“Here, just before his transfer to Hilltop, is where our second sting is being placed. We’ve baited a trap with Salley and Leyster. He’s going to strand them in the Maastrichtian. We’re going to investigate. Again, there won’t be the physical evidence to prove he was at fault. But three months later, when we yank the expedition back, we can use their testimony to convict him.”
“Wait,” Tom said. “Why would you place a second sting just before the first? No wonder Robo Boy was spooked.”
“We already knew the first sting didn’t work,” Griffin said testily. “So we’re placing the second sting as early as possible in order to minimize the time available to him. We want to get him out of our hair as quickly as possible, remember?”
Molly flipped through the material in the binder, scanning the headings and subheadings, reading the captions. The final page was a casualty list.
She looked up. “Five deaths?”
“A terrible thing,” Griffin said. “But unavoidable.”
“Five deaths? Unavoidable?”
“They all knew the risks.” Griffin turned a page in his binder. “Tom, Molly, your part in this operation will be to—”
She stood so fast the chair toppled over behind her. “This isn’t what I took this job to accomplish. I refuse to be a part of it.”
“According to our files, you play your part as directed.” He tapped his binder impatiently. “So, please, spare us this display of histrionics.”
Jimmy Boyle’s face was like stone. Amy Cho looked alarmed. Tom Navarro had raised his hands and was shaking his head. Calm down, he meant. Choose your fights carefully. Never do anything irrevocable when you’re angry.
She ignored them all.
“You don’t intimidate me, and you can’t con me either. All this I-have-the-files-and-I-know-the-future bullshit doesn’t cut it. I’m not going to go along with your filthy little plan. I’m going over your head. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll quit. So your files are wrong. One way or the other, they’re wrong.”
Griffin made an elaborately bored grimace and flicked his fingers toward the door. “Go. See how much good it does you.”
In a rage, she left the room.
She stormed down the hall to the Old Man’s office. Normally, the door was closed and the office was dark. But on her first day here, the Old Man had promised that the door would be open, “anytime you need to see me.”
The door was open for her.
She went in.
The Old Man looked up from his work. It was uncanny how much he looked like Griffin while somehow feeling like a completely different person. More solitary, in a wolfish sort of way. More deeply scarred.
The fingertips of one hand lightly stroked the skull he kept on his desk. Involuntarily, she remembered the half-facetious rumor that it was a trophy from a hated enemy he had somehow defeated. “Come in,” he said. “Close the door, have a seat. I’ve been expecting you.”
She obeyed.
It was like entering an ogre’s den. Thick curtains kept out the sunlight. Heavy wooden furniture held a clutter of mementos and framed photographs. He even had an Quetzalcoatlus skull propped up in the corner. It was as if he dwelt within his own hindbrain.
“Sir, I—”
He held up a hand. “I know why you’re here. Give me credit for—” He stifled a yawn. “Give me that much credit, anyway. You’re hoping that age has mellowed me. But if it hasn’t, you think you’re prepared to quit.
“Alas, it simply isn’t that easy. Your Griffin made the decisions he did because
Molly’s heart sank. She prided herself on being able to see deeper into a face than most, but the man was unreadable. He might be a saint or a devil. She honestly couldn’t tell which. Looking into his eyes was like staring down a lightless road at midnight. There was no telling what might be down there. Those eyes had seen things she could not imagine.
She took a deep breath. “Then I’m afraid I must tender my resignation. Effective immediately.”
“Let me show you something.”
The Old Man removed a sheet of paper from a drawer. “This is a copy, of course. I just returned from a ceremony where you were presented the original.” He slid it across the table to her.
It was a citation. The date had been blacked out, as had most of the text. But her name, in black Gothic letters was at the top, and several phrases remained. “For Exceptional Valor” was one.
“I can’t tell you what you did—what you’re going to do—and I can’t tell you when you’ll do it. But twenty people are alive because of your future actions. You got into security because you wanted to make a difference, right? Well, I just saw an old woman kiss your hand and thank you for saving the life of her son. You were embarrassed, but you were also pleased. You told me that that one instant justified your entire life.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Of course you do.” He took the paper from her hands and returned it to his drawer. “You simply can’t imagine what I could possibly say to keep you on board.”
“No. I can’t.”
He looked at her with a strange glitter in his eye. He likes this, Molly thought. Corruption was the final pleasure of men such as he. Her original mission was lost. Now she wanted only to escape his presence before he managed to drag her down into the mire of complicity and guilt with him. She simply wanted to get out of this room unsoiled.
“Have you ever wondered,” the Old Man asked, “where time travel came from?”
Carefully, she said, “Of course I have.”
“Richard Leyster told me once that the technology couldn’t possibly be of human origin. Nobody could build a time machine with today’s physics, he said, or with any imaginable extension of it. It won’t be feasible for at least a million years.
“As usual, his estimate was correct but conservative. In point of fact, time travel won’t be invented for another forty-nine-point-six million years.”
“Sir?” His words didn’t make sense to her. She couldn’t parse them out.
“What I’m telling you now is a government secret: Time travel is not a human invention. It is a gift from the Unchanging. And the Unchanging are not human.”
“Then… what are they?”
“If you ever need to know, you’ll be told. The operant fact is that the technology is on loan. As is ever the case with such gifts, there are a few strings. One of which is that we’re not allowed to meddle with causality.”
“Why?” Molly asked.
“I don’t know. The physicists—some of them—tell me that if even one observed event were undone, all of time and existence would start to unravel. Not just the future, but the past as well, so that we’d be destabilizing all of existence, from alpha to omega, the Big Bang to the Cold Dark. Other physicists tell me no such thing, of course. The truth? The truth is that the Unchanging don’t want us to do it.
“They’ve told us that if we ever violate their directives, they’ll go back to the instant before giving us time travel, and withhold the offer. Think about that! Everything we’ve done and labored for these many years will come to nothing. Our lives, our experiences will dissolve into timelike loops and futility. The project will have never been.
“Now. You’ve met these people—the paleontologists. If you told them that the price of time travel was five deaths, what would they say? Would they think the price was too high?”
His face grew uncertain in her eyes. She squeezed them tight shut for the briefest instant. When she
