Empire Games Series, Book 1(103)
“Well, Miss Douglas.” Inspector Morgan leaned toward her. “You’re a very lucky woman. Unlike the driver of Streetcar 411 on the number 18 circuit, who I gather has been signed off sick for the rest of the week from the shock of nearly running you over.”
“Shit.” Oops.
“I’ll take that as a nondenial,” Morgan said drily. “The driver also testified that you were there one second, then vanished the next. Which, along with the gadgets found on your person—and the spy devices you distributed around the switchyard—tell us exactly what kind of person you are.”
Rita took a mouthful of coffee, desperately trying to buy a few seconds to get a handle on a situation that seemed to be spinning out of control. “What kind of person would that be?” she asked.
The inspector’s expression froze for a split second. “An evasive one. I suggest you start answering my questions, Miss Douglas. We know you are a world-walker sent by the United States government, and now that we’ve caught you we know how to keep you. All we have to do to neutralize your ability is keep you on an upper floor, or in a basement, or blindfolded. The question then becomes one of whether you cooperate willingly, or whether we have to do this the hard way.” Morgan took a mouthful of coffee. “The hard way is easier for us, you know. We just do it by the book. Charge you with espionage, try you, lock you up, and throw away the key. Case closed. If you really want to spend the rest of your life chained to the wall of a cellar, we can make it happen.”
Rita dry-swallowed. Her tongue felt like parchment and her heart was pounding. To stop her hands from shaking visibly, she wrapped them around the coffee mug. “What’s the alternative?”
“You answer my bloody questions!” Inspector Morgan leaned across the table toward her, voice strident. Rita recoiled against the back of her chair. Morgan settled back, her tone moderating: “I don’t care how you justify it to yourself. I don’t care if you tell yourself you’re worming your way into my confidence to gather intelligence before you escape and report home. Your motives are immaterial. All that matters is that you answer enough of my questions that I can tell my superintendent that you are in a cooperative frame of mind.” She paused. “Do you want a minute or two to make your mind up?”
Rita knew enough to translate from cop-speak: There’s no pressure, this isn’t a boiler-room operation, I just want you to do as I say right now. But although she felt a mulish urge to throw it back in Morgan’s face, the inspector really did hold all the cards. Unless Rita was willing to world-walk from the top floor, her only options were the ones Morgan was offering her. Life in a hole, or full cooperation … whatever that meant.
“Ask away,” she said hoarsely, wondering if she’d be able to live with this numbness afterward. “What do you want to know?”
The inspector stared at her with unreadable eyes. “Let’s start with: which agency do you work for, and when are they expecting you to report back next…”
PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020
FEDERAL EMPLOYEE 004930391 CLASSIFIED VOICE TRANSCRIPT
AGENT O’NEILL: So our asset is now past her deadline. Gentlemen, ma’am, do we have any comments?
LIAISON, STATE DEPT: Colonel, is there any prospect—in your opinion—that she’s defected?
COL. SMITH: What? No, absolutely none whatsoever. If you’d asked me three months ago I’d have said it was a low probability outcome, but since then she’s seen the Gate and acquired a partner. She’s solid, in my view.
LIAISON, STATE DEPT: So, she’s either dead or captured?
COL. SMITH: (slowly) Those are the likeliest reasons, yes.
DR. SCRANTON: Have we had any signals since insertion? What about the switchyard?
AGENT O’NEILL: According to these transcripts, the last pop-up drone got nothing. It looks like they went through the rail yard with a fine-toothed comb—nothing answers when we ping it; all the relay nodes are unresponsive. Air Force sent another pop-up over the downtown station, but it got nothing from Rita’s inertial mapper or the bug in her left shoe. They’d have had to get lucky to find her, but it’s still worrying. The silence, I mean.
DR. SCRANTON: What else are we seeing over there?
AGENT O’NEILL: The drone we had overhead when we inserted Rita picked up her beacon in the central station. A few seconds later it disappeared and reappeared just outside the building. It’s possible something inside spooked her, but not enough to abort the mission. Since then we’ve had zip. The five-minute restriction on how long we can leave a drone in the air over there means we have huge holes in our coverage. Rita disappeared in the middle of a ninety-minute blackout with no assets in place to track her.
COL. SMITH: I’d like to draw your attention to the ground activity around the station at that time. And in the downtown area in general. Lots of cars, lots of people on foot—too many for six a.m. She could have walked straight into a dragnet.
AGENT O’NEILL: What kind of dragnet could stop her jaunting?
DR. SCRANTON: There is a very unpleasant case that I’d like you to consider. We know that this, this Commonwealth entity, has extensive technological capabilities. Maybe they’re not up to our level, but they’re advanced enough to be extremely dangerous. We also know that they’re one topological shift away from time line two, where we made hard contact with the Clan world-walkers—