by Nina Croft
“And that’s what happened to the guy who disappeared back at the ranch?”
“No, that was an emergency time displacement, only to be used in dire circumstances. I guess he thought you were going to shoot him.”
“These transponders? What do they look…? Shit.” He got up and went across to where his jacket was thrown over a chair. He delved into the pocket and pulled out the two transponder devices. “Your watch?”
“Yes. It’s also an alarm. It tells me whether there is some sort of time anomaly close by. It allows us to track down the source of the alerts.”
“It went off this morning?”
“When the other agents were getting close. And that first day in the van, when we were driving from the prison.”
“That’s how you knew people were following. Who?”
“I have no clue and that’s the truth.” She watched as Quinn sat down again and studied the transponders carefully, as though they might blow up or drag him to another time. Finally, he put them both down gently on the table beside her. “Maybe we should keep them where you can see them. In case any more of your friends decide to pay us a visit.”
She’d been trying to pretend to herself that she was telling Quinn this as part of her mission, because it would help her get to the truth. But she was breaking all the rules. Had the Bureau found out? Had she messed up and something had changed? She picked up the second transponder and swiped her finger over the controls, punched in a question. Brent’s friend had been dispatched the day after her. That didn’t tell her anything useful.
“We’re getting sidetracked,” Quinn said. “What happened when you came back? Did you find what caused your alert?”
“No. I had nothing but the time and we weren’t sure how accurate that was. There was no location, either. My first visit was a year ago. I started in Washington, set myself up a cover as an FBI agent and started going through reports, searching for anything that might help. I found references to an oversight committee looking into a group of telepaths. That seemed a probable link, since there shouldn’t have been telepaths in this time. I came back a year later to see what this oversight committee had discovered and found that it had been disbanded. Not only that, but the members were all dead. And I could find no reference to this group of telepaths. It was as though they had vanished completely. But I did find a reference to the man who had originally asked for the oversight committee review, about five years earlier.”
“Martin?”
“Yes. Then I found an article that told of a people discovered in Africa by a man named Malcolm Rayleigh in 1878, and I knew there was a connection. But guess what? Martin Rayleigh had vanished. Then I got lucky. As I was about to go rethink the whole thing, I picked up an alert that a Martin Rayleigh was being transferred between prisons. And so, I decided to go visit him.”
They were both silent for a few minutes while she let him process all she had told him. He rubbed a finger over the line between his brows. How much did he know? She suspected a lot. The more interesting question was, how much would he share with her?
“What happens if you find your anomaly?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. Our goal is to remove the source, with as few ripples in time as possible.”
“Remove?”
She pursed her lips. She didn’t want to lie. “Usually it’s a matter of sending them back to where they belong. We prosecute them in their own time.”
“You don’t kill them?”
“Not usually, but sometimes they are…eliminated. There are not many crimes that result in the death penalty in my day, but violation of the time laws is one of them. The possibilities are vast, and so there has to be a strong deterrent. The consequences can be catastrophic.” She hated that part of the job but saw the sense in it. People knew the consequences if they still chose to break those laws…
He scratched his head. “What about us?” he asked. “My people. Do any of us make your little alarm go off?”
“Is there a reason why you would?” Silently she entreated him to tell her, to share, to trust her. “Tell me about your people. Where you came from.”
“You’ve heard most of it. None of us knew where we came from. We were part of a covert operations group, and we believed we worked for the government. We were all fostered as children and had no clue who our parents were. A few of our people died suspiciously, so we parted company with our government controllers and went searching for the truth. Anyway, to cut a very long story short, we discovered our connection to the original tribe. We were the product of genetic experiments mixing their DNA with ordinary DNA. But in the process of discovering this, something else turned up. It appears that our DNA contains markers which suggest we come from the future, not the past.” He shook his head. “I still can’t believe I’m saying that. I mean it’s crazy, and yet at the time, it’s just one more in a long list of crazy things.”
She’d suspected something similar, but hadn’t been able to see how.
“Tell me more about the original tribe.”
He shifted in his chair, clearly not comfortable with the question.
“I need to know, Quinn. I need to understand what happened. This won’t end with me. They’ll send someone else and someone else. We need to resolve it.”
“No fucking eliminating anyone.”
“No eliminating.”
“Christ, I wish I could see inside your head. I have no clue whether you’re lying to me.”
“I’m not lying. I promise that I will not willingly harm you or your friends.”
He took a deep breath. “I want to trust you. Hell. I’ve wanted to trust you from the moment I saw you. Well, maybe not quite then. If I remember correctly, you knocked me on my ass. But there’s not a lot I can tell you. You were at the meeting with them, you know just about as much as I do.”
Frustration clawed at her. There had to be more. She suspected she was so close to the truth, yet it still eluded her. “But they must know something. What about this secret they spoke of?”
She could almost see the mental fight he was having inside his head. To tell or not to tell. Finally, he gave a brief shrug. “When we first found out about the tribe, we believed they had all transferred to Scotland. But in fact, a small group was left behind. The guardians.”
“And what were they guarding? Do you know?”
“Something that’s lain hidden in those mountains for thousands of years.”
“And…?” She was going to punch him if he didn’t get on with it. “What is it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it.”
She gritted her teeth. “Tell me.”
“Kane believes it’s a time machine.”
And there was the answer. She heaved a huge sigh. A time machine that had been in place for thousands of years. It seemed unbelievable. She was guessing the tribe’s ancestors had been on that machine and had traveled from the future to some long ago past. But why? No matter how hard she searched her mind, she couldn’t come up with a logical answer to that question.
But what could they do about it? None of the original people were still alive. Only their descendants. How long did someone have to be in place before they were a legitimate part of that time period? Quinn didn’t show up as an anomaly. This was his time, where he was meant to be. And the time machine had been hidden away, with only a few people knowing about it. Surely, they could destroy the machine. That would be the best course of action and would satisfy the Bureau. Quinn would be safe. At least, for now. Her mind shied away from that.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“That if we destroy this time machine, the anomaly disappears, and there’s no reason for anything else to happen. You belong here.”
“There might be one slight problem with that,” Quinn said.
She didn’t want a problem. She wanted to go back with an answer, one that would make everyone happy. And she could find out what the hell was happening in her time. Why agents
had been sent back to kill her.
“There’s no problem,” she said, hoping she was telling the truth. “It will be easy. All we’d have to do is turn a switch and it will self-implode.” He raised an eyebrow and she sighed. Why couldn’t time travel be more straight forward? Just this once. “Okay, tell me about this little problem.”
“The guardians. They won’t let you anywhere near that machine.”
“They’re not using it, are they?”
He snorted. “From what I can tell, they can’t even open the fucking thing.”
“So why will they complain? You can explain why it needs to be done.”
“Well, you see the time machine is part of something bigger. Kane and his people believe they were sent from God-knows-where, for some sort of sacred mission. They’ve managed to totally forget what that mission is, but apparently, all will be revealed through the machine when the time is right.”
“And do you know when the time will be right?”
“2020.”
Her mind went blank. “Holy shit, no.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Something was definitely up. Her face lost the little color it had as her mouth dropped open. She snapped it closed quickly, but this time, he wasn’t going to let her get away with fobbing him off. There was something she wasn’t telling him.
And it was time she started opening up.
“Come on, Mel. What happens in 2020?”
She pursed her lips. “Why do you think anything happens?”
He snorted. “Your expression, when I mentioned it. You were shocked. Why?”
“You’ve got to understand. This is so hard for me—talking to you like this—it goes against all my protocols. I’d lose my job and everything I’ve worked for. I could be prosecuted.”
“That won’t matter if someone else comes after us. We’ve been lucky so far. That won’t last.”
She looked away and he could almost see her mind working. Finally, she took a deep breath and returned her attention to him. “In 2020, there’s a global Cataclysm that destroys 95 percent of the Earth’s population.”
For a second, the words didn’t make sense. He swallowed. Did he believe her? He really wished he didn’t, but he had an idea that this was no lie. It explained her earlier shock. “What kind of global Cataclysm?”
“It’s not known. Most of the records of the time were destroyed. And anyone close enough to see what happened would have died in the blast. There have been a lot of theories, though. Most are some variation of a nuclear attack that escalated. The levels of radiation were high afterward. They still are, in many areas.”
He got up and paced the room a couple of times, then came back, stood over her and then paced some more. He headed over to the minibar and grabbed a small bottle of scotch, unscrewed the top and swallowed the contents in one go. He tried to think what to ask next. Tried to get his head around the idea that the world as he knew it was going to end soon. “Where? Who survived?”
“We don’t know where exactly, but most theories claim it happened somewhere in the United States. The whole of the northern hemisphere was decimated, wiped out.”
“And this is going to happen in two years’ time?”
She nodded. “2020.”
“You’re absolutely certain?”
She nodded again. “It’s a historical fact.”
This was crazy. He sank down on to the mattress beside her. “We have to find a way to stop it.”
She reached out and rested a hand on the bunched muscle of his thigh. “We can’t stop it. It happens. We can’t even try. That’s the sort of thing we’re totally not allowed to do. The sort of thing that could make the entire world implode in on itself. It’s too big.”
Now he could feel his anger start to rise. This wasn’t happening. He wouldn’t let it happen. There had to be something he could do.
“You’re saying everyone I know, everyone I love, is going to die. Hell, for that matter I’m going to die. And you expect me to do nothing. You wouldn’t have even told me if I hadn’t pushed it. Would you?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. What good does it do?”
He knocked away her hand and pushed himself to his feet. He looked around the room, found his boots and his T-shirt, and pulled them on.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He ran a hand through his hair, pressed a finger to the spot between his eyes, trying to relieve the pressure so his brain would function, and he could think of a way out of this. “I need some fresh air.”
She blinked up at him with those huge eyes, searching his face. Finally, she gave a small nod. “Don’t be long.”
He left the room without another word. It was late afternoon and the air was cooling. He could feel the chill on his skin but didn’t go back for his jacket. Instead, he walked. The motel was situated downtown, and the streets were busy at this time with people on their way home from work. He opened his mind and allowed their passing thoughts to filter through his head. Simple thoughts. What they would have for dinner. A problem with their boss. One man planned to ask his girl to marry him. It was hard to believe that this could all be gone. He shoved his hands in his pockets and closed his mind. Time to get real.
What did he know?
Kane’s mission was supposed to take place in 2020.
The world and just about everybody in it was due to be destroyed in 2020.
Were the two connected? And if so, how?
Frustration clawed at his insides. How the hell was he supposed to know? He couldn’t do this on his own. He needed to talk to Jake and Christa. But he’d left without a phone. Or any money. And he needed to go back and talk to Mel. Find out what else she knew, and how much longer she had in this time. She’d said time was running out. Christ, she was going to vanish, just like the man this morning. Go back to her own world…and leave him here. Except not for long, because very soon he was going to die. He didn’t want to die. He also didn’t want Mel to go, didn’t want to lose her. But he’d lose her anyway, even if she stayed.
Somehow, he needed to save the world and everyone in it, while persuading the woman he loved—
He stopped short at the thought. Love? Where the hell had that come from? He didn’t do love. But once the idea had entered his head, he couldn’t get it to go away. It was all just heightened emotions. Too much danger. Nearly dying obviously did strange things to his head. Made him imagine things that weren’t there.
He finally turned around and headed back the way he had come. Maybe he’d find she had already vanished, gone home, where he couldn’t follow. He didn’t realize he was holding his breath as he pushed open the door. For a second, his heart stopped. She wasn’t there. Then he heard a humming from the bathroom. He closed the door behind him and headed over to the doorway. She was standing there, still wrapped in the white towel. She’d obviously washed out her shirt and was drying it with the hairdryer.
She glanced across at him warily. “Are you okay?”
He shrugged. “As okay as anyone who’s been told they only have a couple of years to live.”
“I’ve been thinking. You can come with me.”
“Come with you where?”
“To the future. We have the second transponder.”
“Isn’t that changing stuff? Won’t I self-implode? Or be prosecuted or…” It wasn’t going to happen anyway. He couldn’t run away and leave his friends to die without trying to save them.
“Maybe, but I think I could swing it. I could make an argument for bringing you back. It’s a minor change. I need you to help me locate the time machine and couldn’t risk leaving you. I don’t know, but I’ll come up with something.” She sounded almost desperate, and some of the tension inside him loosened a little. She couldn’t turn her back on him so easily. She might not be ready to admit it, but she cared about him, too. He reckoned it had taken her by surprise, but he was no longer just part of a job.
“I can’t go with you,” he said gently. “I ca
n’t leave my friends to die.”
“You’d rather stay and die with them?”
“If I have to. But I’ll die trying to save them and the rest. The future is not set—you said that. We can change it.”
She gritted her teeth. “If you did manage to stop it—which is impossible—if you did change things, chances are I won’t exist. You’ll take away my future.”
“So what happens? You’ll disappear in a puff of smoke?”
She frowned. “I don’t think so. I think I would still continue to exist in this time. But everyone I know and love would be gone. They would never come into being.”
He hadn’t thought of that. “Christ, it’s enough to make your head explode.”
She turned away and dropped the towel, pulling the shirt on over her makeshift bandage, then picked up her pants from the floor and tugged them up. He followed her out of the bathroom and flung himself down on the chair by the bed.
“What do you think happened?” he asked. “Where did the original tribe come from? And what is Kane’s mission? You know, maybe they were sent back to stop whatever it was that happened.”
“Or maybe whatever this mysterious mission is precipitates the disaster.” She frowned, tugging on her lower lip as she did when she was thinking. “That may be the way to justify you coming forward with me. We need to find out more.”
“I can’t go with you.”
“You can’t stay.”
Suddenly he was tired, and his stomach rumbled. “How long have you got, before you get pulled back or whatever you call it?”
She glanced at her wrist—she’d put on one of the transponder devices. “Six hours.”
“Plenty of time to come up with a plan. Let’s go out for dinner. Forget all this for a little while and maybe the answer will come.”
She studied him for a minute, her head cocked to the side. Then he heard a clear rumble from her stomach. The world might be going to end, but they still had to eat. “Let’s go,” she said.
They had dinner in a small restaurant a few blocks down from the motel. A typical American burger and fries sort of place that managed to come up with a vegetarian option for Mel. The food was good and by unspoken mutual consent, they didn’t talk about anything important while they ate. She asked him about everyday things in his world and he asked about hers. “What’s it like? Earth in your time?” he asked.
