Prologue

by Greg Ahlgren

  “But what does that have to do with anything?” Paul asked.

  “There had to be something else in the pocketbook,” Lewis answered. “Something important to go back for. What could she possibly need? I assume it was some sort of radio and Natasha had the sibling?”

  Amanda shrugged. “I’ve since thrown it away.”

  “So you told Natasha I was in Dallas running an op with a defector from Russia that would involve Kennedy. You both assumed that meant that the defector was a Russian. That’s why she came down and was asking the wrong questions in the émigré community,” Ginter said. “And after we met on Tuesday, you told her about my plan. Except you had determined that Kennedy should be shot for real, and my plan gave you two the perfect cover.”

  Paul deVere slumped to the ground and put his head in his hands. “I just can’t believe this,” he said quietly. Amanda kneeled next to him and put her arm around his shoulders.

  Paul looked up. “So, Natasha, why’d you set off the fire alarm? Is the lab on fire?”

  “I’m going to guess not,” Lewis answered for her. “That also threw me off. I assumed there either was a fire or someone wanted to make us think there was one. But what you really wanted, Natasha, was to summon firefighters and District cops to force us to use the wormhole before they arrived and arrested us.”

  “Yes,” Natasha said. “And I also needed to cover the noise of scraping along over the ceiling to that back area. Amanda is right, Professor Ginter. We underestimated you.”

  Ginter nodded. “You’re not the first Russian to have done that.”

  Paul shook his head. “You should see how he is with girlfriends who lie to him.”

  “I’m going to guess again,” Ginter continued. “You knew from Romanov’s parallel research that August 8, 2026 would open a wormhole to 1963, prior to Kennedy’s decision to pull out of Southeast Asia. And you let your Russian friend...?”

  “Igor Rostov,” Natasha answered helpfully.

  “...Rostov, hack into Amanda’s computer knowing it would trip an alarm because you had told her that her home computer was safe. And you knew that Rostov wouldn’t call for additional help because he was doing this solo to make himself look good.”

  “That was Vlad’s plan,” Natasha answered simply. She turned to Amanda. “I’m sorry, but it had to look good. You had to look panicked.”

  Paul roused himself from his hunched position. “So, are Collinson and Pomeroy still alive?”

  Ginter slowly shook his head. “Technically, they’re not born yet. But back there they were probably both in custody. Or rather they will be.”

  “But if no squisher came back,” Paul asked, “if it was just Natasha and she had the same goals as us, how’d they get caught?”

  Ginter looked at Natasha and held her gaze for a fraction of a second longer than necessary. She seemed to nod imperceptibly just before Ginter broke off eye contact to answer Paul’s question. Natasha slumped down next to Paul and squeezed his hand reassuringly.

  “I didn’t say no squisher had come back,” Ginter said. “I think we’ve been joined in our recent journey by either a squisher or a pathological liar-from Portland.”

  This time when Ginter turned toward Pamela three other sets of eyes moved with his.

  “What, what, do you mean?” Pamela stammered.

  “Eckleburg didn’t miss much. I never knew him to screw up. Why would he send someone who knew nothing about explosives to check out a bomb project?”

  “Yeah, so?” Pamela said, regaining a bit of her composure. “Maybe someone else screwed up?”

  “Or maybe he didn’t screw up. Maybe he thought you were a bomb expert because you are one.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” she exclaimed defiantly. “I told you, Arthur was the bomb expert.”

  “Whose bombs always failed. Didn’t they, Pamela?” Ginter asked. “The civil administrator in Portland, the CA recruiting center in Bangor? All failures. There wouldn’t have been enough C-4 to sink any ship in Portland Harbor. You designed those bombs, not Pomeroy. And when they did go off no one was ever injured because they had been tipped off.”

  “So, Arthur wasn’t that good at it,” Rhodes challenged defiantly. “He was a drunk. You’re connecting dots that aren’t related.”

  “Am I?” Ginter challenged. “Tell us all what you told me about how you met Arthur. You said that you had spent a weekend at your brother’s one-week time-share in New Hampshire and you met Arthur at a bar. You had driven up on a Friday and back on Sunday?”

  Pamela had a disgusted look on her face. “Yeah, so?”

  “I told you my niece had a time share at Loon Mountain. Hated it. Bad investment. A one-week time-share runs from Saturday to Saturday. You wouldn’t have been up there for a full weekend.”

  Pamela looked incredulously from one to another. “Are you believing this? You’re talking six years ago, Lewis! How the hell am I supposed to remember how long I was in some lousy condo in New Hampshire? Do you forget that I was engaged to a resister? Did you forget that? Or do you believe that I was responsible for the cops showing up early at that Chase job?”

  “You ever been to a wake, Pamela?”

  “Huh?”

  “You ever been to anyone’s wake in Maine?”

  “Of course I’ve been to a wake,” she answered indignantly. “What are you talking about?”

  Ginter discerned concern creeping into her expression.

  “Did you ever notice that when someone dies and everyone is standing around the funeral home people will say stuff based not on how close they were to the dearly departed but rather based on the angle of their relationship?”

  Ginter could tell that no one around him knew what he was talking about. He pressed on. “Let’s take a professor at MIT. Colleagues, even those that knew him for 20 years will stand around the casket and talk about his research skills. Former students will tell about stuff that happened in his classes. His adult nephew will talk about how as a kid he’d walk over to his uncle’s house every Saturday morning to ride on his pony. The professor’s girlfriend will tell about how he liked to swim naked on Saturday mornings.”

  “So?” Pamela asked. But Ginter could see the look of alarm growing.

  “What people say about the deceased depends, you see, on the angle they knew him from, not necessarily on how close they were to him. But your description of your fiancé sounded like a freakin’ obituary, right out of a file. ‘He was my fiancé and he was an environmental lawyer who once settled a big case.’ That’s what you say about a boyfriend you loved?” Lewis asked incredulously.

  Tears welled up in her eyes. “Maybe, just maybe, it’s just too painful to think of him any other way,” Pamela protested.

  Lewis was undeterred. “Was it so painful that you didn’t even refer to him by name? I’ve known lots of people who have lost spouses, boyfriends, lovers, and they always refer to them by name. ‘I was engaged to Joe, who was great.’ But you never made it personal. You told us this tearful story and never even mentioned his name.”

  “I know his name!” Pamela roared.

  “Oh sure, you remember it from the file. But you didn’t use it. And you should have known his age. When I asked you how old he was, you nearly gagged on the question. You never figured that issue coming up when you reviewed the CA file for your cover, did you?”

  “What, what do you mean?” Pamela stammered. “I told you he was my age.”

  “Correction, after you fumbled the question, I suggested that he was your age and you grabbed at it.”

  “Well, he was my age,” Pamela insisted.

  “Really?” Ginter asked. “Unfortunately for you, I knew Curt. Not close but well enough. When he was killed three years ago, he was in his mid-fifties. You’re what, 35? If I know how old he was, why didn’t you?”

  Pamela sucked in a deep breath. “I was embarrassed,” she said. “Curt was older than me and that was always an issue-”

  “Why didn’t
you know his nickname?” Ginter continued. “On the drive south after we passed New York you said you always loved the Apple and wanted to stop off and paint the town red. The same city where your fiancé supposedly was killed? C’mon! And when I worked his nickname into the next sentence you never reacted. As you stand here today, you still don’t know his nickname,” Ginter challenged.

  “And by the way,” he added. “Curt played baseball, not football.”

  Pamela dropped her eyes and nodded. “O.K., O.K., so I lied about being engaged to him. I never even met him. I had heard a lot about him from a girlfriend in Portland whose boss knew him. I just thought that if I told you that, you might accept me easier.” She looked up at them all. “You’ve all sacrificed so much and I just wanted to fit in.”

  Paul and Amanda looked back at Lewis Ginter. He sensed doubt in their faces. To his left, however, he could tell that Natasha was not taking her eyes off the Portland woman.

  “The punch,” he said simply. “When we were leaving Cambridge you dropped Igor with an open palm karate chop to the face. Pretty professional for a pamphleteer.”

  “I learned that at the Portland YWCA,” Pamela said, her voice almost a whisper.

  “They teach that one at the Academy,” Natasha said, still sitting on the ground to Ginter’s left. “I know; I had to learn it. You never told me she had dropped Igor with a flat punch. He’ll be out for over an hour.”

  Ginter sensed Natasha starting to stir and saw out of the corner of his eye that her right hand was no longer in view.

  “I never learned that at any Academy,” Pamela wailed. “I told you, I learned it in a women’s self-defense class.”

  “And is that also where you learned what Ralph Collinson looked like?” Ginter asked.

  “Huh?” Pamela asked, but her eyes held the wild look of a hunted animal.

  “You told us you came down to Boston July fourth weekend. Collinson disappeared, when?” Ginter asked, turning to Paul.

  “Before June 22,” deVere answered slowly.

  Ginter turned back to the woman. “Yet when I asked you for a description of Collinson you gave it to me. Exactly where in custody did you see him?”

  “But it was at that meeting in April, you saw me there,” Pamela protested.

  “Collinson wasn’t at that meeting,” Ginter answered evenly. “Remember?”

  Ginter took a step to his right. “You were at Dealey Plaza. You must have broken into my room at the motel and seen the plan. The sketch referred to Oswald as a patsy.” He waved his hand. “A bit impertinent, I know. Before he got shot by Ruby, Oswald was on TV, saying that he was just a patsy. Where’d he learn that from? From you?” Ginter demanded.

  Rhodes looked wildly from one to the other. “I was in your room,” she stammered. “But only because I wanted to help. I wanted to do something and you weren’t telling me what was going on.”

  Paul deVere cleared his throat. “It’s true,” he said. “Oswald called himself a patsy. And Lewis called him that to me and Amanda.”

  “You called him a patsy,” Rhodes cried, indicating Ginter. “You had even written it down.”

  “But I never told him that,” Ginter said evenly. “Only if someone saw the plan and talked to Oswald would Oswald use that word.”

  Ginter turned full to Rhodes. “When I last saw you in Dallas you had crossed the street and were out of view. The plan said we would be on the fifth floor. You climbed up to the fifth floor to find Oswald, didn’t you?” he demanded.

  “You’re crazy,” she croaked, but her voice was only a whisper.

  “From the plan you would know that the second bullet was charged. You know explosives and knew what would happen. You knew that our plan was to not kill Kennedy and you told Oswald that. The Mannlicher never blew up and Oswald got off three shots. They only found three shell casings and two unused cartridges. That’s five. What happened to the loaded one? When I ran down the stairs did I pass you as I ran past the fifth floor? Had you gone in there looking for Oswald? Did you see me go by and then climb up to the sixth, knowing that Oswald was now alone? Did you tell him that he was being used as a patsy, that he had been set up? Did you empty his clip and show him the charged cartridge? Did you take it from him and race down after me, leaving an angry and hurt Oswald alone with just enough time to reload his clip? But you didn’t know about the ‘frag, did you? After you left he reloaded the clip bullet, ‘frag, bullet.”

  Ginter had moved closer to her. Rhodes clutched her pocketbook in her hands.

  “Let’s see what’s in the bag,” Ginter said softly.

  “I don’t have any exploding bullet,” Pamela wailed. “Look, I can prove it.”

  With a sudden movement she reached into her shoulder bag. Ginter realized too late what she was doing. Even as he reached under his left armpit he felt, rather than heard, two muffled thuds from the red pack to his left. Pamela jerked backwards, her right hand holding the short bladed survival knife she had yanked from her bag and was spastically attempting to slash at Ginter. She was dead before she hit the ground.

  “Jesus!” Paul exclaimed, staring at Pamela’s motionless body.

  “Why did you start that, without a gun on her?” Natasha asked Ginter matter-of-factly. “Agency grads always have a blade.”

  Ginter walked over to Pamela’s body. “Sloppy, I guess. I was Special Ops, not Intelligence, remember?”

  “Are, are you sure?” Amanda stammered, starting to sob, her arms tight around Paul deVere. She buried her face in his chest.

  “I am sure,” Natasha said. She stood and walked over to the body and peered down before nudging it with her foot. Two holes through Pamela’s jacket two inches apart had turned crimson and a tiny line of blood extended between them.

  “I wonder how she likes the connection of those dots?” Natasha asked tonelessly, looking at the corpse without emotion.

  “I didn’t know you could assemble it blind in a backpack,” Ginter said.

  “Not the whole thing,” Natasha said. “The ‘S’ model has a shortened barrel and a folding metal stock which I didn’t need for such a point blank shot.”

  “Are you really, really sure?” Amanda sobbed.

  Natasha nodded. “Igor’s superior, Petrovchenko, would have had someone to get around me. He always had a back-up plan. Perhaps he was suspicious of me, having seen that parts of my file were soft. Even Igor accused me of having a protector when I wouldn’t submit to him. She was Petrovchenko’s insurance.”

  “But Pamela saved us from Igor,” Amanda blubbered. “At the lab.”

  “Had to,” Ginter answered. “She knew that Natasha had disappeared from the hallway and figured out that she was already in the wormhole. She had to follow her at that point.”

  “But why not just let Igor kill us and then she could go after Natasha?” Amanda asked.

  “Rostov didn’t know who she was,” Ginter said. “And she needed us to work the Accelechron. She didn’t know how to do it and the wormhole was closing. Petrovchenko obviously didn’t trust Natasha, and so Rhodes had to follow her. And she couldn’t kill us back here because she needed us as bait to find Natasha.”

  “She must have killed that campus police officer who went missing,” Natasha added. She pointed with her toe at the serrated knife lying next to Rhodes’ body. “Probably trying to get in to see your little machine and the officer came upon her. The patrol car was found near the lab.”