Killing Time Read online

“No, I’d never ask that kind of sacrifice of you,” she said gravely. “I want you to cut me.”

  He snorted at her dry tone, then paused and said, “You’re serious.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He grinned, shaking his head. “There are laws against a law enforcement officer using a knife on a prisoner, unless said prisoner is using violence against the officer or others. If I cut you even a fraction of an inch, you’d have me brought up on charges before the hour’s out. Good try, though.”

  “Well, okay then, cut yourself. I don’t care. Just cut someone.”

  He was actually laughing now, as if he was enjoying the conversation. “I’m not going to cut you, myself, or anyone else. Dead end. Try another one.”

  “Coward,” she muttered under her breath. “Give the knife to me and I’ll cut myself. It shouldn’t be difficult, even though I’m handcuffed. You can tell anyone who’s interested that I somehow got a knife out of my pocket, and my fingerprints will be on it, so you’ll be safe. Does that satisfy you?”

  “I won’t let you cut yourself,” he said mildly. “Give it up.”

  “I can’t believe you’re being so stubborn. Has anything I’ve shown you so far not worked? You couldn’t cut the ID card, the scanner worked. Why don’t you try a little trust?”

  “Because I’m not an idiot?” he offered.

  “You’re an idiot if you don’t. A homogenized, close-minded idiot.”

  “Homogenized?”

  He sounded as if he was enjoying himself; his eyes were sparkling, and his lips kept quirking before he’d catch himself and flatten them into a thin line.

  “That’s a delicate way of saying inbred. You have only two genetic sources? It’s nothing short of a miracle you can function.”

  “I’m functional in all ways,” he assured her, grinning.

  She groaned and closed her eyes in exasperation. Now he was making sexual innuendos . . . she thought. The language differences were just enough that she wasn’t certain. If he was, then she supposed men were men no matter what century they lived in.

  “All right, all right,” he said, suddenly capitulating. Nikita’s eyes snapped open and she watched as he dug his hand in his jeans pocket and pulled out a knife that, when he flipped it open, showed a wicked four-inch blade. Deliberately he sliced the edge down the pad of his left thumb, and dark red blood immediately welled and began dripping down his hand.

  “Open the Reskin,” she instructed. “Brush it on the cut. Well, wipe off the blood first, then brush it on the cut.”

  “Now you tell me,” he said, grabbing a paper napkin left over from their lunch and holding it to his bleeding thumb. “If you’re bullshitting me, that’s going to put me in a very bad mood,” he warned.

  She ignored him, watching as he held the thin tube of Reskin in his left hand and unscrewed the cap, pulling out a small brush that glistened with an opalescent liquid. “It doesn’t take much; just a light coating will do.”

  “It had better.” He pulled the napkin away and quickly dabbed the Reskin on his cut. “Ouch!” he immediately yelped. “Shit! You didn’t tell me this crap burns!”

  Nikita laughed; she couldn’t help it. “Look at your thumb.”

  He looked at his thumb and his expression changed in a way she couldn’t describe: it wasn’t shock, or disbelief, but a sort of numbness. Very slowly he recapped the Reskin and laid the little red tube back on his desk, then dabbed at the remaining liquid on his thumb.

  He didn’t say anything for so long she felt like screaming from the tension, but she held herself rigidly under control and waited for him to decide what he was going to do. He might reject what his own eyes had told him. People could sometimes be illogical, so she had to be prepared for that.

  Finally he got up from behind his desk and walked around to squat beside her chair and unlock the set of cuffs that held her ankle to the chair. Then he cradled her hands in one of his as he unlocked the cuffs that bound her wrists.

  Dropping both sets of cuffs on his desk, he resumed his seat and said, “Okay, start talking. Tell me everything.”

  “Everything? How long do you have?”

  “Just start talking. I’ll tell you when I’ve heard enough.”

  8

  Now that he was really listening, she didn’t know where to begin. She’d been rubbing her wrists, but she stopped and spread her hands. “What do you want to know? Give me a subject.”

  “You mentioned that you were tracking a killer. I’m not saying I buy into this time-traveler stuff, but I’m trying to catch a killer, too, so I’ll listen.”

  She was silent a minute, trying to organize her thoughts. “We might need a chart for this.”

  He took a flip-top notebook and spun it across the desk toward her. “Draw one.”

  Draw one, he said. She smoothed her fingers across the lined page. If the man knew how seldom she had actually used a pen and paper, he’d probably laugh. She was familiar with them only because of her studies. Real paper was almost priceless, saved for archiving crucial information and teaching a very small selection of investigators about the past. There was so much mankind had learned and could do, but preserving digital information for longer than a generation or so had so far eluded them. Maybe she could take some paper back with her, she thought. The sale of it would go a long way toward establishing her financially.

  “Pen?” she finally said, and he hooked one from inside his jacket, extending it to her.

  First she drew a straight line crosswise on the paper, then small lines bisecting it. Starting with Monday, above each small line she put a letter for the day of the week: M, T, W, T, F, S, S, all the way across the paper.

  Then she drew an arrow coming down between Monday and Tuesday. “Someone came through early Monday morning but we don’t know who. Whoever it was knew enough to bypass the security at the Transit Laboratory, and to send himself. We know when he—”

  “He?”

  “For the sake of convenience, I’ll say ‘he’ instead of ‘he or she,’ but it could just as easily be a woman. Anyway, because of the computer settings, we know when and where he transited. In the beginning, the weight of the transportee had to be known and the computer calibrated for that weight, but that was too dangerous, because what if he gained weight, even just a pound, in the other time? He wouldn’t be able to get back. So that method was refined, and now the weight doesn’t matter, just the links.”

  “Links?”

  He was a master at one-word questions, she thought. “They’re actual, physical links, worn around the ankles and the wrists, programmed to both send and retrieve.”

  “So where are yours?”

  “Safely buried, where no one can find them. If I lose my links, I can’t get back unless a SAR is sent with replacement links.”

  “When we say SAR we mean Search and Rescue,” he observed.

  “That’s what it still means. They’re a squad of specially trained commandos, because no one knows what conditions they will be going into. Usually just one SAR is sent, to diminish the chance of attracting attention.”

  He propped his chin in his hand and smiled at her. “If you’re spinning a yarn, it’s a damn good one. You have quite an imagination. Go on.”

  She gave him a long, level look. “If you thought this was pure fabrication, you wouldn’t be wasting your time listening, and you know it. Not only that, if this were an interrogation we wouldn’t be in your office, we’d be in an interrogation room and this would be taped. Maybe you don’t want to believe me, but you can’t explain any of my equipment, can you?”

  “I’m listening. Don’t ask for more than that.”

  She needed a lot more than that from him, but for the moment she let the subject drop and went back to the chart she was drawing. “A message was left on a computer at the Transit Lab, sort of a catch-me-if-you-can statement.” She paused. “You need to understand that there are several groups who are against time travel, for whatever reason. So