Triptych (36 page)

“Muppets!” Gwen snarled hatefully, finally dropping the gauze away from her forehead. The revealed skin was an angry pink. Basil couldn’t help but think that she was going to have a wicked lovely scar along her eyebrow to match the one above it. Already the skin around her eye was starting to purple — it would be one heck of a shiner, too.

“Gwen?”

“We were fooled by goddamn Muppets!” She kicked one of the animatronic helmets across the warehouse. It skittered sickeningly along the bare concrete, looking nothing so much as a decapitated head when it splashed through a wide trail of drying blood. Basil couldn’t decide if he wanted to giggle or vomit.

Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to frame Kalp and his people. But
this
far? It was almost too much — it was almost ludicrous. At least now those same someones were going to pay for it. From the brief glimpse in the direction of Doctor Zhang’s team, Basil guessed a lot of them already had. The Institute was vicious about protecting and avenging their own, and Basil was sure that lot of reports written tonight would contain the words “fire fight” and “accidental” and “intended to capture alive.”

Basil wondered how many had been rounded up into the final vehicle of their little motorcade, the armoured prisoner transport. He hoped
that
air conditioner was broken, too.
Oh, yes,
Basil thought with the closest thing to glee that he could manage while still so emotionally raw.

Basil swept his gaze over the mechanical detrius littered along the work benches. The spread of devices was tempting for only a moment, before he remembered that all these marvellous little gadgets had been invented for the sole purpose of killing those he loved. It was all evidence, and it was pretty damning. This warehouse held everything they’d need to put the surviving terrorists away forever.

Well, almost everything.

The spaceship was still at the Piersons’ farm.

That would be the final piece of evidence required for the inevitable upcoming trial. There would have to be some way to carbon date it — to prove that the machine had been built now-ish before it went then-ish. That morning he had handed over the full contents of the black briefcase; the Flasher Basil had reverse-engineered and wrangled into existence with the lump of circuits and metal that Kalp had left them on the dining room table. The second one he had rigged out of 1980s technology and the remains of the ship’s Flasher were under lock and key, officially and permanently off limits. They couldn’t go back and get the 1980s version of the ship. They would have to fetch the now-version if they wanted the ship at all.

Time travel was dangerous, and it was over. Basil had already made certain that the technology couldn’t be copied. He had never written down any blueprints or notes of his own, had purposefully handed over the Flashers sabotaged, and had created a computer virus to slowly worm through the Institute’s database and eat up any information about the Flashers any time another safe house was raided and information transferred in.

Just as well. He had no desire to do any more time travelling, especially if there was any chance that next place they ended up could be in
his
childhood. The grandfather paradox temporal theory was all well and good, but Basil didn’t want to test the idea that it would be physically impossible for him to accidently kill or influence his younger self, all the same. He’d gone through enough gut-flipping panic when Evvie Pierson had handed him baby Gwennie.

Basil wrenched his mind off of that surreal moment and sidled over to the table where the Flashers had clearly been studied. Picking up a few pieces, he turned them over in his hands, using the appearance of studying the technology to “accidentally” roll the notes up and drop them into a filthy pool of dust and gore. “Oops, clumsy me,” he said, taking a deliberate step into the middle of the puddle and crushing the fragile blue paper a few times, just to be sure.

Something caught his eye. Nestled in the middle of a jumble of discarded nuts and circuits was a small, perfectly triangular casing with a narrow halo of wires and ports feathering from the cap of a tube. He picked it up, watched the vivid dark rainbows that marked it as not having originated on Earth dance across the surface, and snapped it open along the hinge. The inside was familiar, but he couldn’t quite…ah-ha! If he just imagined it melted, half destroyed in the crash of a spaceship into a strawberry patch then, yes, he recognized it very well. It was part of the triggering mechanism for the Flashers that the assassins had been using. He had used one of these very same components to get them back to the present, and one that was in even worse condition to get them to 1983.

One that he had found on the table in his own dining room. The world around Basil skittered to stop for a brief second, going still and meaningless as his brain lanced through the problem that had been eating at him since that horrible day in their house:
why did Kalp have a Flasher Trigger?
It begged the question: Who sent it to him, and why? Did they expect Kalp could have used it to build his own Flasher? And if so, did that mean that the letter had come from somebody trying to help Kalp escape from the Institute, or to convince him to use it to flee after having assassinated someone?

He knew now that Kalp would never have sided with the assassins, but that didn’t mean that the sender of the component and the letter did.

Uncertain about what this meant for the investigation, Basil surreptitiously pocketed the trigger and continued to rifle through the rest of the mechanical debris on the worktable with a renewed urgency. Nothing else jumped out at him.

Basil was willing to bet his life that they would never meet the person who invented the Flashers; nobody would own to it at least, and Basil took vicious, hopeful pleasure in imagining that the creator had been the pilot whom Gwen had shot in the face.

He held no hope for retrieving the corpse buried in the corn field in a condition pristine enough for the courts to do anything beyond verifying whether the body had once been human. Basil remembered the long awkward fingers that had grabbed baby Gwennie, the way the tips hadn’t moved or flexed, the way that its feet weren’t quite right, and hated that he’d been duped by latex gloves and the unnatural stillness of death.

Of course, he hadn’t examined the corpse closely after Gwen had blown off its head; it was a
headless corpse.
They just dragged it out and got rid of it and tried not to look. Basil tried not to think that somewhere, right then, somebody might have been doing the same to the man he loved.
Had
loved. Still did.

“Here comes trouble,” Gwen said under her breath.

Basil looked up and followed her line of sight — oops, Director Addis, storming in the door and puffing with displeasure.

“Grey, Pierson,” he snapped before either of them had a chance to offer an excuse for defence. “I’d have you both very harshly disciplined for failing to follow orders
again
if it wasn’t for the fact that you always seem to bring me something worthwhile when you go on these damned little constitutionals of yours. What have you found?”

Gwen pointed to the heads. Addis went as pale as a man with his complexion could go, turning a sort of strange mossy grey.

“Right. Okay. But, seriously, never again. It’s as if you
want
a punishment.”

“I don’t know,” Gwen said with a shrug, “I could use a bit of punishment, me. Suspension at home, maybe? Barred from the Institute for a…month or two, say?”

Addis spluttered.

Basil grinned, catching on. “Just long enough for one more…constitutional, sir.”

Addis narrowed his eyes.

Gwen held up her hand, palm out, like a Girl Scout. “Last one, sir. I swear. For a little evidence retrieval.”

The director nodded curtly and threw up his hands. “Get it all sorted out with requisitions, I don’t want to hear about it. You just bring me back that evidence.”

Basil grinned and nodded in return and then Addis was gone, off to harangue someone else with his flashing black eyes and great brown brow of disapproval.

Over
, Basil thought, and let forth a great sigh. For the second time today he felt all of the tension slide out of his posture and he leaned back against the work bench, rubbing his temples with his knuckles to dispel the headache that was building behind his eyes.
Thank God, that’s it, it’s finally — 

And then the Mobile Flasher Tracker vibrated in Basil’s pocket.

For a second, everything froze. Basil felt his breath block up his throat, felt his heart twitch into stillness, his limbs swing to a halt. And the device in his pocket vibrated rhythmically, insistently, the way the heavy dinosaur footfalls vibrated in “Jurassic Park.”

But…but no. No.
he thought, straightening slowly.
We’ve got them. All of them. They said “all clear.” Right?

It vibrated again, a low chittering of the casing, the swooshy hiss of the fabric of his pockets being forced into motion. Gwen’s head swivelled toward him and her eyes narrowed on his pocket.

He pulled the device out, staring at it with such intensity that when it vibrated again, he was so startled that he nearly dropped the thing. Gwen stared down at the device as if it were a slimy, three headed hydra. Her lips went white.

“No,” Basil hissed. “Someone’s got one, and they’re warming it up.”

“Shit,” she said. “We missed one.”

She glanced at the map on the screen, looked up and around the warehouse to get her bearings, and then she was off, a shot of streaking black against the dust-dull concrete floor and the dowdy red brick, weaving around the forensics teams and banging out of a small, rusty door that might have once been the warehouse’s lunch break exit. Basil resisted the urge to shout her name, to try to rein her in. He would have better luck calling down Halley’s Comet. Instead he just sprinted out the door after her.

None of the other Agents looked up as he passed, too intent on their own work. Once outside, Basil realized that he had completely lost sight of Gwen.

He turned in a circle, looked down at the insistent red triangle that was flickering on the Tracker’s screen, and hesitated.

“
Basil
,” hissed his ear-mounted radio and Basil jumped. “Can you hear me?”

“Gwen?” he asked, tapping his ear piece on. “How the hell…where are you?” He looked around, peering into the deep shadows thrown off by the sharpness of the various out buildings of the warehouse. There was nobody out this way but himself, nobody to see or overhear.

He turned his head anyway, cupped his hand over the mic.

“Gwen, you’re supposed to be broadcasting on all channels, not using our team frequency.”

“Basil, you need to come here.”

It was getting hotter, the clouds scudding away from the sun as if they were also suffering from its too-intense glare, and a heavy damp heat was swiftly dropping over the warehouse’s yard, eerily still and thick. The calls and curses of the angered Agents and Ops men and women floated over the charnel house that had been the assassins’ last refuge, and she wanted him to follow her into that mess? His spine prickled with cold apprehension.

Oh, no, no. Basil was a scientist. He was supposed to stay in front of screens and white boards. He knew that now. Suddenly yearning for the pungent interior of the surveillance van, he was torn between his overwhelming but carefully honed instinct of cowardice, and the desire to make sure that the woman he loved, the only lover he had left, didn’t go and get herself accidentally shot by one of their own guys.

He dithered, feeling stupidly like a child presented with two washrooms but no way to tell which was for men or for women, desperate to use a toilet yet scared to make the wrong choice.

“Basil, get your ass out here.
Now
. There’s…I found…Basil,
please
.” Her voice took on a plaintive tone that Basil hadn’t heard since before their Gareth had died. That made up his mind. Worry punched into Basil’s chest. Gwen never said please, not like
that
.

“Fine, okay,” he hissed. “Turn on your GPS.”

He fumbled for the PDA in his vest pocket and switched it on. As soon as he’d logged into the tracking system, he saw Gwen’s bright red dot flashing. She was alone — or at least, there were no other tracked agents around her — in a shed on the other side of the tomb of a warehouse. Basil cursed. Of course Gwen would be the only person to head in the opposite direction as soon as she’d been dismissed back to base camp.

Basil went around to the other side of the wall, looked around to make sure he wasn’t being followed, then shot across a disturbingly empty stretch of crumbling parking lot to the rusted silver shed. They had dismissed this shed upon first evaluation of the compound as holding nothing but garden tools, but it sounded as if Gwen had found something infinitely more interesting.

Basil resisted the urge to stop and look around to check for tell-tale flashes of spotting scopes in the sunlight, and instead poured on more speed.

He was wheezing by the time he got there, heart pounding in the back of his mouth. The door had been left hanging open, and Basil had enough presence of mind to pause before rushing in. He looked around the corner.

He needn’t have bothered.

There was nobody here but Gwen.

She was standing with her back against the wall, staring in disbelief at the hulking great mass of metal that filled the rest of the shed.

“Is that…?” Basil began, then stopped, throat closing up around the confirmation.

Gwen nodded. Then she shook her head uncertainly. “I think so?”

Basil reached out, touched the wickedly pointed nose of the aircraft, followed the flare into the saucerish wings. Up close like this, he could see where the paint didn’t match, where the alloy of the metal gave way to rivets and steel disguised by painted-on designs. It had been salvaged and put back together piecemeal with whatever the builders could find, or steal, mixing Earth and alien technology and disguising it poorly with a slap of paint in approximately the right places.