Star Noir

by Paul Bishop

  “Oscar?” I asked slowly, the memory of the man vague and faintly out of reach for some reason. It was an odd sensation because I was sure we’d worked together once or twice.

  He nodded, recognizing my struggle. “Psychiatrists have a name for the condition.”

  “You too?”

  “Everyone in G division is experiencing it to a greater or lesser degree. We had to close it down, you know.” His gaze shifted toward the table and two chairs. “I couldn’t stand to see a Chippendale moldering away under plastic tarps in some damp warehouse.” He knocked the ash off his cigar into a gold-plated ashtray on the desk.

  I managed to pull together threads of memories now, but it was like trying to recall a story read years earlier and put out of mind. It took time to draw all the pieces back in order. “It was a hit, wasn’t it? All hush-hush.”

  “Hush-hush?” He gave a short laugh. “More like we were too dumfounded to even begin to make sense of it. We didn’t want to talk about something none of us understood.”

  “But you understand it now?”

  JT hesitated. “Not completely. We have a few very definite ideas, however. Quite frightening ideas, to be sure.”

  I studied him, but his face telegraphed nothing. He continued without waiting for a response from me. “Actually, if an incident hadn’t occurred that I think will greatly interest you, I wouldn’t speak of it now.”

  “Is that why the goons didn’t come in?”

  His expression remained somber. “Some need to know and some don’t. You are aware of the peculiar circumstances surrounding Oscar’s disappearance?”

  “Vaguely.” The more I thought about it, the more the threads came together, but the cloth was still fairly tattered. “You were there, weren’t you?”

  “I was,” he said flatly, “along with all five section leaders. We were seated around the table. Oscar had finished giving a report on something or another—that’s not important—and was sipping a glass of water when…” JT grimaced. “He wasn’t there anymore. The glass shattered on the floor and he was gone.”

  I recalled it happening something along those lines, but the details still hid behind a brain-fog as thick as the LA smog outside.

  JT’s view shifted and fixed somewhere beyond my shoulder as if he watched it happen all over again. “Almost immediately, after the shock of it passed, I became aware of a hole in my memory for lack of a better term. I didn’t immediately recall anything of Oscar’s report. Neither could the others. It’s like part of our brain had been cut out. Only after the neurons began rerouting themselves were we able to begin to put it back together.”

  His analogy worked for me too. My neurons were busily building bridges across a similar memory hole.

  “I’m uncertain that I even remember what Oscar looked like,” he continued. “Can you?”

  I shook my head. “But then I only met him once or twice when I had to work with one of his operatives. They don’t approve of socializing in our line of work.” I grinned.

  He resumed his tale, his expression dead serious. “I knew the man fairly well—at least I think I did. Even that’s unclear. An eight-man security team scanned every square millimeter of the room with their equipment and found nothing.”

  His pause filled the office with an eerie silence. He broke the spell with a sudden breath. “It gets even stranger, Martin. The notes Oscar had been speaking from were merely blank sheets of paper. Within a few days, it became clear that everything he’d had a hand in had vanished. That’s why G Section came apart. He helped to organize it. Remember that three-page spread Time Magazine gave him back in ʼ48?”

  He produced a dog-eared copy from a drawer and passed it across to me. “Pages thirty-seven to thirty-nine.”

  I flipped to them, stared for a moment, and whistled softly. “Blank. Is this a joke, John?”

  “No joke, I assure you.”

  “How does something like this happen?”

  JT frowned. The last few years had seen his stomach wander out to where it almost burst the seams of his tailored blue Celulon suit. His stiff gray hairline, however, had remained stationary and his blue eyes were as keen and alert as ever. In every respect, JT was as pretentious as the vast room he occupied. “It’s time I show it to you.” He pushed his chair back and pounded his cigar into an ashtray.

  “It?” I asked and the warning muscles across my shoulders tightened again. I followed him across the thick pink stuff at our feet to the carved wooden door in the blue wall.

  “What I’m about to show you?” He stopped and obviously remembered who he was speaking to and how trite it would sound. “Well, I needn’t bore you with a lecture on security.” He unlocked the door with a common key. A second door, this one steel, barred our way. He pressed a hand to a bio-panel. A lock deactivated somewhere within the wall and the heavy door slid aside to reveal a long, brightly lit passageway. A muted turbine whine flowed from the far end.

  The whine grew louder as we approached a set of doors. They slid apart for us and we stepped past them. I gasped and my heart jumped to my throat as I grabbed the iron railing of a narrow scaffold perched upon the sheer side of an immense concrete cavern.

  “It’s startling when you see it for the first time,” he noted blandly. His statement might have been funny if it wasn’t for my shock at the precipitous drop beneath the spindly platform I’d unexpectedly stepped out onto. A hundred feet below us, little white-coated men and women scurried about like busy termites. On that distant floor and towering yet another fifty feet above our heads, a steel and crystal monolith glittered in the floodlights that ringed the cavern—the god of this chamber; an inanimate being that cried the wailing whine of spinning turbines.

  JT tugged my arm. I backed away from the drop into a small room. Padded doors closed silently, and my stomach lingered for a moment on that terrifying platform as the elevator started its plunge. I swallowed and said, “Okay, you have me sufficiently curious. So, what is it?”

  He spoke as if he hadn’t heard me. “When Oscar disappeared, so did his son, his father, and his grandfather. We located his wife, Marion, living in Denver with a man she’d been happily married to for the last twenty-three years. She claims she never heard of Oscar.”

  “And why is it that I need to know about this?”

  I might as well have not spoken because he dismissed the question with a wave of his hand. “Now, there is only one explanation for the complete disappearance of a bloodline and for our confused memories.” He paused to let me think that through. “Have you ever heard of the Mandela Effect?”

  I had to search my memory for the info. “It references something that happened in the last century, I believe, about someone named Mandela. I forget who he was, but seem to recall it has to do with faulty...” I worked my brain and dredged more details from wherever the mind stores trivia. “Or memories of an event that turned out to be different from what actually occurred. Something along that line.”

  He nodded. “Close enough. We believe someone managed to slip back in time and assassinate one of Oscar’s ancestors.”

  If he was joking, his face didn’t give it away. “I didn’t know you were a fan of science fiction, John. That worn-out plotline is as old as Wells or Verne.”

  His expression remained flat. “I wish it were only fiction. And to your question as to how it involves you, well, that’s the easy part. We believe the murderer is Carlos Vendimos.”

  “Vendimos?”

  “He is an assassin, after all. Who better qualified to chop off a low branch on Oscar’s family tree? Imagine a long line of dominos. Topple one and the whole row falls. Kill a man’s ancestor fifty, a hundred, even a thousand years back and the whole bloodline disappears—falls—if you don’t want to mix your metaphors.”

  It sounded too incredible, but JT was not one to make up fables.

  “You and Vendimos go back quite a long way—professional competitors, in a manner of speaking. I thought it might pique your
interest.”

  I wasn’t buying it. “People aren’t dominos, John. How did Carlos Vendimos manage to pull off this fantastic task, anyway?”

  The elevator finished its descent, its doors slid apart, and we stepped and stopped before that gleaming colossus I’d seen from my previous dizzying perspective.

  “How does Vendimos manage it?” he asked rhetorically, his eyes fixed upon the thing before us. “He uses a time machine.”

  “Amazing. More than amazing—it’s unbelievable!” I knew I was repeating myself, but my mind couldn’t seem to snap out of that one single thought.

  “Amazing seems to have become your favorite word, Martin. Your last three sentences have used it six times.”

  We’d returned to JT’s office. The big man sat at his desk, leaned back in his chair, and lit another cigar. “You’re wondering why I’m telling you all this.”

  My gaze moved to the wide window where vague shapes of the Los Angeles cityscape pierced the perpetual haze that challenged the building’s air filtration systems. From the moment the goons had plucked me from my office, I’d been prepared for whatever new assignment JT had in mind for me, but I hadn’t expected it to be Vendimos. He’d gone quiet and it had been over two years since I’d even heard anything about him. I had begun to wonder if his wound hadn’t been more severe than I remembered.

  “We’re not exactly a boys and girls club, John,” I said. “Revenge has never been our MO. We hit and we take hits. We lose people and they lose people. I didn’t for a moment think you told me about Oscar to make me weepy-eyed and burning to get even. Geez, John, that a sucker’s game.”

  He nodded. “I’d have been disappointed in you if you had.” He sighed and glanced at a paper on the desk. “Vendimos is one of the best—age unknown, no biometrics, and no vids. That’s significant considering there are cameras everywhere these days. He’s been extremely careful.”

  “A commendable trait for someone in our line of work.”

  “Very. As you know, all we have is an artist’s sketch.” JT passed the page across the desk. “Here’s the latest update. You will note that we’ve added a crooked left eye and scar across it since your last encounter. I assume their surgeons are competent and that most of the damage has been corrected by now.”

  I grinned. “Vendimos considered himself something of a D’Artagnan. It shocked the hell out of him when I plucked that peeper from its socket.”

  JT frowned. “It’s a pity you didn’t finish it when you had the chance. He is not a man who forgives and forgets.”

  “I tried.” I shrugged and fingered the puckered scar beneath my shirt below my bottom rib.

  “Yes. Well, his people patched him up and we did the same for you. Now, it seems you two will have another go at each other.”

  There was more to it than that. He merely hadn’t told me yet. Sometimes, you had to work it out of him. “Why are you tossing me into the ring with Vendimos now? We don’t do revenge unless the opportunity conveniently presents itself. Oscar knew what he was signing on for.”

  He leaned forward. “Frankly, I wouldn’t know a heterodyne from a co-phased dimeter if one were to bump into me on the street, but as I’m caretaker of that expensive machine back there, some of the engineers thought it would be nice if I knew a thing or two. Maybe only so I didn’t sound like a simpleton discussing it. One interesting fact is that it operates more or less like a two-way radio, at least in principle. It employs a repeater as the second transmitter. Unlike conventional radio, however, its frequency is in an extreme sub-microwave range. A nano-wave?”

  I shrugged. If he expected technical help from me, he would be disappointed.

  “Another fact is that it draws a tremendous amount of power.”

  “I heard the turbine generators.”

  “And those were merely keeping it idling. They never shut it down for fear a reboot will scramble the circuitry. One result of all that energy is that it generates a powerful RF signal easily detectable with the proper equipment. Follow?”

  I shook my head. “You lost me at repeater.”

  JT grimaced. “Honestly, I’m not sure I understand any of it either, Martin. What I’m getting at in my long-winded way is that we have the equipment to detect those RF signals.”

  Finally, I caught the drift of where he was going with this. “If Vendimos’ people have a machine like yours and they use it, you can trace the signal back to the source?”

  “Close, but not exactly. Have you ever heard of the inverse square law?”

  I nodded. “But don’t ask me to explain it.”

  “The brains that built that machine refer to the phenomena as Reverse Dispersion—you take the inverse square law and reverse it. In other words, the sub-micro signals act exactly the opposite of normal RF signals. They’re highly dispersed at the source and taper to a needle-sharp beam as they near their target. Reverse Dispersion. We can tell exactly where they go, but their point of origin remains guesswork. The best we can do is trace it back to a radius of a few hundred kilometers.”

  “Hmm. I see,” I said, not really sure that I did but certain I didn’t want to hear it explained all over again. “I still don’t get what all this has to do with me.”

  “You will in a moment. The morning Oscar disappeared, our equipment registered a strong sub-microwave transmission. Since no one else is supposed to have a time portal, the technicians weren’t prepared for it. At first, they thought it a glitch in the electronics, a fluke of some kind. I’m told the sensitive equipment is prone to picking up errant signals from space, the sun, the North Pole, and sometimes, even from little Johnny down the street playing with his Christmas walkie-talkie set. After some investigation, they wrote it off as a spurious hiccup in the airwaves.

  “A second transmission eight hours later brought them to their feet. It occurred precisely seven minutes after Oscar disappeared.”

  “So reading between the lines, you’re saying these two signals were Vendimos?” He nodded and I proceeded along that trail. “The first signal—little Johnny’s walkie-talkie set—sent Vendimos off on his trip to some undetermined place and time to eliminate one of Oscar’s ancestors. Evidence would indicate he successfully completed the assignment some eight hours later, at which point, he returned to the present and produced that second signal, which the brainy-boys downstairs intercepted.”

  “That’s more or less correct, Martin.” He smiled and took a long pull at the cigar, obviously relishing the experience, before he set it in the ashtray and said, “We actually know a little more than an undetermined place and time, however. We know whom Vendimos assassinated and when.”

  “That kind of precision is not a problem?”

  “We are an organization that specializes in solving problems.”

  I would have told him I was impressed, but that would have only fed his ego.

  “This morning, we intercepted yet another signal. We’d been watching for it and this time, we were prepared. Its origin was somewhere in the state of South Dakota. Its destination, Kentucky, 1815, at—just a sec, I wrote it down somewhere—ah, here we go. At a place now called Barnrock, but two hundred and fifty years ago, it was called Jacophsburgh.

  “At the same time we were tracking this morning’s transmission, two of our agents were breaking into an office in Amsterdam known to be used by Vendimos from time to time. He wasn’t there, of course, but they did find a couple of interesting files. Oscar’s name was on one of them. It contained a family history with specifics of one Robert Elston Milborn, Oscar’s great, great, great—and maybe one or two more greats—grandfather. The date was 1928.”

  I fished a pack of Juicy Fruits from my pocket and said, “That’s interesting evidence if you ever want to take this before a court of law. It’s not the way we work, and it still doesn’t bring Vendimos any closer to the business end of my pistol. What was the second file?”

  JT’s smile activated my warning muscles again. “This should be of particular in
terest to you, I think. It concerns a hit scheduled for today. The place is Jacophsburgh, Kentucky, year 1815. Vendimos’ target, it appears, is one Jerimiah Sole.”

  The half-stripped stick of gum froze in my fingers. He was no longer smiling when he shoved a paper across the desk to me. I took it mechanically.

  “That’s right, Martin. Your extremely great grandfather.” He steepled his fingers beneath his double chin. “I do hope we won’t be too late.”

  I peered doubtfully through the little portal into the cramped tunnel beyond. Given that the machine was almost as large as the seven-story building it occupied, I wondered about such a tiny opening. “Do you expect me to crawl into there?”

  JT handed me a round-brimmed hat with a tall crown. “This ought to be your size. How does the outfit feel?” he asked and scrutinized me quickly.

  “Like a tent. People actually wore clothes like this back then?” Although the pants and coat were of a generous cut, the material weighed at least three times as much as my usual attire. That might prove a problem if I had to move fast.

  “It’s directly from the historical museum. Every item is authentic, down to the wool underwear and shoes.”

  I wiggled my toes inside the large round leather boots. “Hadn’t they figured out how to make them fit?”

  “Right and left lasts were not in common use. One shape for both feet was the norm. I’m sure you’ll get used to them.” He took a black leather satchel from one of the attending white-coats. “Your prop.”

  It had a fair weight to it. “What is it?”

  “You’ll be a doctor. That’s your bag.”

  “I don’t know anything about doctoring.” I opened it and didn’t recognize most of the vintage tools contained within. There were two non-vintage items amongst them, one of which I was familiar with and another of which I wasn’t. The familiar item was a black Kinter 9mm pistol. I took it from the bag.

  JT grinned. “You can perform serious surgery with that scalpel.”