Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

Faith clambered over the rail and let herself drop down. She landed twenty feet below on the hard floor, like a cat landing on its feet, legs flexed to absorb the impact like the over-pimped shock absorbers of a monster truck.

She reached into her waistband to pull out her last clip. The target — Madelaine Carter — was directly in front of her, trapped because the only way out was clogged with people tangled with each other and too petrified to sort themselves out. She would have smiled if she’d had that particular face gesture on file. Instead, her face remained impassive, as calm and expressionless as a person fast asleep as she rammed the last clip home into the grip of her handgun.

Sal and Rashim gave the mall guard — Kent — a thoroughly unconvincing pair of aliases and random contact numbers. The guard, though, seemed more than happy to take down what they said, no questions asked. Quite probably he was preoccupied with thanking God he was alive still. He offered a nod — Sal guessed that was his version of a ‘sorry for earlier’ — and told them to go home.

They now picked their way through the crowd at the front of the mall. A slew of police cars had parked up in a semi-circle just outside the entrance and officers were setting up a cordon around it, urging the rubbernecking curious back away from the rotating glass doors at the front.

‘Good grief… that was…’ Rashim wiped sweat from his forehead.

‘Close?’

He nodded. ‘Incredibly.’

‘They’re the same ones that were chasing me and Maddy before we came back in time to get you.’

‘Almost identical to your support units. They were definitely a similar batch number. Quite possibly from the exact same batch.’

A possibility occurred to Sal as they backed away from the crowd outside and studied the front of the mall from a comfortable distance. There were still people spilling out of the revolving doors, being hustled out of harm’s way as quickly as possible by paramedics, cops and mall guards. Maybe they were a batch of support units that had malfunctioned? Perhaps whoever was running their little agency from the future had decided to send them some replacement support units and something had gone wrong in the process?

She shot that idea down just as quickly as it had popped into her head.

No. There was the San Francisco drop point. That’s where they’d get back-up copies of Bob and Becks — frozen foetuses ready to grow. These were ones already fully grown and given a very specific mission. To come after the whole team and not rest until the last of them were dead. Apparently. So… no mistakes there. No malfunctions. Just deadly intent.

‘You think we should make our way back to that diner?’ said Rashim.

Sal was about to answer when two gunshots came from just inside the mall’s entrance foyer.

A moment later a large plate-glass window exploded and screams ripped through the air. The police who’d set up a cordon to hold the crowd back now drew their sidearms. All of them spinning round to face the glass frontage of the shopping mall. People spilled out of the slowly turning revolving door, the side doors, even through the jagged-tooth remains of the freshly shattered glass frontage.

‘There’s Maddy!’ hissed Sal.

She emerged with the others, arms up and wrapped round her head to protect it, hunkered over like someone getting out of a helicopter. Sal pushed through the crowd now all turning and scattering from the entrance at the sound of another shot fired inside the foyer.

‘MADDY!’ she called out. ‘OVER HERE!’

The girls all but crashed into each other.

‘Maddy? I thought you were — ’

‘Just GO! Gogogogogo! ’

Faith picked her zigzagging target out of the retreating, stampeding crowd. She levelled the. 40 Smith amp; Wesson. Now the thing had a fresh clip, she resolved to empty all twelve rounds in several controlled double-taps. To be absolutely certain of killing the target. As she aimed down the short barrel, she caught sight of one of the other targets: Saleena Vikram. Both girls tangled with each other for a moment, then, turning their backs to her, ran away hand in hand.

Two for the price of one. Faith nodded. Pleased with herself for producing an appropriate saying for the occasion. She was about to pull the trigger when the world went completely dark.

7.42 a.m., 12 September 2001, Interstate 95, outside Branford

Five minutes later they were all back aboard the RV, on the road and running on the last quarter-tank of petrol, Bob driving north-east as instructed and Maddy rocking back and forth beside him in the passenger seat trying to get a handle on things, get a handle on her jangling nerves, a handle on the growing knot of grief in her chest, as Sal, Liam and Rashim threw questions at her over the seat.

‘He’s gone,’ she said, finally answering them as to where the hell Foster was.

‘What? Do you mean…?’ Liam struggled to say any more. So Rashim finished his question for him.

‘They… they got Foster?’

She nodded. ‘Shot him.’

‘He’s dead?’

Here it comes. Maddy felt her composure slipping. The blissful comfort of numbness was ebbing away, like the downslope of a novocaine buzz after root-canal treatment. The first hot tears trickled down her cheeks. She tasted salt on her lips and licked them away.

She nodded. ‘Yes, Foster’s dead.’ Her voice was a lifeless whisper. The flutter and tap of moth wings against a windowpane. She took her glasses off and buried her damp face in her hands and realized that now she’d finally become that typical movie girl-in-distress: all quivering, dimpled chin and smudged mascara.

Albeit minus the mascara.

2055, outside Denver, Colorado

Joseph Olivera had got to know Frasier Griggs quite well. Griggs was the only other man in the world, other than Roald Waldstein, of course, who knew of the TimeRiders’ existence.

Frasier Griggs was Waldstein’s lesser-known junior partner. Where Waldstein was the source of the patents, the ideas man, the genius, Griggs was the practical other half: the software designer behind Waldstein’s prototypes, the builder; the Steve Wozniak to Waldstein’s Steve Jobs. Although most people assumed the ‘G’ in W.G. Systems was in memory of Waldstein’s dead son, Gabriel, Griggs was in fact the ‘Real G’. The company’s first stakeholder, the fledgling company’s first employee and perhaps the closest thing to a friend that Waldstein had ever had. Hell, on his desk, Griggs even had a tea mug with that printed on the side — The Real G.

The TimeRiders team established in 2001 became effectively ‘active’, and monitoring their activities began on 4 September 2054. On a day-to-day basis, Joseph and Griggs were the ‘base team’ doing that.

Only four months after the team started functioning, things began to go wrong. On 3 January 2055, they received a broad-burst tachyon signal from 2001. A malfunction with the field office’s displacement field had caused the first team to be killed. They’d received a garbled plea for help from one of them who’d managed to survive. Griggs panicked. For the first time since working for Waldstein, Joseph saw his boss’s normally ice-cool composure slip.

It wasn’t that the team had been destroyed that unsettled him; it was the fact that one of them had been careless enough to send an unencrypted, widespread tachyon signal. It was sheer blind luck for Waldstein that the message hadn’t included a mention of his name. But it might as well have, given he was quite likely the only person in the world, at that moment, with the know-how to send a traveller back in time.

That short signal could have been picked up by labs right across the world, and it could only mean one thing for everyone who might have detected it: that somebody was already up and running with viable displacement technology.