He looked up at her and smiled. “Well, that will have to be for version two-point-oh.”
After a moment, he was done writing, so he returned to sitting on the side of the bed. He handed her the tablet. “Go ahead. Try one.”
She thought for a moment - or at least made it look like she was thinking – for his sake. After a moment of seemingly intense pondering, she chose her date. “What if I want to go to the future? Say, the morning of December 9, 2018?”
He laughed. “That’s pretty specific,” he said, but rang up the date. The tablet spewed a lengthy decimal at them.
“That’s it?” she asked.
“Pretty much.”
“Show me how you get that into the time device.”
Jeff nodded and opened the combination on the case holding the device. He opened it and pulled out a metal stick about a foot long with buttons and an LED screen on it and held it up to show her. “Here are the buttons, zero through nine, and there’s the screen. Honestly, the hard work was the years of research. It’s pretty simple now.”
“It seems like it.” She held her hand out and he gave her the device to inspect. She rolled it around in her hands, running her thumb over the raised buttons. “How does it work then? Does it create a field or something around you?”
He shook his head. “No, you have to be in contact with the device. I have a theory that you can also be in contact with something in contact with the device, but I haven’t been able to test it yet.”
She handed the device back to him and took a deep sigh. It was too forceful, so she pulled back her energy. “Jeff, there’s something I have to ask you.”
“What’s that?”
“We still have a bit of a trust issue.” She stood off of the bed and leaned against the wall. “I would feel more comfortable if you left either the time device or the tablet in here with me while we slept.”
He smiled, which she didn’t expect. “You think that because I took one trip, I’m going to take another one?”
“It would be easy for you to do so.” She held up her hands. “I know it’s asking a lot. But we must be in this together. I know that you could leave this hotel room, go back in time, and end up back here without me knowing anything about it. That is a frightening thought.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Jeff said with a shrug. “If it makes you feel more comfortable, I’ll leave the... tablet here. No problem.”
“I appreciate it. That was not easy for me to ask.”
“It’s okay,” he said as he rose from the bed. He slid the tablet back into his bag and set it on the desk next to the television. “I’m going to get some sleep now. Big day tomorrow.”
“Yes, it is,” she said.
A moment later, he’d grabbed the time device and was gone. She locked the door behind him, then turned back to the room. She picked up the complementary stationary and pen that Jeff had been using and sat down in the desk chair. She pulled the tablet out from its case, touching the screen lightly. It illuminated, showing the screen that they’d been looking at moments earlier.
She uncapped the pen and began to copy the digits on the tablet’s screen onto the note pad.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
If someone had asked him if he was tired, Jeff would have denied it. But when his head hit the pillow, the next thing he remembered was the incessant beeping of the nightstand alarm. It didn’t matter what country you were in – when you weren’t ready to get up, the alarm clock was a mortal enemy. Fortunately, he found the unfamiliar off button on the first try and the noise stopped.
While his body pled with him to grab another fifteen minutes of sleep, he knew that they had a deadline. Even if it wasn’t a firm deadline. According to Evelyn, in the alternate reality she’d described, she wouldn’t be going back to 1983 until the evening on this date. If you believed such things. They were specifically giving themselves some breathing room in case something went wrong, so there was a window of several hours to play with in case someone, say, overslept.
He heard a knock on his door. Apparently, more sleep wasn’t going to happen. “Go away,” he said quietly enough that Ekaterina wouldn’t be able to hear it through the door, but loudly enough to make him feel defiant for saying it.
Another knock, so he rolled off of the bed and stumbled to the door. He opened it enough that he could see her face through the crack. “I’m up,” he said, his eyes still foggy from sleep. “Give me twenty minutes.” She nodded and he closed the door.
They’d determined that they would return to the same hotel after the mission was complete, so there was no clean-up necessary. He figured twenty minutes bought him time for a shower, so he hopped in and let the water run on his face to wake him up. While he didn’t have too much responsibility on this trip, he thought he should be as alert as possible should anything unexpected arise. Besides, at the heart of it all, he did understand that what Ekaterina would be doing would probably be very emotional for her, so he felt that, as the man, he might just be called upon to “be there” for her. He was up for that responsibility as a pit stop on the road to getting his life back.
After he showered and dressed, he pulled the time device from its bag and inspected it – more out of obsessive-compulsiveness than anything else – and then replaced it. He picked up the bag and headed to the door.
Ekaterina was waiting in the hallway for him, Abby’s tablet in its satchel around her shoulder and the case of weaponry at her side. “We are stopping on the drive so I can teach you how to shoot the gun.”
He laughed, though it wasn’t a hearty one. “Can I get a doughnut and a coffee first?” he asked.
She was serious. “There is bread, eggs and coffee in the hotel lobby. You can take them with you. I will drive.”
“We have a car already?” he asked. He loved surprises first thing in the morning.
“I’ve arranged one, yes.”
He thought about things for a moment, then nodded his head with exaggerated determination. “Okay. Let’s go.”
She turned and walked down the corridor. Jeff followed. He hadn’t realized he was going to learn how to shoot a gun today, and wondered just where she was going to take him. Could they just pull off the side of the road and blast a few rounds into the trees? Maybe they could. He thought she was being much too serious for the morning, though he continued to remind himself to understand the shoes she was wearing. She had a much tougher road to traverse in the coming hours than he would. She’d been much softer during their brief conversation in the middle of the night when she’d wanted to learn about the technology and then hang onto the tablet. Perhaps this intensity was simply how she prepped for a mission. He could understand why.
They walked down the stairs instead of taking the elevator, Jeff taking Ekaterina’s lead in doing so, then stopped in the hotel’s kitchen area where he threw together a plate of various breads and two hard-boiled eggs. He poured himself a coffee, but couldn’t find a lid, so he sipped off of the top to make sure he wouldn’t spill it as they walked. He could feel Ekaterina looking on impatiently. Then they left the hotel and she showed him to a silver Toyota Camry, which caught him by surprise.
“I thought it would be a Russian car of some sort,” he said, opening the door.
“Does everyone in America drive an American car?”
He laughed at her sarcastic smile and got into the car. He took another sip of the coffee and set it in the cup holder, where it looked ominously ready to spill.
“You should have taken a lid for that,” she said.
“I didn’t see any.”
Without answering, she started the car and pulled out of the lot. They were quickly on a two-lane highway that, other than the navigational signs in Russian, didn’t look too much different to Jeff from two-lane highways in America. Traffic was heavy, with a balanced mixture of tractor trailers and small, fuel-efficient cars. The terrain was wide open – lots of fields and distant forests, with large manufacturing plants interming
led among them. The scenery reminded Jeff very much of Colorado before you hit the mountains.
Ekaterina drove fast. Really fast. Probably the kind of fast you could only get away with by having a high-level government ID in your pocket. He tried to read the expression on her face as she drove, but didn’t want to get caught leering at her. He could tell she was determined, and seemed to become even more so every kilometer they drove closer to their destination. Her level of determination coincided directly with the amount of space she was leaving between the gas pedal and the floor. She was a different person than the one with whom he’d been traveling.
Finally, after fifteen minutes or so, she spoke. “Have you ever fired a gun?”
“I haven’t, no.”
“Well, you’re going to need a crash course. What I think we are going to do is this – I’ll take two of the three needles and you keep the other. These will be weapons. You and I seem to both be in agreement that if anyone gets stuck in the past, there are better solutions than to kill ourselves.”
He laughed. “We could make a compact to do each other in.”
“There are better alternatives than that, as well,” she said, without acknowledging his attempt at humor. They sped past an eighteen-wheeler with a FedEx logo and Russian writing on it as though it wasn’t moving. “You will keep the gun and will cover me. I will go into the house, which you’ll see before we travel back in time, and take Belochkin from behind while he’s not expecting it.”
He looked at her. “Why go into the house? I thought the assassination took place outside.”
She was nodding, still looking forward. “It did. But from what I remember of Belochkin, he had an acute sense of his surroundings. Remember, he was elite Soviet military, not some common soldier. You did not just sneak up on him. I think it’ll be much easier if I spring upon him from inside what he believes to be an empty house. Evelyn was lucky in catching him outside and succeeding in killing him.”
Jeff held up his hands. “You’re better at this than I am. I’m not going to question your strategy.”
“Also,” she said, “if I am forced to confront Evelyn outside and there is any disturbance, Belochkin will be alerted.”
He shook his head. “I can’t believe that you’re going to kill… Yourself. How can you possibly prepare to do that? And how are you going to do it?” Their syringes were accounted for. The gun was for back-up. She had no other weapons.
“I do not want you to worry about that,” she said, admonishing him. It may have been his imagination, but he thought she was talking with much more of a Russian accent now than she had been previously. “You have enough to consider.” She paused, as if waiting for him to retort, but he had nothing to say, so she continued. “You will have to be ready with the gun in case something goes wrong. While the ideal is that I am able to penetrate Belochkin’s skin with the needle – if that fails, you may have to shoot him.”
“Will there be guards? Would someone hear the shot?”
“If there are guards, they will not be near the front of the compound,” she said, her eyes remaining fixated on the road. “They will not be able to react swiftly enough. She passed a Volvo by darting into the right-hand lane.
Jeff looked at the signs on the side of the road. They’d made their way onto M-2, the road that would take them all the way to Tula, where the former Belochkin compound was. “I’m taking your lead here,” he said. “I’ll try to do whatever you need me to do.”
“You do not sound very confident,” she said.
“Sitting here, I’m probably not. But faced with a Soviet general who would probably kill me if given the chance, and who we already know wants the world to end in nuclear war, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to react quickly.”
She shook her head. “I feel very safe.”
“Well, it’s what we have right now. I won’t let you down.” In truth, he really didn’t know if he could do it. More likely, if anything happened to Ekaterina and he was faced with a life-or-death situation, his best bet was not the gun. It was the time device. Though that presented a sticky situation, because he wasn’t quite sure what would happen if they failed to kill Belochkin. With three trips left in the battery, he’d be able to take another run at it, but if he left Ekaterina behind, he’d have lost his primary weapon… her. But, he thought that if anything happened to her, he could immediately go back to five minutes before she’d gotten into trouble, warn her, and then carry the plan out as intended.
Maybe. Who knew if that would work? Even if it would, it was not ideal. So he focused on Ekaterina just doing the job as planned, and them heading home. As planned.
They drove for a while in silence before she spoke again. “You should get the gun out and hold it. Get used to the feel of it.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now. You need to become accustomed to it so that it feels natural. I cannot have you freeze up if we lose control of the situation.”
He obeyed, reaching into the back seat and pulling forward the case. He opened it and pulled out the pistol, then closed the case and set it on the floor at his feet. He held the gun in both hands, feeling the weight of it and the coolness of the metal against his skin. He was comforted that it felt as he’d imagined – the way she’d been setting the experience up, he’d honestly thought it was going to feel very foreign to him. But it fit in his hand, and as he ran his finger along the trigger, his confidence boosted. Though he reminded himself that the plan was for everything to go right and the gun to stay holstered. He appreciated a well-executed plan.
“How does it feel?” she asked.
He nodded. “I can handle it.”
“If anything unexpected happens, I will hold him in a stable position where you can get a clean shot.”
“You can do that, even if you’re in trouble?”
“Yes.”
Jeff continued to fondle and inspect the gun for another ten minutes until he felt the momentum of the car slow. He looked up to see that the traffic had died down to a trickle of cars, and Ekaterina took an exit off of the main highway. After a few turns, they were alone in the country, thick forests on either side of them. Taking advantage of their solitude, Ekaterina accelerated the Camry even faster than she had on the highway.
“I haven’t been this way in many years,” she said, “but I’m remembering every centimeter of it.”
“I hope so,” Jeff said, peeking at the speedometer, which was tickling 160 kilometers per hour.
Finally, Ekaterina slowed the car and turned right onto a solitary road that seemed to disappear into the forest. For several minutes, they wound in a series of S-curves that would have bored away anyone possibly wandering onto the road. The trees’ canopy overhead was thick enough that it would have been impossible to tell the time of day with the limited sunlight it allowed.
“Man,” Jeff said after they seemed effectively lost. “The only way to get to Belochkin would’ve been time travel. Geez.”
Ekaterina didn’t say a word, her two hands gripping the steering wheel as she concentrated on the route. Eventually, they came to a fork in the road, where she hesitated for a moment, then pointed to the left option. “That’s the compound,” she said. “That way.” Then she took the road to the right.
Jeff looked back at the road disappearing behind them. “If the compound is that way, why are we going this way?”
“We’re not going directly to the compound. We’re going to the rear side of the compound.”
“Okay,” he said. He’d trusted her this far.
After another few minutes, the road ended, leaving them at the tree line and the beginning of an enormous field. To the left, Jeff could see what had to have been the compound, behind an enormous wall and dense trees. As Ekaterina drove across the field offering them a better view, he could see that the wall was in disrepair, covered in cracks and thick strings of ivy.
“The compound has been deserted for decades,” she said, now unable to take her eyes off o
f the facility, despite the fact that the ground in front of them was uneven and the Camry jostled as she drove. “It is very sad. This was once a hallmark of Russian military might.”
“Kind of secretive to be a hallmark,” Jeff said. “Don’t you think?”
She was shaking her head. “Not like the Kremlin or the Pentagon. This was where the Soviet Union’s top military minds would gather. Not to decide the next mission or strategy. But for philosophical thought. Enjoyment of each other’s company. Camaraderie.”
“Oh, so kind of like Camp David?”
“Camp David is for the President and his elitist friends. This facility had a much broader view of leadership, and was far more secret.”
They continued to drive along the wall, which must have been twenty feet high and now curved to the left. The property was substantial, and Jeff hoped for a chance to see the inside – more from a historical point of view than anything else. He knew they’d ultimately be inside the compound in 1983, but like an old church or fort, the idea of standing in it and imagining the past appealed to him.
It wasn’t to be, though. Ekaterina pulled the car to a stop at the base of the trees lining the wall, near a decrepit wooden outhouse. They got out of the car. The air was warm and muggy, and smelled like an unkempt field. Jeff looked out at the vast nothingness that surrounded them – more fields, another tree line to their left, and a distant one several football fields away in front of them.
“Strange place for a toilet,” he said.
“This is true. In fact, this outhouse was merely an escape route from the inside of the property. If the Americans had ever infiltrated the compound, the facilities’ inhabitants were instructed to escape through a secret tunnel leading here, where they would be recovered in military vehicles.”
“Was that a real concern? The Americans finding this place?”
She looked at him closely, seemingly for the first time since they’d left the hotel. “Was it a real concern that Russia was going to drop a nuclear bomb on you?”
Fulfillment (Wilton's Gold #2) Page 17
