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  “Yah,” he said quietly into the mouthpiece. As expected, it was Jeff checking status of the target. “I can see him across the room,” he replied to Jeff’s question. “He stopped for dinner about forty-five minutes ago. I suspect he will be on the road again soon.”

  Jeff’s voice was somewhat difficult to hear over all the noise at the bar. “Has he acted normally? Anything to indicate he is worried or planning to meet with anyone?” Jeff asked.

  “No, nothing unusual. Other than leaving shortly after meeting with you guys, he has done nothing out of the ordinary. Like the meeting never happened. Oh, he called that boss of his, Carol, and left a message asking to meet with her in the morning. We had his cell being monitored as you requested. The call wasn’t very helpful. Mostly he was simply letting her know about the situation, that there would probably be some questioning of their people. That was all. It’s all recorded and is being forwarded to your office.”

  “Where did you pick him up?”

  “I waited for him outside the main gate, about a mile down the road.” Sam hesitated. “One funny thing though. The GPS based tracking unit that is supposed to send me his location isn’t working. I tested it after we installed it last night in preparation for today. But when I tried it a little while ago I got nothing. It didn’t matter though. There were really only two ways he could go. If he had turned the other way I would have started out after him. As it was, he headed the expected direction. After I waited for him to get about a half mile ahead of me, I pulled out after him. Other than fighting traffic, it has been an easy tail. He never even looked around, which means he doesn’t know, doesn’t care, or is being very clever.”

  “I’m sure he has considered the possibility,” Jeff continued. “He might be just as confused as we are by all this. Still, Williams wants to be sure about him. This is a very odd development.”

  “Okay, I’ll stay with him, but even money says he will head home and that will be it for the night. I think he only stopped because traffic was so bad. Something about the way he was driving suggests he usually doesn’t come this way at this time of day. I don’t think he expected this much traffic. I’ll let you know if he does anything unusual. Do I stay the night if he packs it in?”

  “Absolutely. Call in and we will send out relief around midnight. I don’t want him pulling something clever and making a move after we assume he is staying home.”

  “Good thing he stopped here to eat,” the agent responded. “I’m still curious though. I wasn’t there for the briefing. We have worked this Morris thing for a year. Why does this Jim guy all of a sudden become so important? I would have thought he would have been looked at a year ago”.

  Jeff summarized the situation. “Remember I wasn’t involved a year ago. I just came on board a short time ago. That really doesn’t matter, however. We weren’t entirely up front with the subject when we met with him. We told him about the gun and the letter, and that old man Morris had megabytes of encrypted data on his hidden computer system. We didn’t tell him that there were other items of similar oddity as well. Another thing. The only things we found that were not encrypted in that basement room were in a single container, and looked as if they were not normally stored there. Almost like they had been brought from somewhere else for some reason when Morris suddenly disappeared. Williams suspects another cache of surprises will be found.”

  “What kind of things were there?” questioned the agent into his phone.

  “First, there was a page or two of very strange characters. On an attached note Morris indicates the characters are samples of a language of some sort. He seems to have contacted a number of international experts to help him identify what language or interpret the meaning. From the looks of things, he has been trying to resolve this for many, many years, but no indication of any progress.”

  “Odd,” muttered the other through a mouthful of hamburger.

  “Then”, Jeff continued, “there is a small piece of greenish-blue metal. You can see where a small sample has been removed, probably for the analysis that is attached. This is something that Morris had first done quite a few years ago. It appears he repeated the sampling a number of times as technology improved. He has test reports going back over thirty years, but the most recent report indicates the composition is entirely of common known materials. The report also indicates that there is no known way to combine those elements into the metal-crystal compound that was submitted. It has mechanical properties that are very unusual. The lab doing the analysis has suggested a lot of money could be made selling the product. Williams wants to have these analyses verified, including some form of crystal diffraction study to understand the molecular structure or the stuff. It damn sure is hard. We couldn’t even mark it.”

  “This is getting weird,” responded the agent.

  “Oh, and then there is this guy’s boss,” continued Jeff.

  “Carol,” offered the agent, pushing away his completed dinner.

  “Yeah, Carol,” responded Jeff. “Morris had apparently investigated her as well. He mentions a number of questionable ‘facts’ in her documented history, and seems to imply that there are too many holes for her background to be valid. We need to check this immediately as their consulting firm has access to many very secret programs. I cannot imagine how she could have passed a false background through all the security checks that must have been performed.”

  “And then there is the mystery gun,” offered the agent.

  “And then there’s that, to tie this Jim Crampton into everything. All the items stored together in the one box. Everything a mystery. Williams thinks all of this is going to lead us to what happened to Morris, and doesn’t even seem to care about how odd it all seems.”

  “And you?” asked the other.

  “I’m assigned to Williams,” he replied. “But, at the same time, there is something much bigger than Morris here. I can’t wait to see what the various tests are going to show. If they validate what Morris’s documents claim.... well, I just don’t know. But for now, let’s see what happens.”

  “Have you bugged the house and their main office?” asked the field agent.

  “Not the office. We haven’t been able to get into the office, despite her being out of town. We planted devices in the house, but she hasn’t returned yet.”

  “Oops,” interjected the agent. “Target’s on the move. Gotta go. I’ll call back after I put him to bed.” With that he clicked off his phone and dug out a rumpled wallet. He left a twenty-dollar bill on the counter, as he didn’t have time to wait for the cashier to check him out.

  Chapter 10

  Saturday, 20 May 2006

  Seattle, Washington

  It was seven o’clock in the morning when I walked into Carol’s executive suite on the second floor of our consulting offices at Epoch. Of course she was already there, dressed the part of a chief executive in her ladies suit with a pale pink blouse. She had never understood high heels, and today wore her standard flats, although I’d bet they cost a couple of hundred dollars a pair. Never a fan of jewelry, she wore only a diamond stud in each ear and a stylish watch on her left wrist. I could imagine the surprise and confusion that would result if that watch were ever examined closely by the wrong people. While the functions of the uptime technology packed into the device would never be understood, the degree of miniaturization alone would raise a few eyebrows. I knew that like me, she also wore her tunnel key under her blouse, although it was always concealed from view. It was something one could not part with, even though we now have several people we could count on as backup should we be separated from our own keys.

  At forty-one years of age, one would swear she couldn’t be a day over thirty. Another benefit of the life extending medications we were all taking. She explained last year when the question came up that appearance would become a problem for all of us in a few more years as it would be many more years before any of us looked to be in our forties. At some point the people we worked and i
nteracted with would start to notice.

  “Jim,” she said through a brilliant smile, and she rose and walked around her desk to greet me. A warm hug followed, and we walked together across the room where we could be more comfortable. We had known each other over twelve years now, had shared a variety of adventures up and down the timeline, as well as personal intimacy. She had saved both my life and that of my wife, and oddly enough as these thing work out, was my wife’s closest friend.

  “Naiya?” she asked, almost as if she was reading my mind.

  “Still at downtime headquarters. I expect her back in a couple of days.”

  “Good. I miss her being here. She is the only one I can share my personal secrets with.”

  I wondered about those secrets as I marveled at the absurdity of such a close personal friendship between the two women, one born almost 800 years uptime, and the other, Naiya, born even further downtime. What were the odds against such a development? But, I considered myself extremely lucky. I had my wife, and it hadn’t cost me my closest friend and long time ally.

  “So, tell me about your interesting visit yesterday.”

  We skipped over talking about her trip to Washington. Important to the business, it was a low priority to the real reason for our existence. I knew she would brief our executive Vice President, Mark Jenson, who really ran the company day-to-day about everything important in that arena. After a number of very successful years, a little fore knowledge had guaranteed that, we had grown significantly. Now the company fielded more than seventy experts in far ranging disciplines, supporting both government and commercial endeavors across the country. Our foreign involvement was still in its infancy due mostly to the strict monitoring associated with government ITAR regulations that made official international activities too bothersome to pursue. Only a half dozen individuals really knew what we were actually about. Only those few carefully chosen individuals knew about the thirty-five special people funded from private funds, and of the half dozen facilities we had established both in the United States and Canada. Only three others had keys allowing them unrestricted access to the time complex.

  “Not the break in security we had anticipated,” I said, unconcerned that we might be monitored. Current state-of-the art electronics was simply no match for uptime technology. Carol had equipped our facility and homes with special gear, readily available in her time era, that would disrupt and permanently disable any hidden bugs within the facility. In addition, her office was fully shielded by further electronic marvels that would thwart any 21st century technology directed at monitoring our conversations. Her office was inside, without any windows, to further guarantee complete privacy. Any search, legal or covert, would simply fail to find any of the uptime equipment, because none of it bore any resemblance to electronics that existed today. Searchers, assuming they were even clever enough to look in the right areas, would simply not recognize what they were seeing.

  “As I said in the message I left you yesterday, they have the gun we couldn’t find. It appears that Kurt Morris came across it somehow, quite some time ago, which suggests a reason why he has always shown an unusual interest in us, you and me in particular.”

  “That damn annoying old man,” she muttered under her breath. “Even now he causes us problems. I had thought when we successfully caused his disappearance last year, especially since we were nowhere in the area, that we would be done with his interference. It seems I was premature in my expectations.”

  “It’s more complicated than just having an old gun of mine in his possession,” I explained. “Not only does it create some nebulous link between us which didn’t exist before, but unfortunately Morris left some documentation along with the relic which makes the whole thing appear very bizarre in their eyes. Given the total lack of progress in finding Morris, and the desperation of this particular agent, it’s the kind of thing he is guaranteed to follow up.”

  I hadn’t told her any of this in my brief message for obvious reasons. “The agent knew something of its age,” she said, already guessing where I must be headed. “How long has he known it was your gun?”

  “I can only repeat what they told me yesterday, and I suspect they were not telling me everything. But it seems Morris had to have known for quite some time. I get the impression the agents have only recently become aware of it and the materials Morris left behind. The young one, an agent named Jeff, no last name given, seemed curious in a way that suggested he has access to more than they were letting on.” I paused for a minute and considered the best way to organize the story. It took only a few minutes to fill her in on the details, as I knew them.

  “Then they only have Morris’s note to support this wild story.” She thought for a minute. “They have no way to trace the real history, and know how much of what Morris documented is actually factual. Even if they have some cloth he claims was with the gun they can date, there is no way they can know if it was really found with the gun, or part of some hoax that Morris was preparing for unknown reasons. After all, he never came forward with it.” She paused.

  “What about the gun and the material it’s encrusted with?” I asked. “Do we know if that can be dated?”

  “I really don’t know, but we will find out. Even the deterioration of the metal itself may give them some clues. But I’ll bet there are ways even that could have been faked; ways that would be hard to dispute.” She stopped and looked at me, remembering a time many years ago. “If only we had found it that day!”

  I nodded, then continued with another tack. “It seems that any investigation of the gun itself will likely result in too many unresolved questions. Not to mention how unbelievable the story surrounding it will sound. Even the senior Fed, his name is Williams by the way, didn’t come across as being comfortable with the concept. But the concern remains that all of this has piqued his interest, and that means he might be looking at us harder than we would really like.”

  “How formal is this investigation?” Carol asked, making a note to herself on the pad she had brought to the table. “Do we know exactly who they are working for?”

  “That’s one thing working for us, “I responded. “I sense that he is working with a small team, at most. His focus has been the Morris disappearance and the failure in that area has significantly affected his status and responsibility. It seems he is obsessed with finding an answer to that mystery, perhaps neglecting other responsibilities. It may well affect the reception his discovery will receive within his organization. Maybe wishful thinking, but he didn’t look to be on the top of his game,” and I described my perceptions of him. “Doris told me just before I left the other day that they were with the NSG. If I recall, the NSG is some kind of watchdog agency that supports the government in running security checks of personnel, and sometimes runs investigations when there is a violation of security protocols. As organizations go, they aren’t one of the heavy hitters.”

  “Well, we have people who can find out who he is and how much of a problem we are looking at. What about the other one, the young agent named Jeff?”

  “I could see him looking beyond the obvious Morris connection if he was given the chance,” I answered. “The older one keeps a heavy hand on him. It would be interesting to know the relationship there. Is he just a junior agent assigned to Morris, or something else?”

  She made another note on her pad.

  “So, in your opinion, how big is our problem?” she asked.

  “Mostly a nuisance factor,” I replied. “Oh, I admit I was pretty wound up at first. But what do they really have here?” I stopped and considered how best to summarize the ping-pong thoughts that had kept me awake the previous night.

  “First, the firm is pretty clean. Mark runs most of the action, and only a small handful of the staff is other than they seem. And even they usually perform real consulting work, just like the job I do for Aero. All of our business is legitimate, and the success mostly the result of a great manager and top notch people doing what
they love. Our results should be spectacular. Oh, we have selectively enhanced our results using a tidbit or two from uptime, but even that is nothing that couldn’t have been another brilliant insight by one of our staff geniuses. We pay top dollar, well above the industry standard, and reward our people with other perks as well. Why not, money is not really an issue. We have the means to generate whatever resources we really need, and we aren’t doing this to make money like everyone else. Still, the company makes a good profit, a strong argument if anyone questions how well we pay our people. Besides, one of our goals has always been to get the best people around, so if we get a breakthrough, we have the talent needed to pursue it.”

  “And the company has been vetted every other year by government oversight,” she added. “Working the classified programs has exposed us to frequent checks. That should work for us as well.”

  “That’s right. Our agent friend is going to have rough going trying to initiate an investigation of a company that has a clean history and provides a vital function for the country’s security. No, this is going to have to be on a personal level. That’s where the gun points anyway.”

  “So you think he will go after people. You suspect our key staff will be affected?”

  “I wish he would go that way,” I replied. “It would waste a lot of their time with nothing to show for it. But I don’t think he will. I think any investigation will be much more restricted. It is most likely that I will be the primary target. After all, the connection they are pursuing directly links a possession of mine to Morris. And you will be affected, of course. For two reasons that I can think of. We are linked together from day one, and Morris had reservations about you as well.”

  “You mentioned that. I would really like to know what he documented for them. It would help us be prepared. We did a damn good job setting up my artificial past, but there could be cracks there somewhere. Some little thing we overlooked. For all the hoops they make you jump through, the government background checks are not as effective as they would like people to believe. We have fooled them with both my identity and Naiya’s, and they have looked pretty hard. Especially at Naiya when we brought her in for citizenship posing as a Greek citizen.”