Fortune

by Craig W. Turner

  She leaned forward. “What if terrorists got this technology? Hell, let’s take it down to the most simplistic level for you. What if your biggest rival in college got the technology and went back, stole your ideas, and put himself on your career path. You wouldn’t feel too good about it, would you?”

  “I suppose I’d never know.”

  “You suppose,” she said, repeating him, then taking a delicate sip. “But look, I know you didn’t fly out here to talk philosophy with me. Lay it on me. What disaster did you cause with your little invention?”

  “My friend, Dexter...”

  “Dr. Murphy?”

  “We lost him,” he said. “Well, not actually lost him. We know exactly where he is. Or, rather, when he is.”

  Her eyes widened across the table from him. “You... left him in the past?”

  “We were attacked. Everything happened very quickly, but, yes, we left him in the past. He told us to, and there wasn’t any choice – if we hadn’t, none of us would have gotten back.”

  “When in the past?”

  “Well, Major Garvey’s time. 1770.”

  Erica sat back in her chair again and glanced around the coffee shop. Jeff watched her face as she processed what he was saying. He interpreted her expressions as wonder, then anger, followed by bewilderment, and ending in a harshly judgmental laugh. “Well, you really stuck your foot in it this time, didn’t you?”

  “That we did.”

  “Your friend with the scar?”

  Jeff shook his head. “Everyone else is fine.”

  She threw her hands up in exasperation. “So you’re here to ask me to help you find him. What would possibly make you think coming to me was a good idea?” He would have to get past her scorn.

  “Because Dexter told me to.”

  “How?”

  Jeff reached into his satchel and pulled out Dexter’s journal. He opened it to the appropriate page and handed it across the table to Erica, who took it from him, scanning his friend’s last entry, bookmarked just for her. “Dexter had been keeping a journal of our plans, in case anything went wrong. He tactically showed it to me just days before we went on this mission.”

  She looked up. “Mission? Is that what you call this? Like you’re a secret agent?”

  He shrugged. “Just for lack of a better term,” he said, his voice trailing off.

  She continued reading. “That Erica girl,” she said out loud. “Good way to endear me to the cause.” After a moment, she shut the journal. “Did the cell phone thing work?”

  “It did.” He purposefully hid a smile.

  “No way.” The first time she’d seemed intrigued. Even let down her defense for a moment.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know how it worked, but it did. I can ring up his exact location on Friend Finder. He’s at Market and Third Streets. Can you help?”

  “While I’m very flattered that, after you insult me and blow my world apart, your friend has the confidence in me to have you ask me for help, I think I need to know a little bit more about what’s going on first.” He was pleased that at least it wasn’t a “no.”

  Nodding, Jeff said, “I’ll tell you the story.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “We’d planned to go after Major Garvey’s gemstones.”

  “I figured.” She finally went back to her coffee as she listened. Jeff’s still sat untouched in front of him.

  “So we posed as British soldiers, carrying a message to Garvey from the King.”

  “What was the message?”

  “It said that Colonel Windermere wanted an accounting of all Colonial land dealings within Garvey’s territory. Dexter said that Garvey would have been on top of those.”

  “Well, yes,” she said. “Garvey was exceptionally hungry for land and the Colonials knew it. It was why burning down his home was such an iconic victory, though no one claimed credit for it.”

  Pretty clear why Dexter would see Erica as a kindred spirit. “The gambit worked and we were invited into the house. Garvey left us alone in his study while he went upstairs to look for something. During that time, Dexter loosened the chest from its moorings and I kept watch. We got the chest free and got it outside into the patio area when Dexter all of a sudden ran back into the house. He yelled for us to leave without him, which I refused to do until a bunch of Red Coats bashed through the door with their rifles pointed at us. It was a choice of live or die, so Abby pulled the trigger on the device and we were back in the present time.”

  “Abby?”

  “She’s the fourth member of our team. She’s a mathematician.”

  Erica sat stunned for a moment. Actually, longer than a moment. To Jeff, it was as if everything around them slowed down as she pondered what the next words out of her mouth were going to be. Finally, she looked down and shook her head. “I have so many questions right now.”

  “Fire away.”

  “I can’t even choose one to start with,” she said. “You haven’t been able to ascertain what happened to him?”

  He shook his head no.

  “Well, we know he’s dead. He was either shot on sight or hanged shortly thereafter. The British weren’t a forgiving bunch during that time period. Your friend is probably right that they would’ve held him in the prison garrison, probably the Old Stone Jail – you said Third and Market Streets, right? It should be easy enough to find out what happened to him. Though it probably won’t be pretty. Prison conditions were deplorable.”

  “So you’ll help?” he asked, hopefully.

  “Slow down. So you were able to engage the time... device, you called it... that quickly? On a moment’s notice, it was ready and would send you to the right place and time?” She snapped her fingers.

  “Abby’s algorithms are flawless. She’s very much responsible for the success of our travels. Once we arrived in 1770, she programmed it and had it ready to go for the necessary moment’s notice. The calculations take some time, but she has them figured out before we ever need them. If you agree to help us, you’ll obviously get to see how it works.” The table next to them had been empty until now, but a bearded man with a knit cap and an e-reader sat down, so Jeff made a mental note to keep his comments about being in 1770 a little quieter.

  “And a moment later, you feel you would’ve been shot?”

  “They may have actually gotten a shot off. We don’t know. Emeka and I owe our lives to Abby’s reflexes. That’s assuming we would’ve been shot on sight. At the least, they would have taken the device and made it impossible for us to return.”

  “And were you successful? Did you get the chest?”

  “No, we didn’t.”

  “At the studio, why did you say that Garvey stole the gemstones?”

  “Because he did,” he said. “The chest never left the premises. I saw it sitting there. It confused me when I first read about it after getting back, knowing we hadn’t taken them, but he must have used the story of the robbery to cash in on the jewels. He returned to England, was decommissioned, and moved back to America after the war. Where would he have gotten the money to do that?”

  “You read Darby’s paper?”

  He smiled. “How do you people know all this stuff?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You and Dexter can just pull this stuff out of your brains.”

  “Well, I don’t know how your friend studies, but I use an eidetic memory.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Well, close enough. That’s how I’ve been able to do well in this business – by being able to tuck some research in the back of my head and bring it out when necessary. I’m sure Dexter’s the same way.”

  “Pretty impressive.”

  “Actually, though, this whole thing is a great example of how you and I see history differently,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “Everything you just said. You read some researcher’s work and inferred that not only was she correct in her assumptions – which wer
e, if I remember correctly, assumptions – but since Garvey came to America, it meant that he had to use the gemstones for his own purposes. You’ve been doing an awful lot of inferring.”

  “But how else do you interpret history? Not everything’s spelled out for us.”

  “But it is.” She shook her head, taking another sip of her coffee. “Things happened the way they were supposed to happen. The ‘why’ is not nearly as important as the ‘what.’“

  “I thought the importance in learning our history is not to repeat its mistakes.”

  “Is it? Is it really? Each of us makes decisions on a daily basis that affect people around us – and we never really know the scope of that. Obviously, someone like the President makes a decision and affects hundreds of millions of people, and his decisions get written about in the history books. But you, yourself, made decisions just today that affected people, and each decision you made set off another set of circumstances that have now become history. Does it make sense for us to analyze every one of those decisions, or build on them? What’s more important? That they happened or why they happened?”

  “But some decisions are more important than others.”

  “Sure they are,” she said. She was on a roll. He was hoping that her passion was bringing her closer to helping them, rather than further from it. “But in big and small decisions, the ‘why’ is less important than the fact that the decision was made. Second-guessing history is a waste of time. ‘What if?’ Who cares? Does it matter why Lincoln went to the theatre that night? Not really – it just matters that he went and that Booth shot him. Does it matter why you decided to rush out of the house one day without brushing your teeth and just happened to meet the girl of your dreams when you weren’t ready to, or does it just matter that it happened? It’s not our place to guess what someone’s motives were when they made their mark on history.”

  “Brushing my teeth?” Jeff frowned at her analogy; she was too much like Dexter.

  She laughed in spite of herself. “It’s the most trivial daily decision I can think of,” she said, which made him laugh, too. “Just about the only time the ‘why’ matters is when you’re screwing around with time travel.”

  He sighed. “I guess I see your point... But, Erica, it doesn’t change my question. Will you help me get my friend back?” He felt like a used car salesman continuously dragging her back to the buying decision. It seemed to work better for them.

  Erica shook her head back and forth while processing something, then finally spoke. “I can’t promise anything,” she said. “The cell phone thing helps. In fact, it tells us that he wasn’t shot on sight in Garvey’s house, so there would be a window of opportunity. But there are a lot of variables in play that could really confuse things. I don’t want you to think this would be an easy rescue.”

  “Believe me, I wouldn’t.”

  Without a word, she picked up her purse and started digging through it, ultimately producing a pen. “Let’s do this,” she said, pulling a napkin from the dispenser on the table and writing an address on it. “Meet me at my office tomorrow morning at 9:30 – assuming you’re not flying back right away. I need to digest all of this without you right in my face. Let me see what I can come up with and we’ll talk in the morning when I can have some research capabilities in front of me. That work?”

  “Anything you need,” he said, taking the napkin from her. “Honestly, I’m grateful that you’re even talking to me. I know I put you out.” He was sincere. He liked her, and was sad to have hurt her.

  “Don’t be self-defeating,” she said. “If I can figure this out, that’ll be two things you have to make up to me.”

  Erica stood and marched out of the coffee shop, leaving Jeff alone with a still full cup of coffee. For the moment, he felt as though he’d accomplished what he’d gone there to do, but her last comments about not expecting an easy rescue hung in the air behind her. Up until these last few days since they’d left Dexter behind, he’d had a feeling of omnipotence, that his invention gave him the power to do pretty much whatever he’d pleased. But she was right. There were no guarantees. The truth was that his friend was dead right now, and that it was in large part his fault. Worse, he was dead and gone in a way that there would be no mechanism to remember him, to honorably send him off and give his friends and family the opportunity to properly mourn him. And unless they could pull off a near impossible feat, he would stay that way. Jeff had needed someone to put it in perspective for him, and even though Erica’s involvement made him feel a step closer to getting things back to normal, everything suddenly seemed a little bleaker.

  He glanced down at the napkin. “Stanford?” He said out loud, drawing a look from his bearded neighbor. He thought Stanford was something like an hour away. She was going to make him work to get her answer.

  Leaving his cup on the table, Jeff left the coffee shop to find somewhere to stay for the night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The last time she’d seen Jeff Jacobs, it hadn’t ended well. It hadn’t started particularly well either, but it definitely hadn’t ended well. While today’s meeting had left Erica with an awful lot of questions, it felt more promising. Well, by comparison.

  While it had been almost painful to see him standing in front of her in the studio, at the same time it had been a welcome surprise. As much as she loathed the idea, she was fascinated with his ridiculous story. As a result, she felt a connection with him. Maybe it was just to learn more about what he was up to, but the link between them was impossible to ignore. Even if everything was a charade, why he would single her out was intriguing in itself.

  On the ride to the coffee shop, the flurry of emotions that had carried her home from New York just a few days before had rushed back. She, of course, being an academic, did her best to suppress the emotion in order to think things through more clearly. What she came up with was that, if Jeff was indeed telling the truth, in that he had actually created a time travel device which he could use to go back in history and change events, it really didn’t matter what he’d done to date. Mainly because what was done was done. There was no second-guessing at this point. History had been made, and just like the historians who question what would’ve happened if the U.S. Navy had sniffed out the kamikaze attack on Pearl Harbor a day before, or Kennedy had canceled his trip to Dallas, it really didn’t matter because things transpired the way they did, and now we have that history in our record books, not some other. Jeff had said pretty much the same thing, but she was not going to admit to him that they were in agreement.

  What was critical was that he didn’t do anything like it again.

  It was that ideal, developed on the short drive from the studio, that had spurred her to get involved. She’d read it in Jeff’s eyes that day at his house – he was not intending to stop. Like any scientist hell bent on discovery, he was going to keep pushing the envelope to see what greater accomplishments he could achieve. Then, there was the way he talked at the coffee shop. His friend being marooned in Colonial times was merely a speed bump for him, disturbing as it was. To her, it was a good bet that if they were somehow successful in rescuing Dexter Murphy, Jeff would even try to persuade him to keep going. The only way for her to prevent that from happening was for her to stay close to him.

  Which meant helping him rescue his friend, and working to make sure that this was the last trip. Realistically, she didn’t believe the rescue could be done. Using the same logic of what’s done is done, there just didn’t seem to be a way for them to go back and put Humpty-Dumpty back together again. Because there wasn’t any such thing as “back together.” History had been written the way that had led them to that moment. End of story. Trying to change history “back” in her mind was probably even more dangerous than what Jeff did in the first place. But, if it was a means to an end – the end being putting the entire time travel thing to rest - and by involving herself she could have some control over the details, she felt she didn’t have a choice but to
engage. Almost as if she owed it to history; at the least, she’d decided she owed it to her own history to find out whether Jeff was telling the truth, or if the whole thing was a magnificently constructed charade for fulfill some darker purpose.

  As she walked among a mixed crowd of business people and tourists, she dug in her purse for her cell phone. She tabbed through the phone book while trying to walk a straight line, which proved to be impossible on the busy street. Instead, she finally ducked inside the entrance way of a tucked-in-the-wall sushi restaurant that she made note of to check out some time. Able to focus, she scrolled through the listings on her phone until she found the number she wanted and dialed.

  A ringback tone played into her ear, and she immediately recognized it as the “Brickmaker March,” a fife-and-drum favorite of American Revolution buffs. She found herself humming along when the other end of the line clicked alive. “Hello?”

  “Rosalynn?”

  An elderly Southern woman’s voice came through the line. “Yes?”

  “Rosalynn, it’s Erica Danforth.”

  She could hear a smile on the other end of the line. “Erica Danforth. I haven’t heard that name in a long time, but I have to admit that I thought of you recently. When those two young fellows were on the news saying they found the gold from the Wilton heist. Were you a part of that, at all?”

  “I’ve met with them, yes,” she said as she spun and covered her left ear to drown out the sound of a MUNI bus passing by.

  “Were they legitimate?”

  “I can’t argue otherwise.”

  “Well, that’s got to make you happy,” she said. When they’d known each other, studying parallel tracks for a semester at Stanford, Erica had found Rosalynn Darby to be a sweet woman, always encouraging to the younger students. Rosalynn had returned to school to study history after a successful career in finance – Market President for one of the larger banks in the Southeast, she’d explained in her high-pitched drawl, as if that position alone explained her return to academia. Erica did think that her research and her theories were a little misguided, but she was a fountain of knowledge in regards to the American Revolution.