by Liana Brooks
“Mine has reindeer,” Edwin said.
“I look forward to seeing it. I’ll be at the hotel downtown. If you need anything, just call.” Sam walked out of the office for the last time. She wanted to cry. No, that was a lie, too. She’d been wanting to cry for months. Ever since she’d buried her father, she’d been carrying a weight she couldn’t escape. Every day, her knees bent a little more. Every sunrise hailed another day of battle. One without Hoss.
And one without her anchor . . .
Her throat tightened with grief.
The bureau had signed her death sentence. Anywhere they took this project would be the path of her destruction. And Mac’s
She crossed the parking lot to where her new car sat, a used, gray Alexian Virgo. Mac was just the kind of person they’d get to volunteer to go through the machine. If they told him he could go back and save his friends from the ambush, he wouldn’t even stop to think about it. No one would. It seemed she was the only one who didn’t want to change the past.
All she wanted to do was change the future.
Mac pushed open the door to Sam’s office and looked in. Her flustered junior agent stared at him with a shocked look on his face.
“C-can I help you, sir?”
“I’m looking for Agent Rose; do you know where she is?” Maybe he should have stopped for the flowers.
“Uh-uh.” The younger man shook his head.
“Do you know when she’ll be back?”
Edwin frowned in confusion. “What?”
“Agent Rose?” Mac stepped forward not quite sure how to proceed. “Do you know if she’s returning tonight?”
“She resigned!” Agent Edwin blurted out. “She left!”
Mac closed on the desk and gently took the paperwork that the junior agent was clutching tightly. Sam’s signature was at the bottom of a resignation form. Reason for leaving was listed as personal.
For a moment, his heart leapt with joy. Personal reasons. She was going to come to Chicago with him! But . . . no. That would be a transfer. There was no reason to resign if she wanted to come with him. “What did Agent Rose do this morning?”
“She went to the district meeting. I mean, I think . . .” Mac gave him a steady, questioning look. “I wasn’t supposed to know about it,” Edwin admitted. “Definitely wasn’t supposed to be there.”
“I don’t care—I’m not going to get you in trouble. What did you hear?”
He shrugged. “Maybe Agent Rose arguing with the regional director. Something about her dog, and warnings, and a machine they took to Fort Benning. Maybe. I was outside waiting to ask her a question.”
“Not listening.” Mac nodded. “The director told her to toe the line, didn’t he? I bet that went over well.”
“Like telling a hurricane the city is a no-fly zone, sir.”
Mac set the paperwork down, tapping it as he stared into space. She couldn’t go back to her apartment. She hadn’t stayed around to take him home from the hospital.
In retrospect, he should have seen that as a huge, glaring red flag.
Sam was trying to get him out of the picture. Which meant there was really only one place she would go. “Sit on this,” he ordered Agent Edwin. “Give me forty-eight hours to see if I can talk some sense into her.”
Agent Edwin slowly nodded. “How are you going to reach her?”
“I’ll start with a phone call.”
“I tried; she left her phone and badge in her office.” Edwin grimaced. “In the trash can.”
Smart girl. She wasn’t leaving anything for someone to track. The Alexia Virgo she drove was old enough that it didn’t have a speed restrictor in it. It was tenuous, but he didn’t think she was just going off the grid, like Connor and Nealie. Which meant she was doing it for a reason—that someone’s being able to follow her would be either dangerous, illegal . . . or both.
And if he had to guess, he would say she was on the road to Fort Benning.
Mac smiled. “I know where she went.”
He drove back to the hotel first, parking the rental in the back of the lot. It had been years since he had done anything remotely black ops or covert, but the training was still there. The bureau couldn’t be fooled for long, but he didn’t need more than a head start. Once he was gone, there were only a few possible endings, death and imprisonment being the most likely options. With luck, and possibly divine intervention, he might be able to swing success.
Adrenaline burned through his veins. Time slowed to a crawl. It had been a long time since he’d been in the zone, but he was back now. In control and sure of himself like he hadn’t been since Afghanistan.
With careful attention, he tore through his luggage, discarding anything memorable. Nothing traceable was coming. Nothing that would garner attention. The government phone stayed, credit cards, all of it. There was no way the rental car could come, but it did mean he needed transportation that could move fast.
He looked out the window at the library down the street. Dereliction of duty. Fraud. Forgery. Possibly grand theft auto . . . it helped if he acted like this was hostile territory. He wouldn’t think twice if he were behind enemy lines and in a military uniform. Here, the lines were blurred. This was supposed to be home, but the people gunning at him were the ones in uniform.
Mac called down to the front desk—the room was reserved for another six days. By accident or design, Sam had it covered. Still in his suit, he walked down to the library and called the rental company. Thirty minutes later a young man named Kori picked him up.
“Thank you,” Mac said as he climbed into the car. “My transmission broke, I called the tow truck, but that doesn’t get me home to Columbia tonight. If I’m not at that meeting tomorrow, my boss will kill me.”
Kori laughed. “Yeah, my dad’s like that. I miss curfew, and I’m grounded for a week!”
Ah, to be seventeen again.
Kori dropped him off at the main desk and Mac spent another hour filing paperwork under the name of Cole Clary. Mr. Clary was a scruffy individual about Mac’s height who had been engrossed in a computer game when Mac walked past him at the library. Apparently, the computer game was pay-as-you-go, and the hapless Mr. Clary had forgotten to put his wallet away.
Mac had turned it in to the main desk like a good citizen after he lifted the driver’s license and cash.
“What kind of car, Mr. Clary?” the clerk asked as he signed the last page of waivers.
“Anything that runs,” Mac said. “Nothing flashy. I just need to get there on time.”
“I have the perfect car.”
A beat-up, brown Moka Black with twenty thousand miles on the tires. Mac checked the engine—there was a driver’s black box that would keep him from speeding, but he could work with that. “Looks great.”
“Just drop her off in the Columbia office when you get there, and you’ll get your fifty dollar safety deposit back when you plug her into the charge station.”
“Perfect.” Mac took the keys and pulled out of the lot. The first stop was the beach with the mud parking lot. He turned donuts in the empty lot until there was a good layer of mud on the car, then smeared the license plates and covered the rental sticker. He stripped off his suit and stuffed the bureau uniform in the trash. The chances of his ever needing that again were dwindling with every passing second. T-shirt and jeans were what this op called for. And sunglasses.
Time to chase Sam.
He drove the speed limit for an hour, then pulled into a good-sized town and stopped at an auto-parts store for two basic travel essentials: an auditor and a radar detector. Popping the hood, he fixed the auditor in place. It would read the allowed speed limit and tell the restrictor box that the car was within seven miles of that limit at all times. Then he hooked the radar detector in and set it to search for large radio signals, radars,
and police bands. Traveling just shy of two hundred miles an hour wasn’t good for the tires, but it ate the miles between the Space Coast and the Home of the Infantry in record time.
CHAPTER 19
Ten thousand deaths, my beloved. Let me fall before you. Let my death be the one that wins you life anew.
~ excerpt from the poem “A Living Death” by Jorge Sabio I2–2068
Wednesday April 2, 2070
Fort Benning, Georgia
Commonwealth of North America
Iteration 2
Sam parked her car behind a charging station down the street from the main research facility and left the windows cracked and the keys lying on the driver’s seat. There should have been a storm brewing in the distance. Big thunderclouds boiling in the atmosphere promising a torrent of rain and shattering thunder. The wind should have picked up, gusting around her or howling down the street like the song of a damned soul. Birdsong and a gentle afternoon zephyr seemed wholly inappropriate.
It was a metaphor for her life, really. Every grand plan with which she set out fizzled into obscurity. Not failure, she didn’t fail. But all her efforts were swept away in the great rolling tide of time, lost, forgotten, erased like footprints on the sand.
She parked her car in the back and made her way to the station bathroom to freshen up. The woman in the mirror was a stranger. Sleepless nights had left bruises on her cheeks. Stress had thinned her, sharpened her features, and left her wan. Aside from the faint heartbeat fluttering her neck, she was already a corpse.
“Why are you doing this, Samantha?”
The woman in the mirror stared back with unforgiving eyes.
“What do you think this will get you? Another year? Another decade? Everyone dies in the end.”
Ten thousand deaths, wasn’t that what Mac had said? There were ten thousand deaths needed to make a life. The machine would take ten million. Everyone here would die if Emir and Loren had their way.
“I swore an oath,” she told the woman in the mirror. “I promised to sacrifice everything if that’s what it took to defend the nation. Everyone else is blind. I’m the only one who sees the danger, so I’m the only one who can prevent the destruction.”
Saying it aloud almost made it possible to believe all that.
Or maybe she really was delusional. Maybe Loren and Petrilli were right.
She had to wonder how many other Sams had repeated that in other iterations? She wondered if they’d reached this point, too. If the detective who chased Gant had hesitated, then run into the vortex, telling herself she had to stop Gant before anyone else did. Maybe Juanita’s last thoughts were of how she was dying to protect her people.
Or maybe they were all as selfish as she. Wanting to keep themselves away from the nightmares of crossed timelines and greedy men.
There really was no way of knowing.
Fort Benning. Talk about ghosts. He’d done basic training there, and Ranger school, and airborne school. Most his life between nineteen and twenty-five revolved around the ancient army post. Somewhere in his wallet, he still had the ID they’d issued him before his last deployment.
By the time he’d sobered up and started thinking straight, the brown card was little more than a souvenir, a memento of a shattered lifetime. He’d kept it out of misplaced sentimentalism. The lockdown was an annexed portion on the southwest side of Fort Benning that UNATBI had taken over in 2066. Part of the old training grounds outside Jamestown off Blueridge Road.
He recharged the car at a rest stop just inside Georgia before turning north on 520 as the sun set. Sam was bureau-trained. She would wait until it was late, and the guards were tired, before she tried anything. He tried to take some comfort from that.
Knowing that Sam was an absolute rookie charging in to steal a device that had already been involved with six deaths and more than one murder attempt made him drive faster. At Cusseta, he pulled over at a pawnshop. They sold him a small gun and ammo with no questions. Insanity all around. He wouldn’t have handed a weapon to a man who looked like him.
Maybe they just wanted to get me out of their store.
He didn’t blame them.
A quarter to eleven, he abandoned the rental in the woods outside the lockdown. He wiped it down for prints, left the keys in the driver’s seat, and Cole Clary’s driver’s license on the dashboard. Hopefully, the guy had a decent alibi.
Now, where would his errant senior agent be? He scanned the tree line around the lockdown as he secured his new gun. There was a darker pocket of shadow under a thick layer of broad-leafed vines. Something glinted in the yellow light from the building. Amateur—she hadn’t taken her jewelry off.
He smiled as he melted into the brush in the way only a Ranger could.
Lying on her stomach, Sam crawled forward, timing the cameras on the outside of the lockdown. A hand covered her mouth, and she was pulled forcibly backward, landing on something warm. Her nose told her who it was even before Mac hissed “Be quiet!” in her ear. She was wrapped in his arms, sitting on his lap in a tent of vines
“What are you doing here?” she whispered, turning so she could look at him.
“That’s my line.”
She tried to wiggle free, but Mac just tightened his grip, pulling her closer. Her heart rate picked up. “I don’t have a choice, Mac.”
“You’ll break it, they’ll rebuild it. You aren’t going to accomplish anything. Let’s go back to Florida. Agent Edwin is sitting on your resignation. We can think of something else.”
“I already have. I’m not breaking the machine.” She froze as a guard’s flashlight swept the foliage. Someone standing behind them and looking at the light might have seen their profile, but the guard standing by the building could only see vines. He moved on.
Sam lowered her voice. “I’m not breaking the machine,” she said again. “I’m removing it from the timeline. Emir said that all timelines eventually collapsed back into one, didn’t he?”
“Phased back into balance,” Mac corrected. “I remember.”
“So I remove the machine from the timeline, and it will eventually be removed from all the timelines.”
He shifted position, his five o’clock shadow grazing her face. “How?”
“Take the time machine through the time warp.”
Mac held her in silence. It seemed he was holding her tighter. She could smell his soap and hear the high-pitched buzz of mosquitoes.
“I have to go, Mac. This is the only option I have. There’s nothing for me here. I’ve lost everything. I have nothing.”
He kissed her cheek. “You have me.”
“But I don’t. Not like this. Not with my head already in the guillotine.” She bit her lip, trying not to cry. “You should leave.” She couldn’t keep pushing him away. She wasn’t that strong.
“I can’t lose you.”
“Thank you.”
She could feel Mac swallow hard. He gestured toward the lockdown. “You have a plan for this?”
“The director’s keycard, running shoes, and a couple of prayers.” She’d managed to get a tour of the outer labs, but even her sunny smile and a bureau badge hadn’t been enough to get her near the machine. Thankfully, the lab director was the careless sort who left her badge sitting on her desk when she went to the break room for lunch.
“I would have preferred a fragment grenade.”
In the distance, someone shouted.
“Ah, they found the car,” Mac said.
She glared at him, a look he probably missed in the dark.
“Call it a distraction,” he said. With a light push, she was crouching. “Time to run.”
They waited for the guards and cameras to move, then sprinted for the side door. Sam slid the director’s card in, and the lock turned green.
“This is way too easy,” Mac
breathed.
“Tell me that in five minutes. This is after hours.”
“So, what, six minutes before the lockdown turns this into a pretty mausoleum?”
“Three.” Bureau security didn’t believe in second chances. Once lockdown was initiated, vents would flood the halls with a knockout gas that would leave them incapacitated.
She ran headlong down the tiled hallways, following the map in her head. Two lefts, a right, the third right . . . and there it was. Bastard. The machine that would ultimately kill her. Emir’s theory meant she could take the time machine out of play, but it also meant Jane Doe would still get buried in 2069. She would be buried in a pauper’s grave after months of hideous torture finally killed her.
Mac’s hand rested on her back. “Sam?”
“I hate this machine.”
“Two minutes and counting.”
She unlocked the door. The buttons were easy. She’d watched the remote video presentation with the taste of bile in her mouth, but that didn’t mean she didn’t need to know how to work the thing. Ironically, Petrilli had sent her the video because he hoped it would win her over to the bureau’s way of thinking.
“When are we going?” Mac asked.
“If it’s still the same setting from the lab, we’ll move back in time a year. April of ’69. We might jump a few miles.” Thirty seconds for it to power up. “My math might be a bit off, though.”
“Let’s just hope it doesn’t drop us in a live-fire range out on the post.”
“Let’s hope our bones aren’t twisted like a wrung-out towel.”
Mac grimaced.
Forty seconds more for the machine to rattle to life. A claxon sounded in the building. Red lights flashed.
“We begin losing oxygen in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .”
Sam hit the button. “One.”
A blue-green mist swirled as she held the button down. Time slowed. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
She clutched the machine to her chest and leaned in for a kiss. Mac wrapped his arms around her, and they fell into the portal together.