by Libby Drew
“How will she survive?” D’arco asked. “She has no money. None that would be recognized a hundred years ago. How long until she’s back at the destination point, praying you come to rescue her?”
“Hopefully she’s there now,” Reegan said, though he thought the odds slim. Silvia had ditched her bio bracelet without activating an alarm. He doubted she came by the knowledge accidentally. That was a tidbit he wouldn’t be sharing with her husband. “However, I think we should assume we’re going to have to look if we want to find her.”
“I can’t believe this is happening,” D’arco whispered. “She’s going to get hurt.”
“Yeah. I’d say she’s going to start running into trouble pretty soon.”
The temperature in the room dropped. Goose bumps rose on Reegan’s arms as D’arco pivoted and speared him with dark eyes. “What exactly do you mean by that?”
“Well.” Reegan looked to his boss for help, but all he got in return was Maxie’s impersonation of his goldfish, eyes wide and mouth formed in an O. “I’m talking about the Novikov Principle.” D’arco’s expression didn’t change. Reegan appealed to his goons. “Paradox-free time travel?”
D’arco stalked across the floor toward him. “Explain.”
Reegan licked his lips and gave an experimental pull of his arms. D’arco clocked the move, gave a slight nod to his man. “Let him go, Emilio.”
The pressure on Reegan’s shoulders eased. He shook free. “The Novikov Principle is what makes all this possible.” He spread his hands to encompass the crowded office. “Time as we know it is a series of closed curves. Loops,” he specified when D’arco’s brows drew together. “The portal folds the loops so that we can travel back in time.” They couldn’t go forward yet. Not reliably. Although Reegan was hoping for that breakthrough in his lifetime. “People used to think time travel was dangerous, or even impossible, because interfering in the past would cause a paradox. Do you know what a paradox is?”
“I’m not an idiot.”
“Just checking. These days we know paradoxes don’t happen. Novikov’s research proves that if an event occurs that might give rise to a paradox, the probability of that event is zero.” He’d quoted that gem directly from his eighth grade science lesson, and it had been twenty years since he’d laid eyes on it. What kid graduated cyberschool without knowing this stuff backward and forward?
D’arco stepped close to Reegan and loomed. “That’s it?”
Pretty much. That was as simple an explanation as he could manage. And no way was Reegan going to extrapolate what that meant for Silvia unless he had a gun to his head. “That’s it. That’s how we’re able to travel into the past without causing a paradox. It’s scientifically impossible.”
D’arco pulled back, nostrils flaring. “But you couldn’t stay in the past forever and not change something.”
Finally he was catching on. “No, you can’t. We do change things. We make small changes all the time just by being there. But small changes iron themselves out. They smooth over. Like ripples on a pond.”
“Forever?”
Maxie spoke up. “That’s what Dr. McNamara has been working around to. It doesn’t work forever. Eventually, the probabilities shift. The longer we’re there, the greater the potential for our presence to create permanent changes to the timeline.”
Reegan winced. D’arco wasn’t going to like what came next.
“When that happens,” Maxie continued, “the jaunter is eliminated.”
“Eliminated?”
“That’s right.”
“How?” D’arco directed the question at Regan.
Reegan shrugged. A million different ways. Car accident. Lightning strike. Heart attack. It was the ultimate catch-22. A person could go anywhere. See anything. As long as they returned within a certain period of time. “I couldn’t say exactly how it might happen.” He laid it all out. “But you can’t make a long and happy life in the past. The clock starts ticking the moment you step into the portal. Statistically, the more aggressive your interference, the quicker you’ll expire.” Lots of people had died before the science of jaunting had been perfected. A strict code regulated the tech’s use because of that.
A sound escaped D’arco’s throat. “So what you’re telling me is that if you don’t find her, she’ll die.”
Reegan swished that watered-down version around his mouth before answering. “Right. She’ll die.”
“But you’re not going to let that happen.”
Reegan bit back hysterical laughter.
“Find her, Dr. McNamara. Before any harm comes to her. If you don’t, I’ll shut this whole operation down and throw so many code violations at this company, you’ll both rot in jail for the rest of your lives.”
Reegan’s instinctive loyalty to Silvia, a woman who didn’t even know his name and whom he hadn’t laid eyes on in ten years, was causing him more trouble by the second. She was nothing like the young woman who haunted his dreams. That girl had been helpless, relying on him to keep her safe. His mistake had been an unforgivable breach of trust. Silvia, on the other hand, had brought this mess down on herself. He’d have to remember that, if he could. He rose from his chair, gritting his teeth at how shaky his knees felt.
Maxie stood as well, crushing his broken cigar in a white-knuckled grip. “We’ll get her back.”
D’arco gathered his men close. “We’ll wait in there.” He pointed at the jaunt room, where earlier Reegan had watched Silvia through the mirror. “I’m sure you and Mr. McNamara have preparations to make.”
“It’s Dr. McNamara,” Reegan muttered. He acknowledged the bodyguards as they filed out, then closed the door and turned to Maxie.
“Well, isn’t this a fucking ugly pickle?” Maxie asked. He’d lumbered over to the mirror. In the room beyond, D’arco accepted a glass of brandy from Emilio and made himself comfortable on one of the plush sofas. He twirled the snifter, watching the amber liquid ride the inside of the glass. With one leg crossed over the other and head tipped to the ceiling, the only sign of his agitation was the ever-present tic in the corner of his eye.
His two other goons hovered close by. The biceps on the biggest bulged through his suit coat, and with the patchy beard and growled, unintelligible responses, could have passed for Bluto. The other, tall and thin, had decided to compensate for his receding hair by growing it long. Braided in a scrubby brown pigtail, it protruded from the back of his neck like a boot spur.
Reegan joined Maxie in front of the mirror. “Something’s not adding up. She planned this. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing like he’s suggesting.”
“If that’s true, her planning skills suck. She’s going to get herself killed. And all because her husband probably wanted her to serve chardonnay instead of Chablis with dinner. Rich people are twisted, and not in a good way.”
“No. She’s running from him. I’d bet on it.”
Maxie harrumphed.
“Is that all you have to say?”
“You want to know what I think?” Maxie cut his eyes to the side. “That’s her fucking problem. We need to be worried about ourselves.”
“I’m sorry,” Reegan ground out. “I didn’t mean to bring this down on you.”
“Yeah, you sound real sorry.” Maxie waved off his retort. “Drop it. I’m an asshole, not an idiot. If this bitch wanted to disappear, you didn’t have a prayer of stopping it. This is on her.” He stabbed a finger onto the desk in front of him. “The best we can hope for is to come out of this breathing, with our balls and our business intact.”
“Our business? You circling the wagons, boss?”
“Just putting things in perspective.” Maxie flipped a switch at the side of his desk, and a virtual screen appeared in the air between them. His fingers flew over the holographic keyboard. “There are no good solutions to this shitstorm. Our best hope is to find the woman and get her back here before the two of you are killed. After that, she’s on her own, and we can hope to hell D’a
rco feels like being kind to the rest of us.”
“And how are we going to do that? The city is huge and packed to the gills.”
“Yeah? I doubt she made reservations at the Marriott. So she’ll have problems finding a place to stay.” Maxie’s fingers flew over the keys. “How much planning do you think we’re talking about here?”
Reegan chewed his thumbnail, then dug in his pocket for Silvia’s bracelet. He jingled it in his hand. “She managed to get the bio bracelet off without alerting me.”
Maxie’s fingers froze. “No shit?” His brows crawled into his hairline. “I was going to ask you how you lost her. How’d she manage that?”
“With money and a bit of trolling online, probably.”
Maxie snapped his fingers. “So she’s smart.”
“Not really.” Reegan swept a hand across the desk, pushing the 3D screen aside. “She has no idea about closed timelines and traversable wormholes. What was she thinking?” He smacked the wood with his fist, rocking the fishbowl hard enough to splash water over the rim.
With a flick of his wrist, Maxie repositioned the screen in front of them. “She was thinking she wanted to go back in time.”
Reegan snorted. “Don’t we all?” He glanced into the jaunt room. Bluto and Pigtail had spread themselves along the perimeter. Emilio stood directly in front of the two-way mirror, staring inward. As intimidation tactics went, it worked a little too well for Reegan’s liking. He gave the guy the finger. “No. What she wanted to do was erase the past. That’s completely different.”
“Not when you’re desperate.”
That hit too close to home for Reegan’s liking. “You got a plan?”
Maxie spun his finger in the air, and the display rotated to face Reegan. He squinted at the information hovering on the screen. “A P.I.?”
“Yeah. Why not?” Maxie lit a fresh cigar. “It won’t be cheap, but a dollar stretched a bit further back then. I’ve got enough old currency in the vault to make it work.”
Bring a stranger into the mix? Wasn’t he tempting fate enough as it was? “I don’t know. Getting involved with a local could get me eliminated even more quickly. And it’s late at night there. Where the hell am I going to find a reputable private investigator at that hour?”
A slick smile spread over Maxie’s face. He winked. “Who says we need reputable?”
No one. But qualified would help. The two tended to go hand in hand.
“Fine. Let’s say I find some workaholic willing to take on a missing person’s case at nearly midnight. There’s going to be a fine line between giving them enough information to help and withholding enough to protect myself.” Minimizing timeline ripples would buy him time, but there were no guarantees.
“Thought you were a big-shot professor?”
Reegan dropped into a chair and massaged his pounding temples. “Of history.”
“You’re field trained.”
“Jesus!” Reegan exploded out of his seat, waving at the thick smoke hovering over Maxie’s desk. “Not for this. I don’t think my three-hundred-page dissertation on the internal politics of the Unionist Party is going to be a huge help here.”
Real fear crept in. D’arco hovered like an angry wasp, and now Reegan had to play a game of chicken with the cosmic forces of the universe. Maybe some help wouldn’t be amiss. “Okay. We’ll try the private eye.” He’d have to make up one hell of a cover story. “You have someone in mind?”
“Right here.” Maxie stabbed his cigar at the data scrolling on the screen. Smoke floated into the graphics, causing them to flicker. “Saul Kildare. Ex-marine. Ex-police detective. Hung out his shingle in 2019. Took it down about a year and a half later. Must have got a better offer somewhere. Small operation. Just him, it looks like.” Maxie expanded a picture of the guy, and Reegan had to bank his instinctive reaction. Black hair, longer than what Reegan had expected for ex-military, and deep-set blue eyes. “Nice.”
“I thought you’d like that.” Maxie scowled at Saul’s handsome, chiseled face. “Ready to hear the best part?”
“He’s gay?”
Maxie wheezed a laugh. “Don’t die, McNamara. I’d miss your sick sense of humor.”
“I was kind of being honest.”
“That’s the sick part. No, the good news is that the address for his residence matches the address for the business.”
That was good news. Maxie’s database was state of the art, a supercomputer so full of information about the metro area’s history that it made Reegan dizzy. It was Maxie’s pride and joy. If he said the guy slept where he worked, then Reegan trusted him. “All right. It’s not going to get better than that. Guess I’ll pay Mr. Kildare a visit.”
“Say hi for me.”
Reegan slipped Silvia’s abandoned bio bracelet back into his pocket. It might come in handy later. He keyed Saul’s address into his own, and he and Maxie left the office side by side.
Maxie stopped him outside the jaunt room. “This is going to be the longest few minutes of my life.”
“Stop trying to make me jealous.” No matter how long it took Reegan to fetch Silvia and get back to the portal, little time would pass here. The loop always unfolded with a small overlap, returning jaunters five minutes after they left. Maxie would barely have time to get nervous before Reegan returned.
“Hey, knowing my ass is riding on you is no pleasure cruise.” Despite his words, Maxie clasped him on the shoulder. “Be careful.”
Chapter Four
Saul jerked at the loud knock, and the vodka slipped from his grip. He caught it one-handed before it hit the floor. At least his reflexes were still half decent. With a scowl, he set the bottle back on the desk just as the pounding stopped.
Unless it was Cammie checking up on him—and she had a key—someone had the wrong address. He didn’t have any friends. Not anymore.
The silence stretched long enough that Saul sniffed and reached for the vodka again. His hand had barely brushed it when the pounding resumed, and his fingers twitched, sending the bottle crashing to the floor. The sound of shattering glass didn’t disturb him as much as the sight of all that clear oblivion leaking through the wood planks. “Fuck!” He stalked out of his office and across the reception area. On the other side of the frosted glass, a man’s figure stood, tall and broad-shouldered.
Saul jerked the door open to a sandy-haired Indiana Jones impersonator, and the man’s fist, which had been raised to pummel the glass yet again, dropped to his side. Saul took in the khaki pants tucked into scuffed calf-high boots and the long-sleeved button-down shirt. The safari hat resting on the stranger’s head, tilted jauntily to one side, completed the costume.
Saul rested his forehead against the doorframe and sighed. “Can I help you?”
“I’d like to hire you.”
It shouldn’t have hurt, being the butt of the guys’ jokes after all these months, and mostly it didn’t. Saul had opened the door to his share of male strippers this past year. And singing telegrams. And other not-so-harmless things. His punishment for daring to be gay in the old boys’ club.
He didn’t have it in him to play along tonight. “Tell Ron and the rest of them to fuck off. I’ve had enough. One more incident and I’ll file harassment charges.”
The man’s tentative smile slipped. “I feel like we’ve miscommunicated somehow. Let’s start again. My name’s Reegan McNamara, and I’d like to retain your services.”
This Reegan guy was the best actor they’d sent so far. And gorgeous enough to make Saul reckless. “My professional services?” he asked, loading his tone with suggestion. Reegan’s short hesitation doomed him. That and the way he was staring at Saul’s mouth. Saul laughed. “I didn’t think so. So you must want to partake of my other services.” He stepped into Reegan’s space, leaving a slim three inches between them, just enough to see the pupils of Reegan’s eye dilate, and hooked a finger under his belt. “My blowjobs are legendary, you know.”
A sound escaped Reegan’s
throat, and he yanked Saul’s hand away. Muttering something indecipherable, he pushed into the room, gaze passing over the cheap, sparse furnishings. “Listen, not that I don’t find your offer appealing, but I’m in a hurry. I’ve lost someone, and I need to find her as soon as possible.”
Saul grasped for a verbal handhold. “Are you trying to tell me you’re actually a client?”
“I’m trying to be, so can you stop it with the fuck-me eyes? They’re very distracting.”
Only the doorframe kept Saul on his feet. Clearly, he’d killed that vodka bottle the conventional way and was now experiencing alcohol-induced hallucinations. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—I’m Saul Kildare.”
Reegan’s face was pinched and drawn tight over his cheekbones, but he cracked a grin at Saul’s wobbly greeting. “I know. I recognize you from your picture.” He stuck a tanned, calloused hand in Saul’s face and looked him over, taking in the wet splatters on his jeans. “You look like you’ve had a bad night, but frankly, so have I.”
Saul took the offered hand, finding it warm and firm against his own. When Reegan’s thumb curled, stroking over the back of Saul’s knuckles, heat unfurled in his abdomen. He swallowed past a dry throat. “All right, Mr. McNamara. Where exactly did you see a picture of me? And what are you doing pounding on my door at midnight?”
“Maybe I heard you were offering free blowjobs, so I hustled right over.” Reegan flashed a brilliant white smile.
Clients who ignored direct questions were usually more trouble than they were worth. Clients who flirted and ignored direct questions were downright dangerous. “How about the truth?”
“Oh, believe me.” Reegan’s gaze ran appreciatively over Saul. “I was being truthful.”
So this was a scam. Funny how it didn’t hurt his feelings in the slightest. The way Reegan’s gaze ran up and down his body, lingering in all the right places, ignited a fire in Saul’s stomach. And the way he swayed closer, as if he couldn’t help himself, sent the flames higher. Giving in to ill-advised desires was his trademark, and as usual, the consequences felt nebulous and far away. This would hurt less than the Stoli in the long run. Maybe. He backed up until he was leaning against Cammie’s desk, legs sprawling open. “Prove it.”