Time's Divide (The Chronos Files Book 3) (33 page)

One segment of the paneling slides up, and the fat Doberman trundles toward us. I tense up instantly when he sniffs me and even more when he gives me a halfhearted snarl. The few teeth he reveals, however, are so worn down I don’t think they could do much damage even if he had the energy to bite. He moves on to sniffing Tate.

“Get on, you ugly beast.” The words are harsh, but Tate’s tone isn’t malicious. The dog’s stub of a tail wags a feeble greeting before he waddles over to a padded mat on the floor and flops down.

Still no sign of Campbell. Tate calls out to him again. No response.

He curses and says a bit louder, “Campbell! Get out here. We need to talk, and we don’t have much time.”

A long, drawn-out noise somewhere between a snore and a groan comes from the other room. Something about it pisses Tate off, because he curses again and storms across to the doorway and out of sight.

“You want to fix this?” His voice is so loud, even from the other room, that it startles me. “We’ve got another chance, if you get off your sloppy ass and help. Or are you gonna lie here basted and let Saul gox you again?”

There’s an answer, but I can’t make it out. Tate fires something back at him. While most curse words seem to have survived the centuries intact, the insults he’s injecting between them have apparently evolved.

Tate sticks his head around the corner of the door. “Need a little help.”

I enter reluctantly, unsure what might meet my eyes. A platform-type bed like I saw at the old couple’s place takes up the center of the room. There’s a white door similar to a Juvapod set into one wall.

Everything seems very dim after the brightness of the adjoining room. Campbell’s sprawled belly up across the bed. His robe gapes open to reveal what looks like a pair of Speedos. He keeps grabbing at a clear tube that runs from an outlet in the wall into his upper arm.

“
Wait
a minute,” Tate says, slapping his hand away. “I’ll give you a jolt before you disconnect. Pru, could you get a cloth from the lav?”

I look around, confused.

“Over there?” he says, nodding toward the door, his voice clearly indicating that I should know where the lav is.

I wave my hand in front of a sensor near the door, and it glides open. It’s actually fairly similar to bathrooms I’m used to, except there’s another podlike inner door. A stack of cloths is on a shelf near the back. I grab one and dampen it at the sink. It doesn’t feel much like a towel, but hopefully it will do.

Whatever the “jolt” was that Tate gave Campbell seems be working. I hand him the damp cloth and go back into the main room. The two of them follow a few minutes later. Campbell is still in his robe, but he’s pulled on a pair of shorts under it. His legs look too thin for his body, almost like popsicle sticks, and he apparently hasn’t bothered ordering the hair restoration service from the Juvapod menu because his hairline has receded so far that it’s not even visible from the front. What hair he does have hangs in dark, greasy strands around his ears. He’s holding a glass of something green—almost the same shade as my anticavity rinse. His other hand is angled over his brow, shielding his eyes from the sun. He plops onto one of the sofas near Cyrus, who is curled up on his mat, snoring.

“Dim light thirty percent.”

The ceiling dims, but the windows seem pretty much the same to me. Apparently to Campbell, too. He scowls out at the sunlit day, giving it what Charlayne calls the “stink eye.”

After about thirty seconds, he turns that same look on me. “Come to view your handiwork so you can report back to Papa, you backstabbin’ little bitch?” Campbell’s voice is slurred and tired, an odd contrast to the venom in his words. He sips the green stuff and waits for me to respond.

“No. I’ve come to try and fix—”

“Oh, yeah.
Fix
it. Isn’t that what she told us when we helped her get the keys, Poulsen? ‘I can fix it, I can get CHRONOS back up and running, I can get your club back, I can make everything better again.’ All lies . . . well, I guess the club is back, but it sure as hell’s not mine. Even this room’s not mine. Belongs to the dog.”

There’s a laugh at the end, short and bitter.

“Shoulda never helped you get back,” he says, looking out at the remnants of DC. “Then you’da been the one stuck outta your time. You’da been the fish on dry land, the anom’ly, instead of me. Or better yet, Tate shoulda left you in that wreckage.”

“Shut up, Morgen. We weren’t doing her any favors when we helped her go back. You knew it. I knew it.” Tate turns and gives me a sad smile before looking back at Campbell. “I apologized for that when she came back. Once we knew Saul was as much a part as Katherine—”

“No.”

They both look at me like I’ve grown another head. Maybe this is a mistake, but I’m tired of Katherine’s name being dragged through the mud. Every time Tate talks about her, I keep imagining her face on some twenty-fourth-century holographic wanted poster. And I think I’m better off if both of them understand that Saul was the one responsible for destroying CHRONOS. For destroying the entire world they knew.

“It was Saul, not Katherine. Saul set her up. The evidence was planted. She only recently found out what he was up to and—”

Tate looks a little stunned. “You’re certain? The investigation was pretty thorough.”

Campbell laughs. “Thorough and conclusive. There was a confession.” He leans his head back against the chair and peers out at me through lids that are barely open, but I still get the sense that he’s watching me closely. “Katherine’s prints and DNA on the case that held the device. On the tape around Angelo’s head.”

“And you’re saying the evidence couldn’t have been faked?” I ask the question of Tate, not Campbell. His scrutiny makes me uncomfortable, and I don’t really like looking at him. “Saul couldn’t have faked it?”

“Saul . . .” Tate shrugs. “Yeah, maybe.”

“You knew Katherine, didn’t you? Do you think she was capable of something like that?”

Tate tilts his head to the side like he’s considering it. “Your mother was more than a little unstable when it came to Saul. You should have heard her at the New Year’s Eve party. This World War II historian, Adrienne. She started coming on to Saul when Katherine was out of the room. When Katherine came in and caught them together, it took me and two other guys to get her away from there. I thought she was going to rip Adrienne’s throat out.”

One bit of that story doesn’t line up with the version I heard from Adrienne. I think Tate has flipped around exactly which party was coming on to the other. I don’t press that issue, deciding to stick with the main point.

“Jealousy is one thing. I was asking about mass murder. Stranding her pregnant self in the past? If she was so crazy about Saul and just wanted to get him to herself, wouldn’t she have planned this for a jump where they’d actually be traveling together?”

He considers that and then nods. “Maybe.”

Campbell tosses back the rest of the drink. “What the hell does it matter? Like I said, the evidence was conclusive. The investigators needed a culprit, and Saul gave them one ready-made. But he also gave the anti-alteration cause a boost, and I seriously doubt that would’ve been part of his plan. No more genetic fixes, no more CHRONOS, nature as nature intended.”

He spits, thankfully into his glass, but it’s still gross. “All that happy horseshit the weak use to bind the strong. The poor use to bind the rich.”

Tate is staring at him. “So . . . you knew from the beginning that it was Saul? Even before this Cyrist stuff began popping up? All along?”

“What if I did?” Campbell’s diction, which was slurred and indistinct only a few minutes earlier, is increasingly crisp, making me wonder what’s in the glass. Or maybe what was in that “jolt” Tate gave him.

“You let her believe all of the evidence against Katherine, knowing it was false? Knowing that you were—no, since you pulled me into it as well—knowing that
we
were sending a sixteen-year-old girl into the hands of a man responsible for killing most of the people at CHRONOS? Instead of back to her own time?”

“Yes. Because she could be put to use there.”

“But at what cost?” Tate asks.

“Oh, give me a break. You’d have sent her back either way if you thought she could give you your precious job back. All that whining about how you don’t belong here, about how you were made for a time long past.”

That hits a nerve, because Tate stands up and takes a threatening step toward the old man. “No. I wouldn’t have. I ought to snap your neck for lying to me, for lying to both of us.”

“Wait—” I reach out and grab Tate’s arm, even though I definitely understand the sentiment and even though I’d stand zero chance of stopping him if he was determined. “We’re here to talk, remember?”

Tate stands there for a good five seconds, like he’s trying to decide, but he finally huffs and sits down again.

I look at Campbell. “Saul said you had a bet. Then why send me back to help him?”

Campbell pushes himself up from the sofa and goes to a small lit alcove in the wall. He shoves the glass into the light. There’s a brief flash as the light grows brighter, and his glass vanishes. “Another.”

A new glass appears, so this must be some sort of replicator system. Thankfully this glass isn’t spit-lined like the other one, but is instead filled with more of the emerald-colored liquid.

“Would you like anything?”

Tate just snarls in his direction, which Campbell interprets as a no. I’d prefer to do the same, but my time in the pod with Alisa left me feeling dehydrated.

Campbell issues the request, and a clear glass of water appears in the dispenser. He places it on the low table in front of me and settles back into the opposite sofa before answering my question.

“Our wager was about Saul’s methods. I didn’t think—and still don’t think—that using some bullshit religion was the best way to achieve our goals. If he’d used the keys a bit more . . . judiciously . . . he could have fixed the problems and left the basic society, the basic history, intact. Instead, he screws up everything and leaves a bunch of moralistic fools in charge who are even worse than what we had before. Just to prove he was right.”

His tone is disdainful, but I think there’s an underlying hint of admiration. It’s a disconcerting mix.

Tate is still glowering at him, so I guess I’m taking the lead in the questioning. “What if you could help us change that? Show Saul he’s not as smart as he thinks?”

Campbell rolls his eyes. “And how do you propose to do that?”

“Go back and stop him from ever getting the keys. Make the changes you’re talking about, but do it your way. A . . . surgical strike. No more Cyrists.”

“Says the woman whose face decorates their temples. Their money, too. Why should I believe you’d want to change that?”

I take a long sip of the water to give myself a few seconds to think. Any arguments I’d use as Kate would undoubtedly be useless in convincing Campbell. And since I’m supposed to be Prudence, I need to think about why she would be here. I’m pretty sure Tate would be part of it. I remember the look on her face in Woodhull’s office when she was talking about him feeling useless without CHRONOS, and she’d be even more upset to see him as he is now. But I doubt the “twoo wuv” defense would resonate with Campbell, either.

So I go with a partial truth. It’s
my
partial truth, but I’m beginning to suspect it’s Pru’s as well.

“Because I don’t want Saul to win. And I don’t mean your silly little wager. I want him to lose everything.
Everything
.” I enunciate each syllable and hold his gaze as I speak.

He watches me silently for a few moments. I don’t look away, don’t blink, just arch one eyebrow at him and stare back.

“And why do you think I can help you?”

Truthfully, I’m no longer sure that he
can
help. I’m thinking Kiernan’s plan of finding Pseudo-Saul might be the better one. But maybe Campbell knows something.

“You’ve been here in the building since the time shift. Tate said they took your key. Do you know what they did with it?”

“They said they were using it to extend the field so that I could travel freely throughout the facility. Just another way of saying I’m a prisoner.”

“Hmph,” Tate says. “Some prison. You’ve seen what it’s like outside. People fighting in the line and degrading themselves to get in for a day. And they won’t earn enough to buy the food that Cyrus there eats each evening. You wouldn’t go outside if they let you.”

“Do you know
where
they took that key?” I ask.

“Why? Are you planning to carry it back to Saul and put me out of my misery?”

“No.” While I’m not entirely convinced that the world would be a poorer place if Campbell went poof, mentioning that to him seems unlikely to help my case. “I don’t have any quarrel with you, Campbell. I’ll leave the key until things are . . . fixed. But here’s the problem. I need to stop myself from giving the other keys to Saul. We got them from the CHRONOS archives, but it isn’t around anymore. If our theory is correct, those keys have to be somewhere, like they were in the archives, prior to September 20th. Tate says no one knows the history of CHRONOS better than you do, so we thought you might have some ideas.”

That’s not exactly what Tate said, but based on the bits and pieces various people have told me about Campbell, it’s clear he was obsessed with CHRONOS. And he seems like the type who might be swayed by a bit of flattery.

Campbell’s expression suggests that was a misread on my part, however. He’s quiet for a minute, watching me over the edge of his glass long enough to make me uncomfortable.

“You’re lying about leaving the key,” he says. “I doubt you can fix this. Either way, you won’t risk leaving a key behind to protect me. But you’re telling the truth about wanting to bring Saul down, so I’d be willing to gamble. Not existing is better than living as a ghost.” He tosses back the last of the green stuff and leans forward, setting the glass on the coffee table between us. “Of course, whether I trust you is irrelevant, since I don’t know what they did with the key.”