"Confidential, as in no one will find my dead decaying body?" Melvin came at me with the light again and I shoved his hand away. "Cut it out."

"He's just checking your vital signs," a deep voice boomed from the other side of the room.

He was here. I hadn't imagined it. And what exactly was the significance behind the "Chief" t.i.tle? Dad was just Agent Meyer, so Chief Marshall must be in charge of ... something.

I didn't know what to believe at this point. I needed a plan and maybe some serious help in the form of advice from Adam. I rolled into a ball, clutching my stomach and moaning. "Bathroom, quick!"

Dad pointed down the hallway to my left. "Second door on the right."

I glanced in Chief Marshall's direction for a second before heading down the hall. He looked cool and calm, just like he had that day in 1996.

I locked the bathroom door and tried to remember what I was doing a couple days ago and, more important, what Adam was doing. I closed my eyes and jumped back in time over forty-eight hours. This was the plan we had come up with. Find a method of communication while in a time jump, so no one in home base would have any knowledge of it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

OCTOBER 10, 2007, 4:32 P.M.

I ended up sitting in the parking lot of the gym. Lack of focus on my ideal destination, I guess, although my accuracy had improved tremendously since leaving 2009. But Adam's house wasn't too far from work. I ran all the way there and was panting a little by the time I rang the doorbell. I only had to wait a few seconds before Mrs. Silverman let me in.

"Hi, Jackson, how are you?"

"Um ... okay. Is Adam home?"

"Yeah, go on in. He's in his room."

I walked down the hall and knocked on the door.

"Mom, I told you I'm not hungry!"

"It's Jackson," I said through the door.

He flung it open and stared at me, taking in my paint-splattered, slightly damp clothes. "What happened?"

"Remember when you told me to ask you about the Latin stuff or whatever?"

Adam yanked me into his room and slammed the door shut. "Spill."

"Am I supposed to show you the message again?"

"I know what it says. That was only if you jumped back to before I wrote the note."

I paced around the room, telling him everything, starting with the incident in the park.

"This is so weird," he mumbled. "You're from the future and this isn't your home base, so that means I won't remember anything. Maybe this has happened lots of times ... of course, I wouldn't know and neither would you, if it's your future self who jumps back to see me." He spun around and looked at me, his eyes bugging out. "I wonder how many times we've had this exact same conversation!"

"Focus, Adam! Crazy CIA dudes are waiting for me to come out of a locked bathroom two days from now!"

He shook his head like a swimmer emerging from a pool. "Sorry. The message is just a code. One I made up years ago that no one will be able to decipher. I can teach it to you."

I nodded slowly. "That way, in my present, I can tell you what's going on without my father and his coworkers knowing."

He grinned. "Exactly. And Jackson, I've never told anyone about this. I've only written messages in my code twice. The first time was nearly two years from now, which hasn't happened yet ... and the second one was a few weeks ago. I created the whole system in my head. They're not going to figure it out easily."

"I think the real question is ... can I figure it out, and quickly?"

He nodded. "I think so."

We dove into a major cram session. Adam was right. His spy language wasn't that hard to decode.

"Okay, what now?" I returned to pacing. "I don't know who I'm supposed to be more worried about ... the CIA or the people they were trying to take down today ... The redheaded dude from 2009 ... he didn't seem to have good intentions then or today, and my dad and his team went after him, so does that make the CIA good?"

Adam wrinkled his nose. "They did knock you out without your permission. Not exactly nice-guy behavior."

"Do you think they want to kill me?" I asked.

His momentary silence reflected the many arguments I had gone through in my mind and his answer matched mine. "They would have done it already. Of course, if you give them everything they need, then maybe..."

"What's my plan for when I go back? My dad already knows I'm from two years in the future. So that secret is probably out in the open."

Adam shifted in his chair. "Okay ... tell them you jumped once." He paused. "No, once is a dead giveaway that you're lying ... say it's been three times and the last time you ended up here and now you can't do it anymore."

I nodded in agreement. "Which is sort of true. I can't go back to 2009."

"Exactly, and since your dad knows something happened to 009 Holly, then he knows you're not just hanging out two years in the past for fun. That you're actually stuck."

I was so relieved he said that, because giving Dad that information was an impulsive decision and I had been worried it wasn't the right one. "Glad I did something right."

"I think it should help," Adam said. "I've read tons of government doc.u.ments ... just for fun. The more truth to your answers, the better. CIA agents are incredibly well trained in identifying liars. Give them some real details and see if you can get Dr. Melvin to accidently slip again, like he did with the genetics thing, and help fill in some of the pieces we're missing."

"I accidently let it slip that I'd seen Chief Marshall before," I remembered.

"Yeah ... but none of them know how or when. Don't tell them about that dive into the past. The one with the secret underground hospital wing. But if you're too secretive or guarded about everything, they'll know you're up to something." He stared at me and lifted his eyebrows. "I'm sure your dad and the other CIA people expect you to be scared about finding out you can time-travel and the weird brain activity thing. You played that up pretty well with your dad and the doctor the other day."

I took a deep breath and nodded. "This is going to be tough, fooling those guys."

"Good luck."

I didn't waste any more time in my little excursion. I jumped again, hoping I could pull off this act. Chief Marshall was a very intimidating guy.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

OCTOBER 13, 2007, 2:07 A.M.

I leaned against the sink and turned on the water, splashing some on my face. I waited another couple of minutes before leaving the bathroom and returning to the living room.

"Are you okay?" Dad asked.

I sank into the couch. "Yeah. False alarm."

Chief Marshall spoke from the armchair he occupied across the room. "You recognized me, last night, in the car," he prompted.

I glanced quickly at Dad and Melvin, leaning against the wall, before answering. Then, as quick as fingers snapping, an image popped into my head, like it had with Toby's lock. "You were in a bathroom ... at a restaurant and you handed me a paper towel, right?"

How did I remember that now and not when I jumped back to 1996?

"Correct. I was checking up on you after you disappeared from Spain. Is that the only time you've seen me?" His eyes beamed into mine like he could read my mind.

"Well ... not exactly." Just make up something. "You were in my house once. In the future. I came home and you were sitting at the table with Dad. I remember thinking you looked familiar then, but I didn't say anything."

"Jackson, when was the first time you time-traveled? Do you remember the date?" Melvin asked.

I turned my eyes back in his direction. This was an opportunity to tell the truth. "November twelfth, 2008. I was eighteen. It just ... happened in the middle of my French poetry cla.s.s. One minute I was falling asleep at my desk, the next I was standing outside my dorm. It took me a while to figure out what had happened."

And that I wasn't completely insane.

Melvin shook his head. "Amazing."

"What's amazing about being stuck two years in the past?" I asked.

"Not that part, but these abilities of yours, and you're not even-"

Dad elbowed him in the side. "Let's not throw too much at him tonight."

"How did you know what I can do? The time-travel part?" I asked Dad.

Melvin and Dad exchanged a long look and then Melvin answered for him. "You carry a rare gene. We refer to it as the Tempus gene. It's been known to produce certain symptoms or abilities."

"What do you mean 'it's been known'? Like ... there are others?"

Like the man in the park today? One of the last people I saw in 2009.

"Time jumpers have been traced throughout history, for centuries. But it's been kept a secret," Marshall said.

They all waited for me to respond, probably thinking I was in shock. And believe me, I was, but mostly I needed time to plan my words carefully. "So, that guy at the park and that woman ... are they time travelers, too? Can they just do it whenever they want?"

"That depends on the individual," Dr. Melvin said. "Based on the information we've been able to obtain, ability levels vary. What kind of control do you have over this skill?"

"I can't do it anymore ... it happened twice before this last jump ... but those were very different."

Dr. Melvin straightened up and strolled over quickly, then sat on the coffee table in front of me. "You said you're stuck two years in the past, right? But what about those other jumps? How did you keep from getting stuck during those jumps?"

I explained the details of jumping, up until the point where I got stranded here. I tried to put as much real detail as I could into the two jumps I told them about.

"Do you ever see yourself when you jump into the past?" Melvin asked. His face had this intense look I'd never seen before.

"Once. The second jump ... I ran into myself at work..."

Somehow that one statement caused both Marshall and Dad to slip from their composed selves. Marshall came over and sat next to Melvin. Then Dad said, "Could be a hallucination of seeing himself. The actual memory colliding with the dive into the past."

"Maybe, but why don't I have another self here? The other me totally vanished from Spain."

"He hasn't been making full jumps!" Melvin said suddenly. His face had the same look of greedy excitement that Chief Marshall had in 1996. "The irony is just incredible. Half-breed makes half-jumps-"

"Melvin!" Dad said sharply.

"Half-breed?" I asked. "Half-jumps?"

Dead silence. Then Dad and Melvin both started talking at once.

"Well ... the gene isn't identical to the others," Melvin stammered.

"Not identical?" Okay, this was getting really weird.

"In doc.u.mented history. Melvin knows a little-"

"Enough!" Marshall said before staring straight at me. "Dr. Melvin is an expert in this recessive gene. Probably more knowledgeable than anyone in the world. The CIA has no choice but to closely monitor anyone carrying the Tempus gene. I think what we're dealing with is a simple matter of evolution. This is why you're different from other doc.u.mented cases. Change over the course of time."

Yeah, right. More missing pieces. Melvin's slip with the "half-breed" comment, and then I remembered Dad's slip the other night when he stormed out of the office.

He's nothing like them.

Maybe he just meant I wouldn't use my abilities to destroy the world. But other people would? Everyone except me?

"Technically, he did jump all the way once," Melvin said, looking over my shoulder. "He probably could-"

"Dr. Melvin, I think Jackson's heard enough for today." Dad stared at him and it was almost like his eyes were pleading with Melvin. "He's just a kid. You heard him, he said he can't do it again."

I hid my reaction to what Melvin had just said, like I didn't even get it. But I did. He was talking about what I had done when I left Holly.

A full jump. Changing my home base. That's why it was different.

"So the CIA is watching all these other time-traveling people? And they're all bad? Like, destroy-the-world bad?"

"It's complicated," Dad said. "The ones we know of are all working against us. We call them EOTs."

"EOTs?"