Connie had moved closer to the bed, and was again reaching out towards Marion. Once more Marion pulled away.
Outside Jones half ran down the street. She was in a hurry to get away from Connie. She was also in a hurry to get back to Ed. Ed who knew what she knew. Ed who understood.
He met her at the door, Jasper jumping about at his feet. He must have been watching the street, waiting for her to return. His face was a picture of concern. Jones took one look at him and burst into tears.
She had been totally in control until she’d confronted Connie. She and Ed had been over everything again and again. It had been such a shock for both of them to discover what Connie Pike had done. But Jones had thought they’d each already more or less come to terms with it.
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.