Fixer Redux

by Gene Doucette

  * * *

  …he’s been identified as Corrigan…[to off camera] is this right?

  * * *

  …Corrigan Bain, a resident of Cambridge. We’re getting this from an attendee of this morning’s event. We are not sure at this time what Mr. Bain’s connection is to the bombing.

  —Channel 4 News, twenty minutes after the explosion

  The Commons erupted with activity in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, and it was wreaking havoc with Corrigan’s head. There were too many people moving too quickly, too much screaming, too many smells. He was having a real sensory overload problem. And for some reason Detective White was yelling at him.

  White, who seemed pretty reasonable a few seconds earlier, was in a hair-trigger sort of state. In the future, Corrigan spun around too quickly and heard the gun go off. He didn’t feel himself take that first bullet, but the second one would strike home, below the left shoulder, not far from his heart and probably ultimately fatal.

  Corrigan adjusted his future by twisting himself out of the way and saw that second bullet hit a woman standing behind him, in the thigh.

  A third bullet would shatter his hipbone if he let it, so he adjusted for that too, but then there was a fourth and a fifth, and while Corrigan could certainly map out a future where he evaded all of them, he couldn’t do the same thing for the other people sharing the lawn. White was going to fire wildly and hurt a lot of bystanders in an effort to bring Corrigan down. If there were no other options—if the only future Corrigan saw was one where White fired his weapon—he and the detective would have to live with the consequences.

  There were other futures, however. The one with the fewest casualties had Corrigan freezing at the sound of his own name, dropping his phone on the grass, and going down to his knees without turning.

  He did this, and didn’t get shot. A second later White had him face down in the dirt. He heard cuffs come out.

  “Are you arresting me?” Corrigan asked. He had tried three other questions in his future. This was the one with the most promise.

  “Yeah, I’m arresting you. What do you think?”

  “I don’t think you need to cuff me.”

  “You have the right to remain silent…”

  “Detective, what changed between now and two minutes ago?”

  “You just blew up some friends of mine, that’s what changed. Now can I finish with the Miranda or do I have to kick you in the head a few times and then finish? Your call.”

  Corrigan let him finish. Then he let him put the cuffs on.

  Corrigan was in a squad car a few minutes later, his hands behind his back and in some discomfort due to that fact. He was a large man, with thick arms, an ever-thickening midsection, and broad shoulders, so having his hands cuffed behind his back felt like holding a particularly challenging yoga pose indefinitely.

  Other than that, he was sort of glad to be out of the crowd again.

  The street was almost impossible to navigate even with the dome lights on. The cruiser had to get past emergency vehicles, media, and hysterical civilians, and since almost every vehicle had flashing lights, none of them stood out.

  They drove close enough to the front of the State House for Corrigan to get a decent look at the damage. The bomb must have been pretty big: all the windows on the left side were blown out, and black smoke was pouring from two floors. It looked like the building was actively on fire. Whatever bomb squad members had been inside when that happened probably didn’t make it, regardless of what kind of equipment they were wearing. Nothing short of a tank would have been sufficient.

  “How’d that happen?” he said to himself.

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  The cop behind the wheel was one of the large young men White used for intimidation back in the tent. Next to him was the other one. White wasn’t in the car.

  “Just thinking out loud,” he said. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  The second one turned to look at him.

  “You were expecting something different?” he asked. “Like what?”

  He looked ready to hear Corrigan’s confession.

  “You misunderstand me, son,” Corrigan said. “Detective White made it very clear that something was in place to keep anybody from setting off the bomb remotely. You heard him. So, how’d it go off?”

  The cop didn’t answer. He turned back around, side-eyed his fellow officer, and left it at that.

  Even with the cuffs on, Corrigan was having a problem taking seriously the idea that he might be in real legal jeopardy. He’d had plenty of run-ins with the police in the past, and only about half of those encounters were pleasant, but no charges ever stuck.

  When he was fixing full-time, he figured out pretty quickly that cops didn’t really have the institutional flexibility to allow for somebody like him. In fairness, most people didn’t, but since the police generally showed up after he’d been there, their issue with what he’d done, and how he’d done it, was sometimes a problem. In a happy world, they’d all know who he was and that he was on their side. In the real world, he got questioned an awful lot, and had been arrested at least three or four times. That was why he always did his best to exit the scene before the police arrived.

  Still, it was impossible to look at this as anything other than a misunderstanding that would get sorted out shortly. He just had to wait for some calmer people to assert themselves, realize he wasn’t a threat to anyone, and send him on his way.

  After all, he didn’t have anything to do with the bombing.

  The topography of downtown Boston was such that one was almost always standing either on a hill, or at the bottom of one. The State House, from most perspectives, sat atop a hill, but it was actually only on a wayward peak on the side of a slightly larger hill. It was possible, in other words, to go past the building and continue traveling up.

  Boston Common was on the side of a hill, too. There were multiple near-flat areas within the Commons—the frog pond, for instance, which was a skating rink in winter—but it was mostly a series of hills or a part of a series.

  Further downhill was Tremont Street, and halfway down that—for Tremont was also a road that traveled down a hill—was a popular independent coffee shop.

  Maggie had been there on many occasions, as they were only a couple of miles from the FBI offices and she was pretty sure she liked their coffee more than the coffee from the Starbucks that was much closer, or the Dunkin’s that was even closer still. She had a suspicion that all fresh brewed hot coffee tasted approximately the same, and the real difference was in how one felt about where one purchased the coffee, but that didn’t stop her from preferring the boutique cup over the national chain cup; it just made her question the forces that influenced that preference.

  Thanks to everything going on at the State House, the shop was line-out-the-door busy, but Maggie had nothing else to do until Corrigan was released, or the bomb was found and removed. She didn’t feel like dealing with an interrogation from people she considered colleagues, and she couldn’t spend the day staring at the side of a tent, so she waited in line and got her coffee and thought about whether this cup was that much better than the five other places she could have gone, without even leaving Tremont, and that was what she was doing when the bomb went off.

  She didn’t hear it, because she was inside, at the back of the store, where the counter to fetch one’s coffee was. She felt it, though.

  “Whoa, what was that?” she asked nobody in particular. She looked around the shop to confirm that other people had felt it, in case she had actually suffered some kind of seizure.

  “Subway,” the young man beside her suggested. “Maybe.”

  The barista, who spent every day standing right where they were, said, “that wasn’t the train.” She looked a little concerned.

  The bomb, Maggie thought.

  It should have been impossible for Maggie to put the idea of the bomb scare aside as quickly as she clearly had, bu
t the truth was that even when she was fleeing the building she never felt like she was in danger. Being around Corrigan could do that to a person. She was far more concerned about him being held for questioning than she was about the reason for it.

  There was another explanation. She’d been working a domestic terrorism case for eighteen months, and on five occasions in that eighteen months, she or someone on her team ended up in a room with a device that they didn’t know what to do with. Each time, the bomb squad was called, and each time the device was disabled or destroyed harmlessly.

  It was how she learned to think about these things over time: hold on until the bomb squad got there, and then everything was going to be okay. Because bombs didn’t go off on the bomb squad.

  So, Maggie had put the entire idea of it out of her mind. Corrigan was there to get her away from it, and the squad was on the scene to clean it up. All that was supposed to be left was for someone to tell her what the device looked like so she could start working on who put it there and why.

  The bomber was supposed to be the threat now. Not the bomb.

  Everything outside was madness. Traffic had already been redirected to a slow death on every side street in the city, leaving the four streets surrounding the Commons to firetrucks, ambulances and seemingly every police car on duty, and all of them had their lights on. Black smoke was billowing from the State House, almost entirely obscuring it. The wind picked up the smell of the smoke, and spread it all over the place. Bostonians who, unlike Maggie, had at no time been two feet from the device that just destroyed half a building, stood next to her on the sidewalk and cried. Loved ones were being called. The Marathon bombing, consigned to a distant memory for so many, was suddenly on everyone’s lips. A bomb had blown up the State House, and tore open all of the city’s old scars.

  I shouldn’t have left the tent, she thought.

  Corrigan was undoubtedly safe, but he was also now at the center of a chaotic scene, and he didn’t do very well in that sort of situation. She needed to find him, say whatever needed to be said to the Boston Police, and get him home before he shut down completely. David could help, maybe.

  She took out her phone. Looking around, she was perhaps the last person in the area to do so: people were taking pictures, live-blogging, tweeting, updating their Facebook pages, and one or two were actually using their phones like a phone.

  Maggie was about to try that herself when she saw the notification flag on one of the applications. It popped up whenever someone put something into a shared cloud drive. Nobody really used the drive anymore now that the task force was done, so there wasn’t a good reason for it to have been hit with something new.

  Curious, she opened the app.

  The first of three new pictures filled the smartphone screen.

  “Oh shit,” she said, loudly enough to draw some attention from a few of the nearby live-bloggers.

  Then she made the first of two phone calls. It wasn’t to Corrigan.

  “David, it’s me. Check the cloud and meet me at the tent.”

  “A little busy right now, Maggie.”

  “Then don’t meet me at the tent. I’m taking over the case either way.”

  She hung up. He would look at the drive and understand. She didn’t have time to walk him through it.

  The second call was to Corrigan, who needed to get uninvolved with this thing right now, provided he was still at the scene at all.

  He didn’t answer. But after several rings, someone else did.

  “Agent Trent?” a man asked.

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “This is Detective Joe White. I’ve placed the owner of this phone under arrest. You should head to the station if you want to talk to him. Maybe bring his lawyer too.”

  Jesus Christ.

  “Can you explain why he isn’t with his phone?”

  “I can. Because this phone set off that bomb. Now if there isn’t anything else, I have a lot of work to do.”

  “I see. Detective White, is it? I need you to tell me exactly where you are. You and I are going to have a long conversation, and maybe at the end of it you should call your lawyer.”

  “I’m at the big white tent. You can’t miss me.”

  It took long enough to get the cruiser to Boston Police headquarters for Corrigan to wonder if walking might have been a better idea. Not that he didn’t appreciate the quiet time in the back of the car; it made it possible to lower his head and ignore the madness running rampant outside for a few minutes. On the other hand, if they walked, they probably would have cuffed his wrists in the front, and that would have been nice too.

  The car stopped in the station’s garage, and then burly cop #2 helped him out of the back. He didn’t know their names. He tried asking for them in the future, but didn’t get any response, so he never bothered to actually ask.

  They escorted him inside, past booking and past the station’s desks. The place was half-empty—unsurprising under the circumstances. The officers who were there, all stood where they were to stare at him as he was led through. It was the first time he felt any real concern about his predicament.

  His eyes landed on one officer in particular. The cop’s name was Wilcox. Corrigan was glad to see the man hadn’t retired yet.

  Wilcox stared along with everyone else, but upon finding his gaze met, gave the tiniest of nods.

  Then it was off to one of the holding cells and—mercifully—the removal of the cuffs.

  Completely alone for the first time all day, Corrigan spent a few minutes enjoying the full range of motion of both his arms,. Then he worked through a couple of exercises he designed for himself, to verify that he knew where the present was. It was a cycle of clapping, stomping, and hand-waving repeated several times, with periods of what looked like deep concentration in between. Anyone monitoring him on the security feed would no doubt have a lot of questions about what was going on in the cell, because it looked like an overly complicated rain dance, but he had no better time to do this and it was something that had to be done.

  Moderately satisfied that he’d gotten his head in order, he sat down on the holding cell’s small cot and tried to work out what had actually happened with the bomb.

  It wasn’t something that was easy to explain to other people. When asked how far into the future he could see, his usual answer was that it was about five seconds, but that wasn’t really true. He could see further, it was just that what he saw didn’t make any sense. It was an uncertainty barrier of sorts: beyond a point, the future became a morass of competing outcomes with roughly equal likelihoods. Since he could see all of the possible outcomes, the pile of undifferentiated results was impossible to interpret.

  But within that barrier, Corrigan knew everything that was going to happen. It was a closed logical circle: the future in that five or so seconds was definitely going to happen because Corrigan could see it about to happen, and he could see it about to happen because it was definitely going to happen.

  That was the problem with the bomb not going off. It wasn’t simply a matter of the person with the trigger deciding not to blow up the bomb. It didn’t work that way.

  Only one person could explicitly alter the future in that five-second window, and Corrigan Bain was that person.

  I did alter the future, he reminded himself. By taking himself, Maggie, and Duplass away from the center of the blast he made an explicit alteration of the future. The problem, as Maggie had already pointed out, was that he didn’t do anything to stop the bomb. The only person who could do that was the one who put it there in the first place.

  “They can do what I can do,” he said aloud.

  It was the only possibility. The bomber must have seen Corrigan alter his own future, and that forced the bomber to alter his as well, and not trigger the explosion.

  Briefly, he considered whether he had already seen this bomber: the Kilroy, standing in the middle of the Commons, shrieking just as the bomb went off. It was also capable of altering
the future, only because it wasn’t the future to a Kilroy; it was the present.

  The idea of one of these creatures deciding to go from the occasional murder to acts of terrorism was truly frightening, but incredibly unlikely. It didn’t jibe with what Corrigan saw, either. He saw a Kilroy in pain, because large-scale explicit alterations of the nearby future was a special kind of agony for them. The Kilroy could have been blaming Corrigan for the bomb, possibly, but it wasn’t the cause.

  Plus, if the Kilroy was in the room, Corrigan definitely would have noticed him. And whoever did this had to be there, in person, to see Corrigan altering his own future.

  This made sense for a few other reasons. For just about anyone else, being in the room when a bomb explodes is a suicidal act. If they were a fixer too (Corrigan never developed a better name for what he did) they could map out the future well enough to know exactly where to stand to survive the blast. And being a miraculous survivor of a terrorist attack was an excellent alibi in this instance.

  Sometimes, when Corrigan altered the future substantially, he caused a reset of sorts, where the five-second future-track vanished for a heartbeat or two. (This was exactly what caused the Kilroys pain.) In that heartbeat, he was stuck in the present, as unsure about what was going to happen next as anybody. The same thing could have happened to the bomber. In that half-second, he wouldn’t have known where to be. Blowing up the bomb then would have been an actual suicidal act.

  It wasn’t a stretch to imagine someone else out there with his abilities. He’d already met one such person in his life. It was a long time ago, when he was a child, and the man was long-since dead, but if there was one, there almost had to be others.

  The door at the far end of the room opened. Corrigan was in one of two decent-sized cells, which were intended to hold a number of people, temporarily, before they were taken elsewhere. Given the mayhem of the day and given it was the middle of the day in the middle of the week, it didn’t strike Corrigan as terribly odd that he was the only one being held.