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Leo and the President were talking quietly together when Charlie waved me into the Oval Office.
“What’s up?” I asked as he closed the door, leaving the three of us alone. Leo gestured to me to sit on one of the sofas, joining them in what, even for this office, was a secretive huddle.
“What we have to tell you now must be kept between the three of us,” Leo said.
“Sure,” I said. The request was not unusual.
“Josh,” the President began. “What do you know about the history of this building?”
I looked at him from under raised eyebrows. “Seriously?”
“Why was the White House built here? Why was it built on this piece of land of all others?”
“Sir, I can get you on the nickel tour if you like.”
“Josh,” Leo murmured warningly.
I shrugged. “I don’t know, was it the piece of land least likely to sink into a swamp?”
Surprisingly the President did not begin a lecture on the geological composition of DC soil. Instead he ignored the flip remark.
“No, the land where the White House now stands was known to be of special significance to the Algonquin Indians who used to live here.”
“So they must have been thrilled when we dumped a ton of bricks and cement on it.”
“The Native American population had been decimated or exiled by this time. But a discovery was made and the White House was constructed here to conceal it. Since the time of Washington the knowledge of this discovery has passed from President to President. The secret knowledge of something strange and possibly magical.”
I breathed out a long “Ah-kay.”
“In the latter part of the twentieth century,” the President solemnly continued. “The secret was lost, we’ve known there was something here we just haven’t known what it is or where to look.”
“Until now,” said Leo.
Standing, he walked to the other side of the room. He pressed one of the wood panels on the wall and stood back. I heard a click and a segment of the floor fell away revealing, unbelievably, a stairwell.
I went to have a closer look and then turned back to the President. “Is this the tunnel you’ve been searching for, sir? Can you finally make your escape?”
“It doesn’t lead out,” the President said. “It leads down. Go with Leo, he’ll show you.”
Leo led me down the dusty winding staircase and the panel slid closed above my head. He switched on a torch and I followed the sound of his footsteps and the circle of torchlight. I sensed our journey was taking us down to the level of the basement and when we finally stopped we were in darkness at a heavy door, its wood aged and warped.
It took both of us to heave the door open and on the other side was something I could not begin to explain.
It was a small room, just four walls built around what should have been a dirt floor but was what I can only describe as a pool of light. It was a circle of pale silver, turning and mobile like a whirlpool. The peculiar light did not come from an outside source like a spotlight but seemingly from a deep place within, casting an eerie glow upwards illuminating the dust particles we had disturbed.
I crouched down to look into the pool, trying to find a source for the light.
“You can touch it,” Leo said and he leaned down and put his hand into it. I cautiously did the same. It felt like a rush of air, warm and forceful, pulling with firm but resistible pressure.
The light was bright, like looking at sunlight through dappled bathroom glass and finally I had to withdraw my hand and look away. I turned to Leo.
“What is it?”
“We don’t know,” he said frankly. “The President was looking at some papers about the construction of the current Oval office which, as you know wasn’t until 1933 and he found out about the secret doorway and how to open it.”
I looked again into the strange light. “Have you studied it?”
“No, we only found it this morning. We dropped the President’s watch in to see what would happen and it disappeared.”
“Did it burn up or something?”
“No, it just seemed to be carried away.”
“So what do the scientists say?” I assumed there was some major Presidential enquiry gearing up.
“We haven’t told anyone.”
“No one?”
“Nope. Come on, lets go back up,” he said and we left the little room, the door slamming shut behind us.
Leo switched on the torch again to guide us back along the passageway and we found the President waiting for us in the Oval Office.
“What do you make of it, Josh?” He asked as we took our seats again.
“Some kind of – uh – energy – some kind of -.” I shook my head. “Nothing outside science fiction, sir. I’ve no ideas at all.”
“Well, that makes three of us.”
“But you’re keeping it a secret.”
“Josh, we don’t know what we’re dealing with here,” he said. “We don’t know whether it’s an accident of nature, just a harmless, pretty effect or whether it holds unique power. Or just say it contains energy more powerful than an atom bomb.
“We’re going to assume for the moment our past-Presidents had good reason to bury it deep and keep it secret. If we release it to the military or the CIA there’s no telling how it might be used or abused. If not now then in the future. We want to know what it is before we decide to tell the world or to fill in that passageway for good.”
“Right, good plan,” I said, and when no one spoke. “So what do you want me to do?”
“We haven’t inherited much from the past Presidents,” Leo said. “Only a single sentence survives and it’s, ‘A gateway to a new world.’”
“In the eighteenth century that could have meant anything,” the President began. “America was the new world. It could be a metaphor for something. Or it could literally mean another world.”
“But what it suggests,” Leo continued. “Is that the energy or light, whatever it is, might carry a traveller. To another place, or perhaps even to another time.”
I tried to absorb this.
“So what we are asking you to do,” the President said while Leo watched me. “Is volunteer to go through the door to the new world. We want you to step inside the pool of light.”
It was time for me to raise my eyebrows again. “I’m sorry? You want me to what?”
“We want you to volunteer to explore it.”
“The thing that might be more powerful than an atom bomb?”
“We realise what we’re asking. We realise the danger,” Leo said. “But you’re one of us, you don’t have a chain of command to follow apart from to the people in this room. And we trust you to use what you learn wisely.”
“Really?”
“Josh, whatever you think, we rely on you and respect your judgement. You’ve proved yourself to us time and time again. But I am not ordering you to go. This is your decision because, as you will understand, I cannot guarantee it is a mission from which you will return.”
Leo stood and put his hand on my shoulder. “Go home and think about what you want to do. Let us know tomorrow.”
~*~
My apartment never really felt like home. It should have, it was a warm place occupying the top floor of a house in a quiet street. It was very much mine with books, photographs, bits I’d picked up along the way and comfortable furniture, some of which I had inherited from my parents when my mother died last year.
But I always felt more at home in the office. There I could work and not think about the single coat hanging on the hook by the door and the one plate to wash up after dinner. At the office I never experienced the same unnerving sense of there being an empty space where someone else ought to be.
Tonight I drowned the loneliness in more glasses of whiskey than I probably should have and pretended to consider my options.
Though the truth was I had already decided to do as the President had asked me. I decided I did not really have anything to lose. After a couple more drinks, brilliant deduction led me to figure out the President and Leo’s real reason for asking me, out of everyone, to volunteer for this mission. Suicide mission no less.
I believed them when they said they trusted me but I was not by any means an obvious choice. I had no survival skills for a start. In fact I was a catastrophe waiting to happen. So I came to the conclusion they chose me because I was the one who had buried the last member of his family, because I was the one with no wife, no child, no one to mourn me if I did not come back.
Fair enough. I could understand that but I was still awake at 4am trying to convince myself there was someone to miss me if the worst happened. I was almost sure Donna would even though I knew I was a pain in the ass to her most of the time. And I had a best friend who would probably miss me too. Even though I had not spoken to him in nine or ten months and even though he did not care that I had been secretly in love with him for just about the whole twenty odd years I had known him.
That’s when I decided it would be a good idea to phone Sam in California. After all, it would be wrong to go without speaking to him for one last time.
A sleep-fogged voice answered the phone after a couple of rings.
“Sam?”
“Yes?”
“Hi, Sam,”
“Josh? Is everything all right?” See, Sam cared.
“Uh yeah, I just thought. We hadn’t spoken in a while. I just thought – were you asleep?”
Sam’s voice concealed a sigh, “No man, why would I be asleep at –,” I could hear a fumbling for glasses. “- at 1am,”
“Oh good.”
“Are you drunk, by any chance?”
“Not by chance, on purpose. Are you?”
There was a pause. “So, how are you doing?”
“Oh fine.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say though my new secret burned on my tongue just as my old one had for years and years.
“Josh, are you still there?”
“Yes. Are you?”
Another sigh. “Why are you calling me now? After all these months.”
“To say goodbye,” I said accidentally.
“Where are you going?” Sam sounded worried again. “You’ve still got a job haven’t you?”
“What? Oh yeah. It was touch and go for a while after the whole…
“Carrick…”
“Yeah, that whole thing but, it turns out I’m necessary and indispensable after all. Well, up to a point.”
“So can you tell me where you’re going?”
“Not as such.”
“Josh, do you want to…you know…speak to me.”
“I do. I just…can’t Sam.” And then I thought it couldn’t do any harm, not now. “Man y’know, I love you. Really love you, just off the chart. Y’know.” I tailed off. “That’s all and I just wanted to say goodbye.”
Then I hung up not waiting for a reply, a dim and flickering flame of sanity telling me I did not want to hear the answer I was likely to get. When the phone rang straight away I disconnected and left it off the hook before slipping finally into a deep alcoholic sleep.
The next day was Saturday and I slept late, waking up with a fearful hangover no amount of aspirins and showers and cups of coffee could dislodge. It kept hitting me though - today was New World day.
I put it off. I finished some work that I convinced myself could not wait. Delved into the desk drawer stuffed with things like my will and my passport and financial papers. I put it all into a sort of order. Everything was going to Sam.
Sam. Now why was I sure I had spoken to him last night? Couldn’t have.
In the drawer I found a gold chain with a small gold musical note charm hanging from it. It was the only thing of Joanie’s I owned and I had always worn it for exams and elections and other red-letter days. I put it on now for good luck.
Eventually as the Autumn day drew into evening I changed into jeans, a sweater and a warm suede jacket. I stuffed a couple of apples, some bagels, some chocolate bars and a small flask of coffee into my backpack. Some people would have demanded weapons and breathing equipment but I was venturing forth with a supply of caffeine. You get what I mean about survival skills.
By the time I got to the White House it was late and most people who had come in on a Saturday had already left. Toby was still there, though, poring over paperwork. He glared at me as I stopped by his office for no terrifically good reason.
“What do you want, I’m busy?”
I slouched into one of his visitor chairs because I knew it would annoy him. “What are you doing?”
“Pardons.”
“You just want to throw away the key, don’t you?”
“At this point, yes.”
“Any possibles?”
He nodded, tapping a file restlessly with his pen. “You would think a society as allegedly sophisticated as this one would be more careful about who it puts in cages.”
When Toby could not be persuaded to talk to me any longer I found Leo and told him I was ready. He called the President from the residence and they both accompanied me in a silent procession down the stairwell and through the narrow passageway.
Leo walked ahead with a torch and the President walked behind, sometimes with a fatherly hand on my shoulder. I think I was literally shaking with fear and if I had not been so concerned about letting them both down I might have turned back.
Leo opened the ancient door and we entered the brick built room. The circle of light had not changed despite my half-convincing myself it had all been a dream.
Leo spotted something on the ground and picked it up. “Your watch, sir. It’s back.” He checked the time. “Still working. I guess that’s a good sign.”
“Josh,” the President said as we all stood around the pool. “Are you sure this is what you want to do?”
“Yes sir,” I lied. “Have you got a message for the new world when I get there?”
The President shook his head. “You’ll know what to say, Josh. You’ll know what to do.”
Then he shook my hand and hugged me and Leo did the same. “Good luck son, come back safe,” he said.
~*~
Afterwards I thought of it as being pulled downwards like water into a plughole. A strange, but not unpleasant, sensation which lasted only a second or two before I found myself deposited on an earth floor.
I got to my feet, unhurt, and found I was still next to the pool, or one like it, but the brick walls had vanished as had Leo and the President. I realised I had definitely travelled.
I was in a more simple room. Walls of tightly banked earth surrounded me reaching up several feet and narrowing at the top to a mounded ceiling. Carved into a wooden plaque high on the wall was an Indian symbol.
There was no door and for a moment I thought I was trapped. But then I saw a crawl space at ground level. It was a basic tunnel, made for a human though one considerably smaller than myself. I was not too impressed by the idea of crawling into this tunnel but I could not see myself explaining to the two men waiting for a report of a new world that I had been put off by claustrophobia.
So I pushed my backpack ahead of me and began my death-defying journey into the damp and musty darkness. It took me a long fifteen minutes to reach the end but the tunnel was made well, sloping gradually upwards, and it held firm. Finally I hacked through the thick growth of weeds and roots covering the entrance and struggled, gasping for air on to the surface.
One thing was certain, this wasn’t the White House. It did not look like any kind of new world either. It just looked like a bad neighbourhood. I had come up on a patch of neglected waste ground at the end of a block. A public building of some kind dominated the block, built in uniform grey concrete and surrounded by a high wall.
I brushed the earth off me and felt in my pocket for my cell phone. I may as well just tell Leo I had arrived, would prefer not to stay and ask him to, if possible, call me a cab. My phone blinked no signal though, so I put it away and started walking.
I felt uneasy. It was dark and the area did not seem to be a welcoming one. No one else was about and there were no cars on the road so I walked for a while trying to get my bearings.
It was a deprived area, I could see that but what I could not understand was why nothing was familiar. I knew none of the street signs or the shop names and even the few cars parked at the side of the road were makes I did not recognise.
Finally I came to the front of the building. A sign read ‘Senator Joseph McCarthy State Prison, District of Columbia’. High iron doors were fast shut and nothing would have induced me to knock and ask for help. For a start, where exactly had this prison sprung from? Who had given it such a name? I knew now I was in DC but it might as well have been the moon for all its sense of familiarity.
The front of the building faced a main street and as I still could not get my phone to work I decided to try and find a cab or a phone booth.
It was a wide street lined with poorly built and shabby three storey apartment blocks. The buildings huddled together in blocks, separated by side streets and narrow passageways. There were people at home in the apartments, I could tell by the lights at some of the windows. But there was no one on the litter filled, pot holed, stinking streets. Not one single person.
Turning a corner I found myself in another row of tenement buildings. This street was eerily deserted as well but I began to be convinced I was being watched.
Then I heard the sound of footsteps. They were approaching from a nearby block and as they grew closer and louder I realised it was the sound of a troop of men marching. They turned the corner and I saw them. There were about twenty men in black uniforms, armed with rifles and marching in military formation following a leader. Their uniforms were not from any police or army I knew and certainly none that should be roaming the DC streets at night.
I froze, not knowing what to do. I was certain I did not want anything to do with these people and yet to run away would only draw their attention. In a few moments they would see me, the only person on the street, without any reasonable explanation as to why I was there.
I pressed myself against the wall of the nearest building trying to conceal myself in its shadow as far as I could. I edged sideways with my back to the wall, hoping to find a doorway or a side street to duck into. But I had not got far when someone grabbed me and dragged me off the street. I was pulled backward into an alleyway and flung into a shadowy corner. A hand was slammed over my mouth to crush the loud complaint I was about to utter.
“Shut up,” a man’s voice tense with anxiety, hissed at me.
The men trooped steadily by. I could not see them from my position but I heard the noise of the march fade as they moved on. Only when there was silence again did the man drop his hand from my mouth.
He spun me round to face him and pushed me against the wall. He gripped my arms.
“Who are you?” He demanded. “What are you doing here?” He shook me slightly. “Don’t you know the Militia could have shot you on sight?”
He frisked me swiftly and took my phone from my pocket, examining it and then holding it out to me. “What’s this? Is it a weapon?”
He waited for me to answer his urgent questions but I could not. I only had one word for him, one question.
“Sam?”
It was Sam. My Sam. Sam Seaborn. My friend for twenty years, late of the White House and now supposedly resident of a very nice beach in California.
Okay, not looking exactly like Sam. He was thinner than I had ever seen him before, he even seemed smaller and slighter than I remembered him. His hair was longer and his blue eyes were fired with fear and adrenalin. But there was no question it was him. None. He wore black jeans and a battered black leather jacket over a hooded sweatshirt. Clothes Sam would never ordinarily contemplate. But it was Sam.
“No one’s called me that in years,” he said. He looked deeply at me then and I thought I saw a flicker of recognition cross his face. But he said, “Who are you?”
“Its me,” I exclaimed and he quietened me with a gesture. “Josh! Josh Lyman. I don’t understand any of this. When did the world turn into George Orwell?”
“You can’t be Josh,” he said gripping my arm again. “You can’t be. Josh Lyman died sixteen years ago.”
He let go of me and stepped back, not taking his eyes from me. “But you look like him,” he breathed. “You could almost be him.”
The sound of his watch beeping startled us both and Sam became instantly alert again.
“I’ve got to go,” he said, giving me back my phone. “Go home by back streets. There won’t be another patrol for an hour but be careful.”
He pulled up his hood and with one last perplexed look at me he turned, broke into a run and vanished round the corner into the main street.
There was absolutely no way I was going to let him out of my sight though. He was the only familiar thing in this whole hellish place. I followed him at a distance and just about kept up without him noticing me. It was not easy, he moved with a stealth and agility previously alien to Sam Seaborn.
I began to face the prospect that this was Sam but not my Sam and this was Washington DC but not my Washington DC.
Soon, after covering only a block or two, he stopped running and I saw him from across the street standing still and silent in the shadow of Joe McCarthy State Prison.
Moments later a truck turned into the street. The only vehicle I had seen on the road. It looked as if it was designed for moving personnel but its back was empty and just three men rode in the front seat. They were in uniform, though a different uniform to the Militiamen. I guessed they were prison guards.
The gates of the prison opened and I saw Sam climb unnoticed into the back of the truck before it drove in. He lay flat until it was inside the prison and then slipped off, rolling into the shadows as the doors closed behind him.
Then there was silence. I stared at the prison gates for a long time, hardly believing what I had just seen, willing the gates to open and Sam to come out.
Instead I heard footsteps from behind me. I turned and saw two old women bundled in coats and hats and scarves hurrying along. Shuffling passed with arms linked, they did not notice me hidden in my doorway and they carried on until they too reached the prison. One of them banged vigorously on the iron doors and when a guard opened a hatch to see who was there she began demanding to see her husband.
The guard told her to go, yelling at her about breaking curfew. She began shouting back and making wild pleading gestures. Her companion joined in by banging on the door with an umbrella.
I knew immediately there was something not right about the scene, there was something staged about it. I was sure it was designed to distract attention from whatever else was going on here. And it was working. Soon the two women had gathered a small crowd of uniformed guards berating them to go away and threatening to have them arrested.
Something else caught my eye. A manhole cover at the far corner of the outer wall began to move. The cover slid noiselessly aside and from my vantage point I could see a man climb out of the hole beneath. It was Sam. Once on the surface he reached down to help another man out.
I could not see the second man clearly but he was older and dressed in what I took to be a prison uniform. Sam made sure the older man stayed low on the ground while he signalled with a raised hand.
A moment later everything started happening. A car sped past, swerving round the corner and skidding to a halt by Sam. The old women unfolded, straightened into much younger ones and ran in different directions, one sprinting past me. The car door swung open and Sam helped the man he had just freed into the back seat. He slammed the door shut and it shot off into the darkness taking advantage of the empty roads to make a getaway but leaving Sam behind and out in the open.
The Prison doors opened and the guards who came running out were driven back by shots from concealed snipers on the roof of one of the opposite buildings.
Sirens began to wail and a car sped out through the prison gates. Sam aimed a gun at its tyres and it swerved onto the sidewalk. He kept firing to keep the car from driving off again but he must eventually have run out of ammunition because he dropped his gun and raised his hands.
A guard who had been firing at the roof snipers turned his weapon on Sam. I had been completely transfixed by the strange and appalling sight of Sam with a gun in his hand but this development knocked me into action and I ran forward shouting ‘over here!’ The guard swung round to me. I heard the crack of his gun and felt a sting at my shoulder before Sam, hurling himself forward, floored him.
Sam took the guard’s gun and pointed it at a group of men coming after him. It momentarily stopped them in their tracks and he started to run.
He grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me off down the road letting the rooftop shooters cover our escape. We ran into an unlit side street and slipped into an alley unseen.
Sam kicked open the back door of an apartment block. Once inside we put our shoulders to the door, holding it shut while listening to the shouts of guards running past. Twice they tried to push it open but we held firm and the disorganised search moved on. It was only after what must have been an hour Sam dared move. We still could hear car sirens and an endlessly circling helicopter but the haphazard foot patrols had moved on and he decided we were safe for the moment.
“We have to get out of here,” he whispered. “Once the Militia get involved they’ll get their act together and start going door to door.”
“Okay,” I said.
He blinked at me in the darkness. “Were you shot?”
It was actually only then I remembered the dull ache in my shoulder and recognised the warmth I felt there as blood.
“I’m fine,” I said. Then I noticed the spreading bloodstain seeping through the shoulder of my jacket and bravely passed out.
When I opened my eyes I was sitting up against a wall and Sam was kneeling beside me. He had taken off my jacket and was pulling my sweater off the wounded arm.
“It’s okay,” he said as he cut away my blood soaked T-Shirt with a penknife and examined the wound with the calm, practised eye of a battlefield surgeon. “The bullet just nicked you, it didn’t go in.”
I gazed at him as I recovered, focussing on the truly strange situation in which I found myself. How this could not possibly be Sam but could not possibly be anyone else.
I watched him take his jacket and sweatshirt off and tear strips off his own shirt to use as a makeshift bandage.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said. “For what you did back there.”
“You’re Sam Seaborn?” I asked eventually.
He looked at me and I could see he was deliberating whether he should answer. Eventually he quietly admitted it. “I used to be.”
“Please Sam, where am I, what is this place?”
He looked at me curiously and sat back on his heels. “You really don’t know. I thought you were a ghost but you can’t shoot a ghost.”
“I’m not a ghost. At least I don’t think I am.”
“Its Washington DC in the Democratic American Republic and its November 2003.” He looked at me again with the same intense, searching gaze. His eyes wandered down and he lifted Joanie’s musical note charm with his finger and examined it. “You’re so much like him.”
“Like the Josh you used to know?”
He nodded.
“What happened to him?”
“We were fighting together during the uprising,” I must have looked blank and he shook his head. “The 1987 uprising. We thought the Republicans were about to fall –“
“The Republicans?”
“You’re kidding. How can you not know this stuff? There’s been a Republican dictatorship since the Fifties. They took power as an emergency measure against the Soviets when the Cold War started. That’s what they said anyway. That’s how they justified it. But in 87 we’d heard the Soviet Union was unravelling and we thought the Republicans were weakening too. We thought the army would fight on our side against the Militia, that the government and the institutions were ready to fall.”
He fell silent, letting the charm he had held while he spoke drop.
“But you were wrong?”
He nodded. Now he ran a finger lightly along my surgery scar, revealed beneath my torn T-Shirt. “So many died, just shot down in the streets. Hundreds were arrested and imprisoned. It barely lasted a week.”
He helped me back on with my sweater moving it gently over my bandaged arm. Then he pulled his own sweatshirt back on.
“I should have died,” he went on. “We were trapped in an alleyway, soldiers on both sides shooting into the crowd and one of them pointed his gun straight at me.” His voice caught. “My friend, Josh Lyman, made the soldier shoot at him. He did what you just did but that soldier had a better aim, the bullet killed him within minutes. Dead in that stinking alleyway.”
He forgot himself, dropping his gaze to the ground as if he could still see his Josh lying there.
“You’re so much like him,” he murmured again. “You’ve got a scar where the bullet went into him. And you’ve got this,” He reached around his own neck and pulled out a musical note charm identical to mine though his hung on a rough piece of leather and was gold-plated, the plate worn away to the silver beneath. “You’ve got his dead sister’s chain which he wore all the time I knew him. I took it from him before I buried him. Its almost all I have of him.”
“He loved you,” I said beginning to understand the meaning of this one of a billion possible universes. “It was no hardship for him to die in your place.”
“He shouldn’t have,” Sam said in quiet despair. “He shouldn’t have left me on my own. Why couldn’t we have gone together?”
I shook my head, too lost in this ancient memory to find an answer for him.
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