Free The Austin Job by David Mark Brown Page A

this case, it lent them to assisting his cause in rectifying the past and regaining his future. He’d learned a lifetime ago that while taking power and keeping it were difficult, disrupting it was easy. Currently, disruption was all he needed.
    After depositing their weapons in a pile at his feet, most of the students left. A few lingered in the corner, preparing hot drinks, pulling book bags from mahogany cabinets for a long night of study. They were good students, slipping easily back into the roll, just as he encouraged them to.
    “Barabbas.” He caught the attention of the slight-framed leader. The young man bundled up the narrow, steel pipes Oleg had crafted into gas-powered firearms—each capable of firing a dozen lithium pellets—and followed the professor from the study hall down a corridor until they reached his office.
    Oleg unlocked the door with a key dangling from a chain around his neck. Once inside, Barabbas closed the door behind them. “I’ll check tunnels, but I need you to go back to capitol. If still no evidence of her or me at meeting place, check hospital and all local doctors where they might take her. If they have her, we must get her back, quickly.” They both nodded. “Go.”
    Barabbas left the weapons on Oleg’s desk, exiting the small office without comment. Oleg hung his umbrella on a rack behind the door and sighed. With drooping shoulders he twirled the ends of his garish mustache. He drew a flask from a drawer in his desk. Twisting off the top he tipped back a long swig of water—purified of all contaminants, boiled over a flame, and filtered. He did not allow himself to sit.
    Tired as he was, he knew this to be the game. Moves and countermoves. He had thrown the gambit, and one of his knights had fallen. He hoped to get her back. Taking another drink, he closed his eyes. His memories the only intoxicant he allowed himself, he stumbled briefly into the past. But with a twitch his lip curled as the memory turned unpleasant. He opened his eyes, shaking the image from his mind.
    Placing the flask back in the desk, he shuffled to the bookcase where he studied the narrow spine of a nondescript book reading, What is to be Done? Tipping the top corner, he opened the hidden passageway from his office to his lab. This sour time will soon pass. He steeled his mind, battling to reclaim mental ground.
    At the base of the stone stairs, originally crafted by direct order of the university’s founders, a set of bronze horns protruded from a relief of a bull’s head engraved into the wall. Oleg shoved the right horn back into the wall. The entrance from his office closed with a distant thud as a series of gas-powered lights around the perimeter of the underground chamber sparked to life. One by one the gas tubes warmed. Glowing brighter, they created shadows from the ghastly assortment of lab equipment and war machines—children of Oleg’s mind. The lab had been the trap that snared him. The promotion, the new office, he now knew had been orchestrated to entice him to resume his work.
    A proud parent, he wove up and down each aisle, running a hand across metallic and glass surfaces, encouraging the devices that their day would come soon. At the center of the room he slipped a framed picture from beneath a work station and held it to his forehead. With effort he felt the presence of the two women represented in it. Forcing the venom into the corners of his mind, his purest thoughts finally transported him through space and time, back to a dirty flat in St. Petersburg, June 16 th , 1902.
    “Oleg, what are you doing? You’ll lose your scholarship.”
    “Shush, or we’ll lose the moment. I’ll have it back before anyone misses it. Just wait until you see the result. It’s wonderfully simple.” He danced around the tripod, adjusting lens and aperture, careful not to upset the box camera he’d borrowed from his university.
    “You and your gadgets. Honestly, Oleg.” She corralled their