by Bob Blink
Jake had come to the same conclusion. They checked each of the stalls. The room was empty. There was one window, but it was high and small, and looked not to have been opened in years. The only other thing they could find was a small cabinet built into the wall, but that was locked with a deadbolt.
Nate had seen four men come into the room, and three had come out. Where was Ray?
Jake didn’t waste any time on unnecessary thought. He back-tracked.
“Maybe we should wait until the two other men leave,” Nate suggested.
“We go now,” Jake said, as he started for the bathroom, his right hand reaching for the pistol in his belt holster.
“Crap!” Nate said as he followed, pulling his own gun out and hiding it from the people in the main room.
Inside the bathroom the two men were just stepping away from the small cabinet that Jake had discovered earlier. One was pocketing a key.
“Don’t move,” Jake said, pointing the gun at the one with the key. Nate pointed his weapon at the other.
Both men froze as they considered the situation. Jake sensed this wasn’t the first time they’d been held at gun point.
It was easy enough to see the room was unoccupied except for the four of them.
“Where’s Ray?” Jake asked.
“Who?” the one with the key asked. He still held it although he’d quietly palmed it hoping it hadn’t been seen. “There’s no one in here but us.”
Jake didn’t spend any time arguing. He and Nate had seen Ray come in here, and he hadn’t come out. Jake quickly looked up at the window, the only other possible way out. It was as secure as before.
“Open it,” Jake demanded, indicating the small door with a slight movement of his pistol. “I saw the key.”
The big one made a face, but didn’t argue. He walked over, put the key into the lock, and opened the door. Then he stood back.
“Step away from the door,” Jake ordered. “Watch them,” he said unnecessarily to Nate.
A quick look was all that was required. Henry Ray’s body was stuffed into the back, but there wasn’t really enough room to hide him. Jake stuck his head in and checked carefully. This made no sense. It was clearly Ray, the pale scar showing on his cheek. His neck had been broken and he was bent in an unnatural way to fit into the small space.
“They killed him,” Jake told Nate when he stepped back from the enclosure. “Why?” he asked the two men.
They were both silent.
“I asked you a question,” Jake said.
The one who hadn’t spoken to this point said. “I owed the SOB. Now we’re even.”
Jake could tell this was a lie, but this wasn’t the time for a lot of questions. He ordered the men to assume the search position against the wall, spread well apart.
“Cover me,” he said to Nate
Placing his own pistol close to his side where it would be difficult to deflect, yet where he could still keep it pointed at the suspect, Jake quickly searched the first one. He found nothing. A few dollars in cash, but no wallet, no ID. A set of car keys, but obviously a rental car. A check of the second man revealed nothing as well.
“What were you planning on doing with the body?” Jake asked.
“We were going to leave him there.”
Jake knew this was false. It would have been discovered.
“One chance,” he answered. Something in his voice must have warned the men.
“We were going to get him with the morning clean up. He’d be gone before the restaurant opens tomorrow afternoon.”
“Who wanted him dead?” Jake asked again. He didn’t buy the claim it was personal. These two worked for someone. None of this made sense to Jake at the moment, but he needed to get as much information as he could at the moment. He’d sort it out later.
Both men looked back at him and said nothing. Jake raised the Sig, but neither budged. They weren’t going to talk. They were willing to gamble he wouldn’t shoot against what whoever was behind this would do if they talked.
Just then the door slammed open as a group of diners burst into the room. They saw Jake and Nate holding guns on the two men. Two of them ran back into the dining room yelling for the police.
“Jake, it’s time to go,” Nate suggested.
So it seemed. Jake followed Nate out of the bathroom. Nate was headed for the front door but Jake had other ideas. He realized the two men had run out behind him, leaving the door to the cabinet open. Jake couldn’t worry about that now. He headed to the table where the fake Ray and the other diners were sitting. He pointed the Sig at the group.
“Wallets and purses, now!” he demanded.
The woman who was sitting next to Watson screamed. Jake was aware there was a commotion at the front of the restaurant, but whether it was the police rushing in or others rushing out he didn’t know. The wallets and purses were produced and Jake quickly pulled out the driver’s license from the man’s wallet. He read the name and tossed it aside. A local resident named Jon Mallory. The name meant nothing to Jake. He got the first purse open and the wallet located before he heard the command from the policeman that had come up behind him. There was no time to check the name. He’d hoped for a few seconds more. He’d been expecting this to happen, and had already prepared his jump.
He back-tracked to a point earlier in the evening.
Chapter 16
“I thought you were going to call Nate to come and help you?” Karin asked.
Jake was back to a time before he’d made the call to his friend. Nate was still in Reno preparing for his trip to visit Brenda Fong’s parents. Jake wouldn’t need to interrupt that now. Getting home had involved a couple of back-tracks and a bit of driving to get within range of his former self, but now he was back with a lot of confusing information to sort through.
“I did,” he said. “I’ve come back again.”
“Something’s wrong,” Karin said, her intuition as on the mark as usual.
Jake nodded. “I haven’t had time to think through it as yet.”
“Tell me what happened,” Karin insisted.
“I was wrong about everything,” Jake said. “Ray isn’t the one behind this.”
“How can you be certain?”
“Because he’s dead, or will be in a couple of days. I saw his body. There is no way he could be the one who threatened us a couple of months from now.”
Karin sat up suddenly.
“Dead! Jake, what happened?”
Jake explained everything that had happened up to the time he transitioned back to this point. Jake felt more than a little foolish. He’d been so worried about the threats against his family he hadn’t thought about the situation thoroughly enough. He’d taken far too much at face value. There had been clues from the beginning. Henry Ray had used his own name to sign the note. Why? At the time it seemed a reasonable thing to do since Jake would be trying to save the sister, and the name would be an obvious choice. But he could have pretended to be someone else, or better still have left the note unsigned. He could have pretended to be any one of Pati’s unnamed boyfriends. Jake would probably never have been able to discover who all of them were. Instead Jake had been deliberately pointed in a particular direction. When Jake had discovered how Ray had disappeared in a careful way, he’d accepted that as proof of sorts that he was on the correct path. It should have been apparent that someone who was trying to save a loved one wouldn’t be likely to resort to the brutal means the author of the note had used to achieve his desired end.
“Who then?” Karin asked, interrupting Jake’s thought.
“I don’t know,” Jake admitted. “I’m somewhat muddleheaded at the moment.”
“It has to be someone who cared about Pati,” Karin said.
“We’ve been through that. There doesn’t seem to be anyone. She was a free spirit of sorts.”
“There must be someone.”
“Short of going all the way back to a time before it all happened, I don’t know ho
w we’d find out,” Jake said.
“But you can’t do that,” Karin said. “We talked about it. The night before the attack was almost certainly when Janna was conceived. You said that passing beyond that time would almost certainly change her existence.”
Jake nodded. He’d decided that a long time ago. When Karin was pregnant with Janna, they’d carefully worked back with the doctor when she had to have been conceived. A combination of facts, the timing of Karin’s periods, and the fact she’d been gone for a couple weeks to help her brother’s wife made it very clear that the passionate night the day before the attack on the Senator had to have been the time. Jake had thought about it a great deal, and he and Karin had discussed it more than once. If he went back, Karin would certainly know. As had happened before, that would change the entire dynamic of that night. At the very least, it was unlikely they would repeat everything exactly, and in conception it was all a matter of luck and timing. The most insignificant change might mean Karin wouldn’t have become pregnant at all, or that she had, it wouldn’t be with Janna. That had caused Jake to form a hard and fast rule. Under no circumstances would he back-track beyond that night. In Jake’s mind, it would mean he effectively was killing his daughter. It had seemed unimportant when they had discussed it, more of an intellectual exercise, because he never would have considered attempting going back so far. But now, unexpectedly, a situation had developed that might require just such a thing.
“I need to stop and think this through carefully,” Jake said. “In the morning I’m going to call Carlson and explain all of this to her. Maybe we can think of something that has been overlooked.”
Karin had been silent while she considered what Jake had just told her. “Jake,” she said softly. “What if this isn’t about Pati? What if whoever is doing this really wants something else?” She explained what she was thinking.
“Shit!” Jake exclaimed when she was finished. “You might be right. I never thought about it that way.”
One of the real annoyances of his looping backwards was the constant need to re-explain the same things over and over because the people he needed to help him hadn’t heard any of it before. For Carlson and Laney, Jake’s call early the next morning was the first they had heard of any of these events.
“Slow down, Jake,” Carlson said. “This is a lot to take in.”
Jake had been trying to get it all out before he got too tangled up again. He had some thoughts, but wanted to set the groundwork with the two FBI agents before going where Karin’s idea was leading him.
Carlson summarized the situation. “All of this started four months from now. Someone used a kidnapping, and attempted murder, and a bomb explosion to get your attention. Then they threatened you and your family if you didn’t do what they asked?”
“That’s correct,” Jake agreed. “The note was signed with the name of the brother of the woman I was supposed to somehow save. That bothered me a little, but not as much as it should have. At first I thought it wasn’t such a big deal. A little research pointed to him as a likely person behind the whole thing. She didn’t have a lot of friends who would have an interest in her, and he had purposefully disappeared. We checked him out, and the fact he was nowhere to be found supported the idea he was behind the whole thing.”
“But you went searching for him in the past?” Laney asked.
Jake nodded, looking into the camera of the secure video network that connected him to Washington. “At first I thought I could loop back, find out where he had gone and how he had found out what he had. Then I would clean the mess up much as I have in the past. Even though he had an idea what I could do, I didn’t think he fully understood what my ability means. I was right on that, but wrong on everything else. I found Ray had been replaced by an actor, someone named Dennis Kennan, the real Ray having disappeared several months earlier. That made me believe the man was cleverer than I’d thought.”
“So you came back to check on that disappearance,” Carlson stated.
“Partially because the long jumps are harsh, and I have to move backwards somewhat carefully, and partially because I believed it necessary to find the real Ray. But I was wrong all along. Someone else is behind this, and they are using Ray as a distraction.”
“And whoever it is, killed this Ray a couple of days from now?” Laney asked. “We have a chance to stop that.”
Jake shook his head. “Let’s not start changing history too quickly. I’m not certain what the ripple effect might be, and I don’t want to disturb the historical situation until I have this unraveled. If I work forward, I want to be checking with a known set of parameters.”
“It’s odd to hear you call something that hasn’t happened yet, history,” Carlson said. “This is the first time we’ve worked together where you know the future so far ahead. What do you suggest?”
“There are several people involved we can start to check out, and arrest with regards to the killing of Ray,” Jake pointed out. “This guy, Charles Watson, who claims to be an actor and replaces Ray during the dinner party isn’t what he claims. Henry Ray didn’t hire him, and from what Nate and I saw at the restaurant, he had to be in the restroom when Ray came in, and when he was killed. The timing doesn’t support anything else. That means he isn’t just someone playing out a simple role. He knew Ray was being killed. He almost certainly works for the people who are behind this thing.”
“I’ll check him out,” Laney said, making a note on the pad in front of him. “We can pick him up and ask a few questions.”
“Not until afterwards,” Jake cautioned. “Remember, we don’t want to disturb too much, and if you act beforehand, they’ll simply deny everything. We need the leverage of them having been caught in the murder.”
“What about the other three you saw Ray with that night?” Carlson asked. “It doesn’t make sense they are actors as Watson suggested. Why would Ray have gone out with them if he didn’t hire them and didn’t know them.”
“That’s what I decided after discovering Ray’s body,” Jake agreed. “Henry Ray had to know them and have his own reason to go out that night. I think he knew the other guy, the one whose name I read off his ID. Jon Mallory. Mallory has to have a connection to Ray. He must have set up the double-date, and Ray thought it was real, but in truth Mallory wasn’t his friend and also is connected in some way to those behind this thing.”
“The girls also had to know something was going on,” Laney noted. “From what you described, they were fully prepared to have this Charles Watson come back in the middle of the date and replace Ray.”
“My thinking exactly,” Jake agreed. “Mallory is another one we need to check out in advance. He brought the girls, but I haven’t figured out how they fit in. Mallory seemed familiar to me, but I can’t say why. That’s been bothering me, so I’ll be very interested in what you can turn up on him.”
“You weren’t able to get anything on the two thugs who actually killed Ray?” Carlson asked.
“They were professionals, that’s all I know. Neither carried any identification, and they refused to speak, even when they believed I might shoot them. That suggests something at a whole new level. Who knows enough and can afford to hire people like that? If you can capture them with the body when they pick it up the morning after the murder, maybe we can learn something.”
“One thing though,” Jake added. “Don’t expect too much from these people even after you arrest them. Whoever is behind this has handled their hiring very cleverly, and when those who performed the kidnapping and attacks four months from now were questioned, they didn’t really know who had hired them. We might not learn as much as we hope.”
“In the meantime, Laney and I can start looking into this Pati Ray and who might have an interest in keeping her alive,” Carlson suggested.
“That hasn’t proven very effective in the future,” Jake replied. “You’ve already tried that in our earlier look at the problem. Besides, I’m starting to think that Pati is ano
ther red herring.”
“What do you mean?” Carlson asked.
“Karin suggested something last night. I think she might have seen through this thing.”
“Explain,” Carlson said.
Jake gathered his thoughts. He hadn’t tried to vocalize this in any organized manner as yet.
“Karin’s suggestion is that there isn’t anyone really trying to save this Pati Ray. Instead, someone wants me to commit a murder. They want me to kill someone back in the past instead. I think the target is the person who I saved in the first place. They want Senator Kerns dead.”
“What?” Laney remarked. “Wouldn’t it be easier simply to just kill him if that’s what they want? Nothing in your story says anything about wanting you to kill someone. Where did this idea come from?”
Carlson was looking at Jake speculatively as well.
“For some reason they wanted him dead then. It must be that killing him now doesn’t serve the same purpose. They didn’t say anything in their demands to me, because they knew enough about me to know how I’d probably react. Personally I believe, if this tricky thing of theirs with Ray doesn’t work out, that’s what the next note the future me will receive. Kill Kerns or you and your family die.”
“I don’t see how this works,” Carlson said.
“A year and a half ago, someone tried to kill Senator Kerns,” Jake said. “This whole thing links back to that event. The fact that Pati Ray died is something that happened, related or not, that whoever is behind this is using. Here’s a way it might play out.”
“I saved the Senator from the assassination attempt. Very few people know that, but you’ve told me that the Stan Mathews name was in your computer for a while linked to that event, until you purposely took steps to delete it. Computers are unpredictable devices, and you never know what files and records still lurk in unsuspecting places. There could even be someone, an IT person, who has a backup of those early files stored away unknowingly.”
“Many months later, someone involved in the Washington terrorist attempt we worked learns about Bob Trask, or even worse, about Jake Waters. That’s the event where Laney learned about me, and we know there are a couple of other agents who are aware of Bob Trask and some of what he can do. There could be others. We have watched and not discovered who else might know, but the chance is there that someone outside the organization, say the media, learned something. Let’s assume for the moment, there is such a person.”
