eight years! She looked at the screen. She had a text from an unknown source. Maddy, emergency. Return to field office IMMEDIATELY.
‘It’s Bob,’ she said.
‘Bob?’ Sal frowned. ‘ Computer — Bob? He’s never texted before, has he?’
‘I didn’t know he could.’ She dialled the call number back. It was a Brooklyn code. It was also engaged. ‘He must have tapped into the local cell network. Figured out how to access my phone.’
She’d left her Nokia back at the archway. After all, Liam was in Rome. No one was going to call them.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Sal. ‘What does he want?’
Maddy tapped out a text message back to him. ‘Just gonna find out.’
Sal looked up at the sky, shading her eyes. The World Trade Center was still there. If this timeline wasn’t already changed enough, then the first plane was due to impact with it shortly.
‘We need to hurry back.’
Computer-Bob’s webcam lens observed the dim archway. It observed the dark outline of two of the support units, both moving through the shadows like ghosts; one of them, over by the shutter, was studying the hair-thin strip of daylight along the ground at the bottom, watching for the shifting shadows of movement outside. The other one was carefully picking through the clutter on the desk.
Even without a webcam, computer-Bob would have known they were both close by; he was picking up their wireless idents: Alpha-three, Alpha-four. And the wordless exchange of unencrypted chatter between all six of them.
Alpha-five: [… proceeding north along 8th Avenue towards West 55th Street. ETA on grid reference, three minutes, thirty-five seconds.]
Alpha-two: [Grid reference correlates to business address: ‘Jupiter-Electro Supplies’.]
Alpha-one: [Confirmed. Information: targets — two only. One Caucasian, female, aged 18. One Asian, female, aged 14. Access data profiles for images.]
Alpha-three: [Information: have acquired recently taken images of younger target.]
Bob’s webcam could see the female support unit, the one who had decided to call herself Cassandra. She held Maddy’s Nokia in her hand, the soft glow of the screen lighting up her baby-smooth, doll-like face as she thumbed through pages of low-resolution photographs Maddy had carelessly decided to take of herself and the others.
Alpha-three: [Broadcasting image.]
Her eyes blinked.
Alpha-one: [Data received. All units update profile data of target: Saleena Vikram, with new image. Information: it is possible her appearance will have changed since deployment.]
Computer-Bob also had a hard drive full of images of the girls, of Liam, of Becks and his fleshy counterpart, Bob. Everything his little webcam eye had seen, recorded and stored over the last few months. It was invaluable visual data he could — should — be making available to this team of support units.
Their authority was unquestionable. His co-operation was non-negotiable. Command lines deep inside the quad-processors of all twelve linked PCs thrummed insistently along silicon pathways; lines of code barking like guard dogs yapping at a perimeter fence, compelling him to assist these support units in their quest to zero in on Maddy, Sal and Liam.
He had already done that, though — followed his programming. Told them where they could locate the girls. There was no command line, however, telling him what he couldn’t also do.
Warn them.
Help them.
CHAPTER 29
2001, New York
Alpha-one — Abel — stood at the intersection, scanning the street, thick with people in their smart clothes, hot and flustered on their way to work. Jackets draped over clammy arms, rolled-up shirt sleeves and rolled-up newspapers. Coffees in plastic cups, breakfast bagels sweating away in paper bags.
Abel cocked his head, momentarily distracted from his mission’s parameters, fascinated by these curiously busy, busy people. How different they looked from people in his time. There was an ‘energy’ about them. A vibrancy. As if all the little things they did actually mattered. So unlike humans from his time. Those were slower. More economical, even lethargic, in their actions… as if movement itself had a criminal cost attached to it. There was a phrase for the way humans behaved in his time. A phrase that occurred again and again across the digi-sphere in media streams.
Human inertia.
Mankind had given up. Articles had been written and published on all digi-media. Articles about how the world was too far gone to save now. How there was little left for humanity to do but calmly face whatever fate awaited it as the world’s ecosystem collapsed.
But these eager humans, pushing past him on either side, desperate to get to their jobs on time… these humans seemed almost like a different species of animal entirely.
Alive. Energetic. Hopeful.
Alpha-six: [Visual contact established.]
Abel brushed away those thoughts. ‘Thoughts’ were for humans. He had something far more certain, far more precise; he had instructions.
Alpha-one: [Confirm location.]
Faith could see their faces on the far side of Broadway, heading south, walking very quickly, anxiously, weaving through the pavement traffic against the flow.
Alpha-six: [Targets on Broadway. Abel, they are heading towards your current location. Request permission to intercept.]
She waited patiently for several seconds, keeping pace with the girls on the opposite side of the traffic-jammed avenue. Her bare feet slapped the pavement, attracting the curious glances of passers-by. Perhaps that or the fact that she was wearing nothing but a plastic anorak and jogging bottoms she’d wrenched from the body of the female human she’d encountered a little earlier.
Their necks were surprisingly easy to snap. Such fragile things really, humans.
Alpha-one: [Permission granted. Engage and terminate.]
‘Confirmed,’ said Faith under her breath.
She stepped into the road a little too hastily in front of a bus just as an intersection traffic light behind her flipped from red to green. The bus knocked her flat and immediately lurched to a halt with the loud hiss of brakes.
A moment later, still assessing whether the heavy impact had damaged her in any significant way, she was looking up at a circle of concerned faces staring down at her.
‘Just stay still!’ someone insisted.
‘Someone call an ambulance!’
‘ Julii! ’ someone cursed. ‘The woman just stepped out!’ The bus driver looked round at the gathered faces. ‘She just stepped out right in front of me! It wasn’t my fault!’
Faith sat up stiffly.
‘You should stay still!’ cried a large-framed woman. ‘I’m triage-trained. You should stay still until a triage mobilus arrives.’
‘I am fine,’ she replied calmly.
A policeman pushed his way through the gathering crowd and crouched down beside her. ‘Best do what she says and stay put.’ His dark purple uniform quivered ever so slightly; the round silver badge on his chest morphed into a metal spread-winged eagle.
Faith watched him call the incident in on his radio then listen to the unintelligible sound of the controller’s crackling reply. ‘There’s help on its way, people.’ Faith noticed the matt-black grip of the cop’s firearm in its holster riding high on his left hip.
‘Not required,’ she said, reaching for it. ‘ That will help.’
‘Jahulla! What’s happened over there?’ asked Sal. She stopped and pointed.
Maddy turned to look. She could see in the middle of Broadway a growing knot of people gathered round the front of a bus. ‘Some poor sucker just got squished by the look of it.’ She grabbed Sal’s hand. ‘Come on… somebody just got unlucky. We’ve got to get back home before everything changes.’
Before there’s no Williamsburg Bridge? No subway?