Three days later, I still hadn’t met our prisoner. But I had invested nearly sixty hours watching what seemed to be a gentle life that revolved around old novels and classic movies. I took note of his postures and motions, and I tried gauging his reactions to what he was seeing on the page and screen. But most interesting to me were those occasional moments when he did nothing but stare off in some empty direction. I wouldn’t let myself guess what he was thinking. But the black eyes would open wide, and the handsome features would quickly change their expression. Smiles lasted longer than frowns, I noticed. I saw flashes of pity and scorn, mild embarrassment and tight-lipped defiance. A few staff members volunteered opinions about the prisoner’s mind. He was reflecting on his childhood, some offered. Others claimed he was gazing into our shared past or the looming future. But what I focused on was an appealing and graceful face that moved effortlessly between emotions—the well-honed tools of the consummate actor.
Twice each day, the prisoner was ushered into a long exercise yard built specifically for him. His gait was always relaxed, long arms swinging with a metronome’s precision and the elegant hands holding five-pound weights, shaped like dog bones and covered with soft red rubber. I thought of an aging fashion model marching on the runway, except he lacked a model’s wasted prettiness or the vacuous gaze. He was endlessly pleasant to whichever guard was standing at the locked door. I paid close attention to his attempts at conversation, his words less important than his charming tone and the effortless, beguiling smiles. Most of the staff was under orders to never speak with the man, which made for intriguing games of will. Somehow he had learned each guard’s first name, and he wasn’t shy about using what he knew. “How’s this day of ours, Jim?” he might ask. “Is it the best day ever? Or is just me who thinks this way? Feel the sunshine. Listen to these birds singing. Doesn’t this kind of morning make you happy to your bones, Jim?”
There was no sun underground, and there were no birds to hear. But after twelve years and five months of captivity, one man seemed to be absolutely thriving.
I watched the five daily prayers, the salat. But I didn’t intrude when the prisoner used the bathroom or shower. (Let others record what he washed and wiped. I could check the database later, if I found reason.) While he slept, I sipped coffee and kept passing tabs on his snoring and the busy dreaming brain. Delicate instruments buried inside his Tempur-pedic mattress tried to convince me that they provided a window into that unknowable soul. But there were no insights, of course. That’s why those nights were opportune times to pick my way through an endless array of summaries and reports, clinical data and highly intelligent, utterly useless speculation.
A favorite teacher once told me that our bodies are epics full of treachery and important residues. That’s why I turned again and again to the medical data. Samples of the prisoner’s fluids and flesh and his thick black hair had been digested and analyzed by a laboratory built for no other purpose. Three thousand years of medical science struggling to turn meat and bone into a narrative that I could understand. But in most cases, my subject’s DNA was remarkably unremarkable—save for a few dozen novel genes tucked into the first and fifth and nineteenth chromosomes, that is. The dental evidence was unusual, but not remarkably so. The first x-rays had revealed an old break in the right wrist that never healed properly. Later, more intrusive examinations had found an assortment of microscopic features that might mean much, unless they were meant to mislead. Only a handful of qualified experts had been allowed to examine that body in full; yet even those few voices managed to produce a chorus of contradictory opinions about the man’s nature and origins. Was our prisoner telling the truth about his birth and life? And if not, from where did he come and what could he possibly represent?
Of course those medical masters were shown only a nameless patient and a carefully trimmed, strategically incomplete biography.
In a dozen years, only nine people had been given full access to every transcript, test result, and digital image. I was one of the nine, or so I had been promised. One can never feel too certain about a government’s confidences, particularly when it involves its deepest, most cherished secret.
The prisoner was known as Lemonade-7.
That designation was entirely random. But the copious records showed that yes, he was given that drink once, and after two sips he said, “Too sour,” and ordered that it was never to be brought to him again.
“Ramiro” was the name he went by. And for reasons that might or might not be significant, he had never offered any surname.
“So what about Ramiro?” Jefferson asked.
“What do you mean?”
“When will you actually get to work on him?”
“That’s what I’m doing,” I replied.
Jefferson was the prison’s CIA administrator. This had been his post from the beginning, which was remarkable. In any normal operation, he would have been replaced by a sequence of ambitious, usually younger types. New guards and fresh staff would have come and spent their allotted time and then gone away again. But that would have swollen the pool of individuals who knew too much about matters that didn’t exist, and what the public had never suspected would have soon leaked out into the world.
“I realize you’re doing work,” Jefferson said. “But are you ever going to talk to Ramiro?”
“Actually, I’m speaking to him now.”
Jefferson was a short, squat fellow with thinning brown hair and a close-cut beard that turned to snow years ago. His files gave the portrait of an officer who had been a success at every stage of his professional life. Running this prison was an enormous responsibility, but until last week, he seemed to be in complete control. Then events took a bad, unexpected turn, and maybe more than one turn, and the stress showed in his impatient voice and the irritability that seeped out in conversation and during his own prolonged silences.
Jefferson glared at me, then looked back at the monitors.
“Okay,” he whispered. “You’re speaking to him now.”
“In my head,” I said. Looking at Jefferson, I used my most ingratiating smile. “I’m practicing. Before I actually go in there, I want to feel ready.”
“You’ve had five days to prepare,” he reminded me.
Circumstances put a timetable on everything. Two days had been allotted to a full briefing, and then I was brought here, and for three days I had enjoyed the freedoms and pressures of this ultra-secure compound.
“Collins went straight in,” said Jefferson.
Collins was a certified legend in my little business.
“Right into Ramiro’s cell and started talking with him.” That was twelve years ago, but Jefferson still had to admire what my colleague had accomplished.
“He also stopped the torture,” I mentioned.
Jefferson shook his head. “He liked claiming that, I know. But everything about the interrogation was my call. I’m the one who put an end to the cold rooms and sleep deprivation.”
I offered a less-than-convinced nod.
“And by the way,” he continued, “I was responsible for bringing Collins in from the Bureau.”
“I guess I’d read that,” I admitted.
“And I just happen to be the hero who let your colleague work however he wanted, whatever method he thought was best, and fuck those hundred thousand orders that Washington was giving us then.”
The old bureaucrat still had a belly full of fire and bile. He offered a very quick, completely revealing grin, sitting back in his chair while thinking hard about past glories.
“But you didn’t select me, did you?”
“I guess not,” he said.
“Collins picked me,” I said. “Last year, wasn’t it? Not that anybody told me, of course. But in case he couldn’t serve anymore, I was his first choice as a replacement.”
Jefferson shifted his weight, saying nothing.
“I’ll grant you, the candidate list is short. But you’d have to admit, I’m rather well regarded.”
Jefferson shrugged.
“If you want,” I mentioned, “I can suggest a viable candidate to replace me. In the event you lose all faith in my methods.”
He was tempted. I saw it in his face, particularly in the sly smile.
“But that would mean more delays,” I warned. “And I doubt if my replacement would be as effective as me.”
“You’re a cocky gal, aren’t you?”
“It has been said.”
“Help you get ahead, does it?”
“It helps keep me sane, mostly.”
Jefferson turned away, staring at the largest screen. The prisoner was sitting at his desk, reading Jane Austen in Portuguese. The date and time were fixed in the bottom right corner: August 5th, 2014. Three minutes after three in the afternoon.
“Before I go in there,” I began.
“Yeah?”
“Tell me about the first days,” I said. “Before you brought in Collins. Right after Ramiro was caught . . . what was your mood, early on?”
“My mood?” His smile grew bigger and sourer, wrapped around a painful memory. “You can imagine what I was thinking. March 2002, Osama was still the big monster, and some stateless warrior slips across the Canadian border with five kilos of bomb-grade U-235. That’s what I was thinking about. But his luck hit a stretch of black ice in Montana, and the state trooper found his Maxima flipped on its back, this bastard behind the steering wheel, unconscious.”
I had seen hundreds of images of the crash scene.
“The man’s fingerprints were unknown. His passport and identity were quality fakes, but we couldn’t tell which foreign power had done the work. Nobody knew who he was. Al Qaeda, or Iraqi, or was he something else? All we knew was that, at the very least, our prisoner was part of somebody’s A-bomb project.”
“You needed to know everything, and as fast as possible.”
“How many like this guy were there?” Jefferson turned in my direction, but never quite made eye contact. “And would his associates be happy hitting New York or Washington? Or did they have more terrible targets in mind?”
I found it interesting: The person most familiar with the full story was still jolted with a simple replay of known events. Jefferson tensed up as he spoke about that heavy lump of gray metal, shaped like a cannon ball and hidden by the spare tire.
“We didn’t know anything,” he continued, “but it was obvious our man was the biggest trophy in the ongoing war. That’s why another Maxima and a compliant corpse were rolled off that Montana highway, the crash restaged and the wreckage burned up. It was treated like an ordinary accident. Now our prisoner had a good reason to miss his next clandestine rendezvous, wherever than might be. Because he was officially dead.”
“You unleashed a lot of specialists,” I said. “Working their delicate magic on his stubborn corpse.”
Jefferson didn’t like my tone.
“You had to make the call,” I continued. “The stakes seemed treacherously high. The proverbial fuse was burning down.”
“Don’t give me that attitude,” Jefferson warned. “Your career has seen its share of hard interrogations.”
I admitted, “It has,” without hesitation. “And believe me, I will never question those early decisions.”
What was the point now, after all?
Jefferson heard resignation where none was offered, and because he was a good career officer, he made his features soften.
“A frustrating subject, the records say.”
“He was.”
“Hard interrogations and potent drugs, in tandem. But how much good did all that do?”
He didn’t answer.
I asked, “So who figured it out first?”
“Figured what out?”
“Ramiro’s list,” I said.
With only his eyes, Jefferson smiled. “It’s all in the files.”
“I don’t always believe what I read.”
“No?”
“But here’s my understanding of the story,” I said, leaning forward. “For five months, that man was abused relentlessly. Every half-legal method was applied to him, often several at once. Then you brought in a fresh crew—old KGB hands, as I understand it—who brought tricks that made everybody feel Hell’s breath. And what did you get in the end? Nothing. Your prisoner gave us nothing. He didn’t offer any name. He didn’t even utter an intelligible word. He screamed on occasion, sure. But only after his elbows were pulled from their joints. And the curses weren’t in any known language.”
I paused, waiting.
Jefferson said nothing.
“And then one day, when his arms were working again, he motioned to his interrogators. He indicated that he wanted a paper and a pen. And when those items were delivered, he filled several pages with letters and numbers—peculiar looking to the untrained eye, if not out-and-out bizarre.”
The original list was sitting in an important vault. I pulled out one of the three copies that had been made since, the writing neat and legible, with a few artistic flourishes, particularly in the 5s and Ts.
“So tell me,” I said. “Who figured this puzzle out?”
Jefferson named one of his staff. Then he quietly reminded me, “It’s all in the records.”
“No,” I said. “I think the genius was you.”
Surprise turned to wary pleasure. With a smug little wink, he asked, “How could it be me?”
“Because you would have gotten the first look at his list. And you’re a bright, bright fellow with a lot of hobbies. I know that because I’ve checked your files too. I think what happened is that something he wrote jogged a leftover memory from your school days. In particular, from astronomy class. The first sequence in each line is obviously a position in the sky, if you know the subject. But it takes a bigger leap to realize that the second sequence is a date.”
“It took me five minutes,” he boasted.
“Easy to do, as long as you understand that the dates are based on the Islamic calendar. The significance of both notations, taken together, would have been answered on maybe a dozen websites. But that answer was crazy. And it left you with a much bigger puzzle sitting inside a cold, cramped cell. Even the earliest dates on Ramiro’s list occurred after his incarceration. And each one marked the day and position of a supernova bright enough to be noticed by earthbound astronomers.”
Jefferson put his arms around his chest and squeezed, shaking his head with an enduring astonishment.
“You were the one, weren’t you?”
He admitted, “Yes.”
“But you didn’t trust your insight,” I suggested.
“Like you said. It looked crazy.”
“So in a very general fashion, you told your subordinate to see if the list might just have something to do with the sky. Because you’re a smart player, and if your wild idea didn’t pan out, you wouldn’t be held accountable.”
Jefferson knew better than to respond.
“And how long did you have to wait?” I asked. “Before the next supernova sprang into existence precisely where it was supposed to be?”
“You know.”
“Seven days,” I answered. “And that’s when you were certain. Sitting in the cold room was something far more dangerous than a few pounds of uranium. Somehow our terrorist, or whatever he was, knew the future. Against all reason, Ramiro could predict celestial events that nobody should be able to anticipate in advance.”
Tired, satisfied eyes closed and stayed closed.
“That’s when you went out and found Collins. An entirely different species of interrogator. A smart, relentless craftsman with a history of convincing difficult people to talk about anything. And for twelve years, you have sat here watching your prize stallion slowly, patiently extract an incredible story from your prisoner.”
Jefferson nodded, smiled. But the eyes remained closed.
I stared at the creature sitting inside his spacious, comfortable cell. And with a measured tone, I reminded both of us, “This is the most thoroughly studied individual in the world. And for a long time, he has given us the exact minimum required to keep everyone happy enough. And as a result, he has maintained control over his narrow life. And yours.”
Jefferson finally looked at me, squirming a little in his chair.
“Fuck timetables,” I said. “I think that I’m being exceptionally sensible not to march in there and offer my hand and name.”
“I see your point,” he allowed.
“To be truthful? This entire situation terrifies me.” I hesitated, and then said, “It’s not every day you have the opportunity, and the honor, and the grave responsibility of interviewing somebody who won’t be born for another one hundred years.”
Jefferson can write the history however he wants. Collins’ arrival was what brought real, substantive changes for the prisoner. The still nameless man was unchained and allowed to wash, and under newly imposed orders, his guards brought him clean clothes and referred to him as “sir.” Then after the first filling breakfast in twenty weeks, he was escorted to a comfortably warm room with a single folding chair of the kind you would find in any church basement.
In those days, Collins worked with a partner, but the two agents decided that it was smarter to meet the mysterious visitor on a one-to-one basis.
Collins carried in his own chair, identical to the first, and he opened it and sat six feet from the prisoner’s clean bare feet.
For a long while he said nothing, tilting his face backward so that the overhead light covered him with a warm, comforting glow. I have watched that first meeting twenty times, from every available angle. The interrogator was a bald little man, plain-faced but with brilliant blue eyes. I knew those eyes. I first met Collins in the late nineties, at some little professional conference. From across the room, I noticed his perpetual fascination with the world and how his effortless, ever-graceful charm always found some excuse to bubble out. Collins had ugly teeth, crooked and yellow. But his smile seemed genuine and always fetching, and the voice that rose from the little body was rich and deep. Even his idle chatter sounded important, as if it rose from God’s own throat.
For a full ninety seconds, the interrogator made no sound.
The prisoner calmly returned the silence.
Then Collins sat back until the front legs of his chair lifted, and he laughed with an edge to his voice, and waving his hand at the air, he said in good Arabic, “We don’t believe you.”
In Farsi, he claimed, “We can’t believe you.”
And then in English, he said, “I’m here to warn you. One lucky guess won’t win you any friends.”
“Which guess is that?” the prisoner replied, in an accented, difficult-to-place strain of English.
Those were the first words he had uttered in captivity.
“You have some passing experience with astronomy, I’ll grant you that.” Collins had the gift of being able to study arcane subjects on the fly and then sound painfully brilliant. For the next six minutes, he lectured the prisoner about the stars, and in particular, how giant stars aged rapidly and soon blew up. Then he calmly lied about the tools available to the Hubble telescope and the big mirrors on top of Hawaii. “You had access to this data. Obviously. In your previous life, you must have studied astronomy. That’s why you took the chance and gave us some random dates, and by pure coincidence, a few stars happened to blow up in just about the right slices of the sky.”
A thin smile and a dismissive shrug of the shoulders were offered.
“Or maybe you are genuine,” Collins allowed. “The implication, as far as I can tell, is that you can see the future. Which is insane. Or you know the future because you came from some to-be time. Which seems even crazier, at least to me. But if that’s true, then I guess it means I should feel lucky. Just being in your presence is a privilege. How many times does somebody get to meet a genuine time traveler?’ ”
Silence.
“But if that’s true,” Collins continued, “then I have to ask myself, ‘Why spring this on us now? And why this strange, cosmic route?’”
The silence continued for most of a minute.
“We can’t break you,” Collins finally pointed out. “Believe me, I know how these things work. What you’ve endured over these weeks and months . . . any normal person would have shattered ten different ways. Not that you’d be any help to us. Torture is a singularly lousy way of discovering the truth. Beaten and electrocuted, the average person ends up being glad for the chance to confess. To any and every crime we can think of, particularly the imaginary misdeeds. But everybody here has been assuming that we’re dealing with a normal human specimen. And what I think is . . . I think that isn’t the case here. Is it?”
The prisoner had a thin face and thick black hair that had been shaved to the skull, and in a multitude of ways, he was handsome. His teeth were white and straight. His shoulders were athletic, though captivity had stolen some of his muscle. He was mixed-blooded, European ancestors dancing with several other races. The best estimate of his age put him at thirty-two. But nobody had yet bothered to examine his genetics or his insides. We didn’t appreciate that his indifference to pain had organic roots, including novel genes and buried microchines that insulated both his body and stubborn mind.
“Okay, you want us to believe that you’re special,” Collins said.
The prisoner closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he took a dramatic breath and then said nothing.
“But I don’t think you appreciate something here. Do you know just how stupid and slow governments can be? Right this minute, important people are thinking: So what? So he knows a few odd things about the sky. I’m impressed, yes. But I’m the exception. Maybe there are some bright lights in the administration who see the implications. Who are smart enough to worry. But do you actually know who sits in the Oval Office today? Do you understand anything about our current president? He is possibly the most stubborn creature on the planet. So when this clever game of yours is presented to him, how do you think it’s going to play out?”
The prisoner watched Collins.
“We won’t torture you anymore. I promise that.” And after a long sigh, Collins added, “But that isn’t what you care about, I’m guessing. Not really. Something else matters to you. It deeply, thoroughly matters, or why else would you be here? So let’s pretend for the next moment that your list of supernovae is true. You can see the future. Or, better, you come from there. And if it is possible to travel in time, then I guess it stands to reason that you aren’t alone, that others made the journey with you.”
Here the prisoner’s heart quickened, half a dozen machines recording the visible rise in his interest.
“I’m guessing you’re part of a group of time tourists. Is that about right?”
In Collins’ copious notes, written several hours later, was the open admission that he had taken a chance here, making an obvious but still bizarre guess.
“You come from some distant age,” he continued. “You’re the child of an era where this is normal. People can easily travel into their past. And who knows what other miracle skills you have at your disposal? Tools and weapons we can’t imagine. Not to mention the historic knowledge about our simple times. Yet here you are. You’ve been sitting in the same closet for five months, and after all this time, maybe it’s finally occurred to you that your friends and colleagues—these other visitors from tomorrow—have no intention of rescuing you from this tedious mess.”
In myriad ways, the body betrays the mind. With the flow of the blood and the heat of the skin, the prisoner’s body was showing each of the classic signatures of raw anger.
“If I was part of a team,” Collins began, “and we leaped back a thousand years into the past . . .”
Then, he hesitated.
The prisoner leaned forward slightly, waiting.
“To the Holy Land, let’s suppose. And suppose I was captured. The Saracens don’t know what to make of me, but just to be safe, they throw me into their darkest dungeon.” Collins sat back, his chair scrapping against the tiled floor. “Well, sir, I can promise you this: I would damn well expect my friends to blow a hole in the stone wall and then pluck me out of there with a good old futuristic Blackhawk helicopter.”
The prisoner leaned back.
Quietly, in that accented English of his, he said, “One hundred and forty years.”
“That’s how far back you jumped?”
“A little farther, actually.” The prisoner grinned faintly, mentioning, “We have been among you now for several years.”
“Among us?”
“Yes.”
“And who is ‘we’?”
“Our leader. And his followers.” The prisoner paused, smiling. “We call the man Abraham.”
Collins hesitated. Then he carefully repeated the name. “Abraham.”
“The father of three great religions, which is why he took that important name for himself.”
“You came here with Abraham.”
“Yes.”
“And how many others?”
Silence.
Collins was not acting. He was worried, his fingers shaking despite the room’s heat, his voice trembling slightly as he asked, “How many of these friends came with you?”
“None.”
“What. . . ?”
“They are not my friends,” the prisoner stated.
“Why? Because they won’t save you?”
“No.” The thin face tilted backward, teeth flashing in the light. “Because I have never particularly liked those people.”
“Then why join up?” Collins put his hands together, squeezing the blood out of his fingers. “Why go to the trouble of leaping back to our day?”
“I believed in their cause.”
“Which is?”
No answer was offered.
“You want to change the future? Is that your grand purpose?”
The prisoner shrugged. “In one fashion or another.”
Collins leaned close, and for the first time he offered his name and an open hand. “You’re being helpful, sir, and I thank you.”
The prisoner shook the hand. Then he quietly said, “Ramiro.”
“Is that your name?”
“Yes.”
“I’m pleased to know it, Ramiro.”
“Don’t put me back into that cell again, Collins.”
“But I have to,” the interrogator replied.
Ignoring that answer, Ramiro said, “I have a set of demands. Minimal requirements that will earn my cooperation, I promise you.”
“Two names and the vague beginnings of a story,” Collins countered. “That won’t earn you much.”
“And I will ask you this: Do you want to defeat the invaders?” When it served his purpose, Ramiro had a cold, menacing smile. “If you insist on mistreating me, even one more time, I will never help you.”
“I don’t have any choice here,” Collins told him.
“Yes,” said Ramiro. “Yes, you do.”
“No.”
Then the prisoner leaned back in his chair, and through some secretive, still mysterious route, he woke a microscopic device implanted inside his angry heart.
For the next one hundred seconds, Ramiro was clinically dead.
By the time he was fully conscious again, calls had been made. Desperate orders had been issued and rescinded and then reissued. Careers were either defined or shattered. And the only soldier from a secretive, unanticipated army was given every demand on a list of remarkably modest desires.
My home was an efficiency apartment no bigger than Ramiro’s quarters and only slightly more comfortable. But I was assured that no tiny cameras were keeping tabs on me. As a creature of status, I also enjoyed communications with the outside world—albeit strained through protocols and electronic filters run by intelligence officers sitting in the field station outside the prison. And unlike our number-one citizen, I was free to move where I wished, including jogging along the wide, hard-packed salt streets that combined for a little less than six kilometers of cumulative distance.
No one had ever predicted “temporal jihadists,” as Abraham’s agents were dubbed. Uranium-toting terrorists suddenly seemed like a minor threat by comparison. Collins’ first interview resulted in a secret and very chaotic panic roaring through Washington. Black ops funds were thrown in every direction. Ground was broken for half a dozen high-security prisons scattered across the world. But then some wise head inside Langley decided that if time travelers were genuine, then there was no telling what they knew, and if they were inspired, there were probably no limits to what they could achieve. A tropical island might look fetching in the recruitment brochure, but how could you protect your prisoner/asset from death rays and stealth submarines? How would any facility set on the earth’s surface remain hidden from prying eyes? The only hope, argued that reasonable voice, was to hide underground, and short, efficient logistical lines were only possible inside the United States. That’s why the last prison to receive funding was the only one finished and staffed: an abandoned salt mine set beneath Kansas, provided with a bank of generators and layers of security that kept everyone, including most of its citizens, happily confused about its truest purpose.
Each guard was a volunteer, most of them pulled from submarine duty. To qualify, they couldn’t have close families, and like everyone on the skeletal staff, they were forewarned that leaves would be rare events, and brief, and subject to various kinds of shadowing.
Most people didn’t even apply for leaves anymore, preferring the safety of the underground while padding their retirement funds.
Life inside the salt mine was never unpleasant, I was told. My superiors—those gray-haired survivors of these last decade-plus—liked to boast about the billions that had been spent on full-spectrum lights and conditioned air, plus the food that most of the world would be thrilled to find on their plates. But nobody went so far as to claim that I was fortunate, nor that this posting was a blessing. The terms of my assignment were grim, any success would bring repercussions, and nobody with half a brain told me that this was an honor, or for that matter, a choice.
Collins’ slot had to be filled, and I was the new Collins.
“Ma’am?”
I showed the guard my ID and badge.
“I don’t need them, ma’am. I know who you are.”
I was a slow, sweat-drenched jogger who had slugged her way through three kilometers of dressed-up tunnels. Technically the guard was off-duty, and he was using his free time to fling a colorful hand-tied fly into what looked like an enormous water-filled stock tank.
“Any bites?” I asked.
“A few.”
“Trout?”
I knew the water was too warm for trout. But the questions you ask often define you in a stranger’s mind, and I thought it was smart to start with a mistake.
“Bluegill,” he told me.
“Really?” I sounded interested.
He was a big strong man, a kid when he arrived here and still younger than me by quite a lot. But in a society where males outnumbered females ten-to-one, I had to be an object of some interest.
“Ever fish?” he asked.
“No,” I lied.
He thought about offering to teach me. I saw it in his eyes, in the tilt of his head. But then he decided on caution, forcing himself to mutter a few colorless words. “They bite, but they’re too tiny to keep.”
Surrounding the tank were huge plastic pots, each one holding a tropical tree or a trio of shrubs. Some of the foliage was thriving. Most just managed to limp along. I could see where a few million dollars had gone, and I suppose it helped the cave dwellers to coexist with living plants. But I could also imagine that a sickly lemon tree standing under fancy fluorescent lights would just as surely defeat a soul or two.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
He began with his rank.
“Your first name,” I interrupted. “What do friends call you?”
“Jim.”
“Hi, Jim. I’m Carmen.”
To the boy’s credit, he saw through me. “You already know my name. Don’t you, ma’am?”
“Carmen,” I insisted.
But he wouldn’t say it. He reeled in his feathery fly, pinning the hook to the largest eyelet, and then he did a modestly convincing job of packing up his tackle. He didn’t want to stop fishing, but my presence made him uncomfortable.
“So you know who I am?”
Jim nodded.
“And maybe you’re wondering if this is a coincidence, our paths crossing in the park like this?”
“It isn’t,” he stated.
“Probably not,” I agreed.
Surrounding the stock tank was a narrow cedar deck. I happened to be blocking the stairs leading down.
“Talk to me for a minute,” I said.
Not as an order, just a request.
Jim hesitated. Then with a nervous grin, he said, “Yeah. I found him.”
“Collins?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I didn’t react.
“Is that what you wanted to ask me?”
I nodded. “You found him inside his apartment.”
“Yes.”
My sense of the moment was that the young man was embarrassed, first and foremost. Security was his duty, and one of the most important citizens of this nameless, unmapped town died during his watch.
“I read your report,” I mentioned.
The boy’s eyes were open but blind. He was gazing back in time, crossing a little more than a week, standing before a long dark pool of congealed blood leading to a pale corpse sitting in bathwater that had turned chill.
“Did you know Collins very well, Jim?”
“Yeah. Sort of.”
“As a friend,” I continued. “Did you talk with him much?”
“I didn’t see it coming, if that’s what you mean. Ma’am.”
“We often don’t with suicides,” I assured him. “People expect depression, despair. Afterwards, we try to remember a telltale noose hanging from the high beam. But that’s usually not the case. And do you know why?”
He blinked, watching me.
“A person is miserable, let’s say. Sad and sick of being alive. Then one day, he finds the perfect solution to his terrible problems. ‘I’ll just kill myself,’ he says. And in that moment, his miseries are cured. He can suddenly smile through his final days, knowing that every pain will soon be left behind.”
Jim shook his head slowly, probably wondering if this middle-aged woman was as bat-crazy as she sounded.
“I knew Collins too,” I admitted.
He sighed, looking at me with curious eyes. The two of us had something in common, it seemed.
“I’ll miss him,” I offered.
The man’s face dipped.
Then before I could ask my next question, he looked up. “Salt Lake City,” he mentioned.
“What about it?”
“How is it, ma’am?”
“Carmen,” I insisted.
“Carmen.”
“Salt Lake is just fine.”
He said, “Good.”
I waited.
He took a deep breath, drinking in the negative ions that were being generated by a filtration system stolen from NASA. Then with a trace of frustration, he admitted, “We don’t get much news down here.”
“I know that.”
“It’s hard. You can never tell what they’re holding back. It’s done for good reasons, I know. But we always have to wonder.”
“Indian Point,” I offered.
“Yeah, it was four days before we heard anything about that. And then only because somebody with clearance decided to jump protocols and tell us.”
“Collins did.”
“I’m not saying,” he said. Which was the same as, “Yes.”
“Did he explain how awful Indian Point would be?”
Jim didn’t answer, carefully turning his reel two clicks.
“The reactors and storage facilities obliterated, all of those poisons thrown up by the mushroom cloud.” My voice broke—an honest shattering. Then I managed to add, “I watched it all on the news. That wind carried that shit right over New York, and then Washington and Philadelphia, and all the mayhem that resulted . . .”
“Yeah,” Jim whispered.
“And then to learn that it wasn’t just some crude uranium bomb that killed twenty million, no. But a fat fusion monster that led straight back to Russia . . .”
With a nudge, I could have knocked Jim off his feet. Almost two years had passed, and the memory was still that raw.
I promised, “Nothing big has happened lately.”
Jim needed a couple of deep breaths. “But at least . . . are things starting to simmer down?”
I shrugged. Honestly, how could anyone assess the state of our world?
“What about the wars?” he asked.
“Some are worse, some better. It just depends, Jim.”
He gave me a long, studious stare. “You know what? You don’t really look like a Carmen.”
“I need a tall hat covered with fruit?”
“Ma’am?” he muttered, puzzled by the cultural reference.
I stepped away from the steps, allowing him enough room to escape.
But he didn’t move, and with a soft, importunate voice admitted, “Some of us are wondering. What is your mission, ma’am?”
“To replace Collins.”
That’s what he wanted me to say, because the other possibilities were too hard to measure, and probably even more terrible.
“I’ll meet our prisoner tomorrow,” I confessed.
Jim nodded, trying to show nothing with his face.
“You often stand guard over Ramiro,” I mentioned.
“Everybody gets that duty.”
“Of course.”
He glanced at the stairs.
“So what do you think about the man, Jim?”
“I don’t know anything about him,” he said too quickly.
I said, “Good,” and left it there.
Then he added, “He seems smart, I guess. But odd.”
“Odd how?”
He had a guard’s burly shoulders. He used them to shrug, saying nothing else.
“I was hoping, Jim. Maybe you can help me.” I paused, just for a moment. Just to let him wonder what I might say next. “What was Collins’ mood when you walked him back to his apartment?”
And now the shoulders tightened, just a little.
“I saw you two on the security videos. Walking and talking.”
“I was going off-duty, ma’am. Carmen.”
“Collins didn’t visit Ramiro again.”
The young man seemed surprised. “No?”
“Didn’t he see the prisoner almost every day?”
“Most days, I guess.”
“But that was three days before he killed himself.”
“I’ll trust you on that.”
“So I’m going to ask you. Officially. What was Collins’ state of mind when you walked with him back to his quarters?”
Jim’s eyes gazed into the past.
“Did he say anything?”
“I did most of the talking.”
“Was that normal?”
“Not particularly. No, ma’am.”
“You stopped at his front door for a minute,” I said.
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Did he show you anything, Jim?”
“Like what?”
“Papers. Something with writing on it.”
“Well, Collins had his black case with him.”
“But you didn’t see a legal pad, or anything like that?”
Jim tried to see yellow paper, but he couldn’t make himself.
“Under the blood,” I said.
“What?”
“Papers got burned. Somebody incinerated them at least twice, to make sure every mark was erased.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“How about the coin?”
“I saw that.”
“Beside the bath?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“A dollar president’s coin.”
“I noticed it, sure.”
I waited a moment. Then I said, “So you walked him and his attaché case back to his apartment. And Collins said nothing that you can remember?”
“Just . . .” Jim held his mouth closed for a moment. Then he forced himself to look at me, and with an impressive talent for mimicry, he used the dead man’s voice. Deeply, with an appealingly slight Southern drawl, he said, “ ‘Want to hear something funny?’ ”
“He asked you that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Did he tell you what was funny?”
Jim shook his head. “Which was too bad, I thought at the time. Collins was real good at jokes, when he wanted to be . . .”
Healthful food and regular rest, plus years of tempered exercise, showed in the prisoner’s fit body and the youthful face. He was wearing beige trousers, a clean white polo shirt and sandals that looked comfortably broken down. It was easy to confuse him for a middle-management worker in the final days of a long vacation. When he heard the reinforced door being unbolted, he stood up. Ramiro didn’t seem at all surprised to find a strange woman walking into his home. “Hello,” he said with a voice that had grown almost American over the years. Then he offered a warm smile and his right hand.
I introduced myself.
“A lovely name,” was his response. Then the spirit of generosity took hold. He surrendered his favorite chair and asked what I would like to drink. Coffee? Tea? Or perhaps the blue Gatorade he kept cold inside his little refrigerator.
I took the chair and requested green tea.
There wasn’t any stove, so he heated the water inside the microwave. Staring at the revolving mug, he told me, “It’s very sad about Collins.”
“It was,” I agreed.
“In a sense, he was my best friend.”
“This must be hard for you.”
“Not particularly.” Ramiro seemed to relish how cold that sounded. He pursed his lips and shrugged, giving me a momentary glance. Measuring my reaction, no doubt.
I stared at the wall behind him, gazing at an enormous photograph of the snow-clad Himalayas.
“By any chance, did you know Collins?”
I waited for a moment. Then I said, “Yes.”
That delay piqued his interest. Ramiro invested the next several moments studying my face. “How well did you know him?”
I said nothing.
“Were you lovers?”
“Guess,” I told him.
That earned an easy laugh. “I know you weren’t.”
“Why not?”
With a calm voice, he asked, “Do you like honesty, Carmen?”
“Always.”
“You aren’t pretty enough for Collins. Or young enough, frankly.”
“Fair points,” I agreed. “But how do you know this?”
“Occasionally the man would entertain me with his stories.” Ramiro glanced at the mug and then stared at me. “I don’t have a passionate life, I’m sure you know. But if only half of his stories were true, then the young pretties didn’t have much chance against his charms.”
“Local girls, were they?”
“I shouldn’t say. Your fraternization rules are ridiculously strict.”
I said nothing else.
Then the microwave beeped, and Ramiro set a tea bag into the plain white mug before bringing both to me. He didn’t use the handle, and when I touched the mug’s body, just for an instant, my fingertips came close to burning.
He pulled his office chair out from under his little desk and sat before me, the right leg crossed over his left.
“Collins and I enjoyed some professional moments,” I began. “In fact, we met long before you happened along.”
He nodded, smiled.
I waited him out.
Then with a sharp grin, he mentioned, “You must be exceptionally qualified to receive this posting.”
“I must be.”
“May I ask a few questions?”
“By all means.”
“Without giving away secrets,” he began, “what kinds of experiences have you suffered during these hard years?”
“Are they hard?”
“I hear little news, and who knows if it’s complete.” Ramiro shrugged, laughing softly. “Which is Jefferson’s idea, I think. Give the subject just enough information to tease out a few fresh, hopefully useful opinions.” Then he sat back, a good-natured sigh rising out of him. “But yes, Carmen. From what I have learned, I think these times are genuinely terrible.”
“Montana,” I said.
“What about it?”
“The day you were found beside the road and captured . . . I was stationed outside Kabul.”
When interested in any subject, Ramiro leaned forward and stopped blinking, his black eyes filling up his face. One examining physician had proposed that the microchines inside his brain were boosting his neurological capacities, and the eyes were a kind of tell. Others thought it was just a personal quirk. Whatever the reason, he was using his interested gaze on me now.
“Then the following year,” I continued, “they stationed me in Iraq.”
“Of course.”
“I was sent to help hunt for WMDs. My assignment was to interrogate the old Baathists and such.”
A thin smile surfaced; he saw the punch line coming.
“Of course there weren’t any nukes or biological nightmares. But we didn’t know that yet. And by ‘we,’ I mean the people on the ground. Washington had strung together the ridiculous intelligence, and the media beat the drums, and we went into Baghdad and kicked Saddam out of his palaces. Victory was declared. But then during that window between the celebrations and the first car bombs, my assignment shifted. That country was collapsing. Our soldiers were pretty much letting it happen, as far as I could tell. But someone gave me dozens and then hundreds of shackled bodies, plus an ever-changing checklist that made no sense to me.”
My host leaned back, his chair offering a comfortable creaking. “I can appreciate your confusion.”
“You understand how my game works,” I said. “I try to know more than I’d ever admit to my subject. But when it suits me, I can be very stupid. And if she gives me something . . . most of my prisoners were female, I should mention . . . if she offers some bit of intelligence that I didn’t have, my first response is to say, ‘Oh, yes. We know all about the cement mixer with the fertilizer bomb. You can’t help yourself with that crumb of old news.’ ”
I had shifted into my best Arabic.
Ramiro was fluent in Arabic and English, Portuguese and Spanish. But his natural tongue was an odd Creole that borrowed from each language, plus a rich seasoning of peculiar syllables and tech-terms that wouldn’t exist for another hundred-plus years.
I wished I knew his native tongue. But I was too old and cranky to learn it in a workable span of time.
The prisoner stuck to his Americanized English, asking, “With that checklist, Carmen . . . what sorts of items made no sense to you?”
“Individually? Nothing was blatantly strange. But it was the whole goofy package. My bosses were hunting people who didn’t belong in Baghdad. Who weren’t native to Iraq, and maybe not even to the Middle East. I made some discreet inquiries, asking for clearer instructions. But nobody knew the sense behind any of our orders. One of my prisoners would eventually stand out—that’s what the generals promised. She would be in her late twenties or thirties, or maybe her forties. Her accent might be wrong. Unless she was exceptionally good with languages, which was another key to watch for. There wouldn’t be any genuine records showing her whereabouts more than five years earlier. And a three-star general confided to me—to all of us—that in the worst interrogations, my phantom would enjoy an extraordinary tolerance for pain and drugs and boredom. And the general promised that when I finally found my girl, she was going to be worth a hundred bloodied mistakes.”
With a dismissive gesture, Ramiro said, “I told Collins. I told everybody. As a young man, I purchased a cheap package of tailored genes and various nano-organs.”
“Of course.”
“Common add-on talents popular in my world.”
“To insulate your poor citizens from the ravages of poverty,” I said, nodding agreeably.
“My warnings were explicit,” Ramiro told me. “I couldn’t be certain about the genetics of the other warriors, or their current identities, much less how well or how poorly they would blend into any local population.”
“You gave us Iraq,” I mentioned.
He bristled. Then after a moment, he said, “This is very old ground.”
“It is,” I agreed.
“Iraq,” he repeated. “Over twenty million people, most of them young. And what percentage of that population did your colleagues and you process? One percent? Was it that much?”
“We tried our best,” I claimed.
“I told Collins. One of the voices mentioned Iraq to me, in passing.”
“It wasn’t Abraham?”
“No, it was one of his associates. He said Iraq was our focus. But even if that was the case, and even if Abraham and his people didn’t slip out of the country before your noisy invasion . . . well, I was always critical of your clumsy methods and your very poor odds for success.”
“I know. You gave Collins ample warnings.”
“Even in the smallest country,” said Ramiro, “there are so many dark corners in which to hide.”
“You warned everybody,” I said.
“And you were following orders,” he said flatly. Then he added, “Carmen,” with a suddenly friendly, familiar tone. “But really, how could your masters expect you to find anybody of substance?”
I paused, just for a moment. “Yes, it was a difficult assignment.”
He didn’t seem to notice my careful tone. “What about blood and skin?” he asked. “Were you taking samples?”
“I wasn’t. But some med-techs were doing just that.” I finally pulled the soggy tea bag into the air and sipped from the cooling mug. “Everybody had their own secrets to keep. Nobody knew more than a sliver of the whole incredible story. I didn’t know samples were being sent back home, thousands of them, and being tested for key genes.”
“Genes that might not have been there,” he pointed out. “Or that could be removed or easily hidden.”
I nodded. “We knew your genetic markers, sure. But who could say what we’d find inside another warrior’s chromosomes?”
“Precisely.”
“But what else could my people do? We were facing an unexpected threat—temporal jihadists born in a distant, treacherous future. What reasonable, effective measures would have helped our security?”
Ramiro swiped at the air.
Quietly but fiercely, he said, “I told you what I knew.”
“Of course.”
“Once my terms were met, I explained everything to our friend Collins.” His voice rose, cracked. “Imagine that a foreign power captured the man standing guard outside my door. They would easily break him. In a few days or weeks, he would confess everything. But what is the operational knowledge of a lowly soldier? Does that man . . . my friend Jim . . . does he even halfway comprehend my importance?”
“Probably not,” I conceded.
“And I’m just a simple soldier too.”
“Simple? I doubt that.”
A sly smile blossomed, faded. “What happened next, Carmen?”
“In 2005, I was yanked out of Iraq. I was flown back to the States and promised a new assignment. But before orders came down, they pressed me into helping with certain war games. Very secret, very obvious stuff. After the endless mess in Iraq, we were going to try to do a better job taking on Iran.”
Ramiro watched me.
“Two strange things happened at that conference,” I admitted. “On the first morning, I ran into a colleague on his way to a back room breakfast, and I was roped in and told to play along. It seemed like a chance deal, but of course it wasn’t. There were a lot of strange faces sitting with eggs and oatmeal. And there was Collins. I hadn’t seen that man in ages. God, I thought, he looked tired and pale. But he practically latched onto me. We sat together. This other fellow sat in the corner, watching the two of us. I think we managed maybe five minutes of catch-up. I told him about coming home. He gave me a cover story, but he didn’t bothering pushing it too hard. Then one of the unknown faces, a guy sitting at the end of the table, threw out this odd, odd question.”
Ramiro leaned forward, absorbing my face and soul with a blinkless gaze.
“ ‘What if you could jump back in time?’ the gentleman inquired. He was pretending that his question wasn’t serious, that it was for shits-and-giggles only. He made himself laugh, asking, ‘What if you and some like-minded friends gathered together? Say there’s a few dozen of you, a couple hundred at most. You’re going to travel back in time together. But there are rules. You can cover only one or two centuries, and with restrictions. Your journey has to be a one-way. You can carry only a limited amount of mass. Bodies and a little luggage and that’s all. There won’t be any return missions to the future. There’s no supply train with fresh M-16s and laptops. And your goal? You want to conquer that more primitive world, of course. You are invaders. Two hundred soldiers armed with your beliefs and training and your superior knowledge, and you’ll have to find some clever way to make your little force strong enough to defeat the old horse armies.”
Ramiro smiled.
“Of course there was a purpose to his wacky scenario,” I allowed. “That much was obvious to everybody there. But the gentleman didn’t offer explanations. For all I know, he was told that our own physicists had just built a time machine, and we were trying to decide what to do with our new toy. The truth never had to get in the way. During a five-hour breakfast, he led a clumsy, half-informed discussion that ended up with tactical nukes burning up London and Paris. And do you know why this happened? I think the show was put on for Collins’ benefit. To give him ideas, to help guide his future conversations with you. And meanwhile in those other rooms, the future Iranian war ran its imaginary, surgical course.”
The prisoner had leaned forward, elbows on knees. Then he revealed something of his ability—his clear focus, his absolute mastery of detail—when he said, “Earlier, Carmen. When you admitted that your Iraqi assignment was difficult. I had the impression—tell me if I’m wrong—but it seemed to me that despite some very long odds, you were successful.”
I said, “I was.”
“You found a suspect? Somebody out of place in our world, did you?”
“Yes.” I paused. “A young woman without family. With no paper trail reaching back more than a few years. She claimed to have worked as a lab technician, nothing more, and she had reasonable explanations for the gaps in her records. But she was the right age, and she was very, very tough. I worked her and worked her, and the only information I got from her was the name of a river in Kashmir.”
Ramiro stared at me.
“At least that’s what others heard when they listened to the interrogation later.” I shrugged, glancing down. “I couldn’t tell you what she was saying exactly, since she was throwing up at the time. But two days later, a special ops group came and took her away.”
My new friend smiled. Then after a moment or two, he guessed, “Collins told you this news at the breakfast, did he?”
“Later, actually.”
“You had uncovered one of my sisters. Is that what he told you?”
“Not in those terms. But Collins took me out for drinks and mentioned that my girl was interrogated by other teams, and when she finally talked, she admitted to pretty much everything.”
“Very good,” he said.
I kept my voice as level and cool as I could manage it. “Collins told me that she was a holy soldier in a war that hadn’t seen its first shot yet. But that day was coming soon, he confided. And my prisoner . . . that young woman . . . had promised that our world would be helpless before this mighty hand.”
Ramiro watched me sip the tea. “Collins never mentioned the girl to me.”
“That’s the way it should be,” I said.
“Of course.”
Then I leaned forward. “I asked about her.”
Ramiro waited.
“I asked Collins if she was still being helpful to us.”
“Was she?”
“Not anymore. Since she managed to kill herself.’”
A doll’s eyes would have been more expressive. Very calmly, he asked, “A suicide implant, was it?”
“No,” I said. “She slammed her forehead into the corner of a desk, breaking a blood vessel in her cortex.” I set down the cold mug of tea, adding, “But now you know why I’m so highly regarded, at least in some circles. I’ve had some measure of success at this very odd game…
Be sure to read
the exciting conclusion
in our October/November issue,
on sale now.
|
