The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  “Mine is much nicer,” said Carter.

  “Yeah, Carter hung paintings,” said Leo. “And he has a rug. You don’t have a rug.”

  “Calliope’s is boring,” said Carter. “It’s just a white box with some computer screens.”

  “It’s perfect,” she said.

  “She’s weirdly in love with it,” said Leo.

  “They suit us,” said Carter. “It’s kind of crazy.”

  “No, it’s not,” said Leo. “They’re your offices. You’re all still you.”

  I ignored them and made my way over to the desk, where I found a flat, square, climate-controlled glass box containing a battered paperback book.

  All the President’s Men.

  By Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.

  After holding it together through the insane emotional rollercoaster of the past hours – and days – the dam finally broke. I traced their names with my finger on the glass surface of the box and I burst into tears. I cried and cried and cried. Calliope discreetly closed the office door as my brother came around the desk and put his arms around me.

  “They did it,” I sniffled into his shoulder. “They really did it. They stopped the war.”

  “You did it, Reggie,” he said. “This was you.”

  “You know,” said Calliope, examining the book, “if you’re really going to invest in an analog book collection you should pay more attention to quality. This one’s only going to depreciate.”

  "Thank you, Calliope."

  "Did you know that the paper used in 20th-century trade paperbacks deteriorates much faster than—”

  “Thank you, Calliope.”

  “You should ask if the box has a UV sealant on the glass, otherwise—”

  "Thank you, Calliope," I said, but I had stopped listening. Carter, on the other side of the room, was standing next to a large window, covered in a rich damask curtain, and held his hand out for me to join him.

  “Come here,” he said. “Come look outside.”

  I felt a little thrill of both anticipation and fear surge through me as my body was pulled, slowly, almost against my will, to the place where he stood. Then he drew back the curtain, and I got my first look at the new world.

  “Look,” he said softly. “Look what we did.”

  Carter took my hand. I took Leo’s. Leo took Calliope’s. We stood there together in silence for a long time, gazing out at the glowing white obelisk of the Washington Monument, rising up like a beacon from the green of the National Mall, as endless clouds of pink cherry trees bloomed all around us.

  Epilogue

  The Man In the Pub

  Galway, Ireland, 1981

  The pub was called The Quays.

  It was named for Quay Street, where it sat, beckoning passersby with its cheery blue storefront that opened up inside to a multi-story maze of Gothic arches, dark wood, staircases and wide open spaces. It was early afternoon on a Tuesday, and business was slow.

  At a small dark table in a small dark corner on the mezzanine, a very young man with very fair hair was drinking a pint of Guinness and reading a newspaper. There was a pencil sitting beside his glass, and from time to time he would pause, thoughtfully, and circle something or write a note in the margins. He was known here, and when he came here to read, the publican brought him his drink and left him in peace. He was quite alone. The pub was sleepy in the late-afternoon sunshine, with only the faintest comforting hum of voices above him and below him. Everything was still.

  “You hate Guinness,” said the voice of a woman, suddenly slicing into the silence, and he looked up, startled out of his thoughts. She was smiling, her voice somehow very dry and very fond at the same time. She was in her late fifties and exceptionally striking – tall and elegant, with long dark hair and an aristocratic profile, the kind that should be stamped on a Roman coin.

  “You’re very observant,” he said, smiling back at her. “I thought I was covering it pretty well. I prefer cider, but apparently here they don’t consider that sufficiently manly.”

  “May I sit?” she said politely, and he nodded.

  “You’re Leo Carstairs,” she said, and he stopped smiling. “You’re an apprentice agent at the United States Bureau of Time Travel, and you’re here on a long-term reconnaissance mission connected to a ring of Irish-American gun-runners in the 1980’s. You were born in a small town in Oregon called The Dalles. You have a scar on the heel of your left foot from a childhood injury with a piece of broken glass at the park. Your favorite food kind of candy is marzipan, because your grandmother Lydia used to have it at her house every Christmas.”

  The young man stared at her, recoiling slightly.

  “I’m telling you all of this,” she went on, “because I need you to believe me that I know you, and that you trust me. You don’t yet, but you will. In your time, you and I won’t meet for another three years. Which was thirty years ago for me.”

  “Are you from the Bureau?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But not your Bureau. Not yet.”

  He looked at her, for a long time, appraisingly.

  “This has nothing to do with the job I’m on, does it?”

  “No,” she said. “But I need your help. You’re the only person I can trust.”

  He sat back in his chair, newspaper forgotten.

  “This is all pretty weird,” he said. “Even by professional time traveler standards.”

  “I know.”

  “You’d better start at the beginning,” he said.

  She nodded and sat down, taking a long swig of his Guinness and then setting it down in front of her. When he made a gesture of protest, she smiled. “Oh please,” she said. “You didn’t really want it.”

  Against his will, he laughed. There was something about her he liked immediately.

  “So what do you want with me, stranger who apparently isn’t a stranger?” he said.

  “I’m going to tell you a story,” she said. “And I need you to tell me how it ends.”

  Hours went by. The publican was pleased to see that young Leo had made a lady friend, although she was a bit too old for him, really, though he could see even from all the way down here behind the bar that she still had an exceptional pair of legs and very pretty hair without very much gray in it at all, and so he wisely left them alone.

  He sent young Mickey up with two pints on a tray, on the house, but told him to come right back and not to eavesdrop. Young Leo was in every afternoon, polite but solitary, and the publican thought it was a nice thing to see him coming to life a little bit with a pretty woman.

  But the pints went untouched, as the pair were too deeply in conversation to notice Mickey at all.

  “Who’s the girl?” Leo asked.

  “She’s a covert asset,” said the woman. “I can’t tell you her name. And you absolutely cannot let her see your face or know that she’s being watched. Stay concealed at all times. This is what she looks like. This is a file on her coordinates and movements. All you need to do is keep her safe.”

  “Who’s after her?”

  The woman paused. “I’m going to tell you some things,” she said, “and it’s very important, it’s crucial – you can’t comprehend how many lives depend on it – that you never, ever, for the rest of your life, tell me that I’m the one who told this to you. Do you understand?” He nodded.

  “There’s a war brewing,” she said. “United Enterprises is hand-in-hand with an agent from the Bureau – my Bureau – and a political operative from the Nixon administration, I don’t know who, to artificially concoct a war with China. It will start in less than twelve months, and by the time it’s over there will be fifty-six million casualties, largely civilian. This girl, the asset in 1972, she and I are trying to stop it.”

  “And I need your help. She’s undercover in the White House, and she may be targeted. She’s trying to unmask a vast conspiracy called Operation Gemstone. It’s vital that she be kept safe. It’s vital. Everything depends on it.” Her vo
ice began to shake. “I need you to make sure nothing happens to her.”

  “This isn’t an official mission, is it?” he said.

  “No,” she said. “It’s off the books. And you can never, ever tell anyone about it. Especially not me. When we meet, I can never know that we had this conversation.”

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You want me to take a leave of absence, concoct a cover story and go back to 1972 to protect a girl whose name I don’t even know, in order to stop a war that hasn’t actually happened yet.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Good. You’ve got it.”

  “Ma’am, with all due respect, I don’t even know who you are,” he said. “You haven’t told me your name. I couldn’t check up on a single detail of this story if I wanted to. Why should I trust you? Why should I risk my life for this girl? It makes no sense.”

  “You’re the legendary Leo Carstairs,” she said. “Or you will be. You’re an adventurer. You trust your gut. You don’t care about sense.”

  She set down the Guinness in her hand and leaned forward. “Look at me,” she said, her rich dark voice suddenly insistent. “What are your instincts telling you? Am I lying to you, or telling you the truth?”

  He looked at her for a long moment – at her wise, steady eyes, at the steely grace in the way she held her head, at her straight back – and his heart turned over very unexpectedly in his chest, and three things became suddenly, sharply clear to him at the same time.

  First, that she was telling him the truth, because she was a person who would only ever always tell him the truth. He did not know how he knew this, but he knew it down to his bones. The dark-haired woman would not lie to him.

  Second, that despite the aura of unflappable competence and intelligence that emanated from every pore of her body, despite the fact that she was so clearly a person who could handle absolutely anything – still, he could see that beneath her steely surface she was absolutely terrified, more afraid than she had probably ever been in her life.

  And third, that at this moment of desperate fear, with nowhere else to turn and no one to trust, she had crossed through time in search of him – Leo Carstairs.

  He wondered, thirty years from now, in her time, what they were to each other.

  He realized, with a flutter in his stomach, looking into her dark worried eyes, that he thought he already knew.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll do it. I’ll be your bodyguard.”

  He had expected – what? Gratitude? For her to collapse into his arms with tears of thanks? He didn’t know. But instead she simply nodded approvingly, with the ghost of a smile, and he realized with a start that she knew him so well that she had known he would say yes before she even sat down at his table.

  “How do I contact you if I need to reach you?” he asked.

  “You can’t,” she said. “I’m relying on you to figure out what needs to be done and do it.”

  “Well, that’s . . . not reassuring.”

  “I don’t trust very many people,” she said. “But Leo Carstairs is the only person who has never once let me down.”

  “That’s very flattering.”

  “I’m not flattering you. I’m telling you the truth.”

  She got up from the table, passing a handheld device over to him.

  “The files you need are here,” she said. “The asset is staying at the Watergate and works in the White House Counsel’s office.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “You can’t know her name,” she said. “It will disrupt her Timeline if I tell it to you.”

  “Well, that’s cryptic,” he said, but didn’t push it. “What happens if someone tries to take her out?”

  “You don’t let them,” she said, and there was something bloodthirsty in her voice. “Whoever you have to take down, however much blood you have to shed, you have to keep her safe.”

  “Tell me who she is,” he said, unsettled by her fervor, questions swirling in his mind, but she shook her head and stood up from the table.

  “By the way,” she said. “when you get back to the Bureau, you should look into Operation Gemstone.”

  “I should?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You should. A time is going to come when a very great deal depends on the information you’re going to dig up.”

  “What the hell is Operation Gemstone?”

  “You’ll know when you find it,” she said as she turned to leave.

  “Wait,” he called after her as she descended the staircase. “I still don’t even know who you are.”

  She stopped and turned to look back at him.

  “I’m the love of your life, Leo Carstairs,” she said. “You just don’t know it yet.”

  And then she was gone.

  The End.

  Acknowledgments

  I am a playwright by trade and training, and this is my first novel. I don’t know if you guys know this, but novels have a lot of words in them. The Rewind Files is like eight times longer (by word count) than my last play, and the majority of it was written between November 2014 and May 2015, which means there were days when trying to get all those words out of my head almost broke me. The list of generous souls who held my hand, shepherded me through this process, read drafts, gave notes, cheered me on, and had my back is obscenely lengthy. For this, I apologize in advance.

  First and foremost, to Chris Hanada and the extraordinary team at Retrofit Publishing, all my love and devotion and gratitude and my firstborn child if they want it. I came to the world of publishing as clueless as a baby deer, but from my very first conversation with Chris I knew I was in the best possible hands. I am profoundly grateful for the countless hours he and his amazing staff put into this project, and for their faith in my work.

  I belong to an online collective of women and women-identifying writers of extraordinary wisdom and humor, who pushed me when I needed it and gave me a safe space to stomp and yell when the words wouldn’t come. I am grateful to all of them, but most particularly to Rowan, whose notes on gender and racial politics were invaluable to the Carter and Kitty scenes in Past Imperfect, and to Alice, whose magnificent resilience and beautiful words inspire me every day.

  To Playwrights West, my theatre family in Portland, both for enriching my life with their creativity and for putting up with my insane decision to write a novel while I was supposed to be finishing script rewrites for my play Dear Galileo.

  To Random Order Bakery & Coffeehouse on Northeast Alberta Street in Portland, Oregon, where I am currently sitting as I write this. Easily half of this book was written there while eating “Cylon Attack” breakfast sandwiches (bacon, kale and fried egg on ciabatta) and drinking endless cups of coffee. It is the Platonic ideal of Writer Coffee Shop: good coffee, real food (not just muffins), open late, serves booze, specializes in pie. I basically use it as my home office and they all deserve medals for putting up with me.

  To Evan, Jesse and Sarah, my beloved trio since our college roommate days 13 years ago, my first readers, and the creators of a fake Change.org petition to nag me to finish The Wayward Traveler faster (the closest I’ll ever come to understanding what it’s like to be George R.R. Martin) – I love these weirdos with the burning fire of a thousand suns. My professional life was in complete upheaval during the year I wrote this book, and these three were unfailingly patient with my stress meltdowns, even though two of them were in the middle of planning their own wedding, which is really not a time that you should be forced to play career counselor to a writer who just left her day job and is now freaking out about it.

  To my best friend Erin, an English professor at Ole Miss and the most brilliant person I know. She is the platonic love of my life and the light in every one of my dark places, from writer’s block to deepest grief. I would not be who I am today without her, her husband Jordan, and our fifteen years of friendship.

  To my grandmother Lydia, our family’s original Watergate junkie, who died when I was five. I inherited, and
used while researching this book, her copies of both the complete transcripts of the Nixon tapes, and The Collected Speeches of Abraham Lincoln. While it remains one of the great sorrows of my life that I never got to talk about Watergate with her, it is in her honor that Agent Carstairs hails from The Dalles.

  To my brother Christopher, a film editor who works with Retrofit, who emailed me last summer to tell me the company was branching out into sci-fi publishing and said “Hey, you should send them your Watergate thing!” At the time, my “Watergate thing” was like four chapters and a pile of assorted shrapnel that I had started three years ago as a NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) project and never finished. It was by absolutely no stretch of the imagination anything resembling a book, and I was so resistant to the idea of letting a real publisher see it that he finally said, “Fine, send it to me and I’ll send it to them.”

  A week later I had a publisher. This is why my siblings are my absolute most favorite people in the entire world: Christopher believed that I had a book inside me even before I did. To my sister Cat, my caretaker and my conscience, who makes me a better human; to my other brother Colin, my partner in geekery and favorite person to hang out and do nothing with; to my phenomenally generous and loving stepmom Debby, my most enthusiastic cheerleader; and to my awesome stepbrothers Michael and Charlie, who will be skateboarding through Europe when this book comes out and make me feel like a cooler person just being related to them – these people are the best family a writer could have. (If you are eagle-eyed, you will spot all their names somewhere in this book.)

  Like Reggie, I too have one absent and one present parent; this book, like everything I write, is dedicated to the memory of my remarkable mother Theresa, who died of ALS in 2008 and whose grit, grace, wisdom, stubbornness, and ability to put idiots in their place without even mussing her hair, are deeply woven into Katie Bellows and all the women in this book.