The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  “’TURQUOISE: commando raid to destroy the air conditioning at the site of the Democratic National Convention,’” he read as he pinned the list of the Gemstone operations onto the wall. “Good Lord. Your wallpaper is terrifying, by the way.”

  “You’re telling me. And look,” I added. “Sapphire, like Mom said. The yacht in Miami. Kitty was right.”

  “Thank God for Kitty.”

  “Thank God for Kitty,” I echoed fervently. “Ooh, and the one to sow discord among Democrats by funneling huge chunks of money to Shirley Chisholm’s campaign, on the grounds that a black woman candidate would make everyone lose their minds.”

  “Oh, you mean Operation Coal?” he said dryly. “Hard to believe African-Americans don’t believe the Nixon Administration has their best interests at heart. What’s his role in all this, I wonder?”

  “Nixon’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I don’t think he ordered the break-in,” I said, crunching thoughtfully. ”Not specifically, anyway. But he knew he had people doing all kinds of unsavory things to sabotage the Democrats and throw the election. He knew there were criminals on his payroll. His hands aren’t clean here.”

  “But did he sign off on Gemstone?”

  “‘But did he sign off on Gemstone . . . ’ That’s the question.”

  “This whole thing gets a lot messier if you’re trying to take down the President,” he said.

  “No kidding.”

  Finished with the wall, he stepped back to give me a clear view. I stood, dusting wonton crumbs off my shirt, and went to stand in front of it, hearing my mother’s voice in my head. Think simply, Regina. Go back to square one. Strip away everything you don’t need.

  I stared at the wall, thickly covered with photos and clippings and case documents. So many disconnected fragments. A sea of faces and words and names. The redacted FBI memo on Project Opal that had launched my father’s investigation. The transcripts of the Sharpeville hearings. The faces of the five Watergate burglars. An outline of Project Diamond, where muggers and kidnappers would be hired to target anti-war protesters.

  And right in the center, pinned there at eye level so I wouldn’t forget, a photo of the World War III Memorial – the bombed-out crater where the Washington Monument used to be.

  “I’m on my way/ I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way,” sang Paul Simon unhelpfully as I let it all wash over me, trying to clear my head and let the answer I needed bubble up to the surface. What was the thread that connected all those things together? How was it possible that a rinky-dink burglary could be the seed that blossomed ten years later into a war costing millions of lives?

  And then I knew.

  It couldn’t.

  “Carter,” I whispered hoarsely. “Carter. I’ve got it.”

  Instantly he was at my side.

  “What? What is it? What do you see?”

  “If my dad was investigating all this decades ago,” I said, words pouring out in a rush of excitement, “and then he was killed by somebody who didn’t want anyone to know about it, then Gemstone itself can’t be the Chronomaly. Gemstone must really have existed. So what if we’ve been looking at everything backwards?”

  “Oh my God,” he whispered. “Gemstone wasn’t the Chronomaly. The Chronomaly was that nobody ever found out about it.”

  “Exactly!” I said triumphantly. “Calliope couldn’t pin down the crisis point because there wasn’t just one crisis point. It was the whole cover-up, stretching a hundred and forty years. That’s the Chronomaly. It’s not one tiny moment, it’s everywhere.”

  Suddenly everything made sense. It wasn’t a rock thrown in a pond, not at all. It was a hailstorm. There were crisis points all over the place. It was a cloak of secrecy, coming from two different times and from multiple sources, inside the White House and out. Whose guiding hand was behind it all, whose brain was shaping and forming the plan, I still didn’t know. But I felt something stirring inside me, the beginnings of something you might call hope.

  Because if the crisis point wasn’t one single moment in time, then I hadn’t missed it.

  I hadn’t run out of chances. Even a small rip could cause the whole thing to unravel. There was still time.

  And maybe, just maybe, we could stop the war.

  “So you’re saying it doesn’t matter that we didn’t stop the break-in,” he said. “If the Chronomaly is the cover-up, then all that matters is that the cover-up needs to fail.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “How do we do it?”

  I stared at the wall, willing an answer to come to me. The five burglars’ two-dimensional, black-and-white faces stared back at me from a Washington Post clipping, and I suddenly felt a satisfying mechanical click inside my brain as the answer revealed itself. I pulled the clipping from the wall and handed it to him. He looked down at the paper and then up at me. Then suddenly, unaccountably, he burst out laughing.

  “You’re kidding,” he said. “It was staring right at us.”

  I nodded, finding myself smiling too. “We need the voting public to get their hands on as many of the Nixon White House’s dirty little secrets as possible,” I said. “If you and I can’t stop this war, maybe Woodward and Bernstein can.”

  “I like it,” he said, grinning. “It works. It fits. Nixon the revered elder statesman with decades of foreign affairs experience, or Nixon the petty thug who kidnaps protesters and plants wiretaps? Which one of those two guys can stand at Reagan’s right hand and sell the U.S. on a war with China?”

  “We don’t even know if there’s supposed to be a Reagan,” I pointed out. “If Nixon doesn’t serve a second term, the floor is wide open. The next president could be anyone.”

  “So . . . it could be someone worse.”

  “Well, yes,” I admitted. “But it won’t be someone who bombs the shit out of China. One thing at a time.”

  “Okay,” he said. “So how do we start? How do we get the reporters? You can’t show them Carstairs’ files; half the stuff in his notes hasn’t happened yet.”

  “We need to give them a target,” I said. “We need to point them in a direction that gives them the story they want and us the story we want. Someone connected to Gemstone, and to the break-in cover-up, but also someone who benefits from the war.”

  “Liddy?” he asked. I thought for a moment, staring at the wall. Then I shook my head.

  “No,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “First of all, we’ve seen the first draft of Liddy’s plan,” I said, “and it was bonkers. Somebody edited it. Made it efficient. That’s who we’re looking for. It’s a totally different kind of brain.”

  I pointed to a page from Carstairs’ notes. “And second of all,” I said, “Liddy dies.”

  “What? Let me see that.”

  “He was in D.C. that day,” I said. “Look. Here. He was killed in the bombing. So it’s not just that he doesn’t benefit from the war. He’s a casualty of it. Maybe a deliberate one. Maybe he knew too much, too. He’s not our guy.”

  I went back and sat down on the bed, crunching another wonton and trying to clear my head. Then I heard an exclamation of delight from Carter.

  “What?” I asked him, and he turned to me with an ear-to-ear grin on his face. “Hey, here’s a nifty piece of White House trivia for you,” he said. “Name the current senior Nixon aide who was both present at the meeting when Gordon Liddy first proposed Operation Gemstone and also gets promoted to Deputy Chief of Staff under President Reagan two weeks after the first bomb drops on Washington.”

  “What? Who?” I exclaimed, and rushed over to see what he was looking at. He pointed at the page pinned to the wall and I stared at it in amazement.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said. “Right underneath my nose.”

  “Poor Calliope,” said Carter. “She was trying to keep you out of trouble and she stuck you right inside the lion’s den.”

  “It does look that way, doesn�
�t it?” I said. “It appears all roads lead to John Dean.”

  * * *

  The night sky was beginning to lighten into dawn by the time we both found ourselves too bleary-eyed, dull-witted and full of cold chow mein to get any more work done. I was hit with a sudden, violent bout of yawning, and drew the blinds closed against the impending sunshine, then climbed into my bed, flapping one arm at Carter in a vague gesture towards the living room.

  “Couch,” I said, closing my eyes. Nothing happened. When I opened them again a minute later, he was still standing there, looking from my bed to the door and from the door back to me in deep discomfort.

  “Couch,” I said again.

  “But—”

  “Blankets in the closet,” I said, too tired for verbs.

  “I don’t know if this is appropriate—”

  “Don’t care,” I mumbled. “I’m bed.” And I closed my eyes, pointedly.

  When I finally woke, many hours later, the light was hard and sharp on the other side of the blinds. I heard sounds of movement in the living room and bolted out of bed in a panic, the shadowy man with the newspaper rising up before me like a specter, before I realized how unlikely it was for an intruder to be running the sink and whistling “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard.”

  I came out of the bedroom, rubbing my eyes, staggering a little under the full force of broad daylight pouring in through the balcony doors, and saw Carter in the kitchen. The detritus of coffee and leftovers from last night was long gone. There was a fresh pot of coffee brewing – I could smell it all the way down the hall – and two place settings on the kitchen island, where we had eaten last night.

  “You know, I do have a dining room,” I said blearily by way of greeting. He handed me a glass of orange juice.

  “Oh, are you referring to the Central Branch of the National Coats and Stacks of Paperwork Depository?” he said, pointing at the table which was buried under piles of crap. I shrugged, conceding defeat. “How do you like your eggs?” he asked, which was the first time I realized he was standing over a hot skillet I did not recognize, deftly cracking fresh eggs into a glass bowl while wearing a cheery red-and-white striped apron I didn’t know I owned.

  “What is happening? Where did you get that pan? Where did you get that apron? Where did you get eggs? There was nothing in this kitchen last night except beer and Chinese food.”

  “And your HIO meter and Microcam,” he said, pointing them out on the counter. “Left to chill overnight but none the worse for wear. I went to the store while you were sleeping.”

  “And bought a French chef’s apron?”

  “The apron’s yours, it came with the kitchen.”

  “It did?”

  “Serious question,” he said, sprinkling some herbs and black pepper into the glass bowl and whisking it in with the eggs, “have you opened any of the drawers or cupboards in this kitchen since you moved into this apartment?”

  “Serious answer, yes I have,” I said, pouring myself a cup of coffee. “When I was looking for the bottle opener.”

  “Well, while you were snoring like a warthog—”

  “I do not snore like a warthog.”

  “Fine, while you were snoring like a dainty and elegant lady—”

  “Thank you.”

  “—driving a herd of buffalo—”

  I kicked him in the shins, but gently, so as not to cause him to mess up my eggs.

  “Anyway, while you were sleeping the restless sleep of the late-night leftover Chinese food eater, I went to the grocery store and home for a change of clothes—”

  “Oh,” I said, noticing for the first time. “You are wearing different clothes.”

  “The fate of the nation is in excellent hands.”

  “Shut up and feed me. So, blah blah, I was sleeping, you were being a productive member of society . . . ”

  “And,” he said with dramatic emphasis, “I think I have a plan.”

  “Oh, goody.”

  “Shut up. Here’s what I’m thinking. So, remember that time you got arrested for being the world’s least subtle prostitute and Calliope saved your – wait for it, wait for it . . . ” He pulled on a pair of oven mitts (since when did I own oven mitts?) and pulled a pan of sizzling bacon out of the oven, which he presented to me with a flourish. I buried my head in my hands.

  “I’m barely awake, Carter, I can’t deal with puns right now.”

  “It was ready anyway, it would have been a missed opportunity. Anyway, so remember—”

  “Yes, yes, I remember, it was excruciating, let’s all have a good laugh at Reggie’s expense.”

  “I’m not making fun of you. Well, I am making fun of you, but I also have a point.” He plunked a plate of bacon and eggs in front of me, then served himself. “My point is, wouldn’t it be helpful if we could get our hands on the crime scene photos of the Watergate break-in? And ideally, a closer look at that wiretap?”

  “Well, sure, in a magical world where I could just steal things from police storage, that would be very helpful.”

  “Okay, I know you’re not really awake yet but I need you to meet me halfway here.”

  I made a face at him and took a huge hungry bite of bacon before I figured out what he was talking about.

  “Oh. You want me to call Detective Barlow,” I said, realizing.

  “I want you to go meet Detective Barlow,” he said. “I just called him.”

  “That was very foresightful of you. Foresightish. Foresight-having.”

  “Farseeing, I think is the word you’re looking for.”

  “No, that doesn’t sound right.”

  “He can meet you at five at the diner across the street from the police station.”

  “Did you tell him you were an FBI agent too?” I asked around a mouthful of eggs.

  “I told him I was your assistant. I tried to make you sound impressive and fancy.”

  “That’s a big job.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “It’s the wiretap that could unravel the whole thing,” he said thoughtfully. “We know it’s 22nd century, or at the very least we know that it’s been through the Slipstream. If we’re lucky, it might tell us something about whoever manufactured it on our end. If we’re very, very lucky, it might give us something that can tie it to the White House.”

  “Hopefully, that something would be John Dean.”

  “Hopefully,” he agreed. “And I was thinking afterwards you could pass along whatever you get from Barlow to the reporters. Maybe this is all it will take. Maybe we point them towards Dean, they start digging, they find what we hope they’ll find, and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.”

  “Cheers to that,” I said, taking a big swig of orange juice. “So what are you going to be doing with your day while I’m off scaring cops and wooing reporters?” He looked away.

  “I don’t want to say,” he said. “You’ll want to come with me, and it’s too risky.”

  “Fine, I’ll drop it.”

  “Really?”

  “No! Tell me where the hell you’re going!” He sighed and pulled his Short-Hop out of his pocket.

  “Election Day,” he said.

  “Oh, that’s smart,” I said approvingly. “That’s a really good idea.”

  “You think so?”

  “I do,” I said. “All we really know for certain is that we need to keep Nixon from completing a second term. The first, most basic tactic should be to see if using the Post means the voters will do it for us. So we need to know if outing Gemstone on the front page has any effect on the actual election.”

  “Exactly.”

  “It might not, you know,” I pointed out. “The polls are solidly in Nixon’s favor. The election is set to be a landslide. It may not be this easy.”

  “I know. But it’s a place to start, at least.”

  “Yeah. It’s a place to start,” I agreed. Then added, “Why shouldn’t I come with you?”

  “Because your Short-Hop is
probably being tracked,” he said somberly, and I suddenly felt cold all over. “I’m an Embed, I use my Short-Hop all the time, and I’m deep-cover. No one but the Director and Deputy Director can access my files. But your mission parameters had no internal transport. Yours is just for emergencies. The second you’re detected in a hot zone – like Election Day – they’ll red-flag your device and shut it down.”

  I swallowed hard. “You’re probably being watched from the Bureau, but it’s possible you’re not being watched from here,” he went on. “That’s good. That means scanners, GC coordinates, HIO readings, but no eyes and ears. So if you stay within the coordinates you were sent to, you can move around freely. Like your mom said. You’re safe in 1972. But the second you switch that thing on, they’ll know.”

  I wanted to argue with him, more out of habit than anything else, but I didn’t. I knew he was right. If I had to, I could do what my mother had done. I could dig my tracker out of my shoulder and go on the run in 1972.

  It was so easy, in this pre-computer era, to hide. There were no networks. Nothing to hack into. It had taken Calliope hours and hours of paperwork and phone calls to break me out of jail, and she had known exactly where I was.

  Yes, I could hide out here if I had to, I thought, swallowing nervous thoughts about the man hiding his face behind a newspaper who seemed, somehow to be everywhere I went. But until the mission was completed, Carter was right. I couldn’t leave.

  We parted ways after breakfast and Carter went home to shower and pack for his jump. After the weird intimacy of the previous night, I could feel as I walked him to the door that we were both debating whether or not we should hug as we said goodbye.

  “I’m not good at this,” I said finally, as I opened the door and he stepped out into the hallway.

  “At what?”

  “This. People.”

  “What does that mean, you’re not good at people?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Honest to God, Reggie, I really don’t.”