TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (12 page)

‘What’s up, Rashim?’

He hurried over and held his hand out.
‘Are these strawberries real too?’

Great. He’s found the fruit
counter.

Liam put some more boxes of Coco Pops in
the trolley. Bob looked down at them.

‘You already have five boxes of Coco
Pops.’

‘Aye, well, ’tis better to be
safe than sorry.’ He nudged Bob’s arm. ‘Anyway, you like them
too.’

‘They are acceptable to my digestive
system.’

‘Oh, come on … admit it, you
actually
like
them. I’ve seen the way you gobble ’em
down.’

‘They are low in protein. I require
large amounts of Coco Pops to sustain me.’

Liam offered him a sly grin. ‘I’ve
seen you slurp that chocolate milk, like a cat lapping cream.’

‘The milk is the more beneficial food
component of the two.’

Liam shrugged distractedly. ‘Ah
well.’ He surveyed the other cereal boxes stacked along the aisle. ‘Hey
look, Bob. You can even have Coco Pops with funny pink teddy bear shapes in it.’
He picked the cereal box up and held it closer to get a better look at the far too
colourful package design. ‘What do you reckon those little teddy bear fellas are
made of?’

Bob scowled disapprovingly. ‘Probably
nothing particularly nutritious.’

‘Maybe not, but it looks fun.’
Liam dropped the cereal box in the trolley. He smiled up at Bob. ‘You remember
what
fun
is
,
don’t you?’

‘I can supply a definition of the word
and several thousand cultural references to the word including –’

‘Never mind.’

7.25 a.m., 12 September 2001, North Haven
Plaza, outside Branford

Maddy brought the tray over to the booth
and sat down opposite Foster. He wasn’t looking so good this morning. Perhaps a
couple of sleepless nights hadn’t helped. Perhaps it was the artificial lighting
in this coffee shop. He’d looked healthier in Central Park: sun on his face and a
fresh breeze ruffling the tufts of snow-white hair on his head. Healthier and happier
back there.

‘Coffee, milky and sweet, just how you
and Liam like it.’

‘Thank you, Maddy.’

She sat down, grabbed her latte and looked
out across the mall. There was a toddlers’ play area and a fake palm tree, beyond
that the mini-supermarket where the others were food shopping. She thought she caught a
glimpse of the bristly top of Bob’s coconut head above an aisle. An hour’s
stop over here, that’s what she’d told them. An hour, grab something to eat,
then she wanted them all in the RV and back on the road. The further away they were from
New York, the better.

Foster sipped his coffee, testing the heat
with his lips. ‘I think it would be safer if you were to head somewhere else.
Somewhere other than Boston.’

‘Where, though?’

‘Anywhere.’

‘Why?’

He took his time answering. ‘I just
think it would be safer.’

‘They can’t know where
we’re going. We lost them, right? We got clean away.’

‘What if they know your family lives
in Boston?’

‘But those support
units … they don’t
know
me. They don’t know anything
about me. How the hell are they going to guess my folks live in Boston?’

‘They know
something
about
you, Maddy. They found you after all, didn’t they?’

‘They found our field office. Maybe
we’ve been … I dunno … leaking traceable tachyons. Maybe we
just got careless and left a breadcrumb trail? All the coming and going backwards and
forwards in time, that’s going to leave some kind of a mark, right? Some kind of a
trackable signature maybe?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. In
fact, you probably know as much, if not more, about this technology than I do
now.’

‘You think?’ She looked up from
her styrofoam cup at his craggy face, seeing the ghost of Liam in there among the folds
and wrinkles. ‘Maybe so,’ she said. ‘After all … not so very
long ago, you were just a young lad from Ireland, weren’t you?’

He looked like he was going to say
something, then laughed. ‘That’s about right.’

‘Foster, there’s something
I’ve always wanted to know.’

‘What?’

‘How we got picked. Selected. Me, Liam
and Sal. You too, I guess. I mean, who knew so much about us? Who knew I was on that
plane? Who knew Liam and you were on that particular deck on the
Titanic
? Who
knew exactly where Sal was in that burning building?’

‘I … don’t
know.’

‘And how come they knew we had the
necessary skills?’ She
rubbed her temple. ‘Not that
that’s helped so much. I’ve messed up more than I want to think
about.’

‘The three of you were perfect,’
he replied. ‘Perfect recruits,’ he added. ‘You’ve done so very
well.’ He patted her arm gently. The lightest touch. ‘Don’t be too
hard on yourself. From what I’ve heard you tell me, you’ve been busy saving
history over and over.’

‘Well, more like fighting fires. But
we’re here still. The world’s the same as it ever was. For what good that
does it.’

‘Oh, it’s important, Maddy.
History can’t be changed.’

‘Yeah, yeah … has to go one
particular way, I know.’ She lifted a plate of sausage patty bagels off the tray.
One for him, one for her, and more for the others when they finally came over to join
them. That is, if the bagels lasted that long. She was famished.

‘Did you have many missions, Foster?
You know … back when you were Liam, I guess.’

‘A few. Enough.’ His smile
looked sad. ‘Enough that I ended up like this. Old before my time.’

‘Long before your time.’ She
could cry for him, cry for this wizened old man sitting opposite her. ‘Foster, you
remember telling me about how travelling through time can age you?’

‘Yes.’

She almost stopped herself. ‘Were you
serious? Are you really only twenty-seven?’

‘I think so.’ He sighed.
‘Twenty-seven, perhaps twenty-six. It’s easy to lose count of the field
cycles.’

She could only imagine how Liam must feel
looking at him now that he knew this fate was awaiting him. That all too soon his body
was going to be irreversibly corrupted by time travel.

‘What were the others like? The team
you were with before us?’

‘Young. Like you … and having
to grow up fast.’ He looked away. His voice had faltered. He sipped his coffee,
gave himself a moment to regain his composure. ‘Only they never got a chance to
grow up properly.’

‘Were you very close?’

He nodded.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry. They lived an
extra life. They had extra time, so they did. Not many people get to have
that.’

‘You miss them much?’

His gaunt face wrinkled painfully. Maddy
realized this conversation was hurting him. ‘Stupid question, I’m an idiot.
I apologize, that was –’

He shook his head. ‘No need to
apologize. I have the three of you now. We’re just as much a family together as
the others.’

‘Family … see? That’s
why I think this is a good idea heading to Boston. Perhaps my folks can help out? The
way I figure it, now we’re
not
living in a resetting time loop, then that
money in the bank account won’t last forever. There’s just under twelve
thousand dollars in it. Now it doesn’t get to “reset” itself every
Monday morning, that money’s gonna go quickly. At least if we go see my mom and
dad, they might be able to lend us some money to tide us –’

‘Maddy. I think going to see your
parents is a
big
mistake.’

‘Why?’

She could see Foster was hesitating. He had
something to say and was fidgeting just like Liam tended to do when he was unsure of
himself. ‘Foster?’

‘Maybe those killer support units
do
know you. Maybe they know all about you.
Everything
about
you.’

She looked at him. He said that in a funny
way, like it was meant to mean so much more than just those words. ‘Foster?
What’s going on? What do you know? What’re you not telling
me?’

Just then she heard a scream. It echoed
across the quiet mall, drowning out the soft burble of mall music.

Sal.

She was running across the toddler play
area, kicking aside multicoloured plastic balls that had escaped the small ballpool.

‘
MADDY!
’ she screamed
again.

Maddy stood up and waved her arm, directing
her over. ‘SAL? We’re over here! What’s up?’

Sal corrected course towards them. Behind
her she could see Liam and the others scrambling out of the mini-mart, crossing the
space in the middle of the mall. Sal barged her way through the coffee-shop tables and
stools set up outside beneath a fake pampas-grass sunshade as if this was supposed to be
a coffee bar perched on the beach of some tropical island. Stools clattered,
pampas-grass parasols wobbled and tipped over. Sal finally came to a rest, bent over a
waist-high partition of fake sun-bleached wood, struggling for breath.

‘Sal? What’s up?’

‘They’re here!’ she
wheezed.

2054, outside Denver, Colorado

It was a small thing. An insignificant
thing, but Dr Joseph Olivera noticed Roald Waldstein left notes lying around from time
to time. The old man tended to prefer the old-fashioned pleasure of pen and paper as
opposed to tapping out his thoughts on a virtual keyboard.

Joseph Olivera noticed that habit of his
boss as they worked together setting up the archway field office. Scribbled notes on
pads of lined paper on the computer desk, most of it in Waldstein’s unique
shorthand: characters and glyphs that only he could make sense of. Joseph wondered how
such a brilliant person could be so scatterbrained, so messy. Or perhaps being untidy
went hand in hand with genius: the messier the desk, the more brilliant the mind?

His notepads of cryptic notes were scattered
everywhere and Waldstein was constantly rifling among his notes, cross-referencing them,
correcting them. It was on one of these pages filled with the swirls of
Waldstein’s writing that Joseph one day spotted the word ‘Pandora’. It
had been the only word on the pad
not
in Waldstein’s shorthand. Pandora,
of course, meant nothing to him. He suspected it was a codeword for one of the many
commercial projects Waldstein worked on simultaneously. He knew his boss was working on
several projects sponsored by the US military. Technology they’d inevitably want
to adapt to weapons systems.

Joseph knew the man was no fool. Waldstein was
a genius. But also a ruthless businessman. His technology patents went to the highest
bidder even if ultimately it meant his inventions were to be turned into devices for
killing, maiming.

Pandora
then … a word he
noted on a scrap of paper, and promptly forgot about.

The
agency
, or the
New York
Project
,
as Waldstein sometimes referred to it, became
‘active’ on Friday 4 September 2054. An occasion marked only by Joseph and
Frasier Griggs. From the comfort and safety of a private research lab at W.G.
Systems’ main research campus building in Wyoming, hidden a dozen miles away from
the nearest town – Pinedale – amid tall, balding Douglas firs clinging to the valley
slopes, the pair of them quietly clinked two glasses of Soyo-Vina Rouge in celebration
and began to monitor the archway beneath the Williamsburg Bridge in a place called
Brooklyn, New York, in the year 2001. They scanned for potential tachyon leakage or any
emergency signal bursts.

Meanwhile, Waldstein had insisted on staying
behind in 2001 to directly mentor the team. He wanted his to be the first face they saw
as they woke up in their bunk beds. He wanted to be the father figure to the three of
them. Said it was important that they wholly trusted him.

‘
They’ll be disorientated
and frightened when they first come round
,’ he said. ‘
I want to
be there for them
.’

And so Waldstein’s top-secret project
had begun: one team, one field office, and all of history for them to watch out for and
protect.

The agency was Waldstein’s back-up
plan to keep history safe. That’s what he’d once told Joseph. It was his
B plan
.

His
A plan
had been his very public
campaign three years ago to ensure that the world’s leaders signed up to an
international law forbidding any nation from continuing to develop time-travel
technology. It was to be a banned science. But he was wily enough to
realize that in this troubled time, while every world leader might publicly denounce the
technology, secretly they’d be vigorously funding it. Working on it. Desperate to
be the first world power with the ability to take control of time itself: the ultimate
weapons system.

‘
I want the New York Project to be
self-reliant
,’ Waldstein confided in Joseph.

‘
Once it’s up and running,
the team will have to manage their own affairs, decide their own mission priorities.
They must be entirely self-sufficient.
’

The team would have all the data, equipment,
critical replacement parts they needed: spare support unit foetuses, growth tubes, spare
component boards for the displacement machine. Anything else they might need they could
buy from a hardware or electronics store back in 2001.

‘
Here in 2054 we must have as
little contact with them as possible. We cannot be directly linked to them, Joseph.
I cannot afford to be caught dabbling in time travel like this
.
I must have
a plausible, believable … deniability.
’

The team in 2001, then, was to be left
entirely to their own devices. Griggs was the most vociferous on that. They had to
survive on their own. No way could there be any interaction between the team and them.
It could lead to their discovery in 2054. Their arrest. And the penalty under
international law – ‘Waldstein’s Law’ – was rightly severe: the death
penalty.