Decoherence (16 page)

“Except she followed you here?”

“She came to see some guys who live in the swamps. There's a protest coming up, and she's out here rallying troops or something.” He shrugged. “I was going to leave, and I didn't even know she was at the party. Lexie was kissing this beach guy, then there's Krystal.”

“The perfect rebound.”

“She likes sangria. We finished our drinks in maybe ten minutes, then headed for the car.”

Sam took out her notepad. “This Krystal, dark hair, about five-­five?”

Henry nodded. “She doesn't look like Lexie, but at a distance after a few drinks? I guess they look alike.”

“You left together?”

“Yeah. Maybe, thirty minutes after I left Lexie? She was still on the beach talking to the guy when I left.”

“Do you remember anything else? Anything odd?”

Henry stared into the distance for a minute. “It was a bit serendipitous running into Krystal again. But, no. The party was noisy, ­people were laughing, listening to bad music, drinking. It was a beach party. The weather was nice. Warm I guess—­that probably caused the heat lightning.”

Sam raised an eyebrow as a sense of certainty settled over her. “Heat lightning? In January? When the party had heat lamps in every corner?”

Henry frowned. “I guess that was a little odd. I was wearing my slacks and a sweater, so I guess I didn't think about it. The pavilion on the boardwalk was hot, but it wasn't really warm, I guess.” He frowned.

Sam pulled up her notes. “It was fifty-­six that night. It was the tail end of the cold snap.” She closed her notebook.

“Does that help?” Henry asked.

“It confirms something I suspected and gives me the murder weapon.”

“Lightning isn't what killed Lexie,” he said. “They made me look at the crime scene photos. She . . . they . . .” He shook his head and looked away.

Sam grimaced in sympathy. “Did you see any concentric rings in the sand, or was the area too trampled.”

Henry frowned at her. “What?”

“Concentric rings,” Sam said slowly. “Were they there?”

“Like the rings from . . .” He shook his head. “No. That's not what happened. Lexie was beaten to death by someone. Not me, but someone.”

“There's no blood on the beach. Witnesses saw you leave the party, but if you left with Krystal—­whose full name and address you will be giving me—­then no one saw Lexie leave the beach. She didn't die there. She was dumped there. I think I know how. With Krystal as your alibi, you'll be cleared of charges. And then we'll talk about the rings.”

“Agent Rose,” Henry said quietly, “what you're cryptically suggesting is impossible. The device in question was destroyed.”

Sam looked him dead in the eye and let him see what had driven the other inmates to look away. “Tell me right here, right now, that you didn't make another one. Look me in the eye and say it.”

He looked at his hands.

“Exactly. You tried to reconstruct the device. How unstable is it?”

Henry jerked back in surprise. “How . . . ?”

“Just be honest with me, Henry. We are friends, after all.”

“It's okay, but the charge is weak. I need a better battery. I didn't . . . I didn't put anyone at risk. I swear it. I know what it did to Matt and Miss Chimes, so I took it out in the desert.”

She frowned.

“I went to Colorado to see a friend at the School of Mines before I moved down here. I took the machine out to the sand dunes. Middle of winter, the wind and cold, it was abandoned. It turns on, but there's not enough energy to get the portal to accelerate properly. It fizzed, and there were some weird little dust storms. Almost like an energy pulse but at a distance. Subportals maybe, but I don't know. I'm missing some of the original components, and there's no way I can find a replacement for the core you smashed. Thanks for that, by the way.”

“I had a very good reason for smashing it,” Sam said. “Not that it worked like I planned, because if it had, Lexie would be alive, and you'd be at work right now.” She pushed her pen and paper to Henry. “Give me a way to contact Krystal, please.”

He slid the notebook toward himself and froze. “Are you sure about this?”

“Do it, Henry.”

Obediently, he wrote down the name and address.

“I'll get this wrapped up and get in touch with you.” She stood. “Don't call the CBI office, though. If you do, I won't remember this conversation, and it will be awkward all around.”

“What do you mean you won't remember this conversation?” Henry demanded. “Agent Rose?”

She held up her left hand. “Agent MacKenzie, now.”

“Congratulations on the engagement?”

“Marriage.” She studied her ring. “We're getting married before the year's out, and we've been married five years already.

“Isn't time funny like that?”

 

CHAPTER 26

“A time cyclone, or uncontrolled time portal, is created during a moment of convergence or expansion when multiple iterations pass through one another's probability fans. Calculating these events is difficult, and controlling them currently not within the scope of our abilities.”

~ memo to senior members of the Ministry of Defense—­I1—­2067

Thursday July 4, 2069

Alabama District 3

Commonwealth of North America

Rogue Iteration

S
tars and cicadas were the first things Rose noticed as she passed through the portal into the rogue iteration. Moonlight illuminated the wooded glen and the portal's ringed imprint in the grass without giving the verdant foliage a chance to shine. The vivid green leaves were a muted shade of near black that blended with the bruising blues and purples of the rest of the landscape.

Rose did a visual sweep with night-­vision goggles and signaled for her team to move forward.

Senturi hit the door first. “Locked.”

She motioned for him to keep his mouth shut and unlock it. A light blipped in the corner as he touched the door. The first reconnaissance team hadn't found a hidden security system, but if someone had gotten sloppy . . . The treacherous memory of the broken dial demanded attention.

It was such a slight change, green to blue. Emir would have dismissed it as an office prank if he'd noticed it at all. Surely, this iteration's Emir would be no different.

Senturi pushed the door open, and red lights flared in the hall.

“Fan out, control the exits.” Everyone moved but Senturi. “Problems?” This was not the time for him to remember he was a spoiled child coddled by a mother in the world's Ruling Council.

“Someone needs to go into the building,” Senturi said. “I should go.”

“I will. I've been there before and know the layout. Get back to the drop site and wait for Emir.”

She pulled her face mask on and stormed into the eerily silent hall, flooded in red. As a child, she'd read a horror story about a house with bleeding walls. This was that building. Cold and silent as a tomb, red light dripping from above, boots echoing on the tile. This is what it felt like to storm the gates of death.

The faint murmur of a voice intruded on the silence.

She hurried forward, trying to locate the sound. It came from the office, muffled by a wall.

“I am telling you, Agent Marrins, the alarms are going off, and everything is in danger.” It was Emir's voice, but worried, harried. This was the Emir from the other iteration.

Rose jiggled the door handle and found it locked. She leaned in to listen.

There was a prolonged pause. “Once again, Agent, I must remind you of the vital importance of secrecy.” A breath. “You . . . I . . . ugh! I am developing a machine that will change the course of humanity. Make the world a better place.”

That was debatable.

The other Emir made a squelching sound of frustration. “Agent Marrins? Agent . . . insufferable imbecile.” Something made a crunching sound, probably a plastic of some kind, possibly the comm line.

Rose smiled. This would be the easiest detonation she'd ever done. Shoot Emir now, and the whole iteration would crumble to dust.

The other Emir began to pace.

A melody played, then . . . “Agent Rose, this is Emir. You must come to the lab. Now! You must come now!” His footsteps stopped. “Agent Rose, you must come to the lab. You owe me that much. My life is in danger. They are coming for me. If I don't give them what they want, they will kill me. They know it works now. I can't stall any longer.”

She sighed. “Why must you make your life difficult?” Rose asked the man who couldn't hear her. Of course they were coming to kill him. What other possible outcome could there be?

“My machine!” Emir said. “You told them it works. You showed them it works.”

Rose's hand clenched on her gun, thumb hovering over the safety. Usually it took only moments for an iteration to collapse, but if there was someone else continuing Emir's work, he could—­theoretically—­be replaced. They didn't have the other nodes collected. Without letting this iteration progress, they couldn't even find the other nodes.

Coming back to this nightmare wasn't on her wish list, so she waited. They might need the name of his collaborators later.

A thought whispered in her mind: If Emir could be replaced here, he could be replaced elsewhere.

“Agent Rose!”

She startled, half expecting to see Emir standing in front of her. But he was still on the comm. Talking to her other self, she realized. Not that it mattered, but she'd rather not kill herself again. It gave her a headache.

“Please, I beg of you. Come to the lab tonight. Bring your partner, bring Altin, bring anyone, but come. Save me!” There was a pause that grew into the silence of rejection. A shuddering sob tore through the stillness of the red-­soaked lab. It was the cry of the prisoner facing execution.

That would haunt her.

It was so out of character for Emir—­for the true Emir, or any of the others she'd encountered—­that she
knew
this iteration was truly different. And that meant it had to be eliminated.

It was easier to take out the other nodes without giving them warning. She did everything she could to make sure they didn't suffer. Now . . . she flipped the safety off, pulled her goggles on, and aimed for the heat-­bright outline of the cowering Dr. Emir.

“Commander Rose?” Donovan's voice crackled in her ear.

She flipped the safety back on and touched her commlink to turn it on. “Yes?” she demanded through gritted teeth.

“Pull back. On Emir's orders.”

In his office, Emir pushed away from his chair and stumbled toward the door.

Rose shook her head. “I have the target node in sight. Confirm orders to withdraw.” Donovan could play games if he wanted, but she wasn't going to.

Emir was poking something on the wall. A keypad, probably. In less than a minute, he'd leave his lab and come face-­to-­face with reality.

“Order confirmed,” the real Emir said over the comm. “Pull back to the tree line, Commander. I have something special planned for this meddlesome
other
of mine.”

Donovan, you fool.
She replied with a clipped, “Yes, sir.” Swinging her gun onto her shoulder Rose pulled her goggles off and ran down the hall as the other Emir stepped out. She waited in the shadows by the back door until she heard his footsteps fade away in the direction of the building's main entrance. Quietly opening the door, she stepped into the darkness and ran for the rendezvous point as a siren's wail screamed in the distant darkness.

“W
here are we going, sir?” Donovan asked, as the portal spun faster, changing from purple to white.

“We're going to answer a call,” Emir said as he stepped through the portal, a comtech and Donovan following after.

They arrived in an empty field with drought-­dry grasses and copses of trees huddling in clumps along the moonlit horizon.

Emir waved his hand at the tech. “Start the call on the scheduled time. Donovan, watch the portal. We'll be transitioning back momentarily.”

Swallowing a growl of dry irritation, Donovan spat out a, “Yes, sir.”

In his growing impatience to escape Prime, he'd forgotten why he worked hard to get along with Senturi and Rose in the first place. A single person couldn't keep Emir in check. His ego was bigger than any one person, and his tendency to create convoluted schemes only made life more difficult for everyone around him.

With Senturi busily spinning his own webs and Rose lost to her latest doomed project, he was the sole proprietor of Emir's sanity. And it seemed he'd misplaced it in his rush to line everything up.

“Sir?” The tech looked up. “The original call just ended.”

Emir held out his hand. “Put it on the open comm.”

“Yes, sir.” The tech sat cross-­legged in the long grass, ignoring the plague of midnight insects, and tapped industriously at his computer screen. “Connecting now, sir.”

An unnatural ringing of a flat bell tone cut into the night air.

“What?” a surly male voice demanded.

“Agent Marrins?” Emir asked with a voice of silk as he smiled.

Donovan looked away. He knew that expression. It meant that Emir had found a new form of torture to inflict and a new victim to practice his cruelty on.

“Emir, is this you again? I told you to shut your mouth and let me sleep.” The man had just signed his death warrant.

Emir chuckled. “I am the Emir. Not the one you spoke to previously, but the original. You should feel honored.”

“Really?” Marrins asked. “ 'Cause all I feel right now is a strong urge to punch you. Do you know what time it is?”

“Time for a change, Agent Marrins. I'm sure you know this world desperately needs one. History has betrayed you.”

There was a speculative pause, filled by the whirring of grasshopper wings and the saw of cicadas. “What are you going on about, Emir?”

“I understand you have problems with the way the government is currently being run?”

Donovan flicked away a beetle with a glowing back.

“What are you suggesting?” Marrins asked.

“A simple trade,” Emir said. “You remove an inconvenience from my life, and I give you the keys to staging your revolution.”

“Can't have a revolution now. It's too late.”

“No, not now,” Emir agreed. “But think what you could do if you had the knowledge of these past years when your nation was voting to keep their independence or give it away.”

Donovan frowned over his shoulder at Emir. He couldn't honestly be suggesting this iteration move further away from the history of Prime. The vote for government control was an einselected node. It had to happen. He took a deep breath and reminded himself that this iteration had a future that could be counted in hours, not years. Even Emir couldn't frag it up that bad.

“That's what your kooky machine is?” Marrins asked. “A time machine?”

“Something like that,” Emir said with a lethal smile. “Not as crude as you might imagine, but very similar.”

“What do you want done?”

“Come to the labs,” Emir said. “And shoot the man you know as Emir.”

Marrins huffed; it might have been amusement or annoyance, Donovan couldn't tell.

“You realize I'm an agent of the Commonwealth Bureau of Investigation, and you've just asked me to commit a federal crime? That's not going to look good on your record, Mr. Emir.” Marrins dragged the name out so it became a slur.

“It's your choice, Agent Marrins. Would you like to continue living in the Commonwealth, or would you like your United States back?”

“You already know what I want,” Marrins said. “I'll be there in twenty minutes.”

D
onovan bent over to check the faux-­Emir's pulse. “Dead.”

“The bullet hole between the eyes should have been enough,” Emir said as he stepped over and looked at his discarded other self. “What a horrible little man.”

“This whole iteration is awful,” Donovan said. The colors were too bright, the noises too strange. Even the bright crimson blood seemed to glow like fire in the light of the orange sunrise.

The only thing everyone seemed to agree on was that this iteration needed to end.

Then the Prime would shift again, and he already had the new Prime picked out. It wasn't as radically different as this place, but not too similar to the current situation, either. Senturi had found it on one of his runs, took a bullet in the shoulder to protect it, and was using the anomalies to jump between the two and maintain the Shadow Prime. Acting like a node in defiance of all of Emir's expectations.

Emir sighed. “Let's leave before this iteration causes us another headache.”

Donovan looked down the rolling hill to the building and the white police car pulling out of the parking lot. One thing still bothered him. “Sir, why did you tell him that you could change his history?”

“Because ten minutes from now, he'll cease to exist.”

“You set a date to meet again.”

Emir shrugged and started walking into the trees.

“I could have done this,” Donovan persisted. The rogue iteration had to fall to make room for the Shadow Prime. His plan was running on a tight timetable. Emir's ego couldn't be allowed to destroy his future. The red-­haired woman was there. Senturi had seen her. She was waiting for Donovan.

“You could have,” Emir agreed. “Rose, Senturi, Bennet—­any of you could have disposed of this Emir. But the other nodes weren't here. There is a chance, however slight, that this iteration may continue for a day or two. With luck, we'll never need to worry about this place again. If we do, we now have an asset here. He won't dare tell anyone about us, not with his precious
country
at stake.” Emir put so much contempt into the word that Donovan grimaced.

That needed to change. Emir thought he ran the world, and he did it with no thought to anyone else. When Donovan's plan came to fruition, Emir would be a footnote, not the headline, of history.

Up ahead, a soft glow between two trees signaled the portal was opening. Donovan stepped over a branch broken by their intrusion and checked his locator. Only he, Emir, and Rose were still in this iteration.

“Everyone else is gone?” Emir asked.

Donovan looked at Rose's location, nearly fifty meters away in a thicket that obscured her from Emir's view. It was time for step one. “All clear, sir. I'm reading no other signals.” He shut off the volume on his comm just as Rose pinged him.

Emir stepped through the portal with a happy smile.

Rose pinged again, demanding an update with the flashing yellow light on his comm.