Ides of March (Time Patrol) (3 page)

The two strode across the beach and into the dunes, Roland narrating as calmly as if describing a pleasant vacation. “This is where the berserkers ambushed us. I took down two, but it was a ploy. One escaped to give word of the number of our party and capabilities.”

“Look.” Neeley pointed. There was a unnatural mist ahead. “Do you feel it?”

“It’s chilly,” Roland said, but he knew that wasn’t what she was referring to.

“Reminds me of the Space Between,” Neeley said, referring to the netherworld region where innumerable Earth timelines connected. “Very faint, though.”

They continued toward a six-foot tall upright stone. There were more behind it, placed in a rough circle. In the center was a nine-foot stone, angled 45 degrees.

“I feel it now,” Roland said as they entered the stone circle. “It’s exactly what it was like a thousand years ago. Tam Nok, the seer, said this was built by the original people, the survivors of Atlantis.”

Neeley was drawn to the angled stone. There were faint markings on it. “This looks like what you said they’re using in the Possibility Palace. Hieroglyphics.”

Roland reached past her and put his hands on the stone. “I had the vision here. Actually, Tam Nok gave me the vision from the stone. Of the nun who had to die and the possible futures if I failed in my mission that day.”

Neeley put a hand on his back. “You didn’t fail.”

Roland let go of the stone. “Let’s see if anything is left of the monastery.”

They departed the standing stones and headed north. Cresting a small rise revealed the place where Roland’s mission had concluded.

There was nothing to show of the monastery and the village. Even the stones were gone from where the chapel had stood. Grass and bushes struggled to grow, as if the ground was cursed.

“I don’t like this place,” Neeley said.

“Nothing good came out of that mission.”

“Yeah,” Neeley agreed. “But nothing bad either. And isn’t that the point?”

Roland was about to say something when Neeley’s satphone buzzed with a text message. She was reading it when the satphone every member of the Time Patrol had been issued by Dane prior to going on leave went off, playing a ring tone:
Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner
.

He pulled it out of his pocket and looked at the screen, then at Neeley. “You first.”

“I’ve got to get someone, escort them back to the States. Chopper’s inbound.”

Roland nodded. “Same chopper’s inbound to pick me up too. I’ve been Zevoned.”

Scout: Arlington Cemetery. Section 60.

“I KISSED MY FIRST BOY
and then I had to kill him,” Scout whispered to the cold stone. She was on her knees in front of the marker, leaning forward, forehead touching the tombstone. “Actually, Nada, he wasn’t a boy, he was a man, and he was trying to choke me to death, even while we were kissing. But still, he was young. And I killed him. Did just as you taught me, in the heart, then shredded it with a twist of the blade. And I thought he’d really cared about me, but it was just pretend. I thought he was my contact. And I know, you’d have warned me not to trust him. A Nada-Yada:
trust no one
. But
we,
you and I, trusted each other.”

She was surrounded by the dead-before-their-time, although as a member of the Time Patrol, Scout was beginning to doubt the nature of time itself. All the coffins were under the same upright headstones, 42 inches high, 13 inches wide, and 4 inches thick, according to Department of Defense regulations. It made them seem the same, except for the words inscribed in the stones.

“Then I had to kill again, same day. Same way. And I thought
he
was there to protect me too, but it was also pretend. They came after me, Nada. Of the six of us who went back, I’m the one the Shadow deliberately went after.” Scout pulled her head back and traced the letters and numbers with her fingers.

EDWARD MORENO

MSG USA

29 OCTOBER 1969

28 JUNE 2005

OPERATION RED WINGS

DISTINGUISHED SERVICE CROSS

SILVER STAR

PURPLE HEART

Sparse words for a life. She hadn’t even known Nada’s real name until she’d seen this marker in a vision after joining the Time Patrol. She’d served with Nada in the Nightstalkers, but when they became the Time Patrol and were given a chance to go back and fix one thing in their past, Nada was the only one who’d chosen to go back. A decision that meant one was unfit for the Time Patrol.

But he’d had a very good reason to try to fix this particular problem. Several in fact.

He’d fixed it and this marker was the price he’d paid.

Scout looked to the side, down the row. There were no flowers in front of the distant marker; the reason Nada had gone back: to make sure the man under that marker died.

Then Scout focused on the other date; the date of Nada’s birth. He’d been born on the day she’d been sent to on her last mission. Black Tuesday. Scout felt a chill slither around her.

There were no coincidences. All of time was a pattern, millions of streams, billions of lives, woven in the tapestry of history that made the present and led to the future. Looking down into the spiraling depths of the Possibility Palace convinced one of that.

What was going on with that date? What was she caught up in? What--

“Did you know my father?” a woman asked, startling Scout.

Nada wouldn’t have approved of Scout allowing someone to get so close without being noticed, but he would definitely have approved of the person. The woman was just out of her teens, her thick hair framing a beautiful face and eyes that reminded Scout so much of Nada.

“Isabella,” Scout said.

“How’d you know my name?” Nada’s daughter asked.

“Na—your father spoke of you often.” Scout was disoriented, looping back to her vision of this cemetery during retrieval from Black Tuesday, 1969. But that vision had been of the place in 2005, and now was now.

“You look too young to have served with my father.”

Not even in high school yet
, Scout thought, trying manage the numbers, the years. “My father served with him,” she lied. She held out her hand. “I’m Scout.”

“Isabella.” Nada’s daughter frowned. “You seem familiar. Have we met?”

Scout was at a loss how to answer that honestly. “I don’t believe so.”

“And your father?” Isabella asked.

“He passed away.”

“So we share that,” Isabella said. “I barely remember him,” she added, nodding at the stone.

“Your mother?” Scout asked.

“She’s fine. Did you know her too?”

“We never met. Is she also visiting?”

Scout regretted the question as soon as she asked it, but between the date on the marker and this apparition, she was completely off-kilter. She saw the dark shadow flit across Isabella’s face. Scout sensed the long ago pain which caused that; not of Nada’s death, but of his life, who’d he been and one of the reasons he went back: to spare his wife and daughter any more pain living with the raging, abusive alcoholic he’d been.

“She doesn’t come here,” Isabella said, without any further explanation.

Scout fumbled in her pocket, pushing aside the satphone Dane had issued, and pulled out her personal iPhone. “Let me give you my number. If you ever need anything, anything, call me.” She rattled off her number and told Isabella to call her right now, to get her number in the memory.

Isabella checked it, glanced at the screen. “Scout is a strange name.”

Your father gave it to me, as he gave you your name
, Scout was tempted to say.

“He was a fine soldier,” Scout said. “I’ll leave you alone. Remember. Call me if you need anything.”

Why today? Scout wondered as she walked away. Why had Isabella come here today, so many years later? The vagaries of the variables? She didn’t believe it. She could sense Nada. He, his essence, was in a place between life and death. A place out of time. He’d lived in this timeline up until recently, but now this timeline was saying he’d died in 2005. What was in between?

Scout walked down the row. She paused at the marker for the man Nada had taken down at the cost of his own life:

CARL COYNE

OPERATION RED WINGS

28 JUNE 2005

BRONZE STAR

PURPLE HEART

US NAVY SEAL

Scout spared one last glance over her shoulder at Isabella standing as still as the stone she was looking at.

Then the sat-phone’s ringtone interrupted and as she heard it, she began crying as she pulled it out, because it was
Keep Me In You Heart
.

She was being Zevoned and the text indicated an aircraft was just two minutes out to pick her and another member of the team up.

I’ll always miss you, Nada
.

She could feel the words, at the edge of her consciousness, where her ‘Sight’ resided:
I miss you too.

Mac: Old Palace Yard, London

“GUY FAWKES WAS EXECUTED
in the open space directly in front of you,” an obnoxious American tour guide was saying with an over-abundance of semi-knowledge. “Drawn and quartered, a most horrible way to die. And Sir Walter Raleigh had his head chopped off in the same place.”

Mac wanted to tell the guide that Guy Fawkes had fallen from the ladder leading up to the scaffold
before
being executed. The fall broke his neck; whether deliberately, if he were smart, or by accident, either way he’d saved himself a lot of pain. And Raleigh would almost
not
have been executed, if it hadn’t been for Mac’s intervention.

Mac tipped back the bottle in the brown paper bag and took a long, satisfying gulp, then had to struggle not to retch. He settled for a couple of belches. A couple of tourists standing near him moved a few steps away. It wasn’t just the bottle in the bag; he hadn’t shaved since coming back from the Possibility Palace to the Gate in New York City and from there to the airport to board a flight to England. He also hadn’t bathed. His eyes were bloodshot and alcohol was oozing out of his pores after five days of nonstop indulgence. Before the binge, he’d looked like a younger version of Tom Cruise.

“Hey, fellow.” Someone grabbed Mac’s elbow and he reacted instinctually. Pulling his elbow out of the grip, spinning in the opposite direction and using the other elbow to hit the man in the side of the head, knocking him to the ground. Only then did Mac notice the ‘bobby’ hat rolling away and the man’s uniform. The crowd dispersed, leaving Mac standing over the unconscious policeman. A half-dozen more coppers were running at him.

Mac jiggled the bottle, estimated he had time to drain it, and began to guzzle it down. He’d just finished when the first cop tackled him. The bag fell to the pavement, the bottle breaking. Two more cops piled on.

Mac didn’t put up any resistance, actually glad to be done with the binge. Some time in a cell would do him a fair amount of good.

He was thrown on his stomach and cuffed, face pressed down, one cheek to the cold concrete. Mac wondered how far into the soil underneath the concrete remnants of Raleigh’s blood might still exist.

There’d been a lot of it.

Two cops pulled Mac to his feet, his hands behind his back. They were hauling him toward a waiting van, when a voice of authority stopped them.

“Scotland Yard. He’s ours.”

The man wasn’t wearing a Sherlock Holmes’ deerstalker hat, but then again, that was fiction too. And Holmes hadn’t been Scotland Yard; Mac vaguely remembered Eagle ranting about it one day in the team room back at the Ranch, located just outside Area 51. That seemed forever ago, a thought which caused Mac to laugh, because, really, time was relevant, wasn’t it?

He knew that for a fact.

The Scotland Yard fellow had a hard look about him, someone who’d seen a lot of bad stuff. Mac could commiserate with that.

“Cuffs off,” the man ordered. “And clear out.”

“He assaulted—” one of the cops began, but didn’t finish.

“Cuffs off and clear out. Take your man with you.”

Grumbling, picking up their unconscious comrade, the cops retreated to their cars and vans.

“You’re a bloody mess,” the man said, folding his arms.

“Just had a bloody time recently,” Mac said and then laughed once more at his own private pun. His satphone went off, playing
Werewolves of London
.

“You a funny guy?” the Scotland Yard detective asked.

“Someone is,” Mac muttered. “Mind if I check?”

The man pointed past Mac, at a black helicopter coming in fast and low. “You can check once you’re on board that. You’re their problem. My job is to get you on that helly.”

The chopper touched down, the side door slid open, and Roland and Neeley hopped out.

Oh great
, Mac thought.
The dynamic duo.

And then it occurred to him they might be working for the Cellar at the moment, in which case they’d probably be tossing him out of the chopper once they got to altitude.

At the moment, that didn’t seem like too bad of an idea.

Eglin Air Force Base, Florida

EAGLE BROUGHT THE SNAKE
in fast, barely a foot above the trees, before abruptly rotating the jet engines up and bringing the tilt-jet aircraft to a hover. Typical Florida panhandle terrain. Flat, scrub brush, low trees, and swamp.

And a graveyard for the men who’d supported him here in his Black Tuesday 1980 mission. They were long gone, melting into the dank soil, becoming part of it. They’d been losers, outcasts, a form of Dirty Dozen who had, most of all, been expendable.

Wars always needed the expendable.

Eagle rotated the engines and went back to nap of the earth flying, then dropping down as he cleared the trees. He skimmed over one of Wagner Field’s landing strips. A twitch of his hands on the controls and he was on the runway.

Eagle shut down the engines and dropped the back ramp. A black man with a rangy build, Eagle had scars scrolled on one side of his bald skull, the results of an IED explosion a long time ago (in relative terms), in a country far away. With Nada’s passing, in life and from this timeline, Eagle was now the team sergeant for the Time Patrol. But since they didn’t go on missions together, as they had as Nightstalkers, it meant a different role, one he was still new to.