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.’
Chapter 49
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.
And now they were acting entirely on their own, beyond the agency’s original remit, Maddy realized they had twice as much need to know what dark secret had been transported across a thousand years of Roman history and the Dark Ages, across another thousand years of Holy Grail history for their eyes only.
A warning? A truth? A threat? A revelation?
‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘This won’t do itself.’
Chapter 50
8 October 2001, Green Acres Elementary School, Harcourt, Ohio
It took Maddy half an hour to successfully connect the hard drive to the networked computers. The new PCs had a different method of logging the hard-drive idents, which meant computer-Bob had some data-shuffling to do before he could get the underlying DOS code to recognize the hard drives, and this external one, under their original ident tags.
Presently, Becks closed her eyes. The influx of new data being Bluetoothed into her mind was an odd sensation. One, of course, she’d had before as Bob had worked with her, slowly bringing her mind up to speed with his. But that had been a trickle. This was a flood. The nearest sensory equivalent was like having ice-cold liquid injected into an artery, feeling it spread, branch, travel… envelop.
There were duplicated memories among the incoming data. Memories she’d already inherited once before from Bob. Memories of memories. Then there were her very own memories: recollections of dinosaurs and jungles. Liam… and an emergent mind-state for him — a feeling — that she’d labelled and carefully put to one side. In her mind she saw medieval towns and castles, Prince John, ridiculously besotted with her. A battle… the siege of Nottingham: ranks of glinting armour and flapping banners shifting in the heat haze of a summer’s day. A remote monastery, a monk called Cabot.
And then an ancient scroll of parchment. Becks recalled leaning over it and, by the dim, flickering light of the archway, moving a deciphering ‘grille’ across faded ink nearly a thousand years old. She could see herself writing down the letters on a pad of lined paper. Then, the decoding complete, starting to read it.
Then the discontinuity. Whatever she’d read had included an instruction that locked it all away into one part of her mind.
After that her memories were of the archway dropping, literally, into a war zone. A destroyed America tearing itself apart. She remembered the one-sided battle. Skies filled with giant airships, and hulking behemoths, engineered monsters, ascending the slope of a battlefield and dropping down into their trenches. Butchery. Blood. The dismembered ruins of bodies cluttering the floor of a trench.
She recalled taking one of those giant beasts down. Staring closely into its eyes as it lay dying and seeing
