The Forever Man (W.A.R.P. 3)

‘Very well,’ he said with a tinge of resignation in his voice. ‘We burn the witch.’

Garrick’s smile was gentle and paternal, but inside he gleefully gloated and congratulated himself for taking the time, all those years ago, to manufacture for himself the bag of tricks to which he had treated these bumpkins on this day. Fortunate too that he had left them behind in Mandrake, for if not they would have been long spent before now.

You get what you pay for materials-wise, Alby, he told himself. Another personal maxim.

His moment of triumph was rudely truncated by the sudden intrusion of Godfrey Cryer, who barged into the chamber, panting as though pursued by the hounds of hell.

‘The witch!’ he called to Garrick, his voice hollow with fear, for the news he was about to deliver would likely enrage his master. ‘She has been taken. Isles took her. Bewitched he was. Africans are susceptible to magic, I have heard.’

Garrick was momentarily peeved at this news, but then he conceded to himself that it was a most satisfyingly dramatic turn, which could have leaped from the pages of a penny dreadful.

The show must at all costs go on, Alby.

‘The familiar!’ he cried with the authority granted him by his disappearing act. ‘She will attempt to free her familiar. To the chapel!’

And, from the table, down he went in a single lurching leap that covered half the distance to the door. With a barge of his elbow, he knocked Cryer aside, making a note in his mind to deal with the fool later, and out into the night he ran, his black boots and pale skin making him seem like a legless ghost floating down the main street of Mandrake’s Groan.

The Field Office

Meanwhile, in the fens. Huntingdonshire. 1647

Fairbrother Isles’s actual name was Fender Rhodes Isles, thanks to his mother’s adoration of legendary funkster Stevie Wonder, who favoured Fender Rhodes electric keyboards. His mother had actually wanted to name her baby boy Wonder but Fairbrother’s father, to his credit, baulked at the notion that his son should be forever taunted as ‘Wonder Isles’.

‘Sounds like something outta Star Trek’ were his actual words, and so they settled on Fender Rhodes, which wasn’t great as names go, but it was better than the alternative.

Fender had jettisoned his own first names on his arrival in the seventeenth century and replaced them with Fairbrother, hoping that any other undercover time travellers might put two and two together and get FBI – but no one had, leading Isles to believe either that his code was too subtle or that he was stranded back here in the age of Roundheads and witches.

Isles had been at this end of the time tunnel for so long that sometimes he wondered if he might have dreamed up the whole future thing.

Computers, cellphones, space travel, Power Rangers.

It was beginning to sound nuts, even to him.

Gradually, as the first years trudged by, he forgot all about his real name and began to think of himself as Fairbrother and even to buy into his cover as the town’s drunkard-cum-halfwit. He bought into it a little too much and spent more nights in the jail than he did in the field office, a fact that annoyed the professor quite a bit. But what was the prof gonna do? Fire him? The prof was a civilian anyway, so technically he wasn’t Isles’s boss.

But, even as he told himself this, Isles knew that this particular civilian was not just a normal guy. This civilian was extra special, or as they might say in the good old twentieth century: a high-value asset.

So all alone he had been, without brother or sister agents, unless you counted Pointer, who hardly qualified as human company any more. All alone until today, when this kid materialized with a magician and the Witchfinder, as far as he could see, but the kid wore the blue and gold. OK, her eyes were weird, but he’d seen a lot weirder in the past twenty years. In fact, the good people of Mandrake probably considered him far weirder than the cat-girl. Yes, he’d been forced to blow his cover to spring her, but what was he going to do? Leave the girl for Garrick to lynch in the square? Hardly. Once a Fed, always a Fed. Though this kid looked a little young to be an agent. Maybe that meant he was getting old.

‘Old and outta shape,’ Fairbrother said aloud, patting his blossoming stomach. He would cut back on the ale, he decided. And the pies. Maybe do a little cardio.

Hey, he realized, I feel … What is this feeling? I feel switched on. Plugged in. I’ve got purpose.

It had been a long time.

Isles negotiated a path through the forest clumps that dotted Mandrake’s perimeter, though to be honest the term ‘path’ barely applied. ‘Trail’ would perhaps be a more accurate word, for he varied his route, as his drill instructor in Quantico had impressed upon him and his classmates by following them back to their secret off-base beer stash one night and trussing them all up with plasti-cuffs.

Never take the same route twice in a row, kids. Twice in a row is a pattern and a pattern leads to your beer being confiscated at the very least.

Isles had learned the lesson well and now had over a dozen routes back to the field office, which were rigged with tripwires and bear pits in case anyone was on his tail. Low-tech stuff but very effective.

Isles switched the mewling figure he was carrying across to his other shoulder as he left the forest proper and moved into the marsh. The waist-high reeds drummed his thighs as he waded through, spraying him with a fine mist that he generally appreciated as his head was often fuzzy, but today he felt sharp and connected, as though something important might happen.

The falling night and thick fog that habitually hung over the fens soon enveloped him, and Isles felt confident enough in this natural cover to take the most direct route back to the office. As he walked, he softly whistled the five notes made famous by the twentieth-century movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind and within seconds a sleek brown hunting dog appeared at his side, keeping pace easily but sneezing whenever a reed flicked against his nose.

‘I hate these rushes,’ said the dog. ‘Right at face level for me, you know?’

‘Yeah,’ said Isles, patting the dog’s head with his free hand.

The hound twisted away from the touch. ‘Quit it, Fender. I swear, you do that again I will bite your hand off.’

Isles laughed. ‘Come on, Pointer. You love it, boy.’

‘And don’t call me “boy”. I ain’t no dog, man,’ said Pointer. ‘I’m a mutation. Have a heart.’

Isles relented; after all, Donald Pointer had once been his partner and was the only person/dog who still called him Fender.

‘ OK. Sorry, partner. How’s the old man?’

‘He’s the old man, you know,’ said Pointer. ‘Still trying to set things right.’ The dog sniffed Chevie’s leg. ‘What you got there? Lunch?’

‘Yeah, you’re not a dog, right?’ said Isles.

Pointer barked once. ‘Darn. These animal instincts, you know. It’s been twenty years, partner. I’m forgetting what it feels like to be a federal agent.’

‘Well, what I have on my shoulder here might just be able to remind us what that feels like.’

‘Yeah?’ said the dog doubtfully. ‘She looks a little young. The FBI are doing daycare now?’ Pointer loped alongside quietly for a minute, then said, ‘And I’m getting a vibe, man. For some reason I don’t like this female.’

Isles laughed. ‘Hah. Maybe that’s because she has cat’s eyes.’

The dog stopped in his tracks, growled, then shook himself and fell in beside his partner.

‘You are not a dog,’ he told himself. ‘You are not a dog.’

Not yet, thought Isles. But more and more every day. Pretty soon there’ll be nothing left of my partner but the colour of his hair.

Isles and Pointer had once upon a time been two of the FBI’s go-to guys in the field of witness security. During their spectacular tenure at Wit Sec they managed to shepherd twenty-five crucial witnesses into the witness box without losing a single body. Isles was the strategy guy and Pointer was the muscle, which was not

to say they couldn’t trade roles when the situation called for it. Their most famous case in Bureau circles was when they avoided a bunch of mercenaries surrounding a Florida courthouse by sneaking the witness through the sewer system. Afterwards the witness, a low-level driver by the name of Stickshift Rossini, had said, Hey, guys, that was one close encounter, which led to Isles and Pointer adopting the five famous notes as their theme tune.

When they make the movie, Donald Pointer used to say, Denzel plays you. Stallone is the only man alive who can do me justice, and they gotta recycle the Close Encounters music.

The movie never happened.

What happened was they got assigned to a very special professor guy in London, of all places, and took a time jaunt back to the seventeenth century that didn’t quite go as planned.

Isles’s shoulders were starting to ache with Chevie’s weight, no matter how many times he switched her over.

‘Hey, Don, buddy. You don’t think …’

The dog trotted a few steps ahead. ‘Don’t even ask, man. You shouldn’t even let that question form in your mind.’

‘Hey, you didn’t even let me speak, partner.’

Pointer turned on him. ‘Oh, it’s partner now you want the cat-girl to ride on my back. I ain’t a donkey neither, got it?’

Isles was always amazed that his partner had taught himself to talk with a dog’s vocal apparatus. It shouldn’t have been possible, but maybe there was a human larynx in there. However, even though Pointer could talk, days could go by when he spent his time engaged in more dog-like activities, like chewing on stuff and chasing rats. And he could deny it all he wanted, but sometimes in the evening Pointer loved nothing more than a good tummy scratch.

‘ OK,’ said Isles. ‘Loud and clear. You ain’t a dog and you ain’t a donkey neither.’

‘Yeah,’ said Pointer miserably, his long face making the expression more effective. ‘But what am I?’

Isles shrugged with one shoulder only. ‘Hey. I’m a special agent but not that special. I can’t answer that question, but maybe the old man can wake this kid up and get us a few answers.’