Brome angrily paid the bill then wandered the sun-washed streets, the plaintive request ringing in his ears: For me, Paul. Please?
Insanity. How dare Gibli think I would risk my life on a pipe-dream of murdering that inhuman monster?
Looking back, he couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment he made up his mind, but he thought it was when he had seen Gibli, clothes loose upon his scarecrow frame, stoop-shouldered, shuffling through the buzzing crowds.
Brome had seen haunted men who looked like that before, in the death camps.
He found a public telecomp, pressed his ident chop into the data-capture slot. While he waited for the phone to initialize the call, an inner voice screamed: Don’t do this! Gibli will drown you with his mad scheme. Think what you’re doing!
Brome summoned his courage. No, he realized, if there’s a chance, any chance it won’t happen all over again … then I owe that much to the faceless millions who died in this event-chain I call my life. And if Gibli’s right … God, if he is!
“Hotel Nationale.”
“Room 434, please.”
The clerk routed the call.
“Joseph, I’ll meet Dr. Zachal,” Brome said without preamble. “I’m not promising anything, you understand, but I’ll meet her.”
Gibli never missed a beat. “Fine. My jet leaves for Tel Aviv in the morning. May I ask what made you change your mind?”
“Don’t ever walk away from me like that again, Joseph. I don’t ever want to see that again in my life.” Brome’s voice shuddered as he remembered the camps and the lurching, tattooed skeletons. And he, one of them.
A long pause. “I’m glad you’re my friend,” Gibli said softly.
Brome removed his ident card, breaking the connection, and waited until the buffer dumped the call data before turning to leave.
* * * *
3.
Man’s destiny? History is replete with examples: the Romans, the Mongols, the Conquistadors. Victims and criminals in different guises, different eras. Man against himself—that is the true eternal struggle.
—Paul Brome, The Last Jew
“When I open the swing-gate into the Gasthof zum Pommer inn you’ll have twenty minutes to kill him before the Van Den Broeck bubble collapses.” Dr. Hannah Zachal sat behind a cluttered walnut desk, sipping coffee from an ivory mug. “By the way, I read your book last night, Colonel, in preparation for this meeting. Can’t say I liked it—too bleak for my tastes.”
Brome hadn’t known what to expect when Gibli finally conveyed him to Israel’s newest High-Energy Physics Institute on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, but he certainly wasn’t ready to debate his literary skills.
“The Middle East wasn’t a garden after the war, Doctor. We didn’t have cheap microfusion energy or dependable life-extension techniques. Israel was surrounded by implacable enemies. We had our past hanging over our heads, coupled with an uncertain future. That’s what I wrote about: man’s failure to build a shining future from the harsh reality of his past.”
“Hopefully, we can correct that now.” Her eyes found Gibli, who sat, a bundle of bones and dried skin, in a deep armchair near a bright window. “Right, Joseph?”
He gazed with half-blind eyes at the diamond-sparkle of the Mediterranean Sea. “I pray so, Hannah. Yes.”
She swung her attention back to Brome. “You’re in good shape, Colonel. That’s fortunate—this project will be strenuous.”
“I still teach a Krav Maga course for the military.” He decided to regain the upper hand. “You’re in pretty nice shape yourself, Doc, from what I can see under that lab coat.”
Actually, he reflected, Hannah Zachal was a handsome woman, despite her prickly personality. Blue-black hair brushed back from her forehead contrasted with ivory skin and deep violet eyes—haunted eyes, he realized, that had witnessed grim secrets of hidden worlds.
Hannah opened a file on her desk and read in a clear voice: “After Dachau, the Aliyah Beth smuggled you into Palestine during the British Mandate. You joined the Haganah, eventually becoming a Lieutenant with the Israeli Defense Force before Joseph recruited you into the Mossad. After several high-profile missions you retired. The reason is a little vague ….”
“Security,” Joseph Gibli supplied cryptically, his long face in silhouette. “Paul’s cover was blown in Damascus during a sensitive operation.”
Hannah shrugged. “Very well. Afterwards, you wrote your collection of philosophical memoirs, The Last Jew. Two more books followed, neither garnering the critical acclaim of the first. Your last rejuv implant was over five years ago. You’re not married and you have no children or surviving family. You are, and always have been, a professional soldier for the State of Israel.” She lifted her eyes from the page.
Brome saw no reason to either deny or confirm these facts. They were common knowledge, to be gleaned from any book jacket.
Hannah closed the file, placed her palms flat on top. “I know you’ve expressed doubt about the significance of this project, Colonel Brome—”
“I never said it wasn’t significant,” he interjected. “I simply questioned whether it was feasible.”
“Point. I assure you, however, I have accurately mapped the topological surface density and transitional energy gradients of the timeline in question. And I’m the only one who knows how to send a man in and bring him back again. Alive.”
“Before I sign on, Doctor, I want to know more about the logistics involved. First of all, why pick me?”
She gave Gibli a sharp glance. “Didn’t you tell him?”
“On the flight over,” he affirmed. “But he still doesn’t believe me.”
Hannah rocked back in her chair and steepled her fingertips. “I don’t want to bog down in a nomological discussion about the nature of the universal laws governing the timelines. Suffice it to say, we have two weeks to get you inside Pommer Inn and complete the assassination. Everything hinges on that one aspect of the mission. Nothing else is remotely important.”
Hannah warmed to her subject. “There are an infinite number of domains, but you need the right metric—the mathematical solution—to map and access them. I will inject you into the late evening of April 20, 1889, the night the target was born. You will complete your mission and my system will retrieve you after twenty minutes. That’s as long as I dare hold the swing-gate open before our respective timelines diverge.” She ventured a thin smile. “I only have a small tokamak reactor as my power source.”
“You still haven’t answered my first question. Why me?”
“Remember what we’re trying to do here, Colonel. Heal a wound. My sense of morality demands I send a man of your history through that domain wall.”
But that’s not the only reason Joseph came to me in Athens, Brome thought. She’s hiding something else.
Hannah said candidly, “I can’t give guarantees. It’s a risk for everyone involved, including myself. If our government got wind of what we’re trying to do they’d shut us down. Or worse.”
“I’ve yet to hear a good reason why I should risk my life for this.”
Gibli spoke. “Paul, it’s simply a question of doing what’s right for Humanity.” His aged fingers played nervously with the shaft of his eyecane. “For me, for you, our past is an awesome mountain. We must escape its shadow. I’m not saying forget what happened. We are our past! But something in here,” he clenched a bony fist and thumped his breast, “tells me for the first time in our long and terrible history, our people can ameliorate it.” He slumped, emotionally spent. “I can’t explain it any better. Except to say, I firmly believe what we do will have a profound impact on how we view ourselves and the future of our species. I don’t know if we’re chosen. We are, however, the only people in this event-chain who have a chance to level that mountain of history.”
“If we’re successful,” Hannah said, “then perhaps we were chosen by some higher power to do this thing—call it God or whatever you want.”
Brome ground his teeth. He felt he was being maneuvered against his will. But, he reasoned, if there was the slightest possibility of bringing it off then shouldn’t he try? For the nameless millions, if for no other reason?
“How many people know about this?”
Hannah: “Only a select few. We can’t risk sabotage by an individual or a fanatical religious group blinded by political motivations.”
Brome digested this. “Will we stay in Tel Aviv?”
She shook her head briskly. “There’s a black lab buried a hundred meters beneath the Negev Desert, east of Mount Ramon. It’s normally used as a hot lab to research dangerous, cutting-edge technology.” She looked at him. “We’ll start your training by running VR simulations. A lot of simulations.”
“If I fail the first time….”
“You can never go back. Translation of physical objects causes contamination of the domains. We’ll never know what causal chain we’ve set into motion when the project has ended. All we can say is they won’t suffer the same fate our world did.”