TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (47 page)

BOOK: TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6)

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She could have kissed him for being so
resolutely … Liam. So brave.

So strong. So flippant.

‘You know, Mads, I was thinking about
this last night. I presume I must be
older
now. You know? Physically? No longer
just a sixteen-year-old slice of a lad, eh?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Older than you, Mads?’

‘I don’t know. It’s
possible. I guess so. What’s your point?’

He grinned. ‘Well now, if I’m
the oldest, does that not mean that makes me the boss around here, then?’

She snorted coffee from her nose. There was
laughter somewhere in that. ‘In your freakin’ dreams, Mr
O’Connor.’

Epilogue

2069, W.G. Systems Research Campus,
Pinedale, Wyoming

Roald Waldstein stared out of the broad
panoramic window of his boardroom. The lemon-tinted sky over the steep slopes promised
another downpour of acid rain, further stripping the last vestiges of green from the
dying Douglas firs and the hilly landscape.

His forehead pressed against the plate
glass, his hands leaving fingerprint smudges. He felt emotionally void. Utterly spent.
The last three days of his life had been spent in a desperate panic to get those embryos
speed-grown and ready. He was far too old for this damned level of stress. He’d
begun to hope it was all long behind him. That his project, the agency, was something he
could forget about.

Fourteen years ago.

Fourteen years ago almost to this day it
happened. Almost an anniversary. The day Joseph Olivera had turned on him and
demanded
to know what Pandora was all about.

Back then Waldstein had begun to look on the
young man almost as a son. A son to replace his boy Gabriel. (So long ago now that
he’d lost little Gabriel and his wife Eleanor. A simple vehicle accident. If his
wife had done just one of a thousand inconsequential little things differently that
morning, she and Gabriel would still be alive and with him today.) But Olivera
had pushed and pushed and pushed, asking questions Waldstein
couldn’t possibly answer and then coming to his own paranoid conclusions all by
himself.

He’d never had Frasier Griggs killed.
The poor man had simply been desperately unlucky. Took the wrong route home one night.
But Joseph had been convinced, hadn’t he? And he wanted to know … wanted
to know why Waldstein needed to steer history this way.

Why? Why do you want mankind to destroy
itself, Mr Waldstein?

If only he could tell the poor young man.
But Olivera had gone and panicked. Olivera had garbled something about Griggs being
killed because he’d found out too much.

That day back in 2055, poor young Joseph
Olivera had convinced himself that Waldstein was going to have him killed. Nothing could
have been further from his mind. He wanted Joseph out of that lab, away from the
instrumentation panels before he did anything stupid. But Joseph had panicked and hurled
himself into an open portal without any preparation, without any density checks.
Nothing. God knows what horror happened to him.

Waldstein had cried for him that day.

And then there was the alarming event a few
days later. A group of anti-time-travel activists managed to break into a project being
secretly developed by the Russians: activists who hero-worshipped Waldstein, regarded
him with his anti-time-travel message as some sort of a
prophet
. It turned out
the Russian time-displacement project was a one-way-only technology with a severely
limited range. But it was enough for the activists to send a lone assassin back to 2015
in an attempt to kill a young Chinese-American boy called Edward Chan. The young man who
would soon write a thesis that would change the world. A thesis Waldstein would read as
a young man
himself. And there it would be: how time travel could
actually be possible.

The assassination attempt was successful and
Waldstein had watched from within the safety of his lab’s protection field as the
ensuing time wave changed everything outside.

That was the final straw. Too much to
handle. Too much stress. He’d beamed a warning back to the 2001 team. But that was
it – the last thing he wanted to do with this. That day, fourteen years ago, was the day
he decided to finally close the doors on his special little project. To mothball it. Put
locks on it and walk away. The agency was back there in 2001. They now had everything
they needed to function – and that was always his intention anyway. For them to be
self-sufficient: entirely on their own and working to preserve this timeline.

They certainly didn’t need a
heartbroken old man like him keeping tabs on them.

He’d closed those doors and locked
them with a few final solemn words.

I’m sorry … you’re
on your own now.

Fourteen years ago.

And, since then, most days he thought of
them: those three hand-crafted genetic products, so carefully designed for their roles.
Liam with his robust, quick-witted mind. Sal with her enhanced visual acuity. Maddy with
a mind designed for data sifting. In a way, they’d almost been like his own
children. Like two daughters and a son. They were back there, all on their own with an
older copy of the boy as the closest thing to a mentor for them. If they could just hold
things together, prevent anyone else unseating this timeline for just a little longer,
just until 2070 … then it would all have been worthwhile. Job done.

Mission accomplished.

Waldstein had even begun to believe it was
all working out.
There’d even been days when he
hadn’t
bothered to routinely check that tatty, yellowing page of
newspaper with the personal ads on it. All, it seemed, was fine, going to plan. They
were back there doing their job … and mankind was counting down its last few
months and years until Pandora happened. Before they wiped themselves out.

Then all of this exhausting stress. Three
days ago, out of the blue, that message from the Maddy Carter unit
demanding
to
know all about Pandora. Demanding … and
threatening
.

His three ‘children’ were
rebelling against their father. Like Joseph Olivera, demanding to know what Pandora was
and threatening to come off-mission if no satisfactory answer was returned. With that
brief message, they’d switched from being part of his plan to being a very big
problem.

Oh God help me
… Opening
up that dusty old lab again after all these years, pulling those military-class foetuses
out from cold storage, growing them, ‘hatching’ them and briefing them –
briefing them to execute his own children – had been one of the hardest, most painful
things he’d had to do in his entire life.

He’d sent them back to 2001 little
more than an hour ago and he’d just realized something. He was probably never
going to know for sure if they’d been successful. Most probably they had. Six
lethal killing machines arriving right inside their archway without any warning
whatsoever? His poor children wouldn’t have stood a chance. The kill team had
instructions to terminate the TimeRiders, destroy every item of equipment in the
archway, then terminate themselves.

He should have thought to instruct them to
send a final message when they had completed those objectives. Just before they
self-terminated … a simple message to let him know the deed was done.

TimeRiders successfully
terminated
.

But in his panic and haste he
hadn’t.

Waldstein looked out of the window as gentle
spots of toxic rain began to spatter heavily against the glass. Well … it was
almost certainly done and in any case, there wasn’t much time left now for anyone
to steer history from its proper course.

‘It’s nearly time.’ He
sighed, leaving a small cloud on the glass. In a few months’ time a virus was
going to be released by either the Japanese or the North Koreans; no one was ever going
to know who. Mankind was going to be almost completely wiped out in the space of a few
short weeks.

‘Nearly time.’ His words echoed
across an empty boardroom. W.G. Systems was a shell of a business now. A few caretaker
staff left, but most had been let go eighteen months ago; there really was no more need
for his business empire to be making any more money. Far better his employees spent what
little time left with their families and loved ones.

‘It’s nearly time,’ he
whispered once more.

I’ve done all that you asked me to
do … please, now, let this be enough.

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