Day of the Predator

CHAPTER 42

2001, New York

Sal looked at her. ‘How can you be so sure?’

Maddy shrugged. ‘I can’t be a hundred per cent certain. But look, if Liam and the unit survived the jump, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what they’d do. I mean, that’s all they can do.’

Sal looked up from the mug of coffee in her hands, across the dim archway, illuminated by the fizzing ceiling strip light, towards the shutter door. It was gone eleven now. By this time on any normal Tuesday, the three of them would have been settling in for the evening: Liam on his bunk with his nose in a history book and a bowl of dry Rice Krispies on his chest and Maddy surfing the Internet. But tonight she and Maddy were both up and sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for midnight to come. Waiting for the ‘reset’. She could hear the softly growing hum of power being drawn in through the mains, building up and being stored in the capacitor. Come midnight they would feel an odd momentary sensation of falling as the time field reset and took them back forty-eight hours to 12 a.m. Monday morning.

Maddy was certain, or at least working hard to give that impression, that immediately after the reset happened and they appeared in Monday one stroke after midnight, there’d be a welcome party waiting outside in the backstreet and very eager to meet them.

Who, though?

Maddy said that ‘secrets have a way of drifting up’. What she meant by that was that advance knowledge of a time machine appearing in New York in 2001 would surely ultimately end up in the hands of some shady government agency, men in dark suits. Something as important, something so profoundly monumental as that could only end up in the hands of secret service spooks. If that was the case… then, Sal hoped, Maddy was going to find a way to cooperate with them to get Liam back.

And then what? What exactly?

Interrogation? For sure. Because they’d sure as shadd-yah want to know every little thing about this place and the machinery inside and how it all worked. They’d want to know every little thing. There’d be endless questions about the rest of this mysterious agency, how many others? Where are they? Who’s in charge?

Sal really wasn’t so sure she wanted to jump back to Monday and face that.

There was the other possibility, of course — that they jumped back and no one was there waiting for them.

Maddy’s logic was quite black and white about this. Sal realized she’d thought this all through very thoroughly. If nobody was waiting for them, then that could only mean one thing. If there was nobody outside waiting for them, then Liam and the support unit had never survived the explosion. Or, if they had survived, then they’d been unable to get a message to them; they were lost in time for good, never to be seen again.

She looked at the digital clock on their kitchen table, red numbers that glowed softly and changed all too slowly.

11.16 p.m.

Oh jahulla… I rea-a-a-ally hate waiting.