Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks) Read online

  People looking both busy and productive, hurried along their way. Many of them smiled as they passed him. Most of them were as young as Ambersson. Some seemed even younger. He and Kingsbury were the oldest people in the room.

  “Welcome to the Temporal Offices of the FBI,” Ambersson said, her tone smug.

  “Excuse me?” He glanced at her.

  She put a hand under his arm and led him forward. Kingsbury followed. She was the only person in the area who did not look happy. If anything, it seemed like she had swallowed something that tasted bad.

  Ambersson led him to a wall covered with glass. Just inside the wall sat people hovered over digital consoles. Beyond them was another room. Only he couldn’t quite see that room clearly. He felt as if he were looking at it through a layer of water. Something—the room in front of the glass, the second level of glass beyond, or the room itself—altered his perspective.

  He felt like he should remove his glasses and clean them, only he didn’t wear glasses any longer. He’d gotten laser surgery fifteen years ago and hadn’t had a problem with his vision since.

  Until now.

  He looked at the women in the hallway. They seemed the same. Something about the room, though. Something about it made him very uncomfortable.

  “What’s this?” he asked, trying not to let his discomfort show.

  “The Temporal Chamber,” Ambersson said, that note of pride and awe still in her voice.

  “We have ourselves a time machine,” Kingsbury said dryly.

  “What?” He glanced around. “That’s not possible.”

  “It’s very possible,” Ambersson said. “We’ve just gotten the technology, but it’s existed in experimental form for three years. We—”

  “How come I haven’t heard about it?”

  Ambersson shook her head slightly and tapped his security badge. “Top secret, remember?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” he said. “A discovery of this important should have leaked. The scientific journals, if nothing else—”

  “Parts of it have,” said Kingsbury. “You just weren’t able to put the pieces together.”

  “Me? Or the world?”

  “The world,” she said. “When it became clear that time travel was even a remote possibility, the government bought a lot of scientists. Those who didn’t play got discredited.”

  “Those who did lost their chance for recognition.”

  “In exchange for unlimited funding and the chance to work in a brand new universe.” Ambersson smiled at him. “And they succeeded.”

  “Giving miracle technology to the FBI?” He felt as if his entire world had turned around.

  “Various branches of government are using it. The Congress, in a closed session, decided to allow each government agency the chance to use this technology—subject to certain guidelines, of course.”

  “Of course,” he muttered, feeling cold. He didn’t like the idea of the federal government having secret control of time. “How does this work?”

  “Complete temporal revisitation is possible,” Ambersson said. “Interference is strictly forbidden, of course. But observation is allowed. And that’s what we’re going to do with your help.”

  The case. He’d forgotten about the case. “Why’s interference illegal?”

  “Because they don’t know what it does,” Kingsbury said quietly.

  Ambersson shushed her, but Wheldon turned his back on the younger agent. “What do you mean?” he asked Kingsbury.

  “They haven’t studied this enough. It’s new technology. We might change the current timeline or we might be creating alternate universes. No one knows and no one knows how to test it.” Kingsbury didn’t approve. He could see it in her eyes.

  “That’s not entirely true,” Ambersson said. “Tests are continuing—”

  “So why are you involved?” Wheldon asked Kingsbury, ignoring Ambersson.

  “My theory is that it’s better to have too much information than not enough. These younger agents, they see only the possibilities. Not the dangers.”

  “We know the dangers,” Ambersson said. “That’s why we insist on full clearance—”

  “So why me?” Wheldon asked.

  “We’ve been dealing with old cases, solved cases,” Kingsbury said, “ones where we knew the timelines to the letter—or at least we thought we did. At the moment, we’re limited in how far back we can go in time. Our system is still quite primitive, and we can only go back with certainty about five years. They tell us that will change in the near future, and then we can begin unraveling history’s mysteries.”

  Her voice got even dryer. She found all of this objectionable in a way he didn’t yet understand.

  “This case isn’t old,” he said.

  “Precisely.” Ambersson moved so that she was beside Kingsbury. Her eyes were bright with anticipation. “We have just gotten permission to look at unsolved cases in which the timeline is clear. We have strict rules. We couldn’t pick a single case. We had to pick something on-going that would have a positive impact if solved. You have a serial killer. We can identify him and stop him.”

  “I don’t see how.” He didn’t like her certainty that the Godiva killer was a serial killer. He didn’t like assumptions at all. “We can’t prevent him from murdering Schlaffler. All we can do is watch. He’s not going to scream out his name as he does so, and we already know he left no fingerprints. If I understand you correctly, we can’t call the police to arrest him as he comes out of the building, and we can’t pluck a hair from his head to get a DNA sample.”

  “We can follow him home,” Ambersson said.

  “To what end?” Wheldon felt his own frustration growing. “I don’t know how things are done in the Temporal Unit of the FBI, but in the rest of this country, you need to build a solid case based on evidence—evidence that will hold up in court. You bring me a machine I can’t talk about, send me into the past to observe something I never could have seen on my own, and expect me to somehow magically prevent this slob from killing again. I think I’m better off doing this the old-fashioned way.”

  He pushed past both the women and started for the door.

  “Grand juries can hear Temporal cases,” Ambersson said. “Testimony is secret and the records can be sealed. You will be able to get an injunction on your eye-witness testimony alone.”

  He stopped, intrigued despite himself. “Then what? Once the case goes to regular court, your little secret will be all over the news.”

  Ambersson shook her head. “We picked your case very carefully, Detective. New York is one of the few states without a sunshine law. We can have the case tried behind closed doors and the record sealed.”

  “Sounds like you have it all figured out,” he said. “What do you need me for?”

  “It’s not our case,” said Kingsbury. “Not our jurisdiction.”

  “And it’s not hard to make it your case. We clearly have a multiple killer here,” he said. “All you have to do is request jurisdiction and you’ll get it.”

  Kingsbury’s smile was thin. “We’re with the Temporal Unit, Detective. We don’t solve cases. We’re trying to see if this new technology has a place in the FBI. For this to have FBI jurisdiction, we need to place other agents on this case.”

  “So?” he said.

  “We prefer not to.”

  “Why? Because I’m easier to control?”

  Ambersson bit her lower lip, but Kingsbury shook her head. “Sunshine laws,” she said. “We take on this case within the FBI, and there’s a chance that we’ll end up in Federal court. We’re not ready to do that—in fact, we don’t dare risk having this technology revealed just yet—and at the moment, we’re the only division who has to use the technology in court.”

  He stared at them. He didn’t want to think about the implications of what she just said. Wheldon’s head spun. “I suppose there are no laws governing the use of the time travel.”

  “Only natural laws,” Kingsbury said
. “Which we don’t entirely understand.”

  He didn’t want to know that. He wanted to be blissfully ignorant of all the possibilities which had just opened before him. But he couldn’t ignore those possibilities in the future. Knowledge was irreversible. And he wasn’t the sort of man who forgot anything he learned.

  “We need you, Detective,” Ambersson said.

  Wheldon looked at Kingsbury. Now he was beginning to understand why her expression was permanently sour.

  “It’s a tool,” she said.

  “So was the atomic bomb,” he said.

  She nodded. “There’s still a killer out there, someone smart enough to attack swiftly and leave little forensic evidence of his presence. This might be your best chance to stop him.”

  It might be his only chance, but she was too polite to say that.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ve been taking you on faith. Why don’t you show me how this cosmic delusion of yours really works.”

  Five hours of meetings later, he was ready to go. Kingsbury would accompany him. She was along to oversee the entire case and to make certain he acted within regulations.

  They tried to give him a crash course in both time travel and in the rules the Temporal Office had established. Time travel, they had discovered, only worked backwards. No one seemed to be able to go forward which one of the techs took as proof that predestination did not exist.

  Another tech explained to Wheldon that so far, they had seen no evidence that the Butterfly Theory was an actual fact. The Butterfly Theory, they’d had to explain to him, was that a change in the smallest, least consequential thing—such as stepping on a butterfly—could change the course of history.

  However, they didn’t want to take any chances. Everything was planned to the exact detail, at least so far as they could know it. The technology was too new to tamper with. Perhaps taking a taxi meant for someone else might have no cosmic effect, but what happened if that taxi, which was supposed to end up in Queens, ended up in Washington Heights? And what happened if the driver, on the way back to Mid-town, got stabbed by a passenger he picked up near the George Washington Bridge? Would that be sufficient to change the timeline for the rest of the world?

  No one knew. And no one wanted to risk it.

  There were other time travel theories that had yet to be fully tested as well. The theory of alternate universes. Some believed that each new action taken in a past timeline opened up a new universe rather than changing the past. But there was no concrete evidence on this yet either. Some travelers believed that small things were different upon their return to their timelines. Others said nothing had changed.

  And then there was the thing the techs all feared the most: that a man might meet himself in the past.

  Some believed that would cause instant death to the person involved. Others thought it would be a curiosity and nothing more, and still others believed that such a meeting would wipe out, not only the man involved, but also everything around him. It might even, one tech said in a hushed tone, cause a rupture in the Space-Time Continuum that couldn’t be resolved.

  Wheldon didn’t like any of this. It made him wish, even more than he had wished before, that he hadn’t been called in to play in this experimental project.

  But he kept thinking about Schlaffler, the way she had died, how another woman, while he dithered here, might be dying in just the same way.

  So he memorized and listened, and thought about the way that crimes happened and laws were made, about the way that men like him were always behind events and never in front of them, about how his job was to pick up pieces, not repair them.

  But ultimately, he was a rules and regulations man, and he did his best to understand everything the techs had told him. He would do the best job he could within the perimeters they set, and he would live with the consequences, just like he always did.

  The actual room was ice-cold as if it were a poorly functioning refrigeration unit. The cold had pockets and he thought he felt several different breezes coming from different directions, sources unknown.

  He’d needed no special preparation, no special training. They had a copy of his latest physical on their desk, and their doctor double-checked his blood pressure and his heartrate, finding nothing out of the ordinary.

  The room was large and dark, and it magnified noise in the way that a lake did on a calm, moonless night. Kingsbury helped him toward a small platform, then she clung to his arm as if she were the one traveling for the first time.

  He could see the technicians who had been teaching him about this new science. They sat on the other side of the leaded glass window, preparing their calculations to send him and Kingsbury into the near-past. The techs had a wavy undefined quality, as if Wheldon were watching them through fog. He felt as if part of himself had already been displaced, sent to a future he would never completely understand.

  A wave of nostalgia ran through him—not for the past, but for his naivete. He wished he had never picked up the report on Schlaffler, never met Kingsbury or Ambersson, never crossed the threshold into this cold, shifting room. But he had, and nothing could change that.

  He was trapped in this place forever.

  “Here we go,” Kingsbury said, tightening her grip.

  And a feeling, not unlike the heady, dizzy sensation he got when he dropped off to sleep after a long and exhausting day, ran through him. The placement of the breezes seemed to move too—he felt as he were going from cold spot to warm spot to cold spot without changing his position.

  He couldn’t see anything except windows before him—leaded, black tinted, they didn’t seem to change. He could no longer see the people behind them, however, and he found that unnerving.

  The entire experience was unnerving. He hadn’t moved at all and yet he knew he was somewhere—somewhen—else.

  “Here we are.” Kingsbury sounded breathless, as relieved as he felt.

  “How do we know we’re in the right time?” he asked.

  She glanced at him, her face pale and dotted with beads of sweat. Obviously this mode of travel wasn’t one a person got used to. She pointed over his head. He turned.

  A clock, with the time and date in large digital numbers, was attached to the wall over his head. He hadn’t noticed it before, but then when he had entered the room, he hadn’t looked.

  The clock, with its date two weeks in the past, made him feel even more disoriented. Part of him believed, however, that they were playing some sort of trick on him—see how the stupid detective would react in a darkened room, after being told he was a rat in a maze.

  “Let’s go,” Kingsbury said.

  “What about the techs?” he asked.

  “We’re not to talk to them. They don’t know what’s going on.”

  “But they’ve seen us.”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “It’s the only real risk we’re supposed to take.”

  She continued to hold his arm, using it to pull him out of the room. The bright lights and clean lines of the hallway made him woozy. He stopped, put a hand on the cool concrete wall and took a deep breath.

  “Nauseous?” she asked.

  He hadn’t been nauseous since he was a rookie, but this feeling was close. “Dizzy.”

  “It’s normal. It’ll pass.” She stood, no longer touching him, not even patting his back. She just waited. “Don’t we have a timeline?” he asked.

  “This is built-in.” Her voice was flat. She continued to wait.

  It took a moment for him to accept the solidity of his surroundings. As the wooziness passed, he realized he hadn’t been in this hallway before. He wondered if it were specifically designed for travelers coming from the future so that they wouldn’t run into the busy young agents who populated the Temporal Offices.

  “All right,” he said.

  Kingsbury let out a sigh, revealing her impatience for the very first time. Then she led him down the hallway to a stairwell.

  It smelled damp and old, the concre
te flaking. He could hear cars honking above him, shouts on the street, the sounds of New York on an average day. Yet he couldn’t remember what kind of day it had been—rainy, sunny, cold or warm. He could remember Schlaffler’s apartment and the body, sprawled on the hard wood, but he couldn’t remember the weather or what he’d had for lunch or what kind of casual conversations he’d had.

  Was his life that unimportant that he couldn’t recall it two weeks later? Had he allowed his work to so consume him that it was the only thing that mattered to him, the only thing he remembered?

  Kingsbury pushed open a steel door, and stepped outside. Thin sunlight came through the canyons between the buildings. The air had a slight chill.

  The street sounds seemed louder here, yet less real, as if the pale light diminished them somehow. Or maybe it was his knowledge that this day was two weeks dead, a mere shadow of its former self, only a memory—yet one they could walk through.

  “Come on,” Kingsbury said. She waited for a break in traffic, then hurried across the street.

  Wheldon followed, being just as careful, the instructions he had received sticking with him. Anything—a fender bender, a missed appointment—had potential significance. He had to be cautious of his every move.

  Kingsbury waited for him on the corner, near the subway stop. He joined her, and they went down the stairs together. The air smelled of exhaust, and he could hear the rumble of the trains. Everything felt real. Only those first few moments in this time period had reminded him that he was from a not-so-distant future, and what he had felt in those moments might have been caused by his imagination, by what he believed might happen.

  Kingsbury paid their way in with tokens, then led him to the right train. She glanced at her watch. “Now we have to be precise.”

  “Why now?” he asked.

  “Some of our guys were here before, making sure we have a nearly empty car.”