“No, Riley,” said Garrick. “Though you were a step closer this time.” He lifted the cup on the left, revealing a shining coin beneath. “I gave your eyes the slip on the second-to-last switch with a tap of my nail on the center cup. Misdirection, you see? I sent you toward what was not there.”
I understand, thought Riley, wishing that somehow he could use misdirection to escape from Garrick.
Someday, I will send you somewhere that I have never been. And then I will give you the slip for good.
Chevie woke up with plasti-cuffs around her ankles and wrists securing her to the toilet. Her head throbbed with dull pain, and drops of blood plinked into a pool between her feet from the tip of her nose.
She was about to unleash a string of swear words when she noticed Riley in the bath, cuffed to the safety rail.
“Are you hurt?” she asked, the sentence’s final t stabbing her brain on its way out.
Waldo! That moron. I will shave him while he sleeps for this!
“No, miss,” said Riley. “Though that lightning rod knocked the stuffing out of me. These cuffs have me baffled. They are slimmer than a shoelace, but I can’t even get a stretch on ’em.”
Riley talked a little more about the cuffs and their fantastic strength, but Chevie zoned him out. What she needed was a moment or two of quiet time so her mind could settle down a bit after the Tasering Waldo had surprised her with.
I wasn’t expecting that. And how was it possible that Felix Smart had put out a Be On the Lookout for me on the network when he never made it back from the past?
Unless he did come back and holds me responsible for all the mayhem?
It didn’t sound likely or plausible.
Orange was with the hazmat team. He knows I didn’t kill them.
Riley was saying something. His tone was insistent, urgent even.
Chevie blinked the stars from her vision. “What? What is it, kid?”
“Your nose is bleeding, miss. Snort it up and hawk the lot out in one go. That’s the best thing for it.”
Snort it up and hawk it out.
Chevie did as she was told, spitting a ball of blood into the sink, and was surprised to find that the bleeding stopped immediately, though the snorting did make her head hurt a little more.
“Did Waldo shock you?”
“He did,” said Riley. “That electric pistol of his had me dancing the dotard’s jig on the floor. I woke just before you.”
“We need to get out of here, kid. You opened your cuffs back in Bedford Square. You got any more magic tricks down your sock?”
Riley glared at his own tethered wrists as though he could free them with mind power. “Not one, miss. How do you open a set of bracelets that don’t have no locks?”
You don’t was the answer to that question.
Chevie followed the logic of her train of thought, ignoring the waves of pain.
“Okay. We’re secured but safe. Waldo has the wrong end of the stick, but the cavalry are on the way, and we can clear things up when they get here. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. So long as we’re in this room, we stay alive.”
Riley frowned. “So this being trussed up like market fowl is a good thing?”
“In a way, yes.”
“No offense, miss, but maybe you being a female has clouded your judgment. If we dangle here for much longer, Garrick will slit our throats and watch us bleed. He won’t even need to mop up after me, for heaven’s sake, seeing as I am already in the tub.”
Chevie glanced sharply at the boy, surprised that he would make a joke, even a gruesome one, at such a time, but then she saw the fear in the boy’s eyes.
The poor guy lives with terror on a daily basis, she realized.
From the suite came the distinctive clatter of armed men entering a room. Chevie heard footsteps padding across the carpet and the oily clicks of pistols’ safety catches being engaged. Muted orders were issued, and Chevie imagined agents taking up positions at entrances and other possible breach points.
“Hey,” she called. “Hey, you guys. In here.” Seconds later an agent appeared at the bathroom door, dressed in the FBI’s version of Casual Male, which had been thirty years out of date when they thought of it twenty years ago. Tan chinos, blue Windbreaker, button-down shirt, and rubber-soled shoes. This guy might as well have had FBI written on his back in big yellow letters, which, in fact, he did have if you ripped away the Velcroed patch. The agent could not suppress a smile when he saw Chevie on the toilet. He drew a switchblade from his pocket and pressed the catch, releasing the blade, as if he were about to cut the plasti-cuffs, then retracted the blade with a touch of the button and pocketed the weapon.
“At ease, Savano. Don’t get up.” Chevie scowled. She knew this guy from back home. His name was Duff, and he had been tight with Cord Vallicose, her favorite instructor from Quantico. Vallicose had seen potential in his young student and taken Chevie under his wing.
“Hilarious, Duff. You won’t be laughing so hard when I get out of here and rearrange your hairdo.”
Duff scowled back, obviously proud of his perfect do. “Can it, Savano. You and your little mystery buddy are in serious trouble. I’m hearing talk that our hazmat boys are MIA. The AD is on his way down from a meeting in Scotland, so until he gets here, keep your trap shut.”
Chevie swallowed her anger; she’d have words with this guy when this was all over. “Okay, Agent. I realize you’re doing your job, and I would probably do the same thing myself if I was in your nineteen-fifties shoes, though possibly with a little more empathy and less jargon. But we have a scared boy here, and with good reason. There’s a pretty impressive guy on our tail, who probably took out the entire hazmat team with a musket.”
Duff sighed like this crazy talk made him sad. “Yep, the BOLO said you were delusional. London does that to a person. Can’t get a decent pizza in the entire city.” He snapped his fingers. “Hey, you know who I should tell about this?” Chevie stiffened. “Don’t you dare!”
Duff pulled a phone from his pocket and made a big deal of focusing the camera. “No, no really. Cord needs to know about this. He said you were his finest student. This is gonna break his heart.”
Duff snapped a couple of shots of Chevie cuffed to the toilet and texted it across the Atlantic to Cord Vallicose.
“Take this seriously, Duff!” said Chevie, struggling to keep her voice down. She knew this guy; the moment she shouted at him he would simply walk away and slam the door. “People are dying, and it’s not over yet. Take your weapon off safety, tell your guys to look sharp.”
Duff seemed on the point of taking her seriously when a text jingled through on his phone. He consulted the screen and smiled broadly.
“It’s from Cord. You should read this—he’s devastated.” And with a nasty chuckle Duff backed out of the room, closing the door behind him.
Albert Garrick arrived at the Garden Hotel seconds after the London team, and could do little but scowl in frustration as he watched them hurry through the entrance. Six agents in Windbreakers, blending in about as effectively as a half dozen penguins would in the chic lobby.
Garrick cursed them for fools, then treated himself to a coffee from a nearby café while he adjusted his plans. His BOLO had yielded an almost immediate callback from Agent Waldo Gunn, and Garrick had hoped to reach the safe house before the inevitable band of heavy-handed federal overkillers. Except in this case it was not overkill. An entire garrison of agents would not be enough to keep him from Riley and the Timekey.
Had Garrick succeeded in reaching the scene before the away team, he could simply have taken what he wanted and disposed of Waldo Gunn; but with six armed agents keeping watch, improvised violence could not be relied upon. The odds were still in Garrick’s favor, but Riley had skill in the martial arts, having been taught by a master, and Garrick had no desire to be felled by a lucky strike from a child.
For a moment he allowed himself to be mildly distracted by the changes that had
overhauled Monmouth Street since what he had begun to think of as his day. Even though Smart’s memories had prepared him for the bright, shiny wonders of the present, it was quite another thing to spy them first hand.
In his day Monmouth Street had been mainly penny digs, and by this time of night it would be lined with residents taking great amusement from the japes of juvenile beggars trying to pry coin from the theater crowds. Now, there were no beggars on the street and barely an Englishman to be seen, though if Smart’s memory served him correctly, they let anyone call themselves British these days.
I might have something to say about that, thought Garrick. When I am king.
He was, of course, joking. He had no desire to be king. The prime minister held the real power.
Garrick finished the really rather excellent coffee, thanked the waiter, then strolled across the street to the Garden Hotel.
Inside the safe suite, Waldo Gunn was not happy. This place was blown, and he knew it. After nearly a decade of caretaking this wonderful location, with more than two hundred at-risk subjects sheltered, the FBI away team had rolled up in their black SUVs and marched mob-handed into his discreet haven. Discreet no more.
And, though Waldo was slightly miffed that his own cushy posting was jeopardized, his main worry was professional.
I don’t even know for certain who the bad guy is, he thought. Agent Orange makes strong claims against Agent Savano, but nothing in her file suggests such a violent nature. There was that infamous incident in Los Angeles, but in my opinion she acted heroically and lives were saved.
So now she’s a mass murderer? It didn’t make sense. Everything was topsy-turvy today. Instead of protecting fugitives, he was detaining suspects. Even more irritating was the sight of those clodhopping agents tramping all over his beautiful Italian rugs, and now they were even trying on jackets from the closet.
If one of them even looks at the Zegna suit, I will shoot him myself, vowed Waldo.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” he called to a lanky agent sprawled on the sofa. “Take your shoes off the furniture. That’s a Carl Hansen!”