“That’s a shitty tradeoff,” Drake said.
Helen’s vision seemed to have turned inward. “Dogs never evolved. And other species never went extinct. Evolution is on a whole new pathway.” She looked up. “Something happened to change everything… in the past.”
“And is still happening,” Emma said. “Hey, has anyone felt strange lately? Like, um, a tingle running through them?”
“Yeah, yeah, like a mild electrical current that runs from your head to your toes, and ends up in your belly,” Drake said. “And the light flicks on and off — the sunlight.”
“Yeah, me too,” Ben agreed. “I felt it just before I saw the tree species change down in Utah. The weird feeling rushes through you as the lights black out, and then there’s a change.”
“And they’re getting bigger,” Helen said. “We did it, we changed something in the past, we broke the rules.” She looked at each of them. “And now we’re going to pay for it.”
CHAPTER 11
Chess Monroe briefly glanced over his shoulder at Mohammed Ibn Aziz as he came down the main street flanked by three enormous men in dark suits that barely contained their hulking muscles. One walked in front, and the other two just behind each of his shoulders.
Aziz used to be the chief accountant for the Maghadam crime family, and since he had been picked up by the CSIS — the Canadian Security Intelligence Service — and threatened with life in prison, he was rumored to have flipped. Word was that he agreed to give evidence against the family for a new name, new home, and complete amnesty on all charges. He’d agreed, and all he had to do was survive until his single court appearance in a week’s time.
No one was even supposed to know he had been picked up, and this one last venture outside was to his strong box at the bank to retrieve some documents he’d need to put the Maghadam elder’s heads on the block. The State Prosecutor’s Office would then do the rest.
The thing about organized crime, and the families who ran it, was they had enormous resources at their disposal — money, property, businesses, and contacts in everything from the highest office of politics all the way down to the most cunning street urchin. Therefore, for every snitch like Aziz, there was a counter-snitch prepared to give up their mother for a golden goose egg.
The Maghadams already knew about Aziz being picked up, they knew about him getting ready to testify, and they even knew about the visit to the bank, probably minutes after it was floated in at the CSIS.
Toronto’s Bay Street was fairly busy at 2pm in the afternoon, and even though it was downtown in the financial district, its coffee shops were overflowing with outdoor business meetings, groups taking the opportunity to take a break and talk a little office treason, and also several weary shoppers walking from one set of retail hubs to the next.
The two men and a single blonde woman at one of the tables laughed and sipped coffee, and the woman leaned forward to cut some cake with a fork. If a trained operative were looking for potential risks, or something that stood out as incongruous, they would have seen that even though she wore expensive clothing, she held the fork roughly in her hand and her fist had knuckles that were raised and calloused.
Chess was one of the two men at the table with her. Both of them were also dressed well, in linen sports jackets, one blue, one brown, and pressed shirts, but they too had the facial features of men used to brutality rather than corporate finance.
Two blocks further down Bay Street, a van moved slowly and then double-parked. The single driver, a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman, had a small communication pill in her ear, and waited. In the back of the van, another man also waited by the sliding door.
As the Aziz party approached, from the café table one of the men facing the group counted the steps of the coming men and lowered the cup a fraction from his lips.
“Now.”
The man in the blue linen sports jacket left the table to wander down the street in front of the approaching Aziz group. The two remaining coffee drinkers continued to sip their coffee, laughed, relaxed, and made small talk as they faced each other. However, behind their dark sunglasses, their eyes were fixed on the party of four now coming abreast of them.
Just down the street, the man in the blue linen jacket slowed so he was only a half dozen paces in front of the lead bodyguard. He spoke softly.
“Show time.”
From his sleeve slid an 8-inch steel spike and he stopped, spun, and then lunged. Before the lead bodyguard could react, he had jammed the spike into the side of his neck.
Aziz’s mouth dropped open and he held his hands up in front of himself like a small animal holding up its paws.
The two guards behind him went for the guns at their belts, but from behind, the man and woman who had been seated were already on their feet and up close. They shot them point blank in the back of the skull with silenced shots so soft it sounded more like a small child coughing.
The three guards were carefully laid against the brick wall, and as the van roared to a stop beside them, its door slid back. Aziz was grabbed under one arm and lifted toward the open door like he was a child.
“You got a date,” Chess said.
The small accountant was pushed inside and the trio followed. On the street, few people were even aware something had happened.
In the back of the van, Aziz’s eyes began to water. “Are you going to kill me?”
Chess shook his head. “Nah, we’re just going to deliver you to the Maghadams. They’ll kill you… eventually.”
CHAPTER 12
Emma leaned forward. “Helen, you said that something was changed in the past, we broke the rules, what does that mean?”
“The butterfly effect is one name for it,” Helen said.
“You mean the theory that if a butterfly flaps its wings in one place, it can affect another, like cause a hurricane?” Emma asked. “That bizarre theory?”
“Something like that, but it’s an actual mathematical design theorem,” Helen said. “Grew out of chaos theory and was put forward by theorists in relation to weather modeling and the path tornadoes took. It can also be adapted to anything that can be affected by minute changes. And time is certainly one of them.”
Helen reached forward and grabbed her coffee cup, sipped, replaced it, but continued to stare into its dark depths. “I did some research when I first thought that something had been changed that might affect us.” She put her cup down but held onto it.
“There are so many theories, such as the grandfather effect, predestination, looping, and something called the Fermi effect. Basically, some of them contradict each other, and some state that no matter what someone did in the past, it was meant to happen anyway and therefore of no consequence to the future. Others say it is impossible to make changes, such as that proposed by the grandfather effect theory.”
“Going back in time to kill your grandfather,” Drake said. “Like, how you can’t really kill your grandfather, because then you would never have existed to have been able to kill him in the first place, right?”
“Exactly. Another theory that exposes the absurd complexity of it all is the impossibility loop.” She laid a hand on Drake’s forearm. “Say, an old lady gives a young man a watch. He then travels back in time and gives the watch to the old woman who is now a young girl. The young girl grows old and then gives it to the man. So, where did the watch originally come from?”