The room was quiet for a moment, save for Garth Brooks. As his stomach settled, Slim Jim decided that he really wanted that coffee now, perhaps with a shot of bourbon. But he decided it wasn't the brightest idea, giving these fuckin' apes another chance to beat on him, so he just kept quiet.
They both stared at him a little while longer, at least one of them with eyes that looked like hard little pellets of hatred. He spoke first. "Think you're pretty fucking smart, don't you, Davidson?"
"Dunno about that, man. Never finished high school." He shrugged.
Then the other one spoke up in a much friendlier, even cheerier tone. "Take a smart guy to end up here, wouldn't it, Jimbo? You couldn't buy most of this stuff on a special agent's salary. Definitely not on a seaman's wage."
Jesus Christ, they were gonna tag-team him. Good cop, bad cop. He would have laughed, if his head weren't pounding so much. "I do what I can," he croaked.
Bad Cop was back. "If you keep smart-mouthing us like that, asshole, the only thing you'll be doing is playing pick up the soap at Leavenworth. You got a house full of contraband here."
Slim Jim almost opened his mouth to protest. The apartment was the registered business address of at least half a dozen of his investment companies, and those companies all had valid permits authorizing them to obtain and use twenty-first-century technology. But the memory of his fearsome lawyer, Ms. O'Brien, arose to shut his trap before he starting babbling.
Bad Cop plowed on regardless. "I wonder how much the IRS would enjoy going through your books? That's how they got Capone, remember? And for that matter, what would the navy make of your new billet? You're supposed to be on active duty, aren't you, Davidson?"
"I do special services for the USO now," he said. And it was true, sort of.
"Does that mean banging that factory worker's wife? The actress nobody knows? Norma or Marilyn or whatever her name is now."
"She left that guy!" he blurted out, and instantly regretted it.
"And I'll bet he'd love to know where she's been these last few weeks," the agent continued with a palpably evil grin. "And what she's been doing. Or who she's been doing."
Slim Jim felt about half the blood in his body rush into his head, then just as quickly drain out again, leaving him giddy. He took in a long slow breath to settle himself and waited for the squeeze to come. He wasn't much surprised when it came from his new chum, the kindly special agent with the altogether friendlier line of patter.
"Yeah, you've got yourself a sweet setup, here, Mr. Davidson. Be a terrible shame if it all went sour and you ended up back on that chain gang. We could probably help you with that, you know. If you could see yourself clear to helping us out with a little problem…"
"Is that so?" Slim Jim replied without bothering to keep the bitter sarcasm out of his voice this time.
"Yes, it is," said Good Cop. "You see, we're a little worried about these characters you've been doing business with, out in California. Not all of them, you understand. Just a few bad eggs, here and there. We hear things about some of them. Disturbing things, really, that'd make a red-blooded man feel a little sick."
The agent seemed to falter over his next line. Slim Jim couldn't help but be impressed with his acting ability. He was very good.
"Sexual things," the agent said with a little choke in his voice.
Slim Jim was tempted to make another crack about Hoover, but that would only get him beaten again, so he rearranged his bathrobe to cover himself and buy some time to think. Some of the racier scandal sheets he liked to read had published big chunks of a couple of books written about the maximum cop after he'd died, or would have died, a few decades from now. Of course, you rarely saw that kind of gossip in the "quality" press, not straight up, anyhow. But Slim Jim understood there'd been a couple of slanting references to it. He'd been all fired up to publish the fucking books himself and sell them on the black market. But Ms. O'Brien had talked him out of it. Said he didn't need the headache of a fight with a vicious old fag like Hoover. That's what she called him, too, "a vicious old fag." Anyway, word was, J. Edgar was going berserk over the things people were saying about him back in the Zone. So maybe this was something to do with it.
Or maybe they were just busting his chops because he was-let's face it-a career criminal. Reformed or not.
Whatever.
His confidence was coming back now. If these guys had something on him, they'd a frog-marched him out of the place already. For the umpteenth time he found himself pathetically grateful to Ms. O'Brien and her ramrod-straight, pain-in-the-ass, do-it-by-the-fucking-book ways. She had insisted that everything he do be completely aboveboard-legally, if not morally. He even paid his taxes now. More than he had to, if truth be known. It was almost as if she'd expected this to happen.
He was gonna have to step lightly around Norma's old man, though. You could never tell what a pissed-off husband was gonna do. But the rest of the feebs' routine was all bullshit and bluster.
His silence seemed to convince Bad Cop to ham it up even further. The guy put his foot against the heavy coffee table that sat between them and gave it a vicious push, slamming the edge into Slim Jim's unprotected shins. He yelped in pain as tears welled up in his eyes.
"We know you're in thick with these time-traveling assholes, Davidson. We know some of these companies of yours have picked up contracts from them. You mix with them, and you got the inside track. You're gonna start working for your country again. Keeping us informed about them."
Two painful lumps were already coming up on his shins. He rubbed at them and complained in his whiniest voice. "I don't know what the hell you're talkin' about, or what you need me for. They don't make any secret of it, all the shit goes on there. They got nightclubs and bars for queers and lemons. They got all the races sleeping together. They don't give a fuck what you think about them. And neither does Congress, or weren't you paying attention. They're in the Zone, man. That's their world now."
At that, the friendly one looked disappointed.
His unpleasant partner leaned forward and bared his fangs. "For now, smartass. Just for now."
Bad Cop placed his foot on the edge of the coffee table again, causing Slim Jim to wince in expectation. But the agent just gave the apartment a good looking-over, and he didn't appear to like what he saw. Again, Ms. O'Brien was responsible for much of the decoration.
She'd flipped the first time she saw how Slim Jim had decked the place out, with moose heads and porn and ratty old furniture. "This isn't the image we're trying to create, Mr. Davidson," she'd said in that quiet, level tone that frightened him a little. "We are trying to establish you as a serious if somewhat rakish businessman, and this looks like the waiting room of a Chechen bordello."
And so, instead of seeing hunting trophies and a pair of billiards tables, the still-nameless agents got to appreciate his taste in fine Italian furniture, restricted technology, and modern art. Lots and lots of modern art, which had cost him nearly three hundred thousand dollars. That had made no sense to Slim Jim, until O'Brien told him that in eighty years, all this art crap would be worth tens of millions of dollars.
"What the hell is that shit, anyway?" asked Bad Cop.
Slim Jim smiled. O'Brien had made him memorize the schtick for when that Hersey guy came around to write about him for the New Yorker.
"Those ones over there are by a guy called Pollock. He went nuts in '38, and he started painting like that. It's like he was cribbing from that Picasso guy over there, don't you reckon? The three by the piano are called Bird, Male and Female, and Guardians of the Secret. My lawyer tells me they're full of seething imagery."
"Jesus H. Christ," muttered Good Cop, falling out of character for a second. "My little girl draws better than that."
"Yeah, looks like something a fruit would hang on his wall."
Slim Jim just deadpanned them. "Well, at least I'm banging the welder's wife, and not Assistant Director Tolson."
Both men colored visibly, an
d Slim Jim actually wished he could take it back. What the hell was up with him, making fun of Hoover and his boyfriend in front of a couple of hired gorillas like this? He had to stop watching those wise-guy movies.
The roughneck leaned forward again, his face bright red and shoulders like bowling balls moving around under his suit. "Listen, you little pissant. You might think you're a big man now. But you're a fucking bug, and you're gonna get squashed if you don't cooperate. You'll do as we say, or it's gonna go hard on you. That fucking lawyers of yours, we've got her number. You're going to start recording every conversation you have with her, every crooked fucking deal you put together. She's about this close to being disbarred, anyway. Her papers mean nothing here. All those bullshit laws she goes on about that nobody here even heard of. If you're smart, you'll dump her and give this guy a call."
A small slip of paper appeared in his hand.
"He's Bureau approved. He'll set you straight, and when you've done that, you're going back to California, and you're taking this with you." He held out a small black disk, about half the size of a garden pea. Slim Jim recognized it instantly. A microcam. Commercial, not mil-grade. The sort of thing that'd be picked up by an elint sweep in less than half a second.
What a pair of fucking bozos, he thought. Probably don't know what an elint sweep is. His expression, however, gave nothing away. "Okay, fellas," he said, showing them his open, honest palms. "You got yourself a narc."
"That's great, Mr. Davidson." Good Cop beamed at him. "You won't regret it, and your country will be grateful."
Slim Jim nodded and smiled nervously, as he figured he was expected to.
He never once looked at any of the eight microcams that had recorded everything in the apartment from the moment he'd opened the door. And those microcams were mil-grade.
HONOLULU, HAWAII
Detective Sergeant Lou "Buster" Cherry didn't so much wake up as find himself more conscious than unconscious, a state in which he slowly became aware of how much he felt like a bag of shit. It wasn't an unfamiliar feeling. There were the usual sorrows of an elephant-sized hangover, the headache like a meat ax to the brain, the nausea, the burning throat, the taste of bile, and the sour stench of his own sweat and unwashed bedclothes.
Then there was a growing list of unrelated woes. The chronic pain of a bullet wound he'd received on the job what seemed like a hundred years ago. The hateful longing for his first shot of the day. A dreadful suspicion that there was no booze left in the apartment anyway. A fading twitch of resentment at the bitch he'd once called his wife-a woman he hadn't heard from in well over a year.
There was something else this morning, too, as he lay on the fold-up cot in his studio apartment, under a pile of dirty laundry. He couldn't quite put his finger on it but…
"You're a disgrace, Detective."
He would have sat bolt upright, but that would've hurt too much. So he groped about for his revolver, knowing in the back of his mind that it was futile.
"Don't bother. We moved it out of reach, just to make sure you didn't hurt yourself."
"Who the fuck-?" The raspy voice was almost unrecognizable as his. He suddenly realized how long it had been since he'd spoken to another person.
He rubbed his eyes and lifted his head, taking in the two figures who stood in the center of his room. They looked as if they didn't want to move, for fear of stepping in something nasty.
"We're from the Bureau, Detective."
At first he had no idea what they were talking about, but then some very rusty memories of his former life began to creak back into place. "Hoover men?"
"Yeah. Special agents."
As they spoke, he became increasingly aware of just how much worse this headache was than normal.
"You got names?"
"Not today, Detective."
Cherry could feel a small storm building inside his head, but he tried to ignore it. "I'm not a detective anymore," he said. "They suspended me. Six years in uniform. Nine in plainclothes, and they fucking shit-canned me because that asshole Jewish kraut pulls some strings." He pushed himself up in his cot and saw a half-empty fifth of Old Granddad lying on the floor. Hell, what's half-empty is half-full, too. He was about to reach for it-thinking it'd make a fine breakfast, right about now-when one of them spoke again, and he froze in place.
"You think Admiral Kolhammer caused you to be suspended?"
"I don't think. I know. I got my owns strings I can pull."
The feeb grunted. "Maybe so. Because you're back on the job."
Then something-two things, in fact-landed in his lap: his badge and his gun.
A squall of confusion blew through his head, and there was no way to ignore it now. He'd been drinking something like a bottle of bourbon every day since they'd ass-fucked him.
He'd never been much for your actual detecting, in the past. Mostly he just knew whom to shake down. But the mystery of this resurrection, of the badge and gun that were lying between his legs… well, it was beyond him.
So he stared at the two men who called themselves special agents. They were dressed identically. Dark suits, white shirts, red ties.
The taller one shrugged. "Everyone knows you shot that guy during the riot in Honolulu. But not everyone cares. Get up, Detective, and pull yourself together. You've got work to do."
A tangle of emotions-relief, dread, indignation, and self-loathing-all boiled toward the surface. "I'm back on the same case? That dyke from the future got whacked with the Jap?"
"No. That won't be possible. You're going back to your old office, but you're going to be working for us-on the side."
"The Bureau?" he asked.
The tall agent just smiled.
8
WASHINGTON, D.C.
He still used the wheelchair, although the treatment had restored his mobility to an amazing degree. Eleanor said he looked twenty years younger, but Franklin Roosevelt still felt uncomfortable.
He knew he wasn't long for the world, even with the treatments devised by Kolhammer's doctors. He might have given himself an additional three or four years at best, but you could never tell. There was so much to do, and he wasn't sure he could see it through to the end. The Transition had proved to be as hideously complicated as he'd expected. Creating the Special Administrative Zone where companies like Douglas and Boeing and Ford could fully exploit the patents they already had on future technologies meant that the market drove the pace of innovation as fast as it possibly could, without sending a shockwave through the "old" economy. But of course, it had also meant establishing an enclave within the body politic of the Republic, which many saw as being a protected reserve for the worst sort of subversive elements. It had cost him enormous amounts of political capital to ram the thing through Congress, even with a sunset clause, and he just knew that his enemies would play merry hell with it at every opportunity. Indeed, they were already doing so. The damnable House Un-American Activities Committee of Congressman Dies had suddenly stopped investigating the Ku Klux Klan and the German American Bund and announced hearings into the Zone that very morning.
Roosevelt had to wonder whether it was significant that Dies had met with Hoover and Tolson for dinner last night.
He really needed a smoke.
Giving up had been remarkably easy after receiving the implant, and it was a wonder how clear-headed he'd become. His mind ran at twice the speed, and he seemed to retain much more of what he read and heard. The physical craving for a cigarette was only a fleeting twinge nowadays, and even that bothered him less and less frequently. But at times like this, he still suffered a powerful need for the soothing familiarity of the habit.
It made him ponder what to do about the cigarette companies when the war was over.
For the moment, however, the war was a long way from being over. In fact, from many angles, the situation looked significantly worse. From the point of view of Lord Halifax, the British ambassador, who sat in the armchair directly across from him in the Oval Of
fice, the course of events must have looked very grim, indeed. A long Roman nose and a high domed forehead conspired to give the ambassador a mournful countenance at the best of times. These last few months, his naturally forlorn expression had grown longer and more strained.
Admiral King wasn't helping.
"Ambassador," King rumbled, "you've got the Trident blocking the Channel. And you still have one of the most powerful fleets in the world anyway. If and when Hitler is fool enough to send his pissant little navy against you, it will be destroyed."
Halifax, who had been born without a hand at the end of his withered left arm, managed to balance a bone china cup of tea on his knee, and take a sip without any apparent effort. "Admiral King," he replied calmly, "the Trident is indeed a powerful deterrent. But she cannot be rearmed. She wasted a good many of her rockets on the Singapore raid."
King raised an eyebrow. "Wasted, you say?"
"You know what I mean, Admiral. It was a marvelous achievement, rescuing so many of our POWs-and yours, I suppose. It played very well with the press, and the Parliament. A second Dunkirk, and all that. But in so many ways, it was irresponsible."
Roosevelt felt the need to break in before this old argument flared up again. There were no representatives of the Multinational Force present, just the president, his three joint chiefs, and the British ambassador. But he'd found, time and again, that whenever two or more people gathered together, they could quickly and easily find themselves coming to blows on this particular topic. Indeed, it had joined religion and politics as a third great social taboo, never to be discussed in bars or at dinner. He knew, as well, that King privately agreed with Halifax, but he could see the navy chief squaring off for an argument.
"Gentlemen," he interjected, "there's no point raking over these coals again. The choice was not ours. It belonged to Kolhammer and his people, and they knew exactly what they were doing. Let's just move on, and deal with the present, shall we?"
It was midmorning in Washington, with an autumn chill lying hard against the windows of his office. Gusting, uncertain winds blew drifts of fallen leaves across the manicured lawns of the White House. The newly formed joint chiefs had gathered to give Halifax some unwelcome news. The U.S. Army simply did not have enough combat-ready divisions to bolster Great Britain's defenses against a renewed threat of invasion. The navy, heavily engaged in the South Pacific and still reeling from Midway and the seizure of convoy PQ 17 by the Soviet Union, could not secure the Atlantic or offer much more than token assistance in the event of a lunge across the channel by the Third Reich. And the army air force was still training pilots and building up its squadrons.
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