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Synopsis

So many mysteries in the past. So many opportunities as well. As Portals, Inc. uses historians to test its time travel devices, historians use Portals to test their theories.

Neyla believes the 17th century discovery of the dead Princes near the Bloody Tower will tell her who murdered the boys centuries before.

Thomas Ayliffe believes he can pull off the crime of the century - any century.

All three agendas collide in a story about crimes and criminals... past, present, and future.

Excerpt

He had gotten a message.

Sent by old-fashioned tradecraft dating from the days of the Secret Intelligence Service, long before the advent of MI6. A simple flowerpot on a balcony in Kensington, a tiny red flag next to the ugliest flower Thomas had ever seen.

The flower didn't matter. The flag did.

It meant: Be at the designated spot, midnight. Be prepared.

So Thomas stood on London Bridge, his back to the traffic, his arms resting on the railing. To his left, the lights of Southwark Cathedral. To his right, the Monument designed by Sir Christopher Wren to remind everyone of the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Thomas pretended to contemplate the lights of London reflected on the water. A bit of a wind brushed his cheeks, bringing the slightly bitter scent of the Thames.

Behind him, cars hummed as they glided by. Someone would notice him sooner or later. A man standing on London Bridge at midnight, his arms resting on the edge, looking down at the water, spoke of melancholy at the very least, a potential suicide at the very worst. His hair ruffled as the breeze grew stronger. Then he felt someone at his shoulder and he braced himself so that he couldn't be tossed over. His heart was pounding.

Paranoia, that's all it was. He was here to do a job, not to be killed.

Still, he stepped slightly to his left, just enough to take him out of harm's way.

"Lovely night." The voice was husky, unfamiliar - and surprisingly - female.

Thomas looked at her out of the corner of his eye. She was slight, hair cropped short, rounded cheeks reddened from the chill breeze. Maybe thirty, maybe younger.

"I've seen better." He spoke the coded response, half expecting her to go off script. After all, it was a lovely night, and strangers occasionally said such things to each other, even at midnight on London Bridge.

"I saw better on New Year's," she said. "The way the fireworks seemed to float through the Eye."

She was his contact, then. Somehow he had always imagined the insider was a man. Middle-aged, disgruntled. Willing to be bought off. Thomas had been watching all of them - those that he could, anyway - wondering who would meet him when the time came.

Odd that he missed a woman. Maybe that's why he had. She seemed shadowy, inconspicuous, perfect for this kind of corporate espionage.

"These days," he said, "fireworks remind me of Guy Fawkes Day when I was a boy."

"Shame they can't blow up Parliament today." She turned toward him and grinned.

He didn't grin back, but he did check, out of the corner of his eye, to see if anyone approached. Aside from the cars humming behind them, the bridge was empty.

"So?" he asked. "You have a date certain?"

"Two, actually," she said. "The first is Wednesday at five PM. West wall, White Tower. The second is July 1674."

"1674?" he asked. "I don't want that year."

"It's your only hope," she said. "They don't like doing remotes. You're lucky. The researcher is highly regarded, but female. She doesn't dare walk across the Thames. She has to be on location."

He shook his head. "I want 1650, early September 1666, or 9 May 1671. 1674 is too late."

"You've also made your impatience known," she said. "If you want to finish your job in the next year, you'll take 1674. It's the only remote planned."

"They're not doing other remotes?" He certainly wouldn't hear of them. He did work at Portals, just as this woman did, but he had never been assigned to the technical areas. The managers had tested all applicants, and he had failed the mathematical portions. But he had aced the history sections. So he'd spent the past two years in research, finding out tiny things for major historians, and growing more and more impatient.

"They're afraid of remotes. They've only done one, and it was controlled. This is the first uncontrolled remote, and some think it too dangerous."

"Uncontrolled?" he asked.

"Into a site where they don't know each and every detail. They don't even have the government's permission." She was staring at the Thames.

He did too, watching the lights ripple on the inky black water. He could get caught on this end, then, not by Portales, but by the British government. But there were no laws against time travel. Not yet.

"You have to be careful," she said as if reading his thoughts. "This is the first such major experiment. Try not to cock it up."

Cock it up. As if he were part of the corporate team. He didn't care if they never had another remote, so long as he got his treasure.

But he wasn't sure how he would go about it, even with this remote. "What happened in July of 1674?"

The woman didn't answer. Instead, she stared at the Thames for a moment. Then she said, "You're the fake historian. You figure it out. And, by the way, your portal is Neyla Kendrick. Good luck."

His portal. A pun. He hated puns, and was about to tell her when he realized she was walking away from him. The breeze carried her vanilla perfume long after her footsteps faded.

He had been told his contact would arrange the right time period, and make sure he could do his job with a minimum of fuss. Everything would be timed to the second.

He needed it timed. He needed it just so.

He could call it off, he supposed. His client would hire someone else, someone with less caution, someone with a few more balls.

Not that he lacked balls. He'd carried out some of the greatest thefts in living memory. But this one would be the pinnacle of his career - not just in money, but in audacity.

The Crown Jewels.

Not all of them, of course. The most famous ones, as well as the ones still in use, had to remain. But the minor ones, the ones he'd researched, the ones no one had done much more than stare at under glass for hundreds of years - he could take any one of those, and would.

If he decided to do this.

1674. July.

He thought he'd covered all the possible opportunities to steal the jewels in the seventeenth century.

What had he missed?

The thick linen tape actually put pressure on her chest. Neyla Kendrick had trouble drawing a breath.

"That's too tight," she said to McTavish, who was trying to dress her.

The Closet was cold. Rows of clothing, all on racks, all from different time periods, ran off into the distance.

She felt like she was in one of the old warehouses that used to line this part of Southwark after the Second World War. She had to remind herself that beyond the double doors was a modern well-lit hallway.

McTavish tugged at the tape one more time.

"That hurts," she said.

He let go and the tape unraveled. She took a deep breath for the first time since he had wrapped the stuff around her. She looked down. Red welts covered the fleshy part of her upper breasts.

"Just get the reduction," McTavish said. "You can have them inflated when you get back."

As if her breasts were balloons. She glared at him.

McTavish had been a dresser, a costumer, and finally a designer for the London Stage. Portals, Inc. had hired him away with an obscene salary, mostly for his knowledge of historical fashion. Not just because he knew how to make someone look like they were from, say, the Middle Ages, but because he could actually pinpoint a year. He could find or make materials that fit so accurately, no native of the time period would think anything was wrong.

McTavish wasn't that careful with his own clothing. He wore the standard long frock coat - this season's current design for the fashionable man - but his was velvet, and too hot. He always smelled faintly of sweat.

"I'm not going to get my breasts reduced," Neyla said. "I'm leaving Wednesday morning."

"It's cosmetic," he said. "It'll be done in less than an hour. You'll have no pain at all. And when you get back - "

"They have to put some substance inside my breasts. It won't be me any more. I like having the original equipment."

He raised his eyebrows at her. "You also want to do your research, right? With those things, no one's going to mistake you for a boy, not unless I wrap all of your torso."

"I won't be bathing," she said, still shuddering at the very idea. She was going back to the land of unwashed flesh, fleas, and bedbugs. That was what she feared the most. The bugs, the dirt, the way she would have to live with it all.

"It'll be July," McTavish said. "Hottest month of the year in any century. You'll already be wearing more clothing than you're accustomed to. The last thing I want is for you to get heatstroke. Another reason not to bind those baps. Get them reduced."

"No," she said. "You're going to flatten them and you're going to make it look natural."

Then she grabbed her pink cotton shirt and pulled it on, leaving her bra on the nearby rack as if she had forgotten it. She wasn't going to wear anything over "those baps." She was going back to work.

"It's not going to look natural," he said.

"Neither are my teeth," she said, "but I'm not having those pulled for verisimilitude either."

Then she stalked out of the Closet.

She was getting angry at McTavish and that wasn't right. He was just a perfectionist, trying to make her the best seventeenth century male she could possibly be. He was trying to protect her.

She appreciated the attempt at protection. But she wasn't going to give up her breasts. She had given up enough for her work. Just moving to London was a sacrifice.

She was a San Francisco girl, born and raised. She loved the cool air, the fog, the modern buildings, and the lack of history. She had gotten all of her degrees at UC-Berkeley, as well as two post-docs, one assistant professorship, followed by a full professorship with summers off and tons of university support to go all over the world to investigate old bones.

She had been about to accept a tenured position when Portals, Inc. contacted her, asking her to submit a proposal for their top-secret project.

Time travel. Controlled, examined. Portals wanted to investigate all kinds of historical avenues before taking its product public. It was a giant form of beta testing. If something went wrong for the historians investigating old myths, virologists investigating ancient diseases, and biologists trying to get DNA from long-vanished species, then Portals would do more testing on its travel system.

Neyla's proposal was simple: It was a redraft of her undergraduate honors thesis, which she had written in conjunction with the History, English, and Anthropology departments. Her thesis was an analysis of the importance of the Princes in the Tower, as told by their bones. Not that she had seen their bones, of course. No one alive had. The bones had been examined only once, in 1933. What then passed for modern science concluded that the bones belonged to two young boys who were the right age to be the princes, and therefore probably were.

That conclusion was enough for the British government. Since then, they hadn't allowed anyone to examine the bones.

She hadn't expected Portals to care about the ancient mystery of the Princes in the Tower, but apparently they had received so many requests from historians and amateur crime buffs, all of whom wanted to solve the mystery themselves (and wanted to spend a year in 1483 and 1484 doing so), that the Portals CEO, Damien Wilder, figured this could be the signature project.

He had been looking for someone who knew how to solve the mystery of the Princes' deaths in a short visit to the past. Neyla's proposal was the shortest - a return to July of 1674, when the skeletons were discovered on the south side of the White Tower.

Unfortunately, no one had a date certain, so anyone hoping to find the bodies might have to spend the entire month in 1674 - which was a prospect she was now facing.

She stepped inside her office, her heart pounding. She was still angry over McTavish's comment. Not because he had any power to make her go through even minor physical changes for this project, but because he had tapped into her fears about the trip.

So many risks. She had to somehow pose as one of the workers or someone who belonged at the Tower during July of 1674. She and her team would be traveling with only the minimum of supplies, a second set of clothing, and the miniaturized scientific equipment.

She slipped behind her desk. Beyond the large glass windows, London sprawled. The skyscape looked nothing like the skyscape in 1674. Then the Tower housed some of the largest buildings in the city. Now century-old buildings dwarfed it. Even the creaky London Eye made the Tower look like a hunk of the past stuck in the middle of the present.

She pulled out the box holding the equipment she would take with her. The box was long and thin as if it contained a necklace from Tiffany's. Inside were small items designed to look like things from 1674 - a quill pen, a pin, a ring. They all housed something important, from her computer (complete with camera and voice recorder) to the many back-ups she needed.

Everything was solar powered, which helped. Her traveling companions would have redundant equipment, so if someone lost theirs, they wouldn't lose the information. The entire trip could be summed up in this small box. If she didn't get the right information at the right time in the right way, the trip and all its dangers would be for nothing.

She couldn't quite get over her own audacity.

To travel into one of the world's most heavily guarded places, to a tower still more famous for its prisoners and executions than for its grandeur and its coronations, took a degree of chutzpah that she would never have guessed she had.

Finally she stood and walked to the window. The Thames glittered in the sunlight. Cars flowed over the bridges and through the city, like blood through veins. She was too high to see people walking. From this vantage, though, she could see the entire Tower complex from Traitor's Gate up front to the Jewel House toward the back and the White Tower in the very middle.

Dark and old, foreboding and entrancing, the Tower at this moment was filled with tourists and schoolchildren, people who had paid to "experience" the past.

In two days, she would join them, pretending to be that peculiar kind of tourist who dressed up in period dress to enjoy an historical monument.

In two days, she would stand by the White Tower, and become someone else.

Neyla Kendrick was exactly the kind of person Thomas didn't want to travel with. One of those esoteric scientific types with a narrow specialty who might have to spend an entire month in the past for one moment alone with a pile of bones.

Thomas wanted to get in and get out, quick and dirty. He'd been willing to spend a few days in September of 1666, the Great Fire, just to get the right opportunity. But even his vaguer instructions for the Cromwellian era took into account the fact that the Jewels weren't very important in the Interregnum. Most got sold or lost or stolen.

Thomas had just planned to do a bit of the stealing, in a very short period of time.

Now he had to spend a month with a woman interested in the bones of children. He wasn't even sure what the fuss was about. The Princes had died hundreds of years ago, at a time when England routinely killed its monarchs. It wasn't even accurate to call the boys princes. Technically, one - Edward - was the King of England.

The son of Edward IV, Edward V's only crime was being underage and sickly. His brother Richard was the spare to the heir.

They had come to the Tower voluntarily, to prepare for Edward's reign. His uncle Richard was supposed to be the kid's Protector, the person who managed the kingdom until the boy came of age. But something happened - historical crap no one really cared about any more - and Richard (the uncle, not the spare) decided to take the kingship for himself.

The boys lived for a while after Richard took the throne. And eventually they died - either from sickness or murder most foul. Richard became the infamous Richard the Third, known more for murdering his nephews than for his deeds as king.

Had the boys been allowed to rule, the entire history of the English monarchy might have changed.

But they hadn't been allowed to rule, and there were more than enough murders after them. Henry VIII murdered wives, for heaven's sake. His eldest daughter became known as Bloody Mary for her actions as Queen of England, and his younger daughter, Elizabeth, had been no shrinking violet. Every English monarch of the period killed "pretenders" to the throne, some of whom had more claim to that throne than the person sitting on it. And each death, if prevented, could have changed the course of English history.

So... two little boys? Really, who cared?

The biggest problem Thomas had wasn't with Neyla Kendrick or with the long-lost Princes. It was with his own knowledge base. He was going to replace one of Kendrick's assistants.

Thomas knew everything there was to know about the Tower during the Great Fire. He also knew everything he could possibly learn about Thomas Blood, whose attempt to steal the Crown Jewels on 9 May 1671 was one of the more famous thefts in English history.

Thomas even knew which Jewels were lost forever in the Interregnum. He just didn't know what had joined the collection by 1674, what would be missed, and what wouldn't.

With less than two days to find out, he didn't have time to study. This job was becoming a great deal of aggravation. But, he had to remind himself, no amount of aggravation would make him quit.

There was no better target than this one, no better test of his skills.

To commit the crime of a lifetime took an amazing thief.

To commit the crime of several lifetimes took one of the best thieves ever.

He wanted that title for his own.

"He's what?" Neyla asked. "He's sick? That's not possible. Men like Peter Wilson don't get sick."

The flunky half bowed as Neyla spoke. He was scrawny, with bad teeth, and thinning hair. And he was young, twenty-two if he was a day. She had never seen him before, but then she hadn't seen half the people who worked for Portals before. Because he was afraid to give her bad news himself, the head of Travel had sent this poor soul to her. Apparently, the head of Travel had figured out she'd be pissed off.

"Beg pardon, ma'am," the flunky said timidly, "but Dr. Wilson's got pneumonia. He nearly died. One of his lungs collapsed. They've reinflated it and given him some kind of treatment, but he won't be well by tomorrow at five - at least not well enough to trust him alone without medical help in such a primitive time. Ma'am."

"You'd think in this day and age," she said, "no one would ever get that sick."

"Beg pardon, ma'am," the flunky said, "but people still do get ill on occasion."

"But pneumonia? None of us should've gotten that. It's one of those things that can be prevented." She ran a hand through her hair. "This makes no sense. Pete Wilson is our biologist, our food specialist. He's the one who is supposed to prevent us from getting sick. He can't get sick himself, not before we go."

The flunky wisely remained silent.

"I suppose we have to call this off now." She stood, turned her back on the flunky, and went to the window. The Tower looked foreboding in the sunlight.

She half expected to feel relief, but she felt none. She wanted to go, and she wanted to go tomorrow.

"I've been told, ma'am, that no one wants to cancel. They've assigned you someone else."

She frowned. "They've assigned...?"

She had handpicked Pete, just like she had picked the rest of her team. But her contract did give Portals the right to assign people to her team. She had argued about that, and she had lost. Portals wanted the right to send troubleshooters and others on trips to take care of potential problems.

"His name is Thomas Ayliffe," the flunky said, "and - "

"Bullshit." She turned. "They're not sending someone named Thomas Ayliffe to the Tower of London in 1674. They can't be serious."

The flunky's cheeks had turned red. "I'm not in charge - I mean, what's wrong with Thomas Ayliffe?"

"You're clearly not up on your seventeenth century London history," she snapped. "Who assigned this idiot to my team?"

"Mr. Wycroft, at least he's the one who told me - "

She didn't need any more. She pushed past the flunky and stormed to Wycroft's lair.

Wycroft had half of the entire twentieth floor. He had assistants everywhere. He was nominally Neyla's boss, although she really answered to Darien Wilder.

Wycroft's receptionist was an old battle-ax who had been hired away from one of Britain's stuffiest banks. She had been hired for her prim and proper attitude, and her withering looks.

But Neyla could out-wither anyone. She took one look at the battle-ax, and the woman leaned back, ceding the field. Neyla hurried past her, only to be joined by Wycroft's chief assistant, Flynn Martin.

He was short and stocky with a friendly face and dark hair just starting to go gray. People mistook him for an easy-going person, but Neyla knew better. Flynn Martin was the steel inside Wycroft's velvet glove.

"I know you're upset," Flynn said. "But, Neyla, we need this trip to go off tomorrow - "

"I'm not taking any old person along with me because you have a schedule." Neyla kept moving, past desks and fake plants and tasteful copies of sculptures from London's most famous monuments.

"We need to test the remote devices," Flynn said. "We've put a lot of planning into this - "

"So have I," Neyla said, "and I'm not going to let some idiot get in my way and blow my cover on the very first afternoon."

"Neyla, let's talk like adults - "

"Yes, let's," she said. "And since my problem is with Harrison Wycroft, I'll speak to him, not to you."

She slammed both hands against the double doors leading into Wycroft's office. The doors banged open.

Wycroft sat behind his desk, with his back to the floor-to-ceiling windows. The cityscape extended beyond him, almost as if it were a decoration in his office, the London Eye turning lazily to his right.

"Neyla," Wycroft said without saying hello, "he's the only person we have available with at least a passing knowledge of the seventeenth century."

Wycroft was an obese man whose size seemed appropriate, partly because he favored three-piece black bespoke suits, bowler hats, and the ubiquitous black umbrella.

"So postpone the trip until Pete is well," Neyla said.

Wycroft sighed and waved a hand at Flynn. Flynn pulled the doors closed as he stepped back outside.

"Pete, it seems, isn't as cautious as we thought. He was dealing with bacteria from another trip, this one to the fifteenth century, and comparing various disease vectors, somehow infecting himself with a particularly virulent strain of Pneumocystis carinii. The problem is that he's ill and in isolation, and we're not going to get him back for weeks, maybe months. Even then he might not be cleared to travel."

She crossed her arms. "How long has he been ill?"

"He's had a cough for a week. It got worse over the weekend."

"And no one thought to warn me?"

"We hoped it wouldn't be serious."

She shook her head. She understood why Pete wasn't going. She even understood the need for haste with this trip. Portals had its various patents to protect, experiments to foster, research and development to promote. She was only one small cog in a very big wheel.

What she didn't understand was how no one seemed to understand that a man named Thomas Ayliffe would be a problem.

"This Thomas Ayliffe is pulling your chain," she said.

"What's wrong with Ayliffe?" Wycroft asked. "Have you had difficulty with him before?"

"What's wrong with him?" she snapped, stepping toward Wycroft. "What's wrong with him? You say he's an expert on seventeenth century London."

"The closest that we have on such short notice, yes," Wycroft said.

"If he's an expert," she said, "he's giving you a message. Have you done an identity check on this man?"

Wycroft slid out a drawer. He pressed something - probably one of his private networked computer links - and examined the answer.

"Yes, of course. He went through the same rather difficult vetting system that you did."

"His name is legitimate?" she asked.

"Yes." The answer came from behind her.

Neyla turned. A man stood there. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and as well dressed as Wycroft, only in a suit that wasn't half as conservative. The man had black hair, blue eyes, and ruggedly handsome features.

"I don't believe we've been introduced." His British accent was so posh that he sounded like he belonged at Buckingham Palace. "I'm Thomas Ayliffe."

"And I'm Nellie Bly," she said.

He stared at her with that same withering look that the battle-ax outside had perfected. "You can check my birth records."

"We have," Wycroft said. "Neyla, what's your objection to the man's name?"

"Apparently Ms. Kendrick believes I'm going to use the name when we go to 1674. And that would be unwise." Ayliffe walked into the room, stopping beside her. He smelled of soap, as if he had just stepped out of the shower.

She looked at him sideways. He was significantly taller than she was, which was also a problem. Brits in the seventeenth century, especially working class Brits, were notably short due to poor nutrition and unhealthy environmental conditions.

"You see," Ayliffe said, "Thomas Ayliffe was one of the many names used by the infamous Thomas Blood."

"Why is that a familiar name?" Wycroft asked.

"For god's sake," Neyla said. "Thomas Blood is the most famous person ever to steal the Crown Jewels."

Wycroft stared at her.

"In 1671. He failed, but spectacularly," she said. "He became a folk hero, depending on your political persuasion at the time. Remember, Cromwell was only a few years before, and not everyone believed in the restoration of the monarchy."

Wycroft raised his eyebrows.

"I can't help my family name," Ayliffe said, "but I promise not to use it when we travel. It's not like you need a passport anyway. No one checks your identification."

Neyla glared at him. He didn't even look at her. He directed all of his comments to Wycroft, which she also found irritating.

But she could do the same thing. "He's too tall," she said.

"Both Henry Tudors were over six feet," Ayliffe said. "Henry the Seventh and his son, Henry the Eighth, were both royalty raised in the best of conditions. Besides, by 1674, they were long dead. No one would remember that they were tall. They would simply remember that Henry the eighth was supremely fat."

She bit her lip, wishing she hadn't said that in front of Wycroft. She made herself continue, partly to cover her gaffe. She now turned toward Ayliffe.

"Even if they did remember how tall the Henries were," she said, "you're going to be posing as some ditch digger who probably never had real meat or fresh vegetables in his entire life. You'll stand out."

"And you won't?" He finally turned to her, then let his gaze run up and down her entire figure.

To her own disgust, she blushed. She wasn't going to defend her appearance.

"According to his file," Wycroft said, "Mr. Ayliffe here used to participate in the Society for Creative Anachronism, so he's not averse to costuming. He works in our history department, specializing in the Elizabethan era, which isn't that much different from the era you'll be traveling in - "

"It's different enough," Neyla snapped.

"But the clothing and customs are close," Wycroft said.

"Close isn't good enough," she said. "We've been working on this for two years. We have a team."

"Pete's not going no matter how you argue it," Wycroft said. "And waiting won't help. We're just going to have to muddle through."

"Let's muddle through without the tall guy," she said. "The rest of us are ready. I don't know what he'll add."

"I do know something about food," Ayliffe said. "I spent a few years at Stratford before I realized that acting wasn't for me, so seventeenth century English isn't that foreign to me. I will probably be able to understand the natives better than you will."

He had a point, although she wasn't going to concede it. Everyone who studied with the Royal Shakespeare Company spent quite a bit of time learning how to speak Elizabethan English, which was still what they were speaking in the 1670s. Her American accent was going to be a handicap. She had planned to speak to the locals as little as possible.

"You will need a translator, right?" Ayliffe asked. "And I didn't see one on your list. I think that might be a lot more valuable than a biologist."

"Pete isn't just a biologist," she said. "He was in charge of food safety."

"If you want safe food, stay here," Ayliffe said. "Back there, you're going to eat things that horrify you because you have no other choice. You'll just have to trust that all those medical precautions they took here at Portals will protect you."

"Nothing will protect against food poisoning," she said.

"Expect a mild case or two," he said. "I've had it. It's not pleasant, but you'll survive."

"In the modern era," she said. "Four hundred years ago, it could kill you."

"But we'll have the remotes," he said. "We'll be able to come back if someone gets deathly ill. Right?"

He directed that last question to Wycroft.

Wycroft's mouth pursed. His eyes shifted to Neyla, then back to Ayliffe. Wycroft looked very uncomfortable.

So no one had briefed Ayliffe on all of the details. Just some of them.

Ayliffe looked from Wycroft to Neyla. "What don't I know?"

"We can return any time in the first three days," she said. "Then we have another window thirty days later. That's it."

"What do you mean, that's it?"

She shrugged. "If we miss the windows, there's a very good chance we'll get stuck back there."

She tried to sound calm about it, but she wasn't calm. She was going to monitor those windows like nothing else, and she was going to return in one of them, no matter what.

"Why?" Ayliffe asked. "You can come back any time. Time travel is time travel is time travel. It doesn't correlate. Even if you leave the past on 30 July 1674, you'll be able to arrive back here one second after you left. What's the problem?"

"It's a design flaw in the remotes," Wycroft said. "Something we haven't been able to solve yet."

"Whatever the remotes do," Neyla said, being as vague as she could be since she'd never really bothered to understand the science, "they work on the initial energy burst for the first three days. Then the system will go dark for a while, recharging, for lack of a better phrase. Our first opportunity to return will be in thirty days."

"Our first," Ayliffe said. "So you won't get stuck."

"We don't know that," she said. "What we do know is that only people who have used the three-day and thirty-day windows have returned. No one else has. I would assume they've tried every thirty days after that. I don't know for certain."

He frowned, then looked at Wycroft. "How do you know this? I thought this is the first major remote trip."

"You think we didn't test the remotes?" Wycroft asked. "We've been testing them for a decade."

"And you're willing to go with this design flaw?" Ayliffe sounded shocked. That pleased Neyla. Maybe he'd back out.

"It's no more dangerous than sending someone back to the seventeenth century," Wycroft said in that tone he used when he was spouting corporate cover-your-assisms. Neyla had heard these arguments before. In fact, she had made some of them.

"So those people who got lost," Ayliffe said, "you haven't sent teams after them?"

"Where would we look?" Wycroft asked. "And what if the problem isn't the remotes? What if they got arrested or something else happened?"

"You don't leave people behind," Ayliffe said.

"They knew the risks," Wycroft said. "So do we. There's a chance that they wanted to stay, you know. Maybe they found true love."

He couldn't hide the sarcasm from his voice. Since Portals went public, the number of movies and novels about people finding love back in time had quadrupled.

"Most likely they died," Neyla said.

Ayliffe looked at her, obviously alarmed.

Neyla added, "If you come with us - and I don't think you should - you're not going on some sanctioned SCA field trip or some little practice holiday for Elizabethan scholars. You'll be entering a dark, dirty world more dangerous than any third world country. The longer we stay, the less chance we have of surviving."

"So let's get in and out fast," Ayliffe said.

"We can't," she said. "I don't know what day in July they discovered the bodies of the princes. Even if I did know, I'm not sure how fast I'll be able to gain access to them."

"This is," Wycroft said, "our first experiment in a deliberately long trip. We've had accidentally long trips in the past, but not something like this."

Ayliffe visibly swallowed. He looked nervous for the first time since she had met him.

"And," Neyla said, mostly to make him more nervous, "most of those accidentally long trips happened in the time travel booth here in Portals itself. Remotes aren't the only problem with time travel."

Ayliffe studied her. Then he squared his shoulders, and looked at Wycroft.

"I suppose I have to sign waivers," Ayliffe said.

Wycroft looked relieved. For some reason, he seemed to want Ayliffe on this trip. "You'll also have to go to medical and make certain you're both healthy enough for the trip and that you have the right protections."

Ayliffe nodded, then he tipped an imaginary hat to Neyla. "Nice meeting you," he said. "Looks like we'll be spending some time together."

"Not if I can help it," she said.

Thomas left. He hadn't expected this much resistance. He had spent two years building his cover at Portals, making certain his identity was rock-solid and unimpeachable, and his work record perfect.

He hadn't known his allies in the company would deliberately make one of the original team ill, but it made sense. He also hadn't expected anyone to know what his name meant. But then, he had initially planned on traveling back in time alone. He had been opening the door to Wycroft's office when Neyla Kendrick had said If he's an expert, he's giving you a message, and he damn near turned around and left.

He'd always used names like Thomas Ayliffe on jobs. A bit of an inside joke, which meant nothing to anyone but him.

But she had seen through it - and accurately. He had sent a small message, one that he hadn't expected to be received until after he left, if he had accomplished his task.

She made him nervous. She was also too pretty to masquerade as a boy. Too pretty and too buxom. He had no idea how the costumers were going to hide those curves, but they had quite a job ahead of them.

Which reminded him. He needed clothes for the journey.

He had a lot to do before five o'clock tomorrow. He hoped he could finish everything in time.

At four o'clock on Wednesday, the team assembled in Neyla's office, dressed in appropriate clothing, all in varying shades of brown. Some of the brown had nothing to do with dye. McTavish had dragged white shirts through mud and dirt and let them dry, then tried to wash them by hand with lye soap. The shirts weren't so much brown as a kind of crap-colored dark tan.

Neyla's breasts had finally been tamed, and the wrapping didn't even hurt. McTavish, working with some of the scientists, had found a mixture of spandex and nanotechnology to squish her breasts. Then McTavish had wound some regular cloth around her belly, so that she looked like a man who had a barrel chest, rather than a pretty boy with man-boobs.

When she looked at herself in the mirror, with her short hair, barrel chest, and spindly legs, she seemed like something out of Hogarth - one of the wide-eyed commoners crowding around his drawing of the crammed streets of London.

The rest of her team looked authentic, too - at least to her. Jeff Renolet, who didn't need wrapping to create his own barrel chest, stood beside her. He was in his forties, balding, with a ruddy face. He normally wore crowns on his front teeth, but Portals' dentist had removed them for this trip. Jeff looked like an old fat man who had been repeatedly punched in the mouth.

Next to Jeff, Benedict Ivance scratched underneath one arm. He had chosen loose-weave linen, which held dirt in every single wrinkle. Modern linen had been treated so that it was soft, but linen without treatment was rough. If he was scratching already, he would be raw by the time this trip was over.

Compared to the others, Dan Sheldon looked like a half-grown boy. He was whip-thin thanks to his daily six-mile runs and his love of urban free climbing. His eyes were clear, his blond hair cut in a bowl-shape. He had the kind of innocent face that often showed up in religious paintings of the era. He could easily exchange his filthy working-man's clothes for priest's robes.

Thomas Ayliffe towered over all of them. His clothing was a bit upscale for a member of the working class, but McTavish had taken care of that by ripping it, mending it, and then ripping it again. Ayliffe looked like an elegant man who had come upon hard times. Besides, Neyla was beginning to think the man would look good in anything.

She hated that she found him attractive. He was annoying and in the way, and he was noticeable. He was going to scotch this mission just by being part of it. She knew it, and she resented it.

She had done everything she could to get rid of him. She had spent fifteen minutes after Ayliffe left Wycroft's office, trying to convince him to take Ayliffe off the team. When that didn't work, she had gone all the way to Damien Wilder's office, only to be told that Wilder was in Japan, making some kind of presentation.

She was stuck with elegant, good-looking Ayliffe and his ripped upscale clothes.

Her party's cover story was simple. They had joined up on a trip to London to find work. They'd been in the city only a few months and had found just enough to keep them alive.

Theoretically, the story explained their extra clothing, their bundles of supplies, and the fact that none of them looked like the other. Friends and colleagues, not relatives.

They'd had the story drummed into them, practicing it and everything else at odd moments. While, Neyla, the only one without a British accent, had vowed not to speak much, at least around natives, the others had to be careful as well. Jeff had studied seventeenth century speech and Ayliffe knew Elizabethan English, but neither of them had heard it spoken correctly.

They double-checked their equipment one last time. Everyone had their own remote, as well as their own tiny computers. Some had specialized equipment. Ayliffe got custody of Pete's food safety devices, with a short instruction on how to use them. Because Pete wasn't coming along, Neyla insisted on double the amount of water purification tablets even if that meant a little extra bulk in their kits.

When they were done, she looked at the entire group.

"Last chance to back out," she said.

They stared at her. Jeff's right eye had developed a nervous tic. Benedict bit his lower lip, as if he was trying not to say anything, and Dan took a deep breath, clearly trying to calm himself.

Only Ayliffe looked like a man about to go on an adventure. His eyes were bright, his cheeks slightly flushed.

"All right, then," she said. "Off we go."

***

They took a cab to the western entrance, and piled out like the excited tourists they were pretending to be. Neyla gazed up at the massive stone entrance, as impressive now as it had been the first time she had come here. Her stomach did a slight flip, and her breath caught.

Now it all felt real to her.

She followed her little troop through the arches, past the buskers and the tradesmen offering everything from a printout of that day's news to Tower trinkets supposedly for less than they were sold for inside.

Almost no one walked in with her group. What tourists they saw were leaving. The Tower closed to visitors at six, and most people had spent all day here.

The modern gift shop looked garish in front of the Middle Tower. Neyla walked past it to the matching ticket booths. They seemed as out of place as the gift shop, but at least they didn't block the old entrance to one of the towers.

She hurried up to the window, the other members of her team following her.

"Five tickets," she said, broadening her American accent and filling her voice with excitement.

The ticket taker, an elderly woman with a kind face, leaned toward the plastic separating her from Neyla. "Ah, luv, I've got to charge you full price, and you'll only get an hour in there. Come back tomorrow noon latest, and you'll be able to enjoy the whole place."

"I'm flying home tomorrow," Neyla lied, sounding as disappointed as she could.

The ticket taker sighed, as if this were her problem, not Neyla's. "Then you're better off, luv, walking the outside for free, taking pictures and looking at the ravens. It's a lot of money for just an hour, and I don't feel right selling you a ticket."

Just sell me a damn ticket, Neyla wanted to snap. I'm sure your bosses would appreciate the revenue.

But she smiled instead. "You're so kind. But my friends here want to see the Crown Jewels, and I want to see where Anne Boleyn got her head cut off."

The ticket taker winced at Neyla's crudeness, but it worked. Playing the demanding American got her exactly what she wanted.

She bought five tickets, then led her little group back to the Middle Tower. The Middle Tower had been an entrance into the entire complex since the beginning of the fourteenth century. It had to have been impressive then, so tall and formidable and new.

Neyla knew the history of each and every building. She knew who built it and why, its various uses, and when it was remodeled, moved, or, in a few cases, destroyed. She carried multiple maps of the entire complex in her head, just in case the remotes worked improperly. The last thing she wanted was to overshoot their historical timeslot and end up inside the wall of a building that had later been torn down - or a moat that had been filled in.

Her group had quite a trek from the Middle Tower down Lanthorn Lane to the Bloody Tower, which would take them to the Inner Ward. Tourists had gone on a prescribed walk ever since the Tower was opened to the public, centuries ago. She knew there were other ways inside the Tower's defenses - she just wasn't allowed to take those ways as a member of the public.

As her team walked, they gawked at their surroundings like proper tourists. The real tourists gawked at them, dressed in their period costume. They received several stares and more than a few people pointed at them.

Neyla tried to ignore them all. She kept her eye on the Bloody Tower, as she had since the first time she had come here. It got its name from the princes. The Bloody Tower was the last place they'd been seen alive, looking out the windows in 1483. Over time, no one saw them any more, and Tudor historians claimed Richard III had murdered them there.

Of course, no one knew exactly what happened to the princes, if indeed they were murdered there or anywhere else. Even if they had died there and the 1933 examination of the bodies was correct, then someone had taken the corpses and carried them across the grounds to the Innermost Ward, where they were buried in the foundation of a spiral staircase.

The bodies had been found in 1674, when workers getting rid of a forebuilding attached to the White Tower dug into the foundation of that staircase. The workers hadn't been surprised.

It wasn't unusual for bodies to be buried all over the Tower's grounds. After all, the place had served as a prison from its very beginnings over a thousand years ago. Many times, unidentified skeletons were discovered throughout the complex; more than once, dozens of bodies were discovered at the same time.

Generally no one cared who the skeletons belonged to. The princes were one of the few exceptions.

The team reached the Bloody Tower, but didn't stop. Neyla didn't look at the windows s she usually did and wonder which ones had provided Edward V's last view of the world.

Now the team had entered the Inner Ward, where the Tower's most famous history occurred. Here, on these grounds, Henry VIII had conducted the beheadings of his rivals and wives. Here Elizabeth the First, when she was imprisoned in the Bell Tower by her sister Mary, walked every day with an escort, probably trying not to look at the spot where her mother had died.

"We're nuts," Jeff whispered.

"You want to back out?" she asked him, feeling a surge of disappointment.

He shook his head slowly, as if he were warring with himself. "Just didn't expect it to feel so real, you know?"

She did know. They stopped on the west side of the White Tower, the oldest building in the entire complex. William the Conqueror had built it in 1097 out of gleaming white Caen stone. It had stood alone on the banks of the Thames, a large Norman keep, the tallest building in all of England, twenty-seven meters high.

Neyla looked up all those meters. The Caen stone had held up well. It no longer gleamed, but it still looked white, partly because of the cleanings that it suffered routinely now that preservationists predicted that the filth in the air would eventually cause the stone to decay.

One of the Yeoman Warders - in his regulation Elizabethan black and red garb (tourists called the guards Beefeaters, which made her think of gin) - approached their group. He turned to Ayliffe, as if Ayliffe were their leader.

"You only have about a half hour, lad, if you're going to see anything important. We shut down promptly at six."

"Thanks," Ayliffe said. "We're nearly done."

The Warder nodded, then wandered away, probably to give his warning to the other remaining tourists.

"We'd better act fast," Dan said.

"We're going to take our time," Neyla said. Going too fast might cause mistakes. The first - and most important - thing they had to do was find the right spot on the ground outside the White Tower.

The grass had been cordoned off - too many feet would cause the stuff to stop growing - but the grass not too far from the northwest corner of the White Tower was exactly where they wanted to stand. They couldn't get anywhere near that demolished forebuilding, since no one knew exactly how big it had been.

Benedict watched the Warders. He would give the team the all clear when they could run for the grass. The rest of the team pulled out their remotes.

The remotes were thin disks that looked like badly crafted circles that hung from a chain. Only, right now, no one in the group wore theirs. They were instead squeezing the disks' sides to turn them on.

The technical team hd already programmed in the date and time. No one on Neyla's team knew how to program these things, even though she'd begged for the chance to learn for the past two years.

She wanted to control when she returned. But she was told that the remotes were so delicate that one mistake could send her into a different time period, and strand her there forever.

She wasn't sure she believed it. Portals was a corporation, after all, and divisions in corporations did their very best to hoard knowledge so that they could hoard power. But she hadn't won that argument, either.

When her device was finally on, she took Benedict's and started it. Then she and the team waited while he watched.

Finally, he nodded. The group hurried to their spot on the grass, and when Neyla gave the signal, pressed the center of the disks, activating the travel mechanism.

She clutched her disk so hard she was afraid she was going to break it. At first, nothing happened. She glanced over at the Bloody Tower, saw a Warder running toward them, and then he simply faded away.

Everything went completely black. A wind buffeted her, changing direction constantly. Thunder clapped - or maybe she was hearing sonic booms - and the air grew hotter, then colder, then hotter again.

For a moment, she felt like she was falling, and then she realized she really was falling. She landed in a heap on the hard ground, the wind gone, the air warm and fetid.

She blinked hard, realized the darkness wasn't quite absolute. A moon shone above her and the stars surrounded it. She'd never been able to see the stars in London before.

"Anyone else here?" she asked quietly.

She sat up, stretched her limbs, and realized that while she didn't have any broken bones, she would be badly bruised. Her heart was pounding.

"I'm here," Dan said, his voice as soft as hers. "Hit my head pretty hard."

Her eyes were adjusting. She could see the outlines of the White Tower now, and thought she might see a dim light through one of the windows. A dim, flickering light. A lantern, perhaps, or a candle.

"You all right?" she asked.

"I think so," he said.

She moved toward his voice. She craved real light - a flashlight, a small phone/ computer display, something. She hadn't planned on the darkness. It felt like a live thing. A close, smelly live thing. Her eyes burned. The air was filled with smoke. She hadn't expected that, either.

"Anyone else here?" she asked as she groped for Dan. Finally her hand found wool.

"Ouch," he said and pulled away. "I banged myself something awful."

"Me, too," she said.

"God. They said we'd fall. They didn't say it would be so far." That voice belonged to Benedict. "You'd think they could calculate how much dirt and fill and stuff accumulated over the centuries."

Neyla sighed in relief at hearing his voice.

"Are you all right?" she asked Benedict.

"Banged up, just like Dan, but nothing serious."

"They said we'd fall only a few decimeters. Did that seem like a few decimeters to anyone? Seemed like at least a meter to me," Dan said.

Neyla had no idea. The fall was expected but hard. She was beginning to worry that Jeff and Ayliffe were too badly injured to speak.

"Experts don't know everything." That was Jeff. He'd half mumbled it. "I don't think they considered the tiny details. After all, they weren't the ones traveling in time."

Neyla was relieved to hear his voice. "Any broken bones, Jeff?"

"Twisted my ankle, but I can put weight on it. I'll be all right."

All the voices were close to her. She let out a sigh. "What about you, Thomas? You okay?"

Silence. She heard her own breath, a little ragged as it went in and out. Beside her, fabric rustled. Then someone's joint made a cracking noise.

"Thomas?" Why would Ayliffe pretend to be hurt? Why wouldn't he answer? "Feel around for him, guys. Maybe he got knocked unconscious."

She kept her voice down as she spoke. She didn't know if guards patrolled the grounds.

Clearly, her team had arrived at night. Which was good on one level - she would be able to see how far the work had progressed, maybe even find the bodies herself - and bad on another. She would have to figure out what to do with her team before dawn, whether or not they would leave the complex or find a place to sleep somewhere nearby, somewhere that they wouldn't get caught.

"I'm not finding him," Jeff said.

"Me, either," Benedict said.

"Hey, Thomas!" Dan raised his voice slightly.

Neyla's eyes were adjusting to the darkness. She made out the shapes around her. The three men, Benedict slightly prone, Dan sitting up, and Jeff, on his hands and knees groping for Ayliffe. The White Tower in front of her. An amazing expanse of ground behind her.

The Grand Storehouse hadn't been built yet nor converted to the Waterloo Barracks. She could see what had been, in Henry III's time, the outer wall, extending all around her. As she turned, she thought she saw movement.

She squinted.

Someone was running silently across the grounds.

Away from her.

"Crap," she said and stood up. "Is that Thomas?"

She pointed toward the shadowy figure.

"It's got to be a guard," Dan said, sounding slightly panicked.

"He's not running toward us," Jeff said.

"Maybe he's getting help," Benedict said.

"No, he's not." Neyla stood and wobbled just a little. Her muscles felt like they'd been stretched and turned inside out. "It's Thomas."

"Why would he run?" Jeff asked.

"He's probably disoriented," Dan said.

"He's not that either," she said.

She should have trusted her instincts. Thomas Ayliffe aka Thomas Blood.

The damned idiot had been sending a message.

And she was finally, finally receiving it.

Thomas had fallen hard on his tailbone, knocking the wind out of him. He had lain for a moment on the cool grass.

He had expected the air to stink, but not something this foul. It was as if he had landed inside a dumpster filled with raw meat on a hot summer evening. While he tried to catch his breath, he willed his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

The darkness was great luck. He could get to Martin Tower, where the Jewels were kept in the seventeenth century, with a minimum of fuss, so long as he stayed away from any guards. Then he could take the Jewels, come back somewhere near here, and press his damn remote, all within his three-day window.

Hell, if he did it fast enough, he would be inside a three-hour window.

Provided he could stand.

The fall had hurt. He had probably landed on some of the things he'd squirreled inside his linen shirt. He'd brought a paste copy of one of the rings he wanted, as well as some keys and a few small weapons. Tools of the trade, which had probably added to his bruises.

Neyla's voice, sounding musical, American, and out of place, asked if everyone was all right. Thomas got onto his hands and knees, stifling a moan as he bent his back.

He crawled along the grass, his fingers finding mud - or something worse. He didn't want to look up. He had no idea how the sewer system worked in the Tower. Did people have privies here? Where did they dump the chamber pots?

He shuddered so deeply that he almost moaned again, but the thought was enough to get him to his feet.

Once on his feet, he could see the outline of the thirteenth century wall. Martin Tower stood on the upper northeast corner, and he could see it vaguely.

He felt disoriented. Knowing that buildings wouldn't be here - the museum for one, the Jewel House for another, Waterloo Barracks for a third - wasn't the same as seeing the grounds without them.

It looked like a completely different place.

It was a completely different place.

He brushed his hands on his knee breeches, grabbed his small bundle of supplies, and started to run as silently as he could.

He headed up the path toward Martin Tower, ignoring the pain that ran up his spine. His whole body hurt, but he was trying to convince himself that it was the kind of hurt a man got when he had the wind knocked out of him, not when he was seriously injured.

He had to remember the plan.

There would be guards. He had read somewhere, in one of the contemporaneous accounts, that the guards around the Jewels had doubled after Thomas Blood's failed attempt in 1671. Which was just three years ago now. Weird.

He had to take out the guards. Break into the Jewel cupboard, and take his items. If he was really lucky, he would get away completely. Neyla would think he somehow never made it to 1674, and she would go on with her mission without him. He would complete his theft and be on his way. With things more precious than gold...

Copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

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