She turned to William, willing him to grasp the significance, but all he could do was stare back at her. So far he couldn’t make head nor tail of what she was telling him.
‘Of what?’ he asked. ‘A summary of what?’
‘Of the most important events in the history of mankind.’
And she walked up to the wall. Pointed. Stopped alongside select verses, single lines that stood out of their sequence, and told him what the symbols meant and what she had concluded.
The more he saw, the harder it was to deny.
City on river. People who build. Pointed houses, graves of kings.
The pyramids.
Rats. Disease. Contagion, death, an unstoppable plague.
The Black Death.
Moon. Three men, big ship, long journey.
‘Don’t think I need to explain that one to you, do I?’
William refused to believe her. What she was saying was totally absurd.
He tried to convince her that she was wrong, that no matter how analytical and critical she thought she’d been, she’d hit on a theory and then, unable to let it go, she’d subconsciously imposed a historical significance on to the text. She’d projected her own knowledge on to it, telling herself it was scientific analysis even though it wasn’t.
Her response was to snap at him. ‘You honestly think I’ve been sitting here for seven months without questioning my findings?’
For a moment he could see something in her, something that made him lose his balance, something he wasn’t prepared for. That flash of temper had reminded him of someone else.
He shook it off, telling himself he was guilty of the very thing he’d just accused her of: framing his current situation with old experiences. There was nothing about Janine that had anything to do with her, nothing beyond his longing for there to be a similarity.
He saw her glare at him, and he chose his words carefully. He didn’t mean to criticise her; he’d made the same mistake himself several times in the past, stumbling upon a theory and then trying to make the data fit the theory instead of the other way around.
‘You’re as frustrated as I am,’ he said. ‘We’ve been told to solve a problem, and we don’t know how or why. So we start looking for patterns. It’s not your fault, it’s just the way it works.’
‘I wasn’t looking for a pattern,’ she replied. ‘I found one.’
He cocked his head to one side. Semantics. And she raised her voice again: ‘Do you think I haven’t said the same thing to myself? You think I don’t find this every bit as inconceivable as you? That I haven’t tried to dismiss it as the product of my own, biased logic?’ She turned around in a wide arc as if to summon up the energy to explain what she knew but what he refused to accept. ‘But then I come in here. And I see them hanging there, in exactly the right order.’
She waited for him to speak. But he just carried on looking at her, that sceptical expression on his face. So she spelled it out for him:
‘If I only interpreted these verses as historical events because they happen to match what I know, how come they’re hanging here, on your wall, in the exact order I imagined? I only got to see them as separate papers, remember? If my deductions are nothing more than biased prejudices, how come this wall shows my disparate fragments arranged and combined exactly the way I calculated?’
He kept looking at her in silence, unconvinced.
And she walked to the far end of the room, started making her way along the wall, firmly tapping various sheets of paper with her palm as she passed them.
‘Mesopotamia. The Pyramids. The Rhodes earthquake. Birth of Jesus. Muhammad. The Black Death. The eruption of Mount Tambora…’
Between each of these were others she passed without referencing, as if she was running through history and stopping at only the most significant moments, and it strengthened her point, made it impossible not to follow her reasoning.
At regular intervals she turned to William to make sure that he understood.
‘First World War. Second. Hiroshima. The Valdavia earthquake.’
This was the proof that she was right, that she’d been right all along, and she saw his face, saw him struggle to remain sceptical, saw him refuse to accept what he heard even though he knew it was futile.
There couldn’t be clearer proof than this. If her interpretation of the verses was correct, then this was the order they should be arranged.
And that was exactly what they were.
She walked towards the end of the wall. Slowed down. ‘Tangshan. The Armero Tragedy. The Indian Ocean tsunami.’
She fixed her eyes on William. Your turn, her body language seemed to say. Go ahead, tell me I’m wrong. Make me go over it all again, because I will, because we both know I’m right.
They stood there. Seconds that lasted for minutes. Janine with her hand resting on one of the sheets, William across the room from her, their eyes locked.
And the silence lasted so long Janine regained the initiative. ‘If all of this is nothing more than supposition on my part —’
William closed his eyes. Knew what she was about to say.
‘— why the hell are these events listed in the right order?’
‘Do you understand the consequences of this?’ William asked.
She nodded. She understood them perfectly. They couldn’t be avoided.
‘The consequences,’ she said, ‘are that if they’ve been telling you the truth? If these verses come from inside our own human DNA?’
He knew it already. But it had to be said.
So she said it.
‘In that case, these events were written in the human genome long before they happened.’
The room was silent for a long time.
They stood there, watching each other, a conversation with no words.
‘And yet’, she said, finally. ‘And yet that isn’t what worries me most.’
She felt William’s look. Took out a piece of paper, handed it to him.
It was the same paper she’d wanted to show him on the terrace, the one with a series of cuneiform symbols that he hadn’t understood and she hadn’t had the time to explain.
‘It’s been worrying me from the moment I saw it.’
He didn’t know what to say, gestured for her to go on.
‘And now that I’ve seen your room? With the timeline and the verses and the order? Now it worries me even more.’ She swallowed, hard. Steeled herself.
‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Tell me what it means.’
Albert ran as fast as he could through Amsterdam’s Westerpark, his coat billowing in the low afternoon sun and his thoughts racing out of control.
Inspector Neijzen, the son of a bitch. The man he’d trusted, who’d been by his side from the evening Janine first vanished. Who’d sat with him into the small hours, helped him search for answers, looked through databases and kept him updated about every clue or lead or piece of news. It had to be him. Inspector Neijzen had raised the alarm.
There was no other explanation.
Now a man had died. And Albert had caused it. He came to a halt by a large pond, on an open gravelled space crowded with enough pushchairs and elderly people and office workers hurrying between meetings to allow him to melt into the crowd. He had nowhere to go.
He picked up his phone, pulled up his office number – and stopped himself. The paranoia was back, and it was all he could do to make himself think.
Was he overreacting? Or could the police be involved in Janine’s disappearance? Did they know who was responsible, had they alerted them about the letter? The same police that he had allowed to search the home they’d shared, inviting them inside the crooked apartment she’d lived in before they met, the same police who’d put comforting arms round his shoulder and sworn they’d done all they could but that everything pointed to her vanishing of her own free will?
The ramifications were almost unthinkable.
If the police knew, then who else? And who was behind her d
isappearance? How many people were intent on preventing him finding out what happened, and what resources did they have?
His secretary’s number was still shining back at him from his phone’s display, and he memorised the last few digits of it, once, twice, until he was completely certain he knew it. Paranoid or not, he couldn’t use his own phone again. The same went for his credit cards: the moment he made a purchase they would know where he was. He decided to find a cash machine and take out as much money as possible before they blocked his account.
What he would do after that, he had no idea.
The only thing he was sure of was that he had nobody on his side.
And that if he ever wanted to see Janine again he’d have to find her himself.
Albert van Dijk stayed in the park for another three, maybe four, minutes.
None of the visitors paid any attention to the man in the coat, skipping stones by the pond.
And none of them guessed that the stone that skipped the most number of times was in fact a mobile phone.
The piece of paper William Sandberg held in his hand still didn’t tell him anything. But what Janine was saying didn’t leave much room for doubt.
It was the logical conclusion to her deductions, and couldn’t be questioned. At least not without going back to her fundamental assumptions and tearing her entire analysis apart. And even if deep down he would have liked to, he wouldn’t know where to start.
All he could do was listen.
‘No matter how much I studied them,’ she said, ‘there were sequences I couldn’t make sense of.’
William didn’t move.
‘Sequences that weren’t fakes. That much I could tell. They came from the original source, they had the same ancient voice, but I couldn’t interpret them to fit any historical event. And at first I tried to explain it away. I’m no historian, that’s what I told myself, so obviously there’ll be loads of things that took place in between the big occurrences, things that were left out when they taught me history in school. Right?’
But she shook her head. Wrong. That wasn’t the reason she didn’t recognise them. There was another explanation, and slowly, slowly, the realisation had struggled its way into her mind.
She stopped and looked at William. Waited for him to make the same connection.
‘You’re not telling me,’ he said, ‘that some of the verses haven’t happened yet?’
She nodded slowly.
‘That the human DNA holds information about the future. Things that haven’t happened, but that will?’
She nodded again.
‘In that case,’ said William, ‘what do we have to expect?’
There was only one answer.
‘Nothing good,’ she said. ‘Nothing good at all.’
23
Albert van Dijk’s office had been empty since the previous afternoon, and then suddenly it was flooded with people.
Some were police, others claimed to be but looked more like bankers, and all of them were rummaging about in the professor’s shelves and on his computer and asking questions about where he was. And whether he’d said anything, as in anything at all about anything whatsoever, and whether there were any places he used to go that they didn’t know of.
The chubby young assistant answered with shrugs and shakes of his head. He had no idea.
The only thing they would tell him was that Albert van Dijk had vanished. Judging by the commotion, he was probably wanted, and they kept insisting that he should inform them the moment the professor tried to make contact, which he sincerely promised them he would do.
And now he was sitting by his desk. Struggling with his conscience.
In his pocket was the note with the Swedish phone number. Part of him wanted to get up from his chair and show it to the police and tell them, look, I know something that you don’t, here you go and good luck. But another part of him felt that he shouldn’t. There was something about the cops that didn’t ring true; they seemed shifty, evasive. Besides, wasn’t it more important to be loyal to one’s employer? Wasn’t that the point of employing someone in the first place? That they were supposed to help you?
Unless, of course, van Dijk had committed a crime so terrible, so unspeakable, that the police couldn’t even begin to tell him what it was.
He sat there. Watching them. And then, he froze.
He had just felt a buzz in his trouser pocket.
He hesitated, realising that this was the moment to pick sides, to decide how much he really doubted the people in the office in front of him.
Or to admit that he’d already picked sides long ago. Why else had he set his phone to silent? Why else was it vibrating inside his pocket, a tickling sensation against his thigh, if it wasn’t because he wanted to be able to surreptitiously answer in the event that the professor called him?
It looked as though the decision had been made.
He’d chosen loyalty.
He got up, wandered out into the corridor, gave a convoluted explanation to a dark-suited man who didn’t want to listen about how thirsty he was and how he hadn’t had enough to drink with his lunch, and that he was going to the cafeteria but they could reach him on his cell if they wanted. And the entire time he was talking he could feel the phone against his leg, and it was all he could do to look the cop in the eye, telling himself that the man couldn’t hear the rattling phone because it was muffled by the thick denim of his jeans.
The cop didn’t react. Not to the phone, nor to the story about thirst and lunch and lack of hydration. He turned away, leaving the young secretary to make his way to the lift and get inside, even though they were only on the third floor.
The vibrating ceased. His voicemail had taken the call.
He pulled the wooden door closed, felt the lift creak and shift as it started its descent, unstable as a geriatric on an icy pavement, and he thought that one day this lift would be the death of someone, but hopefully not today.
He took out his phone. Missed call. Number withheld. Damn.
But he knew his boss well enough to be certain that, if that had been him, he’d try again. And no sooner had the thought formed than the phone rattled in his hand.
‘Hello?’ he said.
‘Hi. It’s Professor van Dijk.’
‘Good. I’m in the lift. I’ll be down in two seconds, I don’t want them to see me on the phone. I’ll go to the café, call me back in exactly five.’
And then he ended the call without waiting for an answer. Outside the lift window he could see the ground floor approaching, and stuffed the phone back into his pocket, opened the door and walked out into the foyer. Down the stairs and into the daylight. Turned towards the cafeteria building.
The two police officers waiting outside the main door let him pass, not considering for a moment that the boy who disappeared along the walkway might have sided with their opponent.
Albert van Dijk stood in the dark corner of a market hall, miles away from the university, trying hard to look as if he had the slightest reason to be there.
Time crawled by. Four minutes. Four and a half.
He squeezed his phone, tightly, as if he was afraid it would tear loose and run off. He’d bought it together with a prepaid card from a small electronics shop a few blocks away; it was used and scratched with sticky buttons and he had to squint in order to read the screen. But it seemed to be working and that was all he needed.
When five minutes had passed, he keyed in his assistant’s number.
It rang once. And then, through the familiar hum of the university café at the other end:
‘What in heaven’s name have you done?’
‘What are they saying I’ve done?’ Albert said.
‘There’ve been people here looking for you.’
‘Suit and tie?’
‘Some of them. And the police. Is it true what they’re saying on the news?’
Albert shut his eyes. The news. Of course. The street had been full of people, and there h
ad probably been more calls made to media hotlines than to the emergency service. The news was out, and if somebody had recognised him it would only be a matter of time before his face was on every news site on the Internet. It didn’t look good.
‘It’s about Janine,’ he said. ‘I understand if you don’t believe me. But she was kidnapped, and I don’t know why, but now they’re after me too.’
The answer wasn’t what he expected.
‘I know.’
In the café, Albert’s secretary checked that he wasn’t being watched. Lowered his voice even though the noise around him was loud enough that he had to press a palm to his ear to make out what his boss was saying.
‘You never read the note on your desk, did you?’
The note? Albert tried to picture his office, searched his memory for a note he might have missed, but there were infinite numbers of notes and messages about things that needed to be done and it was impossible to know which one he meant.
‘What note?’ he said.
The boy skipped the answer; the note wasn’t interesting now. ‘There’s a journalist keeps calling, since yesterday afternoon.’
Albert stopped. Held his breath. Journalist? Why?
‘From Sweden. Says she needs to see you. Says that what happened to your girlfriend?’
Yes? Albert waited for him to finish.
‘The exact same thing happened to her husband.’
Their flight landed in Amsterdam four hours behind schedule, and they were hungry and tired but with no time to eat or rest. They passed through Customs, Christina pulling a light case on wheels behind her and Leo carrying a rucksack that had probably interrailed its way through half of the world.
They were making their way into the gigantic arrivals hall when they realised someone was talking to them.
The man walked a couple of steps behind them, a newspaper in his hand, pretending to read as he talked without looking at them.
‘Just keep looking straight ahead,’ he said to his paper.
Chain of Events Page 21