Emperor-for-Life: DeadShop Redux (Unreal Universe Book 6)

by Lee Bond

  No more time could be wasted. The arrays were useless to her now, so space junk is what they'd become.

  “By your command.”

  Mayin nodded. Of course it was by her command. “And put the rendering back up.”

  She was merely curious, wondered if she might see something that'd give her clues as to who had freed themselves.

  That was all.

  12. Mister Granger Goes to San Francisco

  Granger hung up the phone, ear ringing hotly from the solid lambasting Lissande had delivered unto him from wherever the hell she was in both time and space.

  She was right in that he’d done something terrible and stupid by risking a call to Baron Samiel’s prime agent in the field, but … after the ghastly experience of having his personal timeline rewritten that many times … it’d left him scarred and shaken.

  Part of him tried to believing that none of it had even happened, that with the weird way Baron Samiel controlled the lives of every man, woman and child in the 21st century, all but that last moment in time –where he’d announced that he was going to deal with things in a different way- was the only real and true moment in history.

  And that was how things should be!

  Every other time this had happened –and there were about six or seven that still sort of loomed up at him from the bottom of a bottle when he least expected it - the traitorous memories were quickly drowned by the rational side of his mind, the part that instinctively undid Baron Samiel’s temporal torture.

  But the other part, the part that was capable of enduring Samiel’s re-stitching of the here and now into something more temporally favorable … that part held on to this most recent spiritual assault for all it was worth. He was a dog with a bone and this dog didn’t want to put that bone down.

  Didn’t matter the bone was pure arsenic.

  It was what’d originally attracted him to Samiel in the first place; the powerful man from the future had admitted that once, casually sliding it into a conversation one day, mentioning that everything about his rise to power in the FBI had been artfully crafted to transform him from a mediocre nobody into an agent so superlative in his craft that his efforts would be of extreme importance for many thousands of years.

  “Dog wants to hunt.” Granger dropped the chunky silver phone onto the desk, nodded at the heavy thump it made. “Can’t let this go. Man nearly killed me. How would that look? Find me dead on the floor of extremely mysterious circumstances, weird phone on the floor beside me? I know he’s got other operatives here in the Bureau and he’s got this whole bag of parlor tricks to work with, but … dog wants to hunt.”

  Lissande’s warnings had been, well … beyond clear, specifically concerning him remaining right where he was; as far as she was aware –and as Samiel’s handmaiden, she was one person who knew more than anyone save the Man himself- one Delbert Granger was to remain in Washington DC for the rest of his natural born life. At no point in the proceeding operation –part of which she was in the middle of right that moment- was one Delbert Granger even remotely used.

  Felt to Granger like it was the most important op yet, so why was Samiel's number one terrestrial go-to guy sidelined?

  Delbert picked the phone up and spun it in circles on one edge, watching the surface reflect the light. He was fine with not being used, especially after such villainous treatment.

  There were long moments he ached to be out of Samiel’s employ, where he'd do anything at all to be free. Free, but still aware of what was going on behind the scenes, of course.

  “Of course.” Delbert watched the phone clatter to one side. “Can’t be in the dark. I’m not terribly fond of what the Baron is doing right now, so it doesn’t matter to me if I’m not being used. Can’t see the endgame, but then again, I’m not however far into the future, am I?”

  Memories of those terrible sensations rattled through his insides again, tiny little barb-edged, acid-dripping, fire-wielding recollections that reminded him that not too long ago, he’d been on the floor, convinced he was going to die because of something unexpected happening somewhere in the world.

  Oh, Lissande had been cagey on that front, when he’d tenderly wondered where in the world the temporal storm had issued from, hadn’t she? He’d gotten nothing from her the three times he’d probed on that front, and when she’d threatened him with his life if he persisted, he’d done the smart thing and backed away, dropping her some line about how he was actually grateful he couldn’t remember a damn thing about what’d nearly ended him.

  “Except…” Delbert Granger licked his lips, thirsting for the half-empty bottle of Scotch in his bottom drawer. It’d be so easy to drown his sorrows in that bottle. Hell, that was why it was there in the first place, right? He had a bottle hidden everywhere a phone call from Baron Samiel was likely to happen, all so he could cover himself in a nice, fine blanket of 85% proof forgetfulness. It’d given him a bit of a reputation as an alcoholic, but no one judged him because his work ethic –hammered blind drunk or not- was superlative.

  “I do remember. Enough. I remember enough to know that whatever nearly ruined my puppet master’s great scheme rose up in San Francisco.”

  Delbert moved his hands to the keyboard, curious. Logging into secure databases that only someone with his level of access could view, the field agent began searching for anything logged into the system by the Federal Agents deployed in the San Francisco area. A fresh data base popped up almost immediately, and the aging agent whistled low. There was a lot to wade through.

  “Not worried, though.” Granger reached in to his top desk drawer and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, chuckling to himself at his particular choice of poisons; lighting up in a Federal office was likely to get him in more trouble than if someone walked in on him literally chugging from the bottle.

  Funny how that was, especially when thirty years ago, you’d be hard pressed to find an agent not chain-smoking their way through a box of Lucky Strikes while they hunted the bad guys. “Not after this long working for Samiel. I got a feel for his operations.”

  ***

  Granger looked at his handwritten notes, proud of the investigative work and only briefly troubled by the fact that he’d burned through the entire pack of cigarettes in the process. When the day shift came in, he knew for certain that a few of the more high-strung female operatives were going to flip their shit at the ‘cancerous stench of smoke staining their lungs irrevocably’ coming from the office, but they could all go screw.

  There was every chance that the slender thread of evidence on his desk was going to shred the already tattered remains of his career into less than confetti…

  With that kind of doom looming over him, a visit from Delores in HR -with her PC speak and finely crinkled eyes that were supposed to have you feeling like she was on your side when in fact she was a miserable, tired old bitch who'd rather see the world burn- was as nothing.

  It wasn’t much to go on, not really, but when he’d started hunting for Baron Samiel so many years ago, there’d been even less than this on the desk.

  The first thing of note –and it was a fact he was honestly surprised to've not already known- was the prevalence of predator drones in the Golden Gate City; the agent knew that there was a healthy push to get drones into the skies over all the major cities in America so their men on the ground would have the kind of support that they needed, especially with the insidious effect Samiel’s efforts were having on the people. Ordinary citizens were finding themselves more and more desperate for work, food, freedom, release, with some cities –Detroit being the best and most obvious choice- hovering on the brink of collapse.

  So armed and armored predator drones in cities where crime was at an all-time high made perfect sense. Men and women who served with distinction in those areas could now enter dangerous zones without fear, knowing that backup was in the skies, ready to tear through festering gang-controlled zones at the first sign of serious trouble.

  “But San
Francisco?”

  When he’d uncovered specs detailing precisely how the drones were outfitted for their tour of duty in the quaint city, he’d called up statistical reports on crime for ‘Frisco, finding … nothing of importance.

  More than anything, most of the ‘crime’ happening there was of the ‘perpetual naked and empowered gay men and women wandering around giving young children a shocking education into what happens with age and gravity’ and the ‘stupidly liquored up rich and entitled university students getting into the kinds of hijinks that should only exist in a movie’ variety. Not … not drone-worthy, not as far as Granger was concerned.

  Now, that wasn’t to say that awful things didn’t happen in Frisco.

  On the contrary.

  Murder and arson and rape and kidnapping and drug deals and turf wars happened there on the regular, but it hadn’t escalated to the point where ground troops would need Hellfire missile support. Frisco was … Frisco. Detroit was like Beirut. Many, many differences, there.

  “I have friends in ‘Frisco.” Granger truly couldn’t recall what Samiel had asked him to do in the now dead Line, but … the appearance of armed predator drones in the location where he distinctly recalled his attention being directed during the awful moments of temporal rewiring was too hard to ignore.

  From there, it wasn't too hard to piece together Samiel's most likely request.

  Granger idly scratched his stomach. It ached from being empty so long and he had a special, buzzing nicotine headache that threatened to turn his brain into mush. “So, Samiel asked me to use a drone on someone. Extremely surprising, given his insistence that virtually all our efforts be as cloak-and-dagger as humanly possible. That’s worrisome, but what’s more worrisome is that whoever he wanted me to kill proved … impossible to kill. Or something.”

  Granger was the first person to admit that he understood very little of what it was Baron Samiel and Lissande did, or how they did it, but the practical aspects of time travel weren’t difficult to comprehend. There were perfect explanations in the Back to the Future movies, and while Granger wasn’t particularly fond of terribly made science fiction films, the dangers of temporal paradox and what could happen when you changed the past in unpredictable ways were made no clearer than in Back to the Future 2.

  Making the Baron's enemy worthy of both direct attention and a Hellfire missile. A man either capable of traveling through time himself or a man who was –even more unaccountably- immune to the Baron’s temporally on-the-fly adjustments would be very dangerous indeed, a lethal Marty McFly gumming up the Baron's works.

  “Can’t believe I’m using a movie to understand this crap.” Granger shook his head, mystified.

  But it was true, all the same.

  Baron Samiel had gotten him, Delbert Granger, to use his contacts in the San Fran Bureau to deploy a Hellfire missile against someone. Over and over again. For who knew how many times. Certainly a dozen, if not more, for the spiritual scars running through him were deep and uncompromising.

  Granger imagined Baron Samiel, sitting in his far flung future, eagerly watching and waiting –like Marty himself this time, with that picture of his family - for the changes wrought by the Hellfire’s deployment to ripple upwards, turning everything back the way it was ‘supposed to be’.

  Waiting, and not seeing those changes.

  The one thing the Federal Agent couldn’t imagine was the rage Samiel must’ve felt at realizing that whoever had gained his ire was like him.

  Had it been rage?

  Or … fear? A combination of the two? Granger quite easily recalled the chilling words and the even colder emotion whispering out of the phone’s speaker.

  Baron Samiel wasn’t pleased by the intrusion.

  Granger couldn’t shake a particular feeling he had about this … unexpected change in plans; somehow, in some way, he knew, knew with every fiber of his being that in all the Baron’s dealings in the past to make for a better future, this moment, this very moment in San Francisco, had never ever happened.

  And that was … frightening. He knew he wasn’t giving this surprising turn of events the proper emotive signature, but Granger wasn’t the kind of man to wax eloquent.

  There was someone in San Francisco capable of dealing with Baron Samiel on an even playing field, and that was the kind of thing that'd drive the puppet master to do things that weren’t precisely … wise.

  Like a Hellfire strike in the middle of a city. Sure, yes, it 'hadn't' happened, but what if one of those attacks had proven successful? Could Baron Samiel remove the strike but leave the effects?

  Granger didn't think so. Which meant Samiel was … concerned.

  Which made a salty old federal agent worry.

  “And I think I might know who you are.” Granger tapped a PIDpak image wavering on his cheap, government-issued monitor. “Of all the men and women moving to San Francisco in the last month and a half, you, Mister Garth Nickels, are the only one who's remotely interesting. You … you're off, somehow. Too smart. From the look of your scholastic efforts in Sweden, you’ve got too many interests that might intersect with Samiel’s plans. And I don’t like the smile for your piddy.”

  Granger put his chin in his hands and absorbed as much of this Nickels’ character’s American dossier as he could. There wasn’t anything in the file –which was honestly thin as a reed, given he’d been on US soil for about a day- suggesting he might be the sort of person to either accidentally or voluntarily find himself in Samiel’s crosshairs, but there was that tingle in the back of his mind that said ‘yes, this is the man Samiel tried to kill over and over, only to fail, for the first time, in ever’.

  “The only problem, Nickels, is am I going to like you, or hate you?”

  That was the real rub, wasn’t it?

  Because obviously he was going to San Francisco to see this Garth Nickels with his own two eyes, but in what capacity would he eventually deal with the immigrant?

  “Because let’s be honest here, people.” Granger said as he logged out of all the databases he’d run through in search of Garth Nickels. “After what I went through a little while ago, maybe it’s time to see what the other team has to offer me, right?”

  Granger watched his systems shut down, one by one. He shredded his handwritten notes. No point in leaving any obvious reference points for Samiel’s other contacts in the office; they’d have to work overtime to find his fingerprints on the digital files he’d accessed because again, Granger was at the top of his game. He might not look it, but he was. It’d take a full forensic team days, if not longer, to find anything useable.

  By then, his ass would be in ‘Frisco, where he'd be seeing what the young and intelligent Garth Nickels had to say about time-travel and conspiracies to control the world.

  ***

  Baron Samiel contemplated the string of green lights, a brooding frown on his oddly warped face.

  Things were as close to perfect as they were likely to with this massively altered past, but something still wasn’t right, something was … not in accordance.

  It was a tickle in the back of his throat, a whisper just behind an ear.

  “What could it be?” Samiel’s fingers flew across the antiquated keyboard, large, flat fingers working the keys as only a seasoned professional could. His goal was to send feelers out through the temporal stream in the hopes that he might catch a change before it hit him here, in the very far future.

  It wasn’t impossible, but with this new wrinkle in time, Samiel supposed the impossible was now on the menu. Theoretical butterflies flapped their wings smugly against his wide aviator glasses, mocking his efforts.

  Sending tracers back through time was more complicated than anyone in his employ could appreciate, mostly because he lacked the patience to explain that the tracers were, in fact, subliminal communications with his previous selves.

  Unlike those moments where he engaged in direct, physical transmission with himselves through the temporal incongrui
ty, these … checkups … were best done when himselves were unaware; if they were in the middle of a situation that they were themselves resolving, a situation that wouldn’t plague any of the other thems further up or down the time stream, then it was best that everyone else of him remain ignorant.

  Moreover, in situations like this, Baron Samiel couldn’t afford to risk previous iterations of himself becoming aware that he was, in fact, looking for unplanned danger.

  Those earlier versions of him were him, so if any one of them caught wind of what the second-to-Final version of him was doing, they'd start looking for trouble.

  And if there was one thing the second most Samiel had learned long and long ago was that it was best to let the awful moments happen, to suffer and struggle and survive until you were at a place in your life where you could undo that moment altogether.

  Acting pre-emptively sometimes had it’s downsides.

  Responses were coming in.

  Samiel looked over the data, muttering, “Except you, mystery man. Pre-emptively trying to undo your ownership of old SlimJim’s seems not to’ve done anything at all. Was that it? Just that one thing? A massively colossal reversion of history I took moot for so long that I wasted countless moments to correct, nearly losing two of my best operatives in the process?”

  Samiel plucked at a lip, felt something tear loose. He looked at the thin stitch of flesh clutched between two fingernails with a raised eyebrow before tossing it over a shoulder.

  He entered more commands into the temporal incongruity’s operating system. “I treated your possession of that which had been mine since the very beginning days of my time in the 21st century as a direct assault against my great plans, and why not? Every time I was victorious in undoing that split Line, you rose up out of the ashes. Are you a time traveler then, merely content to live in a better time? If so, my friend, you should’ve gone further back! Six months from now, the world as you dream it to be will come to a shattering, explosive end and … what the hell is this?”