The teenager interrupted. "You don't look like her. Not anything like her. Nobody would believe you were her. You are too tall."
For the first time, Jenna Nicole Caddrick saw Noah Armstrong completely flummoxed. The detective's mouth opened onto shocked silence. But the kid who spoke Latin—which probably meant he was a down-timer, too, same as Marcus—wasn't finished. "I look more like her than any of us. I'll go in her place. If I dress up like a rich tourist, wear a wig the color of her hair, pretend to be rude and obnoxious, wear a bonnet low over my eyes and swear a lot, the people hunting her," the kid nodded toward Jenna, "will think she's me. Or I'm her. It will work," he insisted. "There is a tour leaving tomorrow that plans to shoot in a special competition, men and women both. I have watched every John Wayne movie ever made, twice, and I have seen thousands of tourists. I can pretend to be a woman cowboy shooter with no trouble at all."
The very fact that he'd come up with the idea in the first place told Jenna a great deal about how much the residents of this time station loathed tourists. Obnoxious and rude... It probably would work beautifully, given half a chance. "You realize you're risking your life?" she asked quietly.
The teenager stared her down. "Yes. They have tried to murder Ianira."
It was all that needed to be said.
"Julius—" Marcus started to protest.
"No," Julius swung that determined gaze toward his older friend. "If I die, then I will die with honor, protecting people I love. What more can any man ask?"
How did a kid that young end up that wise? Jenna thought about ancient Rome and what men did to other men there and shuddered inside. The fact that she, herself, had done exactly what this boy was volunteering to do didn't even occur to her. Jenna, too, was risking her own life to save Ianira's.
"That's settled, then," Noah said briskly. "Julius, I don't have words to thank you. Right now, I'd better go up to Commons, check into the hotel under the name on my station pass, find an outfitter. You, too, Jenna. I'll need help getting those steamer trunks back to the hotel, and all the gear we've got to buy along with it." The detective glanced at Marcus and Julius. "We'll bring the steamer trunks back right away, get Ianira and the rest of you into a hotel room until the gate goes. We're going to hide you right in the open, in a perfectly ordinary hotel room, and let them tear the basement and the rest of the station apart, looking for you. Then I'm going to establish my Denver persona with a vengeance, draw the attention of the bastards after us, so they'll concentrate on Denver, rather than London. There's going to be one more rude and obnoxious cowboy added to the station's population, today, I believe, the sooner the better. With a name that ought to grab somebody's attention."
The purloined letter... Jenna grimaced. She sure as hell didn't have any better ideas. Noah had gotten her out of New York alive. She was pretty sure Noah could get them all out of the station alive, too. Whether or not she and Ianira stayed that way in London was up to Jenna. She prayed she was up to the job. Because there just wasn't anybody else around to do it. Thoughts of her father brought her teeth together, hard and brutal. You're gonna pay for this, you son-of-a-bitch. You'll pay, if it's the last thing I ever do on this earth!
Then she headed up to Commons on Noah Armstrong's heels to fetch a steamer trunk.
Chapter Four
Shangri-La Station was an Escheresque blend of major airport terminal, world-class shopping mall, and miniature city, all tucked away safely inside a massive cavern in the heart of the uplifted limestone massifs of the Himalayan mountains, a cavern which had been gradually enlarged and remolded into one of the busiest terminals in the entire time-touring industry. Portions of the station emerged into the open sunshine on the mountain's flank, or would have, if Shangri-La's engineers hadn't artificially extended that rocky flank to cover the station's outer walls in natural-looking concrete "rock" faces. Because the terminal's main structure followed the maze of the cave system's inner caverns, TT-86 was a haphazard affair that sprawled in unexpected directions, with tunnels occasionally boring their way through solid rock to connect one section of the station with another.
The major time-touring gates all lay in the Commons, of course, a vast area of twisting balconies, insane staircases and ramps, and all the glitter of high-class shops and restaurants that even the most discriminating of billionaires could wish to find themselves surrounded with. But because Commons followed the twists and turns of the immense cavern, there was no straight shot or even line-of-sight view from one end to the other. And station Residential snaked back into even more remote corners and crannies, with apartments tucked in like cells in a beehive designed by LSD-doped honeybees.
The underpinnings of the station descended multiple stories into the mountain's rocky heart, where the nitty-gritty, daily business of keeping a small city operational was carried out. Machinery driven by a miniature atomic pile hummed in the rocky silence. The trickle and rush of running water from natural underground streams and waterfalls could be heard in the sepulchral darkness beyond the station's heating, cooling, and waste-disposal plants. Down here, anybody could hide anything for a period of many months, if not years.
Margo had realized long ago that Shangri-La Station was immense. She just hadn't realized how big it really was. Not until Skeeter Jackson led them down circuitous, narrow tunnels into a maze he clearly knew as well as Margo knew the route from Kit's palatial apartment to her library cubicle. Equally clearly, Skeeter had taken full advantage of this rat's maze to pull swift disappearing acts from station security and irate tourists he'd fleeced, conned, or just plain robbed.
Probably what saved his life when that enraged gladiator was trying to skewer him with a sword, she thought silently. Under Skeeter's direction, their search party broke apart at intervals, combing the corridors and tunnels individually, only to rejoin one another further on. She could hear the footsteps and voices of other search parties off in the distance. The echoes, eerie and distorted, left Margo shivering in the slight underground chill that no amount of central heating could dispel. Occasional screams and girder-bending shrieks drifted down from the enormous pteranodon sternbergi which had entered the station through an unstable gate into the era of dinosaurs.
The size of a small aircraft, the enormous flying reptile lived in an immense hydraulic cage that could be hoisted up from the sub-basements right through the floor to the Commons level for "feeding demonstrations." The pterodactyl ate several mountains of fish a day, far more than they could keep stocked through the gates. So the head of pest control, Sue Fritchey, had hatched an ambitious project to keep the big sternbergi fed: breeding her own subterranean food supply from an up-time hatchery and any down-time fingerlings they could bring in. The sub-basement corridors were lined with rows and high-stacked tiers of empty aquariums, waiting to be filled with the next batch of live fingerlings. Piles and dusty stacks of the empty glass boxes left the tunnels under Little Agora and Frontier Town looking like the ghost of a pet shop long since bankrupt, its fish sold below cost or dumped down the nearest toilet.
It was a lonely, eerie place to have to search for a missing friend.