TS01 Time Station London (12 page)

“No, I...” Stumbling toward the iridescent swirl, Burroughs finished his sentence hundreds of years in the future.

Time: 1012, GMT, July 10, 1940

Place: Offices of MI-5, Bayswater Road,

London, N.W. 1, England

At mid-morning, Brian received a surprising phone call. Sgt. Parkhurst entered his office as he was lowering a half-eaten, cream-filled Danish to the plate. Quickly Brian wiped his lips and sipped from a satisfying cup of coffee he had brewed himself. “There is a Lady Allison Wyndamire on the blower for you, sir.”

Brian had never heard of a Lady Allison Wyndamire before. Frowning, he reached for the handset of his telephone. “I’ll take the call.”

Static crackled in Brian’s ear as Sally Parkhurst connected the line. “Is this Sir Brian Moore?” an all too familiar voice inquired before he could speak.

Brian brightened instantly. “Dianna! What’s the occasion?”

“Meet me for lunch and I’ll tell you.”

“Where?”

“The Admiralty Inn. Eleven-thirtyish?”

Grinning broadly, Brian promised, “I’ll be there.”

“There’s a small, stand-up bar on the top floor. You’ll find me there.”

“I think I can locate it.” Brian hung up and stared out the window.

Something must be about to happen that is terribly wrong for Arkady to have sent in Dianna Basehart,
Brian reflected. She had been in Brian’s class at the Temporal Warden Corps. They had been friends and frequently partners in the physical training phase. A year after their graduation, they had become closer than casual friends. Then, after a particularly hazardous mission, they had become lovers. Over the years, due to the nature of their occupation, it had become more of an infrequent affair than a torrid romance. Their friendship had endured. Brian found himself looking forward to their lunch date with growing expectation. Meanwhile, he had MI-5 work to attend.

Over the past week, other agents of the Home Office had rounded up some genuine German agents. Brian told Parkhurst to hold all calls and reschedule all appointments for afternoon. Then he left his office by another door and descended to the basement of the building.

Brian gave a hard look to the first of the Nazi agents. “You know, we generally shoot spies. I think this time is going to be different. We are going to hang you and your friend in there.”

Blanching, the agent who had been using the cover name Robert York bit at his lower lip. “Hanging is what we did to the Communists in the Fatherland. It is a degrading way to die.”

“Thought you might see it that way. We see little difference between you and the Communists. All a bunch of bloody tyrants.”

“Hanging’s a good idea, Colonel,” the other interrogator piped up. “I saw a bloke hanged at Newgate once. All his sphincter muscles let go. Fouled himself right messily, he did.”

“Yes, well, our little Nazi here is going to get a firsthand experience of it, if I have my way.”

Thoroughly cowed now, the inexperienced spy made a hesitant inquiry. “What—what do you need to know? Something that would have a mitigating effect on my condition?”

Brian hid the pleased smile. “To whom do you send your information?”

“I… don’t know. It’s a receiving station on the coast. Near Calais, I think. From there it is sent to
Abwehr
headquarters in Berlin.”

“How often do you transmit?”

“Whenever I have something.”

“No, ah, schedule?” Brian probed.

“Yes. I have to check in every two weeks, whether I have something or not. The reporting day of the week changes each time.”

Brian went a new direction. “From whom do you collect your data?”

Their prisoner produced a wry smile. “A lot of it comes from simply reading your newspapers. In the Reich we would never permit such loose conveyance of State secrets.”

“No doubt. But you communicate with other persons, I’m sure. I want names, addresses, meeting places.”

Robert York gave them up. Of course it helped that he had been deprived of sleep for five days, fed only once each day, and yelled at and tossed from one burly MI-5 agent to another for hours, all of them former Rugby players.

When the session ended, Brian arranged for another agent to ask the exact same questions, but in different order, and so on until York’s story checked out. Then he went for the other Nazi. He enjoyed similar results and left the dazed “Germany spy” to the tender mercies of his jailers. Brian climbed to the street floor at a quarter past eleven and hailed a taxi for the ride to Parliament Square and the Admiralty Inn.

Time: 1134, GMT, July 10, 1940

Place: Admiralty lnn, Admiralty Lane,

Parliament Square, London, England

The Admiralty Inn had been in existence since the Lords of the Admiralty of the Royal Navy occupied offices in the same building. In other words, since the late 1600’s. The ground floor housed a public restaurant of the same name. The first floor was bright and airy, though a bit stuffy to the American eyes of Brian Moore. It had a dining area of companionable tables for six, where MPs from the house of Lords could dine.

On the second floor was a boarding school style, refectory dining room; complete with dark wood-paneled walls; open beams; trestle tables; and service through the long, narrow opening in a sidebar. Burgundy drapes framed the mullioned windows at the far end. It was reserved for Members of the House of Commons.

The top floor had a small, private dining room, intimately appointed, and the stand-up bar. There was but room for four at the bar itself, and no tables or chairs. In the crush of the noon hour, with the MPs present, revolving lines formed for the quartet of spaces and the barman did a brisk business. Someone in Commons must be exceptionally long-winded, Brian Moore surmised when he entered and found the accommodations nearly deserted.

At the top of the narrow, winding staircase, he spotted Dianna at the bar. Her striking, raven hair had been done in the latest style of the upper class. She wore a summer dress of diaphanous pink, with a huge, matching picture-frame hat. The combination set off her cobalt eyes and faintly tanned complexion nicely. Brian winced when he recognized the concoction in a stemmed glass she held in one gloved hand. A pink gin. She saw him and waved the other hand expansively. Brian started forward, then hesitated when Dianna broke the stately silence of the room.

“Brian… darling!” she called loudly.

Brian took a breath, and advanced gallantly. He took the extended hand, kissed the glove. “Di—your ladyship. Imagine my surprise when you rang me up.”

Her full, sensuous lips curved in a teasing smile, and her deep blue eyes sparkled mischievously. “No doubt.”

“What brings you to London?”

“Dark and sinister doings. I’ll tell you all about it over lunch. Do they still make that marvelous steak and kidney pie? You know, with the mushrooms, pearl onions, and garden peas in it?”

“I’m not accustomed to eating here. But I imagine they do. It’s the main staple for those in Commons.” To the barman, “I’ll have a Glennlivet.”

With glasses in hand, Brian and Dianna/Allison walked across the room to look out the windows at Admiralty Lane and the small park in front of Parliament House. This time he asked her in a voice so low as to be a whisper.

“What’s all this about? Why the Lady Wyndamire persona?”

Dianna playfully patted him on the shoulder. “We’re after big game. Arkady has received disturbing news. If unchecked, it could do irreparable harm to the Timeline. Your old friend Sir Rupert Cordise is going to stand for Parliament again. Commons, of course. And according to the history logs of ’46 and ’47, he is going to win.”

Brian frowned. “There’s no way he can rally support to oust Churchill. Besides, he disappears entirely in ’41.”

“No, that will change if he’s not stopped. He’s up to some devilment that’s put some ripples in the fabric of Time, and I’ve been brought back to derail his plans.
That’s
why the Lady Wyndamire thing. And, with you being a baronet, it lets us mix in the same circles.”

“How do you propose to counter him?”

Dianna studied Brian for a moment. “You get more handsome every time I see you, Whitefeather,” she evaded.

Brian laughed. “Neither you nor I can remember half the times we’ve seen one another. But is that how you’re going to do it?”

Dianna assumed a coy expression at his innuendo. “It might be that the old monster sex will rear his ugly head. Though there are several other ways. He can’t keep everything in his brain. There will be a journal, or diary files, perhaps. When I have him properly set up, we expose the old traitor and put an end to it once and for all.”

“Yes, and you’ll be in a Beam Back and disappear before I can even kiss you.”

Dianna wrinkled her nose. “Don’t count on that.”

Yet Brian knew that Dianna had no doubt been fitted with an Automatic Retrieval Implant. She would accomplish her mission and it would be automatically activated. She would vanish in the here and now and go back to the future from whence she came. Brian abruptly ended that gloomy Iine of thought when a change in tone warned him that Dianna had changed the subject.

“After we eat, you can come back to the travel agency and help me select a suitable wardrobe for Now.”

“I have a job here, you know.”

“Of course, Brian. And quite a helpful one. It lets you do your work for the Corps so much more easily. I gather you have something to do.”

Brian brushed at his bristly regimental mustache. “Yes, I have. Appointments, one with my boss in MI-5.” He would have preferred to spend the afternoon with her, and his expression showed it.

Dianna read his emotions clearly. She touched a hand to his arm. “You’re sweet. I’ll see you this evening?”

“Yes. I’ll be around about six.”

“Marvelous. I’ve a suite at the King’s Court. I can hardly wait.”

“Neither can I.” He meant it, too.

Time: 1340, Warden Central Time

Place: Temporal Warden Central

Arkady Gallubin scanned the printout that had come from 1940 London. It requested the real name and Home Culture of one Clive Beattie. Also a holograph of his true appearance. They had accomplished that easily enough. Arkady had it in a neat holographic disc on his desk, in the place usually reserved for a plate of his beloved
blini.
He thought of what the Corps had developed and, not for the first time, it chilled him.

Clive Beattie had been born Gunther Bewerber, thirty-two years earlier in the Germany of his Home Culture. Clive/Gunther had been well educated, raised in the home of his parents, his father a mid-level civil servant. Gallubin had also found out recently that Beattie also had the uncanny ability to look like and impersonate anyone. But most of this was already known to Steve Whitefeather. He had been briefed on his last visit to Warden Central.

What was disturbing to Arkady and had to be immediately passed along was what a search of timelines nearer to 1940 had discovered. Beattie/Bewerber was about to do something that would create a great rift in the future.

He and a group of five other German agents, with the assistance of Sir Rupert Cordise, were going to assassinate Churchill. The first disturbance was logged as beginning April 11, 1941. That’s the day Clive Beattie would blow the brains out the side of the head of Winston Churchill.

Time: 2017, GMT, July 10, 1940

Place: Rule’s, Maiden Lane,

London, England

Brian and Dianna went out that night for dinner and dancing. Brollies and bowlers, on knobbed wrought-iron and brass hangers, lined the paneled walls of the foyer in the famous restaurant that had been founded in 1798. Neither the address, the decor, nor the menu had changed since the establishment first opened its doors. Being new to the era, Dianna noticed a decidedly forced gaiety in the conduct of the denizens of London’s nightlife. Over a huge wedge of Stilton cheese and biscuits, she and Brian discussed the fact that at the least he had exposed himself to the enemy, and to the rogue travelers, as an agent of MI-5, if not as a Time Warden.

“You’ve made yourself a target. And you well know, if you die here, you’re dead for good and all time.”

Brian made little of it. “I think you are overreacting. Spies, professional espionage agents, rarely kill one another. That is one of the reasons Arkady gave me for my assuming this persona. A young, healthy, physically fit man not in uniform would stick out glaringly in the midst of all this.” He gestured to the plethora of uniforms in the central dining room.

Their discussion of the topic was interrupted shortly after by the wall of sirens and shrill of whistles. The Germans had taken up night bombing lately, and even though the bombing was restricted to military targets, precautions had to be observed in the event of stray bombs. Brian and Dianna spent an hour and a half huddled in a nearby station of the London subway, the Tube, as it was lovingly called. For half that time the tile floor under them shook from repeated explosions in the distant industrial district.

Over the next two days, he mulled over that tense ninety minutes. Although Dianna had afterward agreed that it was necessary for him to have believable cover employment to function as Resident, she seemed unshaken in her worry about his safety. The third day after, he had this forcibly brought back to him.