by Ramy Vance
“Of course. What, you don’t think those health food corporations make theirs in a test tube first? They add artificial flavoring and water it down to make it sell. Both techniques compromise the strength of the formula. So I created a concentrated cleanse with the same basic ingredients that doesn’t cater to nanny government FDA regulations and will restore your health instantly.”
Buzz snapped his fingers for emphasis, and Rueben entered the room and wryly eyed the drink.
“Ah, Rueben. I have one for you as well.”
“I think I’ll pass. I believe in the FDA.”
Buzz held out the frighteningly unnatural-colored drink. “No, no, after the ordeal we went through, it’s a must.”
Rueben took the drink away from him and set it down. “Buzz, we spent an hour in the county jail. We’ll be fine.”
“Really, I insist.”
Rueben raised an eyebrow, and Buzz took a long gulp of his glass. He violently spat the liquid out, gagged, and screamed, “Con permiso, mujeres. My apologies, ladies.”
They all laughed, and Buzz set the glass down. “Rosa.”
Rosa appeared in the doorway. “Yes, Mr. Buzz.”
“Drinks all around.”
“Ah yes, Mr. Buzz. I had a feeling you’d say that.” She lifted a tray containing fully prepared martinis. She winked as they took them all.
Rueben laughed. “Thank you, Rosa.”
“My pleasure, Mr. Rueben.”
Rosa grabbed the colon cleanses and whisked them away.
The foursome settled nicely into their martinis and began talking.
Buzz started the discussion. “Okay people, let the debrief begin. What have we learned?”
Martha sipped her drink, set it down, and rubbed her hands together. She looked a lot more refreshed in a blue-and-white striped shirt and jeans. “A man named Pete, who may be Rueben’s older self—or from another universe—is trying to kill or kidnap us.”
They all laughed nervously except for Aki. Buzz raised his drink. “Hear, hear.” The rest of them brought their drinks to their lips.
Aki narrowed her eyes while she sipped. When she set it down, she rubbed her chin in the way she did when presented with a clue. “Is anyone going to fill me in?”
Buzz and Martha looked at Rueben in a coded way, and Rueben struggled with how to answer. He didn’t think Aki was ready to hear the truth, and he didn’t believe she’d get it anyway if he told her. He knew Martha was still rattled and confused by the whole time warp ability even after seeing the proof in Buzz’s special computer room. What if Aki thought he was crazy, even after seeing the proof?
Buzz reached into an end table drawer and pulled out a cigar. He crossed his legs and lit it, and the smell filled the room. He held the box out to the rest of the group. “Anyone?”
The rest of them declined, and Rueben crossed the room and stared out the window. “Pete is going to bomb the World Summit.”
Martha was quick to respond. “That U.N. thing? Monday night?”
Aki groaned, momentarily dropping the “out of the loop” routine. “Ugh. I’ve been doing security for all of that. So far we’ve stopped a Real IRA bomber from rigging a hotel room and a Russian mobster with a bomb. We’re not sure what the Russian had planned. But, he’s in custody.” She stared at Rueben suspiciously. “I know you have your ‘sources,’ but do you know how he’s planning to attack it?”
Rueben shoved his hands in his pockets. “He has an army of drones that drop bombs—”
Buzz jumped on his computer. “Drones. What type?”
Rueben fished in his memory for the news footage he had seen in the basement during his captivity by Pete. “They’re ordinary-looking drones. A boxy center with four propellered arms. They were part of a light show.”
“Ah.” Buzz clicked away at his keyboard. “Shouldn’t be too difficult to track down the make and model. Unless they’re custom-made…hmm, leave it to me. Anyway, I’ll work on a program to hack into the drones’ navigation system. In case it comes to that.”
Rueben tapped his finger against the side of his drink. “Good idea.”
Martha pulled a small notepad from her purse and a pen to take notes. When she was repositioning her purse beside her, her keys fell on the floor. She picked them up and dropped them back into her purse, but not before Rueben saw the red toucan figurine dangling from her keychain. Petunia, Martha’s good luck toucan. Martha cleared her throat. “These drones have bombs in them?”
“Yes.”
Aki jumped up. “Rueben, drones with bombs? This is bad. I’m calling Sven.”
“No, Aki, you need to trust me.”
“You just told me that you have these ‘anonymous sources’ that say the World Summit will be blown up by drones Monday night. I can’t sit on that kind of information.”
“I’m not asking you to. That’s why we’re here.”
Martha held out a palm toward Aki. “Calm down, Aki. You have to trust that—”
Aki pushed her hand away. “Quite honestly, Rueben, I hate to put it this way, but you leave me no choice. I outrank you. This is a matter of global security. I need to know your sources.”
Rueben and Aki stood in the living room, enveloped in tense silence. Rueben ruffled his hair, and Aki’s dark eyes searched him. “If you can’t give me your sources, it implicates you in the attack, and I have to treat it that way.”
“No, Aki. I’m not involved.”
“Then give me your sources.”
Buzz interjected, “He can’t.”
Both Aki and Rueben turned to look at him. He stared at his laptop screen, his chin cupped by his palm. The cigar burned in an ashtray beside him.
Aki turned to him and flipped her bobbed dark hair. She strode up to Buzz. “Are you involved, then?”
“Sit, Aki. There’s a lot you don’t know.”
She swiveled around Buzz’s laptop screen. “What are you—” She paused. “This is my agency profile. What the hell? How did you get this?”
Buzz stood and paced the room. “You’re not the only one with security clearance around here. I’m on the president’s payroll as an advisor on artificial intelligence. I likely outrank you.”
“I highly doubt that.”
“Well, fortunately, I don’t care enough to find out. It appears you have enough security clearance to know what’s going on.”
“I agree.”
“Good, then we’re on the same page.”
Rueben was surprised to see this side of Buzz, this sort of in-charge Buzz.
“Take a seat, darling.”
Aki reluctantly obeyed. Rising, Buzz took the floor, pacing, and theorizing in professor mode. “I looked at your history with the agency. It looks like you were part of the security detail of Dr. Eduardo Nunez. Does the name ring a bell?”
She sipped her drink. “Sure. A physicist specializing in temporal displacement.”
“Ah, yes. About four years ago?”
“Yes. I’ve heard rumors about it, but you know it?”
Buzz nodded soberly. “I worked on it. I was a consultant to his scientific research team.”
Martha raised her palm. “So for the uninitiated among us, Dr. Nunez was…”
Buzz answered quickly. “Involved with highly classified government operations having to do with manipulating the dimensions of time and space. Two people died in the beta phases, and Dr. Nunez himself disappeared and was never heard from again. While they scrapped the project shortly after, it did prove the possibility of time travel: they managed to send a banana back three days.”
Rueben narrowed his eyes. “You knew all this?”
“Of course. Why do you think I was so quick to believe you when you first came to me a few months ago?”
Aki regarded Buzz seriously. “I’d heard rumors of the banana experiment.”
Rueben gulped back shock. Buzz was one thing, but Aki knew of experiments involving time travel too?
Buzz continued his lecture. “
Rueben is something like that banana.”
“Capable of simultaneously experiencing multi-dimensional realities?” Aki swiveled her body toward Rueben.
Rueben’s eyes widened. “Huh?”
Buzz closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “To put it quite simply, he can’t die. We can kill him over and over again, but he always returns to life within seventy-two hours of when he died.”
Aki took Rueben in, looking him up and down, and he shrugged. The cat was out of the bag now. Rueben cleared his throat ceremoniously. “I know it’s hard to believe. When I told Martha, it took a long time for her to accept it. Sometimes I think she still doesn’t. So, if you need time for it sink in or—”
Aki shrugged. “No. I get it. Makes sense.”
Rueben pursed his lips. “It just… Like that?”
“Yeah. It’s the only explanation I can think of for how you turned into a badass overnight.”
Rueben scratched his head, not quite sure what to make of that. Buzz straightened his shirt collar and rubbed his hands together. “Well then, that was easier than I thought. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, can we get to more important matters, like stopping the bombing of the World Summit?”
Aki went into full professional mode. “I agree, now that we’re clear on what Rueben’s ‘source’ is. You’ve lived through this attack, then, Rueben?”
“Uh, yes.”
She snapped around, looking for pen and paper, and Martha tossed some spares to her. “Approximate time of attack?”
“Seven-thirty p.m.”
“And you said drones?”
“Correct.”
“How many?”
Rueben didn’t know. He thought back to Pete’s computer screen in the basement. Pete had been viewing a spreadsheet with two hundred cells.
“Two hundred. I think.”
“Wow. That’s a lot. And the million-dollar question: why is Pete doing this? Do you know?”
“He wants to start a global nuclear war.”
“Egads,” Buzz said.
Martha shook her head sadly. “But why? Rueben, do you remember anything else?”
Rueben thought about it. Pete had pulled a notebook out of his black backpack. A notebook with names. He could only remember a couple of them. “Pete had a notebook with names and numbers in it. Do Jackson Ford and Patricia Mendel mean anything to anyone?”
Buzz did a quick Google search on his laptop. “One of the country’s leading civil engineers. And…hmm. One of the nation’s leading doctors.”
Martha tapped her pen against her knee. “What might Pete want with them?”
An idea came to Rueben. He didn’t like it. “What if he’s trying to start a nuclear war. And he’s got a list of some of the people he wants to save. Maybe the rest of the notebook contains the locations of fallout shelters.” He might be just grasping for straws now, but maybe not. Damn, Pete was a real bastard. But why did he want to start World War III in the first place?
Aki pursed her lips. “Doesn’t sound good. We don’t know where Pete is right now. Rueben, can’t you die and go back in time to right before the bar? So we can stop him?”
Rueben was quick to answer. “Can’t. He implanted me with a nanobot that has ‘capped’ my warping abilities at the genetic level. I can’t go back farther than 10:35 p.m. on Friday night.” He proceeded to give his friends an abbreviated version of his captivity at Pete’s hands in the basement of the empty skyscraper.
Afterward, Martha threw her hand over her mouth. “You had to blow your leg off to die? That’s a horrible way to…”
“And you think I have a dangerous mind?” Buzz smirked. “Pretty ingenious, I say. High five, buddy.”
Aki made some notations on her notepad and looked at Rueben as if examining a clinical test subject. “Futuristic tech. You mentioned that he is you, but older, right?”
“Actually,” Buzz said, “I believe Pete is Rueben from another universe. So an alternate Rueben, not a future Rueben.” He then proceeded to give them his “rules for warpers” that he had conceived at the jail.
Afterward, Aki studied her notes. “Here are the facts as we know them so far. The U.N. bombing involving two hundred drones is a little over two days away. Rueben can’t go back in time far enough to apprehend Pete. And Pete appears to be Rueben from another universe.”
Buzz shrugged as if this was an ordinary Saturday afternoon for him. “Yeah, I think that’s everything.”
Suddenly, Rueben didn’t feel so good. He stood. “I need some air.”
He left the living room and heard Aki say, “Where’s he going? We need the subject. I mean, Rueben.”
Rueben cringed as he continued walking away. Last night he had been her date. Platonic-friend date, but one with the potential for more. Now he was “the subject?”
What the hell?
He made it outside and headed toward Buzz’s manicured garden. As he walked into the hedged mazes, hands in his pockets, he thought about Aki. The truth was, he was madly in love with her.
He’d been in love with her for a long time, and that love had only grown as he had died eighty-three times when trying to stop Pout, and he’d tried to woo her anew several of those times.
She had found him exciting and mysterious, and he had thrived on that. Now that his secret was out, it was everything he had feared. She was over him. He would lose her, and that would be that. He’d go back to being the dorky guy in cubicle thirty-three who repaired people’s computers.
Or worse, he’d be the freak who had some kind of weird genetic mutation possibly due to some drug he never remembered being exposed to. Who would want to date that guy? And how would he fight his way out of the “friend zone” now?
He sat against the hedge maze for a few minutes and thought over what to do next. Then his phone chirped with a text. Aki.
Where are you? Marshall is in trouble.
Chapter Fifteen
Saturday, May 20, 5:36 p.m.
Aki and Rueben sat at a table in Buzz’s garden. Rosa brought them tea and pastries.
“Anything else, Mr. Rueben, Ms. Aki?”
Rueben smiled and bit into a scone. It was horrible. She should definitely stick to store-bought twinkies. “That’s it, Rosa. Thanks.”
Aki smirked and tossed her scone back onto the plate. “Buzz trying to be pretentious, I guess?”
“What would possibly give you that idea?”
They both laughed.
“Okay, so tell me,” Rueben said. “What’s the deal?”
Aki leaned forward. “The CIA has noticed some unusual activity. Someone’s tapping Marshall’s phone line.”
“His phone line?”
“Yeah. His cell phone. You have the same phone account, right?”
“Yeah. He has a pension, but he also has memory problems, so I took over all the bills to make sure they get paid each month. I consolidated our phone lines, which was one of my harder victories in the ongoing saga of Handling Marshall Peet.”
“I can see how that would be.”
Rueben sipped his tea. “Yeah.”
“Well, I had Tech check your phone number to see if Pete was tracking yours too. He’s not. But, he is tracking Marshall and has been for a while.”
“You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Bait. He’s going to kidnap Marshall and use him as bait somehow to get us off the board. And with ‘endgame’ being Monday and Pete probably needing to make a lot of last-minute preparations…”
“…he’s probably going to make a move soon,” Rueben finished.
“Right.”
“So, what do we do?”
“The agents stationed outside your apartment building aren’t adequate. We’ve got to keep Marshall busy with us. Not let Pete get a chance at him.”
Rueben burst into laughter. “You do realize what you’re suggesting, right? You’ve interacted with Marshall before. At the police dinner.”
“Yep.”
&nbs
p; “All right, let’s go.”
Aki and Rueben went back into the mansion to say their goodbyes. Buzz and Martha were staring at a screen that appeared to be blueprints.
Aki recognized it immediately. “That’s the U.N. building.”
Martha now had half a legal pad full of notes. “Uh-huh.”
Aki gestured toward the screen. “Where did you guys get this?”
Buzz shrugged. “Oh, I called the White House. I told them I wanted to make sure the security system was working properly for the summit. They sent them right over.”
Martha flipped through her legal pad. “We’re getting the lay of the land, and Buzz is trying to locate the drones by searching the city for possible signals. Nothing so far, but Buzz thinks maybe he could plant a virus that confuses their signal and repels the drones. Or at the least, slow them down once they’re in the air.”
That plot sounded familiar to Rueben. “Did you steal that from Independence Day?”
“Yeah. It worked for Will Smith, and it can work for us.”
Rueben shrugged. “More power to you. We think Pete may be trying to kidnap Marshall.”
“Good luck, you two. Don’t have too much fun without us.”
Outside, Rueben shrugged at his Mazda. “I guess we’ll take your car.”
She laughed and clicked the remote for her Porsche. “I think that might be a good idea.”
He slipped into the leather seat, and she put on her Versace shades and gunned the engine. God, she looked good behind that wheel.
She pulled out of the driveway and out onto the road and picked up speed. “So, what’s the plan?”
“You want to know something? I genuinely have no idea.”
“Come on. He’s your dad. You’ve got to have some idea how to coax him into listening to us.”
He laughed. “You obviously don’t know him.”
“At the police dinner, he didn’t strike me as particularly friendly.”
“That’s a delicate way of putting it. In short, he’s an asshole.”
“Well, I think we should be straight with him. Just tell him we know he’s in danger.”
Rueben laughed. “Do you have any idea how he would respond to that?”