TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) (14 page)

‘You know me,’ said Foster.

The female support unit frowned, a hesitant,
confused expression on her face. The old man standing before her looked very similar to
one of the faces in her database. It wasn’t an exact match, but a very close one.
Close enough that she wanted to take a couple of steps closer, see him more clearly and
confirm his identity one way or the other.

‘Where are the others?’ asked
Abel.

Foster shrugged. ‘Long
gone.’

‘You are a part of their team?’
Halfway between a statement and a question.

‘You
know
me, don’t
you?’ said Foster again, trying a lopsided smile. ‘It’s me. I’m
your Authorized User. Now then … why don’t you lower your
weapons?’

Abel narrowed his eyes. He had to admit the
man standing in front of him with his hands raised did look very much like the man who
had issued them their instructions: Authorized User.

He cast an uncertain glance at Faith. A
glance that asked the question:
Is he?

She was still working on that particular one
herself.

The escalator carried Maddy slowly towards
the shop’s upper floor; Baby-Toddler Wear. It was so still, so very quiet. All she
could hear was the gentle hum of the escalator’s motor and the soft chime of mall
music outside. Still down on her hands and knees, she decided to chance one last look.
She lifted her head to see over the smoked glass side of the escalator, over the black
rubber rim of the hand rail and she caught sight of Foster, standing just yards in front
of the two units. His arms raised in
surrender … but slowly
lowering them as if the gesture of surrender was no longer necessary.

He was saying something, she could just
about hear his voice, low, unclear. But it was definitely him doing the talking.

My God, he’s actually doing it!
He’s actually talking them round!

For a moment there, just for a moment, she
let herself believe something might go their way for once.

Then one of the units fired.

Her last image of Foster was him dropping to
his knees in front of the killer meatbots. She thought she heard him swear at them,
something Irish, something defiant … something
so very Liam
. Then, as
the escalator carried her past a sales display and she finally lost sight of him, she
heard four or five shots one after the other. Then one last executioner’s
shot.

7.32 a.m., 12 September 2001, North Haven
Plaza, outside Branford

Liam led the way out of the
toystore’s upper-floor exit, on to the top concourse. The few mid-morning shoppers
were frozen where they were; no one was going anywhere, merely exchanging expressions of
panic.

‘Was that a gun I just heard?’ a
woman asked Liam as he and the two support units rushed past.

‘Aye,’ said Liam, dragging a
dawdling Becks by the hand.

‘We must stop and fight them,’
she said.

‘There’s two of ’em. And
they got guns.’ He looked at her. ‘Are you that desperate to get yourself
into a scrap?’

She cocked her head. ‘Scrap?’
Not used to Liam’s speech patterns just yet.

‘Inadvisable,’ said Bob.
‘The best course of action right now is evasion.’

Liam nodded. ‘Listen to your big
brother.’

They were just passing a Barnes & Noble
when half a dozen more shots erupted from the floor below and rang out across the
mall.

‘Jay-zus!’

‘Oh my God!’ someone across the
way screamed. ‘It’s terrorists!’

The ‘T’ word spread like a
ripple across a still pond. People’s mouths dropping open into ‘O’s.
The mall music suddenly
stopped and a voice announced over the tannoy
that an emergency situation was in progress and that all customers and staff were to
proceed immediately to the nearest fire exits.

Inevitably someone screamed the
‘B’ word and the frozen tableau of confusion turned into a flood of shop
staff emerging from the entrances of their respective stores, spilling on to the upper
concourse. Suddenly it seemed like a very busy mall.

Liam and the other two joined the press of
bodies heading towards the escalators at the end that would take them down to the front
entrance and out into the car park.

Sal and Rashim had found a different way
out of the toystore on the lower floor, a door marked
STAFF ONLY
that led
to a stockroom piled high with cardboard boxes and bubble wrap. From there they found a
door at the back that gave access to a service corridor of dull grey breeze-block
walls.

‘Which way now?’ asked
Rashim.

‘I don’t know.’ Her guess
was left. Left would take them towards the entrance they came in, she figured. She led
the way. Muted by two closed doors, they heard the faintest crackle of gunfire behind
them.

‘This is insane,’ gasped Rashim.
‘Who in God’s name wants you lot dead so badly?’

‘Jahulla!’ she whispered.
‘Wish I knew.’ It felt to her like they’d been running non-stop for
weeks. In added-up time for her, it was almost that. Just after sending Liam and Bob
back to Rome, that’s when they’d been jumped in Times Square. Ambushed and
pursued all the way back to the archway, and there, attacked yet again – one of the
units even managing to dive through the portal right behind them and join them back in
Ancient Rome.

Pandora
. It was asking about
Pandora that had set this off. Sal
was almost certain of that. That
and perhaps, somehow, it was linked to that poor, poor man who’d jumped back to
1831 to warn her about something.

But what was that warning? ‘
The
bear
’. ‘
You’re not who you think you are
.’
What the pinchudda was that supposed to mean?

I think I’m Sal. I’m Saleena
Vikram. I’m a schoolgirl from Ajmeera Independent Academy in Mumbai. I used to
play Pikodu pretty well. And listen to bhangra-metal. I’m the daughter of
Sanjay and Abeer Vikram. And I used to live in a small apartment in Mumbai. Papaji
used to buy and sell computer chips. Mamaji used to be an accountant. What part of
all of that isn’t right?

They turned a corner.

‘Yo! Hey!’

Ahead of them, a black mall security guard.
‘Stop right there!’ He had a handgun pointed at them. ‘Hands where I
can see them!’

‘We’re trying to get
–’

‘SHUT UP!’ A hand fumbled for
the radio on his belt; he kept his eyes on them. ‘This is Kent. I got two of
’em right here. Service Access 5b.’

The radio squawked static and an
unintelligible voice.

The mall guard replied. ‘Asian. One
male, approximately mid-twenties. One female, mid-teens.’

Another squirt of static and voice.

‘Uh … yeah, he’s got a
bit of a beard. They were both running from the gunfire.’

Static and voice.

‘Copy that!’ He hung the radio
back on his belt. ‘You two raghead terrorist sons of …’ He bit his lip.
‘You gonna see a whole bunch of prison time.’

‘We are
not
terrorists!’ said Rashim.

‘You put a bomb in this mall somewhere?
Huh? That it? You gonna blow up some more innocent people?’

‘Shadd-yah!’ Sal cursed.
‘We’re not terrorists!’

‘
Shallah?
What’s that?
Some Ay-rab raghead-talk or something?’

‘She’s Indian,’ said
Rashim. ‘I’m Persian. That makes a total of zero “Ay-rabs”
here.’

‘SHUT UP!’ He jerked his gun at
them. ‘Put your goddamn hands on the wall, Abu-Babu!’

Sal shook her head, pointing over her
shoulder. ‘The bad guys’re back there! They’ve got guns and
–’

‘You put your goddamn hands against
the wall, miss, or I swear I’ll put a bullet in both of you right now!’

She could see the knuckle of his trigger
finger bulging, the skin paler, drawn over tendon and bone. There were already several
pounds of pressure resting on that trigger.

‘OK … OK …’ She
placed her palms up against the rough breeze blocks. ‘Rashim …’
Silently, she urged him to do likewise.

‘
Rashim
, is it, eh?’
The mall guard shook his head as he approached. Then as Sal and Rashim adopted the
legs-apart-hands-against-the-wall pose, the guard began to pat Sal down one-handed.

‘What is it with you goddamned
Moslems? Uh?’ he huffed as he frisked them. ‘What the hell is it you hate so
much ’bout America? What is it, the Big Macs? The freedom? The rap
music?’

‘Look, please … we’re
not actually terrorists –’

‘Or even Muslims,’ added
Sal.

‘I lost a cousin in what you people
did yesterday. Good man. Worked up in the top of the north tower in the restaurant. Took
care of his folks, worked real hard.’

He began to frisk Rashim. ‘But that
ain’t enough, is it? He’s
gotta live
your way
,
hasn’t he? Got to grow a goddamn Santa-beard and wear them stupid pyjama-suits.
Gotta go an’ worship Buddha five times a day –’

‘It’s Allah actually.’

The guard pushed Rashim’s head hard
against the wall. ‘You shut your goddamn raghead mouth!’

7.34 a.m., 12 September 2001, North Haven
Plaza, Branford

They regarded the body of the old man lying
on the floor in front of them in silence. Beside him a young female was cowering on the
floor, her hands clasped to a wound.

‘P-please … d-don’t
kill me …’ she whimpered.

Both support units ignored her. She was
irrelevant. Back to the dead man.

‘It is an older version of the one
called Liam O’Connor,’ said Faith, studying the old man’s face.
‘A valid target.’

Abel nodded. ‘Good.’ He looked
up. ‘The others will be nearby.’ They’d spotted the group heading into
this store and briefly picked up the idents of the two support units with them. Those
signals were gone now. Switched off.

Other than sneaking past them out of the
store’s main entrance, he noted only two other possible exits for them.

‘We must separate.’

Faith looked at the escalator leading to the
store’s upper floor. ‘I will go that way.’

Abel nodded and immediately strode towards
the staff only door at the rear of the store.

> Locate and kill. We have six
remaining targets
, he added wirelessly.

> Affirmative
, she
replied.

Faith jogged up the escalator as another
tannoy announcement reverberated throughout the mall. ‘Attention,
attention … this is an emergency announcement. All customers and staff are
asked to immediately leave the mall. This is an emergency and not a drill. Please leave
the …’

The escalator jerked to a halt beneath her
feet. She hurried up the rest of the way and at the top she scanned the shop floor. She
spotted thirteen people, seven of them wearing the same pink shirts as the dying girl
downstairs – she assumed the shirt was some sort of a uniform. None of them, or the
others, bore any resemblance to the mission briefing images she’d started with,
nor the library of fleeting shutter-frame images, glimpses of her quarry, that
she’d managed to build up during the mission so far.

Faith emerged quickly from the store,
tucking the gun away into the waistband of her jogging bottoms and hiding the
gun’s protruding handle beneath her hoody. No need to attract any unwanted
attention. They’d already done enough of that with the gunfight downstairs.

She joined the throng of people on the upper
floor, emerging from store fronts. So many of them sluggish, uncertain: seemingly unsure
whether this was a real emergency or a drill, unsure whether the exchange of gunfire
minutes ago might have been stupid kids letting off some firecrackers.

She scanned the backs of heads, necks,
shoulders. She had a comparison image of that particular view of one of the targets
called Madelaine. From back in Times Square, when she’d crossed the street and
chased them into the building. Madelaine: tall, slim. Long, light-coloured curly hair
pulled into a ponytail. Jeans. Checked shirt. The other girl, Saleena: short, slim.
Black hair. Dark leggings, black hooded top. Of course they could be wearing different
clothes by now.

Her eyes coolly evaluated the people hurrying
in front of her, one after the other in quick succession.

Maddy found herself in the middle of a
milling crowd of people, a bottleneck at the top of both of the now stationary
escalators leading down to the ground floor. Someone had turned them off. Probably a
routine health and safety measure in the event of a mall evacuation. Stupid, though,
being off. It was taking an age to get down. She was stuck at the top, waiting for an
elderly couple in front of her to tramp slowly down.

Come on, come on.

She guessed she must be the last one in
their group to get out. The others were probably already running back across the car
park, along the pavement towards the motel and their waiting RV.

Her mind had yet to process what she’d
glimpsed. It was there in her head. Foster being gunned down. But in the fleeting minute
– two minutes – since then, she’d yet to digest it, make sense of it.
Feel
something about it.

That was going to come, of course. Tears.
Probably lots of them. Fear, grief, panic, stress. Four excuses right there to let it go
and cry like some typical movie girl-in-distress: all quivering, dimpled chin and
smudged mascara.

If she managed to live long enough, that
is.

A woman pushed past Maddy, pushed past the
old couple in front of her. Heavy heels clanked on the metal-strip steps, wide hips
bumping people aside as she pushed her way forward and wheezed a mantra of barely
contained panic. ‘Oh my Lord, protect me! Oh my Lord, protect me!’

Maddy wanted to push her way forward like
that. But didn’t. Too rude. Still …

Come on. Come on!

She wished she had Bob here with her. Even
their half-grown Becks. She might only look like twelve or thirteen years old, but she
could snap a neck or take a magazine full of bullets almost as well as Bob.