Fate (Wilton's Gold #3) (29 page)

If Erica had been asked on the car ride over what the worst-case scenario would have been, this was pretty much it. Really, though, she’d never could have imagined something this bad. At least a dozen guns were fixed on them as they came through the door, in addition to the agent who was leading them into the building. In the center of the crowd were Dexter –who looked older – a well-dressed man who she didn’t know and, as if things couldn’t get any crazier, Dr. Victoria Graham, who was a well-known professor of psychology at Stanford. She looked at Jeff’s face to see his reaction. It was immediately clear that he knew exactly who they all were and why they were there.

By her reaction, Erica surmised that Dr. Graham had also recognized her, as she glared at Jeff after taking a disdainful glance in her direction.

Erica gave the classic, “Me?” point to herself, but Jeff stepped in front of her. “Yes, this is Erica.”

“You went back to get her,” she said. “I knew that’s exactly where you were going, but you never said it was
her
.”

Jeff stepped forward and into the conversation, as if he’d been preparing for it. “Victoria, she’s the key to everything. All of my research. The answer to all of our questions about time travel. There was no way I wasn’t going to go get her. And as a scientist, I’d hoped that you would respect that decision.”

“As a scientist...” she repeated with a smirk on her face. “Dr. Danforth, you don’t know this, but-”

“Dr. Jacobs, we’re here to take you into custody,” the older man in between Dexter and the woman, Victoria, said, interrupting… whatever it was that was happening. “You’re under arrest for violating Code 201.A, 302.B, and 211.F of the United States Time Program Code of Ethics.”

“There is no United States Time Program,” Jeff said.

The man walked up to Jeff until he was inches from his face. “There is where I come from,” he said. He was not a happy camper. Whatever Jeff had done must have been pretty detrimental to from the Time Program that Jeff had told her about – meaning, this man must have been from the future where the program had actually been developed. For a moment, she was dismayed because they hadn’t succeeded. She watched as the man turned and walked back to the others. “You didn’t consider that finding you would be pretty easy?” he asked. “Rented a hotel room in Truckee, California. Rented a car. Activated your phone and called your friend Emeka Henderson. Booked a flight out of Sacramento. Booked a car service at Teterboro before boarding the plane. Where else would you be going?”

“Your computer works,” Jeff said. “I get it.”

Erica looked back at the older man. His computer? Jeff had mentioned an advanced system when they’d been sitting with the other Jeff in the forest. Is that how they knew all of this? Except that they were somehow tracking him in real time. He’d activated his phone literally twenty minutes before.

“Problem is, we thought you were dead.”

“Why would I be dead?”

“Because when they found your rusted time device in the forest, there was a skeleton a few feet away. We had it tested. Guess whose DNA it was?” The other Jeff, she thought. Jeff only nodded. “But then you started making purchases, and we quickly figured out what was going on. The question is – which Jeff died in the forest? The one who ran first, or the one who duped us all into thinking he was going back to 1930 to stop Benjamin Kane?”

She watched as Jeff reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small notebook with a black cover. “Does this answer your question?” he asked.

The older man sighed and shifted his body weight to the other foot.

When he’d seen everyone in the room upon entering, Jeff had begun to contemplate his challenges and his opportunities. The first and foremost thing he had going for him was the very point that Bremner had just brought up – they didn’t know who’d survived and who hadn’t. Victoria’s presence in the room was key to this, as her former lover might possibly have just been thrust back into her life. It was foolish of them to bring her because her feelings clouded the work they needed to do. It was a factor he could use.

What he wanted to do was keep them off balance. Pulling Bremner’s book out of his pocket was an important move on his part, as it insinuated that it was the original Jeff that was standing before them. Bremner would have no way of knowing that the two of them had actually crossed paths and the notebook had changed hands. Dexter and Victoria wouldn’t know the book existed at all. He would be able to use it to turn them against Bremner.

Of course, if they’d taken a moment to think about it, the other Jeff would have returned to his own time a year-and-a-half into the future and not to this time, so his ruse wouldn’t last too long before one of them thought it through.

“You recognize this book?” Jeff asked him.

“Very clever,” Bremner said.

“Dexter, do you know what this book is?” he asked. Dexter shook his head. He flipped through the book dramatically, as if searching for an excerpt. “This book is-” He stopped when he reached the page with Fisher’s information on it, remembering what his other self had said back in the forest in 1849 – “If you’re asking the question, they got him.” Fisher had been one of Bremner’s targets for elimination. Or, as the other Jeff had put it, for a tweaking. “Oh, very interesting,” he said, playing it up.

“What is it?” Dexter asked.

Jeff closed the book. “This book contains a series of accounts written by Dr. Bremner detailing time travel missions he’d taken to eliminate specific threats to the USTP.”

“What?”

“This is preposterous,” Bremner said. “Take him into custody.”

Jeff felt the hard metal of a pistol in the small of his back, but held his ground. “Dexter, do you know who Suzanne Mellen McCarthy is?”

“Yeah, she’s the Senator – wait, Mellen? As in George Mellen?”

“He’s an entry in the book, yes,” Jeff said. “Any idea what Senator Mellen’s been up to since you returned from the Kane mission?”

“Agent Fisher,” Bremner said. “I’m not going to say it again. Arrest this man.”

Before he could move, though, Jeff turned quickly, holding out the book. “Agent Fisher,” he said, “you may be interested in one of the entries, as well.” He opened the book to the right page and held it out for him.

Keeping the gun trained on Jeff, Fisher took the book from him. He read the contents of the page and then looked up at Bremner. “You went after
me
?” he asked. “I don’t even know you. Why would I be in this book?” Jeff didn’t have the time to think about when Bremner had actually done something to Fisher, or what he’d done to get in the book. He just knew he was in there and was using it, and was not surprised when the other agents in the room reacted to the fact that one of their own was in this book. The rest of it didn’t matter.

“Are you serious?” Bremner asked. “He shows up with this cockamamie handwritten book and you start accusing me of something? He’s the criminal!”

“Jeff, where did you get that book?” Dexter asked, talking over everyone else. He stepped forward and put his hand in front of Bremner, blocking him. The other FBI agents, aside from Fisher, remained in position even as Jeff could see a hint of doubt on their faces.

Jeff took the book back from Fisher and turned toward Dexter. He made eye contact with his friend – who would be the only one of them who could decipher if he was playing a charade or not. He’d told Dexter he had concerns about Bremner on the car ride to New York, so by unveiling what he knew, it was likely that Dexter would figure out what was going on. He decided to push forward with it.

“The only way that Dr. Bremner could preserve the information – and I give him credit for thinking like a scientist – was to document everything in a time that was before any of his missions. Since he was only addressing current threats to the program, most of the missions only went back a short amount of time, other than Mellen, who he went after by arranging for the murder of her grandfather in the 1930s. He hid this journal in the foundation of the Jefferson Memorial as it was being built so there’d be a record. Every time he was targeting someone, he went back in time to document it. I followed him back and picked it up after I was sure he was gone for good – and before they started pouring the foundation of the building.” He thought he’d summed up what his other self had actually done pretty well.

“No,” Dexter said quietly, shaking his head. “Kane went back… Murdered Mellen because they were competitors. There was no PCS… The senator…”

Jeff had actually deduced what had happened after Dexter had seen Bremner on the street in 1930. “There were no PCS hits because Dr. Bremner here dismissed them.” He paused for a moment to allow Dexter to process. “You told me yourself, Bremner has the final say. Any connection to Mellen, and any connection to the Time Program, were removed by-“

“Are you finished?” Bremner asked. Jeff noticed that his speech hadn’t deterred any of the agents quite as much as he’d hoped. They were still trained on him, doing their jobs and saving questions for later. He tried to ascertain – based on Fisher’s comment that he didn’t know Bremner – if the team was from the present or the future. He guessed that the agents were actually from the present and had been shanghaied into USTP service, which was a pretty brazen move for Bremner, given the inherent complications. “Can you please take him into custody? We can have this conversation back at the office.”

“What about her?” Victoria asked.

“Leave her out of it,” Jeff said, knowing that if they left the room he was cooked. He needed to stall, and engaging her would be the best way to do it. “I told you, Victoria, she was important to my work. Now I’m back. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

As he spoke, he subtly stuck his right hand into his pocket and began manipulating the keypad on the time device.

Erica was unbelievably confused.

She’d been there when he’d learned about the book, and was guessing from the interactions that the older fellow was the man that Jeff had described as the head of the Time Program in the future. So he
was
from the future – probably three years ahead, where Jeff had told her he’d been marooned. But she hadn’t expected him to hand the book to the FBI agent, Fisher.

Now, though, Jeff was having an interaction with Dr. Graham, who she didn’t know well enough to have an opinion on, but certainly had crossed paths with her many times at Stanford. From the attitude she was giving her, Erica was guessing that she and Jeff had some sort of relationship. And while he hadn’t mentioned it to her, Jeff was acting as though that relationship had been an important one. What she didn’t know was if he was being sincere, or if she was actually part of this Time Program. She considered that she may just have been here in an effort to manipulate Jeff, but even as they faced this horrible situation, her thoughts were caught up in her own real standing with Jeff. It made her realize that she cared for him more than she might have let herself believe. But with Dr. Graham here, and their obvious history, the situation was getting increasingly murky.

He’d walked up to her, but one of the agents grabbed him and pulled him back. Jeff looked at the man like he was crazy, then accepted it and stepped backwards with him. “Victoria, I’m sure we’ll get time to talk,” he said. “You have to make sure we get time to talk.” He pled with her to stay involved.

Erica watched the woman’s face. She was clearly torn. She’d been hurt. She was angry. But she must have had genuine feelings for Jeff and now didn’t want to see him harmed. Maybe it was real.

“You’ll have all the time you need to talk,” the older man said, trying to hurry the conversation. “Lock him up. And get that book for me.” She saw him look down to Jeff’s side, so she followed his eyes to see his hand in his pocket. “What’s in there?” he asked.

Jeff didn’t have to answer because Dexter did for him. “It’s a time device. Careful!”

Everyone in the room flinched as though Jeff had a hand grenade. Some of the agents actually took a step back from Jeff.

The older man sighed again. “I’m going to need that,” he said. “Plus the one in your left pocket. If my calculations are correct, you should have one trip left on each of them? Yes?”

Jeff nodded sullenly and Erica’s spirit withered. Was it over? What would they do with him? What would they do with her?

Jeff pushed a few more buttons on the device in his pocket, not losing eye contact with Bremner, who was approaching him.

“It’s time to put an end to your playtime,” Bremner said, taking slow steps forward. “Time travel is far too dangerous to have it in the hands of someone so irresponsible.”

“You already have a time device,” Jeff said, ignoring the condescending tone and trying to be as challenging as possible. “You don’t need mine.”

Bremner’s eyes turned to Victoria for a split second. Which was all Jeff needed to know. She was holding the device that had brought them.

“Alright, alright,” he said, slowly pulling the original time device out of his right pocket. The one he’d been using from the beginning. “You win.”

“You’re doing the right thing, son” Bremner said as he reached out to take it from him.

Just was they made the exchange, Jeff pushed the button to activate the device.