Time Sensitive

by Elyse Douglas

  Table of Contents

  TIME SENSITIVE

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Quotes

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  PART 3

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  EPILOGUE 2018

  Thank You!

  TIME SENSITIVE

  Time Travel Suspense

  by

  Elyse Douglas

  Copyright

  Time Sensitive

  Copyright © 2019 by Elyse Douglas

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The copying, reproduction and distribution of this e-book via any means, without permission of the author, is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and refuse to participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s intellectual property rights is greatly appreciated.

  Dedication

  For Lillian: thanks for the newspaper article.

  Quotes

  Time flies over us but leaves its shadow behind.

  —Nathaniel Hawthorne

  CHAPTER 1

  In 1968, when I was twenty-six years old, my husband and two daughters perished in a fire. Paul, Lacey, and Lyn all died—gone in a flash, in a senseless accident—gone from my life forever.

  Until recently, I had taken pride in the belief that I had moved on with my life. After all, the tragedy had occurred many years before and people are expected to push away the memories and let time heal all things. People are expected to recover and find the strength and the will to keep going on with their lives. And that’s exactly what I had done, or thought I had done, until lately.

  It was after I retired and was diagnosed with atherosclerosis that the old ghosts began to awaken and lift their heads, especially deep in the night. They brought back the darkness, the guilt and the regret. As I lay in bed, I could smell the spring scent of the girls as they slept. I could see Paul lingering in a shadowy corner, his expression tender, his fingers beckoning. My sick heart began to ache, just as it had all those years ago.

  I knew I should have bypass surgery, but I kept putting it off. I don’t know why. I’m usually aggressive and a good problem-solver. I’m not a procrastinator, but as the days progressed, I awoke to the disheartening realization that my heart had never truly mended. It was still broken, as shattered as it was on Wednesday, June 5, 1968. What truly hurts, and has been broken, cannot be cured by bypass surgery.

  In 1968, I was one of the few women who worked for the NSA in Fort Meade, Maryland. I was the only female linguist analyst; I had always been proficient in languages and spoke French, German and Spanish fluently. While NSA stands for the National Security Agency, we often called it “No Such Agency,” because we were a secret agency, responsible for tracking Communists, peace activists, black and white radicals, civil rights leaders, and even drug peddlers. My job, specifically, was focused on crypto systems and intelligence interpretation. As the volumes of data came flooding in, I extrapolated and distilled it into clear, concise and potentially useful facts. It wasn’t easy, and it took hours and weeks and months to sort through the often trivial and useless mountains of files and codes to find only a word or a sentence or a series of numbers that were worthy of being quarantined or flagged as possibly urgent and valuable.

  I was good at it—not my words, but my boss’s words, Steven Case’s words. There were no personal computers in 1968, and although we had some impressive technology for our day, it couldn’t compare with the technological capabilities of today. In those days, intelligence gathering was tedious, time-consuming, mind-numbing and impressionistic, at best. An IBM Mainframe, with its 256k memory and punch cards, did some analysis, and we human analysts did the rest.

  I worked too many hours, worked too many weekends and ignored my family, and, in the end, I paid dearly for it. Of course, after the tragedy occurred, I saw things more clearly—don’t we always in hindsight? Doesn’t the fog lift and the full flood of baking sun reveal all our failings and bad choices—all our painful regrets?

  I had arrogantly taken my family for granted and when they were snatched away from me in that sudden, awful and violent way, I saw how utterly selfish and stupid I’d been. But it was too late. As they say, what’s done is done. You can’t go back—at least I couldn’t go back then—to 1968.

  But then there was my friend, Luke, who suggested the impossible, that perhaps I could go back in time and right all the wrongs. Assuming, of course, that I wasn’t killed in the process.

  CHAPTER 2

  I first heard about Cyrano Conklin and TEMPUS from Luke Baker, a former colleague at the National Security Agency. Luke and I had worked together for many years and had retired around the same time. Luke was also one of the few people still alive who knew about the personal tragedy which had changed my life forever.

  Luke called me one Saturday morning in February 2018 and invited me to breakfast. We met at the Pancake House and I ordered eggs, bacon, white toast and coffee. Luke got the blueberry pancakes. After we had ordered, he asked me an intriguing question.

  “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Is that a joke? I’ve kept secrets my entire life, Luke. So did you. That’s what we did for a living.”

  “This is a big secret. As they used to say, this is one of the mother-of-all-time secrets.”

  I kept waiting for his explanation and he kept putting me off, saying he needed the fortification of pancakes before he could talk business.

  Finally, he pushed his empty plate aside and leaned back. “I hope you’re not angry at me, Charlotte, but I did something quite on impulse.”

  “That’s not like you,” I said. “When was the last time either of us did anything on impulse? We’re not the impulsive types.”

  “Exactly,” Luke said. “But we’re not getting any younger, are we? I’ll be seventy-seven years old in two weeks. You just turned seventy-six, right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Luke had white hair, a bit of a paunch, and steady blue eyes. He wore Benjamin Franklin style wire-rimmed glasses that made him look a bit owlish.

  “So what have you done, Luke?” I asked, pushing my plate away and sipping coffee. “The eggs and pancakes are gone. Out with it.”

  He leaned in and spoke at a near whisper. “TEMPUS…”

  “Okay… Tempus in Latin means time,” I said.

  “How is your Latin?”

  “Not the best. Not the worst,” I answered. “As someone said about Shakespeare, I have small Latin and less Greek.”

  “Do you know the Latin word Itinerantur?”

  “If my Catholic school training serves, it means journey.”

  “Or travel.”

  “Okay, if you say so.”

  “Time travel,” L
uke said as if I should know what he was talking about.

  “Luke, I know secrets were your business, but I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  Luke pursed his lips and reached for his water. He drank. He considered. He stared at me.

  “Remember the Manhattan Project? Do you still have that near photographic memory you used to dazzle us with, Charlotte?”

  I closed my eyes and reached back into my memory files. “Top secret group of physicists and government officials who were part of the research and development undertaken during World War II to produce the first nuclear weapons. The first research was based at Columbia University, the University of Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley. Nuclear facilities were built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and… let me think… yes, Hanford, Washington. The main assembly plant was built at Los Alamos, New Mexico.”

  I opened my eyes, proud of my still vigorous recall.

  Luke grinned, pleased. “Okay, smarty pants, who was the physicist in charge of putting all the pieces together?”

  “Easy one. Robert Oppenheimer, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley.”

  “More coffee?” Luke asked.

  “Why not?”

  After our cups were refilled, and the waitress had retreated, Luke smiled at me strangely.

  “Do you know the name Cyrano Conklin?”

  “Never heard of him,” I said.

  “But you will.”

  “Okay. Enlighten me.”

  “Professor of physics at Oxford and MIT. He’s in his 50s. He’s a genius, which means he’s a little nuts. For the last seven years, he and five other physicists have been secretly doing research and development for a thing called the Tempus Project.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “They’ve been working very assiduously on time travel.”

  I glanced away, shaking my head. “Are you serious? Time travel?”

  He jerked a nod. “Very.”

  I aimed my skeptical eyes at him. “Time travel what?”

  He lowered his voice to a near whisper. “They are currently looking for candidates who are willing to undergo testing for possible time travel. In short, I submitted your name.”

  I stared at him, struggling to read his face. Was this a joke?

  “I hear your clever and analytical mind thinking, Charlotte. But it’s no joke.”

  I felt oddly amused, oddly intrigued, and oddly outraged.

  “I don’t know what to say, but first of all, why didn’t you ask me first before submitting my name? I don’t know who these people are, what the hell this TEMPUS thing is all about and…”

  Luke broke in. “… Charlotte, think about it. Just stop and think for a minute. If I had told you, you would have said no… no ifs, ands or buts. Secondly, you fit all the criteria they are looking for.”

  “And what is that, Luke?” I asked, raising my voice.

  He took in a breath. “Brutally honest?”

  “Sure, why not? Be brutal.”

  “You’re alone. No family. Few friends. Nothing to live for…”

  He threw up a hand to stop me from speaking.

  “Your words, Charlotte, not mine. And you have a deep, deep regret and hatred for yourself that you have never been able to shake, not with all the shrinks, the self-help, the booze or even a brief stint with religion.”

  I blinked fast. I couldn’t stop blinking. His words hurt.

  “You spent your whole life working for the NSA, Charlotte, working massive hours, being forced by your bosses to take vacations and time off. Now that you’re retired, you don’t know what to do with yourself, so you drink and read and, I suspect, you are just waiting for death.”

  “Luke, that’s not fair.”

  “Hear me out. Have you scheduled your bypass surgery yet?”

  I stared at him. “No, but that doesn’t mean I’m curling up into a ball and waiting for death.” I took in a sharp breath and turned my head from him. I was angry. I was scared. I was not able to process the idea of time travel. It was too fantastic. Too out of reach. Too crazy.

  Luke reached for my hand and gently squeezed it. “Charlotte… I have had a good life, a fulfilling life: a successful marriage, three great kids, a grandson, and satisfying work. I have watched you struggle for years, unhappy and hurting. I’ve seen how your guilt has eaten away at you. I was not supposed to know about the Tempus Project. I stumbled onto it through an email error—someone at the NSA mistakenly cc’d me on a memo. Isn’t that how wars are won or lost, how dictators fall, and how families are saved? When I read it, I thought of you and I contacted Cyrano Conklin and told him your story. He is very interested.”

  Luke reached into his shirt pocket, drew out a card and slid it across the table.

  “What have you got to lose, Charlotte? What do you have to gain? Just think about it. If there was any possibility that you could return to the past and save your family—no matter how remote and seemingly impossible it seems—how would that change your life? You could spend whatever time you have left watching your daughters grow up. You could see your husband, Paul, alive again and know that you saved them after all. Isn’t that worth considering? You may get the second chance that no one else on this Earth has ever been given. You have the chance of getting your family back. Isn’t it worth a simple interview with Cyrano Conklin?”

  CHAPTER 3

  Like many married couples, Paul and I often had variations on the same conversation. I remember this one because it occurred on the morning of Tuesday, June 4, 1968. Steven Case, my boss, had once again asked for volunteers to work late. Politics were highly charged that summer, and the NSA was receiving a barrage of information about possible assassinations. Since the country had gone through three assassinations in less than five years, JFK in November 1963, Malcolm X in February 1965 and Martin Luther King in April 1968, we took the information seriously. There was also new data about possible violent protests at the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In addition, we were monitoring the Vietnam peace talks going on in Paris between the U.S. and North Vietnam.

  I told Paul that I might have to work until at least eight o’clock.

  “Charlotte, the girls were looking forward to having dinner with you. I promised them last night that you’d be home tonight.”

  “I know it’s hard for you, Paul, and I don’t want to disappoint them. But at least they’ll grow up with a good role model, they’ll know that I’m a dedicated professional, that women can perform meaningful and important work and make a difference in this world. When I was growing up that wasn’t even a possibility.”

  “That’s all well and good, but we got married so we could also be together and have a family. We talked about balancing work and family.”

  “Okay, so sometimes the balance is a little off, but that’s how things are. Right now, my job requires I give a little more than usual. It will change. I’ve told you this.”

  “It hasn’t changed, Charlotte. You’ve been giving more and more to your job and less to the girls.”

  I got defensive. “I give what I can right now, okay? This is 1968, and things are changing for women. Our lives are finally changing for the better. I just want to be a part of that change.”

  Paul sighed. “I know you do, Charlotte. All I’m saying is, don’t forget us while you’re out there changing the world.”

  “That’s not fair, Paul,” I shot back harshly. “You know I love you and the girls. You know I’m always here for you if you need me.”

  Even as I said those words, I anticipated his response.

  “Charlotte, honey, you’re missing so much of the girls’ childhoods, their special moments. Not to mention last week’s parent-teacher conferences.”

  I bristled. “Paul, they’re only in preschool.”

  I lit a cigarette, took a puff and then snuffed it out, folding my arms tightly against my chest.

  Paul continued. “But it’s important for you to
hear how they’re doing. And it puts me on the spot. Most of the time I don’t know when you’re coming home or how late you’ll be. It’s just that there are times when we all miss you, and that’s happening more and more.”

  “I do what I can do,” I snapped. “I have a very responsible job. You have no idea the pressure I’m under, what we’re monitoring, between the race riots and the demonstrations against the Vietnam War, which is not going to end any time soon, I can assure you, no matter what the politicians say. I’m working hard to protect our country and make the world a safer place for you and the girls; a better place for everybody.”

  I laugh at myself now, even as I write those words, those old, arrogant, self-important words.

  I secretly knew I was wrong. I knew my family should have come first. No one had twisted my arm to marry Paul, and I was happy to give birth to our two lovely daughters, three-year-old Lacey and five-year-old Lyn. I was selfish. I wanted it all, or, to be blatantly honest, I wanted the status and the respect I got from my job first, and then I gave to my family whatever I had left over, which frankly, wasn’t all that much.

  Reducing my work hours was something I could have done. I could have worked from nine to five. No one was twisting my arm—none of my bosses. But then everyone was working long hours—the men were working long hours and they weren’t seeing their kids either. I had to keep up, didn’t I? I was one of the few women in that department. I had the men’s respect and I wanted to keep their respect, didn’t I?

  I could have balanced my work life and my family life. Women do it all the time, now, but I chose not to. I made the choice: me first, and I paid for that choice in the worst possible way.

  Many people recall that night in 1968. It was the night Robert Kennedy was shot, assassinated in the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel a few minutes after midnight, after delivering a speech to his campaign workers. It was an event that dramatically changed the United States if not the world. Being the fourth assassination in the U.S. in five years, it felt as though the country was disintegrating into chaos, and people wondered if our democracy could survive all the violence.