TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (31 page)

‘Difference is … we
know
our lives are a funny joke, Liam.’

‘You can never know anything for sure,
Sal. In the end, it’s all a question of what you choose to believe.’ He
watched a cloud of his breath drift away – turning, twisting, dissipating in the cold
afternoon air.

‘Thing is … I choose to be
Liam. I like him.’ He smiled at her. ‘I like being him. And maybe he was
once a real lad who lived in Cork and I’m just borrowing his memories, or maybe
he’s just a made-up person put together from bits and pieces. Who
cares?’

‘But that’s no better
than …’ She struggled to think of an example. ‘That’s no better
than a child pretending to be Superman. No better than all those people who believe in
God. Or Jehovah. Or Allah, or Vishnu, or –’

‘Maybe.’ He shrugged. ‘But
it works for me.’

She sighed. ‘I can’t do it,
Liam,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t think I can pretend I’m who I
thought I was. All I’ve got that’s real is the time in the archway. You.
Maddy.’

He pointed at what was clasped in her hands.
‘Is that why you’ve got that with you all the time?’

Sal looked down at the notebook – her diary
– and nodded. ‘That’s me, Liam.’ A solitary tear dripped on to the
scuffed black cover. She wiped it off irritably. ‘That’s all there is left
of me. Ink and paper.’

A crow cawed from the bare branches beyond
the chain-link fence surrounding the playground. The solitary, ominous noise of
approaching winter.

‘Sal?’ He reached out and
squeezed her gloved hand. ‘Don’t do this, Sal. Eh? Don’t drift off and
away from me an’ Maddy. We need you, so we do. The three of us need to hold fast
together. To stay a proper team.’

‘Need me? What do I do?
Nothing.’

‘You will do. When we’re set up
again in London, we’ll need you watching for them little changes. Up in the centre
of the city, Piccadilly Circus maybe, watching for the time waves.’

She gave that a moment’s thought.
Perhaps he was right. Perhaps there was a purpose for her still. She wiped her nose and
sniffed noisily. Then sniggered.

Liam smiled. ‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘No, go on. What’s so
funny?’

‘Something you said.’

‘I said something funny?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s
nothing.’ Her face brightened for him. ‘You’re right. We’ve
still got a job to do, haven’t we?’

‘Aye. So come in, then, Sal. Before
you freeze.’

‘I will. You go. I’ll be along
in a minute.’

‘All right. I’m makin’
some hot chocolate. Care for some?’ He cocked a brow. ‘There’ll be a
fair chance of some of them nice chocolate biscuits with the cream in the
middle.’

‘Oreos.’

‘Aye, those are the fellas.’

‘Sure. Count me in.’

She watched him go, kicking those leaves
again on the way back to the double doors of the school gymnasium, blue paint flaking
off both and a rusting push-bar on one of them. The door clattered shut behind him.

Something you said,
Liam … something funny. Really funny.

‘Perhaps the whole universe is just a
big pretend?’ she muttered softly.

No, actually, not that funny after all.

7 October 2001, Washington DC

Faith appraised Agent Cooper. Unlike most
humans he appeared to be very task-focused, very
driven
. One could say binary,
almost
Boolean
, in his mindset. He could almost have passed as one of her
short-lived batch of clone brothers and sisters. Except, of course, he wasn’t six
foot six inches tall and carrying around eighteen stone of muscle and dense-lattice
bone. He was just as frail and vulnerable as any other human being: one of her hands
round his neck and a quick twist and he’d be burger meat in a suit. That
unfortunate frailty notwithstanding … she’d so far been quite impressed
with his performance.

She resumed eating the bowl of Cow &
Gate baby food.

Cooper in turn was silently appraising her.
Perched on the edge of his desk, he grimaced as he watched her spoon the baby food into
her mouth. ‘I can’t believe you can chow down that stuff.’

‘It is an optimal formula,’ she
replied with her mouth full. ‘Maximum nutrition with a minimum of energy consumed
in the process of breaking it down and digesting it.’

She noticed he was looking at her intently.
‘What is it, Agent Cooper?’

‘You’ve,
uh … you’ve got a blob of that stuff right there on the end of your
nose.’

She remained staring at him – a face that
seemed to be wondering why that mattered in any meaningful way.

‘It’s not a good look,
Faith.’ He leaned forward, reached out with a finger and deftly flicked it
away.

‘
Not a good look
,’ she
mimicked him. An almost exact copy of his southern Virginian accent.
‘Why?’

‘Why … why? Because you
don’t want to look like some sort of day-release outpatient from a
nuthouse.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘You’re odd enough without dried baby
food plastered all over your face. If you’re going to be working alongside me, we
need you to not attract any attention. I’m pretty much exceeding my authority
letting you down here as it is.’

Faith finished her food, put down the bowl
and carefully wiped round her mouth. ‘I understand.’

Cooper really had stuck his neck out.
He’d brought her to The Department a couple of weeks ago. Ushered her past several
ID checks, pulling rank on the security personnel. And now here she was down on the
mezzanine floor in his domain – the ‘catacombs’ – being kept here like some
sort of a pet.

Truth was he didn’t know what to do
with her. She couldn’t be left to her own devices roaming around Boston conducting
her very own hunt-and-seek mission, murdering who she pleased because she might just
consider them ‘a contaminant’ – whatever the heck that was really supposed
to mean. And he didn’t want to kill her. She was all he had. She was his only
connection to whoever these mysterious time travellers were.

What he had was not very much: an autopsy
report on Faith’s dead colleague, and a tiny chunk of fried circuitry pulled from
his head that wasn’t anything more now than an interesting fingernail-sized nugget
of silicon and graphene.

This creature, this flesh-and-blood
robot-woman, was the best piece of evidence he had that he wasn’t going mad; that
time travel had been quietly going on right in front of everyone’s nose for God
knows how long. For God knows how many
decades. Cooper couldn’t
even begin to contemplate how valuable the treasure trove of knowledge residing in that
digital mind of hers was.

But right now the only investigative process
he had on the go was Agent Mallard out there doing the donkey work to track down and
confiscate all the CCTV footage that he could lay his hands on. There was the footage
from the mall, but also a petrol station, a diner and a motel they’d used the day
before. Mallard had already brought back several boxes of tapes, and from those there
were some not bad, albeit grainy images of their faces that they’d managed to
isolate and enhance.

But that was it. Other than Mallard’s
legwork, and hoping for a lead to turn up, he had this unlikely ‘woman’ in
front of him.

‘I know I keep saying this,’ he
said, breaking the long silence, ‘but if you just shared with me the data you have
on them, I could put it to good use. I can get priority access to the Bureau’s IT
department. We can tap all sorts of databases … medical insurance, local and
state law-enforcement incident reports, bank records, traffic –’

‘No,’ she said softly.
‘Your assistance in this matter is –’ she paused, her eyelids flickering as
she considered a choice of phrase – ‘
appreciated.
However, I am unable to
share with you data about the target.’

Perhaps he could try a different angle.
‘Well, what about you, then? Hmmm? Or how about telling me something about where
you’ve come from?’

Her cool grey eyes locked on his. ‘You
wish to know about the future?’

He shrugged. ‘Yeah, why
not?’

She silently considered that for a moment.
‘I am unable to tell you specific details. But I can discuss the early symptoms
that are occurring in the world at present.’

‘Symptoms?’ He laughed at that.
‘You make the world sound like it’s a hospital patient.’

She cocked her head slightly. ‘That
analogy is suitable. This world
is
“sick”. It is unsustainable. It
is dying.’

‘Dying? What do you mean?’

‘Population tangents increasing versus
rapidly diminishing world resources. Even in this time evidence of this, of these future
problems, is known to your world leaders. But they choose to do nothing. Oil will run
out. Global warming will increase. The polar caps will melt and a third of the
world’s land mass will be submerged by rising sea levels. It will become accepted
in 2035 – far too late to deploy corrective measures – that global warming was more
significantly affected by the explosion in world population than it was by hydrocarbon
usage.’

She adjusted the cuffs of her jacket. Her
hair was growing in quickly – still boyishly short, though. But now, with a vaguely
feminine fringe of dark hair and office clothes Cooper had bought her from JC Penney,
she almost looked like your typical Wall Street
go-to girl
: hard-faced,
ambitious and smartly turned out.

‘In only twenty-five years from now
there will be nine billion human beings attempting to exist on a diminishing
resource-poor land mass. The arithmetic is inevitable, and was always entirely
predictable, Cooper. Even now there are scientists that are accurately predicting
mankind’s fate.’

‘Which is what?’

She shrugged. ‘You will destroy
yourselves.’

He puffed his cheeks. ‘That’s,
uh … that’s pretty grim.’

‘It is what will happen.’

‘Jeez, I bet you’re a blast at
parties.’

She cocked an eyebrow. ‘I don’t
understand the relevance or intended meaning of that comment.’

‘Never mind.’

Just then the door into the main office
swung inwards with a bang. Cooper jerked and spilled coffee on to the crisp white cuff
of his shirt. He saw Mallard’s face across a chest-high maze of vacant office
cubicles.

‘Christ, Mallard! You made me
jump!’

‘Sir! Sir!’

‘What the hell is it?’

Mallard picked his way through, past an
empty watercooler that hadn’t been used in years, past desks with dust-covered
computers that, if someone actually bothered to switch them on, they’d find still
ran on Windows 95.

‘Sir,’ he said, breathless, as
he finally stood in front of Cooper and Faith. ‘We’ve got a solid lead. Some
small-town sheriff reckons he’s ID’ed one of the images we put up on the
Bureau’s Most Wanted site.’

‘Where?’

Mallard looked down at a Post-it note in his
hand. ‘They’re in Ohio. Someplace called Harcourt. It’s some has-been
town. Used to have several auto-parts factories. They’re all closed down now.
Mothballed.’

‘Hang on.’ Cooper looked at
Faith. ‘That’s what you suggested, wasn’t it? They’d go to
ground someplace like that? Quiet. Out of the way …?’

‘With access to a source of
electricity and required technical components.’ She nodded and almost smiled.
‘It is what
I
would do.’

8 October 2001, Green Acres Elementary
School, Harcourt, Ohio

‘But it’s going to be
dangerous, isn’t it?’ Sal looked at Becks. She was no taller or bulkier than
any normal twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl. But she, like Bob, was originally
engineered for military purposes, a killing machine; if she got the idea into her head
while Bob was not around, there’d not be much of any of them left.

Maddy clucked her tongue. ‘I’ve
got no idea how she’ll behave. But if she bugs out on us, we’ve got Bob
right here to restrain her, or …’

‘Kill her?’

‘Look … it won’t come
to that, I’m sure. More likely she’ll just swoon and pine for Liam like some
pathetic fangirl.’

Sal snorted. That was kind of funny despite
the seriousness of the situation. ‘But why now? Why don’t we wait until
we’re settled in London?’

‘I’m not sure we’re going
to have enough power back in 1888 to sustain our back-up frozen embryos. Once we go
through to the past, we may not be able to regrow replacement support units. It might be
just Bob and Becks … one of each. We lose them, we won’t have any
back-up support units to grow.’

‘What about the San Francisco drop
point?’

Maddy shook her head. ‘I don’t
think it would be a good idea
going anywhere near there. They’ve
got to be watching that place now. No … it would be dumb for us to go back
there.’

Sal nodded.

‘We can take the foetuses with us,
just in case there’s some way we can find a way to grow new support units if
needed. But, really, I think we need to sort Becks out now, once and for all. We need
both our support units fully loaded and functional.’ She turned to them both.
‘Once we go back, we may have to ditch our embryos and that means no more support
units. We’ll have to rely indefinitely on these two. Which is why … we
need to test her mind out now, Sal, while we’ve got a chance here in 2001 to grow
a new one from scratch if … you know … this doesn’t work out.
Anyway,’ she added, ‘while Liam’s in London it might be easier. We
don’t want Becks hurling herself his way and slobbering all over him.’

Sal curled her lip. An ‘eww’
written all over her face.

Maddy pulled a hard drive out of her duffel
bag. Masking tape with ‘Becks’ felt-tipped across it. Becks’s
complete, original consciousness, her mind, right there in a hard plastic case. Maddy
held it up. ‘You ready for this, Becks?’

‘Affirmative. I am ready.’

‘All right, then.’ Maddy
wasn’t entirely sure this was the sensible thing to do. But what was locked away
on there, in an encrypted folder, was knowledge that was far too important to remain
there forever … a decoded portion of the Holy Grail. A message sent by
someone, quite possibly the previous team. Quite possibly a previous version of Maddy
herself. And God knows what the message was. Another warning like that scribbled Pandora
one? But whoever had sent the message from two thousand years ago, they’d thought
to pass along an instruction to Becks to keep the secret locked away until certain
unspecified conditions were met. And now all of that was sitting
on an
external hard drive: on a piece of hardware that was unable to
process
these
thoughts; on hardware that was merely able to store them. They needed Becks’s
knowledge, her memories installed back on-board a support-unit mind where, hopefully
someday soon, Becks would be able to announce that these mysterious
‘conditions’ had been met, and let Maddy know what the big secret was.