He started running, hating how the suit slowed him down and made him awkward.
Chapter Four
He watched Henbury and Adams very carefully after that. The seed had been planted in his mind, and he was sure he would never look at them in the same way again. That was Dickson’s skill as a civil servant◦– to brush aside the seemingly obvious to reveal an insidious menace that could ruin everything. That was how he worked, warping trusting souls into suspicious minds. Thacker could only assume that Dickson thought it kept the country safe, the price of freedom being eternal vigilance.
All Thacker knew was that tiny actions now carried enormous significance. The way they continually picked at the all-in-one coveralls given to them after their clothes had been bagged as high-grade biological waste and shipped post haste to Porton Down. The way they ate, like starved dogs wary of another random kicking. The way they examined every item that looked new and unusual, from the guns the soldiers carried to the nylon rope fixing the tent down.
Most of all, the way they talked to each other in low, urgent whispers, using only a pared-down version of English, as if the very words they used were rationed.
It was now entirely Dickson’s show. Somewhere along the line it had turned into an MI5 operation. Thacker was just there to assist, and shoot something or someone if it was deemed necessary.
But rather than freezing him out, Dickson took him into his confidence. Thacker was one of the few people on site who had a security clearance as high as he did.
Just before they entered the isolation tent, they put on the gauze masks used by surgeons. Henbury and Adams had missed eighty years of pandemics, and in their weakened state, a common cold could carry them off. Dickson was carrying a small tape recorder in his hand.
Thacker let Dickson go first. He followed closely behind, his hand resting on his webbing belt, just behind his sidearm. Henbury looked up from his scraped clean plate and backed away fractionally.
Dickson took a chair opposite. Thacker declined to sit, and stood at ease slightly behind and to the right. It afforded him a clear shot.
‘Is the food all right?’ asked Dickson.
Henbury dropped his spoon onto the crockery. ‘Not enough salt.’
‘Apparently too much salt gives you hypertension.’ When his comment was met by blank incomprehension, he added: ‘High blood pressure. Bad for the heart.’
‘Who are you?’ grunted Adams, pugnacious and wiry. Once, he’d been solidly built, muscle on his yeoman’s frame. Now he was gaunt, but still bellicose.
‘My name’s Dickson. I’m part of the, er, Secret Service. Major Thacker, you met in the hall. He’s regular army, like you were.’ Dickson placed the tape recorder on the table between them. ‘Do you know what that is?’
Henbury started to reach forward, and Adams caught his wrist. They looked at each other, and after a book’s worth of unspoken words, put their hands back in their laps.
‘It’s a tape recorder,’ said Dickson, faintly annoyed. ‘It records soundwaves on magnetic tape, which can be played back over and over again. I want to sit it on the table between us so that it can record this and subsequent interviews. It’s just a machine.’ He pressed the record button with his thumb and laid the whirring thing down. ‘Would you both like to state your names and your dates of birth?’
‘No,’ said Henbury.
‘This is getting stale already. We can keep you here for as long as we want. Forever, in fact. We can do to you whatever we want, up to and including killing you, if we think it’ll serve the national interest. Neither of you legally exist, and until we get some answers from you, you won’t be legally dead, either.’
Thacker frowned, and cleared his throat. The surgeon’s mask was a minor irritation compared with the full army respirator. ‘You both scare us. You’ve been somewhere unimaginable, and now you’ve returned. It’s Mr Dickson’s job to make sure you, or anything else that might have come with you, doesn’t pose a threat to the country. If you cooperate with us now, we can reach an informed decision, and sooner rather than later.’
Henbury seemed to slump even further back in his seat. ‘What’s your job, then?’
‘To make sure Dickson gets what he wants from you. Look, this isn’t going to be some good cop, bad cop shtick.’
Dickson smiled. ‘Shall we start again? Names, please.’
There was silence, then Henbury’s quiet, defeated voice: ‘Robert Arthur Geoffrey Leslie Henbury, born eighteenth of February, 1893. Now you, Adams.’
Adams grunted, then said: ‘George James Adams, twenty-first of April, 1886.’
‘Thank you, gentlemen. For the record, I’m handing to Robert Henbury the front page of today’s Times.’ Dickson shook the broadsheet out and pushed it across the table.
Henbury took it warily. His first reaction was to dismiss it. ‘This isn’t The Times.’
‘Not as you recognise it. It’s still The Times. Still printed in London.’
Henbury flattened out a crease with the palm of his hand. Adams, despite himself, leaned over.
‘Who are these people? I’ve never heard of any of them.’ Henbury was bewildered, and then he followed Adams’ quaking finger to the dateline at the top of the page.
‘It’s a lie. A trick. You’re trying to trick us!’ Adams was on his feet, unsteady, fingers gripping the tabletop.
Thacker’s fingers wandered to the butt of his pistol. ‘You’ve travelled, not in space but in time. Eighty years into the future. Now you’re here, and we have to deal with this whole extraordinary situation. Will you tell us where you’ve been, and what happened to you while you were there? If you like, you can start by explaining what that contraption is on the first floor of the west wing.’
Both men were too agitated to continue. Henbury crumpled the news sheet in his fist and gaped at Dickson, then at Thacker, and back again. Adams started to swear, using damn and blast and bloody like they were going out of fashion.
‘We’ll try again in the morning,’ said Dickson, and clicked the tape recorder off.
Outside, Dickson searched furiously for a cigarette, and didn’t stop his frenetic activity until the first rush of smoke had been sucked deep into his lungs.
‘That went well,’ said Thacker.
‘Bollocks it did. We both lost our rag. Too eager to prove that Little Lord Henbury and his sidekick are either homicidal lunatics or impostors from the ninth dimension bent on world domination.’
‘You know, you have a turn of phrase that’s almost poetic.’
Dickson laughed. ‘And you’re too phlegmatic.’
‘When I was down in that house, I was crapping myself every step of the way.’
‘Yes, but you did the job. Henbury should recognise your type: the Empire was built on people like you.’ Dickson chain-lit another cigarette and stubbed out the old one on a tent pole.
Thacker flipped off his face mask. ‘Do you want to take a look at the device in the house? There’s still enough light left.’
‘Don’t want to go poking around in the dark? Can’t blame you. Sure, why not. Do I have to wear that ridiculous NBC suit?’
‘Not if you don’t mind some rogue pathogen coagulating your blood in an instant, or rupturing every cell in your body.’ Thacker scratched his ear. ‘We’ve got things like that back in the lab, all safely locked up.’
Dickson pursed his lips. His cigarette nodded up and down. ‘They’ve some civvy getup at the portable lab. I’ll borrow one of those.’