One Word Kill (Impossible Times Book 1) Read online

  Something about his frown told me it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  ‘But . . .’ I invited.

  ‘But the headbands won’t work yet,’ Demus said. He limped away, turned round, limped back. ‘The electronics I need can’t be bought yet.’

  The wind picked up and the rain turned from a mist to a steady patter. The chill cut through my coat and found my bones. I sat on the wet bench looking out over the wet fields at distant housing, a dripping forest behind me. Suddenly I was as miserable as I had ever been.

  ‘You couldn’t have found this out before you came back?’ Mia asked.

  ‘I could, and did. But the timing wasn’t mine to choose.’ Demus slumped back on the bench, beside me. He set a hand to my shoulder. ‘Chin up, kid.’ Perhaps my current low moment had punctuated his memories deeply enough that he still remembered it. ‘I need a better microchip than the ones on offer. A 32-bit processor at a minimum. A Motorola 68030 will serve. Just. But I can’t buy one. They do exist, however. Two years from now I’ll be able to order one.’

  ‘So why not just come back to when they can be bought?’ Mia persisted.

  ‘The answer to pretty much every why-question you have, all of which are perfectly reasonable, is simply this: I remember coming back to 1986. I remember that I didn’t show up in 1988 when all of this would have been much easier. When whatever tied a knot in our timeline happened, this is where the pieces fell. If I change anything, and I can, then it will no longer be the timeline I remember, and nothing I do can help the Mia I left behind.’ Demus sighed. ‘And the net result is that I need this chip, and currently the only examples of it are the prototypes held in research labs at several locations across the globe.’

  ‘Right, so you’re going to go all James Bond and steal the microchip from a high-security Tokyo laboratory?’ I laughed out loud. It was almost less feasible than time travel.

  ‘No. But now I get to answer the question you forgot to ask. The one about why I roped your friends into this. First, though, let me ask you a question of my own.’ Demus wiped the rain from his scalp. ‘What is it that John’s father does, exactly? You know. To make all that money?’

  CHAPTER 14

  ‘John?’

  ‘Yes?’ He sounded odd, but it was a bad line, full of crackles and fizz.

  ‘Emergency!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘None of us know how to dance.’

  ‘You mean you and Simon don’t.’

  ‘When have you ever danced?’

  ‘At my cousin’s wedding last year. There was a disco at the reception. I’ll have you know that I’ve got moves.’

  ‘We’re coming over.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘As soon as I’ve tricked Simon into coming.’

  A long silence filled with crackles and the ghosts of someone else’s conversation, then, ‘OK. At least it’ll be funny.’

  I hung up and leaned against the counter. ‘It’s on.’

  Simon’s phone was in the kitchen. It seemed wrong somehow. In my experience phones were in the hall, private things. But Simon’s mother apparently had no secrets, nothing to say on the phone that couldn’t be said within two yards of the kitchen table. Which was where both she and Simon’s little sister, Sian, sat watching me expectantly. Their cat, Baggage, had wound herself around my ankles and lay there shaken by loud purrs, as if she had realised some long-held ambition.

  ‘What are you going to tell him?’ Sian asked. ‘He won’t go there without a good reason. I mean a reason he thinks is good.’

  ‘I’ll tell him we need to do some planning for our next D&D session, and that John can’t come here because . . . he . . . he’s grounded until Friday.’

  ‘Nice.’ Simon’s mum nodded. Ever since the idea of getting Simon to a party had been mooted she’d been wholly on board. ‘I’ll give you a lift over there as soon as he gets home from school. I’ve always wanted to see this alleged mansion of John’s.’

  Half an hour later we pulled up in John’s gravelled drive. We were buzzed through the automatic gates at the street, and the house had remained hidden behind leylandii trees until the sweep of the approach revealed it.

  ‘Fuck me sideways!’

  ‘Mum!’ Simon’s protest went unheeded.

  ‘It’s like a stately home. In Richmond.’ Simon’s mum gawped without shame. ‘Go on then. And Simon, if there’s even the slightest chance he’s gay, make sure you marry him!’

  Simon shot out of the car faster than anyone of his girth should have been able to. I suspect most teenage boys could win the hundred metres in an attempt to outdistance parental embarrassment. I followed quickly, calling back my thanks for the lift.

  I joined Simon on the steps beneath a porch supported on grand columns. The doorbell was an ivory disc at the centre of a ridged brass plate and the chime it caused sounded both deep and distant.

  I always expected a butler to open John’s front door. A tall, immaculately tailored man with a pencil moustache straight out of the 1930s. John in a T-shirt, jeans, and socks was always something of a let-down. This time, though, it was Mia, barefoot, in a man’s shirt and black leggings, and the sight of her did something complicated to my insides.

  ‘Come on.’ She walked off down the broad, tiled hallway. The distant strains of a piano reached us.

  We took our shoes off and hurried after her. We all had the afternoon off due to a frozen pitch cancelling games and I’d taken the morning off, too, so I could scheme with Simon’s mum. What Mia’s excuse for being here before four on a Wednesday was, I didn’t ask. John was in one of the living rooms, playing on their grand piano. He was sickeningly good at it, and the piece was unashamedly romantic.

  ‘Such a show-off!’ I came to stand next to him, watching his hands flow across the keys.

  ‘Jealously is an ugly thing, my boy.’ John finished with a flourish. ‘Simon! You came! I didn’t think you would.’

  Simon put his bag on the polished mahogany expanse of the piano. ‘Why not? I don’t want to die in this wasteland any more than you do.’

  ‘Ah.’ John grinned at me. ‘You told him this was about D&D. Cunning.’

  ‘You’re here to dance, Simon.’ Mia reached for his hand.

  ‘You lied!’ Simon pulled back, scowling in my direction. ‘I’m going.’

  ‘You can’t. Not unless you want to walk the whole way.’ I claimed his bag from the piano. ‘Also, I have important news from Demus to discuss . . . after.’

  John played a ‘Dun! Dun! Dun . . . !’ on the deep notes, then got up and walked across the room. ‘You’re here for the same reason Nick is. You’re going to your first Arnot party and you’re both afraid of dancing. And girls.’ He reached the hi-fi system, a monster of a thing that managed to convey the sense that it was both horribly expensive and at the same time very, very cool. A work of finest German engineering capable of delivering Motown’s hottest beats with clinical efficiency. ‘Fortunately, I have gathered together examples of both. Music . . .’ He hit the play button and the opening bars of ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’ filled the room, Michael Jackson joining in quickly enough with his curious mixture of ooos and ahhhs, as if he were easing into a cold bath. ‘And the lovely Mia is here to represent the female half of the species.’

  Mia made a mock curtsey.

  We stood, looking at each other. Mr Jackson was doing his level best, but the degree of awkwardness with the four of us in a brightly lit room was sufficiently high that, with a gun to my head and the option to dance or die, I would have happily opted for the sweet mercy of a bullet.

  ‘Wait.’ John was starting to look as uncomfortable as I felt. He ran for the lights and dialled down the dimmer to squint level. ‘This is a lot easier with a beer in you. Trust me.’

  Mia approached Simon and began to swing her hips. Michael Jackson was beginning to start something at last. ‘It’s easy,’ she said, reaching for his hands. ‘You can’t do it wrong, except by just stand
ing there.’

  And somehow, she made it happen. It wasn’t down to her enthusiasm or cajoling, it wasn’t even the pretence of anonymity in the half-light, or the implicit vow of silence, a secret pact never to be spoken of. It was just something in her. Kindness maybe. But in the space of a few minutes all of us were dancing, badly, and just not caring. And John, for all his money, looks, and mastery of the piano was, by far, the worst of us!

  We danced through ‘Startin Somethin’’ into ‘Baby Be Mine’, where I watched Mia, and on into ‘The Girl Is Mine’, where John and I exchanged speculative glances.

  I had come to the house hurting and sick, dreading the whole thing, even as I played along that it was Simon who needed the lesson, not me. A large part of me had zero interest in going to a party. That part wanted to curl up around my illness, to turn in on itself and wait to be reprieved or to die. Even a good chunk of the part of me that said I should go was saying so out of a sense of guilt. The guilt that people on a timer feel about wasted opportunity. The big C had wrapped itself around me, and here I was thinking of letting my first real party slide by because I felt sick and I might make a fool of myself on the dance floor?

  But when the beat took hold and I let myself go, it seemed that the pain and even the nausea took a back seat, replaced by a joy that was, in part, relief, but mostly just the simple primal pleasure of the dance. And yes, it was also true that some fraction of it was also down to the fact that although John Featherstonhaugh might have music at his fingertips, when it came to Motown, the rest of him jerked around with about as much sense of rhythm as an epileptic cow. It was true when he had joked that jealousy was an ugly thing. And true that I was jealous. Mia felt increasingly precious to me, even though so little had passed between us. To John, I knew she would simply be a conquest. Not treated badly. But not . . . valued to her true worth.

  Inevitably ‘Thriller’ arrived, after which the needle parted company with the vinyl and we stood just a touch out of breath, a touch sweaty, starting to feel the embarrassment rise around us once more.

  ‘You see,’ Mia said, laughing. ‘Easy. And you’re all coming to the party, or I stop coming to D&D.’

  ‘OK.’ Simon agreed without hesitation. I think it was the D&D threat that did it. Mia was part of our group now. And those ties run deep. You don’t abandon a party member. Even if it means going to a party.

  ‘So what did Demus say?’ John asked.

  We had adjourned to another living room and were distributed along the length of two huge leather sofas, the over-stuffed kind punctuated with deep-set buttons; Mia and I in one, facing Simon and John in the other.

  ‘Well, for starters he told us what your dad does,’ Mia said.

  ‘What does his dad do?’ Simon asked.

  ‘John’s father is, among other things, the chief financial officer for Motorola UK,’ I said. ‘He is also on the board of directors and a significant shareholder in the parent company.’

  ‘This is news?’ John stretched. ‘I’ve told you this before.’

  ‘Yeah . . .’ I deflated somewhat. ‘Well. I wasn’t listening.’

  ‘So why does he care what my father does?’

  ‘To make the gadget that’s going to record Mia’s memories, so she can be healed after her accident—’

  ‘Wait! What?’ John raised his hand. ‘Accident?’

  ‘He didn’t say much about it, but she gets hurt and we need to record her memories to put them back afterwards.’

  ‘This sounds like bullshit.’ John pressed his lips into a thin line.

  ‘His gizmo won’t work without a 68030,’ I said.

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ John said.

  ‘It’s a microchip.’ Simon shuffled along the sofa. ‘In development. Not yet released.’

  I would have asked how Simon knew this shit, but it was the sort of stuff that he always knew. Anything from the gauge of an unknown stretch of rail track in the Alabama mountains to the specifications of an unreleased microchip.

  ‘Well then, he waits until it comes out and buys one,’ John suggested.

  ‘Not an option, apparently.’ I tried to sound apologetic. After all, technically it was me that was causing all this trouble. Or would be. ‘It’s all got to happen before the end of next week.’

  ‘So . . .’ John spread his hands.

  ‘So that’s why he proved himself to you guys,’ I said. ‘With the “batter up”, and knowing all the dice rolls.’ I took a deep breath. ‘He wants us to steal one for him.’

  CHAPTER 15

  ‘Industrial espionage? That’s what this is all about?’ John punched a cushion. ‘I knew this was all nonsense. The guy just wants to steal a march for one of the competitors. You know how much the research behind a new chip is worth, right? Hundreds of millions!’ He punched the cushion again. ‘I knew it.’

  ‘He’s from the future,’ I argued. ‘This new chip is like a steam engine to him. He doesn’t want to steal the ideas. Just the thing.’

  ‘With stakes this high he could afford any amount of special effects to fool us into believing his story.’ John started to pace around the room. ‘Think about it. He just happens to need this fabulously valuable thing to save our friend. In the future. It’s not like Mia’s in any danger. She doesn’t need saving.’

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ said Simon, unswayed by John’s passion, ‘is why he thinks we’ll be able to steal this chip for him. Even if you could argue that John might be helpful, that still leaves me and Elton. We’re not exactly top of the cat burglar list. He’d be better off kidnapping John and mailing pieces of him to his dad until he hands over the chip.’

  ‘Thanks.’ John favoured Simon with a rather ungrateful stare.

  ‘He needs John because just before Christmas John’s father took him on a bring-your-son-to-work day to the laboratory where the Japanese have sent a prototype of the chip for testing. John knows where it is and the rough layout. He needs you because he thinks you can hack into their mainframe, like in that film WarGames. I told him you couldn’t, but he says you can. He thinks you can find the combination for the safe where the chip is stored overnight. And he needs Elton because the easiest way of getting in is through the roof, and since Elton is practically Bruce Lee, he’s going to be able to scale security fences, climb buildings, and suchlike. You’ve seen what he can do.’

  ‘If he’s got money, can’t he just hire people to do this for him?’ Simon asked.

  ‘It’s a question of contacts, timing, and trust. He doesn’t know who to ask. He doesn’t have time to find out. And if he did, he couldn’t trust them.’ The real answer was that he remembered that they were involved. Not a direct memory, because apparently I was going to wipe those, but from information he gathered later. And if he remembered they were there, then they needed to be there, or none of this would work for him . . . and me. I felt selfish asking, but twenty-five years of guaranteed life, and more on offer, looked pretty damn good from where I sat, so I needed Demus to be my future. I needed my Mia to be his Mia.

  ‘Why does he think Simon could get information out of the mainframe? Or even get on it in the first place?’ John asked.

  ‘He says you’ll be able to find or guess your father’s password. He says it’s probably written down somewhere. Most likely inside his wallet. And he knows that Simon has been breaking into protected files on the mainframes at his dad’s university for years.’

  They both looked at Simon, who coloured and stared at his hands. ‘There’s no law against it.’

  ‘See!’ I said. ‘Demus says the security in computers during the 80s is a joke, and that anyone with a good understanding of the operating system should be able to root out the combinations for the lab safes.’

  ‘If they’re recorded on the system,’ said Simon.

  ‘He seems sure they are,’ I said.

  ‘So, all he wants us to do is rob my father’s work of their flagship new product, then?’
/>   ‘Yes.’ I hadn’t really expected John to leap at the opportunity. ‘They won’t really be losing anything, and it will help save Mia.’

  ‘Who doesn’t appear to need saving from anything,’ John said.

  I fell back into the sofa. We had all been standing practically face-to-face, close to yelling. I let exhaustion take me. ‘I believe him.’ I could have told them what Mia’s eyes had failed to tell her. I could have said that Demus was a future me, and if we kept to his script, if we allowed our timeline to be his, then my recovery was a done deal. I could have but I didn’t. It was too close to begging and something in me wouldn’t allow it. ‘I believe him and I’m going to try to get this chip with or without you lot. But I won’t succeed without you.’

  ‘Then why try?’ Simon asked.

  ‘Because you guys would try on my behalf if you believed it. And Mia’s one of us.’

  A tapping at the window stopped John from having to answer. Elton bounced into view, jumping to be seen.

  ‘I’ll go let him in.’ John set off on the long trek to the front door.

  ‘Why didn’t he just ring the bell?’ Mia asked as John left the room.

  ‘John’s mother doesn’t like him in the house.’ I looked at the floor.

  ‘Why not?’ Mia paused. ‘Elton’s the nicest guy ever. He’s always polite. He calls my mum “ma’am”.’

  ‘Wrong colour.’ Simon had less of a problem saying it than I did. He never really understood how people treated each other anyway.

  ‘Jesus!’ Mia flopped into the sofa beside me. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Fuck indeed,’ I said. ‘You can’t choose your parents, but John’s mother is always a reminder to me that I got a pretty good deal.’

  We sat in silence after that, until John came back, Elton on his heels.

  ‘Hey all.’ Elton perched on the arm of the larger sofa. ‘Who died?’ He looked edgy. Nervous. Not like Elton.

  ‘It’s nothing. We’re still in shock from seeing John’s dancing.’ I made a smile. ‘Also, you missed the bit where I told them that Demus wants us to rob a computer lab.’