Winston Chase- The Complete Trilogy

by Bodhi St John

  “Good man. We’d rather be too thorough here than miss something, yes?”

  Bledsoe tapped the earpiece, cutting the connection. He groaned and rubbed his eyes. He needed to sleep, but it would have to wait until he got word from the team of Amanda’s capture. He felt a jolt of excitement twist through his chest at the thought. After years of watching her from halfway around the world, he would finally be able to speak to her in person. She would fear and hate him at first. That was unavoidable. In time, though…

  Things could change. Everything could change.

  Bledsoe closed his eyes and allowed himself a moment to let his mind roam free into the dream he’d been building since 1948. Normally, such meditations energized him. Not tonight, though. There was much left to take care of, and being fifty thousand feet in the air set him on edge. The engine noise on these Gulfstream C-37A planes purred with eerie calm compared to the roaring four-propeller lions built by Douglas and Boeing back in the ‘30s. Too quiet, too comfortable, the Gulfstream cruised over the Pacific at nearly the speed of sound.

  Bledsoe feared flying in general, and whatever he feared he made certain to understand completely. Facts kept the world in order and the fear at arm’s length. He knew why a Gulfstream C-37A used twin Rolls-Royce turbofan engines and how the plane would survive if one engine failed. He sat in the back row because statistics showed a 69 percent survival rate for plane crash passengers seated in a plane’s tail — 15 percent better than those in front of the wing.

  The plane’s cabin contained only fourteen chairs, all but one of them empty. It gave the place a surreal air, like sitting amidst graveyard tombstones. Moreover, between the leather upholstery, wood paneling, touchscreen displays, and three-course meal, the amount of waste here was astronomical. It would offend the sensibilities of anyone who had lived through the Great Depression, especially in Texas.

  The Gulfstream’s opulence reminded him of flying aboard Air Force One in July of 2001. Perhaps being in the presence of the president and his staff had made that Boeing 747 seem excessively lavish. Bledsoe spent most of that flight from Seattle to Washington, D.C. in the guest section, but had finally been allowed twenty minutes with the president’s chief special projects adviser in an office adjacent to the Presidential Suite.

  The room was no marvel of interior decoration. No stunning chandeliers glittered above finely framed artwork. Even the chevron-shaped desk looked more like veneered pressboard than fine hardwood. Still, the room could have held twenty people, and empty space impressed Bledsoe in an environment that should have offered little more than perfectly regulated air, recessed lighting, and plush carpet. Empty space indicated that the President’s advisor valued simplicity and efficiency.

  No sooner had they sat down than the president himself poked his head in and shook Bledsoe’s hand. That instant felt like the high point of Bledsoe’s life. In only a short time, he had gone from being utterly lost, with everything and everyone he’d ever known vanishing in the blink of an eye, to meeting the president of the United States. The commander in chief left almost as quickly as he’d entered, though, and over the next twenty minutes, his sense of victory ebbed. The adviser, a heavyset man named Marks who must have been close to retirement, asked a few questions about 1948 and Area X. Then he leaned back, put his feet up on the desk, and with a surprisingly adolescent grin asked, “The little green men — is it true? You met one?”

  Bledsoe didn’t know how to reply, so he only nodded.

  “And you’ve got that alien stuff, the QV things…” Marks waggled a finger at Bledsoe’s body. “…all running around inside you?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s how I was able to come forward from 1948.”

  “I was one year old in 1948," the adviser mused. "If I could go back, I’d like to meet Lou Boudreau.”

  Bledsoe had no idea who that was, and it clearly showed on his face.

  “Lou Boudreau,” repeated Marks. “American League MVP for 1948. The man who helped end Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak in 1941.”

  “Why not meet DiMaggio?” asked Bledsoe.

  The adolescent grin vanished, and something cold and hard came into the older man’s eyes. “Because being the best is just about God-given talent and a lot of hard work. But being able to beat the best? That takes something else.”

  Marks gave him a little wink and laughed.

  Bledsoe had expected to brief the president about his research, to explain his theory on how the alien ship generated its unique type of alpha radiation, and how this knowledge might help to reverse engineer a similar technology for America. However, no sooner had Bledsoe started down his carefully rehearsed speech with Marks than the adviser raised his hand.

  “I know all about that stuff. What I want to know is how we get the time machine thing.”

  “I don’t think it’s possible, sir,” Bledsoe lied. “There were five objects, five interoperating pieces of the machine. Three were left behind in 1948 to be destroyed in the blast. I believe they were designed to be disposable, but we don’t yet know how to create new ones.”

  He believed nothing of the kind. The bit about Alpha Machine pieces being destroyed was intentional misdirection, and he couldn’t read Marks’ face well enough to know if the man believed him or not.

  While in the mind-lurching nowhere between time and space, hovering before a wall of infinite possible futures, Bledsoe had been dimly aware of Claude holding on to the Alpha Machine as the strange reality around them blurred and bubbled on ribbons of white energy. Bledsoe had tried to wrest the machine from Claude’s grasp, causing all of them to emerge suddenly in the spring of 1989. They had fallen apart in dazed, anxious wonder just long enough for Claude and Amanda to reactivate the machine and vanish, stranding him. Bledsoe didn’t know where or when the couple would land, but he did know that Claude possessed all five Alpha Machine pieces.

  Marks leaned forward. In the mammoth jet’s disorienting quiet, the crackling of the adviser’s leather chair as he shifted sounded loud and ominous. “But that still leaves two pieces we can find and study. Those pieces are our new Holy Grail, and we need them.”

  “I agree, sir,” said Bledsoe. “But finding these people… They could be anywhere in the world, and at any time. They’re not just a needle in a haystack. They’re a needle in a hayfield, and we don’t even know which country the field is in.”

  “Mr. Bledsoe, we have a lot of new technologies since your time. We have ways of finding needles.”

  “With all due respect, sir, I don’t think the world would have the slightest idea about me if I hadn’t come forward. Most of the workers in Area X were careful with their privacy. This couple we’re searching for won’t come forward. They’ll hide. For that matter, I don’t know if they went back and brought more people forward. I’m sure they were planning to hide long before blowing up the facility. Finding them now would take eyes in every building, on every street corner, everywhere…”

  Marks cocked his head thoughtfully, as if listening to some inaudible echo, and each time the words bounced back to him, his face grew a little less blank and a little more cunning.

  “I can do that,” he said.

  Five years later, there wasn’t a camera on every street corner — Bledsoe could blame rights activists and their obsession with privacy for that — but it was getting closer. The computers behind those cameras continued to improve in finding patterns and recognizing faces. Finally, one day in December 2006, Management’s system had flagged a photo posted to OregonLive.com showing a crowd shot from some elementary school’s holiday pageant. The system dismissed it as a low probability match. The nose and cheekbones were off. The longer Bledsoe stared at it, though, the more he wondered. In the end, he convinced Management to send an investigating team and had his hunch confirmed. Amanda, it turned out, had a kid, but alpha particle scans confirmed that she did not have the Alpha Machine.

  After much debate, Bledsoe convinced Management to leave Amanda an
d her boy out as a fly on the water, waiting for a bigger fish to swallow it. Meanwhile, Bledsoe had gotten his lab. He wasn’t in charge of the revived Project Majestic, but he had free rein to do whatever he wanted as long as he could demonstrate ongoing progress. It allowed him the chance to continue exploration into QVs. And in the endless hours of running tests and managing a lab, he had the time to slowly, painstakingly plan how he would remake the world when the Alpha Machine finally fell into his hands.

  ***

  From the database of obscure numeric facts stuck in his head, Winston knew that it took an average of seventeen city blocks to make one mile, although there was no defined length for a block. The MAX light-rail station waited twelve blocks away, or roughly 0.7 mile. Running that distance in three minutes flat would put him in the top 10 percent of fourteen-year-old runners, which was a given. He didn’t know the speed of his opponents, though…or if the train would be on time.

  A few steps into his sprint, Winston cleared the motel’s corner and locked in on the black sedan. The LED glow by the driver’s head had vanished, which meant the men were just sitting there, waiting. For what? Reinforcements, probably. Telling his mom she had sixty seconds to pack might have been optimistic.

  Winston couldn’t reach full speed while dodging around cars, but he gave it his best shot. Both men in the sedan turned their heads toward him. The driver appeared to be in mid-sentence when his mouth stalled with surprise.

  That was the problem. Neither of them moved. If Winston simply ran past them, they were likely to drive in pursuit, and that wasn’t going to work.

  For half a second, Winston thought about banging on the driver’s side window, but that was too risky. A lifetime’s worth of reruns, everything from Starsky & Hutch to The Dukes of Hazzard, gave him another thought.

  Half a dozen more steps brought him within range. The passenger raised his hands, as if to protect himself.

  Winston changed his angle of approach slightly and twisted as he jumped. His butt landed just above the driver’s side headlight. He slid along the length of the hood, suddenly grateful that cars didn’t use hood ornaments anymore. The rivets in his back pockets scraped across the paint, leaving long gouges in the black finish.

  During his second-long slide, hands in the air as if on a roller coaster, Winston noticed his mom’s motel room. One of the curtains bent back. She must be watching.

  The thought only formed in his mind as he reached the far edge of the hood. His hands slammed down, smacking into the metal, propelling him off the hood and back onto pavement. He hit it at a run, then checked himself.

  Not too fast. Listen…

  The car doors opened. A man, probably the driver, yelled, “Stop!”

  Winston smiled and poured on the speed, pausing only to lift both elbows in front of his face when he hit the scrubby arborvitae trees lining the motel property.

  As he broke through, Winston realized he hadn’t taken traffic into account. At this hour, the streets were mostly empty, but two cars revved down the street right before him. The nearest one blared a quick warning. Winston came up short, skidding, and almost tripped over the curb. The second car passed. Winston pushed off, head down, clearing all four lanes in a few long strides.

  When he reached the far sidewalk, Winston glanced over his shoulder and saw the two agents struggling through the arborvitae. Good. Then Winston realized that he’d forgotten to take the weight of his pack into account and how it would slow him down. He had left himself an extra minute. He’d need every second.

  Winston made it one block, then two. A Safeway supermarket filled the next block. When he reached it, Winston found the agents only a hundred yards behind him. They looked serious but far from winded. In fact, they appeared downright angry, as if their leisurely morning coffee date had been interrupted by the possible humiliation of telling all the guys back at work they’d been run into the ground by a fourteen-year-old.

  Careful, he thought. Don’t get overconf—

  A uniformed man rounded the corner at the far end of the block. He was dressed in black from his leather shoes to his jacket, which featured patches on the shoulders and a badge on the chest.

  “Hey! Grab him!” shouted one of the agents.

  For an instant, Winston hoped the man was a security guard coming off of a long graveyard shift. Of course, he was never that lucky. The man turned, revealing the outline of a gun holstered on his hip. Reflexively, the cop’s hand reached toward his pistol, then he paused to assess the situation: some kid with a big backpack coming at him out of the early morning gloom at a dead run, pursued by two adults calling for help. Winston thought of dodging to the right and going for the far curb, but his peripheral vision told him that a big SUV and a long delivery truck were keeping pace with him in the right lane, blocking him from crossing.

  It happened without thinking. Winston only knew that he was being pursued from behind, was blocked on the right, and the guy in front of him now had his fingers wrapped around his pistol grip. Two steps before the supermarket’s front doors, Winston didn’t wonder what a detour would do to his chances of making his target on time. He merely threw his shoulder into the first door.

  The jarring impact slammed through Winston’s body. He staggered, nearly fell, and pain shot through his left arm. His fingers tingled. Why was the store closed when the lights were all on?

  The sign answered him. Above the door handle, a decal suggested, “PULL.”

  Winston cried out in exasperation. He yanked the door open and nearly crashed into a waist-high rack of Portland-themed sweat jackets.

  “Wait!” cried a man’s voice behind Winston.

  He didn’t pause to look. He dashed past an unattended checkout aisle and into the freezer section. At this hour, the store staff were finishing their inventory stocking, and Winston had to dart around piles of boxes, two pallet jacks, and a wheeled mop bucket. Before he even knew what to do with it, Winston slowed just enough to grab the mop jutting from the yellow bucket with his left hand. The bucket teetered, spinning away from Winston on two wheels as the mop came free. The bucket collided into the freezer with a loud crack, and a wash of gray water spilled across the aisle.

  Winston reached the end of the freezer aisle and searched for the swinging double doors that every supermarket had leading into the stock room. Only a few steps behind him, the two agents splashed into the mop water. This should have been the part where they slipped, feet flying into the air, and landed with giant sounds of “oof!” and skulls smacking into hard tile. Unfortunately, these weren’t the comics. When people ran through water, it only made a little splash. The agents never slowed.

  As Winston scanned desperately for the back doors, the men barreled down the freezer section, wet-bottomed loafers smacking on the tile. They were nearly on him. He thought about turning and trying to fight them off with the mop. In a Jackie Chan movie, he would devise a hundred different ways to disable his pursuers with a wet mop head and a stack of Totinos pizzas, but this was real life, and he despaired.

  Way down at the end of the meat aisle, an aproned butcher pushed through the swinging doors with a trolley of shrink-wrapped steaks. Doors! Winston sprinted.

  Something behind him squeaked, and Winston risked a quick glance. As they’d come around the end of the freezer section, pulling a hard right in pursuit, the older agent in front had leaned too far into the turn. His still-wet right foot slid on the tile, sweeping into his left, and his legs suddenly went sideways. The determined pursuit on his face suddenly changed to shock as he lost altitude. His hip banged into the floor, but momentum kept his body sliding forward.

  The agent tumbled under a display table showcasing two large pyramids of boxed doughnuts. The table lurched backward with the impact, and a cascade of pastries rained down on the man, half-burying him.

  Moths to flames, cops to doughnuts, thought Winston as he turned back and barely clipped the edge of the meat trolley.

  The second agent must hav
e stopped to help, because he heard the lead agent shout, “Get him!” even as he was trying to free himself from the doughnut avalanche.

  Winston slammed through the swinging double doors. He heard the butcher call out, “Hey, you can’t—” but Winston was already deep into the dimly lit area. A rectangular window in a door to his left showed the butchers’ cutting and packaging chamber. To his right was a large room piled with bags of crushed soda cans. He passed a row of blue lockers, and then, at the end of the concrete hallway, saw two doors with long bar handles and a red-lettered EXIT sign hanging over them.

  Winston heard the two agents bang through the first set of doors. He dashed to the exit, pushed down on one of the release bars, and shoved. The bar hammered into the door, but nothing happened.

  He wondered if he needed to pull instead, but that couldn’t be right.

  He shoved harder. Nothing.

  Only when Winston stepped back did he notice the sign: “Lock broken. Use north exit.”

  “This way!” yelled one of the agents.

  They were almost on him. Winston was trapped. There was no way he could backtrack and find a different exit without getting caught.

  He hefted the mop in his hand, again wondering if there was any way he could fight off two trained government agents with a soggy-topped stick.

  No way.

  He threw the mop aside, and it clattered against the wall.

  No, not a wall. A door. And on the door, printed in gold letters on a black, easy-to-miss sticker, was the word “STAIRS.”

  Winston cranked on the knob and dashed through, taking the steps two at a time, arms pumping. No sooner had the door below clanked shut than it slammed open again and banged into the wall. The sound in the narrow, cement stairwell felt like a gunshot.

  Winston rushed to a door with the number 2 painted next to it. More stairs led off to his left. He opened the door wide, then ran higher up the stairs as quietly as he could.