Written in Time (34 page)

“Alan would have done that, yes,” Peggy said hesitantly. “I’m sure he would have.”
 

Ellen thrust her hands into the pockets of her dress. “So you’re suggesting, Peggy, that somebody might be doing time transfers up there in the mountains, and, if it were Jack’s and my great-great-grandson, Alan, he would have let you guys know, right?” Ellen didn’t wait for Peggy to give an answer. “So if somebody’s doing time transfers up in the mountains without telling you—shit!”
 

Ellen took Lizzie by the shoulders and made eye contact. “Help me get stuff together, then saddle a horse. I’ll need two pistols, a lot of ammo, food, water. I’ll need one of your dad’s knives.”
 

“The rifle?”
 

“No. You guys keep that and the shotgun and the other handguns. I’ve gotta dig through your father’s closet and find some clothes. If I look like a man from a distance, there’s less chance of trouble. Peggy?” Ellen glanced at Clarence’s wife. “You help Lizzie. And find me some binoculars. Let’s hurry it up. Jack could be riding into God knows what!”
 

As soon as she was through the front door, Ellen reached around behind her and started undoing the buttons down the back of her dress.
 

Alan had never felt guilty owning a Ferrari. As one of the richest men in the world, he could choose to drive whatever he wished. Someone had once said to him, “I pity a man like you, Mr. Naile. Rolex watch, fancy car. How many houses do you have that you never stay in more than a couple weeks at a time? How many homeless people could live in them? I ask you that!”
 

Under agreements of strict anonymity, Alan had donated tens of millions of dollars to various causes, all from personal funds. Horizon Enterprises actively sponsored a wide range of charitable endeavors, some openly, others quietly. No one shamed him into giving, because he had no obligation to help his fellow man; it was his choice to make and he chose to do so, because giving people a leg up when they needed it, donating to medical research and the like was something he liked to do. It was not his obligation to give; it was his privilege to do so.
 

When he’d first realized what Morton Hardesty had done, Alan Naile called his wife, told her his discovery. He had asked her, “Wasn’t I paying Mort enough? Why did he sell out to Lakewood Industries? To get into Bethany Kaminsky’s pants? I mean, I just don’t see why . . .” There had been no answer. There could be none.
 

Alan usually took his wife’s advice.
 

Morton Hardesty lived in Hubbard Woods, in Winnetka. Alan had taken his private elevator to the parking garage, gotten into the Ferrari and started to drive. It was nine in the evening and traffic was light, everybody in Chicago apparently celebrating an October Indian Summer night in ways that didn’t involve congesting the Kennedy Expressway.
 

Alan Naile’s wife had advised against confronting Hardesty, at least until the following day. Against his usual wont, Alan Naile ignored his wife’s advice.
 

The Edens was even more deserted, and Alan Naile did something he rarely did, despite the muscle his car possessed. The top was down, and Alan Naile let the Ferrari do its thing, settling in around eighty-five and feeling the night air rip across his face.
 

“Shit!” Alan Naile roared the epithet into the slipstream. Lakewood Industries was the dark side mirror image of his own company, exploiting everyone that it could, profiting from the misery it created. Bethany Kaminsky, his opposite number at Lakewood, apparently never listened to her connscience . . . if she even had one.
 

The rivalry between their firms had begun in his grandfather’s time, when his grandfather had run Horizon with the advice and consent of David Naile, who had started it all, built the business from a small ranch and a smaller general store in Atlas, Nevada, into an economic and technological empire.
 

There had been strong evidence to suggest that, at least prior to World War Two, Lakewood Industries had worked closely with Nazi Germany. Alan’s own father had told him once, “My dad felt that Lakewood kept some of its ties with the Nazis long after Hitler invaded Poland, even after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. There wasn’t any way to prove it. We profited from the war, but legally and ethically. Lakewood profited any way that it could. If old man Kaminsky hadn’t had certain members of Congress in his back pocket, more of it would have come out. There’s a lesson to learn here, Alan. We’re capitalists and damned proud of it, son. We’re out to make money, and that’s called self-interest. Enlightened self-interest means that you have a moral grounding. You’ll work hard for a buck; you’ll sacrifice time that you could be using just to have fun or whatever. There are some things you won’t do for a buck or a million bucks or a hundred million bucks. It’s called having a sense of personal and professional honor. I want you always to remember that.”
 

Alan Naile remembered it now.
 

He wanted to rip Mort Hardesty’s head off and crap down Hardesty’s neck. Instead, he’d try to reason with Hardesty, ascertain how far along Lakewood Industries had gotten in the pirated time-travel experiments and put Horizon Enterprises into full overdrive on damage control.
 

“Shit!” Alan Naile shouted out again into the night. He so much wanted to pound Morton Hardesty’s face into a wall, his hands were shaking.
 

Ellen Naile reined back on the Appaloosa, legs braced against the stirrups. Still in the saddle, she reached into her left saddlebag and took out the Maglite flashlight she’d thought to bring at the last minute. Batteries were precious, even the rechargeable kind, but time might be even more precious. It was full dark and still overcast, and her night vision had never been anything to scream about.
 

Ellen flashed the beam ahead, and then trailed it back along the ground. As a young girl, her favorite cowboy hero had always been Clint Walker. He could read trail sign like an Indian, she remembered, and she wished he were with her now.
 

She saw what might be hoofprints on some of the softer looking ground. “What the hell,” she murmured, shutting off the flashlight and hoping the Appaloosa could see in the dark better than she did as she dug in her heels and gave the horse its head . . .
 

Alan Naile wanted to break down the door, but he rang the bell instead.
 

Morton Hardesty’s house was a large red brick bungalow. Architectural styles were something Alan Naile had never really learned, but the house looked nice, vaguely English, with ivy trailers growing up along the front and low steps leading to the doorway. Mort had inherited the house from a maiden aunt some years ago, its entire complement of antique furnishings and old oriental rugs part of Hardesty’s legacy as well. He’d had a housewarming party shortly after moving in, inviting all of his coworkers and the corporate management staff.
 

Alan had cut short a brief stay in New York and flown back at midday from a conference out on Long Island in order not to miss the occasion. Like his wife, like his parents, like his grandparents, he had never been much for parties, but to have missed Hardesty’s soiree would have appeared snobbish, and Alan had never wanted the image of something he personally found disgusting.
 

As he prepared to ring the doorbell again, a nervous-looking Morton Hardesty opened the front door, his eyes shifting right and left. Other than that physical manifestation, Hardesty appeared as he always did: bland.
 

Hardesty wore a long-sleeved knit shirt, the buttons of its front plaquette closed to the throat. The shirt was gray or green—Alan Naile was marginally visually color challenged; but Hardesty wore slacks that were clearly blue, so, unless Hardesty was even more color blind than he was, Alan Naile assumed the shirt to be gray.
 

“Alan.”
 

“Mort. I need to talk with you—now.”
 

“Is there something wrong?”
 

“You know what’s wrong, Mort.”
 

“Ahh, yes. I do. Not much of a porch, is it? Why not come inside?”
 

“How far along is Lakewood with the time-transfer process, Mort?”
 

“Pretty far along, Alan. They’ve established a base in 1900 up in the mountains not far from the Naile ranch. And, of course, we’ve worked out all of the kinks in making the trip forward in time, so, essentially, we can enter the past and return to the present whenever we wish. Why don’t you come in?”
 

“Why did you betray me, betray us, Mort? Wasn’t I paying you enough? You could have told me that and I would have paid you more. What was it? Bethany Kaminsky?”
 

“I find her irresistible, I don’t mind admitting. A woman like that, Alan, and a guy like me? Well, I had to bring something else to the table. Bethany has a certain vision that’s daring, to be sure, but intriguing. If she’s successful, who can say? You might cease to exist in the next few seconds because you were never born. I don’t pretend to understand time. If your great-great grandparents die, well, you’d still be here. But if your great-grandfather dies, well, before your grandfather is born, that could be a whole other kettle of fish. But if you had never existed, then the time process wouldn’t have been developed, so your great-grandfather would have lived and you’d still be here. It’s confusing as hell to talk about, but if you’ll come inside, I can explain it better mathematically. But you’re not all that good at higher math, are you, Alan? Only bottom lines.”
 

“Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Mort.”
 

Morton Hardesty smiled. “See, I was already here, Alan, and it seems that you’re the one who ‘rode in’ with that flashy Ferrari of yours. And as to being fucked, well, I’m the one who gained, and you’re the one who lost. Why not come inside and maybe we can work this out, Alan?”
 

Alan could feel something—almost genetic, it was so deep within him—telling him that he should get out of there. He hadn’t taken his wife’s advice, and perhaps he should have. But he wasn’t going to ignore an instinct that seemed to come from so deep within him. “Tell you what, Mort. Instead of coming inside, I’ll have my attorneys burn some midnight oil instead. Trust me. You’re the one who’s fucked.”
 

Alan turned to start down the steps and back toward the curb where the Ferrari was parked. He stopped when he heard Bethany Kaminsky’s voice. “Alan. All this toilet talk in front of a lady! Really! Actually, depending on how one uses the word, Mort really did get fucked.” Alan Naile reached the bottom of the steps and turned around, looking at Bethany Kaminsky. She was barefoot and wore a man’s bathrobe, the fingers of her right hand straying through her tousled hair. “I just fucked him. And, later on this evening, I’ll fuck him again. Actually, I fuck his brains out, sometimes two or three times a day.
 

“You know me,” Bethany Kaminsky continued. “I’m always right there to squeeze the last penny out of a buck. Mort’s great. Doesn’t give two shits about money! Just wants his brains fucked out on a pretty regular basis, and even old Mortie here beats a vibrator!” She clapped Morton Hardesty on the shoulder almost like a man would, then leaned up on her bare toes and kissed his balding forehead. “But in the figurative sense, Alan, you’re the one who is fucked. We have a time base in 1900. We’re going to take over the world, but we’ll keep your great-grandfather alive if Mort says we have to, so we don’t screw this up. And you, my old rival, are about to really get fucked, in the figurative sense, although it might be fun in the literal sense. But, hey, we’ll always have Paris.”
 

“What the hell are you talking about?” Alan asked her. “You and I never had Paris or Pittsburgh. I’d be afraid of catching a disease.”
 

And, at the small of his back, Alan Naile felt something that he had never felt before, but instinctively recognized: the muzzle of a gun.
 

“Have you two guys met, Alan?” Bethany Kaminsky asked, the tone of her voice something more suited to a casual introduction at a cocktail party than a confrontation. “Alan, meet Lester Matthews, Lakewood’s security consultant. You and Lester will have a lot of time to get to know each other on a very intimate level before we take you back in time and kill you. Isn’t that a great idea, Alan? The classic problem of what to do with a dead body instantly resolved. And even if someone ever suspected, the crime will have taken place almost a century ago.”
 

“There’s no statute of limitations on murder, Bethany,” Alan announced matter-of-factly, the forced calm in his voice belying the churning in his stomach and the perspiration coating his palms.
 

“Say! That is true, isn’t it? Well, we’ll just have to be doubly careful, then,” Bethany told him, smiling.
 

As a boy, Alan had gone to camp several summers. The summer that he was twelve, instead of camp, he’d spent three weeks staying with his best friend’s family, their guest at a compound on Lake Superior near the border with Canada. The last ten days of the stay with his friend Brad’s family had been the most exciting, because Brad’s grandfather had come up to join them. In his sixties then, the grandfather, Alan had learned, was a veteran of the OSS, World War II’s Office of Strategic Services, the organizational predecessor to the CIA.
 

The older man was delighted to learn that young Alan had a genuine interest in those stories of wartime service which could be freely discussed. With only seven days remaining of Alan’s stay, Brad’s grandfather had come up to him after breakfast and asked, “Would you like to learn a few things?”
 

In those last seven days, Alan learned the basic uses of detcord (blowing up a few old tree stumps), a few handto-hand combat maneuvers, how to throw a Ka-Bar knife and certain means by which one might disarm an armed opponent. Alan tried one of those techniques in the instant that the recollection sprang to mind, realizing full well that he hadn’t practiced it since that summer more than two decades ago. With as much fluidity as he could muster, reassuring himself feebly that Bethany Kaminsky really wouldn’t want to run the risk of a shooting on a public street in a Chicago suburb, David smashed the heel of his right foot downward against what he hoped would be Lester Matthews’ right instep, throwing his body weight back and arcing right. The muzzle of the gun was hard against his back for a microsecond. With his right forearm, he swept the weapon to the gunman’s left, his body twisting to the man’s right. Alan’s balled left fist hooked upward and across, catching Lester Matthews full in the right side of the mouth.