“Good evening, everyone,” a woman’s voice called, prompting Martin to stand and see the Commander across the room. “I want to thank you all for the hard work you’ve been putting in. We’re getting closer. Believe in what you’re doing every day, because every small step that each of you make leads to one huge leap for the Road Runners.”
The room broke into brief applause as Commander Strike bowed her head and worked her way across the room to Tarik’s office where she closed the door behind her.
Everyone settled back into their places and Martin sat back down on the sofa, debating if he should rummage through the cupboards for a snack.
He had no time, as Bill started toward him from one of the side offices. He waved a hand and grinned. “They’re ready for you.”
“Already? She just got here.”
“Tarik briefed her over the phone on her way. Things move quickly in this organization; don’t be surprised if you’re already thrown into the middle of things tomorrow, should you still agree to join us.”
“What should I do, Bill? Am I crazy for not wanting to kill Sonya to end the war?”
“Not at all. This has been a polarizing topic for us. The topic was put up to a vote for all Road Runners in a position of leadership, minus those who work directly with Sonya. Across the world, we had 600 total votes cast. 301 came back in favor of killing Sonya, 299 against. I don’t think Commander Strike has slept in four days. She’s a huge fan of Sonya—once had talks with her about moving into a higher position in her office. But, she’s a bigger fan of ending this war. This decision has been eating away at her. I don’t think anything can happen that will change her mind at this point.”
“You’re not helping me.”
“I’m not trying to sway you one way or another. This is a heavy decision and I’m glad I’m not in your shoes. You have to decide what’s best for you. But I suggest you get in that room before the Commander gets impatient.”
Martin nodded and shook hands with Bill. “Thanks for everything.”
Bill bowed his head in appreciation and Martin turned to return to Tarik’s office. The door was cracked and he pushed it open to find Tarik standing in the corner of the room while Commander Strike sat behind the desk, hands folded beneath her chin.
“Hello again, Martin. How are you doing?” she asked with a gentle smile. Now that Bill had mentioned it, he noticed slight bags under her eyes.
“I’ve had better days, that’s for sure.”
“I know this has been a lot thrown your way, and I hope we can still reach an agreement on you joining us.”
Martin nodded as he sat down in the seat across the desk. “I can’t kill Sonya.”
“I know. But we need you to. Hear me out. We believe Sonya is on to us. We tried poisoning her drink, and she conveniently knocked it off the table to look like an accident. She has stopped contacting some of her closest friends within the organization. All of her trust has vanished, and that’s on me. We have someone slipping her information; there’s no way she could have figured this out on her own. We’ve kept her duties the same as always, kept her security detail consistent, but she still knows.”
“Not surprising. It sounds like there are some strong opinions on the matter.”
Commander Strike nodded. “I know. I must have changed my mind at least a hundred times. But it’s what needs to be done. It’s one life against millions; it’s really a no-brainer.”
“It’s not. Because Road Runners aren’t monsters—I’ve gathered that much in the last day. You are good-hearted, well-intentioned people. You’re the complete opposite of Chris. He would’ve had Sonya dead within five minutes of learning this information, if the roles were reversed.”
Bill had said she wouldn’t change her mind, but Martin felt obliged to at least try. He watched the wrenching decision swim behind her exhausted eyes.
“I appreciate the input. It means a lot coming from someone who is still technically an outsider, but the decision is made and we want to discuss it with you.”
“I’ve already talked about it with Tarik.”
Tarik nodded from the corner, arms crossed with a foot planted on the wall for support.
“We haven’t discussed how you would go about this. We’ve considered multiple ways of carrying this out. We don’t want anything vicious done to Sonya. It needs to be a painless death. We’re not asking you to shoot her in the head or anything like that. We have three options prepared: more poison for a drink, an injection, and a letter.”
“A letter?”
“It’s covered in a poisonous powder—from the future. Our plan is to equip you with all three options when you go to meet Sonya. Each one will affect her in the same way. These poisons are designed to make the receiver fall asleep, and eventually slow down the heart rate until it stops. She won’t feel anything painful this way.”
It’s like putting an animal down.
“Why the three options?”
“We want to give you flexibility. The plan is to have you meet with Sonya, spend some time with her and catch up.”
“Catch up? It’s only been a few hours since she even left me.”
“Yes, but she left you with a laundry list of questions. I heard about the meeting in the Oxford Hotel basement. They said you were completely stunned, and I don’t blame you.”
“Do you guys always trick people like this?”
“Not always, but it’s Sonya’s role with us. She’s even passed up promotions to continue doing it. She loves being in the field.”
Martin thought back to that day at the cabin again. Sonya was upstairs when Chris had stopped by for his visit. They were that close to each other and she didn’t even know it. What would she have done if she came downstairs and saw her father chatting with Martin on the balcony?
“It just feels like I’m being used at this point. All this effort to get me to join so I can kill Sonya. If I do, then the war ends. Then what?”
“Then you’re a hero, and the world is saved. There will be a recovery effort that takes place. A lot of damage has been done at certain points in time that we’ll need to evaluate how to fix. But we’ll have the ease of knowing there will be no more attacks.”
“Just because Chris dies, you think the Revolters will give up?”
“The Revolters are a lost cause without him. This war will still be going on in other continents, but the big decisions run through North America. If Chris dies, so does their vision. He recruits weak-willed people who require guidance. Sure, there’ll be a few who give it a try and attack us, but the majority will go into hiding. Because if Chris doesn’t survive, how can they expect to?”
Martin looked in the Commander’s direction, but not at her. He looked through her, into a future where he was considered a hero. A secret hero that the whole world wouldn’t know about, just the Road Runners and Revolters. A hero in a second world that existed not by imagination, but underground, working every day to keep the world safe.
“It’s not everyday someone gets an opportunity like this,” Strike said. “We have a unique opportunity to give ourselves—humanity—a second chance at life by fixing things. One thing I’ve learned is that none of that matters. What happens in your current life is what will forever shape you. Even if you had managed to save your daughter, your soul remains forever scarred by her disappearance. That alone dictated the next twenty years of your life.” Martin nodded. She was good. “Now you’re here at the ultimate crossroads. You can go back to your life and spend the rest of your days on the run from Chris. Or you can be the one who ends him once and for all, so no one ever has to be running again.”
“I want to know something. If I kill Sonya and Chris never steps foot outside of his house, will you blow up that mansion knowing there are at least fifty Road Runners being held captive underneath it?” Martin drew on his knowledge from the brief conversations he had with Julian and Bill.
“You’re a forward thinker, and that’s how I know you’ll do
big things for us, even after the war. To answer your question, no, we would not put those 50 lives at risk. There are ways to get to him even if he hides in the house.”
Martin nodded, imaging himself slipping poison into Sonya’s drink while she cooked dinner for him. He longed for his old life with her and wished it could’ve been real. He’d happily spend the rest of his life on the run if she was by his side.
He leaned back in his seat, relaxed for the first time in hours, and grinned at the Commander who watched him with anxious eyes.
“I’m in.”
85
Chapter 30
Martin had no plans to kill Sonya, but the Road Runners didn’t need to know that. All they cared about was that he agreed to go through with it. Who was to say he couldn’t have a change of heart at the last minute?
Just get me in with the Road Runners and I can explore other options from there.
He had no clue the magnitude of their resources. There had to be a different option. Road Runners only murdered Revolters, not other Road Runners.
“I don’t have to sleep in this office, do I?” Martin asked after Tarik had pulled a bottle of whiskey from his desk drawer. Turns out the Commander and her trusted leaders weren’t so different after all.
Commander Strike threw her head back and laughed, an obvious wave of relaxation spreading over her like a wildfire. “Of course not. The folks in this office are researchers and watchers. We have eyes all over the world in offices just like this. They know that living here is part of the job when they accept it. A lot of these people come from lives destroyed by Chris. They feel they have no other purpose than to eat, breathe, and sleep Chris until he’s pronounced dead.”
“So what will I be doing?”
“You’re on a special assignment in the field. We have even more people in the field than in offices, physically following Revolters in an effort to find their hideouts, among other tasks, of course.”
Like killing your own?
“So what happens now?” Martin asked.
“Well, something new that we’ve been doing: injecting a tracking device into your body.”
Martin’s grin turned into an immediate frown.
“It’s not so we can keep an eye on you, it’s more to know if you’re still alive and well. And if you’re in danger, where you are exactly.”
“Why is this new?”
“We decided once people started getting taken into Chris’s house that we needed a way to check on them. We had no way of knowing if they were alive or not, making a decision difficult about what to do with the house. We still don’t know, actually, as the only one who had a tracker was shot the same day you escaped.”
“I watched that from my window.” Martin remembered that moment, thinking he’d never make it out of the house.
“Yeah, we had to watch it, too. Had a car on the way to pick him up, but Chris never really meant to let him go. You know, you’re not the first person to escape from his mansion.”
“Is that so?”
“We’ve watched five of our own make a run from that house, all who were shot. We don’t know if Chris just let them out to a hopeless escape, or if they actually broke out and were caught. That’s another reason we want everyone to have tracking devices—it just helps us gain more information. “
“Makes sense. After I get my tracker, then what?”
Commander Strike was beating around the information he wanted.
“We’re all gonna rest tonight. Tomorrow morning we’ll implant your tracking device, provide you with the poisons and the information about Sonya, and you’ll be on your way. We’d like to see her dead tomorrow night, if possible. We already have heavily-armed crews surrounding Chris from a distance. Sonya has a tracking device already, so we’ll know the moment she dies. Their deaths will nearly be in sync.”
“That’s pretty aggressive. Won’t I need time to regain trust with her before trying to slip anything to her?”
Martin’s plan was to stall once he was with Sonya, maybe find a way to warn her. It sounded as if the entire Road Runner community would be watching this play out like the Super Bowl. A death party. Can Martin pull off the impossible and save the world? Bring your chips and dips and find out, this Wednesday at six!
The thought sent a shiver down his back.
“We’ve been complacent enough, especially under past leadership. I don’t believe in waiting things out. We have a mission, and it’s time to complete it.”
The smile left her face as she spoke sternly. Commander Strike was this close to achieving their biggest goal and wouldn’t risk it so Martin could have small talk with Sonya.
“Now let’s all get some sleep. I know I’m running on fumes and you probably are too, Tarik.”
Tarik nodded, tipping his glass to finish the last of his whiskey.
“We have extra beds here, or you can go home and come back in the morning. It doesn’t matter to me, just know you’ll need to be here by seven.”
Martin pulled out his cellphone (oh, how he missed it) and saw the time as 12:30. It was already Wednesday morning.
“I’ll just stay here.” There was no point in driving home to toss and turn in his bed for five hours when he could just do that here. His mom wouldn’t even be awake, and he had said his final goodbyes. She had known he wasn’t coming back home despite his promises to return for one more farewell.
“Perfect. We’ll get you a private room. Welcome to the team.”
Commander Strike rose and stuck out a hand that Martin grabbed firmly.
This is really happening. I’m a Road Runner.
The nightcap in Tarik’s office must have helped Martin fall into a deep sleep, because his mind still raced despite his body falling into a limp pile of flesh on the mattress. It turns out all of the offices doubled as bedrooms where beds pulled out of the wall, and the temperature adjusted to a perfect 70 degrees on the thermostat.
Martin fell asleep thinking about Sonya and the life they had made in 1996. It was perfect, and he wished he could’ve stayed. With his new knowledge of her, he knew that was impossible. No matter how long they would’ve carried out their lives together, it still would end with him joining the Road Runners. That was her job, and she was damn good at it.
He remembered when they played house, cooking dinner, doing dishes, and making love multiple times a week. It was a glimpse into the life that could have been if Izzy never died. Izzy always thought her dad was a hero, and now she could look down from heaven and see for herself.
I’m here because of you, and I need to see it through.
The thought of joining the Road Runners and taking on a mission of killing Sonya didn’t worry him. Not knowing what his life would look like, say in the next 48 hours, terrified him. He could wind up a hero just as well as dead. He was officially in a war now, and all is fair in love and war, right?
Except for when you use your love to kill someone for the war. Martin reflected—something he had lacked the time to do—on what he had accomplished during his first trip into the past.
Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. Izzy is still dead. Columbine ended up worse. I almost died. And I fell in love with a girl who was only trying to recruit me to this shit show.
Martin cried in his dark room, tears streaming from his face and soaking into his pillow. The fear of failing again, on such a grand stage, made him sick just thinking about it. Izzy, Sonya, and his mother all spun around in his head. His old life was gone, and forward was the only direction to go.
86
Chapter 31
Martin had set the alarm on his cell phone for 6:30 A.M. His brain itched with fatigue as his bleary eyes opened. He had made a point to not look at the clock while he tossed and rolled all night—that only made it worse. By his mental calculation—unreliable after getting no sleep—he had slept a total of two sporadic hours throughout the night.
He told himself that he could go through with whatever the Road Runners asked of him, bu
t the thought of killing anyone kept him awake.
The next 24 hours would be spent on autopilot, and he preferred it that way. The excitement had worn off, the determination vanished, leaving him a sulking pool of regret.
I never asked for any of this.
Martin pulled himself up from the bed on wobbly legs. His mind protested having to do anything as a long day awaited. They expect me to have this mission done tonight? I’m gonna need a nap. Maybe I’ll take some of this poison and enjoy the ride. They said it doesn’t hurt.
He shook his head clear of the thoughts, knowing that was just the exhaustion speaking.
“Get off your ass and be the hero. For Izzy. She led you here.”
Martin’s pep talks to himself usually worked, but they fell on deaf ears this time. He crossed the room to examine himself in a mirror on the wall. His hair flew in every direction, his eyes were bloodshot and puffy. I look how I feel.
A knock banged on the door, startling him, and he crossed the room to open it.
“Good morning, Sunshine,” Bill said, chipper with a cup of coffee in his hand. “I heard you’re officially part of the gang now. Welcome.”
“Thanks, Bill.”
“Rough night? You look like a pile of shit that got run over by a semi-truck.”
Martin chuckled. “You know, I’ve been hit by a semi before, and I’d have to agree with you.”
Bill laughed and slapped Martin on the shoulder. “I know this has been a lot, but hopefully today goes quickly and smoothly for you.”
Martin nodded, unsure what to say. Quick and smooth was the last thing on his mind. He preferred it to be dragged out and avoidable.
“I came to make sure you were awake and ready. Commander Strike is expecting you in Tarik’s office at seven sharp.”
“Yeah, I’m just about ready. I’ll be there.”
“Great, have fun. I won’t be in there, have a couple matters to tend to, but wanted to wish you good luck.”
Wealth of Time Series Boxset Page 50
