‘Then we should begin immediately.’
Chapter 8
21 August 2001, Arlington, Massachusetts
Joseph Olivera held the digital camera in front of him and panned it around the tree-lined avenue. Such a beautiful place. Long, freshly clipped lawns leading up from a wide avenue to generous whiteboard houses. Suburbia. It was mid-afternoon and peaceful and the sun was shining with a warm, mid-August strength, dappling the road with brushstrokes of light and shade through the gently stirring leaves of the maple trees.
Beautiful.
As a child Joseph had dreamed of living in a place like this. He used to watch old programmes from this time, family dramas they used to call ‘soap operas’, with healthy, tanned people always smiling, happy families, driving nice cars and worrying about nothing more important than high school proms, or who was dating who or who was going to win a thing called the ‘super bowl’.
Joseph walked slowly down the avenue, panning his camera left and right. In the viewfinder an elderly woman was kneeling among a bed of flowers with gardening gloves and pruning shears. A postman walked cheerfully by with a nod and a smile for Joseph. Some chestnut-coloured Labrador was frolicking on a lawn, chasing a frisbee. He could hear the lazy buzz of a lawnmower somewhere.
Suburbia. Beautiful suburbia.
Joseph had only ever known cities. All his life, cities. Towering labyrinths of noise and chaos that seemed to contract on themselves, getting tighter and more choked and crowded with each passing year. His early school years he’d lived with his family in Mexico City, then, later on, as a student in Chicago. He’d been working in London in the 2040s, during which time large portions of that city had begun to be abandoned to the all-too-frequent flooding of the River Thames. Finally, he’d ended up in New York. They’d been building up those enormous flood barriers around Manhattan then. Hoping to buy the city another couple of decades of life.
But always… always he’d dreamed of a place like this, mature trees, lush green lawns, sun-drenched porches and white picket fences. The perfect place to grow up. The perfect place to spend one’s childhood.
He passed a driveway with a Ford Zodiac parked in it, stunning paint job. Pimped with skulls and flames to look like it had driven bat-out-of-hell style right out of Satan’s own garage. Joseph grinned.
Some young man’s first car, of course.
Joseph looked around. One of these houses would be hers. He panned his camera left. Then right. The viewfinder settled on a grand-looking home. Mock colonial with a covered porch that fronted it and wound round the side. There was even a rocking-chair on there.
Perfect.
Joseph crossed the avenue. The house’s driveway was empty. Presumably no one home. Just as well. Better that he didn’t attract the attention of anyone inside.
His digital camera still filming, he walked up the tarmac drive, sweeping the camera gently in a smooth panning motion, taking in every little detail, finally reaching the bottom of three broad wooden steps. He took them one at a time. Now standing on the wooden boards of the porch, freshly whitewashed. He let the camera dwell on the rocking-chair for a moment, the hanging baskets of purple and pink Sweet Carolines, on several pairs of gardening boots and gloves, a small ceramic garden gnome holding a chainsaw. Somebody’s idea of a joke present for Mom or Dad. The camera recorded all those small, important, personal details.
And finally he panned the camera on to the door of the house. Mint green with a brass knocker in the middle. Joseph smiled wistfully. What a wonderful childhood home to have. What wonderful childhood memories to have.
‘I envy you, Madelaine Carter from Boston,’ he said softly. ‘To have all of this…’
He had enough to use now, and turned the camera off.
Chapter 9
12 September 2001, New York
Faith was picking through the scattered circuit boards on the desk. They were specifically querying the motherboards first. That’s where the cache memory was, lodged in these ridiculously bulky chips of dark silicon on tiny hair-thin metal seating pins.
They had both been meticulously teasing small charges of electricity into the circuits, stirring them to life and diverting the random nuggets of dormant information to a connected monitor. What they were getting mostly was useless gibberish: random packets of hexadecimal, every now and then punctuated with snippets of English. Faith’s internal clock informed her they had spent nearly twelve hours on this process. Twelve hours during which their targets must be putting a healthy distance between them.
She picked up the motherboard of a yet unchecked computer and prepared to hand it to Abel to jury-rig a connection to the monitor when her eyes settled on a pad of lined writing paper half buried beneath the mess on the desk. She reached out and picked it up. The last used sheet had been torn away roughly, leaving a few tattered paper shreds attached to the glue binding at the top, the tops of several letters in biro. That’s all.
But that wasn’t what Faith was focusing on.
It was the shallow indentations on the page that had been directly beneath the torn-away page. She held the pad close to her face, tilting it so that light from the desk lamp fell obliquely across the paper. She could make out the faintest lines of indentation… the hard tip of a biro pressed too heavily, too quickly on the page above. The scrawl of someone in a hurry. Perhaps someone thinking, making a desperate decision. Writing lists, pros and cons.
She could make out a word, very faint and not entirely complete. But her mind quickly produced a very brief shortlist of possible word variables. Only one of them had any relevance to the data she’d been uploaded with for the mission.
She put the pad down. ‘The team leader, Madelaine Carter, is taking the team to her childhood home.’
Abel looked up from the soldering iron in his hand and a curl of blue smoke twisted in the harsh light of the desktop lamp as he put down the motherboard he was working on. ‘Why do you conclude that?’
Faith handed him the pad of paper. He squinted at it. And, just as she had, his eyes picked out the faintest markings of writing.
‘Boston,’ he said.
Faith nodded. ‘She is going home.’
They emerged from the archway. As they paced swiftly towards the intersection between Wythe Avenue and South 6th Street, a Bluetooth conversation passed quickly between them. They needed a vehicle. They needed a vehicle now. They needed to make up for the lost twelve hours.
Abel stood at the entrance to the alleyway. It was dark now, an hour after midnight. Street lights bathed the Brooklyn intersection opposite with sickly neon, punctuated by the regular circular blue flicker of police lights.
An NYPD squad car was parked diagonally across the intersection, impeding the flow of traffic in both directions. Cones placed out to help make the point. No traffic was being allowed on to the slip road and up the ramp on to the Williamsburg Bridge. No traffic, that is, except emergency vehicles: fire engines, mobile cranes and diggers heading over into Manhattan, the occasional solitary ambulance heading slowly back out. No sirens. No horn. No rush.
Even now, at this late hour, there were still a few pedestrians out, craning their necks to get a look past the towering supports of the bridge at the apocalyptic haze on the far side. Manhattan glowed with a million office lights as usual, but tonight the light pollution was enhanced by powerful halogen floodlights towards the south end of the island that leaked an unstinting glare into the night sky like an unnaturally early dawn.
Faith stood beside Abel, both of them now evaluating the situation. Both of them staring covetously at the NYPD squad car, parked across South 6th Street. Two policemen stood guard ready to wave back any non-emergency traffic trying to pick through the cones to cross the bridge. Not that anybody was trying to get across.