Empire Games Series, Book 1(17)
By the time there was a knock on the door, she thought she’d managed to compose herself. But she learned she was wrong the hard way, as her heart pounded wildly. “Come in,” she said, as if her consent meant anything.
The door opened. It was Gomez, her gaze as judgmental as before. “Get your stuff together; you’re coming with me,” she said. “Five minutes.” Then she stood just inside the entrance at parade rest, watching as Rita hastily flung her toothbrush and spare clothes into her bag.
“Where are we going?” Rita asked.
“Breakfast. Then an interview.” Gomez spoke as if words came at a price. She led Rita along a narrow corridor, then into a windowless ready room equipped with a metal sink and bare tables. A couple of bagged McDonald’s breakfast muffins and oily, bitter cups of coffee awaited. Rita managed to eat under Gomez’s stern gaze; is it the world-walker thing that bugs her so much? she wondered. Or is it my skin? Maybe the two were too deeply intertwined for Gomez to suspend her prejudice: Rita could have passed for Middle Eastern, and if Gomez saw her as a wanted terrorist’s left-behind baggage …
Gomez drove her out of the prefab into the overcast morning light, steering an unmarked SUV under manual control. Her manner robotic, she scanned the rearview display constantly; perhaps she expected to be tailed by terrorists or attacked by world-walkers at any moment. She drove past a taxiway and a ramp studded with parked blue-gray drones, then hung a right into a tightly spiraling underpass leading to an underground parking lot. At the bottom, a security booth and barrier blocked her path. She halted, wound the window down, and presented an ID card to a uniformed security guard.
The guard peered at the badge, then at Gomez—then stared at Rita, huddling in the passenger seat. “ID, please,” he said.
“Agent Gomez with Candidate Red,” she told him. “Candidate has no ID but should be on your list. I’m signing for her on my cognizance.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He eyeballed Rita again, comparing her with an image on his glasses. “Look directly at me, ma’am.”
Rita looked. Saw a Homeland Security uniform, a sidearm, warning notices, and thumbprint locks on the kiosk behind him.
“Spit here,” he ordered, proffering a glass tube.
Rita spat on demand, then she and Gomez waited for a couple of minutes as the guard processed the sample.
“You’re cleared to proceed.” The barrier rose and the tire-height caltrops retracted into the concrete beneath it. “Have a good trip, y’all.”
“A good—?”
“Later.” Gomez’s tone was sharp. Another sharply spiraling ramp took them down another level: then another barrier retracted into the ground. Ahead, the ramp funneled them into something like a truck-sized freight elevator. Gomez inched forward, following directions on a large screen at the far side of the elevator car, then switched off the SUV’s motor. “You may need to swallow a couple of times to clear your ears,” she told Rita as the elevator door rose behind them.
“Swallow?” Something flickered behind Rita’s eyes and her inner ears tightened painfully, as if she was in a rapidly descending airliner. “Uh, what was that?”
Gomez said nothing until the elevator door opened again; then she backed the SUV out into the parking garage. It was brightly lit now, much too bright—
Rita glanced up through the car’s glass roof and saw wisps of cirrus drifting across a blue sky overhead. She froze. When they’d driven in, the sky had been slate-gray with heavy cloud.
“Welcome to time line four,” Gomez said drily. “Ever wondered if a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies? Because now’s your chance for a preview.”
NEAR BOSTON, TIME LINE FOUR, MARCH 2020
There was no airfield here. No underground parking lot, just a ramp leading down to a half-buried blockhouse surrounded by a razor-wire fence. There was a road (a one-lane blacktop with no sidewalk), a guard checkpoint with cameras, a couple of parked gunbots, and a flagpole flying the Stars and Stripes. Beyond it, Rita saw nothing but forest.
Gomez drove slowly past the checkpoint, then along the road between the trees. “We’re still inside the outer perimeter of Camp Graceland,” she told Rita, losing some of her chilly reserve. “It goes on for miles.”
“We’re in another time line,” Rita thought aloud. “That wasn’t a freight elevator, was it?”
“Nope.” She caught Gomez’s withering sidelong glance, and the thought behind it: Are you really that stupid?
“The, uh, world-walkers. They don’t know about this time line, do they?”
Now Gomez looked at her properly, a slow appraising stare that would have made Rita nervous if they’d been driving much faster than the posted ten-mile-per-hour speed limit. The DHS agent looked back at the road. “Assumptions are dangerous, Ms. Douglas. I could tell you that we don’t think the Clan know of this world, and I might believe it too, but that doesn’t automatically make it so.”
“The Clan? You mean, the world-walkers?”
“The Clan is the organization we consider the States’ most lethal threat to national security. They’re world-walkers, yes.”
“But.” Rita checked her assumptions. What she knew about world-walkers was drawn from the news media, and as Kurt had carefully taught her to see, the news media were often deliberately misleading. “You mean there’s more than one kind?”