I curled up as tight as I could, adjusted the coat so my bag and I were completely concealed, and held my breath. The car stopped and I heard the windows roll down.
“Hey Bruce,” said Leo.
“Kid, you can’t be here today,” said a gruff but not unfriendly voice. “There’s some weird security thing going on. You better scoot on home.”
“I’m sorry,” said Leo, “I hate to bother you.” He was so good I almost applauded. There was just the faintest hint of a waver in his dejected voice, like he was holding back tears. “I don’t suppose there’s any news?”
“Nothing,” said Bruce. “Building’s deserted.”
“Huh,” said Leo. “I thought I saw people moving around in the lobby.”
“Oh, that,” said Bruce. “Somebody tripped an alarm on the seventh floor and they sent the team in for a routine sweep. Nothing to do with the investigation.”
Leo sighed.
“I’m sorry you got your hopes up,” said Bruce. “You’re in a tough spot. But you got Callahan on your case, he’s the best there is. The second he finds anything he’ll call you, you can take that to the bank.”
“Yeah. I know. He’s been great. It’s just hard feeling like . . . there’s nothing I can do, you know? I’m just waiting.”
“Kid, you’ve got to stop torturing yourself,” said Bruce. “You’ve got to start thinking about moving on. You still have your whole life ahead of you. You ain’t heard any good news by this point, time to grit your teeth and face the worst. Nobody likes it but we all got to do it.”
“I just keep thinking,” said Leo, in a tone of masterfully understated tragedy, “that one of these days I’ll be sitting there and I’ll just see them walk out that door like none of this ever happened.”
“I know, buddy, I know,” said Bruce.
Leo sighed again.
“Well, I better get going,” he said. “I don’t want to be in the way if you have to go deal with a security thing. I know how busy you are.” They chortled like this was some kind of long-running inside joke.
“Yeah, guarding a deserted building really takes it out of you,” said Bruce. “I’m wiped out by the end of every day.”
“Well, I’ll get out of here and leave you to it,” said Leo. “Say hi to Martha and the kids for me.”
“Will do,” said Bruce.
“And tell her next time I’ll bring over some more of that risotto. Maybe no prawns this time if she’s still having morning sickness.”
“You’re a real pal, Leo.”
“It’s the least I can do,” he said. “I’ll see you soon.”
“You take care,” said Bruce.
Then the window rolled up and we drove away.
“Stay down,” said Leo quietly, without turning around. “I’ll tell you when it’s clear.”
I waited obediently in silence for what felt like an eternity but realistically was probably three minutes before he gave me the all-clear, and I sat up in time to see that we were about to cross the river.
“Okay,” he said, “we’re good. You can get up off the floor.”
I maneuvered myself to a seated position, shoulder screaming in pain, and looked at him in the rearview mirror.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” he said back.
“What in the holy name of Jesus Christ our Lord is happening right now?”
“I’m rescuing you.”
“Yes, I see that. Where are we going?”
“Bailey’s Crossroads, Virginia,” he said. “By the way, there’s a bag on the seat back there with water and a sandwich for you. I thought you might be hungry.”
The memory of the orange chicken I had only gotten two bites of before I fled shimmered before me, and I realized just how long ago that was. I took the bag gratefully.
“Okay,” I said to Leo around a mouthful of sandwich, “I’m gonna eat and you’re gonna talk. How the hell did you get here? Why aren’t you in Croatia? Mom said you were in hiding. How did you know how to find me? How did you get into the building? Did Mom tell you? Where’s Mom?”
“Oh my God,” said Leo. “If I’d known you were going to be like this I would have sent Calliope.”
“Calliope?”
“She’s really the best person to answer most of the five hundred questions you just asked me, and we’ll be there in a few minutes, but in the meantime I’ll do my best. One at a time.”
“Where’s Mom?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “She hasn’t come back. You saw her more recently than I did.”
“She said you were in hiding.”
“I was. In a manner of speaking.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that the best way to demonstrate that I (an innocent civilian with Croatian citizenship and no security clearance) was no threat and could be safely ignored altogether,” said Leo, “was for me to come home to D.C. for a surprise visit, find you both missing and call the police.”
“What?”
“It was my idea,” he said proudly. “I filed a missing persons’ report and everything. See, the FBI knew that if I was working with you, bringing in the cops and the media and drawing attention to your absence would be the absolute last thing you would want. Detectives sniffing around the house, treating it like a crime scene. Access to all Mom’s files, even the private ones. Everything.”
He went on, “But of course the FBI couldn’t have the D.C. police accidentally stumble across anything classified, so they ‘took over’ the investigation themselves. Out of respect for the family, they said.”
“So I’m here, living at Mom’s condo, and once a week I get a call from a friendly agent telling me they haven’t discovered anything new, but they’re still hard at work, and they ask if I’ve heard from either my mother or my sister and I say no in a very sad voice, and they tell me to call if anything changes, and then they hang up and forget about me until the next week.”
“So nobody’s watching you?” I said incredulously. He shook his head.
“They were at first,” he said. “I tried some things out, just to see. I would drive to the Bureau a lot, at weird times of the day or night. I’d just sit out front, in the car, and then go drive around the city. After the first time, I got a call the minute I got back. ‘Just checking in,’ he said. I think he was testing me to see if I’d lie about where I’d been. I told him nothing had changed, but that I had driven to the Bureau and sat there for a long time, trying to think of anything I could remember that would help the investigation, but nothing came of it.”
“And I kept doing it. Sometimes during the day, sometimes at night. Sometimes I’d stay in the car. Sometimes I’d get out and walk around and chat with the security guards. After the twentieth or thirtieth time, a guy in a suit came to talk to me and said having a suspicious car loitering in front of a building that was closed pending investigation was a security risk and I couldn’t park out front anymore. So then I switched to doing very, very slow drive-bys of the front. They didn’t like that either.”
“After another couple dozen visits, when they realized I didn’t mean any harm but I also wasn’t going to stop, they gave up, and the security guards told me that if I had to keep coming to the office, that I had to park the car somewhere out of sight so I didn’t worry the neighbors. I said my mom’s driver still had a pass code to the executive garage, and asked if I could be allowed to sit in there.”
“They said they weren’t sure how sitting alone in a dark, empty parking garage for hours on end was productive to dealing with grief, but it was easier on them than having me lurking around where everyone could see me, so they just gave in.”
Leo grinned. “They’re all private security, not FBI or cops or anything, and I think they’re all pretty far down the ladder. It’s not a very exciting job; the building has been dead so long that they’re all a little half-assed about it. They’re bored out of their minds and I bring a little occasional interest to their week.
Also food. I show up with lunch once a week or so and we sit in the plaza and make small talk. They think I’m a sad, pathetic weirdo, but they definitely don’t think I have any idea where my sister and mother are. I’ve cooperated fully with the investigation for so long that they’ve totally lost interest in me as a suspect.”
“That’s . . . actually brilliant,” I said in astonishment, the thousand other things I wanted to ask him temporarily forgotten. Leo and Calliope, hatching plans together? What the hell kind of crazy world had I come back to?
Small-town Virginia rolled past. “Nearly there,” said Leo, and turned down a dead-end gravel road full of nondescript houses. The last house on the block, before the street dead-ended into a large, swampy ditch surrounded by bracken and raspberry bushes, was a two-story brick-front with a dingy old truck parked outside and a sign reading “BEWARE OF DOG” on the metal fence in front of it.
He stopped the car about half a block away from this house and tapped the Comm on his wrist, which was the first time I noticed that Leo was wearing a Bureau Comm on his wrist, and then—
“Clear,” said Calliope’s voice, and a web of crackling blue electricity blinked into view right in front of us, then disappeared again.
“What the—”
“Invisible security fencing,” said Leo. “Around the whole perimeter.”
“That can’t be much fun for the neighbors,” I said as he pulled into the driveway.
“There are no neighbors,” he said. “We own the whole block. All these houses are empty.” He and Leo got out of the car and went towards the dingy house. I grabbed my bag and followed.
“Hey,” I said to Leo. “Wait.” He stopped and turned to me, and I threw my one good arm around his neck and hugged him harder than I’d ever hugged him in all of our lives.
“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” I said into the shoulder of his soft sweater.
“Same here,” he said back, holding me tight and kissing the top of my head.
“This is all very adorable, but some of the rest of us would also like a turn,” said a voice behind me. I turned to see that the front door was open. “About goddamn time,” said Carter, who was standing there in the doorway with a huge grin on his face, and the knot of panic I had been desperately trying to swallow since I had lost his hand in the Slipstream finally dissolved.
“You’re here,” I said in wonderment. “How are you here?”
“It’s a long story,” he said. “Come in, we’ll tell you everything.”
“I lost you in the Slipstream.”
“I know.”
“When I landed at the Bureau and you weren’t there, I thought—”
“I know. Come in, we’ll explain everything.”
“I thought you—I didn’t think I’d—”
“Don’t you go getting sentimental on me, Bellows,” he said, and wrapped me in a crushing embrace, hugging me so hard my feet lifted off the ground. This was the last straw for my bruised and bloodied shoulder, and I gave a howl of pain. Carter pulled away, horrified and confused.
“For Christ’s sake,” snapped an irritable voice from the doorway behind him, “can neither of you idiots see that she’s bleeding?”
Carter and Leo stared at me. At some point on the car trip, the blood had soaked through all the handkerchiefs and a dark wet patch had spread over my black sweater. It was barely noticeable on me, from a distance, but Carter’s crisp white shirt had a murderous red stain on the left breast where my shoulder had touched him.
“Oh my God,” said Carter in horror. “She is bleeding.”
“Nothing gets past you,” said Calliope. “Get her inside, for God’s sake. Reggie, can you walk?”
“I can walk,” I said. She put her arm around my waist, very carefully, and helped me inside.
Carter closed the door behind us and hit a small button on the wall, and I realized that the small dingy kitchen and oak hallway paneling I was looking at were false, like theatre scenery; they folded up and vanished and revealed a much larger, open-plan great room behind them.
I didn’t get much of a look at it at first, as Calliope led me over to a dining table in the corner, pulled out a chair and sat me down.
“Rags, hot water and the med kit,” she barked. “Reggie, take off your shirt.”
“I missed you too,” I said. She snorted.
“Take off your shirt so we can look at your shoulder.”
“Oh, is that what the kids are calling it?”
“Just do it, Reggie, you can be hilarious later.” I obeyed her, attempting to shrug out of my sweater, but every movement of my shoulder caused more excruciating pain. Calliope watched me struggle for a few seconds before sighing and taking over.
“How much do you like this sweater?”
“Not that much, now that it’s got blood all over it.”
“Good.” She grabbed a paring knife from the kitchen counter and slit the sweater down the middle, then slit the sleeve of my bad arm and gently peeled the fabric away to reveal a bloody pile of linen handkerchiefs tied half-assed to my arm with a strip of silk from my now-ragged camisole.
“Christ Almighty,” said Leo, horrified. “What the hell happened to you?”
“What happened is, she’s her mother’s daughter,” said Calliope. “You know, Carter and I did each other’s, with ice and sterilized tools, like civilized people.”
“Did what? What happened?”
“I had to dig out my tracker,” I said.
“What do you mean, ‘dig it out?’” asked Leo, a flicker of dread in his voice.
“They embed it in the skin underneath your shoulder,” I explained. “Every agent has one. It’s so they can lock onto you for transport and measure your vital signs. Like if something happens to you in the field and you’re injured and you need to be pulled out. Or if the personal transport devices you’re carrying stop working. It’s a safety valve. But it’s also how they track the location of every agent. Mom dug hers out before she came to find me.”
“Where’s yours now?”
“I left it at the Bureau,” I said. “In my desk. I wanted them to think I was still in the building in the hopes that they might waste some time hunting for me and give me a little head start.”
“That was good thinking,” said Carter approvingly, bringing over a bowl of ice and a bowl of warm water with a cloth as Calliope opened a cupboard and pulled out a med kit.
“It didn’t last quite as long as I hoped,” I said. “They flagged it while I was still inside. But it took them long enough to run a geofilter that it bought me a couple minutes to get out of the building.”
“And you dug it out of your own skin yourself?” said Leo, face very pale.
“Well, yeah,” I said. “I had to.”
“How?”
“You don’t want to know,” said Calliope, delicately untying the makeshift bandage. “Trust me.”
“How?” Leo repeated.
“Nail file,” I said. He swallowed hard, blanched and looked a little sick.
“Christ, no wonder you’re a mess,” said Calliope.
“You’re in good hands,” said Carter. “She did mine, and it healed up like magic.”
“All techs get basic emergency care training,” she said, gently stripping away the handkerchiefs one by one. “In case an agent transports back with an injury and you have to wait for the med team.”
“She wanted to do her own,” said Carter. “She didn’t trust me.”
“You did okay,” she admitted.
“All of you are insane,” said Leo.
“You know,” I said, wincing as Calliope took the warm wet cloth from the bowl on the table and began carefully cleaning the blood away from the gash in my shoulder, “I think I have been heroically patient with all three of you so far, but while Calliope is poking at my open wound over here it might be a really excellent time for somebody to tell me what the ever-loving hell has been going on.”
“What did Leo
tell you in the car?” said Calliope.
“I got a very impressive rundown of his ploy to get inside the executive garage,” I said. “But I’m still missing, you know, literally every other part of the story.”
“Oh, I see how it is,” said Carter to Leo. “You just told the part where you come off looking really cool. And nothing else.”
“We were short on time. What do you want from me?” Leo retorted.
“So, he didn’t tell you, for instance,” said Carter, “anything about the Chrono-Splice.”
“What Chrono-Splice?” I asked.
“For Christ’s sake, Leo,” said Calliope irritably.
“I decided it would be better coming from you,” he said defensively. “I’m still bad at explaining it.”
“For the love of God,” I said, “if somebody doesn’t start talking right now—”
Carter pulled up a chair right across from me and took my hand.
“Reggie, when you landed in the transport lab, what did you see?”
“It was deserted,” I said. “Everything was smashed and broken and the computers were missing, but it was all dusty, like it had been that way for a long time.”
“And you must have wondered how that was possible, given that somebody must have been there at some point to jump you back.”
“Right.”
“I planted a Chrono-Splice,” said Calliope. “I placed an untraceable glitch in the system that would trigger a time delay automatically if you were ever jumped back to the lab without doing an HIO scan first.”
“Why was I jumped? Who did it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I wasn’t there. It was long after I was gone. It was your mother’s idea to hide you – and the Gemstone file – in the Slipstream for long enough that any active investigation would have died down. To give you some cover.”
“How long was I in the Slipstream?” I asked. Nobody answered immediately, and that was the first time I looked around and actually noticed the room.
The whole bottom floor of the house was one vast, open space with exposed beams and white walls, a big brick fireplace on one end and an open-plan kitchen on the other, with an island facing into the rest of the room. The furniture was comfortable, faded brown leather and dark wood, but the abundant natural light let in by a series of skylights and windows (all covered, I noted, with digital illusion panels to prevent anyone from getting a look inside) kept it from feeling gloomy. It was warm and inviting and lovely.
The Rewind Files Page 26
