A CIA agent (or former agent) would be following me and my sister on the morning of January 13, 2003. I don’t know why this was my current point of focus, but the idea that I could see the face to go with the voice coming through the phone seemed like a good reason. Honestly, most of my actions over the last couple days had been driven by anything but logic, just a lot of fumbling through time (literally), searching for something concrete to grasp on to. Something real. Facts. Answers. I closed my eyes and focused on the date four years in the past.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MONDAY, JANUARY 13, 2003, 7:35 A.M.
The sun blazed in my eyes again, but this time an icy breeze swept over me, stinging the ends of my ears. I stood outside a coffee shop a few blocks from my building. The door opened and an inviting gust of warm air rushed out. I ducked inside and grabbed the morning paper off an empty table.
I confirmed the date and felt a small amount of satisfaction. It was nice to know when I was for a change.
My legs felt so light, they were like rubber. I sank into a chair and rested my head on the table. A few deep breaths later, I lifted my eyes and looked around.
The only problem was … I didn’t know what I was looking for. Why would it matter if my father worked for the CIA? Although … come to think of it … it might explain the angry dudes with guns storming into Holly’s dorm room. The idea that my dad had a hand in what happened to Holly made me sick to my stomach. As much as I wished the blame didn’t rest on me, I hated the idea of it being my dad’s fault. Still, if I put on my logical (sane) hat for a minute, there were only a few scenarios that could explain everything. I forced myself to sit down and go through these in my head before I made any crazy, impulsive moves … although it didn’t really matter, since I wasn’t in home base. I shook that thought from my head and set it aside … for now. I grabbed a scrap of paper and a pen to jot these theories down, even though I couldn’t take something back with me. Not in this kind of jump. But seeing the words on paper right now would help.
1. My dad, the CEO, is secretly well trained in the art of killer self-defense and paranoid about the safety of his children to the point where he hires, I don’t know, maybe an injured ex-CIA agent to follow his kids everywhere. But that doesn’t explain Dad’s ability to follow us without me or Courtney noticing!
2. My dad DOES work for the CIA and his day job is a cover, but he’s totally the good guy and it’s not his fault that a couple dudes with guns decided to threaten his one living family member because he refused to hand over a secret government password that, if it fell into the wrong hands, would potentially set off nuclear weapons across the world. He just forgot to tell me to watch out for these dudes. Or maybe they got to him first … in 2009 … I mean, how would I know without going back?
3. My dad does work for the CIA as a spy and found out about me being a time traveler in 2009 and decided that me and anyone I’m associated with are a threat to national (or world) security and must be locked up (or killed) to keep the world from being destroyed.
4. Again, he’s an agent for real, and knew that his own son was a freak and had to be studied with brain scans a few times a year and eventually used by the government as a lab rat. Or sold to Russian spies.
Okay, so maybe these theories sounded a little too much like summer box office hits, but seriously … some CIA agent (or maybe he’s an injured, one-legged ex-CIA agent) was following my twelve-year-old self and the twelve-year-old version of my twin sister. So, yeah, my theories have a lot to live up to. And even if options two through four had less than a one percent chance of being possible, it ruled out the solution of just asking my dad, in 2007, what he really did for a living. Although I kind of ruled out confronting him before
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MONDAY, JANUARY 13, 2003, 7:35 A.M.
The sun blazed in my eyes again, but this time an icy breeze swept over me, stinging the ends of my ears. I stood outside a coffee shop a few blocks from my building. The door opened and an inviting gust of warm air rushed out. I ducked inside and grabbed the morning paper off an empty table.
I confirmed the date and felt a small amount of satisfaction. It was nice to know when I was for a change.
My legs felt so light, they were like rubber. I sank into a chair and rested my head on the table. A few deep breaths later, I lifted my eyes and looked around.
The only problem was … I didn’t know what I was looking for. Why would it matter if my father worked for the CIA? Although … come to think of it … it might explain the angry dudes with guns storming into Holly’s dorm room. The idea that my dad had a hand in what happened to Holly made me sick to my stomach. As much as I wished the blame didn’t rest on me, I hated the idea of it being my dad’s fault. Still, if I put on my logical (sane) hat for a minute, there were only a few scenarios that could explain everything. I forced myself to sit down and go through these in my head before I made any crazy, impulsive moves … although it didn’t really matter, since I wasn’t in home base. I shook that thought from my head and set it aside … for now. I grabbed a scrap of paper and a pen to jot these theories down, even though I couldn’t take something back with me. Not in this kind of jump. But seeing the words on paper right now would help.
1. My dad, the CEO, is secretly well trained in the art of killer self-defense and paranoid about the safety of his children to the point where he hires, I don’t know, maybe an injured ex-CIA agent to follow his kids everywhere. But that doesn’t explain Dad’s ability to follow us without me or Courtney noticing!
2. My dad DOES work for the CIA and his day job is a cover, but he’s totally the good guy and it’s not his fault that a couple dudes with guns decided to threaten his one living family member because he refused to hand over a secret government password that, if it fell into the wrong hands, would potentially set off nuclear weapons across the world. He just forgot to tell me to watch out for these dudes. Or maybe they got to him first … in 2009 … I mean, how would I know without going back?
3. My dad does work for the CIA as a spy and found out about me being a time traveler in 2009 and decided that me and anyone I’m associated with are a threat to national (or world) security and must be locked up (or killed) to keep the world from being destroyed.
4. Again, he’s an agent for real, and knew that his own son was a freak and had to be studied with brain scans a few times a year and eventually used by the government as a lab rat. Or sold to Russian spies.
Okay, so maybe these theories sounded a little too much like summer box office hits, but seriously … some CIA agent (or maybe he’s an injured, one-legged ex-CIA agent) was following my twelve-year-old self and the twelve-year-old version of my twin sister. So, yeah, my theories have a lot to live up to. And even if options two through four had less than a one percent chance of being possible, it ruled out the solution of just asking my dad, in 2007, what he really did for a living. Although I kind of ruled out confronting him before
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