Phantom Shift-Petrópolis

This is Part One in a series. Please be sure to follow to Part Two at the End.

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Rocinha, Brazil- February 12th- Carnival, 11:18pm

Shhhhh, shunk, whoosh, thunk, was the sound Alex’s body made sliding down the corrugated roof, just before he landed on the broken cobblestone street of Rocinha. He swore after the Caracas incident he was never running for his life like that again. But there he was, doing it again. He was glad the noise of the traffic covered his fall. After hitting the ground, he limped his way off into the cover of a ravine. Playing Raul was more exciting than being Alex, even if Raul often hurt a little more. None of that mattered now, he had to keep moving. It had gone remarkably smooth up until the hotel. Now he was running for his life.

Earlier in the night he had parachuted into the Castelo Country Club, hid his parachute in the woods, and hiked the rest of the way to the house of Doctor Cardoso. The noise from Carnival had covered his descent into the pool. The Doctor was an honored guest of the Royal festivities at this year's Carnival. It could not have been better timing.

Thank god, the rich and powerful are dumb enough to leave their homes unlocked, believing a guarded community is a panacea against crime. I still can’t believe he left his diary out in the open like that. I know to most it blended on the bookshelf, but to the trained, it was like a beacon.

They probably don’t even know what I have. They just know I have State secrets. Oh well, I just have to keep the ocean in front of me, and Christ at my back to make it to the extraction team on the beach. The ever-closing net of Rio’s military police, especially the Battalion, isn’t making this any easier.

He thought it would be easy to give them the slip once he made it out of the Ministry of Advanced Research, and ditched his disguise once the taxi dropped him off at the cafe down the block from his hotel. Hell, he only went back to grab the documents and equipment he could not take getting into the Ministry. But he should have known better, of course, the SNI had lookouts around the hotel.

For fuck’s sake, getting the documents wasn’t even my part. I already snatched the device from Site 43B. It was high risk, but there was no other way. Rodrigo didn’t have access to the Site. And the Service was unlikely to ever get someone from inside to hand over a copy of the schematics, much less a working copy of the device.

How was he going to tell them he was after what sounded like some sci-fi nonsense? He was already pushing it by telling the Service that his contact was having a hard time getting a copy of the plans, or a working model of the Brazilian Navy’s newest passive sonar receiver. He was not about to tell them he had their device a month ago, and he was working a side mission for a bizarre consulting group. And in the meantime, he had received a counteroffer to bring the device through a temporal anomaly and deliver it to some guy calling himself Tupac. He had no idea how to explain that the contact he was “developing” was someone from an alternate reality. That now he had no idea what to do with the thing in his bag. Does he hand it over to the Group, or take Rosie, the device, and himself off to a better life? He knew one thing for sure.

Parachuting into the middle of the beehive had been the only way to get his hands on some of the most important technology the human race had ever discovered.

How the Brazilians discovered the element, kept its discovery under wraps, and developed the ability to use it to cross between realities is beyond me. But Stubblebine was determined to make sure that the Brazilian Empire wouldn’t be able to dominate the world by monopolizing its power. Hell, it was bad enough that they had clawed away most of the German colonies after World War I, except for that bit about trading Kamerun for the Rhodesian corridor. But none of that mattered now. I just gotta get my ass down to Barraca do Bigode. I can’t limp the whole way there though.

Alex had limped through the ravine for about a mile. Laying on the ground beneath a bush, he watched and waited for the next best transportation to come. He could not trust a cab. Even if they were not on the Agency’s payroll, they would surely be on the lookout for him, on account of him losing his change of clothes, and the State bulletin he could hear on the radio across the street.

There, there it is. The perfect getaway vehicle, Alex thought as the Renault Duster Rolled into the gas station across the street. Rolling out from underneath the bush, he pushed himself up on all fours. Squatting his way across the street, he slid himself behind a boulder. It was the perfect hiding spot. The station attendant could not see him, but he could observe the truck’s owner. Watching as the owner went in to pay for his fuel, he made his move. He dashed across the street as best he could, hunched over, quietly popped the tailgate, threw his go-bag in, pulled the tailgate back up, and hid under the man’s tarp. It was not going to be an easy ride, but he would not be back there for long.

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Ipanema, Brazil- February 6th

Alex approached the group of men playing a passing game with a soccer ball. After asking to jump in he played the game with them for about thirty minutes. Once the game had slowed, Alex asked the group in his best Carioca accent, “who knows where I can get a vitamina de abacate?” If anyone ever questioned his accent, he always claimed to originally be from Porto Alegre.

“I know the best place. Go three streets that way, then five into town,” Rodrigo Gonçalves made sure to pipe up before anyone else could respond. The Crown superimposed over the Anchor, and flanked by the twin dragons of the Braganza's was unmistakable. Alex knew he had his man.

“Thank you,” he responded before turning and heading to the restaurant. Twenty minutes later he was ordering his drink as instructed. Looking through the open backdoor of the restaurant, he watched as Rodrigo signaled to him that it was safe to meet. Ten minutes later they were meeting in the library. Facing each other on opposite sides of the bookshelf, they switched to Guarani, each with an earbud in and their phone on.

"Act natural," he reminded Rodrigo. He always found the phrase “act natural” odd, because if you’re acting natural, you’re not acting.

“How are you, sweetheart?” Alex asked, “Are the kids being good?”

“Yes, I can get fish on my way home. Is there anything else you’d like me to get?” Rodrigo asked his pretend wife.

“No, no. I won’t be home until about six,” Alex responded, before walking off, leaving Rodrigo to pretend to be looking for a book. Alex went up to the second floor to watch if Rodrigo was being followed. Goodman, Alex thought as he watched Rodrigo casually stroll to the counter, and check out three books on something he was already researching. **********************************************************************

Petrópolis, Brazil- Febraury 9th

Alex called into his Station Chief from the secure line in his comms case.

“Sir, I’m going to have to parachute into Duques,” Alex said with a sigh.

“Why? What happened? With this Tupac character you recruited?” the Station Chief replied.

“Well, he was able to retrieve the device, but not the book.”

The National Information Agency was already going to put a hit out for Rodrigo once they found out. He just had to get into Dr. Cardoso’s office, photograph the diary, and leave. But nooo, that was too much. Hell, the doctor had invited him to last night’s dinner. But he chickened out. So, here I am doing the deed.

“He was in place. He claims he couldn’t access the document. It’s the only way, sir,” Alex said with emphasis.

“Copy. We received your plans. We’ll have a helo and parachute ready for you. Over,” and with that the call ended.

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Rocinha, Brazil- February 13th- Carnival, 0100 am

The man finally pulled into his garage. It was now or never. Alex lept out of the truck bed as the man shut off the engine and opened his door.

Blinding the man with the weapon light, Alex pointed the Glock he had picked up off of a guard earlier at him and screamed. “POLICE! GET ON THE GROUND!” The man hit the floor like a sack of potatoes. Alex quickly bound his wrists with the rope he found in the truck bed, wrapped the free end around the man’s head, feeding the rope through the man’s mouth as a gag, grabbed the man’s keys, and bolted to unlock the gate. Unlocking the gate, he bent down to the man’s right ear.

“I’m sorry. You’ve done nothing wrong. I will try to be safe with your truck,” and with that, he got in the truck and sped off. After hitting the Fernando MacDowell, he got on his sat phone.

“Siobhan, Siobhan, this is Raul. I’m in a rush getting home. Have dinner ready to go to my parents,” Alex shouted into the sat phone weaving between the heavy traffic. A half-hour later Alex and the truck were flying past the Hotel Nacional Rio de Janeiro, and onto the beach. Hitting the beach, he wasted no time ditching the truck, and sprinting to the water's edge, throwing his pack in the Zodiac, as he and the extraction team shoved out to sea. Once their feet no longer touched the bottom, they jumped in, ripped the engine alive, and disappeared into the night.

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Washington, D.C.- 0800, October 26, the previous fall

Zzzz, zzzz, zzzz, Alexandros Costas’s phone buzzed in the cubby where he stored it while in the classified area. He was busy briefing the Director of the Office of Strategic Services-Latin America Division. Alex, or AJ as his close friends called him, was always a little intimidated when he had to brief Archer Burnham.

Burnham was a third-generation Serviceman. Burnham’s grandfather had joined when Roosevelt created the Service in 1936, in the midst of the Civil War of 1934-37. The Second Civil War had been triggered by an amalgamation of the Business Plot, Southern separatism fueled by the Second Klan, backlash from Hoover's handling of the Bonus Army, and federal efforts to combat the rise of fascism in the United States. Then, there were the corporatists that painted FDR as a communist. Their goal had been to turn the white labor force against FDR’s Works Progress Administration.

In the tumult of the War, FDR appointed Smedley Butler to lead the OSS. As FDR reminisced upon Butler’s death in 1940,

“General Butler was one of the few military men I trusted in those dark times. He brought the dastardly attack against American democracy to light in our hour of weakness. He led our intelligence service in our earliest days in this struggle against the fascists. I have full confidence that General Donovan will continue the example set by General Butler. As General Butler once said, ‘We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.’ However, our youth have not had the luxury to decide their participation in this war, but they have borne the cost. And they will continue to bear that cost until its end.”

No matter how inspirational President Roosevelt's speech was, it was the Service’s motto "De Oppresso Liber," that spoke most to Alex.

As a true believer in the mission of the Service, Alex had dedicated his life to keeping the US out of unnecessary wars. Alex’s commitment to the Service’s mission was born out of the example set by FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy. However, his division recruiter's misunderstanding that his last name was not Spanish shunted Alex in the direction of Latin America. However, it was the realities he faced on his first assignment that shaped his outlook on the area of responsibility.

The US had quickly declined in the first half of the Twentieth Century. With their late entry into the First World War, they made little impact, especially compared to the Brazilians. There was no question, the injection of the Brazilian Empire in the First World War was the beginning of their ascension to becoming the preeminent Western power in the Twentieth Century. First, their intervention in the coup against Dom Manuel II, while considered controversial, was seen as an internal matter for the Lusophone world.

Despite busying themselves with propping up the last king of Portugal, the Brazilians honored the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance when the Kaiser took the side of the Austro-Hungarians. The Brazilians pooled their immense resources gained by taking over administration of the Portuguese colonies to give the Allies a much-needed boost. And with their ability to move material through Portugal combined with their submarine bases in the Madeira, the Imperial Brazilian Navy made quick work of the German navy.

The Brazilians, seeing the growing threat of American interventionism following the Spanish-American War, took on a more commanding role in Latin America. First, they assisted the Nicaraguans by opening up a second canal zone from 1919-1928. This became the arm of Brazilian dominance in the region, especially after the Second American Civil War saw the retreat of the US from the world stage until late in World War II. By then the US was already too far behind, economically and technologically, to outcompete the Empire. This was the world that Alex was born into.

Alex was lucky enough to have been born towards the end of the Cold War between the Fascists and the Liberationists. When the Iron Wall finally fell under the weight of the Strasserist economies of Europe in 1990, many in the Liberated Bloc knew the void created would lead to a surge in neo-Imperialism. And it was the task of combating neo-imperialism that had taken Alex all over Latin America.

Yet, this mission felt different. He did not know how, but he could taste it in the air. He knew the US was desperate to acquire more information on the Imperial Brazilian Navy’s newest Sound Surveillance system. At least this time he would not be starting from scratch, Rosaria had already recruited a naval engineer, Rodrigo Gonçalves, for the job on her mission in Tounens. But they had to tread lightly with Rodrigo, as he would already be under a higher level of scrutiny being an Afro-Brazilian.

At 1013am Alex came out of the secret compartmentalized information facility to see a missed call and voicemail from a strange number. He pulled out his Bluetooth headset and listened to the voicemail.

“Good morning Mr. Costas. You don’t know me. My name is Gurvaid Singh. I work for the Stubblebine Consulting Group. Rosaria gave me your number. We have a project we’re working on and are seeking candidates with your skills and experience. I have already scheduled your interview. There is no need to call me back, and no one will answer if you do. Just show up Saturday at 1317 F Street, Northwest, Washington, D.C. at 10 am, and we can discuss this opportunity further. Thank you for your time, and have a good day.”

What the hell is this? And what did Rosaria tell them? They better be Americans. Is she a mole? I can feel her out over lunch.

1201 pm, Alex approached Rosie’s desk.

“You ready for lunch partner? I got the message about our reservation with your friend. I thought we’d grab some Indian, and meet them at the park.”

Rosaria was a bit confused at first but quickly caught on. “Sounds great. At least we have time for a long lunch today. Let me grab my stuff, and I’ll see you downstairs in five.”

Alex was waiting in his car when Rosaria got to the lobby. Alex loved his Corolla. She knew he had had it since college, but the thing was pushing two decades and was looking decrepit.

“Hey sweetheart, how’s your day going?” She asked him with a peck on the cheek.

“Good, good. I ordered ahead. I figured your usual works?” He said, caressing her hand as they drove off.

Twenty minutes later they were eating in Joseph Angelo Memorial Park. Settling down on the grass across from the pond, they sat in quiet contemplation for about ten minutes. The tension was as thick as the Virgianian summer. Alex finally broke the silence first.

“What have you gotten me into, Rosie? What is this ‘consulting group’ that called me?” Alex had trouble holding back his anger that she had not consulted him before offering him up.

“Everything is fine dear. They’re true patriots. Mr. Singh will explain more, but what I can tell you here is that they’re a think tank that works to acquire technology that will help the US win…”

“We already do that at the Service, Rosie!”

“Yes, I know. But this is very, very different. Trust me. You should talk to them,” she said, grabbing both his hands and trying to look into Alex’s eyes, despite him staring at the chicken tikka masala-filled naan in his right hand.

“If you insist,” he said with a sigh.

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1000 am Saturday October 29th, 1317 F Street, Northwest, Washington, D.C.

Alex felt out of place in his suit. He always did. Rosaria always said he should dress better, but he was raised in a working man’s environment. An environment where only the most important and self-absorbed insisted on wearing a suit. But there he was, waiting in this strange lobby. Then they came. Distant at first, but growing louder as they approached. The distinct sound of expensive shoes, worn by men of means.

“Good morning, Mr. Costas. Welcome to the Stubblebine Consulting Group. This is my associate, Mr. Puthoff,” Gurvaid Singh greeted Alex with his right hand outstretched, but rotated down. Five watches?

Mr. Singh did his best to conceal them, but Alex had clocked all the ones on Singh's left arm as he approached. The faces were too large to not print on his sleeve. But it was the ones on Singh's right arm that got Alex's mind racing. He could not help but notice the watch coming out from beneath Singh’s cuff. And what looked to be a second watch, face turned inboard of Singh's arm just beneath the sleeve. Who the hell needs so many watches? Alex contemplated as he shook the strange man's hand.

“Good morning,” Alex's voice quivered slightly. He felt the quiver, but could Mr. Singh hear it? It felt odd. Many of the world’s premier intelligence services had interrogated him. But a man wearing an unusual assortment of watches made him nervous?

Eight minutes later they were in the Group’s SCIF. Or at least it seemed like a SCIF. Alex noticed the walls were considerably thicker.

“Mr. Costas, what we are about to tell you is beyond classified. Now, you might be wondering what I mean by beyond classified. Normally when people use classified in the world outside of ours, it’s usually a horseshit phrase that is devoid of any meaning to anyone in our line of work. What I mean by beyond classified is that I am about to share information with you that defies normal conventions of how the universe works. If we tried explaining what we do here, if we put this through the normal channels, they'd laugh us out of the room,” Mr. Singh said as he brought up his presentation.

“Oookkaay,” Alex's voice made the side of his cup vibrate as he took a sip from his water.

“Are you familiar with multiverse theory?” Singh asked it with such a matter-of-fact tone that Alex stopped mid-sip and sat up. The question jetted him out of his ambivalent state. Ordinarily, if someone asked him that, he would treat it as a fun thought experiment. Something that did not have much application to the real world, or was just another overused science fiction troupe.

Okay dude, where are you going with this? Don’t tell me Rosie got me hooked up with some lunatics. Or worse, some assholes trying to turn us by getting us to compromise ourselves. What has she got me into?

“I see the doubt on your face. Let me reassure you, we are absolutely serious. If you’d look at this slide here, you’ll see what we found six months ago. This is the Ministry of Advance Research sending an object through a temporal field. And here they are three months later…” Singh was caught off by Alex choking on his water, “are you okay?”

Cough, cough. “Yeah, I’m good. What happened to that dude?”

“He crossed over,” Mr. Puthoff broke his silence. “He traveled to an alternate reality,” Puthoff continued, in the same manner, you would say the sky is blue.

“Aaanndd, where is he now?” Alex asked, as he watched Singh and Puthoff faces for a sign of what was going on. A clue as to what brought him there.

“We’re not sure,” came a voice from the corner. They had intentionally kept the room dark to hide her. The mysterious lanky woman strolled over to the edge of the conference table. Alex knew this trick. It was a common tactic people used when trying to feel you out. What they did not know was that he was aware of another presence the whole time. The room was too warm for the three of them. He could feel the air from the vent change when she shifted her weight from one side to the other.

“That’s what you're here for. We can’t afford to let the Empire have a monopoly on this. They already have too much power. What we’re asking is for you to go the extra mile for us. We want you to complete the tasking the Service has for you in Brazil, but we’re offering you a lucrative side gig. And perhaps, if we like each other, better working conditions in your future employment. Do you accept our offer, Mr. Costas?

Alex, “So, you’re asking me to betray the Service, and my country?”

“Not at all Mr. Costas. Are you familiar with S3?” the woman responded.

“No,” Alex answered tersely.

“Good. That’s normal. How it should be. I’m going to give you a card. This is a very special business. If you lose this, not only is our relationship over, but you can forget about the Service as well. Take this to the records division at the Smithsonian.

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Washington, D.C.- February 18th

“Okay, okay, explain to me again why you’re burned in Latin America again?” Archer Burnham asked, grasping at the bridge of his nose.

“Sir, the plans and device weren’t where Tupac had originally stated. And Dr. Cardoso had taken all notes regarding the program to his private residence. Tupac didn’t have access to Site 43B, and he backed out of retrieving the diary while in the doctor’s residence. There was no other way. It was either I swam through that old sewer line for the device and parachuted into the Ministry of Science’s housing complex for the diary, or we wouldn’t have both. I’m sorry that’s how things went down. But I was the man in the field, and I could not see risking more time or another agent,” Alex said, tightly gripping his coffee cup, hoping that the Director would not dismiss him, or worse, send him to work the archives.

“Understood. Why don’t you take some time off? How does a couple of weeks sound?” The Director had a way of asking questions in a threatening manner. Alex could not tell if he was getting time off as a reward. Or to give the Director time to build a disciplinary review.

“Sounds great, sir. See you in a couple of weeks,” Alex responded as cheerfully as he could and stood up to leave. As he reached for the door, the Director called him over and stretched his hand out.

“Good job. Glad y’er back,” he said with a firm handshake.

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February 20th- Stubblebine Consulting Group

Alex waited in the lobby again. This time in his customary brown leather boots, jeans, MIT t-shirt, and a hoodie covered by his favorite leather jacket.

“Good morning Mr. Costas,” the lanky, ethnically ambiguous woman greeted him, "right this way," she said with a smile motioning Alex into the meeting room once again.

“Hello again,” Mr. Singh greeted Alex as he entered the conference room. “Do you have the device? And the diary?”

“I do. Have you arranged my payment?"

"Of course. It is all rea—” The room's alarm for an open door had sounded, cutting off Mr. Singh.

“SIR, COME NOW!!” The front desk assistant screamed.

They all watched in horror at the footage of an AVTM-500 Tridente missile as it slammed into the Service headquarters. Alex knew instantly, that despite the blurry image of the missile in flight over Washington, that the Brazilians had sent the missile from a submarine. They were sending a message, and no one outside of that room knew why. As far as America was concerned, they had just been on the business end of an unprovoked attack. Alex knew what was coming, and he wanted none of it. Rosie was gone. His job was gone.

This is their fault. There’s nothing here for me now.

With that, Alex eyed Mr. Singh’s lanyard with his access badge, and the scissors on the assistant’s desk. Then he felt it. His hand moved before he had a conscious thought. It was like watching a movie. He grabbed the scissors, and swung them into Mr. Puthoff’s throat, just between his clavicle and larynx. Ripping them free from Puthoff, he grabbed Singh's left arm as he tried to block the blows, plunging the scissors into Singh’s chest three times. As Singh suffocated in his blood, Alex ripped the access badge off.

“AAAHHH,” the assistant shrieked, causing the mysterious woman to open the door to the SCIF, but Alex was already on it. As the assistant shrieked, he broke her knee preventing her from moving. “Don't move. No calls,” Alex told the assistant before sprinting for the SCIF door. He reached the door as the woman began to shut it, Alex grabbed a fire extinguisher from the wall and shoved it in the opening of the door.

“LEAVE!” The woman screamed, reaching her Glock through the opening, and firing a shot wildly as Alex grabbed the gun by the slide and frame, forcing her right arm into the air. Squatting, he pulled the extinguisher free, grabbed the door handle with his right hand, slamming the door and breaking her arm between the door and the frame. Taking her gun, he knocked the door open with his hip.

“GET ON THE GROUND! WHO ARE YOU? WHAT IS THIS PLACE?” He screamed at her.

“We’re patriots, like you,” she said with a groan. She began backing away as she held her broken arm.

“THE HELL YOU ARE! YOU USED ME FOR YOUR BULLSHIT! YOU KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN! HOW THE HELL WOULD THEY NOT KNOW THAT WAS GONE! EVEN IF IT ALL WENT RIGHT!” he screamed at her, just before shooting her twice in the chest. He walked over to the table, grabbed the device and diary, and walked out of the room. Making his way down the hall, he found the assistant pulling the phone off her desk by the cord. Looking over the desk, he cleared his throat.

“I wouldn’t worry about that, where I'm going they’ll never find me. I sent a message to a contact of mine that will be very interested in whatever it is that you do here. I’d get out while you can,” he said ominously as he opened the door.

Exiting the building, he ran to the parking garage across the street. Reaching his car, he retrieved his go-bag from the back seat, threw his wallet in the front seat, and set the timer on the bomb hidden in the center console. After leaving the garage, he hailed a taxi and headed off for the only place that fit the description of where he needed to go, according to Tupac’s instructions.

Thirty-six minutes later he was in an open field on the edge of the Washington metro area. He began to punch in the coordinates on the device.

“X-ray, one, niner, niner, Hotel, Golf, Bravo, four, seven, six, two, Victor, Quebec, three. Turn this knob three clicks right, and this one five clicks left, point the device away from your body, and press down simultaneously,” huuuuh, huuuh, he exhaled as rehearsed pressing the knobs in. “Dialed in. Here goes nothing,” he told himself as he pressed the knobs. Zzzzz, whaaap, woo-woo-bzzzz, was the next sound he heard as the device shot out a refined beam of plasma.

Hold, hold. Hold it until 3-4 meters in diameter, and the outside of the sphere turns a sapphire blue. He told himself, as he waited for the sphere to expand to the right size. There it is. He picked up his bag and stepped through. Never to be seen in his world again.

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Continue to Part 2

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