The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  “Shut up, Calliope.”

  Nine

  Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

  With very little hard information available about the actual moment the Chronomaly would hit, Calliope had spent a significant portion of her prep time over the past week attempting to determine where within the monstrous bureaucracy of the federal government I would be best placed, in order to maximize my potential for information-gathering while minimizing what she, rather unflatteringly, described as my “total inability to stay out of trouble.”

  “You have no specialized skills,” she had pointed out during my mission brief.

  “Stop. I’m blushing.”

  “I mean we can’t very well send you over to the budget department to do math all day.”

  “That’s what I do here,” I snapped, gesturing rather dramatically at my computer screen. “What do you think this is?”

  “Yes, I’m sure your Chrono-Engineering degree will come in very handy in cutting $7.8 million from the fiscal year 1973 budget of the Bureau of Land Management,” she said. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”

  In the end, after a resigned sigh, she decided that while she fully believed in my ability to screw this mission up from absolutely anywhere, she wanted to keep me within the walls of the White House if possible, and stuck me in the counsel’s office. This seemed, initially, a promising notion. After all, at some point, every government conspiracy involves lawyers.

  On principle, I am rarely an advocate of nepotism, but in practice, I was very grateful that my fictional parents had contributed such a sizable sum to Nixon’s re-election campaign that I was spared the hassle of any kind of a job interview.

  I arrived on Monday morning and was surprised to find that the new hire process in Nixon’s White House – at least for those of us fortunate enough to have wealthy imaginary fathers in Kansas City – was much less paperwork than my Bureau apprenticeship had been.

  A bored-looking woman gave me some forms to sign and asked me some perfunctory questions. Then I was given an identification pass and shown to my desk on the ground floor of the West Wing, in the outer office of White House Counsel John Dean.

  The White House Counsel is, essentially, the President’s lawyer. I assumed there was no shortage of legal business to attend to on the President’s behalf, but was surprised to find that Dean also provided a wide range of services that took him all over the building.

  I was “Dean’s new girl,” which was a free ticket into every wing of the White House. Everyone from the press secretary to the Executive Chef had business with our office, which meant that I spent half the day dashing around the building to either drop off or collect files that Dean didn’t trust in the hands of the White House pages, while sending silent mental curses to Mark and Mrs. Graham for forcing me to do it in high heels.

  I began to doubt whether Calliope had placed me in the right office, since nothing even remotely relating to a possible war with China ever came anywhere near John Dean’s desk; but as an education in the White House’s inner workings, it was invaluable.

  Kitty wasn’t lying about the frat-boy atmosphere. I wasn’t even halfway through my first day before I had to physically remove a junior aide’s hand from my ass. The building reeked of testosterone. The most powerful women in the building were the President’s wife and his secretary; every other woman I met was about thirty rungs down the ladder. Knowing these things as abstractions – and living them day to day as workplace realities – was startlingly different.

  Fortunately, I liked Dean. He was not, as far as I could tell, one of the assholes. He was young and funny and charming and drove a sports car, and if he flirted, it was with such a light touch that it didn’t bother me. He didn’t seem to have the inflated sense of his own importance that characterized so many of the men who buzzed in and out of our office. It was certainly possible that he too was an asshole, deep down, but as a boss he was perfectly fine. If the two of us had had the office to ourselves, the job would have been a snap.

  Unfortunately, we did not.

  Beth Rutherford had been Head Secretary for the White House Counsel’s Office for longer than John Dean had been White House Counsel; she had worked for his predecessor as well. She was abrasive, demanding and ruthlessly efficient, and she visibly could not stand me, which perversely made her my absolute favorite person in the whole building.

  Surely, if she had been my boss in real life and I knew I’d be stuck with her for years, I would have quickly tired of being treated like a moron and given the most hopelessly tedious tasks coming in and out of the Counsel’s office. But as it was, I found her vastly entertaining.

  Beth was one of those commanding women who had probably looked a brisk forty years old when she was in high school and would probably still look a brisk forty years old when she was seventy. She was born to wear impeccable suits and stare disapprovingly over the rims of her glasses (a move which visibly unsettled Dean).

  As I sat at my desk, typing the day’s four millionth staff memo about the new financial disclosure policies, I concocted elaborate backstories for the life I imagined Beth Rutherford leading. I liked to imagine her in another era as a medieval abbess, ruling with an iron fist. I pictured her at the center of an elite circle of lesbian intellectuals, women with bespoke suits and leather armchairs and degrees in French Literature from East Coast women’s colleges, who kept purebred dogs and doe-eyed young mistresses, who would one day rise up and turn Washington into a matriarchal paradise.

  These daydreams were partly a way to pass the time, and partly wish fulfillment; it made me sad to dwell for too long on how Beth Rutherford’s first-class legal brain was wasted on typing and filing because it had been born in 1927 into a woman’s body and not a man’s. She knew she could do Dean’s job better than he did. Dean knew it too, and treated her with an elaborate politeness that both she and I recognized as patronizing.

  And I knew what she saw when she looked at me – another social-climbing young Future Mrs. So-and-So on the hunt. How I wished I could tell her the truth and ask what she knew. How I wished she were the Embed; her level head and phenomenal memory would have been a perfect partner in espionage.

  Calliope had sent me in three weeks ahead of the Chronomaly – or as close as she could get, given the interference – so I’d have time to get my feet under me and take a look around first. But the truth was that I didn’t actually know what I was looking for. I wasn’t convinced I was going to find anything. And none of us had ever discussed what would happen if I didn’t.

  What if the Chronomaly hit and I couldn’t stop it? What if it was right there in front of me and I still missed it? What if I blinked and the moment passed me by and all those millions of people still died and it was my fault? These were the thoughts that kept me up at night in my ridiculous tropical bedroom, lying awake and watching the thick green vines snake their way up the walls and wishing I were anywhere else but here.

  The closest Calliope could pin down the crisis point – that is, the specific moment in time where someone did something they were not originally meant to do and set off the series of reverberations that would coalesce into a Chronomaly – was between midnight on the night of Friday, June 16th and noon the following day. I had a twelve-hour window and a roughly one-mile radius where it would hit. There was just one problem: If Calliope’s calculations were correct, that circle did not contain the White House.

  We had quibbled about this when I called in the day before. “If this apartment really is at the center of the circle, then the White House is outside of it,” I had told her. “The map says 1.1 miles.”

  “It’s one-ish miles. That’s the best I can do with the data I have.”

  “But it’s going to hit on a Saturday,” I argued. “Do I need to figure out a way to somehow sneak into the most secure building in the world outside of business hours, or not?”

  “I’m sorry. That’s as accurate as I can get about the map. The Chronomal
y’s boundaries are fluctuating all the time. I can’t pin it down any further than what I gave you already.”

  “But what do I do? Just wander around the target area, hoping to spot something weird happening? Do I try to get into the building?”

  “I don’t know, Reggie!” she finally snapped. “I’m not the field agent here. I can’t do your job for you.”

  That silenced me. Calliope’s refusal to apply for advanced training, on the grounds that she was perfectly content where she was and Grove needed her, was a longstanding bone of contention between her and my mother, who thought she was wasting her potential. Calliope was fairly sensitive about it, largely because of her fanatical loyalty to Grove, who had been her mentor since she was fresh out of the Academy. I didn’t press further; I was frustrated, but not at her, and it wasn’t worth picking a fight with the best ally I had.

  I arrived home that Friday night around seven, takeout burger and fries in hand. I didn’t have much of a plan for that night except maybe just wandering around the streets taking HIO level readings, hoping to God that the Chronomaly would be something dramatic like a spaceship landing on the National Mall and I’d be able to spot it.

  I still hadn’t thought of a plausible reason for the security guards to let me into the building on a Saturday when they knew Dean wouldn’t be there, but I had some time to kill in the hopes that something would come to me.

  I breathed a sigh of relief as I kicked off my shoes, stepped out of my tailored skirt and blouse, leaving them in a heap on the floor, and unclasped the murderous torture device bra-from-hell.

  Mark and Mrs. Graham had made a tactical error in leaving the suitcases at my house after they had packed them, so I had taken the liberty of adding in a few anachronistic necessities of my own. Buried in the middle drawer of the jungle-green lacquered dresser, underneath the pajamas I never wore, I had concealed my favorite threadbare cotton pants and a feathery-soft faded t-shirt. I pulled these out of the drawer and put them on.

  I would strap myself into their tailored, waist-pinching Republican heiress costume in public, to keep my HIO levels down. But dammit, in the privacy of my own apartment, I intended to be comfortable.

  I took the bag of takeout and a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and slid open the balcony door, stepping outside into the warm night. Washington in 1972 was already plenty urbanized, but still, the air had an open green scent keeping the sour concrete tang at bay, a fresh clearness where the smell of the trees met the smell of the water that was entirely new to me. I drank it in.

  There was no furniture on the balcony, and the view was not stellar – my balcony opened straight out to the adjoining Watergate Hotel next door – so my scenic vista was a wall of unlit office windows. Many floors above me, on the other side of the building, the pricey upper units of Watergate West looked out on the Potomac. But the combination of night breezes, salty French fries, good beer and loose cotton against my skin was so pleasant that I didn’t care much about the view.

  Tomorrow was coming. Tomorrow the world would change, and I was supposed to stop it. It was a big job. It was a lot for me not to screw up. But for now – for the next few hours – I was okay. I could take a minute to just be with myself. Just me, alone, with my beer and my burger and the warm June night.

  I sat down on the cool concrete balcony floor and leaned back against the wall, staring out through the iron rails at the lights of the city, as though I were trapped in some prison in the sky.

  Lulled into a warm, summer-evening complacency, I stared out into the dark stillness for a long, long time. I’m not sure how long I sat there before I became aware of a flicker of movement just at the corner of my vision. When I turned my head to look, it was gone. A feeling of uneasiness stole over me, and I set down my beer and moved closer to the balcony railing. I watched and waited, waited and watched, until suddenly there it was again. A pinprick of light flickered through the darkness in front of me for a few moments and then vanished.

  A flashlight.

  In an office building.

  In the middle of the night.

  I went back into the living room and grabbed my handheld, turning off the lamps inside in order to see better (and remain unseen myself). Half of my brain was telling me to ignore the light and go back to bed, reminding me of the potential HIO impact of intervening.

  So what, I thought. There’s probably a robbery in progress. Sometimes this job means standing by and letting terrible things happen.

  Grove had said those very words to me once, trying to explain the incalculably complex potential consequences anytime an agent interfered with the justice system. He had just come back from a jump to New York in the 1970s, where a minor patch on the Bronx borough president had crossed paths with a rash of vandalism against African-American-owned businesses. He had seen a white man set fire to a black barbershop and had not called the police, even though he knew that if he didn’t, nobody would, and the man would go free.

  I had been furious at him.

  “You have to take a step back and look at the whole field,” he had said. “You have to think about the drunk driver who wasn’t pulled over because the cop who was meant to arrest him was here arresting the arsonist. You have to think about the lawyer who gets called to defend the arsonist, and what other case he didn’t take instead. You have to think about the criminal, too; and his family. Plus all the people around him whose lives would be changed forever if he were arrested. There are too many variables, Agent Bellows. It touches too many lives. This isn’t about right and wrong; this is about accurate and inaccurate. Sometimes this job means standing by and letting terrible things happen.”

  Grove had been right about the arsonist. I discovered later that his wife had learned about the fires and left him, and I felt a small cruel pleasure that he had been punished by at least one person. I knew if Grove were here, he would tell me not to call the police, and he would be right about that too.

  But still, I wanted to know.

  I took a 3-D image of the building with my handheld, marking where the light was coming from. It was an office on the sixth floor. I pulled up the property manager’s files to cross-reference. When I found the sixth floor, my heart stopped. I stared at the screen in shock.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said aloud, to no one.

  “FLOOR SIX,” read the building plans in big block letters on my handheld screen. “DNC HEADQUARTERS.”

  Someone with a flashlight was walking around inside the main office of the Democratic National Committee, looking for something in the middle of the night.

  I had a sudden desperate yearning for advice from Grove, but he was still out on medical leave. So I rang Calliope at her desk, but there was no answer. I allowed myself one bone-deep sigh of pre-emptive exasperation, leaning my head back against the wall, before I bit the bullet. It connected immediately, and a face I was decidedly un-thrilled to see popped up on my screen.

  “Oh God, Regina, what did you do?” she said, panic in her eyes.

  “Hi to you too, Mom.”

  “Yes. Fine. Hello. What’s wrong? What did you do?”

  “Is that Reggie?” I heard in the background. “Oh God, what did she do?”

  “Et tu, Calliope?” I said peevishly as she came around from behind the monitor and pulled up a chair next to my mother so they were both visible onscreen. “Seriously, guys, can you give me a little credit? I didn’t screw anything up, I just need Calliope to run a search for me. I tried you on the Comm, but you didn’t pick up.”

  “Well, I’m here now,” she said. “What do you need?”

  “Anything you can get me on a break-in at the Watergate. Not my apartment, the building across from mine. The hotel and office complex. Sixth floor. DNC headquarters.”

  “Sure. Date and time of the break-in?”

  “Um, right now.”

  “What?” they both screeched in my ear.

  “I’m on the balcony and I can see flashlights in the windows, but t
he whole floor is dark. It’s the middle of the night here.”

  “There’s nothing in the file,” said Calliope.

  “So you’re saying the break-in isn’t significant?”

  “I’m saying the break-in doesn’t exist.”

  “So this is it, then,” I said. “It’s after midnight here. This is the Chronomaly.”

  “Or it’s a robbery that was never reported,” my mother pointed out. “It’s possible that this is playing out the way it’s supposed to.”

  “I don’t know,” said Calliope. “It could be either. There’s no record in the media, in the Watergate security office’s files, nor in any criminal records. Nothing in the DNC’s security files either.”

  “Then what do I do?”

  “You wait and watch,” said Calliope. “If in the next 24 hours we detect a heightened level of interference in the Timeline, we’ll know this is the Chronomaly.”

  “But then I’ll have missed it!”

  “If it is the Chronomaly, we can pull you out for a Rewind,” she snapped, “and send you in again, now that we know where and when it is.”

  “I can’t just stand here,” I said.

  “You have to.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m going over there to take an HIO reading.”

  “Are you crazy?” snapped Calliope, very much like my mother just moments ago. “You want to go stop a possible robbery in progress? You? You’re a desk agent, Reggie, you’re not combat-trained. Someone might have a gun. Don’t be an idiot.”

  “Regina is right,” said my mother unexpectedly. “We gave her a one-mile radius and a twelve-hour window to look for unusual activity that could be related to the Chronomaly. This could be the crisis point we couldn’t pin down. We need eyes inside that building. If she can get within 50 feet to do a full scan on whoever is holding that flashlight—”

  “At the very least, Calliope, I can rule out whether the burglar has had recent contact with a time agent,” I said. “The HIO meter will catch traces of Slipstream radiation if he was exposed within the last few days.”