Fulfillment (Wilton's Gold #2)

by Craig W. Turner

  Though, he had one thing to take care of first.

  “Just give me a moment,” he said, stopping. He motioned with his head. “I need to use the restroom.”

  Fisher and Ekaterina stopped as well and turned to face him. “Jacobs, there’s a bathroom on the plane,” Fisher said.

  He nodded. “All the same, we’re going to be on that plane for a long time and I have a bit of a problem with cramped space. I’d like to take care of this before we go.” He made a face to portray his own embarrassment over the topic.

  Agent Fisher looked at Ekaterina, who shrugged. It was no issue for her, so he nodded. “Make it quick.”

  Jeff laughed. “Some things aren’t always in your control,” he said. “We have time. We’ll be okay.”

  He turned in the direction of the men’s room door they had just passed and wheeled his luggage toward it. Reaching the door, he pushed it inward just as older man in his traveling-to-Florida outfit came out. Jeff held the door for him, then went into the bathroom and set his bag against the far wall. A moment later, the door opened again.

  Dexter joined him in the room. Turning, he slid the lock on the door closed.

  “Good timing,” Jeff said, bending down to unzip his luggage.

  “That’s the only way this works,” his friend said.

  Jeff pulled the time device from his bag and the extra battery from a side pocket. He replaced the current battery, shoving it into his luggage, then handed the device to Dexter. Then, he swung the satchel from around his shoulder and set it on a dry patch on the sink. He took out Abby’s tablet, switched it on, then entered a new date. “Three months should be good?”

  “Safest bet for no one being here would be opening – 6 a.m.”

  He heeded Dexter’s advice and set the time of day for the early morning. The tablet spit out a series of numbers that he read off to Dexter, who entered them into the time device. They did a quick double-check, then Jeff swung the satchel back over his shoulder. “Ready?” he asked.

  Dexter nodded, so Jeff took hold of one end of the device. Dexter pushed the button.

  Their view of the bathroom blurred for a moment and was quickly restored. Seemingly nothing had changed.

  “Did it work?” Dexter asked. “Was that it?”

  “It did. That’s what happens. Everything gets blurry for a split second and then you’re in the new time. Look.” He directed Dexter’s attention to the wall where his luggage had been sitting a moment earlier. It was gone.

  “Alright,” he said, grinning. “I believe you. Now what?”

  “Come with me.”

  “I have to tell you that it’s a little disappointing that the first trip I get to take is to a bathroom three months in the past. I was gipped.”

  Jeff laughed as he pulled the now-unlocked bathroom door open and emerged into the terminal, now sparse in the wee hours of the morning as opposed to the little bit of hustle bustle when they’d entered the bathroom. There was a handful of staff readying the facility for the day – a janitor running a dust mop around the floor and two desk clerks getting their computers turned on and organizing their inboxes. He motioned with his head for Dexter to follow him and they approached one of the clerks.

  “Can I help you?” the man asked, surprised to see two guys come out of nowhere. He was in his twenties, dressed in khakis and a polo shirt with a logo on it that had to be for one of the fixed base operators. He had that look that let you know his daddy got him the job.

  “We need to get to Sacramento, California,” Jeff said. “It’s very important that we leave as soon as possible.”

  The man looked over at the other clerk, a studious-looking woman who was probably stuck with the responsibility of keeping this kid in line. She got a thinking look on her face, then turned her attention to Jeff. “We’ll have a pilot here in about an hour,” she said. “We’ll just have to make sure he’s not booked for anything else today because he obviously won’t get back from California in time.”

  “If you could, please,” he said, pulling a credit card from his wallet and handing it to the woman.

  The woman took the card, then sat down at the computer while the man stood over her shoulder. Apparently two men coming into the airport at 6 a.m. and asking for an impromptu flight was something exciting in what was probably a pretty dull job. While they searched, Dexter tugged on Jeff’s sleeve.

  “How are you paying for this?”

  He smiled. “That’s why we only went three months back. All of my information’s the same. I’ll pay for it right out of the grant.”

  “Yeah, but I mean how do you afford this? You can just drop fifty grand on a flight and it passes the test for a reasonable expense against your grant?” He wasn’t challenging him. More incredulous.

  Jeff laughed, intentionally dismissive. “It’s in the budget,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Well, the ‘other’ you is going to wonder where that money went. Wouldn’t you think?”

  “You know what? I’m a stickler for that stuff. I’ll probably call and fight with the bank.” He laughed again, though Dexter was right. Strangely, it made him think about other times that he found an unauthorized charge on one of his accounts, instances he might’ve chalked up to identity theft. Maybe it was a future version of himself spending his money. He’d have to ponder that one.

  “That looks good,” the woman said into her screen, then looked up at Jeff having been alerted by her system that he’d traveled with them before. “Yes, Dr. Jacobs, we can get you a flight this morning. Did you need a return flight?”

  “Yes, I would. Please.”

  She hit a few keys on her keyboard. “Okay, when will that be?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  Dexter hit him on the arm. “We don’t know how long this is going to take.”

  “Yes we do. It’s a two-hour drive each way. We’ll spend the night and come back in the morning.”

  Dexter sighed, and Jeff gave him an encouraging “we’ll be fine” nod.

  The woman gave him a price – the whole trip would cost about $50,000 and, yes, three-months-before Jeff would indeed have a conniption fit – and they were set. She asked them to take a seat in the waiting area and they’d be “wheels up” in about an hour. By the time they’d reached their seats, the kid had gotten them each a coffee and a handful of creamers and sugar packets.

  “I can’t believe you just toss your grant money around like that,” Dexter said, shaking his head while emptying creamer into his coffee.

  They’d had this discussion before. “You know I can’t take the device on a regular flight. I included a big travel budget in the grant application and they approved it. Am I supposed to feel bad about using it now?” Perhaps, yes, he was being a little cavalier with his spending justifications, but he wasn’t going to admit that to Dexter.

  “Well, as a taxpayer, I’m personally affronted,” Dexter said, “though it’s nice that they brought us coffee.” He finished stirring and took his first sip. “It’s good. Least they could do for fifty grand, right?”

  “I imagine there’ll be better drinks on the plane.”

  “It’s six in the morning.”

  “Not for us,” Jeff said, holding up his Styrofoam cup.

  Dexter tapped it with his own. He took a cautious sip, then said, “So what do you think you’re going to find in the Gold Rush? I hope it’s not Wilton’s gold you’re after. We are in no way prepared for that.”

  He shook his head. “No, it’s not the gold. I want to know why my time device was sitting in the Sierra Nevadas.”

  “And you think going back to Wilton’s time will tell us that?”

  “It can’t be a coincidence that we were planning to go to that place and time, and the device ends up there. We went there. At some point in the future we went.”

  “Or someone else did – with your device.”

  “That’s probably a less likely possibility, but you could be right, sure.” H
e sipped his own coffee. It was too hot, so he set it down on the floor at his feet. “Something happened, and it had to be right then and there because it’s the only moment of any significance recorded throughout history. And if we get there and don’t find anything, then we call it reconnaissance for the Wilton job somewhere down the line. Maybe we’ll even see your guardian angel.”

  Dexter laughed. “It’s not my story. It’s Wilton’s. Crazy bastard.”

  A few stragglers started to enter the airport, en route to business trips or headed south before it got cold, based on how they were dressed. They walked through quickly and were out the doors toward the tarmac. After a short while, jets of various sizes began taking off from the runway outside the window.

  Not long after, and sooner than they’d been told, the woman from the desk approached them letting them know their pilot was there and they’d be ready to board in a few minutes. They were just fueling the plane. Jeff thanked her and they made their way out toward the tarmac.

  Fifteen minutes later, they were airborne and headed for whatever was awaiting them in California.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “This is it, here,” Dexter said, pointing through the windshield toward a rickety wooden building on the left side of the road. “Pull off here.”

  Jeff followed his directions and turned their rental car into a dusty gravel lot, the wheels grinding against the rocks until he came to a stop in what might’ve been designated a parking spot. There were only two other cars in the lot, parked in front of a building that very much fulfilled Jeff’s imagination of what a Western Gold Rush lodge would’ve looked like. The wood, though painted nicely, was tattered from decades of hard winters and he immediately felt as though he was in a different time – even without having ignited the time device again. “Why are we here?”

  “I just want to see if there’s any other intel we can pick up,” Dexter said, getting out of the car.

  Jeff did the same. “You think there’s more that we don’t know?”

  “These guys are the experts. They’ll tell us.” He strode toward the front of the building and up the steps while Jeff lagged behind. “Not long. Ten minutes at the most.”

  The time really wasn’t an issue for Jeff, other than the fact that cross-country travel generally wore him out. But despite his haste to get where they were going, at his core he was a scientist, and he didn’t want to leap into anything haphazardly. If Dexter needed some time to sort out his thoughts and find any advantage he could, he’d give him the time.

  The trip they had before them had a very different feel from the way they’d scripted the Joe Wilton mission at the outset. They were not going to ambush him or steal his gold as they’d previously orchestrated. Their singular purpose was to figure out how Jeff’s time device got to the Sierra Nevadas. Of course, there was always the possibility that their timing would be off and that the device would end up there at some other point. But given that they were planning to be there at that very time, the likelihood was that they would be dropping right in on whatever had led them to that point.

  At one point during their flight, Dexter had tapped Jeff on the arm to wake him from a nap and hypothesize as to whether they might actually run into themselves. Jeff himself had actually considered the possibility that they would be there attempting to take Wilton’s gold – a mission that obviously would have failed because it wasn’t consistent with Wilton’s diary – and they’d see exactly what they’d been planning to do. He hadn’t wanted to jump to conclusions, though. After Dexter had enthusiastically offered his possible theory, Jeff had nodded politely and gone back to sleep.

  He followed his friend under a big yellow and red sign that read “California Gold Rush Museum” and through the double doors of the building. The museum was well-lit, the walls covered with the types of artifacts you would expect to see in such a place – coonskin caps, miners’ clothing, period vignettes and daguerreotypes. Display cases showed chunks of unrefined gold, with small plaques designating where they’d been found. At the register, a kind older woman cashed out a teenage brother and sister buying baseball-sized bags of fool’s gold while their parents sat patiently on a wooden bench to the side, waiting for them to finish.

  While this was Jeff’s first time at the museum, Dexter had already taken the opportunity while in California for a conference to take the drive into the mountains, trying to get some insight into the tragic tale of Joe Wilton and his supernatural experience. He’d come back with few answers. Knowing the landscape, though, he navigated swiftly through the main room and into a second room Jeff hadn’t noticed.

  Following, Jeff found the room to be set up as a miner’s home would’ve been during the Gold Rush – simple, with a low table covered with a wool blanket for a bed, a small bench that likely was used for eating, and a wood-burning stove. He followed Dexter through the miner’s house to a third room where a young man worked, leaning over his desk like a wolf protecting its food. The room was not filled with artifacts, and was clearly the Museum’s office area – containing only two old wooden desks covered with papers and a metal filing cabinet.

  The man looked up at Dexter and pulled a thick pair of glasses from his face. “I know you,” he said. “Back so soon?”

  “Well, it’s been a couple months, but yes. I wanted to pick your brain a little more. I’m glad you remember me.”

  Jeff could see the man processing. “Remember you?” He shuffled through a handful of papers on his desk and pulled out a yellow slip, holding it up for them to see. “You were here yesterday. I didn’t even get to your request, yet.” He read from the paper, “History on Wilton, Fitzsimmons and Pool from before the angel appeared to them. That was you, right?”

  Jeff elbowed him and Dexter sneered. He didn’t want the reminder that they were time traveling. He hadn’t been there three months before. He’d been there three months before three months from now.

  “It seemed like a couple months,” he said, poorly covering. “Driving back and forth to San Francisco.”

  “Yeah, well I’ve been there, done that,” the man said, sliding the paper back into the pile.

  “Do you have a minute?” Dexter asked.

  He nodded and motioned them to the chairs against the far wall. They sat, then Dexter introduced Jeff as a friend and fellow Gold Rush buff. The man’s name was Lionel. He was a docent at the Museum.

  Once the greetings were over, Dexter said, “I’m thinking of going a different direction with my research, to really focus on this supernatural piece. There’s definitely a connection to be made among all of the Gold Rush figures that seemed to come into contact with some supernatural force.”

  Lionel was nodding. “Yeah, well sure,” he said.

  “I’m trying to piece it all together, and I have a theory. But it’s out there.”

  “Out there?”

  “I mean way out there,” Dexter said with a flourish. Jeff almost laughed. “So if I’m ever going to go public with this research, I need to know full-well that my information is solid.”

  “I would think you would want that for any research. No?”

  “C’mon,” Dexter said, sarcastically. Just two history geeks sitting and chatting. “In the age of blogs and FOX News? Nobody can tell what’s true and what’s false anymore.”

  Lionel shrugged. He wasn’t into it.

  “What I need to know is if there are any more details available about the angel that Joe Wilton saw. Did any of his traveling partners – the ones that survived the ambush the next morning, at least – say or write anything about the experience?”

  “You saw the diary.”

  “I did,” he said. “But is there anything more that you know of? Stories passed down or other writings?”

  Lionel sat back in his chair, thinking, then sat up again. “Give me something to work with. You said your theory is ‘out there.’ Can you tip me off to the direction you’re going? It might help me think of something.”

  Dex
ter took a dramatic deep breath. Jeff smiled again – his friend was putting on quite a show. “What if I told you that the U.S. government had found what they believe to be a time travel device in the vicinity of the Wilton ambush?”

  Jeff’s smile left his face. What the hell was he doing?

  He had Lionel’s attention, though. “Is that true?” he asked, mystified.

  Dexter held up his hands. “It’s a theory. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. But if it is true, you can imagine the government would not want that information to get out.”

  “Why would the U.S. government send someone back in time to find Joe Wilton?” He spoke slowly, the way you’d approach a crazy preacher on a street corner in Times Square.

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out. And by itself it doesn’t make sense. But when you start to look at all the different instances from that time period, doesn’t it seem a little too, I don’t know, scripted?”

  “Scripted to do what?”

  “Manifest destiny?”

  A smile crossed Lionel’s face. “So the U.S. government today has sent back angels – no, people pretending to be angels – to get the U.S. to spread across the continent in the 1800s? That’s actually pretty clever.”

  “That’s why I need to know if there’s more to Wilton’s angel story.”

  He sat back again, thinking. “Well, Fitzsimmons died the next morning. Pool was injured and died when they reached San Francisco. Wilton’s wife survived and went on with him to settle in the Bay Area, but I don’t know that they said anything about – wait a second...”

  Without explanation, Lionel leapt from his seat and headed into the Museum’s main room. Dexter jumped up to follow him, so Jeff did the same. When they reached the front area, which was now empty of tourists, Lionel was pulling the cover off of the glass box that encased the Wilton diary.