Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

The Department had a staff that had on a few occasions numbered as high as thirty-five men, but tended in quiet times to number as few as three. As it did right now. The ‘Head’, his assistant and a solitary clerical officer.

Niles Cooper was the ‘Head’ right now, and possibly for the foreseeable future. Handed that role by his predecessor, a middle-aged pen-pusher called Pullman, who’d been looking for an easy assignment to carry him over until retirement. Before him, there’d been an old man called Wallace who’d run The Department — so it was said — since it was set up back in 1945.

Every ‘Head’ had his pet file, so Pullman told Cooper the day he retired and passed the keys to this place over to his younger successor. Pullman said his pet file had been R-497, the Roswell one.

Cooper’s was the slimmest one: 414-T.

Something of an enigma, that one. Several black-and-white photographs, very poor quality if truth be told. They’d been recovered, supposedly, by a Russian intelligence officer from one of the artillery-damaged barrack buildings near Obersalzsberg, near the mountain-top retreat of Adolf Hitler.

The Eagle’s Nest.

But there was no guarantee of the accuracy of that. It might have come from somewhere else, just as likely one of the many bombed-out ministry buildings along the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. The images did have the ink-stamp of a swastika and a correctly configured intelligence reference number used by the Gestapo. So they were at least half-likely to be genuine.

Three photographs in total. The first in the sequence showed what appeared to be the aftermath of a bonfire of bodies in some snowy wood. A jumble of blackened limbs amid ice-melt and slush, surrounded by fir trees with snow-laden branches.

The second photograph was unpleasant. A close-up of a human skull, scorched completely black, and what appeared to be a section of skull cracked or carved open and lying in the snow nearby. The rest of the skull looked empty. Scooped out even.

But it was the third image that made this sequence so interesting, that had granted this slim file a place in The Department’s twilight bowels. The third image was of an assault rifle, like everything else scorched black and the gun barrel bent by the heat of the fire. There were notes stapled to the photograph. Notes made on some typewriter and in German, then added to some years later in English, handwritten blue ink, notes made by some American or British firearms expert:

Make and model is unknown. Not Russian. Certainly not one of ours! Could be a German prototype? The firing mechanism indecipherable. Can’t see how this gun would actually work!

(Signed: G. H. Davison. 16th February 1952)

Someone had drawn a blue-ink circle on a copy of the photograph. The circle looped round some markings beneath the weapon’s breech, a cluster of faint indented numbers and letters. The manufacturer’s markings, batch number, model number, and possibly the weapon’s date of manufacture.

Cooper had studied this photograph many times over the years. Each time, he’d studied it under a magnifying glass with the help of his angled desk lamp, like a manic philatelist examining a perfect and precious unmarked penny black stamp. And every time he’d peered closely at this black-and-white photograph he’d experienced the same shiver of excitement, of promise.

A possibility.

A possibility, and that’s all it was, a possibility that those last four numbers of the manufacturer’s mark were the year of manufacture.

2066.

11 September 2001, outside Branford, Connecticut

The motel was pretty basic, just what Maddy expected for thirty-nine dollars a night. A double bed, a table, a wobbly hanger rack and a small TV, manacled to a wall bracket. They got three rooms: one for Maddy, Sal and Becks, one for Liam and Bob and one for Foster and Rashim. Basic, but at least each room had an en-suite bathroom with a bathtub too small to drown a cat in and presided over by a shower unit that sprayed a lethargic afterthought of tepid water.

SpongeBubba had the RV with an aisle full of plastic bags all to himself.

They all freshened up, each of them relishing their turn in the showers, before heading to the diner next door for dinner. They chose unhealthy, heart-attack meals from a menu with helpful, if somewhat misleading, pictures. After that, they reconvened in Foster and Rashim’s room.

The TV was turned up enough that anyone in a neighbouring room wasn’t going to easily pick words out of their conversation through the paper-thin walls. Fox News was on and there was understandably only one story today. President George Bush had held a press conference and given the administration’s official response to the day’s acts of terrorism, and now his words were being dissected by news hosts in meticulous detail.

Foster was slumped in the room’s only chair. The others were perched on the double bed. Becks sat cross-legged on the carpet like a nursery-school child waiting for storytime and Bob stood in the corner of the room keeping a wary eye, through the window blinds, on the RV parked outside.

‘You want to know what the future’s like?’ said Rashim.

Maddy nodded. ‘Yeah, Liam’s right, we really should get to know how this century all plays out. All we’ve got are scraps of info. Bits here, bits there. Even Foster only knows some of it.’

The old man nodded. ‘Only what was available on the archway’s computer database and that only takes us up to the year 2054.’

Rashim looked at Foster. ‘The year your secret agency originates from?’

‘I suppose that must be it,’ Foster answered with a shrug. ‘It’s the year from which Waldstein set it all up and took it back to 2001.’

‘2054? I was just a small boy then!’ Rashim laughed.

‘Go on, please. Tell us what you can,’ said Liam.

Rashim leaned back on the bed, hands behind his head, looking up at the low cracked plaster ceiling above. ‘It’s not a happy story, boys and girls. We screwed things up. Mankind did. We made a mess of everything. Funny, it’s all history to me, but the future to you.’ He sighed. ‘The world hit seven billion people on the thirty-first of October 2011. In my time historians use that date a lot. Like some sort of a marker. The point at which it all began to go bad.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, whether it was the population explosion or peak oil to blame, 2011 is retrospectively seen as the point at which the world crossed the line and was doomed.’

‘ Peak oil? What’s that?’ asked Liam.

‘Peak oil is the term for the point at which we were never going to have enough oil-based energy to tide us over until we could rely on a new source of energy. Oh, there were things being trialled on a small scale: renewables, wind, tide energy, zero-point energy. But nothing that was near enough to replacing oil. The rest of the century was one war after another being fought for the remaining oil fields, while the world continued to warm up as we ferociously burned our dwindling supply of fossil fuels and the oceans continued to rise.

‘I have a question for you.’ Rashim lifted his head and looked at them all. ‘Any of you heard of the Fermi Paradox?’

Maddy did, or thought she did. ‘Isn’t that the puzzle to do with why we haven’t yet found any alien civilizations out there in the universe?’

He nodded. ‘A mathematician called Fermi calculated the odds of there being other alien life forms out there in the big wide galaxy. He took into account all the usual variables: the number of stars at the right point in their life cycles, the average number of likely planets per star, the probability of any of those planets existing within the “Goldilocks Zone” around the star, the likelihood of a planet having liquid water… all those important variables.