The Doomsday Code tr-3

by Alex Scarrow

  ‘Negative.’

  He cursed then looked around. There had to be something they could improvise with. But he could see nothing out here but withered grass and nettles, frost-stiff and frozen-hard soil peppered with discarded flakes of worked stone and flint.

  Flint.That could do us.

  He began to scrabble in the hard ground to free a piece large enough that it could be used as a makeshift tool when Becks quietly came over and tapped the top of his head.

  ‘Unnecessary, Liam O’Connor,’ she said.

  ‘Uh?’ He looked up just in time to see Bob pulling a long lumber nail out of the wooden crucifix of the freshly dug grave. With a mournful squeak it came out and the crossbar clattered on to the hard hummock of dark soil, disturbing the nearby crows. They fluttered away noisily into the tumbling grey sky with caws of complaint.

  ‘Errrr … you can’t just go and do that!’ he said, absently blessing himself with the tips of his fingers.

  Bob casually strode past him towards the gravestone. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, it’s … it’s just not right. That’s a desecration, so it is.’

  Bob was already hunkered down over the gravestone and etching their pigpen symbol for ‘L’ into its granite surface.

  Liam glanced heaven-ward. ‘Uhhh, really sorry about that … if you’re watchin’.’

  ‘’Tis later in the morning than I’d hoped to set off,’ called out Cabot irritably as he strapped the yoke to a pair of horses. ‘That is, if ye still wish me to take ye to meet John?’

  ‘Yes, yes we do,’ replied Liam.

  ‘Where’ve ye been?’

  ‘To get some fresh air,’ replied Liam as they skirted round the vegetable gardens towards the stables. He nodded at Becks. ‘Our lady was feeling sick.’

  Cabot stuck out his chin. ‘Are ye better now, m’dear?’

  Becks glanced quickly at Liam for guidance but he stepped in to answer for her. ‘She’s fine, so she is, aren’t you … Lady Rebecca?’

  She managed to nod mutely and swiftly adapt her usual tomboy swaggering walk to something that, all of a sudden, looked a little more feminine as they drew up beside Cabot and the cart.

  ‘Noble-born, are ye?’ The old man’s eyes narrowed as he regarded her mud-brown dress made of coarse material and her peasant’s clogs. ‘Lady, are ye now?’ he said with a disbelieving tone in his voice. ‘Hmmm … and from what duchy do ye hail then?’

  Liam looked at her. Come on, Becks, better make it sound convincing.

  Her cool grey eyes returned Cabot’s suspicious stare for a painful few seconds, long enough that Liam wondered whether he’d made a mistake casually introducing her as an aristocrat.

  ‘Je viens de la duche d’Alevingnon en Normandy.’

  Cabot’s manner changed instantly; his flinty soldier’s eyes widened. ‘Ma’am, please forgive my rude manner! I just — ’

  She smiled. ‘It is quite all right, old man,’ she replied sweetly. ‘Our mission to recover this … item … requires a certain anonymity.’

  Brilliant. Liam grinned at her. Bleedin’ brilliant. He could have hugged her there and then. But of course, now that she was supposedly a high-born, that would be inappropriate.

  Cabot gestured to the cart, a simple wooden trap covered with a canvas awning, and two pot-bellied ponies scraping the frost-hardened ground with their hooves, impatient to get going.

  ‘’Tis not much, ma’am, but it is all we have here at the priory.’

  She nodded calmly, almost serenely. ‘The vehicle is sufficient.’

  ‘And far better ye travel in a humble trader’s cart than in anything that might attract the interest of bandits,’ added Cabot.

  Becks nodded. ‘Indeed.’

  Liam smiled. ‘M’lady seems happy.’

  Cabot looked up at a heavy sky that promised snow. ‘Then we ought to leave with haste. ’Tis three days, but only if there is no snow. Three days to Prince John’s winter residence.’ He pulled aside the canvas cover at the back of the cart. ‘There ye are, m’lady,’ he said, offering a calloused hand to help her up into the trap, but she ignored that and hopped up with all the regal grace of a squaddie scrambling up into the back of an army truck.

  Liam pursed his lips. ‘Lady Rebecca’s a very independent woman, so she is.’

  ‘Aye,’ nodded Cabot, ‘noticed that.’

  Bob clambered aboard behind her and the cart dipped and wobbled under his weight.

  ‘Best we get going,’ said Cabot to Liam. ‘We will wish to be well clear of the forests before it gets dark later this afternoon.’

  CHAPTER 27

  2001, New York

  ‘I’m not going to run off and find the first news station I can and blab all about you, you know.’

  Maddy followed Adam up the steps and through a rotating glass door, into a quiet lobby. Before them the apartment block’s security guard looked up from behind a newspaper and a desk and smiled warmly at Adam.

  ‘Lovely evening, ain’t it, Mr Lewis?’

  ‘Isn’t it, Jerry?’ he replied cheerfully. ‘Unseasonably clement for the time of year.’

  Jerry looked like the kind of guy who’d once worked homicide but been put out to pasture. He sat back in a seat that creaked beneath his weight and laughed. ‘Tha’s what I love about you Brits … always got somethin’ real smart-soundin’ to say about the weather!’

  Adam shared his good-natured cackle with a wave and swept past his desk towards the elevators at the back of the foyer. He jabbed a button and they watched in silence as a number display slowly counted down, and listened to the muted rumble of early-evening traffic outside, the rustle of the newspaper in Jerry’s hands.

  With a ping, the brass doors opened and they stepped inside. Adam hit his floor number and the doors swished quietly closed.

  ‘I can’t take that chance,’ Maddy finally answered.

  ‘You still don’t trust me?’

  ‘Nope. I’d be a fool to, since we only met this morning.’

  He laughed. ‘Well, actually, we met seven years ago.’

  Some of his smile spread her way. ‘I guess.’ She looked around the dark wood and brass of the elevator. ‘I’m guessing the rent in this block is pretty high.’

  ‘Very.’

  A soft chime announced their arrival at the fourteenth floor and the doors opened, revealing thick carpet and more dark wood. ‘You think this looks pricey, just wait till you see my gaff.’

  ‘Gaff?’

  He led her down the hallway and finally stopped outside a door, pulling a set of jangling keys from the inside pocket of his jacket. The door opened with a soft click and he pushed it open, gesturing her through first. ‘After you, madam.’

  ‘Oh, very gentlemanly,’ said Maddy. She stepped in and almost immediately she had to stifle a gasp. A wall of floor-to-ceiling tinted windows looked out on a forest of Manhattan skyscrapers, bathed in the rich vanilla light of a setting sun. She crossed a large open-plan lounge until her nose was almost jammed against the glass. ‘Oh my God … this is so cool!’

  ‘I certainly pay for that view,’ he replied, stepping in after her, draping his jacket over the back of a chrome bar stool and hitting his answerphone.

  Maddy turned to watch. There were messages. Of course there were: several from work, several female voices each enquiring what he was up to this evening. Adam shuffled through them, dismissing them casually. He offered her a self-conscious fluttering smile. ‘Sorry about that.’

  She shrugged. ‘Don’t worry. Clearly you’re much in demand.’

  ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘I just need to dig out that old drive of mine.’ He stepped past an exercise bike towards a chest beside the window. ‘Most of my junk from my university days is in here somewhere.’ He lifted the lid and carefully pulled out a dog-eared Warhammer box and chuckled. ‘Could never say goodbye to all my fantasy stuff. You can never let it go, you know? Not if you’ve put the time in, painting them, that I did.’

  He
dug back in, pulling out one or two other assorted items. For the first time since this morning she began to recognize once again the edgy, lank-haired young man she’d visited with Becks back in 1994; a loner, an awkward geek obsessed with dark corners of knowledge — puzzles, numbers, codes, conspiracies.

  She looked around his apartment and realized it was a reflection of him, a reflection of his attempt to completely reinvent himself. No longer a narrow-shouldered pigeon-chested nerd with bad skin and bad breath, but now the very essence of success: smart, intelligent, confident.

  ‘It’s in here somewhere. All the stuff I did on the Voynich, all my degree stuff on dead languages. I never let any of it go — ’ he looked up at her — ‘because I always knew I’d be needing it again.’

  She crossed the lounge and carefully perched on the saddle of the exercise bike. She looked down at his things. ‘Warhammer … you were into Warhammer?’ She giggled.

  He hunched his shoulders. ‘Oh yeah, but I keep that all locked away. The people I work alongside, people I bring back here, they, uh … they don’t get that kind of thing. If you know what I mean?’

  ‘Hell no,’ she said. ‘I bet most of your girlfriends wouldn’t be too impressed.’

  He pulled out a plastic bucket full of a tangle of wires, plug adaptors and electronic doo-dads.

  ‘I used to play with my kid brother’s Warhammer figures when I was younger,’ she added. ‘Made up my own basic combat rules because the rule book was like way-y-y too much.’

  ‘That’s for sure,’ he replied, carefully pulling bits and pieces out.

  She watched him picking his way carefully and realized he reminded her so much of her older cousin, Julian. She’d idolized him. He’d been smart and cool — an uber-geek, always the high-school outsider, but with an air about him … a confidence that he carried with him always, like an impenetrable force-field.

  Adam, hunched down there in his smart Dolce amp; Gabbana trousers and shirt like a boy hunched over a toy-chest, reminded her so much of him. And her heart ached. She’d been nine when it happened; when the world stopped for several hours and watched, on TV, three thousand people die, like it was just some kind of movie. Just nine … She hadn’t really put it together in her young mind that after that second tower came tumbling down she was never going to see Julian again.

  ‘Ah … I think this is the one,’ he said, pulling out a hard drive that looked almost as big as a shoebox. ‘Twenty gigabytes!’ he laughed as he got to his feet. ‘And look at the size of the bloody thi-!’

  He stopped. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Maddy hadn’t even realized she was crying. Tears were rolling out from behind her glasses, down her cheeks and on to her T-shirt. She bit her lips, angry with herself for allowing him to see her blubbing like this.

  Adam stood up and held her shaking shoulders. ‘What’s up?’

  She shook her head. What do I say? You reminded me of someone I once worshipped? Someone who’s going to die tomorrow morning. Maddy felt her resolve crumbling. Why hadn’t Foster rescued Julian instead of her? He’d have made a far better TimeRider, a far better team leader. Right then, she realized if she had the choice to walk out of the archway and back home to her parents’ house in Boston — the choice to leave all the time travel, the worrying about history timelines, this so-called agency that seemed quite happy to throw raw recruits into the thick of it without any sort of assistance … If she was given the choice to walk away, she’d take it in a heartbeat.

  And then, without a word spoken, she found herself sobbing against Adam’s shoulder, dampening his expensive pale blue shirt with her tears.

  ‘Hey, it’s all right,’ he cooed softly, patting her heaving back awkwardly. ‘Heavy day, uh?’

  ‘Yuh, sorta,’ she mumbled snottily against his shoulder. She let go of him and stood back, her puffy eyes trying to find a million things to look at, other than his.

  Outside, the sun was busy with finding a bed for the night, and Manhattan was beginning to find its light switches.

  ‘I … really … don’t know why … I … did that.’ She started to fumble for the first words of an explanation.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he replied. ‘Honestly, you don’t need to explain — ’

  ‘No.’ She decided to straighten her glasses. ‘I do need to explain. I … it’s just the work, the stress. That’s what it is: stress. And …’ She sighed, suddenly realizing that if she wasn’t careful, she was going to go all girlie and cry again. She took a breath. ‘I miss my old life … and it feels like we’ve all been in this weird time-travel agency for years, and … I know it’s only been, like, a few months.’ She laughed whimsically. ‘I guess for a bunch of mysterious time travellers from the future, we must come across as a bunch of losers.’

  ‘No.’ He shrugged. ‘I suppose even mysterious visitors from the future are still human, right? Still stub their toes? Still choke on their gum? Still slip on banana skins?’

  She nodded, dabbing at her eyes. ‘Oh, we’ve done that enough freakin’ times already.’

  He reached for a hand; she tried pulling back, but he grasped it and squeezed it gently. ‘So, it turns out that the history of mankind is in the hands of real people. Someone like you.’ He smiled warmly. ‘You know, I think I prefer that — instead of some team of superheroes who think they know it all.’

  CHAPTER 28

  1194, woods, Nottinghamshire

  The fire crackled hungrily on the pine cones and dried brittle branches they’d gathered by the waning light of the winter’s afternoon. A steady dusting of snow had slowed down their cart, and Cabot — sounding a lot more like a bad-tempered soldier than he did a pious monk — had finally had to concede they were going to have to make camp in the wilderness instead of seeking lodgings in the safety of some hamlet as they had done the night before.

  Had they been travelling during a warmer month, he said, they’d be safer not having a fire and running the risk of attracting brigands like moths. But it was too cold not to.

  Cabot spat on the flames as he finished a mouthful of stale bread. ‘We will be in Oxfordshire tomorrow. And the royal household at Beaumont before afternoon.’

  ‘Are you sure we’ll be seen by John?’

  ‘Aye. I’m sure. The poor fool is losing his hold on the country. He has done much that will enrage his brother, including his foolish orders to Richard’s Templars to take the Grail up north to Scotland ’stead of letting them store it in Beaumont.’

  ‘Why did he do that?’

  ‘I know not. Perhaps he had plans to hide it up there, to barter something out of his brother? So — ’ Cabot’s eyes locked on Liam — ‘if none of ye are of the Templar order, as I suspect, how is it ye know so much about the Grail?’

  Liam smiled. ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’

  Cabot spread his hands. ‘I am willing to listen.’

  Liam looked at Becks and Bob, both standing a dozen yards apart at the edge of the light cast by the fire, silently standing guard. He wondered how much the monk should know; how much he could help them if he did know. And, of course, how much contamination to history that might cause downstream from them.

  ‘We’re … we’ve come from the future.’

  Cabot’s grizzled face remained still, unimpressed by that. ‘Future?’

  ‘Quite a long time into the future, so it is. And, well … there’s an ancient manuscript that mentions this Pandora. We came here to learn more about it.’

  ‘Future … Do ye mean this in the way I think ye mean it?’

  ‘Yes, future. As in days and years that haven’t yet happened, but will.’

  Cabot’s eyes narrowed sceptically. ‘How is that? A man’s life can travel but in one direction. The sun rises then it sets. It cannot move the other way.’

  ‘It’s science,’ replied Liam. ‘I don’t get how any of it works. But it does.’

  ‘Science? What is this word?’

  Liam shrugged. ‘Knowledge of
how things work, I suppose. It’s quite big in my time. Science has given us all sorts of machines and understanding.’

  The old man absently stroked the ridged scar down across his cheek. ‘Some Saracens I met did talk of such things. Of numbers and such, of things that can’t be held, weighed, bought or sold. Ideas … ideas our church would consider heresy.’ His face creased with a grin. ‘Would ye believe — many Saracen scholars say we live on a giant ball!’

  Liam nodded.

  ‘Aye!’ Cabot’s loud cackle filled the quiet wood. ‘Would ye believe such foolishness? A ball!’

  ‘They’re right, though. The world is shaped like a ball.’

  Cabot’s laugh choked, the smile wiped from his face in an instant. ‘A man could burn at the stake for saying such as that in the wrong company!’

  ‘But it’s true, Mr Cabot. The world is a ball, and there are other balls; we call them planets — millions of them up there in space. And they rotate around other suns in what are called solar systems.’

  ‘Our world … goes … about … the sun?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Ye say there is more than one sun?’

  ‘Aye. That’s what the stars are. Suns.’

  Cabot looked up at the sky. He could see none tonight. His face seemed undecided between creasing with another good-natured cackle of laughter, or folding into a stern scowl of scorning disbelief. Finally, cautiously, he looked back down at Liam and shook his head.

  ‘Ye are a strange young man, Liam of Connor, with an odd way about ye and the way that ye talk.’ He smiled. ‘And ’tis a fanciful tale ye tell. Despite my better judgement warning me otherwise, ye are a young man I like. But I would strongly caution ye to keep such tales of coming from tomorrows-yet-to-be, and ball-shaped worlds and many suns, to yerself!’

  Liam shrugged. Maybe Cabot was right. He’d read enough history books to know medieval Europe was a couple of centuries away from accepting ideas like these. To them the world was a flat plain, and the sun moved obediently across it from one side to the other simply because God willed it. And there were no other worlds, just this one. And no other suns. Trying to explain time travel to him, trying to explain how a history yet to happen already exists and — just to make things even more complicated — could even be rewritten, well, even Liam struggled with that sometimes.