“Go back where? What is that pod? Some kind of transporter? If we had that technology, surely the public would have found out.”

Orange’s laugh was hollow. “There are a thousand Web sites dedicated to suppressed technology; two have even posted blueprints of the pod. People believe what they see in the Apple store, not what some nutjob conspiracy theorist tells them.”

“So it is a transporter?”

Orange was finding these questions a strain. “After a fashion. I’m upgrading your clearance. Open my folder on the network. The password is HGWELLS. One word, all caps. Those files will tell you all you need to know.”

Chevie was halfway upstairs to her computer when she remembered why the password seemed familiar.

H. G. Wells. The Time Machine.

A time machine? she thought. That’s insane.

But then, no more insane than a monkey arm and yellow blood.

Chevie called in the hazmat team request to the London office and was given the runaround for nearly fifteen minutes until she invoked Agent Orange’s name; after that she was put straight through to the hazardous materials’ section and was assured that a team would be on site in less than an hour. No sooner had she put the phone down than a brigade of London’s finest firefighters burst through what was left of the front door, determined to hack their way through the building with large axes. They were politely but firmly turned away by a dozen black-clad Fed musclemen who had arrived considerably earlier than the hazmat team and proceeded to set up a perimeter around the house on Bedford Square.

Once Chevie was sure that the perimeter was secure, she told the chief muscleman’s mirrored sunglasses that she was taking ten minutes in the operations center.

Just enough time for me to find out what the blazes is going on here. Chevie was surprised to find that she was handling the day’s events pretty well. She had always been cool under pressure, but this was different. Something sci-fi was going on here. It seemed that the world as she knew it was not the world as it was.

Hold it together , she told herself. And read the file.

Orange’s folder had been sitting on the local network’s shared folders list since she’d arrived in Bedford Square, but she had never been able to access it until now. Chevie felt a little nervous even floating the cursor across the icon.

What am I going to find out? If there is time travel, then why not aliens? Why not vampires? I really don’t want to turn into one of those movie FBI gals who hunt freaks of nature. Those gals always end up with a limp.