‘If he hasn’t, then stage two is in effect.’
And Franquin had turned and walked out into the corridor. Closed the door behind him.
Connors knew that Franquin was right.
They couldn’t wait any longer.
William spent hours feeding the data into his computers, and then waiting for them to process the sequences he’d been staring at for days.
And nothing changed.
No matter how clever computers might be, they lacked intuition. They chewed on the numbers for hours without finding anything new.
After that, he opened Helena Watkins’ files.
He read her notes for the first time from beginning to end, and it was like reading his own mind. Every set-up, every formula and arrow and equation trying to deduce one thing from another, everything that she’d written he had either already thought himself or soon would. She fumbled with the exact same things as him and that could mean only one thing.
He was wasting time.
So long as he was treading the same path as all the people who’d been there before him, he was never going to come up with anything new. And knowing this, William couldn’t stand it when anyone asked how things were going.
‘You know how it’s going,’ he said.
No, not said, he barked it, and his eyes were dark, not just from rage but from sorrow and sadness and frustration and everything else.
Janine had just come in, and her question had been benign and friendly.
But William snapped.
‘You sat right next to me, didn’t you? You saw it as clearly as I did. Everything is going to shit, that’s how things are going, full steam ahead to shit and there’s nothing I can do about it.’
He threw out his arms, a gesture so melodramatic he might as well have been a character in an opera, and he felt it himself the moment he did it but couldn’t bring himself to care. If his anger seemed comedic, then so be it.
And once the floodgate was opened, there was no turning it off. Everything came out, the frustrations over his own inadequacy, frustrations that turned into accusations, as if it was her fault the code looked the way it did and that everything was too late and that he wouldn’t be able to stop it, just as he hadn’t been able to stop the things that had happened already, and he counted on his fingers as he spoke: the airliner, the hospital, Christina, and then he became quiet because his voice began to crack.
And Janine stood there. Looked at him.
And got it.
Somehow, she’d let herself believe that she was as upset as him. That they were just as shocked, because they’d seen the same things. And if only she’d allowed herself to think.
If only she had, she would have known.
His grief was immeasurably greater. He was under pressure and it wasn’t from her, it was from life. But you can’t shout at life, and she happened to be the one who was around.
‘You couldn’t have known,’ she said. ‘There was nothing you could have done.’
‘It was my job!’ he shouted. ‘My job is to know, my job is to do something, that’s the entire reason I’m here! And if I can’t do that, then what the hell am I here for?’
She remained silent, there was nothing for her to say.
And his voice dropped a notch.
‘Every single time something happens in my life it’s not my fault. Every single time, people tell me I have to stop blaming myself, that there wasn’t anything I could have done, and there was no way I could have known. Do you have any idea how tired I am of hearing that?’
She didn’t move.
‘Every single time?’ She said it softly. ‘I didn’t know there were more. Talk to me.’
His answer rolled out like a rumbling of thunder. A grown man’s sorrows but a five-year-old’s dissent. ‘Why? So that you can be the caring, listening, human ear who’ll offer words of advice and restore me? So you can walk out of this room and feel good about yourself ? I’ve been to see people like that in the past, and it doesn’t help.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not that. But because I see someone who’s carrying a weight. And I’m sorry.’ Still calm and steady, soft but sharp and without releasing him from her gaze. ‘I’m so terribly sorry, but sometimes when you see someone carrying a burden that’s too heavy for them, you can’t help asking whether you can help share the load.’
He shook his head.
And it began gently, just as sadly and softly as she had spoken, but his voice grew as he talked and he let it. He let the intensity build until he roared, until something burned behind his eyes, and he didn’t know what it was but he didn’t intend to stop talking.
Because who the hell was she? Who was she to tell him how he felt? To ask him questions about his wife, about his daughter? What did she know – exactly, not a fuck was what she knew – and what help was she, standing there, pretending?
It poured out of him like a torrent, a hurt and offended and infected torrent, and it felt good to let it out, felt good to blame someone else, felt good to roar as if Janine was the author of his misery, as if she had created it retroactively in one single moment. And he knew it wasn’t true, knew that he’d regret yelling at her, but here and now it felt unbearably, painfully good and he had no intention of stopping.
‘She died,’ he bellowed, his voice full of anger and accusation and are you happy now, huh, are you? ‘My daughter died, and I didn’t see it coming, I should have but I couldn’t. I wasn’t there when it happened. I couldn’t do anything until it was too late. And then I couldn’t let it go and that destroyed my life. Mine and Christina’s, and now she’s gone too and is that a weight you’d like to carry for me? Is that how good you are? That you can just take that weight and carry it for a couple of blocks and then everything will be fine again?’
Nobody can shout for ever. There comes a point when you hear your own voice, when you have to change gears again. And William had reached that point. He clenched his jaw, nothing more to say, and if the outburst was intoxication and regret was hangover, then he was already sobering up.
He didn’t want to sober up. Blaming someone else suited him fine. And he threw out his arms again, waved at her to leave, get out of here before everything stops being your fault. Go before it’s mine again.
But Janine stayed. Looked at him. No anger. Sadness, yes, but not for herself. She was sad for his sake. For the man who stood in front of her, who’d just yelled at her, thousands of things he really wanted to yell to himself but couldn’t. The man she hadn’t known for a week but who felt closer to her than people she’d known for years.
The man who’d just told her off, even though she saw he didn’t mean it.
And their eyes met. And both of them knew. Knew that he would tell her how sorry he was, not now, but some time, and they both knew that she would understand, that she would have forgiven and understood long before he started to explain.
And all of that was said between them without a single word.
Then she turned and left the room, and for the first time in as long as he could remember, William sat in a chair and cried.
36
There wasn’t just one message but many.
Written long ago, waiting in sealed envelopes in a safe, and different envelopes had different labels and held different scenarios that Connors had devised years before.
It felt like another time.
No, another world, that’s what it felt like, a world that was still out there somewhere, where all of this wasn’t happening and could be viewed from afar as if it were a game of chess, and then everyone could eat their dinner and perhaps grab a whisky and sleep a good night’s sleep.
Yet somehow they had all stepped over into this world. The world that was unthinkable and mustn’t happen. This was now their reality, and Franquin thumbed through the envelopes, looking for the right one.
It was large and thick and weighed at least a couple of pounds.
Scenario Zero.
That’s what
it said on the outside, and they had sealed it and stored it with the others, hoping that they would never have to open any of them again.
Especially not this one.
He placed it on the table, put the others back in the safe and locked it.
Stared at the envelope in front of him, as if it were a time capsule he’d sent to himself. He could still recall the moment when they’d sealed it, him and Connors, in this very office. He remembered the gravity they’d felt, but also the hope. The knowledge that they were discussing a distant future, so distant that it didn’t seem to exist. Yet here he stood and the future was unfolding right in front of his eyes. And the now they had been in back then, the one that had been so natural and present and real, that now was suddenly so distant and remote it was as if it had never really happened.
That’s how it worked. Time.
It passed.
And there wasn’t much to be done about it.
Franquin stayed still for several minutes, looking at the heavy envelope and knowing what had to happen next.
He would break the seal. Tear the protective paper open.
Inside, there’d be neat stacks of smaller envelopes, labelled with names and addresses and each one would contain a set of numbers.
And those numbers would go out to the addressees.
And then there would only be one way forward.
Connors stepped out through the heavy wooden door, out into the cold of the terrace, wearing only his thin military jacket, even though the air was ice cold and full of crystals that were neither snow nor rain but something in between.
He came and stood next to William, leaned against the banister alongside him, as if he just wanted a breath of air, as if he simply couldn’t resist getting out into the biting afternoon wind to gaze at the view for no specific reason.
Of course it was nothing of the sort. He was there because they knew William had yelled at her.
And now they were wondering how he was. Not because they cared but because they were afraid that William was losing his grip.
The two men exchanged glances. A wordless hello, formal and correct. And Connors asked if William needed anything, or if they could help him with anything, or if he’d come up with anything new.
And William replied as Connors expected, which boiled down to no and no thanks and unfortunately not. And that was it. They fell silent, and then it was William’s turn to talk.
They both stood for a while, leaning against the stone balustrade, watching the mountains and the lake as the wind kept whipping its nameless crystals in their faces.
‘Are you worried about me?’ he asked.
‘You make it sound like a bad thing.’
‘That depends. Whether you’re worried about me. Or just worried I won’t finish the job.’
Connors cocked his head, the gesture a smile of sorts. ‘Couldn’t it be both?’ he said.
‘Thirty years,’ William said, avoiding the question. His eyes fixed on the lake and the peaks in the distance.
Connors glanced at him. Didn’t know what he was getting at.
‘That’s how long you’ve been here. Right? Thirty years.’
Oh. Yes. Connors nodded.
‘How do you manage?’
It took a moment for Connors to grasp what he meant. Again, he had to remind himself that William had been there less than a week. Events had unfolded so unbelievably quickly over the last couple of days that it felt as though months had passed rather than days, but William hadn’t had time to adjust. And how could he be expected to?
Connors wasn’t sure how to answer.
He cast his mind back to his early days there, when the knowledge had overwhelmed him so completely that he couldn’t think. When panic took turns with apathy, when everything had lost its meaning and when their work didn’t lead them anywhere. And the simple truth was that he hadn’t managed. But he’d realised that he would have to manage, and step by step he’d found a way.
And the years had passed.
Years had passed, and now here they were, and even if he’d always known the end was coming he’d clung to the hope that it wouldn’t. And he continued to cling to that hope. As hard as it was.
‘One gets used to it,’ he said.
‘You think there’ll be time for me to do that?’ said William. He smiled a wry smile.
It occurred to Connors he’d never seen William smile, at least like this, for real and without anger and with a sincere, warm irony. He felt a pang in his chest. The man beside him could have been a friend. Someone to share a beer with, or play darts or whatever people in the real world did nowadays, if only things weren’t what they were and they hadn’t been trapped here.
He wanted to give him a good answer. But there wasn’t one.
‘I’ll let you get back to work,’ was all he said. Because what else was there?
And Connors stood up, and moved towards the door.
‘You were wrong,’ said William behind him.
He’d turned, the clouds and the mountains and the wind in his back now, a sad gaze that met Connors’, honest and new and full of pain.
‘Wrong?’ said Connors.
‘Our first meeting. In the big hall, with the table and the chandelier with the projectors. You said that the thing that mattered most to me? The thing that keeps me going? You said it was people.’
Connors raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes?’ he said.
‘You were wrong.’
He, who couldn’t stand people. Who would walk in the rain to avoid a crowded bus, who would cross the road to avoid a party of schoolchildren. He who liked it best when he was left to his own company and who was more and more certain every year that other people were a necessary evil, annoying extras in the movie that was his life, obstacles that interfered and got in his way and stopped him on the street to sell him things he didn’t need.
And yet. Here he was. Suddenly wanting nothing but to hold them. All of them.
All those people he didn’t know, who wouldn’t stop annoying him with their existence, who were there only because it would be so much harder to run the world by himself, even if he’d increasingly often found himself thinking he wouldn’t mind trying.
All of them.
Suddenly he wanted to do all he could to keep them alive. He wanted to shake them and shout that they were in danger; he wanted to tell them he’d take care of it, that he didn’t know how but that he would find a way to stop it, for their sake, for his own, for everybody’s sake at once.
He said it with eyes that didn’t leave Connors’, with a face so void of feelings there was no mistaking how much sorrow it tried to hide.
‘Try to make sense of that if you can,’ William said.
And Connors smiled at him. A warm smile, a smile between friends, or at least from a man who could see right through the other and who saw that the inside wasn’t as bad as everyone thought.
‘It’s simple,’ said Connors. ‘We weren’t the ones who were wrong. You were.’
Connors, by the door. William, by the banister.
Two men that could have been friends.
And for a moment he was back again, William, back in his old life, the one with the plastic floors and the same computers as now but considerably worse coffee, the feeling of chatting with a colleague and that his job was important but manageable, and that life as a whole wasn’t too bad.
‘Even if I do manage to find the perfect cipher key,’ William began, ‘and even if your friends down there in those steel tunnels use it to make a new virus and spread it throughout the world? How can we be sure that it will help? It’s still not a vaccine against the virus that’s already out there.’
A moment of silence.
‘Isn’t it?’ Connors said. ‘If humanity is carrying a predetermined schedule. And if we manage to change that schedule in time. Wouldn’t that, then, be a cure in itself ?’
‘But how can we know it’ll spread fast enough? How do we know the one that’s out there
won’t kill the new, good one? And what if my key isn’t any good either, and there are suddenly two viruses out there, turning into purple circles all over the world and killing people? Then what?’
Connors took a deep breath. ‘The honest answer,’ he said, ‘to all your questions.’
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t know.’
His voice was so thin his words blended in with the wind and the snow, and for a moment there was no telling what was Connors and what was air, and somehow that felt perfectly natural.
Then he sighed, broke away from the silence, and summoned his poise and clarity again.
‘But I do know what happens if we don’t try.’
William nodded. It was that simple.
There were no guarantees, but they had nothing to lose, nothing except time. And he knew he had to keep working until there was nothing left to try.
Connors was about to leave the terrace when he turned in the doorway to answer the question William had forgotten he’d asked.
‘I write a diary,’ he said.
William peered at him, bemused.
‘How I manage. How I’ve been able to survive all these years. That’s the best answer I’ve got.’
Connors shrugged. It had never been a conscious choice, it had simply happened, one day he’d started to write, and it was nothing but a flow of thoughts, and it shouldn’t have made a difference to him and yet somehow it did.
‘Why?’ asked William.
‘I don’t know,’ said Connors.
Opened the door again, turned for the second time, half of him already well inside and obscured by the darkness of the stairwell.
‘It just seemed so much better than doing nothing.’
William returned to his office, and he sat there as the gloomy daylight rotated across the mountains, grey and shadowless enough to sink into dusk without making any difference. For William, night came before he noticed it, not aware until it was already pitch-dark.
Another day gone.
Another one wasted.
Chain of Events Page 30