Coming face to face with Connie like that under such horrible twisted circumstances, the woman she had so admired for so long, had been much more traumatic than Jones had expected. She couldn’t get over Connie’s duplicity. Connie had put almost everyone she was in contact with at risk, including her own partner. Even after the RECAP explosion and Paul’s death she’d duped Jones into becoming involved in order to save her own skin – and to protect the future of RECAP, of course.
Jones could still hardly believe it.
Ed took her by the hand and led her into the kitchen, gesturing for her to take a seat at the little table. He made tea, and waited patiently until Jones was calm enough to give an account of her harrowing meeting with the two women.
‘You’ve been very brave, I just couldn’t face it,’ Ed said, when Jones had finished. ‘At least Connie knows now that she hasn’t got away with it after all. Not totally, anyway.’
He asked if Jones would like a proper drink. Jones said she would.
‘I’ve got some bourbon somewhere,’ said Ed.
He wandered off and started opening and shutting cupboard doors.
The television in one corner of the kitchen was switched on. Jones stared at it out of habit. A news bulletin washed over her. There was a curious item about an FBI agent who had been found dead in bed in Hawaii with his younger male lover, also a Fed. Apparently they’d both been strangled. There seemed to be a suggestion that they may have succeeded in strangling each other. Hawaii State Police reported that they suspected some kind of gay sex ritual.
Jones barely registered that item or any other. She’d done what she’d come to do. She’d needed to confront Connie, painful though that had been. And, Jones had to admit, not entirely satisfactory, either.
There’d been a look in Connie’s eye when Jones told her what she had learned and what she thought of her. And it had been a look Jones had not quite been able to fathom. She couldn’t help think that there still might be something more, another secret that Connie was keeping.
Jones gave herself a mental shaking. It was over. Really over. She must stop dealing with fantasy and get on with her life. A life she was beginning to hope Ed might one day become part of again. Although she knew that was going to take time.
She also knew that scientific research into the mystery of consciousness would continue all over the world. Without Paul. And without Connie.
TWENTY-ONE
A couple of weeks later in his South Bank office, on the top floor of a very tall building, Jimmy Cecil sat with his chair fully reclined and his feet on his desk. He was reading a confidential report, fresh from Washington, on the RECAP affair.
By and large, the American cousins had glossed over it all quite effectively, he thought. For once. It could have been far more embarrassing, not just for the cousins, but for the UK and a number of the other countries, all UN affiliated, who had been privy to the existence of the Ruders Theory. In America the relevant government departments and the various security forces involved continued to publicly insist that the Princeton explosion had been caused by animal rights protesters, and there was no evidence to the contrary. Or no evidence that anyone was prepared to put forward, at any rate.
All copies of the flawed theory had now allegedly been destroyed. As indeed it had been planned to destroy the theory had it been genuine. Although Cecil had always feared that in reality that would never have happened. At least one copy would have survived in the dusty archives of some secret place somewhere, and ultimately, eventually, would have surfaced. Then the whole kerfuffle would have begun again.
Cecil walked to the window and looked out at the sweeping view it presented of the River Thames, iron grey and threatening on a dull winter’s day, snaking along past Westminster, under Waterloo and Blackfriars Bridge, towards St Paul’s and beyond.
For a while he stood there mulling things over. The untimely deaths of the Enforcer and his Apprentice had been regrettable. It was also regrettable, if perhaps inevitable, that they’d already been identified as FBI agents. But that had caused only a minor scandal compared with the uproar which would have occurred if certain of their recent activities had ever become public knowledge.
Duke Johnson wasn’t saying exactly what fate may or may not have befallen that loose cannon Mikey MacEntee. Johnson, of course, was not a man given to imparting any more information than he had to. It went against his nature. But it seemed that, at the very least, the young man was safely out of the way. And Jimmy Cecil considered it highly unlikely that the MacEntee connection would cause any further problems. Johnson had dealt with the matter rather skilfully, he thought. Any more definite solution concerning the brother of the former man in Sandy Jones’s life – or possibly not former any more, Cecil reckoned – may have stirred her up again, which nobody wanted. She had proven to be quite a formidable adversary. For an academic.
A fire boat, on exercise, swept past the riverside building, heading downstream at speed, all its hoses pumping foaming funnels of river water into great arcs which splashed spectacularly back into the Thames. Cecil thought it quite majestic. He watched idly for a few seconds, even though his mind was far away.
All in all, he reflected, the damage limitation exercise had been fairly successfully completed.
It had, of course, been Johnson who had executed the original plan, the bombing of RECAP and all that followed. But Johnson had been operating not only with the off-the-record authority of those in much higher places in America, but also with the tacit approval of the United Nations states involved – something all of them would deny, naturally. Just as Cecil had explained to Sandy Jones.
It was unfortunate that the entire exercise had subsequently proved to have been unnecessary. Jimmy Cecil disapproved of avoidable violence, needless loss of life. But these things happened. And he was pleased that it had ultimately been possible to allow Sandy Jones, a woman he’d always rather liked and admired, to come to no harm. Indeed, not so much possible as obligatory, once the celebrity boffin had so cleverly thrown herself and the whole messed-up operation into the public arena.
It had been a close call though, far closer for both Sandy Jones and Ed MacEntee than either of them would ever know.
Cecil had been left with little choice but to support Marmaduke Johnson when Jones and MacEntee had gone on the run. And he’d then been more or less forced to follow through when the pair of them had managed to get themselves back to the UK – even though they had displayed a level of initiative with which Cecil had been secretly rather impressed.
Individuals were always dispensable. They had to be in the circles Jimmy Cecil moved in. Even individuals you liked and respected. Nonetheless, he had been relieved to have been able to so dramatically rescind, at the eleventh hour, the order to eliminate Jones and MacEntee.
It was, of course, a much greater relief to Cecil that there was actually no effective Theory of Consciousness in existence, and, it seemed, never had been. Neither RECAP, nor any other of the world’s scientists, had yet managed to solve humanity’s greatest mystery after all.
As far as Cecil was concerned that was good news. The status quo would continue. The people of the world were not going to rise as one against their governments, not for the time being anyway. Cecil had believed for years that one day there would be an almighty sea change. After all, there was little doubt that the vast majority of individuals in the vast majority of countries no longer had much belief or confidence in those who ruled their lives.
Jimmy Cecil was a realist. Jimmy Cecil was a pragmatist. He knew about people, and the way their minds worked. He believed it was absurd to suppose that existence could only be physical. And he had little doubt that the scientific community would one day solve the mystery of consciousness, thus taking a conceptual leap which would be far greater even than the leap from the power of fire to that of nuclear energy.
Meanwhile, Cecil remained devoted to the traditions of conventional government. He remained convinced
that any dramatic change in what he regarded to be the natural order of things would lead to a total breakdown in international order, and should be held at bay for as long as possible.
By and large, Jimmy Cecil liked the world just how it was, and intended to continue to do all he could to keep it that way.
Marmaduke Johnson sat alone in his White House office, a small austere room tucked away in an almost forgotten corner. Naturally the president, although highly unlikely ever to publicly recognize his existence, knew where to find him. So did the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and a number of others, similarly eminent, who would also deny that he existed.
Jimmy Cecil had been absolutely right of course. Johnson had made sure Mikey emailed him a copy of the Ruders Theory right at the very beginning. Just in case. Duke Johnson believed it was his job to ensure that both he and America were always a step ahead.
When he’d heard from Cecil that the paper was not what had been believed, that the Ruders Theory did not stand up, Johnson had decided on a second opinion. After all, Duke Johnson didn’t trust anybody. And he certainly didn’t trust Jimmy Cecil, even though the two men, and a small group of others like them worldwide, had been supposed to be working as a team over the RECAP affair.
Apart from Connie Pike, there were two, maybe three, scientists in the world who were capable of judging Paul Ruders’ work. Johnson had called in the one he thought might be most attracted to the material gain he would be able to put his way, and had presented the paper as if he believed it were genuine. Less than a week later the somewhat bewildered scientist had confirmed that the theory was, to put it bluntly, nonsense.
Ruders, and that mad woman who’d worked with him, had just been crazy eccentrics, it seemed, believing in the impossible, deluding themselves. Paul Ruders had had an excuse, Johnson supposed. He’d been suffering from Alzheimer’s. But Johnson still couldn’t understand what made the other one tick. It had been Connie Pike who’d supplied the copy of Ruders’ work to Mikey. And, as probably the second most foremost figure in the field, nobody had suspected a thing when she’d confirmed its authenticity.
Johnson lit another black cheroot from the stub of the one he had already been smoking. Nobody else smoked in the White House, as far as he knew – and, of course, if they did, he would know. But Marmaduke Johnson’s world was a thing apart, a place where he, and only he, made up the rules as he went along.
The little room was hazy with smoke. Johnson liked that, an unsavoury fog providing the illusion of yet another screen behind which he could conceal himself from the prying eyes of democracy.
He leaned back in his chair and inhaled deeply.
With the wonderful benefit of hindsight he wondered how on earth he could have fallen for any of the RECAP mumbo jumbo in the first place.
Unlike Jimmy Cecil, Marmaduke Johnson was not inclined to believe in anything much that he couldn’t see with his own eyes, right in front of him, and preferably reach out and touch.
Sandy Jones was at home in Northdown House enjoying an early-evening gin and tonic and a wonderful wintry sunset over the sea, and looking forward to the next day more than she had looked forward to anything in what felt like a very long time.
Three months had passed since the RECAP explosion and all that followed. Life had moved on. In the morning Jones and her twin sons would be flying to New York together to spend Christmas there. She was paying, of course. She didn’t mind. She hadn’t seen nearly enough of Matt and Lee lately.
She was also hoping to see something of Ed MacEntee. They had been keeping in touch regularly, mostly via Facetime. The old friendship, so easy and natural, had definitely been fully restored. Whether or not the old love affair could ever be resurrected still remained to be seen. Jones was beginning to hope quite strongly that it could.
These were comfortable thoughts. But she also couldn’t stop thinking about Connie, which was not nearly so comfortable. At first Jones had been so angered by what Connie Pike had done, and had felt so let down by her, that she hadn’t been able to be objective.
Since then, as she’d expected would happen, somebody somewhere had leaked to the press that the Ruders Theory didn’t stand up. That it was gobbledygook. And eventually sections of the unfortunate piece of work had turned up in various newsrooms. Jones wondered if Jimmy Cecil had been responsible for that. If not, it had been somebody rather like him, she suspected.
Predictably a certain amount of the newspaper flak which followed had been directed at Jones as well as Connie, but most of the thrust in the press still focused on the question of whether or not there had been a major conspiracy and at what level. There was speculation, accurate speculation as it happened, that the security forces and various relevant government departments which may have been involved hadn’t known the theory was worthless. However, the American government ignored that, and instead presented the revelation as proof that there had been no conspiracy. The discrediting of the Ruders Theory surely removed any possible reason for there ever having been one, it was argued.
Three months on, the White House spin doctors continued to stick like glue to the original assertion that the Princeton bombing had been instigated by animal rights campaigners, and the RECAP lab destroyed by chance. It was also claimed that Marion Jessop had been accidentally mown down by a hit-and-run driver yet to be traced – which made no sense, of course. Jones had seen the incident. There had been other witnesses. And the lethal Chevy truck had returned for a second go. But this was attributed to its driver panicking, and as Jones was now keeping her head down and neither Connie nor Marion stepped forward to contradict anything, the new official version stood.
Jones had decided that the best thing to do under the circumstances was to step back from it all. The revelation that the Ruders Theory was worthless had not done her reputation any good, because it was she who had first gone public about the theory and claimed that there was a major conspiracy over it.
However, three months was a long time in the world of science. And, fortunately, it seemed that both the media and her colleagues in academia now took the attitude that her earlier outburst had been prompted only by loyalty to old friends – misguided, perhaps, but mildly laudable, all the same.
Jones was still going to be installed as Chancellor of Oxford in the New Year, although she’d heard on the grapevine that there had indeed been those amongst the university’s hierarchy who’d made it clear that they would have liked to overturn the vote of the Convocation had they been able to do so.
Her BBC bosses seemed to have taken the attitude that her sudden burst of international fame, albeit tinged with notoriety and linked to a questionable area of science, had added a touch of spice to her image which was not entirely unwelcome. It appeared that they believed her programmes would be all the more popular, and possibly attract a whole new section of the viewing public, in addition to her already established audience.
Her totally out of character behaviour in cancelling filming days at the very last minute was never mentioned again. They had been rescheduled and she was now well into her new series.
But Jones felt that she couldn’t take the RECAP affair any further, even if she still wished to, without doing herself irrevocable damage. And she didn’t see the point. It was over. Surely it was over?
Connie had been totally discredited. It was leaked to the press that she had more or less co-written the worthless paper with Paul Ruders. The full story of her involvement had yet to be revealed, and quite probably never would be. But her scientific standing had plummeted – along sadly with that of the whole consciousness project worldwide, at least temporarily – and Connie Pike was unlikely to work again, either at Princeton, in the unlikely event of RECAP ever being relaunched, or at any other reputable academic establishment. Somewhat to her surprise, Jones found, as the dust began to settle, that she wished the woman no further harm. And she could only imagine how Connie’s relationship with Marion would have suffered.
; However, as the days and weeks passed, Jones had also become more and more convinced that she’d missed something. Ultimately it had all been explained in ways that now seemed just a tad too convenient. A little too neat. There was something somewhere that didn’t quite add up. And she couldn’t get rid of the feeling that Connie Pike had not told her everything.
But this time, there really was nothing in the world Sandy Jones could do about it.
TWENTY-TWO
The previous night the first snow of winter had fallen on Princeton. Connie Pike opened the kitchen door into her little garden at the back and stood for a few moments looking out.
A pale December sun had in places turned the snow the colour of clotted cream, with tinges of blue in the shade. Icicles hanging from the fruit trees shone like white gold. Nobody had yet set foot on the lawn which was covered in a perfect milky white carpet. It was picture book stuff. It was beautiful. It was joyous. But Connie felt no joy. She did not believe she would ever feel joy again.
Her life’s work, was no more. Not for her, at any rate, whatever happened ultimately. After the flawed Ruders paper had been made public, discrediting the entire Global Consciousness Project in general, as well as Connie and Paul in particular, Thomas Jessop and the rest of the Princeton supremacy had swiftly reneged on their pledge to rebuild and reinstate RECAP.
Marion, the woman Connie had loved for twenty-five years, was spending more and more time in her own home. Alone. She had told Connie that she’d forgiven her, that she understood. But Connie knew that wasn’t true. And as she watched Marion struggling to learn to walk on an artificial leg, while coping with the severe pain which still seemed to be almost continual, Connie could hardly blame her.
She so wanted to tell Marion everything. But she didn’t dare. She had unwittingly damaged her partner quite enough. If the whole truth were known it would all begin again. Connie was quite certain of that. And this time the repercussions would surely reverberate worldwide. Many more innocent people could suffer.
Cry Darkness Page 28
