Edward gasped as the ceiling light flickered off, leaving them, for a moment, in complete darkness.
Then the monitors flickered back on and the ceiling light fizzed, blinked and bathed the archway in its cold blue glare once more.
Cartwright giggled joyously. ‘Good God! That was it? Wasn’t it?’
Maddy nodded slowly. ‘Yeah… I think it was.’ She looked at him accusingly. ‘You should’ve been outside our field. You should have been out there with your people. This messes things up. This — ’
‘But I wasn’t outside,’ he said calmly. ‘So why don’t you just get over it?’
‘You don’t understand… you’ve been written out of the present. I’ve got no idea what that means to you or — ’
‘That suits me fine,’ he smiled.
Sal noticed the blinking cursor was back on-screen and all of a sudden it occurred to her what Bob was desperately trying to tell Maddy.
‘Maddy!’ she cried, pointing at the monitors. ‘You need to look!’
Maddy turned to glance over her shoulder. ‘Oh no!’ She turned back to Cartwright. ‘GET OUT OF THERE!’
His wiry brow furrowed. ‘Uh? What’s up?’
‘ MOVE! ’ she screamed.
The displacement machine’s hum changed in tone as stored-up energy prepared to be released.
‘LOOK!’ shouted Maddy, pointing to the ground at Cartwright’s feet. He looked down, wondering what was so special about a chalk circle and, within, a small irregular section of the grubby concrete floor scooped out and…
‘OH GOD, CARTWRIGHT, GET OUT!’
It happened in nanoseconds, the instant appearance of a sphere of energy around the old man. Most of him was inside, all but his left hand.
Sal thought she saw in that fleeting moment dark shapes swirling around him like demons or ghosts, a window on to some world that an uneducated person, a superstitious person, someone from the Dark Ages, might have called Hell.
Then he was swept away. Gone.
The sphere pulsed and shimmered, and now she could see what appeared to be an undulating Texas-blue sky, and an arid and drab landscape… and the wavering outline of a shape stepping through. Liam staggered into view with a distinct look of nausea on his face, and a moment later the sphere of supercharged tachyon particles vanished with a soft pop of rushing air.
‘Jeez, that was an odd one,’ he said queasily, bending over, nauseous and heaving.
‘Liam!’ yelped Maddy. ‘Oh my God… I thought you were going to get all mushed up with Cartwright! I…’
He raised a hand to hush her. ‘Just a second, just a second… I’m gonna — ’
He threw up on the floor and on to the still-twitching hand Cartwright had left behind.
Sal rushed over to him. ‘Liam? You OK?’
He wiped his mouth and looked up at her with his bloodshot eye. ‘I
… I just… I’m all right now.’ He straightened up and looked down in disgust at the hand and the acrid- smelling puddle at his feet. ‘That wasn’t like I’m used to. That one felt really odd, so it did.’
Maddy shook her head. ‘I’m not sure what happened. Cartwright was standing in the circle. I forgot the countdown was due.’ There were tears in her eyes, running down her cheeks. ‘Oh God, Liam, I thought you were going to end up a twisted mess with him and…’
‘Well…’ Liam rubbed his mouth dry and grinned. ‘I’m all right now, aren’t I?’ He spread his hands and looked down at himself. ‘Or have I got an extra arm or something stuck on the back of me head?’
She nodded, wiped her eyes and laughed. ‘No… no, you’re just fine as you are.’
‘Did it work?’ asked Liam. ‘Has anyone looked outside?’
‘I think a time wave came,’ said Laura, looking at Sal for confirmation.
‘That’s right.’ Sal nodded. ‘I’ll go see.’
She turned back to the entrance, hit the button and the shutter slowly began to crank up. They gathered around the rising corrugated shutter and as it lurched to a halt they stepped outside into the dark night.
Manhattan glistened brightly across the Hudson, a towering wedding cake of lights. A commuter train rumbled overhead along the Williamsburg Bridge, and the evening was filled with the soothing white noise of far-off traffic and the echoing wail of a police siren.
‘Normal New York,’ said Liam. He puffed out a weary sigh. ‘That was a bleedin’ mess and a half we got out of, so it was.’
Sal reached out and hugged him tightly, embarrassed by the tears rolling down her cheeks. She squeezed him in a self-conscious way, just like anyone might a big brother, and then let him go.
‘But here we are again,’ she whispered.
They watched New York in silence, each of them lost in their own thoughts for a long while.
Maddy stirred. ‘I better go and sort out the return window for the support — ’ she corrected herself — ‘for Becks.’ She turned and headed back inside.
The rest of them savoured the evening panorama, watching beads of car headlights edging forward along FDR Drive across the river, and a ferry cutting the mirrored reflection of Manhattan with its wake. Finally, it was Edward who stated the obvious as-yet-unfinished business.
‘Me and Laura, we got to go back, don’t we? To get things back to the way they were?’
‘Yes,’ Liam nodded. ‘But I don’t suppose it has to be tonight.’
‘Good,’ whispered Laura, ‘I’m not feeling so good.’
‘We’ve got some beds back inside,’ said Sal. She looked at the girl and the Chinese boy. Both looked pale and ill, their faces smudged with a fortnight’s worth of grime. And Liam… She realized he looked disconcertingly old and young at the same time with that streak of white hair at his temple.
‘I’ll go make some coffee,’ she said.
CHAPTER 79
65 million years BC, jungle
Becks watched the pyre of logs and branches burn. Amid curling tongues of flame she could just about make out the outline of the several dozen bodies she’d stacked on top. The log bridge was gone now, its counterweight device dismantled like their windmill and tossed on the fire as kindling. The palisade, the lean-tos, all gone as well. The assorted rucksacks, baseball caps, jackets, mobile phones that had flown back into the past, all of them tossed on the fire.
By morning those things would be nothing more than soot or contorted puddles of plastic that would eventually break down over tens of thousands of years into minute untraceable contaminants.
Her computer mind took a moment to make a detailed audit of all the other items of forensic evidence that marked their two-week stay here. The human bodies she’d been unable to retrieve: Franklyn, Ranjit and Kelly. Of those, only Franklyn had died in a location that would one day yield fossils, and even then it was statistically unlikely that his body was going to be preserved in a way that would produce anything. A corpse needed to be almost immediately covered by a layer of sediment to stand a chance of that. Those three bodies, wherever they lay, were exposed to the elements, to scavengers.
Bullets and casings littered the clearing. But they too would soon become unidentifiable nuggets of rust in this humid jungle. Perhaps, a hundred years from now, no more than stains of oxidized soil on the jungle floor.
She was satisfied that the sheer weight of time and natural processes would wipe their presence clean. There was always the remote possibility that a footprint or the unnatural scar of an axe blade on a tree trunk might just, somehow, become an immortalized impression on a fragment of rock. But the probability factors she crunched yielded an acceptable contamination risk.
Her partially healed stomach wound had ripped open as she’d laboured on the funeral pyre, but a dark plug of congealing scab prevented any further valuable blood leaking out of her. The dressing on her arm had also unwound
