Scatter, p.11
Scatter, page 11
Another micro-expression. Annoyance this time. “Alright, ‘people who can read the future or change the past.’”
“What I wrote was you’re collecting people whom you believe can read the future of change in the past.” I added just enough disparagement in my voice that I triggered another flash of something that might have been annoyance or even anger. Good. The angrier he got, the more it stabilized me. I could deal with clear enemies better than potential friends.
“You were on the list of twelve. Which one do you think we believe you can do?”
“I have no. Fucking. Clue.”
The old man stared hard at me for a full beat and I thought he might snarl or order Kevin to beat me. Instead, his upper lip lifted into a half smile. It revealed a full set of veneers, brilliantly white and completely out of place in a face that otherwise looked like something exhumed from a long-buried coffin.
He stuffed his handkerchief back into his pocket, turned and walked stiffly to the window like he had all the time in the world. He looked out across the view of the parking lot and green space that I’d noted when I’d entered this office.
“Did you see the A-12 Oxcart driving in?” he said in his thin voice, almost a whisper.
“The what?”
He looked back at me. “The black jet plane on a pedestal right before you enter the parking lot. You know Lockheed developed that for us. Cutting-edge titanium, special engines, fuel, controls, electronic countermeasures, stealth tech. In 1967, when we were ready to go, it could fly higher, faster, more invisible than any plane out there. Designed to spy on the USSR. And you know what happened?”
I shook my head.
“CORONA satellites happened.” He looked back out the window. “They could spy without getting shot down and it was harder for other countries to get mad at them because they couldn’t see them. The Oxcart became an ox cart. Obsolete. It flew 29 missions out of Okinawa to help in Vietnam and that was it. Do you find that sad?”
“Do you?”
The old man turned and did his half smile again. “Because I’m obsolete, too. Is that what you think? Or do you think it relates to this Scatter operation?”
I swallowed. “I’m thinking you’ve reevaluated and you just want to make SCATTER go away, right? It and everyone connected with it. Just let them go.”
The old man’s lips grew wide enough that the skin on them cracked and he actually laughed, a choking, phlegmy sound that ended in coughing and throat clearing that made him pull out his handkerchief again for a moment.
“Bet you think you’re clever coming in here all balls out,” he whispered when he’d stowed the hankie again. “Is it a new plan or just a variation?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Guess we’ll just have to take you to the basement until you do.”
“That’s false imprisonment.”
“There’s nothing false about it, boy.” The old man gestured to Kevin and stepped out of the way as the hulking beast stepped forward to grab me with his arms out.
It was so much like the beginning of every second combat exercise Alvin had put me through that my muscle memory took over before my mind even had a chance to assess the situation. I grabbed Kevin’s reaching right wrist with both hands, spun to its outside and bent it in an arm bar over my shoulder.
He yelled in pain, up on his toes, feeling like his arm was about to be snapped, which I was in the position to do.
“You done?” I said, sure that he wasn’t.
When the old man snapped at him, “Kevin!” I released my left hand to drive an elbow back into Kevin’s kidneys, then spun and, as he started to collapse, shot my other elbow up to his diving chin.
Crack!
Kevin’s eyes went blank, and he dropped to the floor.
I jumped from him to the old man, grabbing the bony hand that he reached it into its jacket pocket. I yanked it out and twisted it so the man grunted and stumbled to his knees.
I fumbled about in his jacket and around his body and waist. No gun. Maybe he’d just been reaching for his handkerchief again.
“We can’t let you leave, boy,” he grunted at my shoes.
As he said it, something large crashed into the locked door. Then a fusillade of bullets shot out the lock. The door crashed in as Wilson and Dadashev entered with guns out, eyes darting back and forth to take in the entire scene.
I tried to pull the old man up and in between me and the two HRTA men, but the old man pulled away from me and shouted, “Shoot him!”
Shit. Really?
They aimed at me and fired wildly into my gut—Whuh!—chest—Ungh!—neck…
11
Jude’s guts and glory
A swarthy man frowned at me. “You have any evidence of this?”
What? I was sprawled in one of the armchairs in front of the desk. I put my hand to my throat. Fine. Chest fine. Gut. Where…?
My heart was racing, my head spinning, as I looked around me. I was in an office. Right. The interview. The swarthy man standing there was Amit Dadashev, and I’d just implied the CIA was performing experiments on unwitting American citizens…again.
And then… And then…
Dadashev’s phone buzzed in his pocket.
He pulled it out, already looking at me strangely, hit Answer, and put it up to his ear. “Yes,” he said and tightened his mouth. His eyes focused on me intently. “Understood.”
He put his cell phone away.
Which meant they were coming. I was fully here now. The old man and his bodyguard, Kevin, were on their way.
I swallowed and pushed myself up to standing. “They probably told you they’re coming to ask me more questions, but I’ve changed my mind. I’m not interested in talking to any of you any longer.”
Dadashev stepped between me and the office door. “Please, just stay until the others arrive.”
I licked my lips inside my mask and shook my head, stepping towards him. “No. I don’t think you heard me, I don’t want to—“
I whipped my right fist into the side of his face, pivoting all my weight behind it.
His head snapped and he went down, stumbling back against the door. I followed up with a left to his nose and he was down, bloody and writhing, gasping, trying to breathe.
I stared at him for just a second, horrified by my own violence. Then again, this man had been quite ready to shoot me repeatedly in the other timeline.
I kneeled down in front of him and fumbled inside his jacket, found the gun he wore in a shoulder holster. For a human resources interview? I unsnapped the holster and pulled out the gun, sick that I was now very familiar with how these worked. It was a SIG Sauer P226, Alvin Westor’s favorite. The SEALs and Rangers had mostly moved on to Glocks 19s, but the Lead-the-Way leader said the ergonomics of the SIG just made it more of a joy to shoot.
The only thing I cared about was that, like the Glocks, there was no external safety to worry about. You just pulled the trigger hard, and it fired. I could handle that.
I held it in front of Dadashev’s eyes now as they blinked hard at me. He was still struggling to breathe through his mouth since I’d destroyed his nose.
“If you try to follow right behind me, I’m going to shoot you. If others come after me, I might shoot them, too. Or whoever I’m holding hostage at the time. Got it?”
I wasn’t sure if this was a smart or incredibly stupid thing to tell him. Alvin hadn’t covered escaping from a CIA headquarters filled with lawmen and women who might want to kill me. But whatever.
I shoved the gun into the back of my suit pants and tightened my belt. Then I grabbed Dadashev by his collar, jerked him away from the door, opened the door, calmly stepped out, and closed it quietly behind me.
Jude, standing outside, gawped at me, stretching his mask.
“Which way did Wilson leave when he came out of here?” I asked him.
Jude pointed down the hall in the direction we’d arrived by.
“Then we’re leaving the opposite way.”
“What?”
“You can tell them I was crazed and distressed. That I forced you. Whatever works. But I need to you to help me get out of here now. This isn’t a joke. This is my life. Help me or I’ll just run.”
I could see my old friend trying to process it all in his mind, swallowing hard as he weighed the steadiness of my voice and eyes, wondering if I was having some kind of panic attack or hallucination. “What did you say to them?”
“Decide now. Three…two…”
“Let’s go,” he said and started trotting down the hall in the opposite direction in which Wilson had gone.
I caught up to him, grabbed his arm, and broke us into a run. “First staircase,” I said.
“There,” Jude gasped and pointed.
I saw it and ran ahead of him to open the door. I pulled him in as he reached it, then I yanked the door closed behind me. It was a typical fire exit, gray-painted concrete stairs heading up and down, metal handrails, old lighting fixtures that had been updated to garishly inadequate white LEDs.
The SIG had threatened to slide down into the back of my pants as we’d run, so I pulled it up now to reposition it. Jude’s eyes went wide, but he said nothing.
As we started thudding down the stairs together, though, he began panting, his face going red. “Just wait. Just wait. Jacky!” He tugged his mask off, desperate.
I grabbed his arm and tugged. We cleared one landing and headed for the next. “Keep going!”
“This…this…building is totally secure,” he wheezed. “You can’t just duck out and…”
“Not planning to,” I said beside him, limiting my steps, but keeping him descending. We passed another floor landing. I wished I could jump down eight at a time, using the handrails to control my descent. But there was no point if I left Jude behind. “I just need to get to a public place with cameras and lots of witnesses,” I told him. “A main entrance.”
“Okay. Okay, then…stop! We need to go out on the fourth floor, center. That’s the most public entrance. We’re built into a hill here.”
“Fuck! How?”
“We can… We can… Oh. Give me a second.” He sat down suddenly on the landing we’d just reached. His chest was going in and out. His face was red and scrunched up in pain. “We go out…this floor. Head to the center block. Take the elevator…”
“Okay. Let’s do that.”
I pulled off my mask and stuffed it into my jacket pocket so they’d see my face on camera. Then I helped my friend up and we went to the door. Before we went out, I checked him and straightened his clothes and my clothes. To look normal. At least until we got to the exit and someone there stopped us.
“This is insane, right?” Jude said, looking at me.
“I…know. I didn’t think this through obviously,” I said. “I’ll go to jail if I have to, but I’m not going to just disappear like my brother and sister.”
“What?”
“Later. Let’s—”
There was a loud bang as a door a few floors up crashed open and feet thudded into the staircase. “You two down!” a voice commanded. “You two up!”
The more thudding feet.
“Let’s go,” I whispered to Jude and we opened the landing door as quietly as we could, slipped out, and pulled it silently closed behind us.
Jude gestured a direction, and we walked like two casual CIA office workers along a more brightly lit hallway than the one we’d left a few floors up. Some twenty feet along, I spotted an elevator another fifteen feet ahead. Jude did too, and we both walked faster. Ahead of us, a couple of women in blue surgical masks reached the elevator and pressed the call button for it.
The elevator arrival bell dinged.
The doors slid open and Jude called, “Hold the elevator, please!”
Then all hell broke loose.
The stairwell door fifteen feet behind us yanked open and Wilson and Dadashev spilled out, their guns drawn. They spotted us and yelled, “FREEZE!” like a bad cop movie. Dadashev took a spread-legged shooting stance while Wilson kept running toward us, aiming as he came.
I turned and pulled the SIG out of my back waistband, but Jude was suddenly in my face, grabbing my gun arm, trying to disarm me. “They’ll shoot you!” he yelled. “You aim and they’ll—”
Blam!
Wilson’s bullet tore through the side of Jude’s face, spraying me with bone and flesh and blood as the women in the elevator screamed and I tumbled with Jude, with what was left of Jude, to the polished concrete that was speckled now with—
I was sitting in a faux-leather armchair in…an office. Window there. Two other men in chairs.
Yes.
My head was buzzing like I couldn’t hear properly. My heart was beating hard and my whole body was squeezing somehow. Not in physical pain, but in…loss? Something awful had just happened. Something…
It all rushed back to me.
Jude!
No!
I took a deep breath and looked around me. The two men were looking at me. Wilson and Dadashev. Right. I was still in their office. I’d jumped back. Jude was alive. When was this?
“Well?” said Wilson.
“What?” I said.
“You just told us your brother’s alive. Do you know where he is?”
I blinked and let my mind race back through the conversation so I knew what I’d told them at this point and what I hadn’t. I’d said my sister had been taken and my brother was alive, and neither of them had seemed to know about either fact.
I now knew they had concealed weapons, though. That seemed strange for two guys who seemed to be basically office drones. Which meant maybe they weren’t really human resources at all but some kind of field agents playing the roles of office drones. Human Resources. Talent Acquisition.
Yet they hadn’t known about SCATTER or time travelers. Old Mr. Southern Whispers had sent them out of the room before we’d discussed these.
Which left, maybe, the possibility that they’d had orders to bring me in and treat me as dangerous, but not necessarily to hold me.
I grinned at them. “You know what, guys? I was fucking with you.”
“What?”
“You broke into my home. You threatened me. You lied to me. So I took you up on your invitation because it gave me a chance to make my friend happy. Dr. Spiegelman. Now, because I left some landmines behind me that will go off if for some reason I’m detained, and you said I can leave at any time, I’m going.”
With that, I pressed myself up out of my armchair and walked to the door.
Dadashev looked like he was going to intercept me but Wilson threw him a look and a shake of the head.
“You walk out that door and you won’t be getting a second invitation,” Wilson said.
“Thank God,” I responded and reached for the knob.
“Not a nice invitation,” Dadashev added.
I shuddered but opened the door and walked out to where Jude was waiting. Masked. Whole.
It was all I could do not to hug him tightly to me for a second, then run.
No one, as far as I could tell, followed us out, and that night I stayed with Jude in his house in Arlington townhouse, rather than the hotel the CIA had booked for me. I figured it lessened the chances that Wilson and Dadashev or anyone further up the chain in the Company would try to make one last play to bring me onboard.
And Dadashev’s threat?
I was pretty sure it was just the empty talk of a man used to scaring people.
Nonetheless, it was one more reason I was glad Jude and I finally had time for a real heart-to-heart talk, something I’d missed from our times hanging out in university and later, on our occasional nights out in Chicago. Right now, it was not only meaningful, it was necessary. Quite apart from Dadashev’s parting threat, I was completely shaken up by the time jumps I’d done this day. More than after the ones Alvin AKA Shadow or Rick Soder AKA the Bat, had made me do. Jumping away from getting shot, then Jude getting shot was too much like my time around Cutter, too much of me needing to escape another overwhelming enemy.
Or maybe it was the same enemy that I was just starting to get a clearer picture of.
Either way, I needed Jude’s calming presence as much now as I had all those times I’d had PTSD meltdowns and panic attacks in university. So we ordered delivery sushi with extra ginger, some edamame and gyoza. When it arrived, we took it into Jude’s living room, each took a couch and tray of the divvied-up food, and went to town with our chopsticks.
And talked.
Not about Kenny being alive or me being able to jump back in time, but about the more normal things in my life. Like Lena. Her insistence I get personal defense training and how that had helped me get stronger while she got weaker from her mom dying. How I’d tried to fix it and failed.
His two couches held a jumble pillows and colorful knit throws that were perfect for this kind of catching up. Jude shared his decision to start going to synagogue again, rediscovering his faith in God even as his eyes had been opened to the incredible complexities of evil in the world.
At some point he finally jumped into dissecting my decision to not join the CIA, labeling me with everything from a fear of commitment to a socialist distrust of authority or simply my hopeless hope that I was going to patch things up with Lena and didn’t see how I could make things work with her on the west coast if I was working out here in Langley.
He was pushing pretty hard.
I finally laughed, shaking my head. “None of those. Jesus, you are out of practice.”
“Then what? Because sure as anything, something went on in there with those guys that you’re not telling me about. You came out so…shaken. I’ve seen that in you before. Something happened. What?”
I stared at him, suddenly wondering if he knew more than he was letting on.
But if he did, why wouldn’t he just say?
Because he knew he was doing wrong? Was he was searching salvation in synagogue attendance? I had a nasty flashback to the undercover cop, James William Gillespie, who’d gotten caught up in the Demon Monks just like Kenny had and had tried to find his soul again by going to a fundamentalist church.
