TimeRiders Read online

  Bob was the first to his feet. He held out a hand each to Liam and Foster.

  ‘I help you,’ he rumbled.

  Liam grabbed the hand and pulled himself up.

  ‘We need clothes quickly,’ said Foster, ‘before we attract any attention to ourselves.’

  Between a pick-up truck and a dusty-looking car there was a double door with a sign on it: BOOK DEPOSITORY – TRADE ENTRANCE ONLY.

  ‘In there,’ said Foster, ‘is a locker room. We’ll find some clothes on pegs.’

  ‘You sure?’

  Foster grinned. ‘I’ve done this training trip a few times now.’

  ‘What if there are people in there?’ asked Liam, his hands hovering self-consciously to cover his soaking underpants.

  ‘There aren’t. They’re all at the front of the building trying to get a glimpse of the president’s limousine. It’ll be arriving in a few minutes.’

  Foster led the way across the parking area and pushed through the double doors. Inside, out of the bright morning sunlight, it was dim and smelled fusty from the stacks of school textbooks littering the floor in untidy piles.

  ‘To your right,’ said Foster.

  They turned into a room lined with employee lockers and pegs on the wall opposite. At the end was a lost-property box stuffed with odds and sods left over the years. Between them they found enough items of clothing to dress all three of them – although the only items that came close to fitting Bob were a pair of sandals, which his large toes drooped over the end of, and a set of scruffy navy blue overalls.

  ‘We look like three tramps,’ said Liam.

  ‘Perfect,’ said Foster, ‘no one’ll think twice about us.’

  ‘Mr Foster,’ said Liam quietly, ‘what’s about to happen?’

  Foster turned to the support unit. ‘Tell Liam.’

  Bob mentally extracted the relevant file from his recently installed database. ‘Information: in precisely five minutes, thirty-two seconds, the thirty-fifth president of the United States of America, John F. Kennedy, will suffer a point-forty-one calibre projectile impact to the throat, and a second to the top of the cranium, ejecting approximately twenty-five per cent of his brain tissue.’

  ‘The man’s killed?’

  Foster looked at him. ‘Have a guess.’

  ‘And what? We’re going to stop this happening?’

  Foster shrugged. ‘More like… delay it.’

  ∗

  2001, New York

  Sal looked around Times Square. This was probably the eleventh or twelfth time she’d taken a walk up from Brooklyn across the Williamsburg Bridge, along Broadway to the hub of the city teeming with endless life. There were so many things to observe in this place – so much going on. She honestly didn’t understand how she was supposed to remember every little detail here, how she was supposed to know exactly what should happen in this thoroughfare from moment to moment at this time of day.

  Her eyes scanned the major billboards. There was a giant display of a jolly green ogre and the title SHREK above his head, and another board with some hairy blue monster and a little green ball-like creature beside him entitled Monsters Inc. Further along she saw a poster for the stage performance of something called Mamma Mia.

  Then, with something that felt like a reassuring stroke of déjà vu, Sal spotted the young mother in the red jeans pushing a buggy before her, across a pedestrian crossing.

  Oh, that’s right… she’ll have to stop and pick up a soft toy.

  A moment later she did, bending down irritably for it in the middle of the crossing and handing it back to a pair of chubby hands reaching out desperately from the buggy’s seat.

  That was a weird sensation.

  She smiled.

  ‘Wow,’ she muttered, pleased with herself, ‘I just predicted the future.’

  ∗

  1963, Dallas, Texas

  ‘Up these stairs, one more flight to go,’ Foster wheezed.

  Liam looked across the stairwell, through an open office door. He could see desks and bookshelves and filing cabinets left deserted. Crowded around every front window was a crush of office ladies in floral print dresses, sporting beehive hairdos, eagerly peering out.

  ‘What are we heading up these stairs for?’

  Foster was too winded to answer. ‘Bob, would you…?’

  The support unit nodded obediently. ‘Information: on the sixth floor of this building is a man called Lee Harvey Oswald. He will shoot at the thirty-fifth president of the United States of America in precisely one minute and twenty-seven seconds. Now, one minute and twenty-six seconds…’

  ‘Uh… thanks, Bob,’ said Liam.

  The thing managed a cumbersome approximation of a smile. ‘You are welcome, Liam O’Connor.’

  As they reached the top of the stairs, Foster slowed down and put a finger to his lips. He pointed through an open door into what appeared to be a storage room.

  ‘This is it,’ he whispered. ‘Through here, on the left, is a row of windows looking down on to Dealey Plaza. Oswald, right now, has his gun resting on the sill of the second window along. In about thirty seconds –’

  ‘Thirty-nine seconds, precisely,’ Bob cut in.

  ‘Bob, be quiet.’

  Bob nodded meekly.

  ‘In about thirty seconds the president’s car will swing round a corner and into view. The car will approach this building and when it’s virtually beneath him Oswald will fire the first shot as it passes. But this first shot,’ Foster continued quietly, ‘we’re actually going to prevent. Follow me.’

  Foster walked through the door into the storeroom, Liam and Bob following cautiously. They stepped between stacks of school textbooks, precariously piled on top of each other, coated in a fine layer of dust.

  Liam glimpsed, between teetering piles, the hairy tuft of the top of a head framed by a tall window. He turned to Foster and Foster nodded.

  That’s him.

  They stepped across the floor quietly until they were standing over him.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Foster.

  Lee Harvey Oswald spun round. His eyes widened at the sight of three tramps calmly watching him. One huge and muscular, one looked very old and the third was little more than a boy.

  His mouth flapped open.

  The muscular man wrenched the rifle from his hands.

  ‘Lee Harvey Oswald,’ said the old man calmly, ‘you’d better start running. Run as fast as you can,’ he said, offering the slightest sympathetic smile. ‘I suggest you head home.’

  ‘Who… who are you?’

  Foster smiled. ‘Hmm, let’s see. Oh, I know,’ he said, grinning, ‘we’re the CIA. Anyway… you’d better get going or my man here will toss you out of the window head first.’

  Oswald nodded uncertainly as he got to his feet, looking Bob up and down. He pushed past them and disappeared out of the storage room, casting one last frightened and puzzled glance at them as he descended the first flight of stairs, three steps at a time.

  ‘Time violation,’ cautioned Bob flatly. ‘This timeline has now been altered.’

  Liam shook his head. ‘But… but have we not just done the thing we’re never meant to do?’

  Foster nodded. ‘Correct. As we speak, time is already shifting, rippling forward through the years. The decades are adjusting themselves, making room for a new reality: that President Kennedy survived today.’

  The old man looked out of the window and watched the open-top limousine, escorted by a string of motorbike cops, sweep sedately up the street towards an overpass… and a grassy hill.

  CHAPTER 27

  2001, New York

  Sal was beginning to feel a little foolish now, standing at the intersection of Broadway and West 44th Street watching the world go by. A sweet old woman had stopped only moments ago to ask whether she’d lost her mommy and daddy and needed to be taken to a policeman.

  Very embarrassing. I’m thirteen, for jahulla’s sake!

  She was about to hea
d for somewhere a little less busy to stand, away from the steady flow of pedestrians, when she felt it… a passing moment of dizziness, disorientation, as if the world was a giant tablecloth and someone, somewhere, had just given the corner a very gentle tug. She reached out for a litter bin to steady herself. Then, recovering her balance, her eyes registered something very subtly different about Times Square long before her brain did.

  Something was different.

  Her eyes flickered around the busy triangular convergence of streets, thick with Monday-morning traffic.

  ‘What is it?’ she whispered. ‘What is it?’

  Then her shifting scrutiny rested on something that hadn’t been there before… a new thing. Above the entrance to the PrimeTime cinema the billboard that had been announcing the arrival of Planet of the Apes had instead been replaced by a large flickering screen showing some kind of news programme. There was text at the bottom: CNN: MISSION UPDATE – Day 346.

  She watched a grainy image of several men in crumpled orange boiler suits holding clipboards and chatting amicably within the cramped confines of some sort of capsule…

  Subtitles ticker-taped on to the screen: +++Cmdr Jerry Hammond and crew celebrate Anton Puchov’s thirty-fifth birthday+++

  Sal noticed that few, if any, of the pedestrians on the pavement around her seemed particularly interested in the broadcast, as if it was something commonplace – old news for them.

  The image of the men manoeuvring awkwardly in the cramped interior changed to a picture of a rust-coloured sphere floating against an ink-black backdrop. A new ticker-tape subtitle appeared:

  +++Mission to Mars: 80 days to Mars orbit+++

  +++CNN warmly wishes Anton a happy birthday+++

  ‘Oh my,’ she gasped, and pulled the mobile phone out of her pocket.

  The phone buzzed in Maddy’s hand. ‘Sal?’

  ‘Did you feel it? The dizziness?’

  ‘I felt sort of nauseous about a minute ago. Thought it was my asthma,’ she said, glancing down at her inhaler.

  ‘I think… I think… that was a… that was IT.’

  Maddy sat up. ‘What?… You mean a shift?’

  Sal hesitated. ‘Yeah… there’s something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘On the big screen here…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s a rocket on its way to Mars… I think.’

  Maddy nearly splashed some coffee on to the keyboard. ‘You serious?’

  ‘I’m watching it right now… on CNN.’

  Maddy looked up at the row of monitors in front of her. At first glance none of them appeared to be showing anything out of the ordinary. One showed Fox News and some dull political story, the second was tuned into MSNBC and a weatherman promising a warm sunny day tomorrow, the next was tapped into the stock exchange, another showed BBC News 24 and was running a story about the Spice Girls’ forthcoming world tour and the tickets selling out within an hour…

  ‘Oh my God,’ she wheezed, suddenly short of breath.

  Didn’t they split up in the nineties?

  But here they were promoting their seventh album!

  ‘You’re right! Something’s changed, Sal.’

  She felt the burden of responsibility beginning to settle on her shoulders, remembering Foster’s quiet pep talk, that it was down to her to pull the strings together, to make sense of the data…

  … to locate the source of the change, Maddy… that’s your job, to find where the shift is coming from.

  She looked at the wall of screens in front of her and wondered where exactly she was supposed to make a start.

  ‘Thanks, Sal. I’ll call you back,’ she said quickly, and snapped her phone shut. She tapped the keyboard and pulled up the CNN news feed. And there it was, a grainy image of the crew inside some cramped vehicle broadcast from God knows how many hundreds of thousands of miles away, and a computer graphic showing how far they’d gone, and how much further they’d yet to go.

  A mission to Mars… that’s got to be the biggest change here.

  ‘Bigger than a freaking Spice Girls tour,’ she muttered.

  She did a Google search on the Mars mission, quickly reading the results before her. Not for the first time in recent days her jaw slackened and dropped open.

  There was an enormous space programme in operation, co-operatively funded by the Chinese, the Russians and America. A small scientific outpost existed on the moon, a ‘cartwheel’ space station hung in geo-stationary orbit of Earth, a number of supply shuttles had already been landed on Mars ahead of the men en route there. The world – this world – seemed obsessed with space exploration, driven to reach out to neighbouring planets.

  She dug deeper into the history of the programme.

  Archived newspaper articles from 1983 described a conference of nations discussing the funding of a ‘permanent lunar outpost’, to build an ‘orbiting mission platform’ for ‘future projects further afield’.

  She found even older newspaper articles, dating from the 1970s, a meeting of minds between the Russian Premier Brezhnev and NASA’s goodwill ambassador John F. Kennedy…

  Kennedy?

  She looked at the name again.

  Not… that… Kennedy? The one who got shot? The president?

  Her history wasn’t great. But she’d seen enough movies and read enough books to be certain the guy died back in the sixties sometime.

  She saw Kennedy’s name suddenly flash up on the CNN ticker-tape feed. A moment later an old man appeared on the screen, a very old man, frail and snowy-haired.

  ‘No way,’ she whispered, ‘that’s not him… is it?’

  +++Ex-president and goodwill ambassador John Kennedy extends his congratulations and best wishes to the Mars crew+++

  Maddy stared at the old man on the screen. ‘Hang on. You should be dead,’ she said. ‘You should’ve died ages ago.’

  But when?

  She was almost certain it had happened sometime in the sixties. She vaguely recalled old news footage of an open-topped car, his wife wearing a pink dress in the back seat and Kennedy in a suit sitting beside her, both of them waving to crowds gathered at the roadside.

  Where was that? When was that?

  She remembered seeing old news footage from a shaky hand-held cine-camera…

  The president’s head snaps forward suddenly, then back. There’s a puff of blood. The man slumps. The woman, his wife, panics. She’s screaming. What’s left of Kennedy’s head is cradled in her lap. The woman looks around desperately for help. Men in dark suits clamber aboard the car. It speeds up. The crowd on the roadside look confused. Some are ducking to the ground. Some are screaming like the lady in pink… some seem to be crying…

  The name of the place where this happened came to her out of the blue.

  ‘Dallas, Texas,’ she uttered.

  She typed a search phrase into Google:

  [+Kennedy +Dallas +assassination]

  The search returned only one link that featured all three words. It was from a newspaper article dated 22 November 1963. It was an article about a ‘suspected aborted attempt on the president’s life’. She clicked the link and a newspaper article appeared on screen.

  … a .41 calibre rifle found abandoned on the sixth floor of the School Book Depository overlooking Dealey Plaza. The man suspected of owning the gun, a Mr Lee Oswald, was later arrested at his home. He claimed to have made plans to kill the president during his visit to Dallas, but said he changed his mind at the very last moment. The story is further complicated by sightings of three strangers in the same building at the time the president’s motorcade was passing, who staff described as ‘being dressed like vagrants’ and were certain had no reason to be in there…

  Maddy slapped the bench and yelped. ‘Yes!’

  She knew exactly where and when Foster and the others had gone back to.

  ‘Found you!’ she screamed triumphantly.

  1963, Dallas, Texas

  The three of
them watched the president’s car slowly roll past them and up towards the overpass in the distance.

  ‘Information: time contamination is increasing,’ announced Bob in a calm emotionless voice. ‘Mission priority: correct time violation.’

  Liam looked at Bob. ‘Um… how are we going to do that?’

  ‘Recommendation: kill John F. Kennedy.’

  ‘What?’ gasped Liam. ‘We’ve got to kill the man now?’

  Foster shook his head. ‘Not this time, Liam. Relax.’

  Bob’s deep voice chimed again with an increasingly insistent tone. ‘Recommendation: kill John F. Kennedy immediately.’

  The old man watched the car drift slowly away from them. ‘There’ll be times, Liam,’ he said wistfully, ‘that you’ll wish time could be changed, that things “down river” – in the future – could be made better than they’ve turned out.’

  ‘But,’ Liam replied, puzzled, ‘we just did change things, didn’t we?’

  Foster nodded. ‘Yes, but on this occasion, history corrects itself after about thirty seconds.’

  ‘It does?’ Liam cocked his head. ‘How?’

  They heard the distant crack of a rifle.

  One shot, followed quickly by another.

  Liam leaned forward, poking his head out of the window. He craned his neck to look down the road as the vehicle swung left and headed beneath the underpass. He saw a fading plume of smoke coming from a wooden picket fence at the top of a grassy slope. The president’s limousine swerved. He saw the lady in the back seat, the lady in pink, scrambling over the seat to cradle her husband’s head.

  ‘In this training scenario, we’ve let history veer off track for less than a minute.’ Foster sighed sadly. ‘But, on this occasion, history does quite successfully manage to correct itself.’ He turned to Liam. ‘Many people believed it was Oswald on his own who killed Kennedy. But there were other men… hired contract killers ready to fire in case he missed or chickened out at the last moment.’

  ‘Information: time violation has been corrected,’ Bob announced formally. ‘Mission priority: return without causing further contamination.’

  Liam watched the chaotic scene down below. The panic among the gathered crowd, the president’s bodyguards clustering around the car.