“So she changed history?” he asked. “And that somehow led to her own demise? Assuming she actually did just disappear, and we didn’t miss her running off into the forest. I wonder if she knew what she was doing.”
“Looked like it.”
The nurse came back into the room carrying a tray with containers of juice and fruit salad. She set it on the table, which she then swung in front of Dexter. “Let’s see how you do with this, and if it goes well I’ll bring you something a little heartier.” Dexter nodded thanks to her as she turned to Jeff. “You, Mister, have to get out and let Bradley get some rest.” She literally grabbed Jeff by the arm and escorted him to the door.
“I forgot my phone,” he said, stopping to retrieve Erica’s phone from Dexter’s bed, but couldn’t stop himself from laughing at the nurse’s aggressiveness. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, over his shoulder at Dexter, who waved at him.
They got into the hallway and the nurse finally let go. “You’re serious about visiting hours,” Jeff said to her.
“Not really,” she said. “I just know you two fellas have some kind of story you’re not telling everyone here, and the best thing that can happen is that he heals up, you pay your bill, and you get the hell out of Dodge tomorrow. Nobody’ll have to ask any questions. But that’s not going to happen if you keep him from resting now.”
Jeff nodded. “I can’t argue with that logic,” he said.
After asking for a recommendation on where to spend the night and find a decent restaurant, Jeff left the hospital.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Jeff sat alone in a booth at a Mexican restaurant along the main drag in Truckee. He’d checked into the Donner Motel, which had a beautiful mountain view out of his room’s window, then walked a quarter mile to the restaurant. There was a diner closer, but when the nurse had mentioned Mexican, he’d been hooked.
He was hungry, too. On the table in front of him were about seven plates – five appetizers and two entrees. He hadn’t been able to decide what to have, so he’d ordered everything that looked good, ignoring the server’s snicker when he didn’t stop. The plates were in a semi-circle around him and he picked off of each of them as he pondered.
In the middle of the Mexican crescent sat two open notebooks and a pile of ripped-out pages with diagrams of timelines on them. As he’d made the short drive from the hospital to the motel, his concept of “fulfillment” had stuck in his head, and in order to sort it out he needed visuals. Dexter’s suggestion that this woman, Erica, had started her journey through time in another reality was giving him doubt that fulfillment was a real, and necessary, concept.
It occurred to him, too, that it was egocentric to believe that his own reality was indeed the true reality. As he’d conducted his studies in time travel, he’d been through all of the hypotheses on how different realities were created every time anyone on the planet made a decision. Do I take the highway or back roads to work? Do I use conditioner in my hair today or not? Do I walk across the room and talk to that woman? Every instance in which a choice is made sets off another chain of events. It was a simple concept for him – or anyone else, for that matter – to understand. So why was he finding it so difficult to wrap his brain around the idea that his reality, the one he held so dear, could actually be the manufactured one? The one resulting from someone else’s time travel.
He’d spent the first 15 minutes waiting for his food searching with Abby’s tablet for a person called Erica Danforth associated with Stanford, History Channel – any of the keywords he’d come across on her phone. Nothing. They’d jumped to a conclusion that this woman did not exist in their reality, and he’d determined walking to the restaurant that he should at least spend some time trying to confirm that. While his quick searching was by no means conclusive, the fact that he didn’t find anything was not surprising. It appeared their quickly-drawn conclusion might have been right.
He picked up a cheesy nacho chip with a jalapeno on it, scraped the pepper off, and popped it into his mouth, chewing slowly and studying the diagram in front of him. He’d roughly illustrated the timeline as he imagined it could’ve happened – a line that skewed in two directions at a certain date – the day that Erica interrupted Wilton’s trip and told him to camp. As he’d been envisioning it since Agent Fisher had come into his life, the line representing his own reality had been the foundation for the diagram, while Erica’s line – though he hadn’t known it was Erica’s line until he actually saw her – was the diversion caused by his own time travel that ended up with his time device being left in the Sierra Nevadas. But according to Dexter’s theory, the placement of the two timelines would be reversed.
In essence, it was the same concept that Evelyn Peters had been relating to him. There was another reality, where a ruthless Soviet premier ruled with an iron fist and kept the world on the brink of war, and with her actions through time travel, that reality was eliminated. In that case, as well, Jeff’s reality in which he was currently living was not the original. Which then caused doubt in his mind that any reality could be the original. He ate a forkful of refried beans.
To Jeff, though, the multiple reality question was one that was probably too big to figure out on a restaurant table. What really was interesting him, however, was how this all played into the concept of fulfillment – mainly since fulfillment was Evelyn’s argument as to why he and Ekaterina needed to go back to 1983. In history, in Jeff’s reality, Joe Wilton was stopped in the mountains by a woman pretending to be an angel, and was then robbed the next morning by bandits. Fulfillment would suggest that someone had to go back and make that happen if the history was to remain the same. But clearly, wherever this Erica came from, she was a part of history in Jeff’s reality. But her disappearance – according to Dexter – would lead them to believe that she might not exist in Jeff’s reality. So how could she possibly go back to intercept Wilton? How could she fulfill her place in history?
He tried to juxtapose that into Ekaterina’s situation. Evelyn’s argument was that someone had to go back in time and murder the man who would become Premier. As it ended up, they’d found the right person. But what really would happen if nobody went back? If he was right in his thinking about Erica, Evelyn’s murder of the future Premier was a part of history. Again – wherever she’d come from. He realized in his heart that he was with Fisher, where he really didn’t want to find out what would happen if they were wrong, but from a scientific standpoint, Erica’s existence had cast serious doubt for him on what actually needed to happen.
Jeff had deduced from his studies, and confirmed it in his only previous time travel to the ballgame in 1951, that the time traveler is the only one who could possibly know that a change has occurred. To anyone else, their reality is the reality. It was incomprehensible that an existing reality could be brought to an end somehow by not fulfilling something that had been changed in the past.
While he thought, the waitress came over to check on him, bringing him a fresh iced tea. He hadn’t noticed his was empty. She asked if he needed anything else, which made him laugh a little because there was nothing else to have. She laughed with him, then went back to taking care of other customers.
He looked around the room at the people – an older couple, probably empty nesters who were taking advantage of their freedom by driving across the country; a young family, certainly tied to the Winnebago in the parking lot; a trucker eating alone in a booth, probably filling up before finishing his trek to San Francisco. None of these people had any clue that the circumstances of the world around them could be steered or changed entirely by someone with the right technology. Which was probably good for them. If he – with years of education and more years of his own study on the topic – couldn’t comprehend what was going on, how would your average cross-country traveler deal with it?
He chewed on a corner of a cheese-and-onion enchilada that was among the best he’d ever had and stared at the skewed timeline before him. It wasn’t
right. He could feel it. The shape was wrong. It was the wrong approach. Something. If anything, the original timeline, once the new timeline was created, was obsolete. It didn’t matter for anything, apparently, even though it could still create a stimulus to affect the new timeline. That seemed to be all it was good for. It made him wonder if a timeline that had been changed could actually be restored. If he was able to go back to Wilton’s time and affect whatever had happened that had caused Erica to disappear, could he actually recreate the timeline where she existed?
That threw him. He suddenly got antsy, realizing he couldn’t sit in the booth anymore, so he called over the waitress who handed him his check. He paid quickly and walked outside into the cool mountain air. It was almost completely dark and the streetlights were sparse, but he wasn’t sure if the chill he felt was from the thoughts dancing around in his mind or the crispness of the night.
Erica was the time traveler. Which meant that she would have knowledge of everything that had happened before the change – that she caused – took place. She would have knowledge of the other reality, and of Jeff in the original reality. She would be able to tell him exactly how she came to possess his time travel device.
He had his new mission.
Moreover, even though it would solve a personal quandary of curiosity for him, the science of what he had in mind was overwhelming. Gone was the drive to determine what he could accomplish through time travel. It was replaced with what could be accomplished in alternate realities.
His pace grew with his enthusiasm, and he arrived at the hotel in a matter of minutes. He stormed through the lobby and up a flight of stairs three at a time toward his room. Once inside, he hoisted his luggage up onto the bed and pulled out the time travel device, then stopped.
He only had one trip left in the current battery. Which was the one that would bring him back to his present time. He swore at himself, because the other battery was sitting in his bag in the restroom at Teterboro three months from then. He would have to get back to the airport in New Jersey, reunite with Ekaterina, and complete his mission in order to get access to his power supply.
Which made him laugh, actually. He sat on the bed, thinking whether he would’ve actually just taken his device and headed back to Henness Pass to follow Erica to 1849. He thought about the dangers of a solo, unmentioned trip, and decided it was probably best that he didn’t have an extra battery. That being said, he was now intent on completing the Russia mission as quickly and expediently as possible. He would accept Evelyn’s fulfillment argument in order to get control of his experiments back.
It had been an exceptionally long day, but feeling like his mind was racing too quickly for him to expect sleep he turned on the hotel television and climbed into the bed closest to the window.
He was wrong. Within five minutes, he was out.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Though he was uncomfortable, Dexter was released from the hospital in the late morning. Jeff picked him up and paid the bill with a wink to the nurse from the night before who had figured them out. In retrospect, they probably shouldn’t have been talking so excitedly about time travel in the room while she was walking in-and-out. Even if she hadn’t heard anything specific, it would’ve been pretty obvious that they weren’t acquaintances who had met that morning.
The drive from Truckee along I-80 to Sacramento took about two hours, in which Jeff regaled Dexter with his musings from the evening before. During the conversation, Dexter bought into everything except the need to go back to Wilton’s time again. He insinuated – while not stating outrightly – that if Jeff could indeed regain control of his research, he should return to his original plan for his experiments, targeting productive and predictable venues where altering reality would not have far-reaching consequences. Jeff didn’t argue, but he’d already made up his mind. He was going to confront Erica before she had a chance to approach Wilton. Once Jeff had walked him up the steps and onto the jet, though, Dexter had actually thought out loud that perhaps she would know what changed that extinguished her from history. He did clarify that his comment should not be misinterpreted as buy-in. Simply food for thought.
While Dexter slept, still weary from his surgery the day before, Jeff used Abby’s tablet to calculate the coordinates he would need to travel back to Wilton’s time and await Erica’s arrival. He wrote them in his notebook from dinner the previous night on the page with the timelines, then tucked everything into his pack and closed his eyes. He considered what a surprise it would be for this woman to see him standing on the path waiting for her.
He laughed at himself, realizing he was now officially obsessed with meeting her. The fact that he knew nothing about her beyond what her phone could tell him, while she must’ve known quite a bit about him to end up with his time device... well, it was driving him wild. He could not wait for the opportunity to engage her.
While he fantasized, Jeff must have fallen asleep because he opened his eyes and a few hours had passed. He checked on Dexter, who was still sleeping, then took out Erica’s phone and clicked through some more e-mails. He found a few that were of significance: a script for her most recent show attached to one of the messages in which she described the Wilton heist; and two e-mails from a man named Kevin Pierce, whose e-mail signature indicated that he was Director of the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History. He perused her script to find the details of the Wilton heist were different. There was no mention of an angel, and there was no reference to “Bad Dan” Carmichael, the bandit who’d led the assault. Just the mysterious disappearance of Wilton’s gold after he was accosted in the forest by unknown thieves. Her show was called The Mystery of History, so it would make sense that she would cover it, but he was fascinated that there was yet another relevant piece to the alternate reality.
The e-mails from the Smithsonian were intriguing, as they seemed to be hastily written and contained links to Times and Post articles. Like many links, they were a series of dates, letters and numbers, which meant little to him. But in the second message, this Pierce guy had added contact information for a Benjamin Shipley at Christie’s Auction House and written, “This story is taking off… Get on it!” Jeff used the plane’s wi-fi to check the newspaper links, but they were broken, so he returned to the messages. He was not a believer that correlation automatically implied causation, but the timing of these e-mails appeared linked to whatever chain of events had landed Erica in the Sierra Nevadas.
He noticed Dexter stirring, so he got up from his seat to retrieve two bottles of water, handing one to his friend. Dexter thanked him with a smile and asked the prerequisite question, “How long was I out?”
“It’s been a couple hours. I slept too.”
Dexter uncapped the bottle and took a swig. “Can’t wait to be home. I’m very glad I don’t have to go to Russia now.”
“I’ll bet. How’s your leg feel?”
“Probably time for some more painkillers,” he said. “You didn’t think to get that minie ball back from the doctor, did you?”
“No, damn. I’m sorry.”
Dexter shrugged. “It’s alright. Would’ve been nice to have.” He adjusted himself in his seat, grunting, so Jeff hopped up again and got the bottle of pain pills from his bag. He looked at Dexter, who held up three fingers, then poured three tablets into his hand. Dexter swallowed them with another drink from his bottle. “Have you been sleeping the whole time?”
Jeff shook his head. “No. I woke up a little while ago. Been going through the phone to see if I can come up with anything else.”
“And?”
“She had a show, called The Mystery of History. There’s an e-mail in there with a script for the show – the most recent one she did was about the Wilton Heist. But it’s interesting because the details are all different. At least they’re different from what we know.”
“No angel, probably. Right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’s because where she came from, there wa
s no angel that came out of the woods to talk to Wilton. Not until she went back in time and did it herself. The history that she’s talking about on her show is the history of the Wilton heist in her reality.”
“Before she changed it,” Jeff said quietly.
“Before she changed it,” Dexter said in agreement.
“None of which answers the question as to how she got her hands on my time travel device.”
Dexter shook his head. “I know what you’re thinking, Jeff.”
“What?”
“It’s not a good path to follow. For some reason, fate has brought us to this point. You’re just not supposed to know who this woman is.”
“I’m sorry if I’m thinking about this more scientifically than you are,” he said. Whether or not that was true.
“Well, you didn’t get shot in the leg.” Dexter finished off his bottle of water and tossed it onto the seat in front of him. “All of this is moot right now anyway. You’ve got a Russian woman and an FBI agent waiting for you back in New Jersey, and until you finish that mission, you’re not getting anywhere near your device anyway.”
Dexter was annoying him, but he was right. Jeff nodded his head. “I guess I haven’t really strategized what’s going on here. It seems like it’s pretty cut-and-dry, but I haven’t given a second of thought to what happens if something goes wrong. I’ve been preoccupied with this. Have you?”
“What? Thought about what could go wrong? Sure I have. That’s what I’m here for.”
“What did you come up with?”
“Well, the worst thing would be – could you grab me another water? – that somehow you get marooned in 1983. Especially in Russia. Still the height of the Cold War, and an American lost in Russia would probably have a hell of a time getting out. We’ve been studying for months about a mission that we’re not even going to undertake. You’ve had about twenty-four hours to prep for a mission that is supposed to end in the assassination of a key figure in another country that you’ve never been to and where you don’t speak the language. I would classify this entire pursuit in the category of ‘let’s hope for the best.’“
Fulfillment (Wilton's Gold #2) Page 13