Fixer Redux

by Gene Doucette

  To her knowledge, she’d never in her life actually had a dream. Everything going on in her head when she closed her eyes was a future-walk, whether she wanted it to be or not. Prophetic dreaming is what the first, second, and third person she told about it called this, but they were all wrong. She wished she could dream, or at least have a night where nothing went on in her head, and everything shut down, and she could wake up feeling rested. But no. The best that could be said about sleep, for her, was that her body got a chance to rest. Her mind did not.

  An apparently inevitable consequence of her weird existence was that she could sleep twelve to fifteen hours a day. There’d been weeks where it seemed as if she was spending more time in the future than in the present.

  But this time, she only had her eyes closed for about six hours. Something in the future startled her so much it woke her up. That was why she was trying to relax now: it was so jarring, she couldn’t at first remember what it was she’d experienced.

  “Benjamin would understand,” she muttered. Then she pushed him from her mind, because he had been dead for five years, and she’d promised to stop letting him haunt her. It would never happen, but she kept trying to banish him anyway; the future was difficult enough without the past poking its head into the room.

  He was essentially the closest thing she had to a father, after her real father…well, she never knew what happened to him. The nuns wouldn’t tell her. The only reasons Sheila knew a father was at one time in her life was that she wasn’t immaculately conceived—surely, had she been, the nuns would have been glad to tell her that—and he gave her a last name. Mother, about whom she knew slightly more, had died giving birth.

  It was unfortunately also true that every little girl in that orphanage had some variation of a hard-luck story about the-parent-who-loved-her-but-couldn’t-keep-her, or the-parent-who-died-tragically, so it was sometimes hard to tell how much of Sheila’s recollection was patched together from other girls’ stories, and/or wishful thinking, and how much was real.

  Benjamin was real. He took her away, helped her hone her skills, worked out surprisingly creative ways to sell them, and only got fresh a few times.

  She pushed him out of her head, and tried to remember what she’d seen.

  It was important. It was supposed to be a future in which she figured out where to find and kill Corrigan Bain. Obviously, it was going to be more complicated than that.

  It shouldn’t have even gotten this far. He’d already screwed up her plans twice, the first time at the State House (although this was partly her fault, for not setting off the bomb anyway, even when the future popped out of view for a few seconds) and the second time at the Prudential Center, when he refused to die. It was honestly just bad luck that their paths crossed at all, but that bad luck ruined three years of planning and cost a very powerful man a lot of money.

  Basically, even if she didn’t have to kill him on her way out of town, she would have done it just out of spite.

  She tried focusing on Bain, to see if he was in the dream. It didn’t work, but there was…

  Police, she thought. And shipping crates.

  “They found me.”

  20

  “Absolutely not.”

  Special Agent in Charge Justin Axelrod had a reputation as a reasonable person; the kind of firm-but-understanding guy who was easy to work for. He’d also been known to entertain some unusual solutions to problems, indicating the kind of flexibility of thought that one just didn’t see all that often in the ranks of law enforcement’s senior management.

  But he had limits.

  “Can you tell us why?” Maggie asked.

  She was thinking about tackling his biggest objection first and working her way down, but the problem was, there was no telling which part of the plan he disliked the most. The whole thing was bonkers.

  “I shouldn’t have to,” he said. “You work for the same FBI I do, and it’s located in the real world, and in the real world we don’t entertain solutions that apparently involve stopping someone with superpowers.”

  “I mean, that’s a given by now, isn’t it?” Erica said.

  Maggie brought her along in case they got deep enough into the weeds for Justin to want a complicated explanation. Plus—and Maggie hated herself for thinking like this—his low-grade flirting with Erica made him easier to manipulate.

  “Not officially, no,” he said. “If you think anybody in this office is going to be putting suspect can see the future on an official report, you’re mistaken.”

  “Okay, but that doesn’t make sense,” Erica said. “You know she can. You know Corrigan Bain can, too, and I can give you an actual scientific explanation for all of it. Why wouldn’t you put it in the report?”

  “Erica,” Maggie said. “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s important. You can’t just pick the version of the truth you’re comfortable with.”

  Justin laughed.

  “Never go into politics, Dr. Smalls. Yes, I understand your point. Maggie, why don’t we start with this: Corrigan Bain is a civilian. I think we’ve all learned a lot recently about what he’s done for this city, but that doesn’t mean we just point him toward the bad guy and step away. That’s not how it’s done. If you’ve located her…no, that’s not even right, is it? You didn’t find her. You found the device she went through all that trouble to retrieve. And you found it using some kind of magical ding-dong only Bain is capable of operating, for reasons I swear to God my forehead will crack open if you try to explain to me again”

  “It isn’t magic,” Maggie said.

  Justin shook his head. He looked ready to challenge Maggie on the finer points of how one defines magic, before deciding against it.

  “You sent Corrigan up in a chopper with the doohickey, and narrowed it down to a harbor dock, and somehow that didn’t immediately trigger a box-to-box search. Did you at least drop a net over the place?”

  “We have the gates under surveillance, but we’re not going in until everything’s in place.”

  “You don’t even know if she’s there. Again, you’ve tracked the device, not her.”

  “She’ll be there,” Erica said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because she wants Corrigan, and in the future, Corrigan will be on the docks. She already knows this, so she’ll be there.”

  “But I haven’t said yes to any of this.”

  “Not yet. As soon as you say okay to the plan, she’ll be there. If you don’t, we don’t know where she’ll end up being.”

  “Because she saw it happen in the future. That’s what you’re saying?” Justin asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did she see when it was going to happen?”

  “I don’t think that matters.”

  “If she saw it happen Wednesday and we went on Tuesday…”

  “Oh, I see,” Erica said. “No, it doesn’t work that way.”

  “Dr. Smalls, as far as I can tell, you’re all making this up as you go along, to push me in the direction of heavy drug use.”

  “I know the feeling,” Maggie said.

  “I mean that whatever day you decide to go is the day she sees it happen,” Erica said. “You can change it all you want, but that won’t impact her; she’ll still get it right.”

  “You know, she’s already considered a terrorist,” Justin said. “I can probably get the National Guard involved. Just have them march in and take the docks.”

  “A lot of them will die if you do that,” Maggie said. “Look, I’m not going into this happy either. Corrigan wants to take on a psychopath, and his plan hinges on…let’s just say I don’t like the plan either. But he says it will work, and I’m out of better ideas. If you want to get past your problem with Sheila Corrigan seeing the future, consider that the alternative is to send people—FBI, BPD, the Guard, anybody—into a fight with someone sitting on a large supply of C-4, who knows they’re coming. Sure, they may get her, but how many are you willing t
o lose to make that happen?”

  Justin sighed.

  “Except, I do have to send someone in,” he said. “This is like that brain teaser. If a man tells you that everything he says is a lie, then his admission is itself a lie. If we make like we’re sending in a force, but we don’t really send in a force, then in the future we don’t actually send in that force, and she’ll know it.”

  “Yes,” Maggie said. “Unless Corrigan is the one who tells them not to go in.”

  “I see. What you’re really asking is for permission to send in an overwhelming force, with orders to take down the target, and then keep to myself that those aren’t really their orders. Instead, their real orders will be coming from Corrigan Bain, a civilian who shouldn’t be there in the first place, and isn’t even on the chart as far as chain-of-command is concerned. And that magically, if he tells them to do something, the other Corrigan won’t be able to anticipate that. Or, or, what? Divine it? This is nuts, Maggie.”

  “Did you read the report?” Erica asked. “From when I was attacked. Corrigan did this before.”

  “Dr. Smalls…” Justin began. He caught himself short of saying something that was probably going to be a lot blunter. “Let’s just say it’s been in the best interest of everyone connected with that case that it is not well-read. I mean that for the sake of Maggie’s career, and for mine.”

  “Once again, I can provide ample scientific—”

  “Yes, I know. But understand that at least twenty percent of the people reporting to me, think wireless internet access is witchcraft.”

  He looked at Maggie.

  “You’re going to be there,” he said. It was a question, but he delivered it like it was an order.

  “In a chopper,” she said, “coordinating from above.”

  “All right. If anyone asks, your boyfriend’s appearance at the scene was a surprise for everyone involved. Set it in motion. Just know that I’m regretting this already.”

  The container terminal sat along a stretch of water called the Reserved Channel, which forked off from the Boston Main Channel that fed Boston Harbor. Beyond the Harbor was the mouth of the Charles River on one side and the Mystic River on the other.

  These were parts of the city about which—up until about ten hours prior—Corrigan knew nothing. Then he toured the shoreline in a helicopter, holding a device whose functionality was an ongoing revelation to Erica Smalls, the resident expert in these sorts of things. The tour also included Castle Island, a place Corrigan had been to, having visited on foot one time while working as a fixer.

  That he could travel to a thing called an island on foot, was just one of the many reasons the collection of land masses and water estuaries in the area remained a mystery. This, despite having spent over two decades staring at a map of the region every morning.

  The best explanation for this, he thought, was that he’d never been called upon to save someone on the water.

  Once they got the helicopter within a couple of miles, the device switched from GPS coordinates to a kind of throbbing arrow on a compass dial. It pointed them in the correct direction and pulsed more rapidly the closer they came. The consensus: Sheila Corrigan was hiding in the container stacks.

  Corrigan and Maggie had to argue a few of the finer points of this for long enough that his head hurt after it was over, and she looked like she needed a smoke. She rightly pointed out that all they’d managed to do was track the object Sheila took from the police van, and they had no reason to believe Sheila was there herself.

  Maggie was right, but there were plenty of reasons this was a moot point. For starters, they had no other leads. Also, the thing was clearly something she valued greatly enough to go through law enforcement to retrieve—twice—so she would probably stay close to it. But most importantly, even if they were about to raid a mostly-empty container on a dock, they had to go in assuming otherwise.

  None of those were the reason Corrigan went with, though. He argued that all he had to do was make a personal appearance on the dock. Sheila would know he was going to be there, and he would know that she would know he was going to be there, and so on. He could change his future so that he was not there, but if he did, it would have to be right before he was supposed to be there, because anything other than that and they risked her seeing the switch-out, like she had at the hospital.

  This was the portion of the conversation that spun everyone around. Erica tried to explain it using terms like contingent probability, but that only made it worse.

  The short answer to all of this was that they had to go in heavy, and Corrigan had to be there.

  It took the Bureau the better part of the afternoon to get the terminal closed down. This had to be done quietly, in shifts. They were fortunate that no ship was in, as this would mean a small army of stevedores moving up and down the dock. Then they had to set up a perimeter, which was also not terribly difficult, as every part of the property not up against the water was behind a fence, so they had a starting point.

  They ringed the fence-line with a joint combination of members of the FBI, ICE, ATF, and the Boston Police. Corrigan didn’t pretend to understand how any of that worked, jurisdictionally, and didn’t much care as long as they all listened to him when he needed them to.

  It was dark now. That hardly mattered in the container yard, because the place was bathed in the kind of electrical lighting that would fit right in at Fenway Park. Those lights weren’t coming at the yard from the same angle of the sun (obviously) so they did have a tendency to create heavy shadows when up against the tall stacks of containers, but it wasn’t much worse than being in the city on a moonless night. Corrigan thought Sheila would use the shadows to her advantage, but he planned on doing the same thing, so it was fair.

  “Corrigan, can you hear me okay?” Maggie asked. She was talking over the wireless from her position in a helicopter somewhere above.

  “I hear you,” he said. “Is everyone in position?”

  The terminal was broken up into three square sections, each with five rows of containers. Each row was between one and three containers tall. The containers could be moved with a lift, to be loaded on a truck and driven away when it was time to do such a thing. Everything was set up on a grid, with clearly marked sections and lots of straight lines. Corrigan had narrowed the signal down to the 1/3 of the yard closest to the Boston Main Channel, at the mouth of the Reserved Channel, which also happened to be the section with the most containers in it. (In contrast, the middle section was nearly empty.)

  If everything had gone according to plan, this section of the yard would now be devoid of all human beings that weren’t Corrigan, Sheila, or heavily armored members of law enforcement. Helpfully, the whole area was supposed to be kept sealed by customs, so security was heightened to begin with. That this meant Sheila had been hanging out in the middle of a secure area for an undetermined length of time, without being noticed, just underlined how difficult this was going to be. She couldn’t walk through walls—as some had suggested she must be capable of—but it sure seemed that way sometimes.

  Corrigan was standing on the inside of the gate. There were three ICE agents with him, including Jeanine, who had been with Maggie’s task force almost from the beginning. Corrigan nearly didn’t recognize her in all the gear.

  Something like twenty other officers had taken up positions along the perimeter fence. The target container was somewhere in the middle of the second row, which was the best Corrigan had been able to pinpoint it. Sheila was surrounded. It was undoubtedly the case that she knew it.

  “Everyone’s in position,” Maggie said.

  Corrigan peeked into the future.

  “All clear,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Maggie’s dislike of helicopters was strong enough that she would have greatly preferred being part of the ground operation for this particular campaign. Everybody down there was looking at an artificially foreshortened life expectancy—and for the most part was unaware of this�
�but she didn’t care. Sitting in a helicopter made her feel exposed, and not in control of her own fate.

  We have to force her to change the future, Corrigan said. A lot. It has to be noisy.

  This was part of the plan-within-a-plan-within-a-plan. The only people who knew about it were Corrigan, Erica, and Maggie. They didn’t tell Justin, or any of the people on the ground. An unavoidable consequence was that people were probably going to die. Maggie didn’t care for that part.

  She opened up the channel.

  “All teams, go,” she said.

  There was an opening to a walkway between the containers, directly in front of Corrigan. He headed that way, with the tracking box in one hand and a handgun in the other. Jeanine and the other two ICE agents flanked him. They were helmeted, in heavy battle armor that was about one layer of padding short of bomb-tech gear. Corrigan, meanwhile, was in a bulletproof vest and no helmet. If anyone thought this was stupid, they weren’t saying so out loud.

  Walking quickly was difficult. The stitches in his side pulled on every other step. He’d been told that no matter how it felt, everything should hold together down there provided he didn’t try running. He had no intention to run.

  Twenty steps in, and his head exploded. He felt the bullet enter his forehead and the world black out as he died. Death tasted like copper.

  He shifted his head out of the path of the bullet. Sheila—it was definitely her—adjusted as well, and the man to his left took a round in the chest. It didn’t look fatal, so Corrigan allowed it to happen.

  “Sniper!” he shouted. “She’s on top of the boxes.”

  Corrigan’s declaration—mainly intended for Maggie—must have been alarming to the ICE agents, because it came before the first round hit the man on the left. Then it did. The guy who took the round fell onto his back, while his partner dropped to a knee, raised his M4 in the direction of fire, and tried to a target.

  Jeanine’s instinctive response to the gunshot was to jump in front of Corrigan. It was a take-a-bullet move that wouldn’t work, long-term, but wasn’t a bad temporary solution to his lack of battle armor.