TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (30 page)

‘Uh … it’s
Herbert
actually.’

Delbert sighed. ‘Now, boy, let’s
not show off in front of the clients. Right, then! Let’s go and discuss the rent,
gentlemen!’

He led Liam and Bob out of the room. Rashim
remained behind, taking in the space a moment longer.

‘You’re really an
inventor
, sir?’ asked Bertie.

Rashim shrugged. ‘More a quantum
technician really.’

The young man didn’t understand the
term, but seemed impressed with it all the same. ‘Well, that sounds jolly
exciting, sir.’ He offered his hand to Rashim. ‘I do hope we shall have a
chance to talk some time. I’ve got some ideas I’d love to share with you, if
you’d care to …?’

‘Uh? Oh … sure,
Bertie.’ Rashim shook his hand. ‘Yes, we’ll talk some time.’

‘Pft! You know, Dr Anwar, I hate it when
Delbert introduces me with that damnable nickname. It’s only him that calls me
Bertie. No one else!’

Rashim snuffed the candle out and stepped
back out of the room to follow the others before the receding light of the gas lamp
dwindled to nothing and they were left in the pitch-black darkness.

‘Herbert,’ the young man called
out after Rashim. ‘My name’s actually Herbert.’ But Rashim
wasn’t listening; he was trying to catch up with the dwindling lamp light.

The young man was alone in the gloom, the
skittering of emboldened rats emerging now it was almost wholly dark again. ‘I was
jolly well christened Herbert George Wells! Not bloomin’
Bertie
.’

But Rashim had turned a corner and was
gone.

7 October 2001, Harcourt, Ohio

Sheriff Marge McDormand cradled the mug of
green tea in both hands as she stared at the computer screen in front of her.

‘Hell of a crazy world,’ she
muttered to herself.

‘What’s that, Marge?’

‘Nothing, Jerry,’ she replied.
She looked past the computer at her husband, sitting in the desk opposite hers.
‘And it’s “Sheriff” during office hours, my dear.’

Jerry pulled a biro out of his mouth and
sighed. ‘It’s not enough I’m your office boy?’

‘The term is “Deputy”,
hon … and that’s only until we can find someone else to stand in.’
She smiled at him. ‘I’m sure we’ll find someone soon. Then you can go
back to being a kept man.’

She looked back at the screen. Quiet day in
Harcourt. She’d done her rounds this morning. Nothing much to write up. A stolen
car dumped outside Gary’s Bar. No harm done to it other than the
driver’s-side window forced and the steering column’s plastic hood broken to
jack the ignition. That and giving Henry Learry – the town drunk – a lift in the squad
car back home to his anxious wife. Marge had found him fast asleep behind the wheel of
his truck after a night binge-drinking, still way too soaked to be trusted to drive the
thing home safely.

Those were the sort of things that Marge
dealt with day to
day. The occasional problem with kids breaking into
and messing around in the abandoned factories, the occasional domestic dispute, the
occasional kitty stuck up a tree. That was it. Police work in Harcourt.

Suited her. She was far too old to be
dealing with real crime. She carried a firearm on her hip, but in five years as sheriff
here she’d yet to unpop the leather flap of her holster in the course of doing her
job.

Which was just fine.

The morning’s breakfast round had
ended up as it always did at the diner where she’d got into the habit of picking
up a take-out coffee and doughnut for Jerry and a green tea for herself. The Williams
girl, Kaydee-Lee, usually served her and kept her there talking about everything and
nothing for five minutes longer than it took to serve up the order.

That poor young girl’s so
lonely
.

Marge wondered why on earth she stayed in
Harcourt. This place was a town with a past, not a future: a glorified departure lounge
for an ageing population that seemed to shrink by a couple of dozen every harsh
winter.

This morning, though, Kaydee-Lee had had
some company. A disarmingly pleasant young man with an interesting accent and charmingly
old-fashioned manners. For some reason Marge thought he was Canadian until she got back
in the car and placed his accent. Irish. The pair of them seemed to be getting on like
old buddies. Thick as thieves.

That girl needed someone in her lonely life.
And the young man seemed to be a nice enough find.

Good for you, girl.

Marge sipped her tea and returned to her
routine of grazing through news websites and the state police intranet pages. The world
really seemed to have gone quite mad in the wake of that
terror attack
in New York. The President was busy banging a drum for the whole world to go to war with
Iraq for some reason. Even though there was evidence surfacing that the terrorists had
mostly come from Saudi Arabia.

Go figure.

And what about those guys in Afghanistan?
What were they called? Tally-something? Jerry kept calling them the
Telly
-
Tallies
. Like those children’s characters on TV.
Weren’t they more likely involved in attacking the Twin Towers than this Saddam
Hussein fellow over in Iraq?

Marge shook her head. Americans were quite
rightly angry. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers were grieving for loved ones right now,
but
now
was surely not the best of times to be making big decisions like who to
go to war with.

The boys want a war
. She sighed
again.
And they’ll get their war sure enough
.

She clicked to close the MSNBC news page and
then pulled up the state police bulletin page. It featured the usual day-to-day bumph,
plus the now obligatory daily notices on the current terror threat level. Today it was,
as it was yesterday and the day before:
RED
–
SEVERE
.
Beside the colour-coded alert was a reminder for all law-enforcement personnel to be
vigilant for ‘suspicious activities and persons’.

Marge was
always
alert for
suspicious activities and persons. It was –
well duh, excu-u-use me
– her job
anyway! She found the notice vaguely patronizing. It would be like telling young
Kaydee-Lee to make a special effort not to pour scalding coffee over the head of the
next customer she served.

Grating her teeth, she dutifully scanned the
rest of the page then hit the link to the FBI’s ViCAP site. The Bureau were
featuring front and centre a rogues’ gallery of Most Wanteds. Two dozen mugshots,
a fair number of them dark-skinned and
sporting dark Santa Claus
beards large enough to lose a small dog in.

‘Nope,’ she muttered, ‘not
seen any of you types skulking around here in Harcourt … nor
you … nor you, Mr Osama bin Laden, nor you, Mr Manuel Caraccus.’ She
clicked on the link for the second page of the gallery.

‘Nor …’ And stopped
mid-mutter. She was looking at a face she’d seen just ten minutes ago.

Jerry heard her suck in her breath. He
looked up from the paperwork on his desk. ‘Given yourself another paper cut,
Marge?’ He noticed her wide eyes, her glasses reflecting the pale glow of the
computer screen, the styrofoam cup held midway between the desk and her mouth, which now
hung open, not making a sound – a rare event in itself.

‘You OK over there, Marge?’

7 October 2001, Green Acres Elementary
School, Harcourt, Ohio

‘Looks like you’re going to
have to dig through some walls by the look of this.’ Maddy clicked on the screen
and zoomed in on a portion of the blueprint.

Rashim nodded. ‘It appears as if they
left space between these walls for cabling to run from the generator room up to the
lights on the top. And over here.’ He pointed on the screen. ‘Cabling that
leads out to an external distribution node.’

‘Uh-huh. I guess they planned to have
the generator as a part of the viaduct from the very beginning. Fascinating.’

Rashim reached for the mouse. Fingers
touched. And recoiled. An awkward half a second.

‘All yours,’ Maddy said a little
too quickly.

He dragged the pixellated image of the
blueprint across the screen. ‘Hmm, it would be a lot easier knocking through to
the generator room itself. Only two walls between our archway and that big steam engine
in there.’

‘But would you really want to do that?
Bust right in there? There’s probably “steam engine” engineers or
whatever you call them in there. Coal-shovellers and stuff. We’ve got to be
ultra-discreet about this.’

‘Indeed. Yes … so maybe
then, we’ll have to tap the cabling somewhere along this conduit. It’s a lot
more work.’ He leaned
forward. ‘And I imagine a bit of a
squeeze, shuffling along inside that space between the walls.’ He squinted and
muttered a curse in Farsi. ‘I wish this image was at a higher
resolution.’

‘Best I could get.’ She
shrugged. ‘In fact, it was the only blueprint image I could find.’
She’d spent a good part of yesterday back at the Internet cafe in the retail park.
She’d found an architectural website with an archive of Victorian-era building
projects. The Holborn Viaduct was hardly the grandest of London projects, but
historically notable because of its incorporation of the city’s first electric
generator.

‘It looks fiddly … but it is
discreet, Rashim, and that’s the important thing. If we’re going to start
leeching on their power, we’ve got to make it so that, if they work out the
generator’s not delivering the power it’s designed to deliver, it’s
got to be almost impossible for them to figure out where the power is leaking away to.
The only way they’ll figure out what’s going on is if they decide to track
the course of the cables. Thing is, if we tap the output cautiously – little and often –
it’ll never be enough of a drain for them to consider stopping the engine and
overhauling everything to figure it out.’

‘Hopefully.’

She made a face.
‘Hopefully.’

‘Hey! You all right there,
Sal?’

She looked up. Liam was crossing the cracked
and weed-speckled playground. He casually kicked his way through a pile of dead leaves,
this year’s fall from the maple trees lined up beside what was once the school bus
drop-off point. The leaves rustled and skittered across the tarmac, caught by a fresh
breeze.

Early October, it was getting cold now. The
clouds above were promising snow, not rain. Sal shivered inside her parka,
puffing a cloud of vapour out in front of her. Liam joined her on the
swing. Sat on the plastic strap-seat next to her. The rusting frame creaked as they both
swung gently, idly.

‘I’m fine.’

‘Jay-zus!’ He rubbed his hands
together vigorously. ‘It’s cold out here! You should come in.’

‘I’m
in
all the time. I
came out to get some fresh air.’

‘Aye …’tis a bit smelly
inside, so it is.’

Both Bob and Becks were eating the same
convenience meals as them. However, their body chemistry preferred high-protein, low-fat
foods. And preferably blended to a baby mush. But tins of refried beans in New Orleans
sauce, Uncle YangYang Kettle Noodles and pop tarts had to suffice as their source of
nutrition. It just meant they farted constantly. Particularly Bob. He was like some
flea-bitten, wiry old mongrel dog letting them off one after the other without any sense
of embarrassment. Seemingly without a care in the world.

‘Why do you do that?’ she asked
presently.

‘Do what?’

‘Talk like you do. The whole Irish
thing. You’re not even Irish.’

‘Hey! Jayz- … I
just …’ His mouth flapped for a moment then shut with a coconut
clop
. He looked hurt. Sal winced. That had come out sounding all wrong and she
felt guilty.

‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t
trying to be rude, Liam. I just think it all sounds … I dunno, fake
now.’

He swung in silence. The frame creaked.

‘I’ve stopped using those Indian
words. I don’t think I even knew what they meant. I’m not even sure if they
were real Hindi words.’ She still had the sing-song Indian accent, though.
She’d even started consciously trying to lose that. If it wasn’t real, if it
was some technician’s idea of how an Indian girl from 2026
ought
to sound … then she was damned if she was going to follow
his programming.

‘I talk this way,
Sal … because it’s the only way I know how to talk.’

‘It’s just code, Liam.
It’s code. Worse than that … the Irish thing? It’s a cheesy
cliché.’

‘It’s who I am.’ He
shrugged. ‘Even if that does make me a –
whatcha-call-it?
– a
cliché
.’

She looked at him. ‘How can you do
that, though? Go on just like before, like nothing’s happened?’

He managed a wry smile. ‘Why not?
Nothing about me has changed at all, so. I’m exactly the same person I
was.’

‘But how can you be the
same
person
now you know what you are? Everything –
everything
– planted in
our minds before we woke up … none of it ever happened! It’s nothing!
God … I mean, maybe we’ve got chips in our heads just like Bob and
Becks. Have you considered that?’

‘Aye. But it doesn’t worry me
any.’

‘How can it not?’

He shrugged. ‘Anyway, Maddy reckons
we’re not the same as them. Our minds aren’t computers but proper human
minds. That’s why we had to believe we were human. So we’d act like humans.
Think like humans.’

‘But wouldn’t you want to have
someone X-ray your head? Take a look inside to see if there’s a chip or something
inside?’

‘Not really. Whatever’s in me
head, machine or meat, it works just fine.’

She sniffed. ‘Except it’s
fake.’

‘Ah well now … who’s
to say anybody’s memories are for real? Hmm?’ He chuckled. A plume of breath
erupted from his mouth. ‘You know, perhaps the whole world, the whole universe, is
just a big pretend – someone’s idea of a funny joke. Huh?’