Shift (ChronoShift Trilogy)

by Zack Mason

  “Millions of tragedies happen every day on this mess of a globe, and I decided I was going to undo some of them. It's a heck of a thing to see a widow’s tears dry up, a lost child brought back to life, to see life spring up where there had been only death and suffering a moment before. I'm trying to make this world a better place.

  “That may sound corny, but I know what it’s like to lose somebody. I lost my own kids several years ago. Drunk driver.”

  Hardy let out a low whistle. “Man! That must have been awesome, being able to go back and save ‘em. That's cool!”

  Mark’s jaw quivered. His eyes swiftly welled with tears as he struggled to maintain composure. The two men sensed the grief he was holding in. Against his will, a lone tear broke rank and trickled down his cheek. He quickly wiped it away with his sleeve, trying to pretend it hadn’t happened. He made a couple of failed attempts to speak again, but could only manage a muffled choke. Hardy’s exclamation had taken him completely off guard.

  “You mean....you didn’t save them?” Hardy asked.

  Mark shook his head.

  “Why not? You’ve got the only tool in the universe capable of such a thing.”

  Mark fought to relax the constricted throat muscles preventing him from talking. After a minute, he regained control. “Not everything....” he croaked, “Can be changed.”

  Ty leaned forward.

  “What do you mean ‘not everything can be changed’?”

  “I mean I tried everything under the sun to save my kids and nothing worked. I just can’t bring them back, all right?”

  “Okay, okay. Sorry. We didn’t know. We’re new at this.”

  “I....I know.”

  “Do you mean like....your kids....that they were somehow fated to die?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I don’t get it. How can we change things in the past if they were fated to happen?”

  “I don’t understand it myself. All I can tell you is that there are a lot of things I’ve been able to change, but there are a few things....I couldn’t.”

  “And you want us to help you change history?”

  “Pretty much. There’s a lot to do, and I can’t do it all by myself. I had two extra shifters, and I knew you two were the right guys for the job.”

  “What if we just walk away?”

  “You won’t. I know you better than you think.”

  Ty and Hardy looked to each other and then back at Mark, big grins plastered on their mugs.

  August 9th, 2012, Washington, D.C.

  Alex Rialto drummed the pencil eraser on his desk as he perused the file one more time. His intercom buzzed.

  “Alex, Mr. Pennington wants to see you in his office.”

  “All right. Tell him I’ll be right over.”

  Rialto was a senior investigator for the IRS. He knew very well that specific three letter sequence was probably the most dreaded in the English language, at least for citizens of the United States. Just a letter or phone call from any agent within the agency made most people quake in their boots, and he was now near the top of the service's pecking order.

  He'd begun as an ordinary clerk at the bottom rung of the agency’s ladder. Through naked ambition and a healthy bit of talent, he’d scrambled up the food chain pretty quickly. In his early thirties, he was still young, yet he'd already earned enough authority to choose his own cases, follow his own hunches.

  He was good at his job. To date, he’d been responsible for the imprisonment of more drug lords and other mafia types than several entire FBI field offices. And just because he knew how to see patterns in the financial data others couldn't. Finances always left a paper trail. There was no avoiding it.

  He had the growing reputation of an agent who always got their man, a reputation that was now reaching important ears in other governmental agencies, ears that belonged to people who might be instrumental in getting him out of the IRS and into something even better.

  “Alex! Have a seat.”

  Sanford Pennington was in his sixties, portly, balding, and oddly commanding in the way only senior government officials can be.

  “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “What projects are you working on right now?”

  “A guy named Mark Carpen.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “You wouldn’t. He keeps a very low profile, though he’s a billionaire several times over.”

  “How’d he get his money?”

  “You name it, he’s done it. Stocks, real estate, etc. All your normal investment stuff.”

  Pennington slapped his knee. “By gosh, we could use a piece of that, that’s for sure! How’d you flag him?”

  “His name crossed my desk because he’s got so many accounts spread across the world, like he’s trying to hide something. He may just be covering the fact he’s a billionaire. Could be a privacy thing. On the surface, he does seem to be on the up and up. His returns have all been filed appropriately, but something in his file keeps nagging at me.”

  “What?”

  “Not sure yet, but something’s not right.”

  “Well, put that one on the back burner, okay. While it would be quite a coup to catch a couple billion in back taxes, it’s an election year, and the main issue is crime. The President is breathing down my neck to break the Santos ring in L.A. FBI thinks we’re the key.”

  “Okay.”

  “Here’s what we’re gonna do....”

  ***

  Rialto obeyed the letter of Pennington's law, even if he couldn't obey the spirit of it. He worked on the Santos case for the rest of the day, but he couldn't get Mark Carpen out of his mind, so he took the file home with him that night. Not just that night either. Due to the sheer volume of records involved, the study of Carpen’s returns quickly became a nightly hobby for the next few weeks.

  He just couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but something was off about the man’s financial history. Rialto had scrutinized the records over and over and over again, yet he still couldn’t see what was gnawing at him.

  Carpen’s tax returns had all been filed on time, and he seemed to have paid every penny in taxes he owed. He'd used all the normal loopholes rich guys use, and even then, there were several he’d failed to take advantage of.

  It seemed like your typical silver spoon case. A lot of rich kids blew their inheritance once their parents had passed on, but this guy had turned his father’s millions into billions. How had he done it? Stock purchases, real estate deals, business acquisitions. Carpen had been very lucky.

  When you got right down to it, that’s what was really bothering him. Carpen was too lucky. He seemed to have gotten in on the ground floor of every wealth-making stock five years before they were ever valuable. Either the guy had a great nose for picking them, or something was fishy.

  At first, Alex figured the stock picks had to be bogus, a front for some nefariously gleaned financial gain, but when he put in requests for official records from the SEC, he found that Carpen had indeed made the stock purchases at the times he said he did. All of Carpen’s other deals checked out similarly.

  Maybe he should kick it back to the SEC. Could it be some kind of long-term insider trading deal? That wouldn't explain the overly fortunate real estate deals though, or the gambling wins.

  Alex Rialto had a nose like a bloodhound. He could smell a crook a mile away. Something was up here, but what?

  According to the file, Mark Carpen was actually Mark Carpen III. He’d inherited his wealth from his father, Mark Carpen Jr., who’d inherited the family fortune from Mark Carpen Sr. Alex had to pull their files from Archives since their returns were so much older. He’d studied those files as well, and they were just like Carpen III’s. They were also filled with fortunate business deals. Yet, he couldn’t see anything in them that shouted “Criminal!” either.

  Something that did stand out was the timing of the filings. The year Mark Carpen Sr. died was the same year Mark Carpen Jr. f
irst began filing tax returns and having transactions in his name. The same held true for the transition between Jr. and Carpen the Third.

  What did that mean? Probably that the sons were completely maintained financially by their fathers until the death of the fathers. Still, it seemed odd for a wealthy father to turn a great financial empire over to his son without having him get his feet wet first. To each his own, he mused.

  However, now that he thought about it, there was something else unusual about those transitions. Carpen III had only been 17 when Carpen Jr. had died in 1984. He’d filed his first tax return when he was only 17 years old. Surely, he’d had accountants who'd managed his funds for him as trustees until he was of legal age. Could it have been some anonymous accountant making the fantastic stock picks?

  As Alex browsed through the returns, new and ancient, for the umpteenth time, one item finally riveted his attention. The signature. The signature was much too flowery, too developed for a 17 year old to make.

  A forgery? If so, who forged it? Why was it forged? Was it one of the nameless accountants?

  He checked the other returns. All of them, up to last year, had the same flowery signature. Had the signatures been forged every year, or was the original signature real after all?

  Alex looked back over the files of Carpen Jr. and Sr. He noticed something else, something very odd. Neither man had ever indicated a spouse. Ever. Yet, they’d had sons.

  He checked the signatures.

  Pay dirt! The signature on every return going back almost 70 years was made by the same person with the same flowery scrawl. Mark Carpen III had been born in 1967, so he couldn’t be the author of all those signatures.

  The same signature for 70 years! What in the world? Did the Carpen family use the same accountant for all those years and have him forge their signature every time? That would mean they'd started using the accountant when he was around twenty and that he was now over ninety years old and still processing the books for the Carpen empire. Didn't seem likely.

  Maybe Mark Carpen wasn’t really a person. Maybe it was a fictitious name being used as a cover for a long-term mob organization.

  The truth was, Alex couldn’t come up with any scenarios that would explain it and still sound plausible to a rational person. It definitely required further investigation. Personal investigation.

  To heck with the Santos gang. There was something big going on with Mark Carpen, and Alex Rialto intended to figure out what that was.

  September 14th, 2012, Boston, MA

  “Gentlemen, we need to develop an operational plan.”

  They sat around an antique mahogany table, long and rectangular in shape and full of character. The simple table would work just as well for research work as it did meetings. Mark wasn't into luxuries.

  He had created a rustic rec room for the main gathering area of their new headquarters, complete with leather couches, a couple of La-Z-Boys, a billiard table, dartboard, foosball, and a chess board. Their round table stood in the middle of the rec room next to the billiard table. He’d set a large screen TV in one of the corners, but they hardly used it. They already knew the outcomes of most of the sporting events, and for movies, he’d built a theater upstairs when they wanted to relax, so it looked like they wouldn’t really need it. He’d probably just give the TV to Savannah.

  Hardy was still dressed in gray sweats from his morning run. Ty sported a pair of long beach shorts and a T-shirt.

  After their first meeting, Mark had asked both of them to set up a dummy corporation, in which Mark had then “invested” $100 million dollars each. They’d both stared at him dumbfounded when he’d told them what he'd done.

  The reality of his wealth and his willingness to share it with them hadn’t really sunk in until that moment. To be yanked out of your home time, your entire life as you knew it, given the ability to travel though time, and then be made a super multi-millionaire overnight had to be quite a shock. They seemed to be coping wonderfully though.

  He didn’t care about the money. It required no effort to earn back those amounts, any amount really. In fact, a couple hundred million was only two months interest in a bad mutual fund for him. What he gained was two dedicated employees who wouldn’t need to waste time on frivolities and would instead focus on the assignment at hand. Friends really, not employees. Well....they would be friends, as they once had been, but for now they were still getting to know him.

  Ty interrupted, “What are we going to call our company?”

  “I’ve been calling it Historical Enterprises for any business dealings with the public, but how about ChronoShift?”

  “I like it.”

  “Me too.”

  “Okay, done.” Mark smiled inwardly. They had just created the very company that Hardy claimed to represent when he’d first hired Mark.

  “Now how are we going to change the world?” He said.

  That was the hard question. The three of them pondered the plethora of potential answers.

  Hardy piped up first. “In my opinion, there are two main categories: present day crimes and major historical events.”

  “What about historical crimes?” Ty added.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like...crimes that didn’t happen yesterday, but years or centuries ago.”

  “Okay, so forget ‘present day’. Just ‘crimes’ and ‘major historical events’.”

  Ty spoke up again, “What about improving the quality of life of peoples in the past. What if we take certain technologies back to previous generations? It could hyper-accelerate the quality of life for people all over the world in our present time.”

  “I did that once, on a very limited basis,” Mark said, “but I don’t think it’s a good idea to do something like that in a big enough way it might change an entire society’s future.”

  “Why not?” Ty frowned.

  “Well....because history is history. The smallest change in the past can hugely impact the present. If we were to introduce a new technology to an old culture, the level of change that act could wreak on the present would be astronomical.”

  “So, what? They could be great changes.”

  “Except we can’t predict what those changes would actually be. Knowing human nature, the changes very likely wouldn’t be great. For example, let’s say we took machine gun technology back to the American colonists during the Revolutionary War to help them beat Britain faster. Sounds good on the surface, but the colonists didn’t have much industrial capacity at that point. It isn’t hard to conceive that somehow the British would also get hold of the technology. They had plenty of industrial infrastructure and might prove capable of fabricating the automatic weapons on a massive scale. They’d massacre us in either the Revolutionary War or the War of 1812, and the United States we know and love would never be.

  “Or, even if the colonists could use the technology to their advantage, how do we know the South wouldn’t be able to use it later to give them the slight edge they needed over the North to win the Civil War?

  “Or what if we were to help someone like Benjamin Franklin create the light bulb 100 years before its time? What if that accelerated the advancement of science so much that nuclear technology became available to Hitler before the US was ready to take him on? What if science had advanced so much by then that he would have access to shifters like ours? He would conquer the world and commit genocide on levels that would make the Holocaust seem minor by comparison.

  “It's too risky,” Mark concluded, “I think we should stay away from that kind of thing.”

  The reality of how easy it might be for them to screw up history, the whole world even, began to sink in.

  Ty capitulated, “I see what you mean.”

  Hardy nodded in assent.

  Mark was scribbling notes on a pad. “Okay, so are there any other possibilities? Or is it just ‘Crimes’ and ‘Major Historical Events’?”

  “We could help the government with espionage and specia
l ops,” Hardy added.

  Each of them looked to the others, considering whether or not they wanted to use this new power that way. The idea died a silent death in the air between them. Each had been in the military and knew how the government operated. In a heartbeat, all three men would jump to help the U.S. government if it were needed to protect the American people, but if they weren’t careful, the wrong people in government would get a hold of the technology. Then, they’d be sucked in. Slaves to the system. And when that happened, it was always for the wrong causes.

  “Okay ‘Crimes’ and ‘Major Historical Events’ it is.” Mark slapped the desk for emphasis. “I think we ought to break the ‘Crimes’ category into present day crimes and historical crimes. The current ones will be pretty easy to research, but the historical cases will be a little tougher to figure out. Granted, I’ve already got the Harvard Institute for Historical Studies doing reams of research for me. I can redirect Savannah and them to give us reports listing the most tragic crimes and tragedies across the country for each year.”

  “So, how are we going to distribute the work? Are we going to rotate assignments, or are we each going to specialize?” Hardy asked.

  “Good question,” Ty added.

  “I think we ought to specialize. The military trains that way because it’s the most effective method,” Hardy commented.

  “What do you think, Mark?”

  “Hardy’s right. We each need to pick a category and take it by the horns. Who wants ‘Current Crimes’?”

  Hardy raised his hand.

  “All right. Ty, what do you want?”

  “If it’s okay with you, I want ‘Historical Crimes’. Not only does it sound good, but I just don’t feel comfortable with all this new-fangled technology you’ve got here in 2012. I feel more at home....back in the past.”

  “Guess that leaves you with Major Historical Events, Mark. You happy with that?”

  “Yeah, I think we all got what we wanted. But I don’t think we should work in isolation either. We should all try our hands at each type of case from time to time to keep ourselves fresh and versatile. Plus, there will be a lot of cases that require the involvement of the whole team, so we need to build team unity and be familiar with every environment.”