by Alex Scarrow
‘Indeed.’ He gave that a moment’s thought, then nodded. ‘But perhaps she is right to seek more information before she decides which way to act.’
Sal watched him return to his work, soldering a circuit board. One of their computer’s motherboards had something or other wrong with it. Rashim had explained it to her once already – it was all blah, blah, blah to her.
Her mind was elsewhere anyway, nostalgic for the good old days. The first few months after the three of them had been recruited. After the Kramer incident. That was when they had most felt like a team. They’d managed to pull themselves together – straight out of the training Foster had been putting them through, and straight into action – but they managed it, they’d put things right. And then there’d been some time afterwards in which they’d got to know each other better, to settle into a routine of sorts living in that Brooklyn archway. Become almost like a family.
Then there’d been the next big crisis: Liam blasted back to dinosaur times. But again, even though they were still pretty green as a team, they’d pulled it off, they’d steered things back on to the right course.
Good times. They’d been such a great team together. And, dare she admit it, she’d even grown to love those two, like an older brother and sister.
But everything that had changed between them, all of it could be traced back to the moment Maddy found that note in San Francisco. That was the first secret between them. Now they were in such a different, uncertain place.
Maddy and Liam – but particularly Maddy – seemed intent on messing with things they didn’t understand. There was a reason that Waldstein wanted history headed this way. She didn’t buy the idea that the man was insane. An insane man couldn’t invent time travel and countless other things. An insane man couldn’t run a multi-billion-dollar corporation making hundreds of millions of dollars of profit while the world economy plummeted into a bottomless abyss.
Insane – it was too easy an answer. Too lazy an answer. Sal suspected Waldstein knew a truth that no one else knew. A truth. Perhaps an unpleasant one … and he was doing what he thought was best.
So, if that was the case, if she truly believed Waldstein’s agenda was a good one, the right thing … then working against that made Maddy and Liam a problem. No wonder Waldstein had sent those support units back in time to find them.
She shook her head. Are we the bad guys now?
‘You all right, Sal?’ asked Rashim.
She met his gaze and flickered a smile his way. ‘Fine. I’m fine.’
Thinking about it all gave her a migraine. She wondered how nice it would be to be an ordinary fourteen-year-old girl. An ordinary girl with ordinary girl problems.
Boys.
That made her smile, made her think of something else. There was actually someone she wished would do just a little more than shyly wave at her every time they caught sight of each other. She found his tall awkwardness, his gentlemanly ways – even his shyness – cute.
Chapter 13
1994, San Marcos de Colón
‘Mr Pineda, is it?’ Liam leaned over the choppy gap between the pier and the boat: a scruffy-looking fifty-foot-long vessel made of wood and ringed by old, bald rubber tyres slung over the side to protect the paint-chipped gunwale. An old mint-green canvas awning stretched along most of the length of the deck, shading the weather-worn planking. Halfway down, a wheelhouse, little more than a toilet-cubicle-sized shack of loose wooden slats and a viewing shutter propped open by a small straight branch from a tree.
‘It Captain Pineda!’ Tall and whippet-thin, skin so dark that the whites of his eyes seemed almost luminous. ‘This me lanch, man. This Mrs Pineda!’
Liam was stumped by his Creole accent. ‘Sorry. This is …?’
‘Me lanch!’ He slapped a hand on the side of his boat. ‘Me lanch!’
‘Uh.’ Maddy was equally bemused.
Adam stepped in. ‘It’s his launch. His boat.’
Pineda nodded his head, a threadbare and faded captain’s cap, one size too big, wobbling uncertainly on top of his wiry coils of hair. ‘She me river lanch. Mrs Pineda.’
‘Named it after your wife.’ Maddy nodded approvingly. ‘That’s really sweet.’
Pineda’s already round eyes widened further with a look of mock horror. ‘Naww! Not after m’ lady. No more. She gawn!’ Pineda hawked and spat venomously over the side into the cocoa-brown river. ‘Gawn ’way! She fly off with ’nother man!’ He crossed lean muscular arms across his chest. ‘Good ’n’ gone. Me beauty here, she now name after m’ ma.’ He grinned: a dazzling smile of big bright crooked tombstone teeth. ‘An’ didn’t need no new paint … she still Mrs Pineda!’
Introductions were made under the watchful gaze of a growing gathering of the curious that congregated on the pier: skin-and-bones river fishermen and their boys in tatters of colourful clothing, many sitting cross-legged on tyre bumpers like a penny-theatre audience. They watched as they knitted repairs to holes and tears in their fishing nets, studying proceedings intently, regarding the odd-looking gringos and chattering among themselves. Special attention, though, was directed towards the extremely large, towering and muscular gringo, Bob. Clearly none of them had ever seen a human this size before.
Pineda helped them load their supplies aboard: several boxes of canned beans, bags of rice and flour, and a dozen jerry cans of drinking water. He stowed them in the shallow hold beneath the planking deck. As he emerged from the hatchway, the midday rain arrived with the suddenness and intensity of a power shower being switched on.
Adam had warned them about that. It came almost as regular as clockwork, the noon monsoon. For half an hour, sometimes for an hour, an intense deluge that brought every activity to a standstill until it passed. Grey lances of rain speared down from a thunder-heavy sky and dashed the river all around them. The awning above them drummed deafeningly and they had to shout to each other to be heard.
‘So where’s our guide?’ Maddy yelled into Adam’s ear.
‘He should be here by now!’ Adam looked around. Their audience had hurried for cover with the first stings of rain. The pier was a vacant space now, rain-slick planks of wood and hummocks of rain-soaked netting. ‘I told that fisheries bloke that we needed him to be here by midday!’
As if on cue they spotted someone jogging along the quayside towards them, a knapsack slung over his shoulder and a twisted and battered brolly held over his head.
Liam was standing out in the rain at the prow of the launch, whooping at the intensity of it. He stopped when he saw the little man approaching. ‘Hey! Is that our guide?’ he called back, his words almost completely lost in the drumming roar beneath the awning.
The man – and he was little – finally pulled up beside the boat. ‘Son ustedes los que viajan por el Coco?’ he shouted from the pier.
Adam shouted back. ‘Do you speak English?’
The man nodded. ‘You are the ones who want travel down the Coco?’
‘Yes!’ Adam leaned over the side and offered the guide a hand to help him aboard. The man ignored it and jumped effortlessly, frog-like, off the pier and on to the deck beside him. Then he grasped Adam’s hand and shook it vigorously.
‘Billy!’ he crowed with a shrill voice. ‘You call me Billy!’
Adam beckoned for him to follow under the awning and, finally out of the rain, he shook Liam’s and Maddy’s hands. He did a double-take before allowing his small delicate hand to be enveloped by Bob’s gorilla paw.
He was very short. Just spare change over five foot, and a squat frame came with it. Narrow shoulders with too large a head perched precariously and top-heavy on them. A moon-round face with long black hair silvering at the sides and pulled back into a ponytail.
He grinned goodnaturedly at them, still panting from his run. ‘Please to be make your acquaintances.’
‘The official we spoke with this morning said you’re able to speak with the Indians along the Río Coco,’ said Maddy.
Billy
nodded. ‘I speaks Zambu, Tawahka, Miskito, Creole, Spanish and –’ he shrugged apologetically – ‘also very bad English.’
‘Your English is good,’ said Maddy. ‘Seriously.’ She turned towards Mr Pineda.
‘This is our launch’s captain.’ Maddy made very sure to emphasize his title. ‘Captain Pineda.’
Pineda suddenly hooted, a high-pitched girlish squawk, as he doubled over with laughter. ‘Me puppysho’ wit’ you, sister. Me the pilot, the steersman. Me firs’ name is Captain. Hehehe …’ Pineda giggled and flashed his teeth. ‘That the name me muddah gi’ me.’
She nodded and smiled. ‘Oh I see, you were christened “Captain”.’ She smiled at that.
His mock-serious face suddenly returned. Serious business. ‘Now, sister, you calls me Captain … or Mr Pineda.’ As an afterthought, he added, ‘Or … Mr Skipper.’
‘Right.’ She nodded. ‘Mr Pineda.’
The pilot turned to the guide. Both men nodded politely at each other and exchanged a few words in Spanish.
‘So, are we good to go?’
Mr Pineda nodded vigorously. ‘Me lanch good ’n’ ready!’ He tugged the loose cap down over his small head. His ears splayed out under the cap’s rim like the open doors of a hansom cab.
‘You know where we gung to, sister?’
‘Uh?’ She shrugged. She was lost in his accent again. She cupped her ear. ‘Could you say that again?’
Adam nodded. ‘I know where we’re going, Mr Pineda. We want to head down the Coco River as far as the branch with the Green River.’
Pineda pursed his lips thoughtfully for a moment as if consulting a mental map of the river, then finally he hunched his shoulders. ‘Me the steersman … you me pay-fair.’ He grinned that bright smile. ‘I take me Mrs Pineda anywhere you aks me to.’
Maddy understood that. She reached through the open shutter window of the wheelhouse and waggled the helm. ‘So, are we all good to set off then?’
Mr Pineda frowned comically. ‘Hey! That me wheel! Only Captain Pineda touch da wheel. Them me lanch reg-gie-lay-shuns!’
She let go quickly. ‘Sorry!’
Mr Pineda shrugged begrudgingly. ‘That OK … let you off this time.’
Chapter 14
1994, Río Coco
The night came more quickly here, it seemed, than elsewhere. At dusk Liam checked the hour on his timepiece. The sun made its bed beyond the irregular horizon of jungle peaks at just after five and left behind it a blood-red stain that finally disappeared by eight.
With the dark, Mr Pineda steered the river launch to the northern side – the Honduran side – of the Río Coco. ‘It safer from the bandits this side, brudder,’ he’d explained to Liam. He threw out a stern anchor and tied a bow line to an overhanging branch from an amate fig tree.
He cooked up a pot of beans on a kerosene burner, mashed them and served them with fried Yojoa fish. And after that, bellies satisfied all round, he boiled some water and made coffee, bitter and strong.
Liam lay on the deck at the prow of the boat, his head rudely cushioned by one of the tyre ‘fenders’. Above him the overhanging leaves of the tree were silhouetted ink-black against the deep blue of a clear night sky. The wooden deck vibrated gently beneath his back as the launch’s diesel engine juddered like an old man muttering to himself. The engine powered a light swinging from a flex in the wheelhouse and a similar one beneath the awning at the rear of the boat.
Liam watched Maddy as she left the others, coffee in hand, picked her way forward and settled on the vibrating deck beside him.
‘Must be a little bit like being a pirate again.’
He smiled. ‘Aye.’ But only a little. The smell of diesel, the soft judder of the engine dispelled the illusion somewhat. It would feel more like those days when Mr Pineda switched the engine off for the night and he could hear the soothing lap of water against the wooden hull.
They lay back in silence for a while, and watched shooting stars zip across the sky.
‘I’m worried about Sal,’ Maddy said presently.
‘Why? What’s up?’
‘I dunno … she seems so different. She’s changed.’
Liam had sensed the same thing. A subtle shift in her demeanour. He’d thought it was something and nothing but now he wanted to hear what Maddy was thinking.
‘When you were away frolicking on the high seas, busy playing pirates with Rashim, she had a major wobble.’
‘A wobble?’
‘She isn’t coping very well with the idea that she’s not really Sal.’
‘Aye … that was something of a blow for all of us, to be fair.’
‘You seem to have coped with that remarkably well.’ Maddy looked at him. ‘You always seem to shrug everything off. Like nothing really matters. You know, I’m so jealous that you can do that.’
Liam wished that it was so. True, the issue of his identity being nothing more than some lab technician’s best guess of how a cocksure young Irish lad would behave and what he would sound like had so far not affected him greatly. I am who I am – that was his maxim: five words that, as far as he was concerned, more or less dealt satisfactorily with the matter. Weighing more heavily on his mind was wondering whether his thoughts were truly his. Whether the decisions he made were his alone, or the product of some lines of programming – digital or genetic.
He had scared himself a little, once, back in the seventeenth century. The way he had calmly rationalized the killing of that Moorish pirate. He imagined that Bob and Becks dispassionately analysed friend and foe, threat levels, viable targets in much the same way. Coldly, clinically, without any compassion.
‘I didn’t tell you about this,’ said Maddy.
Liam looked at her. ‘Didn’t tell me what?’
‘She went looking for herself.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She went forward in time, to 2025, to New York.’
‘Why? Why then, why there?’
‘She said she had memories of visiting New York with her father that year. I told her that they were just implanted memories. That they weren’t real. Just background story designed to make her believe she’d already lived. She went anyway.’
‘Uh … should you not have stopped her?’
Maddy sighed. ‘I … I could’ve. But I didn’t. See, well … we both thought you’d decided to abandon us. We thought you’d had enough and decided to run off and become a pirate. So, we discussed it and I kind of said to her that maybe we should both do likewise: find places we’d like to live the rest of our lives and just go there.’ She shrugged guiltily. ‘I guess for a while I thought it was game over.’
Liam lifted himself up on to his elbows. ‘Seriously?’
‘Sal chose to go find herself. I think she wanted to know for sure whether her memories were just a bunch of things stitched together, or whether they were the memories of a real girl.’
‘And? What did she find?’ Liam felt the ghost of a hope stir inside him. A possibility that maybe his life story was a genuine one. Even if it was a borrowed one. ‘Did she come across a real Saleena Vikram?’
‘She never said.’ Maddy sipped her coffee. ‘I did try asking, but she kinda blew me off. To be honest, I don’t know what she discovered in 2025. She came back, though, obviously. So … I guess maybe she didn’t find what she was looking for. I think she confirmed that there never was, or never will be, a Saleena Vikram. So I guess that’s some sort of closure for her.’
‘Closure?’
Maddy sighed. ‘Crud, do you have to be so frikkin’ nineteenth-century all the time? Closure … it means when you’ve settled a matter you’ve been worried about.’
‘But she hasn’t settled the matter, has she?’
Maddy was a while replying. ‘I don’t think so. She does seem different, somehow.’
‘I think we should talk to her,’ said Liam. ‘Just the three of us … the Three Musketeers. Have us a heart-to-heart when we get back.’
‘I
think that would be a good idea.’
Mr Pineda stepped into the wheelhouse and turned off the engine. It rattled, grumbled and coughed like a bad-tempered asthmatic, then fell silent.
‘Jay-zus … finally,’ whispered Liam.
The quiet seemed to have a volume all of its own. Almost deafening. Then into that void the subtle chirrups and stirrings of the jungle cautiously stepped in; the soothing lap and gurgle of river water against Mrs Pineda’s worn wooden hull.
A torch flickered around at the other end of the boat as Billy foraged for something; he found what he was after and the torch snapped off. Liam could hear the low murmur of their voices. Adam was talking to Billy. Mr Pineda seemed to be trying to engage Bob in conversation about something. It was a one-sided conversation. His goodnatured sing-song contrasted with the occasional monosyllabic rumble from Bob.
‘Maddy?’
‘Yup?’
‘You really think we’ll find an answer in that cave of Adam’s?’
‘I hope so. You know what I think?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I think there are two sides out there. There’s Waldstein, and there’s someone else. We know exactly what Waldstein wants. He wants humanity to wipe itself out in 2070. For whatever reason, good or bad … we don’t know which and we don’t know why. I think it’s safe to say he sent those killer support units because we threatened to stop doing what we were set up to do. Maybe if we could speak to him, he could explain why he wants that, and who knows, we might even agree with him. Then at least we’d be back where we were, working for him, preserving history as it is, but knowing why we’re doing it.’
She smiled wistfully. ‘Just like it was in the good ol’ days.’
‘Aye, that would be nice.’ Liam realized how much he missed the certainty that what they were doing was the right thing: the thing that was saving mankind.
‘But,’ she continued, ‘I think someone else wants something quite different. And this cave, the Voynich Manuscript, the Holy Grail and that note in San Francisco is them trying to get in touch with us, to give us their side of the story.’