Time Streams - Fiction River Smashwords Edition

by Fiction River

  He’d loitered outside for as long as he could, watching the cutthroat operatives of the outdoor Curb Market trade the junk stocks and bonds that the regular markets sneered at. Part of him was fascinated to see history in action. The Curb Market’s annex was nearly finished, and these traders would move inside within the year. But for the moment, they acted like street vendors, waving their tickets and shouting to be heard.

  But he couldn’t simply observe them. He needed to keep an eye on the street. He was watching for a touring car with a New Jersey license plate. He was also looking for some sort of old wooden wagon being pulled by an elderly horse. The horse would end up in pieces all over Wall Street, as would the wagon. The touring car would end up on its side.

  Smart money believed that the car rear-ended the wagon, which had probably come from the DuPont Powder Works with a load of dynamite. Manhattan had banned the transport of explosives on its streets during the daylight hours, but that didn’t mean that companies followed the rules.

  He saw the touring car, recognizing its plate—NJ24246—and realized that the man who claimed to be the chauffer in the news reports looked nothing like the man driving. Then Gage saw a brand new wagon being pulled by an elderly horse. He wished he could take video, but he didn’t dare. He was already attracting enough attention by standing outside the Equitable Building.

  He’d slipped through the crowds and made his way to the restaurant where he sat now, wondering if the things he had seen had any meaning whatsoever.

  Not that he was here for the bombing. He wasn’t. He was here to find Philippa D’Arco, or Darcy as they called her. Her image was stamped—literally—inside his mind. One of those chips that the investigators for the Justice Department used on occasion. He knew what she looked like when she walked, talked, laughed, as if he had known her well. He wouldn’t be able to miss her any more than a lover or her own family would have.

  If Gage saw her. If he found her.

  He wasn’t entirely sure she was still here. He had telephoned the House of Morgan that morning, and asked if she was working. He’d been told that secretaries did not receive personal calls while at work, and then someone had asked his name.

  “I’m her father,” he had lied. “Her mother’s gravely ill. I would like to speak to her.”

  “You may do so during her regular luncheon,” the young man who had answered the phone told him. “All female secretaries take luncheon beginning at noon.”

  “But she is in the office?” Gage pressed.

  “She signed in at 7:45 am, sir. Good day.” And the young man had hung up.

  So Gage had three pieces of information to take back with him. Philippa D’Arcy had shown up to work. The chauffer on the touring car did not look like his photograph in the papers from the hearings. And the wagon that might or might not have been carrying the dynamite was brand new.

  The waiter set down a tall glass with the greenish brown liquid foaming inside. Gage picked it up, hoping for one sip before all hell broke loose—

  And then the world went white. A sound, louder than anything he’d ever heard, shook the building. The air turned fire hot, then evaporated, and his lungs ached. He dove under the table. Too late. Already shards of glass had slid their way here.

  Everything went deadly quiet. Nothing. Not a single sound. Almost as if all of New York held its breath at the same moment.

  And then someone moaned.

  The waiter was crouched against the back wall. The two customers who had been sitting near the window were sprawled on the floor. Another waiter leaned against the counter, still clutching a plate of food.

  Gage stood, ran his hands over his suit, checking to see if he was uninjured. He was. He knocked some glass shards out of his hair, picked up his hat, and shook it off as well.

  The screams were beginning, as were the cries for help.

  He took a deep breath, tasting smoke, blood, and something acrid, but at least there was oxygen again. He steeled his shoulders, and stepped into what he knew would be the hardest few minutes of his life.

  He had to step over the injured, pass the dumbstruck, avoid the helpless, and head for the door. It had been blown open by the force of the explosion. A young man sprawled on the steps, bleeding from a gash in the head. His trembling right hand reached for a spiked rail that had ripped through the shoulder of his suit.

  That had to be George Lacina, who worked at Equitable Life Assurance, the man whose comment to The New York World had set off all sorts of alarms in 2057. Lacina said that he later noticed that all the buttons on his coat had come off, and his watch was ten minutes slow.

  Almost as if time had stopped. Or gone backward. Or rippled.

  All signs of a time-guard.

  Gage glanced at his pocket watch. It appeared to have stopped. But as he looked at it, the second hand moved. He needed to do the same.

  It was easier said than done. Hundreds of people poured out of buildings, hurried down stairs, and ran away from the financial district. Some of them bleeding, many of them covered in glass or plaster, all of them looking terrified.

  He had to go upstream, pushing through them all, careful not to fall or he would be trampled to death. All the while his feet slipped on blood or severed limbs or body parts he couldn’t identify.

  A woman on fire screamed as she ran past him. A man tackled her from the side, wrapping her in a coat.

  Gage pretended he didn’t see, reminded himself it was history. When that didn’t work, he lied to himself that it was a virtual simulation—and he’d been through hundreds of those. Thousands. He couldn’t help these people. They were more than a century dead, and for most, this was the worst day of their lives. But he couldn’t reach out, couldn’t do anything.

  He had to find Philippa.

  He reached the House of Morgan, pushed his way up the narrow steps toward the open doors. People still poured out, but he didn’t see her among them. He caught some of the women who looked unhurt.

  “Philippa,” he said. “Where’s Philippa?”

  Mostly they shook their heads, then shook him off. One heavyset older woman frowned at him, said, “She went … necessary. But … an hour ago.”

  Only she was gone before he could parse out what that meant. Or what he hoped it had meant. Philippa had gone to the ladies room an hour before and had never come back.

  If she was a smart little time traveler, she would have vanished by now, safe back in 2057, inside the Bubble, making her report. But he was here because she hadn’t done that. Her body hadn’t shown up, her chip hadn’t activated, her failsafe device hadn’t returned.

  He knew his chip would survive a blast—he’d been through half a dozen of them, not to mention the fact that everything was tested for all kinds of conditions—so he doubted her equipment had failed.

  He kept grabbing people, asking, “Philippa?” and getting no response.

  Except from a red-haired young man, wearing shirtsleeves, and ripped pants.

  “Thought I saw her upstairs,” he said, voice trembling. “Lordy, I hope she’s all right.”

  Gage nodded, kept moving, found the stairs, tried to ignore what he saw. Couldn’t ignore all of it. The young man held into place by something large—a bit of wall, maybe?—pinning his skull to his teller cage. The man with the broken leg trying to help another man bleeding from the face. The woman ripping pieces of her skirt and using them to tie off oozing wounds.

  Above the trading floor, the glass dome that marked this part of the House of Morgan creaked. People screamed and dove for the walls. He didn’t. He knew it wouldn’t collapse.

  Junius Morgan, carrying a wounded man toward the door. His face was scorched, his clothing blood-covered, but he seemed determined.

  All of these people were heroes. Gage wasn’t. He couldn’t be. He had to keep searching for Philippa.

  He explored several floors, saw more wounded, but no more dead, avoided some of the dazed victims, and kept searching. He didn’t see her a
nd no one seemed to know where she was.

  He spent nearly two hours inside the House of Morgan, exploring each room, seeing all the damage—which was much more considerable than the papers ever made it out to be—and he found no trace of her.

  It was as if she had followed instructions and vanished. Only she hadn’t.

  Finally, when he walked out of the bank, exhausted and covered in dirt and blood, he braced himself. Time to assume his identity as a Pinkerton, pretending he’d been hired by the Equitable Company, since the House of Morgan was unofficially using William J. Burns’s International Detective Agency.

  He would find Philippa, or the parts of her, or what became of her, if he had to stay here for the next year to do so.

  Washington, D.C.

  March 23, 2057 (supposedly)

  The conference room, bunkered under the building, was an unassuming little space, modeled on the White House’s Situation Room. Bunkered, time-guarded with all the latest gadgetry, but so shielded that no one could travel in even from inside the Bubble itself.

  Lane hated the little room. It looked like something out of time itself. Rectangular, with blond wood paneling, matching table, and the most uncomfortable blue chairs in the world, the room was always stuffy and tension-filled.

  He was the last person to arrive, and as he pulled the door open, he had only seconds to prepare. No one had warned him that he faced not only the Attorney General, but Cabinet Secretaries from Treasury and Time as well. And, off in a corner, as if he were monitoring the meeting instead of participating in it, Brandon Carnelius, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

  Lane had barely gotten the door closed when the Attorney General said, “You need to recall Charles Gage from 1920.”

  Kayla Huntingdon was not known for her diplomatic skills, something that had gotten her into trouble with Congress more than once. Sometimes Lane wondered how she ever made it through her confirmation.

  “We lost an operative,” Lane said. “And we’ve found some anomalies.”

  “We know,” said Noah Singh. He ran Treasury. He was known for his diplomacy, not that it showed at the moment. “Recall him anyway.”

  Lane knew better than to remind Singh that he did not work for Treasury. Annabelle Tsu, the Time Secretary, nodded. “We have decided. We’re going to leave the time-guard in place.”

  “We didn’t create it,” Lane said. “I’ve researched. It didn’t come from the government.”

  “Not technically,” Singh said. “But you needn’t worry about it.”

  Lane looked at Huntingdon. He realized from the set of her full mouth that she was furious. She had not been informed about something. Tsu’s long red fingernails tapped on the tabletop. Apparently she hadn’t been informed either.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?” Lane asked. He’d directed the question at his boss, Huntingdon, but he didn’t care who answered.

  “Technically, you don’t have the security clearance,” Singh said. “We’ve decided to bring you into this, since you might run into an anomaly, as you call it, again, and we need you to be prepared.”

  Huntingdon looked down, her blond hair covering her face. Lane had seen her do that before. It was a deliberate move so that no one could see her expression. Yep, she was pissed. And he had a hunch he was about to be.

  “I’m not sure that you’re aware of the fact that the Federal Reserve System was founded in 1913,” Singh said.

  “I know my history,” Lane said.

  “Let him speak,” Tsu said quietly.

  “And worked with other central bankers in other nations during the various wars. The Fed’s powers expanded after the Great Depression, the Great Recession, and of course, the recent Currency Crisis,” Singh said. He sounded like every bad professor Lane had ever had.

  “Let me cut through the bullshit for you,” Huntingdon said. “Somewhere along the way, these so-called financial geniuses figured the only way to control monetary policy was to change it. By going backwards.”

  “What?” Lane blinked. No one was supposed to alter major historical events just because they hadn’t worked properly. Or what this generation thought of as properly. “They can’t do that. It’s not legal.”

  “We started our policy before it was illegal,” Carnelius intoned from his corner. As if that made it right. There were laws in place to cover such things. Otherwise someone could go back in time and do something that wasn’t a crime then, but was now, and be completely immune from prosecution.

  Lane started to say that, but Tsu shook her head. Tsu, who looked as angry as Huntingdon.

  “Forgive me, sir,” Lane said to the Fed Chair, knowing he was out of turn. “But we’re all forbidden from messing with Time.”

  “Yes, we are” Singh said, taking the focus off Carnelius. “The Fed knows that now. But they started before the rest of us. Interestingly enough, they had time travel devices long before anyone else did. And they did things that they’ve been trying to clean up ever since. You’re probably most familiar with the Flash Crash of 2010? That was an error on the part of the time travelers from the International Monetary Fund, who are tied into this as well.”

  “I don’t understand,” Lane said.

  “Someone,” Huntingdon said, “and no one will say who…” and with that she looked at Carnelius, “tried to use a time device in 1920. And then tried to cover it up. Which is why all the original detectives from the Bureau of Investigation to the New York Police Department to the private detectives had no real idea what happened, because all of their theories were true.”

  Lane got cold. A messy cover-up led to conflicting time stories, which led to bad investigations, which lead to chaos that often cost lives. Like it had in this instance.

  “We cannot investigate the so-called bombing without making matters worse,” Huntingdon said. “So call off your people. And when you hit a similar time-guarded moment related to something financial, check before you send investigators into the past.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier if we knew what periods to avoid?” Lane asked Huntingdon.

  Her lower jaw moved slightly before she responded. “It would. And yet, apparently, the Fed is not in the business of making our lives easier.”

  Carnelius shook his head slightly, as if no one understood him.

  Lane filtered several responses before he said the one thing he felt he had the right to say, “We’ve been working on the Wall Street Bombing for nearly a year of our time. We’ve used a lot of resources. Why has this just come up now?”

  “Because,” Carnelius said, “one of your operatives stumbled on some of ours.”

  “Who?” Lane asked. “And when?”

  “In 1920. Miss Philippa—Darcy? D’Arco? She stumbled on my people. The moment they found out who she was, they sent word to us.”

  Time didn’t work that way, but the language didn’t keep up. They’d found out in 1920, but when had they discovered it in 2057? Or had they? How had word gotten back? Lane didn’t know, and he had a hunch everyone would say he didn’t have the right to ask.

  “When can we get her back?” he asked. That at least, would be a victory. He wouldn’t have lost an investigator to this ridiculous operation.

  “They won’t give her back,” Huntingdon said, the frustration clear in her voice.

  “See here, Kayla. It’s not quite like that,” Singh said.

  “She can’t come back,” Tsu said. “She knows too much.”

  “She’s ours now,” Carnelius said. “You don’t need to worry about her. We’ll take good care of her.”

  “Like you took good care of Wall Street in 1920?” Lane snapped.

  “Prescott,” Singh said. “Some respect.”

  “Yes, respect would’ve been nice, wouldn’t it?” Lane said as he got up. “Thirty-eight dead, hundreds more injured, in what history considers the worst act of terrorism on American soil until a bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995? All caused by some idiots mishandling time travel for
the Federal Reserve.”

  “Technically, it wasn’t us,” Carnelius said. “We’re not the only Central Bank with time travel capabilities.”

  “Oh, that makes it so much better.” Lane spread his hands on the tabletop and looked at Huntingdon. “I’m going to tender my resignation.”

  “And I’ll have to refuse it,” she said. “With this kind of secret, you have just become a lifer in the Time Division.”

  Lane’s breath caught. He felt a moment of terror that he then suppressed. “You can’t do that. I serve at the whim of the President.”

  “And at whose whim does the President serve?” Tsu muttered.

  “Enough,” Singh said. “This meeting is over. And it never happened.”

  “Of course not.” Lane felt dizzy. “Just like I never lost an investigator.”

  “You didn’t lose her,” Carnelius said. “You simply transferred her to a better paying job.”

  “I did nothing of the sort,” Lane said. “I want that on the record.”

  “What record?” Huntingdon asked. “This meeting never happened.”

  Lane tilted his head back. His brain hurt. And this wasn’t even a time paradox. It was a political one, with real repercussions on real people’s lives.

  “When will you return her to us?” he asked.

  “We won’t,” Carnelius said. “She’s ours now. Forever.”

  That would have sounded ominous outside of the Bubble. Inside it, it was damn near terrifying.

  “I suppose you won’t tell me what that means,” Lane said.

  “It means she’s elsewhen.” Carnelius stood. “And that’s all I’m going to say.”

  Manhattan