Triptych (38 page)

He didn’t have to read the name — faded brown from too-hot summers and biting winters, peeling away stubbornly from the corrugated tin — to know where he was. He recognized the solid two-storey sand-coloured brick edifice, the gingerbread porch and matching gables, the tenacious clinging ivy, the victory garden that was half the length of the front lawn, dark and rich.

Perhaps the vegetable garden was a bit smaller, now that the one who tended it was older, now that there were only two mouths to feed; perhaps the trees were slightly bigger; perhaps there was an empty dog hutch leaning lonely against the side of the porch stairs; perhaps the ruts on the laneway were a bit better defined, less filled with tire-crushed weeds, deeper grooves.

But nothing about the
feel
had changed.

It wasn’t as if he could ever forget this particular house.

“Where it all ended,” he whispered, chin propped on a palm, leaning his head out of the window to scent the fine late autumn air like a mutt. There were late apples and goldenrod on the breeze, and he sneezed into the crook of his sleeve.

“Or where it all started,” Gwen muttered under her breath in response, eyes never leaving the narrow laneway she turned onto and set the U-haul truck crawling up. Either pot holes or reluctance had her tapping the gas lightly, and Basil wasn’t about to put voice to his guess as to which it was.

“Depending on which side of it you’re on, innit?” Basil agreed, calling to mind Evvie and Mark Pierson, young, newly married, parents of an infant barely old enough to chew — the woman Basil would one day love.

The woman who had…almost had…his son.

For them, the Piersons, for that baby Gwennie, it had been the beginning. The time and place where the whole world had gone utterly and completely wrong for twenty-four hours.

Would they, Basil wondered, feel the same sort of gale-force relief that Basil did? Now that the assassins had been stopped, the mole found and knowingly eliminated, the dead mourned? Or would they feel terror, confusion, having lived nearly thirty years knowing exactly what was to come and then suddenly knowing…nothing?

“Depending,” Gwen echoed, and her knuckles on the oversized steering wheel were white.

Basil abandoned the window, the gently scented early morning breeze, and scooted across the seat. He leaned over the gear-shift and pecked a soft, dry kiss to her cheek.

“I’m here,” he said.

“Here,” she repeated, and the truck shivered to a hesitant stop, crunching the gravel under the tires, beside the gracefully age-drooped doors of the largest barn.

Yes, we are,
Basil thought.

***

In the back of the rental truck, they had shovels and cheap disposable coveralls, a tarpaulin, a half-constructed wooden crate and lots of foam peanuts, a pair of overnight bags with changes of clothes, the clothing they had borrowed thirty years ago, and the letter of permission from the Institute to oversee this particular mission alone.

They had flown into Pearson International airport on Institute-provided fake visas, landed in Toronto and rented a truck, bought the gear at a hardware store on the outskirts of the metropolis, and driven all night. Gwen had insisted on doing all of the driving. Basil had never driven on the right side of the road, and so didn’t contest. He was fairly certain he wasn’t in the mood to die in a horrible multi-car pileup on the highway, especially after he had survived…well, everything he had survived.

It would be ridiculous, first off.

Dawn had come and gone, and so had more Tim Horton’s drive-thrus than Basil would ever care to see again. Gwen couldn’t get enough of the Iced Capps, said that they tasted of home, but he was so sick of cheap workman’s tea that he almost wept at the memory of Evvie Pierson’s well stocked pantry. He felt caffeinated and exhausted all at once and was simultaneously ready to lay down for sleep and jitter through the walls between space and time.

Time
, he thought, marvelling at the strange place his jet-lagged brain wanted to go. It was always worse when you went backwards across the globe. He wondered how feasible it would be to demand that the Institute only send him forward from now on. London Heathrow to Moscow, Moscow to Tokyo Narita, Narita to Honolulu, Honolulu to Vancouver, Vancouver to Toronto. Sure, he could do that.

He was pretty finished with this whole backwards-in-time thing.

And after what Gwen and Basil had been through in the past few weeks, the Institute owed him one; owed him at least that flight. Boy, did it ever.

Thank God the momentary sky-high blip in fuel surtax flight prices from a few years ago had vanished when the Institute had reverse engineered and then mass-manufactured the first hydrogen engines to fit in 747s. He could at least
afford
to take the ridiculous route if he ever felt the need to indulge in it.

Sliding down off of the high rental truck seat, Basil had half expected to get mobbed by some suitably scruffy mutt, but nothing save the crisp air and the low-level throb of laconic possibility, the shiver of seeds waiting under the rich soil, assaulted him. Farms had always struck him as places that were just crouched and poised to strike forward, waiting to explode into a verdant flare of life.

He had yet to see this particular farm in any season beyond autumn — golden and hushed — but fully intended to watch it push out new buds, watch young calves frolic and graceful deer munch and whatever other sort of idyllic shit these sorts of places invested in. He was going to see this place year round because he and Gwen were going to visit here, often. Gwen had reached out that first tentative hand of reconciliation, and Basil wasn’t going to let her screw it up again.

He
liked
the Piersons, damnit.

He liked Canada too, at least what he had seen of it, despite the horrid, horrid tea.

He heard Gwen’s door slam shut, felt the empty truck rock slightly, and then the crunch of gravel under broken-in military boots heralded Gwen’s slow walk around the nose. She had to squeeze between the grille and the door of the barn, leaving a low, long swipe of age-greyed dust along the thighs of her jeans. They were in civvies for this operation, and they’d come in a rental U-Haul with wheat stalks painted on the side; they wanted it to look like the Piersons’ daughter had returned home to fetch some furniture, not a three-decade-buried space craft. The Institute and the Piersons might know why they were here, but that didn’t mean the neighbours had to. And small communities talked.

“Great,” she sighed, and tried to bat the dust away. It just spread out more. She pinched the bridge of her nose and Basil had to choke down a gasp; Kalp used to do that.

“It’s fine,” he said, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and nuzzling at the spot under her ear. He’d claimed that spot for himself, ages ago. That was Basil’s spot.

“Right, right,” she said, but didn’t sound convinced. “It’s not like I put on clean, new jeans for my mother.”

“Your mother has seen you in a filthy uniform. I don’t think a little barn dust is going to make much of a difference, issit?”

She reached up and squeezed the hand he had hooked around her shoulder fiercely. He squeezed back, strong and stable and there.

Then Gwen let go and Basil dropped his arms and she walked towards the house, head high and hands jammed into her pockets to hide the way they were trembling.

Evvie Pierson was standing on the front porch in her overalls, a shovel in one hand, and a pot of tea, tags fluttering beautifully in the light morning breeze, in the other.

Basil really did almost cry at the sight.

Really.

***

The digging took half as long this time around. Partially it was because Basil didn’t have to stop to measure the depth of the hole versus the height of the ship to make sure it would be buried deep enough to not leave a lump, and partially because Mark had seen them coming up the drive with the U-Haul and had already puttered his backhoe tractor over to the dead patch of grass above the raspberries.

By the time Basil had finished his first cup of Evvie’s glorious tea and Gwen had finally said more than “hello,” and “surprise?” to her mother, Mark had the canopy of the long thin ship exposed. With the four of them digging together, they had the sides freed and part of the undercarriage excavated within the hour. It was a one-man ship — one-woman ship, really, and something at the back of his tongue turned sour. It was just long enough for a seated body and the fuel generators in the back, somewhat circular but more of a cigar shape when viewed up close. Aerodynamic.

With the backhoe as muscle and the shovels and some old boards as levers, they slid the ship out of the hole to loll on the grass, one wing pointing up, the weight of the craft resting on the other, and the nose pointed away from the house.

Basil clambered up the side and released the catch that made the clear canopy hiss and slide backwards. He folded himself in half, legs dangling out, and looked inside. Twenty-nine years buried above the garden had not changed the interior at all. He could still see the place where he had ripped out half of the control box for parts, the wrench he had forgotten and left behind, the long thin strip of fabric that had been shredded off the sleeve of his uniform still hanging by a few fibres on the edge of the lateral control stick, the gap in the dash where he’d removed Aitken’s Flasher and most of the interior cabling to get them home.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a dark lump of metal. It was now totally useless as a Flasher trigger, but it had travelled across the decades more than once.

He hadn’t even recognized it for what it was, hadn’t put together this last strange puzzle, until he’d begun dismantling the Flasher in preparation for the court case. Basil thought that the poor little thing deserved a reward, or at least a frequent flyer time traveller’s points card. 

If he allowed for the warping that the intense process of Flashing imprinted on the trigger, he could see where it still fit in the console. He put it away, carefully wrapping it back in its evidence bag and tucking it into his coverall pockets, then turned his eyes to the other evidence inside the ship.

The mysterious music deck was still hooked haphazardly into the console system, held together with duct tape and wire clamps and something Basil vaguely recognized as bubblegum. He resisted the urge to tear it out and throw it to the ground and smash it repeatedly with the flat of his shovel.

This — 
this
 — was why his lover was dead, his son had never been born, his whole life had gotten so
crappy
. This stupid deck in a stupid ship, and stupid Raquel Winkelaar.

Instead he took a hundred photos on his digital camera of the deck rigged into the cockpit sound system from all angles, then lifted it gingerly with gloved fingertips, wrapped a plastic bag around it, and set it securely on the cockpit seat. There would be fingerprints on that deck, and those fingerprints would condemn the people who had almost taken the last precious thing from Basil’s life. They would prove that the pilot had been Agent Aitken.

The woman who had almost killed Gwennie. Gwen.

Everything inside sorted and secured, Mark hooked a chain up to the winch in the inside of the truck’s box, and the other end to the nose of the ship. Along with the help of the truck’s fold-out ramp, they got the ship safely secured in the wooden crate. An ungodly amount of foam peanuts and bungee cords later, Basil was fairly sure that if the ship didn’t make it back to the UK in one piece, it was because the plane it had been in would have been bombed.

He shuddered at the careless thought.

A few months ago, someone out there would have given anything for the opportunity to take out both Gwen and Basil so easily, in one fell stroke. There would have been no regard for the other passengers, of course, and that’s what scared Basil most.

That other people — like Kalp — would be killed and just regarded as collateral damage.

Other people with lovers and children and…

No.

But it was over; over forever, he hoped.

And this was the last winding string, the loose end. With the ship as evidence, the whole lot of the wankers who had killed so many innocent people would be sent up the river for life. For the first time, Basil almost regretted that the U.N. had rallied the nations of the world together to ban capital punishment across the globe.

The Institute had demanded that its own special ops and clean up teams do the retrieval, once Director Addison had revealed what Gwen and Basil were going to do, but Gwen had insisted on going alone. She had withheld the location until they gave in. Basil was sure they’d been followed via satellite GPS the whole time. Her parents’ address had to be on file somewhere, so no doubt the clean team was already en route, but Gwen’s desire had been partially fulfilled already: private time with her parents to patch and pack up the last of a hurtful and terrifying past.

There would be all of today: the rest of the afternoon, talk at the dinner table with the French wine Basil had smuggled into his luggage, conversations late into the night and breakfast in the morning to ward off hangovers.

There would be
time.

The revelation smacked Basil in the forehead and he stood and stared up at the sky, blue and deep and
forever.
Gwen had almost died, and then she had not. Basil still had her. If he had lost everything else, he still had
her.
Basil still had time.

The first bang of a hammer slamming against a nail brought him out of his stupor and he went into the box of the truck to help Mark nail the crate shut. When it was done, they came out and watched as Evvie brushed the back of her hand over her sweating forehead, pushing aside the raucous humidity-induced curls. Gwen echoed the gesture unconsciously, hand in similar curls, and Basil swallowed heavily.

“I was standing right here,” Evvie said. “Right here, by the raspberries, when it happened.”

Gwen folded her hands over the top of the shovel and rested her chin on them.