Fate (Wilton's Gold #3) (26 page)

Anything Erica had experienced so far relative to time travel paled in comparison to this. She sat between two versions of the exact same person, facing each other – one with a gun pointed at his mirror image.

From their brief conversation, she’d been able to ascertain that the friendlier of the two had not experienced the events of the past few days with her – traveling back in time to Colonial America and then to the future. He didn’t even seem to have a good understanding of who she was and why she was here. She had no way of knowing if the new Jeff Jacobs on the scene knew any differently. She watched in awe as they confronted each other.

“You can put the gun down,” friendly Jeff said, standing with his arms raised. “I’m not here to do anything to you.”

“Why are you here?”

“I’m here to get her,” he said, motioning with his head toward Erica.

“And how do you expect to do that? Everything’s changed.”

“Well, no, it’s not. I would say it’s restored, rather than changed.”

Jeff motioned with his gun for her to stand. “I’d rather not,” she said. “There are snipers in the trees. You’d be smart to sit, too.” He motioned again more maliciously, so she obeyed.

“I saw you. In Russia,” good Jeff continued.

“Yes, you did. I tried to save you.”

“Save me?”

“Yes. Belochkin had already been killed – I watched it happen. Which should have restored the correct history. When I went back to the present time, it should have eliminated anything that had taken place afterwards. You were being chased by soldiers, so I made the decision to jump.”

“But you couldn’t know what happened after. Ekaterina duped you. You were waiting in the trees for her to kill Belochkin and come back. But she didn’t. Instead, she set off the alarm in the house, alerting the guards. Then she overpowered you and took the device, pulling both of you to 2018 – three years beyond your present time. One where Belochkin was still alive and the Soviet Union still existed. Once you were there, she tried to kill her other self and destroy the time machine, which would have cemented that history in place.”

Erica listened, but she was already giving up on understanding the interchange. She’d have to trust that the first Jeff she’d met in this reality would explain things later, assuming he got a chance.

“Then how did you get back to 1983?”

“This is going to sound crazy, but I made an alliance with the original Ekaterina. Before she became Evelyn Peters. Look, can we sit? I feel like a clay duck out here.”

The other Jeff nodded, lowered his gun, and they all sat.

“I’m beginning to understand what you were talking about,” Erica said. “The whole thing needs to be stopped.”

“Yes,” Jeff said. “It’s out of control.”

“So what happened to you, then?” the newcomer interrupted.

“Well, you saw most of it. I escaped the guards by engaging the time device, even though I knew it was going to send me back three years into the future from my real present time. I figured I could integrate myself and get back to my original time, and then deal with things from there. It didn’t work. I arrived back in America and got arrested because you, my friend, had disappeared a year and a half before.”

The only thing Erica could process was that there was no way she could process this entire conversation. Fortunately, the encroacher had lowered his weapon, so that part of the problem was at least temporarily out of the way. On the unfortunate side, the situation appeared to demand a solution – and while she was sitting with two of the greatest minds on the planet relative to time travel, each had a different take on how they’d gotten to this exact moment.

“I had to,” he said, leaning back, the gun still in his right hand. “The USTP leadership was going to eliminate me. It was only a matter of time.”

“Do you know why?”

“The USTP,” Erica asked. “What’s that?”

The Jeff she trusted turned to her. “The United States Time Program. The government took my invention and made what, on the surface, was a tourism program out of it. Only it was much, much worse than that.” He turned to the other Jeff. “I’m assuming you stumbled onto something?”

Laying the gun on the ground next to him, the other Jeff reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a tattered notebook. He tossed it across to Jeff, who picked it up and flipped through it. He looked up at his mirror image with a look of absolute seriousness on his face. “What is this? Is this the book that Bremner was keeping? It’s real?” He nodded. “Fisher was right. You went back in time and swiped it?”

The other Jeff laughed. “I’d ask how Agent Fisher is, but I think I already know.”

“Who’s Fisher?” Erica asked, sliding her body so she could see over Jeff’s shoulder. “What is this book?”

Jeff explained while still flipping through the pages. “I had heard that the head of the Time Program was taking mysterious unsanctioned trips into the past, and every other trip was to the same time and place. I was tipped off by the FBI agent assigned to the USTP; that’s Agent Fisher. We followed the head of the program to where he was jumping, which turned out to be the site of the Jefferson Memorial construction.”

The other Jeff sighed and leaned back again. He explained the situation further, “Dr. Bremner, head of the USTP, was going back in time and changing history, and keeping a record of it. But the only way he could keep a record was to plant it sometime before the history he was changing actually changed. Which is why he kept going to the same place over and over again. He would travel with a three minute difference every time so he didn’t run into himself, and he hid the book somewhere where it would never be found – covered by the masonry of the Memorial.”

She watched as Jeff flipped through the book, perusing a series of handwritten journal entries. Each had a name at the top, followed by a write-up on each person. “I can’t believe this is real,” he said. “This is the worst part of my fantasies of how time travel could be misused.”

She sighed. He’d finally arrived in the right frame of mind, whichever version of Jeff this was and whatever he’d experienced.

“Well, at least give him credit for keeping a record so there’s some evidence of what he’s done,” the other Jeff said. “Speaking scientifically, of course. Beyond that, Bremner is pure evil.”

“And he had us working for him,” Jeff said, still thumbing through the book. “Is this why you-”

Something important caught his eye, interrupting him. “What is it?” she asked, trying harder to peer over his shoulder without sitting up.

“Suzanne Mellen McCarthy,” Jeff said.

“You know her?”

He looked up at her and then back at the book. “Well, no, I don’t know her, but I know the name Mellen.”

“Oh yeah,” the other Jeff said, leaning forward with a laugh. “Suzanne Mellen McCarthy. What a thorn in the side that lady is.”

“How so?”

“You don’t know? How could you not know Suzanne… Mellen… McCarthy?” Jeff said. “That’s how she always said her name, with the big pause in the middle. Ridiculous.”

“Humor me,” Jeff said. “I haven’t been back that long.”

“Well, read the thing,” he said, pointing at the book. “Senator Mellen has been the foremost opponent of the USTP. She tried to push legislation that would have cut off funding for the program. Actually, she was temporarily successful until the President signed an executive order authorizing the program to be funded as ‘research.’ Mellen promised she’d bring the program down, but it was an election year, so she lost interest. For the time being, at least. That was in the first year of the USTP, as we were just getting started. I haven’t heard anything about her recently. Not sure what she’s up to now.”

“She’s not up to anything,” Jeff said. “She doesn’t exist.”

The other Jeff sighed. “Bremner.”

“Actually, he had someone else do it for him. They bumped off the senator’s grandfather on Fifth Avenue in 1930.”

“I was wondering why you were dressed like that,” Erica said, feeling like she wanted to be part of the conversation, but realizing she was making a rather large assumption that there was a correlation.

‘How would you know about Mellen if she doesn’t exist?”

“I don’t know a thing about Mellen the senator – I just know about the murder because Dexter was there,” Jeff said. He was looking at the ground thoughtfully, before shaking his head slowly. “But why would Dexter…”

“Dexter? It was on a mission?”

Jeff nodded.

She looked up from reading over Jeff’s shoulder. “Do you see what I was concerned about?”

Both Jeffs laughed simultaneously. “Oh, you have no idea,” one of them said. She was losing track of who was who now that the gun was laying on the ground.

She continued, though. “In the wrong hands, time travel is the most dangerous weapon there is. What, was this Bremner guy going back and eliminating anyone who was a threat?”

The other Jeff laughed. “Not exactly,” he said, shifting his weight onto his other side. “It was a little more altruistic than that. “He didn’t kill anyone – except, I’m learning, for Mellen’s grandfather, who he
had
killed instead of doing it himself. All he did was find a key moment in their lives so he could steer them in a different direction. For
most
of them, he wasn’t a killer.”

“I don’t know if I agree with that,” Jeff said.

“It’s the truth,” he said, shaking his head. “Kind of blew my mind, too. But that computer system-”

“-could identify the key relationships,” Jeff said, finishing his thought. He looked over at Erica. “If you think time travel is scary, this system they set up is ten times worse. They have the ability to analyze any relationship any of us have had in our lives in a way that... well, predicts the future. As we now know, not only can it be used to predict the future, but it can also be used to change the past.”

Erica shook her head. Suddenly she was regretting not ending this when she’d had the chance. Even if it would have meant sacrificing herself.

While it wasn’t the first time he’d been in the presence of another version of himself, it was the first time they’d engaged each other. In the first few moments of the conversation, Jeff couldn’t shake from his mind the old question... if you had a clone, what would you do with it? He wondered, if there weren’t snipers in the trees, if the other Jeff would be willing to sing, “I Can Do Anything Better than You” from
Annie Get Your Gun
with him.

Still, it wasn’t as strange as he would’ve anticipated it would be. There was a comfort in hanging out with himself. He could never complain about a compatibility issue, the only possible difference being the stretch of time where they’d had different experiences and learned different things about time travel - and, possibly, about themselves. Still, that had only been a year-and-a-half for his counterpart, and just about two weeks for him.

The connection with Mellen amazed him. Dexter had been right – he actually had seen Bremner in the street in 1930. And Bremner shouldn’t have known they were there, so it was clearly an earlier trip. All of the thought they’d given to how the USTP system couldn’t account for stories handed down through word-of-mouth was for naught. What it couldn’t account for was the head of the program doing recon to set up a participant to eliminate his family’s business competition, and in the process leave an easier path forward for the USTP itself.

With this new information, he immediately wondered whether Dexter actually had put two-and-two together to make the Mellen connection and had kept it from him, or if he so certainly bought into Kane’s story that he hadn’t even taken time to look at an alternative. While he would want to bring it up to Dexter when he next saw him, it also occurred to him that next time he saw his friend, it might not be on who’d experienced the Kane mission. Which kind of made his thought process moot.

He was interrupted from his pondering when the other Jeff sat up and leaned forward. “Everything you say you’ve been through – it doesn’t make any sense. If you fixed everything in Russia, how come I was still there when you got back?”

“That’s because you’re basing your hypotheses on an incorrect assumption. You’re assuming fulfillment is an actual thing because the old woman said it was. It’s not. She was completely wrong and so were we. Erica sitting here with us is proof.”

“How’s that?”

“You and I both come from a reality where we never went back in time to rob Joe Wilton of his gold, yes?” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Erica nodding, listening intently for the explanation. He tried to put himself in her place – this must have all been extremely confusing for her. “Here’s Erica, who doesn’t exist unless we steal Wilton’s gold. Because she traveled through time from some reality – and it might well not be the reality that we know – she still exists. And Dexter, Emeka, Abby and I, for the same reason, are down the path there waiting to pounce on Wilton’s team.”

“When is the last moment that you both experienced the same thing?” Erica asked.

They both thought for a moment, then Jeff said, “It was in Russia, 1983 – right before you jumped back to 2015.”

“So you both remember coming back here – you said you came back here to find your time travel device, and then you found my phone, right?”

Jeff nodded, then turned to his other self. “Yeah – that’s the one that’s throwing me for a loop. I came here with Dexter, and we hid in the trees right up there. Where are we?” He pointed toward the area he had expected to find them.

“I sent them home. I was trying to minimize the confusion here.”

Jeff nodded. “That’s what I’d intended to do. Great minds think alike, huh? You didn’t tell me why you ran yet. What did you learn that they didn’t want you to know?” He realized they should probably be giving strong consideration to leaving the area, but if they time traveled back in the manner in which he was orchestrating in his mind, he would never get the chance to ask these questions.

“Actually, I didn’t learn anything. I just asked too many questions, and they weren’t the sort of questions that Bremner and his buddy General Carr wanted asked. Believe me, I was fine with the USTP as a means of funding my research. I’m still a firm believer that if the technology is out there, we need to be the ones who know it inside and out. So letting some rich people get their jollies by going to the Alamo? It was fine. But once Bremner built that computer? That was just too much to bear. Eventually I was seen as a hindrance, and the writing was on the wall. After a series of unauthorized removals of the time device were reported, I investigated and found that Bremner was taking them. Stupidly, I brought it up to Carr and was told to let it go. But I knew from Carr’s reaction that I was in trouble. It’s a uniquely powerful position they’re in because they can easily eliminate anyone who has any intentions of trying to stop them.”

Jeff was pleased with his own deduction that General Carr was involved. He thought of Fisher and how he’d been so gung-ho about his theories on Bremner, and then had just disappeared. He wondered if they’d gotten to him, and started flipping through the book furiously.

“You looking for someone?”

“Yeah. Agent Fisher had a theory that was exactly as you just described. I wonder if-”

“If you’re asking,” the other Jeff said, “they got him. He’s in the book, there, towards the back. But they hadn’t done anything to him before I left. I never met him, but I knew of him. They’d said he was involved with finding the time device here in the forest and still had some kind of tie to the program. They must have just been keeping an eye on him for some reason – or Bremner had actually planned something. He has a very low level of tolerance. Leaves nothing to chance.”

Jeff found the page with Fisher’s information on it – one of the last entries. He read it quickly. It was unmistakably him. He closed the book, thinking. “That stinks. We were becoming friends.”

The other Jeff sat up. “Yeah, well I say don’t trust anybody. Best advice I can give. One thing’s for certain, though. We can’t let that ambush happen.”

“Why not?”

“We need to put things back the way they were. You should never have interrupted her.”

Jeff sat up himself. Probably not the best move, but his arm was getting sore from leaning on it. “I’m confused, then. Why did you come back here?”

“I came back here to intercept her
after
she talked to Wilton,” he pointed to Erica. “Find out where she came from.”

“And then what, send me on my way?” Erica asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t know what I would’ve done then. Anyway, you’re saying there’s no such thing as fulfillment. But somehow the time device had to get back here.”

“It already was here,” Jeff said. “Let me ask you this, then... Why didn’t you go back?”

He looked confused. “What do you mean, I didn’t go back?”

“You never went back to 2018. You’re a runner. That’s why I got arrested. You’ve been gone for a year-and-a-half. No one knew what happened to you, except Dexter and Victoria thought they had some idea where you might be headed.”

“Who’s Victoria?” Erica asked.

The other Jeff ignored her. “I never came back? That’s crazy. I was actually getting ready to leave as soon as I took care of a few things.”

“Like what? I’m not letting you go down there and stop them.”

Suddenly the gun was raised again. Erica started to stand, but Jeff moved himself in front of her. She got to her feet anyway, standing a foot behind him.

“It’s the only way to stop Bremner and the USTP,” he said.

“That makes no sense,” Jeff said, his right hand reaching behind him to make sure Erica stayed put. He looked at the gun in his hand. “Is that USTP issue?” He nodded. “Same model Dexter used.”

“Used for what?”

Jeff ignored the question. “What are you going to do, shoot me?” he asked instead.

“Well, if you came here through the Time Program, you know the rules.”

“I do, yes. But shooting me won’t help you.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m younger than you.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Erica asked from behind him.

“It’s this brainiac’s rule that he instituted in the U.S. Time Program – in the case of multiple versions of the same person created by time travel, it’s the youngest version’s responsibility to eliminate the others.”

“I thought you said the government-”

“They did. He went along with them. As did our friend Dexter. They created the program together. I didn’t do anything. This all happened in the three years that I missed.”

“That’s enough,” the other Jeff said, shaking his head. “You’re not younger than me.”

“Pulling that trigger would be an awful big risk for you to take,” Jeff said. “Let me lay it out for you. You think I’m older because you were the first to arrive in Russia. I time traveled and then came back. Follow me?”

He nodded.

“Here’s what you’re missing. You went back to the present time then and lived a year and a half, helping to set up the Time Program. For me, that trip to Russia was only a couple of weeks ago in real time – I’ve lost track of exactly how long, but less than a month. But even though the last time we ran into each other you were younger, that’s not the case right now.”

He could see a look of realization cross his face, and then reluctance in accepting the truth. A moment later, he lowered his gun to his side. “So what do we do?” he asked.

“Well, I think I have a solution,” Jeff said. “But it’ll take some coordination. What needs to happen is that we need to both go back to exactly when and where we came from. That will restore each of us to our respective timelines. Even though the world around us may have changed, we will be back where we started, which should eliminate the duplication.”

“What about me?” Erica asked.

“Do you know when you left?”

“Yes, it was October 2, 2015.”

“Honestly?” he asked, turning to her. “That’s amazing. That’s right after I left for Russia. So – if you were to come back with me, provided everything goes to plan and Lucius Fitzsimmons remains alive, there would be a couple weeks of overlap. If you go with him, you’ll lose a year-and-a-half.” He stopped and thought out loud. “We have three people that need to get back to three different places. You have a device, right? It should have one trip left on it?” The other Jeff nodded. “I have two devices – one with one trip on it, and one with two. I think the best case scenario is for each of us to take a device and go back to the exact time we left. You and I,” he motioned to the other Jeff, “should just assimilate into our lives. My only concern is making sure Erica assimilates into her own, which has all kinds of variables surrounding it.”

He looked at Erica, who was hanging on his every word. The other Jeff shrugged. The plan seemed sound to him.

Quickly, Jeff bent down and took out the tablet, the sticks on the ground crackling under his knee. “Actually,” he said, “with all this travel I have no idea when I left for Russia.” He honestly couldn’t come up with a date. “But I know it was September, so I’m going to set mine for September 30, 2015 to make sure I don’t overlap myself.”

He rang up the new coordinates and transposed them into the device. Then he pulled the sleek USTP device from his pocket and started to enter the date and time for the date Erica had given him, giving her a few hours in between the time she’d left and the time she’d return to make sure there was no duplication. Aligning himself with the plan, the other Jeff took out his own device and began to program it.

“One other thing,” Jeff said. “Now that I’ve thought about it, I want to grab the other time device. I don’t want to leave it in the middle of the woods for them to-”

A crack echoed through the forest – they had no idea from where it had come, and each braced themselves. A split second later, the other Jeff lurched forward, the USTP time device falling from his hand. He clutched his chest and a spurt of blood dribbled from his mouth. Jeff reached for him, but he fell forward to the ground, landing in the dried leaves and pine needles.

Jeff stuffed Bremner’s journal into the back of his pants and quickly crouched next to him, grabbing the time device. He stood and grabbed Erica by the arm, dragging her down the hill and into the road, where they ducked back into the crevasse where they’d first met. She still had the sheet draped down her back. He stuffed the other Jeff’s device in his pocket and finished programming the one he would give to Erica.

“You’re still with me?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Any change in the situation that could change Lucius’ fate could be detrimental to you. Hopefully, that shot will distract the snipers so our own party can be a success.” He could tell from the look on her face that she needed more information to process, but it wasn’t the time or place for theorizing on the intricacies of time travel. “Here,” he said, slipping the more modern of the two devices into her hand. She grabbed hold of it. “Before they come to see what they shot.”

“How will I find you?”

“You won’t have to. I’ll be there waiting for you when you arrive.”

They heard footsteps crunching the dried leaves above them just before they each engaged their devices.