Sami al-Qasr stared at the rows and rows of black chromosomes flickering on the computer screen. These bar codes of silent soldiers spoke a language al-Qasr understood. The Iraqi doctor had devoted practically the whole of his mind to the strange inner life of the cellular nucleus. Was it any wonder, he asked himself, that he was now, perhaps, a little mad?
Tired of waiting, he smacked his large hand on the white Formica desk and looked out of the plate-glass laboratory window into the car park below. His crimson Jaguar was attracting the usual admiring comments from staff enjoying a cigarette break in the sunshine. Otherwise, RIBOTech’s steel-and-glass precincts were silent.
A knock at the door.
Al-Qasr breathed deeply, then twisted his thick black moustache.
‘Come!’
‘Excuse me, Dr al-Qasr, Nancy left instructions—’
‘Instructions?’
‘You like a good strong cup of coffee around this time.’
Al-Qasr looked at the clock. ‘Ah! Elevenses. Very good. And you are?’
‘Ms Normanton, sir. Temporary intern. What’s “elevenses”, Dr al-Qasr?’
‘Old habit I picked up in Cambridge.’
‘You’re from Massachusetts, Doctor?’
‘No, no, no, my dear. Cambridge in England.’
The pretty girl put the coffee down by his computer. ‘Gee, you’ve come a long way!’
‘Yes… in forty years. All the way to Paradise, California. Quite a journey. Full of the unexpected.’ He eyed her slender hips and long, bronzed legs. ‘And please, call me Sami.’
The girl giggled, caught in al-Qasr’s charming smile.
‘See you soon, Ms Normanton.’
‘Oh. Call me Fiona. I’ll be here for a while.’
‘Good.’
Fiona giggled again and closed the lab door.
Al-Qasr gulped his coffee. The chromosomes were staring at him again. They didn’t carry flags; they weren’t fighting each other; they didn’t speak different languages. They spoke the same language. They spoke the language of science. They spoke the language of nature. Maybe they spoke the language of God. No, not God. Not God.
Al-Qasr was fed up with talk of God, especially in connection with science.
Who made the DNA? That was always the question. There was only one rational answer. It was a mystery. The mystery of evolution, of biological change. Why was it a mystery? Because it was there and no one knew why. In the absence of scientific explanation, mysteries seemed irrational.
Talk of God didn’t help science; it only made religious people feel better.
Al-Qasr thought about the billions of ‘bases’ in the genome – billions in number but still only four varieties. It was beautiful, logical, but not moral.
Every kid doing science had heard of the bases: adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. A, T, G and C had become the sugary apostles at the cornerstones of life. But they didn’t make anyone feel better, or behave any better. There was nothing to believe in, only to accept. What had once seemed a revelation had soon settled down to become common knowledge.
And what had all these molecules of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen made? They had made men and women. And what did men and women want? What came naturally: power. Power over their lives, power over other lives. The will to go on, to multiply: nature’s neutral imperative.
You had to have power, but you had to have limits. You had to have a State. You had to have limits. That was always the problem. You had to belong to something. Something you could see. Something you could touch. Something that had real power.
Real power for real Arabs. Trust your own people – that’s what his father had taught him. That’s why he’d joined the Ba’ath Socialist Party in Iraq all those years ago.
For thousands of years before the Prophet, the desert Arabs had been despised as nomads, outsiders. Then the Prophet Muhammad had given them a lead role in history: all they had to do was bond together, submit to the Anvil and be new-forged into a mighty sword of destiny. The world had quaked before; it would quake again. Rebirth… The genes from the past reborn in the present. It was a mystery. It had been a mystery ever since God’s wrath at the Tower of Babel had led Him to divide the children of Noah into the many races of the world, unable to communicate, anxious to fight. It was still a mystery.
Al-Qasr reached for the worn old paperback he kept stuffed in the bottom drawer of his desk. For years, whenever he experienced doubts, he’d looked at it for inspiration: The Ba’ath Revolution – An Unfolding Future, printed in Baghdad in 1968. His fingers touched the grainy black-and-white image of its author, Jalal al-Qasr, a proud man: his father.
He turned to page 78 and to a quotation underlined heavily in pencil:
While the State of the future will harmonise the morality of all religions in an Arab unity, Arabs will always draw inspiration from He who came to them as the Seal of the Prophets. Even in a secular Arab State, the voice of the Prophet will be on the lips of those who no longer hunger. The Party will hold the allegiance of the heart because the Ba’athist State is good for all Arabs, but the heart of many citizens will ultimately belong to Allah. The State will not compel it; it is simply natural.
Al-Qasr had added a note to the side of the passage: ‘Is science the search for His will in nature?’
Jalal had wanted Sami to follow him into politics. Sami had wanted to be a scientist, above politics, pursuing reality at its core. Now it seemed the promise of the Ba’ath movement had faded, for the time being at least. What future for the Arabs now? What future for Iraq?
Shit! He would be too late! Al-Qasr pulled out the laptop from under his desk; he was sweating. His fingers flew over the keys as he followed the links to the encrypted websites that were buried in messages from his distant family in Jordan. An image exploded onto the screen: a US Humvee blown off a distant road by a mine, shot in digital video and cut into four segments, each showing the blast from a different angle.
Then, from out of the flames, in golden Arabic script, burst the slogan:
DAGGERS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS, BROTHERS OF AL-QAEDA