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

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 timesto 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 snownearby. 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