“I knew someone would get around to that eventually,” said Chevie with a straight face, then wished that she could activate the WARP pod so that she could go back five seconds and not crack a funny when her partner’s father was lying dead and mutated on the table. “Can we talk about this outside?”

“Of course.” Felix Smart led her into the corridor, talking as he walked. “The university in Edinburgh funded my father for a few years, then he moved to a larger facility in London in conjunction with Harvard Research. By this time I was already with the FBI in Washington. Once it became clear that to me that Father was getting somewhere, I persuaded my section chief to take a look. You wouldn’t know it to listen to my accent, but I lived in Washington with my mother after my parents divorced. The Bureau consultants loved the concept and threw money at Father, and I was appointed as project liaison. We saw real results, really quickly. We sent through cameras first, and animals. Then death-row prisoners.”

Chevie was not shocked. She knew that it had been common practice for government departments to offer testing deals to condemned prisoners in the last millennium. The government had tested everything from rubber bullets to telepathy pills on convicts.

“The tests were pretty successful. There was a small number of aberrations, usually on the return trip, but less than one percent, so acceptable in a scientific sense. Then some bright spark had the idea that we could stash valuable witnesses in the past.”

Chevie raised a finger. “Just say that last part again. I want to nail it down in the real world.”

“Even John Gotti couldn’t have put a hit on someone in the nineteenth century, right? We sent the witnesses back into the past with a handler and then we would bring them home to testify.”

“So, the FBI does witness protection in the past?”

“Yes. Would you like me to say it one more time?”

“No. I got it.”

“Of course it’s incredibly expensive, and the power needed for a single jaunt is enough to light a small country, so witnesses were always huge security risks and involved in trials that were tied up for a few years. In the ten years that WARP actually functioned, we only sent four witnesses back to various periods. Certain high-ranking intelligence officers felt the government was being short-changed, and so it was strongly suggested by a Colonel Clayton Box, a very enthusiastic specialforces type, that the tech be used for black ops.”

“Wet work? Assassinations?”