Gates of Rome Page 3

  Bob ducked down under the shutter, holding a cardboard take-away tray in his ham-shank-sized hands.

  ‘Who requested the caramel frappuccino?’

  CHAPTER 4

  2001, Central Park, New York

  They walked slowly round the duck pond, kicking the first dry leaves of autumn aside. They watched a young couple rollerblading ahead of them. Maddy smiled sadly, envious of the pair of them, both about her age and seemingly without a solitary care in the world. She watched the young man, tanned, lean, handsome, with long wavy blond hair and a small goatee, leading his unsteady girlfriend by the hands, her feet splaying and weaving uncertainly, laughing at how terrible she was.

  To have that moment. Just that one moment.

  Foster touched her arm sympathetically. ‘I know what you’re thinking.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re thinking ignorance is bliss.’

  She offered him a confessional shrug. ‘I wish I was someone else, Foster. Anyone else.’ She nodded at the couple, their legs beginning to tangle, the young man laughing along with his giggling girlfriend. ‘Being either of them would be nice.’

  ‘They’ll never experience anything like you’ll experience. What you’ve experienced already.’

  Maddy sighed. ‘But it’s too much. I can’t cope with all of it.’ She looked at his old face, sunken cheeks and eyes framed by a fan of wrinkles, ‘laughter lines’ if one was being kind. ‘Every time I come and visit you … it seems I’ve got more and more to unload on you.’

  He cackled. ‘It must get annoying, having to repeat yourself.’

  She shrugged that away. That was the deal. That’s how it was. Foster was here at this time in Central Park. Mid-morning, feeding the pigeons, then on his merry way to live out whatever time he had left however he wanted. For him an hour that came and went, but for Maddy – reliving the same two New York days, the 10th and 11th September 2001 – it was a repeated chance to see him again. To get his advice. But every time they met, it would be the first time he’d seen her since walking away from the team and leaving her in charge. So their conversation began with an ever-increasing recap from her of the events she and the others had endured.

  ‘You guys do seem to have been through quite a lot,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  His face, skin like fine parchment, creased with a grin. ‘Abraham Lincoln sounds a character, so he does. Did he really outrun both your support units?’

  ‘Oh yeah, the guy can run like a kid chasing an ice-cream van.’

  They both laughed.

  Foster nodded at a bench beside the path in the shade of a maple tree. ‘Can we sit? My old legs aren’t what they used to be.’

  ‘Sure.’

  She looked at him, wondering how many days he had left, wondering how much life the displacement machine had stolen from him. A couple of meetings ago, here beside this same pond, he’d admitted he was only twenty-seven years old. More than that – something that had rocked her to the core – he’d told her that he was once Liam. He’d not explained how that could be; in fact, he’d refused to explain. But he’d told her because he wanted her to know that every time Liam went back into the past, the process was gradually killing him: ageing him before his time. That he would all too soon end up like him. She alone needed to be the judge of how much his body could take. That’s why she had to know.

  They settled down, looking further up the path at the pigeons indignantly puffing themselves up and backing off as several Canadian geese waddled over to take possession of ground littered with scattered breadcrumbs.

  ‘Foster?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is it you’re not telling me?’

  He looked at her, a disarming smile. His best attempt at deflecting her.

  ‘Come on, Foster … you’ve only given me half what I need to know.’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you think you know.’

  ‘Why are you … why can’t you just tell me everything?’

  ‘Because I don’t know everything.’

  ‘You know more than me. You know more than you’ve told me!’

  He held her gaze. Eventually he nodded with some regret. ‘All right, yes, that’s true.’

  ‘Why? Why don’t you tell me all you know? What are you holding back?’

  ‘Knowledge, Maddy … foreknowledge.’

  ‘Pandora?’

  He shook his head. She’d explained to him about the note she’d discovered. About the specific mention of that particular word in the Voynich Manuscript. ‘I know nothing about Pandora,’ he’d said and she suspected he was being straight with her about that.

  ‘It’s a message, Foster. A message someone’s trying to get to me. It’s got to be important, right?’

  His fingers steepled beneath the wattled flesh of his jaw and he rested his chin on them. ‘Quite possibly, very.’

  ‘So what do I do about it?’

  He watched the pigeons and geese strutting warily round each other, sizing each other up. Finally he spoke. ‘Perhaps you should ask about it.’

  ‘Ask who?’

  His eyebrows arched suggestively.

  ‘What? You mean call forward? The future? The agency?’

  ‘Not a tachyon signal,’ he said quickly. ‘You absolutely can not do that. The particles will give you away.’

  She knew that already. ‘The drop document?’

  Foster had left Maddy a small library of instructions and advice. One entry had been how to communicate with the agency in extreme circumstances. What was actually classified as ‘an extreme circumstance’ had not been made entirely clear. The method of communication was to place a personal advert in the lonely hearts ads of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, beginning with the words ‘A soul lost in time …’

  Someone, somewhere in the future obviously had a yellowing copy of the newspaper and was watching that page for a subtle change. Watching for a gentle ripple in reality that altered nothing but the wording of that one personal ad.

  ‘Ask,’ he said again finally. ‘Why not?’

  ‘You really don’t know about Pandora … do you?’

  Foster shook his head. She thought she knew him – and Liam for that matter – well enough to spot a lie. They were both completely rubbish at it.

  ‘Maybe I will,’ said Maddy.

  ‘And do let me know what he says. I’m just as curious now as you –’

  She turned to look at him. ‘He?’

  Foster closed his eyes. She realized he’d let slip something he hadn’t wanted to.

  ‘He? Who? Who is he? The agency?’ She turned in her seat, grabbed his arm. ‘Foster?! Are you saying the agency is what? Just … just one person?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘What about all the other teams?’

  The old man’s lips tightened. His gaze flicked away from her.

  ‘Foster? Tell me! The other teams …?’

  ‘There are no other teams, Maddy,’ he whispered. His eyes drifted back to hers. ‘I’m so sorry. You’re alone. The agency is you. Just you.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘… And Waldstein.’

  She all but missed hearing Waldstein’s name. Her mind was reeling, light-headed with a growing panic.

  You’re alone.

  The agency is you.

  CHAPTER 5

  2070, Project Exodus, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs

  ‘Good morning, Dr Anwar.’

  Rashim nodded quickly at the assistant technician, one of his small team. The air around his hand glowed with the stand-by display of a wrist-mounted holographic infopad.

  ‘Anything come in overnight?’

  ‘We had some more personnel changes come in, Dr Anwar. And their attached metrics.’

  ‘Oh, marvellous,’ Rashim muttered unenthusiastically. ‘Buzz them over to my unit and I’ll look at them later.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The technician flipped his wrist and a hologra
phic display blinked into existence, hovering in the air in front of him. His finger swiped across the display and a dozen messages were highlighted then floated out of their ‘in-box’ and into the air like pollen.

  ‘Received,’ said SpongeBubba. The lab unit squatted beside Rashim’s desk like a docile pet. A moment later, he offered Rashim a toothy grin. ‘Collating metrics, skippa!’

  Rashim glanced across the cavernous interior of the underground hangar, an interior blasted out of the mountain over a hundred years ago to make space for the political elite of the time – generals, congressmen, senators and their families – in the event of a thermonuclear war with the Russians.

  He shook his head. Nothing changes. The politicians are always the first in line.

  The hangar, perhaps a shade larger than a football pitch, was illuminated from the sides by floodlights erected on tripods. Pools of retina-achingly bright light stretched across a cold concrete floor, scuffed and grooved here and there decades ago when this installation was stripped bare of equipment and mothballed.

  An empty floor … right now.

  Rashim sat down among the cluster of cubicles and desks deployed in this corner of the hangar. First in again this morning, as always. He activated his terminal with a waft of his hand. His iris flickered momentarily as the terminal scanned and confirmed it was Dr Rashim Anwar issuing the command.

  Project Exodus: Mass Translation Simulator – the words glowed crisply in the air in front of Rashim.

  ‘Activate the floor mark-up.’

  The hangar’s concrete floor suddenly became a glowing chequerboard, criss-crossed with an intricate mesh of pulsing neon blue lines cast from a series of holographic projectors suspended from the cavernous ceiling. Grid-markers: squares varying in size from several inches across to several yards.

  ‘Overlay marker details.’

  Above each square floated holographic displays of columns of numbers: vital statistics for what was one day going to occupy each square.

  ‘And give me the content icons.’

  Above most of the various-sized grid squares, hundreds of them, glowing blue silhouettes suddenly appeared. Some of them the outlines of boxes and crates, several large icons depicting the profiles of vehicles, but the rest displaying the shimmering but clearly discernible outlines of human figures.

  ‘Bubba, can you show me who’s decided to be a nuisance this morning and drop out?’

  ‘Aye aye, skippa!’ SpongeBubba saluted playfully.

  Eleven of the human icons glowed red.

  Rashim got up from behind his desk and wandered across the hangar floor, the beams of light from above projecting down across his head, shoulders and back. He squatted down in front of the first human icon that had turned red. Rashim read the display of information floating in the air beside it.

  Candidate 165:

  Name – Professor Jennifer Carmel

  Age – 28

  Assignment – Biochemist

  Mass Index – 54.4959

  Beneath the display an envelope icon flashed, one of the notifications that came in during the night. Rashim touched the envelope and a message opened in the air beside his finger.

  Candidate 165 Carmel, J., deceased.

  Food riots in Puerto Rico, yesterday.

  One hundred and fifty-six fatalities.

  Cause of death – head trauma, gunshot wound.

  No information on whether she was part of the riot or accidentally caught up. Next of kin informed.

  ‘Sorry, Jennifer Carmel,’ he said, sighing, ‘I guess you won’t be coming along with us after all.’ His finger hovered over a delete icon and her outline disappeared along with her vital statistics. The grid square was empty now.

  Rashim cursed softly. Not that he knew or cared who Jennifer Carmel had been. His frustration was more to do with the fact that unless they could find a replacement candidate with a close enough build and mass index, he was going to have to work through a lot of tedious number crunching and recalibration for this one square.

  He looked up at the other ten human silhouettes dotted randomly across the hangar floor, outlines glowing red, candidates who for one reason or another were no longer going to be able to join Exodus in six months’ time.

  Six months to go. Six months until T-Day. Transmission Day.

  So much could happen in six months.

  The world seemed to be utterly determined to destroy itself in the meantime. The Pacific War between Japan and North Korea seemed to be flaring up to a new level of intensity. While neither of them had any nuclear weapons left to use, there were far worse things they could unleash on each other.

  The rest of the world seemed no less bent on its own demise. Rashim’s own country, Iran, had led the charge there and destroyed itself thirty years ago in a war that started as a dispute with the Arabian Coalition. A war over fresh water no less. Not even oil.

  Water. Drinking water.

  Iran, Iraq, Israel … were now three countries that were too irradiated for anyone to live in even thirty years after the exchange of tactical nuclear missiles. Even if they weren’t irradiated, the few mountainous areas that hadn’t been flooded by the rising waters of the Mediterranean and Red Seas and the Persian Gulf would be far too arid to support life. The millions that died in that one-day exchange of tit-for-tat warheads perhaps were the lucky ones, weren’t they? Death in the blink of an eye instead of this long, slow, global death.

  ‘Skippa?’

  He looked up. SpongeBubba had waddled across the large grid-crossed floor to join him.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Dr Yatsushita has sent a message. He’s on his way into the facility and wants to run a transmission simulation this morning.’

  ‘Well, he’ll have to wait until I rework the figures without these candidates!’ Rashim snapped irritably.

  ‘Shall I send that message to Dr Yatsushita, skippa?’

  He stood up. ‘No, I’d better talk to him when he gets in.’

  ‘Aye aye,’ his unit replied and waddled back across the hangar floor.

  He sighed. There was so little margin for error. A miscalculation on the total mass index even by the tiniest percentage could send them out of the receiver station’s snap range. Not for the first time he was amazed at the foolhardy courage of that incredible man Waldstein.

  The reluctant father of time travel.

  Twenty-six years ago now, wasn’t it? The very first successful demonstration of time displacement. There and back again. Of course the man had never spoken about where or when he went. But he’d done it. More importantly he’d survived it. He’d come back in one piece and not turned inside out like burger meat.

  Their own initial experiments here in the Cheyenne Mountain facility had turned a succession of animals small and large, genetically engineered human prototypes, even several real human volunteers into the equivalent of living pâté.

  Living … for a few ghastly moments … actually alive.

  Rashim marvelled at Waldstein’s incredible genius. Dr Yatsushita was a brilliant man, but even with billions of dollars of funding and almost limitless resources at his disposal, Project Exodus still felt horribly like a large scary exercise in trial and error. Guesswork.

  Waldstein, though … Waldstein had built his machine on his own. In his own garage, for Chrissake!

  Or so the legend supposedly went.

  Rashim often wondered what happened to that man. He’d been such a prominent figure for so many years. Meeting with world leaders, the very last guest speaker at the United Nations before it was finally dissolved in 2049. Then he seemed to disappear. Became something of a recluse. Rashim wasn’t even sure if Waldstein was alive still. There were rumours.

  Rashim pushed a lock of hair behind his ear and turned to head towards the nearest glowing red ‘human’ icon a dozen yards away. Another candidate to delete.

  What did you see, Roald Waldstein? Hmmmm? What did you see with those mad eyes of yours? What did you s
ee beyond these three spatial dimensions we can comprehend? It was perhaps the most frequently asked question during the ’40s and ’50s when Waldstein’s face seemed to be on almost every media news-stream …

  What did you see, Mr Waldstein? More to the point: Why did it frighten you so much?

  CHAPTER 6

  2001, New York

  Liam watched the data slowly spooling down the screen – packets of hexadecimal data that made no sense to him whatsoever. Every so often the spooling stopped and lines and chunks of the meaningless alphanumeric text were fleetingly highlighted. Sometimes the highlighted text switched from white to green. Sometimes from white to red.

  Liam pointed at a chunk that had just turned red. ‘So that’s not good, is it?’

  ‘That is corrupted data,’ said Bob.

  The entire contents of Becks’s silicon mind had been downloaded on to the computer system over thirty-six hours ago, a mountain of data stored up by her during her brief life. And now computer-Bob was working through it, testing the data for corrupted packets. Liam looked at the progress log on another screen: a map of her hard drive, her mind, divided into a grid of blocks of data. White for the data yet to be tested, green for verified and red for lost data. The last few chunks of white were being cross-examined. The rest of the grid was a patchwork of green and red blocks. The red seemed to grow malevolently, like cancer tumours. Far too many of them.

  ‘We’ve lost her, haven’t we?’

  Bob’s face twitched with the ghost of a response. Involuntary? Possibly. Perhaps a sign that he was once again much more than the basic code he was born with. Learning to turn incoming information into an understanding, into context … an emotion. To almost be human.

  ‘Significant portions of her stored data are damaged.’ He offered Liam a wan smile. ‘But I am hopeful.’