1
Grazier
General Elijiah Grazier might have only had two stars on his shoulders, but--as he liked to say--he punched well above his rank. His elaborate master bathroom was proof of that. The walls gleamed with polished marble, had a full-length mirror bathed in lights and matching golden Kohler faucets on the sinks, deep tub, shower, and bidet. The two-story house in Georgetown-just minutes from downtown Washington, DC-didn't look that impressive from the outside, just red brick with white accents. As in all things, it was what lay within that mattered.
Eli padded across Venetian black-marble tiles and onto the thick carpeting in his walnut-paneled bedroom. Tugging back the blankets on his oversized king bed, he pulled his pajamas straight and checked to see that everything on his nightstand was in order: phone, light switch, flashlight, his glass of water, and the M92 Beretta. The intruder alert button was hidden from sight next to the bed and below the table's top.
Hell of a day. But that was Washington. For the time being he had Bill Stevens, the president's chief of staff, by the balls. And he was squeezing. To Eli's disgust, President Ben Masters was cautious enough to keep his pit bull in reserve. As much as Eli would have loved to have cut Stevens' throat and left him behind as roadkill, the president would have disapproved.
Stevens could be dealt with. That was just "Potomac politics."
Eli's pressing problem was Skientia, the cutting-edge research firm. A team in their New Mexico lab had developed a powerful technology that allowed them to project and analyze entangled particles from the past. Events out in the Los Alamos lab might have momentarily chopped the head off the serpent, but on this new battleground, Eli Grazier needed Skientia's science and engineering know-how more than ever. That meant he had to rely on Dr. Maxine Kaplan and her engineer, Virgil Wixom.
Eli trusted Kaplan as much as he'd have trusted a black mamba. Wixom remained an unknown.
"So, is Kaplan smart enough to take the reins?" he wondered as he slipped his feet beneath the covers and lay back to fluff his pillow.
But more to the point, could he control her?
He was reaching to turn off the light when the contralto voice said, "Please do not try anything foolish. And before you reach for your pistol, I can assure you that I took the liberty of unloading it. The intruder alert is disabled as well."
Eli froze as a green-eyed woman dressed in black tactical clothing stepped out of his walk-in closet. Her auburn hair had been pulled back in a ponytail. The bone structure in her tanned face was a perfect balance of cheeks, straight nose, and full lips over a strong chin. Were the faint patterns on her cheeks and forehead the ghosts of scars, or just a trick of the light? She stood about five-foot-six and moved with an athlete's toned grace. Call it predatory. She didn't need the slung M16 or the knife and pistol on her belt to look dangerous.
What convinced Eli to behave lay behind the woman's hard green gaze: something weary, eternal, and strained. He got the distinct impression that she wouldn't think twice about putting a bullet in his brain. That she'd been tested-a lot-and always survived. Wherever she'd been, she'd seen and lived through it all.
"How'd you get in here?"
"Let's just say I go where I want, when I want, to whenever I want."
And it hit him. He remembered where he'd seen those hard green eyes: in the Grantham Barracks camera footage. She had been crouched over a dying man's body in the mental hospital's underground garage. "You're the woman who tried to kill Alpha and Ryan that day."
"Alpha? That what you're calling her?" The distaste in her words couldn't be missed. "Her real name is Nakeesh, and her title in the Ti'ahaule is Domina, not that the term means anything to you."
"Sorry about your companion."
"He was a good man." A faint smile. "Rare. In any age."
"Who are you?"
"I've been called a lot of things over the centuries. Nakeesh calls me the Ennoia. Means the embodiment of God's first thought. It's a mystical concept from another age. She and Fluvium once considered it a cruel and sick joke. Most call me Helen, from the Greek 'Elena. As to why I'm in your bedroom? Nakeesh and Fluvium have to be stopped. Here. In your timeline. Once and for all."
"Fluvium's already dead. As to Alpha-"
"Are you still so limited? Despite what you've seen?"
Fluvium's not dead? Eli had seen the guy's desiccated corpse after it had been removed from a three-thousand-year-old sarcophagus.
The woman calling herself Helen studied him with that flat green gaze, one hand on the rifle slung at her shoulder. "Good. You're starting to catch on to the whole 'time' thing. If Nakeesh contacts Imperator, finds a way to get her hands on Fluvium's cerebrum, your world and your timeline are dead."
"Who's Imperator?"
"Your worst nightmare. Not that I give a shit. They've taken out better worlds than yours. It's just that this is the first time they've screwed up enough that I've got a chance to end it." With her free hand, she slipped a device from one of the pockets in her cargo pants and tossed it.
Grazier snagged it out of the air as she said, "Decide if you're in or out. All you have to do is press the silver button."
Grazier glanced down. The thing looked like a pager. Maybe two by three inches, a couple of ounces in weight. A prominent silver button could be seen on the black surface.
"In or out? You're going to have to be a lot more specific than that." Ely looked up to emphasize his point.
Not a trace of her remained. Not even a swaying of clothes back in the depths of his closet. But for the device he held, she might have been nothing more than a figment of his imagination.
In . . . or out?
He was about to pull his blanket back when a tingling presaged a crackling in the air around him. His skin prickled like a thousand ants were crawling over his body, and the lights went out.
2
Ryan
My name's Colonel Timothy Ryan. Normally, I didn't run meetings where we discussed the safety and security of the world, let alone the future of our entire timeline. I'm still hazy about what a timeline is. Theoretical physics was never my strongpoint. But there I was, staring down the table in the conference room at a team of physicists, Mayan scholars, and engineers. Not to mention General Eli Grazier, my current superior. Wearing his uniform with all its campaign ribbons, the two stars prominent on his collar, he sat in a chair off to the side so as to be inobtrusive. Right. Eli was about as inobtrusive as a crouching tiger.
My team was in charge of saving the world. It remained surreal.
I'm a mental health professional with both an MD in psychiatry and a PhD in abnormal psych. I'd spent my life working with service personnel who put their lives on the line for this country. And too often ended up broken and wounded in ways that didn't leave visible scars. It was one thing to teach a crippled vet how to walk again when he or she had lost both legs. Something entirely different when that person-in an effort to stop the pain-just wanted to end it all.
Working with mental illness was my passion, both in the service and afterward. It had finally taken me to Grantham Barracks, a low-profile military psychiatric hospital in the pine-covered foothills outside of Colorado Springs, Colorado. My battlefield was in my patients' heads. Sometimes I won, other times I didn't.
Along the way, I'd given up a wife and son, any kind of social life, and my list of close friends could be counted on three fingers. Or was it two? Been a while since I took time to keep track.
Sometimes the lines between the services got a little blurred back in the day, but nothing like what I faced as I sat at the head of the polished teakwood table in that plush conference room. I was on the opulent second floor of the Skientia lab building in Los Alamos, New Mexico. General Grazier had me fly down special for the meeting. Eli figured that it was time to bring all the disparate parts of the team together. We were three months into the analysis of data following Prisoner Alpha's "escape."
I glanced down the mirror-polished length of the table, past the others, to where Dr. Maxine Kaplan sat taking notes on a legal pad. She was an attractive woman in her late fifties, her graying hair pinned up, face thin and intense. For the meeting, she wore an expensive gray wool suit finely tailored to her slender body. She had been in charge of Scientia's entangled particle physics experiments. She had been trying to attract entangled organic molecules from the past. Imagine her surprise when the woman we call "Alpha" suddenly appeared in her lab.
"Dr. Kaplan? Now that we have three months' worth of data from the monitors in Lab One, is there anything that hints that Alpha's return is imminent? Any rise in energy? Some clue?"
She raised her eyes, giving me that evaluative look a superior imparts to a menial. One she believes to be hopelessly incapable of understanding even the simplest of concepts. She'd made it clear that compared to her experiments in physics, psychiatry was little more than make-believe medicine practiced by masked dancers pounding drums.
"Maybe Virgil could field that," she suggested, dropping her gaze to the legal pad where she continued to scratch out notes with an expensive golden pen.
Virgil Wixom-also a PhD-was her second. But for having to gasp for oxygen down in the darkness cast by Kaplan's shadow, the guy would have been considered world-class brilliant. Where Kaplan's talent lay in spitting out the theoretical ideas, Wixom was the nuts-and-bolts guy. He was the one who designed and then built the machines that would produce, collect, and analyze the entangled particles. He'd been Alpha's go-to guy who'd helped to build the machine that had allowed her escape.
Wixom-also with an old-fashioned notepad-sat at Kaplan's left. He scratched at his ear and said, "Currently, we're not picking up any meaningful increases in photons or emitted particles. I guess you'd say the fields remain boringly consistent."
"Nothing's changed?" I asked.
Kaplan raised censuring eyes. "As we stated in the last report. Assuming anyone read it."
I wondered if she'd used the same flippant tone with her Skientia bosses. One of them, Peter McCoy, had been left on the lab floor, shot through the heart. The other, Tanner Jackson, was missing, caught in the field generated by Alpha's time machine and whisked away to the future. Neither had been known for having anything resembling the milk of human kindness running even by a milliliter in their veins.
In his chair, Eli shifted, his gaze taking Kaplan's measure. He didn't trust her. Not that Eli trusted anyone. Along with being a two-star, the general is a high-functioning psychopath. There's not an ounce of remorse in the man's body. Eli does what's best for Eli, which generally boils down to survival and power. All of which were at risk after Alpha's untimely arrival.
Maybe placing the survival of our timeline in the hands of a psychopath wasn't such a bad idea. Eli would, of necessity, have to save the world and the timeline in order to save himself. And he wouldn't hesitate to do whatever it took to make that happen.
I glanced next at the anthropologists. In charge was Yusif al Amari, the Egyptologist. Yusif was a broad-shouldered man, early forties, with a coal-black beard. Along with a PhD from Cambridge, he'd been excavating his entire life. He'd helped Reid Farmer open Fluvium's tomb. And now-with a death sentence awaiting him back in Egypt-he was key to unraveling Fluvium's hidden messages.
"Ah, Doctor Ryan," he gave me a smile that flashed white teeth behind his beard. "I hope you are not expecting miracles. We have made some progress. What you would call the basics. Some of the narrative can be followed. Simple things. Like, 'In the beginning.' Or, 'Consider the following.' And then it becomes gibberish. Words don't make sense. It hit me, in preparation for this meeting, that Fluvium is using code in places."
"No surprise there," I said. "He wouldn't have wanted just anyone figuring out how to build a cerebrum." I glanced at our Mayanist. "Skylar? What have you got?"
Skylar Haines was an expert at Mayan hieroglyphics, totally brilliant. He read Mayan writing better than he read English. We needed him because the scrolls and writing recovered from Fluvium's tomb were partially written in Mayan as well as Egyptian and Latin. The only downside to having Skylar working on them was, well, Skylar. In his case, brilliance came at a cost. Given his aversion to most forms of personal hygiene, his stained and rumpled week-old clothing, oily dreadlocks, and yellow-fuzzed teeth, no one wanted to be in the same room. As it was, people had left the chairs on either side of him empty.
He glanced sidelong at me through smudged bottle-thick glasses. "Um, dude, this is some heavy lifting, like challenging, you know? Okay, so, it's like the roots are there. Then it gets crazy complex. The glyphs are nothing like I've never seen. Complex with distinct differences in prefix, positionals, and suffixes. I've never seen a lot of these prevocalics. And it has chunks of Latin tossed in. Like, short phrases right in the middle of a series of glyphs."
I stared at him. He could have been talking Greek. Even if it was Mayan. "Skylar, what does that mean in simple terms I can understand?"
"Best way to put it? Confusing as hell, dude. Like, what would Shakespeare do if you handed him a modern book on string theory? Didn't matter that he's the brightest and most creative mind when it comes to the English language in the 1500s. He's gonna see words in that physics text that he knows. Articles. Nouns. Verbs. Common words in English, right? And then he's gonna see a lot of words that make no sense at all. What would Shakespeare make of the words, quantum wave theory? He'd know quantum as the Latin word for how much. A wave is water in motion. He might know theory as from the Greek, meaning to contemplate or view. See where I'm coming from? And the grammar's different. Endings and usage have changed. Idiom is different. Think: 'Dost thou bite thy thumb at me?' In modern English, it'd be, 'You flipping me off?'"
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