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Or just Pendennis?

He stifled the thought. It couldn't be Pendennis. Pendennis had escaped.

Hadn't he?

The figure on the floor didn't move. Nick floated closer, swinging to the left to get a better view of the man's face. Was it Pendennis? He looked the right size. Small, slightly built. But that could apply to any kid, maybe Upper Heywood were taking in juveniles now?

The face rippled before him, the forehead clearing then the chin, a shifting heat haze obscuring then revealing then . . .

 . . .shattering every presumption that Nick had constructed over the past twenty-four hours.

Peter Pendennis was sitting cross-legged on the floor. And even worse. He was smiling. His eyes looking straight at Nick.

Nick shot to his left. Only a few feet but he had to make sure. Would Pendennis's eyes follow? Was he really looking at him?

The room flowed and rippled. Teasing glimpses, then slowly Pendennis's face cleared. His eyes hadn't moved. Neither had the smile.

Louise wasn't surprised at Nick's news.

"I've been thinking while you've been away," she said. One of the by-products of an hour spent cleaning the kitchen. Plenty of time to allow the mind to wander. "Remember you asked me who else could have a motive to frame you?"

Nick grunted a reply which Louise took for a yes. He hadn't moved from his bed since he returned. Now he was sat on its edge, head in hands and looking like a sad bloodhound whose owner had just died.

"You forgot about the Americans," she said, waiting for a reaction.

"What Americans?" said Nick, his face still buried, his voice distracted.

"Think about it. You send a message to SHIFT asking for John Bruce's brain scan and the next day someone frames you for murder."

Nick looked up. "I hardly think NASA . . ."

"Why not?" Louise jumped in. "If something happened to John Bruce during the SHIFT flight and they covered it up . . ."

"No." Nick tried to wave Louise's argument away. "NASA may be obsessed with image but they're not going to kill to protect it."

"You don't know what they're capable of."

"But why kill? All they'd need do is doctor the scans and the problem goes away. No need to kill anyone."

He looked tired and frustrated but Louise pressed. She'd been thinking of nothing else for the past hour and knew she was on to something. If only because nothing else made sense.

"Couldn't you tell if the scans had been doctored?"

"I'm an astropsychologist not a computer scientist."

"But they wouldn't know that. You could be talking to anyone. At the college, friends . . ."

He shook his head then reverted to staring at the floor.

"Okay, so what about this." Louise switched the HV back on. "I was checking this when you rematerialised."

A picture of John Bruce arriving outside a restaurant appeared.

"That's from two nights ago. He's attending a SHIFT reunion."

Louise waited for a response. Her turn to play the stage magician.

"So?" said Nick.

"So that was the day you sent the query to SHIFT. What would be more natural than an old colleague passing on a warning?"

Nick looked baffled. "What warning?"

Louise rolled her eyes. Was he being deliberately obtuse?

"Think about it. He's in the middle of an election campaign. How's a request for his old brain scans going to be viewed? Someone's going to think dirty tricks. If not John then one of his handlers or backers. And I've seen some of the organisations that are supposedly backing him. Right wing extremists."

She had his attention. "John Bruce is linked to right-wing extremists?"

"Some of his supporters are. I'm not saying John's an extremist but he's attracted money from unsavoury characters. And that's all it takes. One madman who hears about your enquiry and sees it as an attempt to discredit John Bruce by saying his brain was damaged in the SHIFT flight."

"But why frame me for murder? Why not frighten me off? Two large men on the doorstep would have sufficed. A bribe would have been nice."

"You're assuming these people were thinking straight . . ."

"No," he jumped to his feet. "I don't buy that. If someone wanted me out of the way why not kill me? And why not do it quietly? Scattering body parts all over Oxford is a sure-fire way of attracting publicity. And If I'm still alive I can shout dirty tricks and point my finger at John Bruce. That would be the last thing they'd want."

She'd thought of that too. "What if the point wasn't to kill you but to warn you off? Think about it. They don't know if you're working on your own or with a group. So they send everyone a message. Back off or it'll get a hell of a lot worse."

He paced between the boxes before swinging round and shaking his head.

"But I didn't get the message, did I? I thought it was Pendennis."

"But they wouldn't have known about Pendennis. You said it yourself, remember? How many Mafia bosses have I pissed off this week? Replace Mafia with 'dubious right wing organisations' and you'd have your answer. And think about the victim's tongue being cut out. An obvious warning for someone to keep quiet."

"And the nose?"

That was a problem . . . but she had an answer.

"Maybe that was a message too. Don't speak, don't look, don't touch, don't listen and don't poke your nose where it doesn't belong."

Nick shrugged. "What's the point of a message you need a PhD in lateral thinking to understand?"

"But they wouldn't see it like that, Nick. These people are obsessives. They eat, drink and sleep politics. To them everything would be about the campaign and they'd assume you were the same."

Nick sighed. "Maybe you're right."

He didn't look convinced.

Nick commandeered the HV remote while Louise prepared lunch. Maybe there was a news item on Pendennis's recapture. Something to resurrect his failing theory.

He voiced in 'Pendennis' and selected recent news. An apologetic news anchor appeared. "Sorry," she said. "We have nothing on that item."

He slumped forward, feeling the weight of the world once more pressing down upon his shoulders. Had Upper Heywood managed to keep Pendennis's escape and recapture a secret? Or was Louise right—he hadn't escaped in the first place?

Doubt. Despite what Louise said he was reluctant to let go of Pendennis as a suspect. He'd seen Pendennis in action. He'd seen the body. He'd seen the newsreels.

But . . .

He grabbed the remote again. Who were these dubious backers that Louise had talked about? He voiced in 'John Bruce' and 'organised crime' and selected news and documentaries. Back came the apologetic news anchor.

He expanded the search into the web and beyond. Hundreds of hits. He sifted through them, page after page of junk.

He returned to the news and documentary channels, replaced 'organised crime' with 'right-wing' and added 'campaign' and 'backers.' This time he found several hits, including a documentary from two months ago entitled 'John Bruce: where the money really comes from.' He clicked on it.

An excited reporter spent the next forty minutes trying to tie John Bruce to a right-wing plot to put Christianity at the heart of a future education system, replacing the three Rs with the three Cs—Christianity, Creationism and Chastity. It was trial by association. Yes, John Bruce received donations and occasionally shared platforms with members of the evangelical right but there was nothing to show he endorsed their ideals.

Not that facts featured very highly in the documentary's agenda. It was a typical pre-election hatchet job. Bruce was a committed Christian and a Republican, so trot out every right-wing scare story and attempt to trace a link to John, however tenuous or fanciful.

If anything John Bruce came across as politically naïve, someone in desperate need of campaign funds who was trying hard to please everyone he met.

Nick voiced in a new search. Extreme right and terror campaigns. Was there a history of framing people for murder?

Back came the matches. Bombings, shootings, stabbings. From the sample he saw, the extreme right favoured the direct approach—denounce, intimidate, beat up and kill. Surely if he'd been a target they'd have confronted him directly—firebombed his house, lobbied the college for his dismissal, attacked him in the street. Framing someone for murder was not their style.

Not that that ruled out a twisted fellow traveller. The ubiquitous loner with a warped imagination and a desire to see John Bruce as President.

He stabbed a finger at the news button. Time to check the news from Oxford. A series of headlines flashed over the viewing platform. The murder had been relegated to ninth in the list of headline news. But it was something else that caught his eye. The story in second place.

Republican candidate endorses pre-emptive strike v China.

He clicked on the story. A picture of John Bruce appeared. It was night. He was getting out of a car, pausing to smile at the cameras and wave to well-wishers.

The voice of a female news anchor spoke over the action. "This was republican candidate, John Bruce, last night on his way back to his hotel in Manchester, New Hampshire."

A throng of reporters pushed forward and surrounded Bruce as he tried to walk across the pavement between his car and the hotel steps. They fired questions at him and thrust microphones in his face. John, are you confident of winning New Hampshire? Will you drop out if you don't come in the first three? Bruce smiled and kept pushing through the crowd. The questions continued, Bruce answering with a nod or a shake of his head. Then came the question. What's your policy on China? Do you think a pre-emptive nuclear strike against them would be a good thing? Bruce paused and the holocamera zoomed in on his face. Nick couldn't believe it. He was actually thinking about the question. More microphones lurched forward, all other questions forgotten. What was the man going to say?

"It's an option," said John Bruce.

The pavement erupted. Every reporter talking at once, shouting questions, asking for clarification, turning wide-eyed to camera and asking their producers, 'did you get that?'

And at the back, pushing wildly towards their candidate was an apoplectic campaign staff.

Nick called Louise through. What had Bruce been thinking? Reporters doorstep politicians all the time. It was part of their job. Something that Bruce would have been aware of. He'd been through the NASA publicity machine and, surely, his campaign team would have coached him even harder. All he had to do was smile and wave, and ignore any question he didn't want to answer. Had he misheard the question?

Not according to the media. The Bruce camp had been given several opportunities to clarify their candidate's position on China and although they initially issued a statement saying he'd misheard the question, that was withdrawn an hour later. Then the media feeding frenzy really began as prominent Bruce supporters and campaigners were tracked down and asked for a reaction. Most kept quiet, some expressed surprise, some denied he'd even said it, but a few backed his stance calling it brave and clear-sighted.

Nick flicked through the American news channels. Very little else was being discussed. Condemnation was coming in from all sides of the political spectrum, most pundits agreeing that Bruce's campaign was over.

"He was never a credible candidate," said one, "He's never run for office before and tonight it showed."

A few tried to find excuses for Bruce. He was confused, misheard the question or was answering an earlier one. Some even blamed the journalists.

"The only purpose of a question like that is to entrap the candidate. We, at home, heard the question because it was spoken into a microphone but would John Bruce? With all those reporters screaming in his ear? The whole thing was staged."

Only one pundit supported Bruce. A gnarled conservative on Fox's late-night election campaign round up.

"John Bruce only said what millions of Americans have been thinking for years. We've had six decades of being the sole superpower and wasted the last two trying to make the rest of the world like us. Well, wake up America! It didn't work. Now our forces are underfunded, our weapons research virtually non-existent, and we're sinking into a new Cold War. Except this time it's not America that has the technological and economic edge. It's the Chinese.

"Our country has never been so vulnerable. Even if we started today, rebuilding our military strength is going to take years and, in the meantime, any candidate who doesn't consider a limited pre-emptive strike an option isn't fit to run for office."

"That's not John," said Louise, staring at the holographic scene of John Bruce outside the hotel. "He'd never condone a nuclear pre-emptive strike against anyone."

"People change," said Nick, lying on his bed reading something he'd downloaded into his handheld.

"Not that much," said Louise.

She continued surfing the library of John's post-SHIFT appearances as she'd done for most of the afternoon. Every now and then she froze an image, zoomed in on his face, walked up to it and stared at every detail. He was different. There was a zealous naivety that the old John—her John—had never had. She could see it in his eyes. That child-like look of wonder as though every experience was new. The certainty in his voice whenever he talked about God and his great vision for the future. He just looked . . . wrong.

"He's been born again," explained Nick. "That's what happens."

"It's more than that," insisted Louise, unable to take her eyes off that image hovering before her. "I haven't seen him laugh. Not really laugh. He smiles a lot and grins but . . . doesn't he look vacuous to you?"

She turned to quiz Nick. Surely he had to see it too.

He didn't.

"Maybe that's the persona his image makers told him to project," he said. "Honest country boy with a big smile and a firm handshake."

Louise glared at him. Was he playing devil's advocate or did he really believe what he was saying? And what was he reading? What could be more important than understanding what had happened to John? She turned back to the smiling face of the presidential candidate. That wasn't a persona being projected. That was real. You could see it in his eyes. There was no calculation behind them anymore.