Keegan laughed. “Oh, right,” he said, but was distracted when he noticed Landon. “Oh, good. You’re back. Everything back on track?”
“It appears to be,” Reilly answered, not allowing Landon to answer for himself.
Landon turned to look at Reilly and started to say something to the effect of them not being 100% on the same page yet, but the hulking figure of Keegan approached him, and he flinched. He felt the weight of a heavy hand as Keegan slapped him on the back. The impact made him take a step forward.
“This is good,” Keegan said. “I feel a lot better now.”
“I don’t understand,” Landon said, looking up at his tattooed face.
“Let’s just say it’ll be a relief having you with us.” He smiled broadly at him.
“Excuse me?” Landon said, his heart leaping. “What do you mean?” His eyes went to Reilly. “I don’t go on missions.”
No one answered, so Keegan broke the silence. “Did you say I was supposed to get plates?”
CHAPTER 24
Robert knew that his unexplained disappearance would be attributed to fear of what was set to come the next morning. And that his prolonged absence would give people reason to believe that he’d run for the hills. It wasn’t the impression he wanted to give, so while he waited for the maglev transport that would take him away from the SATP campus, he fired a quick message off to Reilly: EVERYTHING’S OK. NEED SOME TIME. BE BACK SHORTLY. Reilly would inevitably reply by asking what that meant and where he was going, but Robert wasn’t going allow a back-and-forth conversation. He just wanted to provide assurance that he wasn’t abandoning the team.
The maglev was the preferred mode of transport for everyone in SATP who had foregone traditional transportation options for a life that existed primarily inside the walls of the campus. For the bulk of SATP’s employees, personal vehicles were not necessary, and could be rented or shared if there was need to travel any distance away from Greensboro, such as for a day trip. Any local travel could be accommodated by the maglev, the superfast magnetized monorail whose branches stretched to all well-traveled destinations in the growing city. At most stations, if someone needed to get to individual neighborhoods not served by maglev, there were readily-available sharing services that could be utilized by the hour.
SATP’s maglev station had become a Grand Central of sorts, as the campus was the economic engine for the surrounding region. Robert, with the public profile he had, would rarely be seen here and, as such, had stopped in his apartment to secure a disguise. Nothing ornate or complex, as the wardrobe department would have fixed up for him on a mission, but simply a knit hat, dark sunglasses and a clip-on earring. He’d also strapped on a weight belt to help straighten him from a distinguishable walk that was the result of a long career at SATP, and the U.S. Air Force before that. It had been a long, tiring road for Robert to become Public Enemy #1 the U.S. government.
At the tail end of rush hour, the station was still relatively busy, with stragglers among the off-campus personnel making their way home. While the work day generally ended at 4:30 p.m., there were enough distractions on the complex to keep people around – from pubs to exercise floors to extracurricular activities such as drama clubs and intermural volleyball. These were little quality-of-life perks that had been implemented for SATP on-campus employees to keep them interacting with one another. About five years before, the off-campus employees had gotten together and asked management for access to the activities and, with no logic to rebuff their request, were granted the opportunity to participate. The move successfully breathed life into many of the programs, and made for a very positive experience at SATP in general. But it impacted the evening commuter pattern. Robert noticed that there were far more people in the station as compared to this time of day in the years immediately after the facility was built.
A train pulled in at full speed and silently glided to a stop in front of Robert. He glanced at the digital readout above the driverless window. Maglev trains were operated completely by network, and had had only one incident in their history of close to 20 years, and that was human error, when someone tried to forcibly hold a door open for a late arriver and was ejected from the train onto the platform as it resumed its speed. It was the last time anyone had disobeyed the automated warning to allow the doors to close. As a result, the maglev system operated at a 99% reliability rate for time schedules. This train wasn’t his, so Robert returned to his incognito posture, leaning casually against a pillar in the center of the station.
He thought about Landon, who he’d just talked into joining a mission that had lots of questions – and likely, danger – surrounding it. He knew that if he’d had more time, he would’ve handled the conversation very differently. The timing of everything that was happening was terrible. Although, he reasoned, there wasn’t any optimal time for it. This Eden mission had been planned behind the scenes for so long, and suddenly it was in front of them. Robert, himself, was probably more prepared than the others – except for Keegan, of course, who’d been passive-aggressively advocating, once he’d learned the idea had been contemplated – but they hadn’t had the time to even raise it with the appropriate political leaders. Even to discuss it among their own team. Which was usually an important component of building a mission: that everyone had to be working from the same playbook. There were detractors among them, starting with Claire. He didn’t know where Landon’s thoughts were. And then, Chester Davies volunteered himself to go with them. They were being incredibly haphazard, setting themselves up for failure.
Worse, no one had any idea what failure meant.
Now, he had to go face the person who was the most adamantly opposed to the mission altogether. To get his “advice.”
When Robert had received the message from Dipin Chopra up in Reilly’s conference room, he hadn’t been expecting it, but at the same time it hadn’t surprised him. He was well-aware of the circumstances of Dipin’s departure from the program, and how the Eden mission had been at the center of the discussion. To his credit, Dipin had kept the most intimate details of the situation to himself, as his home nation of India would’ve surely had a negative response to the real reasoning behind why Dipin was “stepping away” from the program. But he went quietly. Actually, he went too quietly, because the day after they bid him goodbye, he went missing. No one knew where he’d gone, or had seen or heard from him since. Until tonight, when the message on Robert’s timeband had asked him to meet at an off-campus location that only he and Dipin knew of as a rendezvous. The message hadn’t revealed who the sender was, but they’d worked together long enough that Robert knew.
Another train pulled quietly into the station and halted. This one, which read “HIGH POINT” on the front, was his. When the door opened, he slipped inside to find a car that was about half-full, and grabbed a seat in one of the corners, as far away from people as he could get. He knew his disguise was not intricate, and it wouldn’t take much staring for someone to realize it was him. With his current press coverage, anyone noticing him might be looking at him through a different lens than usual.
As the maglev sped out of the complex and quickly past the suburban-like neighborhood that SATP had spawned, Robert’s mind wandered to the attorney general and the argument that he would make in the morning when the lynch mob came to arrest him. It was good logic for someone who wanted to shut down the program, certainly. If the AG came into SATP and accused Robert of various bad things that had happened throughout history, they had to look no further than the records of their time travel history to get a comprehensive list of dozens of high-profile destinations he’d visited. The argument that their mission was always only to observe and report would not fly, because there was no way to prove that’s what they did on these missions. There would be little argument he could make that could be substantiated. It was a wildly clever strategy.
He reminded himself that the ride would not be long, and not wanting to miss his stop, he glanced out the window t
o see Greensboro’s primary luxury shopping area zipping past his view. He heard a tone from the maglev’s system and the train slid to a stop. The door opened, and Robert quietly darted out and onto the platform.
“Robert?” he heard a voice call from his right, and did everything in his power not to look. “Robert Mulvaney?”
He noticed a few other people on the platform looking around to see where Robert Mulvaney was, but kept his head down and plodded forward, not ever looking back to see who’d called him.
At this station, the maglev track was three stories above ground. Rather than get stuck in an elevator with any curious onlookers, Robert took the stairs down to ground level. Here, the finer stores in the plaza maintained self-driving hover taxis to bring shoppers from the maglev directly to their own front doors as expediently as possible, so they could begin spending in their establishment and not someone else’s. Again, not wanting to have to engage in friendly banter with anyone that could turn into an “I saw Robert Mulvaney” social media photo that would then attract actual media to his location, Robert decided to foot it across the parking lot to the array of stores, even though it was a hike.
As it usually was, the parking lot was full of a mix of wheeled and hover vehicles. The economy the past couple decades since SATP had set up shop in Greensboro had been excellent, and people had money to spend. While people’s conversion from wheeled to hover vehicles was happening slowly across the country, few communities had the rapid influx of the newer driving mode as Greensboro, which rivalled the top metropolitan areas such as New York and Phoenix. The installation of the hover vehicle assembly plant in Winston-Salem helped, too, but that only came after SATP had changed the face of the region.
When he reached Marroni, a store that was rarely on his shopping itinerary, if ever, he meandered into the men’s department and began sorting through ties, accessories he saw as completely unnecessary, that for some reason were making a fashion comeback. He’d worn one for a costume party once, and it had been the most uncomfortable three hours of his life. Keegan wore these awful things sometimes, and Robert poked fun at him whenever he did.
"My father would not approve of what you’re doing,” he heard an accented voice say.
Robert laughed, without turning to see the person behind him who had spoken. “Yes, he would’ve.”
A pause. “Well, yes, perhaps. But he wouldn’t approve of the way you’re doing it.”
“No, I think you’re right on that one.” Now, he turned to see Dipin Chopra standing behind him, intensely assessing casual belts. Only, like him, Dipin was in a cheap disguise, sporting dark-rimmed glasses, a fedora and facial hair that he’d never had before. “How are you, Dipin?”
“Better than you, I understand,” he said.
“Oh, I’ll be fine.”
“In a federal prison,” Dipin said, pulling a black leather belt from the rack and wrapping it around his waist for size. “Yes, that sounds like a wonderful time.”
“Well, I guess you can only live the high life for so long before it catches up with you. You knew this was coming, didn’t you?”
“No,” Dipin said, stopping his charade for a moment and standing thoughtfully. “No, I didn’t think this is where it would end up. But I knew SATP couldn’t go on forever like it was.”
“Why not?”
“You are unchecked, Robert,” he said. “Reilly is running the program like he is God. And you are his disciples, doing his bidding.”
Robert shook his head. “That’s a little-”
“Is it? Am I being melodramatic?” Dipin looked at him through his strange glasses. “I have watched the program transform from a haven of scientific analysis to the Guinness Book of Time Travel Records. When I started with the program, there was a purpose for every mission we undertook. Every destination, every time period, all had a specific meaning that would help us understand more about who we are and where we came from.”
“And when did that change?” Robert asked. “That’s exactly the purpose-”
“You know the answer to that question,” Dipin said. Robert didn’t, actually. “It changed when they decided to send you to Egypt.”
“How so?”
Another man wandered into their section and began looking through the underwear. They paused their conversation and resumed their shopping charade for a moment while he strolled through. After a few minutes, he moved on.
“Because the Egypt mission was not the next stage in the program,” Dipin continued.
“Sure, it was.”
“It was not, because we hadn’t finished our research on a half-dozen missions before that. Our mission protocol was always the same – the team leader would make an exploratory mission, and then the research team would follow. When did the research team follow you to Plymouth? When did they go to Johannesburg? When did they go to Helsinki? You did, but they didn’t.” Dipin stopped himself and looked around – his voice was getting to be too loud. He took a breath. “They didn’t. Reilly began to push one project after another forward, without completing the one before it. Promising to get back to them. For him to now push Eden to the forefront, especially in a time of crisis, is exactly what’s wrong with this program.”
“Dipin, I sat through a lot of meetings with you, and I never heard you enunciate your concerns like this,” Robert said. “Why did you hold back on this? It’s a good argument.”
“Because I was told to.”
“You were told to? By who? Reilly?”
Dipin looked down at the ground. “It does not make me happy to say this,” he said. “I was told by my country.”
Robert motioned with his head for Dipin to follow him, leading him to the dress shirts. They reconvened as Robert picked up a prop – a light purple shirt that he found he actually liked.
The move to the other part of the store served two purposes: one, it helped keep them from standing out; and, two, it gave him a moment to think about what Dipin had just said. He tried to organize several pieces of an incomplete puzzle in his head, and then just came out with his question. “Why would your sponsors stop you from challenging Reilly?” But the answer came to him as he was speaking. “Ahhh, because while you didn’t see this coming, they knew. They knew that the President was going to make his move on the program and didn’t want you to get in the way of it.”
“Go on,” Dipin said.
“Go on where? Why would they care what the President does? They’re supporters of the program.”
“Time travel was created by an Indian national who, after he developed the technology obtained dual citizenship in India and the United States, at which point the United States took control of the program – a program it has run for nearly 20 years. If the President shuts down the program-”
“Then India would be the natural choice to restart it,” Robert said. While he considered himself reasonably good at them, he despised politics. “If you had raised the issue about the program, Reilly would’ve been reprimanded, and probably removed, and the program would’ve been fixed.”
“Yes,” Dipin said. “The best thing for India was to let the program spiral out of control. Reilly is making it happen without any prompting.”
Robert exhaled, which he hadn’t done since Dipin had started walking him through the scenario. “That’s why you left? Wait – did you leave because you were supportive of India’s position, or did you oppose?”
Dipin laughed, but it was a serious laugh. “I left because they tried to kill me, Robert.”
“What?” How could he not have known that?
“Are you surprised?” All Robert could do was nod. “I was quietly expressing my concerns about the program, and one day when I’d thankfully gone up to the roof to think, I came back to find my apartment destroyed. I decided that my best option was to make my retirement from SATP public, which turned out to be the right choice. Just in time.”
Robert was shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Dipin. I had no idea.”
“How could you?” he asked, then paused. “My concern has always been, and will always be, my father’s concern: the security of the technology. There have been politics from the beginning of society up until this very minute. But all of history should not fall victim to the politics of today.”
“Why did you tell us that the Eden mission was the reason you were so aggravated?”
“It was, in a way,” Dipin said. “Wouldn’t you agree? The program has become unpredictable under its current leadership, and I was uncertain what will happen when someone tries to stop it. Unfortunately, now we know.”
He leaned in close and lowered his voice. “Was it Reilly?”
Dipin shook his head. “I don’t know, and I’m not one to cast accusation when I don’t have all of the facts. At this point, all I know about General Reilly is that he’s a poor leader, who’s lost sight of science in favor of his ambition.”
That was tough for Robert to hear, as he and Reilly went back many years, and he considered him a friend. Dipin wasn’t wrong, but Robert knew that any ambition Reilly was displaying might not have been solely his own. “Where’s the new guy come in?” he asked. “He was hand-chosen by….” He tailed off, suddenly not certain of the answer.
“… an agreement between India and the President,” Dipin finished Robert’s sentence for him.
“And he’s meant to do what? If India’s intent is to pick up the pieces, why would they make a deal with the President?” He was more thinking out loud than asking.
“To force the Eden mission?”
Robert shook his head. “It can’t be all about some random paper he wrote. That’s ludicrous. They couldn’t have predicted that Reilly’s response to the Attorney General’s announcement would be to fire up the Eden mission. In fact, they don’t even know that’s what he’s doing. Or, do they?”
“Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. It will be a big surprise to many people. But Dr. Tripathi’s appointment is directly tied to India’s role in the program. I have no doubt in that. Who knows what deals people make behind closed doors?”
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