The Doomsday Code

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.’