“What about the stairs?”

  “Same deal. The doorways to those levels are protected by electronic locks. You have to swipe your badge and type in a code to gain entry.”

  Wahlman thought about that for a few seconds. Maybe the guy in the gray coveralls hadn’t been planning to kill Davenport after all. Not immediately, anyway. Maybe he’d been planning to use her to get to where he and his fellow Topple operatives needed to be. That was why the gun had been in the satchel when he marched into the office, instead of in his hand. He’d been planning to stay in character as a NitroLug technician and ask Davenport to escort him and his fellow Topple operatives to Level 14. Which meant that his fellow Topple operatives might still be waiting for him to bring Davenport to him. And the least conspicuous place for them to wait would be in the stairwell.

  But why hadn’t they simply paged Davenport? Why had they sent a guy all the way down to the security office, creating an elevated risk of exposure?

  “Check your pager,” Wahlman said.

  Davenport stopped and unclipped the device from her belt.

  “Whoops,” she said. “I forgot to turn the sound back on after the staff meeting a while ago. I’ve been paged twice since then. Same number. It’s probably the team from NitroLug. They’re probably waiting for me to call them back so they can get started.”

  “I guess they got tired of waiting.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Keep walking,” Wahlman said. “We’re going to take the elevator.”

  “But—”

  “I have a plan. If it works out, we won’t need your badge.”

  “And if it doesn’t work out?”

  “Just hope that it does.”

  7

  William Top had decided to accompany his team of operatives to 1994, and he’d decided to bring Sheila Everton, his lovely new apprentice, along with him. On-the-job training was the best kind of training there was, in Top’s opinion. And, since this was possibly the most important mission in the history of the world—and once completed would indeed actually change the history of the world—he felt compelled to be present, and to lead the way.

  So far, everything had gone exactly as planned. Top and his crew had spun to a predetermined and thoroughly scouted location in the woods, near the highway that led into Jonnerton. They’d commandeered the NitroLug van, forcing the occupants—everyone except the driver—out of their company coveralls before lining them up and shooting them in the backs of their heads.

  After viewing his naked teammates’ skulls explode, after losing control of his emotions and his bladder, the driver had cooperated unhesitatingly with Top’s request for directions to the secret underground installation where Jack Reacher’s blood specimen was being stored, and he’d provided an envelope containing, among other things, an up-to-date list of the procedures and protocols required for entering the facility as a government contractor. In exchange, Top had allowed him to die with his clothes on. Nobody would have wanted his uniform, anyway, since most of the right pant leg was soaked with urine. A shame, since his uniform would have fit Everton way better than the one she ended up with.

  With the proper vehicle, and the proper paperwork, and the proper company logo on their ball caps, Top and his team of operatives had no problem making it past the pair of armed airmen posted at the entrance to the facility. The guards had been expecting them. They didn’t even bother to check the van for weapons. They just waved them on through.

  Once inside, Top and his team could pretty much go wherever they wanted to go. With the exception of the place they actually needed to go. Apparently you needed an official identification badge and a keypad code to gain access to certain areas, a detail that the driver of the van hadn’t bothered to mention. Which infuriated William Top. He felt like going back out to the woods and chopping the guy up with a machete.

  Top had attempted to contact the NCO on duty, twice, and when she failed to respond to the pages, he’d sent a man named Moore down to the security office to request assistance in person.

  Moore didn’t make it to the office on the first try. He ran into an old friend on the elevator. A friend who wasn’t really a friend at all. A woman who’d caused all kinds of problems for William Top’s organization.

  A woman named Lucie Barbeau.

  She’d put up a good fight, according to Moore, whose nose hadn’t quite stopped bleeding yet, but he’d finally gotten the better of her. He’d bound her wrists with electrical tape and had forced her up the stairs to where Top and the others were waiting. She was currently sandwiched between a pair of operatives who were waiting for the order to shoot her. But Top wasn’t going to let her off that easy. Kyle Harrison was dead, and she’d been responsible, and she was going to pay. Very slowly, and very painfully.

  Top had congratulated Moore for capturing the clever and elusive spy, and then he’d sent him back to the security office. Moore was an experienced operative, and Top knew he could depend on him to carry out the assignment, regardless of any other obstacles he might encounter.

  “He’s been gone almost half an hour,” Everton said, dabbing at the beads of sweat on her forehead with her left coverall sleeve. Which, along with the right one, had extended well past the tips of her fingers before being rolled up.

  The stairways were hot and stuffy. Stiflingly so. Especially on and around the landing outside Level 14, where Top and Everton and the rest of the team were waiting, the heat from their bodies exacerbating the situation exponentially.

  William Top had gained some weight recently. That was part of the problem. He hadn’t been eating right, and he hadn’t been keeping up with his normal exercise routine. For a moment, he felt as though he might actually lose consciousness.

  He shook it off.

  “We’ll give him a few more minutes,” he said. “The duty sergeant might have been busy with something else when he showed up.”

  “Want me to try his radio again?”

  “Sure.”

  Everton tried to reach Moore on his walkie-talkie. She transmitted three quick electronic beeps, the Topple mobile device code for URGENT! If you were the recipient of the annoyingly high-pitched staccato alert, you were supposed to drop whatever you were doing and respond immediately.

  “He’s still not answering,” Everton said. “I think we better—”

  “There’s a lot of distance between here and the security office,” Top said. “And you have to remember that we’re dealing with 1994 technology.”

  “He should have been back by now.”

  “We’ll give him ten more minutes,” Top said, glancing down and setting the timer on his watch. “If he’s not here by then, we’ll proceed with Plan B.”

  Plan B would involve a lot more risk, and a lot more bloodshed. Top wanted to avoid it if at all possible. He wanted to exit the facility quickly and cleanly, the same way he’d entered it.

  And as long as Moore and his NCO escort made it up to the Level 14 landing in the next nine minutes and forty-two seconds, that would most likely be the case. But if Moore and his NCO escort didn’t make it up to the Level 14 landing before the admittedly arbitrary time limit expired, there would be nothing quick and clean about what would happen next. Nothing quick and clean at all.

  8

  Davenport stopped in her tracks and turned around.

  “What was that?” she said, referring to the three loud beeps that abruptly emanated from the two-way radio in Wahlman’s pocket.

  Topple was obviously communicating with some kind of code. Which made the device useless to Wahlman. It also made his current plan—to transmit a message pretending to be the Topple operative he’d killed and try to lure William Top and his crew into a trap—very unlikely to succeed.

  He reached into his pocket and switched the radio off.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “We’re going back to the office to get your badge.”

  “I want to know what’s going on.”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me. I’m not moving until I get some answers.”

  “I could shoot you.”

  “But you won’t. You need me. Otherwise, I’d already be dead by now. Or tied up or something.”

  Wahlman sighed.

  “There’s a blood specimen from an Army officer named Jack Reacher in one of your cryogenic units,” he said. “Sixty-three years from now, one of the cells from that specimen is going to be used to produce a man named Darrell Renfro, and another one is going to be used to produce me. Then, almost three decades after that, five thousand of those cells are going to be used to produce five thousand more Jack Reacher clones. Are you with me so far?”

  “Sure,” Davenport said. “You’re either full of shit, or you’re crazy. Or both.”

  “Or neither,” Wahlman said.

  “You want me to believe that you traveled here from the future?”

  “You demanded to know what’s going on. I’m trying to tell you.”

  “I want to know the truth,” Davenport said. “Not some wild fabrication.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Who would?”

  “Try to keep an open mind,” Wahlman said. “Think about how far technology has come in the past fifty years. Then try to imagine how far it might go in the next fifty.”

  Davenport laughed.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll play along. Go ahead and tell me the rest of your little fantasy. It’ll make for a good story at our next unit picnic.”

  “There might not be a next unit picnic if my partner and I aren’t successful. Because there might not be a unit left to have one.”

  “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  “An organization called Topple is going to attempt to destroy Jack Reacher’s blood specimen, so that the clones will never be produced. My partner and I were sent here to see that the specimen remains safe. That’s it in a nutshell.”

  “Sounds like something from a comic book.”

  “It’s not.”

  Davenport laughed some more.

  “Obviously, you and your partner did what you set out to do,” she said. “So don’t sweat it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a classic time travel paradox. If the specimen is destroyed, then you will cease to exist. Which means that you won’t be around to travel back in time and protect the specimen. The fact that you’re here right now would seem to indicate that you accomplished your mission.”

  Wahlman tried to wrap his head around that.

  “The technology is still in its infancy,” he said. “Nobody really knows how traveling back in time will affect future events. That’s why the agency I work for is committed to leaving a minimal footprint. As small as possible. Unfortunately, Topple doesn’t share the same philosophy. They’re in it for profit.”

  “How so?”

  “We’re not sure exactly what they’re up to. But we’re fairly certain that greed is at the heart of it.”

  “Let’s say that everything you’re telling me is true,” Davenport said. “The security here is tight as a drum. How is Topple supposed to get in?”

  “They’re already here,” Wahlman said. “Which is why we need to hurry.”

  “They’re already here?”

  “They’re posing as technicians from NitroLug Solutions. That’s how they were able to get inside.”

  “You should give me my gun back,” Davenport said. “I’m pretty good with it. I’m the current regional champion for—”

  “Negative.”

  “I can help you do whatever it is you need to do. I can call for backup. I can have twenty officers here in less than ten minutes.”

  “Nobody from this time period is supposed to know about any of this. It was never supposed to happen.”

  “What about me? I know about it.”

  “You don’t believe a word of it,” Wahlman said, aiming the pistol at her face. “You want me to give you your gun back so you can shoot me with it. We’ve wasted enough time. We’re going to head on back to the office. I didn’t want you to see the mess in there, but I can’t think of any way around it at this point. And if you try to activate any sort of alarm, or try to resist in any sort of way, it’ll be the last thing you do.”

  “You’re not going to kill me. You need me.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “Because it’s true.”

  “Only if you’re going to cooperate,” Wahlman said. “Otherwise, I don’t need you at all.”

  He clicked the safety off with his thumb.

  Davenport stared at him for a few seconds. Maybe she’d previously come to the conclusion that he was bluffing. If so, whatever she saw in his eyes convinced her that he wasn’t. She took a deep breath, and then she led the way back toward the office.

  9

  In the weeks preceding his death, Ray McDaniels had been working on the formula for a new pharmaceutical, a medication that would permanently obliterate a recipient’s autobiographical memory and, at the same time, leave him or her highly susceptible to the replacement of said memory, using highly sophisticated personality-specific computer programs, along with good old fashioned hypnotic suggestion. In other words, if you were the person administering the drug, you could give the person receiving it an entirely new backstory. A new personal history.

  In theory, he or she would then become whoever you wanted him or her to be.

  This presented some exciting possibilities, especially in conjunction with time travel. You could, for example, reprogram a woman who’d been born in 2068 to believe she’d been born in 1848. Then you could send this hypothetical thirty-four-year-old woman back in time to, say, 1882, and you could leave her there, and she would accept, without question, that 1882 was exactly where she belonged.

  Apparently McDaniels hadn’t told anyone about this new formula. Brodmarkle had found twenty pages of handwritten notes in a misnamed file, and had decided to take the ball and run with it. He didn’t have any experience with pharmaceuticals, none to speak of, but he was a fast learner, and he figured that a patent application with his name on it would make a nice feather in his professional cap. He didn’t feel the least bit ashamed about planning to take credit for work that should have been attributed to McDaniels. The potential accolades wouldn’t do McDaniels any good. Not now. But they might do Brodmarkle a lot of good.

  And he knew exactly who was going to receive the first dose.

  Actually, two subjects would receive the drug, and the reprogramming scripts, simultaneously.

  Two subjects currently residing in 1959.

  One named Kasey, and one named Natalie.

  Brodmarkle hadn’t discussed this clinical trial and timestream reassignment with Victor. He’d tried, but Victor had cut him off. Apparently Victor didn’t have time for such conversations these days. Which was fine. Brodmarkle preferred working independently. And who was going to fault him for taking the initiative on something like this? He’d probably get a nice pat on the back for it. Maybe even a raise.

  As long as everything worked out.

  Which it would.

  Because McDaniels was considered to have been the preeminent authority on such matters. He’d been one of the most distinguished scientists of his generation.

  And Brodmarkle only stole from the best.

  10

  William Top watched the seconds tick off the timer he’d set.

  00:04

  00:03

  00:02

  00:01

  An instant before the digital display went to all zeros, Moore finally showed up.

  At least part of him did.

  His severed head landed at Top’s feet with a splat.

  Top looked down at the ghastly sight, and then he looked up, toward the landing above him. A very large man was aiming a semi-automatic pistol directly at his chest.

  In turn, the four remaining operatives who’d accompanied Top to this timestream aimed their pistols at the very large man.

  “So we meet again,” Top said. “I don’t think I caught your name the first time.”

  “Wahlman,” the man said. “Not that it’s important. Because this will be our final meeting. I can promise you that.”

  Top laughed.

  “As you can see, I have some people with me this time,” he said. “You’re outnumbered, so you might as well come on down and join your partner. Otherwise, you’re going to die. Very soon. Right after I make you watch her die.”

  “I’m outnumbered,” Wahlman said. “That’s a fact. If there’s a shootout, I don’t stand a chance. But neither do you. I can put a bullet in your heart, right here from where I’m standing. One squeeze of the trigger. So it’s up to you. We can both die, or you can tell your guys to stand down.”

  Top took a few seconds to give that some thought.

  “I guess this is what they call a stalemate,” he said. “If my guys shoot first, you’ll probably be able to get a round or two off before you die. And if you shoot first, you’ll be signing your own death warrant, as well as your partner’s. So it’s a lose-lose situation. But maybe we can make a deal.”

  “I don’t deal with criminals.”

  “Then we’re both going to die,” Top said “Is that what you want? I’ll give you ten seconds to decide.”

  11

  Wahlman adjusted his aim. A head shot was no sure thing from this distance. Not with a handgun. But it was possible that Top was wearing some sort of body armor. He just didn’t seem as worried as he should have been. So it was possible that a head shot was the best bet for a kill shot.

  Wahlman certainly didn’t want to die. He was close to being finished with all this. He was two spins away from being with Kasey and Natalie. Forever. He couldn’t allow a scumbag like William Top to take that away from him. Not when he was this close.

 

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