Alex Scarrow - Day of the Predator

Her name.

A note for me?

She reached in and picked it up. Just a folded scrap of paper, a few words scrawled hurriedly on it.

Maddy, look out for ‘Pandora’, we’re running out of time. Be safe and tell no one.

‘How’re you doin’, my dear sister?’ called out Liam.

‘I’m good,’ she replied, grabbing the scrap of paper, balling it up and tucking it into one of her gloves. She closed the box and lifted it back into the locker, much lighter now. She closed the door. ‘I’m all done here, Mr Leighton!’

‘Ah, splendid!’ He came over with his jangling keys and locked the deposit box for her.

‘Everything all right?’

She glanced at Liam making a silly face at her over Leighton’s shoulder.

‘Yes… yes, just fine, thank you.’

A minute later they were exiting the bank on to Minna Street once more, Liam holding the bag for her.

‘Nice enough chap,’ he said.

She turned to look at him. ‘A dozen hours from now he’ll be dead.’

‘Dead?’

‘Yes, dead. That’s why the instructions said to ask for him specifically.’ She’d figured that out on the way back up the stairs. Because if anything happened, if the young man had caught a glimpse of anything inside the box, or heard either of them say anything suspicious… well, he’d hardly have time to do anything with that knowledge, would he? The agency once again cleverly covering its tracks.

‘Jaayyzz. That seems not right to me,’ uttered Liam. ‘Not to warn him somehow.’

Maddy didn’t like it either. ‘It’s how it is, Liam. It’s how it is.’

As they walked up Minna Street towards the main thoroughfare, Liam attempted to lift the mood. ‘You got our little babies?’

She nodded. ‘All in there. Baby Popsicles.’

‘Baby what?’

2015, Texas

Edward Chan and the rest of the touring party sat in the visitors’ reception room, munching on doughnuts and breakfast bagels and slurping orange juice from cartons as their tour guide, Mr Kelly, gave them an introductory presentation.

‘The Texas Advanced Energy Research Institute… or TERI, as we call it for short, was established three years ago in 2012 when President Obama was re-elected. As you youngsters have been taught in school, the world is entering a new, tough and very challenging time. The world’s population is nearly eight billion, carbon emissions have gone off the chart, the world’s traditional energy sources — oil and gas — are rapidly running out. We need to change the way we live or… well, I’m sure you’ve seen enough doom and gloom forecasts on the news.’

He paused. The reception room was silent except for the shuffling of one or two feet and the slurping of orange juice through straws.

‘So, as you no doubt know, the institute was set up as part of the president’s advanced energy research programme. And over the last three years we’ve used the billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money set aside by this initiative to develop the wonderful facility you’re visiting today.

‘We have some of the finest quantum physicists and mathematicians working here, and most of our research work has been to do with a thing called zero-point energy. I’m sure some of you must have heard that term in the news.’

Edward looked around at the other kids. A few heads were nodding uncertainly. One of them — a boy a couple of years older than him, short and chubby with curly ginger hair parted at the side and brutally combed so that his hair kinked in waves to one side, reminding Edward of a Mr Whippy ice cream — raised a hand.

‘Yes, er…?’ said Mr Kelly, raising his eyebrows.

‘Franklyn.’

‘Go ahead, Franklyn.’

‘My dad says zero-point energy is just a bunch of wishful thinking. It’s like getting something for nothing. And that’s impossible in physics, nothing’s free.’

Kelly laughed. ‘Well, Franklyn, that’s a good point, but you see that’s exactly what it is. It is a free lunch. And the idea that there’s such a thing as a free lunch isn’t a new one either. Remember Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity. Well, he argued that even in a complete vacuum there’s a great deal left there. It isn’t just empty space, there’s energy too, endless energy waiting to be tapped. Even the ancient Greeks suspected that we walk through an endless soup of energy. They called it “ether”. But the trick, kids… the trick has always been being able to isolate it, to measure it. Since it exists everywhere, it’s homogenous, isotropic… That’s to say it’s uniformly the same everywhere and in every direction.’

The students stared at him in confused silence.

‘Trying to measure zero-point energy is a bit like trying to weigh a glass of water under the ocean. You know? It’s the same inside the cup as it is outside… and therefore since there’s no measurable difference between what’s in and outside the cup, the logical statement to make would be the “cup has nothing in it”. Which would of course be wrong. So, we have a similar issue with measuring zero-point energy. Only by creating a proper vacuum — and I don’t mean just sucking the air out of a space, I mean a proper space-time vacuum, a tiny one — can we observe what it is that remains.’ He smiled his polished public relations smile. ‘The energy itself.

‘And that’s what we have here at the TERI labs, a device that can create a proper space-time gap. A genuinely empty space.’

Another hand went up.

‘Yes?’

‘Keisha Jackson.’

‘Go ahead, Keisha.’

‘How big a hole have you got?’ asked the girl. ‘Is it big enough to step inside?’

‘Good Lord, no! No. It’s tiny. Very small. It doesn’t need to be big. It’s a pinprick.’

One of the boys at the back giggled.

‘Shortly, we’ll be going through into the main laboratory, where you’ll see the containment shielding that surrounds the area of experimentation. I believe the team is due to be opening a pinhole vacuum in the next half-hour.’ He splayed his hands. ‘Wanna go take a look-see?’

Every head in the room wagged enthusiastically.

1906, San Francisco

They returned to their alleyway with half an hour to spare, having spent an hour on the dockside watching the steam ships being loaded and unloaded, Maddy relishing every little detail of the past and giggling with unbridled delight as dockside workers knuckled their foreheads and doffed their caps at her politely as they walked past.

‘Oh my God! I feel like some sort of duchess!’ she whispered out of the side of her mouth to Liam as they turned into the alley. ‘Everyone’s so… I dunno, so polite and proper back in this time.’

He nodded. ‘Especially to a lady… like yourself.’ He nodded at her dress, her flamboyant hat with its ostrich feathers. ‘Them clothes mark you out as a lady of means. You know? A really posh lady, so you are. Now, if you’d found some dowdy dress that made you look common, them workers would’ve walked on past without a by-your-leave.’

‘Oh, right… thanks,’ she said.

Liam grimaced. ‘Ahhh, now see that came out all wrong-sounding, so it did. I didn’t mean to say it like that.’

‘No, you’re probably right,’ she huffed. ‘I’ve always been plain-looking. I’m sure shoving on a frilly dress and some stupid feather hat isn’t going to make much of a difference.’

They walked down the alley, sidestepping a toppled crate of festering cabbages until they reached the spot where they’d materialized several hours earlier.

‘Seems harsh that, though,’ said Liam thoughtfully.

‘What?’

‘That fella back there, Leighton. You sure he’ll die?’