going on?” I demanded, opening the fridge. From the door I took the last Old Tearsheet Best Bitter from the six-pack he’d brought up the first day we met. He took it from me, found the opener, and a moment later was seated happily on my couch. He patted the spot next to himself and I sat.
“They were batshit-insane-happy about the diachronic effects,” he said. “They’re all about the time travel.”
“But she killed someone!” I said.
“That’s why they’re all about the time travel. It got results. General Schneider gets a star on the wall.”
“Huh?”
“He has been declared a martyr for his country.”
“How is that helpful? Are they going to trick our enemies into standing in an ODEC so Erszebet can Send them to the moon?”
“See, what you and I were too freaked out to think about is that it’s possible to get sent back in time and not end up dead,” said Tristan. “It’s actually possible to go back in time and do stuff. In fact, it may have happened already.”
“What?”
He sat up and took a big swig of his beer. “The intel community has been noticing some inexplicable shit going on, but it’s a little less inexplicable if it is the case that foreign powers are engaging in diachronic operations.”
He gave me a moment to digest this. “DODO,” I said. “Department of Diachronic Operations. You’ve known all along, haven’t you?”
“We have suspected. Now we know.”
“Are you serious?”
He nodded.
“You mean there’s another Erszebet out there?”
He shrugged.
“What exactly are you saying, Tristan?”
“Well . . .” He sat up straighter, put the beer on the coffee table, rested his forearms on his knees, and looked at me. “IARPA—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has been running this thing until now—thinks other countries might have, or might soon have, access to . . . others like Erszebet. Somehow. Purely theoretical at this stage, but the time travel was new information, and all of a sudden, pieces started to fit together. So in case certain other countries have found their own Erszebets and are sending people back in time to fiddle with things, the DNI doesn’t want to see a Magic Gap opening up.”
“DNI?”
“Director of National Intelligence. General Octavian Frink. Reports directly to POTUS. The Director of IARPA reports to Frink. General Schneider, God rest his soul, worked for a black-budget arm of IARPA. And what has happened now—less than twenty-four hours ago, Stokes—is that DODO has been bumped up the org chart. Now it’s directly under General Frink, with a dotted line to Dr. Rudge at IARPA.”
“Dotted line?”
“It just means Rudge is an advisor. We keep him in the loop.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Well . . . I have been promoted to lieutenant colonel and made the acting head of the Department of Diachronic Operations. I’ve been tasked with taking the ODEC and Erszebet to the next level, focusing entirely on time travel.”
For a moment I was so amazed by this reversal of fortune I couldn’t respond. Then: “Great! So . . . you’re not in trouble.”
“I’m not in trouble,” he said with a small, contented smile.
“Wow, Tristan!” I hooked one arm around his neck and gave him a side-hug. He grinned but took it a little stiffly. “That’s amazing. Erszebet’s willing to cooperate?”
He rolled his eyes, but did not look too worried. “We’re working on that. The Asset likes to be pandered to by powerful men in suits. She likes Constantine Rudge because he wears cuff links and went to Oxford. So I think I can chart a course.”
“Well then, congratulations. When do you start?”
“As soon as we can get ourselves to DC for the swearing-in.”
“You and Erszebet.”
He gave me a funny look. “Stokes. We’re going to be sending people back in time.” He jerked his left thumb over his shoulder as if that’s where back-in-time was.
“Right, I got that.”
“So?”
“So, what?”
“So who do you think is qualified to go back in time?”
I shrugged. “Athletes? Assassins?” He was shaking his head. “Historians?”
“Stokes!” He laughed. “Whoever goes has to be able to function in a setting where nobody speaks modern American English. We need polyglots and linguists. We need”—he pointed—“you.”
I stared at him, eyes wide. I bet my mouth dropped open too.
“I need you,” he added, realizing I was incapable of speech at that moment. “And I’m pretty sure you’re otherwise unemployed.”
Although safely seated, I suddenly felt so lightheaded I put a hand on the coffee table to steady myself.
“So what do you say?” he asked, with a comradely grin. “I can’t promise you’ll get to practice your conversational Sumerian, but you never know.”
I felt like I was on the crest of a roller coaster, just about to plunge down a steep, joyfully terrifying thrill ride. I would have to be mad to agree to such a thing. “You want to send me back in time?” I heard myself say, not really sounding like myself.
“Well, not permanently,” he said. “I’d miss you too much, Stokes.” God damn that grin of his. And he even roughed up my hair, the bastard.
“When do we leave?” I asked.
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