‘Who did you think was out there, Connie?’ Jones interrupted. ‘Those guys didn’t look like normal state police to me. And they sure as hell didn’t behave like it either.’
‘God knows. Special forces? Since 9/11 we’ve had a thing called The Joint Terrorism Task Force, made up of Feds, secret services, police too, and all kinds of unmentionables, I should imagine. Maybe it was those boys. Anyway, I don’t think you’re cut out for surveillance work, Sandy. At one point you succeeded in positioning yourself in the full glare of an arc lamp. I couldn’t believe it. The armed-to-the-teeth alleged defenders of our liberty, however, managed to be all looking the other way. I was trying to get close enough to speak to you, then you did your startled rabbit act and fell over.’
‘Um. Not one of my finer moments, I must confess.’
‘Well, I somehow or other escaped unseen again, in spite of you. But I’m quite convinced that if it got out that I was still alive, I would be in grave danger again.’
‘You would? The New York Post splashed on a story this morning that the explosion was caused by a gas leak. Surely that would be one heck of a big fib?’
‘Goddamn it, Sandy. If what I believe is halfways right then there would have been an immediate cover-up operation, orchestrated at the highest level.’
Connie gestured towards the assorted pile of newspapers on the table before them.
‘Have you seen the Post? They’ve got no confirmation from anyone. An anonymous FBI source, for Christ’s sake? Story’s been planted if you ask me. RECAP was deliberately blown up, Sandy. Someone put a bomb in the lab. Gas leak, my ass. We’d just had Health and Safety crawling over the place like nits. There was no gas leak. Trust me, somebody out there wanted to destroy our project and get rid of me and Paul at the same time. Thing is they haven’t entirely succeeded, and the trump card we have is that they don’t know that.’
‘But why? I know RECAP has never been the most popular project in certain quarters, we’ve discussed that often enough. But to blow the place up? To deliberately kill and maim? Who on earth would do that?’
‘Now that, Dr Sandy Jones, is the million-dollar question.’
‘And you have no more idea than I do?’
‘I could speculate. There are plenty of candidates. But no, I haven’t a clue.’
‘OK, so we don’t know who. What about why?’
‘Ah, that’s a different one. I think I may know why.’
‘Yes?’
‘Paul thought he’d cracked it.’
‘What?’
‘Paul told me he’d worked out a scientific formula which explained at last what lay behind our work at RECAP. Our REG results, in the lab, and the field tests. And internationally, of course. All the data we have so patiently correlated. The dice. The pinball. The meditation sessions. Every experiment we’ve ever conducted. Paul believed he had found his way to our journey’s end, or to the beginning of our journey’s end, anyway. He believed he’d discovered what the world has been looking for since the beginning of time. And you know what that is, Sandy, don’t you?’
Jones could barely believe what she was hearing. But she certainly knew the answer to Connie’s question. And she understood at once the enormity of it.
‘The mystery of consciousness,’ she murmured, her voice only just above a whisper. ‘Paul believed he’d solved the mystery of consciousness?’
‘Yep.’
‘But that’s huge. Massive.’
‘Yes, massive.’
Connie’s voice was flat.
‘Do you know exactly what Paul had found out? Do you have his formulae?’
‘No.’
‘He didn’t share his discovery with you? But you two always worked together. You conducted your experiments together, shared your results, correlated your data together. That’s how you’ve always worked.’
‘Not this time. I knew he’d been using nanotechnology almost obsessively recently. He’d believed for some time that was how the next step forwards would be achieved.’
Jones nodded. Nanotechnology. Atom-sized mechanics.
‘I remember that Paul was just introducing the concept of nanotechnology into RECAP in my day,’ she said. ‘RECAP and the GCP have always focused primarily on how mind power can change the physical, haven’t they? The level at which the mind can control and operate machines. And if you work in the area of nanotechnology everything is microscopic and any mental intention required is therefore much smaller. That’s the theory, anyway. Paul always said we needed to imagine a microscopic coffee pot, and how little physical effort would be required to induce it to pour.’
Connie smiled.
‘But he didn’t go into any more detail with you?’ Jones persisted.
‘No.’
‘I wonder why not.’
‘He told me he wanted to dot every “i” and cross every “t”. Even before letting me see. He stumbled across it initially, you see, whatever it was...’
Connie’s voice trailed off. Jones suspected she had momentarily moved away from the horrific events of the last couple of days. She’d gone to another place, a place of discovery, of inspired scientific exploration, a place where, to bastardize the words of Arthur C. Clarke, what seemed at first to be magic ultimately became explained as fact, and successive mysteries of the world were systematically explored and sometimes, just sometimes, revealed for what they really were.
‘Is that all Paul said?’ Jones asked.
Connie seemed to almost physically shake herself back to the present.
‘Well, yes. I know he had long since come to the conclusion, as indeed had I, from the work we have done over the years, that the power of human consciousness is much greater than even we had thought initially, and that it is just waiting inside us to be properly developed. Our experiments with REGs all over the world have surely proved irrefutably that global consciousness does exist, that the human race is capable of at least a certain level of shared understanding between minds, not to mention shared communication. You came to believe in that too, Sandy, didn’t you? Even if you have been trying to deny it, or at least ignore it, for the last twenty years and more.’
She paused. Sandy smiled wryly and nodded.
‘But it was the means of explaining it, the proof, the inarguable proof, that Paul claimed he had finally discovered,’ Connie continued.
She sighed and took another cigarette from the packet on the table in front of her.
‘Paul’s thinking, and mine, of course, was that in the early twenty-first century we were working towards discovering something which would seem just as extraordinary, and indeed as shocking, as when it was learned at the dawn of the twentieth century that matter and energy were essentially the same. The laws of quantum physics. The step forwards that we were heading towards, was that mind and matter are also essentially the same.’
‘But you’ve always talked about it just as a remarkable journey, Connie,’ said Jones. ‘You’ve never thought you were even close to that end, have you?’
‘Well, not really. And, as you know, I’ve always been happy with just continuing the journey. Paul wanted an end result. He wanted to prove to the world that we weren’t all barmy at RECAP. Me? I accepted my barmy label long ago. Anyway, I’d noticed that Paul had been behaving differently for several weeks. Out of character. He seemed tense and wound-up all the time. Excited too. I kept pestering him. Finally he told me he believed he’d found the answer, that he was on the verge of explaining what consciousness is, and how it functions. But he asked me to be patient.’
‘Well, if you had such trouble getting him to share that much, it’s not very likely that he told anyone else, is it?’