by Rebecca York
The sparkling landscape and the press of people were almost too much for her. She had never in her life seen so much wide-open space and so many people. Happy, carefree people. They were all around her, smiling and eating and enjoying the attractions—and they didn’t know how near they were to death.
She could feel that death—so close, like huge, black vultures circling over the landscape.
And she could feel Charles Carpenter. He was breathing the same air that she breathed. Moving through the same happy throngs.
And she had to find him. Before it was too late.
She had described him to the Light Street team as best she could. Some of them were in the auditorium, trying to spot the terrorist among the crowd. But there were no photographs of the man, only an artist’s rendition that made him look like the devil incarnate. There’d been no way to trace him; Charles Carpenter wasn’t his real name.
Feeling as if someone was staring at her back, she swung around to look over her shoulder. Could Carpenter be somewhere behind her? Could he know that she—or someone like her—was looking for him?
No one met his description that she could see. Her senses told her she was moving toward him, so she kept walking along a blacktop path past a pond colorful with water fowl.
In these throngs of people, without the touchstone, finding Carpenter would have been an impossible task. She’d had no idea how big this place was, because nothing in her experience had prepared her for the endless park or the blue dome of sky overhead. But the special cells the Handlers had grafted into her were guiding her to him.
Her heart rate picked up, and her hands began to tremble. Now she was sure she was closing in on him. Proximity was making her sick and shaky and so full of tension she felt as if a live electrical wire was sizzling through her.
Gritting her teeth, she focused on the crowd, scanning faces, thinking that looking for Carpenter was like looking for a grain of food in a chemical dump. But at least Carpenter was alone. Then again, he could have brought along a decoy family to make him less suspicious. She’d heard of terrorists who’d done that. But was Carpenter that sick?
She stumbled over uneven blacktop and caught herself.
Twenty yards away, she saw Max start toward her, but she shook her head. She didn’t want him beside her. She didn’t want him at the center of danger. But he had insisted on keeping her in sight.
He had come down here with the Light Street volunteers. If she thought about what they were doing, she would start to choke up. More people than they needed had asked to be part of this mission. If she failed, everybody who had come down here with her could die. She prayed Thorn could save them. He had used the antibodies in her blood to make a serum that would counteract the virus. The trouble was, there’d been no way to test it yet.
Annie clenched her fists, then deliberately forced her hands to relax. There was no way she could have made it this far by herself. Maybe that was why the other time travelers had failed. The Handlers had wanted the mission to be secret at all costs. But they had no idea what someone coming from the future would face.
An impossible task. The only reason she had gotten this far was thanks to Max and her other new friends. Max and the Randolph Security–Light Street team were making it possible for her to function.
She slid him a quick, grateful look, and he gave her a thumbs-up. She smiled and signaled back.
Last night she’d made love with him, and it had been glorious. She’d never imagined such joy in her life. If she could sleep in his arms for the next hundred years, that would be heaven. But she couldn’t see past this day, this moment—because she was prepared to do whatever it would take to stop the man who had turned her world into a living hell.
Max thought he knew what was at stake. But he hadn’t lived in the disaster zone that had become the planet Earth. He didn’t know what it was like to live in an environment that was raw and harsh and soul-destroying. Where every imaginable environmental disaster, including nuclear bombs, had made large areas uninhabitable. Where living outside a complex took decades off your life, if you survived past childhood.
All that had made the men and women who had trained her for this mission fanatical. They were brittle, nasty people. When she thought about Angelo, the head of the project, she started to tremble. He had sent her here to die. He hadn’t cared about her. But that wasn’t surprising. Where she came from, human life was cheap. There were too many people for the resources they had left. And too much effort had to be put into making the underground environment habitable.
“You okay?” Max asked through her special cell phone. He and the other Randolph Security agents who were fanned out around the park were all hooked to the same network, so they could hear one another.
“No,” she said. It was difficult to speak, difficult just to breathe. Carpenter was too close now. She knew that from the touchstone the Handlers had put inside her. As she took a path that led past the dolphin tanks toward the penguin house, the pain in her head worsened.
She thought about what the Handlers had told her. They’d said the touchstone would lead her to Carpenter. They hadn’t told her the damn thing would make her so sick. Maybe they hadn’t known the effect or maybe they had put too much of it into her body to make sure she could find him.
Where was Carpenter? When was he going to release the virus? She didn’t know the answer to either question. But she had to stop him.
Her task would have been easier if she had a gun. But with the security measures in place after 9-11, she would have been taking a chance trying to get a weapon into the park. If caught, she would have been hauled away by the police and had no chance at Carpenter.
A sudden pain stabbed her head.
“He’s close,” she whispered into her phone. “Very close. I guess he isn’t going to the place where the governor is speaking.”
“We’ll zero in on your position.” It was Jed who answered.
The people around her were a blur of sound and movement.
Ahead of her was a bed of bright orange and yellow flowers. A pity she didn’t know their name, she thought. But there had been no room for such luxuries in her dark, barren world.
As she marveled that anyone would put so much effort into a flower bed, a maintenance man in a green uniform stopped a small truck near the display.
She looked from the flowers to the vehicle. She’d seen trucks like it in the park earlier. The sign on the side indicated they were used for spraying insecticide.
The driver walked to the back of the vehicle and unhooked a hose. And as he pulled it toward the yellow and orange flowers, pain grabbed her by the throat, almost knocking her to her knees.
In that instant, she knew.
It was he. Carpenter. A man with brown hair, dark eyes and pale skin. Not Satan. A normal-looking man in a green uniform.
With a sick certainty, she knew that the virus was in the truck’s tank unit, and he was getting ready to spray it into the air. And everybody in the park was going to get the deadly infection.
“It’s him!” she shouted as she ran toward the truck. From her right she saw another body hurtling toward her.
The man’s face swam into focus, and she gasped. It was Sheriff Bert Trainer. He was running toward her. He was going to stop her.
No! Not Trainer. Not now. What the carp was he doing here? How had he known where to find her? They had told her someone would try to stop her, and now she knew it was true.
Max saw him, too, and came running. “Get out of the way,” Trainer screamed as he hurled himself forward. “Let me do my job.”
Just before Trainer reached her, Max grabbed the man. Trainer bellowed and tried to throw him off, but Max pulled him to the ground where they began to struggle. Trainer fought like a madman, trying to get to her. All because she’d broken up his drug ring?
Annie saw the fight only from the corner of her eye. She kept moving, struggling against the awful pain coursing through her as she ran toward Ca
rpenter. She felt as if she was swimming through poisonous water, choking, gasping, and she was sure she couldn’t get there in time.
When Carpenter looked up and saw her, his face went pale with shock, and she realized then that he’d had no idea anyone might be here to interfere with him.
“Get away!” he screamed, then he quickly turned and reached for the hose controls.
Passersby froze in surprise, riveted to a drama they couldn’t understand.
Miraculously, Annie reached Carpenter, tearing him away from the hose handle, flinging him against the side of the truck. He lunged for her, and they struggled. He was strong and desperate; she was so sick she could barely fight him. It was only because Katie had given her a stimulant that she had any chance at all. But finally, inevitably, he wrenched himself away.
Desperately, she made another grab for him, her fingers tangling in his shirt. With a low growl like a wounded animal, he turned and clawed at her.
Then someone else was beside her. She saw Jason throwing the mass murderer to the ground and follow him down. But was it already too late? She heard a hissing noise. The virus. Was it in the hose or in the tank?
Maybe she could still stop the horror. At least she had to try.
Expecting at every moment that Carpenter would leap on her again, she reached to turn the valve back to the off position. The metal handle wouldn’t move. Panic roaring in her ears, she pushed harder, and the lever gave. As it did, the hissing noise stopped, and she breathed out a sigh of profound relief.
Blinking, she looked at the hose lying limply on the ground.
A scream from behind her made her turn. In their struggle, Jason had thrown Carpenter against a metal fence where he lay panting. Randolph agents moved to block her view, but she heard one of the men on the ground curse.
“What?” she gasped. “Is he getting away?”
“Not likely,” Steve answered, coming toward her. “The bastard had a cyanide capsule under the front of his shirt collar. He’s dead.”
She slumped against the truck. She should have realized that he was no longer living. The touchstone had gone cold inside her. Probably if the tiny computer was still under her skin, she would have fallen down dead, too. And then it would have destroyed itself, so no one would know.
But that didn’t happen. She had stopped Carpenter, and she was still alive.
She couldn’t quite believe what had happened. Had she and the Randolph agents really changed history? Had they prevented Charles Carpenter from turning the world into a wasteland?
“Annie. Over here, Annie. Quick.”
Disoriented, she pushed away from the truck and saw Max motioning to her as he crouched over Trainer.
She sucked in a breath when she realized she’d been so focused on her mission she’d forgotten about the sheriff.
Hurrying to Max, she knelt beside the man on the ground. His breath was ragged.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He didn’t answer the question. “I didn’t come…to hurt you. I came to help.”
Annie struggled to rearrange her thinking. “Why?”
“Angelo sent you…didn’t he?” he asked.
She stared at the man. “How do you know?”
“He…sent me. Thirty years too…early. At first I didn’t remember why I was…here. Then I remembered…but I knew I had to wait.”
He was silent for several moments, his breath rattling in his chest. With a wheezing cough, he began to speak again. “I guess…I convinced myself it wasn’t…going to happen. Till you…” He coughed again, and she could see he was in bad shape. “I got to live here…for thirty years. I was…cop back home. Here, too.” He coughed again. “What’s…wrong with me?”
“The tattoo under your arm, it’s got poison. It’s set to go into your system after you finish your assignment.”
He made a dry, rattling sound. “Angelo…bastard.”
“Yes,” she said past a tight throat.
“I saw your notes…in boat. I…had to…come here. Then I…felt Carpenter…”
“With your touchstone,” she concluded for him. “I guess it lost a lot of its power—until you got close to him.”
“Saw…you…and…” His voice trailed off, and he lay with his eyes closed. “You got him. Thank God.” Those were his last words.
Annie stared at the man who had enjoyed terrorizing her that night on the dock. “He was nasty, like them,” she said to Max. “But he came here to do what he was trained to do. Like me.”
“Yeah,” Max replied. “He had all the makings for a hard-assed cop. All he had to do was learn to speak Southern. But in the end, he came through for your Handlers.”
Max helped her up and took her in his arms. “It’s over. It’s all over.” He stroked his hands over her back, her shoulders.
Behind him she could see someone had slapped a Poison sign on the truck. Beside it, Jason was talking to the police.
“I have to—”
Max interrupted her. “You have to do nothing. It’s finished. You can go on with your life. No thanks to Angelo.”
“But I should talk to the police.”
“No. Jason will handle it. He’s got evidence that Light Street learned about the plot from another source. You don’t have to get involved at all.”
She blinked up at him, trying to take it in. It was difficult to wrap her mind around the truth, but finally she said, “I guess I don’t.”
“It’s over for you,” he said, his tone firm. “You’ve done enough.”
“Did I change history? Is my world different?”
“From the way you described it, I hope so.”
There was something she’d been worrying about for the past two days. “Then why am I still here?” she asked in a voice she couldn’t quite keep steady.
He stared at her, then cursed. “I didn’t think about that. I guess your damn Handlers didn’t, either, if they decided they had to kill you. Or maybe they know something we don’t.” He stopped and ran a shaky hand through his hair. “Do you remember your life? Where you came from?”
She thought about it. Her memories had been sharp and clear until a few minutes ago. Now what she remembered was hazy, like a bad dream from which she’d awakened. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “Ask me later.”
He held her tightly as though he feared she might vanish. And she held him just as frantically. But as the seconds ticked by and she didn’t fade away, she began to relax. Something had happened. The world had changed. But she hadn’t disappeared from existence.
She let Max draw her into a little courtyard, where they were sheltered by stone walls. Bright purple flowers cascaded around them.
In an alcove, water spouted from the mouth of a stone fish into a basin that sparkled in the sunlight.
She looked around in wonder, breathing in the fragrance from the flowers. “It’s so beautiful here.”
He turned her toward him, then bent to brush his lips against hers. The gentle kiss made her heart feel light. Lifting his head again, he looked down at her and smiled. “Yes. This is a good place for me to ask you to marry me.”
She stared at him. “You want to…to marry me?” she asked.
“Yes. I knew it that first night we made love in Maryland. I should have told you then. I should have told you how much I love you.”
“It wouldn’t have changed my decision,” she heard herself say. “I would still have had to come here today. And you would have been angrier at me than you already were.”
He laughed. “Yeah, you’ve got that right. But you were persistent. You would have made me understand why it was important to get that bastard out there.” He gestured over his shoulder.
She licked her suddenly dry lips. “I had to try to stop him. I would have come here by myself.”
“I know.”
“So that makes me like your wife—the woman who was killed.”
He shook his head. “You’re not like her. She had to keep proving
herself over and over. And she went off on one too many dangerous missions. You didn’t have anything to prove. You knew you had something vitally important to do, even when you couldn’t remember what it was.”
“Because I had that thing planted under my skin.”
“That wasn’t the only reason, and you know it. Your sense of purpose didn’t go away after I took it out. When you remembered what was going to happen to the world, you knew you had to stop Carpenter.”
“Yes. But the Handlers didn’t understand that I could only do it with your help. Thank you, Max. Thank you for letting me come here. I know how hard that was for you.”
“Yeah.” He hugged her close. “And thank you for bringing me back to life. Thank you for making me care about someone again. I was operating on automatic pilot until I hooked up with you.”
“Oh, Max.” She drew back her head to look into his face. “I never thought I could love anyone. I mean…well, I loved my mother. She was a wonderful person, even in our world. She gave me a good start in life. But we weren’t allowed to…get involved with anyone. Women and men lived in separate dormers.”
“You got involved with me pretty quickly.”
She felt a flush heat her face. “I’d never met anyone like you. You weren’t harsh and mean. Even when you were furious with me, you were gentle.”
“By your standards, I guess.” He cleared his throat, looking anxious. “So why don’t you give me an answer to the question I asked?”
She felt the tension in him, felt her own heart start to pound. “Maybe I can never fit in here,” she whispered.
“People are resilient. You’ve already proved that.” He gave her a direct look. “You and I are going to be a very, very good team. Unless you’re too scared to take a chance on happiness.”
She was scared. She had never thought that she could have any of the good things that he and his friends took for granted. But her universe had expanded since the moment he had pulled her out of the river.
She took a breath and let it out. “Max, I love you.”
“Thank God.”
