“And what conspiracy is that?” Shauna grabbed a green apple from a bowl on the table. She crunched a bite tasting sweetness, tartness and crispness. Nothing had ever tasted so good. “God, this is good,” she said around a mouthful of food.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”
Shauna laughed. “I never thought I’d hear you say that to me again. It’s wonderful.” She finished the apple in record time and threw the core into a recycle receptacle. “Just because you found me, saved me, healed me and loved me doesn’t mean I’m going to listen to you. I’ve been on my own too long to go back to ancient times.”
“Are you calling me old, young lady?”
All the banter was said with love and warmth. Shauna wouldn’t give this up for anything. Her mother and father were back in her life and it couldn’t be more perfect.
Or could it?
She looked out the window just in time to see Mike and her father bend over the jet engine of the skycar. The intensity in Mike’s face brought out his stark, masculine features. The sun highlighted his strong, cleft chin. A wide smile creased his face and Shauna watched her father throw back his head and laugh at something Mike said. A warm feeling rushed through Shauna. How lucky was she to have him stumble into her life? She frowned, wondering what Mike thought about his new living arrangements.
“You look worried. Your young man seems to like it here, in this century.” Her mother wrapped her arm around Shauna and hugged her.
“How’d you know what I was thinking?” Shauna squeezed her mother’s hand. Tears formed but she pushed them back.
“You’re staring at Mike like he’s a miracle about to disappear. Do you think he will?”
“I don’t know, Mom. He came here by accident. He’s been thrust into situation after situation and he’s always been beside me. He learned the skycar manual in six weeks and flew me to you when I was injured.” She sucked in a breath and slowly let it out. “Not once has he complained. Not once has he said he wants to go back.” At her mother’s look she said, “Yes, he’s known all along he could go back whenever he wants. He’s stayed.”
“And?”
“And I’m in love with him.” There. She’d said it. Out loud and to her mother. It was official.
“He seems like a good man from what we’ve seen of him. Your father likes him.”
“That seals it, then. I’m officially doomed.” Shauna turned from the window and fell onto the couch. “What am I going to do, Mama?”
Louise sat next to her daughter. “Mama. How I’ve longed to hear you say that.” She took Shauna’s face between her two palms and said, “You take that amazing man and love him. You be there for him, help him through the tough times and never doubt him. Always be loyal. That’s how you’ll win a lifetime of love with him.”
“But what if he doesn’t love me?”
“Oh, he does. That man’s crazy for you. It’s written all over his face.” Louise pulled a homemade afghan off the back of the sofa. “You’re tired. I see it in your eyes. Rest.” She covered Shauna with the afghan and tucked it around her as if she were a child.
“Okay.” She shifted down to settle more comfortably and pulled the afghan up to her mouth. “You really think he loves me?”
“I know he does.”
* * * * *
“This dinner is delicious,” Mike complimented. “Even in my day I didn’t eat fresh fruits, vegetables and meats that were this good.”
“We grow everything here. Our cows and chickens are naturally organic, our fish farms are tested weekly. We use no chemical pesticides. We get enough rain each year, our soil is fertile and our seasons are beautiful. It’s paradise here,” Douglas Wentworth explained.
The men sat at the table in the Wentworth’s lovely living room. Mike loved the knotty pinewood table. All around him he saw natural fabrics, real wood and homemade scatter rugs. “I feel as if I’m back in the twenty-first century.” He ran his hand over the smooth wood. “You don’t use the new plastics?”
“No,” Douglas said. “We wanted to go back to nature. But we have our dishwashers and computers. And we won’t give up our self-cleaning napkins, renewable paper or twenty-second century hover scooters and skycars.” Douglas grinned, changing his face from stern to boyish. He leaned across the table to Mike and whispered, “Don’t tell the women but I need my creature comforts.”
“I heard that, Douglas,” Louise said as she came into the dining room. She carried a platter of fresh winter fruit. Oranges, cranberries, pears, grapes and bananas were piled on the platter. “Dessert.”
Shauna followed behind her with three cups of steaming coffee on a twenty-second century platter made from the unknown plastic that Mike liked. He saw striations of red, yellow, orange and thin lines of blue in the material. He could see through the platter to Shauna’s hands, yet the colors were starkly vibrant throughout. It glimmered as if she held a prism in her hands. “Coffee for everyone. Dad, Mom said you were drinking decaf, so this one’s for you.”
Douglas grumbled. “Darn blood pressure. You’d think they’d figure out how to control it better by now.” He glared at the offending cup and took a sip. “At least it’s palatable.”
Shauna stepped around the table and hugged her father. “As long as you’re healthy, that’s what counts.”
“So, tell me what you plan to do about the Fearsome Foursome,” Mike said. “Shauna’s told me a little about their history.”
Douglas Wentworth sat back in his wooden chair and rocked on the two hind legs. “It’s a long and sordid history Mike but in a nutshell the War on Terror wore the people out. President Adams the Second had a burr up his butt to rule the world. In our travels and from our correspondents for The Real Truth, we found some startling news. News that the population in your day had begun to suspect but was vehemently denied by the old government.” Douglas peeled a banana and took a bite. His bushy eyebrows knit together. “Adams and Lorry, two very rich and powerful oil men hid a secret.”
Shauna’s mom took over. “We heard rumblings from friends that in 2015, twelve years after the War on Terror had begun people started digging into the history of the Adams and Lorry families. Oh, many had tried it before but this time people close to them, family friends who’d lost children in the war and were angry, dug deeper.” Louise plucked a grape off a bunch she’d put on a plate in front of her, popped it in her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “It seemed that over time, those informants told their children and their children’s children what they’d learned.”
Douglas scraped his chair back from the table. He paced the room, running his hand through his silver hair.
“What did they find, Mom?” Shauna asked.
Mike leaned forward. He was fascinated. Here was the answer to why his world was in constant fear, always looking over their shoulders for a suicide bomber and stray bullet in the back or an angry pair of eyes. For a minute he wondered what he’d do with this information when he got back home.
If he went home.
“More coffee anyone?” Louise asked.
“Now Louise,” Douglas warned. “Give the kids what they want to hear.”
Mike saw the love and humor in his eyes. Shauna’s parents were still head-over-heels in love with each other.
“The informants found that the United States, the world’s leader, had enough oil buried under its land, in the Gulf Coast, off Alaska, and in other places, that they’d never needed to rely on Middle East oil in the first place. They found that OPEC was contacted by the US oil corporations to cause a worldwide shortage. The idea was conceived by President Adams and Vice-President Lorry. Prices were raised so they could earn gargantuan profits. The people were held hostage to the oil companies.”
Mike jumped up from the table. “We have enough oil?”
“Yes, Mike, you do,” Douglas said. “But those that found out the truth and tried to tell the world were systematically killed. Accidents, disappearances, they were all silenced.” H
e stood behind his wife and pulled her close to him, wrapping his arms around her.
“Of course, the government never let on that the whole War on Terror was planned from the beginning,” Louise continued. She snuggled into her husband’s arms. “Every secret was guarded by the few involved. Adams and Lorry headed a secret society and each member was given untold wealth to keep quiet. Those that wanted out died. You didn’t leave their underground club.”
“What happened, Mom?” Shauna asked. “How’d the word get out?”
“One man, the truest patriot of all time, leaked the word—anonymously. It’s since come out who he was. James Centerfield. He’d been the secretary to the CEO of the secret society and knew all their secrets. When he drafted the documents that authorized an unknown man in the Middle East to perform acts of terror on people to frighten them enough to conform to his wishes, Centerfield’s conscience kicked in.” Louise pulled away from her husband and sat at the table. “You continue, Douglas, I can’t stand this part.”
A frown marred Douglas’ features and his eyebrows knit together creating one line along his forehead. He placed his hands on the back of a chair. The whiteness of his knuckles told of his anger. Mike saw despair clearly written on his face.
“You see, Mike, that man was Bin Laden. The secret society members only wanted small acts of terror to be performed. An embassy bombed, a few marines killed here, a hole in a ship, a few navy personnel killed there. No one ever expected 9/11. But the man craved power and notoriety. When the horror of the towers collapsing was shown worldwide, James Centerfield knew he’d been the instrument to bring the evil and destruction to his country. He couldn’t live with it. He copied the files that ordered him to draft the document authorizing the random acts of terror, snuck them out of his office and prepared to leak it to the world. He did one thing to protect himself, though. That’s how the world eventually found out the real truth. Which is where the name for our digital newspaper came from, by the way.” Douglas grinned.
“Centerfield mailed a copy of the document to a life-long friend,” Louise said. “Then killed himself.”
“Then why didn’t we know about the conspiracy in my day?” Mike asked. He felt angry, deceived. He knew he’d never trust a politician again.
“It got lost in the mail.” Louise shook her head. “The simplest and stupidest explanation. The mail system was backed up right after 9/11. The airlines had lost their contracts with the postal service because they didn’t have good enough security to protect their planes from the possibility of bombs being hidden onboard. The postal service had their own planes but not enough. The documents that James Centerfield mailed to his friend never got there.”
“Then how did the world find out?”
Louise cut a pear into one-inch chunks. She didn’t eat it, just continued to cut the pieces smaller and smaller and smaller with sharp, angry strokes. “When the postal service went out of business—”
“What?” Mike stared at Louise. “Who does the mail?”
“No one, Mike,” Douglas said. “It’s all electronic. Electronic documents, electronic signatures—instant mail.”
“Wow.” Mike sank into a chair at the table and hung his head. “This is too much to process at once.”
Shauna came over and rubbed his neck and shoulders. She leaned over and kissed the nape of his neck and hugged him. “I know it’s a lot. But you need to know why this world’s the way it is.”
“I know but…God.”
“Forty years later,” Douglas continued, “after hundreds of thousands of dead and injured young military men and women, after an unpopular draft, one brave woman, a granddaughter of James Centerfield, found the original copies of the documents. James had stored them with his collection of antique stamps. Appalled at what she found, she sent the documents to the biggest newspapers in the world.”
“What happened?” Mike asked. He shook his head and stared at his hands.
Louise took up the story. “Well, there was a global uproar, as you would expect. Politicians from this country and around the world cried foul. They demanded the opening of all the oil fields in this country. Importation of Mid-East oil ceased immediately. The OPEC cartel collapsed. Terror ended within months. With no need for their oil, the Middle East lost billions of dollars that they’d used to support their terrorists.”
Mike pushed back from the table. “That’s one hell of a story.” He paced from the living room to the kitchen and back again.
“It’s the real truth,” Douglas said.
“I’m sure it is. I see the way this world works. Only a conspiracy that big could turn around this country and get it away from oil.” Mike stopped pacing. “If we had so much oil, why did we stop using it?”
“Because,” Shauna said, “the population was so angry at the oil companies for their greed they raced to put them out of business by using alternative fuels. Every oil company executive was arrested and thrown in jail. The country had its revenge.”
“Good,” Mike stated. “They deserved it.”
Shauna grabbed his hand. “If it hadn’t come out into the open, Mike, the world would be a vastly different place now. For all we know, there might not even be a world.”
“So what do we do now?” Mike asked Shauna’s parents. “How does the past conspiracy relate to the Fearsome Foursome?”
“We’re still digging,” Louise said. “But we’re finding that only one CEO runs the world. He just lets us think the other three are in on it. We wonder if there is only one person alive. Our research has found no documents proving that the three CEOs even exist. Oh, there are pictures of the four men all over the place but we never see them together, ever.”
“Who’s the CEO who’s in control?” Shauna asked.
“Donald Carson,” Louise stated.
“The CEO of Planet Energy Corp?” Shauna bounced up from the table. “Why the scheming, rotten, low-life…”
Douglas laughed. “That’s my girl. All riled up about an injustice.” He gave her a big hug, wrapping her in his bear-like arms.
“Daddy, you taught me to care, remember?” Shauna asked, her voice muffled, her face buried in her father’s shoulder.
“How do you plan to expose Mr. Carson?” Mike asked. He drummed his fingers lightly on the wood table. It didn’t have the ringing tone of the plastic-type ones he’d seen of late but the solid thump he remembered from his day.
“We’ve been working on that for five years, Mike and we’ve made little progress. We’re thinking we have to infiltrate the highest offices of the other three corporations to see if a CEO really exists. That’ll lead us to exposure of Carson.”
“It’s late,” Louise said. “Off to bed. You’ve had a long day Mike, and Shauna needs her rest. The world will still be the same in the morning.”
“Too bad, Mom,” Shauna muttered.
“Off to your room, young lady. In the morning you can tell me what you and your young man plan to do to get your name off the Global Guardians’ most wanted list.”
* * * * *
Mike couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned and stared at the ceiling. If he didn’t know he was in the twenty-second century, he’d think he was in any home in Bend, Oregon back in 2004. The off-white ceiling was hand-troweled and medium-toned wood beams decoratively crossed the top. Rich colors of blue and green with a hint of yellow covered the walls. The pine furniture was stained to match the ceiling beams and an old-fashioned comforter with corresponding blue, green and yellow colors covered the bed.
But the comforter was a tangled mess. Mike lay in comfortable sweats that Shauna’s dad had loaned him. He didn’t need the covers since the house was warm from radiant heat. His mind swirled from all that he’d learned today about the conspiracy, the fact that there might only be one man running the world. The horror that 9/11 was brought on by the greed of a few oil men who only wanted to fatten their pockets sickened him. His world and their way of life changed because of a few sick men. He pu
nched the pillow. “Damn.”
Mike didn’t know what to do. Should he go home and get the word out? How would he explain his knowledge of future events? Would it be too early to gather proof of the conspiracy? Who would believe him?
No one.
He’d be branded a nutcase. Plus, he’d probably change Shauna’s world if he opened up that Pandora’s Box in his time. No. He had to let it go, run its course. His stomach knotted at the thought that so many men and women would be killed in that war.
Then there was the problem of leaving Shauna. He loved her. He’d suspected it from when he’d first met her in her office but he knew it when she’d been shot by Johnson. He thought she was going to die. If it hadn’t been for the kind doctor, Shauna might not be here now.
But could he leave his brother? Never see him again? He didn’t much care about his father. His dad had been too distant when he and Scott were growing up. Their mother had died in a car accident just before Christmas and his father had never recovered. The man had rebuffed every overture he and Scott made to become close in the years following his mother’s death. Luckily Aunt Evelyn, his father’s sister, had raised them. Could he leave her too? Every Christmas was spent with her.
No answers came to him. Mike climbed out of bed, shoved his feet into his boots and went in search of something to drink. He found a beer from some unknown manufacturer and sat at the kitchen table to drink it. The first sip tasted like honey. He hadn’t had a drink since he’d blundered into this century. Mike guzzled the drink and grabbed another.
“Can’t sleep?” Shauna’s soft voice flowed over him soothing and exciting him at the same time. Mike’s body hardened. He had only been able to kiss her, hug her but not to spend any time with her since they arrived at her parents’ house.
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