The Eternal War Read Online Free PDF

too,’ she uttered.
    Maddy looked at the face in the painting … the famous painting every schoolkid in America knew by sight. No longer was there that gaunt face, the dark eyes hidden beneath a thunderously brooding brow and that distinctly Mennonite beard. Instead she could see a forgettable-looking balding and portly man with a salt and pepper moustache and a rosy bulbous nose. Beneath the painting was a plaque:

President John Bell 1861–65

    ‘Oh my God!’ she uttered. ‘Where’s President Lincoln?’

CHAPTER 7
    2001, New York

    They were back in the archway less than half an hour later, still huffing and puffing after the jog from Marcy Avenue subway station. Liam whimpering about his aching side. ‘I shouldn’t have rushed that muffin,’ he groaned pitifully to himself.
    On the screen in front of them, computer-Bob, their field-office system AI, was already spitting out the data pulled in from the external Internet feed.
    ‘He’s just vanished from history,’ said Sal.
    ‘Well, from civil-war history,’ Maddy replied as she skim-read the dossier being assembled, fact by fact, on the screen. ‘Nothing in there, nothing at all about him.’
    ‘This Lincoln fella was quite important, wasn’t he?’
    Maddy turned to Liam. ‘Only the most important figure in the war. The most freakin’ important. He held the Union together.’ She saw one of his eyebrows flicker upwards, a sign that he hadn’t a clue and was hoping she was going to elaborate. ‘C’mon, you’ve been reading up a lot recently, right? Hitting the history books.’ She glanced at a pile of books stacked high beside his bunk bed. ‘So, please, tell me you know which guys I’m talking about.’
    Liam frowned for a moment, then grinned. ‘The Northern fellas … them people in blue.’
    ‘Right. Yes. Abraham Lincoln was the president of –’ she sighed – ‘ them people in blue . Otherwise known as the North, the Union. The point was he kept them together, kept them fighting, led them to victory … but now he’s gone from civil-war history!’
    Sal chewed a fingernail absently. ‘That’s going to mean a big wave, then.’
    ‘Uh-huh … five minutes from now we could be looking out at a world in which the Confederates won.’ She glanced sideways at Liam. ‘ Them fellas in grey. ’
    Computer-Bob’s dialogue box appeared on screen.
    > Maddy, I have completed a scan of all the civil-war data retrieved and there are no references to Abraham Lincoln in this time period: 1861 to 1865.
    ‘Maybe he died,’ said Sal, ‘you know … before he should’ve?’
    ‘Hmmm … that’s a possibility. OK, then, computer-Bob, look earlier. Go earlier.’ She rubbed her eyes, already irritable and red from her cold, beneath her glasses. ‘We have data on him from our own internal historical database, right?’
    > Of course.
    ‘So when and where was he born?’
    > 12 February 1809. Hardin County, Kentucky.
    ‘Do we have a proper detailed biography? All his movements from childhood right up to becoming president?’
    > Yes, Maddy. I have detailed files.
    She had a pretty foggy high-school memory of Lincoln. They’d studied him and the civil war for a semester. Boring stuff some of the time, but it got interesting when the country started to pull itself apart over slavery and the war began.
    ‘He travelled around a bit if I remember correctly, right, Bob?’
    > Correct. His family moved several times. Then when he was a young adult he left home and –
    She waved her hand at the webcam to stop him. ‘Right, then. All right, OK, this is what we do.’ She pushed her glasses back up her nose. ‘I want you to search every external database from his birthdate onwards. I want you to focus your data-trawling on the places he was supposed to have lived in … Kentucky, wherever else he went. Dig into their newspaper archives, a lot of that old stuff is digitized.’
    ‘Hold on.’ Liam sat back in one of the office chairs, dug