Solar Flares & Tax Snares

by Rachel Ford

  Dixon didn’t notice, or if he did, he didn’t remark it. He just crossed the space toward the room opposite. There were three doors here, and an open doorway behind the reception desk. The doorway led to a small room – some kind of breakroom, from the looks of it. Alfred saw a refrigerator in passing, and a set of office armchairs, the kind that would be just slightly more comfortable than the floor, so the employer’s obligation was filled but no one would linger too long over lunch or break. Two doors sat on opposite sides of the room near the back, neatly concealed by matching half walls and potted plants. Behind the foliage, he spotted white symbols, and realized these were restrooms – men on the right, women on the left.

  The third and final door sat opposite the elevator. No efforts had been made to conceal it. It was dark, made of tinted glass and metal that sat well with the general futuristic vibe of the place. A large brass nameplate hung on the wall, declaring this to be the office of Fred Donaldson himself.

  Dixon didn’t knock. He strode over, seized the handle, and pushed it open. Gloria, Alfred saw with a measure of relief, had upheld her end of the bargain: she’d unlocked the door.

  The special agent stepped inside, blurting out his name and occupation as before. Alfred followed, and froze at about the same time the other cut off speaking.

  The taxman was standing in a puddle of blood – and there was more of that all around them: blood on the walls, blood on the desk, and blood all over the suit-clad figure sitting behind the desk, his throat slit wide open.

  Chapter Two

  Alfred tried to get out of the room before he vomited, but he didn’t make it in time. Stomach bile and his half-digested lunch mixed with the blood on the marble floor.

  Dixon regarded him with disapprobation. “Great job, Favero. Contaminating a crime scene.”

  But Alfred was pretty sure that boat had already sailed. Dixon’s fingerprints were all over the door handle. They’d both tramped through the blood on the floor. Their footprints led every which way, obscuring any tracks that might have been there before. What was a little puke added to the mix?

  The police officers who responded weren’t impressed with Alfred’s reasoning, though – or any part of the situation. A burly officer whose badge read Harris spent an entire thirty seconds silently scrutinizing the taxman after they’d reached this part of the story. “So then you…threw up on a crime scene?”

  “I didn’t mean to. But…well, I’ve never seen a guy whose throat had been cut.”

  “How long did you say you’ve been an agent?”

  “Analyst,” he corrected. “Senior analyst.”

  “I guess that explains that. So what exactly is a senior analyst doing on a crime scene, anyway?”

  “We didn’t know it was a crime scene. I mean, we knew it was the scene of tax crimes. But we didn’t expect to find a murder. It was a murder, right? Not a suicide?”

  “His throat is cut, Mr. Favero.”

  “Right. Murder then.”

  The officer took him back to the station, and took his statement, and his shoes since they were covered in blood and possibly evidence. But mostly, as soon as they realized that Alfred knew very little, they concentrated their questions on Dixon.

  Alfred sat waiting in an uncomfortable police station chair, in an austere lobby, while the special agent gave his statement – and argued, it seemed, with the cops over jurisdiction. He heard upraised voices, and snippets of conversation. The chief stomped into the conference room after a while, and a few minutes later, Director Caspersen showed up.

  She paused for a moment to check in on Alfred, but ascertaining that he was fine, she too headed to the conference room. He heard more shouting, but they’d drawn the blinds. He couldn’t tell who was winning and who was losing.

  He still couldn’t tell when they marched out, both sides looking grim-faced and angry. Caspersen and Dixon headed for him. “Let’s go,” Caspersen said.

  “This isn’t over, Caspersen,” Chief Harlow called.

  “You bet your ass it isn’t, Harlow.”

  Alfred waited until they were outside. Then he asked, “What was that about?”

  “Jurisdiction. They’re trying to say that we’re off the case now that murder’s involved. I say that’s bullshit. If there’s financial crimes here, and Dixon’s analysis makes it pretty clear that there are, they’re probably behind what happened. Which means it needs to be a joint operation.”

  Alfred nodded. “But they don’t want that?”

  “No. But he backed down when I started mentioning bringing the FBI in.”

  Alfred wrinkled his nose. “Ugh. We don’t want to deal with them too, do we?” In his experience, the feds were always territorial. It didn’t matter what branch. The IRS certainly was. So had the FBI been, the few times he’d worked with them. Heck, even the Postal Service’s special agents could be bastards in their own right. Not that he would have used that term, exactly. He would have opted for something milder, like stinkers or pains in the backside. But they’d been as territorial as the best of them.

  “No. But the cops want them involved even less than we do. So, for now anyway, they’re cooperating.

  “They want you both off the case until they’ve ruled you out as suspects. Which they should have done already. The guy was dead for at least an hour before you got there, based on lividity and temperature. The medical examiner will confirm that soon enough. And there’s cameras all over the place, so they have your arrival time. And they’ll be working with our own security people to get the footage of you arriving at our building, and your badge scans to get in, and so on.

  “So you’ll be cleared today, I would hope. They may drag their feet a little longer, just to be –” She glanced at Alfred, whose abhorrence of curse words was well known around the office, and seemed to reconsider her word choice. At length, she settled on, “Uncooperative.

  “But they’re sending over the data today. Harlow’s going to have his techs work on copying it.”

  The special agent frowned. “I’d prefer if we got the devices.”

  “Me too. But they agreed Nancy can work with them.”

  Alfred nodded. With Nance on the case, he figured there’d be nothing to worry about.

  “We’re going to need to make this our top priority, gentlemen. And not just for the obvious reasons. We need to figure it out, and we can’t count on Harlow’s cooperativeness lasting long.

  “But this is going to be a big deal. The governor is neck deep in the financial side of this. We need to figure out if he was actively involved in fraud. It might have been a see no evil, hear no evil arrangement. Which means, he’ll walk. The worst that’ll happen is some political fallout.

  “But if he was involved, that means he’s possibly also linked to the murder – either having a hand in it if he and Donaldson fell out, or potentially being in danger himself if their dirty politics is finally catching up to them.

  “And any way this plays out…whether we end up nailing the governor for fraud, or taking a threat to him off the streets…we have to know what we’re up against, as soon as possible.”

  The murder business naturally put the committee out of everyone’s thoughts. Indeed, Alfred didn’t even see Nance until after midnight. She’d texted him, of course. “I’m so glad you’re alright, babe. Caspersen’s got me working late on the data recovery. I’ll be home as soon as I can. I love you.”

  He’d waited up for her. At least, he’d tried. His eyes had refused to stay open past ten o’clock, though. So she found him sound asleep in a recliner when she got home, little Satan, their kitten, curled up in his lap.

  He woke up to the sound of Satan’s joyful yowling, and her voice. As much as the cat liked – or tolerated – Alfred, it was definitely Nancy’s baby. As for Nance, she looked tired. She had the beginnings of dark circles under her eyes – but a smile on her face too. “Oh babe. You didn’t have to wait up for me.”

  He yawned and pushed to his feet. Satan –
or Fluff, as that was his real name – had already jumped onto the arm of the chair and was crying for Nancy’s attention. “Of course I did, Nance.”

  She kissed him, and then gave into the cat’s demands for pets too. “My two handsome men,” she said.

  “I have food waiting,” he said. “Take out, but I thought you’d be hungry.”

  “Starving,” she admitted.

  “Well, there’s coconut chicken in the fridge. And crab Rangoon.”

  She sighed appreciatively. “You are a godsend, Alfred Favero. Come on – I’m going to eat, and you tell me what the hell happened today. I’ve got bits and pieces of it out of people, but that’s it.”

  So Alfred followed her into the room, and so did Fluff. The little monster screamed the whole way, and jumped up onto the kitchen island as soon as they pulled up their stools. They’d both long ago given up on training the cat to stay off the counters. He was incorrigible, and Nance incapable of being firm with him. Even Alfred had had his increasingly frequent moments of weakness, until at last they’d given up the pretense.

  So she ate out of the food cartons, and pet Satan; and he filled her in on the day’s goings on.

  He’d just reached the part about the shouting match between the police chief and Director Caspersen when a third voice sounded in their kitchen. “What are you two still doing up?”

  Nancy yelped, and Alfred almost fell off his stool in his haste to turn around and face the intruder. But by time he saw the other man, he recognized the voice. And he cringed. Special Agent Roger Winthrop of the Interdimensional Bureau of Temporal Investigation was almost never a welcome guest. His unannounced arrivals – intrusions – never precipitated good things.

  Because aside from their day jobs with the IRS, Nancy and Alfred were agents of the IBTI – an interdimensional police force devoted to maintaining time-space continuity against incursions. They’d been recruited after committing a few of those incursions themselves, with the prototype spacetime manipulator they’d found in their first case together, for the IRS. The IBTI had given them the option of joining their ranks or losing the device.

  They’d chosen the former. And regretted it at semi-regular intervals ever since: whenever Roger Winthrop showed up with a new case for them.

  “Son-of-a-biscuit,” Alfred said. “Can you not knock at the door like a normal person?”

  “Calm yourself, Alfred. It’s after midnight. I figured you’d be asleep.”

  “You do realize that that isn’t helping you, right? That just means you planned to creep around the house in the middle of the night.”

  “I wasn’t going to creep. I was going to wait until you got up. And maybe grab something to eat.” Now, he eyed Nancy’s takeout boxes hungrily.

  That was another thing Alfred couldn’t stand about the other man. He’d been born in eighteenth century England, and as a rule he didn’t like returning to his own time period or his own flat. He said he liked the conveniences of running water and electricity too much to go to his own home. Which Alfred could understand, of course. What he couldn’t understand was his propensity to consider their home his; and their food, his.

  “I’ve been eating out of the box. But if you want some, grab a plate,” Nancy said.

  Winthrop grinned and raced over to the cupboards. He knew his way remarkably well around their kitchen, which was no great surprise to the taxman. He’d been there often enough, hadn’t he?

  Nancy shoveled some food out for him, and for a minute he seemed too intent on eating to explain himself. So Alfred prodded, “I assume you have a reason for showing up in the middle of the night?”

  The Englishman nodded and spoke through a mouthful of food. “There’s a case. A doozy of a case.”

  “We’re a little tied up on a case of our own,” Alfred said. “A doozy of a case.”

  “Someone was murdered,” Nancy explained.

  But Winthrop brushed this aside. “I’m sure it’s frightfully important, of course. But I doubt your murder case has the potential to end all life as we know it. So I’m afraid this one takes precedence.”

  Chapter Three

  Alfred knew Winthrop well enough to know that the man rarely told the full story. So either this was pure hype to get them onboard, or else something truly awful was afoot. Either way, he decided his own story would wait.

  And, indeed, it did wait – until the Englishman ate his chicken and Rangoon, in fact. Then, he sat back in his seat. “I don’t suppose I could put on some coffee? It’s been a frightfully long day. You never think it will be, do you? Not with the ability to travel through time. And yet, it seems I never have enough hours in a day.”

  Nance volunteered to make the coffee, but Alfred got up to do it. He wouldn’t have bothered for Winthrop’s sake, but he would for hers. So, contentedly, the other man started his story. And in classic fashion, he started not by divulging anything himself, but by asking a question. “Tell me, what do you know about the planet GJ-273b?”

  Alfred paused mid-scoop, the coffee hovering over the filter, and shot a look back at Nance. Her eyes, meanwhile, darted to him. The fact was, they at once knew a lot, and very little. But almost none of what they did know had been widely disseminated; because what they knew involved the extraterrestrial inhabitants of the planet, called the Geejays. In their time, only a handful of government spooks and diplomats even knew the Geejays existed. And Alfred and Nancy, because they’d stumbled onto a Geejayan ambassador during the Landing Site Earth case.

  “Oh, yes, I understand most of what you know is probably classified in your time period. But you need not worry about that. We know all about the Geejayan people – that’s not their real name, you know. It’s what the earth governments of the mid-nineteen hundred’s called them, and they stuck with it in their dealings with you people for simplicity’s sake. But I digress. The IBTI is well acquainted with them.”

  “Then…why do you need to know what we know?”

  “Because I need to know how much I need to bring you up to speed on.”

  Which, Alfred conceded, was a fair point. So he ran through his accidental encounter with Ambassador Li Muldan, and their subsequent friendship. He acknowledged busting them out of a top-secret government bunker on the mistaken hypothesis that the alien had been taken prisoner. He explained how they’d disguised them with makeup and Nancy’s cosplaying wigs to appear human, and how they’d eventually been apprehended. He finished with their parting, and Li’s return to their home planet.

  Winthrop listened, laughing and shaking his head in turns. “Well, not your finest moment, I must say. But I suppose it all turned out well in the end.

  “And, for our purposes, your cock-up might just be the best luck we’ve had yet.”

  Alfred frowned at him. “Always happy to help.”

  “For various reasons – which will become apparent shortly – the IBTI has had limited success establishing communication with the Geejays. Well, in the time we’re going to, your friend Ambassador Muldan is much older. They are, as you know, a genderless people. Muldan and their partner have three offspring. They don’t call them children, by the way.

  “Muldan is both advisor and…well, I’m not really sure what they call it. Progenitor-in-law, if you will, to the planet’s premier. Which is why, of course, we’re knocking on your door in the middle of the night.”

  “You didn’t knock,” the taxman found it necessary to point out. “You didn’t even use the door…”

  Winthrop ignored the comment. “We are hoping your established relationship will smooth away any mistrust that might perhaps linger.”

  Nancy’s eyebrow arched. “And why would there be lingering mistrust? And between whom? The Geejays and the IBTI?”

  Winthrop turned to Alfred. “How’s that coffee coming along?”

  “Oh no you don’t,” Nancy said. “You don’t get a sip until you tell us the truth. The whole truth. None of your withholding information, Roger.”

  The other m
an sighed, exasperatedly. “I’m not withholding information, Nancy. It’s just been a very long day. And it’s a long story. I don’t want to forget any details.”

  She considered for a moment, then sighed. “Fine. But you better not lie to us this time.”

  “I never lie to you, Nancy. And really, I resent the charge. I have never once told you something that wasn’t true. And while you might not appreciate the need for discretion –”

  He went on for a while longer, but Alfred tuned him out. Winthrop had an endless supply of justifications for withholding vital information, and he really wasn’t interested. He grabbed coffee, first for the Englishman and then for himself and Nance. Finally, he took up his place beside her. “You have your coffee. So what did the IBTI do to the Geejays?”

  Winthrop snorted. “And why would you assume we did anything to them?” Then, ignoring Alfred’s skeptical laugh, he said. “But, as it happens, we are, technically, at fault. Through no design, mind. It was just an accident. But the Geejays have long memories.”

  “What did you do?”

  Winthrop took a long sip of his coffee and sighed. “It wasn’t me. It was one of our new recruits, at the time, anyway. Not that, in our business, that means much. At any rate, he was a new chap, from one of the Melbournes, in a multiverse where – believe it or not – Australia ended up ruling the planet. Name of Robert.

  “Anyway, Robert was tasked with first contact. He was supposed to land on GJ 273 b – the planet. He put in the coordinates for GJ 273 – the star. Easy mistake to make, especially when you’re new. Still, as you can imagine, as soon as he landed…” The other man made a brisk motion with his hands, signifying some manner of abrupt end. Alfred couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be an explosion or a conflagration, or something else entirely. “Very unpleasant business, of course. Once we figured out what he’d done, one of ours went back in time and stopped him before he set out. Problem solved.