September 11 2001, New York

Liam disturbs all that the TimeRiders team seek to preserve, as

he uses his knowledge of the history of the future to save a

stranger from her destiny...

11 September 2001, New York

Liam emerged from the Williamsburg Bridge pedestrian walkway, then headed

down the exit ramp and on to Delancey. The street was busy with morning

traffic. Stop-start yellow-cab windshields reflected a low but rising September

sun peeking above a skyline of looming urban stalagmites.

Blue sky above. Cloudless blue sky. A morning for whistling a cheerful ditty,

doffing a cap to a stranger, wishing good morning to a surly-faced cop. Liam felt

good on his way to the diner. Great even. A little tingle of anticipation was mixed

in there somewhere.

Because she’ll be there again.

The young woman – barely that, a girl still, really – the girl with the dark brown

hair tied back in an old-fashioned French plait. The girl who always stood one

place in front of him in the queue, the girl wearing a freshly purchased smart

office skirt and blouse, clothes she clearly felt uncomfortable wearing. Brand-

new, grown-up ‘lady’ shoes with heels that were tripping her up and probably

already causing her blisters.

How many times had he visited this small busy diner with its steamed-up

windows? Busy with its office workers grabbing takeaway breakfasts of coffee in

plastic cups and bagels in grease-paper wraps. Twenty-seven times? Twenty-

eight? He’d lost count. The window of time that he and the other two in the team

lived through over and over – the day before and the day of 9/11 – allowed them

to view New York intimately. To see the tiny details of life, fleeting moments, in

endless repeat. It was a strange mission to keep history on track that kept them

trapped yet allowed them to travel through the great universe of time.

And how many times had he watched the girl order her coffee, fumble her

change at the counter and spill cents and dimes on the floor?

She was so nervous, wasn’t she?

And how many times had he seen that happen before he’d finally plucked up

enough courage to step in and help, and talk to her?

The first time, he’d helped trap one of her coins that was rolling across the floor

and had handed it back to her. Just a smile and a thank you that time. The next

Tuesday morning visit to Tommy’s Bagel House (‘Open All Hours! Best Coffee

in Lower Manhattan!’): the same dropped coins and panicked foraging on the

floor, but he’d dared to step forward and buy her coffee as she, still flustered,

dug into her purse for the rest of the price of a cappuccino.

She’d said a nervous, a very shy, thank you. Liam suspected she’d only agreed

to sit beside him on a stool perched by the steamy window and sip her coffee

awhile out of polite gratitude.

But they’d spoken. Her name was Jane. It was her first day starting a new job.

Hence the nerves, the fluster. That’s all he got from her. Then she had to go,

desperate not to be late on her very first day.

When Liam next came to the diner he offered to buy her coffee again, a little

more confidently this time, knowing she wouldn’t give him a dismissive New

York shrug and tell him to mind his own.

He had the advantage over her. He knew her name, knew why she was all on

edge, and she …? She was talking to a complete stranger who’d just paid for

her coffee.

Today, Liam crossed the busy intersection on the edge of Chinatown, trying to

count how often he’d sat down with Jane now and shared a few moments. Each

Tuesday morning, the moments getting longer, and the poor girl presumably

having to hurry along that much faster afterwards to get to work on time.

Five minutes later, after the so-familiar coin-chasing routine – he even knew by

now which way the dime would roll and which pairs of legs he’d have to weave

between to grab it – they sat on their stools and stared out through steamed-up

glass.

‘So, a new job did you say?’

She nodded. ‘My first proper job. I … I can’t believe how lucky I am. You know,

it’s not like I have anything more than a high-school diploma.’ She sipped frothy

cappuccino and was rewarded with the faintest moustache of foam left on her

top lip. ‘I’m so lucky. And, God, I’m so-o-o nervous!’

She looked at him. ‘Honestly, I’m totally useless when I’m like this.’

Liam smiled, his eyes on her top lip. ‘Aye, you’ll be fine, so you will. First day?

Who’d not be nervous?’

She returned his smile. Her gaze lingered on him a moment. ‘Is that real?’ she

asked, pointing at the plume of grey hair at his temple. ‘Or is it a fashion thing?’

‘Ahh … that?’ He self-consciously ruffled his hair. The recent big time jump he’d

taken to correct a contamination of the timeline – back sixty-five million years –

had done that to him, and turned a tress of his hair almost white. Shocking at

first, but then he’d grown used to it. Just as he had the whole experience of

being a time traveller. Liam had been plucked from the doomed Titanic as it was

sinking into the ocean and transported to 2001. The other recruits, Maddy and

Sal, were teenagers like him, also chosen because the absence of their bodies

from two other disasters – a passenger airliner exploding mid-air in 2010, and a

burning skyscraper in 2026 – would never be missed.

The team was still finding their feet. Getting to know each other and work out

exactly who was trying to stop the course of history going the way it should, an

upset that sent Liam spiralling backwards and forwards in time with no more

than some lab-grown super-human bodyguards to protect him.

He realized from Jane’s puzzled expression that he’d been staring into space.

‘Ah, well, me mother’s side of the family are to blame for that, so they are. The

lot of ’em go snow-white the first chance they get.’

She laughed. ‘It’s neat. I like it. Looks kinda distinguished.’

A pregnant pause. Liam filled it. ‘So what job is it that you’re off to?’

‘Nothing too great. A receptionist. I get to smile and say “good morning” a lot.’

She shrugged. ‘I guess I can’t screw that up too much, right?’

‘No. Although you might want to, uh …’ He leaned forward, not too much,

pointing at her top lip. ‘… you might want to get a little of that froth hanging

there.’

Jane’s eyes widened. She swiped at her lip. ‘Oh God, how stupid. Is it on my

nose too?’

He cocked a brow. ‘Well, now …’

‘I’m an idiot.’ She touched the tip of her nose – nothing there – then narrowed

her eyes at him. ‘Oh, ha ha.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He smiled, contrite. ‘So is it far?’

‘Huh?’

‘Where you’re working. Is it far from here?’

‘Oh no, not really. Five minutes. Mind you, on these heels? I should’ve brought

some pumps.’

Five minutes. Close by, then. Somewhere in lower Manhattan. Two hours from

now the blue sky outside was going to be overcast with smoke and dust. What a

grim day Tuesday always turned out to be. The Tuesdays always got him down.

At least by the end of the day, their field office ‘reset’ returned them to Monday,

the day before the world had heard of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

‘Where is it … where exactly is this new job?’

She grinned at him. So proud of herself. ‘McGuire Investments. In the north

tower of the World Trade Center. The view’s just incredible from up there!’

*****

Liam spent quite a few nights distracted by that. Thinking about it. Thinking,

when he really ought to have been reading up on general history. Their recent

foray into the prehistoric past might have been a whole lot easier if he’d known

at least something about the late Cretaceous era. As it was, he had survived

that ordeal, been found and brought home, simply because some bespectacled

kid who’d been caught up in the blast back in time did know his stuff about

dinosaurs.

But homework – learning and filling his mind with facts that might prove useful,

life-saving even – was proving difficult. He was seeing her, Jane – seeing her

face, then seeing the all-too-familiar slow-motion image of the north tower

descending amid its own storm cloud of dust. He’d even tried to do some

research to see if Jane was one of the three thousand who never made it out.

He had just her first name. But he also had the name of the company she’d

started working for that morning.

Not being so familiar with computers – technology from a time long after he was

supposed to have drowned with fifteen hundred others on the Titanic – he’d

asked Maddy to help to pull up the relevant information from the agency

database. But he told her he just wanted to know more about the aftermath of

9/11. She’d frowned suspiciously. Maddy was in charge of their team. Only a

couple of years older than Liam, eighteen, but almost like a clucking mother-hen

figure, she’d narrowed her eyes as she looked at him, but helped him all the

same.

So now, after checking the database, he knew two more things about her. Her

name was Jane Brookhill.

And, no, she didn’t make it out of there alive.

*****

Maddy and Sal were getting intrigued by his regular early-morning trips. Liam

explained he’d developed a hankering for pancakes, bacon and maple syrup,

something Tommy’s did extremely well. Half true … that was, after all, the

original reason he’d begun to make a habit of visiting that diner – an unhealthy,

greasy breakfast. Sal joked that he’d end up too fat to fit into the displacement

tube, but Liam wasn’t eating anything each time he visited now. Barely touched

his own coffee. His stomach churned too much for that every Tuesday morning.

Another half a dozen encounters with Jane and he’d learned more about her.

For example, she wanted to be a writer, that she was writing a book, but it was

all false starts and kludgy prose right now. She loved a band called Nirvana and

still couldn’t understand why the band’s singer, called Kurt Cobain, had shot

himself. She preferred slobbing around in jeans, a T-shirt and an old cardigan at

the weekends.

On one occasion, he’d even made a thoughtless, careless, half-baked attempt

to dissuade her from going into work that morning. Careless, because it was a

change to events, admittedly a small change, but one that might just echo

through the years and lead to other more significant disruptions in the future.

And Maddy would’ve thrown a hissy fit at him if she’d found out how stupidly

reckless he’d been to try something like that. And it was careless, because his

suggestion that she skip her first day at work and join him in taking a walk

around Central Park had come off sounding like a seedy, inappropriate chat-up

line. She’d replied by shuffling uncomfortably for a moment and saying, ‘Uh … I

think I better go now.’

She’d excused herself and left.

Against his better judgement, Liam had made several attempts. Each time,

what he’d said had come out sounding just a little bit creepy and stalker-ish. But

watching the north tower collapse later that morning – then over and over again

every time the field office reset its forty-eight-hour window – was too much.

Knowing that Jane Brookhill, so young, so full of hopes and dreams, was

somewhere inside that slowly descending nightmare, doomed to die in the most

horrific way again, and again, and again … It got to him. And, yes, perhaps he

did wonder if they had more than the same coffee routine together, whether

there might be something more than just those few shared precious minutes

sitting on their stools. So he found himself this particular morning saying

something he should never have said.

‘Jane Brookhill, I need to tell you something important.’

‘Hang on.’ She looked up from her cappuccino. ‘I haven’t told you my name.’

She was right; she hadn’t this particular morning. So easy to confuse their

almost identical meetings. It didn’t matter. This morning Liam felt he needed to

cut to the chase.

‘How do you know my –’

‘This is important. You need to listen to me!’

She looked a little taken aback by his intensity.

‘Don’t go to work today. If you do … you’ll die.’

Ah Jay-zus … Liam, you stupid idiot. What are you doing?

‘Uh …’ Her expression changed. Wariness. ‘I … think maybe I better –’

Liam leaned forward, lowered his voice. ‘There’s going to be an attack this

morning. In a little over an hour a passenger plane will be diverted by terrorists

and smashed into the north tower, then another one into the south tower. Three

thousand people are going to die.’

‘Look … uh …’ She got up off her stool. ‘Thanks very much for the coffee, but I

better –’

Liam reached out and grasped her hand tightly. ‘I know this makes me sound

like crazy, but I know the future. I know it! I’ve seen it!’

She tried to pull her hand free.

‘Three thousand people are going to die when both them tall towers come

down.’ Liam could hear his voice trembling. That wasn’t helping. It made him

sound even more like some nut. ‘And, Jane, as sure as anything, you are going

to be one of them. You’re going to die.’

‘Please,’ she said, her cheeks pinking. ‘You’re hurting me. Please let go of my

hand.’

Liam realized this wasn’t working. All he was doing was freaking her out. ‘I’ll let

go, but if I do … don’t just turn an’ run out on me. Give me a minute of your time.

That’s all I’m asking. A minute.’

She didn’t nod. He could feel her knuckles flexing in his grasp, trying to twist

her hand free.

‘Please. One minute. That’s all I’m asking here.’

‘I … I have to … please, you’re hurting me.’

Liam held on. But then another approach occurred to him. ‘I know you like to

write books …’

Now that was something else she certainly hadn’t told him this morning.

‘You want to be a writer. But you keep starting your book over and over and it

never seems right.’

He felt her hand stop flexing.

‘You like a band called Ner-vana, I think it’s pronounced. You normally prefer

hot chocolate, but it makes you sleepy so you chose coffee this morning so

you’ll be alert.’ He tried to think of what else she’d told him on other mornings.

‘Oh yes … you wish you’d brought a pair of pumps to walk to work cos those

shoes you bought yesterday are killing your feet already.’

‘How …?’ She wasn’t pulling away now, but that didn’t mean she was any less

freaked out by him. ‘How d-do you know those things?’

‘Jane, I’m not crazy.’

‘How do you know those things?’

Liam winced. This was already too far gone. Stupid and careless.

‘Have you been … watching me … or … or … or something?’

He looked around the diner. It was far too busy for people to actually pay

attention to some young lovers’ low-voiced row. An old woman was watching

them from a corner seat, but looked away quickly as Liam met her gaze.

‘No … no. Not that. I’m not some sort of a peeping tom.’

‘Then you better tell me how come you know so much about me.’ Her tone was

firm. A tell-me-now-or-I’m-calling-the-police tone. She sat back down on the

stool, a hand reaching absently into her bag and clasping her mobile phone.

‘I … I’ll tell you.’ He shook his head. Smiled. ‘I sometimes struggle to believe

what I’m about to tell you, meself. But I swear to Jesus ’n’ Mary it’s the truth.’

‘Go on.’

‘I see the future.’

‘What?’

And so he told her about the team, their machine, their job … to prevent future

time travellers from disrupting the timeline. He didn’t tell her all of it. But enough.

*****

‘You did what?!’ Maddy looked at him sharply. ‘Please tell me you didn’t just say

what I think you did.’

Liam looked down at the floor, guilty as a whipped puppy. ‘She … probably

didn’t believe me anyway. I just thought that one less victim wouldn’t do any

har–’

‘You frikkin’ idiot, Liam!’ Maddy clenched her eyes shut. ‘That’s exactly what

we’re not supposed to do! Change things!’

‘It’s not a big change. Just one person, Maddy. That’s all.’

They were alone in their Brooklyn archway. Sal and the support units were

doing a laundry run. All the same she lowered her voice. ‘And what do you think

Foster would have to say about that? Huh? Oh, it’s just one person, is it? Well, I

guess that’s fine. Just don’t make too much of a habit of it?’ She opened her

eyes and glared through her glasses at him. ‘One person alive who shouldn’t be

… even one very ordinary person, that’s enough to de-rail history, Liam.’

Foster. The old man who’d recruited and trained them. And for what? They still

didn’t know why they’d been chosen for this impossible task of saving history.

Liam sighed. ‘She’s just a girl. Just a plain old ordinary office girl. Just –’

‘A girl who may one day meet a nice guy, fall in love and have a son. A son who

one day might just miss a red light at an intersection and crash into another car.

A car occupied by some person who one day might have been destined to do

something very important … and now never will because he or she died in a

traffic accident. It’s all connected, Liam! You know that! You know that better

than anyone else!’ Maddy clenched her teeth. ‘Now we’ve got us a problem. So

then … what was her name?’

‘Jane. Jane Brookhill.’

‘And the other day … that was you checking whether she died, wasn’t it?’

Liam nodded. ‘And she did.’

Maddy sighed. ‘Right, well, there’s nothing here on the database right now that

we can check.’ She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. ‘You’re going to

have to go forward in time and find out if she did listen to you and duck out of

work. You’re going to have to go forward, track her down and find out if her

extended life has changed history in any discernible way.’

‘And if she survived … but she doesn’t change history at all …?’

‘It’s highly unlikely, Liam. Everything we do has some sort of an impact.’

‘But didn’t Foster say that history wants to go a certain way? That it can cope

with a little …’ He tried to find the right word ‘… a little meandering?’

‘Well, I guess that’s what you’re going to have to find out: how much

meandering exactly she’s caused as a result of surviving. If she has survived,

that is.’

‘Aye.’ He nodded. ‘All right.’ He took a shuffled step towards her. ‘I’m sorry,

Mads. I realize it was foolish, so it was.’

‘Recklessly, idiotically stupid is what it was. And, quite honestly, I’m inclined to

let you sort this out by yourself.’

‘Uh … I’m not so good on the computer side of things, Maddy.’

‘I know. Which is why I’m going to have to help you.’ She sucked on the lid of a

pen, deep in thought. ‘OK, we’ll have to drop, say, a dozen years forward. I

guess that’s enough time to start with. See if she’s going to make her mark on

the timeline … or not.’

‘You’re coming with me?’

‘Duh. Of course. You’re rubbish enough at dealing with the Internet in 2001.

God knows how you’d cope with it in 2013.’

7 March 2013, New York

The time window opened and dumped them in a deserted, trash-filled backstreet

just off Times Square. Familiar ground to them in terms of the general layout,

but in a million ways different from the Times Square of 2001. Gone was the

leering green face of an ogre for a movie called Shrek. Now it was replaced with

a giant poster for a movie called Oblivion. The streets seemed a little scruffier,

but just as vibrant. More of the billboards were animated screens rather than

posters. Maddy noted scraps of bill posters from an election last year: a hopeful

called Romney had lost to President Obama. And it seemed from scattered

warning notices that stormy weather some months ago had resulted in several

subway stations being flooded.

Sign of the times, noted Liam. Not too long from now they’d be starting to build

giant levees around Manhattan to buy the city a few more decades. Maddy

spotted an Internet cafe and told Liam to go grab a booth in McDonald’s across

the street. She said it wouldn’t take her too long to track down Jane Brookhill’s

details.

A couple of hours actually. She finally slumped down in the booth opposite

Liam and sucked a lukewarm vanilla shake through a straw. ‘Bleughh. You

might have got me a fresher frikkin’ milkshake.’

She had pages of print in her hand and spread them out on the table in front of

her. ‘I started by running her name through the database of 9/11 victims. It looks

like she believed you. It looks like she decided not to go to work that day.’

Liam smiled. ‘She did survive it, then.’

‘Yes. But I don’t know why you’re grinning like that. It’s not actually good news,

Liam. Because a couple of months afterwards it seems she went and did an

interview with a newspaper. Told some story about being visited by a guardian

angel from the future.’ Maddy looked at him sternly. ‘She even ended up

on Jerry Springer.’

‘Jerry …? What’s one of those?’

‘A TV show … Look, it doesn’t matter. Point is she went and blabbed.’ Maddy

picked through her notes. ‘The newspaper interview was syndicated to several

other papers. And the Springer show was aired on a number of networks. It

appears she also got paid a visit on a few occasions by Homeland Security

checking up on her story.’

‘Oh.’

Maddy looked up at him. ‘Yeah. Oh.’ She looked back at her notes. ‘It could

have been much worse. Luckily, it didn’t develop any further than that. She was

written off as an attention-seeker, a fraud. A one-week wonder. She got her

fifteen minutes of fame on daytime TV and then, it seems, obscurity.’

‘Then … isn’t it all right? Could we not just let the poor girl be?’

‘No.’ She picked up one of the pages from the table. ‘No one believed her.

Which is just fine. But that’s people now, in this time. Before it’s known that time

travel is a possibility. What about in thirty-one years when Waldstein shows the

world it’s totally possible?

‘Well, no one will remember her story in 2044 will they? That’s long and

forgotten.’

Maddy rolled her eyes. ‘You don’t get it, do you?’

‘What?’

‘Once on the Internet … always on the Internet. Miss Brookhill’s interview was

reported on various websites in 2001. And that stuff remains online forever,

Liam. It took me all of half an hour to pick up her trail,’ she said, waving the

sheaf of printouts. ‘And it’ll all still be there in 2044. The net’s a digital garbage

heap. No one tidies this stuff up. No one deletes old news stories or defunct web

pages or dead blogs. That crud just sits there forever.’

She looked at the printed cut-and-pasted text in front of her. ‘So, what if

somebody in the future decides to do a search on “time travel” and, say, “9/11

conspiracies”? Voilà! Somewhere in the search results Jane Brookhill’s name

will pop up. Hit that link and we get straight to a rather detailed account of …’

She scanned the page, found the passage she was looking for and read it

aloud. ‘… a young man with an Irish accent and an old-fashioned way about

him. He warned me about an hour before the first plane hit the north tower …

that exactly that thing was going to happen. Just like that. He even named the

flight number correctly …’

Again, another stern stare was aimed at him. ‘How much frikkin’ detail did you

go into with her?’

‘Not flight numbers, an’ all that! I just said that someone was going to destroy

them tall buildings with planes!’

‘Then perhaps she’s embellished the story. Or perhaps mis-remembered it. Or

maybe the journalist embellished it. Either way it doesn’t really matter. The point

is … our agency is meant to be secret, Liam. Top secret. Not carelessly

advertising its presence like this.’

Liam looked out of the window at the traffic outside. New York twelve years on

didn’t look hugely different to him apart from different movies and different

billboards – perhaps there were more people staring intently at their phones as

opposed to holding them to one ear, and stroking glowing screens instead of

tapping at little awkward keys.

‘Congratulations, genius,’ said Maddy. ‘She’s a problem. A problem you’ve got

to go back and correct.’

‘Go back and …?’

‘And don’t tell her to bunk off work. Yes?’

‘You’re asking me to make sure she dies, Maddy. You … you’re asking me to

kill her.’

‘No. Liam, you never killed her.’ Her voice softened. She could find an ounce of

compassion when it was needed. ‘You can’t let yourself think about it like that.

Nineteen religious fanatics killed her. Along with nearly three thousand other

people. Not you, Liam. Stupid, ignorant, crazy men who wanted to be martyrs.’

‘But … I’ll be as good as killing her if I just let her go to work on time, Maddy.’

He looked at her with eyes begging to be let off the hook. ‘Please, don’t ask me

to do this.’

‘I’m not asking, Liam. I’m telling. We can’t have a giveaway story like this out

there on the net. We have to remain totally off the radar. Totally.’

He shook his head. He knew he couldn’t do it. When it came to it, looking into

that girl’s bright eyes, so full of hope and excitement, goals, dreams, plans … he

knew he couldn’t let her hurry away to her job. To her death.

‘Maybe this’ll help,’ said Maddy. She passed Liam a sheet of paper with a

clipping from a newspaper printed on it. ‘I’m afraid it isn’t a happy-ever-after

story for her anyway, Liam.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s not a life anyone would want to live.’ She patted his arm gently and got up.

‘I’ll let you read it …’

11 September 2001, New York

‘Where is it … where exactly is this new job?’

Jane Brookhill grinned at him. So proud of herself. ‘McGuire Investments. In the

north tower. The view’s just incredible from up there!’

Liam smiled. Quite an effort to do that. Smile. ‘Well, that must be … something.’

She paused. Looked at him quizzically, noting the odd tone in his voice. ‘Oh,

but it is. You can see all of Manhattan from up there! It’s awesomely inspiring!’

He nodded slowly. Looked away. Fighting an urge to say something

… something to save her.

‘You OK there? Did I say something stupid? Or –’

‘No.’ Liam turned back to her and smiled again. ‘No. Not at all. I just

remembered …’

‘What?’

Liam forced himself to get up off his stool. ‘I have to … I have to be somewhere

shortly.’

Jane cocked her head uncertainly. ‘Oh, OK.’ She frowned, puzzled.

‘Didn’t you just invite me to sit down and join you for a coffee?’

‘I know. I did. I just … it’s just I remembered I have to be somewhere.’ He

shrugged and pressed out a hard-fought cavalier grin. ‘And you, Miss Brookhill,

have a wonderful new job to get along to.’

She nodded. Looked at her watch. ‘Yes, I suppose I better not be late. That

would look totally bad on a first day, wouldn’t it?’

‘Aye.’

She hopped off her stool and grabbed her cappuccino. ‘Well, thank you for the

coffee. That was so very gentlemanly of you.’

He nodded at that.

‘You know, Liam O’Connor, nobody has manners in New York any more. I

mean, really.’

He knew she was stalling, hovering. Liam could see there was a question

hesitating on her lips like someone waiting for a bus – just in case he didn’t ask

it. She looked like she was going to ask it instead.

‘I think you’ll be late,’ he said a little flatly. Dismissively. ‘You should just go.’

Jane Brookhill closed her mouth. No. It appeared there wasn’t going to be a

suggestion from this charming young man that perhaps they could meet for

coffee on another day when there might be a little more time for them to get to

know each other.

‘Right. OK.’ She nodded awkwardly. ‘Well, uhh … anyway, thanks again for the

…’ She brandished her paper coffee cup clumsily, sloshing a frothy drip over the

rim.

Liam watched her reach for the swing door of the diner. It bumped against her

arm as an old man pushed his way in off the street. She caught Liam’s eye one

last time and mouthed, Manners, huh?

He forced a smile and nodded, then watched her merge into the swift-moving

pavement traffic: one smartly dressed commuter among hundreds heading

south down towards Wall Street.

He pulled out the sheet of paper Maddy had given him and unfolded it to read

the obituary once again.

… was pronounced dead on arrival by paramedics. The thirty-year-old

apartment tenant, Jane Anne Brookhill, was known to have suffered several

severe periods of depression in the aftermath of 9/11, diagnosed as ‘survivor

guilt’ by her therapist, Dr Carver. She was also known to have been voluntarily

sectioned a number of times over the intervening years. Brookhill is best known

for having appeared on a number of daytime chat shows after she claimed to

have been forewarned on the morning of the attack by a miraculous ‘visitor from

the future’. She has no children and is survived by her older brother, Lawrence

Brookhill, and her mother …

His forehead rested against the steamy window. He wiped the glass and could

make out the top of Jane’s bobbing head in the crowd. She had the lively,

purposeful up-down stride of someone eager to travel faster than her legs could

carry her, eager to begin her day.

Liam could still have run out there, caught up with her and stopped her.

Perhaps on another loop-around Tuesday morning he might just do that.

Perhaps on another Tuesday morning he might find another way to delay her

going to work, a way that involved not telling her he was a time traveller,

perhaps telling her something else entirely.

I’ve just fallen in love with you. Say, could I buy you breakfast?

I’m from the FBI, ma’am. You need to come with me now. Explanations later,

ma’am.

Help! I’ve lost my five-year-old nephew. He was just standing here moments

ago.

Any one of them might work. Maybe not delay her for a whole hour, but for five

minutes. Perhaps enough of a delay that things might have worked out slightly

differently for her. That she might have caught an elevator down from the

eightieth floor in time, or have been distracted or delayed from entering that

doomed tower by some other random confluence of chance and event.

A million and one things that, spun out slightly differently, could have saved her.

Or maybe Foster was right: history does have a way it wants to go. History has

those people it requires to die at their proper appointed time and those it needs

to live to go and do whatever it is they’re meant to do.

He finally lost sight of her amid the crowd and knew that he probably wouldn’t

be coming back to Tommy’s any time soon. The temptation to meddle with

events, to save her, would be far too much for him. It was probably best he gave

this place a wide berth at this particular time on a Tuesday morning.

A wide berth indefinitely.

The window was now fogged again by his breath. He sat back and looked at

the fading oval of condensation for a moment. On impulse he finger-drew two

letters in it.

J. B.

His memorial to a young woman who, under different circumstances, he might

just have got to know a little bit better.

Text © Alex Scarrow 2013