“I have never in my life met a girl like you,” he said.
“Nor I a boy like you.” said Andre. She smiled and touched his cheek. Suddenly he darted forward and kissed her quickly on the lips. He seemed as taken aback by his own action as she was. Before she could respond, he turned and quickly ran down the alley and into the next street.
For a moment, Andre was too surprised to move. She slowly brought her fingertips up to her lips.
“Bit young for you, isn’t he?”
She spun around and saw Steiger, leaning with his arms folded against the wall.
“Damn it, Creed! Don’t go sneaking up on me like that!” She was grateful that in the darkness, he couldn’t see her blush. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Officially, I suppose I’m A.W.O. L..” said Steiger. “Un-officially, I’ve assigned myself to keep an eye on Hunter. Frankly, I don’t trust him.”
“That was you back there, firing the laser.” she said. “That was stupid. The boy saw you.”
“Yes, but I think he accepted your explanation about the muzzle flash,” said Steiger. “And the ghost rider made a much more lasting impression. As, no doubt, did you.” He grinned. “I think that’s called contributing to the delinquency of a minor, Lieutenant.”
“Forget the wisecracks,” she said. “What did you make of the horseman?”
“Well, he wasn’t any ghost, that’s for sure.” said Steiger. “Somebody equipped with a warp disc, programmed for a fugue clocking sequence, so that he keeps clocking in and out faster than the eye can follow. What you see was only there a fraction of a second earlier. It’s risky as all hell, a good way to wind up in the dead zone if you’re not very careful, but it’s certainly effective.”
“That’s what I figured, too.” said Andre. “It’s the only possible explanation. You think maybe it was Drakov?”
“Maybe, but I’d guess not,” said Steiger. “He’s too smart to take those kind of chances. It might well have been a hominoid. Which means that Hunter was right. Drakov is unquestionably here.”
Andre nodded. “Or one of his clone, is,” she said. “Either way, it amounts to the same thing. Big trouble. And thanks to your using a laser, now he’ll know we’re here, as well.”
“That ought to make things interesting,” said Steiger.
“That really wasn’t very smart, Creed.”
“You’d rather I’d have let him run you down’? You’re lucky I was there. I had Hunter’s place staked out from a room across the way. When I saw what was going down. I had to move fast. There wasn’t a lot of time for planning something smart.”
“We’d better go see Hunter.” she said.
“No, you go see him,” Steiger said. “I don’t want him to know I’m here.”
“But his information has panned out,” she said. “ Drakov is here. A temporal disruption is in progress.”
“All the more reason not to alert Hunter to my presence,” Steiger said. “That way I can keep an eye on him, just in he decides to take advantage of the situation. Or have you forgotten that he’s on the other side?”
“I haven’t forgotten.” she said. “But he’s been dealing straight with us so far.”
“And I intend to make sure he keeps it that way,” Steiger said. “What do you figure Drakov’s planning?”
She shook her head. “We don’t know, yet. A disruption, obviously, but there’s no way of telling exactly what he has in mind. If we’re lucky, we may get to find out soon. We’re supposed to be infiltrating a secret Tory group that’s working against the Sons of Liberty. Sounds as if Drakov might be behind it, because there’s no record of any such group in colonial history. The horseman is apparently their leader or at least their symbol. They’ve all been talking about him. Last night, four Sons of Liberty were hanged from the Liberty Tree.”
“A temporal anomaly,” said Steiger.
“Yeah.” said Andre. “The Sons of liberty were essentially unopposed during this time period. Sam Adams led them in agitating the colonies against the British. There are Sons of Liberty groups forming in other colonies and Adams will soon be running them all, through dispatch riders like Paul Revere, who will eventually become the core of the Committees of Correspondence between the colonies. The governor of Boston has sent to New York for British troops, but they’re not due to arrive for a while yet. If the Sons of Liberty are stopped here, before things really get rolling, it could change the course of history. Drakov might actually be trying to prevent the American Revolution.”
“Interesting.” said Steiger.
“What do you mean?”
“In the congruent universe, the American Revolution was won by the British.”
“What are you saying?”
“I just find it interesting that Hunter put us onto this in the first place and that the disruption appears to be intended to alter our timeline in a way that would match the timeline of the congruent universe. Don’t you find that interesting?” She stood silent for a moment.
“You think there’s a C.I.S. team here that’s behind all this and Hunter’s trying to lure us into a trap’? But if the horseman’s one of Drakov’s hominoids, then how does that fit with-”
“We don’t really know he is a hominoid.” said Steiger. “And if he is, we don’t know if he’s one of Drakov’s hominoids, do we’? The hominoids were originally developed in the congruent universe by Dr. Moreau as part of Project Infiltrator, before Drakov hijacked the entire project. The C.I.S. could still have some hominoids left. And there’s also another possibility. For all we know. Hunter could be working with Drakov.”
“I don’t buy it.” Andre said. “Drakov almost had Hunter killed. Hunter wants revenge.”
“Or so he says.” said Steiger. “Maybe they buried the hatchet. Maybe Drakov promised Hunter a trip back home in exchange for trapping us. Maybe Hunter isn’t even Hunter.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe he’s a hominoid.” Andre expelled her breath. “Jesus, we never even considered that. How the hell did you manage to come up with that one?”
“You play games with T.I.A. and the Network for as long as I did, you learn to suspect everyone and everything,” said Steiger. “Don’t forget. I infiltrated Drakov’s old organization back when I was undercover as Sgt. Barry Martingale. I know how the man thinks. I wouldn’t put it past him to play out a hand like that. Think about it.”
“Andre sighed. “You may be right, that’s the scary thing about it,” she said. “The trouble is, how would we know?”
“The early hominoids had run numbers tattooed on them somewhere, often high up on the inner thigh.” said Steiger. He grinned. “I’ll leave it up to you to decide how you can manage to get that close. But if Hunter’s got a run number on him somewhere, then he’s probably a C.I.S. hominoid left over from Project Infiltrator. If he hasn’t got a run number on him anywhere, then he may be one of Drakov’s more advanced models. the result of genetic engineering and implant program ming. Which means he’s essentially as human as you and I are, only Drakov doesn’t think of them that way. Or maybe he’s actually who he claims to be. Only that still doesn’t tell us whose side he’s really on.”
Andre shook her head. “I sometimes wonder what it’s like inside that mind of yours,” she said. “It must get very complicated.”
“Not really.” Steiger said. “There’s a refreshing clarity to knowing that when it gets right down to it, you can depend on one thing and one thing only Yourself.”
“I see,” she said. “I wonder, if that’s what it comes down to, how can you he sure that I am who I say I am?”
Steiger chuckled. “Go see your friend. Hunter,” he said. He touched his warp disc and clocked out.
6
“So,” said Drakov, leaning back in the velvet upholstered reading chair, “it appears that we have been discovered.”
“It was only by chance that the fugue clocking sequence saved me,” Moffat said. removing his black horseman garb. He was visibly shaken. “How? How could they possibly have known?”
