Second Paradigm (24 page)

Taking a deep breath, he did his best and connected the wire to make the charge live. He released the breath and wiped his palms on his pants, trying to dry them off.

This made four out of the five charges placed and so far he had managed, if barely, not to blow himself up. Yet. He stood up and walked to the outer hall of the building, moving towards his next target point. About halfway down the building, he paused to look out the window. In the lot below, he could see his wife locked in combat with someone.

Both were moving far too fast for him to make out the details of the combat with any type of clarity, but it was obvious from his vantage that Wanda was in the stronger position, pushing her victory home. The man she fought moved slower than her and appeared to be injured already.

Smiling to himself, he continued moving. Seeing Wanda, remembering the touch of her body on his the previous night, gave him a measure of the calm he had been hunting for. Finding peace after ten years of pain was a powerful gift, and it was a gift that he would have to thank Alexander Zarth for when next he saw him. After a night of sleep with his long lost wife, with time to let his subconscious process everything, he had come to realize that Zarth was the one who had cheated fate.

The man had stolen time itself to keep his wife alive; dodging the paradox he should have created by doing so. Alex had managed to shatter James’s illusion that the twenty-seventh century rogue was the architect of his pain and replace that indictment with one of a man who had saved the love of his life. He owed him a large thank you.

With resettled resolve and calm nerves, Garret moved through the building to the top floor. Lucy’s office was his final target. Scattered across her desk were various papers: signature forms and project notes. Garret’s HUD made reading in the dark easy. By shifting the light differentials on his point of focus, he could make the target of his focus visible for him.

He chuckled to himself as he remembered the fight with Wanda that had caused him to invent that particular feature on the HUD units they had. A simple enough fight, which had started because his reading lamp had been too bright and kept her awake. And now it provided functionality far beyond its original intent, as so many things did.

As Garret leafed through the project notes he realized that the project notepapers in front of him shared that trait with their HUD units. Doctor Nost had been working on a faster-than-light space drive. Something that could theoretically not be done. Yet he had persisted in his research and managed to convince others that it could be. James knew he would have liked knowing this man, if only he had been given the chance outside the disguises he had been forced to don in his presence.

Garret continued to leaf through the notes. What a joke it was to worry about neutrinos in the direction Lucy had been convincing him to shift to according to these notes. Shifting phase space to move through an alternate set of directions, as Nost proposed, would make any worry about spatial debris non-existent. Yet somehow Lucy had managed to convince him that it was a factor. Probably because his infatuation with her blinded his keen scientific mind.

Reading through the notes, it became obvious that Dr. Nost had harbored some very unprofessional feelings for his boss, a fact which made the man less legend and more human in Garret’s eyes. A fact he could well appreciate considering his own history of invention driven by separation from his love. Garret placed the papers back onto the desk and refocused on the job he had been given.

In the corner of the office was a support beam for the building, his target. Crouching down in front of the beam, he unrolled the velvet toolkit and pulled out the various tools he needed to finish the job.
One last explosive to place
. Considering how nerve wracking the last four explosives had been to place, this final piece went up simply and easily. He set the charge, activated the detonator, and rolled his tools back up.

No sweat this time. No shaking hands. Scanning the room to make sure he had left nothing behind, he walked out of the office and almost blundered straight into someone else coming through the hallway. Luckily for him, he heard the person before the other person saw him. Moving into accelerated time he dodged into a cubicle in the main office area, and then reverted back to standard time so that he could breathe.

Crouching in the shadows below a desk, he managed to get a good look at the other man’s face without being seen himself. Much to his shock, he knew that face. Yuri Yakavich, one of the agency’s premiere intelligence officers.

From what he knew of the Corp, an intelligence officer would not have a solid knowledge of field operations, which meant that there was a good chance that Garret would remain undiscovered. He managed to keep his breathing even, and avoided being detected.

Yuri walked straight into Lucy’s office, passing less than two feet from Garret’s hiding spot, and closed the door behind him. Garret frowned, torn. Should he go in and try to stop him? Or should he wait the other man out? Leaving was now effectively removed as an option, because Garret had to outwait him to make sure he had not tampered with the charge. He decided that waiting would be the best course of action.

Even though Yuri was a trained agent, Garret knew that his acceleration of time would make it so that the other man never even knew he was coming, an unbeatable weapon in some sense, but some gut instinct made Garret wait regardless.

Garret did not wait terribly long, though it seemed an eternity to his tense muscles. Yuri only remained in the office for about twenty minutes, and when he walked back out, he moved past Garret’s hiding place, never giving any indication that he realized the doctor was present.

Once the man had left, and he heard the hall door click closed, Garret walked back into the office to check the charge he had left. It remained untouched. All of the paperwork that had been on the desk had been taken. In its place were the sides and chassis of her computer, spread across her desk. Wires hung wantonly from the forlorn looking computer case, and Lucy's hard drive had been taken from the casing.

Garret looked thoughtfully at the scene for a moment, trying to puzzle out why Yuri would break in and sabotage one of his own agent’s missions. He shook his head in confusion and backed out of the office, baffled by intrigue beyond his scope of understanding. He would have to report it to Wanda and Zarth and see what conclusions they drew from it. But that was for later. For now, his mission was done and he needed to leave the building.

Working his way down the dark corridors of the building, he spot-checked each of the charges that he had left behind. The remaining four had also been left alone. Good. He felt the relief of a tension that he hadn’t realized had been there, building behind his conscious mind. All was complete and he could leave.

Being careful not to trip any of the alarms, he worked his way down to the ground floor of the building. It made him feel younger again, being in this situation. Like when he had been a little boy, playing at secret agents with his friends. And then he reached the building’s glass front doors. Through the glass he could see Wanda lying dead on the ground beneath a lamppost.

For a moment, when he first saw her lying there, time froze. Then something in him simply broke. His soul splintered. All thought ceased. He slammed through the locked front doors, shattering the glass as he went through. Desperately, he ran to her, all thoughts of consequences gone from his mind.

Behind him, the building’s alarms silently screamed into life.

Signals shot through circuits, racing down optical cables, covering several miles of wire in the span of a single heartbeat, and completed their journey at the police station alert system.

Much later, by the standards of James Garret, the police arrived to find a secure building with a broken glass door. They tried to contact the building’s director, but for some reason she was not responding to the emergency contact routines that were in place for just such a situation. The sergeant in charge of the scene just shook his head, fully expecting the woman to lose her job the following day.

The same sergeant was just wrapping up his shift later that morning when the call came. Yuri Yakavich, after much internal struggle, called the police anonymously and alerted them that there was a bomb in the building.

He had known about Garret being there, but hadn’t known his purpose, which had been part of his motivation in going into the office the previous night. A difficult internal struggle, but ultimately the decision was made for him.

What he had spotted in Lucy’s office was technology that did not yet exist. The bomb would have been easy enough for him to diffuse, had he been willing to travel forward to his time to grab the specs on them.

As it was, since someone else was playing dirty, and forward travel was not something he could do without getting caught, he simply alerted the police and hoped that would be enough to counter the explosives left. Later that morning, the sergeant died and Lucy’s life was saved, along with Christopher Nost’s. No trace of the information Yuri had stolen was ever detected missing.

Time: 1997
Location: Denver
Operation: Recovery

Wit, Agent Holly reflected, did not come easily to him. He knew that he was intelligent. He knew that he was a good agent. He also knew that patience with his own thoughts was his key virtue, that and the fact that he was stubborn as hell. He would find his way through even the most complex of situations, guided by sheer tenacity as those around him were guided by their brains. But he needed enough time to find his way to those conclusions. When he acted rashly, too quickly, without thinking through the consequences of everything that he did, he created messes.

This recent disgrace, dealing with Agent Yakavich, only stressed and reinforced that fact for him. Bringing back a dead agent, whom he had thought was a rogue, had been leaping too fast. But he paid a price for that. And as he pushed his way through the materials Yuri had compiled, he came to understand that acting rashly was a much greater weakness than he had hitherto realized.

The first fact that he managed to piece together from the file was who it had been compiled for, which meant that he had killed, in an act of brash stupidity, not only the current senior intelligence officer, but also the most skilled and decorated field agent in the Corp. He shuddered as the impact of what he had done hit home.

He took a deep breath and then delved back into the files that Agent Yakavich had compiled. His eyes scanned while his mind worked its way towards greater truths. He hunted for the key to this cryptic puzzle. Trying to find what had prompted Director Arbu to take over this mission and go missing himself, back in the era Holly had recently come from. And above all, why the same man that had told him he would gladly have him shot had then proceeded to release him under orders to study up on this file.

A lot of the information spread across his lap and bed confused him. Much of it seemed to contradict itself. Holly at least understood that in the dual nature of his work contradiction served as a standard. But these files … a lot of them were news articles, with duplicate events occurring on different dates.

The whole thing seemed to be a mess. Holly knew it couldn’t be divergent time streams, because that was mathematically impossible. Which meant another spook was altering things. He could draw no other conclusion from this. The game of espionage often provided contradictory information that an agent would have to sort through, separating fact from fiction. To take it a step further, a step needed to decipher what Yuri had put together, a Time Corp agent also had to then be wary for contradicting evidence that clued one in to the beginnings of a paradox.

Holly continued to read and understanding filtered through his thoughts that this was not a paradox he had contributed to. This was a problem way beyond the scope of anything he had ever seen. Maybe even the mother of all paradox.

As the light dawned on him, he found himself wishing Arbu had never sent him back to interfere. Add in what he had pieced together about a second intelligence force acting on this situation and the results were colossally bad. Finally having achieved that basic understanding, as well as the staggering implications of it, he started to assemble a picture of how the paradox worked.

It was not easy. Holly was also beginning to suspect that there were several pieces of this file missing. Not that Yuri or someone else had removed them. Rather, that there were pieces of this puzzle before him that were too big to fit into a simple dossier, and that he had no real chance at understanding those things. This too, was something that Holly was accustomed to.

People of power generally saw things on a much larger scale than him. It didn’t bother him. Normally, he acted out his small piece of the picture, happy to make a difference in a war to save history. A war he truly believed in. Lost in such thoughts, a slight electrical buzz jolted him.

He sprang up in a panic, sending the papers that had been in his lap flying to the ground at his feet. The all-agent emergency call had triggered. This had never happened before, all active field agents getting called to an emergency situation. He felt the pull on his nano system even now.

It pulled him towards the cusp of the twenty-first century, the same place Holly had been, also the same place to which Director Arbu had now vanished. Holly readied his field gear, then pushed himself backwards in history to answer the summons of the silent call all Time Corp agents had received.

A more cautious man would have thought very carefully about the scope of recent events before responding to that call. A more cautious man might have done some research about the possible motivations of that call. Many of the agents who did answer the emergency call were more cautious people but, lacking Holly’s perspective, and Yuri’s file, did not have the information they needed to be suspicious of the all-agent alert.

Twice in as many weeks of his subjective time, Holly had acted rashly, this time jumping back to assist his director. The second time was no different from the first, in that it would exact blood as a consequence.