Split Second (28 page)

“With respect to Q5, only me. I’m the only one with
the proper codes to activate any of the devices. Knight invented the technology,
and I was his boss. So we saw to it that the software that controls the devices
was inextricably intertwined with instructions that limited access to the two
of us. Period. I’m sure Knight didn’t change this. He has to protect his own
power, and if his underlings could use these devices without him, what would
stop them from freelancing? He needs control over his people. Some are true
believers, but some are just in it for the money and power. And most, of
course, have no idea what this is really all about, as is the case with Q5.”

“So I’m guessing there are no duplicate Edgar Knights
out there,” said Blake.

“Hard to imagine,” said Cargill. “A megalomaniac like him
would never be able to, um . . . trust himself.”

“Right,” said Jenna. “So maybe Roger
Federer
doesn’t want to play Roger Federer for the title,
after all.”

Blake gestured to Cargill. “Can you still activate
his
devices?” he asked.

“Almost certainly. And he can still activate mine.
Tearing out either of our accesses from the software can’t be done without
compromising it. You’d have to redesign very complex control systems. Why
tamper with success? He can use his own devices whenever he wants, so why would
he use mine?”

“And vice-versa,” said Blake.

“Yes,” said Cargill. “Even if he did take my access
away somehow, I had a backdoor engineered in without his knowledge. I wanted to
be able to control it, even with respect to Knight. To override him. I suspect
he’s built or duplicated additional devices, but each of these would also
retain this backdoor access.”

“Have you ever re-captured any of his devices?” asked
Blake.

“Not yet. They give off a telltale radiation signature—call
it dark energy residual—but you have to be within a mile or two to pick it up.
It’s very faint.”

“Any other major pieces of the
puzzle?” said Blake. “Or are we pretty much up to speed?”

“You’re close. I’ve told you all
the key facts.”

“I have to admit,” said Jenna, “as
absurd and horrible as this all is, it does seem to explain everything that’s happened
since I got involved.” She paused, remembering, and a veil of sadness settled
over her. “So Knight was right about how Nathan and I came into the picture,
wasn’t he?”

Cargill nodded, looking distinctly
uncomfortable. “Yes,” he said. “We’ve had computers tasked with monitoring any
scientist who might have even a slight chance of reproducing Knight’s work, or
in this case, explaining and extending it. When Nathan wrote about forty-five
microseconds, he may as well have triggered a nuclear-powered siren. But we never
wanted to hurt him,” he insisted. “We wanted to show him our set-up, tell him
about Knight, and recruit him.”

“But Knight had a mole,” said
Jenna, “and was just waiting for you to find someone like Nathan.”

“Yes. I was asleep at the wheel. It
was unforgivable carelessness. Knight had been absolutely quiet since he left. I
assumed he was building his team and capabilities, making sure to stay well
under my radar while evading my considerable efforts to locate him. I let
myself believe he wouldn’t risk taking any actions that might give himself
away. I got soft and stupid. In short, he lulled me to sleep. It goes without
saying,” he added, his eyes now blazing, “that I am now very much awake.”

“But at the cost of Nathan’s life,”
said Jenna.

Cargill lowered his eyes. “Yes.
Knight’s people must have been closing in on Dr. Wexler during his ambush. My
men knew if Knight got to him, there would be nothing to stop him from
ultimately achieving his goals.”

There was silence in the large
conference room for almost a full minute, as everyone digested all that had
been discussed.

“So what now?” said Blake, finally
breaking the spell.

 
“I’d love for all of you to join our efforts,”
replied Cargill.

He turned toward Greg Soyer and
nodded, making sure he knew he was included in this invitation. “Part of this
is because you now know the score, and not many do. People who do are valuable.
Since I want to limit this number, having you join the team would kill two
birds with one stone.”

“And the other part?” said Blake.

“You’ve impressed the hell out of
me, Mr. Blake. I wasn’t just blowing smoke when I told you this over the phone.
I could use a man like you. As the number three man here, just behind Joe.”

Blake stared at Cargill
thoughtfully, but didn’t respond.

“And we would love to add another
world-class physicist like Dr. Walsh. Greg’s computer and Arabic language
skills are also extremely impressive and would be very useful to us. And while
Jenna is in genetics rather than the physical sciences, she is brilliant, and
given the depth of her knowledge about what is really happening here, she could
make significant contributions. Who better to study the ethics of our
situation, and to find ways to keep me honest?”

Aaron Blake exchanged glances with
the other three in question. “I’m sure I speak for us all in saying that we’d
need to consider this a while before making any decisions. And learn more about
your operation and goals.”

“Of course,” said Cargill. “Perhaps
we can convince all of you to stay with us for a few weeks while you’re
considering. Think of it as a trial period. We can pull strings so you have
cover stories that keep your options open, and your employers happy.”

“Maybe,” said Blake noncommittally.
“You’ve given us a lot to think about. We just have to decide how much we trust
you.”

“I understand,” said Cargill,
rising from his chair and motioning for the rest of the group to do the same.
“So let me give you a tour, and demonstrate duplication. Then you can review
tapes of Knight pushing for more aggressive use of the technology. And then of
some of the men we captured who were in his camp. I’m not sure I painted Knight
as being as much of a monster as he really is, but when you hear firsthand
accounts of what he really wants to accomplish, I think you’ll find it very
eye-opening, and very disturbing, ”

“You want to do all of this right now?”
said Jenna.

“Absolutely,” replied Cargill. “The
faster I can get you comfortable, the better.”

He blew out a long breath. “Because
we’re dealing with a resurgent Edgar Knight. And we have a lot of work to do.”

47

The tour of Cheyenne Mountain—at
least three quarters of it, since Cargill had said they couldn’t venture into
the south quadrant and risk certain people there seeing them—had been as
fascinating as any tour Jenna Morrison had ever taken. And yet only half of her
mind was taking it in.

The other half was darting
around like an over-caffeinated hummingbird, flittering madly from thought to
thought. She had been drinking from a
firehose
since
Sunday night, a period of less than seventy-two hours into which ten lifetimes
of agony and trauma and revelation had been crammed. Her world had been
destroyed, she had feared for her life on numerous occasions, and her horizons
had been expanded in unimaginable ways.

And now she was being given a
tour of the most remarkable facility in the US by the man who headed the group that
had killed Nathan. Could she really work with this man? Just bury the hatchet
and forgive? Should she say, “Sure I’ll work with you. Ever since you killed my
fiancé, I’ve become a lot more flexible.”

She hated herself for not hating
Lee Cargill more.

But he seemed genuine, and a
good man. A man striving to help protect the world, a man who agonized over
many of the things he had been forced to do in service to this goal. A man who
was forced to weigh innocent lives and make impossible choices.

But she had thought the same of
Edgar Knight, proving how easily she could be fooled.

The difference was that Lee
Cargill was offering proof. And she was helpless, entirely in his control, and
he had done nothing to take advantage of this. At least not so far.

Even if she came to believe that
killing Nathan had been the only option under the circumstances—still a big
if—could she ever forgive? And could she really change gears, abandon the years
she had spent working toward her dream of becoming an experimental geneticist?
And did Lee Cargill really mean it when he said one of her jobs would be to
find ways to guard against abuses of power—by him and Q5? While this wouldn’t
be her only responsibility, it was sure to be a treacherously difficult task,
with no obvious solutions.

But wasn’t working with Q5,
especially on this assignment, more important than anything else she could do
with her life? And although they would be part of a larger team, the number of
people within Q5 who knew what was driving this group was relatively small, so
she would have ample opportunity to socialize with, and work with, Dan Walsh
and Aaron Blake, something she found immensely appealing, much to her own
surprise.

She had heard of the unbreakable
bonds forged between brothers-in-arms during times of war, but never thought
she would experience this. But she had. The level of affection, loyalty, and
friendship she now felt toward the two men who had been with her through the
past days’ trials and tribulations was extraordinary.

“So now that we’re done with the
tour,” she heard Lee Cargill saying, as though through a fog, “it’s time for
the demonstration.”

These words brought Jenna back
from her reverie. If a time travel demonstration wasn’t worthy of her total
focus, nothing was.

Cargill led the group through a
reinforced door into a large room, a perfect square of maybe twenty-five yards
on a side. The ceiling was unfinished mountain granite, but almost close enough
to jump up and touch, especially for Cargill, the tallest of the group.

Walsh glanced up and winced. “Is
it just me, or is having such a low ceiling that weighs as much as . . . well, as
a mountain, a little disconcerting?”

Jenna and Blake both nodded
their agreement, while Cargill exchanged a glance with Joe Allen and smiled.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” he said, “while that feeling gets a little
better, it never fully goes away.”

“Good to know I have company,”
said the physicist.

Cargill led them to a rectangular
structure against one wall, about the size of a small apartment bathroom, made
principally of what looked like two-inch-thick clear Plexiglas. The Plexiglas enclosed
inner walls of four-inch-thick white plastic. A recessed viewing window had
been cut into the plastic about chest height. The chamber’s floor and walls
were crisscrossed with red grid lines and several arrows. The most interesting
feature of the structure was the thick Plexiglas door with a bank-vault handle,
which needed to be turned or spun to gain access.

Next to the structure was a
table on which sat a sophisticated desktop supercomputer and several monitors.

“If this is your time travel
device,” said Jenna, “it sure doesn’t look very impressive. Shouldn’t there be
lasers and generators and cool spinning helices?”

Cargill laughed. “You forgot about
electrical discharges and blindingly bright lights,” he said. “I’m afraid we’re
a disappointment compared to Hollywood’s vision of time travel.”

“Not to mention,” said Greg
Soyer, “that people in the movies tend to go back in time more than forty-five
millionths of a second. You know, just a hair.”

“All kidding aside,” said Jenna,
“you would seem to need much greater complexity to make something this
impossible work.”

“The plastic is hiding all kinds
of electronics and power grids,” said Joe Allen. “The device does generate a
field, and it does have means to change the polarity and orientation of the field
to achieve directionality. But once you know the secret to making it work, it’s
surprisingly simple.”

“Which is what makes this even
more dangerous,” said Cargill. “At least nuclear weapons have the decency to be
difficult to construct in one’s basement.”

“Think of it this way,” said
Allen. “The quintessence field powers it, and this is everywhere. The trick is
to tap into it and let it provide the incomprehensible energies required. It’s
like standing under the world’s most powerful magnet before the discovery of metal.
You would think that tapping this mysterious magnetic force would require some
major generators and complex electronics, when the truth is, a simple hunk of
metal is all you’d need.”

“Good analogy,” said Jenna.

Cargill waited for further questions.
When none were forthcoming, he said, “So let me demonstrate. Does anyone want
to volunteer something to send back through time?” he asked. “A shoe? A piece
of jewelry?”

Blake pulled a well-worn brown
leather wallet from his back pocket. “How about this?”

“Perfect,” said Cargill. He took
the wallet and entered the chamber. He placed it in a precise location and
orientation on the floor, using the grid lines as a guide, and then placed a
small glowing disk on top of it, one that was about the size of a very fat
quarter and clearly electronic in nature. He then exited, spinning the door
handle until a buzzing sound from the computer indicated the room was once
again airtight.

He walked the short distance to
the table and sat before the computer. “Joe, show them to the destination area.
I’ll set this to fire one minute from now.”

Cargill’s hands flew over the
keyboard while his second-in-command escorted them to a position fifty-eight
feet away, along a diagonal. An X, about the size of a stop sign, appeared on
the floor, made from red duct tape.

Jenna took her place with her
companions, roughly encircling the X, and shook her head. The fact that she was
about to witness one of the most extraordinary scientific and technological achievements
of all time by watching a handmade X on the floor was absurd beyond measure.

Cargill began bellowing out a
countdown from twenty yards away. “In five. Four. Three. Two. One. Now!”

There were three gasps as Blake’s
wallet appeared in the center of the X, with the electronic disk still on top
of it.

Greg Soyer, who had seen a few
demonstrations already, simply grinned, and Joe Allen didn’t display emotion of
any kind.

Intellectually, Jenna had
expected this to happen, but it was still insane, still unreal. There had been
no discharge, no fanfare, no sound. One moment the wallet wasn’t there, and the
next it was.

“Notice that we only see one wallet,”
said Allen while the three newcomers were still gawking. He lifted the
electronic disk and held it up. “Which means this transmitter did its job. The
instant it realized it was no longer at the coordinates we programmed in, it signaled
the computer, which aborted the firing of the device.”

He picked up the wallet and
handed it to Blake. “Follow me,” he said as he began walking back to Cargill.

When they arrived at the
apparatus, Cargill turned the handle and held open the door, gesturing for
Blake to enter.

His wallet was still on the
floor, just where Cargill had left it. He brought it back out and set both
wallets on the table. There could be no doubt they were identical. Every discolored
spot, every worn-down edge, every nick was the same.

He opened both wallets to reveal
the same contents, laid out identically. He removed a thin sheath of bills from
both wallets, and compared the top one on each, a five. They were identical in
every way. Their serial numbers, of course, but also creases, dirt, coloration
and everything, down to the last atom.

Cargill asked for one of the
sets of bills. When Blake handed them to him, he produced a lighter and set
them on fire, tossing them into a steel trashcan by the desk when they became
too hot to handle. “We tend to frown upon having bills with the same serial
numbers in circulation,” he explained.

 
“Can you repeat the demonstration,” said
Blake, “so we can watch the sending chamber this time?”

Cargill laughed. “We can do
that, but it won’t do any good. I don’t know how much of this Knight covered,
but you never actually see something get sent back through time. You never see
it disappear. Because the universe starts all over again, reboots, after it arrives
in the past. So the future universe it came from never comes into existence.
And then it sends a signal to turn off the system.”

“So the universe with the wallet
in the chamber
waiting
to be sent
still exists,” added Allen. “But the universe from which it is actually sent
never does.”

 
“That is just so messed up,” said Blake in
exasperation, and Jenna, Walsh, and Soyer nodded their agreement.

“Here is my advice to all of you,”
said Cargill. “The best thing to do is ignore time travel, and don’t think
about the paradoxes too hard. If you do, your head really will explode,” he
added with a wry smile. “Just think of it as duplication and teleportation. But
always keep in mind that the universe seems to go out of its way to ensure that
infinite alternate timelines aren’t allowed. So no matter what, we only ever
get this one universe.”

He sighed. “So we’d better make
sure we don’t screw it up.”