Cooper really had stuck his neck out. He’d brought her to The Department a couple of weeks ago. Ushered her past several ID checks, pulling rank on the security personnel. And now here she was down on the mezzanine floor in his domain — the ‘catacombs’ — being kept here like some sort of a pet.
Truth was he didn’t know what to do with her. She couldn’t be left to her own devices roaming around Boston conducting her very own hunt-and-seek mission, murdering who she pleased because she might just consider them ‘a contaminant’ — whatever the heck that was really supposed to mean. And he didn’t want to kill her. She was all he had. She was his only connection to whoever these mysterious time travellers were.
What he had was not very much: an autopsy report on Faith’s dead colleague, and a tiny chunk of fried circuitry pulled from his head that wasn’t anything more now than an interesting fingernail-sized nugget of silicon and graphene.
This creature, this flesh-and-blood robot-woman, was the best piece of evidence he had that he wasn’t going mad; that time travel had been quietly going on right in front of everyone’s nose for God knows how long. For God knows how many decades. Cooper couldn’t even begin to contemplate how valuable the treasure trove of knowledge residing in that digital mind of hers was.
But right now the only investigative process he had on the go was Agent Mallard out there doing the donkey work to track down and confiscate all the CCTV footage that he could lay his hands on. There was the footage from the mall, but also a petrol station, a diner and a motel they’d used the day before. Mallard had already brought back several boxes of tapes, and from those there were some not bad, albeit grainy images of their faces that they’d managed to isolate and enhance.
But that was it. Other than Mallard’s legwork, and hoping for a lead to turn up, he had this unlikely ‘woman’ in front of him.
‘I know I keep saying this,’ he said, breaking the long silence, ‘but if you just shared with me the data you have on them, I could put it to good use. I can get priority access to the Bureau’s IT department. We can tap all sorts of databases… medical insurance, local and state law-enforcement incident reports, bank records, traffic — ’
‘No,’ she said softly. ‘Your assistance in this matter is — ’ she paused, her eyelids flickering as she considered a choice of phrase — ‘ appreciated. However, I am unable to share with you data about the target.’
Perhaps he could try a different angle. ‘Well, what about you, then? Hmmm? Or how about telling me something about where you’ve come from?’
Her cool grey eyes locked on his. ‘You wish to know about the future?’
He shrugged. ‘Yeah, why not?’
She silently considered that for a moment. ‘I am unable to tell you specific details. But I can discuss the early symptoms that are occurring in the world at present.’
‘Symptoms?’ He laughed at that. ‘You make the world sound like it’s a hospital patient.’
She cocked her head slightly. ‘That analogy is suitable. This world is “sick”. It is unsustainable. It is dying.’
‘Dying? What do you mean?’
‘Population tangents increasing versus rapidly diminishing world resources. Even in this time evidence of this, of these future problems, is known to your world leaders. But they choose to do nothing. Oil will run out. Global warming will increase. The polar caps will melt and a third of the world’s land mass will be submerged by rising sea levels. It will become accepted in 2035 — far too late to deploy corrective measures — that global warming was more significantly affected by the explosion in world population than it was by hydrocarbon usage.’
She adjusted the cuffs of her jacket. Her hair was growing in quickly — still boyishly short, though. But now, with a vaguely feminine fringe of dark hair and office clothes Cooper had bought her from JC Penney, she almost looked like your typical Wall Street go-to girclass="underline" hard-faced, ambitious and smartly turned out.
‘In only twenty-five years from now there will be nine billion human beings attempting to exist on a diminishing resource-poor land mass. The arithmetic is inevitable, and was always entirely predictable, Cooper. Even now there are scientists that are accurately predicting mankind’s fate.’
‘Which is what?’
She shrugged. ‘You will destroy yourselves.’
He puffed his cheeks. ‘That’s, uh… that’s pretty grim.’
‘It is what will happen.’
‘Jeez, I bet you’re a blast at parties.’
She cocked an eyebrow. ‘I don’t understand the relevance or intended meaning of that comment.’
‘Never mind.’
Just then the door into the main office swung inwards with a bang. Cooper jerked and spilled coffee on to the crisp white cuff of his shirt. He saw Mallard’s face across a chest-high maze of vacant office cubicles.
‘Christ, Mallard! You made me jump!’
‘Sir! Sir!’
‘What the hell is it?’
Mallard picked his way through, past an empty watercooler that hadn’t been used in years, past desks with dust-covered computers that, if someone actually bothered to switch them on, they’d find still ran on Windows 95.
‘Sir,’ he said, breathless, as he finally stood in front of Cooper and Faith. ‘We’ve got a solid lead. Some small-town sheriff reckons he’s ID’ed one of the images we put up on the Bureau’s Most Wanted site.’
‘Where?’
Mallard looked down at a Post-it note in his hand. ‘They’re in Ohio. Someplace called Harcourt. It’s some has-been town. Used to have several auto-parts factories. They’re all closed down now. Mothballed.’
‘Hang on.’ Cooper looked at Faith. ‘That’s what you suggested, wasn’t it? They’d go to ground someplace like that? Quiet. Out of the way…?’
‘With access to a source of electricity and required technical components.’ She nodded and almost smiled. ‘It is what I would do.’
Chapter 49
8 October 2001, Green Acres Elementary School, Harcourt, Ohio
‘But it’s going to be dangerous, isn’t it?’ Sal looked at Becks. She was no taller or bulkier than any normal twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl. But she, like Bob, was originally engineered for military purposes, a killing machine; if she got the idea into her head while Bob was not around, there’d not be much of any of them left.
Maddy clucked her tongue. ‘I’ve got no idea how she’ll behave. But if she bugs out on us, we’ve got Bob right here to restrain her, or…’
‘Kill her?’
‘Look… it won’t come to that, I’m sure. More likely she’ll just swoon and pine for Liam like some pathetic fangirl.’
Sal snorted. That was kind of funny despite the seriousness of the situation. ‘But why now? Why don’t we wait until we’re settled in London?’
‘I’m not sure we’re going to have enough power back in 1888 to sustain our back-up frozen embryos. Once we go through to the past, we may not be able to regrow replacement support units. It might be just Bob and Becks… one of each. We lose them, we won’t have any back-up support units to grow.’
‘What about the San Francisco drop point?’
Maddy shook her head. ‘I don’t think it would be a good idea going anywhere near there. They’ve got to be watching that place now. No… it would be dumb for us to go back there.’
Sal nodded.
‘We can take the foetuses with us, just in case there’s some way we can find a way to grow new support units if needed. But, really, I think we need to sort Becks out now, once and for all. We need both our support units fully loaded and functional.’ She turned to them both. ‘Once we go back, we may have to ditch our embryos and that means no more support units. We’ll have to rely indefinitely on these two. Which is why… we need to test her mind out now, Sal, while we’ve got a chance here in 2001 to grow a new one from scratch if… you know… this doesn’t work out. Anyway,’ she added, ‘while Liam’s in London it might be easier. We don’t want Becks hurling herself his way and slobbering all over him.’