Yesterday's Hero (19 page)

“Understood.” A nod from her. She finally lets the smile fade, playing the attentive student.

“The Russians were in Trafalgar Square today,” I say.

“I know that.” She looks as if I just revealed to her the great and wonderful secret that the sky is blue.

“You do?”

“I’ve just gone on and on about how I am relatively adept at navigating to the truth and avoiding cultural misdirection put about by such things as government-sponsored mass media. I’m perfectly capable of working out what’s a set of demands by magical terrorists and what’s a publicity stunt gone awry.”

In some ways it’s reassuring to know that our cover stories are seen through. I always feel more effort should be dedicated to duping the public. When it’s easy, I lose a little bit of faith in my humanity.

“Alright,” I say. “Well the Russians and MI37 also had a bit of a disagreement. It got physical.” She rolls her eyes. “I know you know,” I say. “I’m just giving background. Anyway, I became…” I hesitate over the wording, “separated from the main fight.” She raises her eyebrows but I plunge on, ignoring her. “I came across two more Russians,” I say. “They were hanging back. They were talking about events in Trafalgar Square being a distraction. The whole thing about nuking London being a distraction.” And now I do have her attention. “They were talking about a woman called Katerina being at Big Ben—”

“Where the Chronometer is,” Aiko interrupts me.

And that was it. That’s what I’d been talking about. Clyde and I. The Chronometer. Located in Big Ben. Protected by an anti-magic field and ninjas. I remember now.

Time magic. Again. Around and around it goes. And I still can’t find my way to the center of it all.

Which brings me back to why I’m here.

“There’s more,” I say. “This,” I wave at my battered face, “happened because of a fight with one of them. And I’m not the world’s greatest fist-fighter, but normally I don’t suck this bad.”

Aiko looks more doubtful than I think is kind.

“I look this way,” I say with gravitas, “because he was a
teleporter
.” I let that word hang there.

Her eyes go wide. And she gets it. She gets the significance of that word.

“You saw it?” she says.

I nod. And this is the reaction this sort of news should get. This is appropriate. And even though the pain is starting to cut through the drugs, I smile.

“They’ve done it.” Aiko is nodding to herself. “They’ve actually done it. Intradimensional magic.” She’s wide-eyed with wonder.

“You realize,” I say, because I need to check, “that that’s not a good thing, right?”

“No, no, of course not. I know. But still… Christ.” She bites her bottom lip.

And this is it for her, I realize. This is what it’s all about. Where her involvement in this supernatural world circles back to her love of conspiracy theories. Hidden knowledge. That’s her personal crack, and I just gave her a hit off the pipe.

“You believe me?” I ask, just to double-check. I feel I should partly because now I know her personal issue with belief and partly because I’m decreasingly familiar with the experience and some verbal confirmation would be good.

“Well.” Aiko looks up at me, bites her lip again. “I haven’t seen it with my own eyes, but let’s say you’re a credible source. I don’t see why you’d just come here to mess with me.”

I smile again, a small one, but it runs deep.

We sit there silently for a while, she basking in her newfound knowledge, me in my newfound believer. A cult of two.

“You going to eat those?” She indicates the crisps.

“All yours.” She takes the pack, pounds down another fistful. “You know what I don’t get?” she says. I shake my head. “If they’ve worked out how to bend time and space, why would they be interested in the Chronometer? They don’t need it. Why go to the bother of luring you guys to Trafalgar Square just so one of them can sightsee?”

I shake my head. Try to think through the fog of fading drugs and blossoming pain.

“There has to be some limit to what they’re doing,” I say. “They have to need the Chronometer instead. Maybe they can’t travel so far, or…” I stare into the depths of my coke.

“When would they want to go back to?” Aiko asks.

“Chernobyl?” I venture. It’s the vaguest of guesses. It just seems like it has to be the answer to something.

No response from Aiko. I look up from the coke to see if she’s looking at me like I’m an errant child again. Somehow it’s both an aggravating and an endearing look at the same time.

But she’s not giving me a look like that. Instead she’s giving me wide-eyed fear.

“Oh my God,” she says.

“What?” I glance over my shoulders looking for Russians, for a pissed off Coleman with a shotgun. There’s nothing there.

“Chernobyl,” she says. She’s seeing something I don’t. “The space-time experiment. The definitive one. The one that would have allowed the USSR to win the cold war. They know how to do it right. That’s what we’re saying, right? That they figured out how to do space-time magic.”

And it hits me then, the fullness of it.

“They want to go back,” I say. “Back to Chernobyl. They want to do it right. They want to rewrite twenty-five years of history.”

W
e spend the rest of the evening stress-testing the idea. Double-checking ourselves for paranoia.

But it holds water. It makes sense. No matter how we come at it, the facts actually tally with this theory. There’s only one last objection I keep butting my head against.

“They can’t do it,” I say.

“Why not?” Aiko looks a little frustrated at this blanket statement after three hours of solid discussion and napkin diagrams.

“Because they’ll be killed. There’s about a hundred soldiers in there.”

“So they just teleport past them. Go right to the Chronometer itself, wind it back, and goodbye goes today.”

“They can’t,” I say, remembering the conversation with Clyde clearly now. “There’s an anti-magic field of some sort around the Chronometer.”

“An anti-magic field?” Both her eyebrows bounce up.

“Not my words.” I wave my hand.

“And I’m the conspiracy theory nut?”

We’re off-topic. “They can’t teleport in,” I repeat. “They have to face the guards. And several hundred or so of them. Special forces ninjas or some such. And I don’t care how good the Russians are, they won’t get past several hundred guys,” I catch her look, “or girls.”

“So why was this Katerina at Big Ben today?” she asks. “Why give you guys a deadline of the seventeenth? I mean, that’s only eight days away now. Why go public at all?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know.” I shake my head. I genuinely feel like crap now. I slump against the booth and regret the platter of fish and chips.

“You OK?” Aiko asks me.

I shake my head.

“You want me to give you a lift? My car’s not too far from here.”

“No.” I shake my head again. “If I’m seen with you…” I trail off, not sure if the imagined repercussions will really be worse than the actual ones.

“Agent Arthur,” Aiko says, “are you cheating on MI37 with me?” That cat-and-mouse smile is on her lips again.

I smile too, despite myself. But I’m stopping things right here. I’m still pissed at Felicity, but I’m neither angry nor high enough to get stupid. “I should catch a cab.”

She comes out and helps me flag one down. It’s still raining, but I’m rapidly losing the use of my arms.

“We should talk more about this,” she tells me as I climb into the car.

“Yes.” I nod. We should. But… “I’m going to have to run this past the others at MI37,” I say. Aiko deserves to know. Because when I tell them I won’t be able to mention her. And I don’t know what will happen to her role in things after that.

“Sure.” She nods, like she was expecting it.

“I’m not trying to shut you out of this.”

She nods, resigned to the fact. “They won’t believe you,” she says, “just so you know.”

She thinks the worst of them, and I can’t truly blame her. But maybe I know them better. “They’re not bad people,” I tell her.

“You’re not a bad person, Arthur,” she says, “but do you believe me that powerful financiers in Switzerland organized JFK’s death?”

She’s got a point.

“You planning on actually going anywhere tonight, mate?” asks the cabby.

I make my apologies, say my final goodbye to Aiko. “I’ll call you,” I say.

“I know,” she says. Again, the cat-and-mouse smile is back.

Not enough hours later

“W
ake up, Arthur. Wake up.” Soft but insistent words. Each one like a velvet-wrapped brick trying to cave in my skull.

I crack an eyelid. Light lances in and tries to spear my brain.

A silhouette—the only patch of blessed darkness—resolves itself into Felicity. She gives me a quick, tight smile. “We should talk,” she says. “But you needed sleep, so I let you go as late as I could. You’ve got ten minutes.”

“Uuh,” I reply, and roll off the bed.

The previous night slowly resolves out of the pain of waking. The beating. The conversation with Aiko. The startling wisdom of sneaking into my hotel room and going to bed without discussing the day’s events with Felicity while crashing off a potent cocktail of drugs.

But now I’m sober, what do I say to her? I’m in no state for a fight.

Felicity touches my arm as I find my feet. “Just…” she stops. Complicated emotions move beneath the surface of her skin. “You’ll do better today, Arthur. I know you will.”

MI6. October 11th. Three minutes after nine.

“What the hell is this, you tardy fucks?” Coleman eyes the collected mass of MI37 as we file into a conference room deep in the bowels of 85 Vauxhall Cross, the home of MI6.

I feel my blood pressure climbing. My head is still thundering. But I need to roll with the abuse. I need to make nice and convince this gargantuan arsehole that what he believes to be impossible is real.

Flop. Flop. Flop.

That’s not helping.

The MI6 conference room is nicer than the one we have in Oxford. There are no coffee mug rings on the table. There is, to my wide-eyed disbelief, a window.

“Alright, alright,” Coleman blusters. “Shut up. Listen. Big waggly things on the side of your head. Better-looking on some than on others.” He winks at Devon. “Use them.”

Kayla harrumphs.

“Wait.” I hold up my hand, taking advantage of the brief pause this causes Coleman. He looks at me like I’m a turd that just crawled off his shoe and asked to perform for the crowd.

“No,” Coleman says.

“About yesterday,” I start, ignoring him. Coleman takes a step towards me, but Felicity holds up a hand. Finally. Finally she has my back. And Coleman backs off.

I keep the smile locked down, tight in my gut. I can’t afford to spoil this now.

“I know we’ve talked about it before, about how teleportation is impossible. About how intradimensional magic is impossible.”

From the corner of my eye, I see Felicity, almost imperceptibly, shake her head. But she’s backed me to this point. She’ll listen.

“But I saw it happen yesterday.” I lock my eyes on Clyde and Tabitha. “A man teleported in front of me yesterday. Whatever science needed to be worked out—the Russians worked it out. They know how to do it.”

“No, Arthur,” Tabitha starts.

“It all goes back to Chernobyl.” I plunge on. I am not going to be shut down by denials. This is too big, too important. And I lay it all out for them, piece by piece, just the way Aiko and I went through it last night. Until it’s all there, before them. Definite. Undeniable.

“Are you kidding me, Arthur?”

Felicity says it. Felicity who has my back. She’s staring at me, incredulous. And no, she has to see this. She has to.

Coleman chuckles quietly to himself.

“Glamour, Arthur,” Tabitha says. “Illusion.”

“We covered this,” Felicity says, exasperated.

“That’s not how it was.” I shake my head. I look at Felicity. “You said you would look into this.”

“I did, Arthur.” It’s Clyde who replies. “Took me all of two minutes to scan the literature. Gift of incorporeality and all that. It’s still impossible. There’s not a single dissenting voice in the thaumaturgic community. And that’s not a crowd known for being unanimous about things. Except perhaps the wonderfulness of beards. But, you know, Occham’s razor and all that. Look for the simplest solution. So rather than it being the impossible answer, maybe there’s something more obvious. Maybe, whatever you thought you saw…”

He hesitates, looks to Shaw, who nods. “I looked up head trauma symptoms too, Arthur,” he says. “They can be terribly nasty buggers. Much like ferrets. Never saw why people keep those as pets. Teeth with furry tails and attitude problems if you ask me. Not the symptoms that is. Ferrets. But the symptoms, they include altered memories and changed perceptions. Which could account for everything you think you remember. How you interpret it. Seems a little more likely. Wouldn’t you say?” He nods encouragingly.

Goddammit. This is… I shake my head vehemently. “I am not remembering this wrong.” I try to make it sound undeniable, but I fear I just sound petulant. “I saw what I saw. He moved. He teleported. It’s real. The game has changed. They’re going to change it. They’re going to go back and give teleportation technology to the Russians in the eighties. During the Magical Arms Race. They’re going to change it so that they win.”

Coleman keeps on smiling like the mouse who got the whole fucking Edam. I look to Felicity, imploring.

“Stop it, Arthur,” she says. “Just… Jesus, I thought you were going to apologize.”

I throw up my hands. “I have nothing to bloody apologize for! I bought Clyde time. I had the shit kicked out of me.”

And… I don’t know. When does fighting for what’s right just become banging your head against a wall? I look at the door.

“Feel free,” Coleman says. He steps aside, proffers the exit with one sarcastically gracious hand.

“George…” Felicity starts. But she doesn’t finish. Leaves the line and me hanging.