Day of the Predator

CHAPTER 55

2001, New York

Maddy looked at Sal. ‘Oh my God! You hear that? That was a knock, wasn’t it?’ She hadn’t fully expected to be right, that come the stroke of midnight and the reset there would actually, for real, be a knock on their door.

The roller shutter rattled again, and they heard the muffled sound of a man’s voice outside.

‘So we’re going to open it, right?’ whispered Sal.

‘I… uh… yes, I guess we’ve got no choice.’ She stepped forward towards the button at the side and pressed it. With a rattling whirr of a winch motor begging for oil, the shutter slowly rose. Both girls looked down at the ground, at the gradually widening gap, and the soft glow of the street lamp outside creeping across their stained and pitted concrete floor.

Two shoes. Two dark-suited legs. Finally the person outside ducked down slightly to look in, and his wide eyes met theirs.

‘Hello there,’ said Maddy, raising a limp hand. ‘We were… kind of expecting you.’

The shutter rattled to a stop and the man stared at them for a long while in silence.

‘I…’ he started, his voice croaky with nerves. ‘You… but you’re just kids.’ He narrowed his eyes, looking past them at the dim interior. ‘Are there any others here?’

‘Just us, I’m afraid,’ said Maddy.

He looked at her; his old creased face seemed to be struggling to cope with the moment. ‘Are you two… are you f-from the future?’ he asked.

Sal looked at Maddy and she finally nodded her head. ‘You’ve got a million questions you want to ask us, I’m sure,’ Maddy addressed the old man. ‘And we’re prepared to answer some of them. But… you have something, right? Something for us?’

He eyed her cautiously. ‘Perhaps.’

‘A message?’

He ignored the question. ‘Are you time travellers?’

‘I won’t answer anything until you answer me. Do you have a message for us?’

He took a step forward, squinting at the machinery on the far side of the arch. He nodded towards it. ‘Is that some sort of time machine?’

She bit her lip. ‘I’m not saying anything until you answer me.’

‘It is, isn’t it?’ He smiled. ‘My God… this is incredible.’

‘Please!’ called out Sal. ‘Something brought you to us. It’s a message from our friend, isn’t it?’

The old man turned away from them and barked an order down along their backstreet. A moment later Maddy could hear the slap of boots on cobblestones. She retreated from the entrance and into the arch, taking several steps towards the computer desk.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the old man. He reached into his suit jacket and pulled a handgun on them. ‘Please remain perfectly still. Do not touch anything! Do not do anything!’

Half a dozen men emerged from the backstreet, all of them wearing bio-hazard suits, faces hidden behind tinted fascias of plastic. All of them armed with what looked like television remote controls.

Oh no. Maddy felt lightheaded. This isn’t good.

‘We’re going to talk,’ said the old man gently. ‘But we’re going to talk safely away from this place. Please,’ he said, beckoning for them both to come forward, out of the archway and into the street, ‘step forward, away from the equipment.’

Now! You have to do it now!

Maddy spun to face the computer desk. ‘BOB! OMELETTE! ’ she screamed, desperately hoping the desk mic across the archway had managed to pick up her voice. The last thing her conscious mind registered was every muscle in her body contracting with a sudden jolt, and then keeling over on to the hard floor, her forehead smacking heavily against the concrete.

Cartwright watched in silence as the older of the two girls was wheeled away on a hospital gurney, and the other one, younger, Asian or Indian by the look of her, was escorted down the backstreet towards the containment van.

He ordered the remaining three agency men in containment suits to stand guard outside the shutter door once they’d made a sweep and reported that the archway was clear. Good men, trusted men… but still better they knew as little as possible.

He stood alone now in front of a giant perspex cylinder of water, metal steps up the side and what looked like a toddler’s swing seat fixed at the top. Obviously something to do with time travel… like the bank of computer equipment, the other tall thin perspex tubes in the back room, the power generator… all these things clearly played some part in the process.

He wandered back to the long table — a pair of scuffed office desks pushed end to end and cluttered with monitors, a keyboard, a dozen crumpled cans of Dr Pepper and a few empty pizza boxes. He could hear the soft whirr of activity from beneath the desk and ducked down to see the muted glow of blinking green and red LEDs. It looked like there were a dozen or more PCs, the kind you could pick up from any Wal-Mart or PC World, linked together into a network.

Beside the desk was a battered old office filing cabinet. He pulled out one drawer after another, each filled with nests of tangled cables and bits and pieces of electronic circuits, like somebody had ripped off a RadioShack store for bits and not yet figured out what to do with it all.

He felt a small stab of disappointment. In his mind’s eye he’d imagined this moment; he’d conjured up visions of some futuristic arrangement, technology from centuries ahead, something that looked like the bridge of the USS Enterprise set up in this old brick archway. Instead, everything he could see here seemed to have been obtained from the present.

He sat down in one of the office chairs and it squeaked under his weight.

The answers to this place, why they were here in New York… why they were also in the Cretaceous past, how all this machinery worked, and what it could do… all of those answers he presumed were on these quietly humming computers. He picked up the mouse and slid it across the desk. One of the screens flickered out of screen-saver mode and lit up to reveal a relaxing desktop image of an alpine valley and, right in the middle of the screen, a small square dialogue box.

› System lockdown enabled.

Cartwright cursed under his breath. The older girl, the one with the frizzy reddish hair, had barked something out just before he’d tasered her. He’d thought she was calling out to someone else in the arch, but he realized now that it must have been a voice-activated command.

He tried to remember what she’d said. Oh yeah…

‘Omelette,’ he said into the desk mic.

› Incorrect activation code.

‘Dammit!’

› Incorrect activation code.

He tried a dozen other candidate words and phrases: egg, broken eggs, scrambled eggs, boiled eggs, Easter egg, fried egg. Egg hunt, egghead, egg-nog. All of them produced the response on the screen.

Absently he tapped his fingers on the desk. If he was being honest, this wasn’t how he imagined the moment of discovery was going to be: two scruffy kids, a computer system that looked like some bedroom hacker’s dream set-up, and that big plastic cylinder making this place look like some kind of homemade brewery. And this locked-down computer system was obviously not going to tell him anything. He decided it was time he had a little chat with the girls.

He stepped out towards the open door and punched the green button on the side. The metal shutter started to clank and rattle slowly down.

‘No one goes in, or comes out. You have permission to shoot to kill anyone who tries. Understood?’

The three men guarding the entrance nodded.