Eric looked at her with disconcertingly bright eyes. He seemed to be about the same age as her father, she realized, but had the demeanor of a much younger man, full of a dangerous energy. “Yes. We’ve been monitoring you since you were eight,” he added, then waited for her to react.
The enormity of it refused to sink in. Why would the DHS monitor an eight-year- old? It seemed flatly implausible, beyond even the paranoia of the Bizarro-world she’d glimpsed through Gramps’s rambling tales of East Germany. “This is about my birth mother, isn’t it?” She asked. Gomez and Jack said she was adopted, too, she remembered with a pang. It was an annoyingly humanizing fact: the first hint of a human face behind a silhouette she’d been trying to ignore all her life. She didn’t like it. “Why? Did you think she’d show up again after all these years? Like a wicked fairy in one of the Grimms’ tales, come to steal me back?”
Eric shook his head. “Nothing so simple.” He put his coffee cup down, then picked up a hand exerciser ball. “What do you know about world-walkers?”
“What everybody knows. They blew up the White House? They’re out there somewhere in the multiverse, and unlike us they don’t need machines to move between other time lines?” Everyone knew a bit about para-time, after the bombing. They’d discovered their enemy had come from another version of this world, where history had diverged from ours. There were an infinite number of such time lines out there. The US had machines that could transport both people and machinery between universes.
But it was irrelevant to everyday life—unless you had the bad luck to be caught in the blast radius of a terrorist nuke planted by bombers from another time line, or had relatives who had been in India or Pakistan during World War 2.5. All you really needed to know was that they were the enemy, and that overthinking things aloud in public was a bad idea.
“Yes, I get that one of them gave birth to me, once upon a time. But I’m not a—”
“No,” Eric agreed. “You’re not a member of the Clan. And I’d like to distinguish between world-walkers—people with the inherited ability to think themselves from one time line to another—and the Clan, an organization of people with that ability. Like the difference between ordinary Muslims and members of Al Qaeda. The important thing is, one of your parents was a member of the Clan. That didn’t matter until recently, but … things have changed.”
“What kind of things?” She didn’t even try to keep the frustration out of her voice. “What’s this got to do with me?”
Eric picked up a tablet and began to read. “Let’s see. Rita Douglas, age twenty-five. Adopted and raised by Emily and Franz Douglas, in Boston and then New Jersey. Attended UMass, a major in history, a minor in drama. Languages: Spanish, some German. Then a succession of dead-end jobs while trying to pay off student loans and build a career in acting.” He smiled at her, a flash of teeth: obviously he found something amusing in this. “No criminal record, not so much as a parking ticket.” The smile vanished. “Congratulations. You’re very clean. You’d pass a background check for government service with flying colors.” He put the tablet down. “But it never occurred to you to apply. Any particular reason?”
What the fuck? Rita stared at the ex-colonel, then used the too-hot container of too-bitter coffee to buy herself a few seconds. “I’m not the type,” she said cautiously. “I’m not interested in the military.” She’d heard too many horror stories from Libya and Bangladesh vets. And she’d had friends who’d enlisted, then dropped out of touch. “I really wanted to get into a graduate studies history program, or find a solid stage role, but that’s just not happening in this economy.” The post-2003 climate wasn’t terribly conducive to historical introspection. And as for the stage, a momentary twinge from the implant inside her left elbow reminded her what was wrong with that. “What is this about? Why am I here?”
“You might want to put the coffee down.”
She took a mouthful, swallowing hastily and burning the roof of her mouth. “Yes?”
Smith looked straight at her, and she had an uncanny feeling that he could see right through to the back of her skull. “Speculate wildly, please. Why do you think you’re here? Why do you think I brought all that stuff up?”
“I don’t know. You’re going to offer me a job? Because you’ve suddenly got a need for world-walkers who speak foreign languages and can act? What is this, Mission: Impossible? I’m not a spy and I’m not a world-walker—”
“I agree.” The Colonel nodded. “You’re neither of those things. But we can fix that.” He waited politely for Rita to finish spluttering before he continued: “Here’s the proposition. We—by which I mean the organization I work for; you don’t get to meet anyone else at this point—are empowered to offer you a job, with strings attached. If you take it, you’ll spend most of the next two years going through induction and training. You’ll learn necessary skills to bring you up to speed, and be thoroughly evaluated along the way. It’ll be a lot like being in the Army, but without the uniform, the shouting, the saluting, and the shooting.
“If you wash out, well, the pay’s decent and maybe you’ll take away some useful skills. If you pass but don’t have quite the right aptitude, you can quit or we can find you a job within DHS that’s suited to your abilities—interrogating Latino theatrical troupes or something, a safe office job with a pension at the end, if that’s what you want. But if you pass and demonstrate the right qualities, then, once you’re a probationary federal agent, we can talk about the other stuff.”
“But I’m not a world-walker!”
Smith smiled at her again, a Cheshire cat grin that froze her in her seat. “Like I said, that can be fixed.” He leaned forward: “And it’s the one sure way you can guarantee that the Clan won’t be able to touch you. But it’s only going to happen if you accept this job offer and give it your best shot. And maybe not even then. So. What do you say?”
In a moment of crystal clarity Rita realized two things, one very good and one very bad. It was the best opportunity she’d had in years, if ever—and she wasn’t sure she’d be allowed to turn it down. So she licked her suddenly dry lips and gave what seemed to be the only safe answer: “I’d like to see the fine print, please.”
Spies
A PRISON CAMP NEAR BOSTON, TIME LINE THREE, JANUARY 2004
“I think it’s quite simple. To use an analogy from US history in my time line, imagine this is Cape Canaveral and we’re their captured Nazi rocket scientists,” Miriam Beckstein told her audience.