Cry Darkness

by Hilary Bonner

  Jones looked at her in amazement. ‘Jesus Connie, I’m amazed. How did you have the presence of mind to do all that? You must have been terrified, groping your way along a dark tunnel, and after what you’d been through?’

  She shrugged. ‘I think I was beyond terror. The tunnel didn’t really worry me, though. Don’t forget I’m an old Princeton graduate myself, and I’d been involved in my share of student games in those tunnels. Races. Mock battles. I knew the tunnels like the back of my hand once upon a time. You never went down them then, Sandy?’

  Jones shook her head.

  ‘Not even for a dare?’

  Jones was momentarily puzzled. ‘No. Nobody ever dared me.’

  ‘That figures.’ Connie smiled at her. ‘Anyway, I guess I was operating on auto pilot.’

  ‘Some auto pilot,’ said Jones. ‘So Marion came to get you and brought you here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Marion had re-joined them, carrying a tray containing a cafetière of coffee, three mugs, and a plate of biscuits, which she put on the table.

  ‘I thought of Norman at once. I knew he’d let us stay at his place, and that he wouldn’t ask too many questions. He’s very resourceful too, a man of many parts is Norman.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Jones wryly.

  Marion passed her a mug of coffee, and then handed one to Connie. Jones was puzzled by the look that passed between them. She glanced towards Connie enquiringly.

  ‘Dom is one of the few people who have known about Marion and me for a long time,’ said Connie suddenly. ‘She’s my partner.’

  ‘Right.’ Jones realized she was allowing her surprise to show and tried, too late, to check it.

  ‘You seem a tad taken aback, Sandy. What is it? Can’t believe I’m a dyke or can’t believe that I have a partner of either sex?’

  Jones pulled a face.

  ‘You know me too well, Connie, just like you always did,’ she said. ‘I realized when I thought you’d died that I’d never known anything about you, really. About your life. I’m ashamed of myself, but, back in the day, I never even thought about you having a personal life. Away from RECAP.’

  Jones turned towards Marion, who still looked vaguely familiar.

  ‘And yet, I can’t help thinking I’ve maybe met you before, Marion,’ she said.

  The woman nodded.

  ‘Marion Jessop,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t think we ever met, but you may have seen me around with my husband …’

  Jessop. Of course. Mother of Thomas, the current dean of Princeton, and wife of Bernard, who had been Princeton’s dean when Jones had been there. Bernard Jessop, who had once privately advised Jones to have nothing more to do with RECAP if she wanted anything like the level of success in the academic world that she’d already seemed destined for.

  If this relationship dated back to Jones’s time in Princeton, then Marion would have been very much married to the dean of that most conservative of academic establishments. No wonder she and the others had not been allowed to know anything about it.

  ‘My goodness,’ Jones remarked lamely.

  Connie smiled almost apologetically at her.

  ‘Poor Sandy, you’ve had an awful lot of shocks haven’t you, old friend?’

  ‘Yes I have, rather.’

  Marion sat down next to Connie and another look passed between them. In just a glance it spoke volumes about their shared history, and left Jones in no doubt, somehow, that theirs was an abiding love.

  To her surprise Jones felt a fleeting stab of jealousy. She ignored it. She still had a lot of questions to ask, and could not allow herself to be diverted by the news of Connie and Marion’s relationship.

  ‘So were you also there yesterday morning, Marion?’ she asked.

  ‘Sort of. I drove Connie to Princeton from here. That’s my car you saw in the garage. I was parked just around the corner, waiting for her. I didn’t see what happened, but I heard the shots, of course, and the commotion when you fell and the police, or whatever they were, jumped on you. That was a bad bad moment. I thought it was Connie they’d got, at first. Then she came rushing out from behind those trees just outside the quad, badly shaken but OK, and told me about you. We decided that she shouldn’t take any more risks of being seen. I got her to take the car and said I’d try to find you, and follow you.

  ‘I went straight to the borough police station, found a secluded corner, and waited outside. You could have been taken elsewhere, but I chose the most obvious option and hoped for the best. It was a long wait but there was nothing else to do, and eventually I realized I’d got lucky when you came out. Then you got into a cop car, and I thought at first my luck had run out. I was on foot. I had no way of following you. But of course, Ed MacEntee was there, and he spoke to me as he was leaving. I asked him, as casually as I could, if I’d just spotted who I thought I had from so long ago. He told me, more or less, that you’d come to pay your respects, you’d had a misunderstanding with the police, and you were off to the station on your way back to New York.

  ‘I got a quick cab to the Junction and just managed to jump aboard the same train as you. I followed you to Soho House. Then Connie and I hatched the plot to get you here, and called in Norman to pick you up.’

  ‘I never noticed you at all,’ remarked Jones.

  ‘I think you had other things on your mind,’ said Marion. ‘Doubt you were noticing much.’

  ‘A pretty impressive piece of surveillance, none the less,’ Jones persisted.

  Marion smiled. Her eyes shone much the way Connie’s always had.

  ‘I actually got to ask a taxi driver to follow the cab in front,’ she said. ‘Extraordinary thing was, he didn’t bat an eyelid.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that meant he didn’t have to find his way anywhere, didn’t it?’ Jones remarked a touch acidly.

  Marion’s smile broadened.

  ‘Fair comment,’ she said.

  Jones thought for a second. ‘So you recognized me straight away then, by the lab, Connie? Even in the dark.’

  ‘Of course I did. There were lights all over the place, and you weren’t nearly as good at dodging them as you probably thought you were. How you weren’t seen at once by the police or whoever it was out there—’

  ‘Who did you think was out there, Connie?’ Jones interrupted. ‘Those guys didn’t look like normal state police to me. And they sure as hell didn’t behave like it either.’

  ‘God knows. Special forces? Since 9/11 we’ve had a thing called The Joint Terrorism Task Force, made up of Feds, secret services, police too, and all kinds of unmentionables, I should imagine. Maybe it was those boys. Anyway, I don’t think you’re cut out for surveillance work, Sandy. At one point you succeeded in positioning yourself in the full glare of an arc lamp. I couldn’t believe it. The armed-to-the-teeth alleged defenders of our liberty, however, managed to be all looking the other way. I was trying to get close enough to speak to you, then you did your startled rabbit act and fell over.’

  ‘Um. Not one of my finer moments, I must confess.’

  ‘Well, I somehow or other escaped unseen again, in spite of you. But I’m quite convinced that if it got out that I was still alive, I would be in grave danger again.’

  ‘You would? The New York Post splashed on a story this morning that the explosion was caused by a gas leak. Surely that would be one heck of a big fib?’

  ‘Goddamn it, Sandy. If what I believe is halfways right then there would have been an immediate cover-up operation, orchestrated at the highest level.’

  Connie gestured towards the assorted pile of newspapers on the table before them.

  ‘Have you seen the Post? They’ve got no confirmation from anyone. An anonymous FBI source, for Christ’s sake? Story’s been planted if you ask me. RECAP was deliberately blown up, Sandy. Someone put a bomb in the lab. Gas leak, my ass. We’d just had Health and Safety crawling over the place like nits. There was no gas leak. Trust me, somebody out there wanted to destroy
our project and get rid of me and Paul at the same time. Thing is they haven’t entirely succeeded, and the trump card we have is that they don’t know that.’

  ‘But why? I know RECAP has never been the most popular project in certain quarters, we’ve discussed that often enough. But to blow the place up? To deliberately kill and maim? Who on earth would do that?’

  ‘Now that, Dr Sandy Jones, is the million-dollar question.’

  ‘And you have no more idea than I do?’

  ‘I could speculate. There are plenty of candidates. But no, I haven’t a clue.’

  ‘OK, so we don’t know who. What about why?’

  ‘Ah, that’s a different one. I think I may know why.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Paul thought he’d cracked it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Paul told me he’d worked out a scientific formula which explained at last what lay behind our work at RECAP. Our REG results, in the lab, and the field tests. And internationally, of course. All the data we have so patiently correlated. The dice. The pinball. The meditation sessions. Every experiment we’ve ever conducted. Paul believed he had found his way to our journey’s end, or to the beginning of our journey’s end, anyway. He believed he’d discovered what the world has been looking for since the beginning of time. And you know what that is, Sandy, don’t you?’

  Jones could barely believe what she was hearing. But she certainly knew the answer to Connie’s question. And she understood at once the enormity of it.

  ‘The mystery of consciousness,’ she murmured, her voice only just above a whisper. ‘Paul believed he’d solved the mystery of consciousness?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘But that’s huge. Massive.’

  ‘Yes, massive.’

  Connie’s voice was flat.

  ‘Do you know exactly what Paul had found out? Do you have his formulae?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He didn’t share his discovery with you? But you two always worked together. You conducted your experiments together, shared your results, correlated your data together. That’s how you’ve always worked.’

  ‘Not this time. I knew he’d been using nanotechnology almost obsessively recently. He’d believed for some time that was how the next step forwards would be achieved.’

  Jones nodded. Nanotechnology. Atom-sized mechanics.

  ‘I remember that Paul was just introducing the concept of nanotechnology into RECAP in my day,’ she said. ‘RECAP and the GCP have always focused primarily on how mind power can change the physical, haven’t they? The level at which the mind can control and operate machines. And if you work in the area of nanotechnology everything is microscopic and any mental intention required is therefore much smaller. That’s the theory, anyway. Paul always said we needed to imagine a microscopic coffee pot, and how little physical effort would be required to induce it to pour.’

  Connie smiled.

  ‘But he didn’t go into any more detail with you?’ Jones persisted.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I wonder why not.’

  ‘He told me he wanted to dot every “i” and cross every “t”. Even before letting me see. He stumbled across it initially, you see, whatever it was …’

  Connie’s voice trailed off. Jones suspected she had momentarily moved away from the horrific events of the last couple of days. She’d gone to another place, a place of discovery, of inspired scientific exploration, a place where, to bastardize the words of Arthur C. Clarke, what seemed at first to be magic ultimately became explained as fact, and successive mysteries of the world were systematically explored and sometimes, just sometimes, revealed for what they really were.

  ‘Is that all Paul said?’ Jones asked.

  Connie seemed to almost physically shake herself back to the present.

  ‘Well, yes. I know he had long since come to the conclusion, as indeed had I, from the work we have done over the years, that the power of human consciousness is much greater than even we had thought initially, and that it is just waiting inside us to be properly developed. Our experiments with REGs all over the world have surely proved irrefutably that global consciousness does exist, that the human race is capable of at least a certain level of shared understanding between minds, not to mention shared communication. You came to believe in that too, Sandy, didn’t you? Even if you have been trying to deny it, or at least ignore it, for the last twenty years and more.’

  She paused. Sandy smiled wryly and nodded.

  ‘But it was the means of explaining it, the proof, the inarguable proof, that Paul claimed he had finally discovered,’ Connie continued.

  She sighed and took another cigarette from the packet on the table in front of her.

  ‘Paul’s thinking, and mine, of course, was that in the early twenty-first century we were working towards discovering something which would seem just as extraordinary, and indeed as shocking, as when it was learned at the dawn of the twentieth century that matter and energy were essentially the same. The laws of quantum physics. The step forwards that we were heading towards, was that mind and matter are also essentially the same.’

  ‘But you’ve always talked about it just as a remarkable journey, Connie,’ said Jones. ‘You’ve never thought you were even close to that end, have you?’

  ‘Well, not really. And, as you know, I’ve always been happy with just continuing the journey. Paul wanted an end result. He wanted to prove to the world that we weren’t all barmy at RECAP. Me? I accepted my barmy label long ago. Anyway, I’d noticed that Paul had been behaving differently for several weeks. Out of character. He seemed tense and wound-up all the time. Excited too. I kept pestering him. Finally he told me he believed he’d found the answer, that he was on the verge of explaining what consciousness is, and how it functions. But he asked me to be patient.’

  ‘Well, if you had such trouble getting him to share that much, it’s not very likely that he told anyone else, is it?’

  ‘I suppose not. Not before me, anyway. He was planning to go public, of course, in due course …’

  ‘So again, why would anyone deliberately sabotage the lab?’

  ‘Maybe somebody else did know. There are other ways of finding out things. Computers, the Internet, email contact, have led to the biggest leakages of information in the history of the world.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Jones paused to think for a few seconds. ‘This does seem far-fetched, Connie, I have to say that. But even if the news of Paul’s alleged discovery had fallen into the wrong hands, come to the attention of somebody powerful who also grasped the practical implications, I still don’t necessarily see the connection between that and RECAP being sabotaged. I mean, the lab was destroyed and everything in it. I can understand all sorts of powerful people wanting to get their hands on such a ground-breaking discovery, but not wanting to destroy it.’

  ‘Ah, but what if they’d managed to get hold of Paul’s data already? What if they just didn’t want anyone else to have the chance to study it and learn from it?’

  ‘Christ, Connie, you really are going into outlandish territory, you know?’

  ‘Sandy, Paul and I thought the lab had been broken into the night before the explosion.’

  ‘Oh my God. Presumably that’s on record then? I mean, you must have reported it to security, if not to the police.’

  ‘No. We weren’t sure. When we arrived in the morning we couldn’t unlock the door at first. Then something seemed to snap, and it opened. It turned out the lock was broken. Paul studied engineering as a young man. He was very good with anything mechanical, as you know. He built the first REG himself. He was convinced the lock had been tampered with. However, we checked out the lab and nothing seemed to be touched. Certainly nothing was missing. So we didn’t report it. We barely had time actually. We arrived about eight as usual and the bomb went off half an hour later. In any case, the powers that be have always thought us quite dotty enough without our reporting non-existent burglaries.’

  ‘
OK, so that’s when a bomb could have been planted. With a timer set for early the next morning, or perhaps radio activated.’

  ‘Indeed, yes.’

  ‘And you think that your computer system could have been hacked? Paul’s theory copied?’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t have been easy. The one thing we did have at RECAP was sophisticated user protection software, and everything was password protected. We’ve always been meticulous about that in order to be able to guarantee the integrity of our experiments. But I suppose some hot shot IT geek could have done it.’

  ‘Ummm.’

  ‘In any case, Sandy, don’t forget Paul’s reputation. He believed he’d made an extraordinary breakthrough, and he was a quite brilliant scientist. It’s possible that the wrong people simply found that out, and knew enough to want us stopped. It could all be that simple.’

  ‘Even without having possession of his paper?’

  ‘You know what I’ve always believed, Sandy. I believe the world is run by people who don’t want it changed. And nothing, absolutely nothing would change the world more than an explanation of global consciousness. Imagine the international importance of people from different nations being intrinsically linked, through the power of their consciousness and nothing more. For a start the control of national governments over their own people could shrink to insignificance.’

  Jones was thoughtful.

  ‘Paul used to liken the power of consciousness to having possession of an exotic spy satellite which is capable of miracles, like seeing through buildings. It doesn’t always work, but it works enough to be useful.’

  ‘More than useful,’ said Connie. ‘Powerful beyond our dreams.’