‘Please move out of the way!’ she commanded the evacuating people all around her as she levelled the gun at her target.
‘ OH-MY-GOD-SHE’S-GOT-A-GUN! ’ someone screamed.
That worked better. The crowd, jostling to get down the frozen escalator, dropped to the floor as one, and Faith had a perfect line-of-sight on Maddy. The only person still on her feet.
Maddy pushed the large woman crouching in front, desperately trying to get past. But the woman was too big to make a space on the escalator. Maddy found herself clambering over her back.
‘Ow! Jesus help me! I’m being assaulted!’ screamed the woman.
‘I need to get past!’ Maddy replied. ‘I need to freakin’ well get — ’
A shot rang out. The glass of the escalator’s side exploded. The woman ducked down as shards scattered over her rounded shoulders and Maddy rolled over the top of her, on to someone else in front. Another shot thudded into the thick rubber handrest.
She found her feet and decided she was far enough down the escalator to jump over the side. She landed on the top of a display of plastic tropical bushes embedded in a bed of pebbles. Not the softest landing, but perhaps far better than the mall’s faux marble floor. She scrambled on to her feet yet again, people all around her shrieking in alarm as several more shots rang out across the entrance foyer.
‘Get out, get out!’ Maddy screamed at the bottleneck of people fighting with each other to exit through the revolving door, and the fire exits either side of it.
Faith strode towards the safety rail of the concourse above, overlooking the escalator. She saw her target below on the ground floor, grappling with people, tugging at them to make way for her. She took aim again and fired two shots, emptying the clip. Downstairs, more glass exploded, and the screaming all around her took on a new shrill, intense pitch.
Faith clambered over the rail and let herself drop down. She landed twenty feet below on the hard floor, like a cat landing on its feet, legs flexed to absorb the impact like the over-pimped shock absorbers of a monster truck.
She reached into her waistband to pull out her last clip. The target — Madelaine Carter — was directly in front of her, trapped because the only way out was clogged with people tangled with each other and too petrified to sort themselves out. She would have smiled if she’d had that particular face gesture on file. Instead, her face remained impassive, as calm and expressionless as a person fast asleep as she rammed the last clip home into the grip of her handgun.
Sal and Rashim gave the mall guard — Kent — a thoroughly unconvincing pair of aliases and random contact numbers. The guard, though, seemed more than happy to take down what they said, no questions asked. Quite probably he was preoccupied with thanking God he was alive still. He offered a nod — Sal guessed that was his version of a ‘sorry for earlier’ — and told them to go home.
They now picked their way through the crowd at the front of the mall. A slew of police cars had parked up in a semi-circle just outside the entrance and officers were setting up a cordon around it, urging the rubbernecking curious back away from the rotating glass doors at the front.
‘Good grief… that was…’ Rashim wiped sweat from his forehead.
‘Close?’
He nodded. ‘Incredibly.’
‘They’re the same ones that were chasing me and Maddy before we came back in time to get you.’
‘Almost identical to your support units. They were definitely a similar batch number. Quite possibly from the exact same batch.’
A possibility occurred to Sal as they backed away from the crowd outside and studied the front of the mall from a comfortable distance. There were still people spilling out of the revolving doors, being hustled out of harm’s way as quickly as possible by paramedics, cops and mall guards. Maybe they were a batch of support units that had malfunctioned? Perhaps whoever was running their little agency from the future had decided to send them some replacement support units and something had gone wrong in the process?
She shot that idea down just as quickly as it had popped into her head.
No. There was the San Francisco drop point. That’s where they’d get back-up copies of Bob and Becks — frozen foetuses ready to grow. These were ones already fully grown and given a very specific mission. To come after the whole team and not rest until the last of them were dead. Apparently. So… no mistakes there. No malfunctions. Just deadly intent.
‘You think we should make our way back to that diner?’ said Rashim.
Sal was about to answer when two gunshots came from just inside the mall’s entrance foyer.
A moment later a large plate-glass window exploded and screams ripped through the air. The police who’d set up a cordon to hold the crowd back now drew their sidearms. All of them spinning round to face the glass frontage of the shopping mall. People spilled out of the slowly turning revolving door, the side doors, even through the jagged-tooth remains of the freshly shattered glass frontage.
‘There’s Maddy!’ hissed Sal.
She emerged with the others, arms up and wrapped round her head to protect it, hunkered over like someone getting out of a helicopter. Sal pushed through the crowd now all turning and scattering from the entrance at the sound of another shot fired inside the foyer.
‘MADDY!’ she called out. ‘OVER HERE!’
The girls all but crashed into each other.
‘Maddy? I thought you were — ’
‘Just GO! Gogogogogo! ’
Faith picked her zigzagging target out of the retreating, stampeding crowd. She levelled the. 40 Smith amp; Wesson. Now the thing had a fresh clip, she resolved to empty all twelve rounds in several controlled double-taps. To be absolutely certain of killing the target. As she aimed down the short barrel, she caught sight of one of the other targets: Saleena Vikram. Both girls tangled with each other for a moment, then, turning their backs to her, ran away hand in hand.
Two for the price of one. Faith nodded. Pleased with herself for producing an appropriate saying for the occasion. She was about to pull the trigger when the world went completely dark.
Chapter 25
7.42 a.m., 12 September 2001, Interstate 95, outside Branford
Five minutes later they were all back aboard the RV, on the road and running on the last quarter-tank of petrol, Bob driving north-east as instructed and Maddy rocking back and forth beside him in the passenger seat trying to get a handle on things, get a handle on her jangling nerves, a handle on the growing knot of grief in her chest, as Sal, Liam and Rashim threw questions at her over the seat.
‘He’s gone,’ she said, finally answering them as to where the hell Foster was.
‘What? Do you mean…?’ Liam struggled to say any more. So Rashim finished his question for him.
‘They… they got Foster?’
She nodded. ‘Shot him.’
‘He’s dead?’
Here it comes. Maddy felt her composure slipping. The blissful comfort of numbness was ebbing away, like the downslope of a novocaine buzz after root-canal treatment. The first hot tears trickled down her cheeks. She tasted salt on her lips and licked them away.
She nodded. ‘Yes, Foster’s dead.’ Her voice was a lifeless whisper. The flutter and tap of moth wings against a windowpane. She took her glasses off and buried her damp face in her hands and realized that now she’d finally become that typical movie girl-in-distress: all quivering, dimpled chin and smudged mascara.
Albeit minus the mascara.
Chapter 26
2055, outside Denver, Colorado
Joseph Olivera had got to know Frasier Griggs quite well. Griggs was the only other man in the world, other than Roald Waldstein, of course, who knew of the TimeRiders’ existence.
Frasier Griggs was Waldstein’s lesser-known junior partner. Where Waldstein was the source of the patents, the ideas man, the genius, Griggs was the practical other half: the software designer behind Waldstein’s prototypes, the builder; the Steve Wozniak to Waldstein’s Steve Jobs. Although most people assumed the ‘G’ in W.G. Systems was in memory of Waldstein’s dead son, Gabriel, Griggs was in fact the ‘Real G’. The company’s first stakeholder, the fledgling company’s first employee and perhaps the closest thing to a friend that Waldstein had ever had. Hell, on his desk, Griggs even had a tea mug with that printed on the side — The Real G.