“You are not my enemy,” she said. “You have brought me here, and for that I am grateful. But you are not getting this device.”
“That device is the only thing I’ve got going for me.”
“That is why you’re not getting it.”
He weighed his options. While he knew where he was, he had no idea when he was, and hoped that she’d at least brought him back to their present time. He knew they couldn’t stand there for long without being noticed, and if they were in some version of the Soviet Union, a random American on a highly-secure property wouldn’t be received kindly. He had one shot, and he had to make it work.
Summoning his strength, he tried to pull the device from her hands, but was unsuccessful. Not only did she maintain her hold on the device, but she was able to use his momentum against him, causing him to fall forward, the satchel on his shoulder swinging wildly across his body. His side exposed, she cross-chopped him in the kidneys, making him feel as though his back had burst, and he stumbled to the ground. Brush crackled under his body, a noise that couldn’t have been ignored by the various people in the yard. Sure enough, he realized that the cello music had stopped. His time had run out, though Ekaterina was advancing on him, looking to finish the job. He took a deep breath to mitigate the pain in his side, sidestepped her, and sprinted through the trees the several steps he needed to reach the wooden door, then pulled it open. He jumped inside the dark hallway and stumbled down the stairs, catching himself by planting his right shoulder into the dirt wall. Not feeling her immediately behind him, he took off along the dark corridor, sliding his right hand along the wall to maintain a position in the center of the passageway.
At almost full speed, he hit the bottom step at the other end with his foot and crashed into the stairwell. Undeterred, and with the sense that the entire Soviet army was on his tail, he stood, pain flaring through the arm that he’d extended to catch himself. He climbed the steps as quickly as possible and emerged into and through the outhouse.
Instead of an open field, as he’d left it the last time he was in the present, before him was an enormous campus. There were six or seven buildings of various shapes and sizes, including one in the center that had to be about eight stories tall. They were predominantly white with large windows that were darkened to the outside. To the right stood a transformer about the size of a two-family home that obviously provided power to the facility. He took in everything with a horizontal scan, then, not allowing himself a moment to consider where he was, he darted toward another row of trees to his left as fast as he could run. He made it there in what he thought would have been Guinness world record time, and literally dove into the shade of the forest. About 100 feet into the trees, he finally stopped, crouching in a small thicket.
No one had pursued. Ekaterina must have known that a lone American lost in Russia was probably not much of a threat.
After peering through the evergreen brush and out into the field, and taking in the sheer size of the buildings that had replaced the emptiness that had been in the field only moments before for him, he lay down on a sloppy bed of pine needles and caught his breath. His side and his arm ached. He could still feel tightness from the blow to his throat. And Ekaterina had taken his time device, which accentuated the point that he had no idea what day, month or year he was experiencing.
Not one solution came to mind.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
December 9, 2018
Ekaterina did not follow Jeff when he disappeared into the tunnel. She figured he would have enough to overcome. He had no language skills in Russia and no means to get anywhere. If her calculations were correct, he would be three years into the future beyond the present they’d left originally, and his time travel device was in her hands.
Did she feel bad? No. Jeff’s fate was a means to an end for her and, as a scientist, had he considered all of the possible dangers facing him, he should not have engaged in time travel altogether. And certainly not with someone put in her position for their particular mission. She had purposefully not spent too much time getting to know him because, until she’d seen Belochkin’s time travel room, she hadn’t been quite sure what path she would take. Of course, Jeff had been assuming that she was going to follow through with everything that Evelyn had lain out for them, but that had been naive. He was completely unaware that he’d been given different instructions than she had.
Evelyn’s message to her had laid out the plan very succinctly, and her concept of having to re-do any actions caused by time travel – what Jeff was calling “fulfillment” – had been both brilliant and believable. But Evelyn, having cataloged Soviet history in solitary misery for three decades, saw an opportunity to right what she’d made wrong. For thirty years, she was the only person on the planet who knew that time travel was possible, and, knowing it was eventually coming, she waited for her opportunity to integrate herself into the conversation. Ekaterina was convinced that Evelyn could not have done it had she not been one of the planet’s most brilliant people. To be a “regular” citizen – even more incredibly a mental patient – and find a way to position herself as one of the first to hear from the government that time travel was not only possible, but in use, was nothing short of genius.
The e-mail she’d received from Evelyn (though Jeff had been told that it had been a letter in order to streamline the timing of the story) had been incomprehensible at first. It was one of those odd ones out that normally comes in between a hundred other “real” e-mails in a day, and that generally gets shuffled immediately over to the trash bin simply based on an unrecognizable sender. But, as she would have expected, Evelyn’s subject line was brilliantly imagined and forced her to open it: it was a famous quote from Joseph Stalin: “The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic.” There was no warm and fuzzy introduction – just the point of the matter. In Russian.
Evelyn had written the story as she’d told it to Jeff, only the outcome was different. She’d acknowledged that a meeting would be difficult under the watchful eye of the FBI, so she was exceptionally pleased that she’d made it work. Ekaterina had accepted the invitation by simply e-mailing back her flight information to New York.
In truth, until she had actually traveled to 1983, she’d been playing everything by ear. She had her instructions from Evelyn, but did not have the faith that Jeff could actually make time travel work – and if he could, whether it would be possible, not to mention wise, to try to make such a dramatic change to history. Amid her entire thought process, she knew there was a complete lack of understanding for how such a change could affect her personally.
It was why she’d chosen to recalibrate the time device to end up further into the future than when they’d left. She took in her surroundings. If the time device was programmed as she’d intended, they would be a little over three years beyond their original present time – which put them several hours before the “other” her was scheduled to make the jump to 1983 to assassinate her mentor. Given her instructions from Evelyn, she’d been astonished that both Jeff and the FBI had believed that Evelyn had happened to stumble onto them only days before the date she’d time traveled. The coincidence was so absurd she couldn’t help but bring it up to him on the plane. She wondered if this jump had put her into the same world as her other self. If that was even possible. Or would her jumping back and forth have eliminated not only Evelyn’s existence, but the original Ekaterina (according to Evelyn’s story)? Her thought was that the other Ekaterina would, indeed, be there, and would have to be stopped from her original time travel. Whatever it took.
The compound was a far cry from the dilapidated mess they had left in their present time. The trees were larger, and the brush along the property’s exterior fence was much thicker. But the grounds were the same, though she noticed that the basketball court now had two baskets instead of just the one that the General-Polkovnik had been using only moments before. The people scattered around the property had decided Je
ff’s commotion was nothing of interest, and had gone back to their activities. She stayed hidden in the trees as she scanned the area, however. Her next move was likely not into the compound proper, but through the tunnel toward the field where she could reassess her position and form a strategy.
She had an advantage, if indeed the right changes had been made, that she hadn’t had in 1983 – she would be recognizable if anyone found her. As far as anyone else knew, according to Evelyn’s story, Ekaterina Batrudinov was a scientist working on time travel at the behest of the Premier. If she ran into anyone who wondered why someone had ventured into the compound or the surrounding area, she at least had a link to the powers-that-be that could get her out of any sticky situation.
Leaving the compound behind, she slipped into the secret tunnel and walked slowly through it until she reached the stairs, climbing sixteen of them, counting in her head as she had as a little girl practicing for an eventual attack by the Americans. The tunnel was not well-publicized, and she imagined she was one of the few who knew of its existence. She emerged into the grassy area behind the compound, squinting into the light.
Only it was not a grassy area any longer. Her field of vision was filled with an expansive facility – a series of interconnected buildings with white walls and dark square roofs. She counted seven of these buildings, peppered across the property and separated by second-floor glass walkways and lavish landscaping, including a collection of sophisticated topiaries. At one end of the campus was what appeared to be a power station the size of one of the smaller buildings. There was little evidence of human activity, most likely due to the wintry temperatures, except for what appeared from a distance to be two men in lab coats strolling across one of the walkways between the two largest of the buildings, and a parking lot holding several aisles of cars.
She hadn’t been to the compound in decades, but was quite certain that no facility like this had existed anywhere in the area. She deduced that her gambit had been successful. With the need for as much power as she knew that station could provide, this facility had to be the site of Belochkin’s time travel project. The facility, though large, was secluded from any traffic that might venture out this way, and the General-Polkovnik, or the Premier if he had indeed reached that position, would want his secretive project as close to himself as he could keep it. For the first time, she allowed herself to fully accept that Evelyn had been telling the truth, and she took a moment to enjoy the pride she felt in restoring the glory of the Soviet Union. If any mission could be categorized as fulfilling one’s destiny, she could not imagine anything grander.
But her new mission was Phase Two, and it had not yet been completely formulated.
She now had some knowledge of what Belochkin intended to do with the time travel device, and wondered if it was that same information which had caused Evelyn to go back and murder him in the first place. She’d told her to look in the room, but hadn’t divulged what she’d found, or what it had meant to her. Perhaps she thought Ekaterina would have her own interpretation, offering her a way out should she choose to take it. What she’d learned was that she didn’t need – didn’t want – a way out.
Since Ekaterina had been raised until the night of Belochkin’s murder in the same exact manner as Evelyn, with the same values and learning, she couldn’t imagine that her alter-ego would have intentionally done something that she knew would bring her country to its ruin. She believed Evelyn hadn’t fully comprehended the disaster she could cause by eliminating one of Russia’s great leaders. She imagined that, if she had the unlikely chance to come face-to-face with her, she would force her to gain that understanding.
Spurred by a boldness rooted in familiarity, she strode across the tall, unkempt grass until she reached the manicured facility grounds, then settled into a casual walking pace that would not arouse suspicion. There were a few items on her priority list, the first of which was determining if there was indeed another version of herself walking around, which she suspected to be the case. Of course, there was a new factor in that there was another time traveler on the premises, as well. She’d been evaluating Jeff’s options and, without his time device, the only chance he really had available to him was to reach the other Ekaterina. While his resources to do so were definitely limited, the race was on.
It occurred to her that, when it came to deciphering the effects of time travel, she was out of her element. Once Belochkin had been killed and she’d returned to the Academy as a child, she was trained as a spy. Other parts of her brain were developed that strayed from the academic and focused more on the interpersonal. Though it did please her, strangely, that this facility’s existence demonstrated she had the capacity in her to develop the time travel program. That little girl in 1983 would be at the top of her class no matter which path was chosen for her.
As she reached the parking lot, she wondered which of the cars in it belonged to her other self, settling on a blue SUV that bore the Russian name рейс, or “flight,” which must have been a prominent Russian automaker in the new present time, as she saw a number of these. But as she passed the cars and stepped onto the sidewalk leading to the front of what was labeled Building #1, she switched her focus to what she’d do once she was inside. There would be advanced security throughout the facility, but she knew she was safe if there was a retina or fingerprint scan, as hers were the same as Evelyn’s. It was a passcode system that would cause her issue, but no obstacle would be too difficult to overcome. Just potentially time-consuming.
Reaching the front of the building with no one else in sight, she approached a small pad to the right of the main doors. As she’d predicted, it was a combination retina scan and security code that would allow her entry. She engaged the device and completed the eye scan, which was accepted. Then she closed her eyes and attempted to channel her other self as to what might have been chosen as a passcode. She took herself back to the mind of a five-year-old, the most recent direct correlation she’d have with her time-traveling alter-ego. After a moment, she raised her hand to the keypad and entered the numbers that had come to her mind: 0-6-1-1-5-1.
To her left, the security door clicked. It had worked.
Her mother’s birthday. While she hadn’t seen her mother in some thirty years, those numbers were emblazoned in her mind. Apparently they always would be.
She pulled the door open and entered the building, passing through a second set of doors to come into a long white hallway. To her right was a small reception area, from which a uniformed guard rose and approached her. His posture was sluggish as he half-heartedly made an attempt to put his body in between her and the hallway, but it was enough to bring her to a stop.
“Я сожалею, Доктор. Есть проблема с вашим доступом безопасности.” There was a problem with her security access.
She put on a bit of a show, turning back to the door, then asked the young man what was wrong.
“Система говорит, что Вы находитесь уже в здании.” His computer was telling him that she was already in the building.
She laughed and stuffed her right hand into her pocket, pulling out the only thing she had in it, which happened to be a handful of Russian money she’d picked up when they’d landed in Moscow in their former reality. She realized that if the Soviet Union was still in existence, the money she had in her hand would be not only worthless, but unrecognizable, so she tried to hide its design from him. “Я оставил мои деньги в автомобиле и хотел достать чего-нибудь поесть,” she said. She’d left her money in her car and needed something to eat. Mumbling, she chastised herself for leaving out of a side door without signing out, hoping that would effectively sell her charade.
The guard studied her for a moment. The uniform he wore was different than that of the soldiers of the Russia she’d left. It was the traditional Soviet red, and though the effect was only psychological, it seemed mor
e intimidating to her. She found some pride in that, as well.
Finally he stepped aside, instructing her to be more conscientious “next time.” She nodded, then took about ten steps down the hall before the door behind her opened. She heard the guard jump to his feet and snap to attention, so she stepped to the side reverently, having no idea who was coming toward her. The man entering was at least six-foot-four, his chiseled chin covered with a thin beard. He wore the sharp dark teal uniform of a Soviet Lieutenant-Colonel (if she remembered her history correctly), with his chest full of accolades. He paid no attention to the guard, striding past him with his head up.
The guard, however, perhaps feeling the need to say something, greeted him as Podpolkovnik Dmitriyev, a name that meant nothing to her. Dmitriyev walked past her, as well, though he did glance quickly at her as he passed. A few moments later, the clicking of his heels in the hallway stopped as he disappeared through one of the many doors. Before moving on, she looked back at the guard, who’d returned to his seat and was shaking his head to himself. She thought she heard him breathing heavily, as if he’d just run a 100-meter dash, and recognized that this Dmitriyev was someone she might need on her side if she was to be successful.
There were seven buildings for her to explore to find where the Russian time device was. She knew that finding the time device meant finding the other Ekaterina.
She’d already killed her once. The question in her mind was – what would she do with her when she found her again?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Fulfillment (Wilton's Gold #2) Page 20
