by Alex Scarrow
‘We can replace books, Liam.’
He shrugged. ‘And a few comics.’
Maddy sighed, leaned over and pulled open one of the bags. ‘Oh, come on … and the Nintendo too?’
‘Well …’ He looked sheepish. ‘I thought …’
‘Jesus, we can pick another one of those up at any computer game store.’ She shook her head. ‘Just the difficult things. Just things we can’t easily replace, I’m afraid.’
He sighed and swung the bag ruefully into the open rubbish bin beside the vehicle.
Maddy poked her nose into his other bag. ‘OK, I guess these books can come aboard.’ She took the bag off him and disappeared inside the RV.
Liam looked back under the shutter. It was dark and gloomy: a vacant space once more, strewn with the cables and rubbish, boxes of tools, cartons of nuts and bolts, spools of electrical wire. A desk with the gutted remains of a dozen Dell computers left beneath it.
A large wardrobe that had contained, until this morning at least, a bizarre collection of garments. A twelfth-century leather jerkin, two Wehrmacht army tunics. Several Roman togas. An Edwardian-era suit and lady’s gown, a steward’s tunic and more. The clothes were all squirrelled away aboard the RV now.
It looked like the abandoned premises of some black-market, cash-in-hand PC repair shop. A sweatshop, a squat, a student dosshouse; the Aladdin’s cave of some foraging vagrant.
He offered it a lukewarm farewell wave. Thanks for the shelter. And smiled with amusement at his own mawkish sentimentality. How daft it was that a pile of damp bricks and crumbling mortar could make him feel guilty for abandoning it like this.
The RV’s motor rattled to life.
‘Come on, Liam.’ Maddy’s head was poking out of the passenger-side window at the front. ‘The sooner we’re off, the better!’
‘Aye.’ He raised his hand in acknowledgement and turned back to the dark interior. ‘Well there, Mr Archway, you’ve still got a job to do,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘After all … there’s this bridge above you that needs holding up for a while yet.’
‘Liam!’
‘I’m coming!’
Sal sat in the back of the RV on an oat-coloured seat worn through at the corners and showing yellow foam. Her seat belt didn’t work. She decided Bob could have stolen something that looked a little less old-fashioned, beaten-up and threadbare. She’d spotted glistening, spotless tour vans rolling through the streets of New York. Ones that looked almost futuristic, like spaceships on wheels. Instead they had this.
She looked out through the rear plastic window, scuffed and foggy, someone’s name and a love heart scratched into it. She watched Brooklyn receding like a movie back-projection: busy with cars, bumper to bumper at each intersection, waiting to get on the two lanes across the Williamsburg Bridge on to the lower east side of Manhattan; the morning ebb and flow of commuters, regular as bowel movements.
There was some relief mixed in with the sadness of a goodbye. At least she wasn’t going to see this particular morning ever again. Tuesday 11 September was at last playing through for them the way it did for everyone else. Once. One terrifying morning albeit seemingly running in slow motion.
Relief she wasn’t going to have to see that again. The swooping airliner. A sky filled with billowing smoke and the confetti cloud of millions of pieces of fluttering paper.
But, yes, sadness too. Brooklyn – this place, this side of the East River, had become so familiar to her. Almost as familiar as the suburbs of Mumbai that she’d grown up in. The Chinese laundromat with that old lady so proud of her office-worker son. The coffee shop from which she’d collected countless cardboard trays of coffee and paper bags of assorted doughnuts. The YWCA whose skanky showers with hair-clogged drains she and Maddy had had to use more times than she cared to remember. Their alleyway always cluttered with rubbish, the cobbles underfoot slightly tacky, the walls with fading sprayed gang tags.
And their archway.
Their home.
The RV juddered to a halt at a traffic light and just then – Sal knew it was due any second now – she spotted a subtle flash on the distant skyline: the pale sliver of a fuselage catching the morning light, moving fast and descending towards the twin pillars of Manhattan shimmering in the sun-warmed morning.
She lost sight of it among the skyscrapers, but then a moment later the distant sky was punctuated by a roiling cloud of orange and grey that drifted lazily up into the empty sky. No sound. Not yet. Just a silent eruption like an undubbed movie special effect.
Then, half a dozen seconds later, even through the closed window, over the chugging of the RV’s engine, she heard it. A soft, innocuous-sounding whump. Like the door of an expensive saloon car being slammed shut. The heads of pedestrians on the pavements either side of them turned to look towards the sky above Manhattan … and never turned back.
Green light. The Winnebago motorhome crossed the intersection and turned left on rolling and slack suspension that made the vehicle sway like a boat on a choppy sea.
Behind a row of apartment blocks, Sal finally lost sight of Manhattan, the Twin Towers and the billowing mushroom cloud of smoke and the frozen pedestrians as they headed up Roebling Street – a place where people and cars and taxis and trucks continued to move from one traffic light to the next in blissful, clockwork ignorance, at least for the moment.
Chapter 7
11 September 2001, New York
It was four hours later that footsteps scraped and tapped down the cobblestone alleyway. Nearly one o’clock. Framed and silhouetted by muted light from outside, two figures stepped into the open entrance of the archway. Two tall, athletic figures, one male, one female.
They stared into the gloom. Perfectly still. Attempting to comprehend the situation. Finally the male figure took several steps forward into the dim interior and then squatted down to inspect a tangled nest of data-ribbon cables and the green plastic shard of a circuit board, dropped or just discarded to be crushed carelessly beneath someone’s foot.
‘Faith,’ said the male unit.
The female figure joined him. Her cool grey eyes surveyed the rest of the archway.
‘It would appear we have been misled, Abel,’ she said.
‘Correct.’
She stepped towards the table topped with computer monitors, and keyboards, drinks cans and sweet wrappers. She reached out for something.
‘What have you found?’ said Abel.
She inspected the small webcam in her hand, as if the glinting, lifeless plastic lens contained a soul that could be peered into and cross-examined for answers. The AI installed on this network of computers had sent her and Abel to a random address across the city. It had assured them that that was the precise location where the human team members would emerge from chaos space – their return data stamp.
Her thoughts travelled wirelessly to Abel.
> This AI provided us with incorrect information.
> Affirmative.
Her hand closed tightly round the webcam. Plastic cracked inside her taut fist.
She turned to look at Abel. ‘The AI broke protocol. It lied.’
Abel nodded. ‘The AI may have been corrupted by prolonged interaction with the organic modules. It has developed feelings of loyalty to its team.’
Faith examined the gutted computers, the mess in the archway. Objects strewn across the floor. ‘They arrived here while we were gone.’
‘And left,’ added Abel. ‘We must determine where they are now headed.’
Faith nodded, closed her eyes and queried her mission log:
[Restate Mission Parameters]
[Mission Parameters]
1. Locate and eliminate team members
2. Locate and destroy critical technical components (see sublist 3426/76)
3. Self-terminate
She examined the detritus on top of the desk and beneath it. ‘It appears they have taken the critical technical components. The displacement technology. The sup
port unit propagation hardware.’
‘Agreed,’ said Abel. ‘That indicates they intend to redeploy elsewhere.’
Abel joined her, then his eyes began to sweep along the clutter on the desk. ‘They may have discussed strategies within audible range of the system AI. We may be able to override the AI system and access its recently cached audio files.’
Faith pointed at the computer cases, unscrewed and exposing the innards of wires and circuit boards. ‘The hard drives have all been extracted.’
‘There may be residual data in the system’s motherboards. Recently stored data.’ He looked at her. ‘This is system architecture that is fifty-three years old. There will be data packets still on any solid-state circuitry. We can query each circuit board with a small electrical charge.’
Faith nodded. It was a place for them to start. Very much a case of looking for a needle in a haystack, though.
‘This will take many hours.’
Abel nodded. ‘Do you have an alternative plan?’
She shook her head.
‘Then we should begin immediately.’
Chapter 8
21 August 2001, Arlington, Massachusetts
Joseph Olivera held the digital camera in front of him and panned it around the tree-lined avenue. Such a beautiful place. Long, freshly clipped lawns leading up from a wide avenue to generous whiteboard houses. Suburbia. It was mid-afternoon and peaceful and the sun was shining with a warm, mid-August strength, dappling the road with brushstrokes of light and shade through the gently stirring leaves of the maple trees.
Beautiful.
As a child Joseph had dreamed of living in a place like this. He used to watch old programmes from this time, family dramas they used to call ‘soap operas’, with healthy, tanned people always smiling, happy families, driving nice cars and worrying about nothing more important than high school proms, or who was dating who or who was going to win a thing called the ‘super bowl’.
Joseph walked slowly down the avenue, panning his camera left and right. In the viewfinder an elderly woman was kneeling among a bed of flowers with gardening gloves and pruning shears. A postman walked cheerfully by with a nod and a smile for Joseph. Some chestnut-coloured Labrador was frolicking on a lawn, chasing a frisbee. He could hear the lazy buzz of a lawnmower somewhere.
Suburbia. Beautiful suburbia.
Joseph had only ever known cities. All his life, cities. Towering labyrinths of noise and chaos that seemed to contract on themselves, getting tighter and more choked and crowded with each passing year. His early school years he’d lived with his family in Mexico City, then, later on, as a student in Chicago. He’d been working in London in the 2040s, during which time large portions of that city had begun to be abandoned to the all-too-frequent flooding of the River Thames. Finally, he’d ended up in New York. They’d been building up those enormous flood barriers around Manhattan then. Hoping to buy the city another couple of decades of life.
But always … always he’d dreamed of a place like this, mature trees, lush green lawns, sun-drenched porches and white picket fences. The perfect place to grow up. The perfect place to spend one’s childhood.
He passed a driveway with a Ford Zodiac parked in it, stunning paint job. Pimped with skulls and flames to look like it had driven bat-out-of-hell style right out of Satan’s own garage. Joseph grinned.
Some young man’s first car, of course.
Joseph looked around. One of these houses would be hers. He panned his camera left. Then right. The viewfinder settled on a grand-looking home. Mock colonial with a covered porch that fronted it and wound round the side. There was even a rocking-chair on there.
Perfect.
Joseph crossed the avenue. The house’s driveway was empty. Presumably no one home. Just as well. Better that he didn’t attract the attention of anyone inside.
His digital camera still filming, he walked up the tarmac drive, sweeping the camera gently in a smooth panning motion, taking in every little detail, finally reaching the bottom of three broad wooden steps. He took them one at a time. Now standing on the wooden boards of the porch, freshly whitewashed. He let the camera dwell on the rocking-chair for a moment, the hanging baskets of purple and pink Sweet Carolines, on several pairs of gardening boots and gloves, a small ceramic garden gnome holding a chainsaw. Somebody’s idea of a joke present for Mom or Dad. The camera recorded all those small, important, personal details.
And finally he panned the camera on to the door of the house. Mint green with a brass knocker in the middle. Joseph smiled wistfully. What a wonderful childhood home to have. What wonderful childhood memories to have.
‘I envy you, Madelaine Carter from Boston,’ he said softly. ‘To have all of this …’
He had enough to use now, and turned the camera off.
Chapter 9
12 September 2001, New York
Faith was picking through the scattered circuit boards on the desk. They were specifically querying the motherboards first. That’s where the cache memory was, lodged in these ridiculously bulky chips of dark silicon on tiny hair-thin metal seating pins.
They had both been meticulously teasing small charges of electricity into the circuits, stirring them to life and diverting the random nuggets of dormant information to a connected monitor. What they were getting mostly was useless gibberish: random packets of hexadecimal, every now and then punctuated with snippets of English. Faith’s internal clock informed her they had spent nearly twelve hours on this process. Twelve hours during which their targets must be putting a healthy distance between them.
She picked up the motherboard of a yet unchecked computer and prepared to hand it to Abel to jury-rig a connection to the monitor when her eyes settled on a pad of lined writing paper half buried beneath the mess on the desk. She reached out and picked it up. The last used sheet had been torn away roughly, leaving a few tattered paper shreds attached to the glue binding at the top, the tops of several letters in biro. That’s all.
But that wasn’t what Faith was focusing on.
It was the shallow indentations on the page that had been directly beneath the torn-away page. She held the pad close to her face, tilting it so that light from the desk lamp fell obliquely across the paper. She could make out the faintest lines of indentation … the hard tip of a biro pressed too heavily, too quickly on the page above. The scrawl of someone in a hurry. Perhaps someone thinking, making a desperate decision. Writing lists, pros and cons.
She could make out a word, very faint and not entirely complete. But her mind quickly produced a very brief shortlist of possible word variables. Only one of them had any relevance to the data she’d been uploaded with for the mission.
She put the pad down. ‘The team leader, Madelaine Carter, is taking the team to her childhood home.’
Abel looked up from the soldering iron in his hand and a curl of blue smoke twisted in the harsh light of the desktop lamp as he put down the motherboard he was working on. ‘Why do you conclude that?’
Faith handed him the pad of paper. He squinted at it. And, just as she had, his eyes picked out the faintest markings of writing.
‘Boston,’ he said.
Faith nodded. ‘She is going home.’
They emerged from the archway. As they paced swiftly towards the intersection between Wythe Avenue and South 6th Street, a Bluetooth conversation passed quickly between them. They needed a vehicle. They needed a vehicle now. They needed to make up for the lost twelve hours.
Abel stood at the entrance to the alleyway. It was dark now, an hour after midnight. Street lights bathed the Brooklyn intersection opposite with sickly neon, punctuated by the regular circular blue flicker of police lights.
An NYPD squad car was parked diagonally across the intersection, impeding the flow of traffic in both directions. Cones placed out to help make the point. No traffic was being allowed on to the slip road and up the ramp on to the Williamsburg Bridge. No traffic, that is, except emergency vehicles: fire
engines, mobile cranes and diggers heading over into Manhattan, the occasional solitary ambulance heading slowly back out. No sirens. No horn. No rush.
Even now, at this late hour, there were still a few pedestrians out, craning their necks to get a look past the towering supports of the bridge at the apocalyptic haze on the far side. Manhattan glowed with a million office lights as usual, but tonight the light pollution was enhanced by powerful halogen floodlights towards the south end of the island that leaked an unstinting glare into the night sky like an unnaturally early dawn.
Faith stood beside Abel, both of them now evaluating the situation. Both of them staring covetously at the NYPD squad car, parked across South 6th Street. Two policemen stood guard ready to wave back any non-emergency traffic trying to pick through the cones to cross the bridge. Not that anybody was trying to get across.
The support units exchanged a cursory glance.
Perfect.
Abel led the way towards the nearest of the two policemen.
The policeman noticed Abel’s strident steps approaching him. ‘Sir, you need to step back!’
Abel drew up a few steps short of the cop. ‘Why?’
‘We’re keeping this access-way across the river clear for emergency vehicles.’ He waved his hands at Abel. ‘Please step back now, sir. There will be more fire trucks and heavy vehicles passing through at any time.’
‘Please give me the ignition key to your car.’
The cop ignored him. ‘Just step back off the road, sir.’
Abel reached out and grabbed one of the cop’s fingers and twisted sharply with a flick of his wrist. ‘Please give me the ignition key to your car.’
‘Hey! Ow! Hey!’ His other hand – clearly not his gun hand – fumbled around his ample waist to find the leather flap of his holster.
‘I will break your finger,’ said Abel politely. ‘This is a warning. Please comply to avoid further discomfort.’
The cop lifted the flap and grabbed hold of the gun’s grip. He pulled the weapon out and levelled it at Abel’s face. ‘Let go! Now! Let go and get down on the ground!’