Fixer (28 page)

Beverly helped him to his feet and handed him his cane, which was one of those damned metal ones with the four-pronged feet. The whole place was full of them, which meant everyone had the same sort of trouble pedestrians with open umbrellas have navigating sidewalks. Except most pedestrians don’t fall over when you knock their umbrellas askew.

Without being asked, the intern took his arm at the elbow and walked him patiently—i.e. slowly, as he was on his second hip and third knee—down the church pew-sized row to the side door. His departure in mid-Bingo caused a mild ripple of interest, which would surely turn into a tremendously complex bit of gossip by dinnertime—not that he particularly cared. 

Ames was what one might call maladjusted to his current lot in life. Specifically, he hated being old and wished on more than one occasion that he had not outlived his wife—even though she divorced him two years before her own death due in large part to the aforementioned maladjustment. If he were to ever adopt a “physician, heal thyself” mentality, he might even conclude that he was in dire need of antidepressants. Sadly, he usually didn’t care enough to show any interest in making himself less miserable, so that was out of the question.

The side door led to a wide corridor with the hall he’d just left on one side and large, tinted picture windows on the other. Through the window one could see the rotunda that stood before the visitors center and beyond that the brick walls and iron gates that marked the boundary of the gated community/elderly hospice/hell on Earth. It was a place where older persons such as himself might move if they wanted all the disadvantages of an old age home combined with all of the disadvantages of living alone in a private condo
and
all the disadvantages of living in New England. And people wondered why he was grouchy.

The telephone took a few minutes to get to, as it was at the front desk and they had left by the least convenient door, but when they did get there the phone line was still lit up. Beverly helped him around to the back of the desk, sat him down, and handed him the receiver.

Corrigan Bain was already talking.

“. . . to finally find you,” he said.

“What? Corrigan? It’s . . . uh, it’s Uncle Fred. What were you saying?”

There was a pause. “I’m sorry. I’m ahead.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’m glad you found me, too. It’s good to hear a friendly voice. You said there was a death?”

Pause. “I had to say that. They wouldn’t find you for me otherwise.”

“Yes, of course. But something is the matter.”

“Something is the matter,” Corrigan agreed, and then added, “Harvey suggested I call you.”

“Harvey . . . Not Harvey Nilsson. But he died back in . . .”

“I know. He’s in my living room right now. I’m . . . I’m a little confused, Doctor. Haven’t been able to sleep for, oh, nine or ten days now because of the ghosts and . . . and . . . Well, Harvey said I should do this, and I think he may be right.”

“Corrigan, where are you?”

“It’s what we were always afraid of, isn’t it, Doc?”

“Where are you, Corrigan?”

“At home.”

“Can you find a way to get to me?”

Pause. “I’m kind of afraid to go out in public right now.”

Ames sighed. “Then I’ll have to go to you. Can you tell me your address?”

Corrigan did. Ames scribbled it down on a notepad and then said, “I’ll take a cab and be there as soon as I can, all right?”

“Okay. I should . . . I should put on some clothes, huh?”

“I think that would be for the best.”

Ames hung up and noticed that Beverly was still loitering around the desk. “Your friend Harvey died?” she asked sympathetically.

“Yes, very sad. I wonder if you could have one of those golf carts take me to my condo for a couple of things. And then I’ll need a cab.”

Chapter Nineteen

Now

Cold. The whole case had gone cold. Maggie Trent hated to admit it, but it was the truth. 

This happened a lot more often than anybody in the FBI would ever care to admit. Sometimes, there just wasn’t enough evidence. Either the guilty party stopped doing whatever it was they had been doing and never got caught, or they kept going and eventually slipped up somewhere. What frightened her was that this might be one of those rare occasions when the bad guy had no intention of stopping, while at the same time the FBI had no hope of catching him.

It was, in short, the kind of case most agents spent their entire careers trying to avoid.

As she sat in her cubicle with the voluminous case file weighing down the center of her desk, the words Randall Hicks had spoken to her not ten minutes earlier still hung in the air like a rain cloud.

“Bury it,” he’d ordered. “For the sake of your own career.”

While it killed her to admit it, he was right. All she had to do was declare the deaths to be an unusual mixture of accidents and suicides, plus one
unrelated
home invasion, and she could put it to bed and go back to the usual terrorism task forces and money laundering seminars. And the best part—it was easily the most logical conclusion. It’s what Randy and everyone else in the building would have done already.

But it was wrong. And five years from now, after she’d buried the case under piles of open cases, after another five or ten kids from MIT ended up dead because she thought of her career first? It would still be wrong.

She flipped the case file open for the umpteenth time and wandered through, either looking for a good excuse to put it to bed or for the one thing she missed that would make all the difference.

Her fingers stopped at a part of the case she only dimly understood. It was a handwritten brief of Archibald Calvin’s big idea, penned by Calvin himself and handed over only under duress. Much of the text was easy enough to understand, but it was followed by a dozen pages of mathematical calculations using a symbology that, if pressed, Maggie might have identified as Martian. She’d been led to conclude that were she to show the entire thing to anyone with an advanced math background, they were as likely as not to simply stroke out on the spot.

Maggie stood up and looked around. It was ten minutes before five. The office was nearly empty. Not because most of her coworkers quit early but because there was a big law enforcement gala going on across the street. Randy was speaking, and nobody wanted to be the one agent with nothing to say about his speech. Maggie even had a slinky black dress still in dry cleaners’ plastic hanging on the side of her wall just above a matching pair of sling backs. She’d been waiting all day to slip into that outfit. But that was before her boss had told her to ignore a murderer. Now she wasn’t in the mood.

Satisfied there was nobody around who would rat her out if she was spotted still reviewing the Dead-End Case From Hell, she sat back down to go over Calvin’s notes again.

*  *  *

Archie Calvin had started off with three questions. How did Corrigan Bain see the future? Why did he see only a few seconds of it? Where did the possible futures—the ones he’d altered out of existence—go? 

For the second and third questions he had proposed a hypothesis. From a probabilistic standpoint, there were very likely futures and less likely futures. Starting from the present and moving one second ahead there were, macroscopically, a limited number of possible outcomes. One second after that, there were contingent outcomes based on what had happened in the first second. And so on. He argued that up until five or six seconds had passed—it got shorter as more variables were introduced—the most likely future, or as he called it, “the path of greatest likelihood,” was predictably evident. After that, the number of contingent outcomes was too great for there to be a clearly defined path. 

Corrigan couldn’t pin down definitively how many seconds into the future he could see, and the reason was that it depended on where he was at the time and how many “objects” were in play. Hypothetically, in a room by himself, he would be able to see several minutes ahead, although he wouldn’t know he was. But in a crowded room he might see only three or four seconds. 

Whenever Corrigan altered the future substantially, he complained that a brief period followed in which the future simply disappeared. She remembered him describing it as like temporarily losing sight in one eye. Calvin reasoned that the problem had nothing to do with Corrigan losing track of the future. Within the region in which Corrigan had acted, that future briefly ceased to exist. He was forcing it to reset.

Maggie was with Calvin for all of that. It made so much sense she wished Corrigan Bain were answering her phone calls so she could explain it to him. He might even find it useful in his work.

But when Calvin went about answering the first question—how it was possible to see the future at all—she got dizzy. He reasoned that Corrigan’s block of time might be eminently knowable precisely
because
of its invariant nature. He coined a term for it—
chronoton
—that borrowed from subatomic particle names. The
chronoton
was “a period of time bounded by the limit of contingent likelihood.” 

From this he suggested that as a practical matter, there was no reason why an ordinary soul such as himself should not be able to view more than just a point on the
chronoton
—the “point” being the very front tip of it, or, more urbanely, the present. Just because it hadn’t happened yet, he argued, didn’t mean it wasn’t real. It simply existed further down the time line. He then embarked on a chain of reasoning that could be summarized as,
if it’s real, it can be seen.

This launched him into another several paragraphs on Corrigan, whom he then described as “unbounded by the one-dimensional present on the arrow of time and thus not subject to its laws.” But the big questions had less to do with what Corrigan was than with what happened as a consequence of his actions.
He
could change events taking place within the
chronoton
, and that, based on Calvin’s own theorizing, should not be possible. In altering the future, Corrigan must therefore be temporarily shortening the
chronoton
—severing the arrow of time, as it were—which was the real reason why the future disappeared briefly whenever a change was effected.

Calvin then drew an interesting conclusion. He said that while Corrigan could change the future, nobody else, being bound by time’s laws, could do the same. He wrote, “It is only possible to view the entire
chronoton
because
it is invariant. An explicit alteration of an event within the period would foreshorten the
chronoton
, making it impossible for the viewer to
see
the event he seeks to alter: a paradox. Ergo, the viewer can only view that which is not only unchanged but that which is, by its nature,
unchangeable.
”

Maggie was pretty sure she understood this all right, although it did make her head swim when she tried to follow the logic’s circuitous path too carefully. But from there Calvin took a dive into ridiculous complexity, almost dropping the English language entirely in favor of lengthy mathematical equations. The gist of all the math, or so he assured her, was that it proved the existence of the
chronoton
and hypothesized that a method for accessing it was possible.

Taken from cover to cover, the whole thing read like a bunch of Star Trek science-fiction doublespeak, which was how Maggie might have taken it if it weren’t for the fact that the team at MIT had apparently done it. 

Great for them—except it was getting them killed, and she still didn’t know why.

*  *  *

She flipped ahead and found the list of the postgrads who had participated in at least a part of the project. Before the deaths began there were thirty of them, plus Offey. Most of the surviving members of the list were still out of town, and over the past few days she’d spoken with every one of them by phone just to make sure they were still alive. Clearly they were. The killer, it seemed, preferred to wait until they returned—provided he even intended to kill them all, which was an open question. Calvin’s assumption was that there was only one aspect of the project’s execution that was “causing” the deaths, which was fair insofar as Calvin himself was still alive. But until one of the postgrads spoke up, there was no telling what aspect it was and which of the remaining survivors were in danger. 

The lab vandalism Erica had told Tanya about had also ended up being a dead end, only because MIT was being institutionally pigheaded. What she needed to know was which lab it was, and who on her list of names had access to it. Hopefully, this would give her an idea of how many people were still at risk. But the university wasn’t interested in promoting the notion that their students were in danger of being murdered by a phantom and had resolved to be as unhelpful as possible. Like Randy, they’d just as soon wait until the whole matter went away.

“Maggie?” Karen said from behind her. She jumped at the sound of the voice. “Sorry, didn’t mean to disturb you.”

Maggie turned. “No, it’s okay. My mind was elsewhere. What’s up?”

Karen Taylor, dressed in a very smart-looking, albeit ill-fitting evening gown, looked ready to go and hit that bar across the street—hard. “You coming?” she asked.

“Oh! What time is it?”

“Five fifteen. Our boy is onstage in another twenty.”

“Yeah, right, okay.” She glanced at her own dress, which really desperately wanted to be worn. “You guys go on ahead. I have to change.”

“You sure?” she asked. “Because two or three of us walking in late looks a lot better than just one of us walking in late. Besides, I don’t really want to hear the whole speech, do you?” 

“Go,” Maggie insisted. “I’ll see you there.”

“All right. I’ll hold a drink for you.”

“Thanks, hon. Think I’ll need it.”

“I bet you will.” Karen smiled. She, and probably everyone else in the place, knew exactly what the details of her afternoon meeting with Randy had been all about. It was hard not to know these things in this kind of office, populated as it was by federal employees whose expertise lay in detecting things.