Alex Scarrow - Gates of Rome

They settled down, looking further up the path at the pigeons indignantly puffing themselves up and backing off as several Canadian geese waddled over to take possession of ground littered with scattered breadcrumbs.

‘Foster?’

‘Yes.’

‘What is it you’re not telling me?’

He looked at her, a disarming smile. His best attempt at deflecting her.

‘Come on, Foster… you’ve only given me half what I need to know.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you think you know.’

‘Why are you… why can’t you just tell me everything?’

‘Because I don’t know everything.’

‘You know more than me. You know more than you’ve told me!’

He held her gaze. Eventually he nodded with some regret. ‘All right, yes, that’s true.’

‘Why? Why don’t you tell me all you know? What are you holding back?’

‘Knowledge, Maddy… foreknowledge.’

‘Pandora?’

He shook his head. She’d explained to him about the note she’d discovered. About the specific mention of that particular word in the Voynich Manuscript. ‘I know nothing about Pandora,’ he’d said and she suspected he was being straight with her about that.

‘It’s a message, Foster. A message someone’s trying to get to me. It’s got to be important, right?’

His fingers steepled beneath the wattled flesh of his jaw and he rested his chin on them. ‘Quite possibly, very.’

‘So what do I do about it?’

He watched the pigeons and geese strutting warily round each other, sizing each other up. Finally he spoke. ‘Perhaps you should ask about it.’

‘Ask who?’

His eyebrows arched suggestively.

‘What? You mean call forward? The future? The agency?’

‘Not a tachyon signal,’ he said quickly. ‘You absolutely can not do that. The particles will give you away.’

She knew that already. ‘The drop document?’

Foster had left Maddy a small library of instructions and advice. One entry had been how to communicate with the agency in extreme circumstances. What was actually classified as ‘an extreme circumstance’ had not been made entirely clear. The method of communication was to place a personal advert in the lonely hearts ads of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, beginning with the words ‘ A soul lost in time…’

Someone, somewhere in the future obviously had a yellowing copy of the newspaper and was watching that page for a subtle change. Watching for a gentle ripple in reality that altered nothing but the wording of that one personal ad.

‘Ask,’ he said again finally. ‘Why not?’

‘You really don’t know about Pandora… do you?’

Foster shook his head. She thought she knew him — and Liam for that matter — well enough to spot a lie. They were both completely rubbish at it.

‘Maybe I will,’ said Maddy.

‘And do let me know what he says. I’m just as curious now as you — ’

She turned to look at him. ‘ He? ’

Foster closed his eyes. She realized he’d let slip something he hadn’t wanted to.

‘He? Who? Who is he? The agency?’ She turned in her seat, grabbed his arm. ‘Foster?! Are you saying the agency is what? Just… just one person?’

He said nothing.

‘What about all the other teams?’

The old man’s lips tightened. His gaze flicked away from her.

‘Foster? Tell me! The other teams…?’

‘There are no other teams, Maddy,’ he whispered. His eyes drifted back to hers. ‘I’m so sorry. You’re alone. The agency is you. Just you.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘… And Waldstein.’

She all but missed hearing Waldstein’s name. Her mind was reeling, light-headed with a growing panic.

You’re alone.

The agency is you.

2070, Project Exodus, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs

‘Good morning, Dr Anwar.’

Rashim nodded quickly at the assistant technician, one of his small team. The air around his hand glowed with the stand-by display of a wrist-mounted holographic infopad.

‘Anything come in overnight?’

‘We had some more personnel changes come in, Dr Anwar. And their attached metrics.’

‘Oh, marvellous,’ Rashim muttered unenthusiastically. ‘Buzz them over to my unit and I’ll look at them later.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The technician flipped his wrist and a holographic display blinked into existence, hovering in the air in front of him. His finger swiped across the display and a dozen messages were highlighted then floated out of their ‘in-box’ and into the air like pollen.

‘Received,’ said SpongeBubba. The lab unit squatted beside Rashim’s desk like a docile pet. A moment later, he offered Rashim a toothy grin. ‘Collating metrics, skippa!’

Rashim glanced across the cavernous interior of the underground hangar, an interior blasted out of the mountain over a hundred years ago to make space for the political elite of the time — generals, congressmen, senators and their families — in the event of a thermonuclear war with the Russians.

He shook his head. Nothing changes. The politicians are always the first in line.

The hangar, perhaps a shade larger than a football pitch, was illuminated from the sides by floodlights erected on tripods. Pools of retina-achingly bright light stretched across a cold concrete floor, scuffed and grooved here and there decades ago when this installation was stripped bare of equipment and mothballed.

An empty floor… right now.

Rashim sat down among the cluster of cubicles and desks deployed in this corner of the hangar. First in again this morning, as always. He activated his terminal with a waft of his hand. His iris flickered momentarily as the terminal scanned and confirmed it was Dr Rashim Anwar issuing the command.

Project Exodus: Mass Translation Simulator — the words glowed crisply in the air in front of Rashim.

‘Activate the floor mark-up.’

The hangar’s concrete floor suddenly became a glowing chequerboard, criss-crossed with an intricate mesh of pulsing neon blue lines cast from a series of holographic projectors suspended from the cavernous ceiling. Grid-markers: squares varying in size from several inches across to several yards.

‘Overlay marker details.’

Above each square floated holographic displays of columns of numbers: vital statistics for what was one day going to occupy each square.

‘And give me the content icons.’

Above most of the various-sized grid squares, hundreds of them, glowing blue silhouettes suddenly appeared. Some of them the outlines of boxes and crates, several large icons depicting the profiles of vehicles, but the rest displaying the shimmering but clearly discernible outlines of human figures.

‘Bubba, can you show me who’s decided to be a nuisance this morning and drop out?’

‘Aye aye, skippa!’ SpongeBubba saluted playfully.

Eleven of the human icons glowed red.

Rashim got up from behind his desk and wandered across the hangar floor, the beams of light from above projecting down across his head, shoulders and back. He squatted down in front of the first human icon that had turned red. Rashim read the display of information floating in the air beside it. Candidate 165: Name — Professor Jennifer Carmel Age — 28 Assignment — Biochemist Mass Index — 54.4959

Beneath the display an envelope icon flashed, one of the notifications that came in during the night. Rashim touched the envelope and a message opened in the air beside his finger. Candidate 165 Carmel, J., deceased. Food riots in Puerto Rico, yesterday. One hundred and fifty-six fatalities. Cause of death — head trauma, gunshot wound. No information on whether she was part of the riot or accidentally caught up. Next of kin informed.