TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (16 page)

2055, outside Denver, Colorado

Joseph Olivera had got to know Frasier
Griggs quite well. Griggs was the only other man in the world, other than Roald
Waldstein, of course, who knew of the TimeRiders’ existence.

Frasier Griggs was Waldstein’s
lesser-known junior partner. Where Waldstein was the source of the patents, the ideas
man, the genius, Griggs was the practical other half: the software designer behind
Waldstein’s prototypes, the builder; the Steve Wozniak to Waldstein’s Steve
Jobs. Although most people assumed the ‘G’ in W.G. Systems was in memory of
Waldstein’s dead son, Gabriel, Griggs was in fact the ‘Real G’. The
company’s first stakeholder, the fledgling company’s first employee and
perhaps the closest thing to a friend that Waldstein had ever had. Hell, on his desk,
Griggs even had a tea mug with that printed on the side –
The Real G
.

The TimeRiders team established in 2001
became effectively ‘active’, and monitoring their activities began on 4
September 2054. On a day-to-day basis, Joseph and Griggs were the ‘base
team’ doing that.

Only four months after the team started
functioning, things began to go wrong. On 3 January 2055, they received a broad-burst
tachyon signal from 2001. A malfunction with the field office’s displacement field
had caused the first team to be killed. They’d received a garbled plea for help
from one of them who’d
managed to survive. Griggs panicked. For
the first time since working for Waldstein, Joseph saw his boss’s normally
ice-cool composure slip.

It wasn’t that the team had been
destroyed that unsettled him; it was the fact that one of them had been careless enough
to send an unencrypted, widespread tachyon signal. It was sheer blind luck for Waldstein
that the message hadn’t included a mention of his name. But it might as well have,
given he was quite likely the only person in the world, at that moment, with the
know-how to send a traveller back in time.

That short signal could have been picked up
by labs right across the world, and it could only mean one thing for everyone who might
have detected it: that somebody was already up and running with viable displacement
technology.

Joseph remembered Griggs and Waldstein
having a blazing row that morning. One held behind closed doors, not meant for Joseph to
hear, but the one word he did pick out from their heated exchange was the word
‘Pandora’.

Waldstein had little choice. Either he had
to go back to 2001 and set things up all over again, or he had to send a message to the
survivor, instructing him on how to set things up for himself.

Waldstein wanted to go back, but Griggs
insisted that another trip back to 2001 was pushing their luck too far. If this was it,
if this meant the premature end of their project, then so be it. Better than the three
of them facing a lethal injection.

Joseph soon learned who’d sent the
message, who the sole survivor was. It was Liam O’Connor. A second message arrived
after the first, this time via the safe method: the personal advert. A field
malfunction, that’s what he’d said.
Equipment failure
. The Liam
unit had been aged chronically by a sudden blast of tachyon radiation that had bathed
the entire archway with a lethal dose.
The other two units
hadn’t stood a chance. They’d died in their sleep.

Waldstein replied with a detailed packet of
instructions. And not a single word of support or comfort. But then that was it,
wasn’t it? The Liam unit was merely a piece of equipment to Waldstein: a
disposable asset. Joseph had wondered how the man could be so cold; in a way, the Liam
unit was as much a part of Waldstein as he was a part of Joseph’s programming.

Poor Liam. He’d be alone back there.
Alone, and suddenly aware now of what he was. Joseph felt for him. The boy was so young
and yet now so old and quite clearly entirely on his own. The ‘base team’
was offering him instructions from afar and that was pretty much all the support the
poor man had.

That was the first thing. The second
misfortune happened not long after.

A contamination event had occurred in 1941.
It appeared the event had been corrected by the re-established team but one of the team
had been killed. The observer unit: Saleena Vikram. They needed to grow a new one with
an adjusted memory: one that would allow her to be inserted into the existing team. Some
tricky synaptic programming there for Joseph to do.

There was no avoiding it; they were going to
need to carry out the ‘edit job’ on the Saleena unit here in 2055, then send
it back.

That was it for Griggs. Too much. He wanted
out. There was another blazing row between him and Waldstein behind closed glass doors.
This time Joseph picked out one word several times over.
Pandora.
And Griggs
screaming at Waldstein, ‘Why? Why do you want that to happen?’

The third thing was Griggs’s death a
few days later. It was sudden, unexpected and left Joseph feeling distinctly uncertain
about this whole project.

The night before he died, Griggs had been on
edge. He’d also been drinking. Joseph didn’t get much sense out of Frasier
other than he’d told Waldstein he’d finally decided he was going to leave
this project, that he didn’t want to have anything more to do with ‘this
madness’.

The next day Frasier Griggs was found dead
several miles outside W.G. Systems’ Pinedale, Wyoming campus. The official verdict
was that some ‘flood migrants’ must have ambushed him. There were plenty of
them out here now – the displaced, the desperate, the hungry – millions of them from the
various east-coast states partially or completely submerged by the advancing Atlantic
Ocean. The lucky rich lived in fortified urbanizations. The rest in large displacement
camps. That’s how it was. The haves and the have-nots separated by coils of razor
wire and private security firms.

It could have occurred as the official
verdict stated: that poor Frasier had just set his Auto-Drive to take him home along the
wrong road at the wrong time and the hastily erected roadblock, the subsequent murder
and vehicle theft were just another sad sign of these dark times.

But then Joseph discovered something that
made him suddenly very frightened of Waldstein. Griggs’s personal
digi-pen
– a very expensive one modelled to look like an old-fashioned
fountain pen – was sitting in Griggs’s
Real G
mug like some carelessly
discarded biro. Something he never did. He had a brass holder for his digi-pen and it
always nestled there when not in use – one of his obsessive-compulsive habits.
He’d never leave it like that, poking out of his mug.

So that’s why Joseph picked it up and
thumbed the control nub.

A memo. It wasn’t even
password-locked. It was the last entry recorded on Griggs’s digi-pen. He must have
recorded it not
long after he’d rowed with Waldstein. He sounded
angry still. Perhaps even frightened.

‘
He’s insane. The
man’s completely insane, Joseph
.’ Griggs’s words were badly
slurred. He must have carried on drinking after Joseph had bid him goodnight.

‘
I think he wants the whole world
to die, Joseph. That’s what Pandora is. It’s the end of the world. Roald
knows all about it. When it happens, how it happens. And you and I … and
those poor clones back in 2001 … we’re here to make sure it happens
that way.
’

A pause. Joseph heard the slosh of liquid,
the clink of a glass. The sound of a gulp.

‘
You know … that first
time he used a time machine? Back in ’44. I don’t think he went back in
time to see his wife, his son, like he always claimed. No. I think he went forward.
I think he discovered how mankind finally kills itself off. And all
this … everything … his campaign against time travel, this
little project, those poor lab rats back there in New York in that archway, you and
me … it’s all been to make for certain it damn well happens that
way
.
We’ve been played for fools, you and me, Joseph.
Fools!
’

Another pause.

‘
You can stop this, Joseph.
I … can’t. He won’t let me back in after what I said. He
won’t trust me anywhere near this project. I should’ve shut my mouth. I
shouldn’t have confronted him. But it’s done. I’m out of the
circle of trust … and that’s how it is. But you can do something.
You’re all he has now. He trusts you. You could derail this thing! Sabotage
it!
’

The sound of heavy breathing, rustling
across the mic.

‘
Joseph. History has to be
changed. Do you understand? Not preserved … but changed
. You have to
do it! You’ve got to steer us all away from wiping ourselves out!’

Another pause.

‘
God forgive me for my part in all
of this …
’

12 September 2001, North Haven Plaza,
Branford, Connecticut

‘We’re going to have to pull in
a lot of favours to keep the lid on this, Agent Cooper.’

‘That’s what favours are for,
aren’t they? Rainy days like this.’ Cooper looked around the entrance foyer
of the shopping mall. It looked like a thousand other malls, all pastel plastic fascias
and plastic plants. Faux Greco-Roman columns and Doric archways. Only this one was
decorated with icing-sugar granules of glass scattered across the fake marble floor,
shopping bags discarded in the stampede to exit. Several drops and smears of dried blood
dotted here and there.

‘What cover story are we putting
out?’

‘Armed robbery that went
wrong.’

‘Good.’ Cooper nodded. Keeping
it simple. If there’d been a whiff of ‘terrorist’ to it, the press
would be all over this story. That had been his first instinct, a
‘terrorist’ cover story that some conspirators involved with the Twin Towers
incident – some of the press were calling it
9/11
now … a catchy term
for it – had been identified and put under surveillance: the men had been a terrorist
cell attempting to lie low for a while, until things settled down and vigilance levels
dropped once more and they could have a go at slipping past immigration and out of the
country,
but they’d been followed and caught as they headed
upstate from New York.

If Cooper had gone with that cover story,
this car park would have been crawling with news-station broadcast vans and reporters
doing pieces to camera. Instead, a simple ‘armed robbery gone wrong’ story
didn’t have the same pulling power right now. They had the mall to themselves for
a day or two. A crime scene: every entrance taped off and guarded by a uniformed
officer.

‘We got CCTV coverage of most of the
incident.’

‘That’s all been
confiscated?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Cooper had already seen some of it.
Digitally copied and enhanced to make it a little clearer. There was no mistaking the
fact that the two armed people, one man and one woman, had been hit several times in the
opening crossfire. And yet they’d walked on as if nothing had happened, leaving an
easy-to-follow trail of blood droplets in their wake.

Cooper looked up at the escalator, one glass
side of it shattered. Then at the railing running round the horseshoe-shaped balcony of
the floor above. A twenty-foot drop down to where they were now standing.

Incredible.

‘The female really jumped down from up
there?’

‘That’s what the eyewitnesses
said.’

‘They’ll need to be informed
they were mistaken, or that the woman shattered her legs and spine on impact.’

‘They saw her get up and take several
steps.’

Cooper looked at Agent Mallard, one of the
few FBI agents his limited budget allowed him to deputize into The Department. Mallard
was young, eager to impress. Ready to do as he was told. ‘That’s what they
thought
they saw, Mallard. Do you
understand? What they
thought
they saw in the heat of the moment. The mind plays tricks on what
you think you’ve seen in a situation like this.’

‘Right,
yes … sir.’

‘The male one?’

‘Preliminary autopsy’s already
been done.’

‘And?’

Mallard hesitated. ‘The report says he
sustained thirty-seven separate gunshot wounds.’

‘Thirty-seven?’

‘Yes, sir. The police officers who
were interviewed said they only managed to bring him down after four or five successful
head shots.’

Cooper kept his face impassive, his response
measured. This wasn’t the place for outbursts of incredulity. He also needed to be
sure his new recruit fully understood the situation. ‘Mallard?’

‘Sir?’

‘You’re going to
see
some things,
learn
things that – I’ll be frank with you – most Presidents
don’t even get to know about. You understand, once you’re in The Department,
you’re in it for good?’

‘That was made clear to me,
sir.’

‘Good. Now … take me to
where they’re holding the other one, the female. I want to talk with her
directly.’

12 September 2001, Interstate 90, Newton,
Massachusetts

The rest of the drive up to Boston had been
quiet. Liam, Maddy and Sal all silent with their own thoughts. The two support units sat
perfectly still; Bob was busy as he drove, sorting through packets of code and
prioritizing the most useful bits to upload to Becks. She sat in the back, still as a
shop mannequin, as she digested the code floating back to her. Rashim gazed out of the
window at more of a world he’d only ever seen in video-film files, while
SpongeBubba chirped exclamations full of childlike wonder every now and then.

So very much like a child with that squeaky
voice and slight lisp …

Look, skippa! A RED car!

Hey! That man’s re-eally
fat!

Maddy wondered why Rashim would deliberately
choose to hack his robot’s code to be so grating. But that was it, wasn’t
it? The faults, the irritating traits and annoying behavioural ticks, the imperfections
and phobias … it’s those things that make us human. That’s why he
made his lab unit so irritating. Less of a soulless machine.