The Time Gene, page 65
Cronin blurted a cry. “So what do you know?”
Raccoon’s swift ire bubbled to the surface. “Patience, man. You finished those diaries? You think they’re a lie? You’re wrong. They’re gospel truth, man.”
“What…? How dare...?”
“Hold your horses, brother. What I mean is, the truth is in there. It’s there for the hewin’ out, like a diamond in a rock. Firstly, Kron is real. And he’s dangerous. You’d do well to remember that. Second thing is, you did invent the chronoporter. He stole your invention, and he stole your identity.”
“But how?”
“Because he was communicating with that son of a bitch from the future. That Perun, or whatever his name was.”
Cronin’s nerves rapidly disintegrated. He had to strain to hear Raccoon’s mangled voice. “You...you mean to say that in the future, someone got hold of the blueprint I wrote during the Star Trek weekend? Then sent a copy back in time to this Kron so he could build my chronoporter…and frame me for its many casualties?” The idea recoiled him so much that his feet would not hold him. He staggered and flailed as though he were dancing on burning metal prongs. His voice grew feverish, and a wild panic gripped him. “So I am, indirectly, the murderer of hundreds of men. I can’t take that, Raccoon. You know I’d rather die! In fact – damn it, they took my knife!” he cursed, as he fished in his pocket for his confiscated penknife. “No matter!” he raged. Madness consumed his entire being as he groped through the cell for any possible implement of death. He found salvation in his bed sheet, which he coiled into a rope. “I’ll hang myself, Raccoon! I will!”
“CRONIN, NO!” Abel yelled. “Don’t be such a goddam fool. I’ve sweated blood for you. And I ain’t done it so you could give yourself a necktie. Cool it, dude. Now listen, woolhead. You know and I know that you could never risk, far less sacrifice, innocent lives to perfect an invention. That’s just crazy. Be like Mother Theresa becomin’ a hooker. Most likely, you figured out the theory of this gizmo. Did all the math. Then he came in, stole all your lab notes, pilfered all your research – and used it to his own ends.”
Cronin sat slumped on his ruined bed, sweat dripping down his cheeks. “But Abel, that’s just not possible. There were no laboratory notes. I swear to God this gizmo, other than in that crazy drawing I did at Star Trek, only ever existed in my head. Whoever stole it would need to have read my mind.”
Raccoon growled. “You never told nobody?”
“Not a soul.”
“You dead sure?” Raccoon’s voice was snarling and accusatory.
Cronin’s lip quivered. “N...not that I remember.”
Raccoon banged the receiver against a payphone wall. “You don’t remember? You goddam fool. Don’t you know there’s ways to make a man forget?”
Cronin felt his bones cracking and his limbs melting. “You...you’re saying I gave him info, and then he drugged me, or hypnotised me?”
Cronin heard an irascible sigh through the receiver. The line was so bad that it sounded as though Raccoon were speaking through a dirty sieve. “Didn’t say I knew how he did it,” he growled. “But we know he did. Otherwise how’d he get his pulp fiction onto your goddam floppy? You got a better solution?” Cronin merely gave an apathetic sigh. “Anyway, I didn’t waste my time when I was scrubbin’ for them cops. Raccoon hears things, an’ sees things. I kept my eyes peeled, an’ my ears pricked, an’ nothin’ seemed out o’ order. Nothin’ but break-ins, common assaults, drug dealin’…usual stuff. Until bingo. I found a call logged in an officer’s notebook to the Butyrka prison in Moscow. Now why would he be callin’ a Russian jail? Sure, it sounded legit…they wanted to talk to this prisoner, a Swiss national due for release. Name of Jean-Baptiste Contini. Because of the Russian connection, I smelled a rat. I checked it out. Contini’s real enough. Emigrated to Russia in ’77 to avoid prosecution for drug offences in Western Europe. Convicted of killin’ his wife and her lover in a car shoot-out in Moscow in 1985. Racked up quite a resumé, that boy. I dug further in…again, nothin’ conclusive…but I discovered there’s a doctor who works in that jail, Yevgeny Vedenin, who used to spy for the KGB and FSK. There were rumours – albeit unsubstantiated – of Vedenin’s involvement in a top-secret mind-control experiment on Mount Caroline Livermore in the ‘70s. I’ve done some snoopin’...you know me. So far, I’ve talked to twenty ex-Butyrka prisoners. None willin’ to say a word about Vedenin. That was suss to start with. Mostly said they’d never heard of him. But there was one...quaked like a rabbit...who said they called Vedenin Dr Death. I asked him if Butyrka had had an abnormally high prisoner death rate. He said he once saw Vedenin load a body bag into a Ford Fiesta in the prison yard. Vedenin was talkin’ to the body bag. He said something like ‘go forth from here, and obey the Master.’ You trackin’ with me?”
Cronin shuffled up and down the cell. “Well, no, not really. - a) this is a terrible line, and b) your ramblings are as clear as mud. What in God’s name has this outrageous slander on my name to do with a Russian ‘Dr Death’, a ‘Master’ and a Ford Fiesta? And how come I’m always being lumped in with megalomaniacal Russians?”
Cronin heard Raccoon bang his fists on the payphone. “Can’t you see this, man? Vedenin’s the missin’ link! He’s the go-between, and Kron’s the Master! That’s how Kron got his supply of prisoners to test his – your – chronoporter on. Vedenin faked their deaths, and arranged their transportation to prearranged locations where they would enact the Master’s will.”
Cronin was flabbergasted. “Where Kron could beam them to extraterrestrial planets?”
“Yes…and back again, if they made it.”
Cronin felt the last shreds of his sanity come undone. “But that’s crazy, Raccoon. You can’t extrapolate all that from those ludicrous snippets. For one thing, how could he do that on his own? You’d need an entire army.”
“But here’s the thing!” Cronin’s voice boomed down the receiver. “He had an entire army. You remember Vedvenin was involved in a mind-control experiment? What if Kron was behind it – or at least knew about it? Ernst, I know it’s totally out-there, but the only way it could’ve worked is if Kron had his own army of bio-bots behind him, strategically placed across the planet to answer his call when needed. Dr Vedvenin was one of many bio-bots, Ernst. He was bonded to Kron, and was sent to work in Butyrka prison, to provide Kron with a steady influx of new ‘material’.”
The pounding on Cronin’s temples eased somewhat. The veil was beginning to lift. “Yeah – that kind of makes sense,” he murmured. “But...er...where do I come in again?”
Raccoon laughed. “Can’t you see it? You’re the perfect scapegoat. Our intrepid Kron kills two birds with one stone. Steals your invention, and leaves you to take the rap. If and when, in the future, your chronoporter saves the world, he’ll reveal himself in a blaze of glory. But Kron musta figured that, sooner or later, he was gonna get caught. You’d never hide all them transmitters, receivers and hifalutin equipment forever. You couldn’t. So he plants the ‘Kron Diaries’ on your floppy to frame you...”
“Hang on a minute,” Cronin interrupted. “That disk was locked up for ten years. You needed to open a combination lock to get into the cupboard it was stored in. How could he...?”
“Shut up an’ listen. I’m runnin’ out o’ coin!” came the snarling rejoinder. “The evidence against you is damning...damning, Ernst. I hacked into some o’ the police’s files on you whilst I was cleaning. In addition to the floppy, the police found, amongst your deleted files, an e-mail addressed to you purporting to be from the future.”
Cronin balked. “The e-mail from ‘Perun’...the one that gave blueprints for how to build the tachyo-whatsit?”
Raccoon grunted an affirmative. “If you could call it an e-mail. The data packets contained in the message were compatible with no current backbone or router technologies. It must have been directly transmitted from the sending computer to the recipient. And that’s not possible by any known means. It’d be like tying a message to a balloon in New York City and expectin’ it to get to a private address in Moscow. Whatsmore, when forensics further analysed the e-mail data, the message was found to have been transmitted at superluminal velocity – that is to say, faster than the speed of light – proving the message is tachyonic – it came from the future. This would seem to seal the case against you.”
Cronin trembled as his legs gave way from under him. “So, what you’re saying is, I’m screwed. I’m a lost cause. Kron’s methods have so thoroughly bamboozled our technology, that to fight is of no more use than to fire an arrow from a quiver at a falling nuclear bomb. I must be brought forth as a lamb to the slaughter, to stand trial for one crime I did not commit, as a cover for another crime I did not commit.” Anger burned through him. “You arse, Raccoon. So much for your bully-boy reputation. All just a lie, so you can fleece rich men out of millions of their hard-earned cash. I’ve paid you shitloads – absolutely shitloads – and all you can say is ‘sorry, we can’t out-smart the bad guys.’”
“Ernst, woah!” the lawyer lambasted. “Did I say we were licked? Did I say that? Did you really think I wouldn’t have a plan? We can kill the Master’s plan before it was even born. All I have to do is get into your place, and destroy the blueprint. That way the bad guys can’t exploit it in the future.”
Cronin’s heart leapt. If Raccoon could alter the future, then they surely could alter the past. And he could get out of prison. Then his joy evaporated. “You’ll never get in. The house is guarded 24/7.”
“Am I not Abel Raccoon?”
Dread and relief flooded through Cronin’s chest. “Do it and do it quickly. No-one else will. They have forbidden me contact with my family.” Cronin felt his brain imploding as though he’d done a deep sea dive. “And what if he finds another way?”
Raccoon’s tone was buoyant. “Luckily, I got that covered. To kick the shit out o’ the Master, we need to know two things. 1) What is his true identity? And 2) What is his endgame?”
Cronin’s despondency had eased somewhat, but desperation still saturated his words. “And do you have that information, Abel?” he croaked. “Who is this Titan who can walk through locked doors, solve multi-billion combination locks, hack my e-mail account with technology not yet invented, invade others’ minds, and beam men across the universe and back without anyone noticing? Who is the Master, Abel?”
To Cronin’s irritation, Raccoon’s reply was ambivalent. First came a grunt, then a scuffling sound. “I can’t give you a name,” he mumbled. “I have theories. But I can tell you what we do know...”
Cronin’s heart leapt. Finally, a glimmer of hope! Finally, a chance at justice! Raccoon had done it. One way or another, they’d sink the Master. A chink of light seemed to open in the cell wall, beckoning him to joy, freedom and above all, Nina.
Raccoon’s voice became strangled in noise, then fizzled out altogether. Cronin heard a crack, a scream, a cascade of loud, deafening blows, and the shattering of glass. There followed the chink of metal striking into something hard, a sawing motion, then a hideous crunch, and the sound of oozing liquid.
“ABEL! ABEL!” Cronin yelled, not caring who heard. “ABEL, SPEAK TO ME!”
The line went dead.
Chapter Sixty-One
The Vow
Braemuir, Dundee, 30th March 2005
Roxy breathed a prayer of thanks. Uncle Jock had hobbled her down the aisle without incident. In fact, she and Liam gleamed in their zenith, two halves of a binary star locked in an eternal waltz, their light entangled in an ever-turning circle of gold. There they would forever remain. Jock stumbled backwards and was mercifully hauled into his pew by Raoul and Kelly.
Roxy and Liam’s lips said their vows, but they were superfluous, for their souls were already one, bound by a ribbon of light and love.
Mamie stifled a sniffle, and even Ann, Liam’s estranged mum, could be heard to shed a tear.
“You may now kiss the bride...”
Liam lifted Roxanne as though she weighed no more than a feather, and span her around in a kiss so passionate Father Quinny blushed.
But the rosy glow faded as they headed towards the reception. First, Haggis’ dad’s car broke down. Then, the Raoul’s Royce wouldn’t start, and nobody had any jump leads. Father Quinny offered to go home for some, but he lived out of town and it would take an hour. So, Raoul ended up chauffeuring Roxanne in the front seat of Dwayne Jackson’s rusting Fiat Uno, whilst into the back they squeezed Liam, Leonie and a snoring Uncle Jock, with Best Man Pee-Wee sprawled across their laps. Still, they beribboned the car with white sashes from Peronelle Fatalson’s sewing box. Raoul scrawled ‘Just Married’ on the windscreen in shaving foam. Though, (By the time they left, it read ‘just marred’). By a miracle, they made it to the Boys’ Brigade Hall without being stopped by police. The building looked as if it had been half-bulldozed fifty years ago, but no-one had finished the job. You could still make out the BB anchor logo above the door, though much of the paint had peeled off. The door was loose on its hinges, because Raoul and his mate had had to unscrew the boards before they could open it. “Can we...go in?” Roxy asked, dreading to think whether the ceiling might have caved in, or if they might fall through the floorboards, or the place would be flooded.
Raoul, Kelly and some pals they’d roped in had spent the morning scrubbing down the kitchen, scraping away the rust from the sink, and washing the crockery. As the knives and forks looked as though they’d been used to perform operations in a medieval barber’s, they’d done a whip round the neighbours to borrow cutlery. On the plus side, water was now coming out of the taps rather than black goo. And while one of the hob pans hissed, then fizzed out with a loud bang, the other three worked fine. The salvage mission had been a valiant one – they’d hitched together the old wooden tables and covered them in a set of bright red matching tablecloths belonging to Kelly’s mother. They’d decorated the hall with bright paper decorations that the local children had hooked together. Raoul had redirected the truckload of beer he’d ordered from a mate who ‘owed him a few favours’ to the Brigade Hall, and the hundreds of cans dominated the tables like skittles in a bowling alley. They’d installed as a centrepiece the surprisingly professional-looking wedding cake that Leonie’s mother had made. Old Peronelle, whilst boycotting the wedding of Braemuir’s two ‘worst scallywags’ had condescended to make sandwiches. Raoul, typically, had not thought to cover them, and flies were swarming round. But, Raoul assured them, fish and chips would be arriving in a jiffy. Kelly and two girlfriends could be seen frantically loading supermarket cartons out of Adidas bags in the rusty kitchen. “Practically hangin’ out the back o’ the lorry, they were,” Kelly bragged, as though crowing to her soirée circle about a select boutique where she enjoyed gold-card privileges.
“Them ones here are out of date,” said Barb.
“Aye...27th March,” nodded Kimmy.
“Ssssssh!” Kelly hissed. “We didnae have enough, so our Raoul had to scavenge out the Co-op bins. It’ll be fine – the dates don’t mean nothin’.”
Roxy’s fears about a scarcity of guests proved unfounded – likely because rumours spread about the free booze. “Party o’ the century, this is.”
“Raoul, I thought you were meant to be dj-in’,” Roxanne reminded him, as she and Liam hauled Uncle Jock off the table holding the sandwiches and wedding cake. They dragged him into the gents’ (which was out of order.)
Raoul’s chin sank into his hands. “Shite. I forgot to bring the cds.”
Cries of anger erupted through the hall. “Raoul, you numpty. What’re we supposed to dance to? Pee-Wee’s Game Boy?” If looks could kill, Roxy would have hung, drawn and quartered her new father-in-law.
“S’okay, Raoul, you can use my laptop.” Kimmy shouted from the kitchen.
Raoul scratched his head. “That’s too hi-tech for me.”
“You always wreck everythin’, don’t you?” chimed in Raoul’s ex-wife, Ann, who had already mopped four beers.
“Go easy, Mum.” Liam tried to coax her into having a sandwich. Roxanne sensed her new mother-in-law might soon be joining Jock in the gents’.
“Don’t you have to pay to listen to music online?” Margaret Little had agreed to attend the wedding, but Moraig had stayed away. Roxy was grateful. It would have been awkward.
“Roger left me!” bemoaned Ann Darroch. “I always end up wi’ no-good men.”
“I feel your pain, sister,” Mamie echoed.
“Only morons pay. I ken all the illegal sites!” Barb piped up.
Somehow they managed to hook up Kimmy’s laptop to the hall’s ancient sound system. The speaker blasted out like a pneumatic drill. Someone would have to sacrifice their hearing to turn it down. It wasn’t going to be Roxy. It was her big day.
“Barb, get here now – the chips are burnin’!”
“Kimmy, you set this up. Only thing I ‘download’ from is the back o’ a lorry.”
Roxanne rolled her eyes. “Suppose we should have somethin’ slushy for the first dance, eh? Leonie, what’s the slushiest song you know? Oh, God. I didn’t mean that slushy.”
“Kel...I can only get six o’these in the oven.”
“No problem, we’ll just have the meal six at a time.”
“Seriously, Celine Dion...?”
“Hey...do you smell smoke?”
A bloodcurdling scream from the kitchen answered Roxy’s query. Margaret Little and Mamie tore out onto the street. Leonie stood screaming on the spot. Ann Darroch sat cross legged on the floor bawling that no-one loved her. Roxy, Liam, Pee-Wee, Kayleigh, Ade, Kyle, Raoul and Tom stampeded towards the kitchen. But Raoul pushed everyone aside, and hauled the three hysterical would-be chefs out of the room as ceiling-high flames boogied from the chip pan like teenagers at a rave. Raoul attacked the fire with a foam extinguisher, but the fire had already spread to the cupboards and kitchen units. Six extinguishers later, the fire was out, but the floor was awash with foam. The place looked more like Santa’s grotto after an earthquake than a bridal dance floor.
