Chapter 4
SEE PROLOGUE FOR DISCLAIMERS, ETC.
"Where the hell am I and who the hell are you? Sir!" Mac only just managed to spit out the last word as she took in the clinic-like room around a headache that went all the way to her toes.
"Where you are is a lot harder to explain than who I am." The admiral in front of her waved his cigar around over his head, reminding her of an annoying habit of Secretary of the Navy Sheffield. "Vice Admiral Albert Calavicci, at your service, Colonel Mackenzie."
Mac looked down, expecting to see her class A uniform. Instead, she saw the red dress she had bought years ago to wear on her first date with Harm.
Harm! Her head pounded at the thought of him in trouble.
"Where's my fiancé?" Saying the word "fiancé" out loud lowered the pounding in her head a little as she realized the implications.
The admiral looked away. "'When' might be a better question about both you and your fiancé."
"What?"
"No, that's not at issue. Your fiancé is definitely Captain Harmon Rabb, Jr."
It might have been funnier if it weren't so surreal and her head didn't hurt so much. "I thought they stripped all flag officers of their sense of humor when the first star went on the shoulder boards."
The admiral turned back to her with a smile. "That's better. And just so you know, they try, but if you resist just a little, they back off."
She studied him for a moment as he alternately pulled on his cigar and blew out smoke rings. "Admiral Calavicci?"
He stopped the cigar midway to his mouth, apparently waiting for her to say something more. Then he said, "Yes," and went back to puffing and blowing smoke.
Mac's mind whirled at top speed for thirteen seconds before bits and pieces of ancient scuttlebutt began to filter into a picture, or, more accurately, a well-constructed if never verified rumor. "Are you part of some black op exploring time travel? Operation Wave Jump or something like that?"
Calavicci folded his arms across his chest, letting the cigar dangle over his outer arm, its ashes falling to the floor as it burned untended. "You have way too much information for a JAG officer with no connection to the Bureau of Naval Research and Development."
"So this," Mac waved her arm around, "is Operation Wave Jump?"
He sighed. "For what it's worth, it's Project Quantum Leap."
"For what it's worth, in my time, you're only a rear admiral." She saw his chin jut out and recognized an incoming flag tirade. She held up her hand to placate him and waited for his chin to drop before she went on. "I know, your name isn't on the active admiralty roster. But I've been the JAG liaison to the Admiralty Review Board for the past six years. I've seen the whole list." Including a few others that she had believed retired and moved on to more political arenas. In the 21st century, intelligence needs far outweighed diplomatic concerns.
When he didn't say anything, she continued. "On your projected career track, you were due for a promotion board review in 2007, ten years after the initial funding for the Navy's participation in the project. At the extraordinarily advanced age of 73."
He nodded and dragged at his cigar for a long moment, blowing out two lopsided smoke rings before he commented. "A dirty little secret of the military. Once you reach 40 years, active duty and retirement pay are the same, so Congress tends to turn a blind eye." He stuck the cigar back in his mouth.
"What year is it?"
"I can't tell you that, Colonel," he said around the cigar.
Mac took a step toward him. "You look about 10 years older than the current picture I saw in your file. That makes this 2014 or 2015, right?"
"No wonder the CIA likes you." He took the cigar out and motioned for her to follow him.
Her high heels clacked across the dark tile floor as she followed him through a series of automatic doors into what appeared to be a command and control center. Three technicians looked up, surprise evident on their faces when they spotted her, but each went back to indecipherable tasks after a few seconds.
"I've just broken every rule in the Project Quantum Leap manual, at least six provisions of the National Security Act, and three articles of the UCMJ." Admiral Calavicci pointed toward the front of the room.
"Two, actually."
"Two what?"
"Articles of the UCMJ. I could prosecute on 892.92, Failure to obey order or regulation, based on your requirement to be in compliance with the National Security Act, and on 897.97, Unlawful detention, based on my being held here against my will without cause."
Calavicci's drawn smile made him truly look the age she believed him to be – 80. "They added a new capital article in 2008. 935.35, Failure to protect a national security interest or asset."
"Oh." What else could she say?
"Put this on." He handed her a small cordless microphone, which she clipped to her dress as he picked up what looked like a PDA and pressed a couple of buttons.
A hologram appeared in the center of the room. The only word Mac could summon at the sight was "bizarre." A handsome man with salted sandy brown hair hung suspended in mid-air in a seated position, wearing her dress and her shoes. With a start, she realized he was sitting in her Corvette, although she could not see the car at all.
"Al, do me a favor and sit down in a low chair."
Admiral Calavicci shrugged and kicked his foot out to snag a chair from under a console. "Right. I forget how unnerved you get when I pace through a car." He sat down. "Better?"
Sam, whoever he was, turned his head away from them to the right, which apparently meant that Al had seated himself in the passenger seat despite his location in the physical world. "Not perfect, but it will do."
Mac had encountered a number of very strange things in her life. What she now understood with horrifying clarity upended everything she knew about physics and took everything else in her brain with it for twenty seven seconds before Admiral Calavicci called her name.
"Uh, sorry, sir." She took a deep breath and pointed at the hologram. "He's . . . he's on April 29, 2005, isn't he?"
Calavicci looked her over. "Yes, he is."
"Al, who is that?" The back of Sam's head bobbed as he waited for an answer.
"Colonel Mackenzie. She's a damned site smarter than anyone else we've had here since . . . well, since that biologist whose cloned human embryos you managed to destroy before the super virus could break out of the lab. She put two and two together and divided by pi times MC squared to come up with the right answer. After that, I didn't see any practical point in keeping her on the periphery."
"Admiral, who is that?" Mac asked, pointing at the hologram again.
Heaving a sigh, Calavicci slumped in his chair. "Dr. Sam Beckett, physicist and designer of Project Quantum Leap. Long story short, and we still don't know how after 16 years, Sam has inhabited your body in the mid evening of April 29, 2005 and you, in your entirety, are here with me on the late afternoon of February 14, 2015."
"Poor Harm. He must be traumatized." She was.
From the past, Sam chuckled. "Colonel, I promise you that I will do my best to make sure he doesn't really figure it out. Kids are a problem, though."
"Why?" That seemed the easiest question to ask, though she thought she sounded like a three year old.
This time, the Admiral chuckled. "If they still believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, they can see Sam rather than you and they can see me. People with unusual mental abilities can often see us, too."
Feeling a little more anchored, Mac took a deep breath. "That may explain more than my intelligence. I have an inerrant internal clock and have had visions that saved lives, including Harm's."
"Internal clock?" Sam asked from 2005. She hadn't known him for 47 seconds but she could tell the idea scared him.
"Infallible. I can tell you the time in any time zone I'm in to within a second. It's 1653 now."
Admiral Calavicci checked his watch. "She's right. And we're in the middle of a cave in New Mexico."
Sam shook his head. "I can't do that. How obvious is it going to be?"
Mac smiled as best she could in this bizarre circumstance. "With Harm? If he's distracted enough, he won't notice. But you will have to be the timekeeper because he's the late for his own funeral kind of guy." She put her hand to her mouth in realization of something vital. "Dr. Beckett, you're going to need to get the battery replaced in that watch I'm wearing ASAP."
The hologram looked down at her wrist, which was unnerving to watch. "Al, what do I do until then?"
"Hold on, Sam. Ziggy's working on it."
The solution came as quickly as the problem. "Just make sure you have my cell phone with you. I clip it to my left hip whenever I'm in casual clothes. It can wait until I . . . you . . . whatever . . . until San Diego."
Sam relaxed against her driver's seat. "Al, I like talking directly to her. Can we find ways to make National Security an issue in every leap?"
Admiral Calavicci's cigar fell to the floor.
"I'll take that as a no. Colonel, since I have the luxury, I need to ask you about some things. Like, where do you live?"
"Please, if you're going to be borrowing my body, the least you can do is call me Mac." She gave him her address and walked him through using her GPS navigation system. "Make sure you take it out and hand carry it with you to California on Sunday. We'll need it." What an odd thing to say, she thought.
"I will. What do I need to know to um . . ." Sam blushed.
She understood Sam's unspoken question. "Admiral, can I talk to him privately?"
Admiral Calavicci didn't look happy about it, but he ordered Ziggy to pipe the audio into the private conference room off the control center. "Let's go, Colonel." He extended his hand toward a door in the far corner.
"Admiral, at the risk of violating article 889.89, when I said 'privately', I meant 'privately.'" She brushed by him and marched across the floor to the door, hoping it would slide open and save her the embarrassment of walking straight into it. It did.
Sam pointed out the irony of their situation. "In here, you and I can hear each other but can't see each other. Al and I can see each other but not hear each other out there. That pretty much sums up my life over the past 16 years, Mac."
She found herself liking Sam. "I can't begin to imagine, Sam. You wanted to talk about Harm, right?"
His blush rose again. "Just give me the Cliff Notes version of your relationship, Mac. I really don't want to blow this for you. He loves you."
"I love him." She started to giggle. "I'm afraid the Cliff Notes are the length of a Harlequin Romance and a lot harder to follow, Sam."
"How long have you been together?" His disembodied voice had a gentle, friendly tone.
Mac sighed. "Eight years, three months, and 26 days, but who's counting?" She thumped down on the six-person conference table and kicked her shoes off. "It took us until noon today to figure out how to admit to each other that we've been in love for at least four of those years, probably seven and maybe even all eight, if we were truly honest."
She spelled out the most important episodes – meeting in the Rose Garden, Annie, Dalton, Chris, finding out what happened to his father in Russia, the baby deal, Sergei, Jordan, Harm's return to flying, Mic, Renee, Harm's crash and the wedding that wasn't, Afghanistan, Singer's murder and Harm's trial. Sam interrupted her narration of the events in Paraguay when her cell phone rang in the console; she sensed his relief when it was Harm saying he would be half an hour later than he expected because of issues with Mattie's move to Bethesda tomorrow morning. She picked up her story and told him about Webb, Sadik, and finally her endometriosis. Even keeping to headlines and taglines, it took her an hour and Sam was already unpacking the small suitcase Mac had packed for her two nights at the hotel when she was finished.
She wondered what her – his – face showed when he spoke after a full minute of silence. "So, you two have never actually made love?"
"Sam, before noon today, counting mouth-to-mouth on the Watertown as a very generous addition to the list, we had kissed a grand total of four times. Once, Harm thought I was someone else. Once, it was a good-bye kiss at my engagement party. And the last time, it was under the mistletoe at a party." She sighed. "Tonight would have been very special."
"That's the main reason I wanted to talk to you without Al hanging luridly on every word. How can I let him down easily? I mean, it's not fair that you wouldn't get to be here for your first time, and, let's face it, I get queasy just thinking about being in a woman's body when . . . just, yech."
Mac got a startling, somewhat appalling image in her head. "So, even though you've leaped into women before, you've never had sex as a woman?"
"No!" Sam groaned. "Just the thought is enough to make the wet bar seem like a good investment."
Mac straightened herself to her full height even though he couldn't see her and put on her best Marine Corps command voice. "Dr. Beckett, if you put one drop of alcohol into my body while you inhabit it, I will end your leaping days forever." She hoped she never got used to using such mixed pronouns to refer to herself.
Sam was silent for twenty three seconds. "Yes, ma'am. Understood. But about the other thing?"
"If you can stand a massage, which my body could use even if your mind isn't quite ready for it, tell Harm I'm having cramps and a little bleeding from the stress of everything. Just act like you have a horrible backache and stomach cramps, it should convince him. He'll hover, but he will back right off the amorous behavior." She knew that about her sailor – solicitous to a fault, he would pamper her body with loving care without pressing his own desires upon her.
"He'll be bitterly disappointed. I would be."
"Are you married, Sam?"
"Yes."
She could hear the longing in his voice and knew this was the right tack. "If your wife was in pain, what would you do?"
He snorted. "Everything in my power to make her feel better. Point taken. He's here. Talk to you later, Mac."
She wasn't sure if he heard her say, "Later, Sam."