Book Description
It's a diabolical game of cat and mouse as top TEC agent Jack Logan tracks a scavenger through time and history . . .
USA, 2007: There's a deadly thief on the loose, with stolen millions and a time machine that could virtually shut down the planet. Now the world's most covert agency--the Time Enforcement Commission--must find him before he destroys the world.
TEC cop Jack Logan gets his first glimpse of the scavenger at the Empire State Building--just seconds before a B-25 slams into it on a summer morning in 1945. The felon escapes, and Logan survives to discover huge disturbances in the timestream--all connected to the scavenger's shopping list. From the fabled Lost Dutchman Mine to a Mississippi steamboat and a cyberfortress unsettingly close to the nation's capital, Logan races to apprehend the scavenger before he executes his chilling plan of global murder . . .
USA, 2007: There's a deadly thief on the loose, with stolen millions and a time machine that could virtually shut down the planet. Now the world's most covert agency--the Time Enforcement Commission--must find him before he destroys the world.
TEC cop Jack Logan gets his first glimpse of the scavenger at the Empire State Building--just seconds before a B-25 slams into it on a summer morning in 1945. The felon escapes, and Logan survives to discover huge disturbances in the timestream--all connected to the scavenger's shopping list. From the fabled Lost Dutchman Mine to a Mississippi steamboat and a cyberfortress unsettingly close to the nation's capital, Logan races to apprehend the scavenger before he executes his chilling plan of global murder . . .
From the Publisher
This is a fast-paced, action adventure spin-off series based on the successful Jean-Claude Van Damme film, "Timecop" from Universal Studios where a secret organization polices time travel.
About the Author
Dan Parkinson is the author of many westerns as well as a number of successful TSR fantasy novels. He has also written The Gates of Time, an exciting science fiction series in which a time travel agency is the center of drama and action.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Superstition Mountains: Arizona, 1873
The Yaquis were everywhere, like shadows among the rocks. Stover had killed two of them almost immediately, but in the burning hours since then, he had been unable to get even a single clear shot. They moved like ghosts, he thought. A glimpse of a dark head above a boulder, seen again thirty yards away as a shadow crossing a slanted crevice--it might be two Indians, or the same one moving fast.
Maybe there were only two or three out there, or maybe a dozen. It didn't matter, Stover told himself. One or a hundred, it makes no difference how many if you can't even get a shot at them.
Up on the tumbled rise where a faint trail led toward Weavers Needle, there was a visible target, but the Dutchman was far beyond the range of Stover's repeating rifle. "Walz, you old devil!" Stover rasped through sun-cracked lips. "You're enjoying this!"
Snapping a quick shot at a flick of movement off to his right, Stover turned and looked again. Even at this distance, he could see the Dutchman's snowy beard split in a malevolent grin. The Dutchman was just sitting up there, watching! He felt secure on that shelf of stone, well above the tumbled landscape of the desert below. The Yaquis couldn't get to him up there. The cliff was a fortress, and Walz controlled it.
But Stover had no such cover. He had come a mile or so since that first attack, leaving behind two dead mules and one dead Mexican--a mile of duck and run, dodge and shoot--and always the Yaquis were with him. Like silent, darting shadows they were all around him. An arrow had gouged his rifle stock, and another still protruded from his backpack.
He drank the last few drops of hot, acrid water from his belt canteen and rasped a curse as the bit of moisture only compounded his thirst. His back to a sheer surface of sunbaked stone, he lay still for a moment, listening. Then he rolled to his left, got to his knees, and flung the empty canteen away from him. The full-arm throw sent the container arcing high, above the climbing boulders below him.
He saw its silhouette spinning across the sheet-copper sky and fixed his slitted eyes on the rocks below. Something moved there, and he leveled his rifle and fired. Fifty yards downslope a savage figure leapt out of hiding, whirled around in a shower of spurting blood, and fell.
"Three," Stover muttered.
Echoes of the shot still dwindled among the tumbled stonesas he spun around, raced from his cover, and scrambled up a fan of loose pebbles. He heard shouts, and a flashing arrow whisked past his ear to explode shards of stone just above his head. He rolled to the right, found a foothold, and climbed another eight or nine feet to dive into the shade of a low overhang. Another arrow followed him, clattering against the stone at his back.
Distantly, drifting down on the desert wind, he heard cruel, cackling laughter. The Dutchman knew the Indians couldn't reach him, and the Indians knew it, too. So they were going after the one they could get to. Himself. May the devil take you, Jacob Walz, Stover cursed silently. I'd have helped you with your find, if you had let me. I'd have been a good partner. I'd have settled for a share of the gold. But no more, Dutchman. I'm coming for you, and I'm not dead yet!
Gravel rattled below him, and Stover brought the rifle up and fired point-blank. The Indian was hardly more than a child, but the short-ax in his hand, poised to throw, was no toy. The Indian staggered backward, sagged, and slid down the gravel fan.
"Four," Stover whispered, fitting a fresh cylinder into his rifle.
He waited a few seconds, then flung himself over the sheered stone above him and rolled into the shadows beside a standing rock. More seconds passed, becoming a full minute, and Stover moved again, more deliberately. Nothing responded but the desert wind; nothing moved but a pair of buzzards circling lazily above.
He raced to new cover, still higher on the slope, headed around a jagged boulder, then cut back and went around it the other way. And then he knew that the Indians were gone. As changeable as desert storms, they had simply gone, vanishing into the arid rifts and broken stones of the desert.
It was the way of Yaquis. Primitive and unpredictable, they could be deadly, but they were seldom persistent. They came into these mountains sometimes, following the old trails. They took what came handy, then when they felt like going on, they simply went.
Easing around an outcrop, Stover looked up the mountainside. The shelf above was empty. Jacob Walz, too, had gone. As though tiring of the entertainment below, he had gone on his way, onward toward that secret trove where the nuggets were as big as marbles and the bits of ore were almost pure gold.
Stover had seen the nuggets. Half of Phoenix had seen them and heard the white-bearded old German's drunken boasts about the rich discovery he had made. And Stover wasn't the first to follow Walz when he headed out from Phoenix. Back there at the foot of the mountains lay the bodies of two Phoenix men, with the Dutchman's bullets in them.
Looking around now, Stover felt a shiver of excitement. I must be close, he thought. Deep in the Superstitions, the trails were few and hard to follow. He could see the landmark called Weavers Needle from here, and his intuition told him that the mine was very near. Beyond the peak above the Needle, other canyons opened out--canyons far easier to reach by other routes than this.
With a prospector's instincts, he gazed around, fixing landmarks in his mind. Ahead was the serrated peak, and below it Weavers Needle. Nearer, midway between here and that next slope, wind-scoured stones like bizarre castles shadowed a smaller, crack-riddled crest where a lone, weather-beaten old paloverde tree stood, stripped of its bark. A single, skeletal limb jutted from it, pointing away from the Needle.
He saw something else, too. In a shadow of overhanging rock, just beyond the old tree, something white moved slightly in the wind.
"That snowy beard betrays you, Dutchman." Stover nodded. "So that's your game, is it? An ambush? Well, we'll just see about that." Keeping out of sight, he circled high around and found a ledge within fifty yards of the little cave where the white whiskers waited. Easing to one side for a better view, he rested his rifle on a stone and cocked its hammer. Sighting carefully, holding on the dark shadows just below the white beard, he fired.
In the cave, a dry stick shattered and toppled outward into the slanting sunlight. Stover gaped at the thing lying on the ground there--a white rag, a piece ripped from a linen shirttail.
Directly behind him, metal clicked on metal as the hammer of a big rifle was hauled back. Stover turned, gaping. The last thing he ever saw was the white-whiskered face of Jacob Walz, and the last sound he ever heard was the Dutchman's cruel, cackling laughter. Stover was dead before the thunder of the old man's rifle reached his ears.
Atop a weathered spire, not far away, Jack Logan shook his head slowly, controlling his impulses. Old Jacob Walz had just added one more victim to his private graveyard on the mountain. No matter how you cut it, it was murder, pure and simple. Again, as so many times before, the TEC agent felt that surge of frustration, the aching need to go down there and arrest that man for what he had done.
But what Walz had done was beyond Logan's jurisdiction. Murder, yes. The killing of Eli Stover by Jacob Walz was cold-blooded, willful murder, with intent. But it was a murder that had occurred nearly a hundred and forty years ago. And it involved no alteration of history. It occurred just as it had always occurred in 1873, and thus it was out of Logan's jurisdiction. As a timecop, an agent of the Time Enforcement Commission, Logan's purpose in life was to track down temporal perpetrators, to keep history from being changed.
History wasn't always pretty, he reminded himself again, but changing it was unthinkable. Every alteration of past time reflected itself in changes down the timestream, to the present and into the future.
Jacob Walz killed Eli Stover in 1873. Now Jack Logan had witnessed the crime, and could find no fault with the sequence. Whatever had started the ripple on the so-called Dome of History, the big overhead Eventuality-Wave Resonance Projector display in TEC headquarters, this wasn't it.
Still, E-warp registered a level-two ripple centered at this date in history, and the historians gave it a 90 percent probability that it had to do with the Lost Dutchman mine in the Superstition Mountains in Arizona.
Out there in the broken desolation of that rocky slope, Walz went to retrieve his mules. He returned with his own animals and Stover's, too. With only a glance at the dead man lying in the sun, the Dutchman headed back to his mine.
So far, nothing anachronistic had occurred. But Logan knew that if he returned now to 2007, the ripple would still be there, blending into the timestream, becoming part of the fabric of history. And history would be different then, by that much. Some change, happening here and now, would snowball down through the years, and some significant alteration would be forever uncorrected.
"For want of a nail," Logan muttered, "the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of a horse the rider was lost; for want of a rider the battle was lost, and all for the want of a nail." He frowned. "Now where did that come from?" he growled. "Flotsam! Damned speed-brief, it always leaves clutter behind."
In the distance, he could see Jacob Walz poking around a crack in the broken stone--a crack that seemed too narrow and too shallow to mean anything. Yet now and again, the old man seemed to disappear into that crack, carrying tools or bundles, and reappeared carrying different items. It was an optical illusion, Logan realized....
The Yaquis were everywhere, like shadows among the rocks. Stover had killed two of them almost immediately, but in the burning hours since then, he had been unable to get even a single clear shot. They moved like ghosts, he thought. A glimpse of a dark head above a boulder, seen again thirty yards away as a shadow crossing a slanted crevice--it might be two Indians, or the same one moving fast.
Maybe there were only two or three out there, or maybe a dozen. It didn't matter, Stover told himself. One or a hundred, it makes no difference how many if you can't even get a shot at them.
Up on the tumbled rise where a faint trail led toward Weavers Needle, there was a visible target, but the Dutchman was far beyond the range of Stover's repeating rifle. "Walz, you old devil!" Stover rasped through sun-cracked lips. "You're enjoying this!"
Snapping a quick shot at a flick of movement off to his right, Stover turned and looked again. Even at this distance, he could see the Dutchman's snowy beard split in a malevolent grin. The Dutchman was just sitting up there, watching! He felt secure on that shelf of stone, well above the tumbled landscape of the desert below. The Yaquis couldn't get to him up there. The cliff was a fortress, and Walz controlled it.
But Stover had no such cover. He had come a mile or so since that first attack, leaving behind two dead mules and one dead Mexican--a mile of duck and run, dodge and shoot--and always the Yaquis were with him. Like silent, darting shadows they were all around him. An arrow had gouged his rifle stock, and another still protruded from his backpack.
He drank the last few drops of hot, acrid water from his belt canteen and rasped a curse as the bit of moisture only compounded his thirst. His back to a sheer surface of sunbaked stone, he lay still for a moment, listening. Then he rolled to his left, got to his knees, and flung the empty canteen away from him. The full-arm throw sent the container arcing high, above the climbing boulders below him.
He saw its silhouette spinning across the sheet-copper sky and fixed his slitted eyes on the rocks below. Something moved there, and he leveled his rifle and fired. Fifty yards downslope a savage figure leapt out of hiding, whirled around in a shower of spurting blood, and fell.
"Three," Stover muttered.
Echoes of the shot still dwindled among the tumbled stonesas he spun around, raced from his cover, and scrambled up a fan of loose pebbles. He heard shouts, and a flashing arrow whisked past his ear to explode shards of stone just above his head. He rolled to the right, found a foothold, and climbed another eight or nine feet to dive into the shade of a low overhang. Another arrow followed him, clattering against the stone at his back.
Distantly, drifting down on the desert wind, he heard cruel, cackling laughter. The Dutchman knew the Indians couldn't reach him, and the Indians knew it, too. So they were going after the one they could get to. Himself. May the devil take you, Jacob Walz, Stover cursed silently. I'd have helped you with your find, if you had let me. I'd have been a good partner. I'd have settled for a share of the gold. But no more, Dutchman. I'm coming for you, and I'm not dead yet!
Gravel rattled below him, and Stover brought the rifle up and fired point-blank. The Indian was hardly more than a child, but the short-ax in his hand, poised to throw, was no toy. The Indian staggered backward, sagged, and slid down the gravel fan.
"Four," Stover whispered, fitting a fresh cylinder into his rifle.
He waited a few seconds, then flung himself over the sheered stone above him and rolled into the shadows beside a standing rock. More seconds passed, becoming a full minute, and Stover moved again, more deliberately. Nothing responded but the desert wind; nothing moved but a pair of buzzards circling lazily above.
He raced to new cover, still higher on the slope, headed around a jagged boulder, then cut back and went around it the other way. And then he knew that the Indians were gone. As changeable as desert storms, they had simply gone, vanishing into the arid rifts and broken stones of the desert.
It was the way of Yaquis. Primitive and unpredictable, they could be deadly, but they were seldom persistent. They came into these mountains sometimes, following the old trails. They took what came handy, then when they felt like going on, they simply went.
Easing around an outcrop, Stover looked up the mountainside. The shelf above was empty. Jacob Walz, too, had gone. As though tiring of the entertainment below, he had gone on his way, onward toward that secret trove where the nuggets were as big as marbles and the bits of ore were almost pure gold.
Stover had seen the nuggets. Half of Phoenix had seen them and heard the white-bearded old German's drunken boasts about the rich discovery he had made. And Stover wasn't the first to follow Walz when he headed out from Phoenix. Back there at the foot of the mountains lay the bodies of two Phoenix men, with the Dutchman's bullets in them.
Looking around now, Stover felt a shiver of excitement. I must be close, he thought. Deep in the Superstitions, the trails were few and hard to follow. He could see the landmark called Weavers Needle from here, and his intuition told him that the mine was very near. Beyond the peak above the Needle, other canyons opened out--canyons far easier to reach by other routes than this.
With a prospector's instincts, he gazed around, fixing landmarks in his mind. Ahead was the serrated peak, and below it Weavers Needle. Nearer, midway between here and that next slope, wind-scoured stones like bizarre castles shadowed a smaller, crack-riddled crest where a lone, weather-beaten old paloverde tree stood, stripped of its bark. A single, skeletal limb jutted from it, pointing away from the Needle.
He saw something else, too. In a shadow of overhanging rock, just beyond the old tree, something white moved slightly in the wind.
"That snowy beard betrays you, Dutchman." Stover nodded. "So that's your game, is it? An ambush? Well, we'll just see about that." Keeping out of sight, he circled high around and found a ledge within fifty yards of the little cave where the white whiskers waited. Easing to one side for a better view, he rested his rifle on a stone and cocked its hammer. Sighting carefully, holding on the dark shadows just below the white beard, he fired.
In the cave, a dry stick shattered and toppled outward into the slanting sunlight. Stover gaped at the thing lying on the ground there--a white rag, a piece ripped from a linen shirttail.
Directly behind him, metal clicked on metal as the hammer of a big rifle was hauled back. Stover turned, gaping. The last thing he ever saw was the white-whiskered face of Jacob Walz, and the last sound he ever heard was the Dutchman's cruel, cackling laughter. Stover was dead before the thunder of the old man's rifle reached his ears.
Atop a weathered spire, not far away, Jack Logan shook his head slowly, controlling his impulses. Old Jacob Walz had just added one more victim to his private graveyard on the mountain. No matter how you cut it, it was murder, pure and simple. Again, as so many times before, the TEC agent felt that surge of frustration, the aching need to go down there and arrest that man for what he had done.
But what Walz had done was beyond Logan's jurisdiction. Murder, yes. The killing of Eli Stover by Jacob Walz was cold-blooded, willful murder, with intent. But it was a murder that had occurred nearly a hundred and forty years ago. And it involved no alteration of history. It occurred just as it had always occurred in 1873, and thus it was out of Logan's jurisdiction. As a timecop, an agent of the Time Enforcement Commission, Logan's purpose in life was to track down temporal perpetrators, to keep history from being changed.
History wasn't always pretty, he reminded himself again, but changing it was unthinkable. Every alteration of past time reflected itself in changes down the timestream, to the present and into the future.
Jacob Walz killed Eli Stover in 1873. Now Jack Logan had witnessed the crime, and could find no fault with the sequence. Whatever had started the ripple on the so-called Dome of History, the big overhead Eventuality-Wave Resonance Projector display in TEC headquarters, this wasn't it.
Still, E-warp registered a level-two ripple centered at this date in history, and the historians gave it a 90 percent probability that it had to do with the Lost Dutchman mine in the Superstition Mountains in Arizona.
Out there in the broken desolation of that rocky slope, Walz went to retrieve his mules. He returned with his own animals and Stover's, too. With only a glance at the dead man lying in the sun, the Dutchman headed back to his mine.
So far, nothing anachronistic had occurred. But Logan knew that if he returned now to 2007, the ripple would still be there, blending into the timestream, becoming part of the fabric of history. And history would be different then, by that much. Some change, happening here and now, would snowball down through the years, and some significant alteration would be forever uncorrected.
"For want of a nail," Logan muttered, "the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of a horse the rider was lost; for want of a rider the battle was lost, and all for the want of a nail." He frowned. "Now where did that come from?" he growled. "Flotsam! Damned speed-brief, it always leaves clutter behind."
In the distance, he could see Jacob Walz poking around a crack in the broken stone--a crack that seemed too narrow and too shallow to mean anything. Yet now and again, the old man seemed to disappear into that crack, carrying tools or bundles, and reappeared carrying different items. It was an optical illusion, Logan realized....
