She looked up at Sal. ‘I’m going to go find Foster. Bring him back if I can. He’ll know what to do, Sal. Because I sure don’t.’
‘But he’s gone for good you said. He wasn’t here when the bubble reset. He’s gone.’
‘Gone from our two days, yeah. But not Wednesday… not Thursday, not any other day after that.’
‘You’re going to ride forward?’
Maddy considered that, but the less time travel she did — forward or backwards — the better. Foster had quietly told her timeriding was a bit like smoking; like a single cigarette, it was impossible to say for sure how much a single smoke might take off your life, but if you could ever avoid having a cigarette that could only be a good thing.
‘I’ll miss the reset. That’s what I’ll do,’ said Maddy. ‘I’ll go into Wednesday and hang around those places. Who knows? I might get lucky.’
‘You can’t do that! You’ll be gone for good like Foster!’
‘No… we’ll schedule a return window.’ Maddy pinched her lip in thought. ‘Yeah, we’ll schedule a window at, let’s say, eight in the evening on Wednesday.’ She turned round and pointed towards the shutter door. ‘Just outside the archway in our side street. That’ll bring me right back into our time bubble, back into Monday.’
‘But what if a time wave happens while you’re gone?’
Maddy shrugged, resigned. ‘I can’t see you coping any worse than Maddy “Mess-up” Carter’s done so far, right?’
‘Oh shadd-yah! We should be figuring out how to get Liam back, not messing around visiting tourist attractions.’
‘Yeah? But think about it — there’s nothing we can do, is there? Just wait around… wait for a time wave to hit us and hope it’ll lead us directly to him? That’s it. That’s pretty much all we can do right now. Just wait. Well, at least while we’re sitting around here doing nothing useful I can try and find Foster, see what else he can suggest.’
Sal clamped her mouth shut.
‘Make sense?’
Sal nodded slowly. ‘OK,’ she replied, fiddling with a pair of plastic bangles on her wrist. ‘Do you want me to come with you? Two pairs of eyes?’
The screen in front of them flickered.
› Recommendation: Sal should remain here as the observer.
Maddy nodded reluctantly. ‘Bob’s right. If we get a time ripple preceding a wave, we need you here as our early heads-up. You should stay here and do your mid-morning walk around Times Square just like always. And, anyway, if the poop hits the fan and for some reason I end up being stuck out in Wednesday it’ll be good to know there’s someone left holding the fort, right?’
Sal tried a confident nod. ‘Uh… yeah.’
‘Right… that’s the plan, then.’ Maddy looked at her watch. It was just gone five in the afternoon. Outside, the sun would be looking ahead for a place to settle beyond the smoke-filled sky of Manhattan, and most of New York was already back at home, the normal day of work abandoned hours ago as they silently watched live news feeds from their dinner tables.
Tonight, New York was going to be a ghost town, just like it always was on the Tuesday as the clock ticked down towards their field office time bubble resetting itself.
CHAPTER 26
65 million years BC, jungle
Liam wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. ‘Jay-zus, it’s almost as hot as the old lady’s boiler room, so it is.’
‘Old lady?’ It was Mr Whitmore.
Liam thought the man had been far enough behind not to hear his bad-tempered mutterings. He shrugged. ‘Oh, just a… just an old ship I used to work on.’
He stopped where he was, catching his breath for a moment. The hot humid air felt heavy on his lungs. They stood still for a while, trading ragged breaths and listening to the subdued noises of the jungle around them, the tap of water dripping on waxy leaves, the creak of the tall canopy trees subtly swaying and shifting, the echoing chatter and squawk of some flying creatures far above amid the branches.
Further back down the trail he’d been hacking out with his improvised machete, he heard the others stumbling towards them: Franklyn, their resident dino expert grinning at the prehistoric jungle around him like a kid in a candy store; Lam behind him, squinting up at the bright lances of sunlight piercing down through the cathedral-like vaulted roof of arched branches and thick leaves, and Jonah Middleton whistling something tuneless as he stumbled clumsily after them. The rest of the group were back on their ‘island’ fixing a counterweight to the bridge so it could be raised and constructing a camp under Becks’s supervision.
Two days and nights they’d been here already and both nights, like clockwork, rain had come down in a torrential downpour, soaking them all and making sleep impossible. Tonight hopefully, with Becks hard at work — a one-man construction team, they’d at least have shelters to huddle beneath.
‘You used to work on a ship?’ said Whitmore, his breath wheezing past each word. ‘Was that before you became… what did you say you were — some sort of time-travelling secret agent?’
‘I didn’t really say it like that, Mr Whitmore. Did I?’
He scratched his beard. ‘I think that’s exactly what you said.’
‘Oh well, even though that does sound a little barmy, that pretty much describes me and Becks, so it does.’
Whitmore shook his head. ‘I’m still trying to get my head round this being real, you know? It’s just — ’
Liam grinned. ‘Oh, it’ll mess with your head all right. That’s for sure.’
‘You’re really from the future?’
‘Well, actually, not precisely the future as it happens.’
Whitmore looked confused by that.
Liam wondered if he should really say any more. Becks was right in that the more information they handed out to these people the greater the potential risk to blowing the agency’s anonymity. But he also figured what the heck… they were here and the future was sixty-five million years away.
Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
‘I was born in Cork, in Ireland in 1896, if you must know. And I should’ve died in 1912.’ He looked at Whitmore and his grin spread even wider. ‘Aboard a ship you might just have heard a little something about… the Titanic.’
The man’s eyes widened. Lam, Franklyn and Jonah joined them then, all five of them filling the quiet jungle with their rasping breath.
‘What’s up?’ said Lam, noticing the goggle-eyed expression on Whitmore’s face.
‘That’s… surely… that’s just impossible!’ blustered Whitmore.
‘Well now,’ replied Liam, looking around at the Cretaceous foliage, ‘you’d think all of this little pickle we’re in would be impossible, right? I mean… us lot stranded in dinosaur times?’
Whitmore ran a hand through his thinning salt and pepper hair. ‘But the Titanic… you were actually on the Titanic?’
‘Junior steward, deck E, so I was.’
Jonah pushed his frizzy fringe out of eyes that were filling his face. ‘No… way… dude!’
Lam wiped some sweat from his brow. ‘This is just getting weirder and weirder.’
‘I was recruited, see. The agency plucked me moments from death just as the ship’s spine snapped and apparently both halves went sliding under. Made no difference to time, do you see? It made no difference to history whether my bones ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic with everyone else’s or not. That’s how the agency recruits… poor fools like me who’ll never be missed.’
‘My God,’ whispered Whitmore. ‘That’s really quite incredible.’
‘What about the other one?’ asked Franklyn.
Jonah nodded appreciatively. ‘Yeah, your foxy goth girlfriend.’
Liam assumed he was referring to the support unit. ‘Becks? No… she’s, uh… she’s certainly not my girlfriend.’
‘Whatever,’ said Franklyn. ‘Where does she come from?’
Lam shook his head. ‘Maybe we should be asking when does she come from?’
Franklyn’s face stiffened at being corrected. ‘Yes… when.’
Liam decided a small white lie was better right now. Telling them she was some kind of a robot killing machine probably wasn’t the best thing to be telling them. The last thing their little group needed was a reason not to trust Becks. They all needed each other, and they certainly needed her help.