Scatter, p.33
Scatter, page 33
I was almost there. Further than I’d gotten at any other time than the Reflecting Pool Escape, and much closer to commercial stores, taxis, police.
A much scruffier young man bumped me from my right and I caught his eyes in my peripherals, feeling my heart sink. It was Xiaobo, of course. I jumped to one side, but he leapt after me, grabbing my arm with a, “We need to talk!”
The timeline didn’t end.
Instead, he dragged me forcefully with him south out of the group of staffers and across the wide walkway toward the south end of the Capitol Grounds.
“What are you—?”
“Just walk, yo. We’re going for a ride. Just you and me, yah?”
Yes!
The next thing I knew, I was in the passenger seat of a pinkish Porsche with “Taycan” written on the back of it, freaking awesome leather bucket seats that smelled new, and two high-definition video screens stacked up from the center console up the front middle dash. One had a map of the area displayed. One had a drive mode and battery… This was electric.
“Seatbelts on, yo.”
Yo, I thought with a sudden spurt of fear and put mine on. “Before we go, can—”
My words got sucked away as Xiaobo zoomed us silently backwards through a bunch of scattering pedestrians, then forward in a curve that shot us like a soundless bullet out onto the narrow New Jersey Avenue, wheeling around the cars in our lane like they were standing still, avoiding oncoming cars by a rushing whisper of inches and blaring horns.
At the six-way crossing of New Jersey SE, North Carolina SE, and E Street E, he wheeled us in a wild, squealing, left-hand turn through the red lights and rushing cars, up on the sidewalk by a red brick building that might have been a church, and bouncing back onto the road before sideswiping a concrete lamppost and grinding along a line of parked cars, their side mirrors crunching and exploding, glass tinkling on concrete.
Then we were free again, accelerating like a bullet.
My eyes were stuck on wide. My heart was pumping like it was going to explode. My hands were clutching the leather seats on either side of my hips.
“Bill Murray Bill Murray Bill Murray,” I muttered. Groundhog Day, driving crazy with a groundhog on his steering wheel because he knows he can’t die. He’ll just reset. So nothing matters, right? Was I the groundhog in this scenario? Punxsutawney Phil? Was spring coming early if I stuck my head out of this speeding death trap and saw my shadow?
“I hate my fucking sister!” Xiaobo yelled at me as he hung a hard right onto 3rd St. SE, slamming me toward him in the car.
“Okay! Okay! Me too! I got something to tell you!”
“You told me already, yo!”
“No, it’s about what you can do to prove you have the power!”
Xiaobo punched the speed pedal even harder in response, sideswiping an oncoming car that obviously hadn’t seen him coming even though every other car on this narrow two-way was peeling wide for us as we whizzed whizzed through, leaving the sound of honking, screaming, and crashing metal in our wake. And there we blew through another four-way-stop!
I had to work my tongue around to get enough saliva to talk. I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore. I think they were buried inside the seat leather. “You text me. Early. Before I ever get to the Capitol. Throw off all their plans!”
I wanted to close my eyes as I saw a four-lane cross-road coming up way too fast that actually had traffic lights for the east-west traffic…that were green for them so the lane we rushed toward were filled with cars.
Xiaobo yelled a curse in Chinese and actually applied the brakes, not to stop, but to time his entry then shot across the first two westbound lanes and whipped up hard left, just past, I saw, a raised concrete divider between the two sets of traffic lanes and, on the right, a line of thick metal stanchions that blocked off 3rd at that point.
Had Xiaobo seen both of those? Was he just lucky? A crazy good driver?
Didn’t have time to think hard about that as he wheeled around a timed driver, clipping that car’s front grill and pulled up hard right again, throwing me toward him.
I took the opportunity to shout my cell phone number in his ear a few times, along with a pneumonic, hoping against hope that he wasn’t so far gone in his mania that he couldn’t hear me.
Then we were whipping down what had to be 4th, past old red brick buildings and shiny new condos and commercial storefronts, lots of people screaming and more cars crashing, us bouncing a bit when there just wasn’t room to get through the madhouse cleanly.
Aaaand…water ahead. Heading for the Potomac? No. I scanned the map in my head and saw we were going to die in the Anacostia.
Xiaobo shot us past a winery to our right and parking lot to our left, across a curb and concreted and grass and fountain strips and wooden boardwalk into another set of stanchions guarding its outside edge.
The stanchions bent and snapped as we hit them, even as they crumpled and yanked down the Taycan’s front bumper and hood, and exploded the lights, so that the rear end of the car’s inertia was redirected upward. The Taycan, with us inside, flipped and spun like an Olympic dive on coke into the icy gray waters.
Bam! against the waves. Sinking.
If I hadn’t been caught by my seatbelt, if I’d hit my head, I think I’d have jumped right then. But instead, part of me had half jumped out of my body in another way, imagining our crash and flight from the outside like the impossible thing it was.
I completely came back into the submerged car now and studied Xiaobo. In the interior lights that had switched on by themselves, I saw his face had taken on a kind of awed wonder over what he’d done. Had he really intended this? Was he truly suicidal? If so, all he had to do was keep himself from jumping back in time and it would all be over.
I didn’t think that was going to happen, though, so I repeated my burner phone number and its pneumonic out loud again, staring at Xiaobo until he acknowledged me.
“You text me,” I said. “Early.” I repeated the number again.
Xiaobo just grinned and tried to lay his head back against the headrest, but we were almost upside down and he couldn’t. He started laughing.
The car jolted like it had hit something. The bottom? That soon?
The angle shifted until I realized we hadn’t been upside down so much as descending with the car’s front down past 180 degrees. With the front now mired in the river’s muck, the rear of the Taycan was pushing past our backsides, searching for the bottom.
The entire interior shifted with another jolt as the rolling weight pried the front from the muck and left us finally completely upside down, hanging from our straps. I tried to undo them. Couldn’t. I also finally registered that my legs felt strange and wet and saw they were buried in twisted metal. Couldn’t draw them out.
“Shit.”
I struggle with my door and window. Couldn’t make either of them move.
Still…
“We gotta be only what? Twenty feet dow—”
There was a loud pop as the driver’s side window, that must have been cracked when we first flipped, suddenly imploded in an explosion of small safety-glass balls that splashed against my face as the water rushed in.
Cold.
Yeah. The interior was going to fill in under a minute. We were going to drown if we couldn’t get free.
Xiaobo’s hanging face was red with the blood rushing into it, his cheeks all distorted. But he had his eyes closed. He was no help.
Would there be a rescue? How long would it take? If I let myself suffocate, could they revive me? How could I even do that?
I started to panic.
Dissociate! I yelled inside myself. Let go. Let go of this body or die.
And…
39
The early bird
I came out of the shower first and grabbed two towels. I handed one to Wenling.
After a quick swipe or two to my head and body, I leaned my naked butt back against the edge of the sink so I could watch Wenling dry herself. Just because it might be the last time.
She stopped and let the towel hang at her side, framing, not hiding her nudity. “Does this relax you?”
I looked down at my mini-me that I thought had been pretty well exercised. He was starting to bob. “Apparently not.”
Wenling gave a slow, satisfied smile. “Good. Then maybe it gives you something to look forward to. After our negotiations.”
So saying, she finished toweling off, dropped the towel to the floor, and walked from the bathroom ahead of me with such obvious awareness of her effect on me that I was tempted to run after her, jump her, and insist on a second session on the massive bed the George had provided for us in this Presidential Suite.
But even as I thought it, I remembered the entire reason I’d let Wenling seduce me in the shower was because of how much I’d been missing Lena and aching over the loss of her love. It almost immediately doused my physical desire for Wenling and I finished toweling off and went to get dressed. Sober now.
I only had on my underwear and dress pants when my burner phone dinged at me from the pocket of my blue jeans that I’d carried out of the bathroom and dumped near the bed.
“What’s that?” Wenling called from where she was doing her makeup at the large, gold-framed mirror in the living room part of the suite.
“No idea,” I called back. But even as I said it, I started feeling the wrongness of the situation. Of the phone dinging. Of Wenling calling to me and me answering back. That felt…off.
Frowning, I dug the phone out of my jeans and saw I had a text message from a phone number I’d never seen before.
One word.
Yo.
Suddenly it was the safety glass of the driver’s window bursting into a thousand little bead and washing over me. The wild ride with Xiaobo. The escape from the Senate building. All the escapes. All the different timelines and everything that had happened in them. Everything I’d learned. It was like they’d always been there inside me. It only took a few seconds to get them all lined up in order in my head.
I’d run four timelines in the US Capitol.
This was timeline five.
What now, punk?
“Jackson?” I heard the note of worry in Wenling’s voice, though it obviously wasn’t enough yet to have her abandon her physical preparations to check on me. “I didn’t think you could do very much with that phone.”
I quickly erased the text, amazed that Xiaobo had actually sent it. Amazed he’d followed through.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I accidentally pressed a timer function earlier. Are you almost ready?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Okay.”
I slipped the phone into my pocket, quickly pulled on my shirt, grabbed my tie, and ran into the bathroom, shutting the door behind me and locking it.
Before I could rethink and start to doubt the plan that had come to me during my last shambling escape from the ketamine twins in the basement of the Capitol, I pulled out my burner phone and dialed Jude.
He answered on the first ring. “Where are you?”
I spoke quietly. “Right now? The George hotel. It’s a couple blocks from the Capitol, where we’re going to be going soon. Where are you?”
“Just left Langley. Figured I’d drive around the Capitol area and see if I can find a place to park for a couple hours.”
“Don’t. I have something else I need you to do instead.”
“What?”
“I need you to contact Andre Poussaint. You can find him through Amit Dadashev or Robert Wilson, the two guys who I talked to in Human Resources and Acquisition at Langley.”
“Wait. Wait. You want—”
“Tell them that in about forty-five minutes to an hour, I’m going to be in a meeting in a SCIF in the basement of the Capitol with Senator Antoine Jonquist of Wyoming, billionaire Zhou Wenling, and Dr. Uwe Bent, current leader of the organization called SCATTER. It is no longer part of the CIA, as you said, but it is very much alive, active. They have Zhou Wenling’s brother working for them, my brother and sister, and they’re currently trying to recruit me, voluntarily or not.”
“You? Why?”
I couldn’t take the hurt wheedling in his tone. Like he suspected, but didn’t want to say. Like he was hurt I couldn’t confide in him after all we’d been through together and all he’d done for me. Was doing for me today, with this. “Because they think I can time travel like Kenny.”
“Can you?”
I looked up at the ceiling. Down at the floor. The last person I’d willingly shared my secret with had abandoned me over it. The others who knew wanted to exploit me for it. But this was Jude. Jude who’d talked me through panic attacks and been my first and only true friend at university. My truest friend still.
“I can,” I said. “But maybe don’t mention that to Poussaint, okay? I need him wanting to lock up Bent, not me, too.”
I heard a snuffling sound on the other side of the phone. Like maybe the always emotionally balanced Jude Spiegelman was overcome. When he spoke, I could hear it in his voice. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “I’ll get them.”
“No, thank you. Last thing? Tell them to bring a lot of firepower. Bent has at least four trained violent operatives in the Capitol basement, but I think maybe a lot more scattered throughout the building to keep watch.”
I hung up, stowed my phone, and started tying my tie, sure that at any moment Wenling was going to storm into the bathroom to ask why I wasn’t ready.
When I’d finished with the tie, I walked quickly to the bathroom door and put my ear to it. I heard the murmurs of Wenling speaking quietly on the phone, then swearing angrily, then making a sound like she was changing her clothing. Good. I ran back to finish combing my hair and pulling on my socks and shoes. I was just finishing lacing my second shoe when Wenling did finally storm into the bathroom.
She wore a different outfit than she’d worn in all our previous timelines. This was a pantsuit, charcoal gray and nappy, the blouse a thicker cream material, the matching pumps shorter-heeled. She stomped one of those. “Why are you not ready? We have to go.”
“Almost there.”
I pulled on my second shoe and tied it, donned my expensive suit jacket, and followed Wenling out of the hotel room. I looked at the clock and wondered why Colonel Jian hadn’t yet showed up to give us Kenny’s warning about my being abducted downstairs.
The reason came to me. In this timeline that Xiaobo had sent me back to, the abduction had never happened because I knew about it from previous timelines and so just avoided it without needing Kenny. Like I was about to do now.
I touched Wenling’s arm as she started for the elevator. “No. There are two men downstairs waiting to abduct me. In an earlier timeline, they abduct me, take me to what I assume is a SCATTER operating base, where Kenny sees me and comes back in time to tell Colonel Jian to warn me.”
She frowned, working through it, and nodded. “What do we do?”
“Call Colonel Jian to bring the limo to the back of the building just to be safe. We’ll go down the stairs and leave out the back. Then call your SCATTER contact and warn him we’ll walk if he can’t guarantee a safe meeting and negotiation.”
I didn’t mention the guns and ammunition the colonel and I had loaded up on before leaving last time. They hadn’t been needed before, and they’d just become one more messy thing to clean up if, no, when I finally made it out of the Capitol.
Wenling connected with Bent on the phone. Her speech to him wasn’t exactly the same, but every bit as powerful as the last time I’d heard it. When she was done, we left by the stairs, met Colonel Jian with the limo out behind the George, and drove to the Dirkson without incident.
Beautiful day. The sun was out.
Breathe.
As we entered the Dirkson, I found myself silently praying that Jude was also on the ball and persuasive, because my stomach had already started to churn in anticipation. It was as if I could feel the weight and trauma of each of my previous timelines waiting like an ugly, overpowering mugger at the end of the Dirkson subway ride.
My plan hinged on reading Poussaint’s role right. Putting it all together, I figured he’d been brought back into the CIA to search out and extinguish the last traces of SCATTER. The CIA somehow knew it still existed, but hadn’t been able to track down its members and stop its operation. So they’d brought in a legendary spy whose experience was ferreting out rogue operatives. He’d thought I was somehow connected to SCATTER when they’d brought me in for my memory abilities and he’d been willing to waterboard me if that had been what it took to find out how I knew about the operation.
And If I could give him Dr. Bent now, maybe he could shut SCATTER down. Which meant I could get Kenny and Kansas back, get myself out of this repeating time trap Bent had caught me in, and not have to keep looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life.
If Poussaint did not turn up with the cavalry, I was just going to collapse from the sheer emotional weight of what had come before, regardless of what was going to happen this time.
Knowledge might be powerful, but it was goddamn heavy and frightening, too.
Getting out of the subway inside the Capitol basement, the ghost land of seeing multiple versions of reality became more intense. I was walking through the subway platform, running through it, hiding and getting drugged in it…
I spotted the ketamine twins tailing us as Jonquist led us to the SCIF, and I imagined other SCATTER operatives watching us from every doorway. Did they, too, wonder why Wenling had changed to heavier charcoal clothing?
We entered the SCIF, but before I felt the familiar air compression as the door closed behind Colonel Jian, bringing up the rear, the ketamine twins slipped in through the door and took up standing positions on either side of me. The sweet-faced young woman gave me a smile so engaging I could almost feel Wenling fume from where she stood watching us from three feet away.
Ironic, given how she was mentally preparing to barter me away in return for her brother.
