Here is an excerpt from a story I am working on. A short set-up: 'Mr Rothakis' is a character whose appearance, opinions, (and often) actions are remarkably similar to my own. He is from alternate Timeline, a lot like ours but with some key differences.
He has run afoul of some people from yet another Timeline, one that is the continuation of the Commonwealth Timeline that some of you are familiar with from my other novels. (LEONTARI; and: VIASMAE)
They have recruited him, and he is now their agent in his own TL. When he is in the Commonwealth TL, he is very low-Status: a barbarian, old and ignorant, though learning fast.
OTOH, back in his own TL, he knows more, and has more confidence, than most people around him. Hence the following:
Someone was knocking on the door. Pounding, actually. Long rolls of light banging interspersed with short bursts of hard hammering.
“Wake, up, Kim.”
“Whah? Whoozat?”
“It has to be a cop, no one else does that trick to wake people up. I hope it’s just Deputy Dan, the guy I met at the Fair. Get up and dress, if you want to. I’ll deal with him.” He turned to the door and shouted: “OKAY! Give me a minute, huh?” The pounding subsided.
He shook out his tangled hair, looked around. He found his pants, grabbed some shorts, then went to the bathroom and washed up a bit. He forced a comb through his hair and tied it up. When he was dressed he walked to the door. Kim was sitting on the edge of the bed, still naked, looking disturbed and resentful. “I’ll bring breakfast back, okay?”
“Yeah, okay.” She was not a morning person, that was obvious. He shrugged and grimaced. She shook her head and lay back down.
He stopped by the door and took a couple deep breaths, composing himself. He pulled out his wallet and checked for his key card, and made sure he had a twenty in the money compartment. Then he went over his recently re-written ‘cop-encounter checklist’ and smiled. He opened the door a crack and said, pleasantly: “I have a guest in here and she’s not dressed for a visitor. Let’s go across to the coffee shop and I’ll buy you a scone.”
“Good enough,” said the deputy. It was Dan all right. He had a laptop under his left arm and a sarcastic smile on his face. Ambros buried his resentment for the moment, thinking: ‘I’ll need to adjust his attitude right quick.’ It was amazing how the Shifter in his pocket increased his cool around this cop. The Shifter and the backing it represented: a Timeline full of badass anarcho-militants, who were now his friends. He slipped out the door, closing it behind him.
When they were seated, with coffee and tea and bits of food in front of them, the cop made as if to speak. Ambros held up a hand, obtained silence, then said: “I don’t like being gamed. I never have. The business of pounding a subject awake in the hope of discomforting him and extracting information? That’s you, gaming me.” He was looking the man directly in the eye, and letting a little of his anger show: “If you think I have info that you want, ask for it. Email me and I’ll meet you. If you bang on my door like that again, you can forget about a cooperative attitude from me.” He smiled then: “I read the RCMP Interrogation Manual when it was posted online, and a lot of the commentary on it from cops and from bad guys. So, no games, okay? You respect me, I respect you, as one person to another.”
He could see the deputy struggling with the implications. Dan glared at him, then slowly his expression softened. “Okay,” he said, reluctantly. “I see your point. I’ll do my best.”
“I hope so. I realize that ten years ago, before all the budget cutting BS that’s been going down, you probably would have just run me in for sassing you like that.”
“Maybe.”
Ambros looked at the deputy’s ID tag: “So, Deputy Samuelson, what can I do for you?”
“Mr. Rothakis...may I call you Ambros?”
“No.”
“Um...”
“The day may come when it’s Ambros and Dan. It ain’t here yet. What can I do for you?”
The deputy lifted the computer off his lap, and set it on the table. He said: “Well, then, Mr. Rothakis, I want you to look at a surveillance video, and tell me what you think. Mr. Clotarde—we got a name out of him, but we have no way to confirm it—he is still a mystery to us. A bigger mystery than ever, actually.”
“Have you checked with la Migra? They might know something about him. Surely they’d want to ask him a few questions.” Ambros kept his poker face in place, giving nothing away.
“Yeah, we called ’em. They asked us to keep him, but it was gonna be a week before they could send a guy down from Portland. Anyway, there’s this system, we only have so many jail beds...”
“You mean you’re short of deputies and guards, of course. The beds are there, you just can’t use them. And I read in the paper about the Matrix. So he got ‘matrixed out’ did he?”
“Yeah,” Samuelson said, sourly. “He was out the door for ten minutes when the Sheriff called me in and showed me this video. Here, press play.”
Ambros did as he was asked, and watched a grainy video of a dozen men and a couple women filing out of the County Jail. As they dispersed into the street, one man stopped. It was Frenchie, for sure. He opened the plastic bag that held his belongings, pulled out his ‘Passport’ and activated it. He vanished. There must have been an audible pop from the air rushing in, since several of the released prisoners and other passersby turned to look. Then everyone went about their various affairs; it seemed that no one had actually seen the man vanish. But the camera had...
“If this isn’t just ‘shopped, then that’s a remarkable thing.” Ambros was grinning inside, and wondering how to handle this. He wasn’t going to lie, not directly, but there was no way to tell the truth and not seem like a nutball.
“I wondered about that myself,” said Samuelson. “But like I said, I saw this video ten minutes after it was recorded. Sheriff Burr is not that hot when it comes to tech stuff, he couldn’t have faked this.”
“I didn’t really think it was faked.”
The deputy rolled his eyes. “Then why did you bring that up?”
“I was stalling for time, trying figure out how much to say.”
“Oh.”
Ambros grinned: “Most people would never admit that, huh?”
“Not like that. How ’bout you just spill all you know and let me decide what’s relevant?”
“Hmmm...that would get you out of my hair. You’d decide that I was insane and not a good source of information, and you’d let me alone for a while.” Ambros paused then shook his head: “That’s just another way to lie to you, though. The facts here are not secret, they’re just hard to believe. How about this: I’ll tell you three things now. You won’t believe me. Then, when or if you find evidence or see stuff that convinces you that those three things are true, I’ll tell you something else.”
“I ought to take you down to the Jail and let you sit for a day.”
Ambros let the silence grow for a while, until Dan showed signs of discomfort. Then he said: “You guys have enough money troubles without a suit for false arrest. You’d lose that lawsuit. Because you have nothing on me. Because I am innocent of all wrongdoing, save that I am an anarchist and have no respect for authority. That, however, is not a crime.” He laughed out loud, then, saying: “So how about my offer? Deal?”
The deputy looked sour again, then smiled sarcastically and said: “Three things I won’t believe? But they’ll be true things? Yeah, right...fire away. Hit me with your best shot.”
“Okay. One: the tape is not ’shopped nor is there anything wrong with the machine. Mr. Clotarde--I should say Private Clotarde-- is no longer in Eugene, at least not this Eugene. It is possible that he will return here, but unlikely.”
“He really did just vanish? Bullshit.”
“I told you that you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Right...next?”
“Whether he returns or not, I expect you will encounter others of his sort. They will come and go as he did, by means of their ‘passports’, like that black cylindrical object that looked so odd under your x-ray machine.”
“How did you know that we x-rayed his stuff?”
“I guessed. Finally, Private C. belongs to a military group, an army. The little I know about them at this time suggests that they have zero respect for the sanctity of human life, except of course for their own. I expect that we are going to be dealing with them, and the intelligence agency that is associated with their government, in larger numbers as time goes on. That’s the third true thing.
“Now here’s some advice, Absolutely Free: Don’t underestimate them, or cut them any slack at all. And wear your body armor when you are dealing with ’em.”
“Huh.”
Ambros slurped the last of his tea, took the bag with Kim’s breakfast in it, and excused himself: “I expect that Kim is awake by now, and she’ll like her breakfast. And I have work to do beginning at noon. So, remember: email me and wait till I answer. Sometimes I’m a little slow.”
“Email you and wait. Got it. And Mr. Rothakis?”
“Yeah?”
“You were right. Ten years ago I would have arrested you.”
“Yes. I know.” Ambros grinned and left the cop glaring at his third cup of coffee.
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