He couldn’t have picked a better firing position himself.
A low wall ran around the edge of the rooftop, just high enough to act as support for his weapon. It was as good a spot as any and Nate settled down, prepared to do the job and be done with it. Assassination wasn’t anything new for him; he had fifteen confirmed kills on his military record. It was the first time he’d ever taken out a civilian, he had to admit, but that wouldn’t matter. Killing was killing in his view.
Do the job, go home, and figure out how you’re going to get out of this mess, he told himself.
He opened up the case and swiftly assembled the rifle, barely having to look at it as he did so. He kept his eye on the house down the block, watching for movement in any of the rooms. It was still early, just before dawn, so he might be sitting here awhile, but he didn’t want to take the chance of missing his target. Maybe the guy was an early riser, like he was. If he could get him before the street around him began to wake up, so much the better.
A thought occurred to him. What if it’s a woman? The note hadn’t given any indication one way or the other just who his target was, never mind whether it was a male or a female. He thought about it for a moment and then realized it didn’t make much difference to him. He’d killed female fighters during the Faith War; was this any different? Given what he’d seen yesterday in regard to what happened to an operative who failed an assignment, he was as much fighting for his life now as he had been back on the battlefield. If he didn’t do the job, his recruiter would “flip his switch,” as he’d said, and turn him, quite literally, inside out.
Rifle assembled, he settled into position, kneeling in front of the low wall at the edge of the roof with his rifle braced over the top. He brought the scope to his eye and began scanning the windows for movement.
A few of the lights were on, indicating someone was likely up and about, so he concentrated his attention on those rooms. He could see what looked to be a kitchen and a living room on the lower floor and possibly a bedroom, though it might be a bathroom, on the upper.
There!
A man’s upper body came into view, framed in the window, and Nate’s body acted almost without conscious thought. He had the sight picture settled on a point just to the right of the target’s nose and was pulling the trigger when the man turned his face into the light and Nate recognized him.
Too late! His mind screamed, but he jerked his hands to the left as the gun went off, hoping it was enough.
The bullet left the muzzle of his weapon, shot across the space between them in the blink of an eye, and slammed into the wood along the windowsill instead of striking his target as planned.
Nate breathed a sigh of relief and slumped down against the wall he’d been kneeling against. His heart was pounding and sweat was pooling in the small of his back as the adrenaline dump washed through his system. He didn’t want to think about how close he’d just come to wiping himself out of existence.
The man he’d been sent here to kill was… himself.
Fuck!
He sat there, his back against the wall, rifle in hand, and wanted to hit himself for being so stupid. How could he have missed this?
Clearly he’d seen something yesterday that he shouldn’t have. That had made someone back at Limbus nervous enough to order not just his death, but the complete elimination of everything he’d done in the last several years, judging from the age of his other self. They weren’t just trying to kill him; they were trying to wipe the last several years of his life completely!
That pissed him off.
The question was what he was going to do about it.
He couldn’t just go back and claim that he’d done the job; the very act of doing so would make it obvious that he hadn’t. Going back would also put him in range of whatever it was the recruiter had used to turn the other agent inside out and Nate had no desire to see what that felt like up close and personal.
There was just as much risk in staying here, however. What was it that sonofabitch had said? Something about the little bastards in his bloodstream? Nate glanced down at the spot on his arm where he’d received the hypo shot less than an hour ago. What if the trigger for his punishment was already inside him, just waiting to be activated? Or worse, would turn itself on when the seventy-two hour mission deadline passed?
The second injection was designed to neutralize the effects of the first, he realized, in a moment of stunning clarity. Without it, the operative would essentially self-destruct. It was a fail-safe mechanism; it kept the operative from remaining in the past and fucking things up in the future.
Nor could he simply hire someone to go and waste his recruiter. If the bit about the farcaster being keyed to his personal DNA signature was correct, he was the only person who could use it.
Unless…
He glanced over the edge of the roof and back toward his target. He could see the other him moving around in the kitchen, oblivious to the twist of fate that had very nearly ended both their lives only seconds before. Aside from himself, he was the only other person he could think of that might have an interest in how all this turned out.
You’re nuts, he told himself, but given the situation, that was hardly a reason not to do what he had in mind.
Five minutes later he was standing on the front steps of the target house, gun case in hand, knocking loudly on the front door.
After a few minutes the overhead light went on and he heard the sounds of someone fumbling with the locks on the other side. Then the door was thrown open and the figure of a man filled the doorway.
“Do you have any idea…”
That was as far as he got. There was a pause as the man standing in the doorway finally got a good look at him and tried to come to grips with what he was seeing. After a moment there was a whispered, “What the fuck?”
Nate knew exactly how he felt.
He felt a smile stretch across his face as he said, “Hello, Nate. I’m Nate. We have a few things to talk about. Do you mind if I come in?”
Another pause, longer this time, and then the other man held the door open and beckoned him inside.
Just as Nate knew he would.
Recruiter 46795 sat behind his desk, alternating between watching the mission clock on the wall and the red folder sitting atop his desk, next to a handheld device that contained a single switch. Personally he was betting on the folder disappearing before the clock ran out. Operator Benson didn’t appear to be the smartest apple in the bunch. Clever, and curious as well, too curious actually, but smart? Not so much.
More than likely he’d carry out the mission assigned to him, never even realizing until it was too late that he’d just gunned down his younger self, thereby erasing every future event from that point in his timeline, wiping out both versions of himself, the past and the future, with the simple act of pulling the trigger.
It was an elegant solution and one Recruiter 46795 was particularly pleased to have crafted. Eliminating all traces of Benson would also eliminate the failure to control Benson from the recruiter’s record, thereby solving that problem as well.
An hour passed.
Then two.
With each passing moment his frown deepened and his anxiety rose. He was confident the nanobites would do the trick when the mission deadline passed, but he hated to be forced to rely on them. It was such an incomplete…
“Did you really think you’d get rid of me that easily?” Nate Benson’s voice asked from the darkness just beyond the doorway.