Triptych

After - Part II

AS THEY took their seats, the same junior specialist that Addis had waved down placed a tray in front of Gwen and Basil — sandwiches, cups and a pitcher of water, and the components and tools Basil had requested. Excellent. Addis may not have liked their methods, but he seemed to be perfectly cognizant that the best way to catch the bad guys was to trust them.

The room around them filled slowly with people who looked like lawyers, boardroom suits, someone who looked disappointingly like a psychotherapist, and of course, their peers — Agent Shelley and his special ops squad. Lastly, Agent Aitken slid in to the seat furthest away. She wouldn't meet their eyes.

Gwen picked at her sandwich but Basil dug in, alternating hands in order to have one free at all times to get at the small circuit boards inside the sleek, half-melted shell of the Flasher they'd used to get to 1983. He had an idea, but he wanted to make sure it would work before he told anyone, even Gwen, about it. Gwen glanced over, recognized the ruined Flasher, and jumped to the erroneous conclusion that Basil had hoped she would: that he was trying to repair the Flasher and not remake it. Gwen turned away again, back to glaring poisonous daggers at the top of Aitken's bowed head.

"Well?" Shelley said, when everyone was assembled.

Gwen cut a glance at Basil. "Go ahead," he said, a piece of lettuce catching on his lower lip. "Busy here. Besides, you know how much of it you want shared."

So Gwen stood up and told them.

As she narrated the last thirty hours — carefully edited to exclude the fact that the child they had rescued had been herself—the room was silent, disbelieving. Nobody asked for proof, but nobody quite believed either, and then someone in Shelley's squad said, "Does this change tomorrow?"

Basil looked up from his work, eyebrows drawn down. The crumb of some already-forgotten piece of bread crust fell from his chin. "Tomorrow?" he asked. A sense of mild dread pushed at the back of his throat. "What happens tomorrow?"

Shelley scowled at the agent, and it was clear that somebody had been telling tales out of school.

Gwen put her hands on her hips, and Basil knew that she understood the relevancy of the verbal slip just as well as he; something was planned, something that they were not supposed to know about, something that they were being shut out of purposefully, probably because of Kalp.

"Agent Shelley," she said. There was no patience in her voice. She was already slightly hoarse from speaking so long, and she sounded very, very fed up.

Tiredness and impotent frustration scratched against the underside of Basil's skin; he could only guess how irritated Gwen must be.

Some sort of nobility or soldier's guilt (probably relating to the fact that he'd been the one who assigned Aitken as Kalp's personal guard to begin with) tugged at Shelley's expression. Something within him quickly won, but Basil wasn't sure which side it was until Shelley spat, "Fine."

Shelley tossed a lurid red folder into the space of table in front of them, and Basil shoved away the empty sandwich tray to peer over Gwen's arm as she flipped back the cover. The first page was a slightly blurry aerial shot of some sort of down-on-its-luck factory and yard. Basil wondered if it was once filled with fresh-cut lumber or piles of shining roof tiles or corrugated metal shipping containers of tinned food. He supposed he would never know; all it was filled with now were some rusting piles of scrap metal and litter. The walls of the building were graphitized in a lurid yellow that Basil could see in the photo, painting bold splashes on the brick, but the angle and clarity robbed the words of readability.

"What's this?" Basil asked.

"Tomorrow's target," Gwen answered for Shelley. The head of ops gave a quick nod. "You've found the circle assassinating our people?"