She hunkered down to wait. It was a lovely starlit night. And quiet. Several vehicles passed, two or three turning off the main drag into driveways and parking areas, just one pulling out. A woman strolled by walking a Labrador. That was all.
Then just before ten p.m. her patience was rewarded. Out stepped Ed, with Jasper on a lead. He turned right, walking away from Jones. She waited until he disappeared from sight after turning right at the next junction, then she started her engine and followed, drawing the car to a halt once she was alongside him, and opening the window.
‘Get in, please,’ she instructed.
‘What the fuck?’ said Ed.
‘Please, we need to talk. But not here. It’s possible you may be under surveillance. Please get in.’
For a moment she thought he was going to walk away. But he didn’t. He obediently climbed into the passenger seat, with Jasper jumping swiftly onto his lap.
Jones pulled away at once.
‘Where the fuck are we going?’ asked Ed.
‘Somewhere away from here, with no CCTV,’ replied Jones.
‘Why?’
‘I told you, we have to talk.’
‘Yes? So what is wrong with the telephone, may I ask? Followed by a normal house call perhaps?’
‘I just said. You may be under surveillance. Your phone could be bugged.’
‘Sandy, for Chrissake. What on earth makes you think anyone is likely to be following me?’
‘Look, I don’t think there’s much doubt that the RECAP lab was blown up, deliberately—’
‘You don’t think?’ Ed interrupted. ‘Since when were you any sort of forensics expert? You’ve been interviewed by the police, for a very good reason, and released, like any other suspects there may have been. You’ve seen the news reports, haven’t you? They say it’s a gas explosion.’
Jones spotted an unlit lay-by ahead and pulled in. She stopped the car and turned to face Ed.
‘No they don’t,’ she replied. ‘The New York Post said the explosion was caused by a gas leak, and the authorities have yet to confirm or deny it. But I don’t believe the blast was caused by gas, and, you know what, I don’t think you do, either. I think you’ve got the same gut instinct about this thing that I have.’
‘Do you really have any idea what I think about anything?’
‘I used to have.’
‘That was a very long time ago.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
Jones paused. She had to pick her words carefully. She mustn’t tell Ed that Connie was still alive. The pair of them and Marion had agreed that would be far too risky.
‘Look, I actually talked enough to Connie on the phone, when she called me a few days before the explosion, to realize how worried she was,’ Jones improvised. ‘She said that she thought the lab, and she and Paul in particular, were being targeted in some way.’
She told Ed then about the Internal Revenue checks, the speeding tickets, the threats to the financial future of RECAP, and all the other things Connie had related to her. Including the sudden and intrusive attentions of the state Health and Safety department.
While she was speaking she became aware of Ed’s attitude changing, just a little.
‘You didn’t know about any of that?’ she ventured.
‘No, I didn’t. Why didn’t you tell me the other night?’
‘You didn’t give me much chance,’ said Jones. She actually hadn’t known it all then, of course.
Ed didn’t respond.
‘What are you thinking?’ Jones ventured.
‘Look Sandy, it’s been no secret for years that half the academic establishment, what am I saying, more like ninety-nine per cent of the academic establishment, would like to have seen RECAP closed down,’ Ed said eventually. ‘That doesn’t mean that anyone was going to actually blow the place up, for God’s sake.’
‘No. But, and this is what I wanted to see you about, is it possible after all these years, all these series of experiments, that the RECAP team was on the brink of discovering something the establishment couldn’t cope with. Wanted to destroy?’
‘For God’s sake, Sandy. Conspiracy theories are one thing but—’
‘People have died, Ed,’ she interrupted. ‘Including those you and I loved …’
She was taking poetic licence there, knowing as she did that Connie was still alive. Ed was quickly on to her anyway.
‘People you and I loved? You’ve got a damned cheek, Sandy. You’ve barely been near any of us for more than two decades.’
‘I didn’t think you wanted me near,’ she said, keeping her voice calm. Ed’s comment was fair enough, after all.
‘Maybe not,’ he replied. ‘But they did. Paul and Connie. Particularly Connie.’
‘Yes, well perhaps what I’m trying to do here is honour a debt of love. I’m trying to repay something.’
He sighed. Short, sharp, impatient.
‘What do you want from me, Sandy?’
‘I want to find out if you know anything which could throw light on all of this …’
‘Don’t you think I would have told you straight away.’
Jones repeated Connie’s words.
‘You may have a piece of the jigsaw in your possession, and because it’s just one piece of many, not even realize it.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Look Ed, you and Paul were close, weren’t you?’
He turned away.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, Connie told me in our phone conversation that Paul had indicated that he’d made progress, real progress’ – she paused for dramatic effect – ‘that he may have brought all those years of work to a final conclusion.’
‘So?’ muttered Ed.
Jones did a double take.
‘You knew that?’ she queried.
‘Yes. That’s what he thought, anyway. He told me that much. He wasn’t sure though, he was still working on his theory, finalizing it, and that is why he didn’t want to go public, or even to tell me or Connie exactly what his findings were.’
So Connie had been right. Ed at least knew something – and quite probably more than anyone except Connie.
‘Did you believe him?’
He turned back to face her, but she couldn’t see his features, just the dark shape of him.
‘Did I believe Paul? Do you remember who you are talking about, Sandy? Of course I believed Paul. He was at the top of his field. Had been for decades. He didn’t make mistakes. Not in his work. And he didn’t make statements he couldn’t back up.’
Jones nodded. That was true enough. And it was pretty much the way the entire academic world, and anyone else who had knowledge of Paul Ruders, would regard the man.
‘But you’d no idea exactly what he’d discovered?’ she persisted.
‘He believed he may have found out why all the sometimes quite inexplicable data we had correlated over the years had occurred. Why REGs behaved the way they did, why the behaviour of machines, according to the results of detailed scientific experimentation, really could be affected and sometimes controlled by the power of the human mind.’
For a few seconds Ed sounded just like Connie: evangelical.
‘The secret of consciousness?’ Jones prompted.
‘Maybe. All those years of the GCP, had surely proved beyond any reasonable doubt, to anyone with a mind that wasn’t totally closed, that global consciousness does exist. And yes, Paul finally believed that he had discovered what it really is. How it works. I don’t know how you put that exactly, but …’
His voice tailed off.
‘But, if he’d succeeded, dammit, if he’d halfways succeeded, then in the early part of this millennium we would have the most important scientific discovery since the beginning of the last, since Einstein’s theory of relativity, and since the development of quantum physics,’ said Jones, paraphrasing the way Connie had explained it to her. ‘Maybe greater. I think greater, don’t you?’
‘Maybe.
’
Jones was aware that Ed was sitting very still.
‘And now we’ll never know,’ he said quietly. ‘Paul is dead. He won’t be able to tell us. He won’t be able to offer the world what could have been its greatest ever gift. And Connie, oh Connie …’
Ed seemed unable to finish what he was trying to say. Jones thought she could just see his shoulders begin to heave. She reached out a hand and touched his cheek.
‘Don’t be upset, dear Ed,’ she murmured.
Ed knocked her hand away at once.
‘Don’t be upset? You stupid woman. Don’t you realize my whole world has just exploded – literally? I’ve lost the only people left who really cared for me. Apart from my brother, I suppose …’
‘I’m sorry …’
‘You’re always sorry.’
‘I know.’
Ed was audibly sobbing now.
‘You know what, I’m not sure how much I care about RECAP any more. Connie is the greatest loss, the most awful loss to me. I loved her best. You see. From the beginning … After you …’
Jones hadn’t expected that. She hadn’t expected Ed to break down. She certainly hadn’t expected him to mention his feelings for her. She didn’t know quite what to do. His sobbing seemed out of control. Maybe he’d been holding it all in until now. Cautiously she reached out to him again. This time he did not pull away from her, instead moving closer and continuing to sob into her shoulder. It was heartbreaking. She couldn’t let it go on. She had to tell him. She just had to.
‘Ed listen, Connie’s alive,’ she blurted out. ‘She escaped.’
He stopped sobbing at once and immediately pulled away from her.
‘She’s a-alive?’ he stumbled. ‘Oh my God, she’s alive!’
She told him all of it then, everything that she had promised Connie and Marion she wouldn’t tell him or anyone else. And as she spoke she told herself that if she couldn’t trust Ed MacEntee, she couldn’t trust anyone.
When she had finished Ed had just one question.
‘When can I see her, when can I see Connie?’
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t supposed to tell you she’d survived. For your sake as well as hers. I’ll have to pick my moment to confess—’
‘You really think she’s still in danger, don’t you?’ Ed interrupted suddenly.
‘Yes. We all do. And we think if we had possession of Paul’s thesis we could put a stop to it all. Actually, Connie and I both hoped that he may even have given you a copy of his work, hard copy, USB memory stick, whatever …’
‘Why would he? He had all the normal backup. He would have kept copies himself, on different devices. He wasn’t expecting to be blown up, for Christ’s sake.’
‘I suppose you’re right.’ Jones paused. ‘Paul was a meticulous man. In his work, that is. Though you wouldn’t think it from the way he looked – nor the behaviour he allowed from his dogs.’
She smiled. She thought Ed might be smiling too, but she couldn’t see.
‘Thing is,’ Jones continued, ‘Connie saw the police take Paul’s home computer away. So they, the FBI, the CIA, people in government, any of those could well have a copy now of all his work.’
‘I doubt they’d understand it.’
‘Maybe not. But maybe they don’t need to understand. They just don’t want anybody else to. After all, to understand the meaning of consciousness, for people to be able to communicate in that way, would upset the status quo more than anything else discovered in the name of progress that you could possibly imagine.’
‘Isn’t that a bit fanciful, Sandy?’
‘Is it? Well, the whole concept of RECAP is fanciful, isn’t it. But do you really think it is likely to have been a coincidence that the RECAP lab exploded and Paul was killed just as he was on the brink of going public with a literally earth-shattering discovery?’
‘I don’t know.’
Jones took from her bag a piece of paper, on which she had written the number of her new burner phone, and handed it to Ed.
‘Look, call me tomorrow, on this phone, it’s safe,’ she said. ‘Or any time if you can think of anything that might help. We need to protect Connie as well as Paul’s thesis.’
‘OK,’ said Ed. ‘I certainly can’t think of anything right now. Oh, except … I do have a pal in the police. I could sound him out, if you like. He might at least tell me if the cops really believe the gas explosion theory.’
‘Well, that would be something.’
‘I’ll call you then.’
‘Good, but please don’t use your cell or your home line. Call from a pay phone, and not one too near your apartment, either. Or get yourself a pay-as-you-go. Promise?’
‘Are you sure all this subterfuge is really necessary, Sandy?’
‘I’m sure we shouldn’t take unnecessary risks.’
‘OK. OK. I promise,’ Ed replied.
Jones dropped him off where she had picked him up. Ed walked slowly home around the corner, allowing Jasper some more time for a sniff around and a wee or two.
The man sitting in a black sedan with tinted windows, parked across the street from Ed’s apartment building, watched their arrival. He’d seen them leave about thirty-five minutes previously, on what he knew to be their regular nightly walk. They had been a little longer than usual, but it was a beautiful night.
As Sandy Jones had hoped, the man had taken no notice of her in her commonplace saloon car.
Indeed, as soon as Ed and Jasper had disappeared around the corner he’d taken off down the road in the opposite direction heading for a nearby Mexican takeaway. He didn’t even see Jones pull out. This was not the first time he’d kept watch on Ed MacEntee, mainly to monitor any visitors he might have. And the man was already in the habit of fetching himself some supper during the habitual dog walk. After all, Ed couldn’t receive any visitors if he were out with the dog, could he, the man reasoned. He was perhaps not the cleverest or most diligent of surveillance personnel.
He kept an eye on Ed and Jasper until they’d entered the building, but was actually concentrating rather more on the beef and bean burrito with chilli sauce he had acquired.
Then his cell phone rang. He answered at once.
‘Of course, Mr Johnson,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it straight away.’
He took a final enormous bite of his spicy Mexican sandwich before reaching into the back of the car for an anorak which he pulled on over the black suit, white shirt and black tie he always wore. Glancing longingly at the juicy burrito, now abandoned on the passenger seat, he climbed out of the car, tugging up the hood of his anorak as he crossed the road.
Chilli and garlic sauce dribbled from the corners of his mouth down over his chin. He wiped the stuff away with the back of one hand, as he opened the white painted gate to the apartment block and made his way up the path to the front door.
TWELVE
It was well after midnight when Jones arrived back at Dom’s loft. She used the remote control Marion and Connie had given her to operate the doors of the garage. As she switched off the car engine the small door at the back opened and there stood Connie.
‘I thought you’d be in bed by now,’ said Jones.
‘You have to be joking,’ said Connie, as she led the way upstairs.
Marion was sitting on one of the big leather sofas. She gestured for Jones to sit next to her, and poured her a glass of wine from the bottle on the low table in front of them.
‘Right, Sandy, tell us all,’ commanded Connie, as she sat on the other sofa.
‘I’m afraid there’s not a great deal to tell,’ Jones began, nonetheless proceeding to give a fairly full account of her meeting with Ed, without dwelling too much on how upset the man had been. Neither did she mention her indiscretion regarding Connie, which she was already beginning to regret.
‘So unfortunately it seems Ed has little to offer, apart from the vague promise of approaching his police department chum,’ she concluded. ‘Paul had indeed tol
d him about his final thesis, and the remarkable conclusions he had drawn, but Ed certainly doesn’t have a copy of any of Paul’s work. I suppose it was always a long shot …’
Connie and Marion were clearly disappointed – as indeed Jones had been.
There seemed to be little more to say or do that night. The three women finished the open bottle of wine and then retired to bed. The sofa had already been made up for Jones, and her shoulder bag, collected from Soho House by Marion, as promised, stood on the floor alongside. Jones still felt jet lagged and tired, unusually so for her. She supposed stress probably had a lot to do with that. She climbed gratefully beneath the covers, and in spite of her abiding anxiety, fell asleep almost at once.
However, all too soon she was woken by the sound of a spirited rendition of the cancan. She opened her eyes, lying bewildered for just a moment, while struggling to remember where the heck she was and what the heck was going on. She felt as if she’d only been asleep for five minutes. Eventually she realized that the cancan music was the somewhat inappropriate ringing tone plumbed into her burner phone. She struggled onto an elbow, registering as she did so that daylight had arrived, and glanced at the clock on the wall. It was just after seven thirty a.m.
She picked up the phone and squinted at it, bleary eyed. She couldn’t even read the number which had appeared in the display panel. Was it safe to answer? Surely it had to be safe. Nobody could have traced the phone to her that quickly, if indeed they ever could. And only Ed had the number. It must be him calling. It was him.
‘Hi Sandy, how are you?’ he began.
‘Oh, never better,’ she responded ironically. ‘Not quite awake, actually …’
‘Sorry if I woke you. I just wanted to make sure you’d got back to New York OK, and to check that you and Connie were all right.’
Ed sounded cheery. Surprisingly cheery, Jones thought, considering the state he’d been in the previous evening.
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