Day of the Predator

CHAPTER 22

2001, New York

‘Maddy! Where are you going?’

Maddy ignored Sal’s pleading voice as she strode across the archway, cranked up the shutter and stepped out into the backstreet.

I can’t do this… I can’t do this.

She felt the first tears roll down her cheeks as she picked her way along the rubbish-strewn sidewalk towards South 6th Street at the top. Her first proper mission in charge and she was already going to pieces. An impetuous decision on her part, stupid and hot-headed enough to go against Bob’s reasoned advice, and now she might just be responsible for killing Liam and the support unit. Not only that, but she’d probably also caused the deaths of dozens of others. And, most importantly, Edward Chan.

‘I can’t do this,’ she muttered. ‘I’m just not ready for this.’

She stepped out of the backstreet on to the corner and watched the busy intersection for a while: traffic turning right to pick up the bridge road, left towards the river; pedestrians making their way over to their jobs in Manhattan… all of them oblivious to the commercial jets already in the air and heading towards their doom.

She wanted Foster back. Needed him back. What possessed him to think for one moment she was actually ready to run a field office? His pre-recorded ‘how to’ answers stored on the computer just weren’t enough. She needed him to talk to, to explain the technology to her more fully, to tell her more about the agency and their place in it. There were so many gaps in her knowledge she didn’t even know enough to have an idea what questions to ask. She was floundering.

‘Damn you, Foster!’ she hissed under her breath, and wiped at her wet cheeks.

The old man could be anywhere in New York, if, indeed, he’d decided to stay on in the city. He’d walked out on her on one of the Monday mornings, walked right out of the Starbucks with a bag over one shoulder, leaving her alone with her coffee. It was Tuesday today. If he was that desperate to see the world before he died, then he might just as well be on a Greyhound bus to some other state or even on a plane to somewhere exotic.

Face it. He’s gone for good.

‘She just got up and left!’ said Sal.

› I sensed emotional stress markers in her voice.

‘Well, duh! Of course she’s upset! She’s just… I mean, she may have just killed Liam!’

Sal realized her own voice sounded shrill and loud. ‘Oh jahulla! Is he dead? Did she kill him?’

› Insufficient data. The residue signal suggests a sudden and violent enlargement of a dimensional pinhole, releasing a vast amount of energy.

‘Like a bomb?’

› Correct. Just like a bomb.

She slumped down in the office chair. ‘So, dead, then,’ she uttered, looking down at her lap and suddenly beginning to feel the stab of pain. The equivalent, in days, of almost three months had passed since Foster had pulled her from a falling building. So much had happened in that time, a world almost conquered by Nazis and then in the blink of an eye reduced to a radioactive wasteland. Their trip to the basement of the Museum of Natural History, finding the clues… Liam’s message in the guest book. And all the clean-up and fix-up after that whole nightmare. It almost felt like another life: Mumbai, Mum and Dad, the burning building.

This place, this scruffy archway criss-crossed with cables, had begun to feel like a home, and Liam and Maddy… even Bob, like an odd new family. Now, in one moment, with one simple mistake, she wondered if that was all gone. She looked up from her hands, wrestling each other in her lap, to see Bob’s silent blinking response on the screen.

› Not necessarily.

‘What? What do you mean “not necessarily”? Do you mean not necessarily dead?’

› Affirmative. They may have been transported.

‘You mean like one of our time windows?’

› Correct. The sudden dilation of a dimensional pinhole being used to extract zero-point energy may have functioned in a similar way to a portal.

‘Where? Do you know where? Could we find them?’

› Negative. I have no possible way of knowing when they would have been transported to. It would be random.

‘But… but they could be alive, right? Alive, somewhere?’

› Affirmative, Sal. But in the same geographic location.

‘Is there anything we could do to try to find them?’

› Negative. We are in the same situation as before we sent the tachyon signal. If the explosion did not kill them, then they are sometime in the past or future.

The rising hope she was feeling that there might be a way to find them and bring them back in one piece began to falter.

› My AI duplicate and Liam may attempt to establish contact with the field office, provided it can be done with a minimum of time contamination.

‘You mean like Liam did with the museum guest book? A message in history?’

› Correct. If they have not been transported too far in time, it may be possible for them to find a way to communicate without causing a dangerous level of contamination.

‘So what… we wait? We wait and hope for a signal?’

› Affirmative. We must wait and we must observe. There is no other viable course of action.