Written in Time (40 page)

“Who? Who came against the house? Nobody—”
 

“Oh, my God,” Jack whispered, looking suddenly frightened, visibly shivering, overwhelmed.
 

“Lizzie? And Clarence’s wife? More guys like these that tried killing us? They were going to attack the house?”
 

“Blake told me before he died. Take care of her, of Helen, as quickly as you can, Ellen. Tell me what I can do to help.” He cut away the last of the barbed wire with the Leatherman tool he carried in his saddlebags, then sat down and covered his face with his bloodied hands for a moment.
 

“I’ll help you round up some horses. You take a couple of them. You can leave us out here alone. There is no choice but to do that. I’ll get Helen back by myself.”
 

Jack looked up from his hands. His eyes looked as if he were holding back tears. Some of the Bledsoe girl’s blood was smeared on his face. “We’ll pick up the best of the guns these guys lost, so you and Helen have plenty of firepower if you need it.” The Bledsoe girl seemed somewhere between sleep and unconsciousness, had made no sound but those associated with pain. “Can you make it back with her?”
 

“She’s not comatose, just really hurting. I can make some of that better, get her back to the house so Clarence’s wife can take care of her. We’ll be fine. We can load a spare horse with all the rifles and handguns we can carry. With my hair stuffed under my hat, from a distance I’ll look like a guy. We’ll be fine,” Ellen volunteered again.
 

Jack nodded, mumbling something about getting his own horse as he jogged off.
 

The room was cold, kept that way, perhaps, to keep the computers—banks of them—running at peak efficiency. Alan Naile was freezing, but wasn’t numb. Almost every inch of his body hurt. When he’d awakened tied to a straight back chair as a captive of Bethany Kaminsky’s thugs, Lester Matthews had ordered, “Hurt him a lot, but not anything permanent yet. No bones or teeth. We’re not a hundred percent sure of how we’ll play this.”
 

Expertly, two of Matthews’ men began following their boss’s orders with egregious zeal, their blows leveled at muscle groups, at the abdomen, the groin, Alan sinking beneath the waves of pain, awakening and, in the next instant, the administration of pain beginning anew. It went on like that—the brutalization—for what seemed to him an eternity. Pain, unconsciousness, more pain. The only way to judge the passing of time was by the faces of his tormenters. They had both had average five o’clock shadows in their hollow cheeks when the pain began. When at last it ceased, their faces showed at least another full day’s growth.
 

They freed him from the chair and hauled him, still otherwise bound to his feet. He wet himself as he stood, but had done that already after they’d first started beating him in the stomach and groin. Matthews remarked, “You stink, Naile.” Then Matthews ordered his men, “Clean him up a little before you bring him along. But be quick about it.”
 

Cold water from a scrub bucket was thrown on him. His feet free, his hands—those were numb—still bound behind him and his arms bound at his sides with a rope tight around his chest, he was led off toward the door of the room in which he had been beaten. Before the door was opened, a dark blue pillowcase was pulled down over his head. One of his tormenters threatened, “Let out a fuckin’ word, and I’ll haul your ass back in here and put your nuts in a bench vise. When the pain gets too bad and you pass out, you’ll fall, but your balls’ll still be locked in that vise. You might even tear ‘em off.”
 

Alan said nothing, only nodded his head within the pillowcase. It was clear that the identity of the tortured prisoner was something to be kept secret. Why?
 

He was shoved along, walking for what seemed blocks, the pillowcase hood removed only after he’d been tied into another chair in this room filled with computers and high tech electronics.
 

Bethany Kaminsky’s face had smiled down at him.
 

After she walked away, joining Matthews, Alan had begun his assessment of the room. A dozen computerwork stations, another room beyond with what was likely a supercomputer. But other equipment looked at once strange and familiar. As seconds dragged on into minutes, recognition slowly returned. What he was looking at—at least some of it—were upgraded versions of certain of the monitoring systems devised to duplicate the time-travel phenomenon.
 

Why was such equipment here? As he nearly verbalized the question aloud, Alan’s consciousness was flooded over by a wave of bitterly cold realization. If the time base to which both Mort Hardesty and Kaminsky had alluded was, in fact, in the mountains in Nevada, then this equipment was for farther research. If Lakewood Industries’ minions could travel back and forth into the past from one location, other locations could be established. Not in an office building in some Chicago suburb, he told himself. No, such equipment had to be for something else.
 

Kaminsky interrupted his thoughts as she called to him from across the room, then began walking toward him, Matthews—the left side of Matthews’ face bruised from where Alan had punched him—at her side. “You’re wondering what all this stuff is for? Right?”
 

“Research into time-travel?”
 

“In a way. The supercomputer in the next room is running permutations, as Mort calls them. If such and such event took place or such and such person ceased to exist or never existed, how would the present be affected? Like that. This is complex stuff, my soon-to-be-ex-rival. The actual time-travel stuff that we have is for plotting coordinates and polishing our technique.
 

“I always just loathe it in movies when the bad guy tells the good guy his plans before killing him, don’t you? But,” Bethany went on, “in this case, it’s a sure bet you’re going to die. And if for some reason you escaped at the last second before death, you’ll be almost a hundred years in the past. Who would you tell? What good would it do? Besides your damn relatives, everybody’d think you’re crazy.
 

“So,” she continued, obviously enjoying herself, “here’s a kind of overview of the business plan, Naile. I want to control the world, but from behind the scenes. Women do it best that way—control things. For that, I need the cooperation of a country. Now, I’m as patriotic as the next gal—well, not really, but anyway—so, we’ll give the good old USA a shot at things. And Germany and England. I left out the French, but I don’t think they’d work out. They’d rather do everything for themselves.”
 

“You’re leaving out places like the Sudan, Iceland, Columbia, too? Gee! Need an industrial base at the turn of the century?”
 

“Now, isn’t he clever, Lester!” Bethany Kaminsky enthused, throwing up her hands. “You can see why Alan Naile’s a captain of industry! Right you are, Alan! Very good boy! At the close of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, there were only four countries that could ramp up for the kind of technology I’m offering. But here’s why I sort of figure the United States wouldn’t be interested, and probably not the Brits, but, they might surprise us. Who knows? Right? Better yet, you guess, bright boy.”
 

Alan didn’t have to guess. “You’re going to offer latetwentieth-century war-related technology to the highest bidder, enabling that nation to take over the world. Aerial dogfights with F-16s pitted against Sopwith Camels? Ground battles with modern tanks against horse-mounted cavalry, M-16 rifles against old bolt-action infantry weapons? You filthy bitch!”
 

Matthews grabbed Alan by what remained of his shirtfront, but Kaminsky waved him off. “By controlling the flow of technology, then playing the combatants against one another, I think I’ll do well. No high-tech fighter planes like F-16s, but maybe the Korean War kind of jets. That sort of thing. One sale like that a hundred years ago would propel things along throughout the century to where Lakewood now would be the dominant financial power in the whole world. All thanks to your lovely family, the present is going to change very dramatically. Technology will leap ahead by a hundred years. If you could see what the present will be like, you wouldn’t recognize it. The more high-tech military hardware I introduce into the past, the more technology will have to catch up. Progress, Alan. Progress! I’ll own it all. You’ll be dead. Your relatives back in the past will watch it happen and won’t be able to stop it.
 

“Just think, Alan.” Bethany stooped down in front of him, grabbed his testicles through his pants and whispered, “The dream of Caesar, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Hitler—all of them, guys, couldn’t do it. I don’t have balls. I don’t need them. And I’m the one who’s going to conquer the whole fucking world.”
 

Bethany stood up and ordered Matthews, “Take him back in time and shoot him with a period weapon with period ammunition. Then leave his body for the insects and the animals—and his loving family.”
 

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
 

Jack had taken his own mount, Barbie, Blake’s horse and one other, heading back for the ranch to discover Lizzie’s and Peggy’s fates, essentially retracing the way he had come and as quickly as possible. With hard riding, he would be at the ranch by dawn.
 

For safety’s sake—it was a way less traveled—and because the route would be easier on someone who was injured, Ellen had told Jack that she would take the slower course back, through the mountains.
 

With dusk approaching, early it seemed, and leading Helen’s mount behind her, Ellen began a serious search for what would be their evening’s campsite. Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels had always found a convenient “grove of cottonwoods just outside of town,” but there were no cottonwood groves to be had, and town—Atlas— was quite a long distance away. Ellen Naile settled instead, for what in other climes might have been called an oasis.
 

In the barren expanse so high still in the mountains, there were few examples of vegetation other than scrub pines, but they happened on a reasonably flat tract perhaps a quarter the length of a football field and nearly as wide, an ideal mountain pasture except for its comparatively miniscule size. There was decent-looking grass for the horses, a pool of water from which she wouldn’t be reckless enough to drink (without a ceramic filter) and pines that looked overall fuller and greener, less as if they were struggling for life. All told, the spot was as fine a campsite as she might have hoped for.
 

“We’ll stop here for the night, Helen.”
 

“Yes, Miz Naile.”
 

“You can call me Ellen, sweetheart.”
 

“Yes, Miz Ellen.”
 

“Youth.” Ellen shrugged and sighed under her breath. Albeit bruised, with abrasions and cuts all over her body—Ellen had treated them from her first aid-kit—the Bledsoe girl had bounced back remarkably quickly. Aside from her tattered dress beneath the blankets in which she was cocooned and the cuts that were obvious on what skin still showed, the Bledsoe girl’s principal physical symptom was exhaustion. And she said little about that. The relatively stoic pioneer girl was mainly bone tired, but elated that her parents had survived.
 

“Helen,” Ellen volunteered, continuing quickly before the girl could return some polite response. “I’m going to help you off your horse, then get you settled. If you want to nap, feel free. I don’t need any assistance at all getting camp set up, and I really just want you to rest so you’re feeling good when you see your mother and father. I’m going to make something warm to eat, and I want you to have plenty of it.”
 

Eating—Ellen had yet to defecate since she’d set out after Jack and had no intention of doing like the proverbial bear in the woods unless such were unavoidable; she would eat sparingly.
 

In a way, Ellen felt liberated. After eating, the inevitable did, in fact, become unavoidable. She had gotten through it—less yucky an experience than she had thought that it would be—and felt confident that she was, at last, at home in the wild, could handle the rugged life. She laughed at herself. However successful the experiment in physical hygiene had been, she harbored no desire to repeat it.
 

Adjusting her clothes as she walked out of the trees and toward their small fire, Ellen wished again for a cigarette. Certain bodily functions just seemed to cry out to be punctuated with a smoke.
 

Looking past the fire and into the fast-advancing night beyond their campsite, Ellen spied flashes of light in the purpling darkness.
 

Barbie had settled into a long-strided trot after Jack Naile resaddled and remounted the mare. According to his leather-cased Rolex, the time was a few minutes after two in the morning. Judging from the terrain, at the current pace he could make it to the ranch by a little before six. At this stage, Blake’s horse and the mount Jack had liberated from one of the dead ambushers were more a liability than an asset. He left them behind to show up on some spread nearby—perhaps even his own ranch— when they got tired of foraging for food and water and missed the security of the feedbag and the trough.
 

There was the matter of Blake’s body, but the marshal’s death would be easily enough explained. As a writer of fiction, Jack had occasionally referred to himself as “a professional liar,” and covering for Blake being gunned down—especially in an age where forensic ballistics were all but unknown—wouldn’t even be a challenge.
 

All that concerned Jack Naile was the safety of his family. He had already promised himself that he would kill Jess Fowler, had to before Fowler hatched some other plot. Soon, perhaps within days, David and Clarence would be back from San Franciso, having cashed in a portion of the diamonds brought back into the past as a portable and negotiable source of wealth. Once they were back, Jack was determined to do what he had to do.