Fate (Wilton's Gold #3) (18 page)

Suddenly, he saw the possibilities differently, and realized he actually might not need Fisher to put himself in danger. He walked back a few steps to the original device and bent down to inspect it. Yes, it had a battery in it.

“What are you looking for?” Dexter asked.

“Just seeing if this one had a battery in it.”

“Why’s that?” Then he realized, whispering, “Oh. Is that what you’re thinking of using to get back to Kane?”

Jeff stood and looked at him, trying to figure out where his friend’s mind was. Dexter was serious about going back to change the Kane situation. He rubbed his chin, thinking. But not about how to save George Mellen from his murderer. “It might be a possibility,” he said. “I don’t know how we can get one of the new devices out from behind security.”

“I think I do,” Dexter said.

“Really?”

He looked down. “Well, I’m not sure I can, but I think so. It’d have to be on the run. If I do it, there won’t be much time to get the job done.”

Jeff held up his hands, playing along. “Dexter, I don’t know if that’s a fight I’m willing to engage in,” he said. “It’s nothing personal against you, but there’s a lot of harm that can come from attempting this – and all to stop someone that has little or nothing to do with either of us personally.”

“It has a lot to do with me personally.”

Jeff sighed. Even though he was giving Dexter a hard time, this was a good distraction for him. Having Dexter focused so intently on his mission immediately defined itself to him as a means to an end. He looked back at his device sitting on display. “Well, maybe we can think about this one as a back-up plan.”

“You think there’s juice left in there?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. But, I’m tracing the path of this device. It has to be the one the other Jeff brought back with him from Russia. Because that’s the only version of the device besides the one I had and Fisher took from me.”

“Plus the one in California.”

“Yes, the one in California, right. But that one would be all rusted.” He wanted Dexter to come to these realizations on his own. “There’s a battery in this one, which suggests to me that it’s the same battery that was in there originally. Unless someone used the device – which I doubt, because my guess is they immediately started innovating new technologies – Jeff took two trips with this device. Which would leave two trips there.”

“What if not?”

Jeff walked past him to the power section. “When they downgraded the batteries from four trips to two, did they keep the same casing for the battery?”

“That was a long time ago...” Dexter said, following him. “I believe so, though.”

Sure enough, the modern batteries on display looked identical to his original model. “No need to reinvent the wheel,” he said. “This is it. We have the device and we have batteries. We just need to get them out of here.”

“How do you know those batteries are charged?”

“We don’t,” he said, looking intently at the glass case. Truth was, though, he did know they were charged. There was a trigger on the side of the battery that indicated its life. All three were actually full – his version, the upgrade and the current version. There was a vulnerability that they didn’t see. “Who’s the curator of this museum?”

He sighed. “Who do you think?”

“You?”

“Yes.”

“So you know how to get these out of here?”

“Jeff, this is ridiculous,” he said. “They’re relics. You don’t even know if they could still possibly be operational.”

“But you can get them out,” he said, mumbling. “Are they secure?”

“They are, but that’s not a problem. Look, Jeff, I think I might want to just take my chances trying to get one of the real ones. We know they’re charged. They have the screen display on them so there won’t be mistakes with the coordinates. You could get these out, get in the middle of a situation, and find out they don’t work. Using the real ones is the smarter way to go.”

He agreed, but he wasn’t about to tell Dexter that. He looked up at him. “Alright, this isn’t the place to talk about this. But when did you plan on doing this?”

“When you do your training on the device.”

He laughed. “What, just grab-and-go? Dexter, it’s not worth it.”

“I disagree.”

“Well, that could be today, though. Are you ready to do this? Risk everything?”

Dexter shook his head. “No, we’ll make sure that part of the training isn’t done until tomorrow. Give us time to get our ducks in a row.”

He returned his line of sight to the glass display in front of him, though he wasn’t focused on it. One more day would probably be smart, but he knew the longer they gave the USTP leadership to watch them, the more danger they all were in. He could work on getting his hands on one of these batteries, and clue Fisher in to what was going to take place – still enlist his help, even. He’d be a valuable asset. Dexter appeared resolved and ready to go, even if his plans were unknowingly parallel to Jeff’s own intentions, so the timing was good. He would just have to keep him off-balance. The museum was a great misdirection.

“That’s fine, but I need this battery by the time I’m done with my stuff today. Do you think could get me access-”

A shadow crossed over them, cutting him off. They both looked up with overwhelmingly guilty consciences to find Abby standing in the doorway.

“Are you guys ready?” she asked. “We don’t have all morning.”

Both men followed her obediently into the atrium. Jeff snuck a glance at Dexter, who nodded subtly at him. He was on-board, destination 1930.

“Is that too much light?” Abby asked, fiddling with the blinds covering the window.

“It’s fine,” Dexter said, looking at the screen at the front of the room. “Probably as good as you’re going to get.”

The conference room seven floors up in the USTP headquarters was one that Dexter had never used, amazingly enough. If he’d been asked, he would’ve claimed that he’d been in every part of the facility, but clearly that wasn’t the case. One side of the room featured floor-to-ceiling glass facing the atrium, though from their angle they couldn’t see much except the opposite side of the seventh floor. The other side of the room overlooked the USTP campus, but it faced east, which enabled the morning sun to illuminate the room, hindering their view of the presentation screen.

The room was state-of-the-art, with an experimental holographic teleconferencing system that they unfortunately weren’t going to get to see as well as normal, “old school” teleconferencing. The conference table was situated with display tablets built into fixtures at every seat that swiveled to always face the users (in case they were turned to watch the presentation), and Abby had told them that the room was equipped with next-gen wireless with speeds 1500 times faster than those that even the most tech-savvy companies might have in their offices. It was impressive, if not a little excessive.

Despite the brightness of the sun, Dexter had spent the first several minutes while Abby was getting the presentation set up staring out the window. He hoped that anyone watching him would envision that he was simply taking in what was a beautiful view, but in reality he was going over his morning conversation with Jeff. The plan was for Jeff to do his training on the time devices the next morning, but if they were able to complete the analysis and his physical early enough today, they might not have a good enough reason to postpone. Bremner was pushing them to get Jeff through the program as quickly as possible, and if they could rush him through the process and be back in business in the morning, he’d want it to be that way.

Of course, Dexter knew that it wasn’t just about getting back to the business of sending rich people back in time for their jollies. Because of what he knew, Jeff was a dangerous person – the USTP had made him that way by altering and then controlling his circumstances. He figured that, the way Bremner perceived things, the faster they were able to get Jeff ingrained into the program and, as a result, into his new life, the less unpredictable he’d be. They didn’t know him like Dexter did.

“I thought you could just transfer the data from the server directly to this room,” Dexter said, choosing one of the leather-back chairs and sitting.

Abby was working on a laptop with the screen facing away from them so they couldn’t see. She hadn’t transferred the image to the projector yet. “I’m just skipping through all of the intro stuff that we would show to a participant who knows nothing about time travel. Jeff’s been there, done that, so we don’t need to go through all of it.”

Dexter looked at Jeff, contemplating every way possible to slow down the day. “Jeff, you wanted to go through everything just as any participant would, right? Should we go right from the beginning?”

Jeff shook his head. “No, let’s do this,” he said, motioning with his hand for Abby to speed things up.

What was he doing? He made a “slow down” sign with his hands, but Jeff waved him off. He wanted to get through this. Not having any other choice but to accept it without being obvious, Dexter began to plot excuses why they wouldn’t be able to do the device training that afternoon. He’d have no problem securing the battery for Jeff, who must have thought the old battery would fit in the new device. But since they had the evening to regroup and plan, he’d ask that question then.

Abby looked up at Jeff, who repeated his let’s go gesture. “Alright,” she said, standing with a black remote in her hand. She walked away from the laptop and pushed a button. The screen lit up, showing a screen similar to the ones in the control room. “Jeff you’re getting some inside baseball here. We don’t usually go into this much detail with the participants, but since you want to know how the program works, we want to show you the back end. For your mission, we analyzed about 350 million possible relationships. Your risk factor was low – only nine percent. Which isn’t surprising given that you’re looking at a destination on the other side of the country, over 150 years back.”

“Nine percent out of a hundred seems like pretty high risk,” Jeff said.

“Well, it’s not all risk,” Dexter said. “It’s possible risk. The system doesn’t suggest that nine out of every hundred relationships will spark an incident. It looks for combinations of those that are related. A person could come out of the first round of analysis with a very low risk factor, but end up with a high PCS.”

“You told me what PCS is, but refresh my memory.”

“That’s potential conflict score. Every participant is given one relative to the mission they plan to take.”

Jeff was nodding. “I see. So I could not have a large number of potentially conflicting relationships, but some of those might be direct concerns. Let me ask you this... Say I go through this analysis and my PCS ends up being high. What happens then? Am I stricken from the program, or can I look at another destination?”

“Good question,” Dexter said, glancing at Abby, who was waiting, remote in hand. She didn’t appear to be getting impatient even though her presentation had been interrupted. “It hasn’t happened yet – nobody’s come up on the wrong side of the PCS scale. But if they did, that’s where the analysis put forth by the computer would be matched up against Dr. Graham’s psychological evaluation. The big question would be why you came up with a high PCS. The dual evaluation would help to determine if it was simply poor planning, or if there was something amiss that told us you shouldn’t go on the mission at all.”

“And Kane?”

Dexter shook his head. “Kane was a different story. His connection was hearsay, which the computer couldn’t predict. But, as Abby will show you, since that happened – well, since I returned and reported what happened – the system has been adjusted to add what are called proximity alerts.” He’d told Jeff about the proximity alerts the day before, but he was putting on a bit of a show for Abby – and everyone else that was listening in to the conversation. “While there’s no data that relates to word-of-mouth accounts that have been passed down, proximity is another tool to help eliminate that gap. Of course, there’s no way to go back and test it against the Kane numbers, because those disappeared when he changed history. I’m assuming that if Mellen, the guy who was murdered, got his paper from the same newsstand every morning, he lived or worked somewhere close by. The system probably picked that up and flagged it as a caution because he was a business competitor of Kane’s, but with proximity alerts, it would’ve shown up red and we would’ve at least had the chance to deal with it.”

“Interesting,” Jeff said, then turned his attention back to Abby.

She continued, pointing the remote at the laptop and changing the screen. “How the system works is that we automatically analyze the relationships that come back flagged red, meaning potentially dangerous. Each of those are assessed separately, then are weighed against those that are flagged yellow, or caution. If there are any in the yellow category that support those in the red category, they’re combined.”

“Three hundred fifty million of them?” Jeff said.

Abby nodded. “Roughly. Out of those three hundred fifty million, there were approximately two million that came up yellow.”

“Two million?!”

She waved her hand. “Absolutely normal,” she said. “The algorithms address everything from a worst-case scenario perspective. There were twenty-three that were flagged red.”

“I don’t think it does center on ‘worst-case scenario,’ exactly,” Jeff said, “but I’ll take your word for it for now. And two million plus twenty-three is not nine percent of three hundred fifty million,” Jeff said.

“Again, it’s the algorithm. There are multiple levels of analysis. As I mentioned, if the red entries are supported by cautionary entries, the number will climb. Nine percent is a good score. You’d be approved to take this mission based on this.”

“Can you talk about how you analyze the red items?”

Dexter jumped in, continuing the conversation that Jeff had begun the day before now that he’d been over it with Bremner himself. “Those are analyzed manually, individually and in detail. The precision of the data in the system is incredible, so we can read exactly what the relationship or interaction is.” He wanted to control this part of the conversation. “Let’s take one of the red entries – I’ll admit, while you were in your session with Dr. Graham yesterday, I was looking at some of your numbers with Dr. Bremner. There, that’s the one we were looking at: 001/MAT/5C/7R/375M/A26. This was flagged because of code 001, the most basic – a familial relationship in the vicinity of the destination. Obviously, we can’t have a participant sneak the secret to the internet to their distant relative.” He tapped the display screen on the table in front of him and suddenly he had control of the presentation. “This one was flagged red simply because of the family code, but it’s really not all that close a relationship. Unless you’re a real genealogy freak.”

“What do the numbers mean?”

Dexter picked up the stylus next to his station and touched the screen. On the HD screen on the wall, everything Dexter touched was highlighted. He went along the list of figures. “Maternal side, fifth cousin, seven times removed, whose home in 1849 was 375 miles from your proposed destination. Age 26 at the time of your mission.”

“That’s pretty incredible,” Jeff said.

“It is,” he said, agreeing and motioning to Abby, the keeper of the algorithms.

“If it wasn’t the scariest thing I’d ever encountered, I’d say congratulations,” Jeff said.

“Jeff, the process is meant to protect us,” Dexter said, finding himself defending the system and then realizing how ridiculous that was; two years ago, Jeff hadn’t been such a skeptic. “It’s being used for good.”

“Oh, I’m sure it is,” he said. “But you can see how easily it could be turned around?”

He nodded. “I do. Which is why we’ve hired people of good moral character to run it.”

Jeff laughed scornfully. “If you say so.”

Dexter sighed. His beef was not with the system – it was the hole in the system that had been discovered. Plus, he didn’t like having his hands tied. But there was too much on the table to get into a debate with Jeff about the merits of the program. Not right now.

Instead, Jeff ended that part of the conversation, turning to Abby. “So what happens next? You go through the twenty-three red entries? Then what?”

She took control of the presentation back and the image on the screen faded into the next slide. The twenty-three red entries appeared with numbers next to them. “Here are the flagged data points,” she said. “The numbers beside each entry are the number of supporting pieces of data attributed to each. For the first, for example, there are 18 entries that could – and I mean
could
– suggest a danger. Eighteen isn’t that many. In fact, the only one on the list here that we would even look into is the one, two, three, four, fifth entry down – the one that starts with ‘317.’ That one sent back 374 possible scenarios. Which is still low, but we’d probably look into it to make sure.”

Jeff shrugged. “Why don’t we go through the exercise, just to see?”

Abby nodded obediently, but Dexter jumped in, recognizing the code from his walkthrough with Bremner the day before. “Jeff, it’s not going to come up with anything. Let’s not waste the time. It’s a lengthy research process, and Bremner wants to keep this moving.”

“It’s no big deal at all,” Abby said, but Dexter glared across the table at his friend.

Jeff appeared to get the hint and waved her off. “Nah,” he said. “Let’s not worry about it. Is that it? Then you know if I’m good to go?”

“That’s about it,” Abby said.

“Let me ask you this,” he said. “I know you said this hasn’t happened, but speculate for me. Let’s say someone’s score comes up with a failing grade, and then they don’t pass they psych exam.”

“Well, you don’t really ‘pass’-” Dexter said.

Jeff held up his hands. “I know, I know. But let’s say someone is deemed ineligible for the mission they’ve selected. What’s the process for letting them know? These are powerful, big-time players coming into the program. You’re not going to just shoot them an e-mail telling them they’ve been denied. How would it hypothetically work, if it were to happen?”

Dexter looked to Abby, who was looking to him to answer. “Well, if that were to happen,” he said, looking for an answer, “the message would probably be delivered by a high-level person in the program. Perhaps Bremner himself. The follow-up would really depend on the results of all of the tests.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

“Afraid of?”

“Yeah – listen to your answer. ‘Probably?’ ‘Perhaps?’ There is no protocol, is there? Because there’s no intention of blocking anyone from the program. Am I right?”

“Honestly, Jeff,” he said. “That decision would be made over my head.”
What was he doing?

“I’m not blaming you. I’m just trying to assess the situation.”

“Well, I’m sure at some point someone is going to fail the test. But meanwhile, it’s not like people choose their destinations blindly – we let them know what’s allowed and not allowed ahead of time, so it’s not as if they’re going to choose a mission that’s going to get them rejected. If someone comes into the program understanding about what would and wouldn’t work, their choice of destination is probably going to be fine. Jeff, millions of people have to take their shoes off before they get on a plane because one guy hid a bomb in his shoe. There are bad people out there and someday one of them is going to infiltrate the program, but the chances-”