frontage of the shopping mall. People spilled out of the slowly turning revolving door, the side doors, even through the jagged-tooth remains of the freshly shattered glass frontage.
‘There’s Maddy!’ hissed Sal.
She emerged with the others, arms up and wrapped round her head to protect it, hunkered over like someone getting out of a helicopter. Sal pushed through the crowd now all turning and scattering from the entrance at the sound of another shot fired inside the foyer.
‘MADDY!’ she called out. ‘OVER HERE!’
The girls all but crashed into each other.
‘Maddy? I thought you were — ’
‘Just GO! Gogogogogo! ’
Faith picked her zigzagging target out of the retreating, stampeding crowd. She levelled the. 40 Smith amp; Wesson. Now the thing had a fresh clip, she resolved to empty all twelve rounds in several controlled double-taps. To be absolutely certain of killing the target. As she aimed down the short barrel, she caught sight of one of the other targets: Saleena Vikram. Both girls tangled with each other for a moment, then, turning their backs to her, ran away hand in hand.
Two for the price of one. Faith nodded. Pleased with herself for producing an appropriate saying for the occasion. She was about to pull the trigger when the world went completely dark.
Chapter 25
7.42 a.m., 12 September 2001, Interstate 95, outside Branford
Five minutes later they were all back aboard the RV, on the road and running on the last quarter-tank of petrol, Bob driving north-east as instructed and Maddy rocking back and forth beside him in the passenger seat trying to get a handle on things, get a handle on her jangling nerves, a handle on the growing knot of grief in her chest, as Sal, Liam and Rashim threw questions at her over the seat.
‘He’s gone,’ she said, finally answering them as to where the hell Foster was.
‘What? Do you mean…?’ Liam struggled to say any more. So Rashim finished his question for him.
‘They… they got Foster?’
She nodded. ‘Shot him.’
‘He’s dead?’
Here it comes. Maddy felt her composure slipping. The blissful comfort of numbness was ebbing away, like the downslope of a novocaine buzz after root-canal treatment. The first hot tears trickled down her cheeks. She tasted salt on her lips and licked them away.
She nodded. ‘Yes, Foster’s dead.’ Her voice was a lifeless whisper. The flutter and tap of moth wings against a windowpane. She took her glasses off and buried her damp face in her hands and realized that now she’d finally become that typical movie girl-in-distress: all quivering, dimpled chin and smudged mascara.
Albeit minus the mascara.
Chapter 26
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.
