The Whitehall Syndicate: A time travel conspiracy thriller (20 page)

Zoning out, she let her pen wander into the middle of the page now and absently began writing, not paying attention to what she was doing. After a few seconds she snapped out of her weary trance and looked down to see CONSPIRACY: THE ADVENTURES OF KIM AND JACK written on the page. She laughed at the random comment and wondered if her sub-conscious was trying to tell her something

With her mind now relaxed, she turned back to the files and her face lit up as everything snapped into place. She knew what Dr Lewis' notes meant and turning back to the device schematics, she instantly figured out what the device did. If she was correct, it was more powerful than she could even contemplate.

Jack and Anisha stood in front of the huge glass window, overlooking London from thirty floors up. The view was amazing, and the city almost looked like a small model and the people were little more than small, coloured blobs. Jack turned slightly and looked at Anisha. She was also staring out of the window, an expression of awe on her face.

The last of the people shuffled out of the computer room and it was free at last. Jack wanted to be watching Pete, especially in these crucial few days before the party, but Anisha wanted to show him something. A quick train journey and here they were.

Anisha's floor was supposed to be closed on weekends, but a lot of people would succumb to sloth, leave some work from Friday, and then have to make it up in their spare time. So it was no surprise to see a few faces as they walked in.

It was an ordinary office floor in every way, from the drab grey carpet to the two hundred or so identical desks. Still, the furniture and equipment were in good condition and the place was clean, so it had the edge over Bob's place of work.

Finally, with almost everyone having departed, Anisha logged onto one of the computers and began pulling up video files. Jack watched, wondering where all of this was leading. Anisha eventually selected the correct ones and showed Jack. It was the videos of Pete watching the game. She pointed to the screen and pulled up two dialogue boxes. “Look right there.”

“What am I looking at?” he asked in a confused tone of voice, secretly growing slightly sick of watching the same video again and again.

“That's the refresh rate for the television screen.” Jack frowned. He had already told her this and wondered what extra information she could have to offer.

“Yeah okay. What about it though?”

“It's two hundred. Now look at another comparative log.” Jack nodded along. “This is another log from a few days beforehand, showing live TV. Look at the refresh rate.”

“It's two hundred. That doesn't make any sense,” said Jack, almost whining.

“The rate doesn't change for re-recordings. It's like that every time you record something. So there must be a fault with the television. It's showing live programs and recordings at the same refresh rate. That's why it came up as two hundred on the camera and not four hundred. My TV won't actually play anything at four hundred. So Pete was telling the truth.”

“But doesn't that mean that we can't prove whether it's a recording or a re-recording?” asked Jack; afraid of having to admit he was wrong about Pete twice.

“Look at the time stamp on the file. It's the date Pete said and I don’t think
it's been altered. The game was on late that night so there wouldn't have been any time to record a new video afterwards.” Jack gulped guiltily, knowing that Pete was innocent but also that Anisha was becoming more and more irate with him.

Luckily he wouldn't have to apologise to Pete this time, since he didn't even know he had been accused. Even so, a cocktail of worry and confusion leaned down on his shoulders and his head became clouded and muddled.

He continued talking to Anisha, simultaneously wondering whom he could trust and who might be unreliable. As she logged off of the computer, she turned to Jack and they shared a worried look. Up until now, Jack had been optimistic about this coming Monday. He knew who was out to stop him and he knew what he had to do. But with this new information everything had changed.

How long until another one of his friends was accused? How long until they were then found innocent? Everything kept taking him in circles and he felt like a dog chasing its tail; he was going nowhere.

The afternoon was dull and gloomy, but the sky had yet to grow
too grey. Frank's bloodshot eyes were firmly on the computer screen, the same as they had been all through the night and the same as Tony's were now. Whoever this Russell Mason was, he was good at covering his tracks. The bank's records contained copies of his passport and driver's license, both of which were in his name and looked genuine.

The numbers on the two identity documents came back as valid, so it was Frank's guess that they were created using a faked birth certificate, which was the easiest thing to copy. This was a time when everything possible was kept as a computer record and just one hack would be enough to set you up with a new identity. Frank was at a loss for what to do next.

Tony yelled out to him and he quickly pried himself off the desk and over to his partner. On Tony's screen was a computer program cycling through what looked like a random chain of letters and numbers. It was complete gibberish to him and as Frank watched, Tony explained it all clearly.

“Okay I had a hunch that with all the safeguards on wire transfers there would also have been some sort of cash pickup at some point. Now for a large payout, you're not going to send someone to pick it up for you.”

“Right,” nodded Frank. He was smiling, and had already worked out where Tony was going with this.

“So I traced back the bank records to find any large cash withdrawals from the account. The latest one was two weeks ago. Now the bank only keeps records for a week.”

“So it's a dead end?”

“No,” smiled Tony. “This program extracts deleted data from a disc, even when
it's been re-written. The Bank granted me remote access to the partition of the server that housed our suspect's file. I'm running the program now.” Even Frank understood that and his face lit up.

“Good work slick.”

Tony had had great computer skills for most of his life but had opted out of higher paid jobs to go into the police because he wanted to help people. As Frank saw him work now, he could see that the young lad was turning into a fine detective.

As Anisha and Jack walked home, Jack's phone began to play the breakneck distorted chords of The Moral Lepers' “When I was a Lad”. Anisha smiled at the interesting choice of ring tone while Jack picked it up. He mouthed out that it was Kim and Anisha flashed a plastic smile.

There was something about Kim that didn't sit too well with her. The way she was always clamouring over Jack, always in trouble and needing help over the smallest things. Anisha scoffed at the girl in her head.

She had been shot at so far, and had already done enough to have the police lock her away for life. From her perspective, Kim was just being a drama queen. Then again she had the support of all the others and Kim was alone. She barely knew her and it was unfair to judge too hastily.

Eventually Jack hung up the phone and turned to her, a look on his face of shock and puzzlement. Anisha asked what was wrong and after a few seconds of staring at her with his dazed look, he finally answered. Kim had worked out what the device did. It wasn't exactly a weapon but it could certainly be used as one. It was a machine that disrupted the rules of time.

He explained it to her the way Kim had to him. Normal time machines worked by using several of twenty small, rare crystals. A beam fired through the crystals and created a time field. The smaller the crystal, the larger the field that was created and so the further back the subject went.

The crystals were incredibly expensive and prone to burning out after repeated usage, especially the smaller ones. That was why the cost of time travel increased exponentially the further back you wanted to go, and also why there was a two-month cap on travel.

A typical machine used only nine or ten crystals of different sizes and calculated the correct combination to send the traveller as far back as they needed. The problem was that cutting a crystal shattered it internally so only crystals in their naturally occurring size could be used.

That placed a limit on how far back one could time travel since
very few naturally occurring crystals were small enough for travel of more than a month.

The machine Green was building was totally different from the others. Built into it was some kind of synthetic crystal and it let you go back in time and actually alter the future. If somebody planned it correctly, they could pretty much change the world in any way they wanted.

Anisha weaved her fingers through her perfect black hair and her face contorted into the same worried look as Jack's. They were one step closer to finding out what was going on, and yet again everything had become even more complicated.

Anisha ventured the first theory. “Okay well if Green is building this thing to alter the world forever, then that means he's going to destroy the world as we know it now. So whoever wants to stop him, must be a good guy right?”

Jack liked the logic in theory. It made him out to be the force of good, stopping the evil Green from destroying the world. But whoever was blackmailing him into killing Green definitely wasn't any force of good; he knew that for sure. He was about to start brainstorming his own ideas when he got a video message from Frank, telling him about Russell Mason.

The self-preservationist inside Jack told him to withhold the information that he had just learned, but he resisted. Frank was making a serious effort to get to the bottom of whatever was going on, and he knew that he had to help him if he wanted to find out the truth.

             
Green senior sat with Pete watching the football game. They had spent the whole morning racking their brains and going over the scheme. This football game was their way of relaxing: it distracted their troubled minds from the danger ahead.

Pete yelled at the screen as a freckly brunette hit the ground to a referee's whistle. Mixed football was great as a show of social equality but in practise it didn't work properly.

When the men tackled them, the women would always take a fall and claim a fowl, which the referee normally gave them because the men were bigger. As a result, many players now resisted hard tackles. It was annoying for Pete to watch, since subtle brutality was always one of the things that lured him to the beautiful game. As he and Green senior sat there drinking cheap beer, he felt slightly guilty. Jack's life was at stake and he was watching a football match that he didn't really care about.

Each of the group had their own reason for helping out Jack. Anisha was a friend, Green was trying to save his own life and Gina felt she owed him for saving her life. But nobody's reasoning was as simple as Pete's. He simply saw a chance to save a human being's life, and he was willing to do whatever it took to do it. Jack was important to Anisha and Anisha was important to Pete. That made Jack important to Pete.

              Green senior heard the sound of something being squeezed through the letterbox and heaved himself off of the couch to investigate. There weren't many postmen who worked at this time. Pete came over and stood behind him as he opened his mail. It was a dirty brown envelope with nothing written on it and inside was a folded sheet of brown paper.

Green senior read aloud the message. “Time is running out.” Instinctively, Pete poked his head through the doorway and whipped his eyes around in both directions. There was no one in the entire building. He walked out into the hallway and began running down it, still looking out all around him. Nearing the elevator, he saw an arrow-shaped light dimly
luminescing. The lift was coming back up and he had missed his chance to catch whoever delivered the envelope.

Disgusted with himself for letting them get away, he slowly walked back to Anisha's apartment. Green senior was still in the doorway, waiting to lay his eyes on the culprit. When Pete walked in alone and shook his head, Green senior just sighed, closed the door shut and dropped the letter on the rack.

             
Gina was on her afternoon break. It was only fifteen minutes but it was enough for her to pop into the back room and lay out her map. After her prank call, the durations of all the subsets of her plan were co-ordinated, but she still had to find a location to stop the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Somewhere quiet and with as few people as possible but also a place which was easy to get to.

             
The problem was that the three best candidates for the task in their group would all be at Green's house. There was no way they could also ambush the ambulance as well. This was the only weak part of the plan and it had to be resolved if Monday was going to work out properly.

             
Gina scratched her head, deep in thought. No one had prepared anything yet to deal with the more important event of all: the one where Jack was going to be shot. She looked down at her slender silver watch and saw that her break was nearing an end. She would have to finish up when she got back home.

             
As she left the room she walked over to the front of the shop, onto the gravely driveway for a few breaths of fresh air. Turning around to walk back to her desk, she failed to see the small red laser light dancing over her back as her tight, slender body lined up with the crosshairs of a sniper rifle.

              It was another late night in London and another cloudy sky. Grimy rain was firing down on the pavement, and what few people remained on the streets, were running wildly from the hammering assault. A large Negro man sat on a bench in the park, water dripping off of his short black hair. His thin eyebrows were arched downwards and his eerie eyes helped give off a menacing aura.