TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6)

by Alex Scarrow

  She levelled her impassive gaze on Mary. ‘Why are you happy, Mary?’

  ‘I have you.’

  Faith had compiled a short list of non-specific, noncommittal yet reassuring responses that she could trot out in response to Mary’s endless chatter. She picked one at random.

  ‘Then I am happy too.’

  ‘I feel like there’s a hope. A way out of Whitechapel. A way out of this stinkin’ awful unfair city.’

  ‘Yes.’ Faith played a smile. ‘We have your plan.’

  Mary checked the coins in her purse. The last few nights their petty crimes had paid off well. Mary had decided they could try their luck along the Strand. There were a number of members’ clubs along that busy road that disgorged drunken gentlemen into the streets in the early hours. Faith had played her part well, catching the eye and attention of a number of them with some suggestive and teasing come-ons while Mary had made quick work of dipping her hand into their coat pockets.

  ‘We’ve already got almost a whole pound! A few weeks like this, Faith love, and we might have enough for tickets to take us anywhere we want!’

  ‘The place that you called “Wales” sounds like a very nice place.’ Faith was vaguely aware that her AI was adopting some very sophisticated human behavioural traits. She was ‘playing along’. Acting a part. Lying. Faith had no intention of travelling off to a place called ‘Wales’, but maintaining the illusion that she was sold on that idea suited her well. Mary was a useful accomplice with useful local knowledge. More than that, between them they seemed to have developed an efficient way to accumulate money; something that was needed, of course, to purchase food.

  Faith finished her lamb broth. Generously full of chunks of mutton and other useful proteins.

  ‘I think you an’ me’s earned a night off. What do you say?’

  Faith was looking out of the soot-smudged window. ‘As you wish.’

  ‘We could go down me local, the Queen’s Head. How’s that sound?’

  Faith turned to look at her reproachfully. ‘You intend to consume alcohol again?’

  Mary shrugged. ‘It’s just a little celebration. We done so well, you an’ me. Just one drink ain’t gonna hurt, is it?’

  ‘Information: intoxication impairs performance and compromises judgement.’

  Mary laughed. ‘Bleedin’ ’eck, Faith. Come on, just one little drink. Ain’t gonna kill me now, is it?’

  12.27 A.M., 9 NOVEMBER 1888, WHITECHAPEL, LONDON

  The pub – The Queen’s Head – turned out to be another useful location for Faith to log faces. Her database of stored images was rapidly increasing in size. She’d spotted, logged, analysed and filed 17,217 faces in London so far. None of them, of course, were the people she was after. But it meant over seventeen thousand humans ruled out.

  As she calmly surveyed the florid faces around her, through clouds of acrid pipe smoke, Mary was enjoying herself. One drink had turned into several drinks and she was now in the middle of a noisy muddle of men and women, leading them in singing along to an accordion player, all of them equally inebriated. The innkeeper winced at the racket as he collected the empty tankards. Keen to begin kicking out his patrons for the night.

  Faith approved of Mary Kelly. There was an iron strength in the woman: not physically, of course, but in the way she could command the obedience and respect of others. The kind of person who, in another life, in other more favourable circumstances, might have achieved great things. Instead, all she would ever be was a ‘street woman’, a pauper, quite likely destined for an early grave. If she could feel any emotion for Mary, it would be fondness. Instead, the best she could manage was dispassionate approval.

  She watched Mary sing tunelessly for a while, a foghorn voice that carried over the other tuneless voices, then turned back to the task at hand: observing the faces around her.

  And it was then, as she glanced around once more to check for any new faces, that she caught sight of a dark-haired young man. Just a glimpse of a face on the far side of the public house. Her breath caught in her throat.

  Liam O’Connor.

  [Information: 85% identity match]

  She started to push her way through the fog of pipe smoke and heaving, sweaty bodies. Florid, bearded faces loomed closely at hers. Men with gap-toothed smiles leered at her as she squeezed her way frantically through.

  For a moment she lost sight of the young man. Then re-established visual contact again a few seconds later. Closer now. She could see his face was slim, his nose prominent beneath two thick arched eyebrows.

  [Information: 87% identity match]

  She began to feel adrenaline coursing through her body. Her mind determining the best strategy. To kill him right here in this pub? Or better to watch him discreetly and perhaps follow him when he left at the end of the evening in the hope he was going to lead her back to the others.

  Closer now. She could see the young man was the same height and build.

  [Information: 88% identity match]

  She needed to be closer; to not have clouds of pipe smoke obscuring her view; or red-faced, drunken fools staggering into her, breathing rancid fumes in her face. She could snap any one of these fools’ necks with the slightest flick of her wrist, and perhaps no one would notice in the press and surge of bodies. A man might collapse to the sawdust-covered floor of this pub and they would all assume he’d passed out from too much drink.

  But it wasn’t worth the risk of alerting the attention of Liam O’Connor, now just a few yards away from her, laughing at something being said to him by someone else.

  Faith reached to pull her bonnet down a little, hoping to disguise her face. Too late. She noticed his brown eyes flicker on to her. Resting on her … and then a smile for her benefit. No alarm. No flicker of recognition and panic.

  No. Just a fuzzy-headed, drunken smile.

  ‘Hoy! All right?’ the young man called across to her. ‘Buy you a drink, love?’

  [Information: not Liam O’Connor]

  She ground her teeth. Turned on her heels and started to push and squirm her way through the crowd back to where she’d been standing moments ago. Only to discover Mary was no longer there with her newly made drunken friends.

  Chapter 68

  12.30 a.m., 9 November 1888, Whitechapel, London

  Mary guessed Faith had had enough and taken herself back to the room they were sharing off Miller’s Court. It wasn’t so far; just a couple of streets away from the pub.

  She staggered down Dorset Street, cursing and muttering as her feet slipped on rain-slicked cobblestones. She’d only intended to have the one drink. After all, it was well-earned. But one had led to two and more, and she’d spent more of that money than she’d really wanted to. Not that she was too worried about that. They could make that money again tomorrow. Easily.

  Faith had an alluring way about her. An innocence and beauty that drew men like bees to honey, like moths to candlelight. So distracted were they with trying to chat her up, it was like stealing pennies from a blind man’s cap.

  What a splendid pair we are.

  Although Faith was a little peculiar. There was an almost doll-like manner to her expressionless face. As if her features were as rigid as porcelain. And an almost mannequin stiffness to her, as if she was always on guard. Like one of them redcoat-’n’-bearskins standing to attention outside Buckingham Palace.

  Mary wondered about her. She was such a puzzle.

  She turned left off Dorset Street into the dark alleyway that led into Miller’s Court, a cul-de-sac of dosshouses around a small cobblestoned courtyard that always seemed to reek of human faeces.

  She staggered in the dark, steadying herself against one greasy brick wall.

  ‘Blimey,’ she muttered. ‘Bit too much of the blimmin’ laughing juice.’

  Faith was probably already back in their room. Tucked up in the one bed they shared, toe to head. Mary did actually wonder if Faith ever slept. She always seemed to be wide awake, staring up
at the cracked plaster of the low ceiling. She wondered what thoughts passed through that mind of hers. What wishes and dreams, wants and needs. She seemed to give so little away.

  What a pretty puzzle she is.

  Mary was in fact so puzzled by her friend that she failed to notice the shadow of a man entering the alleyway behind her, casting a long veil from the faint amber glow of a gas lamp on Dorset Street, all the way down the dark little alleyway into Miller’s Court. Like some impossibly stretched, impossibly tall being. The shadow fell across her back, marking her with darkness … like the ghostly touch of the Grim Reaper, marking her soul for imminent collection as she entered the last few minutes of her life.

  Chapter 69

  15 December 1888, Holborn Viaduct, London

  ‘What we’ve got on the Ripper murders isn’t a lot,’ said Maddy. She’d grabbed the information and dumped it into Bob’s head from Wikipedia back in 2001. Which, given that the site had only been running since January, wasn’t a hugely detailed article.

  ‘The night of the eighth of November … the early hours of the ninth of November is when the last victim, Mary Kelly, gets murdered. There’s no precise time, just that she was supposedly last seen at midnight and was discovered dead by a neighbour at eight thirty in the morning.’

  Maddy pulled up two grisly black-and-white photographs on one of the monitors. ‘These were both taken by the Metropolitan Police.’

  ‘Jay-zus,’ whispered Liam.

  ‘Yeah, not very nice I’m afraid.’

  He looked at Sal queasily. ‘I feel sick.’

  ‘Well, you need to get over it, Liam,’ said Maddy. ‘You’re gonna see this for real very soon.’

  ‘Is that her face?’ asked Rashim.

  Maddy nodded. ‘What’s left of it. The Ripper seemed quite keen for some reason to completely disfigure her face.’

  Rashim leaned closer. ‘My God, it looks like he was trying to remove it.’

  ‘So, now that’s how the crime scene is supposed to look. In correct history, her body is found in her room, lying diagonally across her bed, her lower torso opened up and the contents, her organs, placed on the bed beside her.’ Maddy reached across the desk and picked up a pad with notes on it. ‘But this is the description I’ve summed up from the recent newspaper articles.’

  She looked down at her notes. ‘So, this bit I’m about to read to you is the contamination bit, what shouldn’t have been found at the scene of the murder …’ She began to read.

  ‘… on the floor beside Kelly’s bed in her small rented room off Miller’s Court was found the body of her attacker. At first glance a wealthy gentleman in his middle years, wearing an evening suit and thick coat, his top hat placed on a small table beside the bed. His manner of death – a crushing of the cranium – was believed to have been caused by the swinging of a coal shovel or similar device. Although Kelly claimed she had no memory of the struggle with Lord Cathcart-Hyde, it is clear she must have struck him once to the side of his head to render him unconscious, and then repeatedly as he lay on the floor, until his head was completely stoved in as if some workshop vice or similar device had been applied to the skull and wound tight until it was crushed out of all recognition …’

  ‘Good God,’ whispered Rashim.

  ‘A crushed head.’ Liam had once seen Bob do that. A German guard in one of those concentration camps back in America. Bob had squeezed the poor man’s head in one of his big hands: squeezed like it was nothing more than a ripe tomato. ‘Bob? Could Becks do that?’

  ‘Affirmative. Even partially grown she has enough physical strength to deploy that kind of damage to a human skull.’

  ‘Then it really is Becks!’ said Liam.

  ‘If that is Becks then she may have flipped out,’ said Maddy cautiously.

  ‘May have? Jeez …’ Liam all of sudden wasn’t quite so keen on the idea of a reunion with their lost team member, even if she supposedly had some sort of weird, twisted digital version of a schoolgirl crush on him.

  ‘Her AI must have been unstable,’ said Maddy. ‘I’m sorry, it’s my fault. We shouldn’t have tried loading her up with the stuff from the hard drive.’

  ‘We’re going to need to kill her, aren’t we?’ said Sal.

  Maddy nodded. ‘We can’t leave her running around out there.’

  ‘We could attempt to incapacitate her,’ said Rashim. ‘We may even be able to reset her.’

  Maddy looked at him. ‘How?’

  ‘Your support units are older-generation units,’ said Rashim. He pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps twenty-year-old technology. I would say engineered around about the 2050s. Not like the support units you encountered in Rome. The ones procured for Project Exodus.’

  Bob nodded. ‘This is correct.’

  ‘OK, so Bob and Becks are older models,’ said Maddy. ‘So what does that mean?’

  ‘The computers are dense silicon wafers. The circuitry is mainly a graphene construct with some conventional silicon that is tightly meshed. Very tightly meshed. It is those small silicon portions which are vulnerable to power surges that can cause instances of micro-welding.’

  Maddy noted Liam’s eyes already beginning to glaze over. Mind you, she wasn’t actually any the wiser herself. ‘So? What are you getting at?’

  ‘The older wafers in your units have a built-in trip switch to hard-set the chip into an “off” state to protect these weaker silicon parts from that kind of surge damage. During the Russian–Chinese conflict over the Caspian oilfields, it was a common insurgency tactic by the Chinese to stun or incapacitate Russian hunt-and-kill squads with taser darts, and then later reprogram and reboot them with trojan viruses that made them turn on their own side after some trigger event – a word, a noise. There was a very famous incident of one squad that returned from a mission behind Chinese lines, passed through the sentry posts into the camp and nearly wiped out an entire regiment of Russian conscripts as they slept in their beds.’

  ‘So, what are you saying … we taser Becks?’

  ‘Well … yes.’

  ‘That’ll turn her computer off without, you know, completely trashing it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly right. You see, the later-generation military units, the ones we had for the Exodus Project, designs from 2069, had chips made entirely of graphene circuitry. Those are completely resistant to that kind of surge-welding.’

  ‘So we taser her. That means she’s switched off? I mean properly off. She’s not going to reboot, wake up, or anything like that, then, is she?’

  ‘No. It is a hard-reset. A tiny physical switch is flipped and it’ll stay flipped until someone physically gets into her head and flicks it back on.’

  ‘Can you make something zappy like that from the bits we’ve got lying around?’

  ‘There’s no need. You already have one.’ Rashim nodded at one of the boxes of gadgets and spare parts piled beneath the desk, still patiently waiting to be sorted through.

  ‘When we were packing up, I was emptying that old filing cabinet,’ he shrugged. ‘I found one in there. I thought you knew we had one?’

  Maddy rolled her eyes; yes, of course they had one. She’d never used it. Never thought to. It had sat in the filing cabinet with all the other junk, waiting to be useful.

  Well, now it was.

  ‘All right, let’s get it out, check the thing works. Meanwhile …’ She turned to address the bank of computers. ‘Computer-Bob, start charging up; the sooner we go back and get this done, the better.’

  ‘Maddy, what if that taser thing doesn’t work?’ asked Liam.

  ‘You’re taking Bob along, aren’t you? I’m sure he can handle little Becks.’

  ‘Aye. But … she’s quick. She’s very agile.’

  ‘Look, Liam, if for some reason you guys can’t incapacitate Becks – if Bob can’t wrestle her to the floor … or she looks like she might be doing a runner – she’s got to be killed. Do you understand? If her mind has gone wonky, she’s a co
ntamination worry. More than that … whatever crazy stuff she gets up to may attract attention to this moment in time. She could blow our cover. Either you grab her and taser her, or you take her down.’

  She looked at Foster’s old pump-action shotgun leaning against the wall in the corner. Although why she still thought of it as his, she didn’t really know. ‘You should take the gun along with you. Just in case you need it.’

  She was expecting an argument from him. She knew Liam was fond of her, it, the unit. She knew he’d have reservations about gunning her down in cold blood.

  ‘Aye, the gun.’ He eyed the weapon nervously. ‘Good idea.’

  Or actually, on the other hand … maybe he wouldn’t.

  Chapter 70

  12.32 a.m., 9 November 1888, Whitechapel, London

  Liam was soaked to the skin. This dark little corner of Miller’s Court where they’d chosen to huddle and wait for Jack the Ripper offered little protection from the fine rain. It was as if God was hanging over London with a giant fine-nozzle plant spray, gently wafting aerosol clouds of moisture down on to the city. Moisture that seemed to find its way into every nook, crack and crevice.

  They were beneath a lean-to: little more than four rotting posts of wood supporting a roof of rain-slick slate tiles that all seemed to be conspiring to channel bulbous, greasy drops of rain on to Liam no matter where he chose to crouch.

  In the stillness of the early hours, the only sound to be heard was the soothing symphony of a rain-damp city fast asleep: the soft hiss of persistent drizzle; a dog far away with an intermittent worrisome bark; the soft cooing of pigeons tucked away under guttering, pleased with themselves for being dry.