- At least 17 men have been executed in the last two decades without a clear motive, with the same gun. FBI Special Agent Jamie Pratt has to find how some of those murders were carried out when the gun had not yet been made.
- FBI Special Agent Jamie Pratt is working on a case involving a serial killer. They've found series of murders - some as far back as 30 years ago - where the victims were all killed with the same gun. They seem to have one victim per year over those 30 years and the murders are spread across the country. They can find no connection between the victims however. They get a break when recently declassified information shows that the gun used in all the murders was manufactured only a few years before and issued to a Dr. Theresa Givens at the National Security Agency. It makes no sense and no one can figure out how a recent gun could have been used in a murder 30 years ago. Givens left the NSA six months ago after her project was canceled and is now a university professor. Finding out the nature of that canceled project will give them the answers they seek.—garykmcd
- Timelines Prologue On August 21, 1966, Robert Beck walks into his room in his run-down house backed up against the railroad tracks. He looks out as a train rumbles by. Then he turns to a corkboard on a wall facing the window. He starts ripping off and ripping up snapshots he has taken and developed, all depicting the same much younger woman. As he works, he starts sobbing and trembling, and finally collapses on a couch.
And then someone turns on a lamp. A woman, age thirty-five, with straight red hair and a hard-bitten, driven face. She demands that he confirm his identity as Robert Beck, and then announces that he was executed - twenty-nine years into the future - for the murder of eight women. "And I am here to carry out that just and legal sentence." When he says he doesn't understand, she says, "Only one of us has to." And without another word she shoots him twice in the chest, then once in the forehead between the eyes.
And then she unclips from her belt a hand-held device and presses a button on it. An oval-shaped field full of shifting burnt-orange light forms before her. She steps through it, leaving Beck alone.
Timeline 1
In July of 1996, FBI Special Agent Corey Lonn comes to visit his good friend, SA Jaime Pratt. After she fields yet another telephone call from a reporter asking for salacious details about her best friend, and about the man who murdered and dismembered her (for it was Pratt herself who tracked him and brought him to justice), Corey hands her the file: Robert Beck, the seventeenth case they now know of of men who all died from acts of murder, all committed with a 9-mm Smith and Wesson, each with two chest shots and one head shot, distributed evenly in time: one a year since a case in Miami, Florida, in 1956. The baffling thing about these cases is that the targets have no connection that they all share. Some, but not all, were arrested for minor sex offenses before they died.
Corey tries to make a date with Jamie, but Jamie demurs, because her current interest, a patrolman named Warren, finally agreed to a date: dinner in her apartment. As the two are enjoying one another's company, Corey calls with a fresh finding: the Robert Beck file has a fingerprint on a table lamp, that matches one Dr. Theresa Givens, consultant at the National Security Agency. The problem: Dr. Givens was only five years old on the night of Robert Beck's murder.
Pratt agrees to see Dr. Givens about it. The next morning she appears at the University where Dr. Givens is a professor of theoretical physics. Her specialty: the physics of time, and the perception of it by human beings. She is talking about her identification of the tempore discernus, the region of the cerebral cortex that governs time perception, that is best developed in a seven-month-old unborn human child. An anti-abortion activist interrupts the lecture at that point, but Pratt is able to see Givens afterward. Givens naturally cannot explain, nor figure out, why her fingerprint wound up on a table lamp in a murdered man's house while she was in kindergarten.
That night, two things happen. One, Warren stands up Jamie and carelessly lets his other date's laughter carry into the telephone for Jamie to overhear. In anger, she slams down his tabletop portrait and cuts herself on the broken glass. Two, Dr. Givens returns to the murder scene in August of 1966 to wipe off the print on the table lamp where she had turned it on.
Timeline 2
The second happening, of course, changes the time line. We perceive that by watching as Jamie Pratt is first looking at Dr. Givens' file, and then suddenly looking at a different file, in an era in which she has made a different choice of roses (yellow instead of red) for her desk, and even the telephones ring at a different musical pitch. The injury to her hand has still occurred in this timeline.
Corey walks in and introduces the name of Theresa Givens, this time in a different connection. They explore this with a ballistics expert at the gun range (where Jamie demonstrates she is a crack shot). A 9-mm Smith and Wesson, issued to Dr. Theresa Givens in 1989, also fired bullets recovered from the body of a two-bit sugar pimp who is one of the Nine-Millimeter targets.
The two agents forget about the Nine-Millimeter series for awhile, as Jerome Horowitz, convicted serial murderer, gives his last interview before his execution. He reveals when his spree began: on February 16, 1980, the day after his twenty-first birthday. He invited people at work to a party at his house and nobody came. One Cindy Vetterman, the most popular girl at his workplace, said she would come, and didn't. So the day afterward, he went to a park for lunch. He sat on a bench thinking about her. Later that same day he killed her and dismembered her. And he would do it again, sixteen times. His last victim: Allison Morris, friend of Jamie Pratt.
The execution does not bring Pratt the closure she had sought, and only Corey understands this.
But Dr. Givens also watches that interview. The next day she buys a newspaper carrying this headline: Horowitz Executed. Then she opens the door to her laboratory and starts her time portal. And so, on February 16, 1980, young Jerome Horowitz is feeding the ducks in a pond when a fiery doorway opens, and a thirty-five-year-old driven woman steps through and demands that he confirm his identity. Following her pattern, Givens describes how she found him, and announces the date of his execution. "I am here to carry out that just and legal sentence!" she says, and then, with her usual three shots, carries it out.
Timeline 3 Theresa Givens returns from this trip through time to find a newspaper on her desk bearing a completely different headline.
In the FBI office, the Nine-millimeter Series corkboard now has a new face on it: that of Jerome Horowitz.
And Allison Morris, very much alive, will visit Jamie Pratt and ask her to join her for lunch.
But right before this happens, Corey fills Jamie in on some research: at the age of fifteen, Theresa Givens was kidnapped, raped, and beaten nearly to death. "Sex offender; victim of a sex crime," says Jamie. But how could a gun, issued to her, kill both before and after it gets built?
After this conversation, Allison tries to suggest the lunch date, and also suggests Jamie ditch Warren and go out with Corey instead. Jamie promises Allison they will get together the next day.
Jamie goes to the University to ask Theresa Givens about the matter of her gun being implicated in forty-year-old murders, though it had not even been built yet. And in this timeline, Jamie walks through the open door into the laboratory, where Givens startles her by recognizing her. And then Givens dumbfounds her by describing time travel, describing her attempt "to set things right," and trying to recruit her. Dr. Givens has a problem: a time traveler remembers both the time line he came from, and the time line as it changes. Dr. Givens has done this twenty times by her reckoning (whether that's a rough estimate or Jamie Pratt never saw two of the Nine-Millimeter cases, the script does not make clear), and cannot do it anymore--because it damanges her brain every time. But now she decides to jump back into time once more--to confront her original assailant. Pratt tries to arrest her, but Givens activates the machine and steps through the portal. Pratt, seeing her disappear, draws her own service automatic and steps through the portal after her.
On October 28, 1976, a criminal drags a kicking and screaming girl--the young Theresa Givens--into his cellar. After he tells her his intentions, Theresa Givens comes through first and draws her gun on him. But he draws his gun and points it at the young girl's head. Next, Jamie Pratt comes through and tries to defuse the situation. Instead, the elder Dr. Givens lowers her weapon and steps forward. The assailant throws the younger Theresa aside, shoots the elder in the chest--and then falls to a single headshot by Pratt. The elder Givens, as she lies dying, urges Pratt to send the younger Theresa out of that cellar and back home. The dying Theresa then gives Jamie her portal opener and tells her to use it while the using is good.
Timeline 4
When Jamie Pratt steps back through the portal, the laboratory disappears and becomes just another extension of Theresa Givens' personal library. And Pratt also realizes her best friend has been murdered, and the murderer executed. She goes back to the office and in a fever of desperation opens Allison Morris' case file. "It's not fair!" she cries. Corey asks after her, and the two of them decide they will start to go out together after all.
But there is one more thing Pratt must do. So she goes to the University to see Dr. Theresa Givens. Whom she finds calmly telling some students to imagine witnessing Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address, or being in Paris when Charles A. Lindbergh lands. Pratt asks Givens whether she built the machine, and Givens, after recognizing Pratt as the one who saved her, confirms it.
In the last scene, February 16, 1980 gets another rerun. Jerome Horowitz is feeding the ducks when, as before, the time portal opens. Only this time Jamie Pratt steps through. "Are you Jerome Horowitz?" she asks. He confirms it. And then, without a word, she shoots him down.
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