Major Boro Grol arrived at Zografou University twenty-two minutes later, clearing the municipal police from the third-floor corridor with a single flash of his black SIB warrant card.
He was an imposing figure even in a crumpled linen suit, towering a head above Alex and walking with a stiff, deliberate stride that betrayed the titanium joints inside his knees only by the faintest mechanical click when he pivoted on the tiles. His cropped grey hair, square jaw, and pale, unblinking eyes gave him the look of a siege engine dressed for town.
For fifteen minutes Grol said almost nothing. He knelt stiffly beside the bloodstain on the corridor floor where Nikos had fallen, inspected the crowbar marks on the titanium door-jamb, and then plugged a ruggedised SIB diagnostic slate directly into the serial port of the biometric DNA scanner.
Alex stood nervously beside the workbench while Grol scrolled through the green columns of hexadecimal telemetry. Across the room, Nestor Drakos was nowhere to be seen; five minutes after Grol’s arrival, the professor had excused himself to go down to Sub-Level 3 to check that the primary cryostats had not been affected by the security lockdown.
Suddenly Boro Grol let out a low, humourless grunt.
‘Your dead guard outside was shot at 17:12,’ Grol said, his deep voice rumbling like gravel in a cement mixer. ‘And the crowbar marks on the outer bulkhead were made by the city patrolmen at 17:35.’
‘We know that, Major,’ Alex said, wiping his palms on his trousers. ‘Whoever killed Nikos was trying to bypass the scanner when the alarm went off.’
‘No, Doctor White,’ Grol said, turning the diagnostic screen toward Alex. ‘Nobody bypassed anything. Look at the nanobot-DNA access log for the inner vault.’ Alex squinted at the timestamped entries—and felt the floor tilt beneath his shoes.
16:30:19 — BIO-KEY MATCH: ID-01 [DRAKOS, NESTOR I.] — INNER VAULT OPEN 16:34:02 — BIO-KEY MATCH: ID-01 [DRAKOS, NESTOR I.] — INNER VAULT LOCKED 17:11:48 — PERIMETER ALARM MANUAL OVERRIDE — CORRIDOR 3B ‘Nestor opened the safe himself forty minutes before Nikos was killed,’ Alex whispered, stunned. ‘He took my prototype retriever. Wait—why would he steal his own project’s hardware and shoot the night guard to make it look like an outside raid?’
Grol’s pale eyes narrowed as a secondary alert flashed crimson at the foot of his SIB slate: a massive, unauthorised power draw was spiking three storeys beneath their feet in the deep containment cavern.
‘Where is Professor Drakos right now?’ Grol snapped, drawing a heavy matte-black automatic pistol from beneath his jacket.
‘Sub-Level 3,’ Alex breathed. ‘The primary lattice chamber!’
Buried thirty metres beneath the Athenian bedrock, the Sub-Level 3 containment hall was a cathedral of vibration-dampened steel and liquid-helium conduits.
When the heavy blast doors hissed open before Grol’s master override card, Alex and the big SIB major sprinted onto the steel gantry overlooking the core.
‘Stabilising at five terahertz…’ Alex whispered, stopping dead at the railing as he read the wall-projected telemetry. A cold sweat broke out across his brow. ‘My God, Boro—he’s running the primary core at full resonance without biological shielding!’
In the centre of the sunken pit below them, suspended by magnetic fields inside a vacuum bell purer than deep space, hung the TDC-1—the primary Time Displacement Core that Alex had spent twelve years growing atom by atom. And strapped directly to the external induction bus of the chamber was Alex’s stolen New Year’s Eve retriever box, acting as a harmonic bridge. Standing before the quartz inspection port at the base of the chamber was Nestor Drakos.
At fifty-seven—or rather, eighty across the jagged seam of his true life— Drakos no longer looked like a university professor or a Moscow financier. His white hair stood on end in the intense electrostatic field; in his left hand he held a compact 9mm pistol—the weapon that had silenced Nikos upstairs—and in his right palm he held an antique eighteenth-century gold pocket watch crowned with a blown-glass bulb.
‘Step away from the console, Professor!’ Boro Grol’s voice boomed across the steel cavern as he levelled his service pistol over the gantry rail. ‘SIB! Drop the weapon and cut the main bus, or I put a round through your spine!’
Drakos did not even glance up at the gun barrel. He turned slowly at the base of the glowing quartz column, looking up at his young protégé with an expression of terrible, ancient triumph.
‘You should have stayed on the tram, Alex,’ Drakos called over the rising bass roar of the five-terahertz field. ‘Or better still, you should never have sent that chimpanzee across midnight on New Year’s Eve. When I saw the telemetry from your little secret retriever in January, I knew the last piece of the mechanism was finally in my hands.’
‘Nestor, what are you doing?’ Alex shouted down from the gantry, gripping the cold steel rail. ‘If you bridge the portable retriever into the five-terahertz lattice, you’ll tear a permanent hole through the local light-cone! The radiation is stripping the chamber!’
‘Not a hole, Alex—an anchor!’ Drakos held the eighteenth-century gold watch up to the blue-white glare of the containment bell. ‘Look at it! Twenty years you have worked beside me, and you never once asked why I knew the exact crystal geometry before you ever ran a simulation! You think you invented time displacement in 2040?’
Drakos gave a harsh, ringing laugh that echoed off the steel walls.
‘John Harrison built this cage in Red Lion Square two hundred and sixty-six years ago!’ Drakos roared. ‘And I am the boy who carried it through the mud of Hastings and the flames of Pudding Lane! I am Isaac Peckham—and I have waited forty years in this century for you to grow me a crystal strong enough to finish what I started!’
Beside Alex, Boro Grol didn’t waste another breath on madness. Seeing Drakos’s fingers dance across the manual interlock console, the ex- commando braced his forearms on the rail and squeezed the trigger twice.
Two flat thunderclaps echoed through the cavern.
Fifty milliseconds before the nine-millimetre rounds could cross the pit, the tachyon field around the quartz column surged outward. The lead slugs hit the boundary of the spherical bloom, flashed into incandescent vapour, and vanished—displaced ten thousand years into empty air.
‘You cannot shoot a man who already stands at the other end of history, Major!’ Drakos shouted, his face lit with skeletal blue shadows as the quartz bell began to crack under the harmonic strain. ‘I have already stepped back to 1502 and 1776! I have already written the letter that brought me here! Now I merge the watches and close the circle forever!’
‘Nestor, stop!’ Alex screamed, vaulting down the metal companionway steps. ‘You’ll collapse the whole timeline into the rift!’
Drakos did not use the remote manipulator arms.
Ignoring the klaxons and the fracturing quartz, he thrust his bare right hand—clutching the gold H6—straight through the magnetic curtain into the five-terahertz heart of the primary lattice.
The air inside the cavern did not explode; it screamed.
A column of blinding, blue-white fire erupted from the chamber, swallowing Nestor Drakos, the retriever, and the containment bell in a single vertical tear that ripped backward across thirty-eight millennia of earth’s history—reaching simultaneously into a frost-bound London watch-shop in 1792, a rain-lashed cave in 13 AD Calicut, the kitchen of Red Lion Square in 1776, and a concrete radar bunker on the Suffolk shingle in 1970.
