Still unconvinced, Blake grabbed at Tobias’s shirt and ripped it apart. Buttons popped off and pinged to the floor.
“Hey, what are you doing?” Tobias exclaimed, trying to pull away.
Blake didn’t answer, he just stood staring at the black tattooed ‘S’ between two stars on Tobias’s chest.
I’ll be damned.
Blake’s mind was in overdrive now, trying — but failing — to figure out this development. Here he was, existing twice in time. How can this be possible? He stepped away as Tobias attempted to pull his clothing together. Blake continued staring at the other man, waiting for an epiphany to strike.
So Tobias was back before on this mission and hadn’t been as successful as he’d thought. But he was forced to stay and live out the rest of his life in this time. And he took that opportunity to head to the U.S. and save his parents — or their parents, as it seemed — but they’d still died. In a car crash this time, instead of the plane crash.
A sense of amazement settled in as Blake realized that trying to stop his — their — parents’ deaths had been the underlying motive for both of them to accept this crazy mission.
“Why are you here?” Tobias asked.
“Same as you. To stop the Russians. The future isn’t going to look so bright if we don’t.”
Tobias frowned. “Amhurst didn’t run?”
“No, he had a moment of senility and thought he could take on three men in a vain attempt to get his codex out of their hands,” Blake said dryly.
The other man’s eyes widened at this news. “And?” he asked almost breathlessly.
“Gernot escaped with a large fragment of the rock. I can only assume he saved it and stashed it away for his friends in the future.” Tobias quietly absorbed the information, and Blake continued, “But nothing has changed this timeline, so perhaps pride got the best of him — or better yet, he was never able to get all of the information from Amhurst. It’s possible they have the fragment but still lack the correct process for traveling forward like they wanted.”
Tobias waved a hand. “That still doesn’t explain why you are here. Why not send someone else?” He stopped then, peering closely at Blake. “Are mother and father alive?”
The line of questioning caught Blake off guard, but he didn’t want to divulge the fate of his — their — parents to Tobias just yet.
“Yes, they’re fine,” he lied.
Tobias’s eyes brightened with hope. “They survived the crash?”
Blake swallowed over the sudden dryness in his throat. It was hard to play with the facts like that, even though it was technically true — they did survive the plane crash, after all; just not the car crash years later.
“No, they didn’t survive the plane crash, because they were never on the plane.” Well, that much is true, he thought, then went on, making the rest up as he went along. “You head back to the States and years from now manage to convince them not to board the plane.” After that lie passed his lips, he thought of something. Is that exactly what ends up happening … because I told him this?
The relief on Tobias’s face struck a chord of guilt in Blake, and he had to look away for a second.
“Thank God,” Tobias said. Then his eyes sharpened. “But again, that doesn’t explain why you’re here.”
Blake gave a half shrug. “Wallace. He can be … convincing, can’t he?”
“That he can,” Tobias nodded, wearing an expression that resembled affection. “But he is a good friend.”
“Are you kidding me? Wallace is a snake. He manipulates people to serve his own personal cause.”
“He’s not all bad. He has made the sacrifice as well. Several times. You should try and understand his motives.”
“Too late for that. He’s dead.”
Tobias blinked and drew back. “You … you killed him?”
“No, he Hitlered himself with some poison.”
“He was going to leave this place,” Tobias said, looking suddenly very sad. “He felt like he was done with all of this — that it was always destined to be a failure. He would say, ‘Sometimes the man who comes out of the machine is not always the one that goes in’.”
Blake rolled his eyes at Tobias. “Obviously. Look at us,” he drawled.
“I led a different life than you, I assume,” Tobias said. “I was an orphan, malnourished, and desperate. It didn’t take much to persuade me there was a way out.” He smiled sadly. “And I’ve been here for close to two years now.”
“That’s something else I don’t understand. I’ve only been here two days. What took you so long to get to Amhurst?”
“He wasn’t my first mission. Technically, I didn’t even have a mission.”
“You had no mission?”
Tobias shrugged. “I was approached by Wallace in 1986; he said he could send me into the past.”
“He just approached you? Out of the blue?”
“I’m ashamed to say I was living on the streets, and he presented me with an offer. You know — the kind I couldn’t refuse. As I said, it didn’t take much. I was hungry to escape my situation, and the things I had to do to survive.” He reddened with humiliation.
Tobias. Poor and living on the streets. It seemed Wallace did more than make a simple proposal; he’d used a vagrant as his own personal crash test dummy to see if the machine worked. Better to attempt it on a worthless street person than one of his trained recruits.
Blake wondered how many others Wallace had snared like that and how many didn’t make it through the portal. He had believed in the man, and yet Wallace was turning out to be no better than the Commie thugs Blake himself was sent to dispatch.
Why did I trust him? Blake had no answer. Now that it was evident bribery, blackmail, and the possible murder of innocents were not beyond Wallace’s methods, Blake felt like an idiot for having had any semblance of faith in him. Not that it had been a lot to begin with, but it had been enough to make him jump into this mess too, hadn’t it?
The sound of Tobias’s voice penetrated his thoughts and Blake tuned back in to hear him say, “Wallace got some new information and we got started on this mission two days ago as well. He said they sent back another operative as a failsafe, but he didn’t mention it would be you.” Tobias shook his head. “Or — I guess me, it appears.”
“Like I said, Wallace is a prick.”
Tobias offered no reply.
It was true Wallace had a silver tongue. Blake remembered wondering if Uncle Tobias was clairvoyant, given his pre-existing knowledge that Blake would accept the mission to travel back. But no, his uncle hadn’t been psychic. He’d already lived this life and knew from this moment right here and now that they would meet in the past.
“So what was your scheme after failing miserably here — and me having to clean up this mess?” Blake waved his stump of a left arm in Tobias’s face. “I’m not sure if you noticed, it cost me an arm.” Then he added as an afterthought, “And nearly a leg.”
Maybe it was the stunned surprise of hearing about Ben Wallace’s suicide, or that he’d just been attacked by an identical twin and interrogated in the water closet, but at the sight of Blake’s missing arm, Tobias reacted with horror. “My God,” he gasped, “what happened?”
“Satoshi happened.”
Tobias cringed and shuddered. “I was just purchasing a ticket to leave town and head to the U.S. After that, it would be a waiting game until I could warn my … our parents.”