Time Change Book One: The Jump Read online

  TIME CHANGE

  Book One: The Jump

  by

  Alex Myers

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Alex Myers

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  BEFORE

  The dark man hated their questions, but answering was a small price to pay for what only they could give him. Their relationship was symbiotic and worked well—power was balanced, egos were in check. Together, they usually worked for the greater good, as long as you didn’t get too specific as to the definition of good.

  While they wielded power and influence, he was the muscle, the agent, the physical presence that put ideas into practice. He pawed the travertine tile with the toe of his sandal.

  “Why do you want him again?” they asked—‘they’ because they always spoke as one. “What is it about him that is so exceptional? So different indeed, that you are willing to imperil all?”

  “I’ve never had to perform a ‘save’ yet,” the dark man said.

  “That’s debatable. We can agree that’s it’s not the first time you interceded or influenced.”

  “Well, no—“

  “You may use him but he needs to be more respectful. More appreciative.”

  The dark man stifled a laugh. Respect? Really? He thought it was amusing coming from them. “I will be personally involved.”

  “What is it you need from us?” they asked, the voice sounding metallic and edgy.

  “The girl. I would like to have the girl.”

  “The girl?” They laughed. “Are you really so uninspired? The girl is the one you entreat when you are vexed, always.” They conversed among themselves; the dark man never understood why they had to be so formal. “Indubitably, you may utilize her. She’s yours anyway, is she not? What else?”

  “I need to make a jump.”

  They looked concerned and huddled; they spoke in a language the dark man didn’t understand. It sounded like pops and snaps, like the sound of breaking sticks. The spokesman emerged and nodded, then added, “He’ll need to anchor himself. He also must employ free will and that means you must keep your ascendancy at bay.”

  The dark man nodded and smiled, because this time they were not seeing the whole picture. One life, possibly two, and the potential to save hundreds of thousands—that was a deal he was willing to make.

  CHAPTER 1

  PRESENT DAY

  The Incident

  “The bomb,” the sergeant kept saying. “Tell us about the bomb.”

  Jack Riggs was being held at the Norfolk Virginia police station in a windowless room that reeked of stale cigarettes and gallons of coffee, a room that alternated between being too hot and too cold, but always seemed airless and claustrophobic. He’d never been through anything like this before, not remotely. It had been ten years since his last speeding ticket.

  Part of him had remained detached, even with the appearance of the first gun at the school, which had blossomed into multiple guns, followed by being pushed to the floor. Then the ride behind the mesh barrier in the back of the police cruiser. His heart, which usually pounded so sharply and powerfully, had beat with a distant rhythm. His detachment, in fact, had interested him; something in the chain of events should have sparked an emotion, but instead, everything had felt cool and muted, as though it were happening to someone else.

  Saudade. Jack used the word like a talisman. It was Portuguese, a singular word that meant “a somewhat melancholic feeling of incompleteness.” Of all the words he knew—and he knew many—it was the one that he thought best described him. He spoke it out loud, he said it often. He knew that it was he and not the world that was broken.

  He hadn't even been arrested—just detained and then questioned. He was interrogated, confronted, provoked, and cajoled for six hours before they begrudgingly let him go. He’d never even thought to ask for a lawyer.

  After all, Jack reasoned, he’d done nothing wrong. He wasn’t a criminal, a terrorist, or even an accomplice. He was a science teacher, for crying out loud, a high school science teacher. This was a matter of bad judgment, not national security.

  He knew that lust was to blame for his current situation, but he hadn’t been able to help himself—though, in fact, nothing had happened. He’d always drawn a line in the sand when it came to his students. Still, there had been something about Shalah from the moment she’d first walked into his classroom—he knew she was something special. Brilliant and beautiful, she wasn't even a woman really, not yet, just a high school student. But she was more than a girl, and at least (thank God) she was eighteen.

  Looking back, Jack Riggs knew he’d gotten so played.

  Jack walked out the front door of the Norfolk police station and had to push back at the winter humidity. Rain was coming and the smell was heavy and wet. Pulsing green-black clouds threatened. Thunder rumbled in the distance and he wondered about a cab. He was cashless and without a credit card. He had used the cop’s desk phone to call his erstwhile girlfriend about an hour ago when things had started to wrap up and, of course, she hadn’t answered. He’d left her a message without a lot of hope.

  It started to rain.

  He pulled his iPhone out of his pocket, turned it on, checked for messages and saw that he had several. They’d confiscated the phone as part of their original pat-down when he was pinioned on his classroom floor. After they’d searched its contents, they’d been nice enough to shut it off and save his battery.

  As he approached some steps in the walkway, he looked up and saw his girlfriend pull into the parking lot in front of the station. Ashley’s face was all sharp lines and angles. Some women had a beauty that was subtle and snuck up on you; Ashley went the other direction. Great-looking at first, the flaws showed up afterwards. Years of stress and bitterness had cut deep creases into her forehead and around her eyes and heavily lipsticked mouth. Her jet-black hair was disheveled and surrounded the porcelain whiteness of her face. She was Jack’s age, thirty-five, but today she looked ten years older. As he got into the passenger seat, he could see the porcelain actually looked red and blotchy.

  Heat blasted from every vent. He closed the door and sat without saying a word while she stared at him, her eyes black, watery, and cold.

  “Drive, please. Just get me away from here!” He said it much louder than he meant to and she looked angry.

  “A bomb, a gun? Really, Jack, how could you do that to us? We are done.” She said her last three words like the blows of a dull axe on a tree.

  A chain of thunderbolts blasted a hole in the darkening sky. Ashley jumped but Jack wasn’t bothered. She hit the gas, then the brakes, then merged with traffic onto Riverfront Boulevard. Rain slashed the sky from the northwest.


  As they got on the expressway, headed east to Virginia Beach, the rain pelted down even harder. To the north, black clouds throbbed, churned, turned into dark swelling towers with flat angry anvil heads.

  After a mile of quiet crying, she finally asked, “Did they belong to that girl you’re screwing . . . your student?” Her knuckles were white from gripping the steering wheel. She turned the wipers to their highest setting.

  Jack had no idea how much she knew about what had happened, how much anyone knew, but he knew enough not to volunteer information. “Could you pay a little more attention to the road, please?” Jack was still getting the story straight in his own head. “The gun and the bomb belonged to Shalah’s boyfriend. Ramzi Yousef. And I wasn’t screwing her.”

  “Then why did you have those pictures of her? She’s just a child.”

  “She’s eighteen.” Jack’s stomach sank. “What pictures?”

  “From your phone. It’s all over the Internet. Then the TV stations picked up on it. They’re blurring the photos, but you can tell she’s naked. Jack, she’s lying on your bed. I recognize the comforter—I bought it for you.”

  “She broke into my place and took those pictures. She was trying to blackmail me.” Jack thought about things for a moment, “So if you knew all of this, why did you come to pick me up?”

  “Maybe to see you suffer, to see you squirm a little bit.”

  He may have not been arrested, but his situation seemed almost as bad. He wondered how the pictures had gotten out and then he thought of the dullard back at the evidence lockers and his lack of discretion. Jack counted his options; he could try to lie his way out or he could let Ashley down easy by trying to blame himself. In his general state of ennui, bedding women had become a numbers game and every now and then you had to eat crow, accept your punishment, and move on. This was just a fender bender in a lifetime of hit-and-run romances. He almost wished he cared more.

  Before he could speak Ashley said, “I know that it’s not the first time you’ve cheated on me.”

  “I didn’t cheat on you!” he said. “Not in any meaningful way.” This was not Jack’s first rodeo, not his first time getting caught, and it probably wouldn’t be his last. “Listen Ashley, you're giving me a ride, and I appreciate that. But I'm not going to have a sudden epiphany and change my ways.”

  Ashley’s face was grim. “Is she a terrorist?” she asked.

  “No, but her boyfriend might be.”

  “And what about you? What kind of judgment did you use? They say you were helping her and her boyfriend build bombs in exchange for sex.”

  “Is that what they’re saying about me?”

  “I had a reporter confront me at work, asking about a terrorist double love triangle. Why were you involved with them?”

  “It wasn’t them, it was her—and I’m not proud of it. Not that it makes any difference, but nothing happened. Per se.”

  “You sound like Bill Clinton talking about Monica Lewinsky.”

  “Probably the thing that kept me out of jail today was that I called the cops last night. Shalah left me a note, telling me about the plans to blackmail me. Then an email, with the photos attached. I was planning on going to the police today anyway to make a statement.”

  Ashley shook her head. “Was she getting ready to attack the school?”

  “No,” Jack said. “I told you she wasn’t a terrorist. The gun wasn’t even real. It was a plastic replica of a Kalashnikov, an AK-47. She also had a replica of a Sig Sauer P226, which was still in her bag.”

  Her eyes widened. “How do you know so much about guns?”

  “I told you. Back in college, I was in the Army Reserve. I needed help paying tuition. Plus my dad was a collector, a gun freak really. He used to take me to the shooting range. I’ve just always kept up with weapons, even though I haven’t shot one in years. As I said, the ones that she had were just plastic replicas. That’s how she got in through the school’s metal detectors.”

  “So, the bomb was fake too?” she asked.

  Jack shrugged and smiled slightly. “No,” he said. “The bomb was real.” He thought for a moment. “Pretty sophisticated, too.”

  “Was it powerful?”

  “Yeah. Astrolite is the world's most powerful non-nuclear explosive, about twice as powerful as TNT. She couldn’t have taken down the whole school, but one or two classrooms for sure. She’d used a cell phone as a detonator; her boyfriend had modified it and connected it to an electrical firing circuit. Thank God Ramzi or someone else didn’t call her this morning. That might have been his plan, now that I think about it. Perhaps he was going to turn her into a suicide bomber. They never got the chance, though, because I defused it.”

  “Is that why you were holding it when the police came into your classroom?” she asked.”

  “I’d just taken it from her.”

  “Was there a struggle?”

  “No, she handed it to me,” Jack said. “I asked for it and the guns too. I said I needed to see them in order to grade her project.”

  “I’m not sure I’m following?”

  Jack sighed, exasperated. “It was for a science project I’d assigned: ‘Scientific Solutions to Modern Problems.’ She was giving a PowerPoint presentation and, halfway through, she pulled the gun and bomb out of a hockey bag. About fifteen kids texted everyone from their parents to the police—that’s how the cops got involved.” Jack thought for a moment. “From what the police said, her boyfriend was a pretty nefarious dude. I guess he posted some really radical stuff to a bunch of websites— Arabic sites—talking about global jihad.”

  Ragged, dripping cloudlets were reaching down from the darkening sky. If Jack had been paying better attention, he’d have recognized this as a supercell, the strongest kind of thunderstorm and the one most associated with severe weather phenomena. But Jack’s mind was elsewhere as they drove right into the heart of it.

  “If all this is true, then why did you get arrested?” Ashley asked, staring at him as if trying to read his face.

  “First off, I didn’t get arrested—they just brought me in for questioning—and secondly, I was holding the weapons when the SWAT team busted in the door. I’m kind of surprised they didn’t arrest me.”

  “Or shoot you!” She softened a bit. “What did he say about you in those postings?”

  “That I was helping him.”

  “That’s ridiculous . . . right?” She searched his face, watched his body language.

  Jack put his head in his hands and massaged his temples. “Not entirely.”

  “Oh my God!” she said.

  “I wasn’t helping him, but I might have helped her with a little of the science . . . inadvertently.” Jack twisted toward Ashley, straining against the seatbelt. “Not the science of bomb building, so don’t even go there--she told me she was working on high-powered rocketry, stuff like launching satellites.”

  “I hope you’re hearing yourself and how little sense this is making.”

  “Shalah Muneem is brilliant—“

  “And beautiful.” Ashley said and kept her eyes reproachfully on his face.

  This was starting to wear on him. “I saw the kid’s excitement and didn’t want to squelch a creative spark.”

  “A sexual spark, you mean.”

  Jack shook his head in frustration. Why am I wasting my breath? She has her mind made up. “No, intellectual. She didn’t turn things in that other direction for a while.”

  “Two or three hours?”

  “No, like two or three days.” He sat back, deflated. “I should have asked more questions. I should have suspected something—hey, can you please slow it the hell down?”

  With one hand Ashley gripped the wheel and with the other she was grabbing her throat. Jack thought she was losing it.

  “I thought you wanted me to be honest with you,” he said.

  “I do,” Ashley cried, “but that doesn’t make any of this easier to hear.”

  He looked at her and w
ondered what it was that they’d had. Lately they’d been drifting apart, talking once or twice during the week, and maybe getting together one night on the weekend for sex. He shook it off and continued. “I wanted to give her a chance. I saw all this potential. She was wasting away . . ..”

  “And what? It reminded you of someone?” She let the question hang.

  Sheets of rain were blanketing the road ahead. Downbursts of wind rocked the car side-to-side and hail was exploding in icy chunks sliding down the windshield.

  Again, he turned to face her. “What are you trying to say?” A muscle twitched angrily in his jaw.

  “Oh please, Jack. You’re the poster child for unrealized potential.” Now she looked annoyed, but he was upset too, his temples pounding thickly, his throat tight. “You’ve got a Master’s Degree and you’re teaching high school in a district where almost half the kids don’t even graduate. You live in an apartment, drive an embarrassment of a car, and have no savings account.. Do I need to connect the dots?” She paused for a moment. “I think your biggest issue is your mom.”

  He did a double take. “Oh give me a break! You’ve been reading too many self-help books.”

  “Your mom committed suicide, and for years you thought it was your fault.”

  “That’s old news. I’m a big boy, I’m over it.” He pulled back his shoulders and lifted his sharp jaw.

  “Are you? I think it explains your screwed-up perceptions of women. To you, women are something you need to conquer and once you do, once you have them hooked, you find it doesn’t fill that hole in your heart that your mom left and so you move on.”

  “Wow, I get interrogated by the FBI today and you want to give me a hard time about ‘mommy issues.’”

  “Plus a father with such unrealistic ideals that you never felt like you were good enough, which is probably what really killed your mother.”

  “And where did you hear all this crap?”

  “From you.”