Fixer Redux

by Gene Doucette

  When the speeches began, Corrigan was able to focus on the words and keep himself pretty well rooted in the present. Even off to the side, he hated being on the stage, where nearly everyone in the room could look at him if they so wished. They didn’t, because the people taking turns behind the podium drew the attention of the room, but if he did something unfortunate, like laugh aloud at a joke that hadn’t landed yet, he’d certainly catch some eyes.

  There were all there to honor to work of five FBI agents from the Boston field office, who were part of a joint task force consisting of significantly more than five people. Despite sleeping with the head of that task force, Corrigan knew extremely little about what they were doing until the arrests started happening and the media picked up on it. All he’d known about it in the moment was that Maggie spent very little time in the condo they shared, and the work had her smoking more than she let on.

  The task force led to what the media was calling a “significant” domestic terrorism arrest. It was actually a dozen arrests conducted in timed raids in three states, coordinated through the Boston FBI office.

  Applause.

  He heard it coming before it got there. The guy at the microphone had been talking about Deputy Mayor Duplass for the past ten minutes, as a way to introduce the man himself, which led to everyone in the room clapping, which was an awful cascade of noise.

  “Thank you everyone!” Duplass half-shouted. He was about 30% politician, 40% revival tent preacher, and the rest was retired law enforcement, family man, with—probably—at least a whiff of graft and corruption. Corrigan kind of liked him.

  “When I think about this great country of ours…I think about freedom.”

  Corrigan bit his tongue. The preamble was exactly the sort of corny he and Maggie would have been giggling about if they weren’t being watched. He heard the line coming before it was said, and still had to fight the urge to at least grin stupidly.

  “But protecting that freedom comes with a cost. The men and women on this stage with me today are the kind of people who understand exactly what that cost is, and they pay it, over and over, every day.”

  Maggie turned around to give Corrigan a little smile—and perhaps to check on him. Then she stuck her tongue out and rolled her eyes. She wasn’t fooling him; Maggie agreed with most of what Duplass was saying, she just wasn’t as corny about it.

  The deputy mayor’s speech drifted into a lengthy discussion of terrorism, a subject that might inspire a less nuanced political animal in a jingoistic direction. Corrigan thought Duplass handled it well, though.

  After the lengthy introduction came the awards portion of the morning, and Corrigan could imagine a near-future in which the event would conclude and he could get to the part where he hides in the corner of a reception hall. Maybe from there, he and Maggie could return to their nice, quiet, unpopulated condo.

  Everybody got a plaque, a handshake, and a photograph with Duplass. The applause was continuous and made Corrigan’s head ache, but he tried to keep it under control for Maggie, whose name was going to be announced last.

  “And finally, the head of the joint task force: Senior Agent Margaret Trent!”

  Maggie got up to loud cheers that had begun—from Corrigan’s perspective—five second earlier. She walked across the stage, her hand outstretched to greet Duplass, her smile lighting up the entire room. A camera flashbulb went off, and then a second…

  And then the entire world exploded.

  In a blink, a propulsive wall of flame erupted from the base of the podium, tore Maggie and Duplass apart, and expanded outward from there. A bomb was all Corrigan had time to register before the explosion expanded to consume everyone else on the stage, and then the first row, and then Corrigan himself.

  He could feel the heat on his face, and the punch in his chest, when the force of the blast hurtled him backwards and he lost control of his body. He was being crushed, and ripped open. He was being murdered.

  He was dead.

  It hadn’t happened yet. It was five seconds in the future. That wasn’t enough time to get away from it, but he could try.

  He leapt to his feet and charged Maggie and Duplass, still in the middle of their photo op and entirely unaware that they had only a couple of seconds to live.

  “Bomb!” he shouted. Nobody could hear him, and he was moving too slowly, like trying to run in a dream, because his body was still reacting to being shattered against the back wall. Did he even make a noise?

  To everyone’s surprise, including the men there to guard the deputy mayor, Corrigan slammed into Duplass and Maggie and carried them off the stage and onto the floor. He landed with them beneath him, wondering if the lip of the stage and his body would somehow combine to protect them from the blast that was a second away. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and waited.

  Nothing happened.

  Rather, what he expected to happen, did not. The bomb didn’t go off.

  Plenty of other things did happen, though, since as far as everyone else there was concerned, the weird dude in the corner had just bum-rushed the two most politically important people in the room.

  Whenever Corrigan changed the future, for the briefest of moments that future would disappear and get replaced by the version kick-started by his actions. It was, in a way, the only time he felt normal and achieved a modest bit of peace. But he hadn’t done anything to disable the bomb; there was no reason to expect it not to detonate.

  Yet it hadn’t. The future reset with a blink that sometimes felt like it should come with an audible component, and maybe did. Maybe there was a system reset sound that only Corrigan Bain, fixer, could hear.

  The room turned into a mad scramble of activity. The audience on the floor near where they landed jumped from their chairs and backed up, scuffling metal chair legs on a wood floor. Duplass started shouting, and punching Corrigan, whose entire weight was on the deputy mayor’s chest. Maggie was shouting too, but more out of concern.

  “Corrigan, what is it?” she asked, trying to push herself out of his grasp.

  And then there were the men with the guns. Four of them, in suits, looking angry, grabbing him by the shoulders and pushing handgun barrels in his face and screaming orders at him.

  All at once. It was happening all at once, and he was lost. The bomb hadn’t gone off and that was a singular point in his future with nothing on the other side. Now he was in a future that didn’t appear to understand what to do with him.

  “There’s a bomb,” he said, still too quietly. Nobody could hear him. His ears were ringing from the explosion that didn’t happen and he could hardly breathe from the fire that had scorched the air in his lungs and he was being too quiet.

  “ON YOUR FEET!” screamed one of Duplass’s bodyguards.

  “What’s wrong with him?” someone in the crowd asked, or was about to ask.

  “Who is he?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Is there a fire?”

  The questions were all coming at the same time, from all directions, and the words were starting to run together. He was losing his grip. He could still see the fire.

  Maggie was on top of things, though. She looked him in the eyes, not angry or confused. Just worried.

  “Tell me,” she said, calmly, holding his face in her hands. “Tell me what happened.”

  A gun barrel was pushed up against his head and in another three seconds the man to his right was going to kick him in the kidneys. A second after that, the deputy mayor was going to be pulled out from under Corrigan, and the hairpiece he didn’t want anyone to know about was going to come loose.

  “There’s a bomb. In the podium, there’s a bomb. Get everyone out of here.”

  She jumped to her feet.

  “BOMB!” she shouted. “EVERYONE OUT!”

  The man to Corrigan’s right kicked him in the kidney, another one pulled Duplass from under him, and then all of them were on top of Corrigan, punching and pulling. He heard handcuffs out
and felt them going on his wrists, all in the future, but that was okay, because the bomb continued to not explode.

  Still, he didn’t feel like getting handcuffed, so the second before they went on, he altered his own future, twisting under one of the men and rolling onto his back. In one of his futures, the man who had recently had his gun pressed against Corrigan’s temple actually got off a shot, which was a good indication nobody responsible for the deputy mayor’s safety was listening to the bomb announcement. That was just poor training.

  Anyway, a gunshot would just make the whole situation messier, so Corrigan caught his legs up with one of the other men, who tripped sideways and fell into the guy about to fire. The impact was exactly right to jostle the gun loose, which made sense only because Corrigan had run through multiple permutations of the future in order to get to the one that did what he wanted.

  That left one guy unaccounted for. He still had it in his head that Corrigan was a threat. He leveled his gun just as Corrigan got to his feet. In the future, the man took two shots. Neither would hit Corrigan, and one would wound someone behind them. More bad training, he thought, as he twisted the gun loose from the man’s hand and elbowed him in the nose.

  By then, Maggie’s announcement had started to really sink in and people began heading for the exits. The crowd scene Corrigan could barely tolerate when it was an ordered passage into the room turned into the utter madness of a rioting exodus. All was shouting and screaming, spaghetti-string futures splitting off in dozens of directions at once. The only good thing about it was that the rush for the exits put some bystanders directly between Corrigan and the bodyguards who seemed intent on ignoring their primary responsibility, that being to get Duplass out of the room he was sharing with an explosive device.

  Corrigan lost track of the present as he got caught up in the crowd, until Maggie found him again.

  “Let’s go,” she said, repeatedly. Her words were echoing forward.

  “I can’t…”

  “Yes, you can. You take my hand and follow me and I’ll get you out. Come on.”

  2

  …a wild scene at the State House today as Deputy Mayor James Duplass was attacked during an awards ceremony by this man, an apparent guest of one of the men being honored. We do not at this time have the man’s name…

  —local cable news, 45 minutes after the incident

  The total evacuation of a building as large and important as the Massachusetts State House was quite complicated and involved, not to mention chaotic. The word stately did not spring to mind, Maggie thought.

  The first thing to happen, after she got Corrigan—who was now useless thanks to the aforementioned chaos—out of the room, was that somebody pulled a fire alarm. This put a few hundred more people—from the rest of the building—in the way of their exodus, and slowed it all down. Had it been an actual fire, Maggie wondered how the building designers expected anybody to survive.

  The good news was that nobody appeared to be in an active panic. Once the spectators from the room where a bomb was identified, mingled with the people who thought this was a fire drill, everyone calmed down and milled out of the main doors and down the steps, in an orderly fashion.

  The State House sat at the top of a hill, among a collection of tightly-packed buildings and narrow streets—a defining characteristic of most of the city—and directly across from the Commons. This convenient fact meant when the entire state government and all of the attendant staff members, hangers-on, and so forth, were evacuated on a Wednesday morning, they had a place to go. There were very few other places downtown where this was the case. It might even have constituted a design specification by whoever decided to put the State House where it was, except both the building and the Commons were older than bomb scares, and possibly also older than bombs.

  It was fortunate for everyone that this was happening on a cool day in April. Two months in either direction and it would have been either too hot or much too cold to spend a lot of time in the middle of a field on a steep hill. But April? April was a good time for an evacuation.

  Maggie and Corrigan made it down the stairs and across the street, to a bench at the edge of the Commons.

  They sat down. She held Corrigan’s hand and waited for an indication that he’d rejoined her in the commonly-recognized present.

  Corrigan had a habit of slipping out of the present and into the future. There was a stupidly complicated explanation for it that Maggie didn’t understand, but the simplified version she did understand went like this: his consciousness drifted forward. She’d seen it happen often enough that she could tell when he was gone, and also when he fought his way back.

  It was about three minutes before he returned.

  “How are you doing?”

  He paused for a few beats, before answering.

  “I’m okay,” he said.

  “Are you with me?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good. Can you tell me what just happened?”

  He nodded. He was nodding before she asked.

  “There’s a bomb in the podium. It went off, and we all died.”

  “That sounds terrible,” she said.

  “It was.”

  “Except the bomb didn’t go off, and we didn’t all die.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I noticed that too.”

  “Did you stop the bomb somehow?”

  He looked off into the middle distance for a while. The lawn in front of them—and slightly below, thanks to the incline—was full of bored-looking State House staffers, lighting up cigarettes and making lunch plans. Behind them, the street was already full of emergency vehicles and Boston Police cruisers. Two officers were standing on Park Street, talking to someone Maggie recognized as an audience member from the ceremony. She was pointing out Corrigan to the officers.

  “I don’t see how,” Corrigan said. “It’s all blurry. There was a lot going on.”

  “Sure, but one of the things that didn’t go on was the bomb exploding. If you didn’t stop it, who did?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe the trigger was attached to Duplass somehow, and when you tackled him, you prevented him from setting it off.”

  She was avoiding the suggestion that the deputy mayor of the city was also a suicide bomber, as that seemed like a step further than anyone was comfortable going.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “The timing’s off. I shouldn’t have been able to reach both of you before the explosion. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Unspoken, was the real possibility that there was no bomb, and Corrigan had suffered some kind of episode. They weren’t going to talk about that.

  The officers on Park radioed in Corrigan’s location, and a few seconds later, there were five officers standing in front of their bench. Maggie already had her ID out.

  “Hi guys,” she said. “You probably want to talk to us, huh?”

  Another two hours passed, in which Corrigan Bain remained in somewhat voluntary custody. Nobody knew whether or not to arrest him, but everyone agreed he had a lot of things to answer for, but until the room that ostensibly held a bomb was inspected by people who were specifically equipped to handle bombs, nobody knew what to ask him, either.

  He and Maggie remained at the bench, flanked by uneasy-looking police officers, for about half of that two hours, until the tent went up.

  BPD had a tent. It was there to provide them with a command center a distance from the building, and the fact that it was set up at all, strongly implied they expected this bomb search to be a long-term project.

  Maggie thought that made a lot of sense. Whether or not they found a bomb in the auditorium, they’d probably have to search the whole building before letting everyone back in, and it was a big building.

  This was Maggie’s first bomb scare.

  They didn’t happen all that often, or not as often as someone raised to expect them routinely due to televised dramas might expect them to happen.

/>   There were other kinds of scares, sure. Anthrax was a good one. Maggie remembered racing to a certain bank building in the financial district that was being evacuated because someone in the mail room found white powder on a chair. It turned out to be baby powder that had puffed out of the pants of an obese mailroom employee. She was dressing—for reasons surpassing fashion, or taste—in Lycra pants which didn’t entirely fit; the powder had been applied to prevent chafing.

  Assassination threats were a thing now and then, mostly when a head of state was visiting. The FBI usually had an advance team working with the Secret Service, and sometimes she was on one of those teams. Those never got serious enough to warrant any evacuations, and only a couple of low profile arrests. She did have to detain a person claiming to have an interest in blowing up the president, but on investigation it turned out the bombs he was talking about were rotten produce. They still kept him in custody until the president left the city, and then handed him over to the nearest psychiatric unit.

  Once the tent was set up, she and Corrigan were led down to it, for what she assumed would be a joint conversation with some representatives of Boston Police, after which maybe they could go home and let the cops deal with the rest of this mess. It was, either way, not an FBI situation until or unless BPD asked for assistance, so Maggie was off the clock.

  They were met at the entrance by David Spence, one of the dozen or so BPD detectives she’d worked with in the past—most recently on the task force—at which point it became clear the police had decided it would be in their best interests to separate her from Corrigan.

  “Maggie,” he said, “c’mon over here.”

  She looked at Corrigan.

  “You good?” she asked.

  “Super,” he said. Then they escorted him inside.

  Maggie thought this wasn’t good news, but it wasn’t like they could arrest him for notifying them of a bomb in the building.