Gods and Monsters

VII

Terminal 5 - Heathrow Airport, London

The team stood around in one of the private rooms as they thought up their next steps. Atlin was still struggling to comprehend exactly what had happened to Anton. None of them had been properly trained for these supernatural occurrences, yet they had all been thrown straight into it, simply because they had been among the first responders. They were the wrong team in the right places. Surely for something so covert, so dangerous and unnatural the government would put together a specialist team for these events, not just some local detectives?

"Go through it for me one more time." Charlie asked sternly as he tried to process an explanation for exactly what had happened.

Atlin sighed, tired of repeating herself now for the third time. "He just disappeared into thin air; no traces."

"Okay, but just before that, did Anton do anything specific, something unusual?"

"Well, he snatched his arm away as I went to place him in cuffs, and then he moved it up to his shoulder..."

Charlie's eyes light up as he had his eureka moment. Pulling Winnie out of his jacket, he flicked a few switches and pulled some knobs of the small silver device before speaking aloud once again. "Winnie, bring up details on posthuman teleportation."

The others slowly looked up, half bemused but half amazed. Rachel's face glowed as she observed Charlie's excitement before the soft voice of Winnie spoke.

"Teleportation is the ability to move instantaneously from one location to another without physically occupying the space in between. This can be achieved by various means, including causing the atoms to travel at light-speed, warping the space, or use quantum superposition, in which the user teleports by replacing and restocking energy in a spatial behaviour."

"I hypothesise that not only did Anton teleport away from Atlin and Mike, his ability originally had a ripple effect on the space-time continuum which took flight 616 from 1995 to the present day explaining how the plane arrived here today with the passengers unaware of the change." Charlie explained, his body full of motion as he finally unravelled the secrets of the plane.

The room was stunned. A few weeks ago, had any of them heard Charlie ranting as he was now they would have simply laughed and left the room, however after the Embankment Incident and some of the other files Charlie had shown them, manipulating the space-time continuum really wasn't that much of a stretch. It was Peggy's turn to speak now as she got up from the seat she had been occupying. "So if Anton teleported, time travelled or whatever to get here, why not teleport away sooner, and why to bring everyone else in the first place?"

"Having these abilities isn't as easy as it sounds. Not only does Anton likely have limited control over his power, what he did would cause a huge amount of strain on his system. In fact, I'm surprised he was even able to get away from Atlin and Mike when he did. He can't have travelled far."

Mike slapped his knee as he got up from his own chair across the room, walking over to the opposite side to address the group. "Back in '92, I and some of the lads went on holiday to Barcelona, for a messy weekend. When we were there, we got separated after a few too many drinks. The first thing I did was look up a geezer my old man had done some work for a few years back as I knew he had a place nearby and I could hole up there until the morning and look for me, mates."

"How does that relate to Anton and the flight, Mike?" Rachel asked.

"The bloke's probably knackered after today, so can't be too far away. He's also in a foreign country and he's panicking so he's gonna want to head somewhere he knows. He'd of been on that flight here for a reason, so look into his known associates, friends, family, whatever. There's bound to be someone around here who he's going to go to for help. Find them, find Anton."

20 minutes later

Details of the more supernatural elements of the case had to be kept quiet with Butch around, but the team figured that whilst they had a fellow officer willing to work with them that they may as well take advantage of it. They had each been assigned a role to look into Anton: Butch was checking family members, Peggy checking friends, Atlin checked work colleagues and other associates whilst Mike put out an APB for Anton's arrest and Charlie and Rachel continued to look through the passenger list in case that turned anything else up.

"Hey, guys!" Butch called out as he brought his document over to the others. "It says here that Anton was actually engaged in 1995, to a Deborah Grey. She lived in New York whilst she studied there, but her family had an apartment over in Twickenham. Looking into Deborah's records, it looks like she is now the owner of the apartment."

"That's it. We'll head there now." Charlie said to a disapproving Peggy who was rather annoyed that he felt he was able to order the others around.

Rachel moved further back into the room and gathered the documents the others had probed through moments before. "I'll stay here and continue looking through these – just in case, there's something we've missed."

As the team set off to their cars once again, Butch called after them. "Well if you guys are going, so am I. It was my boys case back in '95 and I want to help wrap it up." He was clearly perturbed by the day's events but the group admired his resilience to let anything faze him. Butch was a man in a foreign country in a foreign time period but he just got on with it.

Peggy looked at Mike and Atlin before speaking. "Butch, there's certain...sensitive information around this case, and even though you're a cop in New York, you don't have any jurisdiction here. It's safer if you stay here for now. We'll contact you if we need anything."

He sighed but nodded as he went back and sat down taking half of the passenger list to help Rachel look through the information.

Turning back to Mike, Peggy moved close so that she was out of Butch's earshot. "Be careful; this whole thing with the teleportation sounds dangerous and I don't want anyone getting hurt."

"Aww, that's sweet of you Parker, but remember I've been doing this for a long time now. Which reminds me, how'd you come the leader of our little team when I'm the higher rank?" Mike asked with a throaty chuckle.

"Bring it up with the boss." She said with a smirk.

Continued in Part 8