A Time & Place for Every Laird (22 page)

Day Five

“Wow
. No wonder they want to keep this secret,” Sorcha said, setting aside the binder filled with the information Danny had printed for them the previous day as Hugh looked up from the stack of old newspapers he had been working his way through while she read through the technical report.

She rubbed her eyes with a sigh before lifting her head to stare out the window
, but Hugh wasn’t certain if she was truly seeing the misting rain and rolling waters at all.  She looked dazed and introspective, but since Sorcha had spent the whole of the previous evening and most of the morning poring over the contents of the thick binder, Hugh couldn’t blame her.

Nor did he rush to ask about what she had discovered.  A part of him wanted to know, but as he had
conceded the previous day, there was probably nothing in the report that would be able to change his circumstances.  Perhaps the only good they might truly derive from it was the knowledge of what they were up against.

So
, instead of asking, Hugh went into the kitchen and poured her another cup of coffee, preparing it as he had learned she preferred it, with little coffee and large amounts of sugar and flavored cream.  Returning to the library, he pressed it into her hands and went to the fireplace, stoking the flames and adding more wood to fight the lingering morning chill.  He loved the room with its huge stacked stone fireplace, clean white painted shelves, soft green walls, deep, comfortable furniture, and wealth of books.

With Sorcha
there with him.

As she had said, it was easy to become spoiled.

“Are you going to ask?”

She was hugging her mug in both hands, peerin
g at him curiously over the brim as Hugh returned to the sofa they had been sharing and sat next to her.  Not too close; Hugh was finding that her permission to flirt had made her proximity an almost unbearable temptation.  “I’m sure ye will tell me when yer prepared tae do so.”

“But you don’t really want to know any more, do you?”

She was coming to know him so well. “I believe I
need
tae know.”

Sorcha nodded solemnly.  “So do you want the
gritty details or just the Cliffs Notes version?”

“O
ne day ye might hae tae tell me what these ‘Cliffs Notes’ are,” Hugh teased, reaching out to tweak her chin but pulling away before he made contact.  A brief caress of that silky skin would not be enough now.  “’Tis a rainy day with little else tae do, so tell me all if it pleases ye tae do so.”

“
What?  Oh, right,” she said, casting him a sidelong glance, as if the request was at odds with her thoughts.  “Let me start with the basics then.  Do you know what a wormhole is, Hugh?”

No, but Hugh didn’t ever want to admit such ignorance again.  Instead, he only raised a brow.  “Okay, how about a black hole?” she asked,
then sighed.  “Gravity?”

Hugh scowled at that.  “As ye said, I am nae simpleton, Sorcha.”

“Okay, imagine a body in space with a gravitational pull stronger than light,” she said, prompting a vague recollection.

“Aye, there was a man, an Englishman, I
cannae recall his name but he was a rotund, dark-faced man … a member of the Royal Society, who experimented with gravity and magnetism.  He theorized such a thing,” Hugh said, tapping a finger on his lips as he tried to remember the details of the brief discussion.  “Something about a heavenly body so massive that light couldnae escape it.  Is that what you are referring tae?”

“Right. 
A black hole.”

“He said ye
cannae see it.  ’Twas only a theory.”

“That has become truth.  The reason you can’t see it is because it won’t reflect light
, but we know where they are because they pull on other objects around them.” She paused, then asked, “With me so far?”

Hugh nodded
, and she continued.  “Jump through history to the theory that a black hole is a region of space/time.  A combination of the two, okay? A wormhole—and I am going to be incredibly simplistic here so don’t beat me up over it after you read a textbook on the subject—would be like two black holes meeting in the middle, like a tunnel with each end in a different space/time, connecting two points even a million miles away from each other with a pathway between.  They always use the example of a folded piece of paper where two ends that were far apart are suddenly right next to each other.”  Sorcha drew two dots on the back of one of the pages in the binder, representing them as black holes and bending the page so that the dots met as a demonstration.

Hugh nodded again.  He could visualize that.  “Carry on.”

“These wormholes aren’t constant. Again, it’s all theory—I mean, we don’t know, because we haven’t been there to see it—but we think they form and collapse pretty quickly and they exist at a Planck-scale level.  I mean, it’s far below subatomic levels …” She paused at his petulant scowl.  “It’s really, really, really small.  So small that it is pointless to try to physically measure them.  Anyway, at that level it’s believed that space/time is unstable and chaotic.  They call it quantum foam, and the wormholes form pretty easily in those conditions.

“Most of the quantum wormholes in the foam lead
only a few Planck-lengths away.  About this far,” Sorcha said, pressing her thumb and forefinger together with no space between.  “But sometimes they can span light-years or even across the universe.  Well, one theory leads to another and someone gets the idea that you can cross through it.  Then comes the idea of a transversible wormhole that says you should be able to go back and forth across it.  But all in all it’s a naturally occurring event.”

“In space,” he clarified.

“Yes, in space.  That’s what makes this whole thing so weird,” Sorcha told him, picking up the binder and idly flipping through the pages.  “There’s this organization called INSCOM—it’s an acronym; the military is big on them.  It stands for U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command.  Basically they are the covert sector of the Army tasked with counterintelligence, information warfare, and electronic warfare.”

“They’re spies?”

Claire waggled her hand back and forth.  “It’s a gray area.  It’s hard to be an Army wife without getting a feel for these kinds of things.  I would say they are spies as much as they wage a little warfare electronically themselves.  These days you can cripple a nation with just a few keystrokes.”

Hugh only raised his brow.  “Verra well.  Carry on.”

“Okay, so this whole thing started when INSCOM contracted DARPA—another acronym that stands for Defense Advanced Research Project Agency.  DARPA is a military think tank paid by the government agencies to just spout out new ideas.  Mark-Davis works with them a lot, kind of like two brains in the same head.  Apparently there are places already that can create a wormhole, but DARPA has been trying to develop a way to take one of those short-lived wormholes, stabilize it, and expand it for macroscopic use …  Making it big enough to actually see.  They want to trap one end and stabilize it using negative energy.  Theoretically, negative energy is the stuff that caused the initial inflation of the early universe.”

“The early universe?”

“Are you too early for the Big Bang Theory?” she asked, but read Hugh’s closed expression well enough to know there would be no answer forthcoming.   She rubbed her eyes again, tiredly.  “Oh, I so don’t want to argue creationism with you right now.  Let’s just leave it at the idea that with this negative energy, you could open one end of a wormhole and expand it, okay?  Are you with me so far?”

Surprisingly enough, he was.  Other than a few of her terms, Sorcha’s explanation had been simple enough so far.  “So how are they employing this power?”

“DARPA hooked up with Dr. Fielding to start developing new surveillance technology for INSCOM using wormholes.  Basically, they started out wanting to be able to open a tiny wormhole into a room or area where bad guys are meeting or whatever.  From their end, they could open a large enough one to send through a small camera or a microphone so they could see and listen to conversations even in bunkers far underground.  It would be virtually undetectable.”

“Would they truly attempt something so far
-fetched?” Hugh asked after a moment’s thought.  “It doesnae sound like ye believe it either.”

“I wouldn’t normally
but since INSCOM is part of the same organization that tried to develop parapsychologic methods in the seventies and eighties, I guess I can’t be too surprised.  They were trying for this thing called remote viewing, where a psychic or seer could look into the minds of people across the world and see what they were planning.”

Hugh snorted at that.  “And ye think my time
was filled with witchcraft and other such nonsense!”

“I agree with you on that point.”

“But if a wormhole is a natural phenomenon, how are they controlling it?”

Sorcha shuffled through the pages once more, obviously not searching for an answer but
occupying her hands.  “An electrical charge—we’ve gone over electricity, right?—well, the charge steers the destination end of the wormhole, which stays on Earth rather than taking off across space because it is the nearest gravity well to the opening.  I mean, it could go somewhere else but the tendency is for it to stay on Earth.  But it requires vast amounts of power.  We’re talking a whole grid devoted to keeping this thing running for just a few minutes, so they can’t keep it on all the time.”

Hugh nodded as he processed the information she had provided.  “So how did I get involved in all of this?”

“Well, now that’s where
Fielding really screwed up—or I guess found their moneymaker, depending on how you look at it.  They found out through a little trial and a lot of error that if the power was shut off abruptly rather than slowly backing it down, the negative energy construct—the force that was holding the wormhole open—would just collapse.  As the negative energy collapses, it momentarily enlarges the wormhole.  Think of it as an implosion followed by a larger explosion.  When this happened, the opening would enlarge and last for a second or two, leaving no trace once it was gone.  Fielding stumbled onto a gold mine here, Hugh. That is why the NSA was called in on this whole thing.  The government agencies are notorious about not wanting to share their toys, and INSCOM obviously doesn’t want this ability to become common knowledge among the other agencies or our allies.  Can you imagine the power in being able to get somewhere, knowing that there was no way for anyone to track your movements?” she asked.  “I mean, they can’t keep this thing open for long with their current energy source.  It wouldn’t be long enough to send troops through, for example, but it would probably stay open long enough to kidnap or assassinate someone.  Or at least long enough to toss a bomb through.”

“Or to have an innocent passerby fall into it.”

“Yeah, that too,” Sorcha said, her voice ripe with sympathy.  Hugh pushed off the sofa and went to the window, staring just as blankly as she had before.  She continued softly, and he knew that the worst was yet to come.  “I think that the trouble my friend Darcy was referring to is that Dr. Fielding hasn’t been able to nail down the destination point at all, and if he can’t do that, then what’s the point, right?”

“What do ye
mean, he cannae control the destination?”

Sorcha bit her lip hesitantly.  “The other end just bounces all over the place
… and time, apparently, each time they power it up.  As far as I can see, the targeting software is showing that it opens up at different destinations with no discernible pattern.”

“So I just walked into this wormhole
when it ‘bounced’ into the Drummosse Muir two hundred and fifty years ago?” Hugh asked unnecessarily.  He already knew the answer.  By God but he had always thought he had lived a fairly charmed life.  How unlucky could a man be to happen upon such an occurrence with such incredible bad timing?

“And you and that Native American probably startled Fielding to death when he realized that his wormhole didn’t travel through space alone,” she told him.  “I didn’t see anything in there about anticipating time travel.
”

Hugh grimaced at that. 
“And the reason he dinnae simply send us back through the hole is because he cannae duplicate the destination,” Hugh said dully.  He had been expecting that, of course, but it didn’t make the truth any easier to hear. 

“And the reason he kept you was because there was
no way he was going to go public with such a huge mistake.”

Lovely
, Hugh thought.  How terribly comforting to know that it was all nothing but an innocent mistake.

Hugh fell into a brooding silence, standing at the window with one hand braced against the pane.  Unlike at his last such lapse, this time Claire was all sympathy.  Lord only knew she had hated telling him the truth.  It couldn’t have been any more pleasant to hear it. 

His attention had drifted
to a cargo ship chugging by in the distance, but Claire wasn’t certain if he was truly seeing it or if his thoughts were turned entirely inward at that point.

It was
there again, that urge to comfort, but this time Claire did not try to turn it away.  She went quietly to his side and slipped her cold hand into his warm one, giving it a comforting squeeze.  Finally, he looked down at her with the desolation that had been temporarily banished lurking once again in his eyes, but even when all must have seemed lost to him, Hugh was still chivalrous enough to recognize the chill that had come over her.  He caught her hand between his and chafed it between his.  “If we have the schematics for the machine, could we build it ourselves and find a way tae send me home?”

“I’m not a quantum physicist, Hugh,” she said regretfully
, absently slipping her other hand between his for warmth as well.  “And I don’t know anyone who is.  Time machines are as new a concept to me as they are to you.  It’s always been just science fiction.”

“So we
cannae just build our own then?”

“Not unless we can harness the 1.21 jigawatts of electricity it would take to work one,” she quipped
, then bit her lip.  “Bad joke. But, no, there is no way we could find a power source even if we could build the machine itself.”

Hugh grunted but remained silent.  Silent enough to
renew her worry as he looked into the distance once more.  She wondered what he was thinking but couldn’t bring herself to ask.  Instead, she slipped her arms around his waist and hugged him close, resting her cheek against his chest.  The warmth of his embrace, the press of his body against hers was everything she had imagined it would be.  Claire could only hope that human contact provided him the comfort it gave her now when he needed it the most.  “I’m sorry, Hugh.  So sorry that I can’t give you the answers I know you want to hear.”

His arms came around her, tenderly at first
, but then he was clutching her so tightly it almost stole her breath.  Hugh buried his face in her hair, and she could feel his deep breaths caressing her neck.  One hand crept up her back until his fingers tangled in the hair at her nape.

Her heart full of worry for him, Claire whispered into his shoulder
, “Are you okay?”

Lifting his head, Hugh pressed a kiss against her temple and eased away, raising his other hand until he was cradling her head between them, the heels of his hands against her jaw and his fingers curling at the base of her skull.

Looking down at her, he seemed as fierce and hard as he had been that first day, but this time it was not trepidation that made Claire tremble.

“You can kiss me now if you like,” she whispered
helplessly, fully expecting that he would take advantage of the offer.  But as he tended to, Hugh surprised her again.

“Nae, lass, I do plan on kissing ye long and hard, but when I do, it willnae be in a moment of gratitude,” he said,
searching her eyes intently.  His eyes were dark with growing desire but there was a question there as well.  “I dinae ken what it is about ye, Sorcha, but for some reason I cannae remain in a mood for long since I hae been in yer company.  For as long as I was held in that prison, I was angry.  Every day more so than the one before.  I should be angrier than I am now for all that was done tae me, for what was taken away.  I should be angrier wi’ ye for being so provoking, but I am nae.  Why is that?”

“My charm is irresistible?” Claire jested, summoning the hint of a smile to the corner of his mouth.

“Is that what it is?” he asked with just a whisper of humor but it was enough for her to know that the worst had passed.  “Either way, ye’ve been a balm tae my soul, Sorcha.”

“Gee, I’ve never been anyone’s balm before,” she whispered in an awed tone, hoping to banish the shadows lingering in his eyes.  It seemed to work.

His blue eyes brightened at that, and the tension in his expression eased.  Claire felt the pad of his thumb caressing her cheek tenderly.  “And what am I?”

Temptation?  Salvation?  Claire shook her head.  “You are a vacuum.”

“A vacuum?”

“It’s a
…”

“I ken what a vacuum is, lass
.  I only wonder how it might apply tae a person.”

“Oh, well
, that’s easy,” she said with a winsome smile.  “You have sucked all the anger right out of me.  I hadn’t realized how angry I was with the world at large and everyone in it, but you’ve helped me to see that and send it all away. Admittedly, it lingered on the surface there for a while, but now I’m all cleaned out.”

“Is that so?” he asked, rais
ing an arrogant brow.  “I may provoke ye tae anger again.”

“Nope, I won’t let you
.  This is now an anger-free zone.”

Hugh released a dry chuckle.
  “I doubt that.  Ye are easily roused.” 

Yes, I am
, Claire thought, and Hugh must have intuited her more lascivious thought in some way because his brow raised slightly.  Suddenly Claire realized that she was still standing in the warmth of his embrace as naturally as if she belonged there.  She was locked in his arms with his hard thighs pressed against hers, his broad chest against her breasts.  With her head tilted back to look at him, she was arched against every inch of him.  The desire that she had fought against and denied assailed her once more, but this time Claire let it flow over her, savoring the feel of her heart fluttering in her chest, the shaky intake of breath, and even nerves that made her hands tremble as they slid up his muscular back.

Hugh’s fi
ngers tightened in her hair, forcing her head back even more until his lips were just inches from hers, but his body was taut, as if relaxing would allow his mouth to fall on hers against his bidding.

“I’m not feeling an ounce of gratitude, I swear it,” she whispered.  “Are you?”

“Nae,” he murmured huskily.  “Nary a bit.”

But still he did not kiss her
, and then Claire remembered their bargain.  Bringing an arm between them, she skimmed her palm along his rough jaw and around the back of his neck before urging him down as she rose high on her toes.  The soft brush of her lips against his set them tingling immediately, and a quiver followed, coursing down her body and answered by his.  How could she have thought to deny this?  Something so powerful was unusual, too rare to brush aside.  It was meant to be seized, an opportunity meant to be taken.

“I’m instigating,” she whispered against his lips.  “Please kiss me, Hugh.”

And there in the glow of the roaring fire, Hugh bent Claire back over his arm with a low growl and lit a fire in them both.  His lips moved across hers tenderly at first, as if testing her response, but Claire parted her lips and urged him to deepen the kiss, drawing in his lips as her tongue flicked against them.  With a groan, Hugh swept his tongue against hers, dueling skillfully, only to withdraw before his mouth covered hers once more.

Hugh drew away slowly, his kiss softening until he brushed one last tender kiss across her lips and lifted his head.  Brushing her hair back from her temples, he looked down at Claire with a warm smile that went all the way to his blue eyes
, and she couldn’t help but return the gesture, lifting her face for another kiss, but Hugh eased back.

“Now t
hat that is all settled, I believe it is time for luncheon,” he said smoothly as he drew away, much to Claire’s disappointment.  Who was changing the subject now?

Parted from his warm body,
Claire felt a chill wash over her and waited for regrets to do the same.  For guilt to take her in its own icy grip.

The only regret she had was that their kiss had ended too soon
.

Phil Jameson strode into the stark control room of mounted monitors with ill-concealed impatience.  “Where are we?  Talk to me people.”

“All the animals have been retrieved and contained with minimal injury.”

The agent waved an impatient hand.  “And the others?  What have you got?”

“We got a retrieval team setting up near the Canadian border north of Spokane.”

“Which one?”

“Eyewitness reports identify it as Anomaly X20.”

Jameson grunted.  “ETA?”

“Twenty-four to forty-eight hours.  Tops.”

“And the other?”

There was palpable hesitation among all the junior agents at the question.  “Nothing on Anomaly J42, sir.   No eyewitness reports as yet.
  Blood tests were inconclusive.”

“I
found her, sir!” Marshall, parked in front of one bank of monitors, announced happily, tapping a series of buttons to bring up surveillance footage on one of the larger monitors and pausing it to freeze the image of a car in the frame.  A sigh of relief exhaled simultaneously from the other underlings.  “It’s Claire Manning.  We got her car off a traffic camera in Seattle north of the airport.”

“Is J42
with her?” Jameson barked.

Nichols followed Jameson into the surveillance room and studied the monitors.  “Are you still pursuing this, Jameson?  I thought we decided that Claire Manning wasn’t a suspect.”

“
You
decided,” Jameson told his INSCOM counterpart.  “I have my own thoughts on the matter.”

“Your gut,” Nichols said dryly, sipping from his coffee as Jameson pinned him with a scowl.  “I’m telling you, we should be out scouting the area instead of pursuing this bullshit.
  Your J42 is either hiding or dead.”

Jameson ran a frustrated hand through his hair.  He’d had an entire detail working night and day to track Claire Manning but still had no solid proof that she was even harboring the anomaly
—Jameson could hardly think of him any other way.  He had seen the video from Fielding’s lab, had seen the thing that had escaped.  It was a beast, a terror.  There was no reason at all to assume that Mrs. Manning had voluntarily aided its escape.  No significant proof that she was being coerced.

But there was no proof she hadn’t aided it
, either, and his gut said she had, for whatever reason.  There had been no sign of the escapee at all, despite Nichols's “scout the area” crap.  No sightings.  No reports, though his agents were at the point of exhaustion from hours spent in front of the monitors.  They needed to find this Manning woman before more people were hurt, including Claire Manning herself.

“
Show me what you got, Marshall.” Jameson commanded, turning away from Nichols.

“Impossible to tell, sir.
” The enthusiasm in the agent’s voice dimmed and faded after he had watched the interaction of the two senior agents.  He backed up the video footage and played it forward slowly.  “Camera shot every two seconds.  We got one of the front, but the angle is too deep to see inside.  We’re lucky we could get enough of the license plate for someone to catch it.”

Jameson grimaced as Nichols lifted a mocking brow. 

Nichols pulled out a chair and sat next to Marshall.  “How goes it on the other escapee?”

“Much more promising, sir.  He
…” he cast a look up at Jameson and corrected himself.  “I mean, X20 has been fairly resourceful but was easily noticed making its way out of Spokane.  Simms and his men are currently tracking it through the mountains on infrared.  They should have it soon.”

“Any chance the other one is with him?” Nichols asked.

“It doesn’t appear so, sir.”

Jameson was disappointed with their progress
.  Finding one being’s heat signature in the wilderness was easy, but how would they track another body through a crowd of millions if the anomaly had made it into Seattle?   “Get men at the Seattle airport.  I want every flight checked and Claire Manning found.  Nothing on the family yet?”

Marshall shook his head,
“No, sir, as far as we can see she hasn’t attempted to contact her parents or call them.  No emails, either.  We’ve got their phones tapped and the older brother’s.  Tails on friends, just in case, as ordered.”