The Clout of Gen (14 page)

A few days later, after John became sure of their morning routine, he took a taxi and followed them to school. Both of Dmitri’s kids, his daughter Anna and her younger brother Sergi, John’s main target, went to the same school.

The area near the school became his new stakeout for the next few days. John wanted to know everything: school start and end times, where the driver picked the children up from, and every other detail about their regular schedule. All he needed was a fingerprint from Sergi so he could compare it to the one Yaturo had held on to for all those years.

When he felt confident enough and had everything under control, John decided to make his move, and getting the child’s fingerprint turned out to be easier than he’d imagined it would. John stood among the parents like any other father waiting to pick up his children. He already knew from his observations over the past few days where Anna and Sergi waited for their driver. He’d planned everything precisely, and he was standing only a few steps away from Dmitri’s son. Still, he couldn’t quite see the kid in great detail, so he knew he had to get closer. So, when the boy’s back was turned, he intentionally dropped a toy near him. Sergi picked it up and handed it back to John with a smile. As if the fingerprint wasn’t bonus enough, John caught a good look at the boy’s glowing blue eyes; Yaturo was right, for he’d never seen such bright blue eyes in all his life.

Back at the hotel, John took out the fingerprint detector device he had picked up in Kyoto. The fingerprint was an identical match. John was so excited that he began cursing Alexi out and mocking him. ”We beat you, you bastard! We found you, you lying bastard. Sergi, we know you are Alexi, and I’m going to get you now!”

John felt like some kind of spy in the movies. He continued to study Sergi’s movements. He felt he had all the time in the world to do it right. The most important thing was to know every movement Sergi and his family made. On the weekends, Sergi and his nanny took their dog for a walk at the park near their home, a fifteen-minute walk from their house. The boy seemed quite fond of the household pet and loved chasing it around and playing with it. John couldn’t believe such an innocent, normal-looking kid would turn out to be the mastermind behind so many disasters and tragedies and casualties that had happened in the past four decades. He looked like any typical kid, playing with his dog and enjoying life. Nevertheless, John remembered his fury at all the misery the child would cause in the future, and remembering Yaturo’s final words, he had to go ahead with his plans. No matter how old this child was, how innocent and cute he seemed, his life had to come to an end before he could cause all that damage.

John carefully reviewed his plan to be sure he had all the details in order. It was nearly complete. There was one thing left to get, and that wasn’t something he could get easily find on the street. He needed a handgun. He would have to kill Sergi quickly. The boy was rarely alone, so John knew when the opportunity presented itself, he would have to act fast. A gun was the quickest remedy to the world’s little would-be problem.

John wasn’t fond of guns. He had a registered Smith and Wesson at home that he’d purchased only for safety reasons, to protect his wife and son and himself. In the end, he’d nearly taken his own life with the thing. If it wasn’t for it being jammed not once but twice, the good old box might have been left floating there forever. He had money, so all he needed to find was someone who would sell him an unregistered, untraceable weapon. He decided he needed to find someone who worked underground, so he began going to the nightclubs of Yakutsk and befriended some sketchy characters there. He played the role well. He befriended the bartenders and tipped them well. In time, he built up the nerve to ask about where he might find some drugs, for he knew that any drug dealer would be happy to hook him up with a gun for the right price.

Within three days, John had his weapon, complete with a silencer. He had insisted on that, as he did not want to make a scene out of blowing a child away. Everything had to be done quickly and quietly. The gun was a light handheld Russian revolver that could easily be stashed in a pocket and disposed of after the deed was done.

Now, it was just a matter of time. John decided the following weekend would be the perfect opportunity.
Finally, it will all be over,
he thought. He could hardly grasp the impact of his actions. “Am I really doing this?” he said. “Am I really about to change history forever?”

-

It was six a.m., and John hadn’t slept a wink all night. He had imagined every possible scenario hundreds of times. He had been planning everything out for days. After finalizing things with the hotel, he would check his bags at the airport. He had already booked an international flight to Harbin, China, but he wasn’t going to be on it; he just wanted to make sure that if he was followed or suspected, that would throw them off track and have them going on a wild goose chase, searching for him all over Harbin. His original plan was to book a plane directly from the airport as soon as he had finished with Sergi. The flight he planned on taking would leave at one p.m., heading to Moscow, and from there he would make his way back to Stockholm. He would collect his original passport and be on his way, never be found again. Worst-case scenario—which he had to consider—John would be a suspect, but they would only know him by his fake name and appearance, and by the time they searched for him, he would be long gone. It was a perfect plan.

If everything went according to normal routine, Sergi, his nanny, and the family dog would leave their home to head to the park around ten a.m. John had an hour to kill Sergi; he had to approach the boy at just the right time, while his nanny was busy and he was playing with his dog. After firing the one quick and fatal shot, John would drive his rental car halfway back and then desert it. He would then take a taxi to the airport.

The plan wasn’t what kept him up all night though; it was the possible results of his plot. He had to wonder what the outcome might be. He was going to kill a person who had significantly altered the past.
Will that change the present? If it does, where will I be? What about Adam? What will the world be like from now on?
He had to wonder if he was doing the right thing. He wasn’t sure, but one thing he was sure of was that the present time he was living in wasn’t fair to the world in general and him in particular, and that had to change.

As expected, Sergi left home a few minutes past ten, with his nanny and his dog in tow. John followed them from a distance by the car; the park was about 2,000 yards away. John parked the car as soon as they entered. There were a few people scattered here and there, jogging, reading books, and walking dogs of their own. John walked in the park just like any of the other random pedestrians, but he stayed within a close distance of Sergi. He kept an eye on every step Sergi took. Dmitri’s son was an active child, full of energy. He continued running and jumping around, playing with his dog. After fifteen minutes of such hyper frolicking, his nanny had had enough. She sat down on one of the benches and began casually reading the newspaper as the boy continued playing with his dog, squealing in delight.

John had to find the right moment to make his move, as Sergi was still in the nanny’s range of sight. The boy’s dog ran off, and Sergi called for it. It turned out that Sergi wasn’t creative enough to come up with his own fake name, for his canine friend’s name was Alexi.
The boy must really love that dog,
John thought.
He remembered its name, even after decades. The pet must mean the world to him.

It wasn’t until Sergi was far enough away, out of the nanny’s sight, that John felt his chance had come.  He followed the boy with quick steps.
It’s now or never,
he coached himself.

There wasn’t a soul in sight, and even the damn dog was nowhere to be seen. Sergi was carelessly skipping stones in the small lake, calling the dog over and over again.

John was getting closer, and within seconds, he was only fifty feet away, with Sergi’s back to him. Breathing heavily, with his heart nearly pounding out of his chest and sweat covering his body, John took out the gun made sure the silencer was properly attached, and shot the boy directly in the back, sending him collapsing to the ground, motionless and silent.

John’s hand was trembling, but he had done it. He looked around and realized that no one was near them. He quickly ran toward Sergi, and was just about to turn the boy’s body around to see if he was dead when Alexi came from behind. He began barking at the sight of John and started biting him on his leg. John tried to get loose, but the dog was tearing holes in his trousers and barking even more loudly. He kicked the vicious beast hard; in the process of the scuffle, he accidentally dropped the gun. John started to run away, hoping no one had noticed. He was a few meters away when he heard the faint sound of another shot.

Chapter 5

As he added the last pins to the large world map on the wall, he repeated, “And those are the men who will change the world.” Twenty-nine green pins scattered around the map from east to west, from south to north, everything in perfect balance. Looking at it with confidence, he picked up the last pin, a red one, and placed it on Kyoto. “You will lead them all, for it’s in you nature to be a leader,” he said.

He had carefully studied all the politics that surrounded each one of them. He had studied them all over the years, and there wasn’t a thing he didn’t know about them. He knew what each of them liked, what they despised, what their ambitions were, what limitations they had, and the things that set them off and inspired them. He knew each and every one by heart, and he knew each would do his job, right down to the last detail.

There were still some final touches he needed to do before he could put his plan into action. As he prepared to leave for his office, he took a quick glance in the bedroom mirror. He hadn’t shaved for weeks. His eyes were swollen and red. He hadn’t left his place for a very long time and had been living on canned food. Finally, it was time for him to go out and fetch the remainder of what he needed. He took his shirt off and gazed at the scar just below his right shoulder.

He couldn’t recall every detail, since the injury had happened nearly twenty-three years prior. A bullet had entered from his back and gone out the front of his body; luckily, it only penetrated muscle and didn’t hit anything vital along the way. As told, some madman had shot him right there in the park, and if it wasn’t for Alexi licking him while he was unconscious, he wouldn’t have woken up, picked up the gun lying next to him, and hit the running man in the head. He was told by his parents that the original shooter had gone into a coma as a result of the retaliatory shot. He was never properly identified, as he had fake Ukrainian documents, and no one could establish any related motives. It was assumed by them, that the shooting of the boy was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The case was never solved, and several years later, all was forgotten to his family. Dmitri, his father, had taught him from as little as six how to use weapons in hunting, so it must have been his instinct that saved his life, and with his hunting experience, he managed to get a direct shot on his assaulter.

Truly, he was proud of himself. He had defied the odds. After he suffered the gunshot that day, he became an isolated boy, very shy, and was afraid of any taking part in any social activity for several years. He always had problems with his right side, and he couldn’t move his shoulder well. For that reason, he was left out of sports and had never really fit in with the rest of the kids his age.

He had a decent relationship with his father, a physics professor. His dad was aware of the boy’s insecurity at school. He knew his son was treated like a black sheep due to his injury, and he decided to homeschool him. The boy was taught by the best teachers from all around the world, among them his father, who taught him all about physics, which understandably became the boy’s passion. It became his life and he did outstanding in it.

For that reason, Sergi always believed his injury was a blessing in disguise. It gave him a reason to prove himself, and it was the drive behind his success. Otherwise, he would have been as normal as the kids who treated him badly. Instead, he graduated with high honors. He was too smart for his colleagues, and his obsession with Einstein’s relativity theory landed him in continuous debates and made lots of trouble for him. He had always believed in the probability of time travel, and that made him a target for jokes. His strange ideas were often laughed at, and that made him a very bitter man, filled with hatred for people who wouldn’t give science its due acceptance. He understood well that most people would disregard his reports as nonsense. This only fueled Sergi’s determination to prove them all wrong. To do that, he had to find ways to accomplish what he believed in.

He yearned to broaden his knowledge, so he decided to learn more about astronomy and went on to continue his father’s studies about the internal energy of minerals. He was fascinated with the idea of energy in those minerals and that innate energy’s ability to multiply velocity when exposed to right energy.

Sergi’s father passed away while he was in college, but he left the young man with great wealth and access to a whole world of minerals from his mining plants back in Yakutsk. Sergi decided to use them in his own studies, and through blogs on the Web, he found people who he considered smart and brave enough to venture into the world of Einstein. He dedicated millions of his inherited wealth to research, and after years and years of searching with the help of his talented team, he discovered his chance. From there, he decided to take the path alone, and all those who had helped him were compensated very well to step down quietly.

He developed mining facilities, and the intensive study of various diamonds and minerals finally paid up. They dug into unexposed areas and found what seemed to be remnants of human bones. Most importantly, they found mutations in some minerals; it seemed the area had been buried for years and years, and the minerals they unearthed revealed unique characteristics, particles that had the ability to move faster than light.

Sergi was in a critical phase of his study, and he didn’t want any distractions. Thus, he decided to go under the radar for a while and started his own work, combining the theory of relativity with general theory. He understood that in order to increase the velocity of such particles, there had to be two combined factors, a free fall and a powerful energy source that would come in contact with the mineral. Such a combination would increase the velocity levels on the particles to exceed that of light.  By controlling the intensity of energy applied on the mineral, they could control the velocity of its particles, thus controlling the travel of time.

The mutated minerals were stored in a circular watch-shaped device that he had designed. The material used in the device was unique; it would hold the mutated mineral in the right place and minimize the effect of all the scattered radiation once the energy hit the mineral. The design of the watch made easily wearable, and it was also programmed to give the exact location without any marginal error through its connected tracking device.

Sergi already owned several satellites that he used for his various media companies, and he would get his energy source from one of the satellites he had in space. The satellite would reflect a specific chosen power from a sunray on an exact location and time on the device to activate it. The device, in turn, once activated and in an inertial motion, would transfer any mass through time as it multiplied velocity to levels exceeding that of light.

Sergi needed a few things for this to happen, so he left home and took his dog out with him, the same breed as his beloved Alexi, his childhood pet for over ten years. That dog had saved his life, and that breed would play a crucial role in his accomplishments. He didn’t need anything that difficult to find: plastic tape, some toothpicks, and a blue file cover, he loved the color blue.

After nine years of research and studies, over three billion dollars of money spent, and it was time to test it. An hour later, Sergi was back home, sitting in front of his computer. On the Web, he searched for any unusual security threats that had occurred on the night before Super Bowl in the last sixty years. He wanted to know if there had ever been a dog discovered with a gun strapped to it. After ensuring that there had never been such an incident, he knew his plan was perfect. Sergi intended to send his dog, strapped with a gun, back to 2018. He only chose that year because he had an inexplicable affinity for the number eighteen. “If this works, we will change history!” Sergi told his dog.

Sergi made all the preparations and entered the exact location coordinates where the ray would hit, as well as determined the exact power of the energy needed to transfer the dog back to that particular year, on that particular day. He timed the ray to hit in exactly two hours, which would give him enough time to get to the nearby bridge, the perfect location for the inertial motion, as the free fall would be perfect at that place. As for the fate of the dog, the animal had been trained to take the watch off of his collar, and Sergi only hoped the creature would find a better life in 2018. As soon as the dog hit the place, an extra beam would be sent to the device, and both the device and mineral would disintegrate, leaving no trace. There would be no error, and it would be a direct hit, thanks to the satellite tracking system built into the device.

He hugged the dog, strapped an unloaded gun on him with plastic tape, and tied the watch lightly around his neck. They went to the bridge, where he had already carefully marked the exact location. As soon as the ray hit the watch, Sergi planned to push the dog of the bridge. It felt cruel, but Sergi knew that science often required great sacrifices, and he was willing to make them to prove himself right, no matter the cost. At exactly two a.m., the light hit the watch, and the dog was pushed off the bridge with a yelp and promptly disappeared in midair. Sergi quickly ran to his car, turned on his laptop, and searched for any security news from the stadium at Super Bowl 2018. He couldn’t believe it when he read the headlines: “Stranded Dog Strapped with Gun Found on Super Bowl Eve. Police Still Searching for Clues.” No one had any answers, and everything happened at the exact time Sergi had planned.

“I knew it!” he screamed, proud of himself. “Where are you bastards now? Go on and laugh, you pathetic, ignorant fools! Laugh all you want to, but I told you! I told you I could travel back in time!”

Sergi was proud of what he had done, and now that his dog had made it, it was his turn. All he had to do was to prepare the responsibilities required of each of his chosen men from the past. He would then give them to a Japanese man whom he knew was an exact fit for the role—a man named Yaturo Hitari.

Sergi prepared the files, filling them with all the details and resources they would need, laying out their responsibilities. Their lives were an open book for him; it was just a matter of filling in the spaces. They would be like his puppets, and he would be pulling all the strings.

Sergi was confident that Hitari would carry the burden well. He decided he had to meet with Hitari at the perfect moment, a time when Yaturo was elated and feeling positive. The grand opening of the steel factory was the perfect opportunity for such an important rendezvous. It was the largest factory of its kind in Asia that time. He entered the date of May 17, 1967, as that would give him a full day to make his arrangements. He then entered the exact coordinates for his location; it would be in a secluded park in Kyoto, early morning. From there, he would go to a hotel and rest a bit, then meet Hitari the following day. Sergi allowed himself four days to finish the meeting. He would be brought back to his present date and entered the exact location he would be in for the mineral activation. He chose the Kiyomizu-dera Temple as the location of his travel back, as it there was a perfect area he could plunge from to achieve the necessary inertial motion.

All he took with him was the file, some money, and his beloved toothpicks; he always had toothpicks in his mouth—a habit he’d picked up from a young age. There wasn’t a moment when he didn’t have one in his hand.

Everything was set, and he was confident that he would be successful. He arrived at the bridge site and waited for the right moment. The beam hit, and he jumped. It all happened in a flash, and there he was, in the middle of the park, standing alone on a warm day in Kyoto. Other than a mild headache the first day, everything went well.

It was a busy day at the Hitari Steel Factory, and the Japanese were very proud of the achievement, as people from all sectors of life were present. Everything was perfectly arranged, and Sergi could see Hitari from a distance. He was busy greeting everyone and talking to them. Clearly, it had to be the best day of his life. Little did he know that what he would find out later was far more important.

Sergi waited for the right moment to approach Hitari, when he saw him standing alone with a glass of wine in his hand. He approached Hitari and congratulated him on the opening, then requested that they talk in private, as he had something very important to tell him. Hitari was reluctant at first, but he was kind enough to take him to his office on the third floor of the factory. It offered a beautiful view of the entire factory.

Sergi was very direct and to the point. He began talking about world power and giving control to the youth to change history. He knew Hitari was involved with several movements during college, but Sergi felt he wasn’t having the impact on Hitari that he had planned. Hitari didn’t seem very interested. Sergi had already established a Plan B, and since Hitari didn’t seem to want to give him time to explain, he took an envelope out of his coat and asked him to have a look at it. He told him if he was interested, they should meet at the Kiyomizu-dera Temple three days later. He told Hitari to be there at exactly two p.m. and to come alone, or he wouldn’t get the answers he would be seeking. The moment Hitari took the envelope, Sergi was convinced that his plan had worked; he knew there wasn’t even the slightest chance that Hitari would ignore his fate.