Hilary Bonner
Cry Darkness
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.
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 they 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.