gritty and he wanted to wash his face, lay down in a real bed, take a pill to make him sleep without dreams, make him forget everything he’d seen and lost. Just for a little while.

There was a muted beep. The guard by the door answered his ear piece, frowned, then turned his back on the cage of prisoners to unlock the door. Basil straightened and dislodged Gwen gently, which snapped her back into full military alertness. The door swung open.

Framed by the light in the hallway and looking furiously resplendent in his anger, was Director Addis. His fine chocolate suit was rumpled and what little tightly curled white hair he had left was rocketing upwards like a broken sofa spring.

Director Addis did not look like a happy man. As if to underscore Basil’s assessment, he said, “I am not a happy man.”

Gwen and Basil exchanged a glance but otherwise stayed silent. Gwen disentangled her fingers from Basil’s and smoothed down the front of her sweater, her face carefully masking over into that blank soldier stare that Basil still hated so much, more now that he knew what rollicking turmoil it confined.

“Tell me,” Addis snarled, stomping across the room with more echoing force than his slick dress shoes should have been able to provide. The soldier locked the door behind him.

“Tell me,” Addis repeated, his splendidly smooth South African accent growing jagged in his anger. “
Why
do I have two of my own Specialists in the brig for defying orders, breaking into the Institute Armoury, stealing weapons, and manufacturing non-sanctioned technological devices that they claim make people
travel in time
?”

“So you read our debriefing statement, then?” Basil asked, and couldn’t keep the cheeky tone out of his voice. The statement had been agonizingly and deliberately vague. It consisted of just forty-five words:

We were trying to triangulate the origin location of the Flashers when we detected an anomaly that could only have been another Flash. I set our Flasher to arrive at the same location. We ended up in 1983. We killed an assassin and returned here.

Basil, who had always been accused of biting verboseness, had been perversely pleased with his tantalizing brevity.

Addis said nothing, so Basil asked, “Going to let us out so we can go take care of my triangulation program?”

“The program ended six hours ago,” Addis snapped. “Agent Shelley is reviewing the results now. We’ve already called MI5
and
Scotland Yard. They’re sending down a forensics team and a veritable platoon of SWAT guys as we speak.”

Startled, Basil looked at his watch. Huh, it was twelve hours off, then. Forward.

Well, that was a bit of an unforeseen side effect of travel in the fourth dimension. He would have to write a paper on it, or something. Not that the U.N. would let him publish it, say,
ever.

Addis ran his hands over his mostly bald pate, encouraging the frizzing curls into an even taller display of frustration. “I don’t know what to do with you two. You
snuck out
of your own lab, for God’s sake, and stole two automatic assault rifles! How am I supposed to handle that in front of the Board? I understand how the loss of your Aglunated could spur feelings — ”

“We know where there’s evidence that could put these fuckwits away for life,” Gwen cut in. She had not moved from the bench in the cell, hadn’t immediately sprung to her feet like Basil had when the director had stormed in, hadn’t grabbed the bars and blurted.

She had just sat there. Waited for the director to tell Basil off and get out all his frustration and anger, his professional humiliation.

Now she said again: “We know.” The tidbit of vital information dangled between the three of them like a particularly tempting carrot.

The director sighed, wrapped his own hands around the bars like he was the one imprisoned, and rested his high dark forehead against the cool poles. He let out a soft and surprisingly vitriolic string of cuss words filled with more impropriety than Basil thought such a proper man would have known.

Addis sighed again, and asked his shoes, “What do you want?”

“All charges dropped,” Basil said, immediately.

“And we’ll be the only ones going to fetch this evidence,” Gwen added.

Addis winced.

“Let us go alone, or I won’t tell you,” Gwen said again, and her voice was eerily monotone. “You’ll need it to put these assholes away for the rest of their miserable, small little lives,” she reminded him.

“Gwen — ” Basil said, at the same time the director looked up and said, “But — ”

“There’s no danger,” Gwen whispered, and that hard, military look was gone. She looked human again, and vulnerable, and miserable. She looked like a woman who’d fought viciously with her mother, who had hated a dead lover unjustly, who had buried her child.

She looked like
herself
.

“It’s just…it was my…” Gwen tried to say, and then stopped.

Basil cleared his throat. “It’s personal.”

The Director frowned. “Doctor Grey, I still can’t — ”

“
Very
personal,” Basil said with a particularly emphatic eyebrow wiggle.

Addis stared at them for a long moment. Basil felt his stomach tighten, worried that he had just made things worse. Finally Addis narrowed his eyes and shook his head once.

“Fine, yes, okay,” the Director huffed, and gestured for the guard to unlock the cell door. “But we nail these guys first. Then you go get the evidence. Our first priority is to make our people
safe
.”

“Oh, yes,” Gwen said, and rose and walked out of the cell.

“Debriefing with security in ten, then.” The other man’s dark eyes narrowed. He blew out hard through his nose. “You’re a shrew, Pierson,” he said to Gwen. “But you’re good. I need to know what you’re bringing me back.”

“An aircraft,” Basil said. “And its pilot.”

“Mint condition and unharmed?” Addis requested. His tone held hope but his gaze was resigned.

Gwen smiled. “Absolutely not.”

Basil stopped just outside of the cell door to pat Addis on the shoulder and added, “Also? I’ll need that Flasher back. And can you get someone to bring me my wallet of tools and the bag of electronic components that were in the back pocket of my tac vest? Cheers.”

Addis scowled and didn’t answer, but as Basil broke into a trot to catch up with Gwen, already out the door of the holding room, he saw Addis poke his head into the hall and wave a junior specialist over. Good.

They were led by the guard first to cold, industrial change rooms. They were handed new clothes and given a few moments of privacy to wash up and prepare for the debriefing that was about to follow. Gwen said nothing, changing and splashing water from the sinks on her face and under her armpits with brisk efficiency. Right now, she was the soldier the Institute had taught her to be. The brief glimpse of hurting woman Basil had seen in the cell was hiding again, waiting; the empathic daughter was just a memory.

Basil felt sort of foolish washing up in a sink, though he piled a big marshmallow of foaming soap into his hand and thoroughly scrubbed the corners of his eyes and along the rough scrape of his stubbly beard. It felt fantastic.

Following her lead, Basil changed quickly; clean, new shorts straight from the cellophane packaging, crisp new uniform trousers, new socks, a new shirt. His old clothing he deliberately and viciously crammed into tiny balls and punched into the already full wastepaper bin. It was satisfying to see the bloody, dirty pants vanish under the mounds of wet paper towel.

When he looked up, Gwen was watching with wide eyes.

“My father’s tee-shirt,” she said.

Of course she’d want it.

Basil felt stupid. He reached back into the bin, pulled out the shirt, shook the paper towel detritus off it, and folded it neatly. He placed in on the top of the pile of Gwen’s carefully folded borrowed clothing — the teal sweater with the hideous shoulder pads, the tight high-waisted jeans.

Her eyes were slightly glassy, her pupils wide, her gaze locked onto nothing in the middle distance, her mind in the past.

“At least I won’t owe Mark a shirt as well as a new Betamax,” Basil said, inching up behind her. Gwen was no wispy starlet, and for that Basil loved her. He circled those wonderful hips, that waist that was thick with muscle, the soft little spot under the belly button he adored so much. There was a still-healing line of white flesh, firm under his fingertips, that ran across her tummy — proof that he’d almost had a son, once.

They’d all been strong enough to get through that, but only because they had each other. How would Basil get through this? When the soldiering and the debriefing and the technological tampering was over, when it was just him and Gwen alone in a small dark room, how would he…?  He shook his head. Later. He’d think about it later. Right now, he could just hold on.

Gwen made a sound, and it took Basil a second to figure out exactly what it was meant to be. Her laugh was so flat — yet at the same time, so genuine — that it hurt to hear it. He pressed his forehead against the back of her neck as she made that terrible mirthless sound, sucking in her warmth along with the air he gulped desperately, trying to absorb her temporary amusement to fend off his surging sorrow.

In control. Right.

Kalp was dead.

It hurt to hear it only between his ears, so he said it out loud: “Kalp is dead.”

It had only been about fifty hours since Kalp had denied anything to do with the letter on the dining room table and Aitken had panicked. Basil wasn’t even sure that he really
knew
that it happened, even though he’d already cried a lot, even though he’d been in mourning since before Kalp hit the ground.

Like an equation too dense for him to decipher, it just hadn’t
sunk in
.

Gwen turned around and kissed him hard on the mouth. “Yes, he is,” she said, and then they went to the meeting to tell everyone in the debriefing room why.

***

As they took their seats, the same junior specialist that Addis had waved down placed a tray in front of Gwen and Basil — sandwiches, cups and a pitcher of water, and the components and tools Basil had requested. Excellent. Addis may not have liked their methods, but he seemed to be perfectly cognizant that the best way to catch the bad guys was to trust them.

The room around them filled slowly with people who looked like lawyers, boardroom suits, someone who looked disappointingly like a psychotherapist, and of course, their peers — Agent Shelley and his special ops squad. Lastly, Agent Aitken slid in to the seat furthest away. She wouldn’t meet their eyes.

Gwen picked at her sandwich but Basil dug in, alternating hands in order to have one free at all times to get at the small circuit boards inside the sleek, half-melted shell of the Flasher they’d used to get to 1983. He had an idea, but he wanted to make sure it would work before he told anyone, even Gwen, about it. Gwen glanced over, recognized the ruined Flasher, and jumped to the erroneous conclusion that Basil had hoped she would: that he was trying to
repair
the Flasher and not remake it. Gwen turned away again, back to glaring poisonous daggers at the top of Aitken’s bowed head.

“Well?” Shelley said, when everyone was assembled.

Gwen cut a glance at Basil. “Go ahead,” he said, a piece of lettuce catching on his lower lip. “Busy here. Besides, you know how much of it you want shared.”

So Gwen stood up and told them.

As she narrated the last thirty hours — carefully edited to exclude the fact that the child they had rescued had been
herself — 
the room was silent, disbelieving. Nobody asked for proof, but nobody quite believed either, and then someone in Shelley’s squad said, “Does this change tomorrow?”

Basil looked up from his work, eyebrows drawn down. The crumb of some already-forgotten piece of bread crust fell from his chin. “Tomorrow?” he asked. A sense of mild dread pushed at the back of his throat. “What happens tomorrow?”

Shelley scowled at the agent, and it was clear that somebody had been telling tales out of school.

Gwen put her hands on her hips, and Basil knew that she understood the relevancy of the verbal slip just as well as he; something was planned, something that they were not supposed to know about, something that they were being shut out of purposefully, probably because of Kalp.

“Agent Shelley,” she said. There was no patience in her voice. She was already slightly hoarse from speaking so long, and she sounded very, very fed up.

Tiredness and impotent frustration scratched against the underside of Basil’s skin; he could only guess how irritated Gwen must be.

Some sort of nobility or soldier’s guilt (probably relating to the fact that he’d been the one who assigned Aitken as Kalp’s personal guard to begin with) tugged at Shelley’s expression. Something within him quickly won, but Basil wasn’t sure which side it was until Shelley spat, “Fine.”

Shelley tossed a lurid red folder into the space of table in front of them, and Basil shoved away the empty sandwich tray to peer over Gwen’s arm as she flipped back the cover. The first page was a slightly blurry aerial shot of some sort of down-on-its-luck factory and yard. Basil wondered if it was once filled with fresh-cut lumber or piles of shining roof tiles or corrugated metal shipping containers of tinned food. He supposed he would never know; all it was filled with now were some rusting piles of scrap metal and litter. The walls of the building were graphitized in a lurid yellow that Basil could see in the photo, painting bold splashes on the brick, but the angle and clarity robbed the words of readability.

“What’s this?” Basil asked.

“Tomorrow’s target,” Gwen answered for Shelley. The head of ops gave a quick nod. “You’ve found the circle assassinating our people?”

Shelley snorted. “It’s amazing how many people believe the urban legend that the traffic cameras aren’t actually on or monitored. The last guy was careless. But,” and here he paused and looked up and directly at Basil, “it wasn’t until we went to search your lab after you two took off that we could find the final destination. We had him on traffic cameras all through London, but once he hit the countryside he was gone. We knew the direction he was
headed
 — the Flasher residue gave us the location.”