Time Frame (Split Second Book 2)

by Douglas E. Richards

  “Who are you trying to kid?” said Cargill. “I was in your organization. You never found a weapons program you didn’t support. You green-lighted all of them.”

  “Did I?” replied Vargas. “Don’t focus on what I said I supported. What I pretended to push for. Focus on what actually ended up seeing the light of day. I couldn’t say I wanted to end WMD or other large-scale, high-impact weapons programs because I felt they were too horrible to be used. I’d be removed from my position. So I did the opposite. I killed off these programs claiming they weren’t horrible enough. You just accused me of this yourself. I earned a reputation as a tyrant and a warmonger, but I killed off programs without anyone knowing that this was my goal from the beginning. And through it all, I kept my job.”

  Cargill’s eyes widened as memories of his time under Vargas came rushing back. The colonel was exactly right. This is what had happened.

  Vargas had never been satisfied with the destructive potential of the worst weapons being worked on. He insisted they not be deployed until they were improved in impossible ways, or he killed the programs outright for not meeting his lethality goals.

  And Cargill had fallen for it like everyone else. Cargill had met plenty of wolves in sheep’s clothing. But he had never once considered that Vargas might be the opposite: a sheep in wolf’s clothing. It was stunning.

  “Your behavior was all a ruse,” whispered Cargill. “It’s obvious now. So of course you’d want to shut time travel down, too, no matter what it took. You want to stop Knight as much as we do.”

  “That’s right. And to stop you, also. To end the threat of this capability once and for all. I planned to act when I had you both in my sights, so to speak.”

  “What did you and Knight discuss last night?” asked Allen.

  “I told him about the dummy file you’d given me access to. The one you made up to look like Wexler’s theory.”

  “Speaking of that,” said Cargill, “how did you know it wasn’t real? You’ve never said. I wouldn’t think higher dimensional mathematics was bathroom reading material for you.”

  Vargas explained how he had run the file through a plagiarism program.

  A broad smile came over Cargill’s face. “This is just incredible,” he said to his prisoner. “So it turns out we’re of exact like mind when it comes to weapons, you and I. You’re of exact like mind with our entire management team. And you’re clever enough to kill weapons programs in such a way that no one suspects your true position on them. And clever enough to check advanced math that you have no hope of understanding. An hour ago I thought you were the world’s biggest asshole, and now I have nothing but admiration for you. And I haven’t even been drugged with T-4.”

  Vargas smiled and was clearly quite pleased.

  “So Knight wants you to deliver us to him on a silver platter,” said Cargill. “How?”

  “By either finding dirt on you, or framing you. Either way. He’s tasked me with continuing to trace out where the secrets are kept, so I can do a thorough job of burying Q5 and its tech for good.”

  “Which is what you planned to do on your own, anyway,” said Cargill.

  “Right. Once I find dirt, or manufacture it, I’m supposed to take it to Janney and get him to lure the entire senior management team out of Cheyenne Mountain.”

  “Lure us out, how?” asked Cargill.

  Vargas shrugged. “Any pretense would do. The president would just have to make it sound innocent so you wouldn’t raise your guard. He could simply tell you he wants to meet the newcomers on your team. He’s never met Aaron, Jenna, Daniel, or Nathan, so this request wouldn’t be too suspicious.”

  “And knowing when we’re traveling to meet with Janney,” said Cargill, “you can divert us into Knight’s hands. Delivering everyone he wants. Danial and Nathan for information. Aaron, Jenna, and me for revenge.”

  “Exactly. He’s thinking of framing you further from there. The president won’t know you were diverted by force. He’ll think you fled. That you went rogue and convinced the entire team to go with you. Knight can have a few key people killed in a way that makes you look responsible, to make it worse. When Janney learns that all traces of the recipe for time travel are gone, you’ll get blamed for that as well.”

  “An impressive strategy,” admitted Blake. “I assume your plan was to carry this out exactly as Knight wanted, but instead of just killing us, you’d kill him at the same time.”

  “Yes. And myself also, since this has become something I can’t avoid. Not if I want to stop him.”

  Cargill nodded thoughtfully. “Suppose I could demonstrate to you that our team shares your principles. Unambiguously. Not when you’re drugged and have to trust me, but convince you when you’re stone-cold sober. Demonstrate to you that we’ve been working toward peaceful uses of this technology, and fighting to keep it out of the hands of people who would use it as a weapon—which we thought included you. If I could prove this to you, would you join us?”

  “No question about it,” said Vargas.

  “Well, you are still under the influence of T-4,” noted Allen.

  “I’m aware,” said the colonel. “But I’ve shared my philosophy, and you know I can’t lie. If you really can convince me your philosophy is the same, why wouldn’t I be willing to join forces? Why wouldn’t I be eager to join forces?”

  Cargill exchanged glances with Blake and Allen. This couldn’t have worked out better. With Vargas in their camp, and knowing Knight’s plan, they could turn the tables. They could let Knight think he was getting the drop on them while the reverse was true. Then they could interrogate him instead of the other way around. Learn how many duplicates of himself he had made, and where they were kept. Put down this cockroach a second time, but this time do it right, make it final.

  “How do you feel about killing someone in their sleep, Aaron?” asked Cargill.

  Blake sighed. “It’s better than killing someone who can see it coming,” he replied. “I’ll take care of it right away.”

  “Thanks,” replied Cargill.

  A second version of Hank Vargas was even now in his quarters, sleeping soundly. They had broken in earlier, hit Vargas with a tranquilizer dart, and then taken him to a kettle, where they had made a single copy. They had returned the original to bed, with an extra dose of knockout drug to keep him sleeping for another six hours, and awakened the copy in the room they were now in, bound and gagged.

  If the injection of T-4 had killed the copy, they would repeat the exercise the next night, this time attempting a different kind of interrogation. In this way, they could learn what they were up against and kill the duplicate each time, leaving Vargas to awaken, none the wiser.

  None of them could have guessed that the duplicate would become their ally. Given this, it made more sense to kill the original instead, and keep the conversation going.

  Cargill turned to Blake. “Don’t dispose of the body like we planned,” he said. “Just seal him in a body bag, making sure it can’t leak any odors, and leave him locked in his quarters. We can dispose of him later. Since this Hank Vargas will still be alive and active,” he said, gesturing to the prisoner that Joe Allen was now freeing, “no one will be knocking down his door looking for him.”

  “Roger that,” said Blake.

  Cargill took a deep breath. Everything was finally breaking their way. But he was spinning too many plates. He wouldn’t get any sleep for a long time. First, he needed to spend hours getting Vargas fully up to speed and providing absolute proof of his own sincerity.

  Then it was time to call the president.

  55

  President Alex Janney stared at Linda Cosgrove across his magnificent desk and shook his head in contempt. “I didn’t invite you to the Oval Office to listen to excuses,” he said. “If you can’t control your own coalition, than maybe you shouldn’t be Speaker of the House.”

  Speaker Cosgrove shot him an easy smile, unperturbed. “So why did you invite me?” she asked.
“To make threats?”

  Janney sighed. “Apparently not successful ones.”

  “Look,” said the Speaker, “the founders purposely designed our government so that passing legislation isn’t easy. Trying to get Congress to pull in one direction is worse than herding cats. It’s herding self-interested, narcissistic, opportunistic cats. Who only care about getting reelected, no matter how much they pretend to care about their constituencies.”

  “The founders may have wanted checks and balances, Linda,” said Janney, “but they have to be rolling in their graves at our inability to agree on anything. And they weren’t the ones who decided the idiots in the Office of Budget and Management should control important legislation.”

  Janney was about to go on when a small screen affixed to the desk in front of him came to life and large words began to scroll across it.

  Lee Cargill called in and is holding, began the message. Says he can’t overstate the urgency of speaking with you. Says he needs an hour, at minimum.

  Janney cursed under his breath. Goddammit!

  The government was too big, his responsibilities too great. Too great for him, too great for a thousand men. It was a constant swim against the current. Try to move forward, be proactive, and a hurricane or earthquake, a missile test or successful terrorist attack, could divert him for days or weeks. Sometimes it seemed that the job entailed little more than reacting to one crisis after another.

  He was tempted to have his assistant tell Cargill to go pound sand, but knew he couldn’t. Not given the tech the man controlled, and the fact that he had just sent Vargas inside to rattle his cage. Apparently, this had worked only too well.

  The president told Linda Cosgrove that something had come up, apologized, and promised to reschedule. The Speaker looked miffed, and who could blame her? The idea was to light a fire under her ass, not piss her off for no reason.

  Minutes later a computer-generated holographic image of Cargill appeared across Janney’s desk, at the very location the Speaker had just vacated.

  “You do know that I have a job of my own, right?” snapped Janney the moment Cargill appeared. “I just blew off Linda Cosgrove for this. What do you want?”

  “I’ll get right to it, Mr. President,” said Cargill, bleary-eyed and looking like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. “It’s time for full disclosure. There’s a lot I haven’t shared with you. That ends now.”

  “Haven’t shared with me?” said Janney. “Or do you mean there’s a lot you’ve been lying to me about?”

  “I had my reasons for what I did. Which I’ll tell you while I set the record straight. But I hope you’ll at least appreciate that I didn’t mislead you for personal gain or for power. I did it for what I deemed important security reasons, and for the good of humanity as a whole.”

  “Do you know how self-important even saying something like this sounds?” said Janney.

  “What can I tell you?” replied Cargill. “We both know time travel has the power to transform civilization. Sounds like hyperbole, but if anything, it’s understatement. But I have a lot to cover, so I’ll get right to it. If, when I’m done, you think I’m a liability and want me gone, I’ll leave willingly. If you think I should be executed, I won’t put up a fight. I just ask you to keep an open mind.”

  “Go on,” said the president, who couldn’t help but be intrigued, especially by the word executed.

  “First, I have a duplicate of my best operative, Aaron Blake, hiding in North Korea, standing by. If you give him the green light, he can teleport into Kim Jong-un’s palace, kidnap one copy of Kim, and leave another in place. And he can poison the one left in power so he’ll only live another three or four days.”

  Janney stared at the image across from him in disbelief. “Where do I even begin to unpack that statement?” he said.

  “I’ll provide all of the background you need.”

  “This is much worse than just misleading me!” snapped Janney. “You set up an Op to remove a dangerous foreign leader without my authorization. Who do you think you are?”

  “I don’t blame you for being angry,” said Cargill. “But I only put Blake in place, nothing more. Given the tools that time travel gives me, I figured getting him in place was so dead simple I wouldn’t need your authorization. I’d only need that to proceed with the Op.”

  Janney considered. “Even if I buy this, you stretched your authority past its limits, and you know it. But go on. Did getting him in place turn out to be as easy as you thought?”

  Cargill grimaced for just an instant before a neutral expression returned to his face. “Not quite,” he said. “But easy enough. He’s there and ready, after all.”

  “Okay,” said the president. “So what other background do I need?”

  “First,” began Cargill, “you need to know why Knight and I pursued Nathan Wexler’s work so zealously. I told you it was an important theory that could help advance what we’re doing. But it was more than that, and I knew it. It was work that would allow us to increase the distance traveled through time to almost half a second.”

  Janney’s eyes widened. “Are you saying you can do this right now?”

  Cargill nodded.

  “And you’ve kept it from me?” said Janney. His surprise was faked, since Vargas had filled him in, but his outrage was very real.

  “I’m afraid so, Mr. President.”

  “How does that translate into teleportation distance?” asked Janney, already knowing the answer.

  “The Earth moves about a hundred twenty miles in half a second.”

  “And you didn’t deem this important enough for me to know?”

  Cargill lowered his eyes. “I’m sorry, sir. But we both know the immense power and possibilities that fifty-eight feet gives us. So what about almost eleven thousand times this distance? If one is tempted to use time travel as a weapon when an object can be lobbed fifty-eight feet into enemy territory, how tempting is a hundred twenty miles?”

  He paused. “I had to ask myself what you would do if I told you. Would this be enough power to finally seduce you into pursuing the technology’s military applications? You and I see eye to eye for the most part, but absolute power corrupts. I’ve already become corrupted. I’m making duplicates of people, something I vowed to never do. I’m using the tech for military applications, like abducting Kim. I couldn’t be sure what you would do once you pondered the potential of a half-second. And neither could you. So I chose to shield you from the possible corrupting power of this discovery.”

  “To shield me?” barked the president. “You aren’t my parent, Lee, and this isn’t your call. And a lie is a lie.”

  As far as motives went, this wasn’t the worst Janney had ever heard. If it was true. But the result was more power concentrated in Cargill’s hands.

  “You’re right,” said Cargill. “But there were other considerations, other ways you might react. You could panic, realizing how vulnerable America would be if this ever got into the wrong hands. Realizing how vulnerable you are, personally. If this technology can capture Kim, it can certainly bypass the Secret Service. Any concerns you had about me would be greatly amplified, because you would know that I could reach you effortlessly, wherever you were. You would know you could never be safe from me.”

  “Is that a veiled threat?”

  “Not at all. If I wanted to threaten you with physical harm—since you’d be powerless to stop me—I’d have already done it.”

  Janney stared into his guest’s holographic eyes for several seconds and then nodded. “Go on.”

  “So you could have seen the half-second breakthrough as an irresistible weapon. Or you could have seen it as too big a danger, and shut it down. At the time, Knight was still at large. If I disclosed this to you, you might decide to mothball the program, leaving Knight as the only one with the keys. I couldn’t risk that.”

  “So you had no confidence that I’d make the right decision,” said Janney, insulted. “Eit
her I’d embrace the added power too much, or fear it too much. You know there’s a middle ground, right? The one you think you’ve been taking, I presume.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. President. I trust your judgment. But even if there was a five percent chance you would fall on either side of this fence, I didn’t want to risk it. But it’s worth the risk now.”

  “What changed?”

  “Nathan Wexler has come up with a theory of how to suppress time travel. More than a theory. Late last night, he actually perfected a crude, working prototype. Right now it can block a kettle from firing, but he hopes that one day he’ll be able to protect a destination from incoming travelers. A destination like the White House. Create conditions in the fifth dimension that will make the White House seem like the inside of a mountain, rejecting any deliveries from the near future. You would no longer be vulnerable, and we could protect all of our important installations.”

  “But this is only theory at this point?”

  “Yes, and it’s a much tougher problem than blocking time travel at the source. But I would never underestimate Nathan Wexler. Just the kettle suppressor is a major game-changer. The group’s been discussing ways we can implement these suppressors so we can eventually share this tech with the world. I can tell you more about this later, but the bottom line is that the landscape has shifted dramatically.”

  Janney shook his head. This was an understatement. The capabilities and issues Cargill was raising were each worthy of months and years of deep thought. And the man wasn’t finished. Cargill wasn’t forcing him to drink from a fire hose, he was forcing him to drink from Victoria Falls while standing at the bottom with his mouth open, looking up.