Terrorists. A terrorist’s bomb brought the plane down. Chuck had told her about it. He’d warned her. But she’d done nothing. She’d called no one.
And over three hundred people had died.
Maggie did a U-turn, tires squealing, heading for Tia’s.
Chuck saw Maggie pull up outside of the restaurant. She was driving much too fast, and he knew she was here because she’d heard the news reports about Flight 450.
He went out on the sidewalk to meet her.
As he moved into the late-afternoon sunshine he was struck again, as he had been repeatedly since yesterday, by the sense of freedom he felt. For the first time in years he was able to go wherever he pleased without a pair of bodyguards watching his back.
“I tried to warn them,” he told Maggie before she could say even a word. “I remembered it was World Airlines, and I called them right after you left last night, but the jet had already departed from Kennedy Airport. I was too late.”
“How did you know?” she asked. There was suspicion in her eyes, and her face was almost ashen.
“I told you how I knew,” he said quietly, aware that the clerk from the nearby convenience store had come out onto the sidewalk to have a cigarette and was eyeing them curiously. “Why don’t you come inside, and I’ll buy you a drink. You look as if you could use something.”
She backed away from him. “You knew because you’re one of them. You’re one of the terrorists who planted that bomb.”
“Oh, come on. You don’t believe that. That’s ridiculous.”
“And your claim that you’re a time traveler isn’t …?”
She did a double take then, as if really looking at him for the first time. The Santa Claus pants and makeshift sandals were gone. Her eyes were wide as she took in his jeans, his nearly brand-new polo shirt, and the expensive leather of the new cowboy boots he’d picked up just this morning. He knew he looked a lot different from the wild-eyed man who’d pounded on her door just over twenty-four hours ago.
“Where did you get those clothes?”
“I’m not a terrorist,” he told her. “In fact, my phone call to World Airlines saved lives. The way it really happened—the way I remember it happening the first time around—the bomb didn’t go off until the plane was coming in for a landing. It took out an entire terminal at Heathrow. Five hundred people on the ground died, as well as the three hundred and forty-two passengers on the plane.”
“Where did you get those clothes?”
He could tell from the look in her eyes that she wasn’t buying any of this. Okay. They’d start small. They’d start with his clothes.
“That was easy. I went home. To Charles’s home. I know where I used to hide the key, and his clothes are all my size—because I’m him. This shirt is a color I never liked—I won’t miss it. The jeans I’ve already missed. I remember that I wondered what happened to them. See, there’s this strange memory thing that happens when you change the past. You get something called residual memories and—”
“Just stop!” she said fiercely. “Stop with the time-travel crap. I want to know who you really are. I want to know the truth.”
“Maggie, I swear, I’ve told you nothing but the truth.”
Maggie spun away from him, heading toward the pay phone that was under the overhang of the convenience-store roof. “That’s it. I’m calling the police.”
He caught her arm. “Don’t. Please. I didn’t have anything to do with that plane crash. I was just trying to show you that I am from the future by telling you what was going to happen.”
Maggie was scared. She didn’t know what to think, what to do. She wanted this out of her hands. This man looked so normal, dressed in jeans and a casual faded-green polo shirt. His hair was neatly combed and his chin was smooth from a recent shave. He didn’t look like any kind of a madman today. He looked like the kind of man who would stand out in a crowd—the kind of man she’d make an effort to meet face-to-face.
Well, she was face-to-face with him right now, all right.
“Let go of me or I’ll scream,” she whispered.
“Two more days,” Chuck said. His gaze was steady but no less intense as he looked into her eyes. “Please, Mags. Give me just two more days to change your mind.”
She shook her head. “Two days isn’t going to make a difference in the way I feel.”
“Yes, it will. I remembered something else that happened. The news came just two days after the reports of the downed jet.”
She closed her eyes. “Oh, please, don’t tell me anyone else is going to die—”
“Not if I can help it,” he told her. “I already called the seismology center in California, telling them to release a warning. There’s going to be an earthquake—a pretty bad one. The epicenter’s in Whittier. The reports should be coming in right about this time on Sunday.” He smiled then, a slight twisting of his lips. “Even you’ve got to admit that there’s no way I could be responsible for an earthquake.”
Maggie stood in her living room, staring at the television.
An earthquake. The TV news anchors were reporting an earthquake, just the way the madman had said. Exactly the way he had said.
The epicenter was in Whittier. The quake registered a 6.2 on the Richter scale.
Amazingly, the news anchors reported, as far as they knew at this point, no one had been killed or even badly injured. Apparently, an unidentified caller had predicted the quake. Since this was California, they said with a smile, and conditions for an earthquake had been right, the caller had been taken seriously enough for them to use the emergency broadcast system to warn the city’s residents.
Oddly enough, the call was traced to a pay phone in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, of all places.
Maggie slowly sat down, right in the middle of her living-room floor.
She’d spent the entire weekend trying to work, but barely able to. She’d kept coming back to the TV and the news reports of the plane crash. To the pictures of the people who had lost their lives when the terrorists’ bomb had gone off.
But now the screen was filled with live video footage taken during the earthquake.
The madman had accurately predicted the future not once but twice.
The madman very likely wasn’t mad at all.
The telephone rang. Maggie wasn’t a time traveler from the future herself, but she knew exactly who was on the other end.
She crawled across the carpeting to her coffee table and pressed the mute button on the remote control as she picked up her cordless phone.
“Where are you?” she asked. “We need to talk.”
“I’m at Tia’s,” Chuck’s soft baritone voice told her. “I was hoping you’d let me come by.”
Maggie looked at the soundless pictures of the earthquake’s destruction on the TV. A road had been nearly ripped in half, the blacktop crumpled and folded.
“I’d rather meet you at the restaurant,” she told him.
He didn’t hesitate. “Fair enough. I’ll get a table for dinner.”
“Order me a tequila,” Maggie said. “I think I’m going to need one.”
· · ·
“I called it the Wells Project,” Chuck said.
“As in H. G. Wells?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I’d been working on the theory for years—literally since I was a kid. But it wasn’t until a little more than three years from now that I came up with the breakthrough equation.
“I got approval from Data Tech to run with it, but when the time came to actually build the Runabout, we had to look outside the company for funding.” He frowned down at the last of the refried beans that remained on his plate. His cheese enchilada was long gone. “That’s when I was approached by Wizard-9.”
“They’re really called Wizard-9?”
Chuck had to smile at Maggie’s expression of disbelief. “Yeah, they’re really called Wizard-9. It’s a pretty powerful organization. Covert too. And dangerous as hell. Not even the president himself
knew about this group. Or if he knew about them, he didn’t know what they had planned, that was for sure.”
He took a deep breath. “Anyway, they provided Data Tech—and me—with the money necessary to build the Runabout in return for the right to regulate use of the device. They told me that time travel could be a deadly weapon, and without regulation, there was always the possibility that terrorists or criminals could get their hands on the Runabout and change the course of history. I suspected they were interested in more than regulating the project, but I let myself be blind to that. All I cared about was making the Wells Project a reality.”
He stopped himself from drumming his fingers on the table before he even started. All this was his fault. He’d let Wizard-9 get involved. He was responsible for everything that happened as a result of that. He was responsible for all those deaths, for Maggie’s death.…
“Turns out that the agents from Wizard-9 were the terrorists,” he told her grimly. “They used the Runabout without my authorization to go back in time and set a bomb at the White House. The president, the vice president … everyone was killed.”
“How did you know?” Maggie frowned. “I mean, if the agents from Wizard-9 didn’t tell you they were going back in time, how could you even know that everything didn’t happen the way it was supposed to happen? How did you know they were responsible?”
“I probably wouldn’t have known, if I hadn’t been doing experimentation in something that I called ‘double memories.’” Chuck pushed his plate forward as he explained. “I just ate a cheese enchilada, right?”
She glanced down at his plate and nodded.
“You have a memory of me eating that cheese enchilada. If you were paying close attention, you probably have a memory of me burning my tongue. You have a memory of sitting across from me, eating your black-bean soup and a salad. You remember the waitress—the scent of her perfume, perhaps. You have memories of all those things, right?”
She nodded again, her gaze never leaving him as she tried to follow where he was leading. He liked having her full attention. It had been a long time. The Maggie from his time had been distracted and unhappy for the past few years as she struggled to make her failing marriage work. But this was before all that. This was before she married that fool. This was before she discovered that the sizzling attraction that sparked every time she looked in Chuck’s eyes wasn’t what she wanted.
“Now, suppose I were to go into the men’s room and sneak out the window to the alley where I supposedly keep my Runabout. And suppose I were to travel back in time just an hour or so,” Chuck told her, “where I would intercept you on your way into Tia’s and take you somewhere else—like up to the Pointe—for dinner. Suppose I order a couple of steaks and baked potatoes and we eat that. I changed history, right? Steaks and potatoes replaced enchiladas and black-bean soup. But. Here’s the strange part.
“I’ve found that when time has been tampered with—and my going back in time and changing these things, as inconsequential as they seem, is time tampering—people are left with residual memories. These residual memories—or memories of how it actually happened the first time around—provide time travelers and those people affected by the time travel with double memories.
“Your most vivid memory would be of your steak and potato, but you would also remember the black-bean soup. It’d be foggy almost as if it were a dream, but it’d be back there. Double memories. Of course, since I’m the person who did the actual time traveling, both of my memories will be clear and vivid, because both events actually happened to me.”
She nodded. “That makes sense.”
“If you concentrate, you may be able to find a residual memory of what you did immediately after you heard about the earthquake the first time around.”
Maggie closed her eyes for a moment, frowning slightly. When she opened her eyes, they were wide with surprise. “I stayed home and watched the news all night,” she said. “Oh, that’s so weird.”
“That’s right.” Chuck gestured around them at the restaurant. “This isn’t the way it originally happened, so you have double memories both of being home alone, and of spending the night with me.”
Her eyes flashed as she met his gaze, but she looked away immediately, and he realized the implications of what he’d said. He’d meant evening, not night. Spending the evening with him. Still, she didn’t seem overly averse to his inadvertent suggestion that they spend the night together, and he felt a familiar hot flare of desire at the thought. God, he’d wanted her for so long.
He had to clear his throat before he spoke again. “A double memory can be so distant and dreamlike, I might not have noticed it if I hadn’t been researching the phenomenon. But I knew something was wrong the morning that I woke up and turned on the TV and heard the first of the news reports about the White House bombing. I had a residual memory of that same morning that was very different. I could remember that I got up, turned on the TV while my coffee machine did its thing, and I felt disgusted by the lack of hard news. The biggest story even on CNN was the birth of some pop singer’s baby. I still had that memory, and that’s how I knew that time tampering was responsible for the assassination. And I knew it was the work of Wizard-9. They were the only ones besides me who had access to the Wells Project.”
She was still watching him intently, her chin tucked into the palm of one hand. “So, okay,” she said. “You’ve come back in time to change events that are going to occur in my future. But since you’re from the future, all of the changes that you’re going to make have already happened in your past. Shouldn’t you already remember them?”
Chuck shook his head. “I understand what you’re saying, but it doesn’t work that way. I can’t make one little change and know instantly how it’s going to turn out unless I return to my own time. If I were to go back to my time after making a change, I’d have a sudden rush of very vivid double memories. I’d remember all the things that had happened differently in the seven years between now and then.”
“So how will you know when you’ve made the changes you need to make?”
He gazed into her eyes. “I’ll know.”
“How? Because if you don’t know the outcome, maybe you have done all you need—”
Chuck shook his head. “Simply coming back in time isn’t enough. I need to create an event that will affect the life of my present-day self—of Charles. And as Charles does things differently, I’ll have those new double memories—but only one by one as they happen in real time.”
“Wait, you lost me.…”
Chuck shifted in his seat, leaning across the table, trying to make her understand. “Think of it on a physical level,” he said. “Look at me. I’m here, I’m whole, right? If you were to X-ray me, you’d see I’ve never had a broken bone. I’ve lived to be forty-two years old and I’m still in one piece. But if I convinced you to go and push Charles—not me, but Charles—off the sidewalk and into oncoming traffic, my own X rays would suddenly be very different. You’d probably see multiple signs of healed fractures. And I’d probably have a couple more scars to show for it, even though it didn’t happen to me. But think about it. It did happen to me, because he’s me.”
He sat back in his seat, uncertain if she understood. “Memories, even double memories, work the same way. Until I actually change the past—until I convince you to actually push me into traffic, to continue with that rather grim example—I won’t have a clue as to what’s going to happen.”
Her eyes didn’t leave his face, her gaze sharp and probing. “Most people die when you push them into oncoming traffic. You’re not here to ask me to help kill you, are you?”
Chuck considered trying to laugh her words off for about a tenth of a second, but the look in her eyes convinced him to be honest. This was Maggie he was talking to. She’d always been able to see right through him. “Actually, that’s a solution I’ve considered,” he told her seriously. “If Charles is gone, all those theories about time travel are gon
e too. It’s a quick and easy fix. But remember what I just told you. What happens to him affects me. If he’s dead, I’m dead too. I’m hoping to find another way.”
Maggie took in a deep breath, letting it out in a burst of air. “Oh, man.”
“I’m going to find another way,” Chuck told her. “The agents from Wizard-9 tried to kill me. I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing me dead—even if the only way they’d remember me was in the faintest of double memories.”
“That day you came,” Maggie said. “There was blood on you. Your shoulder …”
His shoulder had only been scraped. Most of the blood had not been his own. Chuck took a sip of his soda. “I went to Data Tech that morning breathing fire, intending to use the Runabout to go back in time and prevent the bombing, but they were waiting for me.”
He reached across the table for her hand, needing to touch her to eradicate the memories. He could still see her eyes, dimming as the life seeped from her body. He couldn’t tell her all of it, but that didn’t matter. He was going to make damned sure that it happened differently this time around.
“You were there,” he whispered, “and somehow you knew they were gunning for me. You tried to warn me. You saved my life.”
“Yeah, well, saving people’s lives is one of those things I just happen to be good at—along with finding clothes for the naked time travelers who show up in my backyard.” She was trying to make light of it, but he knew she was not unaffected by the touch of his hand.
He was not unaffected either. He laced their fingers together as he took a deep breath. “I need you to help me, Maggie.”
She looked down at their hands, and then up, back into his eyes. “Okay.” She nodded. “I’ll help.”
THREE
“CHARLES NEEDS TO be convinced to give up time-travel research,” Chuck said. “I’ve been thinking about the best way to do this, and I keep coming back to you.”
Time Enough for Love Page 3