Read The Traveler for Free Online

the murderers of the many technicians of the doorway could reach the elevator, exploding water from the destroyed Möhne Dam was forced from the conduit tunnel. The furious flow of water burst forth like the rush of an oncoming train. The laboratory started filling fast with water from the collapsing dam.
    *   *   *
    The girl saw the explosions with the view she had of the doorway before it collapsed. Her eyes had found the frightened visage of her baby brother as the world she knew vanished before her eyes. She reached up at the spinning vortex of color as their eyes met and that was when she saw the frightened face of her brother turn to shock as the bullets ripped into the floor near him. Then the doorway closed forever and she was left with her hand reaching for nothing but the blackness that was the bunker. Moira Mendelsohn collapsed to the floor with the newspaper clutched in her hand.
    Three hours later the young woman who had become the first time traveler in the history of the world broke open the door that led to the clean fresh air of the outdoors. It smelled wonderful. She looked at the stars above and took a deep breath.
    The Traveler vanished into the Wellsian Doorway on that dark night back in 1943—and then disappeared again into a war-torn world of 1942—almost one year before she vanished the first time.
    The Wellsian Doorway was closed and would not be opened again for close to a century.

 
    PART ONE
    DEPARTMENT 5656
    This is a tale left unfinished … so let us conclude the story our way.

    â€”Dr. Niles Compton, director,
    Department 5656,
    National Archives

 
    1
    ST. JUDE’S CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
    The nondescript Black Hawk UH-60 helicopter eased its large bulk onto the painted heliport atop the hospital normally used to airlift critically ill patients to one of the most prestigious hospitals in the world. Before the wheels set down, one of the men in the passenger compartment felt the eyes on them in the darkness of the heliport. He knew that with those eyes came weapons—weapons that were right now trained on them and their air force flight crew.
    Colonel Jack Collins looked over at his boss, Director Niles Compton, who was just placing paperwork back into his briefcase. Jack watched as the director removed the wire-rimmed glasses from his face and then watched as the fifty-one-year-old Compton rubbed the black eye patch that covered his right socket. Compton realized the colonel was watching him and quickly lowered his hand and replaced the glasses.
    The two security men Jack had assigned to escort them to Los Angeles were politely not paying attention to the director nor his recent deformity received during the war with the Grays the previous month. The two men, Diaz and Voorhees, both U.S. Marines, were dressed in civilian attire. Collins unsnapped the seat belt and waited on Compton to gather his things just as the sliding door of the Black Hawk was opened from the outside. Before anyone could stand to leave, a rather large man in a navy blue Windbreaker stepped up to the door with four other men attired in the exact same manner. Jack assisted Niles as he maneuvered his cane to support his badly injured right leg. Collins knew Compton would never walk without the support of the cane again.
    As Niles Compton straightened in the dying wind of the helicopter’s rotors, Jack thought it beyond curious that Compton was now afflicted with the same war-won deformities that their benefactor, Senator Garrison Lee, had suffered with since his final days in World War II. He didn’t know if the sight was ironic, or just a cruel joke for the man who was the most humanitarian gentleman he had ever known—notwithstanding the fact that he was also the most brilliant man in government service, if not the world. The respect he had for the director had grown leaps and bounds since he had first met Niles back in the summer of