Empire Games Series, Book 1(93)
“I shouldn’t—” Rita stared at her. “Oh what the hell—you’ll do it if you feel like it anyway, huh?” Her cheek quirked. “I’m not going to say don’t—I don’t want you to feel like you need to lie to me.” Rita’s eyes lost some of their sparkle. “But please don’t take any risks on my behalf. It’s not worth it. And for fuck’s sake, please don’t let Gramps go all James Bond on me?”
“Too late: I’m already taking a risk on you, and your grandpa will do whatever he wants. Where did I leave the truck?… I want you to come stay with me. Shouldn’t I know what I’m inviting into my home?”
Angie drove Rita back to her place. Rita kept noticing her stealing furtive glances, and shivered. Is it worth it? she wondered, then realized she couldn’t imagine life in any other way—a horribly, gratifyingly unexpected change to undergo in less than a week. Then what should I do next? There was no obvious answer.
*
The next morning, after dropping Rita off back at the hotel, where her employers wanted to keep her under their thumb, Angie stopped off at a big-box Staples and bought a couple of notepads and pencils and a packet of envelopes. Then, over her lunch break, she began to laboriously draft a letter to Ri’s grandpappy Kurt. Once she got home she retreated under the comforter with a dog-eared copy of a paperback her parents had taught her how to use long ago, and the draft of the letter. She was very rusty: it took her a long time to transcribe it using a prearranged page in the book as the key to a one-time pad. But that was okay. Cipher skills came back once you started using them again, and she had a feeling that after Kurt wrote back with his instructions she’d be getting all the practice she needed.
PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020
Evening, morning, a new day, a new headache:
“Walk with me,” said the Colonel. Rita noticed the missing “please”: attendance was mandatory. Smith led her into the open-plan area of the light industrial unit, past a temporary cubicle farm for the nonclassified workers, past the makeup, wardrobe, and props departments—the membrane dividing Hollywood production from Hollywood product was gossamer-thin in a short-term clandestine ops headquarters. They ended up at the door to the Faraday-shielded office trailer that served as a classified site office. Inside, the Colonel’s own mobile office was barely big enough to hold two chairs and a folding desk. “We have a problem,” Smith told her.
Rita tensed. “What kind?” He said “we,” she reminded herself. She clung to the choice of pronoun as she waited for him to continue.
Smith frowned at her, the rictus slowly deepening into a grimace of anger or frustration. His mood finally snapped like an overstretched rubber band: “Fucking morons!” He slumped into the chair behind his desk. “Siddown, Rita. I am”—he raised his hands—“so sorry I have to tell you this.”
“What?” She sat, bewildered. She’d been nerving herself for a grilling about Angie for the past seventy-two hours. Things weren’t as bad as they were during the crazy noughties, but there were still plenty of crazies willing to throw the Defense of Marriage Act in your face if you stood up to be counted. (Pro-marriage activists had moved on to trying to get the federal ban on sodomy laws revoked, now that they’d rolled back Roe v. Wade.) “Is it about my, uh, friend…”
Smith put her mind at ease: “Your new girlfriend isn’t an issue.” He waved a hand dismissively: “She held a Top Secret clearance back in the day. That ticks most of the boxes on the form. No, it’s the … it’s what Eileen was worrying about the day before yesterday. Too many chefs spoil the broth, and right now we’ve got sixteen different chiefs trying to run the kitchen. They can’t even agree on whether it’s sushi or McDonald’s.”
He pointed at the tablet on his desk stand: “O’Neill and Gomez had your third mission profile mapped out pretty much as I wanted it and we were ready to run you through it today. Then the shit hit the fan. From the Homeland Security Council, no less.” Smith’s frown turned thunderous, as if he were contemplating the wreckage of his midlife-crisis sports car, crumpled under the front fender of an uninsured pickup truck. “They’ve given me a Priority One tasking to look at the state of geological and paleontological research and confirm that BLACK RAIN was created in the Year of Our Lord 4004 B.C., just like our own time line.”
“Huh?”
“That’s not all.” Smith looked grim. “Additionally, you’re supposed to find evidence that BLACK RAIN has been visited by the Grays from Zeta Reticuli, and look for, uh, ‘flying saucer secrets.’ Someone else wants to know if the locals have located the Golden Plates of Moroni. Then there’s a request for information on the state of anthropogenic climate change in BLACK RAIN, and that one actually makes sense, except it contradicts Executive Order 4603 banning use of federal funds for research into … You get the picture.”
Rita closed her mouth. “What is this stuff?” she asked plaintively.
Smith rubbed his eyes and sighed. “It’s open season, or silly season, or both. We’ve unintentionally created a honeypot for excitable whackjobs of every creed, and they’re trying to piss all over the mission requirements with their own agendas.” He tapped his tablet again. “Case in point: there’s a Priority One tasking to locate the site of the Martian implant control station in upstate New York.”