“Wait!” Jack shouted. Delgado wheeled round. “We were given the letter in Cambridge…”
“Quiet!” Delgado spat in frustration. “Marlowe works for us — and he is safe now — he told us what happened. You were going to kill him unless he gave you details of the plot. You forced him to write the letter. We arrived before you could finish your work. You escaped us in Cambridge, but now we have you. You work for Walsingham and you know Walsingham’s other spies. We want their names.”
“That’s rubbish,” Angus shouted out furiously. “We were asked to deliver this letter for money. That’s all we know.”
Anger flashed across Delgado’s face. “You lie!” He clicked his fingers and Plato pulled the lever. There was a creaking of rope and wood as the rack strained. Fanshawe screamed.
“Your friend will die there, if I do not have the truth.”
“Marlowe’s tricked you!” Jack shouted in desperation.
“Before we continue, we search you for more papers.”
The man pointed to Hegel who loped over to Angus and pawed at his clothes. Angus writhed, straining against his chains. “Get off!”
Their situation was desperate. They had no information to give. Jack fought his panic and fear, struggling to think clearly, to come up with a way — any way — they could buy some time. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he had an idea. It was a long shot, but…
Jack hissed over at Angus, “Let him — let him search you!”
Angus looked back at Jack, angrily. “What the hell…?”
Jack said firmly, “Let him!”
Hegel reached into Angus’s doublet searching for anything that might be valuable or useful. He patted the breast pocket of Angus’s under-vest and felt a lump. He looked over at Delgado with a curious leer.
“What is it?”
Hegel wrestled with the fasteners and then slowly removed the slim object from the pocket. It was his time phone.
Hegel held it out to Delgado with a look of confusion. Delgado approached.
“What is that?” he demanded.
Angus looked at Jack with an expression of extreme agitation.
“It’s a kind of lucky charm. We have them, er, where we come from,” Jack said.
“Is it valuable?”
“Not really — but you can open it.”
“Show me.”
“You’ll have to untie me.”
Delgado nodded at Hegel to release Jack’s hands — but he remained firmly chained to the wall by his feet. Jack rubbed his wrists which were already raw from chafing on the rope.
“It is a wondrous thing,” Hegel said in awe. “Plato — come look at this!”
Plato left Fanshawe tied to the rack and ambled over to where his friends toyed with the time phone.
“It is made of a strange smooth material — like shell.”
“Carbon fibre compound, actually,” Jack said, under his breath.
“And you say it opens?”
“Yes — you slide that on the side… and… there.”
The VIGIL time phone slid open and the three men’s faces lit up with wonder as the intricate display and controls were revealed.
“Like a jewel — do you have others?”
Before Jack could say anything, Plato was searching him roughly and quickly located Jack’s time phone and the two others — which they had taken from Whitsun and Gift.
“Four!” Hegel exclaimed.
The Spaniards now had all the time phones. Jack had won them a temporary reprieve but then he noticed something else. From inside the first time phone, the yellow bar winked brightly at them. There was a time signal.
“It produces a shimmering light…” Delgado said.
“It must be magic,” Plato whispered in wonder.
Jack knew what he needed to do next and he knew he was taking a huge risk. But it was their only option.
“Not magic and not witchcraft — just a plaything. If you like I can show you something else it does. But you need to stand there, all gather round and touch it.”
The three other time phones were discarded on a nearby table while the men gingerly placed their fingers on Angus’s time phone. “Now, sir, it does a special trick… you see that little button there?”
“This one?” Delgado asked, pointing at one of the small control pads.
“Yes, that one. You have to press it quite hard.”
“What will it do?”
“Nothing really, just a little… er… trick of the light.”
Delgado pressed the button and Jack closed his eyes and leaned away.
The air around the three men shimmered. Suddenly the gloomy cellar exploded in incandescent white light. When Jack opened his eyes again, the three Spaniards had vanished into thin air.
Jack turned to Angus. “Now, that
An Old Friend
Angus couldn’t contain himself. “Get me out of this!” he cried. Jack was still manacled to the wall but with his hands free he just managed to reach over to Angus beside him and loosen the rope around his wrists sufficiently for Angus to twist them out.
“What about these stupid chains?”
“You’ve got me there.” The heavy iron manacles that still encased their ankles were chained to the wall.
“There should be a key somewhere…”
“Unless it was in our nice Spanish friend’s pocket and it’s been zapped into hyper-space with him… you do realise what you’ve done?”
Jack exhaled. “Sorry — it was all I could think of at the time.”
Angus’s lip curled up in a half smile. “Actually it was pretty cool. Hilarious in fact. What will have happened to them?”
“No idea. Depends on the space-time fix in the time phone. Guess it was still set from when we left — so maybe it will go straight back to the Taurus. Maybe our VIGIL friends back home will have a little surprise when they come face to face with the Spanish Inquisition. Mind you, the phone was not recalibrated before they went, so for all I know they could have ended up on the moon.”
“With any luck they’ve been vaporised. Those guys were something else. I’d love to see their faces. Imagine if the Taurus has zapped them onto the top of the Forth Road Bridge… or the Statue of Liberty or something, by mistake!”
“We’ve got other things to worry about. We have a time signal — great. So all the time phones should be activated. Which means we could time travel out of here, except for the fact that we’re still tied to these stupid chains and the other time phones are over there on the table.”
In the excitement, they had forgotten all about Fanshawe, who was still attached to the rack, in the middle of the room. In contrast to a few minutes previously, he was completely silent. He stared gormlessly from his elevated position on the rack at the spot where the three Spaniards had just… disappeared. His jaw hung loosely from his gaping mouth.
“Are you okay, Harry?”
It was as if Fanshawe had not even heard the words. He just kept staring into space.
Jack tried again, louder, “Harry — you okay? Can you free yourself and get us out of these chains?”
