Alex Scarrow - City of Shadows

‘I know I keep saying this,’ he said, breaking the long silence, ‘but if you just shared with me the data you have on them, I could put it to good use. I can get priority access to the Bureau’s IT department. We can tap all sorts of databases… medical insurance, local and state law-enforcement incident reports, bank records, traffic — ’

‘No,’ she said softly. ‘Your assistance in this matter is — ’ she paused, her eyelids flickering as she considered a choice of phrase — ‘ appreciated. However, I am unable to share with you data about the target.’

Perhaps he could try a different angle. ‘Well, what about you, then? Hmmm? Or how about telling me something about where you’ve come from?’

Her cool grey eyes locked on his. ‘You wish to know about the future?’

He shrugged. ‘Yeah, why not?’

She silently considered that for a moment. ‘I am unable to tell you specific details. But I can discuss the early symptoms that are occurring in the world at present.’

‘Symptoms?’ He laughed at that. ‘You make the world sound like it’s a hospital patient.’

She cocked her head slightly. ‘That analogy is suitable. This world is “sick”. It is unsustainable. It is dying.’

‘Dying? What do you mean?’

‘Population tangents increasing versus rapidly diminishing world resources. Even in this time evidence of this, of these future problems, is known to your world leaders. But they choose to do nothing. Oil will run out. Global warming will increase. The polar caps will melt and a third of the world’s land mass will be submerged by rising sea levels. It will become accepted in 2035 — far too late to deploy corrective measures — that global warming was more significantly affected by the explosion in world population than it was by hydrocarbon usage.’

She adjusted the cuffs of her jacket. Her hair was growing in quickly — still boyishly short, though. But now, with a vaguely feminine fringe of dark hair and office clothes Cooper had bought her from JC Penney, she almost looked like your typical Wall Street go-to girl: hard-faced, ambitious and smartly turned out.

‘In only twenty-five years from now there will be nine billion human beings attempting to exist on a diminishing resource-poor land mass. The arithmetic is inevitable, and was always entirely predictable, Cooper. Even now there are scientists that are accurately predicting mankind’s fate.’

‘Which is what?’

She shrugged. ‘You will destroy yourselves.’

He puffed his cheeks. ‘That’s, uh… that’s pretty grim.’

‘It is what will happen.’

‘Jeez, I bet you’re a blast at parties.’

She cocked an eyebrow. ‘I don’t understand the relevance or intended meaning of that comment.’

‘Never mind.’

Just then the door into the main office swung inwards with a bang. Cooper jerked and spilled coffee on to the crisp white cuff of his shirt. He saw Mallard’s face across a chest-high maze of vacant office cubicles.

‘Christ, Mallard! You made me jump!’

‘Sir! Sir!’

‘What the hell is it?’

Mallard picked his way through, past an empty watercooler that hadn’t been used in years, past desks with dust-covered computers that, if someone actually bothered to switch them on, they’d find still ran on Windows 95.

‘Sir,’ he said, breathless, as he finally stood in front of Cooper and Faith. ‘We’ve got a solid lead. Some small-town sheriff reckons he’s ID’ed one of the images we put up on the Bureau’s Most Wanted site.’

‘Where?’

Mallard looked down at a Post-it note in his hand. ‘They’re in Ohio. Someplace called Harcourt. It’s some has-been town. Used to have several auto-parts factories. They’re all closed down now. Mothballed.’

‘Hang on.’ Cooper looked at Faith. ‘That’s what you suggested, wasn’t it? They’d go to ground someplace like that? Quiet. Out of the way…?’

‘With access to a source of electricity and required technical components.’ She nodded and almost smiled. ‘It is what I would do.’

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

‘But it’s going to be dangerous, isn’t it?’ Sal looked at Becks. She was no taller or bulkier than any normal twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl. But she, like Bob, was originally engineered for military purposes, a killing machine; if she got the idea into her head while Bob was not around, there’d not be much of any of them left.

Maddy clucked her tongue. ‘I’ve got no idea how she’ll behave. But if she bugs out on us, we’ve got Bob right here to restrain her, or…’

‘Kill her?’

‘Look… it won’t come to that, I’m sure. More likely she’ll just swoon and pine for Liam like some pathetic fangirl.’

Sal snorted. That was kind of funny despite the seriousness of the situation. ‘But why now? Why don’t we wait until we’re settled in London?’

‘I’m not sure we’re going to have enough power back in 1888 to sustain our back-up frozen embryos. Once we go through to the past, we may not be able to regrow replacement support units. It might be just Bob and Becks… one of each. We lose them, we won’t have any back-up support units to grow.’

‘What about the San Francisco drop point?’

Maddy shook her head. ‘I don’t think it would be a good idea going anywhere near there. They’ve got to be watching that place now. No… it would be dumb for us to go back there.’

Sal nodded.

‘We can take the foetuses with us, just in case there’s some way we can find a way to grow new support units if needed. But, really, I think we need to sort Becks out now, once and for all. We need both our support units fully loaded and functional.’ She turned to them both. ‘Once we go back, we may have to ditch our embryos and that means no more support units. We’ll have to rely indefinitely on these two. Which is why… we need to test her mind out now, Sal, while we’ve got a chance here in 2001 to grow a new one from scratch if… you know… this doesn’t work out. Anyway,’ she added, ‘while Liam’s in London it might be easier. We don’t want Becks hurling herself his way and slobbering all over him.’

Sal curled her lip. An ‘eww’ written all over her face.

Maddy pulled a hard drive out of her duffel bag. Masking tape with ‘Becks’ felt-tipped across it. Becks’s complete, original consciousness, her mind, right there in a hard plastic case. Maddy held it up. ‘You ready for this, Becks?’

‘Affirmative. I am ready.’

‘All right, then.’ Maddy wasn’t entirely sure this was the sensible thing to do. But what was locked away on there, in an encrypted folder, was knowledge that was far too important to remain there forever… a decoded portion of the Holy Grail. A message sent by someone, quite possibly the previous team. Quite possibly a previous version of Maddy herself. And God knows what the message was. Another warning like that scribbled Pandora one? But whoever had sent the message from two thousand years ago, they’d thought to pass along an instruction to Becks to keep the secret locked away until certain unspecified conditions were met. And now all of that was sitting on an external hard drive: on a piece of hardware that was unable to process these thoughts; on hardware that was merely able to store them. They needed Becks’s knowledge, her memories installed back on-board a support-unit mind where, hopefully someday soon, Becks would be able to announce that these mysterious ‘conditions’ had been met, and let Maddy know what the big secret was.

And now they were acting entirely on their own, beyond the agency’s original remit, Maddy realized they had twice as much need to know what dark secret had been transported across a thousand years of Roman history and the Dark Ages, across another thousand years of Holy Grail history for their eyes only.