Cry Darkness

by Hilary Bonner

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Facts

  Prologue

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Part Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Part Three

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Part Four

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Part Five

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Part Six

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Acknowledgements

  CRY DARKNESS

  Hilary Bonner

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2020

  in Great Britain and 2021 in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2021 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  This eBook edition first published in 2021 by Severn House,

  an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  Copyright © 2020 by Hilary Bonner.

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Hilary Bonner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-9051-1 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-748-4 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0486-8 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  For Maggie Forwood

  Fifty years of friendship and still counting …

  All the powers of the universe are already ours. It is we who put our hands before our eyes and cry that it is dark.

  Swami Vivekananda

  THE FACTS

  An American paraplegic, Matthew Nagle, known as the first real bionic man, was fitted at Rhode Island Hospital in 2004 with an electrode implant designed to assist him to channel and focus his thoughts in order to send out brainwaves powerful enough to operate mechanical devices. He successfully learned how to use a computer, operate a TV, and draw on screen.

  In 2013, a quadriplegic American woman, fitted with a brain implant developed by a US government research agency, flew an F-35 fighter-jet simulator using only her thoughts.

  Clinical trials, bankrolled lavishly by governments convinced that the brain is the next battlefield, look set to continue indefinitely. In 2013 the US launched its Brain Initiative, with an estimated budget of 4.5 million dollars, spread over a twelve-year period, and in the same year the European Union announced that it planned to devote 1.34 million dollars (almost 1.25 million euros) to a ten-year Human Brain project.

  Meanwhile, over the last thirty years laboratory-controlled experiments conducted throughout the world, known collectively as the Global Consciousness Project, and linked to a database at America’s prestigious Princeton University, have indicated repeatedly that it is possible for the human mind to predict and therefore potentially influence outside events, both mechanical and physical.

  The scientists running these experiments claim that this involves appearing to predict events of global significance like 9/11, the massive Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, and the death of Princess Diana.

  They believe that if the power of consciousness could be channelled and controlled the human race would have within its grasp a force of infinite magnitude quite beyond present comprehension.

  PROLOGUE

  They waited until the moon had passed behind a cloud. Then, cloaked by darkness, they made their approach, running hard across the lawn until they reached the protection of the building itself. Pressing their bodies against its walls, they moved stealthily sideways, almost crab-like, towards their chosen point of entry.

  Breaking in was not a problem to them. They were experts in the art. Even the most sophisticated of security systems presented little difficulty. They had the knowledge, they had the equipment, and they had already studied the target.

  It took only a few minutes to gain entry to the building, and a couple of minutes more to reach the designated room within.

  Once there, the younger man removed the black rucksack he was carrying on his back and passed it to his older companion, who took from it what appeared to be a quite unremarkable piece of office equipment. A cardboard box file, mottled grey in colour.

  The older man flipped up the lid of the box file, and focused the narrow beam of his pencil torch on its contents. Inside lay a cylindrical object, apparently constructed primarily of metal, but more innocent looking and perhaps smaller than might be expected of a weapon with a quite terrifying capacity for destruction. It was a pipe bomb, an explosive device used primarily by terrorist organizations worldwide, all the components of which are legal and easily obtained. On detonation a shock wave passing through the device causes every particle to break down simultaneously, and a major explosion is therefore completed in just a few millionths of a second.

  The man studied the pipe bomb for a moment before flicking down a switch at one end of it, thus completing its lethal circuit.

  He then carefully closed the lid of the box file, and placed his torch on a convenient shelf so that its beam focused on a nearby filing cabinet, the bottom drawer of which had already been opened by his younger colleague, who had also removed most of the contents of the drawer.

  Even more carefully, he carried the grey box file across the room, using both hands, and lowered it into the cabinet drawer, pushing it to the very back. Then he replaced the various other files and papers, which had previously been removed, and shut the drawer. Slowly and silently.

  It was unlikely that anyone would even notice the file before the explosive device it contained had fulfilled its dreadful purpose, activated at exactly the optimum time by mobile telephone. But if they did, the chances were that the grey file, so ordinary, and so like several others used in the filing system into which it had been integrated, would not give any particular cause for alarm.

  The two men exchanged a fleeting smile of satisfaction at a job well done before making their way, quickly and quietly, out of the building, using the same route by which they had entered. They took pride in completing any task that they undertook with total efficiency.

  And as the
y slipped outside, waiting again, on a night of changeable weather conditions, for the moon to pass behind a cloud, before heading for the cover of the tall trees conveniently grouped at the far side of the lawn, neither of the men gave a thought to the havoc they were about to wreak.

  The horror of death by explosion, or indeed almost any other means, was nothing new nor even mildly disturbing to them. They had no qualms at all about deliberately setting out to kill and destroy.

  The device they had planted was capable of reducing most of the building in which they had left it to a pile of rubble, and blowing to pieces anyone who might be inside at the time. This did not concern them one jot.

  They considered themselves to be professionals. They believed that their cause was the only right and proper one, and that any means, however foul, would be ultimately justified by the end that they sought.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  The phone call that would change everything came out of the blue one Monday afternoon, as Dr Sandy Jones was sitting at her desk feeling dangerously pleased with life.

  Sandy Jones was a TV boffin, every bit as much a media figure as an academic. Thanks to a succession of series for the BBC presenting science to the people in what was generally regarded as a remarkably accessible way, she had, without really intending to, become something of a celebrity.

  She was Professor of Astrophysics at Devon’s Exeter University, but it was her media success which had brought her a degree of material wealth and a certain standing in society.

  She’d just enjoyed rather a good lunch, a treat she rarely indulged in, but earlier that day she’d received a letter offering her the chancellorship of Oxford University, her old alma mater. And she still couldn’t quite believe it.

  Sandy Jones had been brought up in a sink housing estate on the outskirts of Birmingham, and attended a far from adequate inner-city comprehensive, which nonetheless had successfully fast-tracked her through her early education.

  By the time she was seventeen, brilliant and precocious, she had a string of GCSEs to her name and had won her Oxford place. At barely twenty she achieved a double first in physics and found herself – almost, it had felt, without being actively involved in the process – studying for her MSc and then her doctorate at Princeton, USA, having gained a much-coveted post-graduate research position.

  She was internationally regarded as a leading force in her chosen area of expertise, and in the UK had become as famous outside the scientific establishment as she was acclaimed within.

  The vast majority of her contemporaries at the top of their fields in British academia still came from highly privileged backgrounds.

  Jones did not. She fingered the battered gold Longine watch which had been her father’s most treasured possession. He had acquired it in Berlin during the last days of World War Two. It was about the only thing of any value Jack Jones ever owned, and when he died, far too early at fifty-three, the watch passed to his only child. Sandy Jones had been eight, a bright little girl who spent the rest of her childhood watching her mother struggle horribly to provide even the barest essentials of life.

  The Longine was a big watch for a woman of slim build and slightly less than average height but Jones didn’t care. She wore it always.

  Now she was going to become the Chancellor of Oxford, having been elected by the university’s Convocation from an imposing list of nominees.

  Jones glanced out of the window of her office in the heart of the Exeter campus. It was a green and leafy academic oasis, the kind of environment which, in her early life, she could only have dreamed of.

  She picked up the Oxford letter lying open in front of her on her desk and, with some reluctance, folded it in its envelope and popped it into a drawer.

  It was at that moment that the phone rang. Jones reached out with one hand and almost absent-mindedly lifted the receiver to her ear.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, rather more curtly than she’d intended, her thoughts still far away.

  ‘Don’t you “yes” me, you arrogant English upstart,’ responded a voice she instantly recognized. It had been a long time. That made no difference. For a start nobody else in the world would speak to her like that.

  ‘Connie, how the devil are you?’

  Jones felt her face split into a grin as she spoke.

  Constance Pike, psychologist, philosopher, and innovator, a woman who, when Jones had met her at Princeton, had displayed an intent rather more extreme than Jones’s comparatively modest aim of seeking to better understand the universe. Connie had wanted to turn it upside down, inside out, and totally restructure it, and had never given up trying to do so.

  She’d had a profound effect on the young Sandy Jones, and although the path Jones had chosen could not have taken her much further away from Connie, within the confines of science anyway, Jones probably still admired her more than anyone she’d ever met.

  ‘Better than I deserve, I expect. And how are you, Sandy? Still taking charge of the world?’

  ‘I thought that was what you always wanted to do.’

  ‘No damned fear. Just change it a bit, that’s all.’

  Sandy Jones laughed. Connie always had made her laugh, even when she wasn’t trying to be funny.

  ‘And how’s the rest of the team? Paul OK?’

  ‘Right enough. He’s got a new puppy. Brings it to the lab, as usual. And does it ever stop pissing? Does it hell!’

  Jones laughed again.

  ‘Nothing changes then.’

  ‘Nope. The lab stinks worse than ever before.’

  ‘Which is saying something.’

  ‘Sure is.’

  ‘Anyway, you still keeping on trucking out there?’

  Jones fell easily into the American vernacular. It was something that she did. One of her communicating tricks was to almost automatically try to speak the same language as anyone she was trying to connect to. It wasn’t a trick with Connie though. Just the way things had always been between them.

  ‘Doing our best not to let the bastards get to us, anyway. Do you know they put sprinklers in here last week? Health and safety. Fire regulations, they say. Bullshit! More than forty years since Paul started it all, and suddenly the dorks can’t leave us alone.’

  ‘Did you think they’d forgotten you?’

  ‘Only when it suits ’em. There’s a sprinkler right above my computer, would you believe. Don’t dare even light up a cig. It goes off, I’m sunk.’

  ‘Literally.’

  ‘Yeah, literally.’

  They both chuckled. Smoking had already been banned inside most of the university buildings even when Jones had been at Princeton, but Connie, Paul, and their team had been then, and obviously remained, a law unto themselves.

  There was a silence. Jones waited for Connie to speak again. After all, it was she who had called her, and it had been a long time since the days when they’d made regular phone calls across the Atlantic to each other just for a chat. It must have been the best part of a year since they’d been in contact at all, and that had been just an email exchange. She suspected Connie must have a specific reason for calling her now.

  She heard Connie cough, clear her throat.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Right as I’ll ever be.’

  There was another silence. Jones surrendered.

  ‘Is the great pleasure of this phone call down to anything in particular?’ she asked, keeping her voice light.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. The last time we were in touch you said you’d be coming to see us. I’m still waiting, you jerk.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I was going to take the train over when I was in New York giving the Triple A last year.’

  Jones paused, remembering. It had been a great honour to be asked to give the keynote address to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, and she had to admit that she had made the most of every moment of it.

  ‘I just didn’t get time in the end,’ she finished lamely.


  ‘Any chance in the near future?’

  ‘Well, not for a bit. I’m kind of busy right now.’

  That much was true enough. The BBC now liked her to produce a major series annually, and they’d rushed her current one, The Big Bang and You, onto the screen with such haste that there was still footage to be shot for the final episode. She was also soon to begin filming a major sequel, After the Big Bang.

  In addition she always took pains not to neglect her duties at Exeter, which was why she frequently filmed at weekends.

  And later that month she was to attend a dinner at Oxford, being given in her honour, prior to the ceremony inaugurating her as chancellor early the following year.

  ‘I’m going to be up to my eyes for the next few months,’ she continued.

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  She had expected an instant tirade from Connie, whom she knew had remained every bit as idealistic as she’d been twenty years earlier, in spite of now being over sixty, Jones reckoned. While her contemporaries strove for glory, or at least for tangible reward for their efforts, Connie seemed to stay exactly the same. She was dedicated, evangelical about her work, and of course poor. She was also inclined to be brutally scathing of those who had chosen other more materially rewarding paths, and could be particularly cutting in her dealings with Jones, who didn’t mind because she was well aware that was how Connie treated those she was especially fond of. So when Connie didn’t react in the expected way, Jones was puzzled.

  ‘You sure you’re OK, Connie?’

  Another pause, followed by an indirect response.

  ‘There was something I wanted to talk to you about, that’s all.’

  Connie sounded flat. And there was an inflection in her voice that Jones couldn’t make out. But she didn’t have the time to worry about it.

  ‘Well, go on then, shoot.’

  She checked her watch. Fond as she was of Connie Pike she really was going to have to end this conversation. She’d actually hoped to make a couple of important telephone calls before leaving her office to attend a crucial faculty meeting in the administration block. But time was running out. She had little more than ten minutes to get to the other side of the campus if she didn’t want to be late. And Sandy Jones was never late.