horrible thing I have ever seen. They are coming to kill Julia
You already feel guilty about losing Dad without ever
reconciling with him. Know this, the future is coming and if
you don’t help Nick, Julia will be dead before the sun sets and
the fault and guilt will lie squarely on your shoulders if you
With sincerest imploring,
MARCUS STARED AT his signature, at the raised corporate seal that he hadn’t removed from his desk in weeks. He reached back into the envelope and pulled out the online
A whole minute went by before he looked up at Nick.
Without a word he picked up his phone and dialed.
“Helen? It’s me. I need to speak to Jason right away.”
Marcus listened.
“What do you mean he’s not in,” Marcus yelled into the phone. “Don’t tell me that. Give me his assistant.”
There was a five-second pause.
“Christine, it’s Marcus, where’s Jason?”
RACING DOWN SUNRISE Drive in Marcus’s Bentley Continental GTC convertible, Nick was glad not to be driving for once today. Glad to have an ally he could trust implicitly. Nick had called and found Julia at the gas station just north of town in the village of Bedford. With all of the stations and pumps in town closed, she had driven the five miles to fill her nearly empty tank before heading to pick up a doctor who was needed to help with the recovery effort.
With a quiver in her voice, Julia had told him of getting off Flight 502 before it left. He told her not to move, to get into her car and wait for him there.
“I can’t believe Jason is dead.” Marcus shook his head. “I had no idea he was going up to Boston.”
“I’m sorry,” Nick said.
They fell silent.
“I’m pretty convincing.” Marcus finally broke the moment, alluding to his letter as he cut through the ghost town of Byram Hills.
“Thank God.” Nick nodded, looking at Washington House as they drove past.
“This whole thing is too incredible. But you’ve got tell me what’s going on.”
It took Nick five minutes to bring Marcus up to speed, about his near scrapes with death, about Dance and Dreyfus and Julia and the mahogany box.
Nick pulled out the gold pocket watch and opened it, holding it out for Marcus to see.
“Put it away,” Marcus said.
“You don’t want to see it?”
“Sometimes in life there are some things we shouldn’t see, some things we shouldn’t know.”
As they headed up Route 22 past Sullivan Field, they both fell into silence. Flames licked the sky as heavy black smoke filled the air, blotting out the sun. It was 1:15, fire departments from Banksville, Bedford, Mount Kisco, Pleasantville, and five other jurisdictions supplemented the Byram Hills volunteers who had been fighting the raging conflagration for over an hour now, in a battle that would have no winners.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, because what you are doing is the right thing to do and I would do the same, but have you thought about how your actions are changing the future? Have you thought about the impact every step or interaction will have?”
A red Toyota four-runner flew past Marcus, cutting him off as it raced off to who knows where.
“Our actions have far-reaching implications that we never see.” Marcus pointed to the Toyota as it disappeared down the road. “The simple act of a reckless driver can initiate a domino sequence of events affecting hundreds of lives, each of which in turn affects every life it touches.
“A man races down a highway, causing an accident, which delays countless people from making it home on time. And among those delayed is a doctor whose small child ingests a rubber ball, clogging his airways, his panicked babysitter has no idea what to do, and the three-year-old dies. Now, if the child’s father was to make it home when he was scheduled to, he would have Heimliched the kid, clearing the ball, and they all would have sat down to a normal dinner. And then that child would grow up to cure cancer, as he was so inspired by his father.”
“Makes you want to kill the asshole on the highway doesn’t it?” Nick said.
“But who knows what fate holds? What if that child grew up and cured cancer?”
“He cures cancer, you said that,” Nick said.
“But…”
“There’s always another but-”
“But in so doing he created something far worse that killed millions. If we were to know all that, then that maniac driver just saved millions of lives. Who’s to say what the consequences of our actions, whether noble or selfish, will be for the future?”
“For the want of a nail,” Nick said, referring to the old poem.
“For the want of a nail.” Marcus nodded in agreement.
As Marcus continued up the highway, the bright midday sun painted a glare on the world. He slipped on his mirrored sunglasses and reached into the side pocket of his door, pulled out some sun-screen, and rubbed it on his bald head.
“My God, though.” Marcus laughed. “Think of what could happen with the power you hold in your hand.”
“I’d be a hit at the horse races.” Nick laughed in return.
“Horse races? How about the stock market? Business deals? Knowing your opponents’ moves before they make them?” Marcus pulled the envelope addressed to himself from his pocket, pulled it out, and looked at the Wall Street Journal page. “Do you realize just with this almost-four-hour advance information, I could make millions?”
“Okay, glad to see the capitalist in you is still alive.”
“Seriously, think about international relations, peace negotiations. You could change the course of history, prevent disasters and…” Marcus paused. “Plane crashes.”
Nick listened to Marcus. His thoughts having been so singularly focused on Julia, he hadn’t pondered the value of what he held in his hand.
“It could change the outcome of murder trials, the capture of criminals…” Marcus’s tone returned to bitter truth. “The outcome of wars. In the wrong hands-and that’s just about everyone’s-that thing is as dangerous as can be. The power of knowing the future could corrupt even the most noble heart.”
Nick had not given much thought to the dark purposes of what he held and the consequences it could produce.
“Promise me you’ll destroy it once you’re sure Julia is safe.”
“You have my word,” Nick said.
Marcus looked again at the
Nick tucked the envelope into his pocket. “Glad to see not all men are so easily corruptible.”
“Nick.” Marcus turned to him. “Does Julia know about her death?”
Nick shook his head. “She experienced it, it happens, but that’s hours from now. As far as she knows, right now, she feels lucky to be alive, having gotten off that plane.”
“I’ll never get used to this concept.” Marcus shook his head. “You talk about the future as if it’s the past.”
“It’s how life has been running for me for eight hours now.”
“With no continuity, with no one else remembering what happened, how do you keep it straight? I couldn’t keep my mind focused.”
“I just think of Julia. I don’t care about time, I don’t care about anything right now but finding and stopping her killer. She gives me all the focus I need.”
FLAMES CLIMBED SIXTY feet into the sky, the intense heat like a force field preventing the fire crews from getting within fifty yards. The roar of the fire sounded like an inhuman beast as it singed the air, searing the metal of the fuselage.
White cloudlike foam had been shot across the debris field to aid in dousing the gas fire. Eight water cannons and countless hoses arced streams across the sky, fighting the spreading flames as they nipped at the surrounding woods.
The tanks in the wings were mercifully half full for the short flight to Boston; no need to endure the cost of the additional weight with the price of gasoline these days. But that small piece of good luck was lost on the firemen who fought desperately to contain the three thousand gallons of impossibly flammable liquid.
Men in fire suits searched the grounds in hopes of a miracle but found nothing but shattered bodies, and mere splinters of metal. National Guardsmen arrived by the truckload to supplement the effort. Crowds of the curious, morbid, and shocked looked on before being escorted away or led to assist.
Dance walked about the perimeter of the flaming wreckage, ignoring the wayward water spouts dousing the flames as they sprinkled on his blue blazer. With all of the death before him, all of the senseless loss and suffering, Dance didn’t feel a moment of pity; he couldn’t muster a tear of sympathy for the dead. Somewhere in there was the body of Sam Dreyfus, somewhere in there was the box he wouldn’t part with, a box whose value was inconceivable. If a millionaire like Sam Dreyfus wanted it instead of all of that gold, all of those diamonds, its worth had to be in the hundreds of millions.
He couldn’t help smiling, knowing that Dreyfus had gotten what he deserved. He hoped he had been fully aware of his imminent death as the plane fell out of the sky.
There was no fear in Dance of someone’s getting near the box-if it had survived the crash-before he did. The crash site was a crime scene, and anyone caught stealing from here would be facing multiple felonies in addition to public scorn. If the heavy wooden box had managed to survive, nobody would know what it was, and Dance, as a detective in the crash’s jurisdiction, would procure access to the debris holding area and steal it before anyone was the wiser.
With Sam Dreyfus’s betrayal and death, it was up to Dance and his men to clean up the evidence, to find and erase the security tapes, to track down anyone who might have seen them.
