The Ministry of Time

Adela frantically tells the narrator she’s in danger. She says a mole is feeding Ministry information, including the time-door’s location, to the Brigadier, whom she still can’t find. Adela thought Quentin was the mole, she explains, so she had him “neutralized.” Back at the safe house, Graham reports that something happened to Maggie. He went to her safe house and found her bridge, Ralph, drowned in the bathtub. A woman Maggie was dating is dead too. In the past, Graham, Arthur, and Maggie arranged a secret meeting spot in an underground tunnel system, in case of emergency. They must flee their safe house, but the narrator is practically frozen with fear. Graham takes action and directs her. She notices that he has a handgun of his own and fake passports. At Arthur’s safe house, they find that he’s already dead.

They find Maggie in a bunker connected to the tunnels. Cardingham arrives soon after. The narrator realizes the mole will know their location from the expats’ microchips, which the expats don’t know have been implanted in them. She tells them about the microchips and must admit she’s known about them all this time. Graham is furious. He feels utterly betrayed. Maggie tells the narrator she forgives her. After removing the microchips using a scalpel from Cardingham’s first aid kit and throwing them in the river, the group spends an anxious night in the bunker. The next morning, the narrator contacts Adela, who says she’ll send a SWAT team to pick up the expats and put them in protective custody. Adela tells the narrator to meet her immediately and sends her a location by the river.

The narrator finds the Brigadier and Salese with Adela, their blue light weapon trained on her. They tell the narrator that Adela is her future self and that all this has happened before. Last time, however, Adela says, the Brigadier and Salese killed both Arthur and Maggie. The Brigadier denies killing anyone. Declassified records from his time in the future prove the Ministry killed Maggie and Arthur, who weren’t useful enough to them once they realized the time-door limited the number of free travelers. Adela reveals she has a son in the future named Arthur John Gore. She then stabs Salese in the neck. The narrator attacks the Brigadier and gets ahold of his weapon. She tries to shoot him as he runs away, but it fails to fire, and he escapes.

In the future, Adela says, the UK has been at war for a decade with an alliance of countries nicknamed “the Tiger Territories” (298): China, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Nepal, and a few others. She also reveals that her parents both died recently and that she’s married to Graham. She went back in time to try to prevent Arthur and Maggie’s deaths. After describing more details of the future, Adela admits she isn’t happy. Graham and Cardingham suddenly appear, interrupting the conversation. They hold the women at gunpoint because they believe the women are conspiring against them. At Adela’s urging, the narrator runs. Later, she wonders what might have been if she hadn’t.

The Ministry holds Graham during the first few weeks after his extraction. He thinks of them as captors. He meets his bridge, the narrator, and sees in her a resemblance to the Inuit woman whose husband he accidentally killed, though in time he realizes he mostly imagined the resemblance. He believes God is offering him redemption by bringing him and the narrator together.

The narrator goes to the Ministry to shut down the expat project, as Adela instructed. She finds Simellia there and learns she’s the mole. After learning from the Brigadier what happens to Africa in the future, she tries to help them prevent it. Simellia holds the narrator at gunpoint, telling her she’ll become a murderer in her future Ministry role. The narrator wrestles the gun from Simellia and then takes her to the room with the time-door. There they find the Brigadier, who tells them about future wars and destruction. The narrator empties her gun into the time-door machine. The Brigadier implodes like a tiny black hole and then is gone. While the narrator is distracted, Simellia grabs the narrator’s other, holstered gun and then holds the narrator as a hostage to escape once security agents arrive. Outside, Simellia lets the narrator go, and she returns to her safe house.

The narrator finds Graham in the kitchen with his gun trained on her. He says he doesn’t trust her; in fact, he hates her. Graham makes the narrator delete all the project files from her laptop and then says he and Maggie are leaving and she’d better not try to track them. Soon after, the Ministry arrests the narrator. Six days later, she meets with the Ministry Secretary, who knew Adela’s identity all along. She came through the time-door and directed the entire expat project, he explains. He thinks Simellia is the one who tried to destroy the time-door. The narrator learns, however, that it wasn’t destroyed at all. At that moment, Adela’s body imploded just like the Brigadier’s. The three expats escaped in the confusion, but Cardingham was since apprehended and is now cooperating with the Ministry. Though Adela was a field agent with the Ministry, in this timeline the Secretary says the narrator won’t be allowed to work for the Ministry at all.

The narrator moves back in with her parents and enters a deep depression. Since the Ministry took everything of Graham’s, including pictures of him in her government phone, she has nothing left of him except the chicken necklace he gave her. Eventually, she finds work as a freelance proofreader. Over time, her depression becomes manageable. She then receives a package from Graham with her copy of Rogue Male and a photo of a field by a lake. In answer to the narrator’s previous question is a handwritten note: “Of course I loved you” (329). From the trees in the photo, the narrator guesses the picture was taken in Alaska; maybe Anchorage. She decides to travel there to look for Graham and Maggie. The novel ends with a note she writes advising her past self to make better choices if she wants a better future.