“He said that we could never stop you. That you would cross heaven and hell to find him.”
Garrick tousled Riley’s hair, and the boy forced himself not to jerk his head away from the touch.
“Time and space, to be precise,” said Garrick. “And I picked up a few valuable tidbits on my travels.” As he was saying this, Garrick knelt and placed the tip of the switchblade over Duff’s chest. “But one lesson I learned long before this particular jaunt was not to leave any witnesses. Not unless I want to swing for the kindness.”
“Let me do it, master,” blurted Riley. “To make it up to you for all the blundering and trouble I’ve put you to.”
Garrick was touched, but wary. “You would make your bones? Now?”
“Your way is the only way,” said Riley. “I see that now. The time has come for me to embrace my destiny. To back the winning horse.”
Garrick tapped his own chin with the blade, then leaned forward to slice Riley’s cuffs.
“I have no patience for tomfoolery or hesitations, Riley. Strike quickly and earn yourself a footnote in my good books. Otherwise I will be treating you as a hostile.”
Riley took the offered blade. “I am grateful for the chance, master. You can count on me.”
Chevie could only hope that Riley was making a play; otherwise, if he actually intended to do whatever it took to keep himself alive, that might include killing her and Duff both. In any case, she had to appear outraged.
“Don’t do it, kid,” she warned. “You kill a Fed, and there will be nowhere to hide.”
Garrick smiled slyly. “Oh, but there is a place, isn’t there, Agent? Or perhaps a time?”
Riley held the blade in his fist and then moved so fast that even Garrick’s eyebrows lifted. He twirled the knife a full revolution and then slid it cleanly between Duff’s third and fourth ribs, directly above the heart. A poppy-shaped bloodstain blossomed at the spot and quickly soaked the material of the agent’s crisp shirt.
“There,” said Riley, his voice quavering slightly. “It is done. And no big deal either. Shall I send the other one off also? Unto dust, as you always say, master.”
“Murderer!” cried Chevie, aiming a kick at Riley, which Garrick deflected with the heel of one hand.
“All credit to you, boy. That was a clean puncture. In like a hot poker through snow.”
“The girl, master?”
“No,” said Garrick, taking back the switchblade. “Though every strike binds you to me with blood, I must do this one myself.”
Garrick grasped Chevie’s chin with his fingers. They felt like steel pincers along her jawline. He ratcheted her head backward, carefully removed the Timekey from her neck, and laid the blade along her windpipe.
Chevie flinched as her life flashed before her eyes, just as the movies had told her it would.
She saw her teacher’s face, kind and worried, as she rescued her student from the clutches of a briar patch on the Topanga Canyon trail. She saw her father’s motorbike accelerate around a bend on the Pacific Coast Highway, and she knew now he would never return, that his fuel tank would explode as he passed through Venice Beach. She saw her friend Nikki riding a big wave on Cross Creek beach, her hands reaching toward the sky as though she could grab onto a cloud.
The images faded, and Chevie discovered to her surprise that she was still alive. Garrick crouched over her, spine curved, a grimace dragging at the corners of his mouth. A man at war with his demons.
You must prevail, Albert Garrick, he thought. Your mind is your own.
Chevie was afraid to breathe. The tiniest movement would press her tender throat against the razor-sharp blade.
Do it, Garrick told himself. Make the cut. Unto dust.
Riley tried to take advantage of Garrick’s hesitation. “Master, leave the lass be. It’s me you’re after. Leave her, and let’s away.”
Garrick rounded on the boy, pointing the switchblade at his eye. “You are plum correct there, my lad. I have come for you, and you proved yourself worthy. Now make yourself useful and check the gentlemen beyond for heartbeats.”
Riley hesitated at the door. “We are not clear of this yet, master. Perhaps a hostage would be useful?”
Garrick seized upon this notion. It gave him a legitimate reason for not harming the girl.
“Perhaps a hostage would be of use. But I fear this one will rebel when an opportunity presents itself.”
“I will vouch for her,” said Riley.
“Do you understand what you are saying?” asked Garrick. “You are offering yourself to pay for her crimes? Her punishment will be yours? And you yourself are teetering on the edge of the abyss after your escape attempt, even with that kill. I will brook not one more scrap of insubordination.”
“I understand, master. Perhaps she can help us.”
Garrick closed one eye and the other glittered. “Us, is it? There’s an us now?”
Riley waited for his master’s response with held breath. He knew that Garrick would not hesitate to kill Chevie simply to make his argument clear, but something held him back.
I was right. Garrick has changed, Riley observed. His posture, the meat on his bones. Even his tone seems different.
“Very well,” said Garrick, after a tantalizing silence. “We take the girl. But if she does betray me . . . you both pay the price.”
Riley sighed, relieved that Chevie would live, even though she would probably kill him given the chance.
Garrick gazed down at her. “You are as transparent as a window at Fortnum and Mason’s to me, girl. You are thinking at this instant that so long as you are alive, then there is a chance of escape.”
Garrick bent low over Chevie, tracing her eyebrow with the tip of his blade. “Abandon all hope,” he whispered. “For hope has abandoned ye.”
Chevie believed him, and so did the boy.
Garrick was positively ebullient to have Riley back. He had an audience again, swelled to twice its size. “Numbers in the stalls are up by a hundred percent,” he commented to Riley as they rode in the black cab toward Bedford Square. “It must be a good show.”
Chevie and Riley sat opposite him on the fold-down seats. Chevie was traumatized from stepping over the half dozen federal corpses in the safe suite.
Duff was a jerk, thought Chevie. But he was a human jerk. Chevie had never seen so much death and was more shaken than she had imagined she would be in a combat situation. Her only consolation had been the sight of Waldo Gunn safe inside his panic pod.
At least Waldo knows I am not a murderer. But this scrap of comfort did little to dispel the shock that crushed her spirit.
Riley, on the other hand, had lived his life in Victorian London, where murder was rare but life was cheap. Many poor children died at birth; if they did survive that first day, the odds were that cholera, smallpox, scarlet fever, or whooping cough would do them in before their fifth birthday. Riley had seen the grim reaper’s handiwork more times than he could count.
Life and death are two ends of the same ride, Garrick had once told him. Nothing to celebrate or mourn.
And so Riley told himself to stay sharp, or he and Miss Savano could be coming to the end of their own rides.
Someday I may mourn all the souls Albert Garrick has done in, he thought. But not this day. This day is for fighting.
It was the early hours of the morning, and the streets were alive with die-hard revelers and city workers, winding along Tottenham Court Road under the eyes of coppers who walked the beat in pairs. Motorized street sweepers scoured the road with their bristled brushes, throwing up wakes of muddied water; and in the shop windows, employees of a dozen electronics stores switched on a thousand television and computer screens.
“Pleasantly warm,” noted Garrick, tapping the knife in his breast pocket, so that Chevie would not forget that it was there or what it could do. “What is the season?”
“Summer,” said Chevie sullenly. Garrick sighed, and his face seemed to slide like m
elting butter until the features were his own again.
The face of an accountant, thought Chevie. Or a geography teacher. Not a merciless assassin.
Garrick punched Riley’s shoulder playfully. “Ah . . . summer in London, without the stench of decay in our nostrils, and the two of us finally brothers in enterprise. Could there be anything finer? Almost a pity we have to go home, eh, boy?”
“Why do you want to go back?” asked Chevie.
Garrick tugged at the Timekey around his neck. “In spite of my new abilities, this world is new to me. I am at a disadvantage here, and a fugitive to boot. When I return to my own time, London town will be my oyster. Can you imagine what I could achieve with my understanding of the future? In the field of armaments alone, I could change the world.”
“A psychopath who wants to take over the planet. How original.”
Riley drew a sharp breath, anticipating swift punishment for such an impudent comment, but to his surprise Garrick almost seemed to be enjoying the exchange.
Garrick slapped his thigh. “Oh, Chevron, you are a tonic. The odds are stacked against you higher than the Tower of London and still you are full to the gills with pluck. I see now why Felix was fond of you.”
Chevie snorted. “Felix? Fond of me? You’ve been misinformed.”