Fixer Redux

by Gene Doucette

  Turning the phone off was also a perfectly good option. It wouldn’t stop the calls, but she could get a little sleep before dealing with the caller, which would be nice. She didn’t do that either, because he would know—it would go right to voicemail after one ring instead of eight—and he’d be even more pissed off.

  There were perhaps two or three people in the world who Sheila Corrigan was unwilling to piss off any more than absolutely necessary. The guy calling her was one of them.

  At the same time, he could wait a little longer.

  She stepped inside the container, pulled the door closed behind her, and then slid aside a partition next to the external latch. She reached through the opening and reconnected the counterfeit customs seal that was more or less the only thing keeping her entire operation a secret at this point.

  The container was one of about a thousand boxes in the Boston Harbor shipyard. Officially, it was just waiting for a company that didn’t know it existed, to lay claim to it and drive it away. Until that time, the seal—which would prove the contents had been inspected and cleared by customs, if it were real—had to remain on the outside of the container.

  If customs had actually examined the contents of the shipping container, they probably would have had a few words to say about the C-4.

  The phone stopped ringing. Sheila closed the partition, which turned the interior from near-total darkness to complete darkness. Undeterred by this detail, she took three steps to her right, picked up the battery-powered lantern, and lit it up. Then she got the generator going, and the portable heater, which she kept as far as possible from the crates in the back of the container.

  Sheila imagined a time in the distant future—farther than she was capable of seeing, and thus the speculation—well after she’d completed the Boston gig and abandoned the rest of the C-4, the shipping container it was in, and the entire country. They’d stolen a lot more explosives than they needed to fulfill the needs of the assignment, which wasn’t really anyone’s fault. Sheila had told Sharon and Nick they didn’t need so much, but since Sheila was the only one privy to the actual goals of their little team, she couldn’t very well complain when Sharon and Bernard walked as much as they did off the base. And then it was too late, because one couldn’t very well flush plastic explosives down the toilet, and sending what they didn’t need back to the army—while practical—was a bad idea.

  In that imagined distant future, the C-4 would deteriorate, and then one hot summer day it would explode and take out the entire shipyard.

  It was a pleasant thought. Sheila knew a lot about making bombs, but less about storing explosives long-term, so she couldn’t know for sure when that day might come, but she was looking forward to it. Because, to hell with this town.

  The phone started ringing again.

  “Not yet, dammit,” she muttered.

  She sat down on the cot, slipped the left arm out of her jacket, and then went about the painful task of sliding the right arm free.

  She still couldn’t believe the pretty one shot her. She couldn’t believe she was shot, period, but that it was the pretty one to do it was that much more galling. Sheila had been, by her estimation, on her best behavior given the circumstances. She’d planned on letting the girl live, even.

  This was why there was no point in being nice.

  The battlefield dressing she’d applied wasn’t doing the job. Neither was the antibiotic, or the pain pills, both of which she’d stolen from a pharmacy when it became clear the wound wasn’t going to heal itself with nice little bandage and some harsh language. What she needed was a hospital.

  Maybe a different hospital than the one she’d just blown up.

  She changed the bandage, tried to ignore the smell—unquestionably a bad sign—and dug up the bottle of eighty proof painkiller she had under the cot. After a couple of quick swigs, she recapped the bottle and answered the phone.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “It isn’t done,” he said, without preamble. When you’re one of the richest people in the world, you don’t bother with introductions.

  “Half of it’s done,” she said. “I got the doodad back.”

  “He’s still alive.”

  “Are you asking me, or telling me?”

  “When are you taking care of him?”

  “It’ll happen. It’s just not going to be easy, I’ve told you this. He’s hard to kill, for the same reason I’m hard to kill. I’ll do it, I just might have to blow up half the city to get the job done.”

  “Shiva…get it done and get out of there. We’re already writing off this entire affair. The last thing we need is another one of you out there, making news. He’s devaluing our patent.”

  “You’re sweet,” she said. “I love it when people talk about me like I’m proprietary software. Maybe you should sue him.”

  “If you think I haven’t investigated that option, you’re mistaken.”

  “Right. Well, look. Like I said, I have your doodad, so they won’t be using tracing it back to your project.”

  “It’s incredibly valuable, so I’m glad, but I’m told it’s effectively untraceable.”

  “Sure.”

  Sheila thought whoever told him that was lying to him, but that wasn’t her problem.

  “I know you don’t appreciate it when I question your methods, Shiva, but why didn’t you end it today?”

  “An opportunity didn’t present,” she said. “And you’re right, I don’t appreciate it. Is there anything else?”

  “No,” he said. “But. I do want to correct you on one detail. You aren’t as hard to kill as you think. I will call again tomorrow. Try to answer more promptly.”

  He hung up. She resisted the impulse to smash the phone into tiny pieces.

  Instead, she opened up the map of Boston that had been so handy over the past month. Somewhere on that map was the ideal location for a bomb.

  “I’ll sleep on it,” she said, after a minute. “That’s faster.”

  Then she lay down on the cot and closed her eyes. It was time to visit the future.

  “Let me see if I have this right,” Erica said. “You were in a coma, and then…”

  “It wasn’t a coma,” Corrigan said. “They told me it wasn’t a coma. I just wasn’t waking up.”

  “All right, well, neither of us are doctors, but that sounds like a coma, doesn’t it?”

  “Sure.”

  “I mean, I was in one.”

  “You were, yes,” he said.

  “Doesn’t make me an expert in comas, but I don’t remember being all that lucid.”

  “Go on with what you were saying.”

  They were in a corner of one of the Mass General Hospital’s cafeterias, which meant if they did need an expert on comas, they could probably get their hands on one by standing on the table and loudly asking if there was a doctor in the house. This would likely distress their FBI guards, who had already gone through a lot of trouble to recon the room and secure the corner table. Erica was nearly positive that Sheila wasn’t anywhere near the hospital any longer, but given she had already proven capable of getting in and out of just about any building, their need to make sure was only sensible.

  “While you were in this not-coma,” she said, “you were visiting the future, and in that future, you saw the scene out front. Except it wasn’t exactly the scene out front.”

  “Right. I was supposed to go out the front, under escort. She was supposed to show up and attack us, in order to kill me.”

  “Did she?”

  “Did she show up?” he asked.

  “Did she kill you, in this future.”

  “Yeah, I think so. I woke up before it got that far.”

  “That’s what woke you out of your not-coma?” she asked.

  “It was pretty shocking, yes.”

  “She killed you with a gun?”

  “Again, yes.”

  “Even though you’re kind of hard to get a straight shot on.”

&nbs
p; She remembered the story about Corrigan, from when he was a kid. He’d encountered another person with the same abilities: an asylum patient, who was armed. Corrigan, at twelve, was capable enough to prevent this guy from getting a clean shot off.

  “I’m not saying it made a lot of sense,” Corrigan said. “But that was how the future played out. So we changed the future.”

  “Then she changed it even more.”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Which means, she can go ahead, the same as you. You guys are just diving in to a certain point in the near-future, and taking turns altering it.”

  Corrigan shrugged.

  “I’ve never even done that before. Not like this. I used to…this was how I saw accidents coming, before, when I was still working as a fixer. Accidents are louder. I’d go into the future in my sleep, find an accident, and remember the time and location.”

  “Then you have done it before.”

  “Yes, but this wasn’t an accident I witnessed. It was a murder.”

  “Maybe there’s an exception when you’re witnessing your own murder,” she said. “I wouldn’t invest too much into this being something new for you; pretty sure those rules about only stopping accidents came from your head. There’s certainly no scientific explanation.”

  “Right.”

  He took a sip from his coffee and looked as if he was focusing on something going on at the other end of the room. This was about normal for him, she decided.

  “Your turn,” he said. “You shot her. Tell me about that.”

  Erica walked him through what happened. He looked suitably impressed.

  “Maggie showed you the device?” she asked, once the story was told.

  “Yeah. It messed with my head. I can see why she thought it would be useful, and why Sheila wanted it back.”

  “Yes, but…hang on. It was blown up in the truck, right? She didn’t get it.”

  “She did get it,” Corrigan said. “I saw it in her hand.”

  Erica grabbed her bag from the floor and started rummaging around in it.

  “Patel,” she said, “Can you call Maggie?”

  “Sure,” he said. “What for?”

  Erica pulled out the small plastic box she’d been carrying around since the day Sheila dropped it.

  “Tell her I think we have a way to track Sheila Corrigan’s location.”

  The news got Maggie to the cafeteria pretty fast.

  “You can track her?” she asked, while still halfway across the room. “Great, where is she?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Erica said. “And it’s just a theory.”

  Maggie sighed, in the way people tended to around Erica, whenever she said the word theory.

  “What’s the theory, then?”

  “We use this,” Erica said. She put the black plastic box on the table.

  “That’s the thing that doesn’t work,” Maggie said. “The thing that doesn’t track the signal the device doesn’t give off.”

  “I’m sorry,” Corrigan said. “What did you just say?”

  “It’s complicated,” Erica said. “So I’ve been thinking about it for a while, because I like complicated things.”

  “Great,” Maggie said. “Did you figure something out?”

  “Maybe.”

  Erica pushed the box across the table, until it was in front of Corrigan.

  He shrugged, and picked it up. After about thirty seconds, he said, “wow, this is neat.”

  “Is there something on the display?” Erica asked.

  All she’d been able to figure out so far was that the box had a front and a back. The front was clear plastic, but nothing ever came up on it.

  “Yeah,” Corrigan said. He held it up to show them.

  “It looks the same,” Maggie said.

  “Yes, there’s nothing there,” Patel agreed.

  “It’s only lighting up in the future,” Erica explained. “That’s why we can’t see anything. But he can.”

  “In the…how?” Maggie asked. “How is that even possible?”

  “I’m not sure,” Erica said. “Objects have a certain permanence, but something happening in the present can stop happening in the future. Assuming the future has some positional indifference, there’s no reason to think something can happen in the future and not in the present. I’ve never seen considered in any work before, but…”

  “Okay,” Maggie said, “okay, never mind, forget I asked. Corrigan, what does it say?”

  He looked at the display again.

  “I’m thinking when it gets closer it has some kind of hot-cold component to it,” he said, “because there are two parts of the screen. One part has a faintly blinking dot that changes position when I move it. But we’re not close.”

  “And the other part of the screen?” Maggie asked.

  “N 42.36, W 71.15. That’s all it says.”

  “Those are GPS coordinates,” Patel said.

  “Yes, they are,” Maggie agreed. “If we find out where it is, maybe we can get ahead of her for once.”

  “Can we?” Erica asked. “What I mean is, isn’t that what happened earlier?”

  “She’s right,” Corrigan said. “That’s exactly what happened earlier. I think we can agree, it didn’t work the way we wanted it to.”

  Maggie looked like she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Erica couldn’t blame her for that; it had been a long night, and this stuff was headache-inducing.

  “I can’t go to Justin with news that we’ve located the suspect, again, and we can’t do anything,” she said. “That’s not how any of this works.”

  “It’s near Boston Harbor,” Patel said.

  “What?” Maggie asked.

  “The GPS location.”

  “Do you think she’s on a boat?”

  “Could be,” he said. “But she doesn’t have to be.”

  “Do you think she’s swimming?”

  “No, that isn’t what I mean,” Patel said. “She could be on the shore. These coordinates aren’t precise enough.”

  “I wouldn’t be on a boat, if I were her,” Corrigan said.

  “Why’s that?” Maggie asked.

  “It would nullify my abilities. If I was out on a boat, and you wanted to kill me...”

  “Right, we could just torpedo the boat. I don’t think the FBI has torpedoes, but maybe we can borrow one.”

  “If she was on a boat,” Patel said, “it would fit the available information. We’ve had this woman’s photo posted throughout the city; if she was sitting in a room at one of the harbor hotels, I feel as if we’d already know this.”

  “We’ll have to do an aerial survey. Corrigan, how do you feel about a tour of the city in a helicopter?”

  He was grimacing before she even finished the sentence. Erica forgot sometimes how different long conversations were for him.

  It must be like watching a play you’ve already read, she thought.

  “I’m not fond of the idea,” he said.

  “If she’s on land, we need to know what part,” Maggie said.

  “If she’s on a boat, she’ll see the helicopter and know she’d been identified,” Patel said.

  “She’s not on a boat,” Corrigan insisted.

  “Then we don’t have anything to worry about,” Maggie said. “Except for how it’s apparently impossible to come up with a plan to capture her.”

  “We can go in with overwhelming force,” Patel said. “She’s still only one person.”

  “One person with a large supply of C-4, in the middle of a city.”

  “That will only do her any good if she knows where to put the bombs, right?”

  Maggie glared at him.

  “Are you suggesting someone who we already know can see the future won’t know where to put her bombs?” Maggie asked.

  “I’ll go alone,” Corrigan said.

  “No.”

  “Maggie, it’s the only way. I’m the only one whose movements she can’t entirely anticipate.”


  “You can barely walk, Corrigan. It’s not an option.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Erica said. “We’re not dealing with someone who knows the future. She’s dealing with likely outcomes, right? Once you’ve narrowed down her location, the most likely outcome is to go in with a team. So, plan to do that. Walk it right up to the last minute, and then don’t. Do something else instead.”

  “As soon as you say that, the something else becomes more likely,” Patel said. “Doesn’t it?”

  “Bourbon,” Maggie said, “and a cigarette. Who’s with me?”

  “I can alter my actions in a way she can’t see,” Corrigan said. “Plan the assault, I’ll order the team’s movements myself, and I’ll go in.”

  “Still no,” Maggie said. “We need an army of Corrigans before my answer changes.”

  Corrigan had a Eureka expression before Maggie finished talking. Erica wondered if Maggie saw it too, and had just practiced ignoring it, because sometimes it was kind of eerie.

  “What is it?” Erica asked.

  “I have an idea,” he said. “You two are going to hate it.”

  Sheila awoke with a start, shaking, and covered in sweat.

  She sat up, slowly, and tried to get her bearings.

  I’m in Boston. In a crate. Nothing’s happened yet. Remember your training.

  She closed her eyes again and took a few cleansing breaths, concentrating on bringing down her heart rate.

  Relax.

  She could hear the words of the man who taught her how to tap into her own dreams.

  The future is what you make of it, he was fond of saying. He had no idea how much more literal that was for her than for anybody else, because she never told him what was really going on when she slept.

  She was exploring her own future. It was something she’d done since she was a kid, which—along with the everyday weirdness of seeing things happen a few seconds before they actually happened—made for a pretty messed up childhood. It was years before she worked out how she knew about big events like plane crashes and earthquakes a day or two beforehand.