‘Your job was to tell them what it said?’
Janine nodded. But with a reservation. A yes leading to a no.
‘That’s what I thought. At first.’
William waited for her to continue.
‘They did their best to make sure I didn’t understand the exact nature of my task. The texts they gave me were fragments of something bigger. I got them out of sequence, a few passages at a time, new pieces at irregular intervals – without ever getting to know how they fitted together. Some of them weren’t even genuine.’
The word puzzled him. ‘Genuine?’
‘They were fakes.’ She gave a shrug. ‘I’ve been working with this long enough to know if someone is writing in a language they don’t fully command. It isn’t any stranger than to hear a foreign accent. You’re from Sweden. Franquin is from Belgium, Connors is British. And some of those passages they gave me were written by someone who’s alive today.’
‘A temporal Professor Higgins,’ William said with a smile.
She frowned. Didn’t get the reference. And he shook his head, never mind, go on.
‘I confronted them.’
‘And what happened?’
‘From that moment, they changed my tasks. They started to give me phrases in English. Expressions and idioms – some of it pure nonsense. Telling me to translate them in the other direction. Into Sumerian cuneiform. As if that was what they needed me for all along. To learn the dialect, to imitate it…’
No, she told herself. That was speculation. And she changed tack.
‘Anyway, most of the texts I got were rubbish. But then there was… Some of it said exactly the same thing as the texts I’d picked out as fakes.’
William immediately grasped what she was saying.
‘As if somebody had already tried to translate it,’ he said. ‘But the result hadn’t been good enough.’
Janine was taken aback. That had been her thought too, but she was surprised at how quickly he had come to that conclusion.
He saw her reaction, explained himself: ‘I’m in the same situation. My job is to find a cipher key. Because the person who tried before me didn’t succeed.’
Her turn to be one step behind. ‘Didn’t succeed with what?’ she asked.
‘With writing an answer.’
She stared at him. ‘An answer to what?’
He said nothing for a moment. The truth was he didn’t know. And that annoyed him, because even if everything seemed to fit, at the same time it didn’t fit. How would they be answering a text that was found in their DNA? How do you answer a message if you don’t know who wrote it?
There had to be more to this than they were telling him. Every new question he asked himself only reinforced his conviction that the version he’d been given was incomplete.
‘AGCT,’ he said again. ‘Tell me what you know.’
‘I don’t know any more than what Helena Watkins told me. Strike that: what I gathered from what she said. That the Sumerian texts were embedded in some genetic code, and that somewhere there is a virus, which —’
She stopped mid-sentence. She couldn’t decide what marked the end of her actual knowledge and what was mere guesswork. When she started talking again she did it slowly, choosing her words carefully as if evaluating them one by one before saying them loud.
‘— which is incredibly contagious, and which is going to be used… for what? I can only guess.’
The unease in her eyes as she spoke surprised him.
‘I don’t even know who we’re working for. Are we helping them to do good? Or the opposite?’
Surprised him, because he had assumed she knew more.
But the truth was she knew as little as he had known himself until the previous evening. And as that fact dawned on him he realised that his next task would be to tell her the things Connors had told him. It would be down to him to tear her world apart and leave her with an endless series of large and unfathomable questions that he wouldn’t be able to answer, the same questions that had been reverberating within him, keeping him awake most of the night.
That was to be his task. And he had to do it now.
He looked her in the eyes, lowered his voice.
And then he apologised for what he was about to tell her.
Janine received the news with considerably more composure than he had. She sat in her pew, her eyes fixed on his, almost letting him read her thoughts, as if he could see them being shunted around and rearranged like crates in a warehouse. And he saw how she waited for them to settle, how she fought against shock and panic and the gamut of emotions William had experienced the night before.
Every now and then she asked a question. Some he could answer, some he couldn’t.
‘That’s everything I know,’ he said. ‘And the best bit? I don’t even know if it’s true. All I can say is that this is what they’ve told me, and on one hand it kind of makes sense, but on the other…’
He finished his sentence with a shrug.
On the other, there was something missing.
And they lapsed into silence, minutes melting into one another.
When she eventually spoke, Janine’s voice was calm. Verging on formal.
‘Helena Watkins’ wall,’ she said. ‘Do you know where it is?’
‘I suppose that’d be my wall now.’
She looked him in the eye.
‘I need to see it.’
21
There was something about the car parked outside his apartment building that made Albert van Dijk stop on the other side of the street.
He could barely keep his eyes open. His body craved food and sleep, and all he wanted was to get home as soon as possible.
And yet, he’d noticed the car.
Perhaps it was because it was parked a few metres from his door. It was a non-parking zone, as he knew to his cost: the day he moved in, his rental van had been ticketed there, and that very moment he’d resolved never to buy a car as long as he lived and worked in the city.
Perhaps that was the reason it had caught his attention.
Or perhaps it was because the car looked the way it did.
A black Audi. Who in his building would drive a black Audi, or even be visited by one, a visit so pressing that the driver had stopped right outside the door where there was nothing but pavement and a bicycle lane, despite there being plenty of legal parking around the corner?
Albert van Dijk hesitated. The pedestrian crossing light had turned green and around him people began to cross in both directions, a muddle of heads that alternately blocked and revealed the Audi outside his door. Instead of crossing, he stayed where he was. Let the light return to red.
He pulled out his phone, pretending to read his text messages and to look around him for a sign with a street name, as if he didn’t have the slightest idea where he was and as if there was nothing odd about remaining there as a second wave of traffic came to a halt and more pedestrians began to cross the road.
Oh, he seemed to be thinking as he peered at the building behind him: Korte Marnixstraat. I see. Number two.
He played his little charade to himself, and all the while his eyes kept scanning the area for anything else that felt out of place. There was nothing remarkable about the car itself; it was large, possibly a diplomatic vehicle, but it didn’t have government plates and the windows weren’t tinted.
What did strike him as odd, though, was how it had one wheel up on the pavement, carelessly and clumsily squeezed against the kerb as if it had been parked in a hurry. Who would be in that much of a rush that they couldn’t drive to the next street and stop in a legal parking bay? At eleven in the morning?
The crossing was busy with people again, and Albert hoped silently that he wouldn’t run in to one of his neighbours. Worst-case scenario, they’d assume he’d finally lost it completely, and they’d talk slowly to him the way people did when dealing with lunatics. ‘That’s where you live, sir, see? The big house over there, the one with the white windows? Let�
��s you and me get ourselves safely over the street now.’
But nobody stopped, nobody offered to help him across, and he was just telling himself to stop overreacting and cross the road, when he noticed the four men.
One of them was waiting behind the glass door to his building. Another one was loitering beside the drainpipe where his building adjoined the next, leaning against the dark brickwork with a mobile phone in his hand. And two more men were waiting on the street corners where one block ended and new streets headed off into the maze of streets and canals. As if to stop someone from getting away, he thought. Someone. Him?
All four men were dressed in ties, suits and coats that were too thin for the weather, at least if they were planning on hanging about outside all day. They were middle-aged, or at any rate older than him, but that was about all he could tell. He couldn’t make out their faces at this distance, and he didn’t want to stare at them in case they sensed that they were being watched and spotted him there.
But once he’d noticed them, there was no doubt about it. All four of them were as busy pretending to do nothing as he was himself, and their nonchalant expressions were as alert and attentive as his own.
He told himself he was being paranoid; what reason could anyone have for following him? The thought embarrassed him, but even so, he couldn’t shake it.
He turned, compared the street sign with a text message that didn’t exist, acted out a suitably understated gesture of what the hell, and started off back down the street as if clumsy me he’d gone too far in the wrong direction. He was simply a man looking for an address he didn’t know how to find. That was it. And if the four men on the other side of the street had registered him, they’d no doubt dismissed him already and were standing there waiting for the right guy to come along.
Or, so he thought.
He’d walked just a few paces when he heard the steps beside him.
‘Albert van Dijk?’ said a voice. Suit. Tie. Number five.
Of course they would be watching this side of the street, too.
‘Do I know you?’ Albert asked, mentally kicking himself. If he hadn’t been Albert van Dijk he most probably would have said no.
‘We have a couple of questions,’ said the man.
‘Be my guest,’ said Albert.
The man shook his head. ‘We have a car waiting.’
When Janine stepped past William into his office, it felt like unveiling a work of art for the first time.
Not that she ever had, but the feeling, she thought, the feeling had to be the same. The feeling of having stared at a piece of cloth, draped over something and following the contours of the sculpture or the monument or whatever it was hiding, an indistinct hint that there was something there but that you couldn’t tell what it looked like.
And now the cloth had been lifted.
And for the first time she saw it in its entirety.
On one wall were the ciphers. They were as unintelligible to her now as when they’d danced around on the walls of the huge room seven months before, that first time the task was presented to her. And just as unintelligible as when Helena Watkins had showed them to her, secretly and in confidence, either to encourage her or to help them find the solution or maybe both.
On the adjoining wall hung the texts.
Her texts. That’s how well she knew them. After spending seven months on them they’d become her texts; a quick glance at each of the sheets was all she needed to know which of the Sumerian verses she was looking at.
Verses. She called them that for lack of something better. Short, succinct messages that didn’t seem to say very much at first glance, but that belonged to a context that she slowly had started to see, a context that had terrified her, and that she finally, finally was about to have confirmed.
And if that context was in fact the human DNA?
Then it terrified her even more.
William watched her as she walked along the wall.
‘What do you make of it?’ he said. Softly, as if that would distract her any less.
He regretted it as soon as the words were out. Idiot, he said to himself inside his head; he knew exactly what she was going through and he had only one responsibility and that was to shut up.
He had been in the same situation often enough to know that at this moment Janine had no time for anything but her own thoughts. And the one thing worse than being interrupted was having someone try to sneak into your consciousness, slowly claiming your attention until you realised you’d lost focus and that you hadn’t had it for quite a while.
He didn’t say anything more.
And neither did she. Every so often, she’d pause and take a closer look at one of the pages. Then start walking again, keep going between the groups of papers, from verse to verse, on to the next. Minutes passed. And William let them.
‘I’ve been waiting for this,’ she said at last.
‘For what?’
‘The order.’
She stepped back. Stood at a distance, studied the rows of Sumerian symbols, took in the entire wall at once. As if finally it spoke to her, as if it was communicating just the way he had tried to make it speak to him for the last couple of days.
He suddenly felt alone. As if the wall was a large piece of sheet music, as if she was the piano teacher and he was the pupil who’d turned up for his first lesson, unable to see anything beyond a series of incomprehensible dots and lines. It seemed overwhelming, hopeless – he would never be able to see it, never be able to read it like her.
But he pushed the thought aside.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
She ran her eyes over the walls. One more time, just to be sure.
‘It’s what I was afraid of,’ she said. ‘It’s a timeline.’
22
Albert van Dijk heard the car behind them long before he saw it. It was the whining sound of a turbo kicking in, and subconsciously he registered that it wasn’t just going fast, it was accelerating, probably trying to beat the lights at the crossing.
His first instinct was to speed up and try to get across the street before the car hit them. It was pure self-preservation, the very thing the driver expected.
But his second instinct was that this was his one chance.
The man in the suit had a firm grip on his arm, discreet enough not to be noticeable but strong enough to stop Albert from cutting loose and running. The man’s other hand rested in his coat pocket, presumably still holding the gun he’d allowed Albert to get a glimpse of, just in case he was thinking of trying anything stupid.
And Albert started to walk faster, exactly as they expected him to.
The suit next to him speeding up as well. The car getting closer. Closer still.
And then he did it.
It wasn’t really a push. All he did was take advantage of the man’s own kinetic energy and a sizeable chunk of surprise. He stopped dead, leaving the suited man swirling around him in a semicircle. He didn’t lose his balance as such; one more second and he would have clutched Albert’s arm even harder, steered him across the road, cursing at him never to try that again.
But the man didn’t get a second.
The blue Golf didn’t come to a stop until well after it had passed the crossing, and by then it was far too late.
By then the windscreen had been smashed by the suited body that materialised in front of the car from out of nowhere, swung into the road against its own will, bounced up over the bonnet and rolled back over the roof with dull thuds against the thin metal until it slumped across the black skid marks the tyres had left behind on the asphalt in their desperate attempt to stop.
The man hadn’t stood a chance. The suit that had begun the day newly pressed and elegant was dirty and torn from being dragged on the ground; the arms and legs were spread at angles that nobody would voluntarily spread anything. When pedestrians rushed to his side to help, they were met by a lifeless face, eyes staring blindly into the spreading pool of his own blood.
>
‘He pushed him!’ The woman who shouted was in her twenties; she had university books under her arm and horror in her eyes from what she’d witnessed. She searched for confirmation in the eyes of people she didn’t know. ‘He pushed him in front of the car!’
‘Who?’ someone said. ‘Did you see who?’
‘I think it was my archaeology professor.’
‘What do you mean timeline?’ William’s eyes stared impatiently at the wall. He turned to her, anxious to catch up, frustrated at being one step behind.
Janine pointed to the Sumerian verses. ‘I never got them in this order,’ she said. ‘But you know how your brain works. You start searching for logic. You automatically start creating a context. Because you think there has to be one, that the pieces you have must be parts of a puzzle, but you don’t know how they’re supposed to go because you’ve never seen the lid of the box.’
He nodded for her to go on.
‘At first I was just experimenting. What happens if you read this one after that one? Or this after that? Then what will it mean?’ She lowered her voice. ‘After a while I started to notice that there were too many things that seemed… familiar. As if I recognised them from somewhere. And the more fragments I managed to combine, the clearer it became. But I kept dismissing it as coincidence, because… well, it had to be.’
She paused, trying to come up with an explanation.
‘What you need to know,’ she said, ‘is that early Sumerian was an ideographic language. There are no sentences, no grammar, it’s all symbols stacked together to represent different concepts, and one single symbol can have several meanings. So there’s an element of ambiguity. But even if you take that ambiguity into account…’
Her eyes finished the sentence. No matter how many times she’d tried to interpret the verses differently, she always came up with the same results.
‘What did it say?’ asked William.
She stared at the rows of symbols, unsure how best to put it. ‘Every passage is like a verse.’ She rephrased it in her head. ‘A summary. No – a description.’
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