TimeRiders 05 - Gates of Rome by Alex Scarrow Read Free Book Online

worse already.’
    ‘Not really.’ She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. ‘The agency is just us.’
    The words hung above the table in the space between them. They hung in the stillness of the archway, accompanied by the soft hum of networked computers and the muted rumble of a train running over the Williamsburg Bridge above them.
    ‘What do you mean
just us
?’ asked Sal.
    ‘I mean exactly that, Sal. We’re
it
. The three of us.’
    Liam sat forward, frowning, confused. ‘But … but Foster told us there were other teams, in other places, so he did.’
    ‘I know he did. But he lied.’
    Sal looked past her. One eye lost behind a fringe, the other one just lost. ‘But …’
    ‘There was that message, Maddy.’ Liam leaned on the table.‘That message from the future about Edward Chan, so there was …’
    ‘There is one other person in the agency,’ she replied. ‘It’s that guy Waldstein. Roald Waldstein.’
    ‘That fella who invented time travel?’
    ‘That’s him. He’s the one who set this archway up. He’s the guy who recruited Foster and the previous team.’
    Sal shook her head, working it through in her mind silently.
    Liam slapped a hand on the table. ‘Jay-zus-’n’-Mother-Mary! You know I … I was wondering why it’s always
us
who was dealing with everything! Why them other teams were too bleedin’ lazy to get off their backsides and help out!’
    Maddy splayed her hands. ‘Well, now we know.’
    ‘But didn’t Foster say this Waldstein was totally
against
time travel?’ asked Sal. ‘That he, like, campaigned against it or something?’
    ‘Yes, he did. But he also set this up, secretly, as a back-up plan. I guess he figured that even with international agreements prohibiting the development of time-travel technology, on the sly, every government would be having a go at it.’
    Liam laughed softly. ‘I knew it! I just bleedin’ well knew it!’
    ‘It’s not fair Foster didn’t tell us that,’ said Sal. She looked up at Maddy. ‘Why did he lie to us?’
    Maddy shrugged. ‘I guess he didn’t want to overload us. Put too much pressure on us.’
    ‘Did he just tell you now, Maddy? This morning?’
    She nodded. ‘Yup.’
    Sal’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why?’
    ‘Why? What?’
    ‘Why did he wait till
now
to tell you?’
    ‘I guess … I guess he figured from all the stuff I told him we’d been through that we were ready to find out.’
    ‘
Chutiya!
’ She stood up, biting her lip angrily. ‘He thinks we’re
bakra
? Stupid? What else is he holding back from us?’
    Maddy would have liked to say ‘nothing’, but she wasn’t entirely sure that Foster had given them the whole picture yet. She too was guilty of that, holding truths back from her friends. For example, when exactly was she going to tell Liam that time travel was killing him? Ageing him? That he was going to look exactly like Foster very soon.
    A bigger deal than that – that he and Liam were the
same person
. When the hell was she going to tell him that?
    And what did that mean anyway?
    Maddy had tried running that little doozy through her mind many times over. Did it mean Liam had been recruited from the
Titanic
before? Did it mean that this archway existed in a bigger loop of time, that one day Liam was going to be an old man? An old man who had somehow outlived her and Sal and now needed to renew the cycle by revisiting the last moments of their ‘normal’ lives and recruiting them all over again?
    ‘Maddy?’
    She looked up. Sal was sitting on the end of the table. ‘There’s something I’ve seen, but I’ve been keeping to myself.’
    Liam looked from her to Maddy. ‘Uh? Hang on! Has everyone here got a bleedin’ secret except me?’
    Sal ignored him. ‘This may sound crazy, but … have we been recruited before?’
    ‘What?!’
    Sal ignored him again. Her eyes were on Maddy. ‘Has Foster said anything like that?’
    ‘Recruited before? How do you mean?’
    ‘Foster said there was