were tired and his back was sore. Rizzo was not especially worried. lie knew the team was being spread thin and relief would arrive as soon as they could spare someone, but just the same, he hoped they would send someone soon. He was tired and it would start to look unusual if he remained too late on the corner with his pushcart.
He sold a hag of chestnuts to a grey-haired gentleman in a long tweed Inverness and a bowler hat, apparently on his way out for the evening.
'Working a bit late tonight?' the man said with a smile.
Rizzo shrugged elaborately. 'Aah. eez the wife, she 'ave 'er seezter comma to visit. All night long, ya-ta-ta- to-ta, like cheekens.' He made rapid gestures with his hands, fingers together and outstretched, thumb and index fingers coming together and apart quickly in a representative gesture of ceaseless chatter. 'Aah,' he said. waving his hand in derision. I stay late anda sell my cheznoots.'
' Don 't bl a me yo u on e b it, old ma n, ' s aid t he ma n, grinning. 'Know just how you feel. My sister-in- law's a bloody horror herself.'
'Grazi,' said Rizzo, accepting the man's money and putting. it in the little cash box on his cart. 'Ciao, signori.'
'Ciao to you, too, Sergeant Rizzo.”
Rizzo glanced up quickly. too late, his eyes focusing on the small plastic pistol held in the man's right hand. There was a faint chuffing sound, halfway between a cough and a hiss, and the tiny dart struck him in the chest. He
Simon Hawke
The Dracula Caper barely had time to realize he had been shot before he lost consciousness.
Pvt. Linda Craven crooned a Cockney song to herself while she sat on an overturned basket by the curb, making fresh buttonholes from some of her flowers. She wore a long dress made out of Connie black linsey-woolsey, lace- up ankle high boots with rundown heels, a black plush jacket, a long black shawl and a feathered hat. Every now and then, when someone would pass by, she would stretch out a handful of flowers and make a halfhearted, plaintive- sounding pitch, punctuated by a sniffle. and then she would return to her song, a song about how,' loverly' it would be to have a room somewhere far away from the cold night air, with lots of chocolate to eat and an enormous chair to sit in. Sung in an ear-gratingly Cockney whine, it sounded perfectly in keeping with the time, even though it wouldn't be written for years to come.
There was still no sign of H. G. Wells. She felt utterly miserable about the whole thing. She blamed herself for having slipped up badly It did not occur to her that perhaps the mason Steiger hadn't given her hell was that there really wasn't anything she could have done about the situation. The odds of her having been able to prevent what happened would have been infinitesimal. Even if she had recognized Moreau, a man she had never seen before, it would have been necessary for her to notice him activating his warp disc, an action easily concealed, and move quickly enough to kill him before he could clock out with Wells.
It would have seemed rather incongruous, to say the least, if a Victorian woman had suddenly opened up on a man in a London teashop with a laser or a disruptor pistol, which was one of the reasons why she wasn't armed with one. If anyone in the teashop had wondered where the two men at the table by the window had suddenly gone, they would have been struck dumb by the sight of a man being killed by molecular disruption, briefly wreathed in the glowing blue mist of Cherenkov radiation and then disintegrating right before their eyes. Paranoia ran high at TAC-HQ. The warp discs they all wore were failsafed and, in ease of an emergency, there was an arms locker hack at the command post, likewise failsafed to self-destruct unless it was opened properly. To remain on the safe side, the team had been issued weapons more in keeping with the time. In her purse, Linda carried a Colt Single Action Army revolver, otherwise known as a. 45 Peacemaker. It weighed almost 3 pounds and it packed a wallop. It was an 1873 design and, although it would have been regarded as highly unusual for a young woman in London to be carrying such a gun, as a visitor from America, it was not beyond the realm of possibility that she might have one.
She knew what she would have to do if Moreau showed up again with Wells. She would have to make certain she could get a clear shot at him without endangering Wells or anybody else, which meant she might have to place herself in a position of vulnerability. She'd have to move fast and get in close, kill Moreau as quickly as possible and then either prevail upon Wells to return with her to the command post or take him by force. Wells would have to be debriefed. She had no doubt that she could handle Wells and she felt reasonably certain that she could take care of Moreau. After all, the man was a scientist, not a soldier. Still, it would be wry risky. There was a good chance that Moreau could return with Wells during someone else's shift on surveillance duty, but Linda hoped it would happen during her shift, so that she could redeem herself for having lost him in the first place. She didn't even want to think about what could happen if Wells never returned from wherever it was Moreau had taken hint.
She was only twenty-two years old, still a rookie, green and on her first mission. She was painfully aware of her lack of experience compared to the other members of the mission support team. She was thrilled to be working with the First Division's number one temporal adjustment team, but she also felt intimidated. Andre Cross was a legend in the service, as was Finn Delaney, already a veteran when she was still learning how to crawl. Steiger was Gen. Moses Forrester's second-in command and prior to that, he had been the TIA's senior field agent. She knew they couldn't have been happy to have a rookie assigned to their support team. None of them had said as much, but she was certain that on a mission of such importance, they would have preferred more experienced personnel.
Scott Neilson seemed to understand. Like her, he was a rookie, though he wasn't quite as green as she was and he seemed to think much faster on his feet.
'Look,' he had told her one night while they were having dinner in a pub, 'nobody's going to hold it against you that you're a rookie. They were all green themselves once. It's really very simple. You either learn fast or you don't make it.'
'That's just what I'm afraid of,' she had said. 'It's not so much that I might not make it myself that worries me, but the idea that I might screw up due to my inexperience and it could mutt in temporal interference, a disruption or maybe even a timestream split. The idea of all that responsibility is simply staggering. The pressure's unbelievable. It gives me migraines:'
'And it makes you nauseous and upsets your stomach and you can't sleep and when you do sleep, you have recurring nightmares.' Neilson said.
'I know, I've been there. They've all been there, except maybe Steiger. Nothing seems to bother him much, but then you've got to be pretty cold to be a TIA agent to begin with.'
'So how do you handle it?” she said.
'You don't,” he said, 'Believe it or not, after a while, it sort of handles itself. There's only so much pressure you can take before you either break or you just get used to it. You even become casual about it. You have to, otherwise you simply can't function. If you were the type who was liable to break, chances are it would have come out in your psych profile and you never would have made it this far. But almost everybody goes through what you're experiencing the first few times out to the Minus Side. Nobody expects a rookie to take it like a veteran. They're not going to cut you any slack, but they won't hold your inexperience against you, either. Anybody can mess up, even someone like Delaney, who's got more years in the service than both our ages combined.'
“How long did it take before you learned to handle the pressure?' she said.
Neilson had laughed. 'Are you kidding? I still have nightmares. Almost every night, except when I'm so exhausted that Idon't even dream. And I'll tell you a secret-I don't really believe that anyone ever learns to handle it. They just learn to live with it. It's no accident that the First Division has a reputation for being such a bunch of hellraisers in Plus Time. You get drunk; you fight: you fuck: you get into high risk sports: whatever it takes to give you an outlet for the pressure.'
'What do you do?' she said.
'Well. I don't drink and I'm afraid I'm not much of a. fighter.' Neilson had said. 'I barely made it through combat training.'
She had smiled. 'So what does that leave?'
Neilson grinned self-consciously. 'Well, actually, not what you might think. Iget into a lot of hand-eye coordination things.”
'Like what?'
'Quick-draw target practice with antique revolvers and semiautomatic pistols. Knife throwing, Darts. Sleight-
