Fate (Wilton's Gold #3) (31 page)

Almost immediately after they’d said goodbye to Dexter, the first of Fisher’s men stood groggily. Jeff could feel Emeka tense up beside him, readying for any confrontation that might spring up. But the man was too out of it, almost falling back over once he’d reached his feet.

After a few moments, most of them were at least standing, each of them finding the tiny dart stuck in random parts of their bodies. There were a lot of questions as to where the darts had come from, but true to his word, Fisher corralled everyone and led them out of the lab with an understanding that everything had been taken care of. Jeff had to imagine that, had they been thinking straight, they wouldn’t have been too pleased about the way they were taken out – especially given the uncertain nature of their operation in the first place. But a few minutes later, Fisher was rapping on the lab door to be let back in.

Left in the room were Fisher, Emeka, Erica and himself. What they were about to do was monumental – as monumental as the first time he’d traveled through time. So, he sat for a moment and looked at each one of them. Fisher had a job to do, and he was staying to see it executed. Erica was fulfilling a mission she’d started only a day before, but one that seemed like it had been forever ago from what she’d told him. Emeka was a most loyal friend, who would do whatever Jeff needed done for the good of the cause. And as for himself... Well, he was finally ready to let it go.

“Thank you all,” he said. “It’s been quite a ride.”

“What’s the plan, Boss?” Emeka asked without acknowledging his emotion.

“Probably best to start with the servers,” Jeff said. They headed over to the tower and began to extract the various hard drives on which Jeff’s time travel research was stored, preserving the legitimate data from his government grant under his direction. He fetched a toolbox from the other end of the room and gave Emeka and Fisher screwdrivers to begin dismantling the drives. “We have to open them, take out the memory cards, and destroy them,” he said.

He started Erica on paperwork, loading important documents into the shredder he’d purchased a couple of years back, never knowing it would be a world-saving endeavor. When showing her the shelves where volumes of research were stationed, he couldn’t believe how much he’d put on paper.

After he’d set everyone in motion, he asked if they minded if he took a moment to make a phone call. He stepped outside the lab for a moment and dialed his smart phone. After a few rings, a familiar voice answered.

“Did you make it back to Philly okay?” he asked Dexter.

“There you are… Where have you been?”

Jeff laughed, but didn’t explain why.
Where hadn’t he been?
As they’d been working in the lab, he’d asked Erica to clarify the brief conversation about Dexter being married, and had learned that their time traveling had transformed Dexter from the Columbia University professor Jeff knew into the director of a history museum in Philadelphia – a museum that only existed because Jeff had talked the original owner of the building in which it was housed into removing a fire hazard while back in the 1830s. Apparently, by saving Erica, that skewed history had been restored and his best friend now lived in suburban Philadelphia, as opposed to Teaneck, New Jersey, where Jeff had picked him up before the fateful meeting where he’d met Agent Fisher for the first time. Erica had told him they’d had a party in celebration of a successful mission a few nights before, and then Dexter had returned home.

“Yes,” he said, with an air of bitterness that Jeff expected. “I wasn’t quite ready to go back to work yet – not with you and your girlfriend gallivanting around in the future. I was assuming there would be at least one more adventure for the rest of us. Then, of course, there’s a woman in my house that I don’t know, but that’s another story for another time.”

“It’ll be okay,” he said, guessing that he and Erica were probably the only people alive who remembered Dexter as a professor at Columbia. To Dexter, Jeff had reasoned in the short time he’d had the information, nothing was out of the ordinary because the change must have happened around him. Well, except for the wife. His friend – both the present and future versions seemed to be put out by that change. Unfortunately, Jeff didn’t know enough about the situation to offer more succinct words of encouragement.

“Well, yeah, I’ll figure something out,” Dexter said, the tone of his voice showing how confused and disappointed he was about the turn of events. Not having been there, Jeff tried to empathize as best he could. “I don’t know, Jeff. It’s just not me. I work a lot of hours. I travel. I like my freedom. I don’t know what to do with a wife.”

Had he not just been through a similar set of circumstances with Victoria, he couldn’t possibly have understood what had happened to his friend. “You’ll get through it, Dexter,” he said. “And I’m not going anywhere, so I’m here to help. Whatever you need.” Though what he needed most was to have what was done undone.

“I would hope so. It’s your fault,” he said, then his voice quieted. “Look, Jeff, I’m not going to say anything to her about the money.”
The money?
Oh, from Wilton’s gold – yes, that job had now been completed, Jeff reminded himself. “But don’t leave me out of it.”

“Well, I don’t know what we’re doing with the gold yet,” Jeff said.

“The gold? No, I don’t care about the gold. Give it to the Smithsonian.”

“What?” He was confused. But he hadn’t called his friend to talk about money. He had something much more important he wanted to say to him. “Look, Dexter... The reason I was calling was just to thank you. You’ve been through so much with me, and you’ve always stuck by me. Even though I put you through a lot. I’ll never forget any of it.”

He heard Dexter laugh, and then say, “It’s alright. What historian wouldn’t want to be stranded in Colonial America and left to the noose, only to be rescued to find out that he was married to the daughter of a wannabe historian he can’t stand? While you get to be the hero. All the time. Every time.”

Now Jeff laughed. “Well, when you put it like that, who could resist?”

“You’ll probably get the girl, too,” he said. “Just like you – skate through everything unscathed and have the woman you mysteriously created fall in love with you.”

“Yep,” he said. “I skated right through.” He smiled, thinking of the stories he would never tell his friend.

“Well, just so you know, next time we time travel – I’m taking control of everything. You can sweat next time.”

“Deal,” Jeff said. “I’ll come down to Philly this weekend and see you.”

“Yeah, sure you will.”

They hung up and Jeff leaned back against the wall outside of his lab. It would take a while for him to string together all of the pieces of the various realities he’d constructed – all starting with a reality in which he now lived, that he hadn’t even had the opportunity to experience himself. Each of the people in his life knew different things about him, about time travel, and about how it had affected them. Now, the real time travel research would begin.

He punched his code into the panel beside the door and swung it open. The rest of his makeshift team was hard at work destroying things, so Jeff walked over to the lowest compartment on the server tower and pulled out a case. Setting it on the workstation, he opened it to unveil a half-dozen batteries that had been designed for the time travel device. He retrieved the only remaining time device from Erica and placed it into the case, then locked it up. He looked up to see everyone staring at him.

“This case has to go back to the manufacturer in Albany,” he said. “The batteries and the device need to be dismantled.”

Emeka stepped forward. “I can take it.”

“Why doesn’t Agent Fisher take it?” Erica asked. “It’s probably safest to have them under lock and key.”

Jeff looked at Fisher, who appeared torn. From reading his face, Jeff could see that while he wanted to be in the lab to make sure everything was actually destroyed, he hadn’t been expecting the manual labor of destruction. A ride to Upstate New York probably seemed like a nicer option.

“Alright,” he said, nodding and taking the case. “You’ll have to call ahead and tell them I’m coming.”

“They’ll know exactly what to do,” Jeff said. “The address is on the case.” Happy to leave, Fisher headed for the door, but Jeff followed right behind him. “I’ll walk you out.”

They exited the building and reached Fisher’s car, a black sedan, where he set the case on the passenger seat. Then Fisher turned to Jeff. “You made a compelling case in there, in a short amount of time. I hope to God you’re on the up-and-up.”

“You saved the world today,” Jeff said.

Fisher waved a hand at him. “Let’s not get carried away.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve seen what happens. To me, to you, to all of us, if this technology isn’t eliminated. It’s devastating.”

He looked at him and sighed. “Well, let’s take care of all of this and it’ll be done. There won’t be any more need for us to interact.”

Jeff sighed. He didn’t want to have to ask what he was about to ask, and he didn’t know if it would be acceptable to Fisher anyway, but he was compelled to try. “I need a favor,” he said.

“What kind of favor?”

“I need the device to take one more trip.”

Now Fisher laughed. “Are you kidding me? After all that?”

“Apparently, while time traveling, I messed up my friend’s life – Dexter, you met him in there. Well, a future version of him. I changed something in the past and he’s suffered because of it. If I have the opportunity to fix it, which I would with your permission, I want to take it.” Fisher started to speak, but Jeff cut him off. “I know you’re not going to understand this because you haven’t been through it, but if you were the Agent Fisher that I got to know over time, you’d get it. I hate to ask this of you, but I need to.”

“You could do anything with a time device. You could undo what you just did up there.”

He shook his head. “I assure you that I’m not doing anything but righting a wrong. I will even meet you at the plant in Albany to return the device and battery to you so you can turn them in. You tell me when you’ll be there and I’ll be there, too. I’ve tried to think about every possible way I could make this happen, and this is the only option. Believe me, I feel ridiculous asking.”

Fisher looked at him and sighed himself. Jeff knew that he was still assessing the reality of time travel in general, much less trying to understand its intricacies. If he put thought into it, there was no way he should even be considering allowing Jeff to take the device. But he was not clear on the repercussions, and Jeff had earned his trust by showing him Bremner’s book.

“Tell me about this Senator Mellen – the other one in the book,” Fisher said.

Jeff nodded. “Alright. But just so you know, this situation took place in another reality, so I didn’t witness it. Suzanne Mellen McCarthy was a U.S. senator from Florida who was an opponent of what Bremner was trying to do with the Time Program. We didn’t know this at the time, but Bremner sent a business competitor back in time to murder Senator McCarthy’s grandfather, thus eliminating her existence. In the reality I came here from, in 2018, she doesn’t exist. The only way we put it all together was when we read that book.”

“Is that the situation you want to go fix?” He was looking at him, confused.

“Unfortunately, no. We already tried that. It didn’t work.”

“Well, no, I think that it did,” Fisher said. “I’m pretty sure that McCarthy woman is a senator from Florida right now. Yes, I’m sure of it.”

Jeff felt for a moment as though he’d lost his breath. Yes, it made sense perfectly. Erica, by going back to 1849 and stopping Jeff and his team from stealing Wilton’s gold had eliminated from history her trip she said they took where they saved the records office from burning down. Which is why Jeff’s own history didn’t reflect that changes in Dexter’s life. By the same logic, they were now in the process of creating a timeline where the USTP never exists… Which meant that Bremner would never send Kane on the mission to murder George Mellen. They’d tried to address the problem directly, but it would seem that eliminating the Time Program altogether was the only solution. After a moment, he finally exhaled. “We did it,” he said.

“Did what?”

“If Senator McCarthy exists, that means we stopped Bremner. We did it.”

Fisher sighed, thinking. Jeff watched him process what could have happened to him and now was not going to, waiting for further questions. He looked around impatiently, though – he didn’t want to be standing there long enough that someone would come out to see what was happening. This final trip needed to be done in secrecy.

Without another word, however, Fisher reached back and picked up the case. He unlocked it and once again pulled out the device and one battery. “Watching this all take place is very confusing, I have to say,” he said, turning the device from side to side analyzing it. “You know one history. The woman that came with you knows another. Dr. Murphy knows another. My interpretation is that whoever is holding this knows the truth, yes?”

“Well, there are many tru-” Jeff was about to go into the concept of multiple realities, but Fisher cut him off.

“Then the safest thing is for me to go with you.”