by Matthew Hall
Leo reached for the bottle, tipped out what remained and swallowed it in a single mouthful. As he stared into the silence, a gentle rocking sound caused him to look round. Hanging from a nail on the back of the door was the Glock.
Towers followed the small oval of light cast by his torch along the rutted track leaving Ty Argel and the man he had once considered the bravest and most resourceful soldier in the British Army to his illusion of solitude. Credenhill had been good enough to keep eyes on Black while he was in their neck of the woods. Spaced out in the darkness beyond the cottage there would be two young troopers in full camouflage keeping watch. Their night-vision goggles would light up the scene as if to daylight and state-of-the-art listening equipment would convey the tiniest sounds from within to their earpieces and thumb-sized digital recorders. Towers wanted every detail down to the last curse word, belch and toilet flush.
It was only in the detail that you could truly own a man.
15
After her initial reluctance to cooperate Dr Bellman had adapted to her new circumstances just as Dr Razia had hoped. Long experience had taught him that in terms of basic human psychology, brilliant intellectuals were no different to common labourers: they were brought to heel best by a combination of carrot and stick. Or rather, stick then carrot. Rough handling followed by several days of deprivation had broken the young woman’s spirit to the extent that she had become grateful even for small acts of kindness such as a fresh bar of soap or a clean set of clothes. Only once she was rendered into this state of cooperative dependency did Razia take her to his office and bring up details of a Panamanian account in her name containing $4 million. The offer of the access codes and an additional $4 million on successful completion of the project to Razia’s satisfaction had a positively miraculous effect. She and Holst had begun work immediately and had since scarcely left the laboratory.
Even after it had been explained to her in minute detail, not once had Dr Bellman questioned the morality of their task. Having been confronted with a simple choice between continued suffering and self-interest there had been no contest. The percentage of human beings prepared to tolerate moderate discomfort, let alone lay down their lives for the benefit of others was vanishingly small. Dr Bellman and her colleagues did not, thankfully, number among them.
Razia, too, had begun his professional life as a young idealist troubled by the ethics of the work he was required by his government to undertake. But under the tutelage of his superiors he had gained an insight shared by all the greatest scientists: in the pursuit of knowledge human morals are of no relevance. If the scientist is to strive for the facts alone, nothing must be allowed to cloud the judgement. On the occasions this proved difficult, he would remind himself of the bees in his father’s orange groves. These marvels of nature cared only for the survival and prosperity of their species. Those that ceased to be productive were immediately culled by the others. The individual was of value only insofar as it contributed to the good of the whole. Nature dictated these rules with an honesty and clarity that put prevaricating human beings to shame. Had we acted with the determination of our insect cousins we would by now be bringing into the world human beings only of the highest genetic quality who would enjoy long, healthy and useful lives. Human beings wise enough to act only in accordance with the common good.
With this in mind Razia ran his eye along the row of thirty or so volunteers, each of whom had been promised the princely sum of $100 if chosen to assist in his work and began to isolate the healthiest physical specimens. He passed up and down the line three times, pausing to check teeth, nails and the brightness of the eyes of those that caught his attention. Finally, he narrowed his selection to six: three male, three female, ranging from a slightly built young woman of twenty or so to a stocky man in his forties.
His subjects greeted their selection with grateful smiles and went willingly with the guards who led them across the compound to their new quarters while the unhappy rejects shuffled away across the hard-baked dirt, casting jealous glances at their departing co-workers. Razia could have told them that they needn’t be disappointed as there would be several further opportunities to assist in the coming weeks, but there was a point at which justified deception became gratuitous cruelty. As a man of science, that was a line he was not prepared to cross.
Satisfied that he had the raw materials he needed, Razia lit a cigarette and headed over to the mess hall in search of breakfast. He had a long and taxing day ahead.
16
Black emerged from the college seminar room into the warm late afternoon. Two hours of discussion over whether the appeasers of the 1930s were responsible for the atrocities of the Nazis had turned into a furious debate over the threat posed by modern-day Saudi Arabia and Iran. Unusually, the two-wrongs-don’t-make-a-right faction had been matched in number by the interventionists, one of whom was the son of a famously hawkish US admiral. Policing the dog fight had done little for the whisky-induced headache that had dogged him since his five a.m. start from Ty Argel, but it had been a spur to get back to his paper: belief in the peace-giving powers of high explosives was, it seemed, still alive and well among tomorrow’s leaders.
Hoping a short walk would chase away his lingering hangover, he took the long way back to his rooms around the college lake. It was an Elysian scene: curtains of willow shot through with shafts of sunlight and lilies floating beneath. Groups of students lolled on the grass at the water’s edge, subconsciously absorbing a vision of civilized perfection that would remain with them for the rest of their lives. He tried to imagine what Finn would have made of it. Privileged little dicks don’t know they’re born, probably. He’d been raised in a council flat in Belfast at the height of the troubles. And if that wasn’t hard enough, his mother was a lapsed Presbyterian and his father an equally lapsed Catholic. Everybody had hated them, even God.
‘Ah, Leo.’
Black turned to see the college Provost, Alex Levine, striding after him. A tall, rangy man of fifty-five, who, besides being a world-renowned economist, had once been an international athlete. His all-round brilliance aroused admiration and jealousy in equal measure. He caught up and fell into step.
‘I’ve been hoping to catch you. Karen told me you were called away and couldn’t make drinks on Friday.’
‘Sorry about that,’ Black said. ‘An old army colleague died suddenly. Had to lend a hand.’
‘She told me. My sympathies.’
Black nodded his appreciation.
Levine let a respectful moment pass before continuing. ‘We had a meeting of the Appointments Committee last week – your application was discussed. There’s support for you, there really is, but … how should I put this? Everybody appreciates that your real-world experience is hugely valuable, quite possibly unique, but we can’t disregard the need for a depth of scholarship. I want to back you, Leo – you’re a gifted teacher, very popular with the students – as Karen has emphasized on several occasions – but there’s no point sugaring the pill, you’re going to need a little more to get over the line. I understand you’re due to present a paper in the States this summer?’
Black maintained an expression of relaxed imperturbability even as he felt the ground crumbling beneath his feet.
‘That’s right. Late August.’
‘And you plan to publish?’
‘I’m hoping for the Harvard International Review.’
‘Harvard’s good. Excellent. That should help a lot.’
Black took this as code for, If they don’t publish, you can forget it.
Levine stooped forward with a look of earnest concentration. ‘Off the record, OK?’
‘Of course.’
‘I sense a slight feeling among some of the fellows that your appointment might send out a difficult signal – politically.’
‘Have they any idea what I’m writing?’
‘No. Well, not in any detail, I don’t suppose,’ Levine confessed. ‘Look, I hesitate to say this,
Leo, but you’ve come to this rather odd world of ours rather later in life than most of us – after a few decades you develop sensitive antennae.’
‘No, I hear you loud and clear, Provost. If I want a job, I’d better write something to their liking.’
Levine shrugged, as if the suggestion were entirely Black’s but perhaps worth a try.
They stopped by the wooden bridge that led to the walled garden surrounding Levine’s elegant Georgian lodgings. The inner sanctum reserved for the tiny handful of the most politically adept and ambitious.
‘Best of luck, though,’ Levine said in a way which, whether he intended it or not, sounded as if he were abandoning him to his fate. He gave an awkward smile and headed off across the water.
A sudden impulse prompted Black to call out after him. ‘Be straight with me, Alex; how many do I have to win over?’
Levine stiffened and glanced uncomfortably over his shoulder, his neck reddening in embarrassment above the soft blue collar of his hand-stitched shirt.
Black waited for his answer.
‘It’s seven to three, roughly,’ Levine mumbled. ‘But that’s just a guess. There was no vote as such.’
‘I’m grateful,’ Black said, softening. ‘And I appreciate I’ve only got this opportunity because of your support.’
Levine raised a hand in a gesture that was both a wave and a dismissal.
Black watched him cross the bridge and disappear through the door in the wisteria-clad wall at the far side, wondering at the somersaults he must turn inside his complex mind. He had single-handedly constructed economic policy for several emerging economies and was a vocal champion of the poor and a fierce critic of the international caste of the super-rich. Yet his brothers sat on the boards of two of the world’s largest banks and his father had been an Israeli cabinet minister and hero of the Six Day War. Black had never known a man contend so successfully with so many contradictions. But did Levine know the truth of himself or had he merely harnessed his phenomenal intellect to react against a family whose name alone threatened to subsume him?
I want to back you, not, I will.
Black continued on his way, realizing that the Provost had just set out the terms of his appointment: he needed to be sure Black was cast squarely in his own image before putting his weight behind him. The only version of him he would back was the warmonger who had seen the light and been born again to preach a new gospel. A gospel of peace.
Had he become that man?
An image of a fourteen-year-old boy stepping out from a doorway in a narrow Baghdad alleyway appeared behind his eyes. He pictured the expression on the boy’s face in the split second before the bullets from Black’s semi-automatic had sliced his slender body in half.
If there had been a moment that had caused him to change direction, that had been it.
He hadn’t realized at the time. The killing had been a reflex. One of tens of similar occasions when he had shot first in order to guarantee his survival. He had felt no emotion as he looked down at the boy’s bloody remains but he had noticed its absence. The act of taking a life had become mundane. Part of the job.
The West has a weapon far more powerful than any aircraft carrier or infantry battalion: money. Cash. Rich countries breed few terrorists compared with poor ones and possess the resources, if they choose to use them wisely, to all but eradicate the problem of ‘home-grown’ terrorism. It is simply a question of aiming resources at the tiny proportion of the population in danger of falling under the extremists’ spell. But in the developing world the pool of urban, unemployed and disenfranchised young men – those most likely to turn to violence – is vast. Yet the youth of Cairo, Baghdad, Tripoli and Damascus have the same aspirations as that of London, Paris and New York, the same cultural influences, the same material ambitions.
At last the words began to flow. Ideas that for weeks had remained stubbornly fragmented formed into a coherent whole.
The real enemy confronting the West is not one that can be bombed, assassinated or imprisoned. It is, in fact, the very force that built our thriving democracies: the basic human urge for betterment and security that when allowed to flourish leads inevitably to peace, and which, when frustrated, leads with equal inevitability to destruction.
Black’s landline rang. He paused briefly from his typing to disconnect it from the socket, then switched off his mobile. Whatever it was could wait.
He missed her call by two minutes.
17
There were days when Karen’s work frightened her. A superstitious voice inside her head whispered that no good could come from interfering with nature as profoundly as she was doing. But then the latest data from the Canadian and Siberian forests would arrive. New satellite photographs would reveal tens of thousands of additional acres of dead conifers added to the several million already wiped out by the incessant march of the humble mountain pine beetle. Winters a degree or two warmer meant earlier thaws and later freezes. Genetically programmed to survive six months of sub-zero temperatures rather than the four they were now routinely encountering, the beetles were proliferating. Viewed from the air, the once uniformly green forests of the north were a mottled patchwork of green and brown. In places whole hillsides and entire valleys had been wiped out. A few trees had been discovered to produce sap sufficiently concentrated that the beetles avoided them, but if the current decimation continued, it would take centuries for these few survivors to repopulate the landscape.
Human beings didn’t have a few centuries. They had only a few decades at most. If enough forest died, the carbon released into the atmosphere would accelerate global warming to the point at which ice caps would melt and coastal cities and existing nuclear facilities become submerged. Drought and floods, famine and huge movements of refugees would lead inevitably to wars and chaos on a level unimaginable except to the few scientists who spent their waking hours working on myriad ways to prevent it. The terrible irony was that Karen and her colleagues were people who loved and revered nature, but who in order to protect their own species now found themselves compelled to manipulate and even defy it.
The laws of nature dictated the rise and fall of populations as an inevitable consequence of the perpetual competition for survival in a changing environment. Dinosaurs existed for 160 million years but were wiped out within a few seasons by sudden cooling caused by dust thrown up into the atmosphere following a meteorite strike. Jungle turned to tundra. In their changed surroundings the large cold-blooded lizards froze and starved. Only insects, small mammals and a handful of reptiles survived. A mere 200,000 years into their existence, homo sapiens faced a similarly dramatic annihilation, although if it came to pass, it would be one almost entirely of their own making.
Karen rationalized her work by telling herself she was merely engaged in temporary emergency measures. If humankind could be persuaded to behave differently, it too could prosper for millions of years, just as the dinosaurs had. She was the fire brigade, quenching the flames before the edifice collapsed. Once the immediate crisis was over, sanity stood a chance. They could rebuild. And learn.
She had raised her hybrid trees in one of the department’s greenhouses sited just beyond the northern fringes of Oxford. The genetically modified lodgepole pines stood over twenty-five feet high but were only four years old. A tree growing from seed in the wild would be little more than waist height at the same age. Karen had achieved this feat by splicing in genes from the fastest-growing varieties and by controlling greenhouse conditions to trick the trees into believing they had passed through an entire annual cycle every three months. Further genetic modifications caused them to produce a pheromone-imitating compound that attracted the beetles as well as sap that was toxic to them.
What Karen had created were living flypapers with potential to prevent an ecological disaster, but they also posed a risk. How they would interact with naturally occurring species was unknown. There was no telling whether in the medium to long term they would thrive or di
e. But they were fast becoming a necessity, and that was what truly frightened her: human beings had passed the point at which they could rely on the balance of nature to sustain them. That balance had already tipped and if left unchallenged, nature would dictate that the future belonged to other species. Human survival meant interference on a dramatic scale. Playing God.
And all the while, the world went about its business as if there were no looming disaster. In her very darkest moments Karen wondered if perhaps this was the simple evolutionary test to determine whether humanity had a future. To know of the problem but not to act on it would be absolute proof that the species was defunct. Of no further use to the single project of life: survival.
She checked the thermostat inside the greenhouse entrance one last time and stepped outside into air ten degrees cooler. The sudden change in temperature brought her out in goosebumps. Pulling up the hood of her top, she fished her keys from her jeans pocket and locked the metal door behind her.
The greenhouse was one of three rented by the Department of Plant Sciences on the site of a former commercial nursery. Set among fields and shielded from the surrounding landscape by rows of poplar trees, there was nothing to indicate that it was home to a research facility of such critical importance. Only the twelve-foot-high chain-link fence surrounding the three-acre plot gave any clue to its sensitive purpose.
Karen walked along the short paved path to the rack where she had stowed her bike while mentally rehearsing what she would tell her Canadian colleagues during their conference call later that evening. They were close to getting their government to allow experimental planting in British Columbia but needed assurances Karen couldn’t give. She would come under pressure to present her results in a way that played down the risk of unforeseen consequences. Politicians would take a gamble on her trees only if she were prepared to massage the truth to the point of lies and then take responsibility if the worst should happen. It was an absurd situation, but somehow she had to navigate it. Survival, she told herself. Ultimately, that was all that mattered.