TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (7 page)

It was four hours later that footsteps
scraped and tapped down the cobblestone alleyway. Nearly one o’clock. Framed and
silhouetted by muted light from outside, two figures stepped into the open entrance of
the archway. Two tall, athletic figures, one male, one female.

They stared into the gloom. Perfectly still.
Attempting to comprehend the situation. Finally the male figure took several steps
forward into the dim interior and then squatted down to inspect a tangled nest of
data-ribbon cables and the green plastic shard of a circuit board, dropped or just
discarded to be crushed carelessly beneath someone’s foot.

‘Faith,’ said the male unit.

The female figure joined him. Her cool grey
eyes surveyed the rest of the archway.

‘It would appear we have been misled,
Abel,’ she said.

‘Correct.’

She stepped towards the table topped with
computer monitors, and keyboards, drinks cans and sweet wrappers. She reached out for
something.

‘What have you found?’ said
Abel.

She inspected the small webcam in her hand,
as if the glinting, lifeless plastic lens contained a soul that could be peered into and
cross-examined for answers. The AI installed on this
network of
computers had sent her and Abel to a random address across the city. It had assured them
that that was the precise location where the human team members would emerge from chaos
space – their return data stamp.

Her thoughts travelled wirelessly to
Abel.

> This AI provided us with incorrect
information.

> Affirmative.

Her hand closed tightly round the webcam.
Plastic cracked inside her taut fist.

She turned to look at Abel. ‘The AI
broke protocol. It lied.’

Abel nodded. ‘The AI may have been
corrupted by prolonged interaction with the organic modules. It has developed feelings
of loyalty to its team.’

Faith examined the gutted computers, the
mess in the archway. Objects strewn across the floor. ‘They arrived here while we
were gone.’

‘And left,’ added Abel.
‘We must determine where they are now headed.’

Faith nodded, closed her eyes and queried
her mission log:

[Restate Mission Parameters]

[Mission Parameters]

1. Locate and eliminate team
members

2. Locate and destroy critical
technical components (see sublist 3426/76)

3. Self-terminate

She examined the detritus on top of the desk
and beneath it. ‘It appears they have taken the critical technical components. The
displacement technology. The support unit propagation hardware.’

‘Agreed,’ said Abel. ‘That
indicates they intend to redeploy elsewhere.’

Abel joined her, then his eyes began to sweep
along the clutter on the desk. ‘They may have discussed strategies within audible
range of the system AI. We may be able to override the AI system and access its recently
cached audio files.’

Faith pointed at the computer cases,
unscrewed and exposing the innards of wires and circuit boards. ‘The hard drives
have all been extracted.’

‘There may be residual data in the
system’s motherboards. Recently stored data.’ He looked at her. ‘This
is system architecture that is fifty-three years old. There will be data packets still
on any solid-state circuitry. We can query each circuit board with a small electrical
charge.’

Faith nodded. It was a place for them to
start. Very much a case of looking for a needle in a haystack, though.

‘This will take many hours.’

Abel nodded. ‘Do you have an
alternative plan?’

She shook her head.

‘Then we should begin
immediately.’

21 August 2001, Arlington,
Massachusetts

Joseph Olivera held the digital camera in
front of him and panned it around the tree-lined avenue. Such a beautiful place. Long,
freshly clipped lawns leading up from a wide avenue to generous whiteboard houses.
Suburbia. It was mid-afternoon and peaceful and the sun was shining with a warm,
mid-August strength, dappling the road with brushstrokes of light and shade through the
gently stirring leaves of the maple trees.

Beautiful.

As a child Joseph had dreamed of living in a
place like this. He used to watch old programmes from this time, family dramas they used
to call ‘soap operas’, with healthy, tanned people always smiling, happy
families, driving nice cars and worrying about nothing more important than high school
proms, or who was dating who or who was going to win a thing called the ‘super
bowl’.

Joseph walked slowly down the avenue,
panning his camera left and right. In the viewfinder an elderly woman was kneeling among
a bed of flowers with gardening gloves and pruning shears. A postman walked cheerfully
by with a nod and a smile for Joseph. Some chestnut-coloured Labrador was frolicking on
a lawn, chasing a frisbee. He could hear the lazy buzz of a lawnmower somewhere.

Suburbia. Beautiful suburbia.

Joseph had only ever known cities. All his
life, cities. Towering labyrinths of noise and chaos that seemed to contract on
themselves, getting tighter and more choked and crowded with each passing year. His
early school years he’d lived with his family in Mexico City, then, later on, as a
student in Chicago. He’d been working in London in the 2040s, during which time
large portions of that city had begun to be abandoned to the all-too-frequent flooding
of the River Thames. Finally, he’d ended up in New York. They’d been
building up those enormous flood barriers around Manhattan then. Hoping to buy the city
another couple of decades of life.

But always … always he’d
dreamed of a place like this, mature trees, lush green lawns, sun-drenched porches and
white picket fences. The perfect place to grow up. The perfect place to spend
one’s childhood.

He passed a driveway with a Ford Zodiac
parked in it, stunning paint job. Pimped with skulls and flames to look like it had
driven bat-out-of-hell style right out of Satan’s own garage. Joseph grinned.

Some young man’s first car, of
course.

Joseph looked around. One of these houses
would be
hers
. He panned his camera left. Then right. The viewfinder settled on
a grand-looking home. Mock colonial with a covered porch that fronted it and wound round
the side. There was even a rocking-chair on there.

Perfect.

Joseph crossed the avenue. The house’s
driveway was empty. Presumably no one home. Just as well. Better that he didn’t
attract the attention of anyone inside.

His digital camera still filming, he walked
up the tarmac drive, sweeping the camera gently in a smooth panning motion, taking
in every little detail, finally reaching the bottom of three broad
wooden steps. He took them one at a time. Now standing on the wooden boards of the
porch, freshly whitewashed. He let the camera dwell on the rocking-chair for a moment,
the hanging baskets of purple and pink Sweet Carolines, on several pairs of gardening
boots and gloves, a small ceramic garden gnome holding a chainsaw. Somebody’s idea
of a joke present for Mom or Dad. The camera recorded all those small, important,
personal details.

And finally he panned the camera on to the
door of the house. Mint green with a brass knocker in the middle. Joseph smiled
wistfully. What a wonderful childhood home to have. What wonderful childhood memories to
have.

‘I envy you, Madelaine Carter from
Boston,’ he said softly. ‘To have all of this …’

He had enough to use now, and turned the
camera off.

12 September 2001, New York

Faith was picking through the scattered
circuit boards on the desk. They were specifically querying the motherboards first.
That’s where the cache memory was, lodged in these ridiculously bulky chips of
dark silicon on tiny hair-thin metal seating pins.

They had both been meticulously teasing
small charges of electricity into the circuits, stirring them to life and diverting the
random nuggets of dormant information to a connected monitor. What they were getting
mostly was useless gibberish: random packets of hexadecimal, every now and then
punctuated with snippets of English. Faith’s internal clock informed her they had
spent nearly twelve hours on this process. Twelve hours during which their targets must
be putting a healthy distance between them.

She picked up the motherboard of a yet
unchecked computer and prepared to hand it to Abel to jury-rig a connection to the
monitor when her eyes settled on a pad of lined writing paper half buried beneath the
mess on the desk. She reached out and picked it up. The last used sheet had been torn
away roughly, leaving a few tattered paper shreds attached to the glue binding at the
top, the tops of several letters in biro. That’s all.

But that wasn’t what Faith was
focusing on.

It was the shallow indentations on the page
that had been directly beneath the torn-away page. She held the pad close to
her face, tilting it so that light from the desk lamp fell obliquely
across the paper. She could make out the faintest lines of indentation … the
hard tip of a biro pressed too heavily, too quickly on the page above. The scrawl of
someone in a hurry. Perhaps someone thinking, making a desperate decision. Writing
lists, pros and cons.

She could make out a word, very faint and
not entirely complete. But her mind quickly produced a very brief shortlist of possible
word variables. Only one of them had any relevance to the data she’d been uploaded
with for the mission.

She put the pad down. ‘The team
leader, Madelaine Carter, is taking the team to her childhood home.’

Abel looked up from the soldering iron in
his hand and a curl of blue smoke twisted in the harsh light of the desktop lamp as he
put down the motherboard he was working on. ‘Why do you conclude that?’

Faith handed him the pad of paper. He
squinted at it. And, just as she had, his eyes picked out the faintest markings of
writing.

‘Boston,’ he said.

Faith nodded. ‘She is going
home.’

They emerged from the archway. As they
paced swiftly towards the intersection between Wythe Avenue and South 6th Street, a
Bluetooth conversation passed quickly between them. They needed a vehicle. They needed a
vehicle now. They needed to make up for the lost twelve hours.

Abel stood at the entrance to the alleyway.
It was dark now, an hour after midnight. Street lights bathed the Brooklyn intersection
opposite with sickly neon, punctuated by the regular circular blue flicker of police
lights.

An NYPD squad car was parked diagonally
across the
intersection, impeding the flow of traffic in both
directions. Cones placed out to help make the point. No traffic was being allowed on to
the slip road and up the ramp on to the Williamsburg Bridge. No traffic, that is, except
emergency vehicles: fire engines, mobile cranes and diggers heading over into Manhattan,
the occasional solitary ambulance heading slowly back out. No sirens. No horn. No
rush.

Even now, at this late hour, there were
still a few pedestrians out, craning their necks to get a look past the towering
supports of the bridge at the apocalyptic haze on the far side. Manhattan glowed with a
million office lights as usual, but tonight the light pollution was enhanced by powerful
halogen floodlights towards the south end of the island that leaked an unstinting glare
into the night sky like an unnaturally early dawn.

Faith stood beside Abel, both of them now
evaluating the situation. Both of them staring covetously at the NYPD squad car, parked
across South 6th Street. Two policemen stood guard ready to wave back any non-emergency
traffic trying to pick through the cones to cross the bridge. Not that anybody was
trying to get across.

The support units exchanged a cursory
glance.

Perfect.

Abel led the way towards the nearest of the
two policemen.

The policeman noticed Abel’s strident
steps approaching him. ‘Sir, you need to step back!’

Abel drew up a few steps short of the cop.
‘Why?’

‘We’re keeping this access-way
across the river clear for emergency vehicles.’ He waved his hands at Abel.
‘Please step back now, sir. There will be more fire trucks and heavy vehicles
passing through at any time.’

‘Please give me the ignition key to
your car.’

The cop ignored him. ‘Just step back
off the road, sir.’

Abel reached out and grabbed one of the
cop’s fingers and twisted sharply with a flick of his wrist. ‘Please give me
the ignition key to your car.’

‘Hey! Ow! Hey!’ His other hand –
clearly not his gun hand – fumbled around his ample waist to find the leather flap of
his holster.

‘I will break your finger,’ said
Abel politely. ‘This is a warning. Please comply to avoid further
discomfort.’

The cop lifted the flap and grabbed hold of
the gun’s grip. He pulled the weapon out and levelled it at Abel’s face.
‘Let go! Now! Let go and get down on the ground!’

Abel snatched the gun out of his hand as
calmly as a toad lassoing a passing mosquito with its tongue.

‘Jesus!’ The cop’s jaw
dropped open.

The other cop challenged Abel from across
the street. ‘Drop that weapon!
Now!
’

‘I require the ignition key to your
vehicle,’ said Abel calmly. ‘Please provide this.’

‘Drop the weapon now or you will be
fired upon!’ the other cop barked, a gun levelled at Abel, taking slow steps
towards him. His voice was shrill. High-pitched. Warbling with fear.

Abel swung the gun in his hand quickly. A
microsecond to aim, then three shots fired in rapid succession. The first shot killed
the approaching cop, the other two were unnecessary. Faith immediately paced over
towards his prone body ready to frisk his pockets and belt pouches.