Destroyer

CHAPTER THREE

I would rather not use the chaser again until RJ’s given us a working charger, but the lack of adequate cash in the safe means it’s time to go on another collection run.

Over the past few months, we’ve created a long list of potential “donors” by searching through newspaper databases and online archived news footage. Each entry has been chosen carefully, but none are without their dangers.

The list is broken up into groups based on how much cash I should expect to find. The higher on the list, the larger the potential haul. To this point, I’ve stuck to the lower half, with the occasional venture near the middle, but today I’m selecting a name from the top five. In the event that something goes wrong with RJ’s attempts to alleviate the chaser’s power problem, it makes sense to stockpile enough money to cover Ellie’s upcoming medical bills and the rent through the end of the year.

Exhausted from a day that has been stretched even longer than normal due to our trips with RJ, and knowing that my task ahead will require my total focus, I decide it’s best if we wait until morning and get some sleep first.

Upon waking, I pack my satchel with the items I think I’ll need, grab some clothes, and then head into the bathroom for a shower. Moderately refreshed, I grab my satchel and carry it over to the closet. Along with the standard med-kit and notebook I usually take on a mission, I add in a few specialized items I think I’m going to need and then head out into the living room.

There, Iffy gives me the once-over. “You might want to change shirts. Something with a crew neck.”

I’m currently wearing a dark gray, V-neck T-shirt, which, apparently, will stand out in the year we’re headed to.

After I change, I check in on Ellie and am happy to see that she’s sound asleep. Again, I’m not concerned about leaving her alone. While the trip might take several hours, we’ll be gone from our home time no more than a minute.

Back in the living room, I make sure my new T-shirt meets with Iffy’s approval and then pick up the chaser. “Ready?”

She puts her arms around me. “Ready.”

The year is 1998, and I am walking through a building in Tampa, Florida, that is under construction. I’ve left Iffy in 1996, where she will be safe from any shifts in the time line if something goes drastically wrong. I wish we could bring Ellie with us, too, but I don’t want to do anything that might affect her recovery, so to prevent any time line problems, we never tell her specifically where we go or what we will be doing.

In exactly six years, two months, and seventeen days from this moment, a joint task force of federal and local law enforcement officials will surround this building. A shoot-out will result in the deaths of two police officers and seven of the gunmen inside. The remaining four occupants will be arrested. In the days that follow, their boss, Victor Munoz — who, until then, had been running a very successful drug distribution operation — will flee the country and spend the following five years fighting extradition from Guatemala. Ultimately, he will be unsuccessful.

I witnessed the shoot-out already and watched Munoz sneak away from his house as he began his journey out of the country. The latter was unnecessary on my part, but the historian in me is ever curious, and sometimes I just can’t help wanting to see things for myself.

I am back on task now, though.

It is the middle of the night, and there is no construction crew on-site. There is, however, a solitary guard stationed in a hut by the gate of the temporary fence surrounding the property. Periodically he walks through the building to fulfill his duties, but I already know his schedule. I watched each time he left on his rounds and documented them in my notebook. He will not be venturing out of his hut again for another twenty-three minutes, more than enough time for me to do what I need to do.

While the outer walls of the building have already gone up, most of the rooms inside have only been framed out. I draw a rough map of each floor in my notebook.

The largest rooms are on the third level and will eventually be accessed by a hidden elevator at the back of the building. From the newspaper stories that Iffy discovered detailing the raid in 2004, I know these are the rooms in which the illegal product will arrive in bulk and be prepared for distribution.

The fifth floor is the one I’m most interested in, and part of me wants to rush right there. It’s the floor where the money will be counted and where Munoz’s private office will be located. But information is the key. One small detail could be the difference between my success and my never going home again, and for that reason I take my time on each of the lower four floors before finally making my way to the top.

Those same newspaper articles that described the workrooms noted that the building contained a safe, but though Iffy and I searched through everything we could find, we never discovered a mention of its exact location. Logically, it will be on this top floor, too, so I search for anything that might indicate where its future home will be.

Outside the space that will become Munoz’s office is a long room. If I had to guess, this will be where the money is counted. In addition to the doorway into the boss’s office, there are two others. One leads to the central hallway, while the other opens into what will either become a small office or a large closet. Off this room is yet another, even smaller, space — three feet deep by four wide. Unlike elsewhere in the building, the floor of this tiny alcove has been reinforced and stands a good three inches above those in the other rooms. Clearly, it’s intended to hold something heavy.

The safe. What else could it be? It’s easy enough for me to check for sure, however.

I pull out my chaser, use the calculator to determine the location number for the exact spot I am now standing, and store it in the machine’s memory. I then call up the locator for a hidden position a block away from the building and set the time for a forward jump to exactly 3:00 a.m. three months from now.

After checking my notes and satisfying myself that I’ve collected everything I need, I hit the go button.

Iffy once showed me an old movie called The Time Machine, in which images of the world whip by as the traveler moves forward or backward through time.

What a nightmare that would be. If that happened to me every time I traveled, I would squeeze my eyes shut for the whole trip. Thankfully, the only thing I see is a gray mist or nothing at all.

The street is quiet when I arrive. I walk silently to a position from where I can see Munoz’s building. The construction fence still surrounds the property, but the building itself appears to be almost done. I look for lights in the windows but see none. Just to be safe, I walk around the block and check the other side. The only illumination is the flicker of a television set in the guard’s hut. I can see the man on duty sitting in front of it, and from his profile am pretty sure it is the same guy I saw twenty minutes earlier or, from his perspective, three months before.

I make a few quick hops to check when he goes on his rounds and then select the location number of the room on the fifth floor and jump there.

Turning on the flashlight on my phone, I think I’ve made an error. The reinforced space that should be right in front of me is not there. In its place is a painted wall. After I softly rap on it and hear the echo of an open space beyond, I run my fingers up the two strips of molding that appear to parallel the edges of the hidden space. About three quarters of the way up the molding on the left side, a small piece moves a fraction of an inch sideways as my hand touches it. When I push the segment farther, the wall suddenly swings out.

I shine my light into the opening and find — surprise, surprise — a large metal safe sitting on the raised floor.

My next jump takes me six months forward to late spring, 1999, and back on the street, where I can first safely check the building. The fence is gone, and while there are a few lights on inside, the top two floors are dark. A second jump, and I’m once more inside the storage room.

A metal door now shuts off the main entrance to the room; it is secured by multiple locks, while heavy-duty metal shelves sit along the walls. Each shelf is filled with shoe box — size plastic-wrapped packages.

I try not to think about what the bundles must hold, but it’s impossible. I don’t need any research to tell me that over the next several years, people will become addicted and many will die because of the drugs passing through this place. My rewinder training would instruct me to just let it go, but I don’t work for the Upjohn Institute anymore, and, especially in cases such as this, I am more than willing to operate under a modified set of rules. The drugs, however, are something I can deal with later. Right now it’s the cash that’s important.

After opening the false wall and revealing the safe, I mount the tiny camera I’ve brought with me from 2015 inside the top of the doorframe. The device is motion-activated and has a battery that — as long as it isn’t in constant use — should last about three days. The elevated position isn’t the greatest, but putting it anywhere else will increase the chance of its discovery. I’ll just have to make it work.

My next jump takes me to the street again, three nights later. When all looks quiet, I return to the storage room. Many of the plastic-wrapped packages are gone, further deepening my hatred of Munoz’s operation.

I open the secret panel and am happy to see my camera is still there. On an empty shelf, I set up my laptop computer and hook the camera into it. There are four video clips, each of the same man opening the safe. In two of the clips, he blocks my view, but the other two are clear. Well, relatively anyway. The angle of the shot means that I’m seeing only the top of the dial, not the actual number of the combination, which, in this case, lines up with a mark on the right side. But I can use the number I do see as my guide, and soon the safe is open.

As I hoped, it holds considerably more cash than I’ve come across on previous missions. Before, my record take for a single trip was around $9,000. From the stacks of bills in front of me, I know I will shatter that number.

I pull out a balled-up duffel bag, the last extra item I’d included in my satchel, and start stuffing money into it as fast as I can.

It is nearly three quarters full when I hear a key slip into one of the locks on the main door. I suck in a surprised breath and momentarily freeze. I was so sure I would be undisturbed.

My heart racing, I decide to forgo the remaining cash. I zip up the duffel and grab my chaser. As I am reselecting the location and date for the very first place I went after leaving my apartment, the final dead bolt slips free, and the door swings open.

It’s Munoz himself. I recognize him from the newspaper articles. Even though he is clearly startled by my presence, it doesn’t delay him from reaching for what I assume is a gun. Before he can draw it, however, I disappear.

I arrive just a block away from where I was moments before, at almost the exact same time of night, only instead of June 12, 1999, it is July 17, 1996, and on the lot where Munoz’s building will be erected is a rundown house that has sat there through much of the twentieth century.

“How did it go?”

Iffy stands right where I left her. Though she is well aware that I have done much in the time I’ve been gone, from her perspective I left only moments ago.

I hand her the duffel bag. “Munoz came in before I could fill it all the way.”

“Didn’t you do a check first?” she asks, not hiding her concern.

“The top floors were dark. I thought no one was there.”

She looks me up and down. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

“I’m fine,” I say, though my nerves are still on edge. It was the closest call I’ve had on one of these missions. “Let’s get this over with and go home.”

She wraps her arms around me, and we jump forward to January 20, 1999, a mere few weeks after Munoz’s drug operation has moved into its new quarters. Pay phones are much easier to find here than they will be in 2015. The one we locate is in front of a closed liquor store and is covered in stickers and scratches. Thankfully, though, when I pick up the receiver, there’s still a dial tone.

From my experience on previous money-gathering trips, I know the call I’m about to make doesn’t need a coin. I also know this is the moment I’m about to once again break the institute’s number one rule: never knowingly alter the past. Of course, this won’t be even close to my largest transgression. While my actions will cause changes to the time line, it’s unlikely any ripple will affect my or Iffy’s future life in California.

Well, there would be one exception if I had left Iffy in 2015. In that case when I returned, she’d have no memory of where I had gone or why. A small change, perhaps, but who knows how it might affect our relationship? That’s why I always bring her along and leave her a few years farther in the past while I work, just to be safe.

The line rings several times before a woman answers, “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”

I give her the address of Munoz’s building and tell her about the drugs and the money before hanging up. Iffy and I then jump home.

Before I even move, she grabs her laptop from me and plops down on the couch. After a minute, she smiles. “It worked.”

She turns the screen so I can see the news article she’s located.

“Munoz and his men were taken into custody three weeks after the phone call,” she says. “He was convicted and sentenced to thirty years in prison. Which means he’s still behind bars.”

This was but a minor blip on the current time line, but a change nonetheless. The six-plus years Munoz would have remained in business had he not been arrested have now never happened. I’m not fool enough to believe my actions put a big dent in the central Florida drug scene, but I am hopeful that a few people might have been helped.

Iffy opens the duffel bag and counts the money. When she’s through, she says, “Seventy-nine thousand, three hundred and forty.”

I definitely shattered the record.

Here’s where stealing from criminals and changing time lines work well together. The money I’ve taken from Munoz’s safe was now never there in the first place. He was already in jail, his operation dead, by the date I popped into his drug closet. Yes, I know, it messes with your mind. All you need to remember is that I am the constant. It’s the path of the traveler that must be followed. When I took the cash, the old time line still existed, and when I made the call that changed Munoz’s future, the money was already in my possession, so it didn’t just disappear. It does mean that each bill I’ve taken has a duplicate out there somewhere, but it’s unlikely to cause us a problem.

Iffy and I have talked about other ways of increasing the amount of money we have, such as depositing everything in a bank several years in the past so that by now it will have earned considerable interest, or even traveling back and investing in stocks that we know will do well over time. But the truth is, I know very little about finance, especially here, and worry that some detail will be missed that will expose us, so taking these steps makes me uncomfortable. I grew up at the bottom of the caste system in my world, where saving money, let alone investing it, was never an option. Perhaps someday we’ll do it, but for now I’m satisfied with putting the cash we collect — cautiously and not all at once, of course — in a bank here in 2015.