The project liaison gulped audibly over the line. "Yes, sir. Oh, God, please get here quickly! There's more—I daren't say what over an unsecured phone line."
Stirling snarled under his breath. Worse he did not need. "The car's just pulled up," he muttered as headlamps stabbed past the curtains in his cottage window, sending shadows swinging wildly. "I'll be there in five minutes."
He grabbed up his field kit, carefully prepared before leaving London, and ran, lurching on his bad knee. He snatched open the driver's side door. "Move. I'll drive."
Bad knee or not, he could outdrive any graduate student on the planet, and Miss Dearborne was shaking violently behind the wheel. She slid frantically into the other seat. Stirling gunned the engine and squealed out onto asphalt. He didn't even take time to fasten his safety belt. The road roared past in the wake of their passage, tearing great holes in the drizzle and mist. Water sheeted down across the roadbed. Ghostly trees skittered and jumped as he skidded the Land Rover through the turns.
He tried to recall who'd left the pub and in what order—and when. Significantly, Brenna McEgan had left first, pleading weariness. Cedric Banning had followed shortly thereafter, leading Stirling to wonder who might be sleeping with whom. A couple of computer techs had left early, as well, and Zenon Mylonas had called it quits a quarter of an hour after that. A whole laundry list of potential suspects.
He took the turning onto the access road on two wheels, drawing a sharp gasp from Miss Dearborne. They thumped back down and sent gravel flying. Lights blazed in most of the on-site cottages. Beckett's windows were a notable exception, dark as the night itself. Poor bastard won't be needing them ever again, will he?
He skidded to a halt in front of the door, having made the drive in three minutes flat. The main lab door stood open, held by an ashen Blundell. The man gestured frantically. A sharp babble of voices greeted Stirling. The senior scientists were clumped together, faces shocky and pale, voices shrill. Several of the grad students were crying. So was Indrani Bhaskar. Brenna McEgan was missing. So was Cedric Banning.
"Where?" Stirling asked tersely.
Blundell pointed, hand shaking violently, toward Beckett's office.
The death inside that room was nearly too terrible for such a small space to contain. Terrance Beckett had died hard. His equipment lay in smashed profusion, his files scattered across the floor where violent struggles had swept them off his desk. Blood had pooled beneath the body, with splashes across the files, the front of the desk, the broken document trays. Given the placement of the wreckage, Beckett had been tempted out from behind his desk before the attack was launched, taking him by surprise in the middle of a conversation. He'd been knifed repeatedly and his skull crushed for good measure. Stirling didn't have to use guesswork on the type of knife. It lay on the floor beside its victim, all twenty-two wicked centimeters of it. Commando fighting knife, he catalogued the weapon automatically. American-made, high quality, and even easier to smuggle than firearms.
Not a woman's choice of weapon.
Or was it? It wouldn't take much strength to inflict fatal damage with a knife like that, and a woman attacker might explain the prolonged struggle. Beckett could easily have fought his way from one side of his office to the other, if his attacker were female. Less upper-body strength, weaker grip, and the women members of the research group were decidedly petite, compared with Beckett. Might explain the crushed skull, afterwards, as well. Hell hath no fury...
"You said there was worse," he turned abruptly, nearly running Blundell over in the process.
"Yes." The project liaison had to swallow twice before his voice would hold steady. "There's—that is—"
Fairfax Dempsey, Beckett's grad student, snarled, "It's Brenna bloody McEgan, that's what! She's set up the equipment and transferred through time!"
Oh, dear God...
"Show me."
They led him into the transfer room, as they'd dubbed it. A row of padded tables, looking much like ordinary medical examination benches, lined one wall. Two of the five were occupied. Two? Brenna McEgan was closest to the far corner, a psychological choice indicating, possibly, subconscious fear of being caught. A bruise discolored her cheek, evidence of the struggle with poor Beckett. The other traveler was Cedric Banning. His table was the one closest to the door—the position of pursuer, or perhaps just plain haste. Both of them were soaking wet, from the storm or from attempts to remove blood from clothing or both. McEgan's clothing was badly bloodstained; so was Banning's. He must've come in and discovered Beckett, tried to reach the poor bugger, slipped and fallen in the gore...
"Banning left a note," Dempsey said, eyes reddened from the attempt to hold back tears. "She'd killed Beckett before he got here, set up the equipment to transfer herself. Banning plugged his headset into her coordinates and went in pursuit, to stop her..." Dempsey was clutching a crumpled sheet of graph paper, torn from a notebook.
Stirling smoothed it out, frowning over the hasty scrawl.
McEgan's done it, the bloody bitch, the note read, Banning's handwriting nearly illegible. Must have known I was on to her, and the SAS showing up spooked her into jumping. Found out last week she's Cumann Na Mbann, although I couldn't prove it. Came in here to warn poor Beckett, slipped and fell in the blood, trying to get to him, but it was far too late. Have to stop her before she wrecks British history and kills off the whole bloody world. For God's sake, send through a backup to help me with this!
Stirling lifted his gaze to find himself at the still-point center of an invisible, all-too-real sphere of terror. It radiated like a living heat source in the confines of the lab, pushing him up against invisible walls. With creditable calm, he asked, "Why don't we just pull the ruddy plug?"
"You can't!" Mylonas cried, pupils dilating in naked shock.
"Why not?"
"You'd kill them both instantly! Systemic shock, disrupted energy transfer lines, and God knows what the resulting flux in power would do to the fractural planes involved; the system's set on a timer, you see, to taper the power levels off gradually, so there's no possibility of an energy embolism! She's set the bloody timer for a year, and if we try to override it, I can't answer for the consequences! We can plug someone else into the system, send another traveler at the power level she's set, which is what poor Dr. Banning's done, but we can't possibly disengage the system in an emergency shutdown! If we could do so safely, Cedric Banning would have shut it down at once!"
"All right, I get the bleeding picture," Stirling muttered, mopping his face with one hand. Christ, he'd needed more sleep before facing this. Cumann Na Mbann, that was the last thing he'd wanted to hear. The women's arm of the IRA, the most secret part of the whole terrorist organization and the most efficient as well, damned near impossible to infiltrate. Cumann Na Mbann members had done everything from courier jobs, running guns and messages in their babies' prams, to blowing up Protestant social clubs and gunning down British dignitaries. A more ruthless, clever opponent, Stirling could not imagine.
Just his stinking luck...
"Right, then. I'll have to go after them."
"You?" Indrani Bhaskar gasped. "But you're not trained! You don't know the first thing about the time period—"
"And those two do?" Stirling shot back. The too-still bodies of McEgan and Banning lay shrouded beneath the wires of their time-transference headsets. "They're not exactly historians, Dr. Bhaskar. Although I suppose it wouldn't take a great deal of historical training to assassinate Henry II before he has the chance to invade Ireland."