Time Frame (Split Second Book 2)

by Douglas E. Richards

  He didn’t read much fiction, but even so, he had read the overused expression, waiting with bated breath, many times before. Was this what he was now doing? Or was this phrase meant to describe something else?

  He closed his eyes, glad he had chosen to wait this out alone. Joe Allen, his second-in-command, was tied into his ear with a comm, but he didn’t want Allen to see his tension, his uncertainty. Didn’t want to discuss the tough questions with him.

  He had just received a call from Nathan Wexler, at least one version of the man, who had teleported blindly, as planned, and found himself somewhere in the Mojave Desert, a location so barren it could well have been on another planet. As it turned out, it was just sixty-nine miles from the Las Vegas Strip. Since the plan had been for Blake to send the physicist just over a quarter second into the past, which would land him sixty-two miles away from the time machine, it was possible that Knight’s command center was very close to this dense population center.

  Of all the locations Cargill had expected for Knight’s headquarters, Las Vegas wasn’t it. Given that Knight’s ego was the size of Texas, Cargill had half expected him to build a secret lair within a volcano, taking a page from The Incredibles or a James Bond movie.

  On the other hand, Cargill should have known better. These bases had been constructed by the villains of these movies, after all, and Knight had fooled himself into thinking he was the hero of this drama. That his ruthless behavior wasn’t that of a psychopath, but simply the behavior of a pragmatist striving to save the world from itself.

  Holing up in Las Vegas, hiding in plain sight under the most blinding concentration of neon lights in North America, would be just like the man. Assuming Jenna and Blake had been taken to his headquarters, which was not a sure thing. Nothing was a sure thing.

  Cargill’s plan was bold, with a significant chance that it would end in disaster. They were attempting to bring Knight down by first giving him exactly what he wanted, what he needed, to destroy Q5 for good. If he figured it out in time, they would have delivered Jenna Morrison to him on a silver platter, and more importantly, Nathan Wexler’s work.

  For the plan to succeed, everything would have to go perfectly right. So far, it seemed that this was the case. Cargill had been confident Knight would let Blake go and give him a head start in exchange for access to Wexler’s work, something he had already gone to herculean efforts to get.

  In this quest, at least, Cargill couldn’t blame him. Knight had spent so many hours struggling to understand the time travel he had tapped into, it was a wonder his brain hadn’t burst into flame. Getting a chance to peek at the answer key was understandably irresistible. Like another, legendary, bite of knowledge that had been offered up in the Garden of Eden, Cargill was counting on his apple to lead to a downfall similar to the one a serpent had brought about.

  And it seemed to be working better than Cargill had any right to hope. Because even assuming Knight would give Blake a head start, and assuming a duplicate Nathan Wexler had been negotiated into the mix, the odds against the private eye making his way through the phalanx of guards and security that Knight was certain to have, and managing to beam Wexler to safety, seemed astronomical.

  Blake must be even better than Cargill had thought. He doubted the term miracle worker was much of an exaggeration.

  Cargill had just finished a brief call with an ecstatic Jenna Morrison. He had given her the news that her fiancé was alive and they were even now racing to Wexler’s GPS coordinates to retrieve him, scrambling a helo from nearby Nellis Air Force Base to pick him up.

  While Cargill’s identity and the nature of his work were kept in the shadows, he possessed command codes that could get US military bases around the country, and their commanders, to jump to carry out his every order. The commander would know better than to ask any questions about how the man he was retrieving had ended up in the center of a desert without any means of transportation, and why Nellis had been assigned to act as his personal chauffeur.

  But just because this part of the operation had gone much better than expected didn’t mean they were out of the woods. Knight could have knocked Jenna unconscious so she couldn’t activate the explosive. Or perhaps he wasn’t inside the blast range.

  Regardless, what was now eating away at Cargill’s stomach like so much battery acid was that everything might go right. If Jenna truly was in a dense population center in Las Vegas, this would be his worst nightmare.

  Cargill had been certain Knight’s base would be secluded. When Jenna and Blake had initially balked at his plan, he had assured them that this would be the case. The dose of octa-nitro-cubane explosive he had embedded in Jenna’s ring was enough to vaporize a broad circle of real estate around her, the expected size of Knight’s headquarters.

  Even if Knight’s base was secluded, there were sure to be scores of innocents surrounding him who would lose their lives if the plan succeeded. But at least in this case, most of the casualties would be people who had sided with a man determined to thin the human herd, kill every member of Q5, and ultimately ride roughshod over all of humanity.

  But what if Knight had taken Jenna to a penthouse suite on the Strip? If she didn’t realize where she was, and activated the ring, she could wipe out tens of thousands of innocent tourists, causing a blind panic around the world as a veritable crater appeared in the middle of one of the most iconic locations in the US.

  Cargill shuddered.

  Had he become as big a monster as the man they were trying to stop?

  Bigger?

  It was he who had pushed Jenna and Blake into accepting this degree of overkill—just to be sure that Knight was within the blast radius.

  But Cargill had to admit to himself that this wasn’t all of it. He also knew that a larger blast zone would have a greater chance of eliminating the scientists Knight was thought to have duplicated, as well, getting rid of a problem Cargill wasn’t equipped to handle.

  If these scientists lived, Cargill would be forced into making impossible choices. Imprison them, as Knight was doing, or go public with time travel. There was no third option.

  Five identical copies of Elon Musk, with his exact memories up until recently, would be impossible to explain away. All of these Elon Musks would believe, rightly, that they were the father of Musk’s children, the owner of his assets, the rightful resident of his home. And this would repeat itself for hundreds, or even thousands, of famous scientists. It would be mayhem. Anarchy. Insanity.

  And when time travel was revealed, as it would have to be to explain how so many duplicates of so many geniuses had sprung up like copies of newspapers rolling out of a printing press, it would throw the world into a panicked frenzy. This would be a shock to civilization, to the status quo, that would be too sudden, too profound to readily absorb.

  By advocating for the use of so much explosive, if the plan did work, Cargill hoped to eliminate a problem he couldn’t imagine being able to adequately solve.

  But knowing that one copy of these scientists would all still live, knowing that the duplicates had no right in any sane universe to exist in the first place, and knowing that his actions had prevented a disclosure that would tear the world apart, didn’t make him any less a monster. These scientists were innocents, prisoners, and he had put a plan into place knowing it could result in their deaths—worse, hoping that it would.

  And now it might end much worse than he had thought. If Jenna was in a population center, there could be no good outcomes. If she realized where she was and never pushed down on her ring, Knight would survive, and they would have handed him a potent tool. And if she didn’t realize where she was, Knight would die, but at the cost of many thousands of additional innocents.

  Cargill tried to tell himself that if this were to happen, it would still be for the greater good, would still prevent far more loss of life later on, but the constriction of his throat, his inability to breathe correctly, suggested his subconscious would never be fully satisfied w
ith this rationale. Because this is exactly how Edgar Knight justified his heinous actions. In Knight’s mind, the world was headed for almost complete self-destruction. If Knight truly believed he had to eliminate twenty percent of the population to save the other eighty, was he any worse than Cargill?

  Shakespeare had written, Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and Cargill never imagined he’d learn just how true this was. He didn’t wear a crown, but he led a group that controlled time travel, and had virtually unchecked authority, making him the most powerful man on Earth.

  Assuming, of course, that Knight was taken down in the next few minutes.

  If not, Edgar Knight would hold this title instead, and Cargill’s days would be numbered.

  Cargill gritted his teeth as he noticed the time ticking away on a digital clock in the corner of a large monitor on his wall. Almost five minutes had elapsed since Wexler had teleported into the desert. If Jenna did intend to trigger the explosive, she had already delayed it much longer than he would have expected. Did this mean the mission had failed?

  This question was answered an instant later as Joe Allen’s triumphant voice materialized in his ear. “She did it, Lee!” said Allen excitedly. “I have reports of a massive explosion in a region called Lake Las Vegas. Incredible!”

  “Lake Las Vegas?” repeated Cargill uncertainly. “What the hell is that? Please tell me it isn’t near any population centers.”

  “It’s not. It’s sixteen miles from the Strip. Knight’s headquarters was on a man-made island in the center of a man-made lake.”

  “A man-made lake in the Mojave Desert? That’s ridiculous.”

  “I agree,” said Allen. “But also true. It was part of a massive construction project, decades ago, that not many people know about. The site of a multi-billion dollar resort that went bust. The island later became home to a number of commercial buildings, most of them abandoned. Until recently. Nine months ago the island and everything on it was purchased by an anonymous entity for private use.”

  Cargill blew out a breath he felt he had been holding for centuries. This anonymous entity had to be Knight. So his base had been relatively secluded, after all. Thank God.

  Cargill had still punched his ticket into the bowels of hell, had still joined the ranks of history’s greatest mass murderers, but it could have been so much worse.

  “Well done, Jenna,” he whispered, trying to focus on the positive. What they had accomplished was nothing short of a minor miracle. They had brought down a man, and protected a secret, that could well have had a devastating impact on far more than just a tiny manmade island.

  Cargill just hoped that if there was a God, He didn’t judge that this had come at too great a cost.

  9

  Cargill closed his eyes and allowed himself to feel at least some relief at the successful conclusion of such a bold and risky Op, but only for a few seconds. There was much still to be done. “Send in our team to mop up as soon as they arrive on-site,” he instructed Joe Allen. “You know the drill.”

  He had scrambled a team to head to the general vicinity of Las Vegas the moment they had pegged Wexler’s GPS coordinates five minutes earlier, and they were already in the air. “Just make sure they land on the outskirts of the blast,” he added. “By the time they get there, the periphery should have cooled enough for them to be safe. But make sure.”

  “Roger that,” said Allen.

  “Inform Aaron and Jenna that their duplicates succeeded. That Knight is no longer a threat. And tell Aaron that I’m pretty sure he’s superhuman. Also, find out when Nathan Wexler is due to arrive on the runway, and make sure Aaron and Jenna are with us to greet him.”

  “Will do. Did you decide to give President Janney a heads-up on this Op?”

  Cargill frowned. He had made it a policy to tell the president as little as possible about Q5 and his activities, not being shy about withholding key information, including their recent ability to travel almost a full half-second back in time. The president had known about the battle to acquire Nathan Wexler, but Cargill had told him only that he had discovered a theory that could help them develop the technology, without telling him the specifics of how.

  “I decided against it,” he said. “The odds of success were too low. Why risk upsetting the apple cart for nothing?”

  “Sure,” said Allen, who knew him only too well. “But mostly you didn’t tell him because it’s better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.”

  “There was that too,” he admitted.

  Normally, this exchange would have brought a wide grin to Cargill’s face, but he was torn in too many directions to find it amusing. At the moment, he felt more like vomiting than celebrating.

  “Wait five minutes to be sure news of Lake Las Vegas has reached President Janney,” continued Cargill, “and then organize a call between the two of us as soon as you can. Tell him it’s urgent I speak with him about the explosion.”

  Cargill was left alone with his thoughts as his second-in-command began to carry out his orders. Seven minutes later, Allen informed him that the president was ready for his call. The moment Janney’s computer-generated holographic image appeared, made to look as though the man himself was seated across the table from Cargill, the president began, wasting no time on greetings or pleasantries. “Jesus Christ, Lee! What the hell happened in Nevada?”

  Cargill frowned deeply. “You’re acting like I had something to do with this, Mr. President,” he said, as though deeply offended at the mere implication.

  One of the critical elements of lying effectively was to fool even yourself that you were telling the truth, thereby reacting to others the same way you would if your story were true, with the same indignation, surprise, concern, or outrage. The lies and misinformation he had already fed Janney about Q5’s activities would get him fired, or worse, but the ones he was about to tell now would get him tossed in jail and the key thrown away. Or perhaps get him executed. He could make arguments as to why he thought his actions were valid, but even he appreciated that these arguments might not win the day.

  “Just because I contacted you to discuss this tragedy,” continued Cargill, “doesn’t mean that I caused it.”

  Janney’s pissed-off expression didn’t change in the slightest. “But you know who did, right?”

  Cargill nodded reluctantly. “Yes. I do know. Edgar Knight. He stole some advances we were working on to make the duplication process more effective.” Even though the process involved traveling back in time, the words time travel were rarely spoken. “We happened to have some dark energy detectors in and around Vegas,” he continued, another lie, “and the signature of the explosion reeks of it. We think Knight was probably headquartered at the epicenter of the explosion, and tried to modify one of his time travel devices using the data he stole from Q5. But the parameters weren’t fully perfected. We’re all but certain that it blew up in his face.”

  “Are you kidding me?” shouted Janney from his holographic perch in front of Cargill’s desk. “This is almost worse news than if you had been responsible.”

  Cargill blinked rapidly in dismay. “I have trouble understanding how you could possibly say that, Mr. President. I know there was considerable loss of life,” he added hastily. “I’m not trying to sugarcoat that. It’s absolutely horrible. But if there is a silver lining, it’s that we’re nearly certain that most of those who were killed were affiliated with Knight. Not to mention Knight himself. We’ve been working night and day to find and eliminate him. We never could have guessed that he’d do it for us. Regardless, the biggest threat to the US and the world is now gone.”

  “Is it?” said the president in disgust. “Why isn’t time travel itself the biggest threat? Jesus, Lee, did you hear what you just said? You think Knight didn’t use the right settings and it created an explosion so devastating it could have been caused by a small nuke. I’m not enough of a scientist to understand everything you and Knight presented to me about the process after i
ts discovery. But I am sure about this: you swore to me that the immense energies you were tapping into could only be used to push objects back through time. You guaranteed that they could never be released explosively.”

  Shit! thought Cargill. He had been sloppy. He had underestimated the president and made up a cover story that opened a huge can of worms. He would have to backpedal in a hurry.

  “You’re right, of course,” he said. “And I fully intend to give you all the reassurance you need that this can never happen again.”

  “Like you did the first time?” said Janney dubiously.

  Cargill winced. He had made an idiotic choice of a lie, and he had his work cut out to recover from it. “I deserve that,” he said. “But our best people are sure they have a handle on what happened. This was a freak anomaly that might never be repeated, even if someone were trying to repeat it.”

  He sighed. “And I promise you, we’re done tinkering. If this doesn’t scare us straight, nothing will. We’ve sent matter into the past millions of times now without even the hint of an energy discharge. If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. From now on, we’ll be sticking with what we have.”

  Janney’s glare didn’t subside, but Cargill could tell his response had reduced the president’s anxiety.

  “Make damn sure you do,” said the president. “You’ve made it clear that you’re dealing with energies that could destroy the planet, maybe the solar system. And yet you’re playing around with it like a five-year-old with a flamethrower.”

  “Apologies, Mr. President. You’re absolutely right. Given the stakes, I was far too careless. But you can believe that I’ve learned my lesson. With Knight out of the picture, Q5 will spend all of its time using the current capability—which we know to be absolutely safe—to achieve our strategic goals.”

  “I’m well aware of how much good this technology can do. That’s the only reason I’m not pulling the plug this instant. But see to it that you don’t make another misstep, no matter how small.”