Gomez said nothing until the elevator door opened again; then she backed the SUV out into the parking garage. It was brightly lit now, much too bright—
Rita glanced up through the car’s glass roof and saw wisps of cirrus drifting across a blue sky overhead. She froze. When they’d driven in, the sky had been slate-gray with heavy cloud.
“Welcome to time line four,” Gomez said drily. “Ever wondered if a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies? Because now’s your chance for a preview.”
NEAR BOSTON, TIME LINE FOUR, MARCH 2020
There was no airfield here. No underground parking lot, just a ramp leading down to a half-buried blockhouse surrounded by a razor-wire fence. There was a road (a one-lane blacktop with no sidewalk), a guard checkpoint with cameras, a couple of parked gunbots, and a flagpole flying the Stars and Stripes. Beyond it, Rita saw nothing but forest.
Gomez drove slowly past the checkpoint, then along the road between the trees. “We’re still inside the outer perimeter of Camp Graceland,” she told Rita, losing some of her chilly reserve. “It goes on for miles.”
“We’re in another time line,” Rita thought aloud. “That wasn’t a freight elevator, was it?”
“Nope.” She caught Gomez’s withering sidelong glance, and the thought behind it: Are you really that stupid?
“The, uh, world-walkers. They don’t know about this time line, do they?”
Now Gomez looked at her properly, a slow appraising stare that would have made Rita nervous if they’d been driving much faster than the posted ten-mile-per-hour speed limit. The DHS agent looked back at the road. “Assumptions are dangerous, Ms. Douglas. I could tell you that we don’t think the Clan know of this world, and I might believe it too, but that doesn’t automatically make it so.”
“The Clan? You mean, the world-walkers?”
“The Clan is the organization we consider the States’ most lethal threat to national security. They’re world-walkers, yes.”
“But.” Rita checked her assumptions. What she knew about world-walkers was drawn from the news media, and as Kurt had carefully taught her to see, the news media were often deliberately misleading. “You mean there’s more than one kind?”
“Do bears do their business in the woods?” Gomez glanced at her again, then back to the road. It curved around a thick stand of trees, roots forcing the asphalt up into wrinkles on one side. A fork came into view and Gomez turned left. A minute later they arrived at a broad clearing, where a windowless metal and concrete building squatted in the middle of a clear-cut apron. Something buzzed in the distance, like a lawn mower or a weed whacker. Gomez parked between a Jeep Wrangler and a late-model Humvee, then opened her door. “End of the road, girl. Out and walk.”
Somehow that one belittling word rankled, hurting more than all the fear and craziness of the past couple of days. Rita kept her face impassive as she climbed out and collected her bag from the backseat. “Why did you bring me here?”
“There’s a man who wants to see you.”
“What about? You bugged my phone! You already know everything that happened to me yesterday—”
“Job interview, Ms. Douglas. Unless you want to go back to a zero-hours contract for a failing games SFX start-up, with the Clan looking for you?”
Rita stopped mid-stride. “You have got to be kidding.”
“The US government does not joke, Ms. Douglas.” Gomez’s eyes narrowed. She carried on walking. “This is the best offer you’re going to get. If it was up to me … Come on, let’s get this over with.”
The front door of the building opened onto a very unwelcoming vestibule, watched over by cameras in armored mountings; the inner door was positioned on one side, out of direct line of sight of the outer door, and clearly armored. Gomez had Rita stand on a pair of painted yellow footprints so she could look at one of the cameras, while she called someone on her glasses. What unnerved Rita most was the lack of visible guards. Guards meant human interaction. Narrow slots in the walls and ceiling meant something much less pleasant: bullets, or gas.
After a nerve-wracking wait, a concealed loudspeaker crackled. “Rita Douglas and Sonia Gomez, you may now enter the secure zone. Please proceed to briefing room G11. Ms. Douglas, do not step across any red lines you see painted on the floor. Use of lethal force is mandated.”
Gomez led Rita through a guardroom staffed by four soldiers in body armor, who watched them unblinkingly. Then came a door that led into a much more normal office suite. More doors blurred past until they came to G11. Gomez opened it without knocking.
“Rita Douglas.” The man behind the desk stood. Crow’s-feet wrinkles around his eyes and a salesman’s outstretched handshake welcomed her. He looked about fifty, physically fit but balding, and wore an open-collared dress shirt with his suit. “Have a seat, please. Sonia, if you’d like to wait elsewhere while I discuss the situation with Ms. Douglas?”
Gomez virtually jumped to attention, then fled hastily. Rita looked around, perplexed. Apart from the lack of windows it could have been just another slightly dingy government office. Cheap carpet, institutional desk, and a flag in the corner of the room. There was absolutely nothing to show that it was part of an ultra-secure secret compound in another time line.
Rita was beyond diplomacy. “Who are you people, and what do you want with me?” she asked, trying to ignore the slushy fear in her belly. “Why am I here?”
“Sit down.” He didn’t sound annoyed, exactly, but Rita suddenly found herself sitting, in a visitor’s chair that was slightly too soft and slightly too low. “That’s better. Can I offer you a coffee? With or without caffeine? This is going to take an hour or two so you might as well be comfortable.”
A couple of minutes later the door opened again: it was one of the guards, bearing a cardboard coffee cup and a breakfast muffin. Just for her, apparently. “You can call me Eric,” he told her, smiling diffidently. “I also answer to ‘Colonel Smith,’ but that was in another land and long ago. I’m now officially retired from the Air Force.” His smile faded slightly. “You’re here because you came to our attention before the Clan managed to abduct you. Which was lucky, because if things hadn’t happened in that order you’d most likely be dead. And if not dead, you’d be in their hands. The questions you probably have are, why did that happen? And how can I stop it happening again? Am I right?”
Rita nodded. “I was told, uh, I was given the impression, that you think my birth mother may have something to do with it.”