The Grid

by Nick Cook

  ‘You don’t need me, Josh. Not anymore. Not in the way you think.’

  ‘You’re wrong.’ My voice catches.

  ‘You have the courage to do this,’ she says.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘To finish it.’

  I shake my head. ‘No …’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘We haven’t talked enough. I—’

  ‘What is there to say?’

  ‘I’m so … sorry …’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For the crash. For … everything.’

  ‘None of that matters. Really.’

  ‘It matters to me.’

  ‘Let it go. It wasn’t you.’ She pauses. ‘And it wasn’t me.’

  ‘Then … what …?’

  ‘It was something we had to do.’ She leans forward and kisses me. ‘Trust, my darling. Everything is going to be all right, because it was meant. You. Me. All of it. Didn’t I always tell you about the people who were going to live because of you? Well, now’s the time.’

  She looks around us.

  ‘This will be here – we will be here – waiting for you. But right now you have to go back.’

  She reaches out to me. ‘It’s all right, Josh. It’s all right.’

  I take her hand and the world slews.

  When I open my eyes, everything rushes at me in high definition.

  The Engineer is standing in the corner of the room.

  The component parts of the ballotechnic are stacked neatly on the backpack by his feet. It resembles a child’s puzzle. There’s hardly anything to it.

  ‘Do you understand now?’ he says. ‘That’s how much she loves you, Joshua. That’s how much I …’

  He stops, listens, his head cocked to one side.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘They’re here.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The people who are preparing to storm the tower.’ He looks at me. ‘It’s time to go.’

  I glance at the disassembled pieces.

  ‘You’re giving yourself up?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. An unearthly light shines in his eyes and the wind rushes in, bringing with it the chant of the mu’ezzin.

  And something else.

  The music of the bells. Church bells.

  ‘Come,’ he says. ‘Take me to them. Before the killing begins.’

  The breeze stays on my back as we start down the steps. The Engineer is beside me, a pace or two to my right. I am aware of the rising temperature outside, but in the tower, it remains cool. The shooting pains in my side have gone. And I know they won’t be back.

  On the third level, I glance down. The gun is exactly where I left it. As I step over it, I glance at my watch. It’s working again.

  The sounds of the city grow louder the further we descend.

  When we reach ground level, the Engineer is about to step outside.

  I place my hand on his shoulder. ‘Best I go first.’

  ‘And if they shoot?’

  ‘They’re less likely to shoot me than you.’

  I tell him to shed his robes. He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt underneath.

  ‘Lose the T-shirt too.’

  He takes it off. I place his clothes in a pile at the bottom of the steps. I then open the door a crack and shout for Hetta.

  ‘Josh?’

  Her voice is muffled. She must be thirty, maybe forty meters away.

  ‘Yes.’

  I still can’t see her.

  ‘I’m coming out, Hetta. I have Danilovsky with me. He’s unarmed. The bomb is at the top of the tower. He’s disassembled it. Send somebody up. He’s coming with me.’

  I fully open the door and lead the Engineer outside.

  A guttural command crackles across the courtyard: ‘Down! Fuckin’ down!’

  My momentary hesitation is met by a chorus of yells. ‘Down! Or we shoot!’

  ‘On your knees!’

  ‘Do it now!’

  ‘Now!’

  A second later, my face is in the dirt. I hear the crunch of their feet on the gravel.

  ‘Stay still!’

  ‘Don’t fucking move!’

  Somebody kicks my hand away from Danilovsky’s.

  The muzzle of an assault rifle is drilled into the back of my neck, and I’m yanked to my feet. There are around ten of them, in black tactical gear.

  I glance right as the butt of an M4 catches the Engineer in the side of the head. He drops to his knees. Somebody rabbit-punches him in the kidneys. He gasps for air.

  I’m head-locked. I can’t move.

  I hear boots tearing up the tower behind me.

  ‘Hey!’

  Hetta’s voice. She chambers a round and the effect is instantaneous. The guy who has my neck in a vise lets me go.

  To my right, the Engineer has curled into a ball. Hetta is standing a meter and a half away, her aim alternating between the head of the black-clad SEAL who’s been kicking the shit out of him and the head of the guy who’s been holding me.

  ‘Secure the prisoner,’ she says. ‘Any of you sons of bitches so much as lays a finger on him, I swear I’ll shoot you myself.’

  One of the SEALs pulls Danilovsky to his feet.

  Another takes his arms and pulls them behind his back.

  A third cuffs him.

  I take several steps back to a low wall. I watch them take the Engineer away. A minute later, Hetta comes and sits beside me. ‘What happened up there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘He was waiting for me.’

  ‘On the first level?’

  ‘No. At the top.’

  ‘That’s not possible, Josh. You were in there for barely a minute. We got lucky. One of the SEALs’ patrols was passing at the bottom of the Mount when I made the call. They showed up seconds after I left you.’

  She looks at me. ‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’

  I’m spared from answering by her radio.

  She glances up at the tower and says: ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Agent Hart?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The deuterium–tritium pellet. It’s missing.’

  The Suburbans are parked up outside the gates, no more than fifty meters away. Hetta launches herself toward them. I’m right behind her. As we round the corner, five agents, alerted by the same message, are leaping out of two of the other three vehicles.

  The middle one’s doors are closed. Nothing is visible behind its blacked-out windows.

  The lead agent tugs on the rear nearside handle. It won’t give. Hetta is five meters behind him. I’m three paces behind her.

  There’s a flash from inside, so bright the agent is hurled to the ground.

  I see what looks like a photographic negative of Hetta by the door, weapon drawn. She puts two rounds into the lock and pulls it open.

  ‘That is not possible,’ she says. ‘That is not fucking possible.’

  The interior of the Suburban is clear. Not a trace of flash burn. Not so much as a wisp of smoke. The two escorts are on the rear seat, heads in their hands. Both of them are yelling they can’t see. I glance down. A pair of locked cuffs sits between them.

  And Danilovsky has vanished.

  64

  THE PLENARY THEATER – THE MAIN STAGE WITHIN THE HALL OF the Assembly – holds almost eight thousand people. Multiple rooms lead off it, each hosting a non-plenary event.

  The Secret Service has established its command post behind the stage. The atmosphere in the airless black hole is close to panic. The silence is only broken by the whir of computer fans, the hum of the air-conditioning units, the clack of keyboards. A fluorescent strip casts cold light on the desk.

  Half a dozen agents, plus Hetta and me, are sifting through security badges on our laptops. Another half dozen are running the live CCTV footage through the monitors, while their algorithms explore the facial features of the delegates.

  A man who can vanish from
under the noses of the Secret Service will have little difficulty making himself invisible in a gathering as large as this. But as Cabot said in the Beast, we don’t have a choice.

  What remains of the bomb has been couriered to our embassy, where every detail has been photographed. The imagery is being pored over by technicians at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore right now.

  The question is a simple one. Can the Engineer initiate a thermonuclear reaction of deuterium and tritium without the ballotechnic, the weapon’s trigger mechanism?

  I glance at the monitor above Hetta’s head, where the Holy Father is reading his speech in occasionally halting English.

  He’s dressed in white, and the lights glint on his round glasses. His words are displayed in five languages below close-ups of his face on screens to the left and right of the stage.

  Every now and again he looks up and smiles.

  ‘For too many years, religion has been at the heart of conflict,’ he is saying. ‘I have said this many times before, but peace isn’t only about the absence of war …’

  As the CCTV tracks toward the stage, I catch a glimpse of Thompson in the front row, and beside him, the top of Cabot’s head. Several other Secret Service agents are clustered around them. Jennifer is there, too. And the Russian president and the General Secretary of the UN.

  We’ve had to do this by disconnecting our machines from any communications source, so we remain unobserved. This means it’s taking time.

  Hetta pushes back her chair, rubs her eyes and tips some cold coffee down her throat.

  ‘Three and a half thousand security passes,’ she says.

  Four and a half thousand to go.

  And that’s just for the Plenary.

  There’s a sudden and palpable shift in the mood of the auditorium.

  ‘It is impossible to stay silent on this issue … any longer.’

  The pontiff takes a sip of water.

  ‘In 1992, the Vatican acquired information collected by the former Soviet Union on what were termed “offensive consciousness experiments” – how to develop the mind as a weapon.

  ‘This is not the time or place to discuss the morality of this venture. Suffice to say it provided my predecessors with a remarkable insight into the true nature of consciousness. What this seemed to suggest was shocking to them – perhaps to us all – because of its implications for the Holy Catholic Church, indeed, for religions everywhere …’

  He goes on to describe the substance of my exchanges with Sergeyev, the essence of which, it is now clear, was acquired by the Vatican – and subsequently buried – when M. M. Kalunin met with the apostolic nuncio in Moscow shortly before his death.

  The experiments, the Pope adds, involved readings by psychics of the make-up of basic sub-atomic matter – elementary particles. No matter how many particles they examined, their attention was always directed to the moment of Creation, and to a blueprint of an infinite number of universes preceding our own.

  The cameras pan across the audience. People shift in their seats and turn to one another. Even I can feel the air of expectation.

  ‘As you know, I have tried many, many times to bring together the theology of the Holy Catholic Church and the building blocks of science. There is no reason, I believe, why well-founded theories on the origins of the universe and the evolution of species should be in conflict with the most fundamental tenets of our belief.’

  Murmurs ripple from the front to the back of the auditorium like a Mexican wave.

  Hetta goes back to examining the badges.

  ‘By themselves, the Soviet tests might mean little. But for many years, I have been uneasy with the idea that a benign God would give us only one chance at salvation. And whilst I know that Jesus Christ died for the remission of our sins, I struggle with the idea He died for Christians alone. And we all wrestle, at various moments, with the big questions: about the meaning of life, why we are here, our place in Creation. God’s purpose. Our purpose.’

  He takes another sip of water.

  ‘A little under a year ago, I held my second meeting with the President of the United States of America. Robert Thompson, as many of you know, is a lawyer with a background in theology.

  ‘In my first meeting with him, Senator Thompson, as he was then, told me he had written a paper while at Princeton outlining the underpinnings of the three Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Islam and Christianity – and asked me whether, in my view, there would ever be any hope of reconciling their differences.

  ‘Not unnaturally, I hesitated at the suggestion. But it made me think. And, in the course of discussions with my closest advisers, including the many cosmologists whom we fund to carry out research at our own Pontifical Academy of Sciences, I was told of the existence of the Soviet experiment, and how we had come by our knowledge of it.

  ‘This led me to initiate my second meeting with President Thompson in New York City last year. When we were able to be alone together, he outlined the vision he harbored for the creation of a safer, better world, and I told him of the feeling I and my advisers now shared – that the idea of pre-existence felt right.

  ‘Since then, it has been pointed out to me many times that pre-existence – not just of universes, but of the soul – was a belief held by the very first Christians. And that this belief was driven out because it removed the need for our intercession, the intercession of the Church, between man and God.’

  There is an intake of breath across the auditorium. Several African bishops get to their feet.

  ‘Please, please …’ The Pope raises a hand. ‘I am so nearly finished.’

  The protesters settle back and an uneasy silence descends.

  ‘It was while we were praying together, alone in the Church of St Simeon, that President Thompson said: “What if I were able to deliver the proof that you need?”’

  Whatever he says next is lost in a howl of protest.

  ‘That is way too much of a coincidence.’ Hetta is staring at her laptop. ‘Take a look.’

  I peer over her shoulder. A forty-something guy with a beard and short fair hair stares at me from the screen.

  ‘His badge code says he’s a contractor, name of Axel Lydon. But check out his left eye.’ She hits a key and the image expands.

  I move closer.

  A keyhole-shaped blemish in the iris. A coloboma.

  ‘What are the stats on that?’ she asks.

  ‘Approximately one in thirteen thousand.’

  ‘And we see two in as many months.’

  I look again. The beard is distracting and there may have been some surgery to reduce the prominence of the brow, but it’s Voss, the guy MPD originally told us was Gapes, no question.

  ‘Everybody,’ she yells, ‘listen up. We have a situation here.’

  The dozen agents in the room stop what they’re doing.

  ‘We have two potential targets in the building – Danilovsky and this guy.’ She turns her laptop around so everyone can see.

  ‘Voss. Master Sergeant Matthew L. Missing, without trace. Afghanistan, five years ago. According to his file, he was part of a fourteen-man Marine Special Operations Team. That’s all we know for sure, because our information may have been manipulated.’

  ‘Manipulated?’ a PIAD agent with a round, sweaty face shouts from the back.

  ‘Altered, Agent Gibson. And thank you for volunteering.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you. We need to verify Voss’s specialism. We need to know where Axel Lydon sprang from. And we need both those things the day before yesterday.’

  ‘How?’ Gibson says.

  ‘Your next stop is the National Security Adviser.’

  ‘It’s … it’s five-thirty in the morning in D.C.,’ he stammers.

  ‘You think she’s not watching this? Call her. Now.’

  She throws me a radio and an earpiece.

  Then we’re out the door, heading for the Plenary.

  We enter the auditorium to the left of the stage.


  The pontiff is making his way back to his seat and Thompson is heading for the lectern.

  There is only mute applause as the Pope sits down.

  A crackle in my ear, then Graham’s voice asking Hetta what the fuck she and I are doing. I spot him in the wings, to the right of the lectern.

  ‘Switch to the back-up channel,’ Hetta says.

  I dig into my jacket. Graham is mid-sentence when he gets cut off.

  ‘Gibson – are you reading me?’ Hetta says.

  Gibson acknowledges.

  ‘Anything from Byford?’

  His voice is strangulated. ‘No. She’s not answering.’

  ‘Then try her on another line. Hurry, for Christ’s sake!’

  Thompson steps up to the mike.

  ‘Ten years ago,’ he begins, ‘our military made a small-scale attempt to explore human consciousness. Nobody gave it much hope of achieving anything. Today, however, I am able to report that it succeeded, and spectacularly so …’

  I start walking up the right side of the auditorium, scanning the crowd. Hetta does the same on the left.

  ‘We now have proof,’ Thompson says, ‘that physical existence is made up not just of matter and energy, but of information – data that never dies. A perfect record, burned forever into the hard-drive of reality, of every molecule of matter, of every event, of every emotion, of every thought anybody ever had.’

  I feel the restlessness of the audience.

  ‘Now imagine,’ he continues, ‘what we would know – what we might do – if we could access this data. What it might tell us about our planet; about the origins of the Universe. About us …’

  He pauses. ‘Well, this is exactly what we’ve done.’

  A few people begin to clap, then think better of it.

  Thompson waits a moment or two. I carry on up the steps, trying to look into every face, but there are so damn many …

  ‘This discovery, of course,’ Thompson says, when some semblance of order has returned, ‘has come at a price. Because what it gives us is unprecedented capability.

  ‘We, the United States, now have the means to know what you did yesterday, to know everything that your parents did, and their parents before them. Soon, we will be able to do this in real time, to see everything you do, as you do it; and everything you think.’

  As the implications of what he has just said filter through the language barrier, some people toward the front get to their feet. A few of them start to shout and to heckle.