Day of the Predator

CHAPTER 54

2001, New York

On Sunday 9 September 2001, Lester Cartwright, a small narrow-shouldered man facing his last five desk years before his long-awaited retirement, went to bed with his plump wife. A man who, if you asked him to be honest, would admit to being a little bored with his unchallenging life. His job — yes, it might sound interesting if he was allowed to talk about it — was as a projects budget assessor for a low-profile US intelligence agency. But, in actual fact, despite the intriguing sound of working for a secret service, the work simply involved crunching numbers and balancing costs and expenditures. He might as well have been doing that for Wal-Mart, or McDonald’s, or some carpet store… the job would have been exactly the same.

Not exactly where he’d hoped to end his career when he’d first joined them back in the 1960s, a young man ready to serve his country in the field. A young man ready to kill or be killed for Uncle Sam. Now he was an old man who rubber-stamped expense forms.

That night he went to bed after walking their dog, Charlie, climbed into his pyjamas and picked up a Tom Clancy spy novel, hoping to enjoy at least a few aimless thrills today before turning the light out on his bedside table.

Later, as he slept, change arrived in the form of a subtle ripple of reality. A wave of reality systematically rewriting itself, a wave of change that had started in 1941… with a young boy’s discovery of a strange rock beside a river in Texas. A boy who turned over a rock and saw something curious.

Lester’s boring life in that moment of darkness was replaced in just the blink of an eye, with a far, far more interesting one.

‘Sir! Sir!’ Knuckles rapped gently against the car’s rear passenger window. Lester Cartwright stirred, his mind had been off again, considering the incredible, the impossible.

Only, it isn’t impossible, is it, Lester?

He looked out of the window at Agent Forby, dark glasses, a suit, crew-cut hair and a face that looked like it had never told a joke while on duty. Lester wound his window down an inch. ‘Yes?’

‘Sir, it’s time,’ said Forby.

Lester looked down at his watch. Three minutes to midnight. Dammit

… he must have been napping again.

Getting too old for something like this.

‘Forby, the area’s completely secure?’

Forby nodded. ‘We have a two-block cordon set up. Police and state guard are manning those. The Williamsburg Bridge has been closed and all civilians have been evacuated from the perimeter.’

Cartwright nodded. The cover story had been an easy no-brainer to come up with: a bomb threat. American civilians seemed to react very well to that. ‘So, we’re certain we have just agency personnel within?’

Forby nodded. ‘A hundred per cent, sir. Just us guys.’

Cartwright looked out of the window past Forby’s hunched form. The Williamsburg Bridge towered over them, the nearby intersection was deserted and there, fifty yards away, was the entrance to the small backstreet running alongside the bridge’s brick support arches.

My God… finally. This is it. This is finally it.

He felt his chest tickled by butterfly wings and the short hairs on the back of his neck rise.

‘Very well.’ He opened the car door and stepped out into the warm evening. ‘Then let’s begin.’

Cartwright led the way across the quiet road, lit by several fizzing street lights and the intermittent sweep of a floodlight from a helicopter holding position high up in the sky. Apart from the far-off whup-whup-whup of its rotors, this three-block-wide area of Brooklyn was ghostly quiet.

There was a barricade across the entrance to the backstreet, manned by more of Cartwright’s men. No soldiers or police this close to the target, on Cartwright’s insistence. Only personnel he trusted within the perimeter. Only personnel he’d recruited himself into this small covert agency, an agency he and his men referred to as the Club.

He nodded at them as they raised their guns and let him through. He looked down the narrow cobbled street, littered with garbage, an abandoned skip halfway along.

Good grief, I feel… like a kid.

All of his professional life had been leading up to this one moment, ever since he’d been quietly headhunted from the FBI to come and work for the Club. Forty years of knowing.

Lester Cartwright began to make his way down the row of archways, past the first one, clearly being used by some one-man auto-repair business.

When he’d first joined, his superior had been prepared to reveal only some of the facts: an incredible find in a place called Glen Rose, Texas — a find that had major national security implications. That was all he got for quite a few years. But time passed, and Lester gradually climbed several ranks, finally becoming the senior serving officer in the Club. His departing boss had handed him the complete dossier on his very last day, handed it to him with eyes that looked like they’d been staring far too long into an abyss.

‘ Do me a favour, Lester,’ he’d said. ‘ Sit yourself down and drink a finger of bourbon before you open this file, all right? ’

‘ Sir? ’

‘ You’re about to join a very, very small group… those that know.’

And it was a small group.

Presidents had been briefed — Roosevelt, when the news of the artefact had first been unearthed. Then Truman, then Eisenhower. But they’d stopped briefing presidents when that silly fool Kennedy had threatened to go public on it. That was the year after Lester had joined the Club, the year of the Dallas incident. A very messy business. But the Club had a responsibility.

They hadn’t bothered to tell presidents since then.

Cartwright passed the third and fourth archways, both open-fronted and unoccupied. He could see needles and bottles back there in the darkness. His men had checked in there for vagrants and unearthed only one grubby, stinking and utterly bewildered alcoholic. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest as his feet slowly brought him up outside the metal roller-shutter door of the fifth archway.

Forty years he’d known of a thing called the Glen Rose artefact.

But only for the last fifteen years had he known exactly what it was.

Figuratively speaking, a message in a bottle, with a date on it. A bottle that couldn’t be opened until a certain date. He looked down at his watch and saw that that certain date was a mere forty seconds away.

There hadn’t been a single solitary night during the last fifteen years that he hadn’t lain in bed and wondered what they’d find inside this address. He’d been down this street on a number of occasions and looked at that corrugated metal; he’d even been inside and looked around on several occasions. Empty, unused.

But now, finally, there were occupants inside. Occupants from — his heart fluttered and his breath caught as he considered the phrase — another time.

Cartwright instinctively reached into his suit jacket for the service-issue firearm he kept there as he looked at his watch and realized that after forty years of waiting and preparing he was finally down to counting off the last ten seconds.

‘So… this is it,’ he uttered.

The second hand of his watch ticked past midnight and all of a sudden he thought he felt the slightest puff of displaced air against his face.

He leaned forward, balled his fist and knuckled the shutter door gently.