One Second Per Second Read online

  Gallie and Bess join forces to visit the bathroom. I see a risk there. Even stone cold sober, Bess would be a worry. But Gallie can handle anything, I think. I look around the bar which is now filling up. A guy a few seats up from me looks familiar. Not a TMAer, for sure. I suppose I was bound to see someone the young Joad had known. A teacher maybe? I’m at an age where teachers look like kids so it’s possible. An older kid from school? No, too old for that. I down another glug of wine and look at the shadows growing over Red Mountain. I turn back to the guy at the bar who is now looking at me. I smile and nod. Maybe he’s going to solve the mystery for me. He smiles back widely. My heart misses a beat. Oh Fuck! I leap from my seat sending it flying backwards and lope toward the women’s restroom. I notice Bruce has gone. I burst through the door and Gallie and Bess look up, startled from their conversation. A woman exiting a stall looks at me in horror before reversing back in.

  “We gotta go, now.” I shout. “They’re here.” They ask no questions and follow me out. I see the kitchen entrance and run through the swinging doors. Kitchens always have back doors, don’t they? It’s where the chef goes to smoke. We run, navigating steel counters and cupboards toward the ‘Exit’ sign. We emerge in the back parking lot. Twenty yards away there’s a knot of men in conversation who don’t notice us. Again, I thank god for the incompetence of the slobs Asmus employs. But if we try to get to our car, we’ll be seen for sure. Where the hell is Bruce? Asmus’s goons are standing between us and where we need to be, although without Bruce and his keys, the car is useless to us. I point to the beginning of the vineyard that borders the parking lot. Crouched, we run into the vines. Then I hear shouting, but the heavy vernacular is impossible to understand.

  “What happened to Bruce?” Bess asks. “What good is a guard who vanishes just when a guard is what you need?”

  “Can you see anything?” Gallie whispers. “I can’t.”

  “I’m not putting my head up,” I say. There are enough leaves on the vines to keep us concealed, but also enough to prevent our seeing what’s happening. We look down the aisle of vines and it’s long without an end in sight.

  “We could just keep going,” Gallie says. “It must come out somewhere.”

  “Once they pass this row, they’ll see us no matter how far we get.” I say. “We’d be like pins in a bowling lane.”

  “I’ll strangle Bruce if I survive this,” Bess whispers. “He could be picking them off like sitting ducks. I know these dirtbags.”

  “The car is a mobile arsenal,” I say. “If we could get to it–”

  “Without a key?” Gallie whispers.

  “You know,” Bess says, “I’m put right off winemaking.”

  Two black, shiny boots land in front me. It happened too fast to be sure, but I think Gallie had balanced on her hands and kicked out hard with the soles of her feet, bringing the owner of the boots down on top of me. As I pull myself from under him, another one of them jumps the vines and I see Bess lunge at him. She’s too light to bring him down but as he takes a couple of steps backwards, it gives me a chance to take a run at him, jump and kick him in the stomach. We hit the ground at the same time. I see Gallie, red-faced and struggling fiercely with the first man she had brought down. He’s on his ass holding on to her rather than fighting. I try to get up to help but then stars fill my head and I stagger sideways into the vines. I hear a voice asking if I’m okay. It’s Bess. Gallie and the man she’s struggling with are there, and then they’re not. It takes me seconds to realize that they’ve popped out. Accelerated. Bess is kneeling by me, holding my hand and looking into my face. Then I turn to see the barrel of a gun pointing at me.

  “No,” I hear someone shout. “ ’ee didn’t say to kill no one.”

  “Yer better not,” another voice says. Then there’s suddenly quiet but for the vines rustling in the evening breeze.

  “They’ve gone,” Bess says. The stars are dispersing and I feel a trickle on my forehead.

  “They wanted Gallie,” I whisper.

  FORTY-SIX

  Bess helps me into the van. Zhivov is driving and Prasad is in the back row.

  “How the hell didn’t you detect them coming?” is the first thing I say.

  “Are you okay?” Zhivov asks.

  “There must have been little or no uptime bow wave,” says Prasad.

  “No, didn’t see ‘em coming,” Zhivov adds.

  “How is that possible?” Bess pulls the sliding door closed and we take off with a jog.

  “You’ve got to remember they have technology we don’t,” Prasad says, with irritating calm.

  “Gallie is gone,” I say, lightly touching the egg on the back of my skull. “Accelerated. Bruce too, maybe.”

  “How didn’t anyone in there see Bruce vanish?” Bess asks.

  “Maybe they did. We were out of there too fast to ask.”

  “Where do you think they’ve taken her?” Bess asks. I try to think through the pain.

  “Between the escape and the strike,” I say. “Must be.”

  “Make sense,” Zhivov says. “He’d come looking for you after you got away, and, hope to god, he’d be in no condition to be doing anything after the strike.”

  “We’ll confirm that,” Prasad says.

  “So now our plans change,” I say.

  “No,” Prasad replies.

  “Yes they do. Now Gallie is probably in the mansion–the one that’ll be a crater.”

  “Or she’ll wind up in the barn with the others,” Prasad says. I look back at him and wince with the pain it causes.

  “You want us to take that risk? This was a tit-for-tat mission. I took his wife and he takes Gallie. Those goons had no orders to kill anyone, or to do anything but abduct Gallie. Asmus wanted her and I’m betting he’s going to keep her close.”

  “I understand,” Prasad says, “but you know we can’t send anyone in until after the strike. We’ve been through that and nothing has changed. They’d be dead on arrival, literally. No way around it.”

  “Nothing has changed?” I echo, incredulously. “A fuck load has changed. Just now, everything changed. We’re not going to let Jane Galois get incinerated by a missile that we fired.” I look at Zhivov but he says nothing, his eyes on the road. Bess is staring at me.

  “Missile strike?” she says.

  The medic exits after having applied something to my head that stung like hell. The detector facility sick bay is a bed, two chairs, a chunky computer and monitor, a metal sink, a poster describing the benefits of a healthy diet, and a few primitive-looking machines. Bess and Zhivov are silent.

  “We’re not going to let this happen,” I say.

  “No, we’re not,” Zhivov replies. I’m nonplused. I’d said it to begin the argument. Are we talking about different things? Is Zhivov straying from the company line? I know his type. The company line, rational or irrational, fair or unfair, smart or idiotic, is what they defend beyond all reason. You don’t get to be the Director of TMA any other way.

  “We’re going to get Gallie out of there?” I ask, waiting to be corrected.

  “Yes, we are.”

  “You mean talk your boss around?” Bess asks.

  “That’s not possible,” Zhivov says. “There’s no talking Prasad out of anything. And his logic isn’t wrong.”

  “You’re telling me you’re willing to go against Prasad’s will?” I ask but don’t risk waiting for an answer. “Any ideas? How do we prevent popping up inside a hurricane of bullets?”

  “I did have an idea,” he says. “It’d been too unhinged to bring up, but like you said, things have changed.” I turn toward Bess who gives me the look of a child whose parents had better not be thinking it’s your bedtime. “How many men does Asmus have?” he asks Bess.

  “Ten, a dozen. No more than that. Why?”

  “Ever heard of Russian Roulette?”

  Zhivov locks the deadbolt on the sick bay door. “A dozen men ready to shoot the crap out of whoever shows
up before they can do a thing about it.” He smirks. “But say they detect twenty, thirty arrivals, all simultaneous. Arrivals dispersed all around.”

  “Twelve goons, thirty arrivals.”

  “Let’s make it twelve goons, fifty arrivals.”

  “And I’m one of the arrivals,” I say. “Who are the others?”

  “We’re one of the arrivals,” Zhivov says. “The other forty nine are no one. They’re accelerators accelerating pure fresh air.”

  “Russian Roulette,” I say. “If Asmus and his goons pick our acceleration, that’s the bullet in the chamber?”

  Zhivov nods. “Is it crazy?”

  “Yes, it’s crazy,” Bess replies for me.

  “And you didn’t mention your career-ending idea to Prasad?”

  “You’d take that risk,” Bess asks me. I nod. “And you?” Zhivov nods.

  “You can round up fifty accelerators?”

  “I can.”

  “And weapons?”

  “Weapons? Okay Rambo. Now that we’ve taken the taint off crazy, we may as well go for it.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  I’ve come to notice there’s a pattern to TMA planning. It involves a lot of specifics on how to get to where you need to be, alive, and then from there it plummets on detail. This plan is no exception. In fairness, there’s not much to base a plan on. Gallie is either in a mansion or in a barn. The third option, that she’s in neither, is outside the bounds of the feeble plan we’ve stitched together. The plan has it that we arrive, well-armed, three days after we had escaped, and about the same amount of time before the missile strike. As we arrive, so do another fifty tachyons bursts carrying nothing but air. The plan–the prayer–is that our personal tachyon burst is not among the ones that get enveloped in a hail of lead. This is where the strategy plummets and we lean on pure luck. What we do is go in there, find Gallie and bring her home. My private strategy is to also deal with Asmus in a conclusive way. Not figuring into the strategy is that Boris and I lack even a rudimentary training on the weapons we’ll be taking with us.

  I have a couple of days to spend with Bess as Zhivov goes about his business of collecting the inventory of tools for our wild plan. Because of the stupidity of time, there’s no big rush on preparing, but it’s not the temporal logic that’s driving us. It’s that my heart is in my mouth and every second that passes without knowing what’s happening to Gallie is agony.

  If Bess is still trying to give a second chance to the marriage she never had, she’s concealing it well. But she is serious about restoring the career she never had. We talk wine to the limits of my knowledge. One thing about which there’s no uncertainty is that she has no intention of going home, and no patience for anyone dumb enough to bring it up.

  “Prasad can fuck off to 2030 if he likes, but I’m going nowhere.”

  “Can’t think about that right now.”

  “I know.”

  The night of the mission has arrived. My room is where it starts, and Bess and I are waiting for Zhivov to show up with his final box of tricks.

  “You going to keep each other safe?” Bess asks. She takes my hand and squeezes it.

  “Yes. You know, I had Boris all wrong. First impressions weren’t good, but thank god for him.” I notice my hand is shaking a little so I pull it from Bess’s grip. “He’s not who I thought he was. Breaking the rules. He’s a surprise.”

  “Really?” Bess says with a faint smile.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why is it the smartest people are sometimes the dumbest people?” Bess says. She’s shaking her head. “Didn’t you know?”

  “What?”

  “If your regular IQ was equal to your emotional IQ, you’d never have gotten the gist of breathing,” Bess says. “Boris is head-over-heals for Gallie Galois. How can’t you see that? I’m guessing he has been for years.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. And then you fall out of the blue.”

  “You think they–?”

  “No. He has the look of a man who’s never dared act on it. I wish I knew how not to act on things. My downfall, I’m afraid.” I smile. She doesn’t know it but she had said that same thing to me once before, and my mind turns to Den, the wine entrepreneur and stealer of wives. “Maybe that’s why Jane Galois has men beating her door down and Elizabeth Sato ... doesn’t.”

  Zhivov bursts in carrying the final box. All furniture had been stacked against the walls to make room for his inventory. Boxes of accelerators, eighteenth century clothes and weapons. First he lays out the wrist accelerators across the floor in neat rows. One at a time he programs them, all fifty. They look of different designs and vintages but they’d better all have the same precision. Them arriving even minutes apart turns the game from Russian roulette to straight-up carnage.

  Next we kit up in the breeches, boots, jackets and tricorns. We get an assault rifle each with spare clips and a solid movie-based understanding of how to reload. Zhivov ushers us to the corner of the room to keep out of the tachyon inner blast radii of the unmanned wrist accelerators. We wait, and then like fireworks, the accelerators pop off in twos and threes. They’ll be highly curious picking up these accelerations in the detector control room not a hundred yards from here, but they’ll have no time to do a damn thing about it. After the last one pops, Zhivov and I stand back to back, guns aimed forward, our eyes along their sights, just like we’d seen people do it who know what the hell they’re doing. Zhivov pops off first. I have that feeling you get when you know that in less than a second you could be shredded in a hailstorm of lead and steel. I should be looking along the barrel of my gun, but my last glimpse of 1996 is Bess’s face and the incredulity etched into it.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  The first thing I notice is that I’m not being shredded in a hailstorm of steel and lead. The second thing is a camp of white tents, campfires and the twilit silhouettes of men that extend as far as the eye can see. This is the wrong place. Where the hell am I? I turn to see a group of men clustered around the closest campfire and looking directly at me. I drop my gun and tell Zhivov to do the same thing, although I’m not a hundred percent sure he’s still behind me.

  “Did you see that?” one of the men says, as they get to their feet. They’re holding rifles although they’re not in any kind of uniform. Once more, I’m at the wrong end of several gun barrels.

  “Don’t want any trouble,” I say because that’s all I can think of, as if I’m dealing with a mugger and not a thousand-strong army. I’m sure that my not wanting any trouble is coming as a great relief to them.

  “It’s all good,” I hear Zhivov say. They just came out of nothing. What you mean? Just then. You harecop. Magicked from thin air. They did. Get the lieutenant. You get ‘im. As my eyes adapt to the dark I see that we’ve landed exactly where we had meant to. The mansion is at the center of the vast landscape of tents and the barn is behind us.

  “What’s happening?” Zhivov asks me.

  “This is one hell of any army,” I say. The two men who approach us are unmistakably soldiers, probably officers. They’re wearing the blue jackets of the Continental Army with yellow breeches and black boots. They look us over and someone hands them one of our weapons.

  “They were carrying these?”

  “Yes, they’re ours,” I reply before anyone else has the chance, “but we put them down. We’re not your enemies.” The officer turns to his colleague.

  “These are the swift guns,” he says. He looks back at us. “Where are you from?” He called them swift guns. He’s seen them before.

  “We’re from ...” Where are we from? “We’re Americans.”

  “We’re patriots,” Zhivov says.

  “Are you?” the officer asks with what seems like a hint of sarcasm, although I wouldn’t know how to make that call any more. He whispers something to the other officer. “Come,” he says and walks off. The other officer gives me a shove to follow.

  The Leatown garrison must have been taken. T
here couldn’t have been forty or fifty British troops there, and even if they had had the ‘swift guns’, which I’m not sure Asmus would have let happen so close to home, I doubt that they could have fended off an army of this size. I look toward to the barn but it’s just a shadow against dark. I’m pushed to keep walking.

  “Not in the plan,” I hear Zhivov say behind me, followed by invective after the shove it earned him.

  We’re in the entrance hall with the grand staircase in front of us. There must be a dozen soldiers here alone. I notice that the weapons are purely eighteenth century and that these soldiers, unlike Asmus’s slobs, are standing still, straight and alert. I scan the space. I could see Gallie at any moment, I tell myself, but then fear bubbles up. How did this army take Leatown? Was it violent, a battle? Was Gallie hurt, or worse? Is she even here? Prasad had confirmed that this is where she’d arrived after being taken. But Asmus is a madman. He could have since flung her a thousand years back to die. Or just killed her on arrival.

  We’re told to wait and one of the officers enters what I know to be the drawing room. Zhivov and I are facing each other. I realize we’re still wearing the wrist accelerators. This could be our escape. If it is, we better decide fast because in that drawing room there may be someone who knows what these things can do. But if we accelerate, then what? We get nowhere. No, we need to see this through. Gallie could be in that room. If she is I could lunge for her and accelerate us both. The programming is already in place and a touch of the ‘Activate’ key will take us to where we need to be. I notice Zhivov is looking alternately at me and my accelerator. He’s having a similar thought. I nod. But it then occurs to me that he may be thinking something different entirely–that we should pop off right now. Then the drawing room door opens and the officer beckons us. I take a deep, slow breath to settle my shaking.