Now & Again (9 page)

Inside the single story brick building, Kendall and Josh were crammed into plastic chairs in a corner of the waiting area. The room was noisy and moist with humanity. Kendall idly flipped a paper tab with the number
73
printed on it as a colorful cross-section of irritated citizenry milled around him. Josh sat relaxed and seemed to enjoy watching some of the more interesting characters nearby.

An unflappable, black female police officer with a clipboard scanned the crowd with experienced eyes before she settled on them. She walked directly up to Kendall, ignoring everyone else, and spoke with an inner city attitude. “You part of the freeway crash?”

Kendall came out of his trance and looked up. “Number 73?”

“Forget that. You told intake you were the red Crewcab?”

“The what? Oh…yeah…”

“The one on the shoulder? Flipped and burned?”

He smiled tiredly. “Sounds like mine.”

“We been lookin’ fer you.” She waved him to his feet with the clipboard. “C’mon.”

Both Kendall and Josh nervously got up. The officer stopped, cocked a head and stared hard at Josh. “You in the truck, too?”

Josh nodded with a timid grin. “But just ridin’.”

She looked him over and mentally added his face to her list of future perps. “Come on then.”

She pushed through the disheveled room like an icebreaker through soft sea ice. Kendall and Josh were tucked in behind her and hoped the crowd didn’t pinch back together before they squeezed by. The policewoman never gave a look back as she flowed by the mobbed intake desk and into the station bowels.

Their little flotilla moved down a busy hallway, bearing toward the right side. They passed many people heading the other way: uniformed cops and men in ties, mostly, but none of them made eye contact.

The police woman paused briefly before they turned a corner. “Since you’re the red truck, you’re goin’ to the big room.” She smiled grimly and then led them off again.

* * *

The female police officer opened a heavy door with a frosted glass pane labeled
CR-2
. She waved Kendall and Josh into the long, harshly lit conference room and against a wall beside the door. She smiled widely at the room, waiting for everyone to note her entrance, aware that this moment would be jabbered about for days, and more than pleased to be at the center of the cause. “Figured you’d be interested in these guys. Moved ‘em to the front of the line. They were in
big red
.”

The weary people in the room stopped what they were doing and stared. Some were seated, others were standing in groups, all paused in mid-talk. There were uniformed police, middle-aged men in shirtsleeves, and a few women with beat-up laptops. A cheap metal and laminate conference table held stacks of grisly accident photos, forensics reports, point-of-impact analyses, skid charts, marked up transcripts, and a grubby army of coffee cups.

Unit Leader, Lieutenant Vic Chadek, stood next to a large whiteboard that was literally covered with colored lines and extended notations. Wearing a conservative tie with rolled up shirt sleeves, he held a dry erase marker poised in his hand, and contemplated the interruption with an edgy glare. “No shit?”

The police woman nodded in smug satisfaction, “No shit.” She glanced at the other people in the room, winked, and then exited, closing the door solidly behind her.

Vic capped his marker and dropped it onto the metal lip of the whiteboard with a loud clack. He tossed a half-hearted smile towards Kendall and Josh. “You’re in a Crash Investigation Unit, gentlemen, and my name’s Chadek – Senior Investigator, Lieutenant Vic Chadek. Do I need to tell you two what a hell of a crash we had here?”

They both silently shook their heads.

“I wouldn’t think so.” Chadek leaned over the table and glowered at them for a few seconds, just because he felt like it. “We’re all happy as hell you finally decided to check in, ’cause we weren’t havin’ a lotta joy readin’ VIN numbers off your…remains. You know what I mean?”

They continued to stand quietly against the wall – deer in the headlights.

Chadek pursed his lips as if tasting something sour. “Oh, yeah, why don’t you go ahead and take a seat, guys. Sorry.”

Kendall and Josh hurriedly grabbed the nearest heavy grey metal chairs available and dropped into them. They placed their hands on the table but their fingers kept vainly searching for something to do.

Vic didn’t sit. Instead, he pulled out a chair, angled it and placed a foot on the seat so he could lean over and rest his elbows on his knee. “You got some ID’s on ya?”

They quickly dug out drivers’ licenses and placed them on the table. Chadek nodded at a nearby officer and the man gathered the cards and left the room. Josh nervously followed the man with his eyes until the door clicked shut behind him.

Chadek motioned at the debris across the table. “Let me tell you about this CIU. We analyze impact speeds, skid marks, point of impact placement, time distance, friction, flammables, roadway factors, lighting – stupidity – you name it. And when we’re done, I do a reconstruction. You know what I find, every time?”

He stopped and watched them. His nostrils flared. “I find there’s no such thing as an accident. Get it? Things don’t just happen – they happen for a reason. There’s always a cause, and in a mess like this, there’s lotsa causes, but there’s always a first cause.”

The officer reappeared with their licenses and handed Vic a couple of enlarged printouts. He studied the sheets intensely for a moment and then nodded to the officer. The man snapped the plastic licenses back down on the laminate and returned to his place at the table.

“So…Kendall and Josh…” He looked at each one in turn as he said their name. “Just so you know, I haven’t had a lotta sleep and I’m gettin’ a lotta heat. It’s comin’ all the way from the mayor’s office, and from Captain Broxterman’s office…” His voice was rising. “And all the way down to that Geico lizard, all screamin’ at me to finish my damn reconstruction! But I can’t! Why?” His words dropped back to a conversational level. “Because I’m a professional.”

He leaned even further forward on the table, supporting himself with a hand, and fixed them with a menacing look. “Know what’s holdin’ me up?”

Kendall and Josh wore empty expressions. They hadn’t a single clue what the right answer was but they knew they were in deep trouble.

Chadek didn’t blink. “Your truck.”

“Our truck?” Kendall spoke louder than he meant to. He quickly lowered his voice. “We were just part of the accident, like everybody else.”

“Yeah,” Josh chimed in. “What’d we do?”

Chadek made a show of arranging his chair and sitting down, but he never broke eye contact. “It’s more like what you didn’t do.” His focus snapped to Kendall’s eyes. “And, just for the record, Kendall, you and your truck were not like everybody else.”

He cocked his head, first one way and then the other, like a robin listening for worms. “That, boys, is the end of my cheerful little intro to the conversation we’re about to have. Comfy?”

Kendall and Josh didn’t move a muscle.

“Good. Now, talk to me. Take your time. Take all the time in the world. Tell me exactly why you did what you did and – especially –
when
you did it!”

Quyron rushed into Jonathan Newbauer’s outer office and smiled briefly at Sophia, his administrative assistant. “Sorry, I only found out a few minutes ago. Has it already started?”

The solidly built blonde looked up from her wide screen activities and shrugged at Quyron. “Don’t worry about it. It was a last minute deal anyway. And they’re having problems with the connection – always something.” She smirked. “They’re probably still working through the what’s-up-guy-greeting thing. You know how they are.”

“Yes, I do.”

Sophia walked briskly over to the inner office door and tapped firmly as she opened it.

Quyron paused in the doorway to comment softly, “I don’t know how you stand this every day.”

Sophia smiled innocently, “The pay, dear, how else?”

The well-appointed inner office was airy and bright, with sunlight streaming through a bank of windows. Newbauer waved Quyron to come in. He motioned her to take a seat facing one of the triad of screens that formed the centerpiece of his lavish meeting table. Jonathan vainly struggled with a complex remote device trying to improve the severe picture interference washing across the displays. Nothing he did was helping.

The voice audio snarled and popped in some strange signal-to-noise synchronization with the visual distortion. “I…I don’t understand but there’s…very troubling in the…” Unmistakably, the screen image was the head and shoulders of a man, but it was hard to identify much beyond that.

Quyron seated herself across from Newbauer and close to the image of the man on the screen as he continued, “…need time to evaluate these…and to decide on a…”

The interference came in waves, but plainly, the frequency was increasing. Quyron found herself forced to guess at what he was saying.

“Sorry about…Singapore’s still tweaking…grid…Did…see Quyron?”

Newbauer made a puzzled face at Quyron. Looking back at the screen, he stabbed at what he hoped was an appropriate response. “Yes, Quyron Shur just joined us.” He spoke loudly and in a slow cadence, as if he was talking to the near deaf.

“Hello, Quyron…” the voice squawked back, “…wish I could say…nice to…you but…can’t…I can’t see you, I mean.”

“I understand,” she replied. Quyron gazed helplessly over at Jonathan. He rolled his shoulders and set the remote down. The man on the screen was talking again.

“They’re saying…give up on…and try audio-only…kay with you?”

Newbauer slowly and loudly replied, “Okay with us.”

The screens abruptly cut to the Reivers’ corporate logo and, thankfully, the audio immediately cleared up. A strong male voice resonated in pristine clarity. “I hope that’s – is that better?”

Both Quyron and Newbauer nodded, relieved. Newbauer answered, “Much better. Clear as a bell.”

The voice replied, “Good. Okay then. Sorry about all the hassle – they wanted to do a beta test on their paired particle grid – I guess entanglement communication still has a few bugs. Anyway, I just wanted to report that I made the required speeches, I cut the silly ribbons, did the happy handshake routine and put up with all that fuss here, like a good CEO. They take all that so seriously over here. The bottom line is, our Asian Archive is now public, blessed, and official.”

“Congratulations! That’s great!” Newbauer gushed. “That’ll open things up there – the nanos, the searches in other languages, the cash flow, our market penetration, everything.”

“Fine, fine,” the voice replied flatly.

Newbauer leaned forward. “What about the…rest of the trip?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m getting to that. Just so you know what’s up, Quyron, the other reason for the timing of the trip was a series of hush-hush Beijing meetings. But now with what’s happening in the multiverse, I’m thinking of cancelling them to head back immediately. My pilots say if we did that, the turnaround should be able to…”

Newbauer jumped in his chair, as if shot. “What!? You must be joking! That would be a disaster! Do you have any idea the hoops we went through just to get the right officials to even consent to…”

“Shut-up, Jonathan.” The rasp of irritated authority vibrated from the speakers. “I know exactly what this could cost us and I’m weighing the options. If you can’t remain calm and rational, I don’t want you to speak at all. Do you hear me?”

Cowed, Newbauer slumped back a bit in his chair. “Yes sir.”

“Quyron?”

“Yes, I’m listening.”

“Okay, here’s the issue. These Chinese meetings are key to our Asian expansion plans. They could easily double our reach and open whole new timelines, but I’m torn. I’m really worried about the rash of alarms in the archives; in hindsight, I probably should never have left. Echo forwarded your findings but…I still can’t quite connect all the dots.”

Quyron furrowed her brow. “Neither can I. The apparent loss of access to certain timelines is increasing but I still haven’t any idea what’s causing it, or how to stop it.”

Newbauer watched Quyron and felt his distaste for the woman fester with every word she spoke.

“
Apparent
loss? I wish I had your hope.” The voice sounded plaintive, almost resigned.

“It’s not hope, sir. I’m just trying to stick to the facts as we know them. The nanos and Echo simply can’t locate the missing lines anymore. Once the transmission cuts off, we can’t reinstate the links or locate the nanos. That is, technically, all we really know for sure.”

“How about the new development – your jumpers? Could they be part of the cause?”

“At this point, I don’t know.” Quyron was mildly surprised at how current his knowledge was. “I’m working under the assumption that they’re a result of something else. But until I have more data, they’re a side issue.”

“Understood. These timeline transmission troubles are very distressing to me. There’s a lot at stake.”

“I know that.”

“What does Echo say? Any suspicions? Predictions? Does she offer any…suggestions?”

Quyron paused.
What does Echo say? He’s in daily contact; he could ask her himself. Or is he concerned about something Echo knows that I’m not asking about?
She replied, “Nothing much. She simultaneously tracks and analyzes everything – but as far as causes go? No. Nothing. Predictions? I’m not sure what you mean. What should I ask her?”

There was an awkward break in the conversation, followed by other, muffled voices. “Sorry, I’m getting an up or down request from our hosts in Beijing. I’m on the fence here – do the meetings, or head back? Any thoughts? Quyron?”

Quyron felt out of her depth. “Sir, I don’t know what to advise. You have my reports – I don’t know how immediate the threat is, or how serious. I’m feeling my way and I’m very concerned. I’m not sure how much more your presence here will add. You can pretty much follow everything from there. I can’t offer much more than that.”

“Jonathan?”

Newbauer stared at the logo on the screen and frowned. “From a financial viewpoint, it’s a no-brainer. You have to do the meetings. The future of the company depends on our pushing into Asia, and the dollar potential that this represents for us is…”