Yesterday's Hero (24 page)

“Devon?” Aiko arches her eyebrows.

“Oh.” I shrug, slightly taken aback by her tone. Almost… accusatory? “She’s a researcher. New. Probably very good at her job.” I realize I’m not totally sure what Devon has researched for us so far. “Probably,” I repeat, due, apparently, to my desire to emphasize my lack of clarity on the issue.

“Is she good-looking?” Aiko asks, which seems oddly off-topic.

I blink. “Well, erm…” I look to the others for help, but they are both taking large drafts from their pints. “I mean, she’s a bit…” How to put this? “Well I’m dating someone. But, you know, if I weren’t. Well, I… wouldn’t… date Devon.” I limp to an end. I am not sure that’s really what I meant to say or if it’s what anyone wanted to hear.

Somehow Malcolm is still working on that same sip.

“Girlfriend?” Aiko’s eyebrows are still up.

“Leave him alone,” Jasmine says, slapping Aiko’s arm with the back of her hand. But Aiko doesn’t stop looking at me.

I have a horrible feeling I might know what the cat-and-mouse smile was all about last time I saw Aiko here. But I think I’d rather pretend I don’t.

“Err… yeah.” I take cover behind my pint. “You met her. At the Natural History Museum. Not the goth girl. That’s Tabitha. The smartly dressed, pretty woman.”

“The ice queen?” Jasmine’s eyebrows meet Aiko’s up in the stratosphere.

Malcolm finally puts down his pint. “Jasmine,” he rumbles.

“Oh.” She toys with her headphones. “Sorry. I just… Totally not what I meant.”

“It’s OK,” I say. “She can be brusque at first.” I smile a little. I think I thought something similar about Felicity when I first met her.

“Does she know you’re here?” Aiko asks. She’s going to give herself frown lines if she keeps her eyebrows up there much longer.

“Oh,” I start, then go back to my pint.

“What will she do if she finds out?” Aiko asks, all sweet innocence.

I need a “get out of jail” card really badly right now. And then I realize that out of all the people I know, Coleman has provided me with one.

“Oh my God,” I say, “I haven’t even told you the worst part yet.”

“So tell us,” Malcolm says with unusual quickness.

So I tell them, or at least I tell Jasmine and Malcolm, without really risking a look at Aiko, about Coleman’s mad plan to EMP London.

“Wait.” Jasmine holds up a hand. “Like, seriously?”

“Completely.” I nod.

“No.” Aiko shakes her head. “No he can’t do that. That’s too big. Everything? The financial district…” She shakes her head again. “He can’t.”

“He says he has approval.” I shrug.

“Do anything they damn want.” I glance at Malcolm. Either his Guinness has done something to piss him off or it’s getting the brunt of a glare meant for someone else.

“You remembered to take your meds today, right, Malcolm?” Jasmine reaches over and pats Malcolm’s arm. He shrugs it off. This is not a joke, I realize. I flashback to my conversation with Clyde about the unsuitability of the Weekenders as colleagues.

“Still got the right to be pissed,” Malcolm mutters.

“Wait.” Aiko half drops her pint onto the table. She stares across the table. “Wait. Hold on a fucking minute. No electricity.” All the playfulness is gone from her. She looks stricken. “Big Ben.”

“Big Ben?” Jasmine looks dismissive. “Like tourists won’t be able to tell the time for…” Then she gets it too. “Oh shit.”

And again, they see it so quickly and so clearly. Something that no one at MI37 seems capable of seeing. And how do I bring that vision across.

“The Russians will be able to teleport into the Chronometer,” I say. “They’ll be able to take time apart.”

“Oh fuck,” Aiko says. She teaches small children with that mouth.

“This Coleman guy is, like, a complete prick, isn’t he?” Jasmine says. “Like, just totally.”

“Like, just totally,” I say.

“It’s worse.” Malcolm’s baritone sweeps under the rising sense of panic at the table like a riptide. We all turn to stare. “They might want to turn back time,” Malcolm says, “but they won’t. Nobody will be doing shit after they go in there.”

“Malcolm,” Jasmine sounds as stern as her years will allow, “you
did
take your meds today, didn’t you?”

Malcolm turns to her, slow as thunderheads rolling through the sky. “Residual. Effect.”

And… Oh shit. Oh balls.

“What?” Aiko doesn’t see it.

“We were just talking about it.” I try to keep my head up, to support it under the weight of the colossal fuck-up in the Russian’s plans that I now see. “The residual effect of these spells. Things coming unstuck in space and time. And what if one of them teleports in right next to the Chronometer? What if the very thing governing time comes unstuck?”

I
t’s difficult, I find, to fully hold in my mind something enormous. Even something like an elephant. Ears, trunk, tail—I have to break them down into small manageable parts.

Time itself, unstuck in time. That’s enormous. I can’t… I give it one more try. No I can’t quite grasp that.

“Bits of the world.” Aiko shakes her head as if trying to clear it. “Bits of everything. Some moving forward in time. Some just in stasis. Some slipping back. It wouldn’t… You couldn’t live in a place like that. It would be the end of everything.”

A phrase of Clyde’s slips into my mind. “Standard end-of-the-world scenario.”

There’s silence at the table. Around us the pub patrons carry on drinking, and laughing, and talking about lives, and loves, and all the petty bullshit that we seem to fit in between the important moments. And it seems briefly wondrous because it suddenly seems so fragile, so close to not being.

“I don’t want to be a total downer,” Jasmine breaks the silence, “but, like, a lot of your stories seem to involve the Russians kicking your arse.”

I shake my head. She’s right. “We can’t take them alone,” I say. I know the enormity of what I’m going to ask them. “We need more people. We need MI37. I need you to help me prove to them that this is real.” And I have to remember that this was my plan all along. This shouldn’t seem so daunting. Nothing has changed. Except the stakes.

“And why,” Malcolm rumbles like the warning of an earthquake to come, “would they listen to us?”

“Evidence,” I say, earnest as a preacher man. “Undeniable evidence.”

Malcolm isn’t done. “And why,” he says, “would we want to work with them?”

“Because,” Jasmine answers before I can, “they’re totally awesome.”

Malcolm does not appear convinced. But instead of answering him, I look at Aiko, the tie-breaker.

“What are you thinking, Agent Arthur?” she asks me. This time I think less of a Cheshire cat and more of a sphinx.

“We need them,” I say. “You saw what just two Russians did at the British Museum. And there are so many more.”

“And what,” she asks, “makes you think that MI37 will want to work with us?”

And that’s the million-dollar question, in the end. “If you’re the ones that go to them with the evidence,” I start, “undeniable evidence—”.

“They’ll cut us out.” Aiko finishes for me.

“I won’t let them.” I’m defiant.

She smiles, a little sad, a little sweet. “If you had that much pull, you wouldn’t be here in the first place.”

And she’s right, of course. I massage my temples. Suddenly it feels just like being back at MI37. “So,” I say, “we let the Russians win because of pissing matches?”

Aiko lets out an exhalation of amusement. “No.” She shakes her head. “We’ll fight with you, Agent Arthur. But if you’re planning to lead on this one, I’d rather you had your eyes wide open.”

And, God, I could kiss her.

Except… well, I totally have a girlfriend. Just a figure of speech. Nothing else.

“Can I just say,” Jasmine interrupts my mental backpedaling, “that this is totally awesome.”

Malcolm rolls his eyes.

And, OK, this is on. This is happening. There is traction, forward momentum. And it has been so long since I felt that way.

“We need to go to places the Russians have been,” I say, “back to Trafalgar Square, the British Library, the Natural History Museum, places we know they’ve used intradimensional magic. We need to find out more about its effects. We need to research the meteorite they stole. We need to find out everything. And Chernobyl. We have to know more about Chernobyl. That’s the key to all this, I think. The lynchpin.”

And they’re nodding. All of them are nodding. Even Malcolm.

We divvy up the duties, we buy more drinks, and in that moment I’m even deluded enough to feel like it all might be possible.

October 12th. One day closer to the deadline.

I
ride down the elevator to the basement of 85 Vauxhall Cross, trying to rid myself of the mild nausea the last MI37 staff meeting has given me.

It was all going so well. A status meeting. One Coleman had blown off via email as “a waste of fucking time.” It almost didn’t matter that none of us had anything. I’m not sure I really expect us to find anything until we start chasing the right leads. The Russians have gone to ground most thoroughly.

But then… just after Tabitha told us the past 10 years of records on Russian spies were giving her nothing, just after Felicity had given us her version of a pep talk, Clyde stepped forward.

“I just want you to know I can help,” he’d said. “I can be useful.”

God, a vacuum cleaner is useful. Not a person.

Then, across the table—sliding them with those long elegant fingers that don’t really belong to him—four flash drives. “If you need help,” he said. He looked at Tabitha, but she didn’t look at him. “It’s a copy of an application based upon some personality algorithms I’ve been working on.” He spoke carefully, no margin for error in his words. No margin for himself. “So if you want a digital personal assistant, a pretty advanced one, like the one I downloaded onto Tabby’s laptop then you can just run it on your machine at home.”

Devon had balked. “These are copies of you?”

Clyde again looked to Tabitha. “No,” he said. “A digital personal assistant based upon personality algorithms—”

“Yeah,” Tabitha cut him off, voice an octave below its usual pitch. “It’s a copy of him.”

Devon left hers on the table. I wanted to do the same. But how do you do that to a friend? To what’s left of a friend?

So now, I’m riding down in an elevator, with Clyde in my pocket, and a bottomless hole in my stomach.

Subbasement 3

The elevator doors ping open. The corridor is gloomy, has a musty, abandoned smell. It reminds me of the MI37 facilities back in Oxford. I feel abruptly homesick.

I’m following up on an idea I had last night. Someone wrapped up in all this that no one seems to have thought to question.

The guy at the MI6 front desk gave me an office number. But now I’m down here, the labeling of office doors seems to have been carried out by drunken preschoolers. It’s only after fifteen minutes of walking in circles that I find the right one.

I knock. There is no reply. I try the knob. It turns easily and the door swings open.

My jaw swings open a little bit too.

I am at the top of a flight of gray aluminum stairs. They take angular turns, leading fifteen feet down to a small concrete platform jammed full of rickety metal shelving. The shelves are covered in tool boxes, battered textbook-sized instruction manuals, scrolls. A small desk covered in novelty ashtrays has been jammed into one corner. Beyond the platform the floor drops another six feet, and beyond…

I stare out over a vast subterranean warehouse.

There are more shelves, bigger ones. Some loaded down with pallets and plastic yellow crates. Bronze statues, ankhs, glittering crystals, chipped marble busts, odd gnarls of machinery, strings of dirty jewelry, dried plant
stalks, candlesticks, crucifixes,
unidentifiable chunks of wood, tiny glass vials
—all overflow from the containers,
spilling onto the shelving. There’s a forklift parked down there. There are wider spaces. Glass tanks filled with amorphous shapes floating in ochre fluid. Cages full of stuffed animals with too many heads, too many limbs, too many species mixed into their forms. I can see the two halves of the Trafalgar Square lion Clyde kebobbed the other day leaning up against one wall.

And a tree. In the middle of it all, a tree reaching towards the cavernous ceiling.

A tree that’s waving at me.

“Arthur, mate. You are like a vision of bustiness to a sex-deprived man.”

“Winston?” Jesus. He’s still a tree.

“Meant that in a totally heterosexual way,” Winston qualifies. “Not that there’s anything wrong with the other way.” He shakes branches at me trying to fix my attention as he wrestles his own under control. “You have got to get me out of here, man.”

“Winston,” I repeat, still trying to recover. He isn’t the person I was looking for. “What are you doing here? What’s going on?”

“What’s going on? What’s going on?” Winston throws up his branches, almost toppling a column of precariously stacked wooden crates. “I’ll tell you what’s going on. I’m bloody wilting is what’s going on.”

It takes me a while to realize that this is meant literally. I seem to have trouble keeping up with the recently metamorphosed. But yes, I’ll admit his leaves do look pale and droopy.

“Daylight bulbs aren’t cutting it man. And the bowl of water this dick has me standing in is hardly bloody sufficient for root growth. I need a park. I need greenery. Wind in my hair. Somewhere I can really settle in.” The bark whorls of his face knot together, a look of pain. “I need some bloody company.”

I start to descend the stairs, sorting out the signal from the Winston-generated noise, trying to get to the facts. “
Who
put you in a bowl of water?” I say just before I enter into the warren of bookshelves.

“I bloody did.”

I almost fall the last four feet of the stairs. The short man emerges from around the corner of the bookshelf, almost seems to detach himself from it. I feel like a cloud of smoke and a rimshot on the drums wouldn’t be amiss.