Red, White, and the Blues

by Walker, Rysa

  “What is this?” Madi asks when he hands it to her.

  “No clue,” I say. “Your grandmother just told us that she wrote it all down. And then she complained that you weren’t spending any time with her and invited us all down to the basement for a quick skinny-dip.”

  “Did you take her up on it?” Madi asks with a little grin. “She’s in very good shape for her age.”

  “We did not,” Richard says. “Where’s Katherine?”

  “She was lying down,” Clio tells him. “I’ll tap on the door.”

  While we wait for Katherine to join us, I pick up a fat red crayon from the table, cross over to the paper “screen,” and begin making a chronological list of things that changed significantly in this timeline prior to 1941.

  CHANGES

  1) Conversion of Father Coughlin/Early America First (Date unknown) X

  2) Deaths at Pro-America Rally (2/20/39)

  3) Einstein (5/?/1939)

  4) Attack on Japanese ambassador (6/2/39)

  5) Tomonaga (9/12/1939)

  6) Attempted assassination of Lindbergh (2/22/40)

  7) Fourth of July Bombing (7/4/40)

  Madi sighs. “Pretty sure this is the stage where we should be winnowing the list down. And yet it grows.”

  “I’m just listing everything,” I tell her. “I want to be sure we’re examining all of the possibilities before we start planning how to reverse this.”

  “But if we’re going to actually examine all of the possibilities,” Rich says, “we need to acknowledge that this is a very partial list. How many people had their lives disrupted when they came under suspicion for causing the deaths at the Bund rally? Two people are in jail for that, awaiting trial, but dozens more are being called in front of congressional loyalty committees. And even assuming that the events Team Viper entered all happened at the Fair, it’s open for several months after the Independence Day bombing. If we had more time to dig, we’d probably find five or ten more substantive changes at the Fair alone.”

  Katherine comes in and leans against the doorframe. She looks unusually tired. “You can put an X next to number two, as well, and not just because it didn’t happen at the Fair. I’d almost guarantee that Saul was at the event.”

  “He was,” Madi says. “Unless it was the other Saul.”

  “Alex was able to rule that out,” I say. “His system didn’t pick up any Viper signals in that area during the rally. So it was definitely Saul.”

  Katherine nods. “Number five can almost certainly be chalked up to his activities, too, although I don’t know if they planned it or if it was just a bit of serendipitous mayhem. I was just looking through some stable points I set today when we were at Coughlin’s shiny new temple. They held a rally on February 10th, nearly two weeks before the guy shoots Lindbergh. I showed the stable point to Clio earlier today, and she identified another group that they pulled into the fold . . . the Silver Shirts.”

  “Okay,” Madi says, “this is going to sound like a stupid question, but are they called Silver Shirts because—”

  “Because they wear silver shirts. With a big red L on the chest.” Clio, who has been thumbing through the tablet of news articles RJ put together from the earlier timeline, taps something and then holds the image up for us to see. It’s gray scale, so the shirts really look more white than silver, but there is indeed a large L on one side.

  “The guys who targeted Thompson at the Bund rally were wearing those silver shirts,” Madi says. “I couldn’t see the L because they had on some sort of sash, or maybe a gun belt.”

  “Clio also spotted something that I overlooked,” Katherine continues. “I thought it was just some very bright sunlight from the windows, although in retrospect that’s a fairly rare commodity for early February in Detroit. But Clio said she thought there were three people seated in the balcony, wearing CHRONOS keys. And she was right. Saul . . . along with two of the Vipers. Esther and the other Saul. The three of them seemed pretty friendly. Which I think we can all agree is a complicating factor.”

  We’re all silent for a minute as that sinks in.

  “Why?” Clio asks. “And don’t give me that look, Rich. I can see that she’s upset, and it’s completely understandable given the circumstances, but she knows Saul Rand better than any of us. Out of everyone in this room, she’s the one most likely to be able to tell us what makes him tick. And we don’t even have a full day, so . . . as much as I’d like to give her some time, we don’t have it.”

  “It’s okay,” Katherine says flatly. “But you’re asking the wrong person. Ask Rich. Ask Tyson. They saw through him. They know him better than I do, apparently, in every way that counts. What I can tell you, however, is the one thing that can send Saul Rand into a rage is for someone to call him crazy. I’d bet serious money that the video in my diary—and yes, I’ve seen it—shows the aftermath of me doing just that. Losing his mind, his grip on reality, is the one thing Saul has always feared the most. Or maybe he was lying about that, too. Who the hell knows? I’ll give you whatever information I have about him. I’ll tell you anything you want to know. But I don’t have the answer to why.”

  “Okay,” I say. “You’re right. I don’t think we can get at the broader question, but maybe we can narrow it down. You’ve watched Saul play The Game many times. Does he usually engineer the details? More specifically, do you think he hired a couple of fascist thugs to target Dorothy Thompson? Did he hire someone to shoot Lindbergh? Or does he just like to set the chaos in motion and then step back to see what happens?”

  Katherine considers the question for a moment, then says, “It depends on his goal. If he’s trying to prove a particular point, he’ll map everything out in minute detail. But sometimes, he just likes to watch things burn. He’s willing to suffer a loss. To sacrifice a pawn or even something more valuable. And if he knows he’s going to lose, especially to Morgen Campbell, or even if he thinks it’s headed toward a draw, he’ll make sure to cause as much chaos as possible on his way out. Campbell once said Saul delighted in pissing in the punch bowl, even if it meant that he went thirsty, too. But in some of these cases, I think he probably had to get involved directly.”

  “Probably not for Dorothy Thompson,” Clio says as she types something into the tablet. “In the previous timeline, she waltzed into a Bund rally. She definitely targeted Kuhn and the Bund in her column, so it was risky even then. But once they expanded the guest list, it was an entire shopping list of people and groups she’d either written about in her columns or spoken about in the radio show. Coughlin, William Dudley Pelley and the Silver Shirts, Dilling. Lindbergh, too—she was one of the few who actually came right out and called him a Nazi. If Saul put money and effort into drawing together all of those bad apples? They might not actually kill her, but there would probably be more than a few in the auditorium who would think it might be fun to shake her up a bit. As for the bomb scare? Who knows? I’d heard the name Lawrence Dennis, but that’s as far as it goes. And yeah . . .” She squints at the screen. “I’ve been combing through her articles, and it looks like Thompson took on Lawrence Dennis, too. She called him an appeaser. Get this. ‘The Harvard-educated Mr. Dennis, being intellectually integrated, is openly for appeasement with the Nazis, and even occasionally, in his letters, calls a spade a spade. He does not, of course, go further . . .’”

  “Whoa,” I say. “Let me see that.”

  She hands me the tablet. The article is from December 1940, but that was in the other timeline, before Dennis was added to a major event like the Bund rally. One veiled reference to race might be a coincidence. If she’d used only the word integrated or only calls a spade a spade, it probably wouldn’t even have caught my attention. But both in the same sentence?

  “Thompson knew Lawrence Dennis was mixed race,” I say. “Something he took pains to hide in the 1930s, for obvious reasons. She was taunting him in her column. I still don’t think that the recorded explosion is the kind of idea he’d come up
with. But that’s based on a twenty-minute-or-so conversation with the man and a vague knowledge of his personal history. But he may have wanted to scare her.”

  “Although the same goes for every other group in the auditorium,” Richard says. “Sounds like she’d called pretty much everyone out for being a Nazi or, at the very least, Nazi adjacent. So it could have been a group effort. The only question is whether she signaled in advance that she was planning to attend the Bund rally, and we might be able to find that out, but is that the best use of our time when we know that’s not one of Team Viper’s moves?”

  “But it’s one of Saul’s moves,” Katherine says. “Three people are dead who shouldn’t be. And I don’t give a damn whether they’re viewed as historically significant or not. We’re fixing that.” She looks around at the rest of us, and then says, “Right? If we let that stand, we’re no better than he is.”

  “We’ll fix it,” I tell her. “If it’s not unraveled when we make the other changes, we’ll fix it. But Richard is right. Since we know it’s not one of the moves Team Viper made, it probably shouldn’t be our first priority.”

  “True,” Katherine says. “Unfortunately, we have a lot more certainty about which moves they didn’t make than which ones they did.”

  “But we do know one move for certain now,” Madi says. “Einstein is definitely a Team Viper move. Alisa and two observers contacted him outside the Jewish Palestine Pavilion on May 9th. They show him videos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It hits him pretty hard.”

  “And he just believed them?” Clio asks. “Without any sort of verification?”

  “They had photos of him from the future. I would have gone with something more detailed, but if it was enough for Alisa to catch his attention, I think it will be enough for me to do the same. The only question is what I tell him to convince him to sign the—”

  “You don’t have to convince him of anything,” Katherine says. “Just keep him away from the meeting with Alisa.”

  “What’s to stop them from contacting him later?” Clio says.

  Katherine shrugs. “They might. But they’ll have entered that date and time into the system as their official move, so it won’t matter.”

  “If this was simply a computer simulation,” I say, “you’d be right. But if he doesn’t sign that letter, we could win the game and still have a screwed-up timeline. So . . . yeah. Whoever handles this needs to come up with something.”

  Madi waves her finger. “I’ll take this one. I’ve already watched the stable points, so I have a head start. Maybe I can show him some data from the nuclear exchange with the Western Alliance.”

  “The . . . what?” Clio says, and then holds up her hands. “Never mind. I’m not sure I want to know.”

  “Wise choice,” Madi says. “And I think it would need to be either me or Katherine dealing with Einstein, anyway, since he’s rumored to be a bit of a ladies’ man. The two male observers with Alisa made him nervous, and . . . I’m pretty sure he was checking out Alisa’s tush as she walked away.”

  “Something Alisa would have counted on,” I say. “So . . . that’s one down. We already know that the attack on the Japanese ambassador at the Court of Peace is a match. So that means we have to choose between the July 4th bombing and the mugging of the Japanese physicist.”

  “We’re going to have to prevent both, though,” Katherine says. “I mean, if the physicist getting mugged turned out to be a weird coincidence, which I sincerely doubt, we might let it slide. It’s just a minor injury with a tiny blurb in one newspaper, right? But we’re not going to know one way or another unless someone follows him. The bombing’s a different story, though. There were only two people killed in the other timeline because the police got it out of the British Pavilion in time and the damage was contained. And now we’ve got seventeen killed and dozens injured, so whether it’s caused by Team Viper, Saul, or some unholy alliance between the two, we have to correct the course. I think we each pick one event to take the lead on. We can decide if we work individually or team up after we know what exactly we’ll be doing. The two most likely to require physical strength are stopping the masked guys attacking the ambassador and the two muggers. Madi can handle Einstein. I’ll alert the police to the location of the bomb and let them deal with it as they did last time.”

  Katherine seems to have taken over as team leader, at least for the moment. Maybe that should bother me, but it really doesn’t. Rich opens his mouth to say something, but then quickly closes it and looks over at me. Is he thinking the same thing? Or simply worried about Katherine putting herself in potential danger? We’re all going to have to put ourselves at risk. And she and Rich may not have extensive weapons experience, but they have far more research and field experience than I do. One of them probably should be leading this show, so I give him a shrug.

  He responds with a resigned look and then says to Katherine, “Wouldn’t it make more sense to check the stable point that we set in the closet—the one I burned my hand for—and intercept the bomber there, rather than waiting until the bomb is placed in the crowd? It seems like that would be the safer alternative for everyone concerned.”

  “It would,” Katherine says. “I’ve already checked that stable point for a two-day period prior to the bombing, however, and the briefcase was never placed in that closet. Maybe it’s somewhere else in the British Pavilion, but it’s not there. The only place where we know it will be is the Court of Peace, which, between the attack on the ambassador and this bombing, sounds like a complete misnomer.”

  “But . . . the bomb not being there doesn’t make sense.” Madi pulls out her key and begins scrolling through as she speaks. “Jack said both stable points were kind of dark, so he was going to see if he could get a glimpse of the guy from one of the locations you set outside the building. But he definitely said that a man drops off the case. I don’t remember the exact time, but it was around nine on the evening of July 3rd. And then a different guy—possibly one of the observers—takes it out in the wee hours of the morning of . . . July 4th.” Madi draws in a sharp breath. “Oh my God.”

  She stares in stunned silence for a moment, and then holds her key up to transfer the location to mine.

  “What is it?” Katherine says.

  Madi just shakes her head and holds her key out. Katherine frowns and taps the back of her key to Madi’s, then transfers the point to Rich and Clio.

  As soon as I open the location, I see why Madi is speechless.

  The location isn’t dark at all anymore. A single bare bulb illuminates two bodies on the floor in the center of the closet. They aren’t simply dead. Their skin is shriveled and splotched, their flesh wasted away. Desiccated is the word that comes to mind. I’ve seen similar images in history class, but not from the 1930s. These look more like bodies from one of the targeted biological weapons used during the Genetics War.

  There’s one big difference, however. I don’t recall those bodies being tied together with red ribbon, like these are, capped with a giant bow. In the center of the bow is a CHRONOS key, and propped against the display is a large, handwritten sign:

  Morgen 27V, you miserable fuck.

  It won’t be pawns next time.

  This world isn’t your playground.

  Collect your people, and GET OUT.

  I have no clue what the numbers mean, and even though there’s no signature, there’s no doubt in my mind who left this horrid package for Team Viper. The sight of the bodies sickens me. I’m pretty sure this is only going to make our situation worse, and these people didn’t deserve to die like this. Those are my surface emotions. But what I’m pretty sure is going to cost me sleep tonight is what’s lurking deep beneath. Something I don’t want to admit and that I’d have sworn I’d never feel—a tiny, grudging shred of respect for Saul Rand for sticking it to Morgen Campbell.

  FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID

  BRITISH AGENT PLANTED EXPLOSIVE TO FRAME BUNDISTS

  (July 18, 1940) W
illiam Miller Pell, a British citizen posing as a journalist for the London Daily Express, has been charged in the July 4 bombing at the World’s Fair, following a massive police roundup of individuals with histories of political agitation. The attack killed eight members of the military and nine civilians and hospitalized thirty-two more. Dozens of other individuals, including journalist Dorothy Thompson and her son, were treated at the scene and released.

  Police Commissioner Valentine held a rare press conference, noting that detectives had been convinced from the beginning that the bombing was likely an inside job. The most telling clue was the upholsterer’s hair used as padding inside the briefcase that housed the bomb, which was a variety more commonly used in Great Britain than in the United States.

  Anonymous calls to the police pointed toward the involvement of the German-American Bund. At the command of Mayor La Guardia, dozens of Bund members and leaders were rounded up, along with members of other fascist groups, including the Universal Front, led by Brother Charles Coughlin, and several communist groups, as well. In addition, detectives questioned all 110 employees of the British Pavilion, including a dozen individuals, all British citizens, who were recent hires. Pell claims to have undertaken this action entirely on his own, out of concern for a brother recently killed at the Battle of Dunkirk. In his remarks, however, Commissioner Valentine suggested that there is evidence of a connection to British intelligence.

  In his statement to police, Pell acknowledged that he placed the device on the second floor of the British Pavilion, with a timer set to go off in the early morning hours, when the building would be unoccupied. At some point afterward, Pell alleges that an unknown individual changed the time to five p.m., rather than five a.m., and moved the explosive to the Court of Peace. The goal, according to the accused, was to damage British artifacts housed in the building (many of which are actually replicas, not originals) in the hope of pinning the crime on the Bund and fanning anti-Nazi sentiment that might push the nation toward entering the war against Germany.