Fate (Wilton's Gold #3)

by Craig W. Turner

  “Because, at that point, I didn’t know what would happen. The device was what led the FBI to me. I figured if I brought the device with me, when I got back to the present there would be a hole. I didn’t know where I’d end up.” He hesitated slightly, thinking that perhaps he shouldn’t be having this conversation at all, given his current environment. Still, he’d made the decision to use 1849 as his destination and had felt good about it the night before, so he allowed himself a deep breath to refocus.

  “What did you do with the phone?”

  He laughed, trying to anticipate her reaction. The story was so ridiculous, he could hardly tell it. “I brought it with me to Russia. But when the events in Russia went screwy and history changed... Well, I’d left it sitting in my hotel room, and the circumstances of my time travel mission made it so that I never got back to the hotel. The phone is lost in some reality, somewhere, I suppose. I don’t have it.”

  She analyzed him for a moment. “That’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Keep asking questions,” he said. “I’m sure I’ll beat it,” he said defiantly, almost enjoying himself in the challenge. Without losing eye contact, she tapped the screen of her tablet. The lights on the wall turned yellow. It was uncomfortable. “What’s with the colors?”

  “Your moods in response to certain stimuli are consistently being addressed,” she said. “Since we can’t predict the atmosphere of a time and location in advance of a participant’s mission, we need to establish a comfort level so that you won’t have an emotional reaction which could jeopardize the mission. Kind of like someone getting claustrophobic on an airplane and going crazy, only far more dangerous. The lights, the room, my posture, even the line of questioning are stimuli. Your reactions are being measured.”

  “Really?” he asked, nodding. “That’s actually pretty cool. But what do you do with other participants, where you don’t have this kind of personal insight into their lives?”

  “People generally open up pretty quickly.”

  “Even the billionaires? I wouldn’t think they’d be that accessible.”

  “Everyone wants someone to talk to. No matter how rich they are. This is a safe environment for them.”

  “Wow,” he said. “Doesn’t feel all that safe to me. How about Kane? What was he like? How did he respond to the lights and these pictures?”

  “We really should get back to you.”

  “Why’s that?” he asked. “We’re just two USTP employees talking here. Right?”

  “Dr. Jacobs, I never saw Benjamin Kane.”

  He stood up from his chair, sending it rolling backwards. “I knew it!” he said, pointing at her. “I knew he didn’t go through the program. That just proves-“

  “Dr. Jacobs, please sit down.” Hearing the tone in her voice, he silently retrieved his chair and sat. “I never saw Benjamin Kane because he hasn’t taken a mission. You’re referencing a different reality.”

  Jeff sighed, suddenly very tired, and put his head in his hands. For the first time, his mind was cloudy on what had actually happened, and he tried to focus – not only on what was real and what wasn’t, but how he’d let himself make such an error in front of Victoria. He’d been cocky, and would have to stop immediately if he had any hope of following through on his plan. “You’re right,” he mumbled. “You’re right.”

  “Clearly you have a suspicion that in the other reality Kane didn’t follow the process,” she said. “Would you like to expand on that?”

  Still with his head in his hands, he shook his head. “No. Not now. Just a conspiracy theory. Nothing to get excited about.” He looked up at her. “So, is this what we’re going to do for the rest of the time?”

  “No,” she said. “We’re actually going to go through the procedures,” she said. “It’s what you requested. But before we get back into the slides, can I ask you to indulge me for just a few minutes? I have some other questions unrelated to all of this.”

  “Will you still be analyzing me?”

  She shrugged, then showed a half-smile for the first time since he’d been in the room. “Well, yes, of course. That’s what we’re here for. And it’s what I do, whether I mean to or not... in any situation. I’m sure you understand.”

  He was apprehensive about the smile. “Well then, go ahead. I suppose I could justify that, on behalf of my other self, I owe you at least that.”

  “I should say so,” she said. She pulled her hands away from the table for the first time and set them on her lap. Then she looked at him for a moment, trying to figure out how to say what she wanted. She started to speak, then stopped. Finally, she came out with it. “I’m asking you again. Is that where he went? To find her?”

  So this really wasn’t about him at all. He shook his head. “Victoria, I told you. I have no idea. Isn’t there any way of knowing?”

  “No, there isn’t,” she said. “Not without someone going back and checking for sure. But it’s a big timeline out there. You can’t haphazardly just go searching. Or, at least, that’s what they tell me is the issue.”

  “No way to track the coordinates that were entered into the device?”

  “Not that I know of. Besides, the way Dr. Bremner describes it, the original coordinates might not matter because someone could always jump to one time, then jump to another. After Jeff ran, they changed all the devices to have two-way batteries instead of four-way. Meaning-”

  “I get it. Enough power for just two trips instead of four.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what we did to go back to 1849.” He decided to give her something. “In order to get away from the FBI, I went into a restroom and met Dexter. We went back three months, flew to California, went back to 1849, then did the same thing in reverse to get back.” He laughed. “It was actually pretty genius. To them, we were in the bathroom for, what, ninety seconds. But to us, it was two days and a cross-country trip. Not to mention a shot in the leg and a trip to the E.R.”

  “You say ‘we.’ Who’s we?”

  “Oh, Dexter came with me.”

  She was shocked. “Really? He’s never said a word.”

  But Jeff was shaking his head. “The Dexter you know doesn’t know anything about it. My mission to Russia changed the circumstances of the FBI finding me, which negated in history our trip to 1849. So while it’s still in my memory, and if we were to go to 1849 right now you’d find Dexter there, from our reality now, the trip never happened.”

  She looked at him for a long moment, trying to follow what he was saying, but the look on her face grew more and more confusing. “Wow,” she said. “I have an awful lot to learn about time travel.”

  “It’s a bear.”

  “But you don’t feel you have any insight into whether Jeff went to find this woman?”

  He shook his head. “No. I’m sorry. I know it must’ve been painful for you when he left. When did you last talk to him?”

  She sighed, then looked off at the awful yellow lights, thinking. “The night before he disappeared. We had dinner – went to a crab house in Baltimore – then walked down by the waterfront for a little while. I thought it was a typical date night. Some other couple walking by offered to take our picture in front of the water. I mean, it was very nice, and a little bit farther from home, but dinner and a walk was not unusual for us.”

  “Did he say anything out of the ordinary?”

  “Not really,” she said, shaking her head. “After he disappeared, I tried to trace the conversation back to see if there was any indication something was wrong. I remember we talked about work, which was always hard not to do, but we also talked about a weekend getaway, and were trying to decide where we’d go. I think we’d settled on driving down to Hilton Head. But the next morning, he was gone. While I didn’t see him, he’d apparently shown up for work in the morning, and then was suddenly missing. Just gone. After a few hours, the unauthorized break-in to the time lab was reported, and Jeff was seen on the security monito
rs entering the facility. They’ve since been secured with double locks that require simultaneous identification – you know, due to the possible dangers. But he was gone, and there was no reason, no note, and no explanation why. Then you show up the other day, and my world gets turned upside down. Although, really, it didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry that happened, Victoria,” he said. “I can’t speak to what happened, but I can tell you that I don’t get attached very easily. If he left without a word, there had to be a pretty compelling reason to do so.” He thought about Fisher’s concerns about changing history and wondered if the USTP had done something to his other self. But then, Victoria wouldn’t have memory of him up until the time he left. No, the other Jeff had run.

  “That’s nice of you to say. It doesn’t help, though.”

  “I’m sure it doesn’t.”

  She paused again, her attention turned back to him. She touched the screen on her tablet, but nothing happened. “Whatever you’re planning here, I hope that if you have any opportunity to either find Jeff or give me some closure, you’ll do what you can.”

  He cocked his head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Jeff, you wouldn’t be going through this without an end game,” she said. “I know you too well. The Time Program destroyed your life, using your own technology that you developed. You’re not the type to sit back and let that happen.”

  He laughed and leaned back in his chair. “You can speculate all you want. I’m still trying to make heads or tails of what my life is going to be going forward.” Where was she getting her suspicions? “Are you recording me?”

  She shook her head. “No. I just turned it off. I’ve been recording all this time. But if whatever you’re working on can get Jeff back to me... well, let’s just say I’m giving you a head start.”

  He started to answer, but she touched the screen again. The lights slowly faded to a bright purple, and the screen behind her switched to a black-and-white photo of a purse-snatcher stealing a woman’s purse on a busy city street.

  “Tell me about this one,” Victoria said, as though they hadn’t skipped a beat. “How does it make you feel?”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  After putting a couple of hours in at his desk, Dexter had headed back up to the control room, and now stood in front of the monitors on the wall, watching the data flow across the screens. Like they would do with any participant in the program, they paused the on-going random data searches to run Jeff’s data. Running specific data with a center point for reference – the participant – was much faster than running non-specific searches, and generally took six to eight hours to complete.

  Still, Dexter could follow along as the feedback from the search was returned by the servers. He saw a number of yellow entries dumped from the top screens to the middle screens. Those possible trouble spots would be analyzed after the first run was complete to see if any of them could be interpreted as an issue. Of course, on the screen in front of him was all data and tech language. One he noticed read 001/MAT/5C/7R/375M/A26. He hadn’t looked at the data in a long time, but he knew how to read code 001 because it was the most basic – familial relation. This wasn’t a particularly close connection, however, but the computer still chose to flag it. Quickly, before it bounced down and off the screen, he tried to run through the meaning of the codes in his head. Maternal side, fifth cousin, seven times removed, whose home in 1849 was 375 miles from Jeff’s proposed destination. He couldn’t remember what the A26 meant, but he was pretty impressed with himself for getting that far, assuming he was remembering correctly. After a moment, additional yellow entries had moved Jeff’s relative off the screen.

  Despite his humbly unbelievable memory, the rest of the list was gish-gosh. His eyes picked up another entry – 074/6C/11W/25000/I7/18p. He had no clue what it meant. He remembered at some point learning that there were over 600 categories of possible connections which were analyzed. His expertise stopped at 001.

  “You’re not going to sit here staring at the screen for the next six hours, are you?” Bremner asked, walking up behind him.

  He shook his head. “No. I just like seeing it in action.”

  “So do I,” Bremner said. “It’s like watching a wave caused by the wind in a field of wheat. Just incredible. Any special interest because it’s your friend?”

  “I suppose so, yes.” The previous entry popped into his mind. A26 was age 26. “Oh, it’s age. That’s right.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I was reading one of the entries and couldn’t remember one of the codes. It was age. The age when Jeff’s ancestor would have been at the time of his destination.”

  “I thought that was a unique choice,” Bremner said, now watching numbers on the screen with Dexter. “But then I remembered your journal and the story of Wilton’s gold.”

  “Yeah, I’m not sure why he did that,” he said. “But that’s Jeff. He probably wanted to come up with something that would stump the machine, test the system. That’s how his mind works.”

  As Bremner laughed, Dexter tried not to squirm. He wished Jeff had chosen a different time and destination instead of one of the possible destinations that they’d researched when Jeff had first approached him about time travel several years back. Even if he’d chosen one of the others, and not the one that had so much intrigue attached to it. The gangster who had robbed a bank in Mississippi with a baseball bat painted to look like a gun, or the British officer who was hoarding gemstones that King George III had sent him. Those would’ve been less conspicuous. But Wilton was Jeff’s favorite.

  Of course, the only thing keeping Jeff from taking on the Wilton mission back in the day had been Dexter’s advice that something in the accounting of the situation in Joe Wilton’s handwritten journal seemed amiss. Wilton, trekking across the country in 1849 with everything he owned in his wagon, had written that an angel had appeared from out of the forest in the treacherous Sierra Nevada mountains and told him where to camp. The angel had clearly not been of the guardian variety, however, as the camp had been ambushed the next morning. Wilton’s gold – 60 bars of it – had been taken and a number of Wilton’s team members killed. As they’d analyzed the opportunity, Dexter had been scared off by the mention of the angel. He thought it was far too dangerous an endeavor to trust the storytelling of a man claiming to be taking direction from an angel, but still had made copious notes in his journal about it. He and Jeff had argued often about it, but those conversations ended when Dr. Bremner had shown up at Jeff’s lab carrying Jeff’s time device, the same device that had somehow found its way to the middle of the same forest in the Sierra Nevadas. Within months, literally, the USTP had been created, construction had begun on the new facility, and Jeff and Dexter had been carefully “recruited” by the U.S. government for their integral roles with the program. While Dexter had considered when the old Jeff had run that it was to 1849, there had been no talk at the USTP about the Gold Rush– until Jeff had announced his chosen destination that morning.

  “Well, if that’s what he’s interested in,” Bremner said. “Who’s to stop him? Actually, it’ll be good. I like his perspective. Think about it – there’s nothing really to trace him to that time period except for your journal. Right? This will be interesting.”

  “How are we going to present this to Jeff?” Dexter asked, changing the subject. “Normally, it’s for our eyes only, but he wants to see how it works. Are you going to do a presentation?”

  He shrugged, which was an uncommon move for Bremner, who was consistently very precise in his delivery. “You can handle it. Or Abby. I don’t see any need to be directly involved.”

  Dexter looked back to Abby, sitting at one of the terminals keypunching away. He tried to remember if she’d been aware of their initial conversations about the Wilton Heist, or if those had been just between him and Jeff. In any case, if she knew, she hadn’t said anything after he’d mentioned it. That was a long time ago, too, and she hadn’t been invol
ved in the planning process the way he’d been with Jeff. If it had been mentioned to her, it likely would’ve passed by her without making any real impression. Though with a brain that worked like hers, always mathematically computing relationships, it was very possible that if Jeff had shared anything with her she would have made the same deductions he had.

  “Alright, we’ll put something together,” he said.

  “Oh, there’s a red,” Bremner said, pointing at the screen and interrupting his thoughts.

  “An issue?”

  He shook his head. “I wouldn’t think so. I mean – what could it possibly be? Those are going to pop up from time to time. Every participant search has returned red-flagged entries.” He leaned closer to the screen, reading. “What’s the code on it? One-one-six. Abby? What’s 1-1-6?

  There was a pause as Abby typed quickly on her keyboard behind them. “One-one-six is a proximity alert. It means that Jeff was somewhere within the vicinity of where he wants to travel. Not a huge deal – that’s going to happen all the time. It says M204. That’s 204 miles from the destination, which means that Jeff probably made some credit card transaction there or something. Gimme a second – I’ll check Google Maps... Yes, 200 miles is roughly San Francisco. No big surprise that Jeff would have been there for something in his life.”

  “What’s the purpose of code 116?” Dexter asked. “If it’s going to be that common?”

  Bremner explained. “In theory, there’s the possibility that someone could go back and leave something for themselves to pick up in the future. Probably a little more far-fetched when you’re going back as far as Jeff is suggesting, but if you were going to the ‘50s it might be more relevant.”

  “Leave something like what?”

  “A note or a sign, perhaps. I don’t know. There are some devious people out there. Of course, with the escort – provided they don’t get hit over the head with a bottle – it’s pretty tough to deviate from the prescribed plans.”

  “Kane hitting me over the head with a bottle was pretty easy for him, which is why-” Dexter stopped speaking as another red entry hit the screen. “What’s that one?”