Chevie stepped from the plate. “We should get out of here. Put some space between us and Garrick. I need to get a gun. Do you know anyone? Gun... bang bang?”

“Bang,” said Riley. “Bang bang.”

Chevie pulled Riley from the buried platform and noticed a disk of light hovering in the air, like a spinning silver dollar.

“Silver dollar,” she said conversationally, pointing at the dwindling wormhole.

Riley nodded.

“Men with sacks,” he said, pointing at two men who had entered the basement and were stealing across the mud floor, holding open the mouths of two flour sacks.

Chevie spotted a third man, emerging from a corner, his mouth full of food.

“Not all of them. That one’s got a chicken wing... and a blackjack.”

“I claim the chicken wing,” said Riley.

Chevie was still laughing when the sack went over her head.

HALF MOON STREET. SOHO. LONDON. NOW

Garrick tumbled into the pod less than a minute after his quarry disappeared and no more than ten seconds before the entrance to the quantum tunnel disappeared altogether. Just before his dematerialization, the woman, Victoria, had staggered down the stairs and shot him in the good leg with a small-caliber bullet from an almost dainty rifle, and so focused was Garrick on the diminishing wormhole that he forgot to smother his nerve endings. The sudden hammer blow of agony almost rendered him senseless, which would have been a disaster inside the wormhole. A man needed his senses marshaled and ready for duty inside the time tunnel.

The fault is mine, he thought, for allowing that woman to live.

The last sounds he heard from the twenty-first century before he disappeared were the bitter curses of the old woman, damning him to hell for a murdering scoundrel.

Garrick had an inkling that sparing Victoria was not all his own doing. The ghost of that Scot muck-snipe, Felix Sharp, was making a nuisance of itself in Garrick’s own gray matter. The photographs of Sharp’s father lining the wall and the notion of harming Victoria caused a swelling of phantom emotions that had stayed Garrick’s hand twice now.

No more, thought Albert Garrick. I will be a dead man’s cat’s-paw no longer.

Once the orange energy transmogrified his atoms, enveloping him in the sea of quantum foam, Garrick felt a calm descend over him.

I am nothing but soul now. Immortal.