He sat there for about an hour, getting up twice – first to put his empty plate in the sink and refill his coffee and a second trip to fill his coffee a final time. He finished reading the paper and as he did, he realized that he had lost track of time. He looked at his watch and saw that it was going on ten o’clock in the morning. He wondered how Libby’s cabinet meeting was going. It generally only lasted about an hour but sometimes drug on.
Vincent decided he would see how the morning in the White House was going for the staff and took the stairs down to the ground floor. He had just passed the Map Room when he noticed an agent walking hurriedly towards him. The agent’s face told him something was wrong.
“What is it?” Vincent asked.
“The President, sir.”
Panic began to creep into the back of Vincent’s mind. “What about her?”
“She is missing, sir.”
Vincent felt the panic move to a confused hysteria. “What do you mean missing?”
“She disappeared, sir.”
“People just don’t disappear,” Vincent corrected the agent.
“I know, sir. But she did,” the agent answered, obviously struggling to believe it himself.
“All right. Tell me what happened.”
“The cabinet meeting had just ended. The President walked into the hallway and as she did, a man appeared behind her.”
“He appeared?”
“He just appeared. There were no doors, no way he could have entered the hallway. He grabbed the President. Then, they both disappeared.”
Vincent was scared and confused. “You checked everything? You’re sure there was no way they could have ducked into a doorway?”
“No, sir,” the agent answered soberly. “She just disappeared.”
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Baltimore, Maryland – November 1921
Jack didn’t realize what he had done until it was too late.
His second life came through the discovery of time travel. With that came a life of murder under the inauspicious name of Jack the Ripper. Now that new persona had been stripped away. His slaughter of Libby Williams now changed everything.
Years prior he had been in a similar situation. He had nearly been killed by his associate Jasper before escaping to 1880s London. He arrived with only the clothes on his back, similar to the situation he was in now. He had stolen his way back into a life of luxury and entitlement and had lived a good life for nearly a decade before chance brought Scotland Yard to his doorstep.
Now was different, however. He found himself strangely unfamiliar with what to do next. Somehow he had lost the ability to move through time and worse, the basic carnal instinct that had driven him for years now escaped him.
He had somehow rediscovered his conscious.
Jack escaped to a suburb of Baltimore but didn’t know where to go next. The year was 1921 which was not his home year. He could go back to South Carolina but two decades later, nothing would be the same and his home may or may not be there.
He moved throughout different rural areas for a period of a week, waiting for the manhunt for the murderer of the President of the United States to become not so heightened (the man he had set up was cleared and so the hunt ensued). Jack moved during the night and slept in old sheds and barns during the day. While he was doing this, he unknowingly moved steadily southwest back towards Washington, D.C.
Jack thought on Woodrow Wilson (whose house he was now traveling towards even though he didn’t realize it) as he walked. Jack knew that if he had lost the ability to time travel then there was a good chance that Wilson would have lost that ability as well.
There were only a few other people in the world who could do what they did. He supposed it was possible that there were people who could travel through time that he had not yet come across but he doubted it. Someone from the future could always learn the technology and travel back and forth but generally when they did he was drawn to them. He couldn’t explain why he was, he just knew that he was. That was how he first met Wilson. And how he had been able to confirm that Vincent was indeed the man in the trench who had killed Hitler.
Jack had killed most of the people who were time travelers. Most of the people were harmless enough but he didn’t want to take any chances that those people might change something in history that would change everything for him. What was ironic was that he had just done that to himself.
As Jack was walking, he became aware of the direction he was traveling and he couldn’t help but feel as if something was drawing towards Washington, D.C. He tried to test this theory by turning north and as he did, he found himself running into trouble. He was beaten briefly by a couple of thugs until it was broken up by the police. He ran and found more police in the area. He turned east and west and had the same result. It was like there was something stopping him from going any direction but southwest.
He tried a few more times and the results were similar. He was almost robbed going west. He turned east and a pack of dogs that shouldn’t have been wild but were attacked him. He escaped unharmed. Finally, having proven his theory, he gave in to the pull on him and headed towards Washington, D.C.
He didn’t realize it but another man was being pulled there as well.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Washington, D.C. – November 1921
