Erased, page 24
Dani stepped back from the door, confused. Lara took hold of her arm, her grip alarmingly strong, especially in contrast to her diminutive size. Her facial expression remained unchanged, the odd little smile even more odd under the circumstances. It was unnerving.
“Come with me,” she said, pulling Dani by the arm.
Dani could tell that Lara could easily overpower her if she didn’t cooperate. “Okay,” she said. “No need to get rough. I’ll go to my room.”
Lara released her arm. Someone pounded on the other side of the door, then she heard Swenson ask, “Are you there?”
“Before I go to my room,” Dani said to Lara, “can I get the rest of my meal? I haven’t finished eating. I’ll take it back to my own room.”
Lara nodded and followed Dani back to the lounge, leaving Swenson pounding on the interior of the locked door.
“Did you enjoy your meal?” Lara asked, as if they had not just had a threatening confrontation.
“Yes, I did. I wouldn’t say I could get entirely used to this type of food, but I wouldn’t starve either.” Dani picked up the tray, then deliberately dropped it to the floor. Food and utensils went flying. “Oops!” she said.
Lara leaned over to clean up just as Dani had hoped. She picked up a chair and smashed it over Lara’s back, knocking her to the floor. She swung the chair again as hard as she could, aiming for the head. There was an audible crack when it connected. Dani wasn’t sure if it came from the chair or Lara. She stood with the chair over her head, prepared to deliver another blow, but Lara lay unmoving, face down. Dani prodded her with her foot. There was no response. She put the chair down and turned Lara over. Her eyes were open and her expression was placid, but the eyes didn’t blink, and Dani took that to mean that Lara was immobilized. She hoped she didn’t have the ability to reboot herself.
Dani lifted the robot to her feet, then flung her over her shoulder. Though she was powerful, she was no heavier than a woman of her size. Dani returned to the room next door.
“What’s happening?” Swenson shouted from within.
“I’m coming in,” Dani called through the door.
She stood Lara in front of herself, then pressed the Open button on the control panel. When the scanner activated, she held Lara’s head so the retina scan would pass over her face. When the white light went off, the door opened and Dani released Lara, who remained standing and motionless in the doorway.
Inside the room, Swenson and Hale stood staring in wonderment.
“What’s going on here?” Dani demanded.
Her question seemed to stir Swenson to action. She rushed over to Lara and opened a panel on the back of her neck. “I’m making sure she stays off,” she explained. “How did you do this?”
Dani shrugged. “Just hit her a couple times with a chair.”
Swenson looked at her in astonishment. “Violence?” She turned toward Hale with an air of triumph. “I told you she was capable of it.”
“Look,” said Dani, “tell me what’s going on? Are you prisoners?”
“Yes. Darius has taken control of the entire facility. He’s locked us out of the system, so we can’t communicate with anybody or leave.” Dani noticed that neither of them wore an iJinn device.
“He’s imprisoned you because you tried to kill him. Who could blame him?”
Swenson shook her head. “No. That isn’t it. We don’t have time to explain. We have to get to him before he realizes he’s vulnerable. You, you can stop him. Like you did with her.” She pointed at Lara. “Come on!”
“Wait.” Dani took hold of Swenson’s arm firmly. “You lied to me before, and I’m not about to help you, not without an explanation. So let’s all sit down and talk.”
Swenson frowned. “We don’t have time to talk. You have to take care of Darius now.” She pulled against Dani’s grip, but Dani merely held on tighter.
“Whoa! We’re not going anywhere and I’m certainly not going to bash anybody’s head in just because you tell me to. You can understand that I might have trust issues, right?”
Swenson tried to yank her arm away again, her teeth set firmly in a determined grimace. “Release me!”
“I’m in charge now, okay?” Dani stared her down, her grip unyielding.
Swenson quit struggling, a look of resignation on her face. Dani released her and the three of them went inside where they sat around a table. Lara stood eerily in the open doorway, eyes open as if watching them.
“We couldn’t tell you everything before,” Swenson said. “We couldn’t let you know who Darius really was. It would have created too many complications, too many difficult questions. It didn’t seem like you needed to know everything, just that a dangerous man had to be stopped. We thought it would be easier for all of us, you included, if you had a simplified version of the truth. It all seemed so straightforward. You would find him, shoot him, and everything would be okay. But you failed.”
“I didn’t exactly fail. I had him, but I chose to let him go.”
“What?” Hale stared unbelievingly at her. “Why would you do that?” He looked helplessly at Swenson, who turned her own questioning look back on Dani.
“He’s obviously not what you told me he was. You lied to me. I’m only glad I found out before I killed an innocent man.”
“Innocent? Leo Darius is a mass murderer. He’s responsible for millions, even billions of deaths.”
“Billions?”
“There’s a virus,” Swenson explained. “It’s virulent and deadly.”
“MRV,” Dani said.
“You’ve heard of it?”
“Darius said it’s your plague.”
“That’s true.”
“That’s why he wanted the seeds. He’s growing them right now, to harvest and make the cure. I saw them myself in the lab. He’s trying to save people from the plague.”
Hale shook his head emphatically. “No. That’s what he wants you to believe. That was our original plan. All of us agreed to it. That’s what Bryan was sent back to do. His mission was to bring back the beans.”
“Bryan? But he blew up the Genepac supply.”
“No,” Swenson said sharply. “Don’t you see? You’ve been tricked. I told you he was clever. I told you not to listen to him. Darius followed Frank into your time to stop him from bringing the beans back. He blew up Genepac just like Frank told you he did. And then he tricked you into giving him the only remaining beans in the world. My God, Daniella, do you know what you’ve done?”
Dani’s mind was spinning. “I don’t understand. Why? How has Darius murdered billions of people?”
Dr. Hale looked deadly serious, leaning forward into the table. “He went back in time.” he said quietly. “He went back to the year 2100 with a mutated version of MRV, a version he engineered himself to be deadly to humans. We’ve known ever since your time that MRV was a tough bug to kill, which is why he chose it.”
“Dr. Littleton told me that’s why she liked to use it in her tests.”
“Darius turned a harmless virus into a deadly one. With the mutation he created, he had a very effective biological weapon at his disposal. During his trip to 2100, he released the virus into the population. From that date forward, it has been killing off what Darius believes is a contagion on the planet—humans.”
Dani felt a chill run up her spine, recalling the angry words Darius had spoken to her earlier.
“If Darius has his way,” Swenson added, “he will do everything he can to make sure humans are completely eradicated. The reason he wants the beetle beans is that he’s experimenting with a new version of MRV, one that has no cure. He wants to be sure his new virus is resistant to the beetle bean agent, so he’s growing the beans to test it. Even though he can now destroy all of the beetle beans in existence, he’s obsessed with making sure nobody ever finds a way to defeat his virus.”
“If this is true, why don’t you tell the police or the FBI or whoever you need to tell to get him locked up?”
“We can’t prove that he did it,” Hale said. “He’ll deny it. Just like he did with you.”
“He’s erased the records of his trip to 2100,” Swenson added. “The logs show nothing and nobody witnessed the trip.”
“Then how do you know he did it? He told me himself that the virus mutated, that the world population topped out at ten billion and then began falling because of the virus.”
“Actually the world population stabilized at ten billion before the virus came into the picture. There were some very effective attempts to curb population growth. I believe that we would have been able to control it naturally, that the problem was on the verge of being solved. Darius and I had this argument many times. He didn’t think it was possible to stop population growth without a radical intervention like a global environmental catastrophe or a helpful little microbe that infected only humans.”
“What’s the evidence that Darius created the helpful little microbe?”
“It’s a matter of deduction,” Hale replied. “There is no doubt he’s been working with MRV. He even admits that. The only reason we know this at all is that I saw the log entry before he erased it. It was there one morning, an unplanned transport to April 15, 2100, Beijing, China. I asked him about it. He said it was just a probe he had sent to collect air samples. I don’t think it was collecting air samples. I think it was releasing the virus. From there, the virus would take care of the rest and it would appear to have occurred naturally. Because if it was just a harmless probe, why did he erase the evidence?”
Swenson intervened. “The first confirmed case of a death caused by MRV was in Beijing on April 24, 2100, nine days after the so-called probe sent by Darius. We have no proof he’s responsible. But we know he did it. Look, he’s locked us up here because we know it. He’s going to keep us here until he’s created a version of MRV that’s resistant to the beetle beans. Then it won’t matter what he does or what we do. The virus will be on the loose and there won’t be any way to stop it.”
“Won’t somebody notice you didn’t come home? You do have homes, don’t you? Kids? Spouses?”
“I live alone,” Hale said with a shrug. “Except for my cat Pharoah.”
“Right. The cat from ancient Egypt.” Dani turned her gaze to Swenson.
“Frank Bryan was my husband,” she said. “There’s nobody else at home.”
Taken aback, Dani met her eyes with remorse, remembering how she had delivered the news of Bryan’s death. “I’m sorry.”
“By the time someone notices we’re missing it will be too late. Darius will have his superbug.”
“Have you tried to go back to 2100 yourselves to stop him before he released the virus?”
Hale shook his head. “Over a hundred years of history has happened since that time. If we could do what you’re suggesting, we would completely rewrite history, our history. Things might even be worse. Anything could happen. All of the billions of people who have died from the plague would never have died from it. Our world would be unrecognizable in billions of unpredictable ways. We can’t do that. It’s already happened and this is now our reality. We can live with that. But we can’t let him continue the annihilation of humanity, and we can’t let him control the world’s supply of black beetle beans. He must be stopped now!”
“And you can’t kill him because…?”
The two of them exchanged looks with one another before Swenson said, “There’s a microchip in our…”
“Oh, right,” Dani said, slapping the table with her palm. “The chip. Sends a little shock wave to shut down your brain if you lift a hand against your fellow man.”
“Something like that.”
“So a man can kill billions of people, but he can’t kill one bad guy? Seems like there’s a flaw in this technology.”
“We can’t just sit here chatting all night.” Swenson stood. “We need to get those beans.”
Dani also stood, blocking Swenson’s way to the door. “I didn’t say I believe you.”
“What is wrong with you?” she asked angrily. “You already let him get away once.”
“You said yourself you have no evidence that he’s responsible for the plague. It’s conjecture. You also have no evidence he isn’t working on the cure. The beans are growing in the lab. You’re telling me he’s making an indestructible virus. He’s telling me he’s making a cure. Why should I believe you when I know you’ve already lied to me?”
Dr. Swenson shrank back from Dani, looking frustrated.
“You two can stay locked up in here for now while I talk to Darius. I’ll get to the bottom of this.”
“No!” Hale screamed. “You can’t do this!” He lunged for her, his arms outstretched as if he intended to strangle her.
She jumped back and watched his body go rigid, shudder and fall to the floor with a thud. He lay motionless on his side, eyes open, looking mystified. Okay, she thought appreciatively, so that’s how it works.
Swenson knelt beside him, rolling him onto his back into a more natural position.
“How long is he going to be like that?” Dani asked.
“About fifteen minutes.”
Dani stepped around Lara to get out of the room.
“You’re making a big mistake,” Swenson warned. “He tricked you once. He can do it again.”
“We’ll see. But you can understand why I can’t just take your word for it?”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you the entire truth, Daniella. Mr. Moon wouldn’t allow it.”
Dani paused, looking back over Lara’s shoulder. “Speaking of old Filbert, where is he, by the way? Locked up somewhere else?”
Swenson shook her head forlornly. “No. He resisted. He tried to escape and contact his superiors. Despite lack of hard evidence, he thought he could buy us some time by convening an investigative panel. He wasn’t able to escape. Lara saw to that. Then Darius punished him.”
“Punished him how?”
“He sent him back in time without a transporter. He threatened to do the same to us if we resisted. Moon is doomed to die of temporal asynchrony among strangers. If he survives the earthquake and fires, that is.”
“Earthquake?” Dani’s nerves went taut.
“Darius sent him to San Francisco, April 18, 1906, a few minutes before the earthquake would hit.”
An image of the time machine chronometer flashed through Dani’s mind. 0500, April 18, 1906. Swenson didn’t know Dani had seen that. And Darius had not explained it, had laughed it off, but there had to be some reason the time machine had been set to that date.
“Jesus!” Dani squeezed her eyes shut, a sinking feeling in her gut. Everybody was such a damned good liar in the future! When she opened her eyes, she met the pleading look of Pamela Swenson head on. “Okay,” she relented. “How do we take him down?”
“We still have no evidence against him that would stand up in any court. That’s our problem. We can’t do anything here. We have to do the same thing to him that he did to Moon, imprison him in the past.”
“Where he’ll die a painful death?” Dani shook her head.
“Daniella,” Swenson said soberly, “you’ve never seen someone die of the MRV virus. It’s horrific. And not only is it a horrible death, but it’s a lonely one. Nobody wants to be anywhere near someone who’s infected. Patients are quarantined and their fearful relatives stay away.”
A full understanding of the gravity of Darius’s crimes began to gel for Dani. The human population of the planet had already been decimated by what he had done and he wasn’t finished yet. She nodded slowly. “Send him back with me to my time.”
“You? You can’t go back. That’s suicide.”
“Not necessarily. Darius said I might be able to go back. If you send me back to the precise moment I left, I might resync with my own timeline. He was going to send me back tomorrow morning. Is it possible?”
“I suppose it’s possible. Gavin is more qualified to answer that than I am. We’ll have to subdue Darius somehow. Can you knock him over the head a couple times with a chair?”
Dani couldn’t help but smile at the hopeful look on Swenson’s face. “There’s probably a simpler way.”
“Yes, sorry. I can prepare a sedative and you can inject him with it. Then we’ll need to find a way to get into the lab. We’ve been locked out.”
“We’ve got her,” Dani said, jerking her head toward Lara.
A smile spread across Swenson’s face.
Dani picked up Lara and slung her over her shoulder. “Okay. It’s a plan.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Darius sat slumped in a chair while Dr. Hale worked on the time machine, preparing to send them back to the twenty-first century. Most of the preparatory work had already been done by Darius. All Hale had to do was set the chronometer and activate the machine.
“I’ve found the log entry,” he said over his shoulder. “You came through on Monday, October 3, at one thirty-seven in the afternoon. We can send you back to a couple of seconds before you zapped out.”
“Will a couple of seconds be close enough?” Dani asked.
“It has to be. If I put you back at the exact moment, the moment you activated the beacon, you’ll come right back here. There will be no chance to change anything. We have to catch you before you activate it. We also have to be sure Darius doesn’t get his hands on Bryan’s beacon.”
“How do we do that?” asked Dani. “If I resync with my own timeline, I won’t know what’s going on. I won’t know what the beacon is or that Darius needs to be kept from it.”
“That’s why I’m coming with you,” Swenson said. “I’m going to take the beacon away from you myself, then use it to come back here. That will leave you and Darius in the past with no means of returning. If this doesn’t work, you won’t have another chance. You’ll both be trapped in the past and will die.”
“At least we won’t die alone then.” Dani swallowed hard, her mind returning to the scene outside the window earlier in the evening. She might like it here. At least she was guaranteed a natural life. But then she thought of Gemma and how lonely the passing years here would be without her. She also thought of her brother Nick. If she didn’t go back, his life would be destroyed. Between Gemma and Nick, it was definitely worth the risk to try. “Am I going to pass out like the other times?”
“Come with me,” she said, pulling Dani by the arm.
Dani could tell that Lara could easily overpower her if she didn’t cooperate. “Okay,” she said. “No need to get rough. I’ll go to my room.”
Lara released her arm. Someone pounded on the other side of the door, then she heard Swenson ask, “Are you there?”
“Before I go to my room,” Dani said to Lara, “can I get the rest of my meal? I haven’t finished eating. I’ll take it back to my own room.”
Lara nodded and followed Dani back to the lounge, leaving Swenson pounding on the interior of the locked door.
“Did you enjoy your meal?” Lara asked, as if they had not just had a threatening confrontation.
“Yes, I did. I wouldn’t say I could get entirely used to this type of food, but I wouldn’t starve either.” Dani picked up the tray, then deliberately dropped it to the floor. Food and utensils went flying. “Oops!” she said.
Lara leaned over to clean up just as Dani had hoped. She picked up a chair and smashed it over Lara’s back, knocking her to the floor. She swung the chair again as hard as she could, aiming for the head. There was an audible crack when it connected. Dani wasn’t sure if it came from the chair or Lara. She stood with the chair over her head, prepared to deliver another blow, but Lara lay unmoving, face down. Dani prodded her with her foot. There was no response. She put the chair down and turned Lara over. Her eyes were open and her expression was placid, but the eyes didn’t blink, and Dani took that to mean that Lara was immobilized. She hoped she didn’t have the ability to reboot herself.
Dani lifted the robot to her feet, then flung her over her shoulder. Though she was powerful, she was no heavier than a woman of her size. Dani returned to the room next door.
“What’s happening?” Swenson shouted from within.
“I’m coming in,” Dani called through the door.
She stood Lara in front of herself, then pressed the Open button on the control panel. When the scanner activated, she held Lara’s head so the retina scan would pass over her face. When the white light went off, the door opened and Dani released Lara, who remained standing and motionless in the doorway.
Inside the room, Swenson and Hale stood staring in wonderment.
“What’s going on here?” Dani demanded.
Her question seemed to stir Swenson to action. She rushed over to Lara and opened a panel on the back of her neck. “I’m making sure she stays off,” she explained. “How did you do this?”
Dani shrugged. “Just hit her a couple times with a chair.”
Swenson looked at her in astonishment. “Violence?” She turned toward Hale with an air of triumph. “I told you she was capable of it.”
“Look,” said Dani, “tell me what’s going on? Are you prisoners?”
“Yes. Darius has taken control of the entire facility. He’s locked us out of the system, so we can’t communicate with anybody or leave.” Dani noticed that neither of them wore an iJinn device.
“He’s imprisoned you because you tried to kill him. Who could blame him?”
Swenson shook her head. “No. That isn’t it. We don’t have time to explain. We have to get to him before he realizes he’s vulnerable. You, you can stop him. Like you did with her.” She pointed at Lara. “Come on!”
“Wait.” Dani took hold of Swenson’s arm firmly. “You lied to me before, and I’m not about to help you, not without an explanation. So let’s all sit down and talk.”
Swenson frowned. “We don’t have time to talk. You have to take care of Darius now.” She pulled against Dani’s grip, but Dani merely held on tighter.
“Whoa! We’re not going anywhere and I’m certainly not going to bash anybody’s head in just because you tell me to. You can understand that I might have trust issues, right?”
Swenson tried to yank her arm away again, her teeth set firmly in a determined grimace. “Release me!”
“I’m in charge now, okay?” Dani stared her down, her grip unyielding.
Swenson quit struggling, a look of resignation on her face. Dani released her and the three of them went inside where they sat around a table. Lara stood eerily in the open doorway, eyes open as if watching them.
“We couldn’t tell you everything before,” Swenson said. “We couldn’t let you know who Darius really was. It would have created too many complications, too many difficult questions. It didn’t seem like you needed to know everything, just that a dangerous man had to be stopped. We thought it would be easier for all of us, you included, if you had a simplified version of the truth. It all seemed so straightforward. You would find him, shoot him, and everything would be okay. But you failed.”
“I didn’t exactly fail. I had him, but I chose to let him go.”
“What?” Hale stared unbelievingly at her. “Why would you do that?” He looked helplessly at Swenson, who turned her own questioning look back on Dani.
“He’s obviously not what you told me he was. You lied to me. I’m only glad I found out before I killed an innocent man.”
“Innocent? Leo Darius is a mass murderer. He’s responsible for millions, even billions of deaths.”
“Billions?”
“There’s a virus,” Swenson explained. “It’s virulent and deadly.”
“MRV,” Dani said.
“You’ve heard of it?”
“Darius said it’s your plague.”
“That’s true.”
“That’s why he wanted the seeds. He’s growing them right now, to harvest and make the cure. I saw them myself in the lab. He’s trying to save people from the plague.”
Hale shook his head emphatically. “No. That’s what he wants you to believe. That was our original plan. All of us agreed to it. That’s what Bryan was sent back to do. His mission was to bring back the beans.”
“Bryan? But he blew up the Genepac supply.”
“No,” Swenson said sharply. “Don’t you see? You’ve been tricked. I told you he was clever. I told you not to listen to him. Darius followed Frank into your time to stop him from bringing the beans back. He blew up Genepac just like Frank told you he did. And then he tricked you into giving him the only remaining beans in the world. My God, Daniella, do you know what you’ve done?”
Dani’s mind was spinning. “I don’t understand. Why? How has Darius murdered billions of people?”
Dr. Hale looked deadly serious, leaning forward into the table. “He went back in time.” he said quietly. “He went back to the year 2100 with a mutated version of MRV, a version he engineered himself to be deadly to humans. We’ve known ever since your time that MRV was a tough bug to kill, which is why he chose it.”
“Dr. Littleton told me that’s why she liked to use it in her tests.”
“Darius turned a harmless virus into a deadly one. With the mutation he created, he had a very effective biological weapon at his disposal. During his trip to 2100, he released the virus into the population. From that date forward, it has been killing off what Darius believes is a contagion on the planet—humans.”
Dani felt a chill run up her spine, recalling the angry words Darius had spoken to her earlier.
“If Darius has his way,” Swenson added, “he will do everything he can to make sure humans are completely eradicated. The reason he wants the beetle beans is that he’s experimenting with a new version of MRV, one that has no cure. He wants to be sure his new virus is resistant to the beetle bean agent, so he’s growing the beans to test it. Even though he can now destroy all of the beetle beans in existence, he’s obsessed with making sure nobody ever finds a way to defeat his virus.”
“If this is true, why don’t you tell the police or the FBI or whoever you need to tell to get him locked up?”
“We can’t prove that he did it,” Hale said. “He’ll deny it. Just like he did with you.”
“He’s erased the records of his trip to 2100,” Swenson added. “The logs show nothing and nobody witnessed the trip.”
“Then how do you know he did it? He told me himself that the virus mutated, that the world population topped out at ten billion and then began falling because of the virus.”
“Actually the world population stabilized at ten billion before the virus came into the picture. There were some very effective attempts to curb population growth. I believe that we would have been able to control it naturally, that the problem was on the verge of being solved. Darius and I had this argument many times. He didn’t think it was possible to stop population growth without a radical intervention like a global environmental catastrophe or a helpful little microbe that infected only humans.”
“What’s the evidence that Darius created the helpful little microbe?”
“It’s a matter of deduction,” Hale replied. “There is no doubt he’s been working with MRV. He even admits that. The only reason we know this at all is that I saw the log entry before he erased it. It was there one morning, an unplanned transport to April 15, 2100, Beijing, China. I asked him about it. He said it was just a probe he had sent to collect air samples. I don’t think it was collecting air samples. I think it was releasing the virus. From there, the virus would take care of the rest and it would appear to have occurred naturally. Because if it was just a harmless probe, why did he erase the evidence?”
Swenson intervened. “The first confirmed case of a death caused by MRV was in Beijing on April 24, 2100, nine days after the so-called probe sent by Darius. We have no proof he’s responsible. But we know he did it. Look, he’s locked us up here because we know it. He’s going to keep us here until he’s created a version of MRV that’s resistant to the beetle beans. Then it won’t matter what he does or what we do. The virus will be on the loose and there won’t be any way to stop it.”
“Won’t somebody notice you didn’t come home? You do have homes, don’t you? Kids? Spouses?”
“I live alone,” Hale said with a shrug. “Except for my cat Pharoah.”
“Right. The cat from ancient Egypt.” Dani turned her gaze to Swenson.
“Frank Bryan was my husband,” she said. “There’s nobody else at home.”
Taken aback, Dani met her eyes with remorse, remembering how she had delivered the news of Bryan’s death. “I’m sorry.”
“By the time someone notices we’re missing it will be too late. Darius will have his superbug.”
“Have you tried to go back to 2100 yourselves to stop him before he released the virus?”
Hale shook his head. “Over a hundred years of history has happened since that time. If we could do what you’re suggesting, we would completely rewrite history, our history. Things might even be worse. Anything could happen. All of the billions of people who have died from the plague would never have died from it. Our world would be unrecognizable in billions of unpredictable ways. We can’t do that. It’s already happened and this is now our reality. We can live with that. But we can’t let him continue the annihilation of humanity, and we can’t let him control the world’s supply of black beetle beans. He must be stopped now!”
“And you can’t kill him because…?”
The two of them exchanged looks with one another before Swenson said, “There’s a microchip in our…”
“Oh, right,” Dani said, slapping the table with her palm. “The chip. Sends a little shock wave to shut down your brain if you lift a hand against your fellow man.”
“Something like that.”
“So a man can kill billions of people, but he can’t kill one bad guy? Seems like there’s a flaw in this technology.”
“We can’t just sit here chatting all night.” Swenson stood. “We need to get those beans.”
Dani also stood, blocking Swenson’s way to the door. “I didn’t say I believe you.”
“What is wrong with you?” she asked angrily. “You already let him get away once.”
“You said yourself you have no evidence that he’s responsible for the plague. It’s conjecture. You also have no evidence he isn’t working on the cure. The beans are growing in the lab. You’re telling me he’s making an indestructible virus. He’s telling me he’s making a cure. Why should I believe you when I know you’ve already lied to me?”
Dr. Swenson shrank back from Dani, looking frustrated.
“You two can stay locked up in here for now while I talk to Darius. I’ll get to the bottom of this.”
“No!” Hale screamed. “You can’t do this!” He lunged for her, his arms outstretched as if he intended to strangle her.
She jumped back and watched his body go rigid, shudder and fall to the floor with a thud. He lay motionless on his side, eyes open, looking mystified. Okay, she thought appreciatively, so that’s how it works.
Swenson knelt beside him, rolling him onto his back into a more natural position.
“How long is he going to be like that?” Dani asked.
“About fifteen minutes.”
Dani stepped around Lara to get out of the room.
“You’re making a big mistake,” Swenson warned. “He tricked you once. He can do it again.”
“We’ll see. But you can understand why I can’t just take your word for it?”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you the entire truth, Daniella. Mr. Moon wouldn’t allow it.”
Dani paused, looking back over Lara’s shoulder. “Speaking of old Filbert, where is he, by the way? Locked up somewhere else?”
Swenson shook her head forlornly. “No. He resisted. He tried to escape and contact his superiors. Despite lack of hard evidence, he thought he could buy us some time by convening an investigative panel. He wasn’t able to escape. Lara saw to that. Then Darius punished him.”
“Punished him how?”
“He sent him back in time without a transporter. He threatened to do the same to us if we resisted. Moon is doomed to die of temporal asynchrony among strangers. If he survives the earthquake and fires, that is.”
“Earthquake?” Dani’s nerves went taut.
“Darius sent him to San Francisco, April 18, 1906, a few minutes before the earthquake would hit.”
An image of the time machine chronometer flashed through Dani’s mind. 0500, April 18, 1906. Swenson didn’t know Dani had seen that. And Darius had not explained it, had laughed it off, but there had to be some reason the time machine had been set to that date.
“Jesus!” Dani squeezed her eyes shut, a sinking feeling in her gut. Everybody was such a damned good liar in the future! When she opened her eyes, she met the pleading look of Pamela Swenson head on. “Okay,” she relented. “How do we take him down?”
“We still have no evidence against him that would stand up in any court. That’s our problem. We can’t do anything here. We have to do the same thing to him that he did to Moon, imprison him in the past.”
“Where he’ll die a painful death?” Dani shook her head.
“Daniella,” Swenson said soberly, “you’ve never seen someone die of the MRV virus. It’s horrific. And not only is it a horrible death, but it’s a lonely one. Nobody wants to be anywhere near someone who’s infected. Patients are quarantined and their fearful relatives stay away.”
A full understanding of the gravity of Darius’s crimes began to gel for Dani. The human population of the planet had already been decimated by what he had done and he wasn’t finished yet. She nodded slowly. “Send him back with me to my time.”
“You? You can’t go back. That’s suicide.”
“Not necessarily. Darius said I might be able to go back. If you send me back to the precise moment I left, I might resync with my own timeline. He was going to send me back tomorrow morning. Is it possible?”
“I suppose it’s possible. Gavin is more qualified to answer that than I am. We’ll have to subdue Darius somehow. Can you knock him over the head a couple times with a chair?”
Dani couldn’t help but smile at the hopeful look on Swenson’s face. “There’s probably a simpler way.”
“Yes, sorry. I can prepare a sedative and you can inject him with it. Then we’ll need to find a way to get into the lab. We’ve been locked out.”
“We’ve got her,” Dani said, jerking her head toward Lara.
A smile spread across Swenson’s face.
Dani picked up Lara and slung her over her shoulder. “Okay. It’s a plan.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Darius sat slumped in a chair while Dr. Hale worked on the time machine, preparing to send them back to the twenty-first century. Most of the preparatory work had already been done by Darius. All Hale had to do was set the chronometer and activate the machine.
“I’ve found the log entry,” he said over his shoulder. “You came through on Monday, October 3, at one thirty-seven in the afternoon. We can send you back to a couple of seconds before you zapped out.”
“Will a couple of seconds be close enough?” Dani asked.
“It has to be. If I put you back at the exact moment, the moment you activated the beacon, you’ll come right back here. There will be no chance to change anything. We have to catch you before you activate it. We also have to be sure Darius doesn’t get his hands on Bryan’s beacon.”
“How do we do that?” asked Dani. “If I resync with my own timeline, I won’t know what’s going on. I won’t know what the beacon is or that Darius needs to be kept from it.”
“That’s why I’m coming with you,” Swenson said. “I’m going to take the beacon away from you myself, then use it to come back here. That will leave you and Darius in the past with no means of returning. If this doesn’t work, you won’t have another chance. You’ll both be trapped in the past and will die.”
“At least we won’t die alone then.” Dani swallowed hard, her mind returning to the scene outside the window earlier in the evening. She might like it here. At least she was guaranteed a natural life. But then she thought of Gemma and how lonely the passing years here would be without her. She also thought of her brother Nick. If she didn’t go back, his life would be destroyed. Between Gemma and Nick, it was definitely worth the risk to try. “Am I going to pass out like the other times?”
