Prologue (26 page)

“But you still do,” Malcolm said. They chuckled. “Going to the game tonight? You’re a Mets fan, aren’t you?”

“
Nah,
gave away tonight’s tickets to a Limey. Have to work.”

When Malcolm looked quizzical Lewis added, “Grant applications due.”

Malcolm nodded as if he understood and moved down the bar.

Lewis took a sip of his beer and looked through the front plate glass window at
Madison
’s, the rival bar populated by the Harvard crowd. Each bar claimed individual identity and ambiance but Lewis realized that when you boiled it down, the two were really the same.

It simply was the way it was now, distinctions without a difference. I wonder, he thought as he sat alone, whether I will make a difference. Maybe Paul was right, maybe the cost of trying to make a difference was too high. Lewis Ginter thought of his own cost, thought of how he was going to have to lie to a number of people, and wondered if all his lies would be worth it in the end.

The bartender sidled back. “You look down, Professor.
Must be some huge project.”

Lewis changed the subject.

“So, who’s hot and who’s not?”

Malcolm took a step back and shot Lewis a quizzical look. “I thought you were expecting her.” He nodded at a booth along the wall. “She’s been asking for you.
Came in about an hour ago.”

Ginter looked back quickly at the booth, frowned, and checked his watch. “She’s early,” he muttered to himself. “If I had known she’d be early we still might have caught the game.” He nodded to Malcolm. “Thanks, man.” He lifted his beer and walked over to the booth.

She smiled as he approached. Her hair was now auburn.

“I thought you were going to ignore me,” Pamela Rhodes said as he slid in opposite her.

“I thought I said
5:00
,” he said without smiling back.

She smiled again–was it shyly or mischievously?–and didn’t respond.

“You’re good,” he said. “You knew it was for
5:00
but figured you’d come here early and scope it out.”

“One can never be too careful,” she said.

“So, careful one, what are you drinking?”

“Sparkling water.
I don’t drink alcohol.”

“Strike one,” he mused aloud.

“For me or for you?”

Lewis sucked in a deep breath and ignored the retort. “How’d your meeting go yesterday with the civil admin? Were they real sympathetic?”

“Oh, the usual.
I spoke with some flunky who acted nervous and who checked through all kinds of paperwork and then claimed that he had no record of any Arthur Pomeroy being arrested and couldn’t it have been the District police and was he a drug smuggler or could he have been nabbed by a rival gang?
That sort of shit.
They’ll look into it,” she said and shrugged.

“So, you ready to show me this thing at the school or are you gonna’ drink all night?” she asked, changing the subject.

Lewis hesitated and checked his watch. “Why don’t we head over to my place? We can be there in about 20 minutes.”

She gave him a hard look. “I’m not that naive.”

“I’m serious,” Ginter said. “The schematics are in my apartment and you’ll need to see them first. We’re gonna’ be pretty limited in the amount of time we can spend in the lab and there’s no sense wasting valuable time there pouring over diagrams that I don’t keep there anyway.”

She hesitated. “All right,” she said cautiously.
“Your place first and then the lab.”

Ginter stood up and Pamela Rhodes slid out from her seat. He let her go ahead of him. As they passed the bar Malcolm looked up, eyed the couple, and flashed Ginter the thumbs up sign. Lewis smiled, shook his head at Malcolm, and waved him off.

Amanda started driving to Chow Baby, a small Italian restaurant in
Boston
’s north end. However, as she wended her way under the Route 93 overpass–when would the Big Dig ever be ready?-every nerve in her body told her to go home instead, get a good night’s sleep and get a fresh start tomorrow.

Sighing, she gave in to her better
angels,
and over her tired body’s strenuous objections, swung her car around and headed back to her apartment.

All right, I’m here to crash out. Can’t a girl at least play a game of chess to relax? Well, one game, her conscience said.

She clicked on her chess program and chose white. The board appeared on her computer screen. “E2-E4,” she typed in. The board instantly responded with “E7–E5” and moved the black pawn.

In some ways she felt so alone. She had thought that being single at age 53 would make this easier, that she wouldn’t have any trepidation. What did she have to lose if her molecules ended up strewn over…what exactly, history? But now, just twenty-four days from departure she suddenly wished she weren’t so damn alone.

“F1–C4,” she typed. Might as well be whimsical, she told herself. Jolly me out of this mood.

“D7–D6,” the computer responded.

The cold hand she had been feeling in her stomach tightened its icy grip. There were so many things that could go wrong.

“D1–F3,” she typed slowly, her eyes fixed on the screen in front of her. She sometimes wished that someone could invent a computer where one could actually point at the screen and affect changes. But that was science fiction. Not unlike her own planned science fiction adventure.

Black responded, “B7–B5.”

It can’t be real, she thought. The whole thing is crazy and just can’t be. Trembling, she slowly typed in, “F3–F7,” and held her breath until the computer flashed, “Congratulations! You have checkmated me in four moves.” Amanda never saw the end of the message. By the time it had flashed she had already wrenched her telephone receiver off the wall and was desperately punching numbers as she mumbled, “Fool’s Checkmate, Good God, no,” under her breath.

“I said NOW, goddamnit,” Amanda Hutch shouted into the phone as she wove through traffic back toward MIT. “The program was tripped, Lewis, for God’s sake. There’s no way I beat a level seven in four fucking moves! It’s set to default to a kindergarten chess level if any unauthorized user downloads any Intervention files, even if they reset every one of the trips. You tell me if that’s a goddamn emergency or not!”

“O.K., O.K., Amanda, don’t blow a gasket. But what do you mean by ‘Intervention files?’ What the hell is anything doing stored on your hard drive? I told you, floppy disks only.”

Amanda heard a female voice ask in an alarming voice, “What’s happening?”

“Oh for… Lewis, get out of bed and get over here immediately.
Clothes optional.”

“Hang on a sec, willya’?” Lewis said. He covered the phone for a few seconds and then said, “All right, we’ll be right over.”

“We’ll?’ What the hell do you mean ‘we’ll?
”
Amanda slammed her phone down when she realized that Lewis had already hung up.

“Shit!” She said as she swerved around a Chevy wagon pulling out in front of her, and leaned on her horn. “Shit, shit, shit!” DeVere should still be in the area, she prayed, and hopefully she could raise him on his cell, security risk or no. What did that matter now? But there was no way Lewis would have time to get to
Lynn
to get anything else. The communicators would be lost. Amanda wondered just how valuable they would be. She checked her watch. She should be at the lab in seven minutes. Ginter lived close enough. Amanda figured five minutes to get ready, 15 minutes to travel. Not much time, especially if whoever had downloaded the files was acting fast.

When the traffic in front of her cleared, she began punching numbers into her cell again.

At his room at the Copley Igor’s cell phone beeped. He clicked it on. “Yes?”

“Igor,” Natasha said. “Where are you?”

“At the Copley.
I told you that. Getting lonely?”

“We’ve got to get to the lab.”

“What? Look, Natasha, if this is your way of playing coy-”

“They’re going back in that time machine tonight.”

“They–don’t be stupid, Comrade.”

“You tripped some sort of alarm when you downloaded Hutch’s files. They’re on to you. They’re dashing to the lab right now. Let me call Petrovchenko from here and get us some help.”

“No!” Igor screamed.

“What? Listen, Igor, they’re about to go and-”

“We can handle
this
ourselves.”

Natasha paused a moment and considered. “Igor.”

“Yeah?”

“You didn’t have authority to hack directly into the MIT line, did you? An IM2 can’t reset trips, can it?”

When there was no response Natasha continued hurriedly, “It doesn’t matter. It’s my ass too. I let you do it from my apartment. We’ve got to stop them.
No matter how.”

She took a deep breath. “Bring the red backpack. You must have brought it. It may be the only way if they’re too far ahead of us in the building.”

Natasha counted the seconds until Igor responded.
“Excellent thinking, Comrade Nikitin.”

Natasha breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m on my way.”

She clicked the phone off. Good thing I’m already dressed, she told herself. One useful thing they’d taught her at the Agency was to keep a bag packed at all times.

She grabbed the bag, snatched the Subaru’s keys from the table and headed out the door. She heard footsteps rattling on the stairs above her–two sets of footsteps, a man and woman. The man was talking urgently, the woman protesting.