Not Oswald. Certainly not one L. H. Oswald.
There were other labelled files down here, of other incidents over the decades that had been passed over to The Department to if not investigate then at least to safely archive. Fragments of intelligence gathered that would live forever down here in this air-conditioned twilight, far too sensitive, too incendiary, too dangerous to ever appear in the public eye.
There was file N-27, a certain dark secret from the very last days of the Second World War; a whole drawer of one of the filing cabinets was devoted to that. Then, of course, there was file R-497, the event that occurred in Roswell, New Mexico – several filing cabinets for that one – and typically plenty of silly TV shows, films and tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories about R-497.
And then there were several other, smaller, files.
One of those files had the equally uninspiring name of 414-T. Possibly the slimmest file in the pack of secrets, slumbering down here in the semi-darkness.
The Department was run ‘off the books’. Its funding came from a lump sum dropped into a bank account just after the Second World War. Over the last half a century that lump sum had been managed by a financial management company and invested in various things. Back in the seventies, for example, some of that money had been spent purchasing shares in a promising little tech company with a rainbow-coloured apple for a logo.
The Department had a staff that had on a few occasions numbered as high as thirty-five men, but tended in quiet times to number as few as three. As it did right now. The ‘Head’, his assistant and a solitary clerical officer.
Niles Cooper was the ‘Head’ right now, and possibly for the foreseeable future. Handed that role by his predecessor, a middle-aged pen-pusher called Pullman, who’d been looking for an easy assignment to carry him over until retirement. Before him, there’d been an old man called Wallace who’d run The Department – so it was said – since it was set up back in 1945.
Every ‘Head’ had his pet file, so Pullman told Cooper the day he retired and passed the keys to this place over to his younger successor. Pullman said his pet file had been R-497, the Roswell one.
Cooper’s was the slimmest one: 414-T.
Something of an enigma, that one. Several black-and-white photographs, very poor quality if truth be told. They’d been recovered, supposedly, by a Russian intelligence officer from one of the artillery-damaged barrack buildings near Obersalzsberg, near the mountain-top retreat of Adolf Hitler.
The Eagle’s Nest.
But there was no guarantee of the accuracy of that. It might have come from somewhere else, just as likely one of the many bombed-out ministry buildings along the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. The images did have the ink-stamp of a swastika and a correctly configured intelligence reference number used by the Gestapo. So they were at least half-likely to be genuine.
Three photographs in total. The first in the sequence showed what appeared to be the aftermath of a bonfire of bodies in some snowy wood. A jumble of blackened limbs amid ice-melt and slush, surrounded by fir trees with snow-laden branches.
The second photograph was unpleasant. A close-up of a human skull, scorched completely black, and what appeared to be a section of skull cracked or carved open and lying in the snow nearby. The rest of the skull looked empty. Scooped out even.
But it was the third image that made this sequence so interesting, that had granted this slim file a place in The Department’s twilight bowels. The third image was of an assault rifle, like everything else scorched black and the gun barrel bent by the heat of the fire. There were notes stapled to the photograph. Notes made on some typewriter and in German, then added to some years later in English, handwritten blue ink, notes made by some American or British firearms expert:
Make and model is unknown. Not Russian. Certainly not one of ours! Could be a German prototype? The firing mechanism indecipherable. Can’t see how this gun would actually work!
(Signed: G. H. Davison. 16th February 1952)
Someone had drawn a blue-ink circle on a copy of the photograph. The circle looped round some markings beneath the weapon’s breech, a cluster of faint indented numbers and letters. The manufacturer’s markings, batch number, model number, and possibly the weapon’s date of manufacture.
Cooper had studied this photograph many times over the years. Each time, he’d studied it under a magnifying glass with the help of his angled desk lamp, like a manic philatelist examining a perfect and precious unmarked penny black stamp. And every time he’d peered closely at this black-and-white photograph he’d experienced the same shiver of excitement, of promise.
A possibility.
A possibility, and that’s all it was, a possibility that those last four numbers of the manufacturer’s mark were the year of manufacture.
2066.
Chapter 12
11 September 2001, outside Branford, Connecticut
The motel was pretty basic, just what Maddy expected for thirty-nine dollars a night. A double bed, a table, a wobbly hanger rack and a small TV, manacled to a wall bracket. They got three rooms: one for Maddy, Sal and Becks, one for Liam and Bob and one for Foster and Rashim. Basic, but at least each room had an en-suite bathroom with a bathtub too small to drown a cat in and presided over by a shower unit that sprayed a lethargic afterthought of tepid water.
SpongeBubba had the RV with an aisle full of plastic bags all to himself.
They all freshened up, each of them relishing their turn in the showers, before heading to the diner next door for dinner. They chose unhealthy, heart-attack meals from a menu with helpful, if somewhat misleading, pictures. After that, they reconvened in Foster and Rashim’s room.
The TV was turned up enough that anyone in a neighbouring room wasn’t going to easily pick words out of their conversation through the paper-thin walls. Fox News was on and there was understandably only one story today. President George Bush had held a press conference and given the administration’s official response to the day’s acts of terrorism, and now his words were being dissected by news hosts in meticulous detail.
Foster was slumped in the room’s only chair. The others were perched on the double bed. Becks sat cross-legged on the carpet like a nursery-school child waiting for storytime and Bob stood in the corner of the room keeping a wary eye, through the window blinds, on the RV parked outside.
‘You want to know what the future’s like?’ said Rashim.
Maddy nodded. ‘Yeah, Liam’s right, we really should get to know how this century all plays out. All we’ve got are scraps of info. Bits here, bits there. Even Foster only knows some of it.’
The old man nodded. ‘Only what was available on the archway’s computer database and that only takes us up to the year 2054.’
Rashim looked at Foster. ‘The year your secret agency originates from?’
‘I suppose that must be it,’ Foster answered with a shrug. ‘It’s the year from which Waldstein set it all up and took it back to 2001.’
‘2054? I was just a small boy then!’ Rashim laughed.
‘Go on, please. Tell us what you can,’ said Liam.
Rashim leaned back on the bed, hands behind his head, looking up at the low cracked plaster ceiling above. ‘It’s not a happy story, boys and girls. We screwed things up. Mankind did. We made a mess of everything. Funny, it’s all history to me, but the future to you.’ He sighed. ‘The world hit seven billion people on the thirty-first of October 2011. In my time historians use that date a lot. Like some sort of a marker. The point at which it all began to go bad.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, whether it was the population explosion or peak oil to blame, 2011 is retrospectively seen as the point at which the world crossed the line and was doomed.’
‘Peak oil? What’s that?’ asked Liam.
‘Peak oil is the term for the point at which we were never going to have enough oil-based energy to tide us over until we could rely on a new source of energy. Oh, there were things being tria
lled on a small scale: renewables, wind, tide energy, zero-point energy. But nothing that was near enough to replacing oil. The rest of the century was one war after another being fought for the remaining oil fields, while the world continued to warm up as we ferociously burned our dwindling supply of fossil fuels and the oceans continued to rise.
‘I have a question for you.’ Rashim lifted his head and looked at them all. ‘Any of you heard of the Fermi Paradox?’
Maddy did, or thought she did. ‘Isn’t that the puzzle to do with why we haven’t yet found any alien civilizations out there in the universe?’
He nodded. ‘A mathematician called Fermi calculated the odds of there being other alien life forms out there in the big wide galaxy. He took into account all the usual variables: the number of stars at the right point in their life cycles, the average number of likely planets per star, the probability of any of those planets existing within the “Goldilocks Zone” around the star, the likelihood of a planet having liquid water … all those important variables.
‘Anyway, while the odds were stacked against any one solar system containing intelligent life, given that there are literally trillions of stars, his maths delivered an answer that there must be hundreds of thousands of alien civilizations out there, and tens of thousands of civilizations advanced enough in technology to be putting out radio waves, intentionally or not.
‘So the point is,’ continued Rashim, ‘when we started looking into space for radio signals, we should have stumbled across them almost immediately. According to Fermi’s maths, we should have been swimming in alien radio signals.’
‘But instead we never found anything,’ said Maddy.
‘Right. And that’s the Fermi Paradox. Why isn’t every frequency full of alien signals?’ He sighed. ‘Because we’re alone. And why are we alone?’ He smiled. He wasn’t expecting them to answer. ‘Well … in my time we figured that out for ourselves. Within a century of discovering radio waves, mankind managed to exhaust the raw materials of the planet. The raw materials, the free energy source that every emerging technological civilization gets as a gift from its historical past – fossil fuels. It’s that package of free energy that we should have used carefully while we took our time to discover and harness quantum energy. Humankind never got a chance to take anything more than a few baby steps into space. We never got the time to mature, to reach out into space, for other worlds. Hydrocarbons. Fossil fuels. Oil. We used it all up far too quickly. Too many people wanting too many things. We used it up,’ he said, sighing, ‘and then, as it began to run out, we turned on each other.’
‘The Oil Wars?’ said Liam. He had heard another traveller from Rashim’s time mention them. A man called Locke.
‘Yes. Wars between India and China. Japan and Korea. The first of those was in the 2040s. Russia and the European Bloc, there was a short war between those. And, of course, what we should have been doing is trying to fix another bigger problem. The world itself dying: warming up, rising tides, poisoned blooms of algae killing the seas.’
Rashim fell silent for a moment. ‘Anyway, that’s the answer to the Fermi Paradox; most – if not all – civilizations either destroy themselves or mine themselves dry long before they ever spread out to other planets and are able to mine, harvest them for resources. Once you’ve exhausted your home planet … it’s all over for you. Either you become extinct, or you eventually end up being cavemen once more.’
‘It’s a one-shot deal?’ said Maddy.
He nodded. ‘And perhaps every civilization makes the same mistake. Spends what it has, thinking it will never run out. Then, all of a sudden, it does.’
‘Wonderful,’ sighed Maddy.
‘But on Earth we didn’t just run out. We decided to destroy ourselves in style.’ Rashim snorted. ‘It was some kind of a genetically engineered virus … pretty much wiped us all out in the space of a few weeks. We made a nice tidy job of pretty much erasing ourselves from history.’
‘Shadd-yah,’ whispered Sal after a while. ‘This is depressing! You’re great fun to hang out with, you know that, don’t you?’
He shrugged. ‘You did ask what the future’s going to be like.’
‘I didn’t,’ she replied. ‘It was Liam who asked.’
‘Aye, and now I wish I bleedin’ well hadn’t.’
Chapter 13
12 September 2001, Washington DC
Cooper was up and at work despite the time. The Department was as much his home as the single-bed studio apartment he kept in Queens Chapel, DC. Thirty-nine, with no family, no partner, no children, not even a pet, one might say this twilight office with empty desks, a watercooler that hadn’t been switched on in years and a fading poster of Jane Fonda was his life.
Custodian of secrets so secret even Presidents aren’t privy to them. That’s me.
Perhaps not the world’s most exciting job. But an important one nonetheless.
Last night he’d stayed here, slept in the cot he kept in his personal office.
His PC was on and he was streaming MSNBC, watching it as his coffee and breakfast bagel cooled enough to have without burning the roof of his mouth. It was quite early in the morning; outside in the world, the sky was still dark. On the monitor he watched a news camera pan across rescue workers picking through the smouldering rubble of the World Trade Center. Brilliantly stark floodlights illuminated the enormous mound of rubble and twisted spars of metal. Dots of neon-orange light-reflective jackets decorated the mounds of dust and concrete; dozens of emergency workers picked through the remains of the towers in the vain hope of finding survivors.
The phone rang.
Cooper looked at it. The phones down here never rang. Well, rarely anyway.
He picked it up. ‘Cooper.’
‘Coop, it’s Damon.’
Damon Grohl. A friend from the FBI Academy many years ago. Friends still. Christmas cards were exchanged every year and every now and then they shared a beer, if that counted.
‘Damon!’ Cooper’s mood lifted. ‘Well, been a while! How are you, ol’ buddy?’
‘Fine. Fine. The Bureau down this way is chasing around like a headless chicken with what went down yesterday.’
Headless chicken? Damon was probably right about that. FBI heads were going to start rolling pretty soon over this. Letting something like this slip through their fingers.
‘I can imagine. Not much fun.’
‘Look, Coop, something’s come up that, uh … might be, well, your thing, if you get my meaning.’
Cooper’s curiosity was piqued. ‘My thing?’
‘We’ve got a double cop killing over in Brooklyn. Happened after midnight this morning.’
‘How’s that anything to do with me? The Department?’ A thought occurred to him. ‘Is this linked to yesterday …?’
‘Twin Towers? Who knows? Might be. We’re looking at pretty much anything that moves right now.’
‘You said this cop killing might be my sort of thing?’ A little careless of him, to be honest, talking so candidly like this over the phone.
‘Your phone line is encrypted, right?’
‘Yes. But keep what you say foggy … if you know what I mean.’
‘Foggy? Sure. So, Coop, are you still doing that whole X Files thing down in Washington?’
‘You know I can’t comment on that.’
He heard Damon draw a breath.
‘Damon? What the hell is it?’
‘I think I’ve got something you might want to take a look at, if you can get up here quickly.’
Chapter 14
7.01 a.m., 12 September 2001, outside Branford, Connecticut
Maddy was knocking on the adjoining motel room wall for him to get up. Liam yawned and cracked open eyes to look at the digital clock on his bedside ledge. Just gone seven.
He thumped the wall back. ‘All right! Jay-zus! I’m getting up, so I am!’ he shouted.
He heard Sal’s muffled laughter on the other side.
Bob was alre
ady awake. Not that he ever slept. ‘Maddy has instructed me to tell you we are getting ready to move on.’
They’d all decided they needed a good night’s rest before resuming their journey up to Boston. They’d all been strung out, far more exhausted than they’d realized. A week in Ancient Rome struggling to stay alive and now this. Fatigue had finally caught up with them all.
‘Maddy says we will eat some breakfast then set off.’
Liam’s stomach still groaned. Last night’s triple-decker meat platter pizza was still lying heavily in his gut. He wondered if he could manage anything else right now.
They met outside in the car park beside the RV. Rashim was looking particularly ill.
‘Jesus, what’s up with you?’ asked Maddy.
‘I’ve been up all night, vomiting.’ His face looked almost grey.
‘The food wasn’t that bad!’
He shook his head, his dark ponytail wagging limply. ‘No, it’s my fault. I was stupid. The food was too rich. I’m used to synthetic proteins. Soya products.’ He gulped air and stifled a belch that could easily have been an empty retch. ‘Not used to the real thing.’ Rashim had had a mixed grill. Wolfed it down as he relished the texture and savoured the billionaire-luxury of eating nuggets of real meat.
Foster obviously hadn’t slept well either, dark bags evident under his sunken eyes. Maddy looked at the men in their party with a mixture of pity and contempt.
The diner was open and several trucks were parked up in the gravel car park, their drivers inside already tucking into pancake and waffle breakfasts. Further along their side of the highway was an out-of-town mall called North Haven Plaza. Across acres of car park it looked open already. At least the eateries probably were.
‘OK then, let’s try and find something a little healthier over there, if you guys are feeling a bit precious.’