The group had been exploring a mysterious force that pervaded all of space. There were several theories out there as to the nature of this force, but they could all be summed up succinctly by the physics and cosmology community: we have no idea.
Vargas could only assume that Q5 had found a way to exploit this force, but if this had led to a new explosive or other type of advanced weapon, why had the group been pulled out from under him?
Knight had been right. Vargas was dying to know what this was all about.
He just had to be sure that the dying part of this idiom didn’t become a reality.
Because there were few men he trusted less than Edgar Knight, and this was saying something. Vargas had always had a good radar for megalomaniacs—not just egotistical narcissists, which Knight obviously was, but true megalomaniacs. Knight was all of this, and more. He might have been able to keep his true nature hidden from almost everyone, but Vargas had seen through him very quickly.
What worried Vargas the most was that in the history of megalomaniacs, few were as formidable as Knight. The man was single-minded, ambitious, and flat-out brilliant. Maybe their interests were aligned, as Knight thought. But maybe not. Either way, the man was less trustworthy than a politician.
Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to convince the Black Ops community that Knight was dead, to disavow his existence at the highest levels. There must have been a reason for this. It stank to high heaven.
Perhaps Knight had become wildly unstable. So dangerous his existence needed to be expunged. Since he hadn’t bothered to set the record straight, it was also likely he had gone rogue.
Vargas would be a fool not to prepare as though he were walking into a trap—or onto a landmine. And he was anything but a fool. He had been a special forces operative for too long, with too much combat experience, not to prepare for the worst now.
He put on a pair of tan cargo pants, civilian garb, but custom designed with several well-concealed pockets in addition to the many that were so prominently displayed, and began to arm himself. He first loaded up with weapons in all of the obvious places. After this was completed, he hid two small guns in two hidden pockets, and two combat knives, one sheathed in an ankle holster and one taped to his back.
The colonel looked into the mirror, satisfied, but knew he wasn’t done yet. He fully expected Knight to confiscate his first, obvious layer of weaponry. He wouldn’t even be surprised if the inventor went the extra mile to find and remove his more hidden layer.
Which is why he planned to add a third layer, one that wouldn’t look like weaponry at all.
What was the point of being in charge of all black site weapons programs if you couldn’t use a prototype now and then?
He hoped Knight’s call was on the level. That all he planned to do was share information with Vargas and offer him a golden opportunity.
But if this wasn’t the case, Hank Vargas would be ready.
30
Vargas planted himself on a grassy hillside and surveyed the specified meeting location, a hundred yards away, through high-powered binoculars. The abandoned warehouse itself was relatively small and windowless, and the parking lot behind it in disrepair.
There was no one in sight, and no vehicles. Heavy padlocks were still holding rusting doors closed, reducing the likelihood that Knight was inside.
He continued to recon the warehouse and its surroundings until it was time to move. As expected, when he arrived and parked at the designated spot, Knight was nowhere to be found, but this changed within minutes as an eighteen-wheeler soon joined him behind the warehouse, with the Amazon logo and orange swoosh on the side. If one wanted to choose a vehicle that would blend in, choosing one that mimicked what was quickly becoming one of the most often seen delivery trucks in the United States wasn’t a bad choice. Unless this was an actual Amazon delivery truck that Knight had stolen, which was also a possibility.
But why a tractor-trailer? A sports car was much more Knight’s style.
The man seated next to the driver in the cab’s passenger compartment jumped out before the truck even stopped and pointed an automatic rifle at Vargas’s gut. “Hands up, Colonel!” he said.
Vargas sighed and did as requested, while the driver stopped the truck and quickly joined them. Vargas’s gaze shifted between them. Identical twins. What were they doing working with Knight? Shouldn’t they be filming a chewing gum commercial somewhere?
The driver looked him up and down carefully. Vargas was wearing nothing but tennis shoes, cargo pants, and a black T-shirt. His dyed black hair was covered by a cap that was essentially a larger, military version of a baseball hat, decorated with a mottled, brown-and-tan desert camouflage pattern.
The driver began to frisk him while his partner continued to hold him at gunpoint.
“What’s all this about?” demanded Vargas, pretending such treatment was unexpected. “I was told this would be a meeting among friends.”
The twin holding the weapon laughed. “Really, Colonel? Then why did you come armed for bear?”
Vargas shrugged. “I have dangerous friends,” he said evenly.
The man continued frisking him with admirable thoroughness, removing the obvious layer of weapons and eventually finding and removing the second layer as well, including the knife taped to his back.
When he finished, his twin rapped on the trailer door, which opened seconds later to reveal Edgar Knight in the flesh. It was unmistakably him. Vargas still hadn’t been entirely convinced.
Until now.
Knight gestured Vargas inside. The colonel climbed up to join him, while the gun-toting twin followed suit, continuing to train his gun on Vargas when they were both inside the trailer compartment.
The driver waited until he was sure that Vargas was in his twin’s sights and then retook his position behind the wheel.
“Thanks for coming, Colonel,” said Knight inside the trailer, making no move to shake hands. “Happy to see me?”
“I only wish I knew,” replied Vargas.
Knight laughed. “Never fear. You will soon enough. And you’ll be glad you came.”
Knight closed the door and the truck began to move. Vargas glanced around the surprisingly well-lit compartment, about fifty feet in length. The last ten feet, closest to the cab, held a transparent box made of what looked like Plexiglas, just six inches smaller in every dimension than the space within the trailer it occupied, clearly tailor-made to fit there.
The rest of the compartment could only be described as a traveling bedroom, with a beige area rug, a bed, a dresser, and a small table with a large computer monitor and keyboard attached firmly to its surface. Knight had said on the phone that a colleague had driven him from Wyoming while he relaxed in relative comfort, and now Vargas knew what he had meant.
After taking in his surroundings, Vargas turned back toward his enigmatic host. “Come on, Edgar,” he said, gesturing toward the twin and the gun in his hand. “Is this really the kind of first impression you want to make? I’m unarmed. You’ve seen to that. So why don’t you have Bozo the Henchman here lower his weapon.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” said Knight pleasantly. He nodded at the twin. “His name is Jack Rourk, by the way. He’s a very skilled ex-soldier. But you’re even more skilled, Colonel. Left alone in this trailer, I have no doubt you could overpower me. I plan to tell you everything I know. Willingly. After all, I plan to convince you to join me. But who knows, you might decide that gaining the upper hand is worth the trouble of having to drag it out of me by force. I can’t let that happen.”
He paused. “Besides, what kind of first impression does it make when someone has a fucking knife taped to their back?”
Vargas ignored this last point. He gestured to their surroundings. “You do know they make RVs, right?”
Knight smiled. “Thanks for the tip.”
“Where are we going?” said Vargas.
“To someplace more . . . private. A farm that I
purchased nearby, just for this occasion.” He gestured toward the colonel’s camo hat and smiled. “I guess you were expecting a desert.”
“How far is this farm?”
“It’s in Maryland,” replied Knight. “About two hours away. But we’ll make good use of this time. I can tell you about Lee Cargill. What’s really been going on within Q5. And what really happened at Lake Las Vegas. You’ll think I’m making it all up, at least at first. But trust me, you’ll come around. Rest assured that when we arrive at our destination, I’ve planned a little demonstration. One guaranteed to turn you into a believer.”
31
“I have to give you credit,” said Vargas after Knight had spoken for just over an hour on the reality and intricacies of time travel, fielding dozens of Vargas’s questions along the way. “If this is a twisted fantasy of yours, you’ve been able to present it well. Self-consistent logic and well-thought-out answers.”
“It’s twisted, all right, but it isn’t a fantasy. You’ll learn that soon enough.”
The colonel nodded. He understood the duplication effect of time travel. Who didn’t? Anyone who had seen even one time travel movie had come across a character who encountered an earlier version of themselves. But he still wasn’t crystal clear on the rest. “Help me understand this translocation aspect a little better,” he said.
“Perhaps I’ve been too technical,” said Knight. “I forget how strange this is to the uninitiated. To make this as simple as possible, think of the Earth as a cruise ship, and space as an ocean. Imagine you’re on this cruise ship, which is always moving. You begin at Island A and sail to Island B. A trip that takes exactly one day. When you arrive at Island B, you jump back in time exactly one day.” He paused. “The thing is, time travel doesn’t change where you are. It only changes when you are.”
Knight waited for this to sink in. “So after you send yourself back,” he continued, “where are you?”
“You’re still on Island B,” said Vargas immediately.
“Exactly. But where is the other version of you that you’ve joined in the past? Where was he a day earlier? Still on Island A, right? About to begin the journey you just took.”
Vargas frowned. “Yeah, it’s obvious now. I’m not sure how I missed it.”
“You aren’t the first,” said Knight.
“If I’m understanding your other rules, if I send a quarter back in time your forty-five millionths of a second, I get two of them. But then the universe starts up again and sends the quarter back a second time. Then it does this again. Over and over. Forever. How is it that I don’t end up with an infinite number of quarters?”
“I explained why an object can’t end up in solid matter. Existing matter repels incoming matter from the future. But it can only deflect it so far. If you try to beam into a thick block of matter with no open space nearby, time travel is disrupted, aborted. This is basically what happens with your quarter. Each time you send it back it ends up in the same location. For the first ten or twenty thousand trips, its brethren already deposited in the past deflect it a slight distance away, adding to the bounty. But, eventually, you create a big enough pile of quarters that the incoming one can’t be deflected far enough, and the process is halted.”
Knight paused. “This is a situation I call runaway time travel. In practice, I rarely let this happen.”
“How do you prevent it?”
“The time machine can detect an additional copy of an object when it arrives fifty-eight feet or so away. I can program it to abort the instant a second copy is detected. Or a third. Or whatever number I choose.”
“But you only have forty-five millionths of a second to abort once your machine detects the proper number of copies.”
“Plenty of time for a computer.”
Vargas paused in thought. “You said Q5 can beam things a hundred twenty miles,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“And they can still detect copies that far away and abort before a second firing?”
“Easily,” said Knight. “Because, in this case, they have almost an entire half-second. I haven’t done it in practice, because I’m currently limited to forty-five microseconds. But I developed sophisticated electronic signaling devices when I was with Q5. Imagine a tiny chip with an adhesive backing. One that can broadcast its presence at the same speed as your cell phone. Since your friend’s voice can travel thousands of miles during a call without a noticeable delay, imagine how quickly a signal can cover a hundred twenty miles? A computer can easily detect this signal and abort further time travel, with plenty of time to spare.”
With this question answered, Knight moved on, bringing the colonel fully up to speed on what had happened at Lake Las Vegas. Vargas was skeptical of the story’s veracity until Knight spoke about octa-nitro-cubane. This struck a chord.
Vargas himself had begun this program, and he knew the destructive potential of this explosive. When he had first heard of the devastation at Lake Las Vegas, octa-nitro-cubane had come to mind. He had discounted it immediately, but only because he knew it was impossible to make. Despite going to heroic lengths, his people had only managed to produce an amount of this substance so minuscule it could only be seen under the most powerful of microscopes.
But time travel duplication explained how this minute amount could have been amplified. And the chemist who ran the octa-nitro-cubane lab, Dr. Bob Botchie, had been very close to Lee Cargill, had worked for him on an earlier project. Vargas wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Cargill had convinced Botchie to give him a fraction of his microscopic supply under the table, without breathing a word about it to anyone.
Knight’s story was ringing true. He could still be a raving madman, but everything he said held together well, and he seemed measured and rational.
Vargas noted absently that Rourk continued to hold a gun on him, but this had been going on for so long that Vargas barely noticed he was there. He wasn’t even sure if Rourk could speak. The man had become nothing more than a mute statue that blended in with the scenery.
“Why did you split off from Cargill in the first place?” asked Vargas.
“He got power hungry,” said Knight. “I’m a lot more capable than he is. Which makes me a threat. He wanted me out. Basically it was, ‘Thanks for the invention, Edgar, but I’m not sharing my kingdom.’ He tried to have me killed, but failed. And not by much.”
“How did he explain your absence from the team?”
“He convinced President Janney that I was out of control. A tyrant in the making. A war monger who had branched out on his own.” He shook his head in disgust. “Cargill killed thousands at Lake Las Vegas. Just to get to me. He used a machine gun to kill a fly. So who’s the one out of control? I’ll leave that for you to decide.”
“So Janney and Cargill were behind the fake story that was spread about your death?”
“That’s right.”
“How did Cargill miss you at Lake Las Vegas?”
“I left the island just before the attack,” said Knight. “Cargill didn’t know it.”
“So it was just luck?”
“That’s right.”
The discussion continued for almost twenty minutes, at which point the truck came to a final stop on a narrow, private road. Knight threw open the door and all three men exited.
The road bordered a field that continued on for many acres, perfectly level but currently fallow. Twenty yards behind them, a red farmhouse could be seen, kept in such good condition it could have been removed from a three-dimensional painting.
“So this is your farm?” said Vargas.
Knight nodded.
“What’s it growing? Dirt?”
“Apparently,” replied Knight with a shrug. “Used to grow something else, but I never bothered to find out what. I guess we’re between growing seasons. I didn’t care. The owner was motivated to sell, and I was motivated to buy. Through intermediaries, I’ve acquired massive land holdings across the United Sta
tes and around the world.”
He paused. “When I travel, I don’t like to stay at hotels.”
Vargas glanced back at the trailer and Knight’s makeshift bedroom inside, and rolled his eyes. “No kidding,” he muttered.
A moment later he and Knight were joined by the truck’s driver and another identical twin, who had been awaiting their arrival. Vargas studied the three matching henchmen with great interest. “Is this your demonstration of time travel?” he asked Knight. “Three of a kind?”
The inventor smiled. “No. Not conclusive enough. You might think I went to the trouble to get identical triplets to fool you.”
“Identical triplets? I didn’t know there was such a thing.”
“There is. Very rare, but possible. These three aren’t triplets, but I don’t want you to have any doubt. You already know Jack Rourk,” he said, pointing to the man who was still holding a gun on him. “And this,” continued Knight, gesturing toward the driver, “is Jack Rourk. Finally,” he added, shifting his gaze to the newcomer, “let me introduce you to Jack Rourk.”
“Is this all of him?” asked Vargas.
“Not quite. There are five altogether. The other two are performing duties elsewhere. I wouldn’t usually produce any copies of a man like Jack, but I’ve been a little shorthanded since Lake Las Vegas. And Jack is very talented, and very loyal. And he works well with himselves.”
“Is that supposed to be time travel humor?” said Vargas, his expression much closer to a scowl than a smile.
“Apparently not,” replied Knight.
Vargas’s eye narrowed. “So how many more copies of you are out there?”
“Only one Edgar Knight, I’m afraid.”
“Why is that?”
“Too many cooks spoil the broth. You can only have a single brain, a single CEO. Multiple limbs are okay, like Rourk, but only one of me is allowed.”
Time Frame Page 16
