36: A Novel Page 12

  “Point taken,” I said, another thought popping into my head. “How many of us are there? You keep saying assets, not asset.”

  Dr. Anholts and Johnson exchanged a glance, then he sat forward.

  “You’re it,” he said.

  “What? I’m it? What happened to the others? What about all the other people you’ve identified with the genetic marker? What was it, 83 of us?”

  “This is a very dangerous occupation, Mr. Whitman. Assets deal with some very bad people. They don’t always come back alive. To answer your second question, some are children, tagged for possible future recruitment. Some are infirm or elderly, or otherwise unsuited for the job. Still others are of an ethnic origin or political/religious belief that would preclude us from approaching them.”

  “How many?” I asked.

  “How many, what?”

  “How many assets have come and died before me?”

  “Four,” he said after a long pause.

  “How? How did they die?”

  “All of them died stopping, or trying to stop, attacks before they could happen.”

  “I want the details,” I said, worrying they weren’t being completely truthful with me about the effects of being sent backwards in time.

  “I’ll put in a request with Director Patterson,” he said, his tone clearly indicating he was through discussing this topic.

  I didn’t have any further questions. Well, I had lots of questions, but nothing I was ready to ask. The biggest one was what would it take to go back more than thirty-six hours? Like, say, eleven years.

  Go back and stop Tim from going to Mexico. What would my life be like when I snapped back to real time if I could pull that off? A house in the suburbs? Monica and I raising a whole parcel of noisy, obnoxious kids? Then a thought occurred to me as I was getting up to be escorted to my shrink appointment.

  “Dr. Anholts. One more question. If an asset changed something in the past that caused this place to not exist, what would happen when they came back to real time?”

  “That can’t happen,” she said, pausing in gathering her personal items. “An asset can only go back thirty-six hours. This facility has been in place much longer than that. It’s already in operation, in the past, when the asset arrives.”

  19

  The next six months went by more quickly than I would have believed. But when you’re busy for sixteen hours a day, there’s not much time to think about anything other than what you’re doing. Daily counseling sessions with the shrink. Time with instructors who taught me practical uses for math and science. Philosophical discussions on religion with a retired professor from Harvard. What was called social engineering with a former con-man who’d been sprung from a federal prison for this gig. Etiquette with a female instructor I dubbed Miss Manners.

  Then there was the physical and combat training. Mile upon mile on the fucking treadmill. Then the weight room before hand to hand fighting. Edged weapons. Firearms. Everything from Close Quarters Battle (CQB) to making thousand yard shots with a sniper rifle. I enjoyed the sniper training the most as it had to be conducted outdoors on the helipad.

  I would lay prone, near the edge, with the rifle tight to my shoulder. The trainer would then send a remote controlled toy boat out into the ocean and I’d have to hit a bobbing target the size of a cantaloupe. It didn’t fail to register with me that this was also roughly the size of a human head. The instructor was a former Marine sniper and was relentless. And I learned.

  And healed. My hands felt normal again, as did my face. Even if I still didn’t recognize myself when I looked in the mirror to shave. I’ve never been a fan of shaving, usually wearing a thick stubble for several days at a time rather than scrape a razor across my chin. At least since I got out of the Army.

  Now, however, that wasn’t an option. The plastic surgery had messed with my facial hair follicles. If I skipped shaving, soon it was obvious something wasn’t quite right. No hair grew on half of my upper lip and only in a few thick patches on my cheeks and under my chin. Should I try to grow a beard, I’d look like a poodle trimmed for a dog show. So I carefully shaved every morning.

  As I progressed and grew more confident with the new skills I was learning, I found myself thinking more and more about the harebrained idea I’d had to go back and stop Tim. Hell, he was dead anyway. If I had to, I’d kill him to stop him. I felt horrible every time I had that thought, but I’d had a lot of time to think about what he had cost me.

  Everything. My life hadn’t been my own since the afternoon those two cops had showed up in my apartment. I didn’t buy into Johnson’s feelings about my choice. I knew in my heart there hadn’t been another option. Besides, those guys were playing a dangerous game that didn’t exactly have the best record when it came to living a long and healthy life. If I hadn’t killed them, someone else almost certainly would have at some point.

  Part of me worried I was a bad person for having these thoughts. That same part considered discussing it with the shrink. But I knew the doctor wasn’t here for my benefit. His primary role was to evaluate my mental health and report to Patterson. Was I fit for duty, or was I going to go off the deep end the moment I was free in the past and out from under their constant attention?

  Keeping my personal thoughts personal, I focused on my training and how to go about finding a way to change my situation. I’d run across Dr. Anholts a couple of times in the large cantina that fed all of the staff assigned to the project. Each time, I’d acted very happy to see her, chattering brightly and smiling at whatever she had to say.

  Maybe I was barking up the wrong tree, but to me she seemed to be the key to achieve what I wanted. I saw her again at breakfast this morning, sitting by herself, hunched over a laptop. Grabbing a bowl of oatmeal from the serving line, I walked over and stood next to her chair.

  “Solving more unsolvable problems? Saving the world?” I asked in a teasing voice.

  She looked up at me and smiled, quickly removing her reading glasses.

  “Mr. Whitman! Good morning. No, I’m just reviewing one of my staff’s calculations. Nothing so dramatic as saving the world.”

  She smiled brightly, seemingly happy to see me. I was about to ask if I could join her when a strident klaxon began blaring. She jumped to her feet and snatched the laptop off the table.

  “What the hell’s that?” I asked, worrying we were about to sink or topple over into the ocean.

  “There’s been an event,” she said as she turned to dash away. “Find Agent Johnson. He’ll tell you what to do.”

  Then she was gone, disappearing in the crowd of people who were all running for their assigned work stations. I let them clear out, not seeing the need to push into the mayhem. But Agent Johnson had different ideas.

  I spotted him, towering over all of the people squeezing their way through the exit doors. He bulled his way in, gently but firmly moving bodies out of his path. He saw me immediately and waved for me to join him. I trotted over, the area clear of people by the time I reached him.

  “What’s up?” I asked when I was close enough to not have to shout to be heard.

  “Event. That’s what the alarm is all about. Don’t know details. Come on, we’re going to the operations center.”

  I fell in behind him and followed his broad back through several twists and turns, then up a set of metal stairs to a door I’d never been through. I’d been allowed more and more freedom of movement, but still wasn’t trusted with a key card to get me through locked doors. That was OK. I wouldn’t have gone exploring anyway. No reason to draw unnecessary attention.

  Johnson held his card to the pad and the door slid open automatically. Keeping the card in place, he waved me through ahead of him. The door slid shut seconds after he stepped in. I stood where I’d stopped, looking around.

  The room was small, only a handful of people staffing a limited number of workstations. Patterson stood on the highest level, watching his people work in between looking at sever
al screens. He glanced at us when we entered, but didn’t acknowledge our presence in any other way.

  Flat panel monitors were in abundance, displaying everything from an image of the rig’s helipad to a live feed from CNN. But what caught my attention was the room on the other side of a large bank of windows. And the machine that sat in full view of everyone in the operations room.

  Maybe calling it a machine wasn’t accurate. It actually seemed to be nothing more than a slightly raised dais enclosed with curved glass panels. I had a pretty good idea what it was, just had been expecting something much more Sci Fi movie looking.

  “Is that it?” I asked Johnson in a low voice.

  “Yes. Impressive, isn’t it?” He said with a sarcastic grin.

  Every now and then his façade slipped and I got a glimpse of the real Bill Johnson. I was pretty sure he was actually an easy going guy with a quick wit that tended towards sarcasm. But like the other times I’d gotten a peek, the exterior shell slammed back into place.

  “Pay attention,” he said quietly, pointing at the TV playing CNN.

  It was a terrorist attack on an elementary school in suburban Los Angeles. A local news station already had a helicopter over the scene and we watched as a SWAT unit rushed towards the entrance. There were small puffs of smoke appearing around the body armor clad officers and it took me a moment to realize it was because they were firing their assault rifles as they advanced.

  Two of them fell, but the rest continued their charge. It dawned on me that these guys were running into the face of gunfire because there was a building full of children in danger. I found myself growing angry as another cop dropped to the asphalt, then the rest of them moved under an awning and out of view of the news camera.

  “Audio feed from the local police, sir,” a woman working a complicated array of equipment said to Patterson.

  She pressed a button and the sounds of gunfire and men screaming filled the room. After my time in the Army, and more recently all of my firearms training, I could recognize the difference between the lighter NATO caliber rifles the cops were firing, and the heavier reports of what I was pretty sure were AK-74s.

  The battle raged for close to five minutes, hundreds of rounds being fired by each side. Then it began to peter out and I was encouraged to hear only police weapons. They’d gotten the upper hand.

  Then the main fight was over and it was time to clear the building and mop up. The SWAT team’s tactical radios were set to transmit and we clearly heard every word as they moved through the school searching for additional terrorists.

  “I’ve got video now,” the same operator said. A moment later a large panel on the side wall flared to life and showed the view from the helmet cam of one of the cops as he moved down an empty hall lined with cork boards covered with crayon art.

  I balled my hands into fists when I saw the image. Not long before my fateful day, Monica’s young son, Manny, had drawn a picture of the three of us in crayon. It was stick figures, the smallest one standing between the two adults and holding hands with them. At the time, Monica and I were nothing more than just friends who enjoyed having great sex with each other, and it hadn’t meant as much to me as maybe it should have.

  The cops came to a door, pausing as they stacked up and prepared to enter a classroom. I held my breath as the door was yanked open and black clad bodies flowed into the room. Then the camera followed and I heard a couple of the officers begin hyperventilating. Soon, someone was sobbing. At least twenty small bodies were strewn across the floor, an adult female’s bullet riddled corpse between the door and all of the dead children.

  “Motherfucker,” I breathed and heard Johnson begin mumbling a prayer.

  The cops quickly checked the bodies, not finding any of them alive. Back in the hall, they moved to the next room and found a similar scene. Only this time their weapons were up and they were shouting. When the camera focused, I could see a wounded man lying in the far corner. He was wearing a kufi on his head and had a thick, dark beard. Definitely appeared to be of middle eastern descent. A rifle was across his lap, but he was in bad shape and wasn’t able to lift it to keep fighting.

  The camera blanked out a moment before there was the sound of fully automatic weapons fire.

  “Charlie one, what the fuck was that?” A voice shouted over the radio. Had to be a commander waiting outside the school.

  “Suspect was reaching for his weapon,” one of the cops answered. “He’s down, now.”

  For five minutes we listened as the cops continued to move through the school. There were the sounds of doors being opened and closed, and once more a long burst of full automatic fire. Finally, the building was declared clear and Patterson told the operator to shut off the audio.

  20

  “You don’t need to threaten me anymore,” I said softly to Agent Johnson. “Just put me in a room with those motherfuckers. I’ll redact all their asses before they can hurt one of those kids.”

  “I thought you’d come around,” he said. “I just wish I could go with you.”

  His jaw was clenched and he spoke through gritted teeth. The muscles all along his neck and the side of his face were bunched and bulging. So were mine. It’s one thing to target soldiers or law enforcement. Or even adults. But to go after children? These weren’t humans. They were just animals that needed to be erased from the face of the planet.

  “Let’s go,” Johnson said a moment later. “We need to start getting you ready. The team is good and we’ll probably have an event point to target in a few hours.”

  “Why not just send me back now? I’ll wait outside the school until they show up.”

  I was pissed. Incensed. Wanted to wade into this group and put my newly acquired deadly skills to the test.

  “I appreciate your enthusiasm, Mr. Whitman,” Patterson said.

  He’d heard my comment and stepped closer to us.

  “But that’s not a good idea. We don’t know how many terrorists you’ll be facing. Did they spread out and enter the school from different points? That would mean you couldn’t stop all of them. And how much attention do you think an adult male skulking around an elementary school would draw? You’d likely have the police asking you questions you couldn’t answer well before the time of the attacks.

  “We do things the way we do for a reason, and we’re very good at what we do. Stay patient and listen to Agent Johnson. He’ll guide you through what you don’t understand yet.”

  I nodded, surprised at the man’s reaction. He hadn’t been scolding me. It was obvious he was shaken to the core by what we’d seen, and he’d recognized that I was too. Yet he’d taken a moment to patiently explain things to me. Maybe I needed to reevaluate him. Maybe.

  Johnson tapped my arm and I turned and followed him out of the room. We headed straight for what was called the “prep”. It was a combination gym locker room and military armory. All different styles and types of clothing hung in a dozen different lockers. Each piece was in my size and I would dress appropriately for the event point I was being sent to.

  One wall was covered with just about every type of personal weapon I could imagine. Pistols, rifles, shotguns, grenades, knives, collapsible steel batons, stun guns, pepper spray… if the armorer could think of it, it was there. And none of them had a serial number or any identifying marks.

  “We need to go over a few things that haven’t been addressed yet,” Johnson said, waving me to a seat.

  “What do we need to go over? Give me a gun and point me at them!”

  “Patience, Mr. Whitman. Patience. You should have learned that in the infantry. Rushing headlong into a battle when you’re not properly prepared and don’t have all the information is a recipe for disaster. Correct?”

  I nodded my head, forcing down my impatience and desire to go dispense some good old fashioned justice.

  “First and foremost, you need to remember that you are our one and only shot at redacting this event. If you don’t succeed, those ch
ildren will remain dead. If you get impatient and go charging in, guns blazing, and the terrorists kill you, those children remain dead. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. Sorry,” I mumbled, his words sobering me.

  “Don’t be sorry,” he smiled. “I understand exactly how you feel. I feel the same way. But this has to be approached methodically and professionally. Odds are already stacked against you. You will be outnumbered, most likely significantly. But you will have the element of surprise on your side. They won’t be expecting you. And you must take full advantage of that.

  “Remember what all of your instructors have been teaching you. Don’t telegraph what you’re about to do. Remain calm until it’s time for action. But when it’s time, you strike with every weapon and skill we’ve given you. No mercy. You’re not a cop. It’s not your job to disable or disarm the perpetrators and leave them for law enforcement to scoop up. It is your job to take these assholes off the table. Permanently.”

  I nodded, meeting his eyes. He didn’t need to worry about what I intended to do. These fuckers were dead the instant I had my shot. But the rest of what he was saying was something I needed to hear. To be reminded that I had to go into battle with intelligent forethought. I’d have one opportunity to stop the event, and if I fucked up, there wouldn’t be another chance.

  “One final thing,” he said. “All of these weapons, even the brass of the ammunition, have been specially coated with a silicone based compound. What that means is that nothing will take a fingerprint. Don’t worry about cleaning up brass, and if you have to leave a weapon behind, it doesn’t matter.

  “But that only applies to what’s being sent with you. Any hard surface you encounter after being sent will take and hold prints. Avoid that if at all possible, but we understand it can happen.”