CHAPTER 20 – TO KILL A YOUNG WOMAN
Tower Green, inside the walls of the Tower of London, with Gaoler’s House at right.
01:30 (London Time)
Saturday, July 12, 1941 ‘C’
Helferin Ingrid Weiss’s room, Gaoler’s House
Tower of London, London, England
Three women dressed in the uniforms of German female auxiliaries entered quietly the small room where a teenage girl was sleeping in a bed, being as silent as they could. Approaching slowly the sleeping girl and surrounding her bed, the three German women, two of them holding crude wooden truncheons, looked down at the girl for a few seconds, hatred in their eyes, before attacking and starting to beat up savagely the sleeping teenager. The latter never had a chance to wake up fully as her attackers spat out insults while striking her with truncheons, fists and feet.
‘’You fucking Jewish bitch! That should teach you not to become friend with an enemy officer.’’
‘’Let see if your Jewish God can help you now, you traitor!’’
‘’I hope that you will die from this, Jewish bitch!’’
The teenage girl, her face now bloody and bruised, soon lost consciousness. Despite of that, her three attackers kept hitting her for a few more seconds, with the more senior woman in the lot finishing with a nasty kick into the girl’s ribs.
‘’Here! Have a good night now, Weiss!’’
The three women then hurried out to return to their own rooms before some of the other female auxiliaries detained as war prisoners in Gaoler’s House could wake up and catch them in the act. However, with the girl’s room being in the attic section of the old medieval house, nobody apparently heard the noise of the beating and the three women safely made their way back to their rooms, where they went back to bed as if nothing had happened.
Some two minutes after the three had left the small room, a giant, bald man wearing a blue and gold uniform appeared in a flash next to the bed where the teenager lay unconscious, bleeding heavily from a broken nose. The giant, who was holding a syringe in one hand, couldn’t help feel pity as he contemplated the battered girl, who could not be much more than fifteen years-old. In fact, the giant already knew that this Ingrid Weiss, who was due to marry an American officer in a few days and then become Ingrid Dows, was indeed fifteen. She would also be truly beautiful if not for the bruises now covering her face. The giant man then bent over the unconscious girl, trying to find the best spot to inject her where the syringe’s needle would not leave a visible mark. He soon decided to prick her where a large bruise covered the left side of her neck.
‘’I am sorry, girl: this is not personal.’’
Before he could push his needle in her neck and inject her with a fast-acting, difficult to detect advanced poison, a yellow beam struck him from behind, knocking him unconscious. A strong hand then grabbed him by the collar before he could collapse over Ingrid Weiss and pulled him away from the bed. The man who had shot him with a stun pistol then picked up the syringe full of poison and put back in place the plastic safety cap that had covered its needle. Putting the syringe in a cargo pouch hooked to his belt, he then took out a cylindrical object that was about the size of a pen and fixed it to the Imperium trooper before pushing the red button at its tip, then stepped back. Two seconds later, the Imperium trooper’s body disappeared in a flash, bringing a mean smile to the face of his attacker, a big, powerful man in a gray body-hugging uniform.
‘’Nobody kills my adopted daughter, you Imperium bastard!’’
Then mentally concentrating and powering his implanted time distorter unit, Mike Crawford disappeared from the room in a brief flash of white light.
High above England, over the River Thames, Commander Lara Beltram was anxiously waiting for a confirmation by his trooper sent down to the Tower of London that he had killed Ingrid Dows. So much depended on that apparently minor act, starting with the renewed existence of what had been her home world and that of her crew. Getting impatient after a few minutes of waiting, she looked at her sensors officer, Lieutenant Elizabeth Turner.
‘’So, did Sergeant Reeves report back or not, Lieutenant?’’
‘’Not yet, Captain.’’
‘’Then, call him and ask him what is delaying him.’’
‘’Right away, Captain!’’
Watching Turner try without success to contact Reeves, Beltram suddenly had a bad feeling about this and looked at her second-in-command.
‘’Mister Murray, do we detect any other ship near us or in orbit?’’
‘’None, Captain. However, as you know too well, we still can’t defeat the stealth technology used by the Time Patrol. We should…’’
Murray never had a chance to finish his sentence before the antimatter warhead-tipped missile launched by the Time Patrol scout ship TEEN TEAM struck the Imperium cruiser and exploded into a gigantic fireball with an energy of eighty megatons, vaporizing in an instant the 230-meter-long warship.
Aboard the scout ship TEEN TEAM, Ingrid Weiss ‘B’ watched the destruction of the Imperium cruiser on her display screens and nodded to her partner.
‘’Good shooting, Tom! We are now finally rid for good of this damn Imperium.’’