Fixer Redux

by Gene Doucette

  “Really?”

  He took it from her to check for himself.

  “Next question,” Erica said. “I know when you guys brought this into the building, you thought it was a curious piece of tech from a closed case, where you had the guy in custody. Did anyone check to make sure this thing wasn’t sending out a signal?”

  “Sure, of course.”

  “Maybe you should check again.”

  He put the device down.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “We should check again. I think this could be trying to send out a signal now. Let’s find out.”

  “Only now?”

  “It would have been scanned. But maybe it’s self-activated or…we’ll check. Good catch.”

  He looked at her, and must have seen concern in her expression.

  “Not to worry,” he said. “We’re perfectly safe here.”

  Maggie sat down next to McCarthy, to get a better look at the security monitors. There were ten of them, covering different parts of the facility through rotating camera angles.

  It took only a few seconds to spot Joe. He was lying on his side next to a railing.

  “There,” she said, pointing. “Where is that?”

  That’s the balcony of the cafeteria,” McCarthy said. “Is that your man?”

  “It’s one of them.”

  The sheriff’s radio—which he had on the counter next to the monitors—chirped to life.

  “We got a body here,” Huang said.

  McCarthy opened the line.

  “Can you ID him?”

  “Negative. Plainclothes. Possible civilian.”

  “Send a picture though,” McCarthy said. “We’ll try and get a name.”

  “He’s got no face, command.”

  McCarthy shared a look with Maggie.

  “Roger that, Captain,” McCarthy said. “Keep going.”

  “Where are they now?” Maggie asked.

  “In the airlock.”

  “Come again?”

  “That’s what we call it. Between this world and that one. It’s two doors down, between the check-in counter and the first riot door.”

  “Can I go down there?”

  “You want to see if it’s your man?” he asked.

  “I’m missing one, yeah.”

  “He’s not gonna be any less dead if you go down there in an hour. Stay put.”

  “Command,” someone said on the radio. “I have two more bodies here.”

  “Who’s this?” McCarthy asked. Whoever was broadcasting, it wasn’t Huang.

  “It’s Mark, sheriff. I’m at the gun locker.”

  “One of mine,” McCarthy said to Maggie, before answering.

  “What do you got, Mark?” he asked. “I thought that room was cleared.”

  Maggie really wished there was a map she could look at to figure out where everyone was. What she knew was that if Mark was an officer under McCarthy’s command, he wasn’t at point like Huang’s team was. Sheriff’s department people were trailing the vanguard.

  “BPD cleared it of threats, but they didn’t look past the window. Looks like…yeah. It’s Billy Drake for sure. They’ve both been shot but…look, I think the other one’s Pete, but his uniform’s missing.”

  “Pete Binney?” McCarthy said, for clarification.

  “That’s what I’m saying. Lou, one of the perps might be in uniform.”

  “I’m sorry,” Maggie said. “Did he say Binney?”

  “Yeah,” McCarthy said. “Do you know him?”

  “Is there more than one corrections officer named Binney here?”

  “I’m not sure. Why?”

  “A woman. Was there a female officer assigned here named Sheila Binney?”

  “No, but…”

  She was running before he finished the sentence, and out the front door so fast, the men covering the entrance from the plaza probably would have been justified in shooting her.

  “The ambulance!” she shouted, at nobody in particular.

  Two Boston Police ran up and dragged her by the elbows from the middle of the plaza. One of them was Sergeant Pekoe, who she recognized as the one that unintentionally released Corrigan from custody.

  “Where’s the ambulance?” she barked.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I’m fine, goddammit, where is the ambulance?”

  “It left a minute ago. Another’s on its way. Are you hurt?”

  He thought she needed medical attention.

  “I need to reach that ambulance. I think one of the people we loaded onto it isn’t who she says she is.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sergeant Pekoe, a terrorist is escaping in that ambulance. Find me a way to get through to the driver.”

  He grabbed his radio and called downtown. This would require him reaching the 911 desk and then someone from there calling out to the ambulance, and if she was right the next step would be to figure out where the ambulance was and how in the world they’d be able to mobilize a police response that was appropriate to the situation when all the traffic was paralyzed and half the cops in town were standing next to her. But first things first.

  It took only two minutes to get the driver. Pekoe handed over his radio.

  “Hi, who am I talking to?” Maggie asked. She could hear the siren over the open line, which reminded her the cellphone in her pocket was still connected to Joe.

  “This is Valparaiso, who’s this?”

  “Valparaiso?”

  “Iggy.”

  “All right, Iggy. This is Agent Margaret Trent of the FBI. Can the rear of the ambulance hear us talking right now?”

  “Shutter’s closed, ma’am. What’s this about?”

  “I have reason to believe one of the two wounded deputies you’re taking in isn’t who she says she is.”

  “Okay.”

  “The younger one. Her uniform says Binney, but it belongs to someone else. The injury may be fake, and she may be a threat. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “No, ma’am, I don’t.”

  “All right, either way I’m going to need you to tell us exactly where you are.”

  “Agent Trent, I think you may have called the wrong ambulance.”

  “Are you coming from the jail?”

  “Yes, ma’am, but we only have one patient in back, not two.”

  “We sent out two, Iggy.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, ma’am.”

  Maggie lowered the radio and looked around. If anything, the number of uniformed officers—Boston Police, State Police, Sheriff’s Deputies—had tripled since she was last outside. The woman who identified herself as Sheila Binney could still be there, but she had no reason to be; getting away just meant walking off.

  “Don’t let her escape,” Maggie said. “You tried to warn me, Joe.”

  And I just told her Corrigan was still alive.

  14

  I don’t know if this means anything, but I saw some woman in a uniform running away from the jail at the same time everyone else was running toward it…

  * * *

  …yes I can describe her. Brown hair, ponytail. She was cute. Didn’t look like she was, you know, frantic or anything. Like she was jogging, like. Holding a pace, you know.

  * * *

  …it just seemed weird, that’s why I called…

  —anonymous tip line call

  It wasn’t until Erica heard what sounded a lot like a gunshot that she wished she’d paid better attention to the layout of the Boston FBI’s downtown office.

  It could have been something other than a gunshot; she’d only ever been exposed to the sound of a gun one time in her life, and that was up-close, at a firing range. This was on a first date with someone who thought his accuracy with a lethal weapon was something she would find appealing. It wasn’t.

  She could recall in vivid detail the volume of the noise, even through the noise-canceling headphones, and the steps involved in loading and fir
ing a handgun. (He wanted her to try. She didn’t.) But, interestingly, she couldn’t remember the name of her date.

  The noise she heard in the FBI offices was similar, but significantly more distant: a muffled whump—rather than the bang one might anticipate from the cartoons—that she was having difficulty explaining away.

  Patel would have known what it was, as surely he had more experience with firearms. But he’d been called away nearly an hour ago, only a few seconds after saying that it would be a good idea to determine if the device still in Erica’s possession was actively emitting a signal. What ought to have followed was that he manifested something capable of determining exactly that. But then his phone rang.

  What Patel said after the phone call didn’t make a lot of sense, but Erica figured she’d get a more thorough explanation eventually, since Maggie was the one who ordered him away. He said Maggie thought Corrigan Bain—who was secretly still alive, hidden in a private bed somewhere—was at that moment in great danger. Patel, and the long-absent George, and everyone else connected to Maggie’s team who was currently in-the-know regarding the non-deceased state of Mr. Bain, was heading there to protect him.

  Erica was incredibly curious as to how an attack on the jail translated into Corrigan being in danger, but the answer to that could wait.

  Patel left, and didn’t hand her off to anyone else, because it didn’t look like there was anyone left to hand her off to. So, she was back to having free rein over a large portion of what was probably a secure area, surrounded by a host of top-secret things. Likewise, she was left without any answers to her questions, specifically regarding the weird rectangular box with the cylindrical thing-a-ma-bob inside of it.

  She was able to determine, after about a half an hour of fiddling, that the black rectangle probably wasn’t giving off a signal. One of the discarded devices in the junk room was an old oscilloscope that seemed to be functional, and it seemed to think there was nothing to worry about. Probably, Patel had access to a more modern (and possibly more accurate) device that could do the same thing, but this was enough to calm her concerns for the moment.

  She examined the contents of the rectangle in every way she could, without cutting any wires or disabling the flashing light. Patel said there wasn’t anything that could explode inside of it, but just the same, while it was flashing, it wasn’t also exploding; there was no guarantee that if it stopped flashing it wouldn’t then explode. Or, something less drastic but also bad.

  This wasn’t what she was good at, anyway, which was why she wished Patel had given her permission to send the pictures to Saito, before leaving. Saito was the engineer building the machine for Takani-Ko.

  There wasn’t actually anything stopping her from sharing the pic, just like there wasn’t anything stopping her from waking up one of the many computers that were currently in sleep-mode, and poking around, or picking up a file and reading it. She wasn’t going to do any of those things, though.

  Erica was still sitting in the junk room, lost in thought, when the gun went off. It was jarring—for reasons other than the obvious ones—because she’d been caught up in one of her little reveries, which happened to her a lot while working on a complicated question. Because while she was not good at looking at a piece of technology and working out what it did, she was very good at complicated, albeit abstract, problems.

  The fundamental issue remained the same: there shouldn’t be any way a live video feed offered some kind of future-sight, without that video feed being connected to an ATSV at the source. Since the exoskeleton Bernard Jenks was wearing had no ATSV technology attached to it—she was dismissing out-of-hand the possibility that she was holding a portable one—he shouldn’t have been able to do what he did. And what he did was, connect via feed to a “fixer” (Corrigan’s word) who could see the future remotely, through Bernard’s optical headset.

  This should have been impossible, but it was only the first half of the problem. The second half of the problem was that this fixer then manipulated Bernard to alter the future.

  It remained the case that every attempt to mirror what Corrigan could do through technology ran into a circular-logic dead-end: the future was viewable because it was probabilistically certain; any effort to alter it would mean it was no longer probabilistically certain, which meant it wasn’t possible to view; it was impossible to alter a future that could no longer be viewed, which returned the probabilistic certainty.

  In sum, the future could be viewed but not changed, or changed but not viewed.

  There was no way around this, unless you were a fixer, like Corrigan Bain, or whoever was on the other end of Bernard’s apparatus. Corrigan could do it because his very existence in the timeline was fluid: he existed, perpetually, in the present and the future. He was, in effect, a time traveler capable of zig-zagging between points in a rolling five seconds, in either direction. He was neither fully aware, nor fully in control of this zig-zagging, but that was what he was doing anyway.

  To Erica’s understanding, it wasn’t possible to mimic this. And yet, someone solved the problem, using the device on the counter in front of her.

  The gunshot snapped her out of this train of thought, a kind of violence all its own.

  She scooped up the rectangular device, and stepped out of the room.

  “Hello?” she called out.

  The layout of the area she was in was taken up, largely, by an office bullpen: four desks to a row, low cubicle walls, the whole space boxed in on four sides by a walkway. There were private offices on the other side of the walkway, plus some conference rooms, and other kinds of rooms, such as the festival of electronics in the one she was in.

  The conference room holding the rest of Bernard’s device was down a hall on the other side of the bullpen, as was the TV room she’d wandered into when Patel discovered her roaming freely, but Erica wasn’t sure she could retrace the steps necessary to get to that part of the floor, because she hadn’t been paying attention.

  A little further down that hall was the bank of elevators that got her to the floor in the first place. This part of the floor plan was a little clearer, because Erica remembered taking note of the security procedures. Maggie had taken her to a lower floor first, where she signed in and got a visitor badge. Then they stepped back into the elevator and went up.

  Erica suspected that if one attempted to reach the floor she was currently on, without first stopping at the lower floor and checking in, the elevator wouldn’t go high enough.

  “Anybody here?” she asked.

  The silence that followed, served as a tacit no.

  There was another muffled gunshot, and then two more in rapid succession. She decided two things were definitely true: there was an actual gunfight going on somewhere in the building, and it was happening on a different floor.

  She remembered there being doors on either side of the receptionist desk downstairs, because she could recall being surprised to not be led through either of them. If the layout was similar, a lot of space was available. Maybe that was why no one was bothered all that much that a visitor was wandering freely on this floor—there were more offices elsewhere.

  A fifth gunshot sounded. Only then did Erica think maybe she should devote less time to wondering about the interior design choices of the FBI and more time to getting the hell out of the building.

  She ran in the direction she thought the elevators were, and quickly discovered she had the layout wrong, because she ended up in a cul-de-sac with doors to the rest rooms. She was about to turn around, but there was a third door at the end, and it was slightly ajar. The implication of its position was that there was a janitor’s closet on the other side, but she could see a glow from a monitor.

  She poked her head in. It was a security guard’s station. Evidence of a half-eaten sandwich indicated it had been vacated recently.

  The television screen showed the downstairs bullpen on five screens and the elevators on one. It didn’t look like anyone was down the
re, except that there was definitely someone firing a gun, so maybe it was more accurate to argue that there wasn’t anyone moving down there.

  That wasn’t right either. There was someone down there. She saw a woman walking casually down the middle of the main strip of the bullpen. She had dark hair up in a ponytail, and was in uniform. In one hand, she was holding a small box, and in the other, a gun.

  The woman’s attention was fixed on the box, at first. But halfway out of the room, she performed this weird…shimmy sideways. There was no audio associated with the security feed, but it was happening right beneath her feet, so Erica heard the gunfire just fine anyway. Someone shot at the woman with the ponytail.

  But, they missed. After her odd sidestep maneuver, she fired twice at an unseen target at her ten-o’clock. Then she stood still for a few seconds, and continued walking.

  The woman dodged two bullets, and fired an apparently lethal shot, without raising her eyes from the box in her right hand. She didn’t even look particularly inconvenienced by the incident.

  It was the other fixer. It had to be.

  “Hey, maybe you should get out of here, Erica,” she said, at around the same time the woman with the ponytail disappeared from the office feed and appeared on the elevator lobby feed. Then Erica saw the elevator door open on the feed, and the woman get in.

  The door closed, and the arrow over the door became the most important thing in Erica’s life.

  “Down arrow, down arrow, down arrow,” she muttered.

  It was the up-arrow.

  The list of things Erica thought she should be doing at that very moment was filling up fast. It included: call Maggie; find a gun; find the fire exit; get the hell out of this cul-de-sac.

  She deemed the last one on the list the highest priority, until she saw the open gun locker under the security guard’s desk. The guard must have opened it to arm himself and run out in a hurry. With any luck, he radioed someone to let them know the office was under attack first, but there was no way to be sure. Already, Erica had some concerns regarding the professional-ness of a guard who left both the door to the room and the locker to the firearms open.