Déjà Vu: A Technothriller by Hocking, Ian (ebook reader that looks like a book .TXT) 📗

Jobanique had changed his mind. His enigmatic, closed mind. If he did not want Proctor to be captured, that meant he wanted Proctor to reach his destination. His daughter. What did she have to do with this?

That was the real question.

Jennifer raised her head very slightly. The agent was approaching. A man accompanied her but it wasn’t Frank. He had been knocked out and now they were coming to get her. She considered telling the car computer to get her out of there, but the computer would take several seconds to do it. By then, they would have reached her.

Her fingers trembled. She felt for the door handle and gripped it hard. She would make a run for Met Four.

No, she thought. Lock the doors first, then just drive away.

She touched a button on the dashboard. The doors locked. She touched another and the engine sprang into life. She looked up. Brandt and her companion were closer.

She said, “Computer –” but she did not finish her sentence. She could not look away from Brandt’s companion. He bore an astounding resemblance to her father.

The man caught her stare and smiled.

Jennifer’s mind cartwheeled away.

A summer’s day in Oxford. They were walking down Broadstreet, close to Balliol College. The sky was blue. It was August; most of the students had gone. She was six or seven years old. They had been walking down Broadstreet, just the two of them, students gone, and Jennifer had announced to her father, “Daddy, did you know that the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body?”

Her father stopped short. Passers-by were forced to walk around them. He frowned in concentration, as though he was checking her question against a mental database of brain facts. Then, tentatively, he reached up and touched right side of his head. Suddenly, his left leg flailed into the air behind him, seemed to rise up past his shoulder, and finish in front. Jennifer clapped her hands and giggled. Her father, who was so tall, looked down. His expression was utterly serious. “Do you know – I think you’re right.” Then, he reached up with his left hand and prodded the other side of his head. His right leg swung around just as the left had done. This foot landed in front of the other. “Jennifer,” her father said, “you are right.” Jennifer began to laugh. Her father began to walk. One leg at a time, he goose-stepped down Broadstreet, crash crash crash, Jennifer running circles around him. She laughed so much it began to hurt. When she saw the expressions of those around her, she laughed even harder. They continued until her father began to giggle as well. Finally, he removed his fingers from his wavy black hair and took her hand. He said, “Jennifer, your father’s a fool,” and Jennifer had beamed.

She had wanted to say that she loved that about him, but couldn’t find the right words.

She unlocked the door.

Her father was standing outside. His face was older now, an impressionistic sketch of man who had goose-stepped down Broadstreet thirteen years before. He was trying not to laugh. Jennifer opened the door and stepped out into his arms. She could not cry. She wanted to hold this man but didn’t know what it would do to her. There was no feeling that his proximity – his physical presence – meant that everything was fine…but it meant that, perhaps, some day, it would be.

David clung to her. She squeezed the breath from his lungs. She had grown. She was as tall as him. He closed his eyes and inhaled slowly. Her ear brushed against the stubble on his cheek. Her hair blew across his face – he could smell her shampoo – and he realised, with some sadness, that his girl had become a woman.

The hair blew away and he opened his eyes. The Valley of Fire had gone.

It was the late 1970s. He was seven or eight years old. He lived with his mother and father on a farm in Kent. That autumn, he had wandered into his father’s garage. The garage was a place of power. It smelled of sawdust, black paint and oil. His father had looked up from his workbench and asked him what was wrong. Nothing was wrong, David stammered. He would like a rabbit. Thomas, his best friend, had one, and he wanted one too. His father set down his drill and reached for a cloth to wipe the oil from his hands. They were always oily. “What does your mother think?” he had asked. She said it was OK, David replied. He was looking at the floor.

That same week, David and his father bought the rabbit from a gruff farmer in the neighbouring village. They put it in a hutch and David promised to feed it every day and clean it out once a week. He named it Bugs Bunny. His father wrote Bugs’s name on the hutch with a gold pen. The autumn came and went. Near Christmas, David began to do well in school. He became absentminded. At the back of his mind he knew that he had not been taking care of Bugs as he should, but he knew that his father would. After all, Bugs lived in the garage, his father’s work place.

On Christmas morning, before he could open his presents, David’s father told him that they had to see something the in garage. David could not help but smile; he guessed it was a new bike like Thomas’s.

David knew something was wrong when he saw that the garage was the same as ever. There were no presents. He glanced, puzzled, at his father. Before he could ask a question, his father clipped him around the ear. He was a big man with hands like shovels. David fell onto his knees. He landed on the wooden planks of the car pit. The edges