Yesterday's Hero (12 page)

“Anyway, these folk had all failed the vetting for, and this is important, I think, for a reason. It wasn’t just, you know, random capriciousness. Significant factor in the universe though it may be. But there were reasons. And those reasons, well it’s why we don’t know anyone who was on that original
Weekenders team. They’re not in the fight any more. Not because they stopped
believing. Not because they got tired. They died, Arthur. They were killed. Not metaphorically, or in a manner of speaking, or as an exaggeration. It’s just, this is a dangerous job. I know you know that. I’m not trying to speak down to you. I mean in a literal sense, yes, given my height, I am speaking down, but now I’ve gone back to colloquialisms and idioms and all that. And, what I’m trying to say is that the people in the Weekenders, they’re not right for this sort of work. It kills them.

“And—and this is really my point, Arthur, I’m getting there in the end—every time, every single time they’ve been involved in an MI37 operation, one of our people has died too.”

He takes his eyes off the road, looks straight at me. I can feel the gaze through the mask. “They kill us, Arthur,” he
says. “They don’t mean to. They have the best of intentions. But they mess up. And they die. And we die. So the only decent thing to do, the only right thing to do, and that’s why I started this whole thing by saying you’re a good chap, a chap trying to do the right thing, but the only thing to do is to try and stop them.”

Finally he falls silent. He stares at the road. After a minute’s silence he puts the radio back on. Someone talking about the best way to baste a turkey.

They die.

We die.

I don’t want to die. I don’t want anyone to die. But—and I’m probably going to regret this… But I’ve never in my life trusted absolute statements. In this world, it seems to me, there is nothing that is totally certain. Especially these days, when reality seems to break every five seconds.

“Look,” I say, “you’re telling me Aiko, Jasmine, Malcolm—they’re all brand-new Weekenders, pretty much.” I suspect I sound like I’m grabbing at straws. Maybe I am. “So how do we know working with these ones is going to kill us? It’s a generalization. It doesn’t take the individuals into account.”

What pass for Clyde’s eyes leave the road again.

“The individuals?” he says. He sounds slightly incredulous. “Arthur, I mean, again, not to condescend, but that girl Jasmine, she’s seventeen years old. She’s not been to school since she was thirteen. Malcolm West—”

Another tremor in his arm, I note.

“—was dishonorably discharged from the military, and then was kicked out of Blackwater in disgrace. You know how messed up you have to be for Blackwater to declare you a disgrace?”

I do have to concede the straws are beginning to get a little harder to grab now.

“What about Aiko?” I say. Of all of them, it seems hard to object to her.

Another violent shiver from Clyde. “Honestly? I’m surprised they let her near children.”

“What?” Are we talking about the same woman?

“She’s a total conspiracy theory nut. And, well, I realize ‘nut’ is a pejorative term, and maybe I should be more understanding, but she logs an average of sixty hours a week on internet forums and chat rooms talking about how JFK and Elvis are the same person.”

“Oh.” Not the most reassuring things to hear. And, well, Clyde does have a case against them. A good case even. Might even hold up in court.

But it’s not like MI37 is made up of the most balanced people either. And they helped save my life. Clyde’s life too. So I remain that obstinate juror demanding a smoking gun.

“What about time magic?” I say.

“It’s impossible, Arthur.” Clyde sounds almost exasperated. Like he thought better of me. “It’s just another form of intradimensional magic. Trying to punch out of a reality’s timestream and then into the same reality’s timestream further along. Trying to change time within one part of one reality. It’s not possible. It was all part of Chernobyl. It all ended in a big smoking hole that no one can live in and which causes terrible things to happen to wildlife. Sort of like the anti-RSPCA. Apart from the smoking hole bit. I don’t know what the opposite of that would be. Maybe if the RSPCA started building mountains. But, what I’m saying is that sort of magic doesn’t turn back time or turn shelves into trees. It just kills people.”

Jesus. With that sort of glass-half-empty attitude, no wonder he looked so grumpy.

I shrug, still not entirely cowed by logic. “It just seems like we’re making a lot of generalizations without taking the specific events into account.”

“Crazy people,” Clyde says. “Illusion magic.” It is a remarkably succinct summary of his arguments. If he wasn’t using them to argue against me, I’d compliment him.

“Illusion magic,” I argue, “is like an argument get-out-of-jail-free card. You didn’t break into the bank, some other guy did it, it just looked that way because of illusion magic.

“Time,” Clyde informs me, “was concretized back with the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time as an international standard.”

It seems a mean debating technique to just go and pull reality out from under my feet again.

“Time was concretized?” I ask. I almost don’t want to, but in the end not knowing this stuff just leads to… well it leads to this sort of conversation.

“Oh.” Clyde shakes his head. “Well, you see, when Greenwich Mean Time was established as an international standard there was this clock built. Ceremonial thing. But time sort of got tied to it. Still not wholly sure how that happened. Poses some interesting questions about collective perception and the nature of reality. How expectation influences probability. Really interesting fringe math in that area actually. Maybe I can access, a few papers…” His right leg starts to quiver and we veer slightly.

“Clyde…” I’d rather his leg tremors didn’t send us into oncoming traffic.

“Right.” Clyde nods. “Read those later. But yes. Time. Concretized. In a clock. Called the Chronometer, actually. Not the most original name really. Might as well just have called it ‘The Clock’ and be done with it. But polysyllables make some folk feel smarter I assume. Anyway, yes. Time. The Chronometer. Inexplicably linked. Wind the Chronometer forward, time goes forward. Wind it back, time goes back. So nobody does really.”

I intend to say something like, “What?” or possibly, “Why?” but instead I let out an ugly sort of grunt. I’m beginning to notice that having my preconceptions beaten out of me seems to affect my speech centers first.

So… time travel
is
possible. And we haven’t…

“Hitler?” I manage to say.

“Yes,” Clyde says and leaves it at that.

“Why didn’t we…?”

“Oh! Sorry.” Clyde shrugs twice. “I meant, yes, that is the obvious application. But, well, you know, the possibility of reality-annihilating paradoxes causing the Chernobyl explosion to happen at an atomic level throughout the entire universe. That sort of thing.”

Which does seem like a good reason really.

“Where is it?” I ask. Because it’s as good a question as any I have.

“They put it in Big Ben,” Clyde says. “Sort of symbolic I suppose.”

“Wait.” I try to wrap my head round that one. “Big Ben? The tourist attraction? The first thing to get blown up in every terrorist movie set in London ever?”

“Well,” Clyde says, “to be fair to the chaps that put it there, it’s in a massive, lead-lined titanium room, with its own anti-magic field, surrounded by about a hundred fully-armed SAS ninjas.”

“We have ninjas?” It’s possible that’s not the most important point, but I just have to know.

“Oh,” Clyde says. “I just sort of figured. I mean, if you’re an international power player, shouldn’t you have ninjas?”

That’s something I would have dismissed out of hand not so long ago. Now I’m genuinely worried he may have a point.

Actually, I’m a little worried he’s right about everything. Time magic. The Weekenders. I could have put them in danger. Put my friends in danger. My girlfriend.

George Coleman can be in danger. I’d be fine with that.

But, Jesus, can I be so off on this? I was never a cop to go on gut instinct. Follow the evidence. Follow the paperwork.

But there’s something about this… I don’t know. I just don’t know.

Clyde drives on, and the rain begins to fall.

MI37 offices, Oxford

“T
hat’s it?” Coleman barks at me. He paces back and forth across the conference room floor, puffing his chest out like a preening peacock. Actually, you can lose the “pea.”

I remain looking at Felicity, the primary recipient of my report on our London escapade—the Russians, Winston, the Weekenders, the conversation I had with them afterwards, theories of time magic. She remains, impassive, against the wall.

“Did I miss anything, Clyde?” I am trying to play it cool in the face of Coleman’s bluster.

“What?” Clyde shudders. “No. No.” He shrugs then says it again, “No.”

And thanks for joining us, Clyde. I think the ability to read at any time is going to seriously damage his social skills.

“So?” Coleman examines his corpulent fingers. “You didn’t get the papers I sent you for.” One finger up. “You didn’t capture the Russians.” Another finger. “And you told unauthorized individuals about military secrets.” The third finger. “What do you do for an encore, Wallace, fuck my daughter?”

He steps forward on the last. A schoolboy bully. But if he wants me to kowtow, Coleman’s going to have to try harder.

“George,” Felicity interjects into the tense little space between us, “you don’t have a daughter.”

Coleman flaps a hand at her. “It’s an expression, Felicity,” he says.

Only I call her Felicity.

“Well?” Coleman shoves his finger at me. “What do you have to say for yourself? What mitigating circumstances permitted such a colossal fuck up?”

I stare at that finger. Not exactly the scariest thing that’s been pointed at me today.

“Where exactly were you during the mission?” I ask. “What support did you provide?” I will not be intimidated by him.

Coleman’s cheeks go beet red. “Mission?” he spits. “Mission? It was a request to go to the fucking library, Wallace. I asked you to get a book out. I didn’t think you’d need an armed guard. Next time I’ll just send my goddamn grandmother.”

“We were attacked,” I enunciate clearly, “by two Russian wizards. They ambushed us. And we killed one of them.”

I’d not usually use the death of another human being as demonstration of a victory. No matter what someone does, killing them always seems a little extreme. But Coleman is pushing me to an edge here.

“Yes!” Coleman says. “You even let the retarded treeman stomp on our one potential witness. I mean, bravo, Wallace. A real clean sweep of fuck ups.” He turns his back on me.

I throw up my hands. “Is there even a point to this?” And I know the point, I’ve seen this before on wildlife documentaries. This is a pissing match. Establishing patterns of dominance. Coleman wants us all to recognize him as an alpha dog. Big man on campus. And I am far from an alpha male, but that doesn’t mean I want Coleman pissing on my lawn.

He wheels round. “What’s that?” he barks.

“I said,” I speak slowly, and instead of looking at him, I look at Felicity, “is there a point to all this?”

Coleman approaches me slowly, predatory. And I get to take note of the fact that, while he is getting heavy at his waistline, he is a larger man than me. He invades my personal space, fills it with his bulk.

“How do you think you’d fare, Agent Wallace,” Coleman asks, “against one of the Russians on your own?” There is a bite beyond conversational to his tone now.

“You mean without the wonderful support you provided today?” I’m not going down without swinging a few conversational punches of my own.

“From what I gather,” Coleman continues ignoring my defiance, “you did pretty much zippo to actually defend yourself. Your country. Faffed around a bit. Pulled your gun. Shot a tree. Lost your gun. Without a bunch of untrained, unprofessional, un...” he spits and froths, “...idiots, you would have died.”

Another sneer. “But on your own, Wallace, would you contribute anything other than a few pints of blood to a fight?”

And he does, unfortunately, have a point. Combat is hardly my field of expertise. It’s worked out so far, but it’s because I am with surprisingly competent people, like Clyde, and Kayla, and Felicity, and Malcolm West from the Weekenders.

“We won today,” I say, refusing to go down under one conversational punch.

“I think you’re dead weight, Wallace,” Coleman spits. “You’re not a leader. Not a fighter. Not a researcher. You know only jack and shit. You bring us nothing. And if you don’t find something soon, Wallace,” my name has become an insult, “if you’re not a team player, if you can’t keep your mouth shut around civilians, if you so much as utter a word to those idiot Weekenders again, if you don’t shape up, Wallace, then alone is exactly how you’ll find yourself. In the dark. Cut off. With no one to help you when the bogeymen come knocking.” He peers in close once more. Voice barely audible even to me. “And I think I know exactly how that’ll go,” he says. “And you do too.” He turns his back. “You pathetic excuse for an agent.”

And screw him. I want to hit him. To feel his nose break. God knows if I could break his nose, but God I’d love to feel it. Except he’s pulling rank. He’s saying he could fire me. And there’s a chance he could. Jesus, there’s a chance that most of what he’s saying is even true. I mean, I certainly didn’t kill anyone today. And I basically let Clyde run the mission. But to deliver the news like such a complete jackass. No, I will not stand for that.

“We’ll see,” I say, “who’s standing at the end of this.”

Coleman laughs. An ugly laugh. Too confident for my liking too.

And nothing from the peanut gallery. Clyde, still blank and silent. Too close to a meat statue for real comfort. Kayla, disconnected. Tabitha pissed at both of us for wasting her time. And nothing from Felicity. No leaping to my defense. No putting Coleman in his place.