Free TimeRiders: City of Shadows (Book 6) by Alex Scarrow

attack on America was inevitable. But for the people in these cars all
     around them this whole nightmare was still – and would be for years yet – a bewildering
     and terrifying mystery.
    She drew her mind back to more pressing
     issues, for her. ‘No matter how far we drive, Bob … there’s no
     knowing for sure that we’re going to be safe, is there?’
    ‘No.’
    She glanced at the gauge again. ‘And
     how far have we gone?’
    ‘We are only eighty miles from New
     York as a direct-line distance.’
    ‘Eighty miles? Might as well be a
     thousand and one, I suppose … Let’s take the next turn-off, then.
     We’ve got to fill up sometime soon anyway.’
    Bob nodded. ‘Affirmative. Next
     turning.’
    ‘And how much further to Boston?
     It’s not that far, is it?’
    ‘Approximately a hundred and twenty
     miles as a direct-line distance from our current location.’
    ‘We can do the rest of the drive after
     a rest break.’ She pointed at a road sign looming towards them on the right.
     ‘Let’s take that next turn-off. The one for Branford. See if we can find a
     gas station and someplace to get some food, a diner or something.’
    Maddy suddenly realized how bone-weary she
     felt; physically, mentally, spiritually, she was completely
spent
. A bed would
     be good. A bed with clean, crisp white sheets. God … better still, a hot
     shower. A
bath
even!
    ‘Actually, the hell with that.
     Let’s see if we can stop and find a motel too. We can do the rest of the drive
     tomorrow.’
    ‘Tomorrow?’ He nodded approval.
     Perhaps even Bob realized she needed a night off.
    ‘Affirmative.’

Chapter 11
    12 September 2001, Washington DC
    The duty corridor off the mezzanine floor
     was windowless. The ‘catacombs’, that’s what he’d heard one of
     the personnel who worked down here call it once. Several offices along an unused floor
     beneath an anonymous government building in Washington.
    These offices had another name – a
     semi-official name. The few personnel who worked down in this artificially illuminated
     netherworld called it ‘The Department’. More than half a century ago –
     fifty-six years to be precise – was when The Department was set up. Not here, though.
     The Department didn’t have proper offices to call its own until after the 1947
     ‘New Mexico Incident’. But this had been its one and only home since
     then.
    On several occasions in those fifty-six
     years, these offices had experienced short bursts of frenetic activity; carefully vetted
     FBI agents had been drafted in to do routine belt-’n’-braces work, but never
     fully briefed on the various case files they were doing the heavy lifting on.
    On a need-to-know basis
.
     That’s how The Department did its business.
    There’d been a buzz of activity here
     back in ’47, and again in 1963 after the ‘Dallas Incident’. There were
     a lot of paper files generated over that, all of them still down here in the catacombs.
     Everything one would ever want to know about the death of a President was stored in
     dog-eared cardboard folders, in dusty filing cabinets labelled ‘J-759’. And,
     if one took the time to dig through thousands of yellowing pages of gathered
     intelligence and witness depositions, one might in fact find the
correct
name
     of the man who actually killed President Kennedy.
    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 thefiling cabinets was devoted to that. Then, of course, there was file
     R-497, the