‘That’s it. I mean, you wouldn’t believe the conversations I end up having. “Infallibility itself was not infallibly defined until Pius IX”: someone actually said that to me. The circular logic of it is like an Escher painting. I’ve never known whether to find it amusing or disturbing. But it isn’t that they’re not interested in the message, it’s that . . .’ He winces, struggling to find the words. ‘Well, take these kids here. They still go along to church, but for most of them, their engagement is at the level of obligation. They’re nice kids who want to do the right thing, and the right thing is going to mass, believing in God. They’re nice kids already - they’re not nice kids because of their faith. They don’t need this medium to get the message, and consequently as they grow up, the medium means less and less to them, in the same way as it means too much to the anoraks.’
‘But they were all raised in the Church,’ Heather argues. ‘Yours was the medium that gave them the message.’
‘Kane would call it an unnecessary level of complexity: the values exist and function in society independently, so there’s no need to bolt God on to them.’
‘But aren’t those values residual of our society’s Christian heritage?’
‘You could argue that, but you would only prove Kane’s point - the residue is the essence, and that which was insubstantial evaporates.’
‘If you believe that, why are you a priest?’
‘It’s not so much that I believe it as that I’m afraid it might be true.’
Heather recalls what Kane said last night: ‘He’s a priest because he wants to believe.’
‘Anyway,’ Blake asks, ‘why are you the one playing God’s advocate?’
‘I’m a Catholic,’ she answers.
‘But how much of one? I know you go to school masses, but you don’t take communion. I notice these things.’
‘What, do you take a mental register? I always feared Guthrie might do that, but I didn’t know you did.’
‘I don’t.’
‘You just keep a special lookout for me, then?’
He laughs, a little too quickly, like he’s trying to conceal his embarrassment. She thinks she caught a glimpse, though. She thinks what he didn’t say was:
(‘Something like that.’)
Before the moment can grow awkward, she returns to his question.
‘I’m playing God’s advocate because I’m one of those nice kids grown up. I wish my religion had turned out to be as beautiful and amazing as I once had faith it would. I had faith that the questions would be answered, contradictions resolved.’
‘Instead you got “blessed mysteries”.’
‘Instead I learned that priests weren’t offering answers, just ever more sophistry-laden techniques for avoiding the questions - or for getting you to stop asking them.’
‘And some surviving remnant of your faith sees me as the last hope? You want me to convince you?’
Heather doesn’t say anything. First among the things she doesn’t say is:
(‘Something like that.’)
The light is dimming, and to Kane’s mind the forest they are marching through is starting to seem more Evil Dead than Midsummer Night’s Dream. He’s guessing Sendak has taken them a circular route, as he doesn’t recognise anything and has no idea whether they are still miles from the FTOF or about to happen upon it around the next bend. He goes to check his watch then remembers it still said eleven o’clock the last time he checked.
Sendak looks just a little concerned. He rubs at his scar, that long line like a sideways question mark with the curve cupping his ear and the tail going around the back of his head. You can hardly see it in most light, so the majority of the time you wouldn’t even notice it was there, but Sendak has been absently tracing his fingers along it since lunch. Kane wonders if it’s one of those injuries that plays up under certain atmospheric conditions, and really hopes it isn’t one that plays up under certain psychological conditions.
‘War wound?’ he asks.
Sendak looks at him quizzically, confirming how unconscious the rubbing was.
‘Oh,’ he says, realising. ‘Kind of. Finished my career, but it ain’t no war wound. An accident on the . . .’ Sendak touches the scar again, an action clearly triggered by the memory. ‘. . . base where I was posted. I was the lucky one. Two of my men got killed.’
‘Shit. That’s awful. What happened?’
‘I can’t talk about it.’
‘I’m sorry. I understand.’
‘No, I mean I can’t talk about it, like, for legal reasons. As in highly classified.’
‘One of those “you could tell me but you’d have to kill me” deals?’
Sendak smiles, but there’s a micro-delay before he does so, as though it takes that time for him to decide consciously that a smile is the expected response.
‘That’s it,’ he says. ‘It was in another life,’ he adds soberly. ‘A parallel universe.’
‘So how did you end up here?’
‘Took a long vacation after I was discharged. Liked what I found here. Worked out a way to make it permanent.’
Sendak’s tone is slightly detached, just a little less natural than during their previous conversations. Could be simply that it sounds rehearsed because he must have been asked the same question a thousand times, but Kane wonders if it’s just the paranoia induced by these darkening skies that is giving him the suspicion he’s being lied to.
Sendak checks his watch, doesn’t like what he sees.
‘What time you got?’ he asks.
‘Bang on eleven,’ Kane replies without looking. ‘Watch must have stopped this morning.’
‘Mine too. Eleven hundred hours dead. Got to be closer to sixteen.’
Kane calls back to Gillian, who is walking with Julie about ten yards behind.
‘Gillian, you got the time?’
‘You got the money?’ she replies, prompting laughter from Julie, sufficiently disproportionate as to indicate quality sucking-up.
‘Gillian,’ Kane warns.
She looks at her wrist.
‘It’s . . . sorry, watch must have stopped, sir.’
‘Stopped when?’ Sendak demands.
Gillian appears a little affronted by Sendak’s sudden sternness.
‘Eleven,’ she informs him, before looking at Julie as if to ask: ‘What’s got up his arse?’
‘Fourth time this has happened out here,’ Sendak says, irritated. Irritated is good, Kane thinks, trying to assess his level of concern.
Sendak then stops and takes out his compass, which Kane finds altogether less reassuring. ‘And look at this,’ he says.
He shows Kane the dial.
‘What am I looking for?’ Kane asks by way of admitting he doesn’t know one end of a compass from the other.
‘The needle is pointing north.’
‘Why is that bad?’
‘Because that’s due south. This has happened before too, except the needle usually just goes haywire. This time it’s completely flipped its polarity.’
‘Could we be on top of some underground power lines?’
Sendak gives a small shake of the head, looking away. Kane finds himself returning to the notion that there is something he is not being entirely truthful about.
Conscious of the approach of the permanently earwigging Gillian and Julie, Kane asks quietly: ‘We’re not . . . lost, or anything?’
‘No. This is the same route I take everybody. We’re less than a mile out, and I could find my way back from here blindfold. But something don’t feel right. Let’s pick up the pace, get everybody home.’
Sendak turns to address the whole group.
‘Okay, people,’ he booms out. ‘This ain’t no country stroll. Let’s move like we got a party to get to.’
XVII
Merrick’s ears have stopped ringing but there’s still blood on the tissue each time he dabs either of them. Everyone he sees walking past has smears of it at least, and in some ca
sualties it is still running profusely as they are helped to first aid stations. He had intended to go and get checked out himself when he thought he was the only one afflicted, but it’s clear that it passed through the entire place like a shockwave, its epicentre in the Cathedral.
He was in the Beta labs when it happened. The ever-present throbbing, cyclical pulse had softened, its dwindling intensity like beating a tattoo of retreat. He knew the machine was in its final cycle before the shutdown process, and though it still had hours to run, he speculated that this indicated the onset of some advance procedure, perhaps the running-down of an auxiliary system. Quieter and quieter it faded, then there was a stillness he hadn’t heard in this place in months. Despite his turmoil over the project being suspended, he could feel a big part of himself breathe out in that small moment of calm silence: the resolution of a conflict being over, even if he knew his own battle was just about to begin.
Then it was as if he was punched simultaneously on both sides of his head, while an enormous, massively amplified version of those infernal static pings ripped through the lab, shattering the glass on several monitors and instantly burning out the screens of the unshielded ones. His ears started bleeding and his legs gave way amidst a failure of balance and the onset of dizziness as extreme as though he’d been spun inside a jet engine. He cracked a flailing arm against a glass shelf as he fell, sending beakers and test tubes hurtling to the floor where they smashed and splattered their contents.
He sat slumped on the floor, too dizzy to move out of the way of the seeping fluids, expecting an alert to sound. He heard nothing. Absolutely nothing, beyond the ringing in his ears. For a moment he thought this was because his hearing had been damaged, but after a minute or so, as the ringing and the dizziness receded, it became apparent that there really was silence.
Then the pulsing returned, building up again as incrementally as it had faded, and some kind of equilibrium was restored. It was as though they were all waiting for this signal, this sound to reanimate them. In the silence there was fear, there was unknowing: had something gone wrong with the machine? But upon its resumption, in labs, in chambers, in tunnels and corridors, despite shock and a few injuries, everyone quickly resumed their duties, perhaps with even more alacrity - if that were possible.
The process is well underway, even before the anomaly itself has been closed: the systematic eradication of all tangible traces that this operation ever happened. The soldiers can’t wait for this to be over, but they’re not going to let their eagerness spill into impatience. They are being fastidiously methodical, albeit with demob-happy enthusiasm. Thus anything that obstructs their progress will be harshly dealt with. All samples, all data, all files have been inventoried and will have to be accounted for, down to even the last fragment of the last test tube lying smashed on the laboratory floor. As Steinmeyer predicted, nothing will be permitted to leak from this place but memories, and even those might be cleansed. According to Lucius, there was a contingency in place whereby all but the highest-ranking soldiers would be told they had been unknowingly subject to a drug experiment, and left with the reassuring belief that nothing they saw here was real.
And where is Steinmeyer? He hasn’t seen him in hours. Merrick harboured a growing concern that he was planning to do something reckless, and would confess that it was the first thought that came into his head when that wave went through the place, but then when the pulsing resumed, the thought evaporated. Perhaps, like Merrick, Steinmeyer is inconspicuously going about his own salvage project, his own means of ensuring that his work here is not lost, and maybe whatever just happened to the machine was part of it, a means of distraction.
Merrick’s plan, in the initial phase at least, is considerably more low-tech. He’s watching the corridor, both through the window on the door and via the CCTV monitor suspended on the laboratory wall, waiting for someone to come or go from The Little Vatican. There’s been plenty of traffic through the corridor, especially after the wave, but no movement in or out of the former Alpha labs’ card-locked door.
But now, finally, he sees what might be his chance. There’s two soldiers coming down the passage. He recognises them as Harper and Velasquez. They’re kitted out in full body armour, side arms holstered on their hips. They only get suited and booted like that down here when they’re dealing with the specimens, and from the grim expressions on their faces, he suspects he knows what task this particular detail has been charged with.
Merrick goes to the door as they reach the entrance opposite. He’s expecting to see them press the intercom and request entry, but one of them goes straight for the key-swipe. They have their own auth code. It’s definitely what he thinks.
Merrick grabs an aluminium measuring rod with his right hand and grips the handle of the door with his left. The card swiped, they push open the door to the Alpha labs and proceed inside. Merrick waits for the second of the soldiers to enter, then briskly strides across the passage, sliding the rod between the door and its frame before it swings fully closed.
A few seconds is enough for the soldiers to clear the anteroom and enter the lobby, where they will present themselves to whoever is minding the store. Merrick nudges the door open slightly and listens out for voices: his green light to step just inside, out of sight.
‘. . . been instructed to inform you that all Vatican jurisdiction over any aspect of this facility is hereby dissolved,’ says Harper.
‘Dissolved?’
‘This is coming from the top. You are to cooperate in the surrender of all materials pertaining to any aspect of the work you carried out here,’ adds Velasquez.
‘But this work was carried out under the auspices of the Holy See. That it took place in your facility is immaterial. All documents and samples stored herein are now the possessions of the Vatican.’
‘Not any more. When I said it came from the top, I didn’t just mean our top. Cardinal Tullian has already signed off on this order, as you can see from the document. When you leave this place, it will be with only the clothes you walked in wearing. But first, you are required to escort us to the containment pods.’
Merrick hears them exit: sounds like two priests as well as the soldiers. After the door closes, he waits another few seconds, listening out for any further activity in the lobby. There’s none. He moves rapidly to the front desk, where the main admin computer has been left logged on. There are noises coming from adjacent rooms: someone could walk in here any second, so he knows he’ll have to be quick. He pulls a keycard blank from his pocket and slides it into the mag-writer slot, then issues himself a new pass.
Another fraught thirty seconds’ work tells him where he’ll find what he’s looking for: The Little Vatican’s video files of the experiments, as well as CCTV footage of the containment area. Like his own documents, they will have been scrupulously inventoried and the file tags cross-matched. He can’t afford to have his own files show up back in the outside world, but if it looks like someone from the Vatican made the leak, then it becomes a different story. They also have a highly plausible motive for smuggling footage out of here: putting the fear of God back into the world - or at least the fear of Hell.
As he suspected, the files are not accessible remotely. He’ll have to get them direct from the servers in the Alpha labs’ AV room. He lifts the newly encoded keycard from the slot: he’ll need it to exit the lobby and venture deeper into forbidden territory. But first he opens a wall-mounted cabinet and grabs one of their yellow suits, by way of disguise. Then, before proceeding any further, he retreats to the main door and retrieves the rod, which he had left there as insurance. The doors in this place didn’t open from the inside without authorisation either, in order to trap anybody performing precisely the kind of tailgating stunt he just pulled.
He’s in sight of the AV room when a priest emerges from a door off the same corridor, carrying a folder full of papers. Merrick gives him a cursory nod as they pass, and it takes all of his willpower to deny himself the
reassurance of a look back to make sure the priest is continuing on his way.
By the time he reaches the door of the AV room, he fears he’s going to be sick from nerves inside the suit. He staggers against the door and it falls open, card-swipe not required.
Merrick pushes the door closed again and takes a moment to steady himself. It was one thing sneaking into the TLV lobby, but as that priest passed him, it hit home that if he’s stopped and caught now, he’s going to jail. And if this is how he feels about walking past one priest, how is he going to cope when it comes to smuggling data past the military?
He asks himself how committed he really is to the noble goal of science. Committed enough to carry out the things he did in this place; committed enough to be complicit in the acts that took place in the test chamber. The compromises he has made, the resurrectionist’s Faustian pact he entered into to steal that crucial glimpse: all of these become merely craven excuses for self-seeking amorality if he’s not prepared to make a sacrifice of himself.
He takes a seat before the bank of monitors and plugs a USB- cable into one of the servers. Flash memory is so compact these days that he could leave this place ‘with only the clothes he walked in wearing’, yet have hundreds of gigs’ worth of files secreted about him. Scary as that final walk would be, the real issue would be traceability, and he has that covered.
There’s a lot of files. He can’t take them all, but he only needs a sample: enough to prove what really happened here, and in particular his paradigm-shattering discoveries regarding holy water: again, another plausible motive for the Vatican to have made the leak.
He scans through the lists, finds the corresponding dates, and begins copying the files to his compact media player, a device that would normally be known as an iPhone in the outside world, where it might be permitted to connect to a comms network. As he waits for the data to transfer, he glances at the monitors, his eyes drawn by movement on one of the screens. It’s the soldiers and their Vatican escorts: they’ve reached the containment area, the priests having donned radiation suits en route. Merrick moves to a second keyboard and toggles through the CCTV controls, pulling up images from the expanded brig on all of the screens and fading in the sound.
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