TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (9 page)

She drew her mind back to more pressing
issues, for her. ‘No matter how far we drive, Bob … there’s no
knowing for sure that we’re going to be safe, is there?’

‘No.’

She glanced at the gauge again. ‘And
how far have we gone?’

‘We are only eighty miles from New
York as a direct-line distance.’

‘Eighty miles? Might as well be a
thousand and one, I suppose … Let’s take the next turn-off, then.
We’ve got to fill up sometime soon anyway.’

Bob nodded. ‘Affirmative. Next
turning.’

‘And how much further to Boston?
It’s not that far, is it?’

‘Approximately a hundred and twenty
miles as a direct-line distance from our current location.’

‘We can do the rest of the drive after
a rest break.’ She pointed at a road sign looming towards them on the right.
‘Let’s take that next turn-off. The one for Branford. See if we can find a
gas station and someplace to get some food, a diner or something.’

Maddy suddenly realized how bone-weary she
felt; physically, mentally, spiritually, she was completely
spent
. A bed would
be good. A bed with clean, crisp white sheets. God … better still, a hot
shower. A
bath
even!

‘Actually, the hell with that.
Let’s see if we can stop and find a motel too. We can do the rest of the drive
tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow?’ He nodded approval.
Perhaps even Bob realized she needed a night off.

‘Affirmative.’

12 September 2001, Washington DC

The duty corridor off the mezzanine floor
was windowless. The ‘catacombs’, that’s what he’d heard one of
the personnel who worked down here call it once. Several offices along an unused floor
beneath an anonymous government building in Washington.

These offices had another name – a
semi-official name. The few personnel who worked down in this artificially illuminated
netherworld called it ‘The Department’. More than half a century ago –
fifty-six years to be precise – was when The Department was set up. Not here, though.
The Department didn’t have proper offices to call its own until after the 1947
‘New Mexico Incident’. But this had been its one and only home since
then.

On several occasions in those fifty-six
years, these offices had experienced short bursts of frenetic activity; carefully vetted
FBI agents had been drafted in to do routine belt-’n’-braces work, but never
fully briefed on the various case files they were doing the heavy lifting on.

On a need-to-know basis
.
That’s how The Department did its business.

There’d been a buzz of activity here
back in ’47, and again in 1963 after the ‘Dallas Incident’. There were
a lot of paper files generated over that, all of them still down here in the catacombs.
Everything one would ever want to know about the death of a President was stored in
dog-eared cardboard folders, in dusty filing cabinets labelled ‘J-759’. And,
if one took the time to dig through thousands of yellowing pages of gathered
intelligence and witness depositions, one might in fact find the
correct
name
of the man who actually killed President Kennedy.

Not Oswald. Certainly not one L. H.
Oswald.

There were other labelled files down here,
of other incidents over the decades that had been passed over to The Department to if
not investigate then at least to safely archive. Fragments of intelligence gathered that
would live forever down here in this air-conditioned twilight, far too sensitive, too
incendiary, too dangerous to ever appear in the public eye.

There was file N-27, a certain dark secret
from the very last days of the Second World War; a whole drawer of one of the
filing cabinets was devoted to that. Then, of course, there was file
R-497, the event that occurred in Roswell, New Mexico – several filing cabinets for that
one – and typically plenty of silly TV shows, films and tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories
about R-497.

And then there were several other, smaller,
files.

One of those files had the equally
uninspiring name of 414-T. Possibly the slimmest file in the pack of secrets, slumbering
down here in the semi-darkness.

The Department was run ‘off the
books’. Its funding came from a lump sum dropped into a bank account just after
the Second World War. Over the last half a century that lump sum had been managed by a
financial management company and invested in various things. Back in the seventies, for
example, some of that money had been spent purchasing shares in a promising little tech
company with a rainbow-coloured apple for a logo.

The Department had a staff that had on a few
occasions numbered as high as thirty-five men, but tended in quiet times
to number as few as three. As it did right now. The ‘Head’, his assistant
and a solitary clerical officer.

Niles Cooper was the ‘Head’
right now, and possibly for the foreseeable future. Handed that role by his predecessor,
a middle-aged pen-pusher called Pullman, who’d been looking for an easy assignment
to carry him over until retirement. Before him, there’d been an old man called
Wallace who’d run The Department – so it was said – since it was set up back in
1945.

Every ‘Head’ had his pet file,
so Pullman told Cooper the day he retired and passed the keys to this place over to his
younger successor. Pullman said
his
pet file had been R-497, the Roswell
one.

Cooper’s was the slimmest one:
414-T.

Something of an enigma, that one. Several
black-and-white photographs, very poor quality if truth be told. They’d been
recovered, supposedly, by a Russian intelligence officer from one of the
artillery-damaged barrack buildings near Obersalzsberg, near the mountain-top retreat of
Adolf Hitler.

The Eagle’s Nest.

But there was no guarantee of the accuracy
of that. It might have come from somewhere else, just as likely one of the many
bombed-out ministry buildings along the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. The images did have
the ink-stamp of a swastika and a correctly configured intelligence reference number
used by the Gestapo. So they were at least half-likely to be genuine.

Three photographs in total. The first in the
sequence showed what appeared to be the aftermath of a bonfire of bodies in some snowy
wood. A jumble of blackened limbs amid ice-melt and slush, surrounded by fir trees with
snow-laden branches.

The second photograph was unpleasant. A
close-up of a human skull, scorched completely black, and what appeared to be a section
of skull cracked or carved open and lying in the snow
nearby. The rest
of the skull looked empty.
Scooped out
even.

But it was the third image that made this
sequence so interesting, that had granted this slim file a place in The
Department’s twilight bowels. The third image was of an assault rifle, like
everything else scorched black and the gun barrel bent by the heat of the fire. There
were notes stapled to the photograph. Notes made on some typewriter and in German, then
added to some years later in English, handwritten blue ink, notes made by some American
or British firearms expert:

Make and model is unknown. Not Russian.
Certainly not one of ours! Could be a German prototype? The firing mechanism
indecipherable. Can’t see how this gun would actually work!

(Signed: G. H. Davison. 16th February
1952)

Someone had drawn a blue-ink circle on a copy
of the photograph. The circle looped round some markings beneath the weapon’s
breech, a cluster of faint indented numbers and letters. The manufacturer’s
markings, batch number, model number, and possibly the weapon’s date of
manufacture.

Cooper had studied this photograph many
times over the years. Each time, he’d studied it under a magnifying glass with the
help of his angled desk lamp, like a manic philatelist examining a perfect and precious
unmarked penny black stamp. And every time he’d peered closely at this
black-and-white photograph he’d experienced the same shiver of excitement, of
promise.

A possibility.

A possibility, and that’s all it was,
a possibility that those last four numbers of the manufacturer’s mark were the
year of manufacture.

2066.

11 September 2001, outside Branford,
Connecticut

The motel was pretty basic, just what Maddy
expected for thirty-nine dollars a night. A double bed, a table, a wobbly hanger rack
and a small TV, manacled to a wall bracket. They got three rooms: one for Maddy, Sal and
Becks, one for Liam and Bob and one for Foster and Rashim. Basic, but at least each room
had an en-suite bathroom with a bathtub too small to drown a cat in and presided over by
a shower unit that sprayed a lethargic afterthought of tepid water.

SpongeBubba had the RV with an aisle full of
plastic bags all to himself.

They all freshened up, each of them
relishing their turn in the showers, before heading to the diner next door for dinner.
They chose unhealthy, heart-attack meals from a menu with helpful, if somewhat
misleading, pictures. After that, they reconvened in Foster and Rashim’s room.

The TV was turned up enough that anyone in a
neighbouring room wasn’t going to easily pick words out of their conversation
through the paper-thin walls. Fox News was on and there was understandably only one
story today. President George Bush had held a press conference and given the
administration’s official response to the day’s acts of terrorism, and now
his words were being dissected by news hosts in meticulous detail.

Foster was slumped in the room’s only
chair. The others were perched on the double bed. Becks sat cross-legged on the carpet
like a nursery-school child waiting for storytime and Bob stood in the corner of the
room keeping a wary eye, through the window blinds, on the RV parked outside.

‘You want to know what the
future’s like?’ said Rashim.

Maddy nodded. ‘Yeah, Liam’s
right, we really should get to know how this century all plays out. All we’ve got
are scraps of info. Bits here, bits there. Even Foster only knows
some
of
it.’

The old man nodded. ‘Only what was
available on the archway’s computer database and that only takes us up to the year
2054.’

Rashim looked at Foster. ‘The year
your secret agency originates from?’

‘I suppose that must be it,’
Foster answered with a shrug. ‘It’s the year from which Waldstein set it all
up and took it back to 2001.’

‘2054? I was just a small boy
then!’ Rashim laughed.

‘Go on, please. Tell us what you
can,’ said Liam.

Rashim leaned back on the bed, hands behind
his head, looking up at the low cracked plaster ceiling above. ‘It’s not a
happy story, boys and girls. We screwed things up. Mankind did. We made a mess of
everything. Funny, it’s all history to me, but the future to you.’ He
sighed. ‘The world hit seven billion people on the thirty-first of October 2011.
In my time historians use that date a lot. Like some sort of a marker. The point at
which it all began to go bad.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, whether it was the population
explosion or peak oil to blame, 2011 is retrospectively seen as the point at which the
world crossed the line and was doomed.’

‘
Peak oil?
What’s
that?’ asked Liam.

‘Peak oil is the term for the point at
which we were never going to have enough oil-based energy to tide us over until we could
rely on a new source of energy. Oh, there were things being trialled on a small scale:
renewables, wind, tide energy, zero-point energy. But nothing that was near enough to
replacing oil. The rest of the century was one war after another being fought for the
remaining oil fields, while the world continued to warm up as we ferociously burned our
dwindling supply of fossil fuels and the oceans continued to rise.

‘I have a question for you.’
Rashim lifted his head and looked at them all. ‘Any of you heard of the Fermi
Paradox?’

Maddy did, or thought she did.
‘Isn’t that the puzzle to do with why we haven’t yet found any alien
civilizations out there in the universe?’

He nodded. ‘A mathematician called
Fermi calculated the odds of there being other alien life forms out there in the big
wide galaxy. He took into account all the usual variables: the number of stars at the
right point in their life cycles, the average number of likely planets per star, the
probability of any of those planets existing within the “Goldilocks Zone”
around the star, the likelihood of a planet having liquid water … all those
important variables.

‘Anyway, while the odds were stacked
against any one solar system containing intelligent life, given that there are literally
trillions of stars, his maths delivered an answer that there must be hundreds of
thousands of alien civilizations out there, and tens of thousands of civilizations
advanced enough in technology to be putting out radio waves, intentionally or not.

‘So the point is,’ continued
Rashim, ‘when we started looking into space for radio signals, we
should
have stumbled across them almost immediately. According to Fermi’s maths, we
should have been swimming in alien radio signals.’

‘But instead we never found
anything,’ said Maddy.

‘Right. And
that’s
the
Fermi Paradox. Why isn’t every frequency full of alien signals?’ He sighed.
‘Because we’re alone. And why are we alone?’ He smiled. He
wasn’t expecting them to answer. ‘Well … in my time we figured
that out for ourselves. Within a century of discovering radio waves, mankind managed to
exhaust the raw materials of the planet. The raw materials, the free energy source that
every emerging technological civilization gets as a gift from its historical past –
fossil fuels. It’s that package of free energy that we should have used carefully
while we took our time to discover and harness quantum energy. Humankind never got a
chance to take anything more than a few baby steps into space. We never got the time to
mature, to reach out into space, for other worlds. Hydrocarbons. Fossil fuels. Oil. We
used it all up far too quickly. Too many people wanting too many things. We used it
up,’ he said, sighing, ‘and then, as it began to run out, we turned on each
other.’