TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) by Alex Scarrow Read Free Book Online Page A

acknowledgement and turned back to the dark interior. ‘Well there, Mr Archway,
     you’ve still got a job to do,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘After
     all … there’s this bridge above you that needs holding up for a while
     yet.’
    ‘Liam!’
    ‘I’m coming!’
    Sal sat in the back of the RV on an
     oat-coloured seat worn through at the corners and showing yellow foam. Her seat belt
     didn’t work. She decided Bob could have stolen something thatlooked a little less old-fashioned, beaten-up and threadbare. She’d spotted
     glistening, spotless tour vans rolling through the streets of New York. Ones that looked
     almost futuristic, like spaceships on wheels. Instead they had this.
    She looked out through the rear plastic
     window, scuffed and foggy, someone’s name and a love heart scratched into it. She
     watched Brooklyn receding like a movie back-projection: busy with cars, bumper to bumper
     at each intersection, waiting to get on the two lanes across the Williamsburg Bridge on
     to the lower east side of Manhattan; the morning ebb and flow of commuters, regular as
     bowel movements.
    There was some relief mixed in with the
     sadness of a goodbye. At least she wasn’t going to see this particular morning
     ever again. Tuesday 11 September was at last playing through for them the way it did for
     everyone else. Once. One terrifying morning albeit seemingly running in slow motion.
    Relief she wasn’t going to have to see
     that again. The swooping airliner. A sky filled with billowing smoke and the confetti
     cloud of millions of pieces of fluttering paper.
    But, yes, sadness too. Brooklyn – this
     place, this side of the East River, had become so familiar to her. Almost as familiar as
     the suburbs of Mumbai that she’d grown up in. The Chinese laundromat with that old
     lady so proud of her office-worker son. The coffee shop from which she’d collected
     countless cardboard trays of coffee and paper bags of assorted doughnuts. The YWCA whose
     skanky showers with hair-clogged drains she and Maddy had had to use more times than she
     cared to remember. Their alleyway always cluttered with rubbish, the cobbles underfoot
     slightly tacky, the walls with fading sprayed gang tags.
    And their archway.
    Their home.
    The RV juddered to a halt at a traffic light
     and just then – Sal knew it was due any second now – she spotted a subtle flash on the
     distant skyline: the pale sliver of a fuselage catching the morning light, moving fast
     and descending towards the twin pillars of Manhattan shimmering in the sun-warmed
     morning.
    She lost sight of it among the skyscrapers,
     but then a moment later the distant sky was punctuated by a roiling cloud of orange and
     grey that drifted lazily up into the empty sky. No sound. Not yet. Just a silent
     eruption like an undubbed movie special effect.
    Then, half a dozen seconds later, even
     through the closed window, over the chugging of the RV’s engine, she heard it. A
     soft, innocuous-sounding
whump
. Like the door of an expensive saloon car being
     slammed shut. The heads of pedestrians on the pavements either side of them turned to
     look towards the sky above Manhattan … and never turned back.
    Green light. The Winnebago motorhome crossed
     the intersection and turned left on rolling and slack suspension that made the vehicle
     sway like a boat on a choppy sea.
    Behind a row of apartment blocks, Sal
     finally lost sight of Manhattan, the Twin Towers and the billowing mushroom cloud of
     smoke and the frozen pedestrians as they headed up Roebling Street – a place where
     people and cars and taxis and trucks continued to move from one traffic light to the
     next in blissful, clockwork ignorance, at least for the moment.

Chapter 7
    11 September 2001, New York
    It was four hours later that footsteps
     scraped and tapped down the cobblestone alleyway. Nearly one o’clock. Framed and
     silhouetted by muted light from outside, two figures stepped into