Rifter (The Survival Project Duology Book 1) (14 page)

“Done.”

Kerry took the books back to the shelves and they left the building.

Mara didn’t much fancy taking the tube train again, but she didn’t want to stay where they were in case anyone was out looking for her. The library was the obvious place, if they knew her purpose for being here, which … no, they couldn’t possibly know. Who would guess that someone travelling through a rift would be looking for solutions to climate degradation issues? They were as safe as they were anywhere else in London.

She thought back to when her grandmother used to talk to her about London from when she was a kid, and all the places she used to frequent when she worked there. If this world was that similar, then she knew where they should go. “How about we go back to the South Embankment?”

He nodded.

“As long as we don’t have to change too many times. I can’t make head nor tail of those tube maps.”

“I can’t guarantee that, but if we do, it’ll keep you awake.”

“You’re much too practical,” he said.

“I was brought up that way,” she replied.

Seventeen

Leo hurried out of the building, almost tripping down the entrance steps in his haste. The speed with which Atwood had found him was unsettling, which implied he was being followed, and even though he was several miles away from the MoD building, he didn’t want to wait around to see what the outcome of his conversation with Atwood was. He had no desire to unexpectedly bump into Debra. Two dressings down in one day was more than he was prepared to endure. There was a part of him that no longer cared what anyone thought, because soon it wouldn’t matter, but another part of his brain nagged that he shouldn’t burn his bridges yet in case his plan didn’t work. He might still need the job at the MoD.

He took a second to scan the street before he moved off. No one loitering. No parked vans. No one sitting in a car. Lots of windows. He began to walk.

He hadn’t asked if Mayra had been sent back to the flat, although he assumed she had. She’d be so pissed off with him if she was still there being questioned until her brain felt like a limp rag. He couldn’t face hearing her reaction to the whole process. He knew that she hadn’t done anything wrong, apart from saying ‘yes’ that first time he’d asked her out on a date, but the Ministry needed to make sure.

Too bad if Mayra didn’t like it and wanted to vent her anger. He had things he needed to do and not much time to do them. Casualties were to be expected.

First stop, now that he felt slightly less rusty with a gun, was the disruption site. It was time to test the brac — he couldn’t resist trying — because that would determine his next move. If it worked, he could be through the disruption in minutes — as long as he could disable the guards. He might not even have to if they let him through the tape.

His pulse began to quicken. Anticipation made his body feel like a coiled spring. It wasn’t good. If he turned up at the site all hyper and agitated, they might suspect something was wrong. Although, he had to accept that they might already have been told to report in if he turned up. Most of the guards knew him by sight, and even if they didn’t, he’d have to show his badge.

It was a risk, but he had to take it.

He slowed his pace, in order to try to slow his breathing. He could feel his breaths falter and sputter under the pressure of his concentration.

He arrived at the park and walked through the large, wrought iron gates on the north side. He needed to act confident, as if there was nothing wrong at all. He needed to exude authority. He needed to stay alert for any sign that they knew he was under suspicion. He tried to forget about the fact that the cameras that caught Mara’s arrival could catch his actions as well. Analysis was only likely to be carried out after the event.

It was as he’d expected. They had cordoned off a larger area of the grass, delineated by the fluorescent yellow tape that usually marked a crime scene. Mara’s tape was, no doubt, currently undergoing forensic examination. The three guards stood outside the area. It looked odd. It was a wonder people weren’t standing and staring at them. Three random guards. A large area of grass in the middle of the park. What conclusion would be drawn from that? Would it be on the evening news? God, he hoped not. He sometimes wondered about Debra’s strong-arm methods. She had taken the same approach with him. No subtlety, just stop the rifter getting through, and then trust that they tell you the truth about their mission.

Bad mistake.

She would know that eventually.

He did know all the guards that were on duty and they nodded in welcome. Still, he held out his ID. The one in charge waved him on without really looking at it and let him under the tape without a word.

One barrier crossed, literally.

He took in another long, slow breath and glanced back. None of them were watching him.

He hadn’t studied the disruption that closely the day before and he wished he had. He hadn’t wanted to be too obvious. He thought he knew disruptions inside out and he’d assumed that everything would be the same as when he came through, but it wasn’t. Atwood was correct. The disruption had a much larger surface diameter than the one through which he’d entered this world. He couldn’t imagine Gordon would’ve been able to manipulate that aspect, it had to be a random occurrence. If he could, it would mean the man he despised had far more control over the rifts than he used to, or than he had admitted. Could that much have happened in eight years?

He mentally slapped himself around the head.

Just because it was eight years for him, didn’t mean it was eight years for them. It wasn’t. Mara looked the same as he remembered her. There was no hint of laughter lines around her eyes, no thickening of her body through age. Time hadn’t kept pace at the other end. Time was screwed up. But he knew that already. Where and when you landed depended on which rift you caught.

He knew that disruptions didn’t just appear in London. The known ones, per the MoD, being Uluru, a hamlet in Siberia, and the base of Mount Columbia. No rifters had come through since him, but that didn’t mean that no one had travelled. If they’d caught another rift, they’d have become a part of history. He knew Mara had been scheduled to come through three trips after him .There were only three rifts relevant to this time. She’d been lucky, or unlucky, depending on your point of view. Screwed-up time.

He held his breath as he slowly put his hand into his inside pocket and pulled out the brac, careful to keep it in front of his body where the guards couldn’t see. He waited for ten seconds, counted in his head, to see if anything happened — he didn’t want to wait any longer in case he aroused suspicion. There was no signal, not even a flicker of light behind the brac’s display panel. Leo silently cursed Debra and her army of destructive minions. What good was destroying new technology? What advantage did that give them? He pushed the brac back down into his pocket and took another quick glance around to make sure no one had noticed.

Everything would’ve been so much easier if it had worked.

But it didn’t.

And he’d known it wouldn’t.

Vain hope was such a useless state of existence and he shouldn’t have given into it. He could’ve put his whole plan in jeopardy because of it. But he hadn’t. There were no legions of MoD employees running toward him, surrounding him, taking him down.

He decided he could risk staying a little longer. He ought to make sure everything was in place, because it might be the last chance he had.

Without moving his head, he let his eyes scan for the anchor that tied the rift in place. It was standard procedure. Rift opens, fire the anchor, monitor for half an hour for any instability and atmospheric readings while the rifter is prepared for travel. He spied it on the trunk of a large oak tree, several feet above his head, in a direct line about ten feet from the mouth of the disruption. No one in the office had mentioned seeing it, and it wasn’t catalogued in any of the reports he’d read, so he assumed they were still none the wiser on that score. Good. After Debra’s comments about things he might have hidden, he’d wondered if there was anything else she hadn’t told him she knew about. It seemed not, because if she’d known about the anchor, it would no longer be on the tree. It would probably have disintegrated. If the beam went, Gordon would close the rift. He was glad they were so small. He tried not to sigh with relief, although the guards might only have taken that as frustration. It looked stable, although there was no way he could check. He’d only made one controller. Perhaps, that had been a mistake.

He took a walk round the inside of the tape, feigning more interest than he had about the ground beneath him, then he thanked the guards and ducked back out under the barrier. He walked out of the park without looking back.

He found the sign telling him what time the gates closed. Midnight, and they were open again at five. That wasn’t good for his cause. It made the window of opportunity much too small, but a park was better than a busy thoroughfare. It was the least of his problems.

A brac was what he needed and there was only one place he could get one of those.

He needed to think.

He headed for the river and found a bench. He sat with his head cradled by his hands, trying to block out the city and focus on his task. Mara wouldn’t have gone far. That would be too risky. You needed to stay close to your centre of reference, the disruption, but she could’ve gone across the river. She was more likely to find a pawnbroker and accommodation to the south. But it was daytime and at that moment she should be collecting information. He knew Debra was right about the libraries. Gordon had never trusted anything but that which was written on paper, stick-in-the-mud that he was. You’d have thought that someone who was on the cutting edge of technological advances would have at least believed in the power of the collective mind. Leo’s view of the Internet was very different. He believed it was a powerful source of information, as long as you kept your wits about you and triple-checked every single fact. He was so glad he’d had the opportunity to avail himself of its wealth of information, rather than the sanitised archive he had back home. In fact, he really needed to use it right now, but not on his work phone.

He jogged to the nearest Internet cafe. Even if he was being followed, it would take them some time to sort out what he specifically had, or hadn’t, accessed, especially as the place was buzzing with activity — mainly tourists who had no desire to pay extortionate charges on their mobiles.

Once he’d found a seat that gave him a good view of the entrance and that had a wall behind it, he ordered a strong, black coffee, sat down and logged on. He opened a search for computer motherboards. That would send them along a suitable dead end. He sporadically clicked randomly on one of the results.

Meanwhile, he took out his wallet and opened up the small pocket that was meant to carry spare change. It only contained one thing. He pulled out the gold coin and turned it over in his fingers. It looked tiny in his hand. So insignificant, it was hard to believe it was worth anything. But it was made of gold and it was old. He wondered if Gordon had ever discovered that he’d taken a second one.

He removed his second mobile phone from his inside jacket pocket, the phone that was registered to a Caroline Thiessen. He took a picture of the coin, grabbed the image and performed an image search.

He smiled, wondering how long it would take them to realise he hadn’t done anything on the computer at all.

He remembered he’d once asked Gordon, ‘
What happens if we end up in a world that doesn’t value gold?
’ and had got the tersest response you could imagine. ‘
Gold will always be a scarce resource on this planet. A planet that was formed differently would be highly unlikely to have fostered life. Believe me, it will always be valued.
’ He’d wanted to argue, but hadn’t thought it worth the effort. By his reckoning, if there were infinite possibilities, there had to be a version of this world that had such an abundance of gold that people used it for making drink cans.

He wasn’t in the least bit surprised to find that there was more than one of the coins listed. There were, in fact, four. He was only interested in the most recent. He searched for the dates the items had been uploaded and found that one had appeared in the last few hours. It had been posted on a pawnbroker’s site, with a note that it was still pending release. Clearly, the pawnbroker wanted to create some interest. It was almost certain that he’d try to sell it on an auction site rather than in the shop, then he could tap into collectors across the world, as long as they were willing to forgo the official paperwork. If he got a bidding war going, he could make a decent amount from the sale and certainly way more than he would’ve paid Mara for the coin.

The shop was located near Waterlea, but he knew there was no point in going there now.

So, she would have found accommodation, but she wouldn’t have strayed too far from her centre of reference, and she had pawned the coin.

He triangulated the pawnshop, his flat and the disruption and looked up hostels nearby. Hostels were about the only option, because hotels were too expensive and B&Bs always had a landlady who wanted too much information.

He located half a dozen hostels. He crossed out the closest one to the pawnbroker, which was only around the corner. That was likely to have been a false trail, if she’d bothered with one. He thought about what he’d do if it were him. He would’ve picked the one furthest away, but she wasn’t him. He reckoned she’d have picked the third or the fourth closest. Of course, they were in opposite directions from each other. He couldn’t stake them both out … unless he informed The Department. He wasn’t going to do that.