The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  “I masked my coordinates,” she said. “Or rather, Calliope did. It looks like she sent me to Ireland in the 80’s.”

  “How did she do that?”

  “By sending me to Ireland in the 80’s,” she said, smiling. “That’s where I went first. I left my Comm and all my equipment there. I took nine different Short-Hops with me to get here and then destroyed them as I went.”

  “Yeah, but all they’ll have to do is run a search in the Hive for your vital signs and they’ll see that you’re here,” I pointed out. She did not respond, but unbuttoned the top three buttons of her blouse and pushed it back, revealing an ugly scar on her shoulder.

  “You dug your own tracker out?” I shrieked. “Oh my God, who are you?” I poked at the scar a little and she winced.

  “Wait a minute,” I said suddenly. “This isn’t new.”

  “No,” she said.

  “The scar tissue is already healing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mom.”

  “Two months,” she said. “It took me two months to get here.”

  “Holy shit, Mom, you’re a fugitive.”

  “Yes, I am,” she said seriously, “and I need you to listen to me very carefully, Reggie, because this is about to get very dangerous. There is somebody in the Bureau who wanted so badly for Operation Gemstone to disappear that they killed your father.”

  “What do you mean, ‘somebody?’ You mean Daisey.” She shook her head.

  “Daisey was a suit,” she said dismissively. “No, somebody somewhere is pulling strings that go in every direction – Congress, the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security, the White House – and they’ve been doing it for a hundred and forty years at least.”

  I shivered a little, and not from cold.

  “So it’s one of us,” she continued. “Maybe more than one. But somebody wanted Operation Gemstone hushed up. We found the Chronomaly, so we know when it all went wrong. And now we know why. We went to war over Gemstone and someone in the Bureau will kill to keep it quiet. But what we still don’t know is who.”

  She sipped her coffee thoughtfully. “And I don’t mean the Colin Daiseys and the Gordon Liddys,” she went on, “I mean the brain. It’s someone with very, very high security clearance, pulling the strings from the Time Travel Bureau, manipulating events like they’re moving pieces around on a chess board. And we’re going to smoke him out.”

  “Mom, this is – I don’t even – this doesn’t sound like you at all.”

  “It’s not me,” she said, and there was something sad behind her eyes even though she was smiling cheerfully. “That’s the point. These people know me. They can predict my every move. So I only have one choice.”

  “What’s that?”

  “To stop being me,” she said with a reckless grin, “and start being someone else. I’m doing what Carstairs would do.”

  “Carstairs was murdered.”

  “I didn’t say it was a perfect plan. Do you trust Carter Hughes?” she said suddenly.

  “I do. I do trust him.”

  “Good. Because you’re going to need an ally. With a cargo drop. The long-term Embeds fly below the radar. Only Calliope and I know you’ve even made contact with him. With a little luck, he won’t come under suspicion for a long time. You, however, are going to be watched. You will be followed.”

  “How much danger am I in, exactly?”

  “You’re protected as long as you stay in 1972,” she said, and there was something in her voice I didn’t quite understand. “I can promise you that.”

  “How?”

  “I can’t tell you, Reggie, I just need you to trust me.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “They threw a rock in the pond,” she said, “and the ripples extended either direction, for years and years. So you’re going to stay here, where the rock went in. You’re going to keep hunting for the agent on the ground here, and keep trying to patch the Chronomaly.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I’m going after the ripples,” she said.

  “What does that mean? Where are you going?”

  She shook her head. “The less you know, the safer you are.”

  “Does Leo know?”

  “He knows I’m gone,” she said. “He doesn’t know where. But he’s safe. He’s going to be okay.”

  She stood up, threw her empty coffee cup in a nearby trash can, and suddenly there it was, crystal clear and real and true and right in front of me, the possibility that I might never see her again. I suddenly felt very young and very frightened. “How will I find you again?” I asked in a very small voice and unexpectedly, she pulled me into her arms.

  “Listen to me,” she said. “We’ll find each other again. I promise.”

  “How can you promise that?”

  “You have to trust me,” she said.

  “Mom—”

  “There’s an emergency plan in place,” she said. “In case things go wrong. The less you and I know about it the better. The only person who knows is Calliope.”

  I had forgotten about Calliope. I pushed the button on my wrist Comm, but nothing happened. It didn’t even ring. Mom looked at me sadly.

  “Mom,” I said, swallowing rising panic, “where’s Calliope?”

  “She’s alive,” she said. “But she can’t help you now. We’re on our own.”

  She reached into her pocket just then and pulled out a small object, which she pressed into my hand. “Do not lose this,” she said, and there was a desperate urgency in her voice that I had never heard before. “Whatever happens. Whatever you do.”

  I looked down at my open palm, where I saw an impossibly delicate filigree chain, gleaming silver in the moonlight, with two small round silver pendants attached. I looked closer. One pendant was carved like the face of an old-fashioned clock with Roman numerals, with the hands pointing at just shy of a quarter after three. On the other I could just make out, in the dim light, the outline of a tree with words carved inside it. I squinted to try and read them.

  “Time is a tree/this life one leaf/but love is the sky/and I am for you,” she said. “E.E. Cummings. Your father gave me that. The clock is for you.”

  I looked at her for a long moment, cold fear clenching at my heart. Katie Bellows was not sentimental. For twenty-five years I had endured birthdays and Christmases of ruthlessly practical gifts. She had never done anything like this before.

  “No,” I said. “Give it to me when we’re done.”

  “Put it on, Reggie,” she said. “Keep it with you. Promise me you’ll keep it with you.”

  “Mom, we’re going to see each other again,” I said desperately. “You don’t have to –“

  “Just promise me,” she said, her voice firm. I swallowed hard and nodded.

  “I promise,” I said. She fastened the chain around my neck, then stepped back to look around, checking for pedestrians. “I don’t have an HIO meter on me,” she said. “I’m flying blind.”

  I did a quick scan. “HIO 2.3,” I said. “You’re good.” She nodded briskly, all traces of sentimentality gone, and she was Deputy Director Bellows again.

  “It’s just you and me,” she said. “It’s all on us now. I’m counting on you.”

  “I know.”

  She gave me a long look, opened her mouth as if she were about to say something, then closed it again. She pulled out her Short-Hop, tapped it twice, and then she was gone.

  * * *

  I didn’t walk home right away. I kept walking around the water for a little while longer, reflecting on everything my mother had said.

  Questions kept floating through my head, nagging little questions that wouldn’t go away. If the reporters were right, and Liddy had access to a safe full of cash to fund Gemstone, where had the cash come from? Beth had nearly lost her mind over the thought of misplacing one set of forms about one State Dinner to make sure the cost of the food was billed to the right department. These people were fanatical about budget tr
acking.

  So unless the annual White House budget had a convenient line item labeled “Burglars,” the cash must have been quietly hidden in some other account where nobody would notice it had gone missing. But where? By whom?

  And what had happened in that first meeting? Had the campaign really shot down Gemstone, or just pretended to? Did someone go back to Liddy on the sly and give him the go-ahead later? Had the campaign director ever even known? Had the President?

  All these questions, and dozens more, flapped around my mind like a swarm of bats. But the big question, the truly terrifying one, boomed in my mind over and over, silencing the clamor of all the others, until finally I dared to whisper it.

  Who killed Leo Carstairs?

  The second the words had been said out loud, it was so staggeringly obvious that I was shocked it had never occurred to me before. A messy stack of disconnected facts crystallized into this one perfectly clear truth which contained my entire life inside it. The mysterious rock-thrower inside the crowd in Sharpeville, who startled the police into firing blindly but who nobody afterwards remembered seeing. Daisey’s peculiar insistence, never really explained, about benching my mother on a technicality that week. A massive patch on Nelson Mandela, where no massive patch had ever been needed before, pulling every black agent in the whole department out of rotation.

  As a field mission, none of it made sense.

  As an assassination, it was flawless.

  But if that were true, that meant there was a murderer still out there, who hadn’t flinched at killing my father and wouldn’t hesitate to kill anyone in their way. “You’re protected as long as you stay in 1972,” she had insisted. I couldn’t worry about Mom, or Leo, or Calliope and Grove. Right now, Carter and I were all we had to keep each other safe. That meant we had to work fast.

  I turned away from the water towards home but stopped short when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. A shadowy figure in a trench coat was rising from a park bench about a hundred feet away from me. I could see him folding up a newspaper. His back was to me, but could see the street lamp above him lighting up his blond hair. The same blond hair I had seen behind the same newspaper at the train station, and at the Lincoln Memorial with Carter.

  “Hey!” I shouted at him, suddenly too angry to be afraid. “Hey! Why are you following me? Who are you?” He didn’t turn around, but kept walking. I took off at a run towards him, feeling my HIO meter tick up to 4. “Who are you?” I yelled again. “Show me your face! Why are you following me?”

  He never turned around. I never saw his face. He simply stepped out of the light and melted into the shadows, and by the time I reached the place where he had been, he was gone.

  I walked as fast as I could back to the apartment, taking only the busiest streets, and found Carter anxiously waiting for me. He opened the door to let me in and I walked right past him, scarcely registering his presence. In my absence he had cleaned the kitchen and made a fresh pot of coffee.

  I pulled off all my tech devices – Comm, HIO meter, Microcam and receiver – and placed them, for lack of any better ideas, inside the refrigerator. Then I turned the television on and walked outside to the balcony. Carter, who was quick, removed his own Comm and followed me outside, closing the door behind him.

  “My dad was murdered,” I said without preamble. “He was killed by a fellow agent. They made it look like an accident but it wasn’t; it was murder. And if they killed Carstairs, and they’re after my mother, they won’t hesitate at taking me out, since by family badass-ness standards I’m the weakest gazelle – even Leo’s better off than I am, he went to chef school, he’s got all those knife skills – so I’m a sitting duck. I’m a weak, sitting gazelle-duck. That’s not a thing. But you see what I’m saying.”

  I turned to him and looked him right in the eye. “So what I need to know right now, Carter Hughes, is if you’re the one who was sent to kill me. Because if you are, you son of a bitch, I’m telling you this right now, you will pay for it. She will make you pay. You will not be able to hide. There is nowhere in all of time where you could run that Katherine Bellows would not find you. She will not give up. She will not stop. So I’m asking you right now, no, don’t come any closer, stay where you are, look at me. Tell me the truth. Is it you?”

  He reached out a hand for me. I pulled away, shaking, pressing my back against the wall of the balcony, trying to make as much space between us as I could. He looked at me in silence for a long moment, then ducked back inside and returned with his handheld. He tapped on it a few times, then held it out to me.

  “I was never supposed to tell you this,” he said. “Director Gray asked me not to. I don’t even think your mother knows.” I looked down at the screen and saw the Bureau registry dossier for an agent I didn’t recognize, a black man in his late fifties with a scar running down his cheek. “WILLIAM PAUL HUGHES,” said the white lettering above his picture. “AGENT * * * 14165. STATUS: RETIRED.”

  “Who is this?”

  “That’s my father,” he said.

  “Your father worked for the Bureau too?” I asked. He nodded. “Why are you showing this to me?”

  He tapped on the screen again.

  “The only way I can think of to prove I didn’t kill your father,” he said, “is to tell you something important about mine.” He clicked a few times and then pulled up a field report. It was a grid view, just dots and lines and text on a black background. I could see a scattering of blue dots moving around the screen in a cluster of agents, surrounded by yellow dots representing civilians.

  “What am I looking at, Carter?”

  “Just watch,” he said. I squinted at the screen, trying to figure out what I was supposed to be seeing, when I spotted a blue dot labeled “14165-WPH.”

  “WPH. Your dad?” I said. “Why are we watching one of your dad’s old field missions?” As I watched the blue dot zipped around the screen (he was replaying it for me at high speed) I noticed that it tended to move in concert with another blue dot, this one marked “14493-CEJ.”

  14493 . . . Why was that familiar?

  Still uncertain, but curious now, I watched WPH and CEJ move through the vast mob of yellow dots. Then, abruptly, CEJ disappeared. Carter paused the screen and tapped the green button in the upper right corner marked “SHOW COORDINATES,” and I suddenly saw where – and, more importantly, when – they were.

  “CEJ,” I said softly. “Carl Evan Jenkins. He was his partner.”

  “Yes.”

  “He was on the Mandela task force with Jenkins. He was there when Jenkins got pulled out to go to Sharpeville and rescue my dad.”

  “More than that,” he said soberly. “My father was the agent your father requested. But he had gotten close to Mandela, he thought it was more important for him to stay where he was. So the commander sent Jenkins. But Jenkins was new.”

  “That’s right,” I said, remembering. “The Mandela patch was Jenkins’ first mission.”

  Carter nodded. “That’s why the commander was willing to spare him. She didn’t think he’d be missed. But then, when it all went wrong—” He stopped.

  “My dad retired early,” he said finally. “He’s a fourth-grade teacher now, back in Alabama where our family’s from. He couldn’t take it. It haunted him. ‘Jenkins was too young,’ he would say. ‘Jenkins wasn’t fast enough. I should have gone instead.’ And every night, for the last twenty-five years, he goes to bed wondering if Leo Carstairs would still be alive if he had gone back instead.”

  “No,” I said, my voice hollow, because I so deeply knew that it was true. “You just would have lost your dad too. Leo Carstairs was going to die in Sharpeville, no matter what. When we get home, tell him. He should know that.”

  I suddenly felt tears welling up in my eyes, threatening to spill over. I gritted my teeth, swallowing them back. “He was going to die there, no matter what,” I said again, choking on sobs. “My dad was always going to die.”

  And then I cou
ldn’t hold it back anymore. Carter took two long steps and wrapped his arms around me, and I collapsed into him gratefully, resting my head on his strong shoulder and burying my face in his cool white shirt. We stood there on the balcony as warm June breezes swirled around us, and there in Carter’s arms, held close like a child, I cried for my dead father for the very first time in my life.

  Fourteen

  I Don’t Know Where I’m Going, But I’m On My Way

  I am not one of those women who looks lovely and tragic while weeping. I sniffle and snort and make hideous noises and my face turns into a wet red mess. After I was tired and spent and all sobbed out, I pulled away from Carter and we stood there awkwardly for a few minutes, me all blotchy and snot-nosed, him uncomfortable and serious and sad.

  “I’m getting cold,” I finally said, though it wasn’t remotely true. “I’m going in.”

  He led the way back inside and closed the balcony door behind us, switching off the blaring television I had left on, then followed me into the kitchen.

  It wasn’t until I had opened the refrigerator to see if there were any leftover dumplings and spotted my Comm sitting there next to the food cartons that I remembered the data drive my mother had given me. I whirled around, startling Carter, who I hadn’t realized was standing quite so close behind me.

  “I forgot,” I said. “I forgot to tell you.” I pulled the device out of my pocket and handed it to him.

  “What is this?” he said. “Is this your mom’s?”

  “Even better,” I said. “It’s my dad’s.”

  Two pots of coffee, all the cold dumplings and half a box of chow mein later (I left the chop suey to Carter, despite his earnest assurances that “you get used to the texture!”), I had read every document in the Gemstone files. Then I had paced back and forth impatiently while Carter read them. Now I was lying on the bed listening to the radio and crunching on fried wontons while he used the instant printer to add Carstairs’ notes to our evidence wall.