He took a step forward, squinting at the machinery on the far side of the arch. He nodded towards it. ‘Is that some sort of time machine?’
She bit her lip. ‘I’m not saying anything until you answer me.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’ He smiled. ‘My God… this is incredible.’
‘Please!’ called out Sal. ‘Something brought you to us. It’s a message from our friend, isn’t it?’
The old man turned away from them and barked an order down along their backstreet. A moment later Maddy could hear the slap of boots on cobblestones. She retreated from the entrance and into the arch, taking several steps towards the computer desk.
‘I’m sorry,’ said the old man. He reached into his suit jacket and pulled a handgun on them. ‘Please remain perfectly still. Do not touch anything! Do not do anything!’
Half a dozen men emerged from the backstreet, all of them wearing bio-hazard suits, faces hidden behind tinted fascias of plastic. All of them armed with what looked like television remote controls.
Oh no. Maddy felt lightheaded. This isn’t good.
‘We’re going to talk,’ said the old man gently. ‘But we’re going to talk safely away from this place. Please,’ he said, beckoning for them both to come forward, out of the archway and into the street, ‘step forward, away from the equipment.’
Now! You have to do it now!
Maddy spun to face the computer desk. ‘BOB! OMELETTE! ’ she screamed, desperately hoping the desk mic across the archway had managed to pick up her voice. The last thing her conscious mind registered was every muscle in her body contracting with a sudden jolt, and then keeling over on to the hard floor, her forehead smacking heavily against the concrete.
Cartwright watched in silence as the older of the two girls was wheeled away on a hospital gurney, and the other one, younger, Asian or Indian by the look of her, was escorted down the backstreet towards the containment van.
He ordered the remaining three agency men in containment suits to stand guard outside the shutter door once they’d made a sweep and reported that the archway was clear. Good men, trusted men… but still better they knew as little as possible.
He stood alone now in front of a giant perspex cylinder of water, metal steps up the side and what looked like a toddler’s swing seat fixed at the top. Obviously something to do with time travel… like the bank of computer equipment, the other tall thin perspex tubes in the back room, the power generator… all these things clearly played some part in the process.
He wandered back to the long table — a pair of scuffed office desks pushed end to end and cluttered with monitors, a keyboard, a dozen crumpled cans of Dr Pepper and a few empty pizza boxes. He could hear the soft whirr of activity from beneath the desk and ducked down to see the muted glow of blinking green and red LEDs. It looked like there were a dozen or more PCs, the kind you could pick up from any Wal-Mart or PC World, linked together into a network.
Beside the desk was a battered old office filing cabinet. He pulled out one drawer after another, each filled with nests of tangled cables and bits and pieces of electronic circuits, like somebody had ripped off a RadioShack store for bits and not yet figured out what to do with it all.
He felt a small stab of disappointment. In his mind’s eye he’d imagined this moment; he’d conjured up visions of some futuristic arrangement, technology from centuries ahead, something that looked like the bridge of the USS Enterprise set up in this old brick archway. Instead, everything he could see here seemed to have been obtained from the present.
He sat down in one of the office chairs and it squeaked under his weight.
The answers to this place, why they were here in New York… why they were also in the Cretaceous past, how all this machinery worked, and what it could do… all of those answers he presumed were on these quietly humming computers. He picked up the mouse and slid it across the desk. One of the screens flickered out of screen-saver mode and lit up to reveal a relaxing desktop image of an alpine valley and, right in the middle of the screen, a small square dialogue box.
› System lockdown enabled.
Cartwright cursed under his breath. The older girl, the one with the frizzy reddish hair, had barked something out just before he’d tasered her. He’d thought she was calling out to someone else in the arch, but he realized now that it must have been a voice-activated command.
He tried to remember what she’d said. Oh yeah…
‘Omelette,’ he said into the desk mic.
› Incorrect activation code.
‘Dammit!’
› Incorrect activation code.
He tried a dozen other candidate words and phrases: egg, broken eggs, scrambled eggs, boiled eggs, Easter egg, fried egg. Egg hunt, egghead, egg-nog. All of them produced the response on the screen.
Absently he tapped his fingers on the desk. If he was being honest, this wasn’t how he imagined the moment of discovery was going to be: two scruffy kids, a computer system that looked like some bedroom hacker’s dream set-up, and that big plastic cylinder making this place look like some kind of homemade brewery. And this locked- down computer system was obviously not going to tell him anything. He decided it was time he had a little chat with the girls.
He stepped out towards the open door and punched the green button on the side. The metal shutter started to clank and rattle slowly down.
‘No one goes in, or comes out. You have permission to shoot to kill anyone who tries. Understood?’
The three men guarding the entrance nodded.
CHAPTER 56
65 million years BC, jungle
The wide-open plain was alive with the echoing calls of nocturnal life. Liam had assigned half of them to remain on watch and the other half to try their best to get some sleep, although he doubted anyone was managing that.
A fire was burning in the middle, not for the meagre light it provided, but for the effect it seemed to have on the creatures roaming around out there, keeping them all well away. It was bright enough anyway. The full moon seemed to illuminate the night enough that it felt little darker than an overcast winter’s afternoon in Cork.
‘That moon is actually bigger, right? Or am I going mad?’
Becks looked up at it. ‘Affirmative. It is approximately twenty per cent larger.’
Liam’s eyebrows shot up. ‘A larger moon? So what do you think happened to it? Did it sort of wear down over time or something?’
Whitmore looked at him oddly and tutted. And Becks… he wondered whether she’d just rolled her eyes at him or whether that was just a trick of the light. ‘Negative, Liam. It has not changed size.’
‘It’s just a little closer,’ said Whitmore.
‘Oh.’
Becks resumed her silent vigil, slowly panning her eyes across the plain, watching for the dark furtive shapes of the creatures moving beyond the dancing circle of their firelight.
‘What do you think of those things?’ asked Liam. ‘Are they really a species of super-smart dinosaur? That lad, Franklyn…’ He paused for a moment, realizing the ensuing panic-stricken retreat from the cove, over the jungle peak and down on to the beach hadn’t permitted him a single moment of reflection for the poor boy. He could only imagine what those creatures had done to him, if that carcass from nearly a fortnight ago was anything to go by.
The others were waiting for him to finish what he’d started saying.
‘Franklyn said all dinosaurs, even the smart ones, were pretty stupid.’
Whitmore sucked in a breath of warm night air. ‘Those hominids could well be a dead-end evolution, a
