In High Places

Eleven

People talked about having a poker face. Annette didn't play poker—she didn't know anybody her age who did. But she knew what the phrase meant. She kept her face as still as she could, not wanting any of the guards to see what lay behind it. She wasn't just playing for money here. Money was nothing, or might as well have been. She was playing for her life.

If anything went wrong this morning, she would stay a slave for the rest of her life. And the rest of her life might not last long, either. They might knock her over the head or shoot her to make sure she never had another chance to get away.

Do I really want to do this? Fear made her heart pound and left the palms of her hands cold and wet with sweat. But if she didn't try now, when would she have a better chance? And if she didn't try, what did she have to look forward to? Life? the scared part of her suggested. The rest of her shouted it down. Life as a slave on a low-tech manor in some unregistered alternate wasn't worth living.

The breakfast mush sat like a boulder in her stomach as she went out to morning roll call. Emishtar said something. Annette answered her. She hardly noticed what the older woman said, let alone what she said herself. It must have been all right, because Emishtar nodded.

They lined up in rows of ten, to make them easier for the guards to count. When a man in camouflage gear walked by, Annette took a couple of steps toward him. He frowned. "What do you want?" he asked in Arabic. He didn't sound angry or suspicious, the way he would have with Birigida. But he didn't sound what you'd call friendly, either.

Here we go. All or nothing. Annette answered him in English, with the same words Birigida had used: "My stretch is up. Time for me to go back to the home timeline."

His eyes widened. He wasn't bad-looking, which made Annette sorry to despise him. "You?" he said, also in English.

"Yes, me," he said. She didn't want him thinking she'd memorized the one phrase.

"How about that?" He shook his head. "I tell you, I wouldn't have guessed. Most of the the visitors"—a nice, bloodless name— "you have an idea who they are, even if you can't be sure. They're—goofy is the nicest thing I can say. But I have to hand it to you. You fit right in, didn't get in trouble, didn't make trouble or anything. My hat's off to you." He really did tip his splotched cap.

"Thanks." Annette had never got a compliment she wanted less. You made a good slave. Oh, boy! "How do I leave? They didn't talk a whole lot about that."

Whatever she said could get her in trouble. To her relief, the guard answered, "Yeah, they never do." He made a sour face. "Some of those people don't have it all in one bag, you know?" He pointed to the guard in front of the doorway that led down to the transposition chamber. "Go talk to Paul over there. He'll call your cab."

Annette smiled to let him think she liked the joke. She walked over to Paul. With that name, he could have grown up speaking English or French or German. With the implant you'd never know, not by listening to him. "What is it?" he asked, also in Arabic. That was the language everybody here thought she spoke.

"A transposition chamber back to the home timeline," she said in crisp English.

"You?" Paul said, as the first guard had. "Son of a gun!" There was that same unwanted compliment again. "Okay. I'll fix you up." He took from his belt what looked like an ordinary cell phone and thumbed a few buttons. After waiting for a moment looking at the gadget's little screen, he nodded. "Chamber's on its way."

"Thanks. Um, if I'm going to get aboard, you'll have to let me go down the stairs," Annette said.

"Coming up." Paul used the card on the lock, as he had for Bi-rigida. He even opened the door for Annette. "Maybe we'll see you again one of these days." He meant doing another turn as a slave.

"Maybe you will." Annette meant coming along with Crosstime Traffic people and as many policemen or soldiers as they needed to put this place out of business for good. She had to fight to keep anticipation out of her voice.

Down the stairs she went, before Paul could find anything else awkward to say—and before he could start wondering if the manor really had a paying slave scheduled to go home right then.

The transposition chamber was already waiting in the sub-basement. Traveling from the home timeline to an alternate or from one alternate to another didn't take any time. You felt time when you traveled inside it, depending on how far apart two alternates were. But that wasn't really time—it was only duration. That was how they explained it in training, anyhow. The math of going crosstime made quantum mechanics and genetic physics seem simple by comparison. Without massive computing power, it never could have happened.

All Annette cared about was that the chamber was there. The door sensed her and opened. She jumped in—literally. The door closed behind her. "Please take your seat and fasten your safety belt," a recorded voice said. "Transposition is about to begin."

Annette clicked the belt shut. She'd never figured out what good it would do in case of trouble, but habit died hard. She couldn't tell just when the chamber left the room under the manor, but she knew she'd got away. She let out a fierce, exultant whoop that would have made Jacques wonder which of them was the warrior.

She felt like a warrior. She'd escaped the enemy—well, at least some of the enemy. After doing that, she at least had a chance of getting away from the others. And then . . . she'd be back. With reinforcements.

Jacques watched Khadija vanish down the guarded stairway just before the roadbuilding gang left the manor. She really could talk to the guards, then. And she really did know some of the things they knew. It wasn't that he hadn't believed her. She'd sounded so sure of herself in the transposition chamber—and afterwards, too.

But there was a difference between sounding sure and knowing what you were talking about. Since Jacques didn't know what Khadija was talking about, he couldn't be sure she did. She must have, though, or the guard wouldn't have let her by.

"Your friend, she goes the same way Birigida went," Dumnorix said as they tramped along the already-paved part of the road.

"Yes," Jacques said—he could hardly say no.

"I hope it will be well for her," the redhead said.

"So do I," Jacques agreed.

"Birigida was no loss to anyone," Dumnorix said. "But losing a friend is hard."

'That's true." The more Jacques thought about it, the truer it felt—and the more painful. Khadija was the one person here with whom he could talk freely. And she was a pretty girl, or maybe a more than pretty girl. And he liked her, or maybe more than liked her. He thought she liked him back, too. More than liked him back? He didn't know about that. He wanted the chance to find out, though.

All the guards carried talking boxes on their belts. All those little boxes started chirping and chiming at the same time. Jacques had never seen that happen before. As if in one motion, all the guards grabbed the boxes and brought them up to their ears.

If the slaves had been waiting for that moment, they might have jumped the guards and wrestled their muskets away from them. But they weren't. The men in the mottled clothes quickly grew alert again. A few of them swung their muskets to cover the roadbuilders even as they listened and talked. And with those amazing weapons, they needed only a few.

By the way they shouted at the talking boxes, they didn't like what they were hearing. One of them took Jesus' name in vain. Jacques could recognize it even in another tongue. It was a funny way to swear. Jacques would have used Henri's name instead. God's Second Son, after all, was more important than His First. The Final Testament said so.

Another guard said, "Jesus!" and then several things that didn't sound holy at all. They might never have heard of Henri, or of the Final Testament. To Jacques, that made them strange, halfhearted Christians.

After a few more hot phrases, that guard held up a hand.

"Everybody stop!" he yelled in the several different languages the slaves spoke. He sounded disgusted in every one of them. "We've got to go back to the manor," he went on. "All the savages hereabouts are rising up. They need another lesson. We'll give it to them, too—will we ever. But till we do, maybe they can cause a little trouble. So you get the day off. You ought to thank them. They'll pay for it, though. Oh, yes. They'll pay."

Jacques had heard soldiers use that tone of voice before. He wouldn't have wanted to be on the receiving end of it. He especially wouldn't have wanted to be there if he had only a bow to use against weapons like the ones the guards carried.

If the countryside had really risen . . . How many hundreds, how many thousands, of archers were moving against the manor? Couldn't even a squad of men with these repeating muskets get rid of all of them? The locals were brave to try to fight back. Weren't they also crazy?

"They'll feed me, and I don't have to break my back today," Dumnorix said as they turned around. "I don't mind that."

"Can anyone fight these people?" Jacques asked.

The redheaded man shrugged broad shoulders. "I wouldn't want to try, not unless I had one of those sticks that go boom myself."

A stick that went boom was one thing. A stick that went boomboomboomboomboom was something else again. These muskets would slaughter any force the Kingdom of Versailles could raise. Jacques didn't like to think that, but he couldn't doubt it, either.

Back inside the manor, the guards had to stay in the courtyard. The guards got up on the walls. Jacques heard yelling outside, but it was off in the distance. The locals knew better than to charge the place. They would be asking to get killed in gruesome numbers. The guards took a few shots, but only a few. Their muskets couldn't shoot out as far as the eye could see, then. That was good to know.

The guards yelled back and forth to one another. They sounded furious. Jacques knew what he would have done if he were a local and the dangerous strangers withdrew to their fortress. He would have torn up everything he could that was out of range of their muskets. By the noises the guards were making, that was just what the people who lived here were doing.

But the locals had underestimated the guards and masters. One of the men in mottled clothes carried a long tube up onto the wall. He aimed it out where the noise was loudest. Something shot from it, leaving a trail of fire behind. An explosion followed a few heartbeats later. The shouts outside the walls changed pitch.

Two more guards set up a shorter tube on the ground down in the courtyard. A pair of metal legs supported it. The guards fiddled with screws. Then one of them dropped a pointed metal object with fins on the other end down the tube. An instant later, after a surprisingly soft bang!, the metal object shot out of the mouth of the tube again, ever so much faster than it had gone in. Another one of the finned things went in and went out, and another, and another.

Only after Jacques heard more booms outside did he realize what was going on. Its a mortar, he realized. It was much lighter and less clumsy than the ones his people and the Muslims used to shoot at enemies inside forts, but it couldn't be anything else.

One of the guards looked up and saw him watching what they were doing. Maybe Jacques' face showed he admired the gadget, if not the people using it. The guard grinned at him and spoke in Arabic: "They don't know everything we can do. Now they'll find out, the unclean sons of dogs."

More fire-spurting weapons—they looked something like long, fat arrows—shot from the tube on the wall. The guards up there started laughing and cheering. They yelled something. "What do they say?" Jacques asked the mortar crew.

"The savages are running," answered the man who'd spoken before. He got to his feet. "Now we chase them. Now we really punish them." He sounded as if he looked forward to it.

"Arriving soon," the recorded voice said.

You could never tell when a transposition chamber got where it was going. Annette always tried. She always failed. She knew plenty of other people who tried, too. Knowing where across the timestream you were took instruments subtler than mere human senses.

"We are here," the voice said, and the door slid open.

Annette left the chamber. Now for the other hard part. If somebody here had a list of who was supposed to come back from the manor and when . . . That would be very bad. She glanced around. She was in what looked like an underground parking garage. As far as she could tell, she was the only person in it.

There'd be stairs somewhere, or an elevator, or an escalator. Somewhere—there, in fact. She followed the arrows and the signs under them in the six languages of the European Union: French, Spanish, German, Italian, English, and Polish. They took her to a stairway. Up she went, and up, and up. At last, the multilingual signs announced the ground floor. She opened the door.

There ahead was the door to the street. One more hurdle to leap: a man at a desk. He nodded to her and said something in Spanish. She gulped. "I'm sorry," she said in English. "I haven't had an implant for your language. Do you speak mine?"

"Yes, I do," he said in perfect British English, the kind the EU used. "I asked if you enjoyed yourself on your, ah, holiday."

While you were a slave, he meant. Annette made herself nod and started for the door. "Got to get back to the real world," she said. She was even with the desk . . . past it. She could run now and have a chance—or she could fling this guy into the middle of next week if she had to.

And she might. He rose, a frown on his face. "Won't you get your everyday clothes from the storage locker?" he asked.

She looked down at herself. Her blouse and long skirt were the only clothes she had. They weren't impossible to wear out on the street, not when the slavers had brought them to the manor from the home timeline. But they were kilometers away from the height of fashion. Well, too bad.

She had to answer him. "At the hotel," she said, and walked faster. Let him worry about what she meant.

His frown got deeper. He glanced toward the monitor on his desk. "What is your name?" he asked, holding up a hand. "When did you begin your holiday?"

"Gwyneth Paltrow," she said—the first old-time actress whose name popped into her head. "I began my vacation tomorrow." If she could just keep him confused until. . . the door slid open for her. She hurried out onto the sidewalk.

And then she realized she had a problem she hadn't counted on. Without even a dollar or a euro to her name, without a credit card in her pocket (she didn't even have a purse), she couldn't take the subway or a bus. But she could flag a cab. There was one, a little gold Honda. She waved frantically.

The driver cut across two lanes of traffic to get to the curb. Angry horns blared. Traffic here seemed as berserk as it was in Rome. She didn't know anything worse to say about it. "You speak English?" she asked the cabby.

"You bet, lady," he answered—his implanted language was pure American, or maybe he was. "Hop in. Where to?"

"Crosstime Traffic main offices," Annette said as she jumped into the back seat.

"You got it." The driver zoomed away while she was still fastening her seat belt.

Just in time, too. She looked back over her shoulder to see the man behind the desk come running out onto the sidewalk. He stared at the taxi, clapped a hand to his forehead, and dashed back into the building.

"That guy bothering you?" The driver must have seen him through the rear-view mirror.

"Not now," Annette said. Then she found something brand new to worry about. The slave ring had to be full of Crosstime Traffic people. How did she know she wouldn't run into one here? How did she know the local office wasn't full of slavers? She didn't know, and that was all there was to it. But she had to start somewhere, and that seemed a better place than the police. The police would need too many explanations.

She didn't even know where in Madrid the Crosstime Traffic offices were. They turned out to be near the train station, and near the memorial to the people killed in the terrorist bombings of 2004. That was a long time ago now—back when Gwyneth Paltrow was acting, in fact—and a lot of even worse things had happened since. Pigeons perched on the monument. People walked past without looking at the inscription. Like any old memorial, it was just part of the landscape.

Annette faced her own crisis when the cab stopped. "That'll be twelve and a half big ones," the driver said. A big one was a hundred euros, the same way a benjamin was a hundred dollars. Inflation had added enough zeros to the old currencies to make them clumsy to use.

"Please come in the office with me," Annette said. "They'll pay you in there—I promise they will."

Why do these things happen to me? the cabby's face shouted. "I didn't think you were a deadbeat," he said reproachfully.

"I'm not," Annette answered. "I don't have any money, that's all." It made perfect sense to her. The cab driver didn't look any happier. He got out of the Honda, muttering to himself in Spanish—the English did come through the implant, then.

"If they give me a ticket for parking here, that's yours, too," he said. Annette nodded. She would have promised to pay for the whole car just then.

Into the Crosstime Traffic offices they went. A receptionist spoke to them in lisping Spanish. "Do you understand English?" Annette asked.

"Of course," the woman replied. Her accent was British. After the man in the building with the outlaw transposition chamber, that made Annette antsy. The receptionist went on, "What can I do for you, Miss ... ?" She waited for a name.

"I'm Annette Klein," Annette said, wondering what would happen next.

The receptionist's eyes widened. She called up an image on her monitor and looked from it to Annette and back again. "You are Annette Klein!" she exclaimed. "What are you doing here?"

"Trying to pay this nice man his cab fare, only I haven't got a euro or a dollar or anything," Annette said. "Could you please give him fifteen big ones?"

"Of course," the receptionist said again. She handed the driver a thousand-euro bill and a five hundred. He gave Annette a nod that was almost a bow, then hurried out to his car. The receptionist started to ask questions.

Annette beat her to it: "Are my mother and father all right?" That was the most important thing in her mind just then.

"Yes," the woman said. She looked back at the monitor to get her facts straight. 'They were taken to, uh, Marseille, and some of our other people bought them there. They're in the USA now." She checked the monitor again. "The report was that you were taken to Madrid in that alternate, but nobody could find you there. You might have fallen off the face of the earth."

"I did," Annette said grimly.

"I'm sorry, but I don't understand," the receptionist said.

"I'm sorry, too, for a whole lot of things." Annette's mind was racing a million kilometers a minute, working out what she needed to do. Knowing her mother and father had come back to the home timeline made it easier. "Please take me to your chief administrator here. And I need to talk to the head of security. And please call my parents—here are their numbers." She wrote them down. "Set up a conference call in the administrator's office, please. That way, I can tell everybody everything at once." And somebody outside the office will be listening when I do, too.

The receptionist nodded. "I will take care of it." She got on the phone, where she spoke in Spanish. When she hung up, she smiled at Annette. "Mr. Olivo's secretary will arrange the call for you. And a messenger will take you to his office." A young man—only a couple of years older than Annette—hurried up. "Here's Jorge now."

"Hello," Jorge said. "Come with me, why don't you?"

"Okay." Annette wished she could clean up beforehand, but maybe looking—and smelling—the way she did would help persuade the officials that something inside Crosstime Traffic had gone dreadfully wrong.

People stared at her as she went by. She heard her name mixed in with a lot of Spanish. A man clapped his hands. A woman walked over and kissed her on the cheek. They were glad she'd made it to the home timeline. That was good. If their bosses had anything to do with the slavery ring, they would have a harder time fixing up an accident for her.

PEDRO OLIVO, said a sign on a door. Below the name was CHIEF ADMINISTRATOR in the six EU languages, Spanish first and bigger than the others. The man at the desk in front of the door grinned at Annette and spoke in English: "I have the conference call set up, Senorita Klein. Your parents will be glad to hear from you."

It would still be in the wee small hours back in Ohio. Phone calls at that time of day were rarely good news. Dad and Mom must have had their hearts in their throats till they found out she was all right. "Thank you," Annette whispered.

"My pleasure." The secretary opened the door to Pedro Olivo's office. "Go right on in. The head of security is already in there with Mr. Olivo. Her name is Luisa Javier."

"Luisa Javier," Annette repeated so she'd remember. "Thanks."

Pedro Olivo looked like a man who ran things. He was in his fifties, with gray hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, and an expensive suit. Luisa Javier put Annette in mind of a schoolteacher. She was thin and dark and looked clever. Annette gave them only a glance apiece, though. Staring out of a big monitor were her parents. Sure enough, they looked as if they'd just got out of bed.

"Annette!" Dad exclaimed when the camera in Mr. Olivo's office picked her up. "Are you all right, sweetheart?"

"I'm not too bad," Annette answered. "I'm awful glad to be back in the home timeline again, I'll tell you that."

"What happened, darling?" Mom asked.

"Yes—what did happen?" Pedro Olivo sounded like a man who ran things, too. His voice had a let's-get-to-the-bottom-of-this tone to it. He leaned forward behind his desk.

Annette spoke to her parents: "Mom, Dad, I hope you're recording this."

They looked at each other, there on the screen. Mom reached out and flicked a switch. "Now we are," Dad said. Annette eyed the Spanish Crosstime Traffic officials. Neither of them flinched. The phone connection with the USA didn't suddenly and mysteriously break, either. She took those things as good signs.

"What happened?" she said. "You know I got caught when my folks did, right? And you know I got taken to Madrid instead of Marseille." She waited for everyone to nod. "I got sold there," she said, "and when I did. . . ."

After using their deadly toys against the locals, the guards went out to clean them up. Some of the men in mottled clothes were on foot, others on horseback. Jacques wouldn't have wanted to try to stand against them, and his countrymen knew a lot more—a lot more—about the art of war than these people did.

Because the fighting was going on, he needed a while to realize the guards and the masters had other worries, too. He found out the hard way. A guard came up to him, pointed a musket at his belly, and said, "You—come along with me."

"I didn't do anything!" Jacques squeaked—a slave's automatic protest when he got in trouble with the people in charge.

"Ha!" the guard said, and then, "You were friends with that Khadija, weren't you?"

That told Jacques what kind of trouble he was in. He wished it told him how to get out of trouble, too. No such luck there. "What if I was?" he said—he couldn't very well deny it, not when they knew better.

"That's what we're going to find out." The guard's words held a grim promise Jacques didn't like. He couldn't do anything about it, though. The guard gestured with the musket. "Come on. Get moving." Jacques went. He was sure the guard would shoot him if he tried anything else.

The man took him to a room near the masters' quarters. He'd never been there before. It had no windows, which worried him. One of the lamps that gave light without fire or smoke glowed in the ceiling. Three other guards waited there. They didn't have any torturer's tools that he could see, but he didn't think they'd invited him over to share a roast chicken and a pitcher of wine.

"Tell me everything you know about Khadija," said the guard who'd brought him there.

He told everything he knew about Khadija as a merchant's daughter from Marseille. She'd made it plain she didn't want the guards knowing she was from wherever they came from. In the telling, Jacques also told a good deal about himself.

"So you're not even a Muslim, then?" a guard said.

"Jesus and Henri, no!" Jacques said indignantly. He made the sign of the wheel. "I am a good Christian, or I try to be."

They went back and forth in the language that sounded like English—the language Khadija said was English. One of them returned to Arabic: "So how did she get away, then?"

"Why ask me?" So she had got away, then! Jacques didn't laugh in the guards' faces. Heaven only knew what they would have done to him if he had. He did add, "If she got away, I didn't have anything to do with it. You know where I was all the time. You must be the ones who let her go."

Sometimes the worst thing you could do to somebody was tell him the truth. The guards all started shouting. A couple of them shouted at Jacques. The rest yelled at one another. Then one of them outshouted the others. He told Jacques, "I am going to poke you in the arm with a needle. It won't hurt much, so hold still while I do it. If you try anything stupid, you'll be sorry. Understand?"

"Yes," Jacques said, though he didn't really. If they wanted to torture him, they could do much worse than that. He'd seen worse done when men from his kingdom captured Muslim prisoners. The Muslims weren't gentle to Christians they caught, either. Were the guards trying to see how brave he was? He'd show them!

The man in mottled clothes wasn't even lying. Jacques had known fleabites that troubled him more than the needle. He sat there as if carved from stone. Then the strangest thing happened. Within a few minutes, he began to feel woozy, almost dizzy. It reminded him of the way he felt when he drank too much wine. But he hadn't drunk anything at all. He didn't understand it. Before long, he was too woozy even to want to try to understand it.

"What is Khadija's real name?" a guard asked him.

"It's Khadija, as far as I know," he answered. The guard swore, first in Arabic—which sounded like ripping cloth—then in what Jacques supposed was English, and then in a language that sounded like German. How many tongues did the guards speak? Jacques was too woozy to worry about that, too.

"Have you ever heard of a transposition chamber?" another guard asked.

He wanted to say no, but what came out of his mouth was, "Yes."

"Ha!" the guard said. "Now we're getting somewhere. Who told you about one?"

"Khadija did." Again, Jacques wanted to lie, but found he couldn't. Did it have something to do with the needle? He didn't see how it could, but he didn't see what else could make him stick to the truth, either.

"What did she tell you about transposition chambers?"

"That they were how we got from Madrid to this place. That funny room that didn't move, but when it opened we were somewhere else."

"How did Khadija know about transposition chambers?"

"She said she was from the same place you people were, wherever that is."

"She told you that? Somebody fouled up somewhere." "She told me." Jacques answered the question. He ignored the comment. He couldn't do anything else, not the way he felt. "How could she? Wasn't she a slave like Birigida?" "No. She thought Birigida was disgusting for wanting to be a slave. She came here because she got caught and made a slave, just like I did."

They didn't ask him any more questions after that. They started shouting at one another again, in languages he didn't understand. He was too woozy to care. Later on, when he could think straight, that made him sad.

"—and that's how I got back," Annette finished. She'd been talking for hours, telling as much as she could remember about the manor and everything that went on there. Several cans of Coke stood in front of her. The Crosstime Traffic people had wet her whistle while she talked. Since she hadn't had any caffeine for months, the soda hit her much harder than it would have if she'd been drinking it every day.

Pedro Olivo's face showed nothing as he turned to Luisa Javier. "What do you think?" he asked.

"I think this office has a big problem," the head of security answered. "I think Crosstime Traffic has a big problem."

Were they going to try to sweep it under the rug? They couldn't get away with that, not when Dad and Mom had a recording of everything she said. A couple of commands and it would be on the way to every news outfit in the United States. If that wasn't a recipe for stirring up a scandal, Annette couldn't think what would be.

But she'd underestimated the Spaniards. "I think you're right," Olivo said. "And I think we'd better get to the bottom of it as fast as we can, before it gets worse."

"Where exactly was the building you left, the building with the transposition chamber?" Luisa Javier asked.

"It was on Calle Rodas," Annette answered. "That's all I can tell you. I've never been in Madrid—this Madrid before. No, wait. The building across the street belonged to Petrokhem." The Russian company had offices all over Europe—and several in the eastern states in America, too.

"That's enough to go on." Luisa Javier pulled out her cell phone and made a call. As she dialed, she told Annette, "The chief of police." Then she started talking into the phone: "Antonio? Luisa. We have some troubles here. . . . Yes, I'm using English so the person who ran into the trouble can follow me. . . . No, worse than smuggling. . . . No, worse than terrorism, too. . . . Slaves, that's what could be worse."

Annette heard the howl the police chief let out. She would have felt the same way even if she hadn't just escaped herself. Since she had . . .

"On Calle Rodas, across from the Petrokhem building," the Crosstime Traffic security head was saying. "Yes, an outlaw chamber . . . No, I don't know how they got it. That's one of the things we'll have to run down. ... A lot of time, a lot of computing power. . . We'll get to the bottom of it. ... Gracias. Hasta luego."

"Thank you," Annette said.

"Don't thank us yet. We haven't done anything," Pedro Olivo said. "But we will. You can count on that. We will."

"You may want to monitor your computers for people dumping data," Dad said. "You may want to do that as soon as you can, too."

"Yes." Luisa Javier nodded. "A lot of people will be scrubbing their systems, won't they? Well, they can try." There was a never-ending race between programs that erased and overwrote data and ones that read what had been erased and written over. Annette didn't know which side was ahead right now. Someone like Luisa Javier would have to.

"Some of the people involved in this—this filth will be in high places." Pedro Olivo looked as if he wanted to spit. "To try to save themselves, they will say you are lying."

"If you move fast enough, you can catch them," Annette said. "They have a base in Madrid in the alternate where my family was working. You should be able to get evidence there. And they've got the manor in that other alternate. I don't think there are any proper Crosstime Traffic people in that world. If you go there, though, take lots of people, and take guns."

Pedro Olivo spoke harshly in Spanish. Luisa Javier answered in the same language. Then she sighed and turned back to Annette. "This is going to cause Crosstime Traffic a lot of trouble, you know," she said in English.

"I thought of that," Annette said. TV and the Net and newspapers liked nothing better than blowing the lid off corporate shenanigans. She couldn't imagine anything much juicier than this. Exploiting the natives from who could say how many low-tech alternates, masters—and slaves—from the home timeline, murders . . . "But those people caused me a lot of trouble. I'm just lucky I wasn't stuck there for good."

"Yes, I understand that," the head of security said. "I wanted to make sure you knew what you were getting into, that's all." Her cell phone rang. She listened, then went, "Thanks," and put it away. She looked at Annette. "They're at that building. The chamber isn't there, but they've got evidence it stops there. And they've arrested somebody who I think is the man you got past before you came here."

"Didn't he run?" Annette said in amazement.

"Sometimes people are stupid," Luisa Javier said. "Sometimes they're smart—for a while. Not smart enough, usually, though, and not for long enough. Now it's payback time." That sounded more vengeful than Annette felt most of the time. Today? Today she liked it fine.

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