The Curiosity Killers (8 page)

“Lots of nutritional deficiencies could give one a green pallor,” Vere added. “I’m sure it was all perfectly natural.”

“That was no Colt forty-five is all I’m sayin’,” Kris said. “You want to put words in my mouth and say I’m calling it an alien ray gun, I’m cool with that.” She held her hands up and gave her boss a little shrug. “So what we got for this afternoon, huh?”

Ben wandered to the window, lifted the lacy, sheer curtain, and gazed out. Somewhere, a man roamed the city streets with dangerous knowledge. “An FBI agent wants to know what happened to D.B. Cooper,” he murmured, sounding distracted.

“Do you think that’s for the best, Benoy?” Vere asked.

Ben let his hand drift off the lace edge of the curtain. “Probably not, Eddy.” He gave the doctor a weak smile. “Probably not.”

Friday, August 6, 2100, Avon, Vermont, NBE

Violet Lessep smoothed her skirt before ringing the bell. The building was unassuming and quaint, and that comforted her. She was already outlaying a lot of cash for this trip; to also be visiting some creepy underground lair or big shiny evil-looking glass-enclosed corporation would have just made her more self-conscious than she already was.

When she’d secured the last few hundred she’d needed for the down payment, her father was skeptical. “Kiddo, you already run around the world for the sake of truth, justice, and the Empiricist way. Can’t you be happy with your FBI work? Why you gotta have adventures in your personal life, too, huh?”

“Oh, Pop, you’re too damn practical.” Violet kissed his bald head and scampered out in a manner undignified for her age. But Violet never felt her age, and even with a fancy, important job with a fancy, important government agency, she was prone to whimsy and ebullience. And even if her down-to-earth dad disagreed with the expense of her vacation, he still loaned her the last bit of cash.

Such a softie
.

A girl much Violet’s same height and build, though a decade younger, swung the door open. Eyes the color of Violet’s name greeted her, big ones fringed with thick black lashes and eyeliner that gave them a cat-like look. “Hey, you must be Agent Lessep,” the girl said. She took a step backward and held the door wider. “I’m Kris. Mister Jonson is expecting you.”

“Thank you.”

On her quick spin through the front parlor into a back conference room, Violet saw only a blur of knick-knacks and polished wood and brass. This area was more traditionally appointed in a business motif, all laminate plastic tables and uncomfortable, institutional chairs. The walls were a bland shade of off-white and there was the subtlest scent of ozone in the air, as if it were pumped in artificially.

Kris plopped down in a chair opposite Violet and put a thick binder on the table. “So, you want to find out what happened to D.B. Cooper,” Kris said. She paged through the first few sections of the binder. A scratching sounded at the door behind Kris. She sighed and rose to admit a cat, who proceeded to leap up on the conference table.

“Ignore him,” Kris said. “You’re not allergic, are you?”

“Hmm? No, no,” Violet replied.

“You were saying, about Cooper, you wanted to know what happened to him?” Kris asked.

“Well, no, not precisely,” Violet said. “It’s not so much the
what
as
who
.”

Kris nodded. “That’ll make a difference when we send you,” she said.

“Not where?” Violet asked.

“Did you not…” Kris’s voice trailed off and she laughed. “Oh, wait, wait. What…we thought you’d gotten a referral here.”

Violet squared her shoulders. “I did. One of my supervisors used your service.”

“Oh, but if they’ve already
been
here, no wonder you don’t know exactly…” Kris whistled. “Hoo-boy, you’re in for some interesting news, lady.” She flipped the binder shut and patted it. “You’ll want to start reading this, cover to cover. There’s more training after you’ve read that. We leave clients with an urge to refer inquisitive friends here, so you must know someone who had a great trip he can’t remember.”

“But wait, training? For a conference on profiling?”

Kris shook her head. “No,” she replied. “Training for time traveling.”

Kris rose and exited the room. Violet heard the door snap shut and then lock from the outside.

What the hell
was
this? Violet’s boss, Jason, came back from what he claimed was a profiling conference with all kinds of new inspiration for cracking cold cases. “And it was all thanks to these guys,” he’d said, handing Violet a card. “It costs a pretty penny, but it’s worth it.”

Violet thought of Jason, of their hands touching as the business card passed from his palm to hers, of his sandy hair and sad, soulful eyes. If this was real, if this place was what it said it was and Jason had sent her here…where did he go? For how long? She tried to remember if he’d had more laugh lines when he returned than when he left.

Maybe. Just a hint. And was there a streak of silver in his hair that wasn’t before?

Violet scrabbled around in her purse now for the card. “Jonson’s Exotic Travel,” same as the sign outside. “For the adventure of a lifetime.”

That’s when Violet noticed that the final four letters of the last word were in a slightly heavier font.

Time
.
Adventure. Exotic. Oh, jeez, this can’t be real.

She swung the binder over to the expanse of tabletop in front of her. There was nothing on the cover, nothing pronouncing the mystery within, and yet the first page laid it all out.

“By now you’re probably thinking we’re con artists,” it read, “but we’re excited to announce that it’s true. Time travel is real. It’s possible. And you will be in another month, day, and year in the past before sunset. You may spend hours or weeks there, but when you return, you’ll resume your old life as if nothing ever happened.

“But you will, actually, be changed.

“Because at Jonson’s Exotic Travel, we specialize in the knowledge-hunter, the thrill-seeker, the person with a nagging desire to know the unknowable.

“We help you solve a mystery.”

Violet exhaled, not even realizing she’d been holding her breath as she read. My God, was it true? Everything in her training told her no, this was a con, this was a scientific impossibility. Didn’t some people with a particle accelerator prove decades ago that nothing could move faster than the speed of light? And didn’t you have to go faster than the speed of light to travel in time?

“You’d think so.”

Violet jumped. A young man stood in the now-open doorway, studying her. He was of South-Asian descent and had wild dark hair and thick eyebrows. His velvet blazer looked soft to the touch but also somewhat frayed around the hems. His voice was deep, deeper than Violet imagined someone with his boyish looks would have.

Violet blinked. “Was I thinking out loud?” she asked the man as she stood up.

He smiled and nodded. “You wonder how we actually do the time travel thing, hmm?” He strode across the room and stretched a hand out to her. “I’m Jonson, Ben Jonson.”

Violet shook his hand. “You own this?” she asked.

“I own the building and the business,” he replied. “But my partner owns the tech.”

“Tech,” Violet said. “So…”

“Yes. It’s true. My partner owns and operates a time machine.”

“You think so, but I’m a rational person, Mister Jonson. I have a really hard time believing that.”

“It’s easier to think I’m crazy?” Ben asked. “Go ahead. Sometimes I think I am, but I know too much.”

“You’ve time traveled yourself, then?”

“Ironically, no,” he said. “But I still have proof.” He tapped the binder. “Keep reading, agent. And don’t worry about the locked doors. It’s just for security. We’ll let you leave whenever you want.
If
you want.” He shrugged. “It’s all up to you. Until you sign on the dotted line, this is all theoretical.”

Violet moved a hand closer to the holster resting under her skirt, strapped to her right leg. “I should warn you, sir, I’m a federal agent of the New British Empire. I’m armed and will take offensive action if threatened.”

Ben held up his hands. “No need for that, ma’am. I’ve seen too many guns today. Just hang out here for a while. Let’s talk after you’ve read the manual.” He wandered out.

The door locked behind him.

~

After he was sure the agent wasn’t going to make a break for it, Ben took a winding metal staircase down to the sub-basement that Vere used as his lab. “Eddy, you got a fix on him yet?” he called.

Vere gnawed on a messy-looking sandwich. He looked up from under veils of wrinkled eyelids and nodded to Ben. With a sideways nod, the doctor gestured to one of his computer stations, an ancient cobbling-together of huge, monochrome CRT monitors connected to sleek, steel-encased servers. The entire mess was controlled by the disembodied keyboards of pre-war manual typewriters and mid-century adding machines jury-rigged with coiled landline telephone wires.

Vere tore the sandwich from his mouth. “He thought he was being clever, going down to the sewers,” he mumbled with his mouth full. “Poor lad didn’t know our LoJacks are a bit more sophisticated than most.”

Ben cringed and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “I take it you’ve already done it without checking with me, called in for a removal?” His voice quavered on the last word.

Vere finished chewing his bit of sandwich and shuffled forward. “Boy, you’ve got no head for this part of the business,” he said, laying a hand on Ben’s shoulder.

“It’s a stupid folk tale,” Ben said. “We can’t let a guy go who just wants to keep that memory? He wanted to
know
, Eddy. He said when he hired us that he’s a historian. I can relate. Why else do you think I like hearing their stories when they come back? I like knowing. I get why he did this.”

Vere bowed his head. “It’s not just the green children he knows about. It’s you and me and Miss Moto, our work here, our location, everything.” He swept a hand around the room. “He’s been in the lab, Benoy. Not just the upper room, not just the public things we use for recruitment and advertising, the innocent things. I can’t have the tech getting out. The consequences of unregulated use of time travel? Do you understand how dangerous that is? What would happen to it?” Vere grew impatient. He slammed a fist down on a nearby counter. “My God, man, what do you think the Rénartians would do with this?”

Ben felt a chill course through him.

“Do you think that’s what he is?” Ben asked, his voice low and hollow.

Vere glared at Ben. “That woman, that awful woman who had us believing her intentions were pure…she might not have been one of them geographically, but she was one of them spiritually. Emotionally. They exist among us, spies to that infernal cause of hate-mongering and such.”

“But what would Rénertia care about a Welsh legend from the eleven hundreds?”

“If those children weren’t Flemish, as you say, if they were from another world where technology is stronger and things like that man’s little weapon are the norm, it may not be anything more than firepower,” Vere replied. “Any advantage, no matter how small, is still an advantage. Or perhaps they just want this,” Vere continued, sweeping a hand through the lab to indicate its entire contents. “Perhaps they want to travel backward or forward in time and further strengthen their cause with money or power or…God, it could be anything. Do you want their success on your conscience?”

Do I?

Ben’s gaze fell upon some of Vere’s books, tattered covers on both physics and history, texts the two of them pored over time and again. He stepped toward a stack with one volume on top, a book he knew well because it was from his own teenage library.

Civil War II
, the title proclaimed, followed by
The Second War Between the States
in a smaller font.

Vere’s voice called Ben out of his reverie. “We can’t let that man stay on the loose with that knowledge,” Vere said. “You have to agree, Benoy, honestly. There’s no other choice.”

A nod. The signing of a form with Ben’s sweaty, nervous hand. And then Ben walked back upstairs with a much heavier heart.

Kris was at his office door waiting for him. “Agent Lessep is done with her reading,” she told Ben. “And, man, she’s cute. You gonna do anything about that?”

Ben sighed. “I can’t date a client. None of us can. You know that.”

“Is that, like, in writing somewhere?” Kris asked. “Because you might want to—”

“I thought it was a pretty obvious thing, but if you want to add it to the minutes of the next freaking staff meeting, we can get it in the employee manual, okay? That’s hardly the biggest thing we have to deal with today, Kris. Jesus.” Ben sighed. “Sorry. That was harsh. Yes, she’s very cute. I’m sorry. I’m just…”

“It’s cool,” Kris said. “I’m sorry I was trying to be all lighthearted me when we got a situation going. I get it. It’s less-than-awesome that guy got out.”

“Understatement.”

“Yeah.” She tidied up the remains of the tea. Cups and saucers clinked together.

Such normal noises, Ben marveled. Dishes and liquid and people with plans and people thinking about dates and silly things when…

When I have to decide to murder someone before the day is over
.
Murder. Steal someone else’s actual ability to live, the one thing we each have that’s ours, that makes us special, human, real…I decided to murder this man.

“You want me to set her up in the inner office?” Kris asked.

When he didn’t respond, Kris moved closer to Ben. “Dude, you’re looking a little more haunted than usual. Actually, a lot paler. Like you-are-in-the-middle-of-seeing-actual-ghosts-right-this-minute haunted.”

Ben could no longer feel his body. He was numb from head to toe, knees locked rigidly to keep him upright.

“Tell me about the gun again, Kris.” The sound of Ben’s own voice sounded faraway and unreal. His eyes stayed averted from hers. “I need to believe it wasn’t normal technology. Tell me it was an alien gun, a gun from another planet, another time…anything. Please.” He looked at her, moisture stinging in the corner of one eye. “Tell me we’re doing the right thing.”

There was a client not ten feet from him, sequestered behind wood and metal, learning about what they were going to do to her, and yet the last person who trusted them with his life was about to lose it.

He wasn’t going to pull the trigger himself, but that didn’t matter; it was still his orders.

“Wow,” Kris said, “I thought you and Eddy were always kidding about that stuff.” She lowered her voice. “You
weren’t
going to let him go? It really is…you’re gonna off him?”

Ben flopped down in his chair. He looked at the desk and could still see Wheaton’s footprint on the blotter. He didn’t answer, but instead just stared at the dusty outline.

Monday, August 9, 2100, Avon, Vermont, NBE

Rupert Cob didn’t realize he’d read this manual six times already.

Every few months, Cob learned—through the Jonson’s Exotic Travel training process—that he’d been mindwiped before, and then he’d recall his weekend in a small cabin in the mountains and chuckle to himself at how unreal such a bland vacation seemed in retrospect.