Free The Eternal War by Alex Scarrow Page B

he’d understand.
    He leaned forward, studying them closely one after the other. ‘Remarkable. Like … like little windows looking out upon every corner of this world of …’ His words died as he pulled in a gasp.
    ‘Good Lord!’ he yelled, stepping towards the monitor on the end. ‘These buildings! Are they as giant as they appear?’ he said, pointing at one screen. Maddy turned round. On one screen MSNBC was doing a news story on Wall Street. There was a library image taken from a news helicopter of Manhattan’s skyscrapers.
    ‘Oh yeah … that’s New York. Where we are right now.’
    ‘New York, you say?’ Lincoln bent over the messy desk, peering closely at the monitor. ‘ That is New York! Remarkable! ’
    Liam gently nudged Maddy as Lincoln’s gaze wandered from screen to screen, muttering with ever-increasing incredulity.
    ‘Are we not causing contamination here, Maddy?’ he whispered. ‘I mean he has to go back, so … to be the President of the Union states?’
    ‘Yes, you’re right,’ she replied.
    ‘Surely we can’t send him back to his time knowing about all this?’
    She cursed quietly. ‘He already knows too much. I need to think what we’re –’
    ‘GOOD GOD!’ Lincoln suddenly exclaimed. ‘A DISASTER!’
    ‘What now?’ Maddy pulled away from Liam and rushed forward. ‘What is it?’
    Lincoln’s pointed finger was shaking. ‘A calamity , Miss Carter, a calamity I tell you! Right there through this window! Look!’
    She followed his goggle-eyed gaze and saw he was watching the looping footage of tomorrow’s trade towers disaster.
    ‘No … no, see, relax, this isn’t live .’ She shook her head, wondering how she was going to explain the difference between live footage and recorded footage to a man who’d never seen a moving image before.
    ‘Are there people living in that structure? That tall tower?’ He turned to her. ‘In what city is that explosion happening?’
    ‘New York.’
    ‘Tarnation! You mean here ? This very place?’ Lincoln turned to the others. ‘Is this future of yours in the middle of some war ?’
    Maddy shrugged. ‘Well, sort of …’
    ‘Then we must join the fight!’ Lincoln turned and rushed into the gloom towards the far end of the archway.
    ‘Mr Lincoln!’ called Maddy. There was no answer. But she could hear the corrugated-iron shutters rattling under the impact of his fists. ‘Oh crud … he’s a real pain,’ she groaned, and made her way across the floor to join him.
    ‘Mr Lincoln?’
    ‘Where is the door, Miss Carter? We must join this fight and defend our –’
    ‘Mr Lincoln … will you please calm down!’ She pressed the green button to one side of the shutter door and with the whine of the motor and the clank of chains, the shutter lifted, spilling evening light across the archway’s floor through the slowly widening crack.
    ‘There’s no war going on right now! No invasion of America!’
    ‘But I saw it just then, Miss Carter, with my own eyes! A vast explosion !’
    ‘It’s just an image of something that’s going to happen. That’s all. Nothing you need to get all upset about! OK? Look … everything’s fine outside right now!’
    The shutter rattled to a halt. For a moment she was unsure whether to show Lincoln the world outside. The more details he learned of the future, the more contaminated his mind was going to be. For an anonymous man with little or no influence on history, that might be an acceptable contamination. But for a man destined to be president …? Well, like she’d said, he already knew too much. A little more wasn’t going to make any difference either way.
    ‘Take a look … everything’s just fine.’
    She gently ushered Lincoln forward, stepping into the cobbled alley. She grabbed his shoulders and turned him to his left, so that he faced the end of their backstreet and the dirty, rubbish-strewn quayside beyond. Above them the Williamsburg Bridge swept across the