Time Riders

by Alex Scarrow

  CHAPTER 25

  2001, New York

  Liam nodded with approval at the thermal underwear.

  ‘I got them from a sportswear shop,’ said Sal. ‘That should keep you warm under your other stuff.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, stuffing them into the plastic bag.

  ‘I took the labels off again,’ she added. ‘But all the same … you should keep the thermals hidden. It’s modern material.’

  ‘Right.’

  Maddy joined them around the long kitchen table. ‘So, I’m sending you guys back to a couple of minutes in time after we brought you back, to avoid a tachyon clash.’ She shared a look with Liam. ‘Not making that mistake again,’ she uttered out of the side of her mouth.

  ‘OK.’ She turned to Adam. ‘Adam … you want to tell Liam and these two about your idea?’ She flicked a finger at Bob and Becks standing like two sentinels at the end of the table … in their underwear.

  Adam nodded. ‘There’s a way, we figured, that you can stay in touch –’

  ‘But Maddy said we can’t use the Voynich,’ said Liam.

  ‘No, not using that. There’s a graveyard at Kirklees that dates back to the beginnings of the priory. I’ve actually been there myself and picked through it all. Loads of broken masonry slabs lost underneath brambles and nettles and what have you. If you look, you’ll find them there. Anyway, I took a number of photographs of several of them. One, in particular, was part of a simple gravestone for a man called Robert Haskette, with 1192 as the year he died. So he’ll be dead now, of course.’ He frowned. ‘Well, when I say now I mean … you know, the point at which you –’

  Liam tutted and waved. ‘Don’t worry, I get tripped up by the now–then sort of thing too.’

  Adam continued. ‘He’ll be dead and his gravestone there already and freshly carved … hopefully. You just need to look for it.’

  Becks raised a finger. ‘Question.’

  ‘Yes?’ Adam’s eyes flickered up her athletic body. Then he found himself looking over her shoulder shamefaced, cheeks colouring. ‘Uh … what is it, err … Becks?’

  ‘You do not intend for us to communicate openly? This will present a contamination risk.’

  ‘No, no, of course not. This would need to be encoded. Ideally a code that looks inconspicuous and not out of place on a piece of masonry. Almost like decoration.’

  ‘Do you have such a code?’ asked Becks.

  ‘Indeed. Yes – well, it’s not mine, but it can be adapted slightly. You got any paper?’

  Sal quickly skittered over to the computer desk and returned with a pad of paper and a pen.

  ‘Thanks. OK, this is the Masonic cipher. They call it the pigpen cipher.’ He sketched some criss-cross patterns of lines and dots on the paper and then filled them in with letters of the alphabet.

  ‘Now what you do is, for each letter in your message you use the part of the pattern that the letter is within. I’ll give you an example.’

  He scribbled a coded message. Liam craned his neck forward to get a closer look. It meant nothing to him, and, as Adam had said, it did just look like a rather uninteresting pattern.

  ‘Now, see … if we take, for example, the letter X. Do you see where it sits in the cipher? Which part of this pattern is it sitting in? The part of the large diagonal cross with dots in – the left-hand quadrant – see?’ The others nodded. ‘Now look at that coded message: the first character matches that bit of the pigpen grid, the part that contains the letter X. So the first letter of the encoded message is X. Anyone figure out what the second letter would be?’

  Sal answered first. ‘It’s an M?’

  ‘Yup. You got it. Go on – see if you can do the rest.’

  Sal grabbed a pen off the desk and with a grin quickly and easily extracted the encoded message.

  ‘There you go,’ said Adam. ‘Easy as easy peas.’

  Liam held a finger up. ‘But, err … this is a Freemason code, isn’t it? Won’t that mean any Freemason who stumbles across our gravestone will be able to translate our message as well?’

  ‘Yup, which is why we need to adapt it slightly. If I jumble the order of the letters now, like this …’ Adam drew the pattern again, but this time filled in the letters in a random order.

  ‘Now, provided you keep your messages very short so that no frequency analysis techniques can be used, then it’s almost impossible to break unless you throw some serious computer power at it.’

  ‘Frequency analysis techniques?’

  Adam was about to explain that to Liam, but Maddy cut in. ‘Perhaps later.’ She picked up the sheet of paper and held it up for Bob and Becks to study closely. ‘You guys can remember this layout?’

  ‘Affirmative,’ said Bob, leaning forward. ‘I now have a stored digital image.’

  ‘Affirmative,’ echoed Becks.

  ‘Good. So … that’s how you’re going to talk to us.’ She tucked the paper into the hip pocket of her jeans for safekeeping. ‘And you’ll need to let us know when and where to open a portal. We’ll do the usual thing and plan a day-later one, week-later, a fortnight-later and of course one just before the six-month critical mission window.’

  ‘What’s critical about six months?’ asked Adam.

  ‘Bob’s and Becks’s heads blow up.’

  ‘Whuh? Did you just say …?’

  ‘It’s a safety measure, to ensure the computer tech doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.’ Maddy wrinkled her nose. ‘More sort of a fizzle than a bang, really. The circuits fry.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  She resumed her briefing. ‘So those are the window times, Liam, but … since we don’t really have a clear mission plan, I’m guessing this is all going to boil down to you telling us where and when you want to be picked up. Are you OK with that?’

  Liam nodded. ‘Aye. And you’ve got these photographs, you say?’

  Adam nodded. ‘Yes. Not on me.’ He turned to Maddy. ‘Back at my apartment. On my hard drive. I’ll need to go get it.’

  She pursed her lips. ‘Sal or me will have to go with you to get it, then.’

  ‘What if the gravestone isn’t there?’ said Sal.

  ‘It should be,’ said Adam.

  Maddy puffed her cheeks. ‘Hmmmm, well, look – if it isn’t, for whatever reason, then you come back on the first of the scheduled windows, I guess. Just play it safe. Don’t go wandering off to see King John until you know you can talk to us.’

  ‘Recommendation: first mission task should be to locate the gravestone and send a test message,’ said Bob.

  ‘That’s quite right,’ replied Maddy. ‘Very sensible, Bob.’

  She looked around at everyone. ‘So … I think that’s it.’ She smiled. ‘This is a hunt for something we have no idea what it is, or where it is – other than some nasty guy with a hood stole it and ran off into the woods. So it’s the usual half-baked, no-idea-what-we’re-doing thing again. Business as usual, I guess.’

  She dismissed them all with a self-conscious shall we? As Liam turned to follow Bob and Becks across the archway and up the ladder she reached out for Liam and squeezed his shoulder.

  ‘Liam?’

  ‘Yuh?’

  She glanced at the plume of silver hair at his temple and the first faint hint of an age line around his eyes.

  ‘Liam, I’m glad I told you – and Sal – the truth. It was eating me up sitting on it.’

  He hunched his shoulders. ‘A load shared is a load halved. That’s what me Auntie Doe used to say.’

  ‘You stay safe … again, OK?’

  He grinned. ‘With Punch and Judy, I’ll be fine, so.’

  He turned to go, but she held on. ‘Liam, this is an important one, you know? I’ve got a real feeling this – I dunno … that this is going to open doors. We find out about Pandora and we’re going to find out more about who we’re working for,’ she said quietly.

  ‘It’s a certain Mr Waldstein, isn’t it?’

  She shrugged. ‘So Foster
once told us. I do wonder.’

  ‘Now there’s an idea.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Foster. Maybe you should ask the ol’ fella about Pandora while we’re gone.’

  ‘I was sort of thinking of doing that,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I guess now I’ve told you guys, telling him won’t hurt, right?’

  He cocked his head. ‘I trust him.’

  She smiled at Liam, realizing that in his cheeky cock-eyed grin she could see the ghost of Foster’s gaunt face. ‘Yeah, me too.’

  The archway echoed with the splash of water as Bob dropped into the displacement tube.

  CHAPTER 26

  1194, Kirklees Priory, Yorkshire

  They found the graveyard towards the rear of the priory, a sombre space occupied by only a half dozen stones and a dozen wooden crosses on which hungry beetle-black crows perched, studying the frosted white ground for signs of a meal.

  A recent grave marked only by a long hump of turned soil and a simple wooden cross indicated the most recently deceased person to be buried in this place was not considered worthy of a piece of inscribed masonry.

  In the pale grey light they hunkered down beside each grave in turn and noted the names. Eventually, to Liam’s relief, they found Haskette’s grave beside a small oak sapling that had pushed hopefully upwards for sunlight and rustled gently in the bitter cold breeze. The grave was marked by a three-foot-high block of pale granite, the name and year of death chiselled roughly, clearly not by a trained artisan but presumably by one of the Cistercian monks.

  ‘Recommendation: we should inscribe no more than the symbol for an “L” to indicate you have located the stone,’ said Bob. Liam nodded. He was right – best to carve no more than was absolutely necessary. ‘Uh … did anyone think to bring a chisel?’

  ‘Negative.’

  He cursed then looked around. There had to be something they could improvise with. But he could see nothing out here but withered grass and nettles, frost-stiff and frozen-hard soil peppered with discarded flakes of worked stone and flint.

  Flint. That could do us.

  He began to scrabble in the hard ground to free a piece large enough that it could be used as a makeshift tool when Becks quietly came over and tapped the top of his head.

  ‘Unnecessary, Liam O’Connor,’ she said.

  ‘Uh?’ He looked up just in time to see Bob pulling a long lumber nail out of the wooden crucifix of the freshly dug grave. With a mournful squeak it came out and the crossbar clattered on to the hard hummock of dark soil, disturbing the nearby crows. They fluttered away noisily into the tumbling grey sky with caws of complaint.

  ‘Errrr … you can’t just go and do that!’ he said, absently blessing himself with the tips of his fingers.

  Bob casually strode past him towards the gravestone. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, it’s … it’s just not right. That’s a desecration, so it is.’

  Bob was already hunkered down over the gravestone and etching their pigpen symbol for ‘L’ into its granite surface.

  Liam glanced heaven-ward. ‘Uhhh, really sorry about that … if you’re watchin’.’

  ‘’Tis later in the morning than I’d hoped to set off,’ called out Cabot irritably as he strapped the yoke to a pair of horses. ‘That is, if ye still wish me to take ye to meet John?’

  ‘Yes, yes we do,’ replied Liam.

  ‘Where’ve ye been?’

  ‘To get some fresh air,’ replied Liam as they skirted round the vegetable gardens towards the stables. He nodded at Becks. ‘Our lady was feeling sick.’

  Cabot stuck out his chin. ‘Are ye better now, m’dear?’

  Becks glanced quickly at Liam for guidance but he stepped in to answer for her. ‘She’s fine, so she is, aren’t you … Lady Rebecca?’

  She managed to nod mutely and swiftly adapt her usual tomboy swaggering walk to something that, all of a sudden, looked a little more feminine as they drew up beside Cabot and the cart.

  ‘Noble-born, are ye?’ The old man’s eyes narrowed as he regarded her mud-brown dress made of coarse material and her peasant’s clogs. ‘Lady, are ye now?’ he said with a disbelieving tone in his voice. ‘Hmmm … and from what duchy do ye hail then?’

  Liam looked at her. Come on, Becks, better make it sound convincing.

  Her cool grey eyes returned Cabot’s suspicious stare for a painful few seconds, long enough that Liam wondered whether he’d made a mistake casually introducing her as an aristocrat.

  ‘Je viens de la duché d’Alevingnon en Normandy.’

  Cabot’s manner changed instantly; his flinty soldier’s eyes widened. ‘Ma’am, please forgive my rude manner! I just –’

  She smiled. ‘It is quite all right, old man,’ she replied sweetly. ‘Our mission to recover this … item … requires a certain anonymity.’

  Brilliant. Liam grinned at her. Bleedin’ brilliant. He could have hugged her there and then. But of course, now that she was supposedly a high-born, that would be inappropriate.

  Cabot gestured to the cart, a simple wooden trap covered with a canvas awning, and two pot-bellied ponies scraping the frost-hardened ground with their hooves, impatient to get going.

  ‘’Tis not much, ma’am, but it is all we have here at the priory.’

  She nodded calmly, almost serenely. ‘The vehicle is sufficient.’

  ‘And far better ye travel in a humble trader’s cart than in anything that might attract the interest of bandits,’ added Cabot.

  Becks nodded. ‘Indeed.’

  Liam smiled. ‘M’lady seems happy.’

  Cabot looked up at a heavy sky that promised snow. ‘Then we ought to leave with haste. ’Tis three days, but only if there is no snow. Three days to Prince John’s winter residence.’ He pulled aside the canvas cover at the back of the cart. ‘There ye are, m’lady,’ he said, offering a calloused hand to help her up into the trap, but she ignored that and hopped up with all the regal grace of a squaddie scrambling up into the back of an army truck.

  Liam pursed his lips. ‘Lady Rebecca’s a very independent woman, so she is.’

  ‘Aye,’ nodded Cabot, ‘noticed that.’

  Bob clambered aboard behind her and the cart dipped and wobbled under his weight.

  ‘Best we get going,’ said Cabot to Liam. ‘We will wish to be well clear of the forests before it gets dark later this afternoon.’

  CHAPTER 27

  2001, New York

  ‘I’m not going to run off and find the first news station I can and blab all about you, you know.’

  Maddy followed Adam up the steps and through a rotating glass door, into a quiet lobby. Before them the apartment block’s security guard looked up from behind a newspaper and a desk and smiled warmly at Adam.

  ‘Lovely evening, ain’t it, Mr Lewis?’

  ‘Isn’t it, Jerry?’ he replied cheerfully. ‘Unseasonably clement for the time of year.’

  Jerry looked like the kind of guy who’d once worked homicide but been put out to pasture. He sat back in a seat that creaked beneath his weight and laughed. ‘Tha’s what I love about you Brits … always got somethin’ real smart-soundin’ to say about the weather!’

  Adam shared his good-natured cackle with a wave and swept past his desk towards the elevators at the back of the foyer. He jabbed a button and they watched in silence as a number display slowly counted down, and listened to the muted rumble of early-evening traffic outside, the rustle of the newspaper in Jerry’s hands.

  With a ping, the brass doors opened and they stepped inside. Adam hit his floor number and the doors swished quietly closed.

  ‘I can’t take that chance,’ Maddy finally answered.

  ‘You still don’t trust me?’

  ‘Nope. I’d be a fool to, since we only met this morning.’

  He laughed. ‘Well, actually, we met seven years ago.’

  Some of his smile spread her way. ‘I guess.’ She looked around the dark wood and brass of the elevator. ‘I’m guessing
the rent in this block is pretty high.’

  ‘Very.’

  A soft chime announced their arrival at the fourteenth floor and the doors opened, revealing thick carpet and more dark wood. ‘You think this looks pricey, just wait till you see my gaff.’

  ‘Gaff?’

  He led her down the hallway and finally stopped outside a door, pulling a set of jangling keys from the inside pocket of his jacket. The door opened with a soft click and he pushed it open, gesturing her through first. ‘After you, madam.’

  ‘Oh, very gentlemanly,’ said Maddy. She stepped in and almost immediately she had to stifle a gasp. A wall of floor-to-ceiling tinted windows looked out on a forest of Manhattan skyscrapers, bathed in the rich vanilla light of a setting sun. She crossed a large open-plan lounge until her nose was almost jammed against the glass. ‘Oh my God … this is so cool!’

  ‘I certainly pay for that view,’ he replied, stepping in after her, draping his jacket over the back of a chrome bar stool and hitting his answerphone.

  Maddy turned to watch. There were messages. Of course there were: several from work, several female voices each enquiring what he was up to this evening. Adam shuffled through them, dismissing them casually. He offered her a self-conscious fluttering smile. ‘Sorry about that.’

  She shrugged. ‘Don’t worry. Clearly you’re much in demand.’

  ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘I just need to dig out that old drive of mine.’ He stepped past an exercise bike towards a chest beside the window. ‘Most of my junk from my university days is in here somewhere.’ He lifted the lid and carefully pulled out a dog-eared Warhammer box and chuckled. ‘Could never say goodbye to all my fantasy stuff. You can never let it go, you know? Not if you’ve put the time in, painting them, that I did.’

  He dug back in, pulling out one or two other assorted items. For the first time since this morning she began to recognize once again the edgy, lank-haired young man she’d visited with Becks back in 1994; a loner, an awkward geek obsessed with dark corners of knowledge – puzzles, numbers, codes, conspiracies.