Saskia Brandt: Deja Vu Part 2

'What.'

'Here is your first a.s.signment.' A sheaf of doc.u.ments landed on her desk. They looked ink-based. 'The first thief I want you to catch is an Englishman called David Proctor.'

'English?'

'You're on probation. If you don't catch him, you die, and at length. Good morning.'

Chapter Four.

Met Four Research Center, Nevada, USA: The day before A sound woke Jennifer Proctor. She raised her head from the desk, allowed an eddy of vertigo to pa.s.s, and looked about. Richardo's chair was empty. She was alone but for party streamers and mugs of flat champagne. By her watch, it was hardly dawn. Too early for a hangover. She stepped into her clogs and prepared to call out for Richardo, but there was a man standing in the doorway.

'Who the Christ are you?' she asked, closing her lab-coat.

'My name is John Hartfield.'

The moment grew long.

d.a.m.n it, Proctor.

She licked her dry lips. 'I'm Jennifer, sir. Jennifer Proctor, head of Project N25. Head of a subsection, rather.'

His face in darkness, he said, 'N25? Gerald will have given the programme a more memorable name, surely.'

'Deja Vu.'

'The psychological phenomenon. Well chosen.'

'He says that what goes around comes around.' She forced a smile. 'Mr Hartfield, on behalf of the team, I'd like to express our grat.i.tude for your financial support.'

Hartfield stepped into the room. His face was blank. He might have been watching Jennifer through a two-way mirror. 'No, it is we who are grateful to you.' He scratched a grey eyebrow. 'I'd like to talk about the project. Perhaps we could do that in the context of a tour?'

A tour at 5:00 a.m.

'Certainly.'

Outside, Jennifer shaded her eyes against the cavern lights. From their elevation, the bowl of the great centrifuge was visible among the power plants and workshops.

'I wonder if you could explain the significance of the first experiment, which you described in your report.'

'Here,' she said, producing the savonette watch. 'Take it.'

The chain of the timepiece poured into Hartfield's hand. He read the words that Jennifer had written in magic marker. His thumb rubbed them.

'It happened on Tuesday,' she said. 'One hour before we received presidential authority, the re-injection alarms sounded. These alarms are designed to respond to certain gravitational anomalies that correlate with the re-injection of matter. They're automatic.'

'But you hadn't sent anything through time.'

'Not at that point. The reception centrifuge began to spin up 11:52 a.m. At precisely noon, with the rotation arm at full speed, our cameras captured the materialisation of a plastic box. It struck the reception container at the perfect angle. Splashdown. Turn the watch. You see the time and date?'

'Yes.'

'I wrote that at 2:00 p.m., two hours after the watch materialised.'

'What did you do after it appeared?'

'I couldn't believe it. I ran to the office, opened a drawer, and took it out. The same watch, that is.' Jennifer laughed. The rush of success reddened her ears, but she knew the machine was an emphatic f.u.c.k off to all those who had questioned her youth, her worth. 'There was...there was a moment when I held both watches. In my left hand, the original watch showed the correct time. In my right, the duplicate showed two hours' hence. The same watch. We had done it. But we had only two hours to prep the machine.'

'Were you tempted to not send it back?'

'I don't understand.'

'Were you tempted to let 2:00 p.m. pa.s.s by without firing up the machine and sending the watch back to 12:00 p.m.?'

'That would have been impossible, Mr Hartfield. The effect of the cause had already occurred. You can't have an effect without a cause.'

'What if you tried?'

Jennifer frowned. 'I'm not making myself clear. The watch had already been sent; it just so happened that the sending had not yet occurred. Do you see what I mean? It's no different from firing a gun at a target. You can, as the shooter, wish that travelling bullet should not reach the target after the gun has been fired, but the bullet doesn't care what you think. It will always. .h.i.t. Always.'

Hartfield listened to the watch. He closed his eyes. 'It's running fine.'

'No, each tick is marginally slower than the last. The error was three nanoseconds per second on Tuesday. Now it's three microseconds, an order of magnitude greater.'

'Is that why you can't send a living person?'

'You're asking Wilbur Wright if he can put a man on the moon.' She took the watch and dealt the chain as a spiral into her palm. 'The two things are entirely different.'

At the fence that bordered the industrial enclosure, Jennifer dug into a bin of hard hats and gave one to Hartfield.

'Jennifer, shortly after the turn of the century, I was in Kentucky shopping for a thoroughbred. I fell unexpectedly from my mount and the diagnosis, made some days later, was that I suffered from a malignant brain tumour. In the years that followed, I underwent many treatments, from the medical to the medieval. Ultimately, I went public. I offered half of my empire to anyone who could cure me. As you would expect, I was approached by a number of con-artists and idiots. But one e-mail, from an Argentine medical student, intrigued me. He had an idea for a non-surgical procedure that I'm sure you're familiar with.'

'Orza's nano-treatment,' she replied, gesturing to the door in the fence. They pa.s.sed through.

'In its initial runs, non-cancerous cells were also attacked, particularly neurons a.s.sociated with higher brain function. In that respect, it was as blunt an instrument as chemotherapy. But I took the treatment with only weeks to live and, as you see, twenty years later I'm not yet dead.'

They walked on. Jennifer gestured to the smaller centrifuge that had been built at the edge of the larger one and explained how the two formed a transmitter-receiver arrangement. Hartfield nodded, but his eyes were elsewhere, and he touched her elbow to interrupt her explanation.

'Jennifer, I made Orza a famous man. One day, you too will be renowned. People will want your money and your time. Are you prepared?'

'I'll get used to it.'

'How old was Einstein when he published his Special Theory of Relativity?'

'Twenty-six.'

'And Newton his advances in physics?'

'Not forgetting mathematics and optics. Twenty-two.'

'And you your time machine, Jennifer?'

She felt the tension that gathered in her muscles when people probed her background, tried to divine her wellspring. 'Twenty-one.'

Hartfield stared. 'You've beaten them both.'

Jennifer met his gaze. 'But I had Einstein, and Einstein had Newton.'

'And you had your father. We should not forget him. Did you know that he once worked for me?'

Jennifer could not conceal her surprise. 'You ran the West Lothian Centre?'

'I owned it, and others. These were investments I was happy to make. I owe my life to science.'

'But you owed nothing to my father. I remember the problems he had when I was growing up. Doors closing, friends not returning his calls. Was that your doing? Because of the bombing?'

'Your father returned to academia, eventually. He recovered his career.'

'And my mother?'

Hartfield rested against a wall-like baffle. Behind it, an electrical plant hummed.

'Jennifer, I do hope I haven't offended you. I came here to offer congratulations. And, because your father and I were once friends, I need you to warn him. He is in danger.'

'What kind of danger?'

'I can't be certain. Talk to him.'

'You talk to him.'

'He wouldn't listen.'

Jennifer looked at this man: his blank, closed face; his unnatural body language; his clumsy threat. 'What should I say?'

'Tell him to stay in Oxford.'

'Oxford.'

'Every...'

'Every what?'

'Every effect has a cause,' he said.

Jennifer folded her arms. 'What goes around comes around.'

'That too. Thank you, Jennifer. I'm glad we met. Congratulations once more. I will study your reports carefully. Goodbye.'

The frown did not leave her face until Hartfield had closed the cage on the elevator. The radial arm of the centrifuge began to move. With each revolution, Jennifer felt her headache throb. The last of her drunkenness had gone.

West Lothian, Scotland Professor David Proctor forced himself to breathe with tidal ease, to wax air, to wane. He counted the blown specks on the taxi's windscreen and gave his widow's peak a quick brush. The hotel watched him. Twenty years ago, David had worked beneath its foundations in a research centre whose entrances were now capped and dead. He thought about the cut plumbing, the emptied kitchens, the barge-long conference tables splintered, the coffee pots emptied and the conversation silenced. He thought about it all.

He pocketed the brush.

Now or never, Proctor.

He opened the door and, without emerging, breathed the Scottish air. Nodding firs. A cloud-shot sky. For a moment, he was inside his memories of twenty years before.

'Professor,' whispered a voice in his ear, 'you have a call.'

'I'm supposed to be stealthed, Ego.'

'It is your daughter.'

David looked at his flat shoe on the gravel. Now or never. He withdrew his leg and closed the door. He took Ego, a metallic computer the size of a credit card, from his wallet. 'Go on, Ego.'

'I am having difficulty. Might it be encrypted?'

David smiled. He could feel his daughter's presence already. 'I dare say you'll find the cipher in her high school maths project.'

An image of his daughter appeared on Ego's exterior. Her skin was puffy and her eyes ringed with the sediment of hard work. A sickening fancy: that Jennifer had inherited a filament of decay from her late mother, whose head David had cradled in the last moments of her life in the rain of a split water-pipe not far beneath his taxi.

'Hey, Jennifer,' he said, unsettled by his thoughts.

'Dad. You're not easy to find.'

'Jennifer, I'm really glad you called. Really.'

'You seem shocked.'

'It's your accent.'

'You sound as British as ever.'

David feared this conversation would skim the surface of their hurt when it needed to plunge. 'Jesus,' he blurted, 'we need to talk.'

'Go on.'

'I sent you to New York too soon.'

'You sent me away, Dad.' Jennifer spoke without intonation. David wondered if she had rehea.r.s.ed the statement with a psychiatrist. 'You sent the freak to the freaks, then skipped the country.'