Day of the Predator

CHAPTER 30

Wednesday, 2001, New York

A Wednesday. Maddy realized she hadn’t seen one of those in quite a while. Since she’d been on a plane trip back home to her folks in Boston, in fact. Since she’d become a TimeRider.

She looked down the flagpole approach to the Statue of Liberty’s star-shaped podium and spotted only half a dozen other people. She’d been here once before, on the same school trip that they’d visited the Museum of Natural History. It had been a tedious day full of queuing. Queuing to get ferry tickets, queuing to get on a ferry over to Liberty Island, queuing to get inside the podium building beneath Liberty’s feet and look at the small museum’s exhibits. Queuing once again to get a look up inside the statue itself. A pretty dull day of standing around, being shoved, bumped and barged into, waiting to look at things she actually had precious little interest in.

Today though there were no queues.

The island was all but deserted. Half a dozen ferries had arrived throughout the day, each offloading no more than a handful of muted whispering visitors. And, even then, their eyes had been more on the column of smoke coming from across the bay, coming from Manhattan, than they had been on the giant copper-green statue in front of them.

Maddy took another slurp of the cooling polystyrene cup of coffee in her hands. Horrible. She’d lost count of how many she’d bought from the stall opposite the embarkation pier. She was almost on first-name terms with the bewildered-looking man behind the counter who’d served her every time. He certainly should know by now she took it white with three sugars.

Come on, Foster… where the hell are you?

Through the morning she’d been hopeful as each ferry had arrived. But not now; it was nearly four in the afternoon. Another hour or so and the Statue of Liberty’s little museum would be closing, the last ferry back across the harbour getting ready to leave.

She was beginning to realize today had been wasted, loitering around like this. Cluelessly hovering around the podium’s entrance in hope that the old man would turn up. Never mind, she told herself, now at least she knew that Foster hadn’t spent the first Wednesday of his ‘retirement’ out here. She’d head back to their archway. Today, Wednesday, it would be nothing more than an empty brick archway with a TO LET sign pasted on the roller-shutter door, and outside that shutter door she’d wait until eight in the evening when a shimmering portal would appear, ready to take her back into Monday again.

Then she’d do this all again, try Wednesday once more, but next time she’d loiter outside the Empire State Building.

Her eyes drifted off the tourists as they passed by her and into the podium, pausing as they did to look once again at the pall of smoke in the sky.

She remembered this day, remembered the day after. She’d been what? Eight? Nine? Mom and Dad at home all day, sitting in front of the TV, watching as dust-smeared emergency workers scrabbled at the edge of the smouldering wreck, pulling twisted spars of still-warm metal away in the hope of finding someone alive. She’d been playing on the floor of the lounge with her Tech-Meccano set, trying to build her version of a Transformer, half her attention on what she was doing, half on her parents: Mom sobbing and Dad cursing.

And here she was again. Different place, same day.

An odd urge occurred to her. What if she found a way through the security cordon around the ruin of the Twin Towers and found a TV camera and reporter to be stopped and interviewed by. She could wave at her eight-year-old self, wave at her mom and dad watching the TV. She could reassure them that she wasn’t going to die along with 137 other people aboard Flight 95 in nine years’ time. Tell them she was going to be OK.

She shook her head. Nice idea. But she wasn’t going to do that.

She turned her thoughts towards more pressing matters. Liam and the support unit. Bob had assured her that the copy of his AI in the female unit would make the same recommendation to Liam as he would: to find a discreet way to make contact. Discreet… because a too-obvious message, a message that stood out above the background noise of history, could significantly affect the timeline. But there was the problem. A subtle message carefully laid down in whatever historical period they were in, laid down for only her and Sal to find…?

I mean, where the hell are we supposed to start looking for something like that?

If they’d only been bumped back less than 150 years, then perhaps there was a message waiting for them once more in the Museum of Natural History’s guest books. That was something Sal had decided to try and check out. But what if they’d been knocked further back in time?

Five hundred years ago? A thousand years ago? What was in the middle of Texas a thousand years ago? A lot of buffalo, she guessed, and some Indians. But certainly no visitor guest books for them to discreetly slip a message into. A ‘get us out of here’ scrawled across an ancient Navaho tribal history rug was almost certainly something the support unit would NOT recommend to Liam. Not unless they wanted every historian studying Native American history discussing the message at some symposium.

Subtle. It could only be subtle.

But, she sighed to herself, too subtle and how were they ever going to find it?

Unless it’s a message that’s meant to find us.

She looked up from her coffee.

… Find us…

‘My God,’ she whispered to herself. Maybe that’s what they’d try to do. A message addressed to its finder, whomever that might be. A message that perhaps might promise a reward of some kind to the finder provided it was delivered to a certain location on a certain date. A message that might promise untold wealth, access to an incredible time-travel technology? And think about it. Such a message would be too important, too powerful, to become public knowledge, wouldn’t it? A message like that would become a closely guarded secret, right? A secret handed down by the original finder to his offspring, like a dark family secret or a horrendous supernatural curse. Handed down from one to another, until finally the message is passed to someone who is able to make their way to a certain backstreet in Brooklyn on 10 September 2001 and gently knock on their door, calling out to see if anyone’s inside.

Oh my God… it’s possible, isn’t it?

And what if that happened while she was standing out here like a complete lemon? Waiting for Foster to turn up, when quite probably he was never going to. Computer Bob was right. That’s what he’d said, wasn’t it? ‘Just wait.’

‘Oh, you freakin’ idiot, Maddy,’ she hissed to herself, tossing the polystyrene cup into the bin beside her and heading down the walkway towards the pier.