by Alex Scarrow
‘Right…’ Liam’s eyes were on Rashim’s sunken, tortured body, folds of skin drooping from bones that seemed to almost poke through in places. ‘Right…’
‘There are no more secrets now, Liam. That’s it. You know everything I know.’
He looked down at the hands in his lap. ‘Old man hands,’ he whispered. ‘That’s what me mam always said I had. All knobbly knuckles.’
‘Liam…?’ She rested a hand lightly on his arm. ‘Liam… I don’t know exactly what it means that you and Foster are the same, but it’s something important. Important to all three of us. We have to think it through. We need to talk it through. When we get back, we’ll do that. The three of us, we’ll — ’
She could hear branches cracking, Bob and Sal’s voices. They were returning from the brook.
He nodded. ‘OK.’
Just then they emerged from beneath the shade of a tree with a cracked clay jug in Bob’s arms. ‘We found this!’ said Sal. ‘So Bob’s humped some water up for you.’
‘About time,’ croaked Liam. He even managed that stupid goofy grin for the pair of them.
‘We should eat,’ said Maddy.
Rashim nodded. ‘Yes, eat! Eat!’
‘Aye! I’m bleedin’ starvin’! We was just about to start on them coneys without you, so we were.’ He looked at Maddy. ‘Right?’
She could have wrapped her arms round him then and there, squeezed him blue just for Liam being Liam.
‘Yeah.’
CHAPTER 80
AD 54, outside Rome
‘Are you absolutely positive it was today?’
Rashim nodded, although not as vigorously or as confidently as Sal would have liked. ‘Today, yes, of course, of course, of course it is!
… I remember!’ he muttered irritably.
They sat in a line in the shade of a row of bushes looking out across the flat top of the hill. Wild parched grass and heather swayed gently in the light breeze. They’d been sitting here in the shade as the day had warmed up, gradually sweltering, cooking in their own sweat as the morning passed interminably slowly and the sun beat down on the arid countryside.
Sal sighed. She wasn’t so sure this mad old fool was going to be their ticket home. He was too skittish. Too unhinged. Too completely weird and schizo to seem reliable. She looked at his lean face, all ridges and old scars; his wiry grey hair in tangled tufts, bald patches here and there like an attack of alopecia. Worst of all, his mouth: rotten gums and brown stumps of dead teeth. His breath was almost unbearable — like decaying meat.
She wondered how old he was. Seventy? Eighty? It was almost impossible to guess. But then, as Maddy had eloquently pointed out last night, seventeen years spent in a wooden box was going to ‘mess anyone up pretty good’.
‘Midday. Midday. Oh yes! Yes! It was about midday,’ Rashim muttered to himself.
But then again he’d said last night they’d arrived first thing in the morning, which was why they’d been sitting here like a row of gullible morons since daybreak.
‘Maddy?’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘If we do manage to get back to the archway, what if those “Bobs” who were after us are still there? You know? Waiting for us.’
‘We’ll just have to be ready to fight them.’ Maddy closed her eyes. ‘There were two of them left, weren’t there? A male and a female.’
‘I think so.’
‘Bob can handle the male… the rest of us — ’ she glanced at Liam — ‘I’m sure between us we can handle the female one.’ She shrugged. ‘That’s if we can even get back.’
‘It may be possible that the tachyon beacons can be adapted to return a signal to our field office,’ said Bob.
If they turn up. And frankly Sal was pretty sure today was going to pass by without incident, the four of them listening to this old loon muttering, ‘ Tomorrow will be the day… of course it is… I remember now!’
And the next day. And the next.
‘I don’t want to be stuck here,’ she said.
‘I know,’ sighed Maddy. ‘None of us do.’
‘It is coming soon,’ said Rashim. ‘I promise. Yes!’ His rheumy old eyes took in the wild meadow. ‘This is the place… for certain, yes.’ A long slender finger pointed out at the swaying grass. ‘Right there… me. That’s the spot I arrive.’
Sal nodded, less than convinced. She wanted to say, ‘Yeah. But what if you’re a whole year out? Huh? What then, Mr Genius?’ But she didn’t. It wasn’t going to help any. The mood was already pretty sombre out here. The other two, particularly Liam, seemed unusually quiet and distracted. Normally they could count on him to fuel them all with a generous helping of unrealistic optimism. And if not that, to say something pretty stupid and make them laugh.
‘Maybe I’ll go and get us some more water,’ she said.
No one answered. ‘Liam? You thirsty?’
He seemed to be a million miles away.
‘Maddy?’
She stirred as if she’d been poked. ‘Uh?’
‘Water? You want some?’
‘Uh… er, yeah. OK, yes, that would be good.’ She looked across and smiled. ‘Be careful, ’kay? Remember to keep out of sight. Those scouts are out there.’
They’d seen a few more yesterday, in pairs, careering along distant tracks and roads, almost certainly looking for them.
Sal picked their cracked jug up, got to her feet and turned to head down the slope, through the trees to the babbling brook at the bottom of the hill. She decided she might just sit with her feet in the cool water for a while. And there were several fig trees down there. She could pick a few and bring them back for lunch. That might cheer this miserable lot up.
‘Be back in a bit,’ she said. Not that anyone seemed to hear her.
Sal ducked beneath the low branches, picking her way slowly downhill past the humps of tree roots that surfaced from the hard clay soil like the backs of writhing sea serpents.
‘Wait, Saleena!’ A deep voice.
She turned to see Bob crouching under the low, thorny branches to join her. ‘Maddy sent me to watch you,’ he said as he ducked past her and pushed his way through undergrowth and low pine needle branches.
‘Oh, so I’m not the invisible girl today, then?’
Bob looked back at her. Puzzled. ‘No. I see you quite clearly.’
She joined him. ‘Bob, can I ask you something?’
‘Of course.’
‘I’m scared of those things… those other support units. Why — ’ she stepped over a gnarled root — ‘why were they trying to kill us?’
‘I have no information on their mission, Saleena.’
‘You saw one of them, though, right? They looked exactly like you. Did they come from the same place as you? Are they like brothers and sisters or something?’
He stepped ahead and pushed the branches of a thick bush aside for her. She could see the glint of the stream below, a thread of silver curling its way through weather-worn boulders of flint and sandstone.
‘The unit I saw appeared to be almost identical. Most likely from the same foetus batch. I registered his AI ident only briefly. His software was only one iteration newer than mine. Inception date 2057.’
‘Hold on.’ She run-stepped the last few yards down a steep bank and stopped herself against one of the boulders, blistering hot to the touch. ‘Hold on,’ she said again, ‘you make it sound like the same people… the same company made you.’
Bob scuttled down, keeping an ungainly balance. ‘Correct. The unit I encountered was also manufactured by W.G. Systems.’
‘Who are they? W.G. Systems? They like a weapons manufacturer or something?’
Bob settled down on the hot stones beside the stream. ‘I will fill your jug if you like.’
She handed it to him. ‘Thanks.’
‘They are one of the largest profitable organizations at the time of my inception. I have only common-source market information on them.’
‘Well, that
’ll do.’
‘The company was founded in 2048 by Roald Waldstein. The same year — ’
‘You mean the time travel inventor?’
‘Correct. He filed a number of technology patents in the same year. In the space of less than six years, he becomes the third richest man in the world.’
‘And he’s the one that set us TimeRiders up, right?’
Bob shrugged. ‘That is not information I have. I have, however, heard Maddy make that speculation.’
‘Is she right, do you think?’
‘This is possible. Waldstein campaigns against time travel. Waldstein also has access to the resources and technology to have set up this agency.’
‘But you’re saying it’s also Waldstein’s clones that were trying to kill us?’
‘Affirmative.’
She settled down beside him, letting her feet drift in the cool water. ‘So…’ She frowned. ‘Does that mean he wants us dead now? Why? If he went to all the trouble of recruiting me, Maddy and Liam… huh?’
‘I do not have that information. It is possible they were units that were acquired and programmed by some other organization.’
That made more sense to her. ‘I thought we were top secret, though. That no one else knows about us?’
‘It is possible, Saleena, that you are no longer a secret agency. Remember, Liam mentioned that man Locke?’
‘The Templar Knight?’
‘Correct. If he is to be believed, there are people who are aware of the existence of this agency. Whether they actually know for cert-’
She looked up at him, momentarily frozen. ‘Bob? Are you getting a
…?’
‘Particles. Yes.’ He returned her gaze. ‘It appears that Rashim was correct. Today is the day.’
CHAPTER 81
AD 54, outside Rome
Maddy and Liam watched the young man in silent dismay. Long dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, sunglasses, a checked shirt and jeans. She turned round to see Rashim, staring out, wide-eyed and trembling.
‘My God! That’s you?’
He nodded, his fingers absently probing the sunken contours of his old face.
‘But he’s so young!’ whispered Liam.
‘Yeah,’ said Maddy, ‘he… he looks, like, twenty-something?’
‘Twenty-seven,’ said Rashim wistfully. ‘Twenty-seven.’
It didn’t make sense to Maddy. Rashim said the Exodus group had overshot by seventeen years; that he’d been stuck here for just seventeen years. That made him just forty-four? She turned and studied his feeble frame again. Not old age, that wasn’t why he looked like this… but abuse, malnutrition. Borderline starvation… and the sheer terror of being Caligula’s caged pet.
‘What’s that yellow thing?’ whispered Liam.
She saw something about a yard high, box-like, waddling through the tall grass behind the young man as he paced across the field, several metal rods under his arm.
‘It looks like…’ She giggled a little manically. ‘No, surely…’
‘What?’
Am Ilosing my freakin’ mind? Is that what’s happening?
‘Maddy? You all right there?’
‘Liam, it looks like…’ She shook her head. ‘It looks exactly like a stupid cartoon character I used to watch on cable.’
The old man’s face split with a nostalgic gummy smile. ‘ SpongeBubba! ’ he crooned softly. ‘My little SpongeBubba!’
They watched as the young Rashim stopped pacing across the field, pulled one of the iron rods out from under his arm and rammed it into the hard-baked earth. He squatted down beside it, as the SpongeBob-like robot joined him. She saw him talking to it, listening as its goofy plastic mouth flexed an answer, and then fiddling with something on the rod — a touch-screen or a keypad. The top of the rod began to blink green, like a navigation light.
From behind she heard the careful placing of approaching feet. She turned to see Bob and Sal quietly creeping forward under the low branches of the bush to join them.
‘Who’s that?’ hissed Sal.
‘Him.’ Liam nodded at the quivering older Rashim.
‘And SpongeBob SquarePants,’ added Maddy, not quite believing she was saying that.
‘So what do we do, Maddy?’ asked Liam.
‘I guess one of us has to go out there and talk to him. Let’s try not to totally freak him out, though. We don’t want him to run away.’ She looked at the others. Rashim looked like a wild, completely insane hermit. Bob, thoroughly intimidating, still spattered with dots of dried blood. And Liam and Sal were looking at her expectantly.
‘I guess it’s me, then.’
Rashim squatted down in front of the second translation array marker and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the cuff of his shirt. He was torn between getting this job done quickly, getting the hell back home to the twenty-first century… and taking the time to breathe in this clean air, to savour that rich blue sky untainted by pollutants. To take a moment and really drink in the sensation of actually existing in history; actually standing on a hilltop in Italy
… a mere fifty-four years after the birth of Christ!
He was entirely alone out here. His decision. The less mass to transmit, the higher the safety margin. It was just him and his lab unit. A five-minute errand into ancient history to deploy and test the translation array markers. That’s all.
He kept looking anxiously over his shoulder, for some reason half expecting an entire Roman legion to descend on him at any moment with horns blaring. Silly really, he noted, the cliches one associates with well-branded history.
‘Give me the reference sequence again, will you? I need to check it offsets correctly.’
‘Righto, skippa!’ SpongeBubba said enthusiastically. ‘The sequence is… are you ready, Rashim?’
‘I’m ready. Fire away.’
‘Nine. Zero. Seven. Two. Two. Three.’
Rashim tapped those into the rod’s touch-screen. ‘Go on.’
‘Two. Nine. Seven…’
A pause. He looked at his lab unit. ‘Yeah, I’m waiting… go on.’
‘Uhhh… Rashim?’
‘Yes?’
‘There’s a person coming towards us.’
‘Uh?’ Rashim stood up and saw a young woman in a burgundy-coloured tunic and with a mane of frizzy strawberry-blonde hair striding through the grass towards them. He cursed under his breath. They’d checked this hilltop hundreds of times over for passing density shifts. Apart from signals that might be the occasional bird, or a passing goat… no one came here. Ever. Until now apparently.
Dammit.
He’d learned a smattering of Latin — a requirement for all the Exodus candidates. He quickly removed his sunglasses before she got too close, wincing at the brightness of the day. The clothes and his bright-yellow lab unit he couldn’t do anything about. As she drew up in front of him, he offered the young woman his most charming smile.
‘Uh… Salve.’ He was pretty sure he’d just mangled up the pronunciation right there.
And then, rather belatedly, he realized she was wearing glasses. ‘Hey,’ she replied with a casual wave. ‘How’s it going… Dr Rashim Anwar?’
Rashim’s jaw swung open and hung there uselessly.
She offered him a hand. ‘Yup, I speak English. And yup, I know precisely who you are. My name’s Maddy by the way… pleased to meet you.’
‘How… how… who…?’
‘I know. You’ve got a lot of questions.’ She smiled. ‘Don’t worry — I know exactly what that’s like.’
He stared at her outstretched hand.
‘I know all about Project Exodus, Dr Anwar. So look, I’ll cut to the chase. I work for some people. We’re… well, you won’t have heard of us, but our job is preventing foolish things like this from happening.’
Rashim’s mouth finally closed. ‘You… you’re from thatagency, aren’t you?’
She frowned. ‘ That agency?’
‘The freelance
rs! Rumours! Jesus! I’ve heard rumours. Not sure I ever believed them! But — ’
‘Rumours?’
‘Yeah… about the agency. The agency. They say that billionaire nutcase Waldstein’s involved in some way. Is… is it for real?’
Maddy shrugged. ‘I can’t say exactly who I — ’
‘My God, it is! Isn’t it?’ Rashim didn’t know whether to be begging for an autograph from her, or running for his very life. International law on time travel was unforgiving. And very final.
‘Jesus! I thought it was just us, you know? Just us with a viable time-translation system!’ He laughed nervously. ‘But how the hell…? I mean we’ve had trillions of defence budget dollars, trillions, thrown at this and we’ve only just managed to get the system reliable enough to risk human translations!’
She lowered her hand. ‘Look. We really need to talk with you. Project Exodus is going to fail badly, Dr Anwar. I’ve seen the results for myself.’
‘What? You… you’ve pre-empted us? You’ve arrived here before now?’
She nodded. ‘You’re going to miss this time-stamp by a mile. It’s going to go badly wrong and you’re all going to die. This project has to stop right here.’
She offered her hand again. ‘Dr Anwar… Rashim, I’m not here to arrest you, or hurt you or threaten you. I’m just here to stop this nightmare happening. Can we talk?’
CHAPTER 82
AD 54, outside Rome
Dr Rashim Anwar looked at the old man, stick-thin arms wrapped round knees that bulged like arthritic knucklebones.
They were sitting together in the shade of the trees. He sipped ice-cold Protein-Plus solution from his cell-powered thermos flask, offered it to the young Indian girl beside him.
‘He…?’ he said, pointing at the old man. ‘He’s me?’
Maddy nodded. ‘The Exodus group’s translation overshoots those beacons you were putting out.’
‘But… it shouldn’t. They should anchor the particle signal. They should — ’
‘Mass,’ the old Rashim hissed. ‘Mass. We miscalculate… you and me. We get it wrong. Yes!’