The Doomsday Code tr-3 Page 3

  ‘It’s not about how well you play, Liam,’ said Maddy, ‘it’s the — I don’t know … it’s the energy, the attitude. You know?’

  ‘Attitude, is it?’ They stepped out of West 51st Street on to Broadway, leaving the milling crowd of emos and grunge rockers dispersing behind them.

  ‘Yes, attitude. It’s about getting an emotion across to the audience. Laying out how you feel.’

  Becks cocked her head in thought. ‘That would indicate the musicians were feeling moderate to extreme levels of irritation about something.’

  Liam laughed.

  ‘Anger,’ said Maddy.

  ‘And that’s all you need, is it? To be very angry and very noisy?’

  ‘Umm …’ Maddy made a face. ‘Well, not exactly …’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sal. ‘Angry and noisy is exactly what music sounds like in ’26.’

  As they walked down Broadway towards Times Square, quieter than they’d ever seen it, Maddy checked her watch.

  ‘You’re sure your idea works?’ asked Liam.

  She nodded. ‘We don’t need a portal back to our field office. It’s nearly midnight now. The time bubble will reset in a couple of minutes. By the time we’ve walked back down and across the bridge we’ll be an hour into Monday.’

  ‘But won’t we, like, meet a copy of ourselves?’

  ‘That doesn’t happen,’ replied Maddy. ‘We don’t copy. There’s us and we’re either here or there, but not in two places.’

  ‘I don’t get that,’ Sal replied.

  Liam stuffed his hands in his pockets. ‘Actually, I wasn’t thinking so much about the time thing … just that this is going to be a long walk, so it is.’

  The girls laughed at that. Becks dutifully copied them.

  ‘I would have thought you’d be used to walking?’ said Maddy.

  ‘Why? Because I’m just some potato-eatin’ Paddy from a hundred years ago?’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that exactly. It’s just I don’t suppose there were many cars or buses an’ stuff.’

  ‘Jay-zus, we’re not jungle savages, you know. We have … had … trams and trains and the like in Cork, so we did. I didn’t like walkin’ much then, just as I’m not so keen on doing it now.’

  Broadway led them on to Times Square, which was much busier. The cinemas were spilling out those who’d been watching the late showings of Shrek and Monsters Inc., and yellow cabs queued in the central reserve to pick up the last of the well-dressed audience for Mamma Mia!.

  Sal staggered for a moment.

  ‘You OK?’ asked Maddy.

  ‘Dizzy.’

  ‘It was a bit loud in there, I guess. My ears are still ring-’

  Sal shook her head and looked up. ‘Not that. I just felt the ground shift.’ She looked at them. ‘You didn’t feel it?’

  Liam and Maddy shook their heads. Maddy looked around at the busy thoroughfare. Nothing looked any different to her. ‘Sal? Was it a …?’

  ‘Yes. A small one, I think.’ Her eyes systematically scanned the buildings, the people, the cabs.

  ‘See anything?’

  ‘Not yet … not yet. Give me a second.’ It was difficult. She was used to scanning Tuesday morning at 8.30 a.m., the routine she’d established. She could describe that particular moment and place in time down to the tiniest detail now. But this was Times Square thirty-two hours earlier, with different people doing different things. Then her eyes landed on a poster outside the Golden Screen cinema.

  ‘Over there,’ she said, pointing and stepping quickly through a logjam of cars and pedestrians to get to the far side of the square. A minute later the others joined her as she ran her fingers across the scuffed perspex cover over the sidewalk poster. ‘This is new,’ she said. ‘This isn’t meant to be here. Not on Tuesday morning, it isn’t. I’m certain.’

  Maddy looked it over. The poster displayed a picture of a young man on the run, being chased by helicopters and black Humvees through some European city. It could have been Paris, it could have been Prague, for all she knew. ‘The Manuscript,’ she read aloud. ‘Never heard of it.’

  Liam read the strapline. ‘The greatest code in history has just been broken.’ He looked at the top of the poster. ‘So, who’s Leonardo DiCaprio?’

  Maddy waved the question aside. ‘Sal, you sure about this?’

  ‘I felt something … and this shouldn’t be here.’ She nodded, tapping the poster. ‘Unless it gets taken down before Tuesday.’

  ‘But why would they?’ Maddy checked the date. The movie wasn’t out until 15 October, just over a month from now. ‘They run these posters right up until release week.’ She turned to the others. ‘Anyway, I’ve never heard of this movie. And I’m pretty sure Leonardo’s never been in a — a chase-y, spy movie like this. I’ll give this a look-up when we get back.’

  Becks nodded firmly, an untidy tress of dark hair flopping across her face. ‘This isn’t right.’

  He watched them go, picking up their pace as they strode purposefully across Times Square.

  Don’t lose them. Whatever you do, don’t lose them.

  He matched their pace, weaving between the stop-start yellow cabs and ignoring the insults hurled out of the drivers’ windows at him.

  Don’t lose them … not now, not after all this time.

  He only recognized two of them: the girl with the glasses and the frizzy hair, and the tall athletic girl with long dark hair. The other two seemed to be friends. Close friends by the look of their body language. And they’d stopped and been studying a poster for the movie, hadn’t they?

  The movie, The Manuscript, was just another Hollywood cop-out: a cheesy chase movie with big explosions and stupid slow-motion gunfights and the obligatory baddy with an English accent.

  They were heading down Broadway now, the three girls and the boy, passing by a noisy gaggle of middle-aged women — tourists by the look of them. He lost sight of them for a moment and began to panic.

  Don’t lose them, whatever you do!

  He caught sight of the tall girl with the dark hair again, striding like an athlete on platform heels that added another half a dozen unnecessary inches to her height. He gasped with relief as the other three emerged through the tangle of women. He decided to close the gap on them, unwilling to risk losing them because a pedestrian light went against him, or they’d turned a corner and took a side street before he could re-establish a visual.

  Too long he’d been waiting to see them again. Way too long to lose them now.

  CHAPTER 6

  2001, New York

  Just as Maddy had promised, the archway was there as they’d left it, and not empty and disused nor occupied by alternate versions of themselves giving them grief for causing some weird time paradox.

  She pulled the shutter down once they were all inside. ‘Gonna need a coffee here. I think I need a caffeine hit.’

  ‘Affirmative,’ said Becks.

  ‘I’ll go check on Bob,’ said Liam. ‘See how the fella’s coming along.’

  Maddy nodded distractedly as she made her way to the computer station. ‘Now let’s see what’s what,’ she muttered as she sat down in the chair and swivelled round to face the monitors. A dialogue box popped up.

  › Hello, Maddy. How was the musical performance?

  ‘We call it a gig, Bob.’

  › How was the gig?

  ‘It was cool, very cool and I’ll tell you all about it later. Right now I need to hook into the external Internet link and do a search.’

  › Affirmative. External feed active.

  She pulled up the system’s search engine and tapped into their connection with the World Wide Web. ‘What was the name of that movie again?’

  ‘The Manuscript,’ said Sal, taking a seat beside her.

  She pinched her lip. ‘Like I say, never heard of it. And, sheeesh, I love DiCaprio.’

  The search engine spewed out a page of hits, every last one to do with the movie: reviews, good and bad, mostly bad; enter
tainment news and dedicated film sites all chattering about Leonardo. She picked a website she used to regularly tap into from her bedroom back in 2010, Ain’t-it-Cool-News. She smiled at how primitive it looked back in 2001.

  Good ol’ World Wide Web Version 1.0.

  … directed by Don Rowney, a change of pace and direction for the director who normally does drippy romantic comedies. The Manuscript starts out with an interesting high-concept premise before nose-diving and becoming a pretty dull, dial-it-in chase movie. The first twenty minutes of the film introduce us to what it calls the ‘Most Mysterious Manuscript in History’ — something I thought was a made-up story device until I did my homework: The Voynich Manuscript, apparently a book-length document that first surfaced in the Middle Ages, written entirely in a gibberish language that, to this day, has yet to be successfully deciphered. DiCaprio, still hot from his fresh-faced role in James Cameron’s Titanic, plays Adam Davies, a hacker and cryptolinguist — a code-breaker — who manages to write a piece of software that unlocks the Voynich and foolishly decides to brag about his achievement to family and friends and fellow hackers. But, as is always the case, it isn’t long before the bad guys — the nastiest kind of shady government spooks — come knocking, concerned that Davies’s code-breaking software could be equally successful in unlocking the intelligence community’s deepest and darkest secrets. The movie is based on a supposedly true story culled from the British Press — the real culprit, Adam Lewis, a hacker from England, was written off as an attention-seeking loner after the story appeared in a British newspaper called the Sun back in 1994 …

  Maddy looked at Sal. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘I wonder if that’s the same Leonardo DiCaprio as the old man who bought a whole chunk of the Antarctic, like earlier this year.’ She looked at the others. ‘I mean my year, you know? 2026. He went to live there among the penguins. To protect them from oil drillers or something.’

  ‘You gotta be kidding me. Seriously?’

  Sal shrugged. ‘Might be someone else. Pretty sure the name was DiCaprio.’

  Maddy shook her head at the thought of it before returning to the task at hand. She typed a search on ‘Adam Lewis’ and ‘1994’ and ‘Voynich Manuscript’. As Maddy trawled through the hits that came back, Becks cleared a space on the cluttered desk and placed a mug of black coffee in front of her.

  ‘Thanks.’ She scanned the hits and finally picked a link and clicked on it. A moment later the screen went black and a banner logo appeared: a red-flaming eye.

  ‘Oh look, bingo-bango-bongo,’ she said, reaching for the coffee, ‘let’s see what this gives us.’

  The article was a lazy cut-and-paste job from a tabloid newspaper on to some guy’s foil-hat conspiracy-theory website, Dark Eye.

  … Adam Lewis, a student doing a degree in Computer Studies at the University of East Anglia. The computer geek, looking more like a tatty bearded animal rights protester than a Microsoft pencil-neck, claimed in an article posted to New Scientist magazine that he had singlehandedly achieved what historians, code-breakers and several big American mainframe computer systems have all failed to do: to produce a single legible phrase from the mysterious leather-bound book known to historians and code-hounds as the Voynich Manuscript.

  Lewis, 19, laughingly admits that the deciphered phrase sounds a lot like something that might have come out of the kind of dungeons-and-dragons fantasy games he loves to play with fellow geeks. The sentence he supposedly managed to produce from a passage in the Voynich, which he’s not prepared to identify, is this: ‘Pandora is the word. The word leads to truth. Fellow traveller, time to come and find it.’

  Maddy spurted hot coffee over the back of her hand.

  Sal looked at her, concerned. ‘Maddy? You OK?’

  Maddy sat back in the chair, glasses in her hands, absently wiping the lenses as she gazed wide-eyed and unfocused at the monitor in front of her.

  ‘Maddy? What’s up? What’s the matter?’

  She shook her head, chewing her lip a while before finally turning to Sal, with Becks still towering over them in platform heels and looking bemused. ‘I think …’ she started. ‘I’ve got a feeling this Voynich thing might just be the work of another team.’

  ‘Another team?’ Sal’s jaw slowly dropped open. ‘You mean … another group, like us? TimeRiders?’

  Maddy hunched her shoulders. ‘I think we’re not alone, folks.’

  CHAPTER 7

  2001, New York

  ‘You sure about this, Mads? I mean, it’s just a sentence, that’s all. And it doesn’t really say anything anyway.’

  All three of them were slumped in the threadbare armchairs around the wooden kitchen table and Maddy had printed out the web pages she’d read on-screen. Despite explaining her point (very clearly, she thought), Liam still didn’t seem to have grasped it.

  ‘The point is, Liam,’ she tried again, ‘the point is … this Voynich Manuscript may well be a document used by another team to communicate forward from the past, just like you did with the museum’s guest book, like you did with that fossilized message. Now, if someone’s managed to decode some of it, then maybe they’ll decode more of it, or all of it, and God knows what sensitive agency messages are in there being sent forward. If they think their code’s unbreakable, they could be saying all kinds of stuff in there.’

  ‘And the agency is meant to be super-secret,’ added Sal.

  Liam pursed his lips. ‘All right, I suppose I see your point … I suppose.’

  Maddy sighed, not so much frustrated with Liam being slow on the uptake but more because she was keeping something from him, from Sal too. It felt wrong, unfair, and worst of all it made her feel lonely. She remembered word for word the scribbled message she’d found in that deposit box in 1906 and it was beginning to haunt her dreams.

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

  More than a message, it seemed like a warning. No, it was a warning. But a warning of what?

  ‘Well, surely we don’t need to go right now, though, do we?’ moaned Liam. ‘It’s late, so it is, and my head’s still ringing from that noise you call music. And I’m tired as — ’

  ‘In the morning, then,’ Maddy cut in. ‘We all need a good night’s sleep, anyway. I’m still a little hazy.’

  ‘Good plan,’ agreed Liam.

  ‘But this time it’s not you who’s going back, Liam.’

  The other two looked at Maddy. ‘What?’

  You going to tell them about Pandora, Maddy? You ready to do that? No, she decided, at least not yet. Not until she knew a little more.

  ‘I’m going, and I’ll take Becks with me for security, of course, but you need to be here, Liam, to watch over Bob. If I’m delayed and he’s ready to hatch, you should be here for him when he comes out so that he sees you first. You remember what Foster said? The clone imprints on the first person he sees. Bonds with them. You should be here for his birth.’

  ‘True.’ He nodded at that. She knew he didn’t want to miss that moment.

  ‘And, look, it’s not exactly like I’m heading somewhere super-dangerous. It’s England, 1994.’ She turned to Becks, standing patiently at the end of the table. ‘Where is it exactly?’

  ‘Information: Adam Lewis is a registered second-year student at the University of East Anglia in the city of Norwich.’

  ‘A university campus … there. Hardly dangerous.’ She grinned. ‘Maybe even fun.’

  ‘I could come,’ said Sal hopefully.

  ‘Sorry, not this time, Sal. It’s probably best you’re here too, watching for signs. We’ve had one small ripple … there could be more on the way.’

  Sal huffed. ‘Why do you always get to decide everything now?’

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s …’ Maddy sighed. ‘Foster made me leader, Sal. So I’m supposed to lead. That’s the way it is. I wish it wasn’t. I wish somebody else was calling the shots. I wish Foster was still here, to be honest. But i
t is what it is.’

  ‘Just seems unfair.’

  ‘All of this is unfair! I didn’t want to come here. I didn’t choose to die in a plane crash at eighteen. I had plans, you know? I had plans to do more with my life than watch a bunch of computer screens and live in this cruddy dump.’ She could have said more. Things she’d regret later. It was bad enough having to be in charge when she barely felt she had a grasp on how things worked. But, add to that, somebody somewhere seemed to be trying to warn her about something and she was way too stupid to get it.

  The moment tasted sour and all of a sudden she felt tired. She looked at her watch: it was gone two in the morning. ‘Look, I’m hitting the mattress. Maybe we all should. It’s late and we’ve got stuff to do tomorrow.’

  She got up and headed into the arched recess where their bunks were and pulled a curtain across as she changed into her PJs.

  Liam looked at Sal and shrugged, both of them perplexed at her mood. ‘Maybe she’s missing home?’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ said Sal.

  CHAPTER 8

  2001, New York

  Maddy and Becks were treading water in the perspex tube one moment and gone — along with sixty gallons of diluted disinfectant solution — the next. The large plastic tub flexed inwards with a loud thud that echoed through the archway.

  ‘Jay-zus! Does that tube always do that?’

  Sal nodded. ‘The pressure of all the water suddenly not there … it makes the perspex flex.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ He looked round at Sal sitting patiently beside him, hands crossed in her lap. ‘So what normally happens now?’

  Her smile was resigned. ‘We haven’t had “normal” yet. Either we’ve been hiding from cannibal mutants or we’ve had secret-service agents knocking at the door.’ She laughed skittishly. ‘It seems like we’ve been hopping from one crisis to the next since we first arrived here, doesn’t it?’