Nine Eleven Read online

  Edith’s face flushed red as she also stood. “Nothing of importance.” She clutched the satchel to her chest.

  Dane didn’t move away. “I understand Eagle met you in Greece.”

  Edith’s looked away. “He was doing research.”

  “I’m sure,” Dane said. “Emotional ties in an operational unit are dangerous things, Edith. You have to be able to do your job, even though someone you care about is in danger. In fact, you are part of the system that sends them into harm’s way. I need to know if you understand that the mission comes first.”

  “Of course,” Edith responded, immediately and automatically.

  Dane stared at her as if he could read right into her brain. Eagle had discussed that exact thing with her, whether Dane had some of the Sight that Scout and Sin Fen possessed. There was definitely something different about the man, more than his origin from another timeline. In fact, Eagle had suggested that difference was exactly why he’d been saved from his timeline and brought here.

  As the thoughts zig-zagged in her brain, Edith tried to rein them in, because if he could get a sense of what she was thinking—

  “On the flip side,” Dane said, “we have to care about the agents we send into the past. It’s what makes us human. It’s what makes us different from the Shadow.”

  “The Shadow isn’t human?” Edith asked.

  “It’s human,” Dane said. “A human timeline, at least. But it’s perverted in some fundamental way. What justification can it have to destroy other timelines? Wipe out entire populations?” He didn’t expect an answer. “Be careful, Edith.”

  With that vague warning, he walked away, toward the Met and the journey to the Possibility Palace, leaving Edith Frobish unsettled and worried.

  The Possibility Palace

  Where? Can’t tell you. When? Can’t tell you.

  “Definite connections.” Ivar was excited. “Inside the same mission.”

  He had listed all the missions the Time Patrol had undertaken so far through four different dates, trying to discern a pattern, if there was one, to the Shadow’s assaults on the timeline.

  Ivar drew a line on the blackboard he and Doc used as their ‘Turing Time Computer,’ from the bottom right, 1776 Philadelphia, Doc, to 1826 Monticello, Moms. He pointed as he explained. “On your last mission, you managed to get the Committee of Five in Philadelphia to delay the Declaration of Emancipation by fifty years. Then you told Jefferson someone would show up at Monticello in fifty years. You described the woman, Moms, and what she’d be wearing, because you knew her mission. So you saved your mission by giving Moms her mission.”

  Doc held up a hand, halting the younger man. They were inside a room they’d appropriated as their workspace inside the top level of the Possibility Palace, the same dimensions and layout of the Team Room. Doc sat at the table, his face drawn with exhaustion, his body several pounds lighter than it should be. The anti-radiation meds scavenged from the Space Between were wearing him out, but also keeping him alive. With numerous Ph.Ds to his resume, Doc had been the Nightstalker scientist, and had made the transition to the Time Patrol. “There is a problem with that reasoning.”

  Ivar rolled his eyes. Doc always saw problems with Ivar’s theories.

  “The Shadow is the one creating the time bubbles,” Doc said, “so I couldn’t have created Moms’s mission. I was reacting to it. The Shadow prompted Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin to write the Declaration of Emancipation in 1776. I prevented them from attempting to get it enacted by Congress on the Fourth by having them put an addendum delaying enactment for fifty years. Remember, that Declaration, signed by the members of Congress who were there on the Fourth, still exists in our timeline. It’s somewhere, hidden by Jefferson.”

  “But Moms got Sally Hemings to burn the Cipher that was the key to its location,” Ivar said. “Which caused which?”

  “The Shadow caused both,” Doc said.

  Ivar shook his head. “I don’t see it. The Shadow couldn’t have known you’d do what you did.”

  “What if I hadn’t interfered in 1776?” Doc asked and, as was his custom, answered his own question. He waved a hand about, taking in their surroundings. “This is called the Possibility Palace for a reason. What I stopped was a possibility. Possibilities. Plural. I feared two courses of action by Jefferson and the others. One, that they presented the Declaration of Emancipation with the Declaration of Independence at the same time, later on the Fourth, and both were rejected. A drastic change in history. Two, that they presented Independence, got it signed, then presented Emancipation, and initiated a rift between the colonies, causing the coalition that would become the United States to fall apart and the Revolutionary War to be lost.”

  “And—” Ivar began, but Doc overrode him.

  “We would like to say I prevented both. But why was Pythia there in Philadelphia? Why was a Fate there? Neither took any action. They were observing. As if it were a test. A lab experiment. What I fear, Ivar, is that the Shadow is as lost as we are. That they stumbled upon the fact that six Cascades lead to a seventh event, a time Tsunami, that wipes a timeline out. But they’re not quite sure how to make those Cascades link, other than perhaps in bubbles on the same date in different years. So—”

  Ivar cut him off. “I think the Cascades can cut across dates. All the Shadow needs is six, total.”

  “Perhaps,” Doc allowed. “Regardless, they pick a date and search for important events. Scout reported that Pandora told her there were days in history that are especially significant, where a timeline splits, giving birth to another timeline. We’ve seen those alternate timelines, those possibilities, perhaps realities, as we’re pulled back here at the ends of our missions.” Doc got up then walked to the blackboard, shaking his head. “It’s a very dangerous game we’re playing, stumbling around in the dark, blindfolded. Has it occurred to you that I made the wrong decision in 1776?”

  “What do you mean?” Ivar asked.

  “Perhaps, without my interference, the Committee of Five would have changed their mind in the cold light of morning, when faced with the rest of the Congress. Torn up the Declaration of Emancipation. Instead, I got them to hide it. And the fact it still exists, means it can be found.”

  “It’s irrelevant today,” Ivar said.

  Doc’s eyes widened. “That there was a Declaration of Emancipation, ratified on the Fourth of July, 1776, and then hidden? You think that would be irrelevant? Naïve, Ivar. Very naïve. Come with me.” He went to one of the four doors in the room.

  Ivar followed, his fists clenched at Doc’s rebuke.

  They went outside, onto the balcony that was part of the great spiral descending into the massive, open Pit of the Possibility Palace. The wide, spiral track ran counter-clockwise around the outside of the pit, descending into a vague, distant bottom almost a mile down, the beginning of recorded history.

  The descending balcony was of varying widths, depending on the importance of the spot in the timeline and the number of Time Patrol analysts assigned to that era. The analysts sat at bland gray desks which appeared to be Government Issue, circa 1950. There were no computers, no phones. There were thousands and thousands of filing cabinets stacked along the outer edge against the stone wall. There were occasional ziplines going across, and ladders here and there, going from one level to another, making direct connections between certain eras without having to go all the way around. An intricate series of pneumatic tubes shot small containers with scrolls to and fro. All this to keep tabs on history and look for any possible anomalies.

  Doc leaned on the railing, Ivar next to him.

  “Do you think that room is bugged?” Doc asked, nodding toward the door they’d just exited.

  Ivar was surprised. “What?”

  “Do you think it’s possible someone is listening in on our conversations in there?” Doc said.

  “They don’t even allow phones here,” Ivar said. “The most complicated piece of machinery I’ve seen is a coffe
e maker in the bunk room. And why would anyone want to listen in? We’re a team.”

  “So you trust Dane?”

  “Don’t you?”

  Doc shrugged. “Nada wasn’t a very educated man, but his Nada-Yaddas were always on-target. There was one line he freely admitted he took from someone else, a great figure in history. I always suspected Eagle gave it to him, as it sounds more like something he’d have read.” He fell silent.

  “And that line is...?” Ivar asked.

  Doc was startled, as if he’d forgotten the conversation. “Oh. Winston Churchill. ‘In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’”

  “You think Dane is lying to us?” Ivar asked.

  “I don’t know,” Doc said. “But wiping Nada’s memory of his family? His daughter, Isabella? That’s a form of lying, isn’t it? What’s worse than manipulating a man’s mind? I wonder if they’ve told me the truth about the radiation dosage I received in Pakistan.” Doc looked down, to the indeterminate bottom, at the gray cloud that was pre-history. “I don’t know what I know anymore.”

  Ivar’s anger was gone, overwhelmed by surprise. Doc was the last person he’d expect to say those words.

  Doc continued. “We speculate that the destruction of Atlantis was a key point, a critical juncture in time that spawned many parallel timelines. But Moms went back to a time before Atlantis in order to preserve our timeline by saving what we call the first artist, although we’re not even certain of that. She went into that and beyond.” Doc pointed down.

  Ivar looked over the wood balcony.

  Doc shifted his focus to where the spiral gently ascended, disappearing into another gray mist: the future. If there was a roof to the Pit, it was lost in the grayness. “Uncertainty, Ivar.”

  “Oh, no,” Ivar said. “Not Heisenberg.”

  But before Doc could reply, he was interrupted by someone shouting one level below. Looking over the railing, they saw a group of analysts clustered around one desk. One of them wrote furiously on a piece of parchment. She rolled it up, stuck it in a canister, then shoved it into the portal for the pneumatic tube system between two file cabinets. The message shot away.

  “That desk is somewhere around the turn of the second millennia,” Doc said. “Not long ago at all—very close in time. I fear a Zevon is coming.”

  “You think?” Ivar looked up.

  A dark red spike cut through the gray mist in the immediate future.

  Morningside Park, New York City

  “You should never invoke the Cellar without authorization,” Neeley said.

  “I didn’t,” Scout protested. “Moms did. I thought she had authorization.”

  “I know she was the one,” Neeley said, “but now we have to follow through on her threat, especially since the target is here and going after Isabella.”

  Roland settled the discussion with Roland logic. “It’s done. Can’t undo it.”

  The three sat on a bench in Morningside Park, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Across the park in a clearing, in the early morning light, a circle of people struggled through calisthenics with a man leading them.

  “They actually pay for that?” Roland asked for the fourth time, still marveling over the concept of civilians forking over hard-earned money to do what the Army had been paying him to do from day one in uniform.

  “Yes, dear,” Neeley said, patting his forearm, a surprising public display of affection for the couple. Neeley was tall and lean, maybe a tad too lean, her body laced with whipcord muscle, a contrast to Roland’s bulk. “They pay for it because most people need someone to make them do things they don’t want to do.”

  Roland was cast further into confusion. “They don’t want to work out?”

  “I know,” Neeley agreed. “Terrible.”

  “Then why do it?” Roland asked.

  “For many of them, the goal is to lose weight,” Neeley said. “For those who don’t need to lose weight, the object is to look good.”

  “Ahem,” Scout coughed, not subtly at all, given she was dealing with Roland. He shifted his focus from the target to her, and she nodded toward Neeley, trying to get him to notice what was different: a stylish cut to Neeley’s short hair and all the gray colored out, leaving thick, silky black hair framing her angular face.

  Roland frowned, which made the fresh scar across his forehead, over the top of a barbed wire tattoo, which was on top of an older scar, flush bright red. He didn’t catch on and went back to surveillance mode.

  Neeley and Scout exchanged exasperated looks.

  Scout’s had bright red hair, and unlike Roland and Neeley’s attentive pose, was slouched in her chair, shoulders rolled forward, chin down to her chest, wraparound sunglasses hiding her eyes. “Weird,” she muttered as the instructor had the people running in place, exhorting them to get their knees higher. “Isabella doesn’t need to lose weight or look any better.”

  “True,” Neeley agreed.

  Roland opened his mouth to chime in, realized the object of the discussion was the daughter of his former team sergeant, Nada, now deceased, and that he sat next to his ‘girl’—if a stone-cold assassin from the Cellar could be anybody’s ‘girl’—and closed his mouth without uttering a word. The social complexities of the situation were so far beyond him, even Roland realized it.

  Isabella was near the edge of the circle, about two hundred meters from where they sat. Most of the others in the group were also students from nearby Columbia University. Isabella was dark-skinned, both of her parents from Central America, and her long, dark hair was coiled in a braid that flew about as she exercised. Scout and Moms had convinced the Cellar to have Isabella accepted into Columbia, part of taking care of their own, a tenet of the Team.

  “I don’t see the stepfather,” Neeley said. “Maybe it’s a false alarm?”

  “It’s not,” Scout said. “He’s nearby.”

  “How—” Neeley began.

  Roland interrupted, “Okay. He’s around, then. How far away?”

  Neeley frowned, but she knew the Time Patrol dealt with a different sort of reality than she did in the Cellar, and she trusted Roland’s word implicitly. An attachment many times stronger than love, in Neeley’s world. Only two other people had earned that trust; one was dead, and the other was Hannah, the head of the Cellar and her boss.

  Scout pushed up in her chair, the slouch fading. “He’s approaching.” She closed her eyes, focusing. “Anger. Rage.”

  Roland turned to Neeley. “A Sanction?”

  The Cellar was the police for the world of covert operations. Not just police, but also judge, jury, and executioner. A field operative such as Neeley, once given a Sanction by Hannah, held all power. “Anger isn’t enough to—”

  “He’s past the point of reason,” Scout said. She opened her eyes then looked at Neeley. “I don’t say this lightly. I’ve been at Thermopylae. At the Battle of Mantinea. I’ve shoved a blade into a man’s heart. Twice. What I’m sensing from Isabella’s stepfather is murderous. It’s—” She paused. “Oh!” Her face pinched.

  “What?” Neeley asked.

  “She’s dead,” Scout whispered. “Isabella’s mother is dead, back in Georgia. He killed her just before coming here. We should have checked.”

  “Not our job,” Neeley said. “As Moms told you, Isabella’s mother chose her fate.”

  Scout turned her head to the right. “He’s there now. In those trees. Waiting.”

  “Does he have a gun?” Roland asked, standing up.

  “Yes,” Scout said, “but he doesn’t want to use it. He wants to look into Isabella’s eyes when he kills her, just like he did her mother. He wants them all dead. All the women. All the women who betrayed him, who screwed him over, who ignored him, who laughed at him.” She shook her head. “He’s gone, gone. There’s no coming back to sanity.”

  Neeley stood next to Roland. “Then it’s a Sanction.”

  Roland nodded. “You secure Isabella
, and I’ll get him in the—”

  Neeley disagreed. “If he’s killed a woman, then he’s mine. The last thing he should see is a woman. Payback, in this case, will really be a bitch.” She didn’t wait for Roland to concur, striding across the grass toward the trees.

  Without argument, Roland moved to put himself between the target and Isabella.

  Scout followed Neeley, jogging to catch up to her long stride. “I’m tired of broken people,” she said.

  Neeley focused on the woods. “I don’t know how you do what you do. How you can deal with what’s in your head? I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

  “I wish I didn’t have it, either,” Scout said. “Not that I have much choice.”

  “We rarely do,” Neeley said.

  Scout faltered, struck with a vision of a teenage, long-haired Neeley sitting on a plane, a gaily-wrapped package in her lap, a bomb inside the package, her future hinging on the next few moments. It was gone as quickly as it came, and Scout focused on the immediate threat. She broke off to the right to support Neeley’s plan.

  They closed on the target from opposite routes. He was dressed in sweatpants and a hoodie, his face hidden. Scout ‘poked’ him with the Sight and he startled, swiveling from glaring at Isabella to Scout.

  “I remember you. You—” he began, but didn’t finish as Neeley did a turn-kick from the other side, the metal-tipped point of her boot the focus of all her power. She struck between the ninth and tenth ribs on his right side and directed upward. Pointed, blunt-force trauma broke bone and drove into his liver.

  The largest gland in his body ruptured, and excruciating pain blossomed. He fell to his knees, gasping, trying to cry out, but unable to breathe. Neeley shoved him over onto his back then straddled him, a boot to either side of his chest, staring down. “I’m from the Cellar. You’d been warned.”

  Isabella’s stepfather couldn’t speak, not that it would have mattered. Neeley had made the decision.