Business as usual
Torenz propped his feet on a tiny desk and leaned back in his chair, the springs in the old metal frame squawking in complaint. His fingers were laced behind his head and his eyes were closed. In his mind, he listened to the thoughts of a man thousands of miles away and nearly 1,940 years into the future.
“Twenty-seven equals D. L is…Y.”
The man in the future, a telepath planted among the Allied coders of World War II, paused in his thoughts, so Torenz scribbled what he’d heard onto the yellowed notepad on his lap. The man began writing code again.
“Seven not procee—” The voice faded.
Torenz shoved his feet against the desk and rolled his chair across the dingy room, close to the giant violet wormhole that nearly covered one wall. The other telepath was weak, and the anomaly was damaged, getting worse every day. Proximity helped. As he closed on it, his skin tingles increased to the point they became painful. The smell of ozone stung his nose, making him want to sneeze.
The telepathic connection strengthened with the future again. “—by alternate even number…A. The Nazis will never break that one on their own.”
Sneering, Torenz wrote the last bit of code in his notebook. The Allied commanders all foolishly believed that, somehow, the Nazis had managed to break every code they’d ever written.
It wasn’t the Nazis.
It had always been him and his telepathic contacts stealing the code right out from under the Allied noses. He’d send it to his boss in the far future, who in turn would send it back through time to the Nazi war command.
He had other contacts in WWII too. Officials were still trying to figure out if John Cairncross was the fifth of the famous Cambridge Five spies. They couldn’t make a solid connection between him and the Soviets. The truth—Cairncross was one of Torenz’s.
No one believed in telepaths.
Even if they did, they’d never catch Torenz where he hid.
With a deep sigh at the idiocy of men, he cut the connection between himself and the coder and rolled back to his desk, lessening the effect the wormhole created on his skin.
He reached again into the future with his mind, but much further than World War II. It only took a split second to find the telepath in his employer’s office and form the link between 1 AD and the end of the 21st Century.
Wendy L. Koenig 