He stepped out and stood in the middle of the yard, ears straining for any clue. Nothing. He ran down to the street at the front of the house, looking for vehicle lights. Again, nothing.
He ran frantically back into the house, up to the bedroom, to the safe. The door was hanging open.
He looked inside, desperately clawing among the documents kept there. All the keys to the Ma’rifat’ were gone.
A Martyr’s Love Song: The Making of
the Ma’rifat’
Three things led me to my death.
The first was the Mukhabarat.
Every month I received a videotape showing that my father was unharmed.
They sought demeaning things. To begin with, that I should pass on scientific information that I knew they had no chance of putting to good use, or to any use at all. Then, later, that I should try to build a network of spies in my community, seek to embroil and blackmail my colleagues with women, with alcohol, with drugs, with money.
I gave them the minimum I could to protect my father. Worthless scientific information they could have found in the academic journals. Titbits they could not possibly derive benefit from.
To honour my father and cleanse my soul, I returned to the study of the honourable traditions he and my grandfather had passed down to me, to the science of the Black Land, where ‘black’ is correctly understood to mean ‘wise’, to the alcumystrie that is neglected by the modern ways.
My Beloved, Katherine, gave me a precious gift around this time. It was a summary of lost knowledge, some of it written by the sages of my people, assembled by no less a personage than Sir Isaac Newton himself. To the layman, it would have meant nothing. It contained lists of chemical substances and laboratory procedures, times of day and night for prayer and reflection, astrological and mathematical symbols and scattered phrases in Latin.
But to one who recognized the alchemical significance of its contents, the full, undivided alcumystrie that was both our old tradition and the true subject of Newton’s inquiries, it contained elements of an awful mystery: the combined spiritual and physical procedures, shrouded in warnings and obfuscations, for making the most powerful substance on earth. It is a form of matter that resonates to psychic fields, and in turn warps them around it. It is a key component in building the device known as the Ma’rifat’. It is most commonly known as the Philosopher’s Stone.
I took Katherine’s gift as a token of love. Now I know differently. But at the time it was a demonstration of trust. I confess I took notes from it. Then I returned the copy to Katherine.
The second thing that led to my death was Katherine herself. She was the world to me, the world I wished to live in, the world I wished to create.
For her I ran impossible risks, and eventually I was unmasked. On the vey day I was to be extracted, I was arrested. There was torture, with electricity, with beatings. I did the only thing I could to survive. I negotiated. I was an American citizen. I could go undercover in America. Work in their laboratories. Anything.
They would not release my father. But they agreed to spare my life.
I was given training in overcoming security checks. Training in ceasing to be a good Muslim, so that, for the sake of my cover, I could allow myself to Westernize fully. My mother being American, my English being perfect, I found it easy. I enjoyed it. I stopped praying except in the private depths of my heart. I drank alcohol. I enjoyed several relations with women.
Eventually, the good people of Brookhaven took me in.
The third thing that led to my death was p/éé. The hatred of that attack rings in my soul still. I saw nothing in it but sin, however mighty the hubris of the country I had adopted as my own, and the hubris was great. But the blow struck deep, and partly achieved its aim: it made America become more like the nation its enemies said it was. More like the nation its enemies wanted it to be.
And then a miracle happened. I met Katherine again.
She was as beautiful as ever. Her mind was as first-rate as ever. And soon she made it clear she had strong feelings for me. I had always held back on commitments in my previous relationships with women, and would prefer to cut them off if I found them too emotionally taxing. But this time, with her, with my Beloved, it seemed God had smiled on me. I let myself fall. And fall I did, heavily.
After 9/11, President Bush spoke of Islam as a religion of peace, and this was welcome. For that is what Islam is.
But one day I was spat upon in the street in front of my Beloved. My assailant was an uneducated fool. I told him so, and we fought. She was upset. But without his honour a man is nothing.
Then the Mukhabarat came back again and demanded more. The information I was sending from America was poor, they said. My network was useless. I was told my father would be mistreated. I tried harder to give them nothing but I failed. I received a phone call in which a tape was played to me of my father suffering. I knew it was his voice. And so I gave them more. I was ashamed.
My Beloved was my oasis. But I suspected she too saw my people as ignorant, as incapable, as backward. I think she saw me as a noble exception. I became angrier, as I became more fearful for my father, and as the Mukhabarat pushed harder.
My Beloved asked me more and more difficult questions about the world situation. I felt she was probing me, testing me, questioning my loyalty.
My only solace was in the old traditions. I saw parallels with our work on the accelerator, connections, points of contact. For in smashing together tiny amounts of gold at massive energies and charting the subatomic particles that blinked in and out of existence as a result of the collisions, we were getting closer and closer to observing creation itself in action, matter condensing out of energy and vanishing again –just as in the old tradition, where the dance of energy and matter was the subject of our manipulations. The difference was that we did not need massive particle accelerators, for the crucible of our minds was sufficient. The old way worked with rare substances – the rarest of all was one called red gold, said to be unfindable in the modern age – that were subjected to mental as well as physical experimentation. The state of mind of the knowledge-seeker, his level of spiritual concentration and refinement, was as important as the state of his retorts and flasks and furnace. And the ultimate end-product, assiduously sought but rarely achieved, was not any magical substance in and of itself, but the transformation of the one who sought it into a creature of higher spiritual insight and attainment. It was an honourable path.
I befriended colleagues who were working on a substance they thought was new: metallic glass. I learned things from them, without sharing in return the wisdom of my forebears, for the fusion of glass with different metals was part of the old tradition, part of a path they had no idea they were treading: making the Philosopher’s Stone. For they took no account of their own psycho-spiritual states as they worked. In modern physics we do only half the necessary work, though even there the role of the observer in certain phenomena has been seen, since the early twentieth centuy, as an integral part of any description of what happens at the subatomic level. We are coming closer to once again seeing what the old sages knew: that consciousness and matter are intimately connected. I will never have the chance to work there, but I dreamed of carrying out experiments at the most powerful particle accelerator yet to be built: the Large Hadron Collider, set to begin operations in 200J at CERN, the European nuclear research centre on the French–Swiss border. Humanity will learn things from it that will revolutionize our view of the world, but which were known to the ancient sages all along. It may also teach us how to destroy it in the blink of an eye.
I organized a study class at the laboratory to talk about the great contributions of my civilization to the world. It was well received. They are kind and thoughtful people there.
Then one day my Beloved took me for a drive out in the countryside. At a secluded spot, we stopped, and a van with no windows came out of nowhere.
I was taken.
The last wor
ds I heard her say were: ‘He’s all yours. I’m done with him.’
5
Trial by Ether
New York, August 30, 2004
They met in a conference room near the top of 570 Lexington, several floors away from the sensitive eyes and ears of the newsroom, at nine o’clock sharp.
Robert, sleepless and agitated, sat on one side of the table with Scott from the legal department, John from DC and a lady he didn’t know from corporate human resources. In contrast to everyone else, he wore a battered sports jacket and no tie.
On Hencott, Inc.’s side were three lawyers of varying styles: avuncular-diplomatic (inhis fifties), prim-procedural (in her thirties) and zealous-intimidatory (in his twenties). Robert decided the favourite-uncle guy was the dangerous one.
John, looking like the cat that got the cream, kicked off the meeting. ‘Lady, gentlemen, welcome to GBN. You have made known to us your intention to institute legal proceedings against this house over alleged actions taken by GBN and/or one of its officers in the death of Lawrence Hencott, Chief Executive Officer of Hencott, Inc., in the early hours of Thursday, August 26. May I take this opportunity to extend our condolences for the loss of Mr Hencott.’
‘You may, thank you,’ said the older man.
Robert closed his eyes and visualized 570 Lex’s glorious architectural summit a few floors above them: lightning bolts pulsing from clenched fists, a riot of spikes like a crown of thorns, symbols of radio waves spitting and crackling out into the ether. Although he’d missed only two working days, he felt like a stranger to the cramped, petty confines of the offices and cubicles below.
‘You look… maladapted,’ had been John’s only words to him as they rode up in the elevator together.
He tuned back into the conversation to hear the younger Hencott man reading from the note Lawrence had left in the hotel room where he’d shot himself. ‘… what has happened is because of Robert Reckliss. I am only sorry I cannot tell him myself how much this has to do with him. Should anyone think me a coward for taking this action, let them reflect that sometimes it can be nobler to fall on one’s sword than to continue living in a world of unthinking, blind corruption. To the poisonous ego of Robert Reckliss I say vile, intense torture reveals impossibility of living. It even sounds like a headline. My love to Horace, who will see that my will is properly executed.’
‘Good heavens,’ said John. ‘Could we get a copy of that?’
‘Already done,’ said the woman lawyer. She handed round photocopies.
‘A disturbed state of mind,’ said Scott, shaking his head sadly.
‘No actual mention of GBN here, I see,’ John said, over half-moon reading glasses.
Lawrence’s words reverberated in Robert’s head.
‘To our mind, Mr Reckliss was not acting in a solely private capacity at the time of his unfortunate interactions with the late Mr Hencott,’ the avuncular Hencott lawyer said in a reasonable, measured tone. ‘Without prejudicing any recourse that might be contemplated with regard to Mr Reckliss as a private citizen – and I think all of us would agree you might want to consider retaining a lawyer to represent you in a personal capacity in this matter, Mr Reckliss – the involvement of GBN, throughone of its senior editors, and in its own capacity as publisher of maliciously harmful and inaccurate information, defamatory to Mr Hencott and prejudicial to the corporation he headed, is hardly in doubt.’
‘Malice?’ Scott interjected. ‘There’s no malice here, and you know it. That’s just noise and bluster. And don’t you dare come after Robert as an individual –’
John interrupted him with a wave of his hand. ‘Actually, do you have a lawyer, Robert?’
Robert looked blankly at John, then at the others around the table. Around each of them he could see a faint halo of grey-blue light. He tried to blink it away, but there was nothing wrong with his eyes. As he looked more closely, he realized with mounting excitement he was seeing faint patterns of energy swirling slowly around each of their heads. He gazed in amazement, a million miles away from the morning’s tawdry proceedings.
Vile, intense torture? He found it hard to imagine Lawrence Hencott having such a thin skin that he’d exaggerate so grossly what had happened. The man had possessed a hide like a rhino. And this wasn’t suicide. Adam had killed him, Horace said. Or forced him to die. Not Adam, but the forces that were slowly eating Adam away. Why? What had Lawrence known? What was his role? He had to get out of this office.
He saw everyone was staring at him.
He spoke slowly and firmly: ‘I… don’t… need… a… fucking… lawyer.’
A cell phone buzzed and crept a few millimetres along the polished table. The junior lawyer scooped it up, apologizing. He listened for a few seconds and passed it to his older male colleague, who, after a similarly short period, flushed a sudden, violent purple-red.
‘What? Say that again,’ he snarled. An agitated voice at the other end spoke in jagged bursts. He tried to interrupt several times and failed. Then, with a brisk motion, he snapped shut the cell phone and handed it back. He began forcing documents into his briefcase.
‘This meeting is over,’ he said. ‘I am to inform you that Hencott, Inc., will be taking no further action in the matter of the death of Lawrence Hencott, who, I believe, is being buried as we speak. I apologize for wasting your time, and I am to pass on to Mr Reckliss the warm greetings of the company’s new majority shareholder.’
John looked equal parts euphoric and aghast. ‘Who is that?’
‘Mr Horace Hencott, the deceased’s brother.’
The Hencott lawyers left.
They sat in stunned silence. Eventually, the woman from HR spoke. ‘I don’t think I’m needed here any more.’
John signalled to her to sit still. ‘Actually, there is still the question of our internal investigation. Over the last few days I’ve looked into Robert’s actions, and I have to say there may be grounds for internal disciplinary proceedings.’
Scott spoke up before Robert could react. ‘Are you crazy? What grounds?’
‘Negligence, dereliction of duty, poor judgement. We can’t have our interviewees topping themselves the next day! It’s already a joke on the Street.’
Robert stood up. ‘None of this matters,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back when I’m ready. I may be several days. Unless you do want me to get a lawyer? In which case I’ll be back when I’m ready and you’ll give me a big pot of money.’
John shouted at him as he opened the door: ‘You’re to say nothing about this to anyone, you hear? Nothing! I’m not joking!’
Robert looked him in the eye. ‘No gags, John.’
And with a smile in his heart he went down to the gorgeous aluminium-clad lobby and walked out into the street.
London, September 1990
Robert held the embossed invitation in his hand and laughed out loud.
You are invited to a one-time-only theatrical event. In the garden of the Club of St George, Whitefriars Cut, EC4. A reading of the play Newton’s Papers. 8 p.m. Black Tie.
He telephoned Adam Hale immediately.
Bothwere living in London at the time, Robert starting his seventh year at GBN, with solid stints in Paris and Madrid behind him. Adam had moved to London from Central America earlier in the year, ostensibly as chipper and sardonic as ever but in actual fact desperately short of money, haunted and alone. His ex-girlfriend Isabela, a poet and journalist, had been killed almost a year earlier. He had found her body by the side of the airport road in Santo Tomás, shot in the back of the head. She’d been the love of his life, and in his grief and loneliness Katherine had been his biggest prop and supporter. They’d become inseparable, and in a rush of mutual need had got married earlier in the year.
Adam was freelancing like a madman and travelling as much as he could. To help out, Robert was trying to get him a job at GBN, muchas Adam disliked institutions. Now that Saddam Hussein had gone into Kuwait, it seemed likely they’d be able to use him.
‘What the hell is this? You’re putting that damn play on?’
‘Rickles. How lovely to hear your voice.’
‘Did you finish it? When?’
‘It’s been something of a side project in the past few months. Between assignments, you know. Something to keep the heebie-jeebies at bay. Memories, and so on.’
‘That’s astonishing. Did you finish it on your own?’
‘Or collaborate with Katherine? It’s been a wonderful project for us both, actually. And now we can write it and sleep together, of course. How is Jacqueline, by the way?’
Robert and Jacqueline had been seeing each other for three years now, keeping apartments in Paris and London that allowed them to be together often. She was a childhood friend of Katherine, of impoverished French aristocratic background, working in PR. It was a monogamous, unmarried arrangement, childless so far.
‘She’s splendid, thank you. Is the invitation stag or can I bring her?’
‘Stag, I’m afraid, old man. Very limited seating.’
‘No problem.’
‘I was just shouting at someone at the Iraqi Embassy, actually, speaking of work.’ The workings of Adam’s mind were as much of a mystery as ever to Robert. ‘Unhelpful sods. Press accreditation for Baghdad? I might as well have been asking for the keys to Saddam’s private bathroom.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Not your fault. Is it? Shouldn’t think so.’
After all these years, Robert was still easily exasperated by Adam’s flippancy and non sequiturs. ‘What does Saddam’s bathroom have to do with Newton’s Papers?’
The Malice Box Page 25