Alex Scarrow - The Doomsday Code

Sal shook her head and looked up. ‘Not that. I just felt the ground shift.’ She looked at them. ‘You didn’t feel it?’

Liam and Maddy shook their heads. Maddy looked around at the busy thoroughfare. Nothing looked any different to her. ‘Sal? Was it a …?’

‘Yes. A small one, I think.’ Her eyes systematically scanned the buildings, the people, the cabs.

‘See anything?’

‘Not yet … not yet. Give me a second.’ It was difficult. She was used to scanning Tuesday morning at 8.30 a.m., the routine she’d established. She could describe that particular moment and place in time down to the tiniest detail now. But this was Times Square thirty-two hours earlier, with different people doing different things. Then her eyes landed on a poster outside the Golden Screen cinema.

‘Over there,’ she said, pointing and stepping quickly through a logjam of cars and pedestrians to get to the far side of the square. A minute later the others joined her as she ran her fingers across the scuffed perspex cover over the sidewalk poster. ‘This is new,’ she said. ‘This isn’t meant to be here. Not on Tuesday morning, it isn’t. I’m certain.’

Maddy looked it over. The poster displayed a picture of a young man on the run, being chased by helicopters and black Humvees through some European city. It could have been Paris, it could have been Prague, for all she knew. ‘ The Manuscript ,’ she read aloud. ‘Never heard of it.’

Liam read the strapline. ‘ The greatest code in history has just been broken. ’ He looked at the top of the poster. ‘So, who’s Leonardo DiCaprio?’

Maddy waved the question aside. ‘Sal, you sure about this?’

‘I felt something … and this shouldn’t be here.’ She nodded, tapping the poster. ‘Unless it gets taken down before Tuesday.’

‘But why would they?’ Maddy checked the date. The movie wasn’t out until 15 October, just over a month from now. ‘They run these posters right up until release week.’ She turned to the others. ‘Anyway, I’ve never heard of this movie. And I’m pretty sure Leonardo’s never been in a — a chase-y, spy movie like this. I’ll give this a look-up when we get back.’

Becks nodded firmly, an untidy tress of dark hair flopping across her face. ‘This isn’t right.’

He watched them go, picking up their pace as they strode purposefully across Times Square.

Don’t lose them. Whatever you do, don’t lose them.

He matched their pace, weaving between the stop-start yellow cabs and ignoring the insults hurled out of the drivers’ windows at him.

Don’t lose them … not now, not after all this time.

He only recognized two of them: the girl with the glasses and the frizzy hair, and the tall athletic girl with long dark hair. The other two seemed to be friends. Close friends by the look of their body language. And they’d stopped and been studying a poster for the movie, hadn’t they?

The movie, The Manuscript , was just another Hollywood cop-out: a cheesy chase movie with big explosions and stupid slow-motion gunfights and the obligatory baddy with an English accent.

They were heading down Broadway now, the three girls and the boy, passing by a noisy gaggle of middle-aged women — tourists by the look of them. He lost sight of them for a moment and began to panic.

Don’t lose them, whatever you do!

He caught sight of the tall girl with the dark hair again, striding like an athlete on platform heels that added another half a dozen unnecessary inches to her height. He gasped with relief as the other three emerged through the tangle of women. He decided to close the gap on them, unwilling to risk losing them because a pedestrian light went against him, or they’d turned a corner and took a side street before he could re-establish a visual.

Too long he’d been waiting to see them again. Way too long to lose them now.

2001, New York

Just as Maddy had promised, the archway was there as they’d left it, and not empty and disused nor occupied by alternate versions of themselves giving them grief for causing some weird time paradox.

She pulled the shutter down once they were all inside. ‘Gonna need a coffee here. I think I need a caffeine hit.’

‘Affirmative,’ said Becks.

‘I’ll go check on Bob,’ said Liam. ‘See how the fella’s coming along.’

Maddy nodded distractedly as she made her way to the computer station. ‘Now let’s see what’s what,’ she muttered as she sat down in the chair and swivelled round to face the monitors. A dialogue box popped up.

› Hello, Maddy. How was the musical performance?

‘We call it a gig , Bob.’

› How was the gig?

‘It was cool, very cool and I’ll tell you all about it later. Right now I need to hook into the external Internet link and do a search.’

› Affirmative. External feed active.

She pulled up the system’s search engine and tapped into their connection with the World Wide Web. ‘What was the name of that movie again?’

‘ The Manuscript ,’ said Sal, taking a seat beside her.

She pinched her lip. ‘Like I say, never heard of it. And, sheeesh, I love DiCaprio.’

The search engine spewed out a page of hits, every last one to do with the movie: reviews, good and bad, mostly bad; entertainment news and dedicated film sites all chattering about Leonardo. She picked a website she used to regularly tap into from her bedroom back in 2010, Ain’t-it-Cool-News. She smiled at how primitive it looked back in 2001.

Good ol’ World Wide Web Version 1.0.

… directed by Don Rowney, a change of pace and direction for the director who normally does drippy romantic comedies. The Manuscript starts out with an interesting high-concept premise before nose-diving and becoming a pretty dull, dial-it-in chase movie. The first twenty minutes of the film introduce us to what it calls the ‘Most Mysterious Manuscript in History’ — something I thought was a made-up story device until I did my homework: The Voynich Manuscript, apparently a book-length document that first surfaced in the Middle Ages, written entirely in a gibberish language that, to this day, has yet to be successfully deciphered. DiCaprio, still hot from his fresh-faced role in James Cameron’s Titanic , plays Adam Davies, a hacker and cryptolinguist — a code-breaker — who manages to write a piece of software that unlocks the Voynich and foolishly decides to brag about his achievement to family and friends and fellow hackers. But, as is always the case, it isn’t long before the bad guys — the nastiest kind of shady government spooks — come knocking, concerned that Davies’s code-breaking software could be equally successful in unlocking the intelligence community’s deepest and darkest secrets. The movie is based on a supposedly true story culled from the British Press — the real culprit, Adam Lewis, a hacker from England, was written off as an attention-seeking loner after the story appeared in a British newspaper called the Sun back in 1994 …

Maddy looked at Sal. ‘Interesting.’

‘I wonder if that’s the same Leonardo DiCaprio as the old man who bought a whole chunk of the Antarctic, like earlier this year.’ She looked at the others. ‘I mean my year, you know? 2026. He went to live there among the penguins. To protect them from oil drillers or something.’

‘You gotta be kidding me. Seriously?’

Sal shrugged. ‘Might be someone else. Pretty sure the name was DiCaprio.’

Maddy shook her head at the thought of it before returning to the task at hand. She typed a search on ‘Adam Lewis’ and ‘1994’ and ‘Voynich Manuscript’. As Maddy trawled through the hits that came back, Becks cleared a space on the cluttered desk and placed a mug of black coffee in front of her.