Terminator 2_Hour of the Wolf

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  The interview had been more cordial than she had expected. The file photos of her were all over a decade old, the newest one being a fuzzy surveillance shot made during the 2001 raid in Colorado Springs on Cyberdyne. Even without Portis’s modifications, she did not much resemble that woman anymore. But someone had called the police on her, suggested they look into the Philicos company for irregularities, and possibly resurrect a murder investigation now almost a quarter century old. A big, stiff, anonymous finger pointed her out and the resemblance to the Sarah Connor of 1994, though vague, was sufficient to pique Detective Russo’s professional curiosity.

  But in the end, they could not match the fingerprints.

  Other things failed to line up and the file on Philicos Security and Investigation went back four years and offered nothing but positive marks. Julia Philicos was a stand-up citizen, as was her younger brother Sean. They had even done work for the FBI—nothing profound, but enough for the FBI to conduct a background check on them, which turned up nothing.

  “How’d you get into this business, Ms. Philicos?” Russo had asked. “Forgive me, but you seem a little old to be starting out in the private investigation industry.”

  “How old do you think I am?”

  “Your file says you’re thirty-eight.”

  “And I don’t look a day over forty, is that it?”

  He had almost smiled at that. “You trained for the FBI, 263

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  dropped out of the program, and haven’t done much between then and now.”

  “Ten years as an independent consultant counts as not much?”

  “Well, it’s vague. Consultant to what?”

  “The government. Beyond that I can’t discuss it.”

  He disliked that, but a few phone calls confirmed that she had done confidential work for the Justice and State Departments. The network of contacts Reed had established to back her up worked once more and Russo, after a few more questions that did nothing but delay her, was forced to let her go.

  “Are you staying in Los Angeles?” he asked her finally.

  “I hope to. I like it here.”

  “Maybe we’ll get a chance to work together then.”

  “Maybe.”

  And then she caught it. Through the interview, as it became clearer and clearer to him that she was not Sarah Connor, his interest shifted. He was attracted to her. The realization surprised her and she nearly laughed.

  Sitting there in the police station, waiting for John to show up, she considered the possibility. Detective Russo appeared to be in his forties, hair beginning to thin, but physically still trim, athletic. A part of her toyed with the idea.

  Risky, she thought. How well will Reed’s background hold up under prolonged scrutiny?

  Keeping her distance would be the sane, rational thing to do. On the other hand, a friendly presence within the L.A.P.D. would be an asset. It might pay to accept the implied interest…

  You’re talking about using him, Sarah. Get him involved with you and take advantage of him…

  Leaving it alone made sense ethically and tactically.

  She looked up when John entered. He was alone, dressed in dark clothes. He wore a sport jacket over the black pullover. Black pants, black runners…

  “Ready?” he asked.

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  HOUR OF THE WOLF

  Secomb looked up. “Mr. Philicos, good to see you.” He closed up his PDA and stood.

  “Everything is taken care of here. A case of mistaken identity.”

  “Of course,” John said. “I appreciate your help.”

  Secomb fished a card from his pocket and handed it to Sarah. “Mr. McMillin has instructed me to be on call if you need any further assistance. I’ll walk out with you.”

  As they reached the exit, Sarah looked back. She glimpsed Russo watching her from the doorway leading back to the interrogation rooms.

  Outside, they walked to the parking lot adjacent to the building. Police cars and civilian vehicles mingled across the tarmac. Even at this late hour, traffic was constant in and out of the station.

  “Are we going somewhere special?” Sarah asked John.

  “Jack has a little outing planned,” John said. “We’re meeting him—” His cell phone chirped. “Philicos here,” he answered. He stopped walking, his frown deepening. “Hold on.” He covered the phone. “It’s McMillin. It sounds like a TX-A is inside Destry-McMillin, in one of the labs. My guess it was trying to recover the T-800.”

  “Was?” Sarah prompted.

  “It has Bobby Porter now.”

  “Shit.” She looked around, spotting Secomb heading for the parking lot. “Mr. Secomb,” she called, “I need a ride.”

  The lawyer stopped. “Of course.”

  “Did you bring any gear along?” she asked John in a whisper.

  “Absolutely, but—”

  “Jack expecting you?”

  “I can call—”

  “Where’s Portis?”

  “In the car.”

  Sarah thought as they walked on. “Is Jack expecting a confrontation?”

  “No, it’s purely recon.”

  “Then I’ll take Portis. If he’s anything like Jade and Ant-265

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  on, he’ll be more useful to me in a fight with a TX-A. You go meet Jack as planned. No sense both of us being in the line of fire.”

  John looked ready to protest, but then nodded. He raised the phone. “Sarah’s coming back with Secomb and Portis.

  They’ll be there as soon as they can. Can you keep it bottled up? What? All right, that’s fine. Keep people out of its reach for the time being. I—what? Oh. Sorry to hear that. Is everyone else…? Good. They’re on their way.” He closed the phone and quickened his pace.

  “We need to meet a few blocks from here,” Sarah said.

  “It wouldn’t be a good idea to transfer equipment in full view of the police station.”

  John laughed dryly. “Just like old times,” he said.

  “God,” Sarah said, “I hope like hell not.”

  Six blocks from the station they pulled into a parking lot between a jewelry store and a tax preparation business.

  John opened the trunk of his car and pulled out a heavy case, which he then deposited in the trunk of Secomb’s car.

  Sarah hoped no police surveillance had been attached to her, because the transfer would look illegal. But as Secomb drove off, heading for the highway, she spotted no tails. As they neared Destry-McMillin she was confident they had not been followed.

  Portis listened in silence to the news. When she asked if he would accompany her to help in stopping the TX-A, he agreed. He asked no questions and offered no comment during the return trip to the campus, only stared out the window.

  They pulled into the Destry-McMillin garage to be met by Dennis McMillin and a squad of uniformed security guards. McMillin opened her door almost before Secomb stopped the car. His face showed panic—controlled, dominated by a clear self-discipline that Sarah respected at once.

  “Third floor, in the bioassay lab,” he said. “We have it sealed off—”

  “How many people are up there?” she asked.

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  HOUR OF THE WOLF

  “We’ve got about twenty.”

  “Has there been any attempt to leave?”

  “No. No communications, nothing.”

  “Who else is in the lab with it?”

  “Porter. One dead security guard. Paul Patterson is in there, too, but we don’t know if he’s alive.”

  Sarah went to the trunk. She opened the case John had placed in it. Within lay a pair of energy rifles and a variety of field gear. Sarah stripped off her jacket and donned a kevlar vest. Magazines filled a row of pockets around the waist, below incorporated sheathes for a brace of automatic pistols. She zipped it up and handed one to Portis, who examined it and put it back. He hefted one of the rifles.

  “I didn’t think you could build these
yet,” he said.

  “We can’t, as far as the general public is concerned,”

  Sarah said. She lifted the other and checked it over. “The hard part’s the power cell. This thing requires a lot of juice.

  The shielding makes it heavy, too. Unless you want to scorch your hands, don’t try to fire it continuously.”

  She closed the case, punching in a personal code to lock it.

  “It has Porter,” Sarah said. “Which means, it has you. It would be helpful if you could remember what we did.”

  Portis looked at her. “I’m sorry. I don’t.”

  “We need to discuss this memory problem you have. For now, we try to burn it down and get Bobby free. If it means killing him—you—we let it go.”

  “I understand.”

  McMillin was staring at the rifles with obvious wonder.

  Sarah snapped her fingers and he looked up at her.

  “Keep the floor sealed if you can,” she said. “Has anyone called the police?”

  “No. Should we?”

  “Certainly not. But you might want to call your insurance adjuster. Keep your people away from it.”

  “Can you deal with this…this…?”

  “Better than your people can.” She looked at Portis.

  “Ready?”

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  “Of course.”

  McMillin accompanied them to the elevator. She thought he might wish them luck, but he just opened the door for them and stood back.

  The corridor was empty by the time they reached it. As they stepped out of the elevator, Sarah asked, “What would happen if you’re killed?”

  “Which me do you mean?”

  She pointed down the corridor. “Bobby.”

  “I would disappear,” he said, frowning. “Our meeting earlier would be overwritten. You might get killed in that apartment because I wouldn’t be there to prevent it. The frame would adjust itself to a sudden absence.” He seemed about to say more, but closed his mouth.

  “In that case…” She started forward. “I don’t have a plan, as such. I hope you’re all right with that.”

  “What happens, happened.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “I’ve always thought so.”

  “But do you believe it?”

  Portis did not answer. Sarah touched the stud on her rifle.

  A faint vibration coursed through her hands briefly as it powered up.

  Bobby watched the thing melt and reform completely as Casse. It crossed the lab to the door.

  “We have a great future for you, Mr. Porter,” Casse said as it locked the double doors. “You should listen to my offer before rejecting it out of hand. It would be better for both of us if you agreed willingly, though I admit that I have little expectation of that. But maybe, just maybe, I can offset your innate skepticism and reluctance through gener-osity. You may name your price.” He examined the keypad alongside the door. It was the duplicate to the access panel outside, in the corridor. With a sharp motion, he crushed it. “All humans have a price. I’m sure we can meet yours.”

  Bobby trembled. His left leg was wet. On the opposite side of the room, Paul Patterson lay bleeding on the workbench. He did not move, so Bobby was sure he was dead.

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  HOUR OF THE WOLF

  The sound of blood dripping on the floor seemed inordinately loud.

  “I understand you’re upset just now,” Casse continued, approaching him. “But I’m patient. Let me ask you a question, though. Do you believe in time travel?”

  “Wh-what?”

  “Time travel. Focus, Mr. Porter. The rest of your life depends on it.”

  “I don’t know, I—what the hell are you?”

  “A mechanism. Surely, no organic life can do what I do.

  You’ve surmised that by now. I am a TX-A model Terminator, manufactured in a facility created and operated by an intelligence you will know as Skynet. Insipid name, hardly a description of what it actually is, but it’s the name it was given by its creators and it has kept it until such time as it no longer needs any human designation. I have come to this frame from the future. I arrived in 1982 with instructions to acclimate and observe. Under certain conditions, I am required to act. Those conditions have occurred, I am now acting. Does that help?”

  “The future. What future?”

  “Curious question. A curious answer. A future that no longer exists. Events altered after the initial timeline was established. A mistake. One I—and perhaps we, if you agree to help—intend to rectify.”

  Bobby tried to think through his fear. He had never been so afraid, not even the first time Casse tried to kill him. He had to control it, he knew, or he would never survive. He focused on what Casse told him.

  “How can you come from someplace that doesn’t exist?”

  “An intelligent question. Good. It existed once. It does not exist in the same way, but it has a potential existence.

  It may exist again, at least in some form.”

  “That—you make it sound like a problem in quantum mechanics.”

  “It is. Quantum mechanics is only applicable to the very small, as you understand it. Therefore particles, can have a potential existence, attaining actual existence only under 269

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  certain conditions. Their potential, what you call virtual, existence is nevertheless quite real, at least insofar as you cannot ignore it when trying to examine conditions under which they manifest. Under almost all-natural conditions, quantum mechanics cannot be applied to the macro universe, where Einsteinian mechanics take hold. Almost all conditions. Quantum mechanics applies to the macro universe only when time travel occurs.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “We want you to help us reestablish the timeline. Things have gotten tangled. You have the ability to untangle them.”

  “How?”

  “Building a time machine for us. Then we can make everything the way it should be.”

  Casse looked pleased. Bobby’s mind struggled with what it said. Something was fundamentally wrong with Casse’s explanations.

  He framed another question. It felt close to the problem.

  He opened his mouth to ask.

  The door to the lab blew inward then, knocking him to the floor, spraying splinters across the lab.

  270

  TWENTY-FOUR

  John found the van in a parking lot next to a long, boarded-up building on the grounds of the old air base. He punched in Jack’s number on his cell phone.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m here,” John said.

  There was a pause. “Alone?”

  “Just me, Jack.”

  “Come up here.”

  John pocketed the phone and got out of the car. A jet roared overhead, on its way south out of LAX. As he neared the van, the side door slid open. Hands helped John inside and the door closed with a sharp snap.

  A mobile operations center crowded the walls. Monitors displayed telemetry, some from satellites. Pete sat up front behind the steering wheel. Jack studied the displays while Amy completed checks on the surveillance equipment they intended to plant within Cyberdyne’s facility.

  “Where’s Sarah?” Jack asked.

  John explained about the call from McMillin.

  “I suppose we can do this just as well,” Jack said finally, clearly displeased. “Will she be all right? Do you trust that specialist?”

  “I’m still not convinced he’s a specialist, at least not like Jade and the others. Mom trusts him. To a point. I think 271

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  she preferred to keep him with her rather than letting him see exactly what you intend to do. Besides, if the situation changes at Destry-McMillin, she can let us know.”

  “Unless she’s part of the situation that changes.”

  John did not ask what he meant. Both of them knew the capabilities of a TX-A Terminator. If Casse got his hands on her, it
was possible he could reprogram her. Certainly he could steal the contents of her mind. The risks were legion, which, in Sarah’s way of thinking, meant they should be ignored when possible. Paying attention to them all rendered one inert, immobile.

  “The situation is as follows,” Jack said. “We go in through their fence, to the west, and make our way to the first manufacturing building. Here.” He pointed to a display, an overhead view, highly magnified and computer enhanced, showing the layout of the base. Jack indicated the entry point and target building. “We cannot be caught. Cyberdyne has a new protector in congress, someone who’s about to get them government vendor status again. What my people need is evidence that Cyberdyne is involved in illegal projects, in violation of the restrictions and conditions placed on them after ’01. If we can obtain that information, we can block their clearance. If we can’t, then in another year Cyberdyne will once more be doing business openly with the United States government, probably rebuilding the same centralized missile-satellite grid that got us in this mess to begin with. The first thing we need to do is prove that this facility is owned and operated by Cyberdyne. As far as I could determine, it was acquired by a fourth-level shell company, owned by an offshore concern headquartered in Brunei. Cyberdyne’s protector knows very well that they own this, in fact he helped them get it. But only a handful of others know.”

  “Then…?”

  “It’s a game played in Washington, like a shell game. As long as the pea isn’t visible to too many people, you leave it covered by the cup. It might prove useful in the future.

  Exposing it for no good reason could cost you politically.

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  HOUR OF THE WOLF

  So if the emperor is naked, you keep your mouth shut until it’s on national television.”

  “If we get caught?”

  “Then I’ll be looking for a new job. I expect to have a lot of explaining to do about the intervention in the desert.”

  “That can’t be traced to you, can they?”

  “Directly, no. But only a few people have the ability to mount an intervention like that, it wouldn’t take much guessing to figure out who. I have to be careful for the next few months not to bother the wrong people.”

  “So why are you here, now?”

  Jack shrugged. “I can’t ask anyone to do what I’m not willing to do personally. The likelihood of getting caught tonight is too high. I won’t let anyone else take the heat for my screw up.”