Jude Hardin - The Reacher Code - Timestream 1

He slid the packet and the receipts back into the wallet, pulled out the driver’s license and looked it over.

Wahlman, Rock.

DOB 14 October 1939.

Which meant that he’d just recently turned forty-four.

Happy birthday to me, he thought.

The license had been issued in 1982. Kentucky. Jefferson County. There was an address on the back that you were supposed to mail it to if you found it in a parking lot or next to a gas pump or whatever.

It was almost eleven o’clock. Jessie would be going home soon, and another nurse would be coming in for the nightshift. Wahlman figured that Security Forces would be changing shifts as well. Fresh patrol officers and gate sentries and vault attendants. Everyone busy for the next thirty minutes or so, either giving shift report or taking it.

Which made it a good time to sneak out quietly.

The urinary catheter wasn’t the kind that they jammed into your bladder. It was the kind that they slid on like a condom. Wahlman sat on the edge of the bed and pulled it off and let it drop to the floor. He closed the little thumb clamp on the IV line so that the fluid wouldn’t drip out and make a mess, and then he peeled off the transparent dressing and the surgical tape that had been used to secure the line to his forearm. He gently eased the plastic needle out of his vein, left the tubing and the needle dangling from the pole attached to the bed.

Dark red blood oozed from the puncture site on his arm. He grabbed one of the paper napkins Jessie had delivered with the broth and applied pressure until the bleeding stopped, and then he put the jeans and the t-shirt and the jacket and the filthy socks on and slid the cash and the wallet and the motorcycle key into some pockets. He tried to remove the plastic ID band from his right wrist, but it wouldn’t unsnap and it wouldn’t tear.

He was still dizzy, but it wasn’t bad. He practiced walking a straight line from one end of the room to the other, felt nauseated and sat back down for a minute and got up and tried again. Satisfied that he wouldn’t be pegged as a drunk if one of the security guys saw him walking along the side of the road, he opened the door and looked both ways and followed a sign with an arrow on it to the elevator.

3

18 October 2101.

The date was significant.

Ray McDaniels had been working for the FCYYC—the Federal Commission on Yesteryears and Years to Come—for exactly five years.

1825 days.

The first 1823 without a hiccup.

Now this.

And it just kept getting worse.

Happy anniversary to me, McDaniels thought.

He still remembered his first day on the job. Tim Parker, his supervisor at the time, had met him outside the dilapidated discount superstore that served as a cover for the FCYYC. Located near downtown Louisville and situated on acreage that was within walking distance of the river, the store was supposed to appear as though it had gone out of business. The surrounding neighborhood was supposed to appear as though it had been leveled, and the magnificent new houses pictured on the fading billboards were supposed to appear as though they were part of a huge development deal—one that didn’t pan out.

Of course it was all phony. Like the set of a Hollywood movie. The sheet of plywood bolted over one of the superstore doors actually opened into an anteroom, and from there you took an elevator to an area that would ultimately lead to the enormous underground complex commonly referred to as The Lab. It was like a small city down there, complete with roadways that you could travel around on in taxis that resembled souped-up golf carts, landing pads for magnetic turbine helicopters that could outrun conventional fighter jets, and a commissary where you could buy everything from a toothbrush to a personal chef—a robot, but still a very good cook. There were even apartments, small but comfortable units for assignments that required around-the-clock commitments for certain lengths of time. Kind of like being deployed on a submarine, except that your personal living space included more than a bunk and a locker. Most of the units had kitchenettes, and some even had balconies where you could sit and watch fake sunsets.

The FCYYC had been around for decades. Almost forty years. Along with examples of human technology that dated back to the Stone Age, the agency housed and maintained a remarkable number of twenty-first century marvels that eventually had been banned worldwide, innovations that included driverless cars and teleportation devices and electronic brain implants. Too much too soon, the world’s leaders had decided. Time to dial everything back a notch. Which was why the technology available to the general public in 2101 wasn’t much different than the technology available to the general public back in 2001. People knew that all that stuff had existed. They knew that flying robots, for example, had once been part of the culture. Some were old enough to remember them. Others could read about them in history books, and they could also read about the large number of problems they’d caused. Ordinary glitches that sent the robots to wrong addresses, or out into forests or cornfields, sophisticated breaches that sent them crashing into large crowds of people. It was no wonder that they’d been banned, and it was no wonder that hardly anyone seemed interested in bringing them back. Not at the moment, anyway. But the FCYYC was committed to keeping the technology alive for future generations, if and when the time came to start releasing the innovations widely again. It was part of the reason the FCYYC existed.

With a PhD in chemistry and master’s degrees in physics and mechanical engineering, and with ten years of supervisory experience in the research and development of electroneural pharmaceuticals—including extensive human trials on a somewhat controversial superconducting hypnotic—McDaniels had been hired by the FCYYC as the lead technician for their budding new top-secret time travel program. Technician was something of a misnomer, a title used as a misdirecting and time-wasting smokescreen for certain agencies in the private sector, unethical contractors that sometimes tried to hack into the government’s records and recruit their top personnel. McDaniels was actually a mathematical genius, and a master engineer, and a Level One FCYYC supervisor with the highest security clearance attainable, but he didn’t mind being called a technician. Not if it meant keeping the job he loved. After his first six months in the time travel program, he couldn’t imagine doing anything else. He was on board with the FCYYC, a hundred percent. They could call him a janitor if they wanted to.

Nobody working there seemed to know if Victor was The Director’s first name or his last name, and nobody seemed to care. Victor was what he wanted to be called, and he was the boss, and that was that.

McDaniels already knew what he was going to say about this latest bit of news. He knew before he made the call. But he had to make it anyway. He had to go through the motions.

He punched in the number to the Priority One phone line.

Victor answered on the first ring.

“Yes?” he said.

“Stahler just got back from another recon spin,” McDaniels said. “We have a firm location on Rock Wahlman’s whereabouts.”

Spin was the word Victor had come up with for traveling into a different time period, back during the early days of the program. McDaniels didn’t really care for the term, felt it was a little too casual to describe such a monumental scientific breakthrough, but he supposed it was appropriate enough. All of the human beings that the FCYYC had sent on missions so far—all three of them—had compared the actual traveling part to being sucked into a whirlwind.