The Fourth Rome (27 page)

The KGB officer handed Grainger a wet linen towel.

Grainger wiped his face, then scrubbed his mouth. “That’s better.” He lifted the knob on top of the Russian toilet to flush
it. “Sorry. Too much exotic food, I guess.”

“We will take you back to your hotel.” The handsome KGB agent seemed genuinely concerned. “You should rest. Perhaps we have
all had enough of the celebration this evening.” Etkin’s cultured voice echoed from irregularly set bathroom tile.

Great. Now he’d blown off Chun’s meeting. Worse, he’d been so sick that he’d forgotten all about his gearbag, left unguarded
under the table. Momentarily he panicked. He wasn’t even sure where they’d been sitting or how to get back there on his own.

“Thanks for understanding, Professor Etkin,” Grainger told the KGB man sheepishly. “I’m sorry to have ruined everyone’s evening.”

“Nyet problema.
It is nothing. Tomorrow, we will begin anew with your friends. And perhaps without our Assistant Secretary’s assistance.”
There was something about Etkin, standing there without even wrinkling his nose in a Russian men’s room still smelling of
vomit, that felt wrong to Grainger.

But help was where you found it. The Academy of Sciences cum KGB honcho helped him solicitously back to their table, where
Etkin pulled the plug on the evening’s celebration.

Nan Roebeck had found Grainger’s unattended gearbag and set it ostentatiously on the tabletop. Terrific. He was really going
to catch hell from Roebeck for this stunt.

Grainger was still feeling sick enough that he didn’t argue when Etkin summoned one of the big beefy boys to escort him to
Etkin’s car to wait for the others. He just grabbed his gearbag from the table without a word to Roebeck and left. Sitting
there in the black Zil limousine, he watched as his team and their Russian dinner partners came out.

Etkin and Orlov circled each other on the steps. Seeing them together that way was like watching a film of two clay-mation
dinosaurs getting ready for a fight to the death. Body language never lied the way mouths did. Nan Roebeck’s body language
was telling Grainger loud and clear that he was in big trouble for blowing off their evening meeting like this.

He really had been sick. Although now, with an empty stomach, he was beginning to think he might live.

Orlov waved good-bye and went to a government-issue Lada that had pulled up behind the Zil.

Etkin and the women got in the limo. Etkin sat beside Grainger. The women took the rear-facing seats. The big car pulled away.

He heard the others chatting about the schedule of events for the next day. His head still ached. The car sped through city
streets without regard to traffic regulations.

Nan asked him how he felt as the limo pulled up to the Métropole.

“I’ll be okay.” His voice was hoarse. “Just need some sleep.”

“For somebody with green skin and purple lips, you don’t look too bad. Maybe not trying to set the Moscow record for vodka
drunk in one day by a foreign guest would be a good idea in future,” she advised icily. Etkin looked away, out the window
at the brightly lit hotel entrance.

When they got out of the limo, Etkin followed. He kissed Chun gallantly on both cheeks. “Tomorrow, then. Not so early, because
of your friend. Say, ten o’clock, here. We will have preparations in order for your fruitful visit.”

Chun promised Etkin that everybody would be shipshape. The KGB man shook hands with Roebeck and Grainger before he got back
in his limo and it pulled away.

Grainger went straight to the front desk in the hotel lobby to collect his room key. The night girl handed him the key and
a small package in a glazed tan envelope. He took the package. It had only his name on it, no return address. He hadn’t been
expecting anything. He’d open it in his room, where he could check to see it wasn’t a letter bomb. Something hard and flat,
about the length of his index finger and twice as deep, was inside.

Roebeck stepped in front of him as he turned and shoved him backward with a spread hand. “No. Don’t go upstairs. Not yet.
Can you make it to the TC, mister shrinking violet?”

“I guess,” he said. “It’s not like I’m gutshot or anything.” He hitched his gearbag up on his shoulder. She was the boss.
He’d screwed up. It was going to be a rough haul for the next few hours.

They couldn’t get into the TC through the Kremlin this late at night. They had to go down to the river and find the bolt-hole
entrance. It took a lot out of him, but that was what Roe-beck had in mind. Once they’d scrambled down the bank and into the
tunnel behind some brush, he began really feeling the strain. Climbing around through underground tunnels was a fitting climax
to his day. At least he was now free to pull his field-issue membrane over his face, use his pharmakit, and generally get
his blood chemistries together.

By the time they’d reached the catacomb where they’d stashed the TC, they’d rubbed the worst of their rough edges smooth.
The other ARC Riders had let him off the hook pretty easy. They were a team, after all, and no team benefits from dysfunctional
members. But Roebeck ordered them to discuss no specifics en route, not about their recon, not even results of their fact-finding
efforts.

They had lots of data to exchange, lots of ground to cover, no time for regrets. The boss had something up her sleeve.

Waiting for the TC to phase into view, Roebeck spoke through the com: “As soon as we get inside, Chun, get us out of here.”

“Nan,” Grainger began. “I want to explain what I—”

“No discussion of anything salient. I’m telling you, we can’t assume that there’s no technology here capable of monitoring
or tracking us.” The boss was really tense. She reiterated her standing orders, despite the arguably secure environment instituted
when each ARC Rider was wearing an ARC-issue multifunction command, control, and communications membrane.

“Just come on back, TC,” he heard her mutter.

She was counting the seconds aloud, waiting for TC 779 to reappear. It almost seemed as if she was worried it wouldn’t show
up.

But that couldn’t be.

As the shimmer and shiver of air preceded the temporal capsule into being, Grainger could have sworn he heard Roebeck mutter,
“Thank the stars.”

Whatever she’d found, or thought she’d found, had really scared her. When she found out what Grainger had seen and learned,
she was going to be even more scared.

“In, in. Let’s go! Move,” Roebeck ordered, sprinting for the capsule as its hatch cracked open.

Grainger was right behind her, running for the TC with Chun as if for salvation.

As soon as they were buttoned-up in the TC, he remembered the package. Around him, the TC hummed comfortingly, all power and
protection. Outside, in the immediate vicinity of TC 779’s outer hull, time was effectively stopped in its passage.

Inside, Chun was tapping her wands furiously, mining Central’s download. The bow screen was quadranted. Three quarters of
the wraparound view screen was filled with streaming data. One quarter displayed the time-locked catacombs around them.

Roebeck was pecking out information requests as fast as she could. “Got to get some relevant data,” she said tersely. “Not
this useless crap.”

Grainger scanned the Russian envelope with his handheld. No explosives. Some composite. Some metal. Okay. He opened the package.
It was from Zotov. There was no note, but a copy of Zotov’s visit card was taped to a small, flat box with wire tabs for closures.

In the box were two chips, and a bit of metal in a clear housing too small to hold anything but nanotechnology.

“What the hell is this?” Grainger wondered out loud.

Roebeck said, “Let me see.”

The team leader was silent too long after he handed her the box and she examined its contents. Roebeck turned the box cover
and studied the card taped to it. “Zotov? Who’s Zotov?” she finally asked.

“Obninsk scientist. When you’re ready, maybe I’d better give you a whole after-action report, not bits and pieces.”

“We don’t have time for after-action reports. What we need is a hot wash.”

You did a hot wash every time the work you’d done in the field went wrong.

“How come?” he asked.

“Because I know what this stuff of Zotov’s is. It’s an implant. Up The Line technology modified for Russian production,” Roebeck
said tightly. “Except
I
saw implants like this with Orlov, through the Foreign Ministry. It’s supposed to be the work of Academican Nikolai Neat.”

“A Russian invention? Nanotech?” Chun scoffed. “Everything Russians do is twice the size it needs to be, even for this time
horizon. Etkin says—”

Roebeck shook her head despairingly. “I know what I saw. Let’s leave the issue of how they did it, for the moment. Concentrate
on what they can do. The implants are put into living tissue in order to transport mammals certainly, people by implication,
through time without needing temporal capsules. But you have to do the implanting when the animal, or person, is young. Give
the biological system time to accept the implant. Get it? Then all you need is a handheld, and they’ve got that, too.”

Chun objected, “Just a handheld? That’s impossible. What’s the power source?”

Grainger said softly, “Implants weren’t any part of what Zotov showed me in Obninsk.” Then he stopped. Maybe Zotov had shown
him pieces of a puzzle. Maybe these were more pieces. Puzzles were very Russian. On the tape that Grainger had seen, three
young
people were being abducted by the occupants of a TC from Up The Line. “On the other hand, maybe it’s all connected.”

“What’s connected?” Chun wanted to know.

Neither Roebeck nor Grainger answered Chun’s question.

They were looking at each other.

Maybe Zotov had been trying to warn him. Zotov leaving hardware at Grainger’s hotel like that was a clear signal that the
Obninski academician believed he had to transmit this information through unofficial channels, or not at all.

Roebeck said, “Chun, we’re out of here. Back to base. Forget the static download. Central obviously didn’t anticipate the
kind of data we’re going to need now. I want the highest- level meeting you can get me as soon as we reach Central. Tell them
we’ve run into proliferating Up The Line technology from beyond the 26th. Tell them we need better data, and we need it
now.
Whether or not we get any utiliz-able support from the ARC, I want to be out of Central and back in Moscow within six hours
elapsed time from … now.”

For a moment, Nan Roebeck’s team literally stopped breathing.

What was the team leader saying?

Then Chun said, “Yes, sir,” and her wands flew so fast they blurred.

Grainger was stunned at first. Then he understood. Roe-beck didn’t want to spend enough real time at Central to get bogged
down in red tape. Or to get pulled off the mission entirely.

“Before the wheels start coming off Central’s cover story for this mission, I want to be back in Moscow, March 11, 1992. Nine
hundred hours sharp. Same coordinates.”

Chun said, “Nan?”

“Do it, Chun. You’ll understand after we’ve been through the hot wash. Get off this horizon. Hold us out of phase until we’re
up to speed internally. Take all the TC’s running log systems off-line while we’re talking, as well. Backtrack them ten elapsed
minutes from my hack.” She paused. She hacked the time. Then she added softly, “Ain’t no telling just how nasty this mission’s
going to get.”

“God, you two. You’re scaring me,” Chun said. Her wands had fallen silent. The TC under them was responding to commands that
phased it out of space-time and held it in limbo.

Grainger’s sore stomach threatened to buck as Chun stabilized TC 779 out of phase. Here he was again, cosmic hash with delusions
of personality.

He stretched his arms above his head, cracking his intertwined fingers’joints. “Come on, Chun, don’t be scared.” His arm still
hurt where serum made a lump under his skin. “Same war, different day, is all.”

But he didn’t believe his own pep talk. Not this time. Not with Central ahead and Russia acting as a staging area for some
breakaway faction Up The Line.

If the other two ARC Riders were scared now, wait until they heard what Grainger had to tell them. When all else was said
and done, you still had the nearly insolvable problem of a radioactive, wrecked TC from Up The Line, sitting big as life in
a subbasement in Obninsk.

G
erd sat cross-legged on a ledge of shale and manipulated his sensor pack at its full sensitivity. “There’s a group of people,
ten or a dozen, approximately a klick ahead of us,” he said without looking up. “I believe they’re refugees from the battle.”

Pauli Weigand held a handful of grain to his horse in one hand while with the other he lifted one shoulder strap, then the
other, of his mail coat. The weight of the steel links ground his collarbone despite the leather underlayer.

He wasn’t about to take the armor off. His ribs ached where the revisionist’s bullets had punched him, and he remembered vividly
the sight of the merchant tripping on coils of his own guts. Pauli’s teammates weren’t strong enough to wear mail during this
grueling trek. He was, and he wanted to have it on when he stepped between his friends and danger.

Beckie grinned wanly at him. Nearby her horse and the mule they’d caught for Gerd browsed young leaves from shrubs on the
knoll. The beasts were drop-reined. They were too tired to bolt.

“I shouldn’t have dismounted,” Beckie said. “My legs’re so stiff that I’m not sure I’ll be able to get back up unless you
lift me.”

Pauli shurgged. “So I lift you,” he said. “We’ll reach the river in a few hours.”

“I rode from Memphis to Las Vegas on the back of my husband’s Harley once,” she said, bending backward as she massaged her
thighs. “God, I was stupid when I was young.”

Pauli didn’t know if she meant about the motorcycle trip or about the husband. Maybe both, given some of the other things
she’d said about the marriage.