There was another pause, mostly to give William the chance to show he was following. He showed more than that.
‘Junk DNA,’ he said.
Connors raised an eyebrow. That was more than most people knew. On the other hand, it probably wasn’t all that surprising, Sandberg read the right papers and kept up to date with the buzz from the science world. Or at least he used to, when he was still active.
‘Some people call it that,’ Connors confirmed. ‘Even if I’ve learned to prefer non-coding DNA.’
William gave him an enquiring look.
‘The truth,’ Connors said, ‘is that we’ve been wrong. Junk DNA isn’t junk after all.’
It took a moment for William to register what Connors had said. When he did, he found himself sitting up straighter in his chair. The conversation was going in a direction he hadn’t expected, and there was no way he could keep pretending he wasn’t interested.
‘This is obviously not something we shout about,’ Connors continued. ‘You won’t be reading it in the newspapers or in magazines or in scientific studies. But just under fifty years ago, a group of scientists managed to interpret the remaining ninety-eight per cent too.’
He stopped. Looked at William, waited until he could see that William had understood and was ready to receive the last, crucial piece of information.
But William was already there. Connors had given him all the pieces he needed, there was only one way to put them together, and the only thing stopping William now was the thought that this could not be. It was unbelievable – worse, impossible. For a moment he glanced at Connors, hoping against hope that he’d misunderstood.
He hadn’t.
William shook his head in disbelief, signalling to Connors that he must have come to the wrong conclusions and that Connors needed to help him get it right.
And Connors obliged. Carefully emphasising every syllable:
‘What the scientists discovered was that the human DNA is full of comment lines.’
Once, about ten years earlier, William Sandberg had found himself on board a plane that almost crashed.
For three minutes of eternity the military jet had spun out of control, plummeting at an increasing speed, engines whining and pens, newspapers and coffee mugs hanging motionlessly in the air, hurtling towards the ground. Together with himself.
Terror had intertwined with the dizzying sensation of weightlessness, every last one of his organs had lifted from its socket, and throughout it all his panicking brain kept telling him: Now, now it’s almost over, one more second and it stops, one more second and we’ll regain control and the feeling of firm floor below will return.
But for each time that thought occurred, he was confronted with the fact it didn’t happen. And his thoughts turned into an endless vortex of fear and terror, mixed with hopes for a relief that never came, and then double the terror when he realised that it was truly happening: This is now, we’re crashing and we’re not going to make it.
Three minutes.
Then he’d been pushed back into his seat as the plane righted itself, climbed again with its jets screaming in desperation as the pilot manoeuvred them up into the clouds once more. Outside the windows, red mountainsides whizzed by as a sign of how low they’d come and what an extremely close shave it had been.
Afterwards, he’d learned that they were seconds away from dying.
It took him weeks to be able to sleep again.
What stayed was the feeling of terror, and the constant spiral of hoping for a salvation that didn’t come.
The emotions that William experienced as he stood up from his chair in the parliament and ran out of the room were identical to his minutes in the crashing plane.
Thoughts and reactions followed each other in that same terrifying spiral, a numbing combination of detachedness and absolute reality, swinging back and forth between disbelief and pure panic.
He leapt through the futuristic steel corridors, rushed up the centuries-old stone stairs, out to the disarmingly beautiful view on the terrace, the nameless mountains around him and the lake that rippled below. He needed air, or so he thought; he needed to see sky, but that didn’t help either. He stood there, one moment perfectly still, catching his breath, trying to wrap his mind around what he’d heard. And the next moment he was racing along the banister, as if anything would change because he’d moved to a new location.
As if he could run away from what they’d told him.
Who.
That was the question that kept returning. Like a sweaty loop, always ending up in the same place. Like the nightmarish feeling of being about to wake up, not now, but soon, and every soon became now without anything changing, over and over until he couldn’t stand still. And he moved to the next spot, then to the next, gazing out into the distance in the desperate hope that somewhere out there was an answer.
Who.
He’d been standing like that for quite a while when he noticed he wasn’t alone.
Connors waited behind him, leaning against the heavy wooden doors, watching without saying a word. Again. What was it with that man and watching people?
He couldn’t tell how long Connors had been there. In fact, it was hard for William to determine how long he’d been there himself. He was wet with mist, or maybe it was sweat. Everything around him had become a blur, as if someone had kicked down the foundation to his entire worldview, and now it was lying in ruins.
‘I know,’ said Connors. He didn’t add how you feel, but that’s what he meant. ‘All I can say is that you get used to it.’
William stood silent. Rays of sunlight jutted at angles through the mountain peaks, a slow wind ruffled his hair and sought its way into the openings of his clothes, making his hairs stand on end in the chill.
But none of this penetrated William’s consciousness.
‘The codes we’re working with…?’ he began.
He couldn’t find the words to finish the sentence, but then again Connors didn’t need them. He answered carefully, almost like a teacher explaining to a student.
‘All the information you and Janine have been given has come from human DNA.’ He waited for William’s reaction. Already knowing what the next question would be.
‘And who put it there?’
Connors shook his head. Looked William in the eye.
‘That’s the question we’ve been asking ourselves for fifty years.’
PART 2
Plague
People used to tell me I should live in the now.
I always laughed at them.
Now is just a precursor to then.
That’s all it is and nothing more.
It’s a transient phase that will come to an end, one that there’s no reason to get attached to, because sooner or later that moment will pass anyway. And people can say whatever they want, but if you live in the now you’re this close to living in the past. And only fools do that.
I have always lived in the then.
I’ve eaten breakfast thinking about lunch, I’ve loved thinking about my next; I’ve sat in sunsets with a beer in my hand knowing that when darkness comes we’re going to have to go back to the house. Either that, or we run out of beer and then we’ll have to go back anyway. Or someone will start to feel cold and it’s always the same.
Sooner or later you always have to go back to the house.
So what’s the point of living in the now?
Then will always come. You might as well be ready for it.
And then one day I decided I didn’t want to be alive.
And the only thing I wanted was for then to come as quickly as possible.
Morning. Wednesday 26 November.
Today I’m not so sure.
Today I’m not sure there is a then.
Today, for the first time in my life, I wish I could live in the now.
17
In Connors’ life, the border between before and after was marked by an impenetrable, leaden grey rain.
/> He’d had an excruciatingly slow afternoon. He’d been struggling through endless reams of folded phone-tap printouts – conversations between people exchanging nothing secret whatsoever, recorded on to rolls of magnetic tape and transferred into writing by hammering secretary fingers at green computer screens – and outside the draughty window to his room daylight had come and gone without anybody noticing.
It was October and it was cold and the world was a dangerous place. Washington was run by an actor and Moscow by a KGB chief. And on the giant table in Connors’ office lay huge maps of London and England and the entire United Kingdom, ready to be covered in stiff sheets of transparent plastic to map out the hostile attacks that were always around the corner.
But it was neither politics nor weather that made the hours drag.
The afternoon was slow because Connors was waiting for the clock to strike six.
The memo in his pigeonhole that morning had been unusual, not extreme but unusual nonetheless. It was written on an electric typewriter, posted inside a brown standard envelope with his name on the outside, the edges of it still wrinkled after being fed through the typewriter cylinder.
But most of all, it didn’t have a stamp. And that could only mean one thing. The letter had reached him via the internal mail, perhaps even from inside his own building, even if that felt less likely given the size of the place. No matter how secret the letter was, it would have been far simpler for someone to simply walk into his room, lower their voice and speak to him directly. All the same, he was certain that it came from within the organisation.
Truth be told, that excited him. The building he worked in was unknown even to most of MI6, and an internal memo consisting of one single sentence was enough to create a sense of thrill and urgency, a feeling he no doubt had expected to encounter more often when he was recruited to his position just six months before. At last, there was something happening, and he wasn’t quite as spoiled with things happening around him as he would have wanted.
At four minutes to six he put on his coat.
He walked down the uneven, creaking staircase, out through the inconspicuous door and further down the street to the phone box outside the closed-down pub on the far side of Berkeley Square, entirely according to the instructions of the memo.
And there he stood. Waiting in the cold phone booth as drips of condensation slithered down the inside of the windows, drawing transparent stripes on the misty panes and racing the trickles of raindrops on the outside. The cold Bakelite handset in front of him. The damp slowly working its way up under his coat. The second hand on his watch plodding its way towards the hour. And past. Ten seconds past six. Twenty. Not a sound from the phone.
He started to feel uneasy. Had he misjudged the memo? Was it a trap, was he exposing himself? Someone could well have been watching him come out of the office, they could have stood in the dark without him seeing them, of course they could, and that bothered him. In fact, how could he be sure there wasn’t somebody looking at him from the other side of the square right now, taking his picture with a telephoto lens, perhaps even preparing to follow him as soon as he left? Or worse?
He didn’t have time to finish the thought before he sensed something moving outside.
He spun around. And stared right into a face on the other side of the glass.
The man outside the booth looked straight into Connors’ eyes, his voice inaudible, drowned out by the rain and the wind and the hum of the city seeping in through the gaps under the door. But from the movements of his mouth, there was no doubt the man was saying his name.
Connors nodded back. And the man with the weathered face opened the door. Gestured for Connors to step out into the cold autumn night.
It wasn’t at all what Connors had expected. He felt the uneasiness grow inside him, but he did as he was told, walked out into the evening chill, the rain falling in white streaks across the headlamps of the waiting diplomatic car. It was as if someone had drawn his life in charcoal, everything was dark and blurred at the edges, and he hurried through the downpour, the stranger one step behind, across the street and over to the pavement and into the damp warmth of the rear passenger seat.
The man sat down beside him and closed the door. Introduced himself as Franquin.
He signalled for the chauffeur to start the engine and they swung out into the evening traffic and from that moment nothing would ever be the same again.
Afterwards, Connors’ mind was in free fall for days.
What he’d heard couldn’t be true.
And yet it was.
Why him, he kept asking himself? Why should he have to know?
His everyday life had consisted of theoretical conversations about hypothetical scenarios, a reality that wasn’t his own, filtered through typewriters and telex machines. And even if he knew that somewhere on the outside there was a real world too, that somewhere beyond the wooden panelling and out-trays of the office his theoretical models were the reality for diplomats and defence staff and agents all around the globe, even if he knew that, he didn’t have to be there. He could watch it from afar, and that kept him sharp and rational; it allowed him to find solutions that weren’t affected by stress or rushes of adrenalin or the panic of what-the-hell-are-we-going-to-do.
And that was how he liked it. Connors was a theorist.
Even so, he’d found himself treated to an expensive dinner in a private room at the Ritz, of all places, with chandeliers and heavy curtains and wool carpets so thick that if he’d removed his shoes he wasn’t sure he’d find them again. And there he sat with a starched white napkin on his knee, a dead pheasant on his plate, and a strange man across the table. Speaking in a low voice and telling Connors things he couldn’t keep at a distance.
Messages. In human DNA.
At first all they’d found were patterns, Franquin told him, a recurring logic in a flow that should have been random, the same way you discover coded messages in a stream of noise. And this had triggered the alarm, which meant nobody was allowed to know outside the most trusted.
It had been at the height of the Cold War. A scientist had been the one to make the initial discovery, inside the body of what happened to be a deceased British ambassador. The immediate conclusion was that he’d discovered a way for enemy agents to send coded messages into England, and as outlandish as it seemed, it was entirely logical when they thought about it. What better way to get a message behind enemy lines than by hiding it in one of their own? What could be more secure than letting the enemy work as your unknowing carrier pigeon?
But it turned out that the guesses were wrong. The same sequences were found in other bodies. Bodies that didn’t belong to ambassadors or agents, that had no connection whatsoever to global politics or to warfare. In every single blood test, in every single human being they secretly analysed, in every new sample of human DNA the same code appeared.
And while experts worked around the clock to crack the code and understand what it meant, it became more and more obvious that wherever they looked, the code was there. Any Briton, any European, any living person on the entire planet – no, even inside those who were no longer living, from the recently deceased in hospital mortuaries to medical specimens in preserving jars retrieved from dusty university archives all over the world.
Whoever had put the message inside the human DNA did it a long time ago. So long that it had been spread and copied and passed on, generation after generation.
And the scientists had started working their way backwards, convinced that the incidence would fade the further back in time they went. That the code could be backtracked as it branched out through generations, narrowed down to the time and the place where it was initially planted inside the human genome. But the incidence didn’t fade.
No matter how far back they went, how many far-flung graveyards they visited, how many ancient crypts they entered and pyramids they excavated under the pretext of archaeological missions. The results were always the same.
As long as people had existed, so had the code.
And there was no explanation as to how it got there.
As Connors opened the door from the underground safe zone, breathed the stale air from the castle stairs as he had done every morning for almost thirty years, it was with a sense of sadness. Sadness at the time that had passed, and at the limited results they’d managed to achieve.
The big breakthroughs had been made before his time. They had cracked the codes. They’d interpreted them as cuneiform script. And then, they had translated the script, and realised what it meant and that the truth was worse than they’d imagined.
Desperately they’d searched for an answer.
They had called out into space but nobody had heard. Perhaps because they lacked the key to encode their signal, because what they sent out was in plaintext, with the ones as ones and the zeros as zeros. But what else was there to do when they didn’t know?
Or perhaps, space was the wrong place to turn.
But if it was, then what else was there?
He took a deep breath, tried to shake off the questions even though he knew they would bounce right back, again and again and always without answers. And that filled him with a greater sadness than ever.
Sadness that nothing had changed, that this was his life. What had become of it.
He shook his head, didn’t want to go down that route. He wasn’t yet sixty. He had at least twenty years left, hopefully thirty, with a bit of luck maybe even forty.
Chain of Events Page 16