Old age is a rare gift in our profession. All I hope for is a quick death.
~ Agent 5 I1–2074
Thursday July 4, 2069
Alabama District 3
Commonwealth of North America
An ambulance sat idle in front of the labs. Sam parked behind it. One of the EMTs gave her a nod she returned with a tight-lipped smile. It wasn’t even seven in the morning, and her day was already heading downhill.
“Agent Rose?” Altin stood in the middle of Nova Lab’s atrium. “How’d you get here so fast?”
She raised an eyebrow. “I drove the speed limit and left at six thirty so I could talk to Dr. Emir before I went into work this morning. He called last night babbling about being threatened. Why?”
“Holt was supposed to call you. Emir is dead.”
“What?” Sam fumbled for her phone. “I talked to him a couple of hours ago.” She pulled up the recent calls list and shoved the phone at Altin. “I talked to him less than five hours ago. He’s alive. He has to be alive. I have questions for him.”
Altin sighed as he read the number. “Emir was shot sometime last night. Mr. Troom called us when he showed up this morning and found the lab unlocked, but the doctor wasn’t there. We found the body ten minutes ago back along the tree line behind the lab.”
“Can I see him?”
“Sure, it’s bureau jurisdiction.” He led her through the back atrium doors and past the stone picnic tables up the little hill to the pine trees, where Emir lay facedown on the ground, turned away from her.
“His throat’s shot out.” All she saw were the ragged edges of the wound, but it was enough.
“Yup. Same as Robbins.” Altin tapped his fingers on the butt of his gun. He studied her for a long, silent minute.
“What?”
“He called you?”
“Yes.”
“Because he was threatened?”
Her jaw clenched. “Yes.” Go on. Ask it.
“Why didn’t you come down?”
“Because I didn’t think it was safe. He’s a primary suspect in a homicide case.” Because I didn’t believe he was in danger. Damn, that stung. She should have found some body armor and gone anyway.
Altin said nothing but tossed the phone up and down. “You had your GPS turned on last night, all of that?”
“I’ve recorded every conversation with Emir since you asked me to turn the recorder on. He calls constantly, two or three times a day, at odd hours of the night sometimes. He’s not . . .” The words trailed off as a sob caught in her throat. “God, forgive me. I thought it was just another crazy ramble.” She crossed herself.
“The boy who cried wolf,” Altin said. “You going to be okay?”
Like there were any choices. “I’ll be fine. Let me get my stuff from the car, and I’ll start talking to people. Maybe we’ll get lucky, and the security guards will have seen something.”
The copper penny spun in the fading sunlight, knocked into the efile of Melody Doe, and rattled to the tabletop. Mac picked it up and spun it again. This was the massacre at the valley all over again. He felt it in his bones. Something was missing. If he just looked hard enough, he would find the link and avert disaster.
Apply a little gray matter, MacKenzie. If you’re all jizzing smart, why can’t you see the obvious?
He flicked the penny up and caught it on his hand, flipping it over to see if it landed heads or tails. Heads. Lincoln and Eva Perez smiled at each other from the one-cent piece. Mrs. Perez looked like she’d had her hair updated, too. He flipped the coin again. Tails—2074.
He flipped the coin again. Tails.
Wait. . .
Mac looked at the date—2074.
Impossible. That was five years in the future. The mints might be efficient, but no one would . . .
The efiles dragged his attention. Three people, all dead before they went missing. Three cases of identical trauma. Mac dragged his hand across his mouth as he started sweating. This was madness. But that was the obvious answer, wasn’t it?
Time travel.
Emir had knocked three people back in time.
Even the fracture patterns could support that. Jane Doe’s ripples were nearly continuous. She’d been the closest to the blast and traveled the farthest back. Melody Doe, Melody Chimes . . . she’d never left the office. The explosion in Emir’s lab killed her, and knocked her two years into the past to when Emir was first beginning his experiments. Matthew? The radial pattern was barely discernible, how far was he knocked back? A day, perhaps? A week at the most. Not enough to cause notice.
Mac flipped the coin again: 2074.
Mrs. Azalea said Sam borrowed her car. That Sam left the coin in the car . . . but Sam hadn’t. She would, though. Some future Sam would leave the penny in the car after borrowing it from Mrs. Azalea.
The front door slammed open and shut. Mac shut the files down and looked up expectantly. Sam walked in, perfection in a straight-laced bureau uniform. Everything from her starched white shirt to her navy blue pumps were in place. His eyes rested for just a moment below her neckline, wondering if she was still wearing the lacy black bra from the first day they’d met.
She tossed her purse on the counter and went to the fridge to pour water. “Tell me you have good news.”
“Rough day?”
“Twelve hours of interrogations, reviewing security video, and listening to hours of Emir’s phone calls. He’s dead, by the way, I don’t know if you got the memo down in the morgue. Someone shot him execution style. So, please, tell me you’ve cured cancer or something.”
“I solved the Doe case. The killer, an explanation for the bodies, an explanation for the ripple pattern of the Janes, a location for Melody Chimes, and I can even tell you where to look for the clone lab.”
“Not quite cancer . . .” Sam deadpanned, but he could tell she was eager. “You’ve been busy.”
He flipped the penny again. “I got lucky.”
“A lucky penny? Cute.” They looked at each other for a second, until Sam said, “Do you need an invitation? Tell me what you have!”
Mac tossed her the coin. “Read the date.” He waited until her confusion turned to a furious frown.
“Is this . . . ?”
Mac nodded. “Emir’s machine works, perhaps a little too well. Matthew, Melody, Jane . . . all three were bounced back in time by the machine. He said each iteration, the parallel dimensions, would produce a duplicate person. It’s cloning without clone markers or test tubes. I’m willing to bet that Matthew and Melody were accidents.”
Sam touched the Jane Doe efile lightly. She turned it around. “But I wasn’t?”
“I don’t know, yet. You’re still alive.”
Sam’s brow furrowed. “How does Emir send me back in time if he’s dead?”
“Maybe he doesn’t. Jane is a possible you.”
“A probable me. “That’s what Emir was saying about ground states. No matter how many variables you plug in, the majority of iterations come back to one ground state. A similar path of history. All timelines become one timeline. Isn’t that what he said?” Sam asked.
“Yes.”
“So Jane is me in five years.”
Mac took the file away from her. “No. That won’t be you.” He said it so firmly that Sam’s head snapped up. His eyes caught hers, and he made it clear how confident he was. I won’t let it be you. Ever. He watched as she swallowed, her eyes softening.
“Tell me what happened to Emir,” he said quietly.
Composed, Sam said, “He was tied up behind the lab. Shot through the throat like Robbins. His intern called the police first thing this morning.” She licked her lips. “He called me last night.”
Mac frowned. “The intern?”
“Emir . . . He called, begging me to come to the lab. He said they knew it worked, and they were going to kill him. He couldn’t stall them.”
“They who?”
“He didn’t say.” Her hands clenched. “I didn’t go. I could have saved him, and I didn’t.”
“How were you going to save him?”
Sam looked up sharply. “What?”
“You were going to rush in alone? Again? For what? They—whoever they are—would have tied you up, and you’d be dead with Emir.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“Why didn’t you go?” Mac asked, knowing the answer before she said it.
She looked out the window with a hundred-mile stare. “I thought it was a trap.”
“You were right.”
Sam crossed her arms. “It doesn’t help. If I’d called Altin—”
“He wouldn’t have believed it any more than you did.”
“I know. Altin said the same thing when he listened to the phone call this afternoon.” She sighed. “I hate failing.”
“No kidding?”
Sam smiled before shaking her head. “We need to tell someone about this.”
“Who?” He raised an eyebrow. “It’s time travel, Sam. The first thing anyone is going to do is lock us up for a psych eval. After we’ve spent three months in padded rooms, we’ll come out with our careers shot to find out they’ve classified this into a black hole. This is dangerous information.”
“Are we crazy? Should we go in for a psych eval? I mean, time travel?”
“It fits all the evidence we have. The DNA, the patterns on the skeletons, the penny.” He held up his lucky coin. “It all lines up.”
She laughed. “It lines up?”
“Occam’s razor—the simplest answer is usually the correct one.”
“And you consider time travel simple?”
“I consider it the only explanation that fits with the evidence we have.”
“Why didn’t Emir know the machine worked, though? He said it only sent waves. If it could do more, why wouldn’t he publish that information?”
“Even if he could only send small things back in time, think of the damage. Next year, someone sends back an advanced phone prototype. The research labs tinker with it, and we make a huge advance, but then someone sends back a phone from ten years in the future. It’s too advanced, so we just re-create it without developing the science. What happens from there? When do we hit a point where we are dependent on the future?”
Sam slipped the penny from his fingers. “What happens when someone travels too far back and introduces a new virus, or a new weapon?”
He took the penny back, letting his hands linger on hers. “What happens when we send people back, and we have iterations instead of clones? If your husband’s duplicate comes back in time, who are you married to? Does the duplicate have a right to your bank account? Your health care? Your children? Genetically, aren’t they his? And that doesn’t even address the nonliving things—books, art, music—that could be sent back in time. Buy a famous painting, send it back, sell it as your own.”
“If all iterations reach a ground state where they are the same . . .”
“Emir said this was based on wave forms. All the waves cancel each other out. Every time you split history, it creates a wave, and the wave crashes back to the ground state. Sam”—he took her hand—“anyone who has this information is going to want to use it.”
“I don’t!” She looked panicked. “Do you?”
Glad he was holding her hand, Mac nodded. “If I could go back and warn my platoon what would happen . . . if I could prevent the massacre from happening? I would.”
“It would be a way to test the machine,” she offered carefully.
“No. Luckily for me, the temptation is more of a pipe dream.”
“What do you mean?”
“The machine wasn’t invented then, so I couldn’t go that far back. At least I think that’s how it works. Because if I could, I don’t know if I could stop myself. The idea of undoing all that pain . . .” He looked past her, seeing the sand and sun and blood and fire . . .
“Mac?”
She said it so softly, at first he wasn’t sure he heard. But then he swallowed, finally saying, “Anyone who knows this machine works will use it.”
Sam frowned. “Someone killed Emir because the machine worked.”
“Yes.”
“Did they kill him to stop the machine or because he wouldn’t use it the way they wanted?”
“I don’t know.”
“I really, really hate not having any answers.”
Mac flipped the penny. “Then let’s find some.”