A Chronetic Memory (The Chronography Records Book 1) (32 page)

How was he even talking? She picked her way around fallen chunks of ceiling and retrieved the padlock. A bony hand, stronger than it should have been, grabbed her by the wrist.

“I had all the evidence, you know.” His voice had dropped to a whisper. “All the recordings, from the VAO, from hundreds of cams and mics recording live, under my personal account.”

“So we could have found it, if we’d looked there?”

He laughed again, but now it was a sort of gurgle. “Would you have ever looked?”

She shook her head and stepped back. No. She would never have suspected him.

“Go save my life.”

She felt no pity for him. He had made life miserable for hundreds, maybe thousands, of people. He had polluted the science that she loved. He wore the face of someone she had cared for, someone who had seemed to care for her. But that was all a lie.

As far as she knew, though, he had never killed anyone. Save his life? That might come, along with saving Lexil and Jored and the whole timestream, but she made no promise about saving his lifestyle.

Dani left him there and entered the observation box. She placed the padlock in the chamber, making sure she got the right one, and inserted the memory rod in its place. With quick motions of her hands, she set the date and time. Only one more thing before she stepped out and let herself and everything around her fade into “never existed.” She reached into her pocket for what she needed. That done, she set the timer for five seconds, just enough time to step out of the box and close it up tight.

She hoped it would work.

RIACH LABS, Alki Beach, Seattle, WA. 1336, Wednesday, June 14, 2215.

Dani whistled on the way back from the library to her observation box. Today was a good day. Lunch with Kat had been great, especially when she had found out that Jored’s team had actually won their last game. So funny to hear about his squeals of delight, and how he and his holographic teammates had run around the play area in their respective houses, sometimes slapping hands, sometimes using ghost mode to go through each other’s ‘grafs, all the while yelling and whooping.

Tonight, she’d be meeting with Anders again. Every time they met, they grew closer. So far, they were just friends, but Dani knew she would be quite willing to consider more, and she thought he would too. He was smart and funny, and they worked really well together.

She frowned a bit, thinking of their last meeting when they’d gone over the high school kids’ discoveries and her own follow-up investigation. It was frustrating to be so close to finding the blackmailer and still not know who it was. They had lists of his/her victims. They had amounts of payments. They even knew which of the RIACH accounts was holding the money. But all their efforts to discover who was in charge had failed. So far.

Nobody was ready to give up. They all felt that the solution was just around the corner. She smiled again. Slow progress couldn’t drain her good mood this afternoon.

With her thoughts in the background, she had been mechanically sorting through the objects to scan. She selected a brass belt buckle from the 1880s and set it on the ledge to scan first. But something was already there.

Strange. Had someone come by while she was in the library? She poked her head out to look around. Three other interns were working in observation boxes, but none of them acknowledged her. Not likely that they had made the trip over to her machine.

She looked back at the four objects: a plastic leaf, a scrap of leather, a small stone, and a metal disk. They looked exactly like the objects she had recently returned with the school demo kits. Was there something wrong with them? Maybe someone had left her a note on her worktablet. She checked, but there were no new notes.

She picked up the stone and rolled it over in her hand. She couldn’t see anything wrong, although it seemed lighter than it should be. She shrugged that off, looking for any kind of reason that someone would take these objects from the kit and place them here.

No matter how many presentations she had made, how many objects she had examined, she still found it fascinating that piece of geology could have its entire chronetic history imprinted within it. This stone, which existed in some form in the earliest stages of earth’s history, could tell her everything from that point to the point when she just picked it up. Or—a sudden thought—to the point just before she found it, when someone was deciding she should have it back, and upon not finding her in her observation box, had placed it on the ledge.

Why not? she thought. She could find out who left the objects here by reading the chronetic imprints from the last ten minutes. She put down the stone and selected the metal disk for maximum sensory input.

Immediately, she was overwhelmed with the smell of dust-laden air and burnt electronics. It felt hard to breathe, although she knew objectively that she was breathing just fine. She couldn’t see anything, except for filtered light. Fabric. Inside a pocket, if she had to guess. This wasn’t going to tell her anything. She reached to turn the time back further when she heard the voices.

“That one won’t work.” She recognized the voice. Odd. Why would
he
be here in the lab? Then her own voice! How could that be? She checked the time settings, but they were correct.

She heard some words about a padlock, and fixing something, none of which meant anything to her. But she understood the next sentence perfectly.

“You’re the blackmailer,” she heard herself say. She shook her head. She must have heard wrong. There was no way…

“Congratulations.”

He was admitting to it? As she listened to more of the words, her mind raced. She knew she had not said those sentences. She had been whistling while the words were supposedly spoken. What else could it be? Could someone else have imitated their voices to produce these? She knew chronetic recordings couldn’t be falsified, so the sounds were genuine. But what made the sounds could be fake.

Now the voices were talking about bombs, damage to the timestream, and something that needed to be fixed. And then an explosion, which was so vivid she braced against things that might fall on her. But everything was calm outside the box.

She paused the playback. Damage to the timestream. Seemed far-fetched, but at one point chronography was science fiction too. So what if this whole sequence was from a different timestream, and found its way, somehow, into her observation box. How much of it would be true in this timestream?

She swiped, and the playback resumed. As she listened, her eyes widened, and she smiled. If there was anything useful here, it wouldn’t require much work at all to confirm it. She activated “Notes” on her worktablet and spoke a few words.

She and Anders would have a lot to talk about tonight.

RIACH LABS, Alki Beach, Seattle, WA. 0943, Thursday, June 15, 2215.

Only a few hours into the work day, and Hunter had already made two large deposits into the Research and Development fund, and he had a dozen objects to check into the library that showed high potential. Secrets to be uncovered.

He had never had a job he enjoyed as much as this one, and everything he did secured his future a little bit more.

His face darkened as he thought about his previous career. Decades of doctoring, caring for other people’s whiny kids who came in complaining of sniffles, coughs, sore throats, itches, or crying about broken bones which could easily have been avoided. He had only entered medical school for its promise of wealth, and he’d planned on a lucrative cosmetic surgery practice, but circumstances had forced him to settle on pediatrics.

He’d practiced smiles until he could keep a fake one on his face, even while he was resenting his patients’ stupidity, even while he was looking for expensive procedures that he could order to justify bigger bills. Nobody would refuse a “necessary” medical procedure, and he was a master at convincing them they had no choice.

He had discovered a lot of family secrets, too, and made some forays into blackmail (in the form of family counseling charges) by threatening abusive parents with exposure. They knew the court systems would take their children, so they gladly paid his fees. As a side benefit, he saw those children frequently to set broken bones and prescribe salves for burns. Their parents dared not take them anywhere else.

As a ten-year-old boy, he had watched his father leave for a short trip to the store. His cocaine-addicted mother said he had been shot in a robbery. The neighbors told him his father had boarded a bus for California with another woman and a baby. He hadn’t known what to believe, but it was then that he had decided to devote his life first to learning everything he could, and then making enough money to always be able to afford the best. Once that was achieved, he had set his sights higher, and stepped into the position on the board of the institute.

It only took him a few months to refine his blackmail methods and start making more money. At this point, he knew he would never again have to deny himself anything.

He leaned forward in his chair to inspect the list of items and make the afternoon’s assignments. He was so absorbed that he didn’t notice the red flag on his viewwall that signaled the admission of an unexpected visitor to the institute. He first became aware of the intrusion when he heard his secretary say, “You can’t go in there!” and then splutter to a stop. Hunter looked out to see his secretary with his back to the door, blocking an older man and two uniformed police officers.

A detective, he realized. The man held out a badge. Probably looking for some chronographic investigations. Those requests usually went through one of the other directors, but perhaps they were not available this morning. He cleared his throat.

“That’s fine, Richards. Clear my appointments for this morning.” He knew, and Richards knew, that he had no appointments, but Hunter was never one to pass up an opportunity to make another man appear obligated to him.

“What can I do for you, Detective…?” He trailed off, letting the other man supply his name.

“…Rayes, Tom Rayes. Actually, what I need you to do is come downtown with us.”

Decidedly out of the ordinary. Now he was regretting having Richards “clear” his schedule. “I’m afraid I can’t do that today. I have obligations here at the institute.”

“I’m afraid you will have to.” Detective Rayes tilted his head toward the two officers, and and they stepped forward to flank him. “We can do this the hard way, if you prefer.”

“All my equipment is here. How can I help you without the resources of the institute?”

The detective looked up at the ceiling and gave a barely-audible sigh. “Royce Hunter, you are under arrest for the crime of blackmailing, multiple counts.”

WEST SEATTLE HIGH SCHOOL, Seattle, WA. 1000, Saturday, June 17, 2215.

The members of the Political Action Club were buzzing with excitement when Ms. Harris led Dani and Anders to their meeting room. She counted faces: full tally of students, and Detective Rayes was here too.

She nodded to him.

“Hey, everybody, this is my friends Anders, who dug up all the financial details for us.”

The kids applauded and whooped.

“Anders, these are the kids who helped me take the possibility of blackmailing seriously.”

“So you’re the ones who started it all,” said Anders. He looked around. “Which of you are Joph and Lora?”

Dani pointed them out. Anders strode over to them and shook their hands. “You two did a great job. That was a lot of work!”

Joph shrugged, but he couldn’t hide the broad grin on his face. “We had fun.”

“Yeah, it was fun,” said Lora. “Many,
many
hours of fun. What I want to know is: Did it help?”

Detective Rayes stepped forward. “I’ll answer that one. The work you all put in helped us determine how the perp was getting his information. We were able to identify several of the victims, and find where the funds were being stored. But we didn’t have anything to tie any particular person to the crime. The victims we interviewed claimed they knew nothing. After we showed them evidence of their fund transfers, they admitted to making the payments, but all three of them said they were afraid to tell us more.”

“None of them had any proof to convict a blackmailer anyway, did they, Grandpa?” Ronny asked.

“No, they didn’t. We were stuck, waiting for a break in the case, when Dani got a mysterious tip.”

“Crazy mysterious!” Dani agreed. “Recordings of things that had never happened, the voice of the blackmailer confessing, and my voice responding — although I had never spoken those words. As it happened, the voice of the blackmailer was one I knew well, someone I had trusted to be one of the good guys. It seemed impossible. But it pointed in a certain direction, and when I gave Anders a name, it was easy for him to confirm what we had heard. The man had numerous files of blackmail material stored in his personal account.”

“He left a record every time he accessed the material, and those access dates and times corresponded with dates and times of deposits,” Anders said.

“Anders was able to report it to me under the whistleblower law, and that gave us a reason for a search warrant and enough justification to make an arrest.”