The Rewind Files Read online

  “You say that, but you don’t believe it,” he said. “You can’t tell me that those millions of lives don’t weigh on you.”

  “They do. Of course they do.”

  “Right. And why is that?”

  “Because it was genocide,” I said. “Because it was horrific. All those lives. Twenty-two million Americans and thirty-four million Chinese. Gone. Just like that.”

  “Right,” he said earnestly. “But you knew that before. You always knew that. You grew up knowing that. What’s different now? The only thing that’s changed is you. Your responsibility. Before, they were just dead people from history. Just another war. The perpetual story of the human race, played out over and over.”

  I moved away from him, towards the steps, and he followed me. “They were innocent, even then,” he went on. “Nobody who gets killed when a bomb drops onto a park they’re visiting with their children is a combatant. Nobody enlisted for World War III, Regina. They were always innocent. They always should have been permitted to live. It only feels different because now there’s a chance to save them.”

  “Hope is dangerous, Carter.”

  “Giving up is worse.”

  We stood there at the top of the steps for a long time, gazing out over the National Mall, Lincoln rising up like a Greek god behind us.

  “You don’t hate it here because this era is primitive compared to yours,” he said. “You think that’s why, but it’s not. Not really. You hate it here because you can’t look at these people without picturing what might happen to them.”

  “I’m afraid of them,” I said. “I’m afraid of what’s coming.”

  “I know.”

  “Kitty,” I said. “Where’s Kitty going to be in ten years? Or Beth Rutherford? Or Billy the coffee guy? Or Bob Woodward? Or even stupid Detective Barlow? The President’s going to get hustled off to a bunker. The President’s going to be fine. The important people are always fine. But nobody will care what happens to the secretaries and the bellboys. That’s not how war works. That’s not how anything works.”

  “You care,” he said. “That’s what matters. You’re right. Nobody on the National Security Council is going to leave any room in that underground bunker for Beth Rutherford. And whoever started this war, they didn’t care how many Kittys and Billys and Beths were lost, on both sides. But they’re not the ones calling the shots anymore, Reggie. Beth doesn’t know it, Bob Woodward doesn’t know it, and John Dean doesn’t know it but . . . ”

  He paused for a moment, took a breath and looked at me. “Right now the most important person in the whole world is you.”

  Twelve

  The Mother and Child Reunion Is Only a Moment Away

  Beth kept her steno pad in plain sight when she was at her desk and in her hand when she was in Dean’s office. She left the office exactly three times per day – coffee breaks at 10:30 and 3:30 for ten minutes, and lunch for half an hour at 1:00 – and in her absence, the pad was locked in the top middle drawer of her desk. I presumed those were also the times when she went to the bathroom. She seemed like the kind of person who scheduled her bathroom breaks.

  Carter and I had considered a number of possibilities, from the elaborate (Carter spilling a pot of coffee on her in the hallway and stealing the desk drawer key from her pocket in the ensuing chaos) to the straightforward (“Can’t I just ask her to borrow her steno pad?”) before we settled on a plan that was somewhere in the middle.

  The phone rang at 10:45, right on schedule. She was just back from her coffee break and wouldn’t leave the desk again until lunch.

  “Mr. Dean’s office,” she said in her crisp, clipped telephone voice, and I saw her face darken almost immediately. “For the State Dinner?” she said. “From yesterday?”

  There was a pause while she listened to the voice on the other end of the phone and shot me a poisonous look. I smiled back politely and kept typing. “Certainly,” she said to the voice on the phone. “I’m so sorry. I’ll get that to you right away.” Pause. “Of course, I’ll bring them myself. I’ll be right there.”

  She hung up the phone and stormed over to my desk.

  “Hey, what kind of Danish do they have today?” I asked her, not looking up from my typewriter as she tore through the files on my desk.

  “Where are they, you stupid girl?”

  “If it’s cherry again, I might skip it, but if they have the cream cheese ones they had on Monday I might—”

  “You gave them an empty folder, you utter nitwit,” she snapped at me. “I cannot imagine how you have managed to fail so utterly at such a simple task three days in a row, but the State Department budget office just called the Executive Chef and his office just called me and nobody knows where the file with the signed purchase orders is.”

  “I took it over yesterday, remember?” I said, as she flipped through the pile of folders on my desk frantically.

  “You took them the file folder,” she said. “Apparently you didn’t stop to see if there was actually anything inside it before you went ahead and – aha!” she exclaimed, thrusting a sheaf of papers in my face.

  “Huh,” I said nonchalantly. “What are those doing there?” She was too enraged to respond, and I was delighted to see steam practically coming out of her ears.

  “Want me to run those down to the chef’s office?” I asked sweetly, reaching for the papers, and she yanked them away as though my touch would turn them to stone.

  “You stay right where you are,” she said icily. “Don’t touch these papers or come anywhere near them. I am taking these down there myself because apparently I can’t trust you with one simple—”

  My phone rang, and I waved her into silence as I answered it. She was as close to apoplectic as I’d ever seen her, and I was enjoying myself tremendously.

  “White House Counsel’s Office,” I said formally.

  “How’s it going?” said Carter. “She seemed pretty pissed at you.”

  “Yes indeed, sir,” I said in my most correct and proper telephone voice. “Miss Rutherford has located the paperwork.”

  “You better find something in that steno pad worth the tongue-lashing you’re going to get when she comes back upstairs.”

  “On her way right now, sir. She’ll be there in two minutes,” I said, and hung up. “They’re waiting,” I said helpfully. She turned on her heel and stormed out, papers in hand.

  We had pegged Beth correctly. Annoyance at me had superseded every single other thought, and the precious steno pad was just lying right there in the open, on her desk. With elaborate casualness, in case Dean should come out of his office suddenly, I bent over her desk and flipped through the notepad, hunting for any mention of Liddy.

  But Beth Rutherford was a perfect secretary – she wrote in shorthand. I couldn’t read any of her notes. Fortunately, the handheld back at my apartment could translate it. I leaned over to give my Microcam a clear shot and hastily flipped through the entire notepad, beginning to end, capturing each page onscreen.

  On a whim, I opened up the drawer in her desk to see if there was anything else helpful inside, but there was nothing. It was as Spartan and unhelpful as I could have expected her desk drawer to be, just a sea of pens and pencils and stamps in impeccable rows.

  I took a picture of the inside of the desk drawer – and the surface of the desk, too, for good measure – before darting back to my seat. When Beth returned, still seething, I was seated at my desk, tap-tap-tapping away as though I’d never left.

  Carter and I were scheduled to meet after I finished my lunch. He was waiting in the stairwell, tapping his foot with impatience, when I came out of the mess and around the corner.

  “Anything?”

  “She writes in shorthand,” I said. “I don’t know why I didn’t see that coming.”

  “Damn.”

  “I got every page on camera, at least,” I said, more optimistically than I felt. “We can translate it tonight and look it over.”

  “Anything h
elpful in her desk?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “I hope you didn’t get yelled at for nothing,” he said glumly.

  “I didn’t mind,” I said. “It was fun to watch her get that mad.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “What’s going on here?” boomed a voice behind me, and I turned to see a cluster of gray-haired men coming out of the Situation Room. Carter and I looked at each other, neither sure how to respond.

  “Boy, what the hell you doing in the West Wing?” barked one of them. I flinched a little at the “boy,” but Carter didn’t. Instead, something strange happened. Right before my eyes, I watched him transform. Agent Carter Hughes disappeared entirely and he became his uniform. I don’t know how else to explain it.

  “Beg your pardon, sir,” he said, and I was so irritated that he was being forced to apologize, that I didn’t realize, until the pause grew painfully long that neither of us had prepared any kind of a cover story.

  “It’s my fault,” I said, “I needed . . . the purchase order files for the State Dinner. And I didn’t have time to run over to the kitchens to pick them up, so the Steward’s office sent him to bring me the files on my way back from lunch.”

  You could drive a tractor through the plot holes in this story – starting with the fact that neither one of us had any files in our hands – but the man who had spoken appeared satisfied.

  “Hope to hell you didn’t saunter through the lobby in that getup,” muttered another. “Christ.”

  “No sir, I came through the basements.”

  “Good,” said the first. “He ain’t been bothering you, has he? You just say the word and I’ll get on the phone to the Steward’s office and—”

  “He’s fine. It’s fine. Everything’s fine,” I said, desperately attempting to sound polite despite my gritted teeth and itchy punching fist.

  “Good, then. Well, you give out a holler if he bothers you again,” he said. “This can’t be what your mama had in mind when she sent you off on the train to the big city.”

  “Actually—” I began, but Carter was too quick for me.

  “Pleasant afternoon to you, Miss Bellows,” he said, with a deferential bow. “Sorry for taking up so much of your time.”

  And then he disappeared down the stairwell, leaving me no choice but to go back to my office. I could feel the cluster of old men staring at my ass as I walked away.

  Beth was in a gleeful mood when I returned from lunch, never a good sign, and I spotted a mammoth stack of files on my chair.

  “What’s this?”

  “Your project,” she said, aglow with evil delight. “For the next month.”

  “What’s in these files?” I asked her, heart sinking.

  “Congratulations,” she trilled. “You are now responsible for processing every case of potentially illegal usage of the Presidential seal.”

  I could hear her laughing all the way to the coffee cart, from which she returned with the very last cheese Danish.

  This was hardly what I would deem a proportional response. I prayed to God there was something in that steno pad that would make the brain-melting tedium of my punishment worth it.

  * * *

  Six of the one hundred and eighty-two files later, with the will to live drained out of me entirely, I shuffled home from work and went straight into my bedroom. I gave myself exactly ten minutes to lie on the bed and groan and fantasize about ways to murder Beth Rutherford before forcing myself to get to work.

  First things first. I kicked off my shoes, unpinned my hair, and changed into my illegal 22nd-century cotton shirt and pants, sighing with relief once I was finally barefoot and comfortable. Then I opened my handbag and pulled out the items I had discreetly pilfered from the supply closet on my way out of the office – a fistful of colorful highlighter pens and a plastic box of thumbtacks.

  I delicately removed the Microcam from my hair, sent its image files to the handheld’s translator, and pulled out the tiny instant printer Calliope had concealed inside The Great Gatsby. I turned on the radio as the printer hummed away and pulled the messy sheaf of papers out of the drawer in my dragon-green nightstand.

  It wasn’t much yet – a handful of news clippings about the burglary and paper printouts of my notes on the break-in – but as the printer spat out translated copies of Beth Rutherford’s steno pad, I carefully pinned everything up over the garish jungle wallpaper, creating a calming oasis of white space.

  I’ve always felt strangely comforted in the midst of huge amounts of paperwork – maybe it’s the side effect of being a bureaucrat’s child – and this primitive version of the Bureau’s digital evidence walls soothed me somehow, with its promise of order amidst chaos. I knew I would sleep better with it in the room.

  Once everything was pinned in place, I stood in front of it, taking it all in. If I had hoped for an obvious solution to be found in Beth’s notes, I was disappointed. She had taken notes in the Liddy meeting – and in two other meetings with him over the previous month – but her notes weren’t meant to be read by strangers; they were for Dean and her.

  Merely decrypting the shorthand didn’t help me decipher what “ASK HALDEMAN TV INTERVIEW” or “VPOTUS GOLF PAPERWORK” meant. It was discouraging. Still, there were answers here, I told myself. There were connections hidden in plain sight. All I had to do was find them.

  I opened the glass door leading out to the bedroom end of the balcony, to let in the warm summer air, and then sat down on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall. I stared at it for a long, long time.

  Outside my window the sun set over Washington, bathing the white marble landscape in gold, rose and violet before finally sinking behind the horizon and spreading a dark blue quilt full of stars across the city. I sat there for hours and hours as the light changed around me, until I was sitting in the dark, until the wall was no longer visible except in my mind’s eye, every detail burned into my memory.

  I sat in silence, staring and waiting. Waiting for the answer to come. I walked around inside my own mind, like it was room full of file cabinets that a tornado had swept through. If I picked up each thought and filed it back in its proper place, then eventually the one I wanted – the one with the right answer – would make itself quietly known to me, and everything would click into place.

  It had to. Millions of lives were at stake.

  It had to.

  It had to.

  So what did I know? What did I have to go on? I knew who the burglars were, but they weren’t important. I knew Gordon Liddy was somehow linked to them through the money, but I wasn’t sure he was so important either.

  No, the thing I was beginning to clearly see – and which I suspected both the reporters and the FBI could see as well – was that Jimmy McCord and the burglars were just the hands. They weren’t the mind. Maybe even they didn’t know who it was. But someone bigger than Jimmy, even bigger than Liddy, was backstage, hiding, pulling the strings.

  And whoever he was, he was here. He wasn’t back in the 22nd century, monitoring his plan’s progress through the Hive. No, he would understand, just as we had, that he needed eyes on the ground. He was here.

  And he was watching.

  Waiting to see what I would do next.

  But how, with millions of people in this city and hundreds of them working in the White House alone, was I ever supposed to find him?

  It’s too much, a voice in my head whispered. You have no idea what you’re doing. It’s too much to ask you to figure this all out on your own.

  And that was when I remembered, for the first time, that I didn’t have to.

  I picked up the phone and dialed.

  “Hello?” I heard Carter’s voice at the other end of the line.

  “Come over,” I said. “I need help.”

  “I’ll be right there,” he said, and hung up before I could say anything else.

  In just over twenty minutes he was there, pounding at my door. I opened it. He stared at me.
r />   “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Fine.”

  “What’s the emergency?”

  “No emergency,” I said.

  “You said you needed help.”

  “I do,” I said. “I’m stumped. I need a fresh brain.” Then I looked at him and realized for the first time that he was wearing a coat and sweater over his pajamas. He hadn’t even stopped to dress. His pajamas were striped blue-and-white cotton, like a little boy’s.

  “You were asleep,” I said.

  “Well, yes.”

  “It’s only nine-thirty.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were asleep at nine-thirty?”

  “Do you want my help or not?”

  “You’re in your pajamas,” I said.

  “So are you.”

  “Yes, but I live here.”

  “I thought you were in trouble,” he said.

  “And you rushed over to rescue me. In your pajamas.”

  “Are you actually going to let me in?”

  I stepped aside to let him through. As he took off his coat and carefully folded it and set it on the chair, there was a strange awkwardness to his movements, and I wondered if it was because he was uncomfortable being in my apartment with us both in our night clothes.

  I hadn’t changed out of my thin cotton shirt and suddenly found myself acutely aware that I wasn’t wearing a bra. Hastily pulling a sweater off the back of the sofa and wrapping it around me, I led him into the bedroom. I could feel his discomfort palpably rising, until I opened the door and he saw the evidence wall.

  “This is amazing,” he whispered. I shuffled my feet a little awkwardly, embarrassed by his obvious delight. “Really. This is seriously the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “I need your help,” I said. “I’ve been staring at this for so long I can hardly even see it anymore. And what I really want is just to talk through the whole thing, top to bottom, and see what you spot that I didn’t. What do you think?”