Time Frame

by Douglas E. Richards

  Bile rose in his throat as he raised a silenced gun and put a bullet into each of their heads.

  He cursed to himself as a wave of self-loathing swept over him.

  Who knew how long these girls had been suffering, forced to perform whatever sexual acts Kim demanded. Who knew how many nights they had been degraded without any ability to protest, their lives in constant jeopardy from the whims of a cruel dictator who fancied himself divine.

  But instead of rescuing them as they deserved, he had ended their lives.

  It was an irony only Satan could appreciate. The Blake he had left behind was going out of his way to save two owls and other woodland wildlife. Meanwhile, here he was murdering two helpless young women whose only crime was having been physically appealing to North Korea’s supreme leader.

  Blake’s eyes burned with hatred as he neared Kim’s unconscious form, and it was all he could do not to tear the dictator’s head off with his bare hands. Instead, he injected the pudgy leader with a sedative and worked to shove his rotund, dead-weight body into a pair of pants, unable to keep a permanent expression of disgust from his face, having been forced to see something he would never be able to un-see.

  He had been notified before he had made the jump that Chris Entwistle and Eric Beal were waiting for him in the Swedish Embassy, in a large room whose GPS coordinates he had been given. He had K-2 establish communications with these men and wrestled Kim’s lifeless bulk into the kettle, having to hug the man’s bare torso to do so, suddenly wishing he had taken the time to cover it with a shirt. Or a flamethrower.

  “Sending Kim to you now,” he said to his two colleagues in Pyongyang, seconds before he had K-2 send the dictator the precise duration of time that would land him near the center of the room they were in.

  “Holy shit!” said Beal after a brief pause, obviating the need for Blake to ask if K-2 had been on target. “It’s really him! Unbelievable.”

  “And he looks like an even bigger buffoon in person,” chimed in Entwistle.

  Blake didn’t respond. Instead, he injected the Kim still in the kettle with a slow-acting poison and sent him a hundred yards away from the palace. Finally, he pulled the Kim who remained in the kettle to the floor of the room, entered the kettle, and sent himself back in time to join his two colleagues inside the Swedish embassy.

  The moment he materialized there, the kettle in Kim’s bedroom exploded, obliterating the palace in Hyangsan and creating a massive fireball that was clearly visible for miles.

  And inside Kim’s bedroom, yet another Blake was turned to paste, along with a crazed dictator and the dead bodies of two lovely young girls.

  ***

  “Welcome to the party,” said Entwistle when Blake popped into existence.

  “Congratulations, Aaron,” said Beal, nodding toward the man who was stretched out on the floor. “You did it. Kim Jong-un in the flesh.”

  “Yeah, a lot of flesh,” said Entwistle. “A half-dressed asshole who reeks of alcohol. Why am I not surprised?”

  “Yeah, half-dressed now,” said Blake. “He wasn’t that way when I found him.”

  The faces of both of Blake’s colleagues twisted up into expressions of absolute disgust. “They don’t pay you enough for this, Aaron,” said Beal.

  Blake laughed. “You can say that again.”

  “Are you ready?” asked Entwistle.

  “What’s the plan?” said Blake. “Lee assured me you had one, but didn’t elaborate.”

  Just as he said this his eyes came upon an odd contraption in the room that had to be a kettle. It was only big enough to contain one man at a time, and was mounted on a motorized chassis. One glance at the room’s doorframe made it clear to Blake that it had been carefully designed with these dimensions in mind, so that it could be driven through the door with almost no room to spare.

  “Let me guess,” he added. “We’re going to teleport out.”

  Beal winced. “We aren’t happy about it, either,” he said. “Lee realized that after the palace exploded, North Korea would be locked down tight as a drum. Smuggling Kim out would be dicey at best.”

  “I knew that much,” said Blake. “But I thought he knew of some slick underground railroad-type system to get to South Korea.”

  “Not so much,” said Beal. “I don’t think he wanted to tell you that you’d have to die another time to get out of here.” He frowned. “I’m not thrilled about it, either. I don’t suppose experience makes it any easier.”

  “I don’t have any experience,” said Blake. “I’ve never had to face certain death before. You’d have to ask my deceased brethren.”

  “Right,” said Beal. “Dumb question.”

  “So what is the plan?” asked Blake. “I can’t believe we’re prepared to blow up the embassy.”

  “We’re not,” replied Beal. “The kettle is set to teleport the three of us, one at a time, onto a runway at Camp Casey, a US army base in Daegu City, South Korea.”

  “Daegu City?” said Blake, raising his eyebrows.

  “It’s forty miles north of Seoul,” explained Beal. “The three of us left behind will shove Kim in the kettle and send him to the versions of us on the runway.”

  “And then what?” said Blake.

  “We have a large helo just outside,” replied Entwistle. “We can use a remote to drive the kettle out of the building and onto the helo. The three of us will join the kettle inside and climb as quickly as we can, with the goal of flying to an unpopulated area.”

  “No doubt attracting the immediate attention of North Korean authorities,” said Blake, “who will tell us the city is in lockdown and demand that we land.”

  “We’ll land, all right,” said Beal miserably. “But after we blow the tiny explosive charge inside the kettle, there won’t be much of us or the helo left to find.”

  Blake shuddered. “Now I forgive Cargill for not telling me the plan earlier,” he said. “I wish I didn’t know now.”

  “It really is the only way to be sure we get out,” said Entwistle.

  “I know,” said Blake. “What about the versions of us who end up on the runway? Where will they be going?”

  “Our final destination is inside Catoctin Mountain Park,” said Beal. “The jet will land nearby and we’ll helicopter in.”

  “Catoctin Mountain Park?” said Blake. “I’m not familiar.”

  “Camp David,” said Beal. “President Janney will be waiting for us there.”

  58

  Colonel Li Ming sat in a dark room in silence. In the days of cellphones and comms and AI assistants, Li found it critical to spend quality time alone in thought, without any possibility of interruption.

  And no situation he had encountered in his career was more worthy of thought than this one.

  After finally catching the man they were after, they had brought him to a nearby detention facility, which had promptly exploded, leaving no trace of the man, and reducing his cargo to tiny scraps of mangled metal. The force of the explosion was extraordinary. Unheard of.

  Except that it wasn’t.

  It was almost identical in power and scale to the one that had created a crater at a private airport in Shenyang. Almost identical to one that had leveled more than an acre of forest about eighty kilometers from where the man had been captured, a location Li learned had been the destination of Major Long He and twenty-four men who had gone missing.

  And the same tiny scraps of stainless steel had been found at both locations.

  DEI Director Chang had inspected the sites of these explosions and was convinced they weren’t due to dark energy, although he wouldn’t rule it out entirely. But one more similarity became clear: whatever explosive had been used left no clue as to its identity.

  Then, not five hours earlier, Kim Jong-un’s palace in Hyangsan had exploded. According to Li’s intelligence sources, Kim had been far enough away from the palace that he had survived, but he had been so drunk he had no idea how he came to be there, or what had tip
ped him off to leave.

  Which is not how Kim reported it in the statement he had made on national television two hours earlier. In yet another rewrite of history, Kim explained that he had seen something suspicious in the wee hours of the night outside the palace grounds and had gone out to investigate, his uncanny, godlike instincts serving him well yet again. Two men in a truck had fled when he approached, and while he was giving chase, the palace had exploded behind him.

  Kim had nothing to say about a helicopter that had exploded fifteen minutes later near Pyongyang.

  Like the three explosions in China, Colonel Li’s operatives had confirmed that the two in North Korea hadn’t left a signature, either.

  Whoever was behind this had revealed two technologies with potentially game changing effects. An unknown type of explosive, and even more troubling, a device that could tap into the dark energy field.

  These advances almost had to have stemmed from America, from its black laboratories, which were better funded than any in the world, including China’s. Also, the man they had captured spoke English, and appeared to be a native American, as well.

  And he was now their only real lead. They had to learn who he was. His past. What organization he was representing.

  But this was much easier said than done. Had he escaped, they could have at least hoped to get lucky with facial recognition in the weeks and months ahead. But now they weren’t looking for a living man, they were looking to reconstruct the history of a life, having precious few clues and without any remains of his body to go on.

  Despite these obstacles, Li was certain he could convince his superiors to make learning this man’s identity one of China’s highest military priorities. This was a man who had entered their country with mysterious cargo, and who had left nothing but death and havoc in his wake.

  Li had no doubt that he would ultimately get whatever resources he asked for to aid in his search.

  His people had already tried to match the images they had of this man to online photos, but had failed. The Caucasian’s explosives had left no signature, and he had left no Internet footprint, unheard of in this day and age. Once again, a measure of the sophistication of the people behind him, who had managed the miraculous feat of scrubbing his life from the Web.

  Even if Li’s people had found a remnant of the Caucasian’s past, this would only be the beginning. Anything they were likely to find online wouldn’t point to who he had been working for, how he happened to be traveling with a refrigerator that gave off a dark energy signature, and what, exactly, he had been doing in China.

  But so far, they hadn’t found a single thread to even begin pulling on.

  No matter, Li decided. He had no doubt he would find a path. Eventually. He was nothing if not patient, nothing if not persistent, and he had the vast resources of a mighty nation at his disposal.

  He would learn who this man was, and what he had been up to.

  It was only a matter of time.

  PART 6

  “Double, double, toil and trouble;

  Fire burn, and caldron bubble.”

  —Shakespeare (Macbeth)

  59

  Colonel Hank Vargas sat on the edge of the bed in his Cheyenne Mountain quarters and tried not to reflect on the body bag underneath it. Sharing one’s quarters with a corpse was creepy enough, but this was especially the case when you and the corpse were one and the same.

  He felt a strange temptation to unzip the bag and experience the surreal oddity of gazing at his own remains, without needing an out-of-body experience to do it.

  He shook his head. What was he thinking? Forgetting how macabre it would be for just a moment, once opened, the bag would no longer contain any smell that might have developed, turning his small quarters into a noxious hell.

  Not that he wouldn’t be joining his two deceased duplicates in actual, biblical hell before too long. As much as he kept trying to push his impending death from his mind, it kept resurfacing.

  He was terrified of death. Worse, he felt he had so much life left in him, so much to accomplish. He had been overzealous with drone strikes earlier in his career, and had vowed to spend the rest of his life making amends. He just never realized how short this period of time would end up being.

  But he had seen scores of younger men, friends, die in battle, die for what they believed in. How was this any different? He had let Knight get the better of him, had let him implant a booby trap in his head. At that point he was already dead.

  But he now had the chance to do more good in his death throes than he could have done in decades more of life. And at least he had witnessed the miracle of time travel, of duplication and teleportation, and gotten a glimpse into the possibilities science had opened up, thorny as they were.

  And he would die knowing the technology was in good hands. Cargill was exactly the man he had thought he was. He hadn’t met that often with Cargill and Knight when they were in his group, simply because dark energy was such a pie-in-the-sky concept he didn’t take it seriously. In his view, it wasn’t a weapons program he had to kill, because it already had no chance of success.

  Who knew?

  But his instincts about both men had turned out to be right—even more than he could have guessed. Cargill was a much better man even than he had thought, and Knight far worse.

  But Knight wouldn’t be on the stage for long, either. The man had outsmarted Vargas and had most likely ended his existence, but Vargas was about to return the favor.

  He still had some hope of survival. Cargill had sworn to him that saving his life would be their highest priority. Once they had Knight in custody, there was a fifty percent chance he would survive T-4. If he did, they could get the command that would open the partition inside the titanium capsule in the colonel’s skull, nullifying the poison. Even if T-4 killed Knight rather than loosening his tongue, they could work to get a duplicate Knight to reveal the information they needed to save Vargas’s life in other ways.

  For now, the colonel knew he had to put all of this from his mind. He needed to be sharp.

  Vargas placed a call to Knight, reporting that he had things well in hand, and that President Janney had read the incriminating material he had found on Cargill, which showed that Cargill had been responsible for Lake Las Vegas and could teleport more than a hundred miles.

  “Did he buy it?” asked Knight.

  “What do you mean?” said Vargas. “The evidence I found was real, not manufactured. So of course he bought it.”

  “And was he as furious as you would expect?”

  “More. You have no idea. I thought he might fly out here and kill Cargill himself. So when I recommended he find a pretense to lure Cargill and his senior management team out of their Cheyenne Mountain stronghold, he agreed enthusiastically.”

  “Great work, Colonel. When and where?”

  “We’re all leaving at ten tomorrow morning in a Pave Hawk helicopter. Two pilots from the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station will fly us to meet with the president at Fort Riley in Kansas.”

  “Janney won’t really be there, right?”

  “Correct. Once we arrive, he’s agreed that I should take Cargill aside, in private, and see to it that he’s relieved of command—with extreme prejudice. Janney will then call in to the group and explain that Cargill will be staying at the base, taking on a new assignment, and that Janney will select someone to replace him as head of Q5 as soon as he can.”

  “You couldn’t convince the president to put you in charge?”

  “I tried,” said Vargas. “He said he wasn’t ready to commit, but that I was still under consideration. Who knows, he still might decide I’m the right man.”

  “He won’t,” said Knight. “If he was going to choose you, he would have done so right away. He doesn’t trust you, either. In his mind, you fulfilled your role. You proved Cargill was off the reservation and got rid of him. He’ll say thanks and push you back out of Q5.”

  “I’m not convinced of
that,” said Vargas.

  “Don’t worry about it,” replied Knight. “It’s just as well. We’ll go through with the original plan and intercept the Q5 management team on their way to Fort Riley. Then I can make sure they get the payback they deserve, and get Wexler’s work from him or Daniel Tini.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to torture the correct passwords out of Cargill?”

  “No. I know the bastard too well. He always sets up two passwords. One opens the files. One wipes them out beyond any possibility of reconstruction. Even if I got him to give me a password, I couldn’t trust it wasn’t the one that would kill the information. I’m better off breaking the scientists. And I’ll know if the work they provide to me is real or not. If 45.15 microseconds falls logically out of the postulates and equations, it’s the real thing.”

  “Understood.”

  “Why Fort Riley?” asked Knight.

  “Why does it matter? You told me to get the president to draw them away from the protection of Cheyenne Mountain. And away from their toys.”

  “Just a strange location for the president to be,” said Knight. “Or at least pretend to be. Especially since it’s public knowledge that he’s at Camp David, and plans to be there for an indefinite period of time. I don’t want them getting suspicious.”

  “It was Janney’s idea. Cargill knows that the president would never ask the entire Q5 management team to the White House. They’d all have to log in, and it’s too public. So the president told Cargill he wanted to meet with them as part of two days of secret meetings he’ll be holding with all key Black Ops groups. At Fort Riley, away from the press pool and any prying eyes.

  “As far as Camp David goes,” continued Vargas, “he told Cargill this was part of the ruse. By publicly announcing a stay at his retreat, he can steal away for two days of meetings while the press continues to believe he’s still at Camp David, being reclusive. By making it seem like Q5 is just one of many groups being summoned, part of a black projects review, this won’t raise any red flags. I think it’s a solid strategy.”