by Lee Bond
The whole room spun, like he was in one of those House of Mirrors. Bile and worse shimmied this way and that in his bilious guts.
“What the hell was that?” Special Agent Granger demanded groggily.
“Nothing you need to concern yourself with.” The Man’s voice was a fiery whisper dragging across frayed nerves like static electricity. “You’ve been well compensated for any … unfortunateness you may have experienced… That should be more than sufficient.”
“Feels like … feels like hot coals in my belly.” Granger hissed, finally finding the strength to roll onto his back. He noticed -for the first time- that his ceiling was nicotine-stained, not just painted off yellow. “But my blood is cold. So cold.”
“This is the price you pay for awareness, Special Agent Delbert Granger. Better to be in the know than in the dark.”
Granger made to say something back, but The Line went dead. A dry, sardonic smile on his face, the agent clicked the phone shut and stuffed it away. “Better to be in the know than in the dark, indeed.”
The old man lay there on the floor for another ten minutes, waiting for the fire and ice agony to fade, wondering if this wasn’t it, that he was finally paying for the price of his wisdom, that he wasn't Icarus, doomed to fall once more.
Laying there, absurdly irritated at Johansson -the idiot who'd squatted in the office before him- for smoking like a chimney day in and day out for thirty years, Granger noted that the warring pains were finally subsiding, much like a very bad case of pins and needles.
“Thank God I didn’t go to Tallahasker’s.” Granger struggled to his feet, then plopped his ass back down in the chair.
It’d never rung in public, but that didn't mean it couldn't happen, which begged the question:
Had he managed to avoid such indignity because he knew what was going to happen before it did, or did Samiel rearrange events to make certain it didn't happen?
So many questions still, after all this time.
The faded FBI superstar sat there at his desk for a moment, idly reading some headline or other splashed across his monitor, unable to stop thinking about the phone in his pocket, the price he’d paid to get it, and The Man’s casual dismissal of how much pain and agony he’d endured for a paycheck.
Granted, The Man’s payments always went above and beyond 'danger pay' status, but this … was different.
There was a tiny tremor in Granger’s heart now, where there hadn’t been one before. He didn’t know if it was real or false and wouldn’t go to a doctor if his life depended on it because his life did depend on it, yet … there was something there.
Granger fished the phone from his pocket and stared at it’s silver casing. He could draw the phone from memory. He’d spent hours and hours of his life just … looking at it: when he’d first received the thing, it’d been … unique.
Impossibly thin in an era where cellphones had still big enough to need a backpack, it was antiquated and chunky now. Or seemed to be.
Only … it did things only one other phone in the world could do…
The Man had assured him of that.
Twiddling the silver phone between his hands for a few long minutes, Delbert Granger eventually made a decision. As The Man had said, it was better to be in the know than in the dark.
Time to make a phone call.
A call that'd definitely change everything, and most probably for the worst.
Granger searched his heart and …
Came up wanting. It was better to be on the right side of what was coming, that was for certain, but it was also better to know what was coming. Delbert Granger was no stranger to risks. It was time to take the biggest of all.
It was time to call Lissande Amour.
***
Lissande’s eyes hunted her prey through the crowd, red-haired friend in tow like a tiny Asian boat, wondering just how in the hell she was supposed to ‘initiate the target’; the former was laughing his ass off at something ahead of them both, while the shorter one was trying to disentangle himself from either a very aggressive whore or an even more aggressive stranger.
Behind them both, about fifteen feet away and dressed like the tourists they’d never be, were three of the most professional and well-trained bodyguards Lissande had ever come across in this particular timeframe.
It was remarkable; she’d been assigned other high-profile, high-target clients before by the Baron, both in this timeframe and further up The Line, and naturally, they’d all been under the supervision of people who’s job it was to keep them alive, no matter if everyone else in a fifty mile radius wound up dead and melting into the permafrost, but they’d all stood out like sore thumbs.
The three men lounging at one of those horrid local eateries –this one was nothing more than a converted bicycle consisting of a refurbished, ancient Hibachi and a small fridge full of food- were a testament to their craft because as far as Lissande could tell, not a single local was avoiding them.
And here, in Haiti, with Americans, that was saying something.
Lissande, fanning herself slowly on a balcony belonging to a couple of kids who’d wake up in the morning –or the next night- with a terrible headache and broken memories of some fun in the sun, reminded herself that they were just ordinary, mortal men, and that if they saw her, they wouldn’t –couldn’t- do anything.
They broke off from their negotiations and headed into the crowd, just three more white men in a sea of tourists looking to take advantage of the new trade agreements between the United States and Haiti; in the last year, a fisherman had discovered a massive underground oil field and the US, still ridiculously in love with fossil fuels, had discovered all kinds of reasons to forego their on again-off again relationship with the seedy country in favor of an open arms, full on love affair.
Haiti and her peoples were doing well under the circumstances, but Lissande had seen this kind of thing before, further up The Line.
There’d be a period of intense growth and revitalization followed by a steep, sharp drop the moment the oil disappeared. At the end, poor Haiti would left stranded in the night, feeling dirty, ashamed and confused.
Not that Lissande cared. She hated this timeframe with a passion, wanted, in fact, nothing more than to be sent back up The Line to one of the places she was more comfortable with, like Port of Blood or Sister’s Harbor, where the weather wasn’t so … weathery and there were infinitely less people.
Lissande snapped her attention back to Drake and the ridiculous Sparks Dangerously. The golden-tanned billionaire was haggling with a street vendor for a small bag of doughboys. The woman shook her head in disgust. It was a miracle the two men weren’t morbidly obese from all the poor food choices and alcohol they drank. As she watched, Drake and the vendor came to some sort of agreement just as one of the three bodyguards passed them by. The brightly-clad but otherwise non-descript gentleman parked himself further up the crowded street and proceeded to take great efforts in apprising himself of the local whores.
“I’m never going to get close to them here.” Lissande muttered angrily to herself. She fidgeted with the small silver capsule that was in her purse nervously. Technically, she could release the DNA-coded virus wherever she chose, whereupon the Baron’s deadly cocktail would do all the work, but here, on this street –indeed, any of the places the two idiots were staying these days- there was no way to guarantee that Drake would be infected.
It was an impossible task. The Baron knew it, and was being … polite … on the matter, but she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if she failed to infect Drake Bishop with the beginning stages of ‘Ocular Degenerative Disorder’ there would be all kinds of hell to pay. The man –her employer, possessor, tormentor- was most insistent that Drake Bishop fall sway to the peculiarities of the DeadShop before too much longer, because without the man’s far-flung heir being twined to the temporal incongruity in a way that no other being save the Baron himself had ever been joined, the future that Baron Samiel w
as trying to craft would shatter into a billion irrecoverable pieces.
And the only way to do that was to ensure that Drake Bishop became infected without his knowledge –at least in the beginning- and that in the usual way the attractive playboy lived his life, sire at least one illegitimate heir, passing along the tiny threads of the Baron’s crafty DNA manipulation so that child could be properly raised, under the right influences and in the proper environment. Rinse and repeat for a few hundred years until … until things grew their darkest and most desperate and then voila!
They could begin the next step in their great journey.
Lissande couldn’t wait for this to be all over and done with. She was sick to literal undeath over the whole situation.
The taste of molten metal filled her throat suddenly and the hard lenses grafted directly over her eyes flexed in their moorings, forcing Lissande to grab hold of the railing with both hands. She watched the multi-colored fan she’d been using fall slowly to the ground and then …
The Baron was in her.
It was a feeling she couldn’t get used to, would never get used to. After three hundred experiential years of loyal service to the man, it was an awful feeling, a grubby, grotesque sensation, akin to having a full-sized human being rooting around inside your body like an enormous child.
The Baron’s odd voice filled her senses, blotted out the cacophony of the streets down below. “Lissande.”
Lissande struggled to find her voice, knowing that if Samiel heard either revulsion or pain in her voice he’d come further in to discover what ailed her. Not something she wanted, not under any circumstances. “Baron Samiel. How can I assist you?”
“Something has gone … wrong. With a prime stability point.”
The mighty Baron Samiel sounded distracted. Worried, even, which set Lissande’s hackles on edge. The man was in control of the temporal incongruity. He was crouched over the span of human history like a trapdoor spider, intimately and eternally aware of everything that was happening everywhere. If he didn’t like how something was going, he changed it. He’d been at it so long that there was very little humanity left in him.
Meaning that whatever stood in the way of his goal would be wiped clean from history’s slate. No matter what.
“I thought that wasn’t possible.” Lissande, though a time-traveler more accomplished than most, hardly understood the mechanics behind what she did, and even less of what or even how the Baron maintained a cognizant understanding of what was. Case in point: she had no idea at all that anything significant had changed, yet the upset in Baron Samiel’s voice was a palpable thing, beating down on her own feelings like a massive bird of prey flapping wings over it's next meal.
“Shouldn’t be. Shouldn’t be.”
“Which point?” Lissande tried to see through the Baron’s occupation of her senses in the hopes of tracking Drake, his friend, and their invisible bodyguards, but her … employer’s presence was too profound.
“SlimJim’s.”
“What’s that?” Lissande’s puzzlement was genuine, just as the Baron’s displaced sense of mighty aggravation.
Whatever SlimJim’s was, it was terribly important. They’d lost other points in time before for a variety of reasons and thanks to her connection to the temporal incongruity, she recalled both the loss and the recovery as a kind of doubled-over memory. She wasn’t too fond of those stitched together moments, because when she caught herself thinking of them, it was almost like the Universe itself disapproved and was gearing up to kick her outside into the cold, dark emptiness.
The Baron’s voice overrode her wandering mind, filling it with an address that bore no meaning for her beyond the fact that it was in close proximity to the University where Drake and Sparks pretended to learn things. She nodded blindly.
Once the man was hooked and needed her … assistance … it would be best to be as close as possible. People being turned sometimes did strange, inexplicable things in the beginning, and if Drake –already irresponsible and wildly irrational- did anything, Lissande knew the Baron would want her to respond instantly.
“This has always been mine. I need it to be mine again. I need you to move up The Line a few months…”
“Bishop’s cagier than we expected.” Lissande interrupted, wishing she had more of her senses back; instinct said Bishop and Dangerously were gone from the street and it would be difficult to insinuate herself back into their area without triggering the professionals surrounding them. “He’s resisting my charms. Infiltrating his security team over here was easier than this. For the lady’s man and legitimate hound he is back home, he’s playing it remarkably safe over here. His friend … the one with the hair and the stupid nickname, would be an easier target.”
“No.” Samiel stated baldly. “Needs to be Bishop.”
“Well, I don’t know what you want me to do then. This address … this ‘SlimJim’s’, is it as important as the man?” It was looking like Haiti was off limits.
Lissande called to mind the next port of call for the two man-boys and nodded to herself. Cancun. Harder to disguise her presence in a place that was all about bikinis and semi-nudity, but maybe they’d all be more relaxed; Haiti was making progress –in leaps and bounds- in becoming a far safer vacation spot than it’d ever been before, but the ostentatious wealth that came as part of becoming an American supplier of crude oil wasn’t meshing well with the overt violence and predatory nature of most Haitian gangsters, so there were armed guards –both American and Haitian- on nearly every corner. They were discreet, but they were there.
Lissande nodded again. It was going to have to be Cancun. Loathe as she was to be that exposed …
“Yes. Almost more so.”
Lissande leaned on the balcony railing, gripping tighter and tighter as a tsunami of the Baron’s complex emotions raged hot and heavy down The Line and right through her soul. She’d never experienced this kind of molten glass agony before. Was, in fact, beginning to worry about her sanity and life. If it continued much longer, even her relentless resilience to Samiel’s profound presence would wane and she’d wind up a burnt husk to be discovered and mused upon by the locals for decades to come.
“Baron? Baron! Baron!”
“Sorry my dear, I was … distracted. There is so much going on here, this far up The Line. You were saying?”
Lissande cleared her throat and prepared to make an offer she didn’t really want to make; it was obvious that this SlimJim’s affair was of penultimate importance to Baron Samiel, even more so because he was attempting to deal with it now, when she wasn’t even slated to be back on American soil for weeks yet.
She grit her teeth. “Things with Bishop are going to take at least another three weeks. Then they’re heading back to San Francisco. I can try to hurry things along or … or you can split me, but that will reduce my efficacy.”
“No.” Samiel’s tone was one of utter finality, and Lissande was ashamed of how her heart skipped a buoyant beat. “I can’t risk it. I need you operating at one hundred percent efficiency, especially if Bishop is being mulish. I’ll use local assets to deal with whoever or whatever took the property from me.”
“Understood. The moment I’m successful with Bishop, I’ll move up.”
“There shouldn’t be a need. Unless the situation is different than imagined, of course. Should my own efforts somehow manage to fail, I will contact you.”
“Understood. Lissande out.”
The Baron’s overpowering aura departed slowly, a nearly endless lightning storm sluggishly but inevitably pulling away, leaving her extremities feeling much abused. When the man was gone altogether, she couldn’t stop herself from letting out a long, panting breath, or from dropping to the balcony floor and just … laying there, breathing in and out in even longer, slower breaths. Were she not in the middle of a prolonged and mightily important job, she’d spend the next week in the tub, washing what remained of her soul completely clean of Samiel’s poisonous pre
sence.
If she didn’t believe in what he was doing … there was simply no way to …
Burning hot fire lanced through her ocular implants, a cascading torrent of agony that had her writhing on the wooden balcony floor like a drug-addled fiend, her arms, legs, hands and feet all moving to their own particular beat. Images and memories –the Baron screaming and shrieking in all of them, growing ever more frustrated and rage-filled- surged through her.
Temporal alteration. Something was happening. And not happening.
Over and over again.
And over.
Each split second switch between what was real and what was not was a stainless hammer banging away at her already frayed nerves, crescendo-like collisions that had her twitching as though she were in the middle of a seizure. Lissande’s mind, warped by the curious powers of the temporal incongruity, suffered the same –if not worse- treatment; the human mind –even one so profoundly altered as her own- was not meant to contain more than a single timeline within the precious electrochemical machine, and she was being asked –irrespective of the increasing speed of each frayed moment- to house dozens, hundreds …
Whatever it was, whatever this SlimJim’s represented to him and his successes in the future, it was as important as bringing Drake Bishop over to their side of things because as she lay there, shuddering so violently that it was only thanks to her vast modifications her bones didn’t break, her muscles didn’t flay themselves loose, her blood vessels didn’t burst, she couldn’t recall a single moment requiring this much attention.
The woman tried to reach out through the ocular implants, desperately willing to invite the Baron back into her tarnished soul if only to beg him to stop trying to rewrite the moment in time because it was killing her. It was a bargaining chip, was it not? She was the only one most acclimatized to this point in time –the others in this timeframe could barely speak the language yet and were still too … reminiscent of their own time to function on their own for long- and the only one who might be able to attract Drake.
