Time Streams - Fiction River Smashwords Edition

by Fiction River

  “You automatically leap from this mission didn’t go right to someone has harmed her?” It was Lane’s turn to use the how-dumb-are-you voice. “For all we know, she could have been standing too close to the bomb when it went off, and she got vaporized. She, her device, the failsafes, everything. After all, as you just pointed out, our information from that time period isn’t exactly trustworthy. And I seem to recall that they never did figure out with any certainty what happened that day.”

  The third assistant grimaced. “There’s a lot of evidence to suggest—”

  Wilhelmina held up a hand, silencing him. “We do an out-and-back,” she said. “A short mission, looking only on that day. We send in someone new. We give him the right credentials. After all, William J. Flynn took a train in from DC the moment he heard about the bombing. We can have our man take jurisdiction for just a few hours.”

  Lane had no idea who this William J. Flynn was, although he supposed Wilhelmina had once briefed him on that as well. So many cases, so much to remember. Maybe he would resign at the end of the year. Clearly all of these time paradoxes were taking a toll.

  “I thought we already did that,” Lane said. “Wasn’t that our second investigator?”

  She glanced at her assistants. “We had the wrong credentials.”

  “What?” Lane asked. He knew he hadn’t heard this.

  “We had legitimate New York police department credentials, but we had given our man a position too high up in the department. They figured out fairly quickly that he was a fraud. Only they figured he worked for former Commissioner Arthur Woods, not that he had come from the future.”

  Arthur Woods. Another name Lane probably should have remembered. He sighed. He would have to read up on this entire investigation just to refresh his memory. He could either do that, or trust the woman who sat before him.

  “How much will this cost the department?” Lane asked.

  “It depends,” she said flatly. “You can calculate the loss of a human life and the loss of the training we invested into the investigator, or you can figure the price of one more trip into time.”

  “Possibly losing another investigator,” he said.

  “Possibly,” she said.

  “If we do, we both lose our jobs,” he said.

  “That’s what’s worrying you?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “It isn’t. What worries me is that we’re doing something we don’t entirely understand. We’re throwing more resources at it rather than investigating the best methods and then taking them. There is no hurry, Ms. Rutger, as you’ve often told me. If we send in someone today or next week, it won’t matter. They’ll still go back to the same time period.”

  She raised her chin ever so slightly. He had gotten through.

  “You’re right, of course,” she said. “In my concern, I had forgotten that. We will conduct a more thorough investigation, and then I will consult with you again.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Wilhelmina and her assistants left, but he remained seated. Something about this disturbed him greatly. Not Wilhelmina’s hurry or even the assistants’ passion. In fact, he understood the assistants’ passion. They could have been the ones on the front lines. But for the luck of the draw, this conversation could have been about any one of them.

  No, something else bothered Lane.

  New York’s financial district. Three major attacks that he knew of: this one in 1920, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center. Plus at least two thwarted attacks, one in 2012 against the Federal Reserve in lower Manhattan, and another in 2025 against the New York Stock Exchange.

  Were they all time-guarded events? If so, were they time-guarded by Homeland or Justice or the Time Department? Or by someone else? Something else? A multinational? A foreign government?

  Lane stood up slowly. He had to make a choice here. He could remain the ignorant figurehead, disappointed in the job that they had given him, or he could step into his role as the chief investigator of time irregularities for the Federal Government.

  He hated those dinners his wife planned. He used to love investigative work. He’d simply been overwhelmed by his learning curve and, if he were honest, by the fact that he walked through several time bubbles every morning when he came to work. He hated the Bubble, but everywhere he’d worked in DC had a time-guard of one type or another. The problem wasn’t the job; the problem was his attitude.

  He’d allowed others to dictate policy during his first six months here. Time to change that, no pun intended. Or maybe he did intend to pun. Because it was past time. And he couldn’t use the amazing resources at his disposal to start again. So maybe he could use them to solve something huge.

  Or, if this wasn’t huge, just to make the right decision in the Philippa D’Arcy case.

  Whatever that decision might be.

  Manhattan

  September 16, 1920

  Philippa glanced at the clock hanging on the far wall. The incredible clack of typewriters had its own rhythm, a rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat bing! that had become familiar to her. At the desk next to her, the new hire sang “Over There” faintly under her breath, a reprieve from the Tin Pan Alley tunes she had started the morning with. The last few hours of Philippa’s last day. She looked at all the girls around her, intent on their typing or fixing their shorthand or stacking already-completed letters in manila folders, and wondered how they would fare.

  They might be all right. The large room had no windows, the grillwork making it seem like a prison. All of the girls who worked there wore white shirtwaists and long skirts, their hair in a neat bun. They seemed interchangeable and probably were, to the men who ran the House of Morgan.

  Philippa straightened her desk, rolled a sheet of House of Morgan letterhead in the platen of her Underwood, and stood up.

  Mrs. Fontaine looked up from her desk. It faced the rows and rows of desks.

  “You do not have permission to stand,” she said. She was twice the age of the girls and twice their weight. She ran a tight office, but a fair one. She pretended to be an ogre, but the girls loved her, because she understood what it was to be young and employed and a little bit terrified.

  “I’m sorry,” Philippa said. “I’m afraid I need a personal moment.”

  Technically, the girls weren’t to leave their desks until their thirty minute unpaid lunch break. But Mrs. Fontaine understood that women couldn’t always sit that long, particularly at certain times of the month. She claimed she got her girls to do five times the work the girls in other financial houses did, because she allowed them “personal moments.”

  Mrs. Fontaine nodded. “Make it quick.”

  Philippa wouldn’t make it quick. Not that it mattered. After noon today, she would no longer be employed at the House of Morgan.

  She would make one more tour around the building, and try to see if there was something unusual. Then she would return to her desk and prevent some of the girls whom she’d befriended from taking their usual lunch. They would be safe inside their windowless room, but on that street, near the Curb Market, the Sub-Treasury, the New York Stock Exchange annex, and all of the other buildings, people would die, lose limbs, have their lives forever changed.

  Technically, she wasn’t supposed to prevent that. Technically, she was supposed to go about her business. But there was no way of knowing what the girls would have done without her, so trying to play that game didn’t work. She had to live with herself, and even though, in her real life, in her real time, these women were long dead, they were alive now, she’d been their friend, and she owed them.

  She slipped a steno pad into the pocket of her long skirt, and stepped away from her desk. She smiled a thank you to Mrs. Fontaine, then headed in the direction of the women’s necessary. The one great thing about the House of Morgan was that it had bathrooms and they were clean. Not that she needed to use one.

  She waited until she was out of Mrs. Fonta
ine’s sight, then pulled the steno pad from the pocket of her skirt. She hugged the pad against her chest and then wandered, making certain she looked lost.

  It had worked every time she had done this in the past. Some man would ask her where she needed to go, she would give an answer, and he would point her in the right direction. The younger men would ask her name, and give her a bright smile. The older men would sometimes put their arm around her and guide her to the correct floor.

  She didn’t want either to happen today. She needed to do her last tour unescorted. Then, if she didn’t find anything, she would slip onto the street and run to the Sub-Treasury building.

  She couldn’t get their mission off her mind either. Right now, as she patrolled the inside of the House of Morgan, workers at the Sub-Treasury building were transferring a billion dollars in gold coins and bullion to the federal assay office across the street.

  She had no real idea how they were doing this; her reading told her that the workers were using a wooden chute, and after the bombing, a U.S. Army battalion would arrive to protect the gold.

  Initially the Time Crimes Division believed someone was trying to steal the gold. After the first investigator discovered that no gold got stolen, someone suggested that the time-guard had been put into place to prevent the gold from getting stolen, and had been successful.

  But that didn’t make sense either, because the gold would be a lot easier to steal after the bombing than before. Hell, she could figure out how to do it: she could time travel into the Sub-Treasury or next to the chute in the assay office at 12:01 in the chaos. With the right kind of manpower and weaponry, the gold would disappear.

  But it didn’t; it wouldn’t; it never would. It would remain.

  The fact that she was even thinking of heading to the Sub-Treasury building showed just how desperate she was to get some information, any information, before she left 1920 at 12:02 pm. She had already been to Sub-Treasury courtesy of a nice young guard, who had thought her harmless. A different nice young guard had shown her what he could in the assay office, and there, she found nothing out of the ordinary.

  Not that she knew what she was looking for. Something. Something had to be here, besides this bombing.

  Something had to be so important that changing it threatened The Way Things Were.

  She walked up a marble staircase to the private meetings floor. She’d been called into a few of these conference rooms. She’d sat on a wooden chair in the back and taken notes.

  Today, if someone asked where she was going, she had a half-plausible lie based on that previous experience. She knew that Junius Spencer Morgan the younger, the heir to the throne, was having a meeting in one of the rooms facing Wall Street. She’d seen photographs of the aftermath, although she wasn’t sure which room he was in. If someone stopped her, she would tell them she was going to relieve the secretary handling that meeting.

  But no one stopped her. She went up staircase after staircase to floor after floor and she was about to give up, when she noticed one of the doors to the maintenance area stood open.

  She’d tried that door in the past, and it had been locked. This time, she slipped inside.

  Four men were leaning together, gesturing and whispering. They appeared to be arguing. They didn’t notice her.

  They didn’t look like maintenance men. They were too clean for one thing. People who did physical labor in this decade had a layer of grime on their clothes and skin that just couldn’t come off in a weekly bath. Their clothes were off too. A little too shiny, a bit too new. And one man wore shoes that had a metal ridge she had never seen before. Or, rather, that she hadn’t seen in a very long time. Or, rather, that no one would see for many many years.

  The men all looked at her at the same time. One man flushed red.

  “Can we help you?” asked the man wearing the odd shoes. He had dark eyes and skin that wasn’t quite white. She wouldn’t have noticed that a month ago, but after living here, in a world where everything was defined by skin color, last name, education, and accent, she noticed.

  Her heart started pounding. Her planned lie about Mr. Morgan seemed wrong, somehow.

  “I saw the open door…” she said.

  “Christ,” hissed the man who flushed. “She saw us. No one was supposed to see us.”

  His teeth were white. Even. Perfect. So were the teeth of the first man who spoke. So were her teeth. People here remarked on that.

  These men didn’t belong here any more than she did. And, she would wager, no one in the Time Division knew about them.

  She backed out of the room, slammed the door closed, and ran for the stairs. With one hand, she lifted her skirt enough so that her own boots didn’t catch, and with the other, she put the steno pad in her pocket. Then she reached for the railing. The steps were slick, and she had to slow down some.

  She heard footsteps behind her. She sped up just as someone grabbed her. He smelled of cologne. Not Bay Rum. Cologne. Nothing from this time period. It was too subtle, too complex. And the hand that covered her mouth had had a manicure.

  She bit his palm. He cursed, but didn’t let her go. Instead, he dragged her up the stairs. She struggled, but couldn’t free herself. Her feet banged on every step, jarring her all the way up her spine.

  Surely, someone on the lower levels heard that. Surely, someone would come investigate. Surely, someone would do something.

  She elbowed the man, then tried to hit his face with her fists. When he pulled her onto the upper floor, she levered herself up on his arm and kicked him on his shins. He didn’t even flinch. He continued to drag her. One of the other men joined him, and they flung her into that room.

  She slid along the floor on her skirt, and nearly slammed into the wall. The men peered down at her.

  “What do we do with her?” asked the man who had flushed.

  The man who had dragged her reached down, and pulled her lips back so that he could look at her teeth like she was a horse. She tried to bite him again.

  “Feisty bit of business,” one of the other men said.

  “Who are you, really?” the man who dragged her asked.

  “Philippa Darcy,” she snapped, using the name she used in this period. “I’m expected in Mr. Morgan’s office.”

  “It’s eleven-thirty,” one of the men said to the others.

  The man who dragged her grinned. “Then I’ll wager that Mr. Morgan won’t mind if you don’t show up. He probably won’t even notice.”

  “He will,” she said, keeping to the game. “He’ll notice. He’ll send someone searching for me.”

  “Nice try, honey,” said the man who dragged her. “But you girls aren’t that important to anyone in the House of Morgan. No one except your boss even knows your name.”

  “What do we do with her?” the man who flushed asked again.

  “We can’t send her home for another 31 minutes,” said the man with the shoes.

  Her heart rate increased. They knew. They knew about the bomb; they probably knew that she didn’t belong here.

  “What’s really going on?” she asked.

  “Ah, honey,” said the man who dragged her. “That’s above your pay grade. It’s strictly need-to-know.”

  She struggled to her feet. Damn the skirt. Her legs caught in its folds.

  “I think I need to know,” she said, with more bravado than she felt.

  “And you will know,” the man who dragged her said. Then he grinned. “All in good time.”

  And all of the men laughed, as if he had told a particularly witty joke.

  Washington, D.C.

  March 23, 2057 (supposedly)

  Lane was deep in his research when his assistant peeked her head in the door. He nearly snapped at her, but thought the better of it. Her lips were in a thin line, her hair slightly out of place. She looked frazzled, and one reason he had hired her was because she was the most unflappable person he had ever met.

  “The Attorney General just called a meet
ing downstairs,” she said. “He says it’s urgent.”

  “I thought nothing was urgent in the Time Division,” Lane said.

  “Apparently,” she said, “this is.”

  Manhattan

  September 16, 1920

  At 11:55 am, Charles Gage took his seat at the back of Fred Eberlin’s New Street restaurant. The place smelled of frying meat and spilled beer. The table was sticky, and even in the middle of the day, the electric lights were on. They weren’t very powerful, and they barely cut the gloom.

  The waiter who had greeted him didn’t want him to sit so far back.

  “Wouldn’t you rather have a seat up front by the window, sir?” he asked as Gage strode toward the back of the restaurant. “You can watch all of New York go by without moving a muscle.”

  “Not today,” Gage said. Today, if he sat by that plate glass window, or any plate glass window within six blocks of Wall Street, he ran the risk of serious injury, maybe even death.

  Even sitting this far back was a risk. But he wanted to be inside the time-guard. Within the hour, the police would block off sections of Wall Street, and he wouldn’t be able to get in unless his paperwork was perfect.

  He didn’t want to rely on perfect paperwork. He wanted to rely on outsmarting whatever it was that had set up the time bubble in the first place.

  The waiter sighed loudly. “The specials are on the board up front, sir, but I suppose I can recite them for you.”

  “I’d rather have a sarsaparilla,” Gage said. He’d acquired a taste for the damn things on another job, ten years ago his time, but only a year before this one. He had a hunch that whatever the Coca-Cola company used to make the drink was bad for him, but he didn’t care. It was a taste he couldn’t get anywhen else. If, of course, he had time to drink it.

  He pulled out his pocket watch. He’d set it to New York time the moment he arrived. He couldn’t get to Washington D.C. on September 16, so he’d had to settle for Philadelphia which, for some reason, wasn’t time-guarded at all. He took a train to Manhattan, and arrived at Penn Station at nine a.m. Then he’d walked down the island, and stopped near the Equitable Life Insurance Building, which, at 38 stories, was currently the tallest building in the city, if not the world.