Wednesday's Child (16 page)

The lock on the connecting door was easily compromised and I took three quick steps into the room, fighting a wave of nausea from the stink of death and blood.  I was reaching for Rod’s hat when I heard a noise.  Reflexes I’d forgotten I possessed threw me into a dive and roll behind the covering bulk of the bed as a bullet whizzed by me and struck the wall near the front door.  My gun was in my hand as I bounced up, the image of the badly wounded Arab lying on his bed clear in my mind.  It was just like a training exercise I’d done a hundred times, except this time the target wasn’t a dummy.  Bracing my Walther with both hands as I rose and fired in a single motion, I put one bullet low into the neck of the man who’d tried to kill me.

I grabbed the hat and ran back through the connecting door, pulling it closed behind me.  Cracking open the front door, I looked carefully around from the adjoining room to see if anyone was reacting to what happened.  The parking lot was empty.  I walked quickly back to my car, stealing a glance at the rental office.  Karminian was at his window, watching me.

I drove out of the motel’s parking lot and wound through a residential neighborhood until I was sure I hadn’t been followed, then pulled over to the curb and let the violent trembling that had been trying to take over my body have its way. When I could breathe again, I reached for my untraceable agency cell phone and placed a 911 call to the police. It was 11:05.

26.

I felt no remorse about putting the fatal shot into the Arab who’d tried to kill me, but hours later, as my train pulled out of the station, I still reeled from knowing that terrorist or not, I’d killed someone.  I knew the shooting was justified, but I was still buffeted by waves of guilt-driven anxiety.  It only occurred to me later that it might not be guilt I was reacting to.  I’d literally dodged a bullet myself; if his aim had been better the corpse might have been mine.

I let the gentle, soothing motion of the train dull my senses, calming me. I couldn’t afford to give in to emotion right now. I needed my head to be on straight. 

My reaction to killing the Arab was like a kid who shatters his mother’s favorite vase and thinks if he lays low, no one will notice him.  That might have been possible if the principal shooter hadn’t been Rod, but my inquiries about him and the identification of the Walther bullet made it inevitable that my name would come up. I also couldn’t be sure Karminian wouldn’t give me up under pressure, and I’d left for Maryland Tuesday night with no way to account for my time on Wednesday.  I had to tell William before he found out some other way…but not yet.

Questions about free will plagued me as my train sped northeast to New Jersey. I’d worried earlier about being trapped in a causation loop – doing things because Ilene told me I’d already done them.  My head ached thinking about it, but I had no choice.

Karminian told me, on Thursday, that he’d seen me at the motel Wednesday morning, but I believed going back there Wednesday morning hadn’t compromised my free will because I’d decided to go back before I knew that.  Viewed in the harsh light of uncertainty, I wasn’t so sure.  After meeting with Henry Thursday afternoon, I’d confronted Karminian purely on impulse, because I sensed there was a piece of the puzzle missing that he could fill in.  Was it possible the impulse hadn’t been mine after all?  Maybe I
had to
confront him and learn that he’d seen me on Wednesday to reinforce my decision to return Wednesday morning. 

And what about Henry telling me the second shooter fired a Walther?  Had that ensnared me in a loop, in which I was compelled to be at the motel on Wednesday and enter that room at just the right moment?  Going through the connecting door to retrieve Rod’s hat had been another mindless impulse.  I could claim that I did it because the hat was covered with Rod’s DNA, but who was I kidding?  I went in because I knew Henry wasn’t supposed to find it.

On Thursday, I’d concluded that staying in Maryland instead of catching my train home to fulfill the prophesy of waking up next to Ilene Wednesday morning was proof that I still had free will, yet the very act of staying raised the issue two more times.  In terms of preordination versus free will, Ilene remembering me in bed beside her, Karminian seeing me at the motel on Wednesday, and Henry finding the bullet from my gun were equivalent events. 

My thoughts spiraled out of control with theories and questions feeding each other endlessly.  The only thing that would break the logjam of confusion was having an actual outcome to match against my speculations, and I would have one in a few hours.

It was Wednesday.  Ilene didn’t know anything about her interactions with me on Thursday because for her, they hadn’t happened yet.  She didn’t even know that the questions we were about to resolve were the ones she had raised.  When I told her I was staying in Maryland Thursday night, she’d asked what I thought would happen to her memory of waking up next to me on Wednesday.  Would she come home tonight intending to follow through on the plan we’d made Tuesday night as if nothing had changed? 

I called her from the train, and she greeted me with a perfectly routine, “Hi, Dylan.”

“Hi, Hon, I’ll be home around 8:00.”  

“Oh…right, you said things might be backed up at work.”

I’d said that on Tuesday, when I was expecting to be in my office Wednesday morning after I got back from Maryland.  Ilene retained that memory, but she seemed to be struggling with something.

“Is 8:00 a problem?”

“No, I guess not.”  There it was again.  She seemed puzzled, like she was trying to work something out.

“Where should we have dinner?” I said, not wanting to influence her response. 

Sounding like most of her mind was elsewhere, she picked an Italian place near the commuter station at Journal Square. I’d be arriving at the Amtrak station in Newark. She still thought I’d been in New York all day.

“Okay, I’ll meet you there.  I have a lot to tell you.”

Ilene got there first.  She was sipping a glass of wine and reading something she’d brought home from work.  She jumped up when she saw me and hugged me fiercely, as though she was pinching me to make sure I was real. “You’re not usually this late,” she said, when we were seated.  “Where were you, anyway?”

Had it suddenly occurred to her that Wednesday might not have turned out as planned? 

Instead of answering her directly, I reached across the table and took her hands. “Ilene, I need to you to focus on something, okay?  Remember what we said, Tuesday, about my trip?”

“About having to be there Tuesday night so you could meet John Thursday morning?”

“Right.  Anything else?”

“You said you’d try to get back here tomorrow night so you’d be home this morning.”  She stopped, obviously befuddled, a behavior she only exhibited rarely.  Ilene wasn’t easily confused.

“I need you to think hard, really focus.  Was I there this morning?”

“I…I want to say ‘Yes,’ but…shit, Dylan, what’s happening?”  Then, that wonderful brain of hers kicked in.  “It’s some causality thing, isn’t it.  I feel like I have two sets of memories but only one of them is real.  You weren’t here, were you?  You’re only now getting back from Maryland.”

“Yes to both. A lot happened on Thursday.  In the reality you remember, I came back Thursday night and I was here this morning.  I went to work, came home, and we had dinner like we are now, except our conversation is different.  From what you told me Thursday morning, we must have decided, together, that you shouldn’t tell me anything specific about Thursday. When you talk to me tomorrow morning, you’re going to be totally noncommittal…”

“…because,” she broke in, “you’re about to tell me something made you change your mind about coming home tomorrow night, but you didn’t want to find that out from me because you wanted to be sure the decision was entirely your own.”

“You’re amazing.  I’ve been trying to get this straight all the way back from Baltimore, and you got it just like that,” I said, snapping my fingers.  “I’ll tell you all about it, but first I need to know exactly how you feel, what you think you remember.”

“If I concentrate, I can remember you being there this morning, but the memory of waking up alone is there, too, as if the two memories are fighting for supremacy.  Actually, it’s more like one of them is fading, the other growing stronger.  It’s a struggle to retain seeing you this morning, being so happy you were there – I was worried about you Tuesday night.  You held me when we woke up this morning. I can still feel your arms around me.  But I have the sense that if I don’t fight to keep them, both the memory and the feeling will disappear.”

“I’m betting you’re right.  Eventually you won’t remember I was there.  It’s what I expected to happen after I thought about it for a while.  You know how when you sew something the thread sometimes snags and you get an extra loop hanging out, and you try to pull the stray thread through so everything’s smooth again?  I think space-time does that, somehow.  The extra memories, the causation loops, the potential paradoxes, they’re all like stray loops of thread.

“Every time I live days out of order I create a snag in the trampoline, but the threads have enormous elastic tension.  They’re relentless, constantly fighting to self-correct, but it doesn’t happen instantaneously.”

“Why does it force my memories to be consistent while you retain contradictory ones?”

“It isn’t doing that.  I don’t remember being here this morning.  In my reality, being here this morning is just a hypothetical possibility, an unrealized expectation.  What I remember is you telling me I was here.”

“One more thing – how do you know I’ll tell you the same thing you remember me telling you tomorrow morning?

“Because for me, it already happened.  It’s like when I was injured in the explosion.” 

“I’m sorry, Dylan, that sounds crazy.”

“It sounds crazy to me too but the rules I always took for granted have changed.  The entity you called the Übermensch is a lot smarter and more powerful than we are.  It has the ability to fuck with reality and change the rules of physics, though it’s usually benign, doing its thing invisibly and letting us do ours.”

“What do you think changed that?” 

“I have a theory.  What if it sees humanity heading for a precipice but it has rules of its own that prohibit gross intervention, and it’s only permitted to temporarily bend the rules of our universe to give one of us the leverage to influence events.  Instead of intervening directly, it gives that person a tool he can use to pull the world back from the brink.”

“The precipice being what might result from the release of radiological materials in American cities?”

“Right.  Our track record since nine-eleven doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.”

“And you’re the person who’s going to pull us back?”

“It’s not about me, it’s the situation.  The Übermensch thinks I’m in a position to apply the leverage he gave me, but I have to figure out how.” 

“If your living Thursdays before Wednesdays is a lever, this point in time is a fulcrum.  What does that make you, Archimedes?”

“An involuntary one, yes.”

“I kind of like that,” she said.  “I don’t enjoy feeling like a prop, though.  The Übermensch has no right to tamper with my memories.”

“You’d prefer to remember all the conflicting realities?” 

She nodded affirmatively. 

“We could get Jerry to help work out a way to preserve a record of them.  I thought about doing it myself, but I think it would be more useful if the two of you did it.”

“Aren’t you afraid space-time will find a way to erase it?”

“I’m hoping the antidote to space-time’s ability to self correct is will power.  We might find it’s permanently malleable if we work hard enough at it.”

27.

Friday morning, I called Samir.  We agreed to meet in William’s office at Federal Plaza so he could analyze the messages and conversations I’d recorded.  I felt as though I was betraying Gayle, but until we knew more I had to keep her in the dark.  I had no idea why Rod was involved or whether Gayle knew things she hadn’t told me.  She was my friend, but there was too much at stake to let that determine my actions.  I didn’t relish having to tell her I’d instigated an investigation of her husband, either.

I brought Samir up to date on my trip to Maryland, reversing the order in which I did things and leaving out much of my interaction with Karminian.  It wouldn’t shock either Samir or William that I’d done some sleuthing on my own, since I knew Rod would be nearby and William had always considered me the unit’s flake.

I laid my recorder on the table and played the two messages from Rod’s voice mail.

“The man you bugged is the one you suspected of being involved with the terrorists?  Your friend’s husband?” Samir asked.

“Yeah.  His wife told me he speaks just about every language in the Middle East.”

“And you’re wondering whether the guy who left the message was speaking Arabic, Turkish, or Armenian?  Guess again.  Whoever left these messages was speaking Hebrew, and he speaks it like an Israeli.  The first message says to call him back right away.  The second is more agitated.  He says he made a mistake, that he needs this fellow Burdak to return something to him.  He didn’t leave a name either time, so he obviously expected Burdak to recognize his voice and know what he was referring to.”

I was still back at Hebrew.  That was the last thing I expected to hear.

“It must have been the Israeli who gave Burdak the envelope – Gelsen.”

“Now what?” Samir said, smirking.  “The Israelis are going to blow up New York and cost themselves billions in guilt-induced donations from American Jews?  Not that I have anything against playing on other people’s guilt to get what I want.”

Next came the twenty minutes of recorded conversations between Rod and the two Arabs he shot, including the muffled sounds of the shots themselves, and a “Fuck!” from Rod, who was only three feet from the hidden microphone when the errant bullet grazed his face.  Samir told me to get lost for an hour while he enhanced the sound quality and studied the result.

“Except for the last word in English, you finally got your Arabic,” he said when I returned.  “Your friend Burdak is quite the chameleon.  Here,” he pointed to the recorder, “he’s a Palestinian trying to buy one of the canisters.  He’d apparently been corresponding with them for some time, claiming he represented Hamas, who learned of the smuggled isotopes through sources in Iran, which funded the whole operation.  It’s not clear whether the part about Iran was invented or real, or whether the two Arabs even knew who was funding them. 

“I think they didn’t. They were obviously low level mules, well indoctrinated with hate for the enemies of Islam, but not having much of a clue about anything else.  We’ve already been through everything the FBI had on them, thanks to that agent, Henry White.”

“But,” I said, “the Arabs didn’t deny knowing about the radiological materials, right?  So apparently, whoever Burdak works for has a lot better intel than we do.”

“Damn right!” William’s voice boomed from the doorway, as he strode into the room, electrifying the air like an approaching tornado.  “Manzone finally got a response to the query I put through.  Turns out the CIA has a file on Burdak.  He’s Mossad.”

I should have been more surprised than I was.  Given everything I’d learned in the last few days, it almost seemed like the obvious conclusion.

I summarized what I’d told Samir for William. I’d brought the camera I purchased with his money.  It was decision time.  I decided to brazen it through. 

“I have something to show you.  I didn’t want to say anything yesterday, but I needed to satisfy myself about Rod, because of Gayle.  I knew where he was staying in Washington so I went down a day early and staked out his hotel.  I followed him and got these.”  I showed them the digital images.  “I didn’t realize what I’d witnessed until yesterday.” 

William stared hard at me.  “We’d better get him in here for a chat.  You want to set it up, Dylan, or should I go through official channels and have him detained?”

I thought of Gayle and decided the least I could do was avoid the spectacle of having him arrested.  “Let me handle it.  I’ll call you if I need backup.”

Samir and I got up to leave, but William stopped me with a hand on my shoulder, saying, “Close the door on your way out, will you, Sam?”  William was much too sharp to try to bamboozle for very long.

“You’ve been pretty busy, Dylan.  Not that I’m complaining about the results, but when did you turn into James Bond?  We’ve worked together a long time.  If I didn’t know better I’d think someone was impersonating you.”

One thing I’d learned in the last few weeks was to keep my mouth shut and let other people talk, so I just did my best to look embarrassed.

“Do you have contacts I don’t know about?  Either that or you’re on an amazing run of luck.  Watch that it doesn’t run out on you.”  When I still didn’t respond, he said, “Nothing to say?”  He sounded like his feelings were hurt more than anything else, so I tried a little misdirection.

“You’re different, too, William.  I think you’ve actually grown a heart.  It’s true we go back a long way, but a lot of time has passed since we worked together.  People change.”

“You know I go by results, Dylan, and yours have been great.  But free-lancing can be dangerous and I’m not comfortable finding things out after the fact.  Remember, your number can’t come up every time.”

I grasped for a reply.  “I know I haven’t been following protocol the last few weeks, but I keep finding myself in situations in which I have to react quickly.  I’m sorry if I made things harder for you. I’ll try to keep you informed from now on, but you don’t have to worry about me.  I may have once been the science guy who tagged along with the rest of you, but it’s not that way anymore.  I’m a member of this unit and I intend to contribute however I can.”

He looked at me like a parent whose kid had just shown the first signs of maturity.  “Just be careful.”

William hadn’t been being ironic when he asked if I had sources he didn’t know about.  It wouldn’t trouble him particularly if I did, but he’d never seen me take that kind of initiative before, and he needed to know he could trust my judgment.

The exchange with William confirmed my notion about how people are drawn to others’ success.  He couldn’t be sure whether I knew what I was doing or I was just lucky, but like any good gambler he knew not to interrupt a winning streak.

***

I found an empty office and dialed Rod’s cell number.  He picked up on the second ring.

“It’s Dylan Brice.”

“Yes, Gayle’s friend at work.  It’s been a while,” he said.  “What can I do for you?”

“Actually, I’m working my other job today.  Gayle doesn’t know I’m calling.”

“Sounds mysterious.  Are you planning a welcome-back party for her?”  Damn, he was a cool one.  After what I’d seen him involved in this week, he didn’t miss a beat, not that he had any reason to fear me.

“Some associates of mine would like to discuss areas of mutual interest with you.  We’re all playing in the same arena.  I know it’s short notice, but things that I can’t discuss on the phone make this rather urgent.  We tried getting in touch with you earlier this week.”

“Yes, Gayle mentioned you might be in Washington too.”

“In Maryland, actually, but I was in Washington Thursday evening.  I called your hotel, but you were out.”

“I had a busy week.”

“Do you think you could come into town this afternoon?”

He thought for a few seconds.  “If it’s as urgent as you say…”

“I assure you it is, for you as well as for us.  This really can’t wait.”

“You know, Dylan, the way Gayle talks about you, I’d never imagined us having a conversation like this.”

“Really?  I’d be fascinated to know what she says about me.  Maybe we can stop for a beer after our meeting.”  Just when I was starting to enjoy the cat-and-mouse thing, he asked where we wanted him to meet us.  I gave him William’s address at Federal Plaza.

“I’m on the train.  We just left Union Station.  By the time I throw my suitcase in my car and get back on the PATH train…let’s say 3:30.”

“That’s fine,” I said.  “I’ll meet you in front of the building to escort you in.”  I couldn’t resist smiling to myself.  He had to have recognized the address – everyone in New York did since nine-eleven.  He knew he was coming to a building swarming with federal cops.

If he felt intimidated, he didn’t show it.  Cool as ever, he didn’t seem the least bit fazed by the stark exterior of the building or the heavy presence of government security.  Nor did he raise an eyebrow at the way I slid through with him in tow.

I introduced Rod to William, Samir, and Mary, who’d been studying the CIA dossier on him.  William took charge of the meeting.

“I’m not much for beating around the bush, Mr. Burdak…”

“Rod, please.”

“Rod, then.  It seems you’ve crossed paths with one of my people a couple of times this week.  What we do here’s pretty sensitive, so with two such close encounters, it’s become necessary for us to compare notes.”

“All right,” Rod said.  “Anything I can do to help.” 

Didn’t anything perturb him?

“By the way how’d you injure your face?”

“Just carelessness on my part.  Nothing serious, a few stitches and it was fine.”

“Really?  Looks like you were within an inch of being dead.  I’d call that serious.”

Rod looked hard at me, then at William.  “I thought we weren’t going to beat around the bush.  Who are you, anyway, and why am I here?”

William pushed his credentials across the table to Rod, who looked them over and slid them back. Mary took something out of Rod’s file and handed it to him.  “As to why you’re here, for starters,” William looked at me, “our friend Dylan took this.”  It was the picture of him getting into his car outside the motel, with blood seeping through the white towel he pressed against his face.

“You were following me?” Rod said to me, seemingly more interested in how I captured the image, than the picture itself.

“I was.  I knew things that didn’t add up.  I was concerned for Gayle, but if there was a chance you were involved in what we were investigating the consequences were too serious to worry about anyone’s feelings.”  The way he nodded his understanding said he’d have done the same thing.  “I recorded the conversation with the two men you shot, too.  Samir translated for us.”

For the first time, Rod looked upset.  Being caught didn’t trouble him as much as realizing he’d screwed up and left a trail.

“There’s more,” I continued.  “I wasn’t following you on Thursday, but I was there when Ari Gelsen handed you a package of sensitive documents at APL.”

“I’ll ask you again,” Rod said.  “Exactly why am I here?”

William took the nearly inch-thick file folder from Mary and held it in front of him.  “This is a hardcopy of the dossier the CIA has been building on you.  We know about your Mossad connection.  We’d like you tell us exactly what you were doing this week.”