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

by Lee Bond

  Grown tired of looking through scattered memories of previous selves, convinced that nothing remarkable was taking place in their respective Lines, Samiel had moved onward to his minions, thinking perhaps one of them had deviated from their pre-ordained destinies.

  Lissande Amour was finally in Cancun, working diligently to first attract then infect Drake Bishop with the rarest form of Ziggurat ever manufactured, so that was all well and good. Samiel hoped/knew that she’d be successful in her endeavor; he knew she’d triumph because in the thousands of times she’d tried, she’d never failed, but hope always remained a factor in dealing with Drake Bishop. Lissande would never know it, but the man himself had somehow become a fixed point in time. It was this peculiar trait Samiel hoped to exploit much further up The Line and not some petty lockbox with finicky locks, as he’d told her, and anyone ‘authorized’ to know the ‘truth’.

  The thought of his soldiers outfitted with whatever it was that made Drake Bishop insufferably unique kept Samiel up at night.

  “This will be the ten thousand and eighty-sixth attempt at turning you to my way of seeing the Universe, Drake Bishop.” Samiel refused to close his eyes, refused himself the loathsome habit of churning all those previous attempts over in his mind, plucking at the threads, picking them apart to see how and where and why they’d all failed. It was the habit of an obsessive and it was deplorable.

  “If I can but find the right combination of elements to twist your DNA against yourself, if I can make it right, you won’t do any of the ten thousand eighty-six impossible things you’ve done in the past to keep me from claiming the Bishop line for my own. If only it were as simple as chipping away at your DNA until you become as cowardly as your friend, Eddie Marshall."

  He’d tried that first thing, accurately pinpointing the chromosomes in Bishop’s DNA that were responsible for his ingrained behaviors. Pinpointed them and erased them, seeing no reason not to until Drake Bishop had been transformed into a megalomaniacal monstrosity intent on destroying the world before, well, before the world was destroyed. There were hidden curls and eddies in the Bishop genetic matrix that made for some very evil beings.

  Finding the right mix was difficult, and after a record-breaking four hundred twenty-one tries at turning Drake Bishop into a puppet and seeing the world burn or shatter in four hundred twenty-one hair-raising ways, Samiel had turned to other methods.

  No, no it wasn’t Lissande. She was loyal and faithful to a fault.

  But Granger?

  Delbert Granger was precisely where he wasn’t supposed to be, which was quite frankly impossible.

  Samiel abandoned his attitude towards the impossible in this new fractured Line as swiftly as a snake shedding it’s skin; Delbert Granger wasn’t necessarily a fixed point in time and space like Drake Bishop, but he was an old, corrupt agent who behaved precisely as ordered. Granger was an old dog. Old dogs followed their master's orders to the letter.

  That man had been primed from an early age to be Samiel’s puppet in the Bureau, artfully and deftly manipulated along the whole of his life to become just the sort of agent capable of first smelling something rotten in the world and then tracing it back to the source. Whether he knew it or not, Delbert Granger was one of the most loyal men in the world, even if it was against his intellectual will.

  Delbert Granger, stable, stoic, predictable, malleable … was gone from DC. Moved from his offices. Not at home, not at the watering hole he frequented when his frankly moody heart got the better of him and he got blackout drunk.

  “Where in the hell are you, Granger?” Samiel reached backwards through his mind, digging deep into his own memories, using a wedge of the temporal incongruity’s celestial power as a pry bar. Curling fractals of his previous selves ruffled internal feathers at the abrupt, abusive penetration, flowing away when each of himselves felt the pressing need.

  As he burrowed into his own personal past in such a rough manner, his fingers flew across the keys once more, ordering the incongruity to literally excavate the past until it found …

  “What in the actual fuck.” Baron Samiel muttered, pulling away from the cacophony of himselves as they came to grips with the very thing he’d noticed and they’d missed. As he fled the deepest warrens and corridors of his memories, Samiel ordered himselves to ignore this fracture in what was normal, commanded them to sit and wait and do nothing, for he was going to deal with this.

  Delbert Granger wasn’t going to be happy when this was all over, no he was not. Better to be swift and brutal now, before…

  Before Ultimate Samiel, even further up The Line, a Samiel who might be nothing more than an idle nightmare had by every other Samiel, caught wind. Because if that ‘Ultimate’ version was real, every one of him would have a bad day.

  ***

  Delbert Granger, Special Agent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, inhaled the mostly fresh air of San Francisco deep into his lungs and wound up coughing his guts out and wishing desperately for a cigarette.

  He’d been caught smoking in the bathroom of his airplane, and it’d taken everything in his power –including flashing his very special Federal badge to the Air Marshal- to keep from being arrested right there on the spot. Instead, they’d flushed that pack of cigarettes down the toilet and the few places in SFO that sold the damn things didn’t carry his brand and he wasn’t about to try anything new.

  Not when he was already embarked on something new, a truth the aging agent felt was also shiny and new. Him, going against the script!

  It was as remarkable as it was scary.

  Granger waved a helpful elderly couple –dressed so brightly and gaily in a veritable neon spectrum of colors that they were mobile rainbows that reeked of patchouli and liniment- away before they could get too close, promising them between gasps that he was totally fine, that he just wasn’t used to the fresh air. The older man shot him a dubious look, but thankfully his wife or life partner or whatever the trendy and hip weirdoes in Frisco called each other dragged him away before further intervention occurred.

  Granger shot the old woman’s head a thankful, if fleeting, smile: that old tickling whisper was back. Moving himself to one of the many benches out front of the airport, pulling his one carry-on bag –one of those deals with the little wheels that were more of a nuisance than anything else because they literally caught on anything smaller than grains of rice and then flipped the bag to one side or the other, resulting in impatient Special Agents angrily dragging the goddamn thing along until it corrected itself- along with him, Granger sat down just as it rang.

  Of course Samiel was calling. Why would he not? Lissande had warned him this would happen if he chose to violate The Line by going somewhere he didn’t belong.

  Granger flipped the phone open and prepared himself for the throaty whisper to spiral through him. He wasn't disappointed; the moment Samiel’s voice came through the speaker, the being's extreme displeasure beat against his brains like the wings of a giant condor.

  “Granger.” Er-er-er-.

  The agent flushed. Samiel’s ire was particularly intense if his voice was skipping like an old record.

  No matter. The die had been cast. There was nothing else to do but ride the storm, hope he came out on top. He knew he wasn’t tilting at windmills here, that this madcap lark was the right thing to do; this Garth Nickels person was the cause of this new spiritual torment riding along the base of his soul, the cause of Samiel’s roughshod treatment of him. And so unless the Baron turned him into a greasy spot of soot on this bench in front of San Francisco International Airport, he was going forward, no matter Samiel's ire.

  This was too important.

  “Baron Samiel.”

  “Why are you in San Francisco?” o-o-o.

  “Following our last conversation,” Granger caught himself checking his pockets for a non-existent pack of Lucky Strikes and cursed silently, “Regarding the … difficulty I endured, I realized that I’ve never once been on a proper vacat
ion.”

  “That is correct.” Samiel’s voice was lightning on a chalkboard. “You have never gone on vacation.”

  Granger flashed a false smile. “And so that’s why I came here.”

  “You misapprehend my statement, Special Agent Delbert Granger.” That lightning cracked and snarled through the earpiece, filling the mere mortal with apprehension. “When I say you’ve never gone on vacation, I mean that in the most literal sense of the word. During all my efforts, in every Line through which I’ve passed to come to where I am right this minute, through all the moments in your own personal time that I’ve molded to my own particular needs, never once in any single iteration of your own life have you ever gone anywhere other than where I needed you. You’ve broken your own history.”

  Granger opened his mouth to say something, but his tongue was found wanting. It took a long moment, during which he was forced to listen to Samiel’s angry breathing –a rasping, grating inhale/exhale that was frankly more awful than the agent could’ve imagined- before he found his way around to words. “That sounds … not good. Is that not good?”

  “Your future from the moment you climb off that bench and partake in whatever foolishness you imagined you might do is hidden from me, Special Agent Delbert Granger. In the parlance of your own operations, you’re completely off the reservation. I can neither confirm nor deny your history from my particular point of view. Until you begin doing … whatever it was you planned, you’re either alive, dead or somewhere in the middle. You’ve become Schrödinger’s Special Agent.”

  “I …”

  “What is it you hoped to accomplish there? How did you even know where to go?”

  “I…” Granger delayed the sigh of relief that wanted to escape his lips until he was off the phone; hints of curiosity and interest eddied through the maelstrom that was Samiel’s voice. The boss was no longer enraged, he was fascinated by this turn of events. “The … the moment when you called, to get me to do something, it … it’s still in me. I … I can recall parts of it. Using local law enforcement assets to redirect the predator drone, the … the address of the abandoned school … that … that sort of thing.”

  Granger knew he should announce that he’d uncovered the identity of the person who’d somehow managed to undo something that Baron Samiel had always managed to do, but … didn’t. It was an absolutely perverse, last second decision that had everything to do with how Samiel had treated him during that earlier conversation; if Samiel was blind to what he did until he did it, that might give him some kind of temporal leverage.

  For if Baron Samiel could see his actions from his point in time, then the puppet master wouldn’t be full of these questions.

  A smug grin quirked Granger’s lips. For the time being and until it became necessary, Garth Nickels would remain his little secret.

  “And your plans? Your … goals? What did you hope to accomplish?”

  Time for a bit of truth. It was a universal ploy; always give your tormentor some of what they expected to hear and in so doing, they'd be blinded to what was more relevant… “I wanted to see if I could find the man who … who did that. To me. To you. To your plans.” Granger ran a hand over his balding scalp. It was hard work, talking this long to Samiel, and this was –as far as he remembered- the longest conversation he’d ever held. The rift between their two times was a deep, yawning chasm and it was draining talking across it.

  Samiel took his sweet time responding. “I confess, Granger, I’ve not yet done anything further to investigate the matter, as the individual you seek has yet to properly reveal himself. He overtook my cherished landing point and has done nothing more to disturb the timeline since, making it impossible to locate him. From my perspective, he owns the schoolhouse and nothing else. Until or unless he moves against me, my hands are tied. I had considered sending some of my … special … operatives to that spot in order to rattle this possible time-traveler into doing something foolish, but it seems as though his presence has caused perturbations after all. The irony here, Granger, is that because of your rough treatment earlier in your week, I’d sought to prevent you any further strife, yet there you are. Poised to leap into the dragon’s den. Tell me. Other than the location of the disturbance, do you recall anything else? Were you able to use your agency’s databases to uncover anything of interest?”

  Time for the sweet lie.

  If Samiel himself was lying about his inability to detect his movements –even mere words- the next few moments really would see him dead. “No. No, sir. I … I didn’t use my computer or anyone else’s in DC. I wanted this to be as off the book as humanly possible. No paper trail, you understand? Didn’t want to have to explain to my superiors. I’d planned on doing this old school? On the ground surveillance, as little electronic surveillance as possible, eyes only. If this perp is a time-traveler, he’ll be on the lookout for that kind of thing. Well, that’s what I think.”

  Another long pause, then Samiel came back, reluctance easily traceable through the temporal twist fuzzing the man’s voice. “I … agree. The entire city is a null spot until our unknown individual starts doing something. At the same time, since he’s thus far proven disinterested in making any waves, we cannot … should not, move against him in anything remotely resembling an overt manner.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Because he’s done nothing, he might not do anything. If we show ourselves to be too interested in his comings and goings, he might do something. At my end of things, everything is going along fine. Lissande’s mission is almost coming to a close, the next phase of the operation there in San Francisco –minus the relocation- is ramping up to begin. Everything else in every other Line is locked into place. We’re all good, except for you, and him.” Samiel cleared his throat. “Keep your surveillance as low key as humanly possible, Granger. Tread lightly around this man. He may or may not be a time-traveler. He might be nothing more than one colossal hiccup in the time stream. Just because I’ve never once in my prolonged life encountered one doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Haven’t existed. Couldn’t exist. There’s no way of knowing. Regardless. Don’t do anything to push him into action. Let him do his own thing.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I was unable to prevent him from acquiring the property. You experienced that moment several hundred times yourself, and very nearly died in the process. Imagine what that felt like for me, a being encompassing five thousand years of human history, and all of the offshoots I’ve created to bring this particular stream into focus. What you endured was a mere scintilla. Anything else this man does may have similar or worse temporal repercussions.” Baron Samiel paused for a moment before continuing, quite dryly, “I believe I can say quite confidently that that’s something we would both like to prevent, no?”

  Granger nodded. “Fair enough. So what would you have me do?”

  “As I said. Watch him. Don’t interfere unless … don’t interfere unless he starts doing things that might compromise The Line. I don’t like being blind down there, Granger, and I can’t use Lissande for anything other than what she’s doing, so you get to be my eyes. This is quite the promotion for you, Special Agent. Don’t fail me.”

  The Line went dead.

  “I … I won’t.” Granger stared at the phone in his hand as he always did when a call from Baron Samiel came to a close, an absentminded smile on his face. He couldn’t believe his luck.

  He was loose and free in San Francisco and Samiel was blind to his activities.

  First things first: he needed to find a place to stay, a carton of Lucky Strikes, and a nice, cold Scotch.

  Then he needed to decide if he was going to be friend or foe to one Garth Nickels.

  ***

  Baron Samiel resumed his eternal vigilance over the lights, staring suspiciously at the unwavering green stretch of unaltered history that lay before him, somehow no longer trusting the system that’d taken so many thousands of years to perfect.

  W
as that the unknown time traveler’s plan? To do nothing, and in so doing, force him, Baron Samiel, into action, pushing the envelope of the precariously laid –and oh so fragile- historical timeline that mattered the most into directions it’d never gone before? Tricking him into ruining his own plans?

  Was such a thing even possible?

  Samiel grumbled. He didn’t like these questions, didn’t like what they implied. He was the master of time, no one else.

  Scratching at a rubbery jowl, Samiel looked away from the lights in search of the toolkit he kept near to hand. The last time he’d used it had been after the fifth time Drake Bishop had somehow managed to defeat him simply by being a Bishop; after that most ignominious defeat, the Baron of time and space had created a single light bank for his most important quarry, and he was about to do so again.

  Only this time, it would belong to Delbert Granger, aging Special Agent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Samiel hadn’t been kidding when he’d called the off-the-beaten-path old man Schrödinger’s Special Agent; Granger was no longer enveloped in the normal time stream, making anything and everything he did from now on deadly dangerous to The Line itself. Samiel truly hoped Granger behaved himself.

  Samiel shook his head as he located the toolkit. “Going to have to wire you all the way into the main consoles, Granger. Link you to everything from what Jessop’s doing in Vegas right up to Lissande and Drake. I wish you’d stayed in DC. Well, there’s a thought.”

  The cruel Overlord of The Line considered the notion of rewiring Granger’s personal history for a long moment, twiddling a screwdriver between two fat fingers, eyes glazing over as his immense intellect ran through the various permutations of such a heavy alteration.

  “Won’t work.” Samiel sighed. If he’d gotten an earlier version of himself to call Granger to task, it might very well have, but since he was the most present version of himself, it wasn’t worth the effort –or the personal suffering- to lock this moment in time so he might get a later iteration to do the recursion.