Becks’s eyes remained on Rashim. ‘You witnessed the end event?’
Maddy looked pointedly at him. He’d left just before. Lie to her!
However, the fact was, a version of him had. The Rashim that went through with the rest of the Exodus group saw it with his own eyes. News reports, abandoned digi-stream cameras beaming static images of silent cities, the dead lying in the streets and liquefying. When they’d come across him in the Roman past as a gibbering, insane old man – driven mad as a result of being incarcerated by Emperor Caligula in a small wooden cage for twenty years or so – his rambling account of those horrifying images had been chilling.
Project Exodus had altered history – although not in the way the reckless participants had intended, or hoped. Their intention to graft a modern western democracy on the top of the Roman Empire had backfired badly. The emperor of the time, Caligula, had lulled them into a false sense of security, wiped most of them out and co-opted the technology they’d brought with them.
Maddy and the others had had to go back to Ancient Rome to correct the timeline. To put things back as they should be, they’d ultimately had to go back further and arrive at a time-stamp some weeks before the arrival of the Exodus party – and there, they’d encountered the twenty-years-younger Rashim setting up tachyon receiver beacons for the main party. The younger Rashim would have completed his work and beamed back to 2070 to finish calibrating from that end if they’d not grabbed him and taken him with them. He would have witnessed Kosong-ni. He would have been among the group that came through in a panic, rushing to escape the approaching pathogen. If Maddy and Liam hadn’t intervened and dragged him kicking and screaming back to 2001 with them … he would have witnessed ‘the end’.
‘You witnessed the event?’ Becks asked again.
Rashim cleared his throat. ‘Yes … I, uh, yes, I saw it.’
‘Go on,’ urged Maddy. ‘Tell her exactly what you saw.’ Her eyes said more. And make it sound convincing.
‘I saw the virus spread around the world. I saw that event unfold with my own eyes.’ He stooped down beside her. ‘Kosong-ni did exactly that, Becks … it wiped us all out.’ He glanced at Maddy. She urged him to carry on with a nod.
Good job … Keep going.
‘The last thing I saw before I came back in time was cities around the world, deserted. No sign of humanity left behind.’ Rashim’s voice thickened with believable emotion. Maddy wasn’t entirely sure if that was genuine or laid on for Becks’s benefit. ‘People rendered to just pools of organic liquid. Puddles that used to be human beings –’
Becks’s eyes narrowed. ‘You are stating that the “end” event has now successfully occurred?’
He nodded. ‘Oh yes. It happened all right.’
‘I will need verification.’
‘Like what?’
‘A codeword.’
Maddy’s head dropped with frustration. ‘Jesus! Another codeword? What is it with goddamn codewords! Becks! If it’s something I need to know, then does it frikkin’ matter if I know now, tomorrow, next Thursday, or next year?!’
‘I am unable to tell you at this time.’
Maddy let out a strangled moan.
Liam raised his hand to hush her. ‘We could try approaching the poor thing from a different angle, so.’
‘Like what?’ Maddy sighed. ‘Beat her with a metal pipe until she submits?’
Liam ignored her. ‘Look here, Becks, if you can’t tell us the contents of the message, perhaps you could tell us who sent it? Is it someone to do with the agency? Was it Mr Waldstein? Or someone else working with –’
‘It was you, Liam.’
Liam didn’t hear her. ‘– Waldstein? Or maybe another bunch of fellas? Perhaps –’
‘It was you, Liam,’ Becks said again.
He stopped dead and looked at Maddy. ‘Hold on. Did she just …?’
She nodded. ‘You. She just said it was you.’
‘Me?’
‘The message encoded into a section of the Holy Grail document was sent by you, Liam.’
Liam looked anxiously up at the others: Sal and Maddy in particular, staring at him suspiciously.
‘No … but, see … that must be a mistake. I’ve never been to – where was it it came from? Jerusalem? I’ve never been there! You two know that!’
‘Not so far,’ said Rashim. ‘But it seems that one day you will. A message from your future self. Perhaps it is a warning of some future event.’
Liam suddenly looked shaken. ‘A warning? But … what the hell do I know about anything?!’
‘Maybe it was Foster?’ said Sal. She looked at the others, from one to the other. ‘He would have looked just like Liam when he was younger, right?’
Maddy nodded thoughtfully. ‘That’s possible. It might have been a message he sent for us when he was a younger “Liam-unit”, when he was still calling himself Liam.’
‘Negative.’ Becks was still lying on her back. She arched her neck to look at Liam. ‘You sent the message. Not another Liam-unit.’
‘Uhh … can we stop with everyone calling me a unit, please?’
‘Hey!’ An idea occurred to Maddy. ‘If it’s your message, maybe you could order Becks to over-ride the codeword lock?’ She looked at the others. ‘It’s got to be worth a shot, right?’
Sal shrugged, uncertain about that.
Liam looked at Rashim. He cocked his head. ‘It cannot do any harm to try that.’
‘All right.’ He hunkered down beside Becks. ‘Becks … this is me ordering you. Tell us what that message in your head is.’
‘Negative. The sender has higher authority than you do.’
‘But you just said it was me!’
‘Correct. It is you, Liam. But it is you from further in the future, with access to privileged information, which you do not have now. This makes that Liam a higher authority. This must be taken into account.’
Rashim stroked the bristles of his beard thoughtfully. ‘Time is not strictly linear. It can also be considered circular, a loop. Therefore, there is no certain way to define which point on a circle is furthest forward, in the way you can a straight line. In which case, who really is furthest forward in time?’
‘And, strictly speaking,’ added Maddy, ‘if Liam sent this message while standing around in biblical times, then if you want to treat time as linear, then he’s in the past. The Liam standing right here, technically, is furthest forward in time.’
‘The Liam who wrote the message is older,’ said Becks.
‘How do you know that?’
‘The message specifies that he is.’
‘And how do you know that for certain? That could be incorrect,’ said Rashim. ‘Can you verify that fact?’
‘How do you even know it’s a message from Liam?’ said Sal. ‘It could just be an impostor.’
Becks’s gaze, normally unflinching and relentless, began to falter, her eyes darting from one person to another, like a prison searchlight hunting for escaping inmates. ‘It is unclear … how to evaluate …’
Liam impatiently grabbed her jaw and turned her face towards him. ‘For the love of God, just tell us then!’
‘I am … unable to comply. I wish to obey, Liam, but this contradicts … contradicts …’
‘Maybe we should stop this. She doesn’t look good.’ Sal shook her head. ‘She’s going weird on us.’
‘Jay-zus! Becks, will you just stop with this nonsense an’ tell us!’ Liam said.
Her porcelain-smooth face creased with childlike anxiety, a growing panic. ‘I am … am … unsure …’ Her eyes started to roll upwards, exposing the whites once more. Her eyelids fluttered.
‘It looks like she’s throwing all of her processing power into dealing with this,’ said Rashim. ‘That may not be a good idea, not if there isn’t a valid decision to come to. She’ll just thrash her circuits until she overloads or burns out.’
‘Looks like she’s having a fit,’ said Sal. ‘Liam … I think
you’ve broken her.’
‘Sal’s right. This isn’t good. Bob … make sure she doesn’t try and struggle to get up and do anything stupid.’
Bob bent over and wrapped his gorilla-thick arms round Becks, an embrace that almost entirely enveloped her slight frame.
‘You should pull her out of that partition, Maddy.’ Rashim turned to her. ‘I suggest, right now … before she damages herself irreparably.’
Becks’s voice became a low murmur, a stream of words running into each other and making no sense. Gibberish. The low murmur rapidly rose in pitch from the husky tone of her normal voice to the ragged mewling of a distressed child. The cry of a banshee. The desperate agonized scream of a witch on a flaming pyre.
‘NOW, MADDY, before she completely fries her head!’
‘OK! OK!’ Maddy shouted her three codewords. ‘IPAD! CAVEMAN! BREAKFAST!’
In all of a heartbeat Becks was still and silent once more. For a dozen fleeting heartbeats the dungeon was filled with nothing more than the echoing sound of their collective breathing.
‘OK,’ said Maddy finally, ‘that was just a little bit freaky.’ She crouched down beside the inert form of Becks. ‘She OK, Bob?’
‘Becks is now in the process of rebooting.’ He offered her a reassuring smile. ‘She is fine. I am picking up her normal AI ident signal again.’
Liam got to his feet, blew air out and wandered across the floor muttering under his breath.
‘Good.’ Maddy sucked in a deep breath and wiped her glasses. ‘Crud, I feel like we just performed some kind of a frikkin’ exorcism.’
‘Errr … you might be closer to the truth than you think,’ said Liam.
‘What?’
He was leaning over the computer table, studying one of the monitors closely. ‘There’s a whole load of stuff just coming up here on this screen.’
Rashim was on his feet and on the way over. He joined Liam, peered at the screen for a moment. ‘I think she just jettisoned several gigabytes of data.’
Maddy hurried over to join them. ‘OhMyGod … what is it? What does it say?’
On one of the monitors, text was scrolling upwards as computer-Bob transferred the captured data Becks had hurled across the dungeon. Maddy scanned the scrolling lines: solid blocks of seemingly random letters and numbers.
‘It’s not yet more bleedin’ code, is it?’ asked Liam.
‘Hmmm, I am not sure. It looks entirely random to me,’ said Rashim. ‘Not code. Just digital junk. Corrupted data, I suspect.’
‘Digital vomit.’ Maddy curled her lips with barely concealed disappointment. ‘For a moment there I was kind of hoping we’d finally get a big fat answer to everything.’
‘Nothing’s ever that easy for us.’ Liam sighed.
The captured data stopped scrolling up the screen.
‘I guess that’s all of it, then.’
Sal pushed between them to get a look.
Maddy was less than impressed. ‘Corrupted data, that’s all we’ve got. That’s the “revelation” she spits out for us.’ She shook her head and sighed. ‘Great.’
‘Except that bit,’ said Sal. She planted a finger on the screen in the middle of a dense block of random characters.
Rashim squinted dismissively. ‘Sal, statistically speaking, random letters at some point will spell a word. It is tempting to read something into …’ He looked closer. ‘I can’t make anything out, though.’
Maddy squinted too. ‘y-e-o-d-f-k-l-p-t-h-e-w-i-n?’ She cocked a brow. ‘The win?’
‘No. The letters to the right.’ Sal moved her finger along. ‘See? Those letters!’
… k-l-p-t-h-e-w-i-n-d-t-a-l-k-e-r-s-s-k-b …
‘I make out three words. “The”…“wind”…“talkers”.’ Rashim shrugged. ‘Does that mean anything to any of you?’
Liam shook his head.
Sal made a face. ‘Not really.’
Maddy was about to say likewise. Three random words. Big deal. But then she stopped herself. The windtalkers. The phrase was vaguely familiar. She’d definitely heard that term before. Somewhere. From someone. And not so long ago.
Then, like a slap, it hit her.
Chapter 4
1992, Nicaragua
Adam Lewis wiped sweat from his forehead, pushing the damp coil of a greasy dreadlock out of his face. His back was aching from the weight of his backpack. He eased off the shoulder straps, lowered the pack to his feet and straightened up.
The track zigzagging up the steep mountainside was narrow – in places barely wide enough for a single llama. Barely wide enough for a goat. He turned his back to the vine-covered rock and looked out over the jungle. An undulating velvet green quilt, carrying pockets of morning mist like milky pools on a low-tide beach.
He squinted at the morning sun, still hanging low in the sky, casting rays of light and shadow across the curves and dips of the landscape below. He could see a single twist of smoke curling up from a clearing down in the jungle, by the glinting thread of the river. He could see several small smudges of neon orange: the one-man vinyl tents of their camp.
Adam grinned at the spectacular vista.
To him it looked just like an alien landscape. It reminded him of the Rebel Alliance’s jungle homeworld, Yavin 4. He wondered how much cooler this view would be with the faint, ghostly image of the Death Star hanging like a Sword of Damocles in the blue sky.
‘Awesome,’ he whispered. He pulled out his camera and took several snaps. Their guide had said early morning was the best time to get pictures like these. The low-angled sunlight, the velvet carpet of jungle, the combed-out strands of blue-grey mist.
Professor Brian’s field trip had been an incredible experience for him thus far. An experience that beat the hell out of backpacking in Bali. Or serving cocktails to drunken fellow gap-year students in some remote Mediterranean beach bar.
This was life-changing.
They’d done several days on an archaeological dig at Machu Picchu, pulling artefacts out of the damp dirt. A flight up to Honduras then several more days paddling up the Río Coco in canoes, stopping at a couple of small villages along the way. The locals had swarmed out to greet their pale-faced visitors with an overwhelming generosity. Adam had felt just like every other western tourist must feel: like some stoic Victorian-era jungle explorer stumbling across some previously undiscovered tribe. Except for the fact that many of them were wearing tattered old Nike baseball caps.
A trip of a lifetime.
An expensive one, though. Mum and Dad had shelled out for it, but, as Dad had made perfectly clear, it was a loan, not a gift. That was the deal. One way or another he was going to have to figure out a way to pay them back later on this year or next. He figured he could earn some easy money writing some C++ library routines for that small gaming company that had approached him. What were they called? Electronic Art or something?
He sat down on a protruding dried root-stump of a tree. It creaked beneath his weight.
This field trip was an optional part of his palaeolinguistics course. Actually, Dad had suggested it was little more than a ‘loosely related jolly’ than actually being in any way educationally beneficial. What it was, though, was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Something he’d probably never get round to doing on his own.
Character-building stuff. The beer-swilling morons he shared digs with back in Norwich wouldn’t appreciate that, of course. His pictures of Machu Picchu, Honduras, the Río Coco, the villages, would probably leave them perplexed. Or just bored.
Adam, mate … you got yourself three grand into debt just to take pictures of moss-covered stones? Dude, you need to get a life.
A lot of money, that. Three thousand pounds. Perhaps his knuckle-dragging flatmates were right: three grand might have been better spent in Ibiza, getting drunk and badly sunburnt with some of it left over to cover the living costs for next term.
Sod it. He shook his head and once again sucked in the incredible view before him. No, this
was money well spent. OK, they hadn’t discovered any long-lost tribes or hoards of hidden treasure, or any hitherto-undiscovered species of slimy jungle fungus, but Professor Brian’s students had experienced firsthand an actual dig site.
And, of course, the breath-taking majesty of the Cusco mountains, the fragile beauty of a rainforest.
He was just putting his camera back into his backpack when he felt the root-stump wobble unsteadily beneath his shifting weight. He quickly stood up. The stump’s gnarled root ends had pulled free of the loose, dry soil, and now it see-sawed uncertainly, dirt crumbling and cascading down the steep slope on to the zigzagging trail below. With a tired creak, it slowly began to sway outward, and then, carried further by its own weight, it toppled lazily over the side of the narrow track. Roots trailing behind it, yanked out of the dirt.
The stump bounced and rolled down the sheer slope, finally smacking into a rocky outcrop by the edge of the trail below and spinning out into open air. It ended up crashing through the upper branches of the jungle canopy below, scaring a flock of white-fronted birds into the sky and startling the ecosystem beneath into a momentary chorus of cheeps and whistles and hoots, which eventually subsided and returned to the normal soothing music of rainforest life.
‘Crap.’ Adam whistled.
Nice one, genius. He could have so very easily sailed over the side with that heavy boulder of desiccated wood.
The stump’s bulk and gnarled roots had wrenched away and taken with them a thick curtain of vines that had grown accustomed to its presence and become interwoven with it. This curtain now pulled away, Adam found himself staring at the mouth of a previously completely concealed cave.
Adam gaped at the dark entrance for a moment.
Uh … Mission Control to Adam, if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking – Don’t!
‘Don’t what?’
Duh … don’t wander in, idiot! ‘Things’ live in caves.
‘Relax. I’m just going to have a peek.’
Adam … FYI, some of the dumbest mistakes known to man probably began with the words ‘I’m just gonna …’
‘Just a peek.’ He stepped carefully round the edge of the crumbly bite out of the track towards the cave entrance. Several vines and creepers still made a pretence of trying to hide the entrance. He brushed them aside.