The Doomsday Box

by Herbie Brennan

  “Cyanide.”

  “He gave you cyanide?”

  “Yes.”

  “Show me.”

  Danny glanced at the others. “They made me flush it down the toilet,” he said sourly.

  Cobra kept staring at him intently, his face wooden. “What did it look like?”

  “White,” Danny said. “Little granular crystals.”

  “Smell?”

  “Almonds.” He slipped his hand into his pocket, pulled out the little box, and handed it to Cobra. “I kept it in this.”

  Cobra opened the box cautiously. His eyebrows raised as he looked inside. “Good God,” he said, “the poison ring!” He looked at Danny with a new expression on his face. He took the ring from the box and opened its secret compartment without fumbling or hesitation, then sniffed cautiously at the cavity. “Almonds,” he murmured. His eyes returned to Danny. “Looks like you were telling the truth. You really were instructed to kill me.” After a moment, a slow, surprising grin began to crawl across his face. Suddenly he laughed aloud. “That’s my boy!” he exclaimed. “So it’s up to me to convince you, not the other way around? Now that’s real CIA thinking!”

  “That may not be the only way,” Fuchsia said.

  Opal and Michael cut in together.

  “There was no question of—” Michael began.

  “We told him he couldn’t possibly murder you,” Opal said, glaring at Danny. “That’s why we made him flush away the poison.”

  “I’m not offended,” Cobra told them. “In fact I’m a bit relieved. The problem is how to convince you.” He hesitated thoughtfully. “And myself.”

  “What do you mean?” Danny asked suspiciously. There was a part of him that had sort of taken to Cobra, but he still didn’t really know what to make of him.

  Cobra shrugged. “You want the truth? I’m not sure I’d trust myself to make a promise twenty years ahead of time. Besides, there are other considerations.”

  “What other considerations?” Danny and Opal asked simultaneously.

  “Well, the big one is what the hell is going on here and now.”

  “I don’t follow that either,” Danny told him.

  Cobra made an expansive gesture and leaned back in his seat. “From what you told me, somebody set you up. This guy Stratford, to be precise.”

  “I’m not sure that Mr. Stratford—” Opal began.

  “Oh come on!” Cobra cut across her. “Stratford’s supposed to be your controller in this time frame. Nobody may have put it to you like that, but it’s clear from everything you’ve said that my boy Gary is your controller in your own time. When you came here, he passed you on to Stratford—standard CIA procedure. I know Stratford slightly, but I didn’t know he was—what did you call him? A temporal agent? Anyway, whatever he is, Stratford gets a briefing on your mission, with instructions to set up a meeting with me. Except he can’t make contact with me because I’m working deep cover. But he doesn’t tell you that. Instead he sends you straight into a KGB trap. That’s a setup in my book. The question is, why did he do it?” He looked from one face to the other, a single eyebrow raised.

  After a moment, Opal said, “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Better think of it now. It could be the real key to your situation. Why would Stratford want you dead?”

  Michael sat forward abruptly. “Dead?” he echoed. The surprise in his voice was obvious.

  “Sure,” Cobra confirmed. “Dead. This wasn’t just a mistake, some understandable error in judgment. He didn’t get in touch with me at all. He sent you straight to the KGB. Stratford knew I was in Moscow, but he didn’t know details of my mission. Couldn’t know. Didn’t need to know, understand what I’m saying? He had no idea I was working undercover as a KGB colonel. Far as he was concerned, he was sending you straight to the KGB for KGB questioning on stuff like psychotronics and time travel—both things you know something about, but neither one, I’m betting, you could give any technical details about. I mean, you couldn’t say how any of that stuff works. Am I right?”

  Opal nodded soberly. “Yes.”

  “That’s a sure recipe for torture. They find out you know something and keep prodding for more. You can’t give any more, but they don’t know that; and frankly they don’t care.” He looked at Michael. “What I put you through, Mike, was nothing compared with what the two of you would have gone through if I hadn’t intervened. You’d both have been dead inside a week.” He looked around and focused on Danny and Fuchsia. “And don’t forget, he sent all four of you into the trap. It was only dumb luck you two managed to avoid it.”

  Michael shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Opal looked stunned. Danny found himself frowning as he tried to take in the implications of what Cobra was saying. “If he wanted us dead, why didn’t he kill us all in Langley? Why go to all the trouble of sending us to Moscow?”

  “Believe me,” Cobra said, “killing somebody isn’t as simple as they make out in the movies. Killing four people is a nightmare. Cleaning up afterward, disposing of four bodies . . . We call it wet work in the CIA and we have whole teams trained to do it. But Stratford couldn’t call in a team, not if this was something personal. He’d have to do all the cleanup himself, and every minute spent on it would increase his chances of being found out. But if he sends you to Moscow, the KGB does all the dirty work for him. Plus he has a built-in cover story. He did what he was asked to do, sent you looking for me, but the KGB got hold of you before he had time to make contact and unfortunately tortured you all to death. Nothing to do with him, he did his job, and you were just a bunch of inexperienced kids anyway.”

  “Stratford never saw us before we turned up on his doorstep,” Danny said. “How could it be something personal?”

  “That’s what we need to figure out,” Cobra said sourly.

  Chapter 40

  The Team, Menshikov’s Apartment, Moscow, 1962

  Does anybody mind if I lie down?” Fuchsia asked.

  Danny glanced at her quickly. “You all right?” he asked quietly.

  Fuchsia nodded. “Just want to try something.” She left the table and headed for the couch. She was small enough to lie flat on it. Danny watched for a moment while she closed her eyes, but the others ignored her.

  “What do we do?” Michael asked Cobra. “Go back to Langley and confront Stratford?”

  “I can’t go anywhere until I complete my mission,” Cobra said shortly. “Plague wars may be the big bogeyman in your time, but right now we’re worrying about something else.” He stopped and looked at them one after another, a strange expression on his face. “Hey, wait a minute. . . .”

  “What is it?” Opal asked.

  Cobra leaned forward. “You’re from the future—right?”

  Opal nodded. “We told you—”

  “You learn history at school?”

  “Yes, of course we learn history at school.”

  Cobra sat back and licked his lips. He looked both excited and wary. After a moment he said cautiously, “This is a long shot, but any of you kids ever hear anything about . . .” He hesitated, shrugged. “Maybe this is nothing, maybe a big deal, but . . . you ever hear anything about a Russian plan to put nuclear warheads into Cuba?”

  “Yes, of course,” Michael told him. “You’re referring to the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

  Cobra stared at him, then said tightly, “Crisis? You mean they put in the rockets?”

  “I think so.”

  Opal leaned forward slightly. “I’m not sure they got the rockets in, but they certainly started building launch sites. It was all right, though. President Kennedy found out about it and got tough, and the Russians backed down.”

  “So there wasn’t a nuclear war?”

  “Oh, no,” Opal said. “Nothing like that.” She looked at him curiously. “Is this something to do with your mission?”

  Cobra nodded. “I was sent to Moscow to check out some intelligence we had about Russian plans for Cuba. What we heard didn�
��t sound likely, and the source wasn’t very reliable, but it was too serious to ignore. Put missiles in Cuba, and the risk of nuclear war goes through the roof. You sure they avoided it?”

  “We wouldn’t be here now if they hadn’t,” Opal told him cheerfully.

  “Does this mean you can leave Moscow now?” Michael asked.

  “I’m not sure . . .” Cobra said uncertainly.

  Danny decided to put his oar in before the conversation drifted any farther off track. “Listen,” he said, “I’m not sure we need to go back to Langley. I mean, what Stratford did was awful, but that’s nothing to do with our mission. We’re here to halt a plague. Stratford may have wanted to stop us doing that for some reason, but he hasn’t succeeded. We’ve still managed to meet up with Cobra. He’s sitting here with us now. Mission accomplished, or what?”

  “You haven’t been listening, Danny.” Opal shook her head. “We’re trying to find some way all of us can agree Cobra really won’t send the samples through twenty years from now.” She looked at him coldly. “Without you feeding him a lethal dose of cyanide.”

  “I think Fuchsia may be sorting that out now,” Danny said.

  They all turned to look at Fuchsia. She was stretched out on her back on the couch, eyes shut and eyelids flickering slightly. Twice in succession, her head jerked. After a moment, Opal asked, “What’s she doing?”

  “My guess is she’s checking Cobra’s time line,” Danny said.

  Chapter 41

  Fuchsia, in Trance

  It was so difficult to explain what this was like, Fuchsia thought. Even now, when she was getting at least a little used to it, the whole experience was weird. It started with being able to see with your eyes shut. You sort of looked around them, even though that was impossible. The light seemed to come in from a different direction, which she supposed must mean it was coming from a different time. But whatever—if she concentrated, she could see everybody in the room. Mr. Cobra, looking puzzled. Danny, dear Danny, looking concerned and protective and a bit proud. And Opal and Michael, just looking. Of course, they’d never seen her do this before, so they were probably wondering what was happening; but Danny would explain. Actually, Danny was already starting to explain.

  Watching the others was nearly like watching them with her ordinary sight. Nearly. They were there like they always were, but even when you concentrated on them really tightly, you were still aware of something stretching out behind them, a sort of multiple image, like the trail a runner leaves behind in one of those open-exposure photographs. That had been really confusing the first time she saw it. She knew where they were stretching into now, of course, which made things easier.

  Fuchsia felt her body sink farther into the couch as she shifted to a deeper level of trance. It was for all the world as if she was growing heavier, although she thought she probably wasn’t. She was aware she was also stretching, just like the others, but she was getting used to that now as well, so it didn’t feel too strange. In fact, it was quite pleasant, as if she’d grown bigger and more powerful.

  She entered space-time abruptly, as she always did. It came in like a whoosh in her head, and the sensation of expansion was almost overpowering. Suddenly it was as if she was part of the whole universe, stretching into depths of space and eons of time. She remembered what she’d told Danny about looking over a vast plain, and while it was something like that, the description didn’t really work. It was more as if she was standing in space and looking around in four dimensions . . . but looking around four dimensions all at once. And every now and then she would pick up some little detail, like the building of the pyramids or the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs or the great crystal battlements of Rigel 5. She could understand what she was seeing perfectly—in many ways it seemed just like an extension of herself—but explaining it to someone afterward was far more difficult. Actually, it was more or less impossible, which was why she hadn’t really bothered with Danny. Besides, wonderful though it was, this experience wasn’t very useful. (Which, it suddenly occurred to her, was why your mind didn’t let you experience it all the time.) To discover useful things, you had to zoom in and focus, find yourself a point of reference.

  Fuchsia’s point of reference was Mr. Cobra.

  She saw him and the start of his personal time line, winding away from the now they were all in. It was tempting to look at the time lines of the others—and her own—but she continued to focus on Cobra and pulled back as if she was looking down on him from above so that she could see the whole of his time line flowing into a distant future. As it left his now point, it meandered only a very short distance indeed before it began to intertwine with other time lines, generated by friends and family and fellow agents, until it became like a root leading up into the body of an immense, twisted tree, the combined time lines of millions, billions, living on the planet, generating their collective future.

  Fuchsia zoomed in and discovered something was wrong.

  For a moment she was disoriented. Potential time lines wandered off in all directions, like grayed-out options in a computer menu. These were the time lines Cobra hadn’t taken, leading to a thousand different possibilities for his remaining life. She could see the time line he’d been on before they made their present contact with him, snaking its way inevitably to plague and death at Montauk. She could see where it branched—sometime during Opal’s description of what had happened—making a new time line, the one they were on now. And she could see where it led. . . .

  Except that it led nowhere. Nor did the intertwined time lines that made up most of the tree.

  Fuchsia frowned. None of this was making sense to her, which almost certainly meant she was doing something wrong. And that was not surprising, she told herself, because she was very new to all this. What she needed to do was investigate carefully, taking her time, until she understood it properly. What she needed to do was enter Mr. Cobra’s time line and find out for herself what was happening. She knew she could do that easily, because the way lay open and he had put up no resistance. She hurled herself toward the now of Mr. Cobra, the only possible starting point and her guarantee she would penetrate the right time line.

  It was like entering an old black-and-white movie, but one lived rather than just viewed. In an itchy, scratchy way, she was Cobra, experiencing his experiences, even catching hints of his feelings. Yet she remained an observer, retaining her own thoughts and feelings, retaining a measure of her perception of space-time, most of all, retaining control. She flew along the time line as Cobra himself (like pressing the fast-forward button!) and saw he did indeed leave Moscow, did indeed return to Langley (briefly), then traveled to his home in New York for a joyful reunion with his wife and baby boy.

  The baby was what did it. Fuchsia slowed down her examination so that she could look at the baby and found herself smiling broadly. She liked babies, but that was not the point. This baby was Mr. Carradine, still in nappies, far chubbier than he was in later life. This baby was delightful. This baby—

  —disappeared in a blinding flash, along with its crib and the apartment and the building and the street outside, throwing Fuchsia violently out of the time line to bounce through other time lines that ended just as horribly, just as abruptly, tossing her like a rowboat in a gale until, disoriented and sickened, she managed to withdraw from the time line tree, pulling back and back until she was once again part of the still, silent depths of space-time, floating like an asteroid in fathomless, star-spangled darkness.

  She calmed at once, but became aware of her racing heartbeat as she focused on her body on the couch in the personal now of Mr. Cobra’s Moscow apartment. The memories of what she’d just experienced were flooding through her, a mix of fire and noise and heat, collapsing buildings, screaming people. She could see the shadow of a woman burned into the concrete surface of a half-collapsed bridge. She could see bodies, most of them barely recognizable. She could hear screaming so pitiful she could scarcely bear the memory. The sky
above her head had turned a hideous violet, like some brutal sunset never seen in nature.

  Fuchsia pushed the memories away and forced herself to concentrate. She was aware that her body was trembling, aware Danny had risen from his seat at the table and was hurrying toward her, a look of concern on his face. With a gargantuan effort she ripped herself out of the space-time trance and forced her eyes open.

  “We’re on a time line to a nuclear war,” she said.

  Chapter 42

  Danny, Cobra’s Apartment, Moscow, 1962

  Cobra said, “You’re all from the future, and she can see the future, but the future she’s seeing now isn’t the future the rest of you remember? Who’d like to explain that to me?” The first gray light of a Moscow dawn was creeping through the window, giving him a haggard look.

  “There are different futures, Mr. Cobra,” Fuchsia said.

  “How can there be different futures? The future’s the future.”

  Fuchsia shook her head. “No, it isn’t. Believe me, you have lots of different possible futures, and so have we. The one that actually happens—the main time line—depends on the choices you make and the things you do. I don’t understand this any better than you do, but the time line we grew up in, the one where America and Russia don’t go to war over Cuba, isn’t the time line we’re in now. In this one there’s a nuclear showdown.” She hesitated, then added, “And it doesn’t turn out very well.”

  Despite the mess they were all in, Danny was growing to like Cobra more and more. He took things as they came, didn’t try to insist they should be some other way. Mr. Carradine had the same characteristic. Cobra was showing it now, for he said lightly, “So I can imagine. How long have we got?”

  “To nuclear war?” Fuchsia looked suddenly helpless. “I don’t know how to estimate time properly when I’m in that state. My guess would be . . . maybe two weeks.”

  “But it could be less?”

  Fuchsia nodded. “Yes.”