And men in black always looked like men in black.That had been his decision.He’d wanted to provoke a reaction from the girl and see what happened.
Well, now he knew what he’d suspected.She was smarter than she looked.
“Okay, here’s what we do,” he said, and began issuing instructions.
Chapter6
Present day.
“Is there any sign of him?”Jack asked, leaning over the back of Mel’s chair to see her computer screen.
“No,” Mel said, a spike of worry hitting at her concentration.“But I also found found this in one of the images from the press conference.”
Mel pulled the blown-up image to the front of her tabs and then zoomed in on the relevant section.
“Men in Black?”
“Alice has been been checking, but there weren’t any men in black or anything like them during that time.”
Jack rubbed his face.“You think they are from the future?”
“Ty and Alice have been talking about that and what it might mean if they are.Or were.”Mel was very glad to have both their brains on the team.They needed fresh eyes, fresh brains, new points of view.It was painfully easy to get caught up in the merry-go-round that was time travel.
Jack took the chair next to hers, swiveling it to face her.Despite his visible worry, his smile was the one he saved for her alone.She felt better as she returned the smile and leaned back in her chair.
“Alice has a great brain.She starts with a question, adds more questions until she can’t think of anymore, and then she starts trying to find answers.”
“And what question or questions have got you thinking?”Jack asked.
“Well, we were wondering how to find the other time travelers and we came up with a plan.No, that’s not the right word.We came up with a question that could lead to a plan.”
“What question?”
“What if they are doing the same thing as we are?”
Jack rocked slowly, nodded even more slowly, as the worry in his face increased.
“They can’t do what we’re doing.”
“No,” Mel agreed.“We’ve been careful about not getting our faces in the wrong photographs.They’d need a different plan.”
“Did Alice or Ty have any ideas what they might try to do?”
Mel leaned toward him, taking his hands in hers.“They think their best move would be to set a trap for us.”
Jack’s hands stiffened in hers, but he didn’t pull away.
“A trap.”His voice went flat, erased of all inflection.
“We know they aren’t stupid,” Mel said.“They can think the same things we do, come to the same conclusions.Maybe they tried doing image searches thinking because they were in the future, they could find us.”
“They almost did,” Jack pointed out.
Mel didn’t like thinking about that, but she considered his words now.
“It didn’t feel like a targeted attack,” she said, finally.“It was too broad stroke—and if they knew enough to really go after us, wouldn’t they have done it when we were younger and more vulnerable?”
“There is that,” Jack agreed, his expression sober.
