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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Synopsis

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Other Books by Robbi McCoy

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Epilogue

  Bella Books

  Synopsis

  One moment San Francisco police officer Dani Barsetti is chasing a suspect through an apartment building. The next moment she wakes up in a completely different place and time. It’s the twenty-third century—at least that’s what she’s being told by a group of scientists who aren’t at all happy to see her. Their agent, a man sent back in time to kill a dangerous terrorist, has been killed by the terrorist instead. So now the scientists are proposing to send Dani back in time to finish the job.

  It sounds great to Dani, who only wants to get home. Except for one thing—her trip into the future has totally erased her from the past. Her wife Gemma doesn’t know her. Her parents and siblings have never met her. And the police force has no record of her.

  Could she start over? Could Gemma fall in love with her all over again? Dani has only two weeks to find out before she must return to the future. But is two weeks long enough to fall in love? Or is it only long enough to say goodbye…

  Copyright © 2017 by Robbi McCoy

  Bella Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 10543

  Tallahassee, FL 32302

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  First Bella Books Edition 2017

  eBook released 2017

  Editor: Medora MacDougall

  Cover Designer: Judith Fellows

  ISBN: 978-1-59493-554-1

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Other Bella Books by Robbi McCoy

  The Farmer’s Daughter

  For Me and My Gal

  Melt

  Not Every River

  The Other Megan

  Something to Believe

  Songs Without Words

  Spring Tide

  Two on the Aisle

  Waltzing at Midnight

  Acknowledgments

  With love and gratitude, I thank my incredible partner Dot for her enthusiastic support and continued interest in my writing. Like me, she is a great fan of science fiction, time travel in particular, and her insights into this story were invaluable. To Grace, thank you so much for giving your time and effort to improving this story, and thank you also for being a devoted reader and friend over the years. To Medora, my dogged editor, thank you for saving me from several embarrassing inconsistencies and for having the patience to delve into the brutally convoluted nature of time travel. Being an editor is hard enough work without the addition of warped space-time.

  With my first effort at science fiction, I must mention that colossus of the genre, Star Trek. I’ve been there from the beginning and through all of its incarnations on television and at the movies. This series had much to do with my interest from an early age in astronomy, quantum physics and, of course, temporal mechanics. The time travel episodes were always my favorites. Just the other day I rewatched the last episode of TNG where Q takes Picard four billion years into the Earth’s past to witness the first spark of life arising from the primordial ooze and “nothing happened,” wiping out all life forms that would ever have evolved on the planet in that one alternate timeline moment. It gave me chills, as all time travel stories should. Time travel fiction is an opportunity to live out our most impossible dreams, allowing us to change the past and participate in the future. What could be more fascinating?

  About the Author

  Robbi McCoy is a native Californian who lives with her life partner and cat in the Central Valley, equidistant between the mountains and the sea. She is an avid hiker with a particular fondness for the deserts of the American Southwest. She also enjoys gardening, culinary adventures, travel and the theater.

  She is recently retired from her career as a software specialist and web designer and is enjoying a life of leisure with an occasional spurt of writing.

  Dedication

  To my grandmothers.

  Chapter One

  They were rolling with lights and sirens down Interstate 101 to the Peninsula. Dani drove. Agent Bryan manned the radio, summoning the force to the headquarters of Genepac Industries, a biotechnology research lab. Dani wasn’t sure what the company did. Something to do with genetics and crops. She didn’t care. She only cared that there might be a bomb about to go off in the building.

  The freeway was choked with vehicles moving like sludge at an average of thirty miles per hour. Most of them were unable to move out of the way of the cruiser, but she kept a rapid pace by weaving through them. She rode the left shoulder as far as she could, hugging the concrete median barrier until the shoulder ran out, then she jockeyed over to the right shoulder and used that, dodging merging vehicles while Bryan stiffened and flinched in panic.

  Gee, Dani thought, what’s this dude’s problem? We haven’t even had a near miss.

  “Confirmed,” Bryan said into the radio. Then to Dani he said, “Everybody’s out of the building. Evacuation complete.” He had a nervous but reassuring smile on his pale, clean-shaven face.

  In his thirties, he still had a full head of dark brown hair, parted on the left to reveal one clean white slice of scalp. His sideburns were unfashionably long and reminded Dani of the old cop shows from the eighties that she watched in reruns.

  “What time is it?” he asked, glancing around the car like he’d forgotten where the computer display was.

  “Is that thing on your wrist just for show?”

  Bryan glanced at his wristwatch and chuckled. “Oh, right. No, it’s actually n
ot…it’s not a timepiece. It’s…”

  “Oh, like a Fitbit or something.”

  Bryan vaguely smiled.

  Dani pointed to the monitor to remind him that he could check the time there. Then she swerved, sending them through a narrow channel across two lanes.

  “Watch it!” Bryan shouted, nearly climbing out of his seat.

  “Do you want to drive?”

  “Oh, no, no, no!” He looked terrified at the idea. “You’re doing a great job, Officer Barsetti. There’s just so much traffic. It’s unnerving.”

  “Friday traffic is the worst! Just be damned happy it’s not rush hour.”

  She stole a brief glance at him, at his delicate features and slightly rumpled navy blue suit. She couldn’t quite figure out Frank Bryan and she wasn’t ready to trust him. There was something off about him. Even his way of speaking was odd in a way she couldn’t place. Nope, she definitely wasn’t going to trust him if he wasn’t going to trust the SFPD by sharing his intel.

  “We got no call,” she said, bringing up a question she’d asked earlier. “No bomb threat. You never did tell us how you know something’s going down today.”

  He shifted uncomfortably. “No, I didn’t.”

  So that was it, huh, thought Dani resentfully. That’s the way the FBI wants to play it. We’re supposed to put everything on the line for them and they don’t tell us diddly.

  “This guy doesn’t know we’re onto him,” Bryan said, “and I want to keep it that way.”

  In other words, Dani inferred, the FBI doesn’t trust city cops. Bryan’s body tensed as Dani abruptly changed lanes.

  “Who is this guy anyway?” she asked. “This Leo Darius.”

  Bryan relaxed into his seat. “Environmental activist gone militant. He’s on a one-man crusade to save the world from all those so-called conspiracies perpetrated against the common man by corporate America and the U. S. government. He thinks everything’s being poisoned—air, drinking water, food supply. And it’s all being hushed up.”

  “What about the EPA and FDA and all the agencies working to protect people from being poisoned?”

  “He thinks they’re all in on it too. A huge, worldwide cover-up. He’s paranoid, out of his mind.” He leaned over to read the clock on the computer again.

  Dani made a mental note to tell all of this to Gemma. As a former FDA employee who very conscientiously had done her best to protect the public food supply, she’d be interested.

  “Demonstrating peacefully wasn’t cutting it,” Bryan continued. “Nobody listening, no results. At least not fast enough. So now he’s taking it up a notch. He wants to get some attention. This is his coming-out party, blowing up Genepac Industries.”

  “Why them?”

  “Genetically modified organisms. Food crops in this case. GMOs are public enemy number one in his book. At least we got the staff out of the building before it blows. Saved some lives.”

  “You seem sure it’s going to blow.”

  “Unless we can get to it first.”

  Once they hit Burlingame, they exited onto city streets and headed east. The facility was near the bay under a steady stream of airliners arriving at San Francisco Airport. A gleaming white Lufthansa jet seemed to hang motionless over the shallow south bay before banking to the left to approach the runway. Sunlight glinted off its cockpit window like a laser beam.

  Bryan checked the computer clock again.

  “Why do you keep checking the time?” Dani asked.

  He shook his head. “No reason. Just a nervous habit, I guess.”

  “Darius didn’t happen to say what time this bomb was going off, did he?”

  “No, no, of course not.” He laughed with an undercurrent of nervousness. “I wish he had.”

  Yeah, Bryan was keeping his secrets, she thought bitterly. She didn’t like not knowing the score. Not having all the facts put officers in danger, and one thing the SFPD sure didn’t need right now was another incident. Just yesterday they had said their formal good-byes to Art Martinez in a gut-wrenching ceremony during which Dani couldn’t stifle the waterworks. She wasn’t the only cop there with tears running down her cheeks. Art’s wife Carla and his two little boys sat front and center, all three of them looking shell-shocked. Art never knew what hit him. He was shot in the back of the head on the street by a frizzed-up junkie who couldn’t tell the difference between a cop taking a lunch break and one coming after him loaded for bear. Senseless. The day before, Martinez had slapped her on the back good-naturedly and laughed his peculiar honking chortle. Everybody liked him. One day he was goofing around at the station, and the next he was just nowhere. It could happen to any of them any day. Which is why Dani never wanted to walk out of the house in the morning without making sure Gemma felt loved. This job never let you forget you were mortal.

  Three other black and whites were there when they arrived, SFPD units waiting for Bryan’s orders. He had the lead on this one. There were also two fire trucks on site with a full complement of firefighters and a bomb squad. A group of civilians stood together a safe distance from the building, about a half dozen button-down shirts and khakis with a couple of conservative skirts thrown in. The evacuated staff of Genepac, Dani concluded.

  An industrial building of metal, glass and concrete, two stories high, utilitarian and ugly, stood before them. Puffy white clouds were reflected in the top story windows. The scene was peaceful.

  While Bryan went to talk to Sergeant Tyler, Dani briefly checked her phone. There was a message from Gemma. “I’ll be late tonight. It’s Mom again. I’ll be at Palm Terrace after work unruffling some feathers. Can you pick up something for dinner? Love, G.”

  Not again. Dani shook her head. Gemma’s mother Harriet was becoming a pro at ruffling feathers. Most of the time she was docile, but she had episodes when she couldn’t remember where she was or why she wasn’t home. That’s when she got frightened, angry and sometimes violent, which Dani had to admit seemed like a reasonable response to losing one’s mind. Palm Terrace was the third nursing home for Harriet. She’d been kicked out of the first one for a string of nasty incidents, the last one being when she’d bitten a nursing assistant. They had moved her out of the second place, River Gardens, because Gemma was in almost constant conflict with the staff and it had worn her out. The current place was pretty good so far and Harriet seemed to be adapting better to institutionalization. Dani hoped Gemma could fix it, whatever Harriet had done this time. Otherwise, they were going to run out of places in the city to keep her.

  Dani walked over to Bryan and some of the other officers, including Sergeant Rhonda Tyler, one of Dani’s buddies. She was in uniform, lean, tanned and freckled from the summer sun, her eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses.

  “No sign of anybody,” reported Tyler. “The place is dead. If he’s here to watch his handiwork, he’s well hidden.”

  Dani scanned the area, taking in parking garages, warehouses, storage units, sixties-era office buildings. Lots of industrial, no residential. Darius could be tucked inside any one of those buildings with a pair of binoculars, waiting for the fireworks.

  The bomb squad was suited up and ready to go in with their dog, a relaxed-looking black German shepherd. If there was a bomb, they’d find it. Everybody else was ordered to stay well away from the building, so they all moved across the street. Tyler walked over to Dani with a freshly lit cigarette, then jerked her head toward the building and said, “Do you think there’s a bomb in there, Barsetti?”

  Dani shrugged. “Bryan seems pretty sure of it.”

  She blew smoke out of the side of her mouth, deliberately aiming away from Dani. “I wish he’d share some of that intel.”

  “He said Darius is protesting genetically modified food. He’s some kind of an environmentalist gone militant.”

  “Yep, that’s the story. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to take his word for it. We’ve come up with nothing on Leo Darius. And I mean nothing. And Bryan says his sources ar
e classified.”

  “Have you ever worked with him before?”

  Tyler shook her head and knocked the ash off her cigarette. “No. Never heard of him before two days ago. He’s an unknown entity. When we get back to the station, I think I’ll ask around.”

  “Why? Is there a problem?”

  “No. I just like to know who I’m working with.” She smiled ironically. “I know that look, Barsetti. Don’t worry, I’ll be tactful.” She frowned. “Look, I can be tactful.”

  “I didn’t say a word,” Dani objected, but to herself she admitted her doubt that Tyler could be tactful. It just wasn’t in her. She had the discretion of a wolverine going after a squirrel.

  “Your wife is in the food business, right?”

  “Yeah. She’s a nutritionist.”

  “What’s her take on this GMO stuff?”

  “She usually tells people they’ve been eating it for years. Eighty-eight percent of the corn and almost all of the soybeans grown in the U.S. are genetically modified. And you know those two grains are in everything. People who think they can avoid GMOs these days are fooling themselves. They’d have to grow all their own food to escape them.”

  “So it’s not poison like these guys say?”

  Dani shrugged. “I don’t know, but I’ll tell you what is poison.” She nodded toward the cigarette in Tyler’s hand.

  Tyler scowled. “Can it, Barsetti!” She took a drag, then rubbed the cigarette into the dirt with her boot. “Damn, this waiting makes me jumpy.” She shoved her hands in her pockets as another jumbo jet roared overhead.

  Dani kicked absentmindedly at the gravel, tense and nervous. Like Tyler, she didn’t like waiting and doing nothing, especially when there were lives on the line.

  From across the street, Bryan’s frantic voice reached them. “Get out! Get out!” he shrieked at the bomb squad. “It’s too late! It’s going to blow! Take cover!”