T.I.M.E Stories Read online

  ANGRY ROBOT

  An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd

  Unit 11, Shepperton House

  89 Shepperton Road

  London N1 3DF

  UK

  angryrobotbooks.com

  twitter.com/angryrobotbooks

  T.I.M.E for shenanigans

  An Angry Robot paperback original, 2020

  Copyright © Bragelonne, 2020

  2019@SPACE Cowboys.

  All rights reserved

  Cover by Pascal Quidault

  Set in Meridien

  Distributed in the United States by Penguin Random House, Inc., New York.

  All rights reserved. Christophe Lambert asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Sales of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.

  Angry Robot and the Angry Robot icon are registered trademarks of Watkins Media Ltd.

  ISBN 978 0 85766 846 2

  Ebook ISBN 978 0 85766 854 7

  Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Four

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter One

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  23 January 2014.

  The limousine left Los Angeles and the downtown business district with its office towers standing fixed against a smog-smeared sky, travelling for nearly an hour before turning into a dirt road that snaked its way along the bottom of a canyon like a dried-up river bed. Access to this pebbly track was located three hundred yards south of the highway, hidden behind a thicket of brush. There was no sign indicating what lay at the other end. It was impossible to stumble upon it by chance: those who took this path knew where they were going.

  Inside the vehicle, no one spoke. Neither the chauffeur, right out of Men in Black, wearing sunglasses and keeping his hands welded to the steering wheel; nor the passenger seated in the rear, with greying temples and an expensive three-piece suit. The only sound was the thin hum of the air conditioning and the velvety purr of the car’s engine. The chauffeur’s driving was deft and smooth, and the car’s high-quality shock absorbers had no trouble softening any bumps in the road.

  The limousine came within sight of an oasis of greenery, a verdant enclave in the middle of the arid landscape. A large three-storey building stood behind a fence. The lawns were carefully maintained, as witnessed by the hissing of the automatic sprinklers. A sign attached to the fence read: FATELMEYER PSYCHIATRIC INSTITUTE. PRIVATE PROPERTY.

  The establishment looked like a mock Mexican hacienda: ochre-coloured walls surrounded by trees. There were even some palms. The decor was almost enchanting… if one ignored the bars on the windows.

  The chauffeur showed ID to a security guard on duty and then came to a halt before the main entrance to the building.

  A man was waiting out on the front steps. Maximilian Fatelmeyer, director of the institute, was a weary, balding fifty year-old desperately trying to keep up appearances with the help of sunlamps and hair implants. Despite his best efforts, age was winning the battle. Fatelmeyer waited until the chauffeur opened the door for his passenger and then stepped forward with a broad, almost fawning smile on his face.

  “Mr Rusk, it’s an honour. And a pleasure.”

  “Likewise,” replied the man in the suit.

  The expression on the visitor’s face, however, without being frankly hostile, conveyed no such warmth. The two men shook hands. The director was visibly intimidated. As a private institution, his establishment did not rely on any government grants, but this visit by such an important functionary was not to be taken lightly. Victor Rusk had served as special advisor to the Secretary of Health and Human Services since 2009. He’d already survived two Cabinet shakeups. Word was he was irreplaceable.

  “Would you please follow me?”

  The two men crossed a patio with a fountain before entering a front hall where the air conditioning, working at maximum, induced a thermal shock after the desert heat outside.

  A buffet had been set out near the institute’s reception.

  “Would you care for some refreshment?”

  “Thank you, but I’m on a tight schedule. I’d like to see the patient right away.”

  “Fine. The rooms with the most – ahem – serious cases are on the second floor.”

  An awkward silence ensued as the two men rode up in the lift. There was a soft chime, and the doors opened. They found themselves in a corridor nothing like the building’s welcoming exterior. Cold, bare walls and a grimy linoleum floor. Only one window at the far extremity, a luminous rectangle at the end of a tunnel. The succession of doors to both the left and right were made of metal and painted an olive green that in other circumstances might have passed as faded military khaki.

  Fatelmeyer halted at the second door on the right.

  “Here we are.”

  Rusk put his eye to the spyhole. The fisheye lens provided a view of the entire room, not much of a feat given its narrow confines. There was a washbasin made of stainless steel. A table. A chair. A padlocked wardrobe. A television set installed near a corner of the ceiling, showing cartoons. A young, red-headed woman lying on a bed riveted to the wall was idly zapping between channels. She was wearing a pair of what looked like pyjamas a size too big for her, made from a scratchy-looking blue material.

  “Tess Heiden,” the director announced.

  Rusk turned to him.

  “I’d like to speak to Ms Heiden. Alone, if I may. Can you arrange that?”

  “This would concern the experimental program you mentioned on the phone?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’d like to know a little more, if possible.”

  “I’m not at liberty to tell you more, sorry.”

  Fatelmeyer looked like a small child being offered a spoonful of something distinctly unappetizing.

  “It’s just that… legally speaking, this patient is under my responsibility.”

  “The government will provide you with a release. It’s all perfectly legal. And as for your tax bill, I’ll see what I can do. Establishments like yours bear a heavy financial burden, I’m well aware of that. And I’m a man who keeps his word, Mr Fatelmeyer. If you do me this favour, you won’t regret it.”

  The director’s face relaxed. “All right… But be careful. She can be…”

  He searched for the right words.
br />   “Volatile?” suggested Rusk.

  The other man nodded. “Yes, that’s it exactly.”

  The meeting took place in Fatelmeyer’s office. Handsome furniture made of polished wood. Handmade Navajo rugs. Lots of books on shelves (thick manuals, encyclopaedias) and lots of diplomas on the walls. Light entered the room from a broad side window. A ceiling fan lazily stirred the air, its function largely decorative since the office, like the rest of the institute, was air-conditioned, of course.

  Rusk sat behind the director’s desk. Wearing reading glasses, he scrolled through pages on his touchscreen tablet with a series of nonchalant swipes. He bore a discreet ring on his right hand with a stone that gave off dark red glints, matching the burgundy handkerchief tucked into his suit pocket. When the office door opened, he did not look up from his screen.

  “Have her seated and then leave us, please.”

  Fatelmeyer did as he was told. He was not at all pleased to find himself reduced to the role of a flunky, but if this was the price for relief on his taxes, he was more than willing to swallow his pride.

  The door closed behind him.

  Rusk began summarizing aloud from the information on his screen: “Tess Heiden, twenty years old, born in 1993. A difficult childhood. Mother a junkie. Like you, she had numerous stays in psychiatric institutions. Father unknown… At the age of ten, you were placed with a foster family, the Heidens, who adopted you officially two years later, despite your… unstable behaviour, to say the least. Your adoptive parents died in a car accident in 2010…”

  There was no reaction from the young woman, who remained obstinately silent. Rusk continued: “You’re a fan of comics, TV series, and other nonsense. A ‘nerd’, isn’t that what they say these days? Expelled from nearly every school you ever attended… Two attempts to run away. You were homeless for a year and a half, following the death of your adoptive parents. Some soft drug abuse: marijuana and alcohol. Pickpocketing. One arrest for–”

  “Enough. I know my own life story, thanks.”

  She spoke with a hoarse smoker’s voice. Rusk paused and finally deigned to look at her. She was undeniably a good-looking girl. Not voluptuous, but well proportioned, at least as far as the baggy pyjamas allowed him to judge. The red hair framed a face which still bore signs of childhood chubbiness. Her lips were plump, her nose straight and thin. And then there was that cobalt blue gaze, scanning him with the sharpness of a laser.

  “I’ll go on,” Rusk declared coldly before resuming his reading. “You’re intelligent. Very intelligent, according to what it says here. IQ score of 150. Photographic or eidetic memory: you can retain everything you see or read in record time. Is all that true?”

  Tess squirmed on her seat. “Do you want me to do my Sherlock Holmes act?”

  She pretended to concentrate like some vaudeville mind reader, head bowed and eyes closed, her index and middle finger resting on her nose.

  “Flashy suit, small ring, manicured nails, and there’s a rising inflexion at the end of your sentences… I’d say you’re a big fairy. Am I wrong?”

  “Very funny. Maybe you inherited your sense of humour from your dad, but that’s something we’ll never know… On the other hand, it seems clear that Mom transmitted most of her neuroses to you: borderline personality disorder, outbreaks of violence, dysphoria, self-harming, one suicide attempt… You’re here to deal with all those little problems, aren’t you?”

  “Go screw yourself.”

  “Recommended treatment: psychotherapy accompanied by selective inhibitors to encourage serotonin reuptake. I see here that you assaulted your supervisor during community service?”

  “He deserved it.”

  Rusk nodded. “Uh-huh…” He removed his glasses and stared hard at Tess. “And your coach, when you were fifteen? Your classmate, in biology? The cashier, at the fast food place, last year? Did they all deserve it?”

  “That’s exactly right.”

  “So, it’s not a good idea to bug you, is that it?”

  “In a nutshell.”

  There was a moment of silence. Rusk pushed back his chair with a loud sigh. “What are we going to do with you, young lady?”

  “That’s for you to say. What do you want with me, anyway? What’s it all about, this interview?”

  Rusk stood up and went over to the window, hands behind his back. He looked out at the palm trees, and at the fountain in the patio burbling peacefully. His face was in profile from where Tess sat. He showed no sign of any particular emotion.

  “The Secretary of Health and Human Services has charged me with organizing a series of tests designed to evaluate and precisely classify people like you…”

  “People like me? For what purpose?”

  Rusk swivelled his head without moving the rest of his body. “For the purpose of advancing science, of course,” he replied.

  He did not even make an effort to hide the cynicism of his smile.

  “Cut the bullshit,” the young woman snarled.

  This time, Rusk turned around completely. “You agree to join me, once or twice a week over the course of one or two months, and in exchange, the judicial system of this country, in its infinite goodwill, will wipe the slate clean for most of your escapades. If memory serves, you didn’t just beat up a cashier, did you? There was a broken window, plus damage to a fryer and an electronic display… And if you prove cooperative and perform well, we could – who knows? – even offer you a fresh start! Don’t forget the words of the poet: ‘Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.’”

  “Are you sure you work for HHS? Because, poetry aside, your spiel sounds more like the CIA or FBI…” The man in the three-piece suit before her gave nothing away, his lips fixed in that small smile tinged with duplicity. “And your stupid tests would involve what, exactly?”

  “Chef’s surprise. If I told you beforehand, where would be the fun?”

  “Do I need to give you an answer right now?”

  “That would be good, yes.”

  Tess’s hand lifted slowly, fist clenched, except for the middle finger standing proudly on its own.

  “I see,” said Rusk. He picked up his tablet and headed for the door. “Maybe you’re not as intelligent as the records show, after all. Sometimes our evaluators make mistakes. Good luck with the rest of your life, young lady.”

  Rusk was on the point of crossing the threshold when Tess suddenly called out: “Wait!”

  The special advisor turned around slowly, intrigued.

  The young woman still had a sulky expression on her face, but it did not prevent her from reeling off: “The stone in your ring, it’s a gem. A garnet. The symbol of the Theta Tau fraternity, which also explains the burgundy pocket handkerchief. Your accent is Southern. I’d bet on Alabama. Maybe Tennessee. But it’s strange, ill-defined. You must have gone to an Ivy League university, like the rest of the country’s elite. Health and Human Services? I’d say Harvard, then, with its School of Public Health. And that little quotation points in the same direction: T.S. Eliot. He was a Harvard man too, wasn’t he?”

  “He was.”

  “Should I go on?” she asked.

  Rusk did his utmost to conceal his delight, without completely succeeding. “That won’t be necessary. You’ve convinced me, Ms Heiden.”

  Tess drew a deep breath. “Where do I sign?”

  Rusk took out an optical pen from an inside pocket of his suit jacket and held out the electronic tablet to the young woman.

  “Here.”

  And Tess signed. In the twenty-first century, pixels had replaced blood when it came to making Faustian pacts.

  CHAPTER 2

  One week later.

  Tess was allowed to wear her street clothes (jeans, Doc Martens, leather jacket, T-shirt with a Watchmen-style blood-spotted smiley), and a limousine came to pick her up at the institute. She watched the mind-numbingly dreary landscape flow by from behind the tinted glass: cacti, rocks, sagebrush
, and amaranth. The vehicle left the canyon and joined Highway 111, crossing a bridge over a shallow river. Tess memorised the route. It might prove useful. She was alone in the backseat, and the chauffeur wasn’t talkative. That said, she didn’t care. Let him play that game if he wanted. She could go without speaking for days, no problem. On the plus side, she hadn’t been handcuffed or otherwise constrained. On the minus side, the limousine’s doors locked automatically.

  Tess thought of all those years spent on the road with her mother, a former junkie, paranoid, convinced she was being followed, being bugged, always on the lookout for cabalistic signs, irrefutable proof of a big conspiracy. The billboard, over there, containing a coded message! The record that could be played backward to reveal who killed Kennedy in Dallas! The crossword puzzle that was a veritable gold mine of up-to-date intelligence! The TV series about zombies that was inspired by real events, unknown to the public due to a media cover-up… A big conspiracy, OK, but who was behind it all? The Illuminati? The Greys? A consortium of multinational corporations controlled by Freemasons? Well, that remained a mystery…

  Years living in trailers or bungalow villages, a series of identical-looking dumps. And then there was the parade of “stepdads”. None of them had lasted very long with crazy Mom, although some of them were pretty strange dudes themselves: Satanist bikers, gun-toting doomsday preppers, veterans with PTSD from Iraq, wannabe Che Guevaras… Tess often wondered if her real father belonged to this gallery of nutjobs. Her mother never spoke of him. Tess suspected that she was not even a hundred percent sure of his identity, and the thought always made her feel nauseous.

  Was he like the others? A maniac with guns?

  Guns were the common feature, the red thread linking all these guys, as if her mother had a pathological need to feel protected. But from what? From whom?

  The limousine entered a district full of derelict buildings. Not even a mouse stirred. Well, not quite, because several rodents could be seen scurrying along the decrepit walls on their tiny feet. The zone had been abandoned years ago, as witnessed by the tufts of weeds growing through the cracks in the pavement. The broken windows were sometimes blocked up with pieces of cardboard. The bulbs of the streetlights had been smashed by thrown rocks. Lots of warehouses. The vehicle halted at the entrance to one of them. The chauffeur pulled out a remote control and the heavy sheet-metal door slowly rose, grinding and squealing in its tracks.