The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  “And the other is —”

  “Manual data reconfiguration, sir.”

  “You mean someone has been adjusting the readings on a daily basis to obscure the patterns so we’d never detect the spike.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s impossible, Agent Bellows. That would have to be done internally, from the central GC control room or from a handheld that’s directly linked to it.”

  “Yes, sir. By someone with a deep well of technical knowledge and high security clearance.”

  “Not a prankster, you’re saying,” he said. “We weren’t hacked.”

  “No, sir.”

  “It was one of us. We’re talking about treason.”

  “Yes, sir. It was one of us. Nobody else would know how.”

  He leaned back against the back of the park bench and rubbed his temples wearily. A couple of kids were splashing around in a fountain on the other side of the park. We watched them in silence for a few moments, nobody wanting to speak first. Finally the Director broke the silence. “Who?” was all he said.

  “Any agent in the field has the technical capability,” said my mother. “Their handhelds sync to the central database automatically every seven minutes. Provided someone had the technical knowledge, it could be done from anywhere.”

  “Without being spotted by a tech?”

  “If the tech was right there as it happened, they’d spot it,” I said. “But field agents always know when their techs are scheduled for breaks.”

  “Still, one of them might have noticed something,” said my mother. “If I tried to log in from the field and manually rewrite a signal while Yasmina was monitoring me, she’d definitely register a few minutes of skewed readings before the patch took. She might not know what it was, but she’d have flagged it.”

  “I suggest you begin quietly meeting with each tech and asking some discreet questions,” Director Gray said to her, and she nodded. “It’s most likely someone from Early, Mid- or Late 20th Century, so start with those departments. Bring them in all at once, quickly and quietly, before word has a chance to spread. Don’t mention sabotage. Tell them you’re investigating a server malfunction. If any of them have seen something, they might not know what they know. Go canny, Katherine, and use a light touch.”

  “It shouldn’t be you,” I said suddenly. “If it’s you, they’ll know something’s up. It should be someone with a much lower rank. I’d send a tech, actually. Yasmina or Calliope. Play it off like it’s a purely administrative meeting. Give them an agenda with five topics on it and make this one the fourth. Sneak it in. Blah blah sick days, blah blah the thing that happened with the Weston kids, blah blah Grove is fine, blah blah server malfunction, blah blah other made-up thing.”

  “I agree,” said my mother. “We don’t want to spook anyone. They’re a loyal bunch. Any of them would clam right up if they thought their boss was in trouble.”

  “It is worth mentioning,” I pointed out, “that it could be a tech who did it.”

  “Do you think that’s likely?” asked the Director. I thought for a second.

  “I wouldn’t think so, no,” I conceded. “They’re all too disciplined.”

  My mother nodded. “I think Regina is right,” she said. “Yasmina could do it — she would certainly know how — but she wouldn’t unless I ordered her to.”

  “But if you had,” said the Director, “she’d do it and she wouldn’t ask any questions.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s why it’s imperative that we handle this right. If a tech knows something, and hasn’t come to us yet, either they think it’s nothing —”

  “Or they were told not to tell. Which means we need to walk softly.”

  “I don’t want to be the one to say this,” I said, “but somebody has to. What if —”

  “What if it’s one of the three of us?” said the Director, his voice sober. We all looked at each other.

  “I’m sorry,” I said helplessly.

  “Don’t be,” said my mother. “Obviously it has to be considered. You’re being thorough.”

  “Look,” said the Director, “as far as I’m concerned, the facts we have so far clear only two people. Bellows and Grove. You landed right smack in the center of one of the aftershocks from the Chronomaly and barely came out alive. If either of you were the culprit you’d have known it was there and bypassed it.”

  He paused, then went on. “I’m also inclined to clear your mother straightaway, since she never would have risked calling you out of sickbay to come meet with the committee if she didn’t want you to spot the Chronomaly and tell them about it. Clearly I’m confident in both of you, but I fully recognize you have no such reassurance that it wasn’t me. So for fairness, I think we should submit all our techs and all their records for review. Katherine, I’m assigning this to you while Agent Bellows is in the field.”

  He turned to me. “Agent Bellows, you will report back only to your mother and to me. We will never contact you with anyone else in the room and we ask you not to speak to any other staff about your findings until this has been resolved. The only staff member aware of your true mission is Calliope, who has arranged to discreetly spread it around that you were called to your mother’s office to meet with the committee for a disciplinary hearing in which I threatened to fire you but only relented because the department can’t spare any more apprentices after losing Agent Chao.”

  He smiled slightly. “So instead, as punishment you have been assigned a lengthy and tedious mission to the Nixon White House to gather information on the evolving roles of women in public service. If anyone asks, the words ‘If you’re so enthusiastic about field work, I’m sure something can be arranged’ were uttered, and you and your mother are not currently speaking. Clear?”

  “Perfectly, sir.”

  “That’s all for now,” he said, nodding meaningfully at my mother. They exchanged a look I couldn’t read, but she promptly stood and walked away, through the park and back towards the office. Once we were alone, he looked at me for a long, appraising moment.

  “I meant what I said,” he told me. “I’m confident the mole isn’t you.”

  “Wait. You think it’s her?” I said, aghast. “You wanted to get me alone to tell me you think my mom is a traitor?” He shook his head hastily.

  “No, no, that’s not what I meant at all,” he said. “I have the utmost faith in both of you. I am confident in your loyalty to the country, to the Bureau and to me. There is, however, another possibility you may not have considered. I wanted to prevent your mother from dwelling on it unless it becomes necessary, but it’s something for which you ought to be prepared.”

  I felt a chill at the soberness of his tone and waited expectantly while he took a deep breath and gathered himself to go on.

  “When you were going through your mission file, how many other agents did you spot in the field in your timeline?”

  “Just one,” I said, “but only a Ghost.”

  The official term was “Nonsignificant Human Variable (Deceased),” meaning an agent who had been dead in our timeline for over ten years. They popped up from time to time in our readings, a slightly spooky reminder that in our line of work the past and the present were always connected.

  “What year?”

  “I don’t remember. ’59? ’60? I’m sorry, I didn’t pay a lot of attention. It wasn’t anywhere near my GC coordinates so I didn’t think it mattered. It was only a Ghost.” I looked at him. “Was I wrong? Is it important?”

  “You could potentially make the jump from there to the crisis point with Short-Hops,” he said, “and it would be difficult, but not impossible, to hack an outdated Comm device and log into the Hive undetected.”

  “You think a dead former agent created an Incongruity to trap Grove in 1968?”

  “It’s a possibility we need to consider,” he said. “You’re going to need to keep your eyes open. It may be that the person we’re looking for isn’t one of us. It may be someone
we don’t know yet. It may be someone we knew once and have long forgotten. It may be someone we can’t trace using data and technology and math. You’re going to need to use your gut, Regina.”

  The penny dropped. I looked at him, my heart in my throat. “Why did you send her away?”

  “The chances are very faint, but I do think we need to keep our eyes open to all the —”

  “Why did you send her away?”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Finally he sighed and his eyes met mine, sadly.

  “Because that agent in 1960 is your father.”

  * * *

  It was an uncomfortable dinner, to say the least.

  Leo’s place was closed on Mondays, so he was hosting us in his apartment, an airy white stone loft on the third floor above the restaurant, a few blocks from Dubrovnik’s Old Harbour. He had outdone himself, serving a five-course feast with oceans of wine and a singularly impressive cheese course, but none of us had much appetite.

  We were all behaving like this was a celebratory family dinner, but nobody was fooling anybody. My brother knew as well as anyone else did how little interest I had in field work. Having grown up with me, he also knew firsthand what an absolutely terrible liar I was.

  Though the briefing details were classified, he knew I was hunting for an enemy agent of some kind, and the notion of his sister even remotely engaged in espionage probably didn’t give him a great deal of reassurance in the future of humanity. It was hard for me not to agree with him.

  Mom was the least mopey of the three of us, and to her credit I do genuinely believe she had a higher estimation of my powers than I did. But she had spent thirty-five years at the Bureau and she knew about ten thousand times more than me about what I was getting into.

  Not counting the Ohio catastrophe with Grove, I had done this exactly three times before, all under the supervision of senior agents in non-crisis timelines as part of my final exams at the Academy. It’s true that the Nixon White House was my specialty, but my knowledge was completely theoretical.

  How she could sit there so calmly, sawing the head off her grilled fish, knowing that her daughter was about to go off on a secret mission with massive geopolitical stakes, was beyond me.

  “Regina, are you listening?”

  I wasn’t, as she obviously knew. She sighed and started again.

  “I was saying,” she continued, “that we have a permanent research Embed in ’72 that you should make contact with as soon as you get there. He’s been briefed on your mission parameters and will have a great deal of helpful information for you.”

  “How do you know he’s not the mole?” asked Leo over his shoulder from the kitchen, pulling a second loaf of bread out of the oven. “If he’s in the same time period.”

  “We thought of that,” said my mother. “We ran an aggressive trace on all his Comm activity and we gave his tech a thorough going-over. No suspicious activity. The Director feels confident that he’s safe. He’s an asset we’ve worked with a number of times in the past and he’ll be a good resource for you.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Where does he work?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

  “It’s for your own good, Regina,” she said. “His position is fairly sensitive, and the whole thing would go up in smoke if you blew his cover. Don’t worry. He’ll find you.”

  I nodded. There was a long silence.

  “It wasn’t your father,” she said finally, startling Leo and making him spill the water pitcher in his hand. “I know what the Director thinks, and it’s a perfectly reasonable theory, but it wasn’t your father.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Mom?” said Leo, his voice shaky.

  “She’s going back into the same timeline where we lost your father. Carstairs is —” She took a sip of her wine, seemingly impervious, but I saw a flicker of emotion in her eyes which she quickly hid.

  “Carstairs is the only agent in the field in that timeline who’s close enough to have short-hopped up and back to Grove. And Regina is only going in a few years later. The Director thinks the mole could have been a past agent — and actually, it certainly could be — but it wasn’t Carstairs. Not in a thousand years, not ever.”

  “Then Reggie will just have to find out who really did it and prove the Director wrong,” said Leo, but I could tell his heart wasn’t really in it. Thanks, family.

  Mom was silent for the whole two-and-a-half-hour Underground ride back from Croatia. She tapped irritably at her handheld from time to time, but I could see her mind wasn’t really on her work.

  I wanted to ask her how she knew, how she was so sure. I wanted to ask her what would happen if she was wrong. I wanted to ask her to tell me again the story of that last day in South Africa. I wanted to ask her if she thought he would believe me if I did meet him and I told him I was his daughter. I wondered if that kind of thing had ever happened before.

  I wanted to ask her why, if she was so confident Carstairs wasn’t the traitor, there was such a tight, cold expression on her face when it had come up at dinner.

  But I didn’t.

  Instead I sat in silence with her, all the way home.

  Seven

  Lie As Little As Possible

  I hadn’t been able to fall asleep, no matter how hard I tried, so around 4 a.m. I gave up and got out of bed. I paced in my underwear for a bit, made some coffee, puttered around, made a half-assed attempt at cleaning my kitchen (since who knew when I’d be back) and read through my mission briefing again.

  Forty-five minutes later, I threw the handheld down onto my suitcases in frustration. I had four and a half hours left to kill before go time and if I didn’t find something to distract my brain, I would go crazy. I grabbed some clothes from the top of the dirty laundry pile and decided I had to get out of the house.

  My apartment was in a big steel-and-glass monstrosity on 7th and H Street, in what used to be Chinatown — before the bombing raids in the early 1980’s that leveled D.C. to the ground.

  It used to be lively and colorful, packed with fish markets and hole-in-the-wall dim sum shops and brightly-painted storefronts. Now it was just rows upon rows of utilitarian concrete block housing, with the occasional apartment tower thrown in as a feeble attempt to give the city some kind of a skyline again.

  I was on the seventeenth floor — I’d always liked heights — but D.C. from above wasn’t much to look at. Still, it was my home, and a small strange part of me found myself wanting to say some kind of goodbye to it — to my D.C. — before I stepped back in time 140 years to Richard Nixon’s.

  It was still dark out as I closed the lobby door behind me and turned left down 7th. The streets were largely deserted — a few exceptionally motivated runners, a few delivery trucks, one or two stray cats, and me.

  Mom still lived in Old Georgetown, in the condo where Leo and I had grown up, so this was the first place I’d lived on my own and I knew it like the back of my hand. I loved this sea of concrete in the weird, desperate way you love ugly, broken things simply because they’re yours.

  I walked down 7th, then absently turned right on Constitution and kept walking. I don’t think I consciously realized where my feet were taking me until we arrived there.

  Once upon a time, a century and a half ago, a vast green parkway sprawled through this part of the city, stretching along Constitution Avenue from 1st, where the Capitol Building used to be, all the way down to 23rd, by the Lincoln Memorial.

  It was called the National Mall. Monuments to the presidents and wars that shaped America were housed here. In the springtime, the streets were dazzlingly pink with flowering cherry trees. In the summer, the National Gallery and the Natural History Museum were packed with crowds of school children. It was a beautiful place.

  I stared out over the vast expanse of dead earth and dark craters that now stood in its place, ring
ed with tall iron security fencing and bronze plaques.

  The World War III Memorial.

  * * *

  The first bomb in the 1982 air raid had struck, with near-surgical precision, on the site of the vast white obelisk that had once been the Washington Monument, right at the heart of the National Mall and just blocks from the White House.

  The second, just six minutes later, flattened the U.S. Capitol into dust, killing everyone inside. President Reagan and his senior staff made it into the security bunker safely before the third bomb blew a hole the size of a brontosaurus in the side of the White House. That was how the war began.

  Those first three strikes were the big ones, though smaller bombing raids went on for five more days throughout the city. Communications went down so fast and so thoroughly — phone lines out, news stations destroyed, and remember, this was decades pre-internet — that it was days before the handful of surviving government officials in Washington realized the extent of the damage to the rest of the country.

  C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Virginia, was gone. So was about half of Manhattan, the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado, and the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, not to mention sizable chunks of at least a dozen other cities.

  There were just under 232 million people in the U.S. then, and nearly ten percent of them died. In a red haze of fury, heartbreak and vengeance, the United States — under the leadership of President Reagan, then in the middle of his second term, who suspended the 22nd Amendment and served another eight years unopposed as the nation rebuilt itself — swiftly took the upper hand and flattened China’s three biggest cities.