Countdown to Armageddon

by Edward M. Lerner

Until one thrust met only with air. Taken by surprise, the stick slid from her grasp to clatter on an unseen stone floor. “There is a cave back there!”

  “Great!” he answered, trying to sound enthusiastic. So much for his plans. Harry knew better than to try diverting a determined Julia. He squeezed past her, then strained to hold back a wall of undergrowth almost thick enough to constitute a hedge. “See anything now?”

  In answer, she plunged past him into a dark opening, reaching into her backpack for her flashlight as she went.

  “Wait, dammit. There could be wild animals in there. I promised to take care of you, but you don’t make it easy.” Grumbling, he shrugged the pack from his shoulder and dug for their camp lantern. Once he had it lit, he wormed through the bushes after her.

  The glow of the lantern revealed only a modest grotto and a sadly disappointed Julia. She stood, her shoulders slumped, in the center of the small subterranean space. “Nothing.”

  “You’ve got to think positively. Isn’t there something we can salvage from this experience?”

  “Right.” She turned to leave. “Like what?”

  “Well I, for one, have never done it underground.”

  He took her raised eyebrow as a yes.

  “Ouch, dammit!” Harry moved cautiously from Julia’s side. Their jackets did not cover the ledge, and his bare buttock brushed bare stone. It was cold.

  “Harry?” She sat up in alarm.

  “Dunno. I put my damned foot into something in the double-damned dark and maybe broke a toe.” He also scraped his shin when he moved so quickly. He reached for her flashlight.

  “Keep your mind on your work, big boy.”

  That wasn’t an invitation he would ordinarily ignore, but something was odd. He tuned out the throbbing in his toe, wondering what. A scraping noise? Maybe. Rock against rock? He didn’t think so. Harry scooted down the ledge to where his foot had slipped. The flashlight revealed what had to be a cavity in the rock. He had kicked something big and heavy in there.

  With tremendous willpower, he ignored it when Julia grabbed him. He aimed the flashlight at the hole and peered inside.

  Words failed him; he managed only a choking noise. He dropped the flashlight. Glass shattered and the light went out. The hissing camp lantern behind them seemed to cast more shadows than light.

  “Are you all right?” Julia pressed her naked body against his back. It was for shelter, he knew, not amorousness.

  “I honestly don’t know. Get the lantern and tell me exactly what you see in that opening.”

  She returned with the lamp. Side by side, they stared at the sealed pot that Harry’s foot had sent skidding across the stone floor. Writing had been etched into the baked clay, but the dust of untold centuries nearly filled the grooves.

  After a long while, Julia read the words aloud, and Harry breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn’t crazy. The big, block letters spelled out, in what looked precisely like Harry’s own handwriting:

  PUT YOUR PANTS ON, HARRY. THIS IS SERIOUS.

  The ungainly pottery object sat in the glade to which they had retreated. They studied it, wondering what to do next. When Harry summoned the courage to comment on the stylusmanship, so like his own messy scrawl, Julia readily agreed. She also volunteered, quite unnecessarily, that the asymmetric vessel was ugly enough to have been one of his handicrafts.

  “Should we open it?”

  Julia laid a hand on his arm. Despite the warmth of the afternoon, her hand was icy even through his sleeve. “It was clearly meant for you. You’ll have to decide.”

  A gray, waxy substance glued the lid to the pot. He scraped the sealant with his pocketknife. He worked slowly, meticulously, clearing away every trace of the substance. With a silent prayer to Murphy, he pried under the lid with the knife’s main blade.

  The lid rose with the grinding noise of ill-fitting parts. But Murphy was not so easily appeased. The lid cracked, and a piece fell inside. The shard landed hard on something inside; they heard clearly the sound of something go clink. A puff of dust rose.

  “Flashlight.” He held out his hand. Nurselike, she slapped his flashlight—hers having been broken in the cave—into his palm. It stung. “A little less enthusiasm, please.” He clicked on the light and directed the beam inside.

  Dust and what looked like confetti floated in the air within the vessel. He waited for the flotsam to settle and clear his view. It did, and there was nothing inside but a slab of baked clay atop a layer of . . . what? Age-crumbled paper?

  He reached in and felt gently; he had the creepy sense that he was stirring mummy dust. A flake of paper stuck to his hand. It bore handwriting, faded almost to illegibility.

  Almost to illegibility. The bit he’d retrieved carried the words “tell Julia that . . . ” once again in his handwriting. He held it out for her to see. She shivered even before a gust of wind blew the ancient paper into dust. Paper? He didn’t think so. It had felt too thick for paper, but he had no idea what else it might be.

  No one—not even they—had known they would be here. They hiked at random, had come here only by chance. Certainly, Julia had found the cave only by dumb luck. How, and by whom, had the pot have been placed there, clearly meant for him?

  The papery fragments were too fragile to remove outdoors, prey to any errant gust of wind. He carefully removed the clay tablet, its surface inscribed with rows of tiny letters.

  Near one edge of the tablet something glittered: a gold band half-embedded in the clay. The mate of that ring shone on his left hand. The clay was cracked where the ring had been forced into the slab; Harry used his knife once more to free the ring. Numb with astonishment, he wiped its inside surface clear of dust. He felt engraving. Without reading it, he knew what was etched there, for surely it matched the single word on his own wedding band: Forever.

  Julia took the clay tablet from his shaking hands. She read each word aloud, slowly and carefully, as though mere elocution could somehow dispel the mystery.

  If only it could.

  Night fell, and finally they stirred.

  Ever so carefully, Harry replaced the lid of the pottery vessel. He would, as the tablet urged, have a bit of the papyrus carbon-dated for age to confirm the ancient origin of the . . . time capsule.

  Affirmation was not really needed. They both believed. Belief was key, since the full story would never be known. Could never be known. The seal meant to protect the papyrus had failed over the centuries, and the full story had been recorded only on the papyrus. The tablet offered only a safety synopsis.

  Julia had made a campfire, but the crackling flames did nothing to dissipate the chill. How much they’d never know . . . He sat beside Julia and put his arm around her.

  “Will you do it?” she asked.

  “Make the call?”

  She nodded.

  “Yes.” Harry gestured at the time capsule. “I feel certain that I owe it to him.”

  Harry and Julia spent the night near the cave. Neither slept much.

  When Harry woke from a troubled sleep, he had the nagging sense of something left undone. He replayed yesterday’s events in his mind, over and over.

  Ah.

  The slab of pottery that another version of him had somehow, somewhen, engraved with directions . . . it had a broken corner.

  Harry reopened the strange pottery vessel. He rocked it gently. Nothing. He shook it again, harder. Something came unstuck, rattled around. He picked it out from under the papyrus fragments.

  An irregularly shaped shard of baked clay sat on his palm. Without a doubt, the jagged edge matched the broken corner of the writing-covered tablet.

  Lost in concentration, he did not notice Julia creep up behind him. She gave a cry of surprise at the marvel in his hand. The hunk of clay held another piece of jewelry, this time one not familiar.

  It was a m
assive gold ring, carved with what he could only describe as barbaric exuberance. A single, huge emerald occupied its center. Letters, this time done by an unknown hand in an archaic script, surrounded the stone. He handed the treasure to Julia. For a long time, neither of them spoke. At last, Harry broke the silence.

  “Who, do you suppose, was Arnulf?”

  PART V

  History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.

  —Winston S. Churchill

  CHICAGO, 2003

  A preoccupied Harry Bowen tilted back in his office chair, its front legs aloft. His own legs rested at the calves on the random clutter that obscured his desktop. His dangling, shoeless feet wiggled to the heavy-metal beat from his Walkman. Sleet rattled on the window. A Nature article on superconductivity held his complete interest.

  Someone rapped gently on the frame of the open door. No response. He knocked harder. “Dr. Bowen?”

  The unscheduled visitor had a British accent. Without looking up, Harry replied. “Inspector Ambling, I presume.”

  NEAR METZ, 2004

  “Stay here.” Without a backward glance, Inspector Ambling slammed the door, leaving Harry and two operatives alone in the main security center of the Rothschild Institute.

  Harry scanned the screens of the closed-circuit surveillance system. Interpol had been on stakeout here for days, watching the institute and waiting for the anticipated plutonium delivery. Nothing on the monitors looked out of the ordinary to Harry. Perhaps Ambling had been summoned over his earphone.

  The call to Interpol’s tip line was meant to handle everything. Harry had recorded key details from the otherwhen tablet—the linkage between Faisel and Hezbollah, and the delivery to the institute of missing Russian plutonium—and imagined the matter closed. Only later did it occur to him that calls to the tip line might be traced.

  Now Harry gave his subconscious credit. It had shown foresight, not carelessness.

  Interpol had revealed nothing to the public about stolen Russian plutonium. Harry knew: He had done a fairly thorough Google search. Why would they publicize its recovery?

  This way, he would know when the plutonium had been recovered. After so many years, he would welcome the sense of closure.

  Ambling appeared on the monitor that showed the institute’s main entrance. A van had pulled up, its driver chatting with the guard who stood in the gatehouse. Terrence made the subtle hand gesture that Harry now knew meant “stay alert.” The plan was to let the delivery proceed, recover the plutonium, arrest Faisel, and unobtrusively follow the delivery vehicle to other members of the plot.

  Something—it wasn’t clear what—spooked the van driver. He threw the van into reverse. An unmarked car peeled off a shoulder of the main road to block the driveway. The car was too late; the accelerating van grazed the car’s front bumper and set it spinning. The van kept going, skidded backward onto the highway, and sped off.

  Shots rang out from the woods around the institute, a few at first, then more, and quickly a torrent. Hezbollah? Ambling threw himself flat. Glass flew from the gatehouse and the spun-out car. The guard hung out a shattered window, surely dead. SUVs appeared from nowhere and gave chase. The gunfire redoubled, with institute guards and Interpol agents blasting back at the woods. There was the whap-whap-whap of a rotor overhead, and all hell broke loose: It was a helicopter gunship.

  The firefight seemed endless, but when the shooting tapered off and finally stopped, Harry saw it had lasted only a few minutes. Sirens wailed in the distance. Another helicopter went over. He wondered if the terrorists had gotten away.

  Terrence walked into the control room, rumpled but unharmed, cell phone in hand. “We have the van, cargo included, and the driver will live. Somehow, in the chaos, our friend Dr. Faisel disappeared. He won’t get far. Roadblocks are going up, and we’ve put out an all-points bulletin.”

  Damn the Firanji! Long after the gunfire had ended, Abdul Faisel stood stock-still in the utility closet whose door he had closed behind himself. The plutonium was as good as gone. His bomb was not to be. He, surely, was a hunted man.

  And yet, surely all was as Allah willed. The bomb was irretrievably gone, but another part of his project had been completed.

  Carefully, silenced pistol in hand, he cracked opened the closet door. Through the slit only two policemen were visible, their attention for the moment on cluttered workbenches. The double doors to the hall were closed.

  Pfft, pfft. Two quiet shots; two bodies down.

  He changed the access code on the laboratory door lock and got to work.

  Harry waited in an unmarked car as Inspector Ambling handled “one last bit” of follow-up. It was the fourth promised “one last bit” before he could take Harry to his hotel—unless Harry had lost count. Ambling was a decent enough guy. Harry guessed he would like the man under less intense circumstances.

  But now that everything was over, Harry wanted to be with Julia, not here. With his right hand, he spun his wedding band around his left ring finger.

  Spin, spin . . . stop.

  Harry studied his hands. Prominent on his right hand was the bulky and priceless ring of Arnulf, the token of otherwhen.

  He and Julia had spent years trying to make sense of the time capsule and its contents. Only one theory was self-consistent: As implausible as it seemed, a still-future version of Harry had gone into the past. It must occur after the plutonium heist, after now, or else there would have been no need for now Harry to warn Interpol.

  So past Harry (who was also future Harry . . . his head hurt to think about it) had traveled into history to follow Faisel and his bomb, then sent the time capsule to present-day Harry.

  He had notified Interpol. The plutonium was recovered. That should, he and Julia surmised, heal the timeline. So how could the anachronistic ring remain on his hand?

  Oh!

  Faisel, still at large, might yet travel to the past. Arnulf’s ring on Harry’s finger said that Faisel would go back, and that Harry remained destined to follow.

  He had to find a way to break the loop . . . if he wasn’t already too late.

  Harry bolted from the car. “Where’s Faisel’s lab?” he shouted to an institute security guard as he ran.

  “Basement, north side.”

  He burst through the front doors, sprinted down the stairs, and bounced painfully off the lab doors. Locked! He shattered the glass front of a fire-ax case with a fire extinguisher, seized the ax, and with it hacked open the lab’s doors.

  In pools of blood, two agents lay still on the floor. He saw no sign of Faisel, but who else would have killed them?

  There was a rising hum.

  It came from the large wire-wrapped apparatus across the lab. Cryogenically cooled cables linked the device to what appeared to be a superconducting magnet. Did the cable tap into the institute’s famed superconducting storage ring?

  “Too late.” The taunt, in French, came from inside the apparatus. “And that’s 18, 17 . . . ”

  Harry’s mind spun. The clay tablet had not described the time machine, but this must be it. Release all the energy from the storage ring instantaneously; apply the energy/time version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

  Even without a nuke, Faisel could rewrite history. Assassination of Karl Martel might be less dramatic than nuclear immolation of his army. Would it be as effective? And unlike the climax of a major military camp
aign, a personal attack could happen at any time. It would be even harder to predict and to stop—especially if Faisel took back a gun.

  The risk must be too high. The ring on his hand proved that future Harry still went back.

  “9, 8, 7 . . . ”

  Harry saw no controls, nothing to disable. They must be inside. The only visible power source was the connection to the storage ring; severing that would unleash unimaginable energies.

  But what choice did he have?

  His hands still clenched the ax. Harry raised it over his head and took a deep breath. Arnulf’s ring glittered.

  “4, 3 . . . ” Faisel exulted.

  What if the energy discharge were unbalanced?

  “2, 1 . . . ”

  He brought down the ax in a raking blow along one edge of the wire-wrapped enclosure.

  Blinding light and irresistible force filled the room. Harry was unconscious before he crashed into the wall behind him.

  EPILOGUE

  Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

  —William Shakespeare

  METZ, 2004

  Consciousness returned.

  “Where am I?” Harry must only have thought the question. His second try came out in a feeble, inarticulate croak.

  “You’re awake!” Julia bent over him and softly kissed his cheek. “Take it easy. You’re in a hospital in Metz.”

  “Why?” The casts on both legs and an arm had to be part of the answer.

  She gave him an odd stare. “An accident at the Rothschild Institute.”

  He thought about that for a moment. “I remember intending to visit while we were in the area. But what happened?”

  “The police say you ran into the building and broke into a locked lab, apparently trying to save someone inside. They found you with a fire ax in your hands.” She brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. “Does any of this ring a bell?”

  He found the control for the hospital bed and cranked the top of the bed more upright. “Not really. How is the person from the lab?”