Corrector

by Blink, Bob

  “What time?” she asked.

  “I’ll be there at nine sharp. We’ll probably need the entire day.”

  “How do I know you’ll show up?”

  “You don’t, obviously. But what would be the point of all of this tonight if I didn’t intend to do so? Sleep well Agent Carlson. I look forward to working with you.”

  Jake hung up. He tossed the phone out of the car. He had been wearing gloves, and there would be no way to connect it to him. They would probably put a trace on it, and he didn’t want it to lead them to his hotel and it would be instructive for them to realize he had been a couple of blocks from Carlson’s house when he had called.

  He drove back to the hotel and showered before going to bed. It was remotely possible they could work their computers and discover another Reno resident was staying in a hotel in the city. There were probably many, but they could get his picture from his driver’s license and see the resemblance. If they were that much on the ball, he could expect them before morning. If that happened, he would see how it went. He might have to back-track, but even if they arrested him, if it got him and Carlson together, it might be fine.

  He called Karin and they talked for fifteen minutes. He reminded her that after tomorrow he couldn’t predict his availability, but not to worry unless she had specific bad news. It was hard to know what exactly to say, and they both hung up dissatisfied with the call.

  Jake took a taxi to FBI Headquarters in the morning. He couldn’t detect anyone specifically waiting for him as he stepped through the glassed doors into the lobby, but he was somehow certain they would be waiting and watching. They probably had him spotted already. If he tried to leave now, he was certain they would suddenly appear to detain him, but so long as he continued to do as he had promised, they probably were watching and allowing him a chance to do this his way. They probably had a gun on him. Given the events he was linked to, they could expect him to be armed, although the metal detectors at the door should have told them otherwise. He was unarmed, and carried two sets of ID; both the Mathews name and his own real name. They were going to fingerprint him, and would know in a matter of a few minutes anyway. Moving this along was what was important.

  “Can I help you?” a uniformed guard asked him as he approached a large desk when his turn came.

  “Yes. My name is Stan Mathews. I’m here to see Agent Carlson.”

  It was obvious the name had meaning. The guard nodded, and signaled someone off to the side. A pair of agents came over pretending to being called, but Jake had noted them watching him since he came in.

  “Mr. Mathews?” the taller of the two asked.

  “That’s correct,” Jake replied.

  “Please follow me,” the man said, and headed off toward the back of the lobby. The second agent fell in behind Jake and they continued that way, with Jake sandwiched between the two men. They passed through a sturdy unlabeled door in the back of the lobby, and then to a large elevator. Jake wasn’t surprised as the elevator headed downward instead of upward. While neither man had openly displayed a weapon, Jake could see the outlines of the FBI standard issue Glock 23 on each of their hips. The 23 used the slightly larger .40 S&W cartridge than the Glock he had at home.

  Jake raised his eyes in question as the elevator moved smoothly downward.

  “You’ll get to see Agent Carlson,” the man said. “First, however, we need to ensure you are not armed in some way and take your prints and check you in. That isn’t something we can easily do upstairs.”

  Jake nodded his understanding. Perhaps it would still go as he hoped. If not, he could still sense himself standing outside yesterday.

  It took almost an hour, and when Jake was taken upstairs he was no longer wearing his own clothes. Now he wore another of their mono-color prisoner suits. It was clear that whatever happened, they felt he would not be going his own way at the end of the day. Well, Jake had already resigned himself to spending at least one day in the lockup. It would take an overnight for them to become convinced.

  They rode a different elevator upwards. This one was less ornately outfitted. It wasn’t for visitors or employees. It had plain steel walls that were marked and scratched from years of use. There was no hiding the fact it was used to move prisoners around.

  The rode to the ninth floor where they exited and were escorted down the hall and into the kind of room Jake had become too familiar with recently. This one was nicer than the others, but its purpose was obvious. He was seated and secured, and then the two men stood across the room and waited. Five minutes later Agents Carlson and Laney entered the room. Susan Carlson indicated the two men who had brought him here should leave, and moments later it was just the three of them.

  Jake was glad to see them. Laney looked much as he had just before Jake had killed him. It was reassuring to see him alive and well today. Susan Carlson also looked exactly as she had the last time they had talked face to face. She still had the same no nonsense hairdo, her brown hair firmly in place. Her dark brown eyes were as penetrating as he remembered. The suit could even be the same one, although Jake suspected she had several that were identical. She probably had three or four styles she liked and bought several of each.

  “On top of everything else, you seem to know where I live,” Carlson said as she sat down. “I expect you know we recovered your cellular phone a couple of blocks from my house. Should I consider that a threat of some kind?”

  “I wanted to make the point I have access to a great deal of information you would not expect,” Jake replied.

  “So it would seem,” Carlson said, obviously thinking about the message and her private phone number. “We have a lot of questions to ask you. Is there something you would like to say before we get started?”

  Jake shook his head. “I’ve tried to think of a way to streamline this, but you are going to want to go at it your way. Let’s just walk through it and by the time the day is over, I think I will have made an impression on you.”

  “Okay. Then I think we should start by calling you Mr. Waters. That appears to be your true identity. You greatly simplified our search by providing your real identification. Your prints also match the records we have on that person, and living in Sparks you would be in a position to pretend to be the elusive Mr. Mathews. I should add that we have sent agents over to your hotel to recover any belongings you have there. I can tell you that I expect you will be our guest for at least the immediate future. Any comments?”

  Jake smiled. “No. That is pretty much what I expected to happen. It worked this way the last time we had this dance.”

  “You keep referring to events that didn’t happen,” Carlson said. “Would you like to explain that?”

  “Soon enough. But for now, why don’t we look at the cases you have assembled?”

  “Here is the oldest,” Agent Laney said. “A Mr. Johnson from Florida. He was shot at close range with a 9mm Sig-Sauer semi-automatic handgun. That seems to have been a common approach in these killings.”

  Jake nodded. “He wasn’t the first, but I’ve already told you that you missed a few. We’ll go back to those later, but there are some names you might want to have someone research in the meantime. In some cases I can see where you might have overlooked the connection. In others, I’m a little surprised you didn’t see the similarity.” Jake reached for a pencil and paper from the supplies Laney had brought into the room, wrote for a moment and pushed over the piece of paper that he’d written on.

  Carlson scanned the list. “I recognize some of these. Two were considered suicides. The rest were considered, but we couldn’t find any of the key links that tied the others together. A couple I don’t know anything about.”

  “Actually they weren’t,” Jake said, referring to her comment about suicides.

  Carlson looked at him for a long moment. Then she handed the sheet to Jim Laney. “Have someone look into these.” Afterwards she looked back at Jake. “Now, about Mr. Johnson.”

  “Johnson
killed forty-two before committing suicide,” Jake explained. “Most were adults, but he got almost a dozen children before his rampage was over.”

  Laney was shaking his head. He had stood to take the sheet outside, but had stopped to listen to what Jake had to say. “He didn’t kill anyone. He was found with several weapons and a supply of ammunition, but he was dead when the police discovered him. There were indications he had something planned, but it never happened.”

  “That’s why I shot him,” Jake said. He described the scene where the killings had taken place and what had really happened before he’d corrected the event.

  “That might have been what he intended,” Agent Carlson said, “but it never happened. I don’t know where you got the body count or why you are convinced it happened, but it didn’t.”

  “Let’s walk through a few more cases,” Jake said. “You’ll start to see a trend.”

  Three hours later they had gone through all of the cases the FBI had put together.

  “In each of these you claim the victim was a killer and you prevented him from committing some heinous crime,” Laney said. “Obviously that isn’t true, but just for the sake of argument, how would you know?”

  Jake knew that was what they wanted to know. He was certain they knew the men he’d killed were evil and had been planning attacks, perhaps not as he described, but something. They wanted to know how he had become aware of their intentions and was able to thwart them.

  Jake rubbed his temples. He looked over at Carlson. “Someone is going to bring you a message in a minute. It will be from the Director. He wants to speak with you immediately about the Michael’s case.”

  Carlson looked at him oddly. “What do you know about Michaels?”

  “Absolutely nothing. You let the name slip out when you read the message a few minutes from now.”

  Carlson looked at him oddly and was about to speak when a discrete knock was heard at the door. Laney stood and walked over, opening it. He accepted a note from someone, and handed it to Carlson. She read it, a shock appearing on her face. He handed it to Laney, who read it and mimicked her surprise.

  “It appears you are correct,” she said. “I’ll expect an explanation of this a little later. I have to leave now to respond to this summons. We will continue this discussion this afternoon.”

  Jake watched as she stood and walked out of the room. Laney looked at him oddly. “How?” he asked.

  “When she returns,” Jake said. He allowed himself to be escorted back downstairs where he was given a simple lunch in his cell.

  It was almost three hours before he was back in the room with the two agents.

  “A preliminary check by our experts indicates that the men you killed had the means to cause the kind of damage you have described. In each case the body count you claimed is within the limits of the weaponry that was found with them. I find that interesting. Those assessments were made based on details and information that has never been released to the public, so I find it interesting that your story is able to so closely match the facts. Before we pursue that line of questioning, I’d like to know about the little slight of hand trick you pulled just before lunch.”

  It was time. Jake told them about back-tracking. He explained his history with the ability and what it allowed him to do and how his remembrances of the men he’d killed were actually events that had occurred, but he had been able to undo.

  “You expect us to believe a story like that?” Laney asked incredulously.

  “You already have some indication. That’s how I knew what was in the memo. It came, Agent Carlson indicated she had to leave to meet with the Director. You asked if it was about Michaels. Then I back-tracked with the information. I “knew” before it arrived from your perspective.”

  “I would like to have something a bit more substantial,” Carlson said.

  “I expect as much. You tell me what you would like to know. Something that can’t be known now. Then, after it happens, you tell me the answer, and I’ll suddenly have it for you.”

  “This feels silly,” Carlson said. “Okay. I want to know the closing values of the DOW and the S&P along with the trading volumes as reported in the New York Times financial pages.”

  “How about the final score of the Lakers and Celtics game tonight?” Laney asked. “I’ve been waiting to see them play since the last time the Lakers routed the Celtics.”

  “You’ll have to bring me that information tonight,” Jake said. “I won’t have access to it otherwise.”

  Carlson nodded.

  Jake rubbed his head again, then looked up. He quoted the information Carlson had requested. She frowned, but wrote it down. It was still over an hour before the market would close and there would be a dramatic turnaround in the final fifteen minutes.

  “The final score will be 113 to 112, Lakers taking it by a final free throw,” Jake told Laney.

  “You know now?” Carlson asked.

  “He brought me the paper tomorrow morning,” Jake said. “I read the information then back-tracked just a minute ago. You’ll see when you get the paper.”

  It was late and Jake had given them a lot to think about.

  “Tomorrow I want to go over the cases you claim we have missed,” Carlson said as Jake was being led from the room.

  “Just read the paper,” Jake said.

  “I don’t see how it is possible, but the numbers you gave us yesterday are exactly correct. No one could make that kind of guess, especially the volumes. They were well above normal.”

  “Damn Lakers won as you predicted as well,” Laney grumbled. Jake suspected he’d had money on the game.

  “Suppose for the moment I accept your claims?” Carlson asked. “You seem to have the perfect escape mechanism and have been able to avoid us for a long time. Why are you revealing yourself to us now?”

  “I need your help,” Jake said. “Someone is going to set off a dirty bomb in Atlanta. We have seven days to find out where it is and stop them.”

  Surprise and momentary silence met Jake’s announcement. He could see several questions forming behind Carlson’s eyes, but she seemed to reject each before they materialized into words.

  “How can you know this?” Agent Laney said breaking the silence.

  “The same way I know of the other events,” Jake replied, disappointed in the agent. “The same way I knew about the numbers you asked me to provide you with. I saw the results after it happened. I sent the memories of those events back to myself.”

  Susan Carlson held up her hand. Her eyes were tight and she looked at Laney with some annoyance.

  “It’s a little different to hear about something like this as opposed to learning about a sporting event result. It comes as a bit of a shock and it is a little harder to accept that you really know what you are talking about. I was going to ask you what evidence you have to support this, but you’ve already told us the answer to that, haven’t you? You claim to be able to only bring back mental records of the events. Very convenient. It makes it difficult to trip you up.”

  “This isn’t a game,” Jake snapped back. “I’ve tried to demonstrate what I can do so you would have reason to believe what I am telling you so this event can be prevented. It is not something I can do myself this time.”

  “How about more proof?” Jim Laney asked. “You have lived through the future. What happened that can support your claims?”

  “For the most of the immediate future I was detained in a federal facility. There wasn’t a lot of opportunity to keep abreast of world events. It would be pointless anyway. We can’t afford to wait that long for you to verify events before taking action. This needs to be pursued immediately.”

  “Where were you being held again?” Carlson asked.

  “The Federal detention center in Los Angeles. It was just off the 101 freeway. For what it is worth the codes to the lockup are currently as follows.” Jake gave them the sequence of numbers for both the doors he had to go through for the week af
ter he’d been taken there. Carlson had given him the numbers for multiple days not knowing just which day would prove useful. “You gave me those codes yourself, Carlson. I suppose there is a way I could have learned them, but it is something else you can check on. Any other little tests that will convince you, please tell me. But make it something that can be verified within a day. If we wait any longer, I doubt we will have a chance to stop this.”

  “We’ll think of something,” Carlson said. “For now, suppose we accept you are correct and Atlanta will be targeted, in a week you say? Why Atlanta? Why would that city be targeted? Why not New York or one of the major cities they have gone after before?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” Jake admitted. “I don’t think you did either when we talked. I got the impression the investigation had stalled and had not produced much in the way of results. You as much as implied that no one knew who was responsible, how and when the device had been put into place, or for that matter exactly where it had been located when it was triggered. I also don’t think you were directly involved, so you might not have had access to all of the information that was known at the time. When you came to visit me, you had no inkling that you would be attempting to provide me with information that might help out before the event.”

  “Sooner or later that all would have been discovered? Why didn’t you wait until more was known before coming back if your intent was to be helpful?”

  “The situation wasn’t exactly ideal,” Jack said sadly.

  “Explain,” demanded Carlson.

  “There are limits to my ability. One limit I thought existed was a barrier on how far back I can project. I thought it to be ten days, and making that happen was a difficult task. When I learned of the event it had occurred almost two weeks earlier, and therefore was beyond my capability. I called for you to come because I feared there might be more attacks and I might be able to do something about them at least.”

  “But something changed,” Carlson said. Laney was watching him intently.