by Sam Bourne
‘You’re not on your own, Maggie.’
She looked up, fixing him in a cold stare. ‘I am alone if I’m up against a gang of book-burners and murderers and you’re on their bloody side!’
She stood up and moved towards the front door of the apartment. ‘I know it sounds hysterical, that you probably think I just need to calm down. But if we’re not on the same side, then I need to do this alone.’ She opened the door and held it open, watching in silence as he packed up his things and left.
*
At moments like this, Maggie tended to have two forms of pain relief. Either whisky or a phone call with her sister. This time she opted for both.
‘Maggie?’
‘Hi Liz.’
‘You sound weird. Is something going on?’
‘Thanks a lot, Liz.’
‘I just mean, usually, I call you. Unless, you know, something’s up.’
‘Did I tell you I ran into Uri?’
‘No, Maggie, you did not tell me that major piece of information.’ The excitement in her voice was audible, even from six hundred and fifty miles away. ‘Don’t tell me, he’s married. I don’t want to say, “I told you so.” ’
‘Well, then don’t.’
‘So he’s married?’
‘Was.’
‘Divorced? Or—’
‘Divorced.’
‘It’s just I was hearing about Dolores. Do you remember her? Year above me? Had plaits till she was, like, twelve? Apparently her boyfriend left her when she got the diagnosis. I mean, we knew he was a prize wanker, but I didn’t think even he was capable . . .’
As Liz spoke, Maggie was thinking about Uri. What the fuck was he talking about? Maybe this can be healing. How could he of all people even think like that about the torching of archives and libraries, including a Holocaust museum? And if he did think like that, why the hell was he helping her?
‘. . . he doing now?’
Half an antenna picked up that her sister had asked a question. It demanded a response.
‘What’s he doing now?’ she said, stalling. Of course. Uri. ‘He’s still making documentaries. We were in the same place.’
‘Yeah, that’s kind of essential if you’re going to run into each other. Jesus, Mags, can you cut to the chase? Did you, you know?’
‘No, I don’t know.’
‘You bloody do know, you stupid cow. Did you shag?’
‘Elizabeth Costello, can I remind you that you are now a married woman and a mother of two and you’re not meant to talk like you’re still bunking off Sister Agnes’ scripture class to have a quick fag.’
‘Did you or didn’t you?’
‘All right, I’ll tell you. We did not.’
‘How come?’
‘To tell you the truth, I think maybe he’s changed.’
‘Why, has he gone fat? It can happen. I mean, Paul gets a bit lardy if he misses his bike ride, though I always—’
‘No. He looks good actually. It’s just I’m not sure we see eye to eye any more. We had a bit of a row, actually. Just now.’
‘What about?’
‘I threw him out.’
‘You threw him out? You’re kidding! You’d only just seen him.’
‘I know.’
‘You don’t mess about, do you?’
‘It’s a long story. Tell me, how are the boys?’
The long answer that inquiry always yielded gave Maggie time to think. A feeling that she had pushed down below the surface now rose to the top. Last night, at the library, it was Uri who had suggested they get a closer look, he who had suggested they go in, even though that had meant exposing themselves to grave danger. She had done as he had suggested but when she looked round, he was . . . gone.
‘And how’s work?’ Maggie offered, as if poking at a logfire that might otherwise flicker out.
As her sister spoke about the new academic year and a change in the testing system that was making her timetable a nightmare, Maggie went back to the way she and Uri had bumped into each other in Charlottesville. Of all the race riots in all the towns in all the world, you walk into mine. It was smooth, no doubt about it. But was it a bit too smooth?
‘Sure. So what did you say?’ she asked, tuning into Liz’s monologue just in time to maintain the illusion of dialogue. As her sister replied, Maggie reminded herself that she had been played by men before, that she should have learned her lesson by now.
Liz was running through the pros and cons of her applying for the Head of Computer Studies job at the school rather than waiting to be offered it, especially since Ryan seemed to be needier now that he was in elementary school. Meanwhile, another voice in Maggie’s head was telling herself that this was now, not then. Uri was Uri, he wasn’t the same as those others. Letting the past strangle the chance of something good: that too was a habit from her past.
‘So you know this new therapist I’ve been seeing?’
‘The handsome French bloke?’
‘He says I need to be very careful to avoid repeating childhood behaviours.’
Maggie sat up. ‘What kind of childhood behaviours?’
‘He says I avoid confrontations, that I put my head in the sand.’
‘Like what?’
‘That I go into denial rather than deal with things.’
‘And what’s he basing that on?’
‘I don’t know, just what we’ve talked about, I suppose.’
‘And how often are you seeing him?’
‘Twice a week. Three this week, because of all the stuff we’re working through.’
‘Jesus.’
‘That’s his method. He does an extra session if you have the time.’
‘And the money.’
‘Thing is, Mags. We got deep into the childhood stuff this morning. It was strange. A whole lot of things I remembered, which I didn’t know I remembered, do you know what I mean?’
‘I’ve heard about this. False memory syndrome.’
‘No, I can tell they’re real. It’s just I’d forgotten, if that makes any sense.’
‘That’s because you’ve actually got a life. Which means living in the present, not obsessing over the past. If therapists had their way, we’d spend every single fucking day going over how we felt taking a shit when we were three. But some of us actually—’
‘All right, don’t bite my head off.’
‘I’m sorry, Liz. But these people, really. How much are you paying him?’
‘I told you, it’s nothing to do with money. I’m finding it useful. There’s a lot that happened that I feel confused by.’
‘Well, I think people like this – like this “Yves” – they thrive on that. On making their customers feel confused. So they get hooked and have to keep coming back.’
‘I don’t believe this. Why are you trying to sabotage this, Maggie?’
‘I’m not sabotaging anything.’
‘Yes you are. You’re trying to undermine this process. Now why do you think you’d be doing that? What’s that about?’
‘Now you’re even talking like a fucking therapist!’
‘Oh, fuck off, Maggie.’
Neither of them hung up. They held the silence together for about twenty seconds until Maggie let out a long sigh. ‘I’m sorry, Liz. I don’t know what’s got into me.’ It was true; she didn’t. ‘It’s probably this thing with Uri. Blame that.’
‘All right.’ Liz’s voice was tight, several stages away from forgiving.
They said goodbye. Maggie drained the whisky glass, wondering as she returned it to the kitchen how many more relationships she could ruin before the day was out. And as she washed her face in the bathroom, she wondered if her sister had a point. Had she been trying to sabotage this therapy thing? And if she had, what would be the reason?
Gingerly she removed her clothes, inhaling sharply at the sting the burned skin still sent to her nervous system when touched, and slipped under the covers, trying not to think of Uri and therefore thi
nking only of Uri. Sleep came eventually, bringing dreams of talking statues and falling gravestones, so that Maggie Costello was wholly unaware of the burning havoc being unleashed thousands of miles away, as she lay unconscious and in the dark.
Wednesday
Chapter Nineteen
Bodleian Library, Oxford, 2.05am
The stillness was complete at this hour, the air silent but for the low hum of the electrics which kept this place safe and dry. The books remained where they had always been, lined up on shelves, stiff and straight-backed, standing to attention, like soldiers waiting for their orders.
Waiting was their vocation. Some of them had done it for hundreds of years, right in this very place. Waiting day after day, night after night, for weeks which turned into months, months which turned into years, years which turned into decades and decades which turned into centuries. They were patience itself, ripe with the knowledge that they would disgorge just the moment it was required. They would not force their knowledge on anyone. They would hold it within their pages, yielding it only when required. But there it sat, ready, waiting for the moment.
Line after line, row after row, of books, packed together in the dark of night. Added together, they would stretch for hundreds of miles, girdling the nation if not the globe with their facts, their memories, their observations, their quotations, their dates, their disagreements, their discoveries, their ideas and their proof of all that had gone before.
And not just books. Crammed together in this warren of rooms, this catacomb of pages, were maps and stamps and drawings and sheet music, as well as poems, speeches, novels and reports. There were computations from the dawn of science, as well as sermons from the Middle Ages and ruminations on the birth of modern philosophy – all, in their own way, attempts to touch the face of God.
If any of those long-dead authors had stalked the empty corridors of the Bodleian Library that night, what might they have heard? Not a sound as the fire alarm system was hacked and disabled, for that was a noiseless process easily done from many miles away. Nor would they have had any clue as a distant hand took similar charge of the climate control system, preparing it for use as a crucial tool. Or, more accurately, weapon.
Next came command of the power-assisted doors and the system of fire curtains, the blinds woven from fibre-glass material that were coiled up in boxes ready to roll down like shutters when needed. No less important: cutting off selected cameras from the closed circuit TV system. This was the beauty of the fully connected, fire-conscious building: everything was computerized through a single, state-of-the-art system.
And surely any spectral presence walking through the ancient rooms of the Bodleian would have paid no attention to those objects which were to be found on every floor, stashed away in the ceiling ducts: the heating and ventilation units, glorified metal boxes inside which would be stored a heating element, capable of warming the box up the way an element heats up a kettle, and a refrigeration unit ready for when cooling air was required.
Almost as invisible, out of sight and out of mind, would be the ‘riser’. To the untutored, walking past them each day, they would look like nothing more than a big store cupboard, centrally placed, one on each floor, their doors almost always closed.
But inside were the electrics, a series of panels fixed to the walls for each of the fire and burglar alarms, as well as lighting, heating and ventilation. Along with the main power supply, it was all here, the wiring spidering out to reach all points on that floor. If you could speak of a building having a central nervous system, this was it.
The first move came invisibly, with the remote despatch shortly after two am of an instruction to the heating units on each floor, dialling them up to their maximum setting. Soon the metal became red-hot. The wiring inside began to smoulder.
But of course, no alarm sounded. How could it? That was the job of a fire warning system that had been silently disabled by remote signal.
The ducts in an old building like this were rarely cleaned. Inside was the accumulated dust – the hair, the human skin – of years, if not decades. It would take just a single spark from those wires melting in the heat to light that kindling. But the distant hand was not relying on that. Instead, at a moment calculated with precision, it turned on the fans that were essential to any ventilation system, so that they now breathed all that super-heated air over the dry dust, igniting it as surely as a Boy Scout blowing on a pile of tinder.
The flames would come quickly. The silent witnesses on the shelves, bound in aged leather, would see them – but the CCTV system would not. Carefully selected, the camera with a view of this particular corner had been quietly taken out.
The night security guards, facing their bank of monitors, would see nothing out of the ordinary. And why would they get up out of their chairs to go and look? Foot patrols had been replaced long ago, deemed redundant thanks to the network of motion-sensitive infra-red sensors. If anyone were moving around, they’d know about it.
The air around the vents was dry. Of course it was. Expensive climate control technology always ensured the environment inside this centuries-old building was just so, guarding against the humidity and dampness that might spoil all those precious volumes. There were no sprinklers overhead for a similar reason: water damage was deemed an even greater menace to all those old, dusty pages than fire.
Indeed, the precautions against fire had created the perfect conditions for it. For what lay inside each fire control panel, also now in the grip of remote instruction, but a contingency put in place precisely for an emergency like this one? A set of lithium ion batteries that might fuel the panel in case of a power cut. The trouble was, those batteries were highly flammable. Thanks to the heat and the flames, they would eventually catch fire too.
And of course the smoke did not remain contained. It leaked into those spaces no one ever thought about, but which fire craved: the voids between the ceiling of one room and the floor of the room above. Contained in that space, the smoke swiftly got hotter and hotter. The void was full of cables of all kinds – telephone, electricity, internet – each of them sheathed in a rubber that began to melt. The raw wire was now exposed, so that one cable could touch the naked current of another. The result was another spark. And then another. Those sparks touched the smoke – so hot it was capable of reaching temperatures of six hundred degrees – which promptly burst into more flames.
How long did it take for those flames to spread through the ceiling void of this entire floor? Seconds. And from there into the wall voids, until the fire had the building in its grip from all sides. A library like this one could barely resist the licking tongues of those flames. It offered itself up to them eagerly. It made such perfect tinder: all those dustbins, all those ancient wooden desks and shelves, all those books, all that paper and all of it so fastidiously dry. It was ideal kindling, ready to burst at the first caress of fire.
And from afar, the blaze could now be directed and choreographed. Had the system been working as it was meant to, the air-conditioning system would have shut down at the first breath of fire. But it was an accomplice to this crime: it had helped start the fire in the first place. Turned on at full strength, it continued to send gusts of oxygen to feed the flames. It was nature’s accelerant.
Like a conductor using every instrument to shape the swell and sound of the orchestra, the distant controller was also using the fire curtains to direct the blaze. The conductor might drop down a curtain in one area, allowing the fire to build up and intensify in that confined space, then raise it, encouraging the fire, now grown more fierce, to spread into the next room. The electronically operated doors could serve a similar purpose.
And through it all, those delicate texts, those old scrolls and battered parchments, those documents that recorded civil war, reformation and counter-reformation, empire and revolution, remained silent, save for the crackle and whisper they uttered as they turned into cinders and ash.
Chapter Twenty
/> Washington DC, 7.38am
The moment she saw the news about the Bodleian, and about the fires on a similar scale at national libraries in Paris and Beijing, Maggie wanted to send a message to Donna Morrison, Governor of Virginia: This is much bigger than we thought.
But as she typed in the letters – D, then O, then N – the phone, which usually completed the rest, did nothing to bring up Donna’s name or her number. Impatient, Maggie went into the ‘contacts’, but the device told her starkly, You have no contacts.
She went to her archive of text messages. She would find the governor’s last one and simply reply to that. Except that too was empty.
Maggie looked at her phone and then, in a gesture that made no sense, shook it, as if she might stir it from its slumber, or as if it were an old transistor radio with sand in the works.
Second best, but she would email the governor instead. But when she went to the Mail app, her inbox was also empty. Everything had been deleted, her entire phone wiped.
She went to her laptop and went to the section marked Photos. As the machine processed her request, she felt the anxiety rising like bile. She heard herself muttering: ‘Please no, please no.’ But it was no good. Blankly, the computer let her know that that part of its memory – and hers – had been obliterated. The photos – of Liz, of her nephews, of Uri, of Stuart, of her life – had gone. If they had once sat in the cloud, they were now no more than vapour.
It was clear. Someone was destroying her personal history. They could erase her past by a simple hack, doubtless the work of a few keystrokes from anywhere in the world. They had the ability to do it and, they wanted her to know, they had the will.
She went back to the keyboard. She had her contacts backed up there, also stored, along with her email in the cloud. Unless . . .
Yep, those too had been erased. Jesus Christ, if you wanted to drive somebody mad in the twenty-first century, this was how to do it.
She would have to call Liz. She would remind her that, ages ago, Liz had done some kind of back-up of Maggie’s data on an external hard drive. She would ask her where that was and what she needed to do.
