“I will keep the roofs from falling on you and anyone else, I promise.”
Z.
The next morning Wills and I stake out a downtown hotel where he tells me he tracked some hags earlier. They’re relatively safe from us so long as they stay inside. If we tried to storm the place, we’d likely do more harm than good; a firefight in such a sensitive building would cause too many historical disruptions. Our best option is to wait for them to come out, where we can dispose of them more discreetly.
After Wills approached me on the sidewalk the previous night, he led me to his car (a nondescript rented Civic) so we could talk while he drove. He’d tracked me to the restaurant with his GeneScan, but he had as many questions as I did. Why would the Department send two of us here? They’d never done that before. Having a partner would be helpful, sure, but the Department has always figured that doubling the imprint left on the beat was too big a risk. What was going on?
We downloaded files from each other as he drove. Our intel didn’t match; some of the Events he was protecting weren’t rated as important in my files, and vice versa.
“I was afraid of this,” he said. “The hags must have so many plots back here, the Department didn’t think one Protector could handle them all.”
“But why didn’t they warn us about each other? We might have killed each other by mistake.”
I silently processed his intel, then stopped at an image.
“This contemp,” I said, weighing what to explain and what to hold back, “Tasha Wilson. She wasn’t in my intel.”
“That doesn’t quite explain what you were doing having dinner with her, Zed.”
“All right, I had a date. Report me if you want to. But it shouldn’t matter, since she’ll be dead soon anyway.”
“Yes, but not as part of the Conflagration. She goes sooner. And she’s a target, Zed, which means you need to stay away from her.”
I was reeling; Tasha was important after all? I downloaded the rest of Wills’s intel, checked the dates against my own. The diplomat, the product, the underground journalists. Pieces of the narrative jibed with my own, but some of the characters seemed rearranged, the causes occurring after effects, the wreckage preceding the accidents. How could the Department get so much wrong?
Missions are simplest when the people in Veracity can provide the Protectors with clear, concise information on what happened historically. But this isn’t always possible. Records are incomplete, inaccessible, or damaged. History as recorded may contain flaws, omissions, and biases. There may be competing versions of history. It’s hard to protect what actually happened when you aren’t entirely sure what happened. Whenever the data is less than complete, or when it’s contradictory, the brains in Veracity are supposed to resolve the discrepancies, fill in the holes, before passing the intel to the Protectors.
I’ve grown used to the process of sifting through competing narratives, but this beat is the muddiest of any I’ve been sent to, the theories most divergent, the passions strongest. The bombs in America started the Great Conflagration, sure, but who set them off? Was it terrorists, and if so, was it international jihadists or domestic anti-government radicals? Was it the calculated act of a rogue state, an attempt by a small nation to cripple the hegemonic U.S.A.? Or was it an isolated move by a deranged individual or a small group that sparked reprisals from so many sides so quickly that the violence overwhelmed any possibility of determining the origins? The counterstrikes came so rapidly and apocalyptically that little was left of a press or news media. Analysis was impossible; guesswork was accepted without evidence. Conspiracy theories were touted as gospel; fact merged with fiction. No one really knew what was happening, survivors whispering in the dark. Then came the long migrations to unscorched earth, the disruptions and dislocations, the new alliances. Which is when it got really messy, each side clinging to its own story of what had happened and why, each side blaming someone else, each narrative of blame taking on the power of a founding myth. They were all zealots digging in their heels and aiming their weapons.
There’s a saying that dates back even before this time: History is written by the winners. So what happens when everyone has lost?
“The hags are hedging their bets—I’ve never seen them send so many operatives back,” Wills said as we sat at a red light outside one of D.C.’s many traffic circles. “They’re trying to prevent numerous different Events, cut as many arteries as possible. Maybe Veracity started prepping one of us for the mission, then uncovered more data and realized it was more complicated, and instead of adding all the extra work to one Protector, they prepped a second.”
That would be unfortunate, but believable. Some underling in Veracity could have uncovered a few pieces of data at the last minute—from rediscovered newspaper stories, restored audio records, unearthed diaries. Wills’s information made sense, but it was a lot to absorb. The bottle of wine I’d split with Tasha wasn’t helping.
I thought about the man on Capitol Hill and the blond woman from the restaurant, both of whom approached me and called me Troy, one warning me away and the other acting nice, but maybe only because Tasha was there. I chose not to mention them to Wills.
“If they sent both of us,” I said, “do you think there could be… others too?”
“Maybe. I hope not.”
I’d never considered this possibility before. I’d always thought I was a lone gunman, but maybe I was part of an arsenal. Or part of a scroll, the paper unspooling, more words crossed out and rewritten and revised and recrossed out, paper falling to the floor in an illegible mass.
“The hags are staying in the Mayflower hotel, just south of Dupont Circle,” Wills said as he drove. “They’re learning, doing a better job of insinuating themselves into the era, making it harder for us to take them out so surgically. I’m worried about how many there are this time. Must’ve gotten their hands on more machines than we realized, or maybe they even built some themselves. We’re going to be busy.”
I didn’t bother telling him how unfocused I’d been—the walks to the playground, the drinks at the Anonymous Source. The wine on my breath was probably a good enough hint.
“I can’t believe they didn’t tell us about each other,” I said. “We’re being strung along by bureaucratic morons. I’d like to see any of them try to do what we do.”
“You’re funny, Zed. One minute you’re the burned-out vet drinking on the job, and the next you’re the passionate warrior.”
“Maybe the passion’s faked. Maybe I’m all burned out.”
“Maybe you’re not the only one.” He pulled into a parking space on Connecticut. “Everyone who’s been doing this as long as we have feels the same way. This is my last mission—I’m not supposed to be saying that, but they promised me, and I’m going to hold them to it—so we just need to hang together until this is finished.”
“It’s my last one too.”
“You know what happened to Derringer after his little tirade?”
“I have an idea.”
“Yeah, well, I plan on enjoying my retirement.”
“Me too.” I tried to imagine that.
“That’s the hotel there,” he said, pointing across the street. From here we could just see the grand entrance, the over-uniformed men beckoning taxis and carrying suitcases for the important guests.
I could tell from his suddenly glazed eyes that he was checking his GeneScan—I can’t describe my relief at knowing that I was with someone whose GeneScan functioned properly. “They’re in there—at least four, I think. The fourteenth floor.”
I felt for the gun inside my jacket. “Let’s go in, wipe them out. However many there are. Get this over with and go home.”
“Make a raid on an expensive downtown hotel full of diplomats and politicians and celebrities, kill as many as four hags, and do it without affecting the upcoming Events? If you can think of a way to do it that won’t cause chaos in this city, I’m listening.”
He was right. “W
hat do you suggest?”
“We stake it out, see if they’re planning anything tonight. My intel says no, so does yours, but we wait just in case. When they do leave the building, we take them down, one by one.”
It was a smarter idea than mine, and I resented him for it.
“The sooner we can end this job, the sooner we can get back to”—he shook his head—“whatever the hell it is we left behind.”
We stay in the car all night, one of us at the wheel and the other sleeping. A few times we have to move the car after a cop or security guard or local contemp takes too much notice of our presence—we just drive in a circle and park in a different spot, and that works until sunrise. At six o’clock, when a coffee shop across the street opens, we get out and buy some stimulants.
The fedora Wills leaves in the car after I convince him it’s wrong for the time and only makes us memorable.
“Do you ever wonder,” he asks when we’re well into our second coffees, sitting at a table, “if this job could actually be a punishment?”
“It’s definitely a punishment.”
“I’m serious. They told all of us it was an honor, the most important job anyone could have. But I’ve been running through a few things in my head. You and I both worked in Security for a while, right? We didn’t know each other, different squads, but still. Maybe someone important got tired of us. Maybe we got blamed for something, and they decided this was the best way to get rid of us.”
I try to look at him without letting my eyes stray from the Mayflower for too long. Half the cars that pull up in front of it are Lincoln Town Cars, limousines, or SUVs with tinted windows. Important people with secrets to hide.
He continues, “Because, here’s the thing: Can you really go back and alter history? Can the hags actually do that?” He’s speaking softly, and with the Muzak and the cacophony of customers and espresso grinders, no one can hear him but me. “They think they can, but what if they’re wrong? The Perfect Present—can they really undo that? We have our memories, the basic facts of our lives. These things exist, if only in our minds. If the hags manage to do what they’re trying to do, stop the Great Conflagration, then sure, they’ll change the course of history, but it’ll just go down an alternate path. It won’t change the future that you and I are from, and it won’t change what we carry in our memory.”
“So you’re saying that what we do here makes no difference.”
We’re sitting as far back in the coffee shop as we can without losing the view through the window. We know we’ll be spotted by contemps—so many of them that we could never get their names or samples or even images—but we’ve decided we have no other option. We can’t sit in a parked car on this avenue by daylight, not in this age of “orange alerts.” The only other option is staying in our motel until the time of the specific Events that our intel claims the hags are trying to disrupt, but we don’t fully totally trust our conflicting intel anymore.
“I’m just wondering,” he says, as if the coffee-house environment has unleashed his inner philosopher. “I’m opening it up for debate.”
A homeless man staggers past the window, drops a plastic bag on the ground, stares at it for a moment as if wondering where it came from, and walks away.
“But we’ve done other missions. We’ve gone to the past and been recalled again.”
“And didn’t you find it a little suspicious that they kept us on campus between missions? That we weren’t allowed to leave, walk around, see our families?”
I have no family, I nearly say. But I swallow this down.
“Maybe this is a new kind of prison we’re in,” he continues. “They send us back, we do a mission, and, if we survive, great, they recall us and just send us on another one. Over and over. It will never end, whether we stop the hags or not. We could cause an apocalypse here, spread some horrible disease, kill vital historical figures, and it wouldn’t matter. The ramifications would all occur on alternate paths, and our superiors would still recall us afterward.” He shrugs. “Or maybe this is all some elaborate computer program they’ve plugged our brains into, or a drug trip.”
“We wouldn’t have the same trip. And that back-and-forth idea, that can’t be right either. Because this is our last mission.”
“Sure, they said that, but what if we go back and they say, Oops, sorry, some things have come up, the hags have a new plot, we need more help from our loyal soldiers.” He leans closer. “Don’t you find it odd that this time, on what are supposed to be our last missions, they sent us here instead of to our usual beats?”
“So this is a purgatory we’re in.”
Odd how natural it is to talk in the contemps’ terms for fate, for afterlife. The beat seeps into you.
“And nothing that we do matters,” I say. “No control over our fate or anyone else’s.”
“It’s just a theory.”
One could say the same thing about life in general, right? That we run around in frantic circles, directed by those more powerful than us, having an effect on nothing. Wills’s existential wonderings are only making me more depressed.
“Let’s just say I hope you’re wrong.”
Three women in long jackets pass on the sidewalk; the one in the middle is pointing with her finger like a conductor as she issues commands.
“Me too. Me too.”
“And you’re giving me a headache. Look, the Engineers can play with the theories. I just want to kill some damned hags and go home.” We’ve each had two coffees by now, and so many pastries I’m tense from sugar and caffeine, not to mention sleeplessness from the night in the car. “Let’s go in, get it over with. I’m tired of waiting, tired of being back here.”
“We need to be smart about this. I’m sorry if what I said upset you.”
“What you said didn’t upset me. I just think you’re a little crazy.”
“I don’t think anyone expected us to emerge from this many gigs with our heads straight.” Then he sits up, distracted. He’s seeing something on his GeneScan. “They’re moving,” he says. It’s not quite eight in the morning; the sidewalks are manic with activity. “No, only one of them—the others are staying put.”
As the hag descends the elevator, we flip a coin—trusting at least something to fate—and I win. I’ll follow the hag, and Wills can wait for the next one.
I cross the street, hands in my pockets against the morning chill, engulfed in a mass of office workers. I stand outside the tie shop at the Mayflower’s entrance, glancing at the headlines of the Post through the glass of a dispenser (“Defense Budget Passes,” “Wizards Blow 4th-Q Lead,” “10 Best Cocktails in D.C.”), and then watching Wills, who’s moved to the front of the coffee shop so I can see him. When he gives me a faint nod, I turn to the door and see a young man emerge from the hotel. He’s wearing a long, charcoal-gray topcoat over a suit with cuffed pants, and I wonder if he visited a tailor here or if they somehow managed to construct a contemp wardrobe back in our own time. I wait a few seconds, then follow him south on Connecticut.
I keep just far enough away, lingering at intersections and waiting for lights. He never talks on a phone or to anyone else.
We walk east for twenty minutes. We’ve apparently reached the outer edge of the city’s commercial core—the crowds are thinning, the buildings shorter, the ground-floor delis and snack shops more rundown. Cranes in the distance are struggling to expand the white-collar reach. The hag turns north. On one side of the street is a long line of row houses in desperate need of paint and gardening and new roofs, or maybe just bulldozers. Looming above them on the other side is a concrete monstrosity that stretches as far as I can see. My GPS informs me that this is the Washington convention center.
I know the convention he’s heading to—it was in my intel. Rather than follow him too closely, I loiter at a street corner and pretend to be very interested in the list of bands that will soon grace the nearby tiny club, at least until the bombs hit.
The hag walks into the
entrance and I watch him chat with a man at the front desk. I don’t know how he gets past security, but he manages it. I check and there are no metal detectors, a good thing, since I’m armed. The hag likely is too.
A taxi pulls up to the entrance and a small entourage of businessmen carries briefcases and the leftovers of their conversation into the building. I walk in thirty seconds later. The man at the front desk wears a light brown jacket with the crest of a security firm sewn on the sleeve.
“I’m not on your list, actually,” I say after he asks me for my invitation. I show him, but don’t hand him, one of the extra IDs that the people in Logistics gave me for just such a purpose. It has my cover name, Troy Jones, but it’s not a driver’s license; it’s a badge from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I don’t know how realistic it is, but I assume that this guy doesn’t know what a real one looks like anyway. “I need to hunt around for someone.”
“Oh. Um, who are you looking for?”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“Sir, um, we have some rather important people here today, and I’d—”
“I’m rather important,” I tell him, surprised to be getting such pushback after showing him the badge. Perhaps the authorities aren’t as highly regarded in this time as my training has led me to believe.
“I’m sorry, it’s just… I wasn’t told anyone from the FBI would be coming today.”
“We’re not big on prior announcements. And no one from the FBI did come here today, understand?” I wink at him, burn his image into my drive, and walk away.
I stroll down a hallway wide enough for two tanks. In the center, a hundred yards up, a swarm of business-suited middle-aged and elderly men and a few token women buzz around a breakfast buffet like plump bees attracted by the piles of sliced pineapples and strawberries. Name tags dangle from lapels. To make myself less conspicuous—I’m darker-skinned, slightly younger, and less formally dressed than anyone here—I grab a stack of papers and a thick white binder from a kiosk. I skim through the agenda, the lectures with titles like “Investment Opportunities in Newly Opened Nations” and “Putting Advanced Surveillance Technologies to Work for Your Company.” Last night’s keynote speech was delivered by a senator from South Carolina; a congressman from California will close the sessions at six o’clock tonight.
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