The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  “What are they doing right now?” I murmured. She watched in silence for a few moments before she spoke.

  “Somebody’s at the desk,” she said, “doing something with the telephone. One of them has a file cabinet open. It may be Jimmy. I can’t see, but I think he’s maybe photographing documents. He’s flipping through the file drawers and pulling stuff out, but he isn’t actually taking anything.”

  “That would explain why the burglary was never reported,” Mom pointed out. “If they only broke in to take photos and nothing was stolen, maybe no one ever knew.”

  “That’s only two,” I said. “Where are the other three?”

  “They’re doing something weird with the ceiling,” she said. “Two of them are standing on chairs and they’re taking down ceiling panels and handing them to a third guy. I don’t understand.”

  “I think I do,” said my mother grimly. “Look at the building plans again.”

  “What am I looking at?” said Calliope.

  “Look at whose office that is.”

  “It’s the secretary’s office.”

  “No, not that one. Not the office they’re in now. Look whose office is next door.”

  “Who’s next door?” I whispered.

  “Lawrence O’Brien,” said Calliope. “Chairman of the Democratic National Committee.”

  “Oh my God,” I whispered as it all clicked into place. “Mom. Mom. They’re wiretaps.”

  “They’re putting bugs in the ceiling,” said Calliope. “They’re eavesdropping on the DNC chairman next door. Reggie, it’s just like Kitty said.”

  “Kitty who?”

  “Never mind, Mom. Look, this is it. This is the crisis point. Somebody from our time is spying on the Democrats. They’re trying to steal the election. If Nixon loses then Reagan isn’t president and if Reagan isn’t president then there’s no war with China. This is how it happened, Mom, this is how they did it.”

  “We were right,” she said softly. “God help us, Regina, we were right.”

  There was a heavy silence, broken by a sharp inhalation from Calliope.

  “Goddammit,” she said. “Goddammit, Reggie, you idiot.”

  “What? What did I do?”

  “The security guard just came back through the garage,” she said. “The same one as before. He’s stopped at the stairwell door.”

  “Oh no,” I whispered.

  “Reggie, he’s going to see the tape.”

  Shit. The tape.

  “We need to get you out of there,” said Calliope sharply. “He’s coming up the stairs. And there are three more life signs moving in from the lobby.”

  “I need to get my hands on one of those wiretaps,” I said.

  “No, you need to get out of here before you’re arrested,” said my mother. Again, I could feel Calliope silently adding.

  “I told you guys you should have sent someone else,” I snapped defensively. “I told you.”

  “Yeah, well—” Calliope started to respond but my mother cut her off.

  “Later,” she said briskly. “No time for that now. We need to get you out of the building. Calliope, options.”

  “Stairwell is blocked,” she said. “No fire escape. No way out through the windows. She’s going to have to take her chances with the elevator.”

  “That’s clear on the other side of the bullpen,” my mom said.

  “Yeah. She’s going to have to run.”

  I grabbed the pencil and pulled the Microcam off it, pinning it back into my hair and tiptoed out back through the interconnected offices the same way I had come. The burglars, who had no idea the guards were closing in, were absorbed in their work and didn’t notice me. Once I had reached the last door, I heard thunderous footsteps and bolted for cover, finding myself inside a maze of cubicles.

  “Left, then left,” said Calliope. I got on my knees and crawled, following her instructions. “Right. Left. Left. Right.”

  Then the stairwell door crashed open.

  “Police! Come out with your hands up!”

  “Goddammit,” said one of the voices, and a lazy drawl followed it with, “All right, you caught us”, in a surprisingly calm, somewhat amused tone.

  “For God’s sake, keep moving,” said Calliope. “Left, then right, then you’re there.” I reached the end of the cubicle maze, but there were twenty feet of open ground between me and the elevator. “You’ll just have to chance it,” said Calliope, reading my mind. “They’ve got all five men. They’re distracted. Go low, and fast. Go.”

  I melted into the shadows along the wall, pressing my body up against it and trying to disappear as I bent low and moved as fast as I could towards the elevator. I pounded the DOWN button over and over and over again, looking desperately behind me as it crawled with excruciating slowness up to the 6th floor. Finally it arrived, with a soft ding, and I dove in without waiting to see if the police or the burglars had heard it.

  “Parking garage. Now,” snapped Calliope. I pushed the button marked P and then endured the most excruciatingly slow elevator ride of my life. I was jumping out of my skin by the time the door opened.

  “No life signs,” she said. “You’re clear. Now send the elevator back up to the lobby. Hopefully no one will notice it was gone.” I pushed the button marked L and stepped out. The garage was empty, but it felt even more sinister then it had before. I abandoned all subtlety and caution, sprinting like a crazy person to the apartment building entrance on the other side.

  They were nice enough to give me a few minutes’ grace period, and as I stepped out of the elevator in front of my apartment – sending it back down to the lobby too, just in case – and then closed and bolted my door behind me with shaking fingers, I had a brief interlude of silence to collect myself.

  A very brief interlude.

  “Regina Theresa Bellows, what in the name of God were you thinking?”

  They had apparently decided between the two of them that my mother would go first, and she had clearly been working on some new material as I was scampering through the parking garage picturing security guards on my heels. It was some of her finest work, and even though I pulled out my earpiece and set it down on the bedside table while I took off my clothes and sank into the soft green depths of the bed, I could still hear every word with crystal clarity.

  “ . . . the first thing you learned on your first day at the Academy, you don’t touch anything if you don’t know what it is,” she was saying. “The security guard would never have known the burglars were in the building if you hadn’t replaced the tape. Now the readings over here are going crazy and five men have been arrested and we have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen next. All you had to do, Regina, all you had to do, was go inside that building and do one scan and then leave. This is so typical. You never think about the consequences of anything. You just float along, expecting everything to turn out all right, and you never stop to think.”

  “Ma’am, it’s very late over there,” said Calliope in her best soothing-the-raging-beast voice, the one she saved for Grove when he was in a particularly grumpy mood in the mornings. “She needs sleep. Why don’t we give her a break until tomorrow morning and then she can call in when we have more information on what the fallout of this is going to be, and in the meantime she can get some rest. We can’t do anything right now, and neither can she.”

  I turned out the lamp and the snaky jungle vines melted into darkness. Dimly, I could hear that Calliope and my mother had stepped away from the Comm to bicker privately, and I could make out a line here and there – the higher-pitched voice, Calliope’s, saying “Yes, well, what’s done is done” and the lower-pitched (and much angrier) voice barking something about interference levels and “still no closer to knowing who commissioned those wiretaps.”

  I had long since stopped caring. I closed my eyes and felt the coiled-up tension in my body release. My mother was right – I had screwed up, and badly. But Calliope was also right – I could do nothing a
bout it now. Right now, the only thing I wanted was to disappear into the darkness and put this night behind me. Drained and exhausted, I snuggled deeply into my satiny green pillows and let the comforting sound of Calliope and my mother shouting at each other through my earpiece lull me to sleep.

  Ten

  I Said Be Careful, His Bow Tie Is Really a Camera

  I slept away most of Saturday, ignoring multiple calls from my mother, before finally dragging myself out of bed in the late afternoon. Attempting to put off the inevitable as long as possible, I rang Calliope first instead.

  “Good morning, sunshine,” she said dryly as the screen blinked to life, and I was irritated to see that even though she was in the same clothes she was wearing yesterday and could hardly have gotten any more sleep than I had, she was as bright-eyed and peppy as always. Her hair was still perfect, and she hardly even looked rumpled. I hated her a little bit and grumbled a cranky greeting as I put grounds in the coffee maker.

  (This was another of my particular specialties, which Katie Bellows disdained as an utter waste of time. I can make coffee in any decade of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Academy’s prop shop had a whole closet of coffee makers, all different shapes and sizes, from percolators to pour-overs, and I taught myself how to use them all. This was the only part of my job Leo had ever been genuinely interested in.)

  “Are you making coffee in your underwear?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “It was a long night,” I said. “Clothes make me tired.”

  “You know your mother’s been trying to reach you for the last five hours, right?”

  “Oh, believe me, I know.”

  “We can talk for five minutes,” she said. “And then I’m going to have to ring her and tell her that I have you on Comm.”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “This isn’t a negotiation,” she said. “I don’t have a second offer. Five minutes is the offer. And you’re wasting them.”

  “Fine.”

  “You know you have to tell her what Kitty told you,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Nobody else is going to make the connection between a burglary gone wrong in Washington and a Miami yacht party that never actually happened.”

  “I know.”

  “We have no idea how far back this plan to sabotage the Democrats goes, and we might be the only people who know that this wasn’t an isolated incident.”

  “I know, Calliope.”

  “And if there’s a greater conspiracy to sabotage the Democrats and steal the election—”

  “I said I know.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I assumed you’d be more difficult than this and I put a lot of effort into my speech.”

  “It was a good speech.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And we’re on the same page.”

  “Good.”

  “Except—”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “I’m just wondering if there’s any way for me to tell her about Kitty while leaving out the part where I got arrested for accidentally propositioning a cop.”

  “There is not.”

  “Damn.”

  “Think of it this way,” she said. “For the rest of your life, this is the absolute worst that breaking bad news to your mother is ever going to get.”

  “Challenge accepted.”

  “Okay, time’s up,” she said. “I’m calling her.” The screen on my handheld split from one image to two, and my mother’s face appeared next to Calliope’s.

  “Are you in your underwear?” she said with a horrified expression, and I noted that she too looked fresh as a daisy despite also still wearing last night’s clothes. Apparently I was the only one on the team who actually needed sleep.

  “Hello, Mom.”

  “I’ve been trying to call you for—”

  “I know, Mom.”

  “Because we have a lot of—”

  “I got arrested,” I said, and was pleased to see how thoroughly that silenced her. I took a deep breath and poured the whole rest of the story out in a rush. “There was a guy at the train station when I first got here and I thought he was the Embed, but he obviously wasn’t, and in the course of trying to set up a meet with him, I said some stuff that he interpreted as being, well, suggestive, so he basically thought I was a prostitute—”

  “He what?”

  “ . . . which to be clear, I was totally not propositioning him, but anyway, so I was in jail for a couple of hours—”

  “You were where?”

  “I swear this will go so much faster if you just let me finish. Anyway, so I’m in this jail cell with this girl named Kitty; she actually is a prostitute. She got picked up by the same cop, and we got to talking, and I told her I was working undercover for the FBI—”

  “You said what?”

  “Mom!”

  “Just let her finish,” said Calliope.

  “Fine,” said my mother, through clenched teeth, and remained silent for the duration of the story.

  So I told her all about my conversation with Kitty, about Jane and the Republican lawyer and the yacht in Miami and Lacey and the second lawyer who said the money didn’t come through.

  And I told her about the cover story Calliope had concocted for me, and about my conversation with Detective Barlow and the promise of future help I had exacted from him.

  After I finished, my mother was silent for a long time. Her face on the screen was expressionless. I swallowed hard, and braced for impact.

  Then she burst out laughing.

  She laughed and she laughed and she laughed. Calliope and I stared at her in utter bafflement as her whole face turned red and tears ran down her cheeks.

  “What is happening?” I said to Calliope.

  “I’m . . . not exactly sure. Ma’am, are you feeling all right?” This set off fresh peals of laughter as Mom desperately attempted to collect herself.

  “Oh God,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. It’s just . . . we had dozens of specialists working around the clock for a week to prep this mission, you have hundreds of pages of background documents, you went through eight hours of field drills, and in the first ten minutes you hit on a cop and get arrested.”

  “It was more than ten minutes, Mom,” I said irritably.

  “But he was basically the first person you talked to,” Calliope pointed out, the flicker of a smile on her face, which sent my mother into further paroxysms of laughter.

  “He was the first person she talked to,” she howled with laughter. “And he arrested her.”

  “Look at it this way. There’s nowhere to go but up from here,” said Calliope. Now they were both laughing.

  “Listen,” I snapped. “I made two incredibly valuable contacts and I got you a piece of information you would never have gotten otherwise.”

  “And you did it while smoking prison cigarettes with a man named Big Jim.”

  “I didn’t smoke, Mom.”

  “Well, thank God you weren’t giving yourself lung cancer while you were spending the night in jail—”

  “All right, that’s enough,” said Calliope. “We’ve had our fun at Reggie’s expense—”

  “You certainly have—”

  “But the truth is that we know a lot now that we didn’t know 24 hours ago and it’s all solid.”

  “The good news,” said my mother, “is that there’s significantly escalating chaos in the General Timeline around the crisis point.”

  “Why is that good news?”

  “Because there wasn’t before,” she said. “It’s new. The break-in was clearly a Chronomaly – if not the Chronomaly – and it’s sending this Timestream into a tailspin. That’s a positive sign. That means something is changing.”

  “Did it work?” I asked, hardly daring to hope. “Is the war fading out of the General Timeline?”

  “No,” she said. “Not yet. There are ripples in the pond from this Chrono
maly but they don’t reach that far yet. You’re going to have to throw in another rock.”

  “What’s next, then?”

  She thought for a moment. “All right,” she said. “What do we know? We’re fairly sure what we’re looking at is a carefully-orchestrated plan to tamper with a national election. We know there are multiple parties involved, working from multiple angles, and the common thread seems to be gathering information on the Democrats.”

  “But we don’t know if it’s the party as a whole or the 1972 campaign specifically,” said Calliope. “Or how long it’s been going on.”

  “And we don’t know if it’s someone looking for dirt on the Democrats,” I pointed out, “or if someone is afraid the Democrats have dirt on them.”

  “We also don’t know if Kitty is on the level,” said my mother. “It’s possible she was a plant. You didn’t see her get arrested. She was already in the cell when you got there. She could have been feeding you deliberate misinformation.”

  “I don’t think she was,” I said.

  “I don’t think she was either,” she replied, “but we can’t rule it out.”

  “Still,” said Calliope, “even if we don’t trust the story about Miami, we know what we saw last night with our own eyes. There’s definitely something going on here.”

  “And we know at least one 22nd-century chrono-agent is involved,” said my mother. “Probably the same person who’s been manually reconfiguring the Timeline. It’s bigger than just 1972.”

  “So, kind of like a conspiracy,” I said.

  “No, not like a conspiracy,” she said sharply.

  “Right. Because you don’t believe in government conspiracies.”

  “I do not.”

  “But, like, hypothetically, if you did believe in government conspiracies, you might be forced to admit that this looks an awful lot like one.”

  “Well, I don’t know. Let’s get a second opinion from your new boyfriend, Big Jim.”

  “Don’t be jealous. I’ll give you his number. He’s closer to your age anyway.”

  “Both of you, knock it off,” Calliope interrupted. “What’s our next move? Should Reggie come home?”