Katherine sat smoking. They’d talked into the early hours.
There was frost between them, distance and pain. The hurt he had caused her stood in the room. She had cried, and Robert’s face burned where she had slapped him.
‘You were my anchor. If all else failed, there would be you.’
‘I’ve let you down. And myself.’
‘Please. Let’s just focus on me for the moment, shall we? Yes, you’ve let me down. You’ve hurt me.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I know you are. It doesn’t help in the least. It changes nothing.’
She took a drag on her cigarette and angrily stubbed it out. ‘I shouldn’t smoke. Look at me. I’m a wreck.’
Robert saw himself from the outside. He was there in the room with her, absorbing the tide of her pain, taking her blows as she lashed out. She needed him, and he wanted her to expend her anger on him. Yet a part of him remained distant and watchful, coldly gauging how well the ploy to free himself was working.
She toyed with her lighter, flicking it on and off. ‘When I decided to stay with you, I was coming out of a nightmare. Almost a decade, undercover most of the time. It was killing me, and I quit.’
‘To my benefit.’
‘I was lucky. I thought all the men like you were married already.’
‘You made up your mind pretty quickly. And you were done with danger and dangerous men.’
‘I was.’
‘And you wanted someone dependable and reliable, but not over fifty, and not your actual father.’
‘And you were safe. You made me feel important and safe.’
‘Even with a hurricane looming. Our whirlwind romance.’
‘And do you remember what I said to you? That night in Miami?’
‘You said you would go to the ends of the earth to avoid betrayal. To avoid experiencing it ever again. And to avoid soliciting it ever again.’
‘And now what have you done?’
Robert said nothing.
She stared out of the window. Her hurt seeped into him. He let it flow. She was right, but there was more to it. She too had her portion of blame. He bit his tongue. Losing his temper would be losing control, and this was about the opposite.
‘Robert, after 9/11 something happened to me. I wanted to think it was noble, but looking back now I think it was just about revenge. It wasn’t something I could tell you about, at the time. I shouldn’t now, actually. But I’m going to.’
‘You went back to work?’
‘You knew?’
‘I guessed. You disguised it very well. But something changed about you. You became harder, underneath everything.’
‘You didn’t say anything.’
‘What could I say? I thought perhaps the spooks never really let you go. Part of me was afraid of what would happen if I asked you about it.’
She laughed. ‘Whether I’d have to kill you? That old joke?’
‘Whether you’d have to leave me. I assume you went back to the Brits?’
‘Actually no. I went to the Americans. It was the American side of me that 9/11 really hurt. I had a few contacts. I got into counter-terrorism.’
He appraised her. ‘On the analysis side?’
‘And operations. I did some tough-girl training. Got back up to speed. That yoga retreat I did? Wasn’t yoga.’
‘Were you rusty?’
‘I was the best shot in my class when I joined Six back in ’86. I was so good I got specialist training. I was still good. Very good.’
‘You’re telling me this for a reason?’
She turned cold with anger. ‘I’m sorry, Robert. Was I boring you?’
‘No, I –’
‘You selfish, self-seeking bastard. I can’t bear to look at you.’ She stared out into the night.
‘I’m sorry, Kat.’
‘I need to tell this story. So you can understand what I mean about betrayal.’ Pain filled her voice. ‘So you can understand what you’ve done.’
Unexpectedly, tears welled in his eyes. He’d hurt her far more badly than he’d imagined. An image flashed into his mind of a tiny, misshapen fool. Himself, his ego. Shrivelled, lost in self-gratification.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, more thickly. She saw his impending emotional release, saw where it would lead. She denied him it. There would be no crying in each other’s arms, no reconciliation.
‘Let me tell this. You can’t understand me unless you know this.’
‘Go on.’
‘Something about one of the suspects we looked at in 2002 rang a bell with me. It wasn’t nice work. We were looking at potential spies in the scientific community. There was a particle physicist, an Arab-American, working out at Brookhaven on Long Island, showing suspicious behaviour. He’d only been in the country two or three years.’
‘Were you using your gift at all? I thought it died after you came out of the service.’
‘After I lost Tariq?’
‘Yes.’
‘Guess what. I found him again. At Brookhaven. Working on the particle accelerator, and also showing a lot of interest in metallic-glass research.’
‘You found him? He wasn’t killed after all?’
‘I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He’d survived. But to have been released, then to have come to America – they must have forced him to spy on us. There was no other way.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I’m ashamed of what I did.’
‘I thought you’d loved him. And you were his reason for living. For betraying. For everything.’
‘I know. I used that. I sought him out. Accidental meeting. Amazement. Tears. Protestations of innocence, of miraculous escape. I didn’t believe him for a moment. But it got me close to him. Got me to what he was doing.’
‘You started seeing him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you sleep with him?’
She paused. ‘No.’
‘Did you make him think you would?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then?’
‘America went into Iraq. A few weeks later, I led him to a secluded spot and handed him over.’
‘To whom?’
‘Interrogators.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I told myself it was the job. A necessary job. It was. Then when the Abu Ghraib things started to come out… The bestial things they were doing. I heard about them before they broke publicly. I was sick. It made me sick.’
‘You hid it well.’
‘You helped a lot. Though you didn’t realize. I quit again. I’ve had happier years with you than I thought possible, Robert. And then there was the Blackout.’
‘Our miracle came along. Moss. You a mother at forty-three.’
‘And then I lost him.’
‘We lost him.’
‘And I was cold to you. Lifeless. Since then.’
It was what he’d wanted to say. Yes, she’d been cold. Yes, it was humiliating. To be turfed out into a separate room. To be so suddenly estranged that they killed desire in each other. And yes, in a dark corner of his heart he had wanted revenge.
‘It wasn’t your fault, Kat.’
‘I always felt he was a twin.’
‘That’s what you said.’
‘From the very start, when the doctors said there was only one, I thought they were mistaken. Something had to have gone wrong.’
Katherine had slid from elation to numbness after the miscarriage. Despite all evidence to the contrary, she’d held on to the idea that somehow Moss wasn’t entirely gone. It was a common traumatic response. She’d held on to her dream creature.
‘I know it’s impossible. But you thought I was going mad.’
‘I didn’t know what to think. I just saw myself losing you. I’ve ached to be touched. By you. And then just to be touched. When it happened, it was like life returning.’
She looked into his eyes. ‘Was she good?’
‘What does that even mean?’
‘She wasn’t a bore, at least. Some people are, you know. In bed.’
‘Would it make any sense to say in some ways it’s not even about you?’
She slapped his face, without warning, her face white with rage. ‘Not about me? You couldn’t even find your wedding ring to put it back on, and it’s not about me?’
‘I’m sorry. Kat, I – ’
‘I always thought I’d be able to deal with it if you ran around. Had an affair. I’d just leave. It’s harder than that. But…’
She sighed, fought back tears. Made up her mind.
‘I have safe places arranged that you don’t know about. I have to. I’m going to one now.’
‘Please don’t.’
‘This is what it costs, Robert.’
‘Kat, please. Don’t do this. I want to protect you. To do that I have to help Adam get out. Horace is adamant. I have to go deeper in to help him.’
‘You don’t trust Adam, though.’
‘I don’t trust whatever he’s becoming. What he will become if I don’t help.’
‘Are you going to tell me that this fling with Adam’s woman is part of helping him?’
‘No. I’m not saying that.’
‘It might be.’
‘I’m not saying that. Not hiding behind that.’
‘Maybe part of the cost of saving Adam is my trust in you. Maybe that’s one of the sacrifices that’s required. Because it’s gone, believe me.’
‘I’m not making excuses.’ But it was hopeless. The anger surged in him. ‘But you know what? I might want to fuck Terri again.’
‘So it was that good, was it?’
‘You bet.’
‘You bastard. Don’t try to stop me. You know you won’t find me till I’m ready. Now get out of my way.’
Hours later Robert sat in his study, rubbing his eyes till stars shone, exhausted and alone. After Katherine had left Kerry’s place, he’d returned home to their empty house. Now he was poring over his three-dimensional map of Manhattan. Yellow pins marked the Hare Krishna tree, the site of the Triangle factory fire, Adam’s apartment. Coloured threads ran between them and the red pin at St Paul’s, an orange pin at Mercer, just below Prince. He’d traced a shape that suggested a triangle, but wasn’t one; that suggested a letter G, but wasn’t one.
He felt the cost of the decision in his very flesh. He’d made himself immune to blackmail. Told Katherine about Terri before Adam could. Asserted his power to stand alone. Completed the trial. And now, in his utter freedom, that’s what he was: utterly alone.
He knew he could be cold. Detachment had been a professional virtue. But this was something else: he had deliberately chosen to hurt Katherine. Set her pain against his need and found his need greater. And what if she never came back? He still found his need greater.
Forgive me, he whispered to himself.
His head spun. Part of him felt relieved to have told her. Even to have told her he’d like to make love with Terri again. It was the truth. But he’d taken the confession and twisted it on its head: he’d used it as a weapon, to hurt her. To gain revenge for the pain she’d caused him since the miscarriage. It was unforgivable.
Yet he was now free of the threat of blackmail. It was part of completing the Trial by Fire. He’d assumed responsibility for his actions, and he was paying the price. He could take it.
The way out was on the other side of the darkness gathering around him, around all of them. The way out was the Path of Seth.
He returned to his map of Manhattan, extrapolating lines on the map, seeing them shoot off into New Jersey and Queens and along Manhattan in his mind, seeking meaning.
Look at Water Tunnel Number One, Horace had said.
Tunnel Number One was an iron snake under the city, bringing freshwater, bringing life. Too vital to turn off for repair, too old to shut down safely, sustained by the very flow of water it carried, the tunnel coursed through the Bronx, under the length of Manhattan and away into Brooklyn, bearing water from an array of reservoirs to the northand west. Ninety years old. Slaking a one-billion-gallon-a-day thirst.
He looked at its route. Gravity bore the water south into Manhattan, through a chain of city parks. Central Park, Bryant Park by the New York Public Library, an intersection just by Madison Square Park, down into Union Square Park… Sinking the tunnel-digging shafts on public land had presumably made sense, to avoid hassles with eminent domain.
He looked at the other water tunnels. Number Two never entered Manhattan, feeding Queens and Brooklyn and connecting to Staten Island. Number Three, a behemoth that had been under construction for decades, was designed to allow the other two to be turned off and properly inspected for the first time.
Without Tunnel Number One, Manhattan would die. Was that what Horace was talking about?
So far the waypoints of each trial had been located further north than the previous day’s. If that continued, then the route of the tunnel would connect with his map at… Union Square. Would it then follow the tunnel’s course back towards its origin? He stretched a thread over his map from St Paul’s Chapel, past the waypoint on Mercer where he’d met Terri, through the site of the Triangle fire and towards the top of Manhattan. It led up into Central Park, first passing near the tunnel’s shafts at Union Square Park, Madison Square Park, Bryant Park…
A shape formed in his mind and then vanished as soon as he thought he could see it. Maddeningly, he knew it was something that could give him an edge over the evil that was corroding Adam from the inside out. But it could not be looked at directly.
He stared at the map until he could think of nothing else. But after the initial flash, the pattern eluded him. He was left with just the conviction that he’d found part of the puzzle.
Doubts continued to rack his brain. To what extent was Adam telling the complete truth? Why had he asked to see Katherine?
He needed more information still.
He needed to find Kat, and win her back to him. He needed to find out more about Adam’s and Terri’s lives. And, being honest, he wanted Terri again. Perhaps he needed to fuck it out of his system. Or be with her again and find it less mind-blowing. Find fault with her. Something. He couldn’t reach Adam. He had to meet Terri. All roads led to her. He looked at the map again. With a shout of rage and frustration, he swept his arm across it, sending the miniature buildings and pins flying across the room. He stared into the blackness.
The way out was the way in. He had his freedom, and now he had to make it right. He was growing in strength. Understanding was coming to him in flashes, fading immediately, but he felt tantalizingly close to breaking through.
He rubbed his temples. He closed his eyes for a moment, and slept.
Hours later he awoke with a start, fully clothed, stiff and cold, twisted in the chair in his study. The Quad was buzzing. It was a text message from Terri. Washington Square Park. 11.30 a.m.
He looked at his watch. It was after nine. He staggered to the shower.
Robert stood under the arch in Washington Square Park, facing uptown, waiting for Terri’s call. If he was right, he knew where she was going to send him.
It buzzed.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi. Waypoint 057.’
‘Union Square.’
‘Very good. Impressive. South-west corner. You’re getting quicker. But pay attention as you go. The point is the journey.’
‘Where the hell were you yesterday?’
‘Get moving, lover. It’s a whole new day today. Check out Number 2, as you go.’
‘Water tunnel?’
‘What? No. Number 2, Fifth Avenue. What’s with the water tunnel?’
‘Ignore me. I’m tired.’
He started moving north on Fifth. Across the street was the NYU mews at Number ½, an Elizabethan-looking statue at the far end. To its left, the great Deco heap of 1 Fifth Avenue. Its bronze-plated doors reminded him of the Waldorf-Astoria and its hidden railway siding.
He took a closer look at Number 2, a nondescript apartment building. To the right of the main entrance, inside the lobby but visible through glass, rose a seven-foot-tall plastic tube, yellowishand clear, its lower half enclosed in a marble base. Water bubbled up into it.
‘A brook winds its erratic way beneath this site,’ he read on the plaque affixed to the wall outside. ‘The Indians called it Manette, or Devil’s Water. To the Dutch settlers it was Bestevaer’s Killetje, or Grandfather’s Little Creek. For the past two centuries familiar to this neighborhood as MINETTA BROOK.’
Devil’s water, bubbling up. The snake under Manhattan.
The Quad pointed him away from Fifth, a block over to the east, taking him to University Place. There he headed north. The seven glistening parabolas of the Chrysler Building swung into view again along the avenue as he reached East 9th Street.
He walked on. As he emerged on to 14th Street, at the bottom of Union Square Park, the roof structures of Zeckendorf Towers appeared, three pyramidal forms that seemed to float on the horizon as he moved, momentarily aligning like the Giza Pyramids in Egypt. He walked towards them, seeing a fourth pyramid emerge from behind the other three. From trial three to trial four.
Off in the distance, he could hear drums in the still air, chanting and whistles and shouts. The temperature had to be in the nineties. He was already dripping sweat.
‘Arriving destination’ the Quad showed. Then it buzzed. ‘Welcome to Dead Man’s Curve,’ Terri said. ‘Right where you’re standing.’
‘Hell of a name.’
‘Hell of a game. It’s where the cable cars coming up Broadway used to crashor send people flying as they tried to negotiate the bend. There was no way to decelerate. Sound familiar?’
‘I am that streetcar. Where are you?’
‘Cross to the park and look down. There’s a pattern in the sidewalk, a kind of wheel of time, in a horseshoe shape, wrapping around the south end of the park. Walk the wheel and you’ll find me. Can you hear the march coming?’
The protest march against the Republican Convention was routed to end and disperse at Union Square after passing Madison Square Garden, the venue for the meeting. Hundreds of thousands of people were on their way. He looked about the square. There were some cops, but there were many hundreds more at a discreet distance, he was sure.
He crossed 14th Street and looked down at his feet. There were more inlaid plaques, like those near City Hall, but in metal instead of stone.
Pay attention to everything, Horace had said.
He walked the half-wheel along its western side first, looking for Terri and inspecting the rendering of Union Square Park at different times in history. It was a place of labour protests, free speech, activism, vigils. After 9/11 he’d been here and sat amid the glow of hundreds of candles at a makeshift altar, soaking up the dreadful loss, trying to believe in a force of love so mighty – like the heat and light of the candles at dusk, endlessly multiplied – that it could actually fight and defeat such violence, that it was possible to break the cycle of killing and revenge. There had been such urgent graffiti crying Love, Love and Fight War with Peace… and in his heart he had not been able to believe. He’d felt a black flint of cynicism lodged there, and he bore it still. Love was not enough. Sometimes you had to fight.
‘Robert.’
‘Terri.’
‘Walk to the eastern tip of the wheel.’
‘Coming for you.’
He retraced his steps and followed the other arm of the horseshoe back in time: 1859… 1857… 1855.
He didn’t immediately see Terri.
His eyes were drawn to the corner of one of the larger historic plaques set into the sidewalk. It was a compass, showing north. But not just any compass design. It was a compass rose. It was made of four hearts conjoined.
Robert, Katherine, Adam, Terri.
Images flickered rapidly in his mind. The four of them, dancing through time, connected by strands of fire… and a shadow among them, hiding something he could not see. Was it the Minotaur, latched on to Adam? The image vanished.
Then came a long-stemmed rose, on a misty night many years ago in Cambridge, as he knocked at the door of a Miss Katherine Rota at the start of a blind date.
Then, destroying the rose, came the swirling, pulsing eye of death, staring at them all. A voice came into his head, unheard but understood, and he spoke the words as he received them, like a radio. Turn the flint into a jewel.
It made no rational sense, but he understood. Passing the trials would give him that strength. The power to turn the black flint into diamond. To convert fear into love, and make it enough.
‘Boo.’
Hands covered his eyes softly as the word registered in his mind. He turned around and pulled her against him, kissing her long and hard. Waves of lust broke over him. The world fell silent, and there were just her lips, her touch, her taste, her heat against his body.
Then she stopped kissing him back and pulled away.
‘What’s wrong?’
Terri looked up at him quizzically. ‘That was Friday. This is today. Different trial, Mr Reckliss.’
He was still flushed with desire, with the heat of her.
‘Katherine has left me. I told her what happened.’
‘You took a very courageous step.’
‘I don’t know what I did.’
‘You did what you had to.’
Now he stepped back from her, his hands on her shoulders, taking her in, absorbing her. She stood motionless, unseeing yet seeing, supremely confident in her stance, perfectly poised. His sudden access of lust was fading. Something was wrong with her.
‘A different trial now. I understand. No more sex.’
‘Not with me.’
‘It was –’
‘Be quiet.’
Her lips quivered. And, to his amazement, a tear ran down her cheek.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘None of your business. Listen. The marchers will be here soon.’
He sighed with impatience. ‘I need to find Adam again, Terri.’
‘It’s not safe. Not for any of us.’
‘He needs me.’
‘Sometimes he acts like he doesn’t need anyone.’
He saw the flash of pain again cross her face. ‘He hurt you?’
She hesitated. ‘I’m afraid I’ll lose him.’
‘Afraid he’ll die?’
‘Worse. Lose his love.’
‘Because of what you and I did?’
‘No.’
‘Do you regret it now?’
‘What, then?’
‘I don’t know if you’re ready for this. I shouldn’t give it to you.’
‘Terri, what’s wrong?’
‘I’m losing control. I never lose control unless I choose to, but I’m losing it now.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘We’re at a crossroads. We all are. We’re all interlinked, and we’re all being changed. When you told Katherine about what we did, you did it for a reason beyond simple honesty and devotion, right?’
‘I did it so that Adam couldn’t blackmail me with it.’
‘You did what you had to do to protect yourself. Now I have to do the same.’
She seemed to be talking to the air, to someone he couldn’t see. Convincing herself, he thought.
The voices boomed louder as the great swaying, swarming snake of people burst into Union Square, banners waving, drums pounding, chants resounding.
‘Take this.’ She thrust a slip of paper into his pocket. ‘It’s your clue. Now listen: I’m in danger. I have to look after myself now. Your wife is with Adam. He still loves her. She went from you to him. Which means he may not protect me any more.’
He grabbed her wrist as she twisted away from him. ‘ Terri! Stop!’
But she turned his wrist over with astonishing ease, throwing him off balance, and vanished into the oncoming crowd of humanity before he could recover.
Robert was stunned. Katherine had gone to Adam? A bark of rage and pain issued from deep in his belly. Katherine and Adam? The hypocrite! How dare she! She paid him back like this? He fought to control his breathing.
‘No! No!’
He heard himself shouting into thin air. Passers-by avoided his gaze. Agonizing pain coursed through his chest, surging into his skull.
‘No! Damn it!’
He felt all the power of killing, of sex, of pride, that he had gained on the Path pouring into a black place of rage. He saw himself punching Adam in the head, remonstrating with Katherine, even as Kat threw in his face the utterly irrational, hypocritical nature of his anger.
But it was dangerous for her. Adam was teetering on the edge of evil, of giving himself over entirely to the Iwnw, if he hadn’t already. Had she no idea? Was she joining them too, to work against him?
Suddenly he felt a shadow brush against his soul. Something had passed through him, tried to infiltrate him. The eye. Jesus Christ, suddenly he saw the eye of death staring into his eyes, and it was the Iwnw. Trying to feed on him.
His eyes fell on a huge digital clock on the side of a building facing the south-eastern end of the park. It had fifteen flashing numbers and was part of an art installation that Robert had never fully tried to fathom. The central three numbers usually moved so fast that you couldn’t tell one from another, with the outer ones moving progressively more slowly towards the ends.
But now all the numbers were speeding up and starting to race so fast they were just a blur. The clock was going haywire.
An image jumped into Robert’s mind, a symbol carved into the James Leeson gravestone he had decoded: a winged hour-glass, dancing before his eyes.
Time flies.
The Iwnw were talking to him, feeding on his jealousy, showing him something. Toying with him even.
The numbers on the digital clock all suddenly stopped at once, on the digit 7. Then, in lockstep, they started to count down: 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… o.
At zero, the clock burst into flames. People screamed and pointed as black smoke began to lick from the number display. A smell of short-circuited wiring drifted towards him.
You can’t stop us.
The words appeared unbidden in his mind.
Instinctively he dived into the deepest, most secret part of himself and drew strength there, then filled himself with fighting, hostile light to force the parasite out of his consciousness. He felt it leave, flying back to the virtual darkness it came from.
He staggered into the park, heading northwards, and found a place to sit for a moment. Sweat was streaming from his body.
March organizers called for calm over megaphones. ‘The bang you may have heard was just a malfunction of the clock, people,’ one boomed. ‘Let’s keep it calm, let’s keep it cool, there’s nothing to be concerned about.’
He looked up and saw police milling about the foot of the building where the clock was housed, outside the Virgin Megastore.
He turned his mind back within. The Path. It was the only direction away from the Iwnw. He had to get stronger. He took out the scrunched-up piece of paper Terri had thrust into his pocket.
Amazing turns await the lover
Whose heart is turned towards another
Seek a snake that spirals in
For now it’s time to shed your skin
Find wisdom’s gate, it’s not too late
To conquer despair
Pass the Trial by Air
Chants filled the park. Bush lies, who dies? Still they came, wave upon wave of people, puppets and banners and drums, their course through the city flanked by NYPD in blue and National Guard in green camouflage.
He tried to block the demonstration out and concentrate. There were just too many people. How the hell was he going to find anything with the square jammed with protesters?
He tried to walk towards the north end of the park but found himself carried back south by the sea of people.
A snake that spirals in… shed your skin…
‘Hell is other people,’ he said out loud, as he tried to steer himself towards the edge of the crowd.
He edged round the fringe of the demonstration as it massed into Union Square, and eventually almost reached the Barnes & Noble bookstore on the park’s northern lip. Directly in front of him was an open area popular with skateboarders, when the Farmers’ Market stalls weren’t set up on it. Hundreds of people were milling all over. Under their feet he saw twisting, painted shapes in green, interrupted by sneaker after sneaker, boot after boot. He couldn’t see the pattern, but something about it drew his attention. He stepped closer, eyes on his feet, watching the squiggly painted patterns circle. Amazing turns… a snake that spirals in…
He found the edge of one of the patterns, pushing protesters gently aside as he moved, staring intently at the ground and not at their faces. He wheeled to the right and then to the left, back upon himself, towards the park and back again.
Amazing… a maze… He realized he was walking a labyrinth, a painted spiralling snake in green and yellow and red. Again he turned and turned about, almost reaching the centre and then being twisted left and right back nearly to the rim in a teasing dance. It was in a way erotic, teasing, but also childish and innocent. He felt suddenly joyful.
At the centre, he stopped and looked south. A buzz of excitement rippled along his spine. He had followed the snake to its end, where the painted spiral split into a fork, like a snake’s tongue.
Ahead of him was a grey stone pavilion at the park’s northern end, like the comfort station at Tompkins Square Park, a children’s playground on each side and, in its centre, an arched gate.
Find wisdom’s gate…
He stepped forward into the crowd, making his way as best he could in the direction of the pavilion, allowing himself to be swept in the good-humoured sea of people towards his goal. But suddenly panic ripped through the crowd. He heard shrieks and shouts, incoherent voices mingling and rising like an ocean surge. Looking towards its source, he saw a tall, white-haired man staring right at him, a smile on his lips. Then the wave came, a current of jostling, running people that knocked his feet from under him and carried him ten feet to his right and down to the ground.
He knew with instinctive certainty that the Iwnw had got into someone’s head in the crowd.
Fearful, conflicting shouts went up. ‘They shot a cop! They shot a cop!’
‘Don’t panic! Stay calm!’
‘The pigs are coming! Everyone get out of here!’
‘It was a firework, people! Stay rational! Stay peaceful!’
‘Fight the pigs!’
‘There are children here, for God’s sake!’
Feet kicked him, trod on him. He felt terror. He was going to be crushed. He tried to haul himself up but couldn’t. He rolled up into a ball, shielding his head, scrambling for footing. Then bodies fell on him, shrieking. The air shot out through his teeth. He was being squeezed to death. He strained to twist out from under the bodies. Children cried and women pleaded in panic as the wave of fear swirled through the people.
With a supreme effort he freed himself, crawling and twisting, kicking and pushing others aside, and took juddering rapid breaths as adrenalin ripped through his body. The Iwnw were trying to kill him. He found shelter behind a concrete flower tub and gasped and spat in pain.
Then he saw a little boy fall under the feet of the crowd directly in front of him, screaming. He was maybe nine or ten. Without thinking Robert leaped forward, back into the crowd, and forced himself between a sea of shoes to reach the boy, trying to protect him.
He managed to get up on one knee. Holding the boy around the chest, he stood. He forced himself to take a deep, slow breath. Two. Then instinctively he spoke, whether to the boy or the crowd he didn’t know. ‘Don’t be afraid.’
Once again he gave himself up to the ebb and flow of the mass as he held on to the boy, slowly feeling the power rise within himself to become the pole around which all the people turned. He didn’t know how it was happening, but instinctively he drew from the same strength that had expelled the Iwnw from his consciousness a few minutes before, and poured it out into the crowd with insistent, gentle firmness.
He saw to his right a mother screaming for her son. He felt the boy in his arm try to free himself.
‘Is that your mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘Go.’
He put the child down and freed him into the open space. Then suddenly he was watching himself from above. The crowd swirled about him in a spiral, like the turning masses around the Kabaa at Mecca, like a roaring hurricane around its eye.
Three heads in the crowd caught his attention, shoving through the crowd in different directions, moving away from him now. He knew who they were. He had made them retreat. Pouring the strength of earth, water, fire and air into the crowd, he stilled the people, calming them, allowing his feet to be lifted from the ground as the flow dictated. Then finally he rooted his feet in place.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said again.
He felt the panic dissipating.
Voices went up. ‘It was a firework.’
‘It was the pigs!’ Boos went up at that one.
‘Peace, everybody. Peace.’
When the whirling stopped, Robert found he was standing right at the centre of the labyrinth.
He stepped forward and the crowd parted, no one paying him particular heed, letting him through as though they were a single thinking creature. No one had noticed what he’d done, except the men he was sure were the Iwnw. But he knew he’d averted a stampede. They would have inflicted whatever collateral damage it took to kill him. For a moment, he exulted in his new-found strength, and in the instinctive use he had made of it. He had risked his life to save the boy, finding the power to save perhaps dozens more. Walk the path of the Other.
He still needed the key.
Ahead of him was the comfort station. Wisdom’s gate.
A metal grille stood open at the top of a flight of steps, letting him into the covered central section of the pavilion. To the left he saw gardening and maintenance equipment; to the right were the rest rooms. He looked about for any obvious niches or ledges. Nothing.
Dulled glass bricks were set into the floor of the pavilion, suggesting there was a chamber below, though he could see neither steps down to it nor up to the balustraded top floor of the structure. He checked out the rest rooms, getting nothing but a lungful of disinfectant. Protesters were swirling calmly now around the pavilion, but for the moment none entered. He was alone, at the still point of the turning world.
He looked down at his feet again. There was a ring of green paint around one of the glass cubes set into the floor. Looking around, he saw no other graffiti. He knelt and inspected it more closely.
It was a primitively drawn snake, its tail in its mouth, painted around the central cube in one of the arrays of light-bricks. It seemed to echo the design of the labyrinth painted on to the pavement outside.
Seek a snake that spirals in…
He put a finger on the cube. It was loose in its setting. He took out his penknife and worked it free, and underneathsaw a sealed plastic bag. He scooped it into his pocket, quickly replaced the light-brick and walked out of the pavilion, back into the great wash of people. He had the fourth key.
He let himself drift in the streets of the city, exhausted, heading vaguely north and west, trying to avoid the protesters.
Eventually, in a doorway, he slit open the plastic bag and carefully removed its contents. There were five squares of what felt like pewter, stamped with numerals, each about one inchby one inch.
Stacked together, they made a cube. He saw that the thin edges of each square also had numbers stamped on them, so that the cube was itself made up of 125 smaller cubes, eachmarked withone number.
He was too tired to puzzle it out now. He put the squares away and walked on, observing the city and its people.
After each of the previous trials, immediately after being attacked, he had felt drained of all strength, barely able to think or speak. It had been a more intense feeling of exhaustion each time. Now he felt it hit him again, even harder than before. He felt like a zombie as he walked.
There was a fever over Manhattan. It was a humid, electric fever, a fear-fever, a super-conducting, barrier-breaking fever, one of sirens and shouts and disrupted rhythms. There were sudden rushes of vehicles, there were police motorcycles snaking up and down the island’s spine, lights glaring, and there were special traffic lanes marked in orange cones, speeding black vehicles on special missions, roadblocks where usually access was free.
The fever was eroding distances, giving people permission to challenge one another, to berate, to confront, to seduce.
The airship floated overhead, seeing all. For a moment he saw it as the eye of death, the stare of the Iwnw.
There were strangers in town. People were removed from their usual paths, and new ones appeared before and around them. Excitement and fear salted the air. There was humour, and there was anger. People who would not usually speak, spoke. There was fear of attack, and there was fear of what the fear of attack was doing to people.
There was danger, and the city was alive.
He came to 34th Street and 8th Avenue, where police manned checkpoints in the sweltering heat to control access to Madison Square Garden, site of the Republican Convention. There were TV mobile trucks everywhere, antennae deployed, cables helixing along the shaft like the spiral stairs up the core of the lighting towers at the Lincoln Tunnel. He saw that CNN had taken over the Tick Tock Diner on the corner for the duration of the Convention, adding its own electric-red to the green-and-blue neon and chrome of the Tick Tock itself and the faded Deco glory of the New Yorker Hotel it was part of. The two Tick Tocks, in New Jersey and Manhattan, were superimposed in his mind: two separate but identical gateways to an imaginary, timeless Perfect Diner.
A young woman with a nose stud and black ponytail, wearing a pink ‘Buck Fush’ button on her black unbuttoned shirt, talked up a planned demonstration and the glories of real-time text-message-coordinated protest to a reporter on the other end of her cell phone. With a smile of wry amusement he realized after a moment that she was talking to one of his own reporters.
To his surprise he realized he didn’t wish he were in the thick of the coverage. Deep down, since he’d been frogmarched out of the newsroom, he’d felt relief. He’d been bored rigid, half asleep, dying a slow death while he built up layer upon layer of aversion to acknowledging it. In a way, the same had been slowly happening to his relationship with Katherine. The miscarriage had been killing them.
Now he barely recognized his former self. And he knew he wanted Katherine back. This close to the great round drum of Madison Square Garden – not a garden, not square, not on Madison – it felt like all 37,000 cops in the city were within a hundred yards of him. Hot, angry New Yorkers and tourists bitched and moaned about not being able to pass. Cops politely redirected them along long blocks to the east and west, around the security perimeter. Sirens blaring, a rapid-response team tore past them a block away in a convoy of at least six vehicles, five of them minibuses, traffic cops waving them through a red light.
He had walked himself to a standstill. He decided to go home.
Sitting on Adam’s bed, deep into the undercover role the Watchman had asked her to perform, Katherine prayed for Robert.
She had received no warning that the Path would entail losing her husband this way. The Watchman had said nothing about it. He’d simply given her the mission to get as close as possible to Adam, claiming to have left Robert.
She’d built up a scenario in her mind, based on the real difficulties they’d had since the miscarriage, understanding that she and Robert would have to be apart while he walked the early stages of the Path. She’d begun to exaggerate their estrangement in her mind, even while trying to help Robert understand what he was undergoing.
The Watchman had said she’d know when to begin her run to Adam without his telling her.
And then Robert’s confession had hit her like a thunderbolt. After that, there had been no need to play-act. She’d been given everything she needed to be convincing. It was at once a shrewd move by the Watchman and a form of punishment – so she took it, in her anger and pain – for her part in causing everything that was now happening.
She tried to still her mind, looking back on the past year and the events leading up to the impending attack.
Two days before the Blackout, she’d received a frightening email from Tariq. It was the first and only contact she’d had with him since handing him over to the interrogators. He was free, he said, and wanted her to meet him in Las Vegas, at the Luxor Hotel, at 6 p.m. on August 14. He had some very important information to give her. The message had resonated with anger and fear.
She had gone to the Watchman and told him.
The Watchman had contacted Adam, who for months had been tracking the potential attack. He took it as a tip that the detonation would take place on August 14. It seemed to show Tariq wanted her out of town that day.
And so she’d helped Adam prepare to face him, and then Adam had gone and fought Tariq, and killed him. He’d brought the Watchman a PDA that he took from Tariq, and the Watchman had handed it on to her. It had been of a kind she’d never seen before. Seals within shields within seals.
For a year she’d worked on cracking its codes.
She’d found a ghost programme of hundreds of three-digit numbers.
One string of numbers seemed to denote longitude and latitude. But when she’d looked them up on a globe, they’d proven to be mostly in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from anywhere.
Eventually, she’d seen patterns in the three-digit numbers. She found a programme that linked the digits to the longitude and latitude numbers. They were waypoints for a GPS unit.
She knew something of Tariq’s mind. She knew how playful he could be with words, with numbers. She found a file of ridiculous-sounding doggerel of the kind she and he used to improvise for fun when she was wooing him. Then she saw that each one was related to a waypoint.
She got the feeling – sickening and heartbreaking at once – that Tariq had been thinking of her as he’d put together the intricately structured codes.
Still she worked.
The sequence of the waypoints puzzled her. The presence of an X in certain numbers ate at her imagination. In groups of four, the numbers added to 252. But there was something else she wasn’t seeing.
Her last breakthrough, the one that had started the clock ticking, had taken place just over a week earlier.
She’d realized the Pacific Ocean longitude and latitude points were mirrors of points on the other side of the globe.
She’d linked all that data on the PDA and run a programme to strip out all the codes and encryption. It showed that, when the calculations were done, all the waypoints were actually in New York. In a very specific pattern along Manhattan.
And as soon as the programme had displayed all the linked data correctly, the PDA had lit up and issued its distress signal. For several seconds it gave off a burst of energy on an array of wireless wavelengths, then started to erase the data she had uncovered.
She didn’t know what the signal had contained – whether it had transmitted the decoded information, or broadcast her location, or somehow primed the Ma’rifat’ to explode. It might have simply warned an unknown partner of Tariq that the seals had been breached on the PDA, or something else entirely. Fortunately she had copied the decrypted data on to her own computer. And she couldn’t shake the feeling that Tariq, in one way or another, had wanted her to have it. So that she’d know what he’d done? So that she’d see how badly she’d hurt him, to drive him to build such a device?
She’d told the Watchman immediately, and he’d moved quickly to consult Adam and put together a plan of action. Robert would be made to walk the Path of Seth. It was the only way. She hadn’t fully realized what it would entail, just how destructive it would be.
She was hurting Robert by walking out on him, she knew. She’d always intended to deceive him at this stage of the plan, and that would have been bad enough, but necessary. Now, after he’d slept with Terri, she felt that the hurt she’d inflicted was justified and deserved. For the first time in her life, she cursed and prayed for a man at the same time. Robert, you bastard. Get through this so I can kill you myself. She half meant it.
Katherine’s first proper meeting with the Watchman had taken place more than twenty years earlier, after the night of the fire at Cambridge, when he’d helped explain to her what had happened to them. He’d spoken of his mentoring of Adam, of the need to protect Robert. Their Ouija board session, he’d explained, had gone so badly wrong because of Robert’s presence, because of his unacknowledged psychic power. Her previous sessions had been harmless, well attuned to her own abilities; but Robert had served as a hidden magnifying lens, unbeknown to either of them. Their innocent thoughts and slips of the tongue – wishing he was Adam, confusing the two men’s names – and the emotional intensity of the evening had acquired huge resonance, attracting forces that ordinarily would have been kept at bay. At the level of reality where psycho-spiritual entanglement took place, where time and place were fictions, they had been linked for ever: Robert, Katherine and Adam. Robert’s jealousy and insecurity had twisted through a loophole in the world, starting the fire in Adam’s room. And, briefly, when the fire had threatened to kill Adam and Katherine, a manifestation of Iwnw had been attracted: the eye of death. Robert, somehow, had dispelled it.
She hadn’t fully understood then. She’d remained in sporadic touch with the Watchman through the years of her secret work, though on Tariq she had not consulted him. Too secret, she’d told herself. Now she wished she had.
She knew there were parts of the plan that she didn’t fully understand. Losing Robert was killing her, and hurting him was killing her. But she would do what the Watchman asked. And, for now, that was to win Adam’s confidence, so she could stay close enough to surreptitiously give him strength to resist the Iwnw. The gamble was: could she hide her secret purpose from the Iwnw, and could she herself resist the Iwnw’s influence when she was in such close proximity to it?
Once home, Robert posted a photo of the cube to the website Terri and Adam had given him.
The middle digit of the middle square was missing, he noticed now. If he assembled them as a cube, that meant the innermost central cube would be blank.
He let his mind range over the numbers blearily, looking for any obvious relationships between them. They seemed random, at least to his tired mind. Then he put it in the safe upstairs with the other keys.
He wrote some notes, trying to summarize his feelings, yearning for the Quad to buzz. There was nothing. He called Katherine’s cell phone. It was turned off. Anger made him silent. Even if she had answered, he didn’t know what he would have said to her. He left no message.
He let his mind fill with static and draped himself in front of the TV, watching coverage of the Convention preparations and the demonstration. He saw Commissioner Kelly had announced about 200 arrests. There had been no major incidents at the big march, though a dragon float of some kind had been set briefly alight, sparking a small melee. Later in the evening smaller groups had tried to block the entrances of two midtown hotels where Republican delegates were staying.
A news item said someone was distributing a fake New York subway map, with non-existent stations and routes, to mess with the Republican visitors’ heads.
He saw images of police corralling protesters and journalists together in orange netting, saw the day’s placards and slogans and papier-mâché heads and street theatre.
He watched middle-America Republicans breezily going to Broadway shows amid all the ruckus, their attitudes ranging from insouciant to contemptuous as they blew off the protests. He saw priceless cameos, his favourite being a middle-aged woman from New York indignantly shouting ‘Get the FUCK out of this city! Get the FUCK out of this city! ’ at an anti-protest protester who was berating the marchers for aiding America’s enemies.
He fell asleep, chuckling, with her words echoing in his ears.
Hours later he awoke, feeling refreshed. He’d missed a text message on the Quad that said simply: ‘Post your thoughts, urgently – Horace.’
He gathered his notes, stilled his mind and wrote:
Sometimes the devil’s water brings life.
I am being torn apart, yet I am growing more alive.
I am beginning to hear and see things I would never have believed were possible.
Since these events began, I have lost my job and been humiliatingly expelled from among my people. Tomorrow I will reckon with them.
I have been attacked and beaten, and left vomiting in the subway.
I have been almost drowned.
I have been almost blown apart in a gas explosion.
I have had the breath crushed out of my lungs.
I have willingly broken my marriage vows and lost the ring that symbolizes them. I have insulted my wife.
I have experienced a new autonomy, a new self-respect, then hurt my most beloved one in order to retain it. I have indulged my anger and desire for revenge, and I have dressed it up as honesty.
Yet, in facing death, in the play of lust in my flesh, I have found strength I never knew I had. I have turned basic urges – kill it, fuck it – into spiritual weapons, those of earth and water.
In rejecting blackmail, in asserting my utter freedom, I have added the power of fire to those weapons.
In diving into the crowd to rescue that boy, when self-preservation would have had me stay sheltering and cowering where I was, I have, I believe, added the power of air. It is what I used, without knowing how, to calm the crowd.
I am growing stronger as I advance along the Path, though all this strength is only lent to me, is not my own, is not for my vanity or advancement.
It is for Adam, to help him to resist the corrosion of the parasites within him.
It is for Katherine, to help her on the lonely road I have driven her to. If her being with Adam will help him survive these ordeals, then so be it. But I will have her back.
It is for Terri, to help her overcome the hidden new fear I see in her.
It is for Horace, to guide and instruct me as he may need.
Other people are not hell. They are salvation.
There is a shape in my mind that defies words, just as the peregrinations I have been on across Manhattan – the shape I have drawn on the city, the experiences at each waypoint – are drawing a shape in my soul.
I am seeing connections where none were apparent, lines and images of new harmonies.
The capacity to speak the language of the birds is awakening within me.
All this, to defeat those who have caused these ordeals to come to us.
I pray for my enemy, since praying for my friends is no virtue.
I forgive myself, for everything I have done has been necessary. I ask the forgiveness of others.
I am ready. I am alive. I will fight.
After posting his words, he sat staring into the night, all the lights out, waiting to hear whether he had passed the fourth trial.
Eventually Horace called him: ‘I have read your post. You are advancing,’ he said. ‘But we are running out of time.’
‘Have I done what was required?’
‘Let me tell you about the fourth trial, and about what comes after.’
The fourth trial, he said, had brought Robert to the main crossroads, or transition point, of the Path. At Union Square, aptly named for this stage, the physically based powers accumulated so far met the higher psycho-spiritual powers not yet discovered. The motors of transition from one to the other were the air powers, or the forces of compassion.
To pass the trial, Robert needed to have shown he was beginning to live for others beyond himself, placing his own ego and even his own chances of survival in abeyance. The trial required recovering a key in square or cubic form and finding the heart of his body of light. Without the powers of air, Robert would not survive what was to come.
‘So did I pass?’
‘The setting fire to the large digital clock was not a promising sign,’ Horace scolded. ‘There are shadow sides to all these powers, and your jealousy and anger ignited them. They also let the Iwnw get dangerously close to you.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I learned.’
‘Be sure you did.’
He was struck by a sudden pang of fear. ‘Did I fail?’
‘From what you have written, and from the fact that you risked your life to save that boy and stop the stampede, which was aimed solely at killing you, saving countless more lives, I judge that you have acquired the power of air. Yes, you have completed the fourth trial.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t get cocky. We are just beginning.’
Horace talked for a few minutes about the nature of the Path. It was about speeding up and intensifying natural processes, he said, and living them many times in a single lifetime. It was necessary for a spiritual warrior to experience the erosion of ego. All human beings underwent this, in the trials of love, of parenthood, of serving causes larger than themselves. The difference was in the level of intensity, the degree of disciplined focus and the number of cycles of refinement undergone.
It was in part too what lay at the secret heart of alchemy: the hundreds of evaporations and distillations, meltings and coagulations, of substances in the laboratory flasks mirrored the same process in the alchemist, in the seeker of wisdom – but the substance was himself.
Robert asked him what he should expect next.
‘The remaining three trials can be attempted only by an aspirant who has folded together, in creative balance, the elements of earth, water, fire and air. When the point of equilibrium is struck, a fifth element, or quintessence, is formed – then you will be exposed to the powers of ether.’
It was here that most people fell from the Path, Horace said, for the ether represented the level of reality at which all things were connected – the level at which higher harmonies began to be fully audible, and where clairaudience, clairvoyance and clairsentience began to occur. Many simply chose not to believe it – it contradicted too strongly the world they had grown up believing in. It was the level where the language of the birds began to truly sing.
Robert would be required to tap the energies of the ether, both by expressing in complete truth his thoughts and feelings, and in subjugating his own will – his own ego – to a will greater than his own, the will of the Path itself.
Robert would pass the test if he demonstrated an understanding of how he could now affect reality itself by using his will, yoked to that of the Path – of how he could warp and alter aspects of the world around him.
His dilemma would be simple: to trust, or not, the Path.
Robert would recover a five-sided key, divided into three parts. And he would reassemble another limb of his broken mystical body.
Robert was quiet for a while, absorbing Horace’s words. Then he asked: ‘What am I becoming?’
Horace laughed. ‘None of this will make you a Buddha, or bring you to the level of a great teacher such as the Christ, or Muhammad. You are undergoing but one cycle in an endless ascent to suchlevels. But it might just be enough to stop the detonation of the Ma’rifat’.’
Then Robert heard a sound in the darkened house, a muffled crack. He felt his senses light up like a Christmas tree, nerves suddenly straining, muscles tense.
‘Horace, someone’s in the house. I have to go.’
He hung up and sat absolutely still in the darkness. No sound but his own racing heartbeat. He breathed deeply, trying to slow it down. After a moment, it settled to a firm, insistent hammering.
He stood up slowly, trying to make no sound. Very slowly he stepped forward, heading for the stairs. He reached out with his senses in all directions, seeking any hint of who or what was in the house.
A door creaked faintly on its hinge, upstairs. He imagined he heard breathing. Then all was quiet again.
Katherine had kept a gun in the house, but she had taken it. He kept a baseball bat, though, near the front door. He crept over to it and picked it up. Its heft in his hands reassured him. Gripping his hands tightly around the handle, Robert stood at the foot of the stairs, ears pricked.
No sound. His heart hammered solidly in his chest.
He began to inch his way upstairs, placing his feet softly, avoiding the seventh step that always creaked, making his way cautiously to the top. As his eyes reached the level of the first floor, he caught a glimmer of red light, as from a torchbeam covered by fingers.
Someone was in his bedroom, the one that had been theirs until Kat had taken a different room at the low point of their estrangement. Anger welled in him at the violation of their home. Reaching the top of the stairs, he gripped the bat handle more firmly, ready to swing as soon as he had an angle on the burglar. He walked towards the bedroom. It was not Iwnw, he felt. None of their corrosive energy was in the house. It was more like –
Suddenly a black-clad figure rushed out of the darkness, like the darkness itself uncoiling into his face, crunching into his chin, snapping his head backwards. He reeled and fell, lashing up with the baseball bat as he went down. He made glancing contact with flesh, heard a grunt of pain. Then a kick slammed into his groin, and his whole body exploded in agony.
The figure tore past him and ran down the stairs in the darkness, not missing a step. Then it turned and headed to the back of the house. Robert heaved himself to his feet and half fell down the stairs in pursuit. He saw the back door close as he rounded the corner, and then the figure was gone into the night. He ran to the door, but knew it was futile. From their backyard there were at least three different directions to take to escape.
He stepped out and stood in the middle of the yard, ears straining for any clue. Nothing. He ran down to the street at the front of the house, looking for vehicle lights. Again, nothing.
He ran frantically back into the house, up to the bedroom, to the safe. The door was hanging open.
He looked inside, desperately clawing among the documents kept there. All the keys to the Ma’rifat’ were gone.
Three things led me to my death.
The first was the Mukhabarat.
Every month I received a videotape showing that my father was unharmed.
They sought demeaning things. To begin with, that I should pass on scientific information that I knew they had no chance of putting to good use, or to any use at all. Then, later, that I should try to build a network of spies in my community, seek to embroil and blackmail my colleagues with women, with alcohol, with drugs, with money.
I gave them the minimum I could to protect my father. Worthless scientific information they could have found in the academic journals. Titbits they could not possibly derive benefit from.
To honour my father and cleanse my soul, I returned to the study of the honourable traditions he and my grandfather had passed down to me, to the science of the Black Land, where ‘black’ is correctly understood to mean ‘wise’, to the alcumystrie that is neglected by the modern ways.
My Beloved, Katherine, gave me a precious gift around this time. It was a summary of lost knowledge, some of it written by the sages of my people, assembled by no less a personage than Sir Isaac Newton himself. To the layman, it would have meant nothing. It contained lists of chemical substances and laboratory procedures, times of day and night for prayer and reflection, astrological and mathematical symbols and scattered phrases in Latin.
But to one who recognized the alchemical significance of its contents, the full, undivided alcumystrie that was both our old tradition and the true subject of Newton’s inquiries, it contained elements of an awful mystery: the combined spiritual and physical procedures, shrouded in warnings and obfuscations, for making the most powerful substance on earth. It is a form of matter that resonates to psychic fields, and in turn warps them around it. It is a key component in building the device known as the Ma’rifat’. It is most commonly known as the Philosopher’s Stone.
I took Katherine’s gift as a token of love. Now I know differently. But at the time it was a demonstration of trust. I confess I took notes from it. Then I returned the copy to Katherine.
The second thing that led to my death was Katherine herself. She was the world to me, the world I wished to live in, the world I wished to create.
For her I ran impossible risks, and eventually I was unmasked. On the vey day I was to be extracted, I was arrested. There was torture, with electricity, with beatings. I did the only thing I could to survive. I negotiated. I was an American citizen. I could go undercover in America. Work in their laboratories. Anything.
They would not release my father. But they agreed to spare my life.
I was given training in overcoming security checks. Training in ceasing to be a good Muslim, so that, for the sake of my cover, I could allow myself to Westernize fully. My mother being American, my English being perfect, I found it easy. I enjoyed it. I stopped praying except in the private depths of my heart. I drank alcohol. I enjoyed several relations with women.
Eventually, the good people of Brookhaven took me in.
The third thing that led to my death was p/éé. The hatred of that attack rings in my soul still. I saw nothing in it but sin, however mighty the hubris of the country I had adopted as my own, and the hubris was great. But the blow struck deep, and partly achieved its aim: it made America become more like the nation its enemies said it was. More like the nation its enemies wanted it to be.
And then a miracle happened. I met Katherine again.
She was as beautiful as ever. Her mind was as first-rate as ever. And soon she made it clear she had strong feelings for me. I had always held back on commitments in my previous relationships with women, and would prefer to cut them off if I found them too emotionally taxing. But this time, with her, with my Beloved, it seemed God had smiled on me. I let myself fall. And fall I did, heavily.
After 9/11, President Bush spoke of Islam as a religion of peace, and this was welcome. For that is what Islam is.
But one day I was spat upon in the street in front of my Beloved. My assailant was an uneducated fool. I told him so, and we fought. She was upset. But without his honour a man is nothing.
Then the Mukhabarat came back again and demanded more. The information I was sending from America was poor, they said. My network was useless. I was told my father would be mistreated. I tried harder to give them nothing but I failed. I received a phone call in which a tape was played to me of my father suffering. I knew it was his voice. And so I gave them more. I was ashamed.
My Beloved was my oasis. But I suspected she too saw my people as ignorant, as incapable, as backward. I think she saw me as a noble exception. I became angrier, as I became more fearful for my father, and as the Mukhabarat pushed harder.
My Beloved asked me more and more difficult questions about the world situation. I felt she was probing me, testing me, questioning my loyalty.
My only solace was in the old traditions. I saw parallels with our work on the accelerator, connections, points of contact. For in smashing together tiny amounts of gold at massive energies and charting the subatomic particles that blinked in and out of existence as a result of the collisions, we were getting closer and closer to observing creation itself in action, matter condensing out of energy and vanishing again –just as in the old tradition, where the dance of energy and matter was the subject of our manipulations. The difference was that we did not need massive particle accelerators, for the crucible of our minds was sufficient. The old way worked with rare substances – the rarest of all was one called red gold, said to be unfindable in the modern age – that were subjected to mental as well as physical experimentation. The state of mind of the knowledge-seeker, his level of spiritual concentration and refinement, was as important as the state of his retorts and flasks and furnace. And the ultimate end-product, assiduously sought but rarely achieved, was not any magical substance in and of itself, but the transformation of the one who sought it into a creature of higher spiritual insight and attainment. It was an honourable path.
I befriended colleagues who were working on a substance they thought was new: metallic glass. I learned things from them, without sharing in return the wisdom of my forebears, for the fusion of glass with different metals was part of the old tradition, part of a path they had no idea they were treading: making the Philosopher’s Stone. For they took no account of their own psycho-spiritual states as they worked. In modern physics we do only half the necessary work, though even there the role of the observer in certain phenomena has been seen, since the early twentieth centuy, as an integral part of any description of what happens at the subatomic level. We are coming closer to once again seeing what the old sages knew: that consciousness and matter are intimately connected. I will never have the chance to work there, but I dreamed of carrying out experiments at the most powerful particle accelerator yet to be built: the Large Hadron Collider, set to begin operations in 200J at CERN, the European nuclear research centre on the French–Swiss border. Humanity will learn things from it that will revolutionize our view of the world, but which were known to the ancient sages all along. It may also teach us how to destroy it in the blink of an eye.
I organized a study class at the laboratory to talk about the great contributions of my civilization to the world. It was well received. They are kind and thoughtful people there.
Then one day my Beloved took me for a drive out in the countryside. At a secluded spot, we stopped, and a van with no windows came out of nowhere.
I was taken.
The last words I heard her say were: ‘He’s all yours. I’m done with him.’