Kill - Two Page 9

  “No, no! No, no, but much more than this. Much more than this.” He gestured at me with his open hand. “You know who you are, because of your memories! You are defined by your memories. You know you are human, you know you cannot fly, you know you like whiskey, you do not like rum, you like blonde girls, you can play the guitar, on and on and on, an infinity of limitations to your identity that define who you are, and all of it, all of it, is memory. And your brain makes you the shape you are, gives you blue eyes and brown hair, makes you thirty-whatever you are from memory! Encoded into your DNA!”

  I sat watching him, chewing my lip and feeling out of my depth. Finally, I said, “What’s your point?”

  He grunted. “All of this ‘encoding’ is streams of electrons flowing along neurons and sparking at the synapses where one neuron meets another. That is comfortingly like a computer: circuits, programs, electricity. But I can tell you that there is not one, single scientist on this planet who knows how electrons sparking across synapses produces consciousness. Memory creates identity, but what is identity? Ah! Perhaps, perhaps, it is the consciousness that is producing the sparking on the synapse, uh? Perhaps it is the identity that creates the memory! Uh? Nobody, nobody knows this! These mysteries of consciousness, of identity…”

  I nodded. “So we have a technology…”

  “We have a technology where we are making magic, where we are touching God. This is touching consciousness, and we do not know what it is. And there are many other fields in which we are doing this. As we go deeper down the rabbit hole in quantum physics, and we are able to manipulate matter at the nano-particle level, and we can integrate computers, machines and living tissue, then we are reaching beyond the limits of humanity, and into the realm of magic, of God. Then we are breaking the limitations of humanity. And this we are doing.” He laughed. “If they are doing this at MIT, you can imagine what we are doing at our dark labs.”

  Njal glanced at me. “So at this time, the Omega protocol kicks in. What is the Omega protocol?”

  “It is the final protocol. Can you imagine the kind of hell that will be this planet, with nine, ten, twelve billions of people, existing without joy, without aspiration, without knowledge of who or what they are, with their memories, their sense of identity, fed to them at night while they sleep, by their online app? It sounds like science fiction, but my friend, what we live today would be science fiction for your grandfather.” He shook his head out the window. “This phase is the phase that follows industrial revolution. Technology explodes out of control. Society becomes a machine that nobody can control, and human beings exist in the service of this machine.”

  “So what is the Omega protocol?”

  He turned to look at Njal and his face was devoid of feeling. “Destruction. By whatever means. Preserve the best that humanity has created: art, democracy, the rule of law, philosophy, Shakespeare, Mozart, Monet, Buddhism… and then humanity must die, leaving behind a small elite, entrusted with these jewels.”

  I laughed. “You people blow my mind. Ben was just as credible, just as believable. You know? Sometimes I think you actually believe this horseshit yourselves. You can’t see, you really can’t see, that what you plan to do is the antithesis of everything you aim to preserve. The best of humanity? The best of humanity sets out to murder eight billion people. How is that the best of humanity?”

  “I do not expect you to understand…”

  “No, I don’t expect me to understand either. But what I am asking is if you understand. How do you square that circle?”

  “A hundred and fifty thousand people die in this world every day. Fifty-five million people every year. That is twice the population of the state of Texas, ten times the population of Denmark or Norway. Is anybody responsible for this? Should we try to stop it? Do we have a duty as human beings to halt death? What are the consequences if we halt death, Lacklan? Can you square this circle?” He shook his head again. “It is you who are talking horseshit. Our responsibility is to make the world a good place in which to live.”

  “Who for?”

  He didn’t hesitate, he didn’t bat an eyelid. “Our clan.”

  Njal raised an eyebrow at me. I knew what he was thinking. Last time he’d heard talk like this, it was from the mouth of Jim Redbeard.

  “Let’s get back on task. So Omega is a protocol that instructs you to do what—facilitate or provoke the extermination of nine-tenths of humanity?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then what exactly?”

  “Human beings are essentially a plague, Lacklan. We are parasitical. We suck our host dry, we are never satisfied and we produce vast amounts of toxic waste that damages our host. We cannot help it, it is our essential nature. We are at the top of the food chain, but we do not benefit the food chain, or the balance of the environment in which we exist. We are inherently destructive.”

  I couldn’t argue with that and I said so.

  An expression of deep distaste washed over his face and he said, “Yes, you of all people should know that. There are twenty-four protocols, twenty-four stages through which human development passes, and when it reaches the Omega phase, there is nothing that anybody can do to stop the catastrophic outcome. This happens with all plagues. The plague brings about its own destruction. The Omega protocol states that we must, as you say, facilitate this end, and preserve the best that humanity has created in its development toward its end.”

  “Fine, whatever, so how does this explain why you sent a hit squad after me?”

  “Because, in order to put the Omega protocol into effect, our position must be global.”

  “So you were trying to get back into the States.”

  He didn’t answer. He just stared at me.

  We sped on, almost silent, through the fields and woodlands. Every now and then, a pylon, a tree or some structure too blurred to be identified would flash past. Then we would be in broad, open pastures again and distant objects would move past, slow and sedate: a farm, a village, a distant town with a church and a spire.

  “Who is Alpha now? Is it you?”

  He blinked a few times, then smiled. It was almost a benign smile, tolerant of my stupidity and ignorance.

  “Alpha is Alpha.”

  “You’re not in a position to play riddles with me, Jean-Claude. Don’t try my patience.”

  “I am not Alpha. There has been no change to the position of Alpha.”

  “I killed him. I shot him in the heart. I saw him die.”

  “Then what is your question? You ask me something and you know the answer better than I.”

  “I received a message, claiming to be from him, after he had died.”

  He gave a small laugh. “I cannot comment, Lacklan. I have no information on this subject. I have not seen Alpha since the debacle at Fenninger’s house in Malibu. I cannot answer your question. But I can understand how you feel, to murder your own brother is hard. And the girl you love, she murdered your father.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him. “Yeah, and he murdered hers.”

  “A very sad story. Many conflicts of loyalty. And you are a man of deep loyalties, I think.”

  “Can it. So who will take the positions of Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon in the States?”

  He shook his head. “I do not have this information at my fingertips. We are not so concerned with America. We are more concerned with Europe, the break up of Europe. We make our own army, our own NATO… what does this mean? Will it lead to war with U.S.A.? Is it a sign of the Omega protocol…?”

  War with Europe. It was a theme that kept coming back. Was it something Omega was after? Was it a prelude to the end game for them? They were crazy enough to do it, that was for sure. Timmerman had closed his eyes and seemed to be drifting off into sleep. I was finding it hard to get his measure. His passion seemed genuine. His belief in the righteousness of what he was doing seemed genuine, and it was dangerously contagious. It was reminiscent of Ben. I watched him and wondered if I was, in f
act, sitting in front of the new Alpha.

  As evening fell and the windows turned dark, I asked a pretty stewardess who was passing for a martini, extra dry, and Njal and Timmerman had the same. While we were waiting for them to be delivered, Njal sat checking his phone. After a while, he said, “The police are looking for Timmerman.”

  Timmerman glanced at the phone. He didn’t look happy.

  I said, “How?”

  “They identified his bodyguards.”

  “Their prints?”

  “Yuh.”

  “That was quick. That would normally take days.”

  Timmerman said, “They are SGRS. Their prints would show up straight away.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him. “You’d better pray they don’t find you.”

  Njal read from his phone: “A search has been launched at European level, with the cooperation of French police and intelligence services, and Europol. Witnesses reported seeing the two agents collapse at the station. A third man in a gray suit, believed to be Jean-Claude Timmerman, was seen leaving the scene accompanied by two further men.” He looked up at me. “The general descriptions are basically accurate. All exits from France are being watched, security forces in Spain, Germany, Italy and Switzerland are on high alert.”

  I thought for a moment. “They’ll be looking for three men traveling together. We have two hours before we get to Barcelona. That’s the first place we are likely to encounter a problem. You go to the café car. Spend the rest of the trip there. When you get off in Barcelona, get off farther down the train, from the second class carriages. When we board the Madrid train, get on separately and stay in the café. We’ll meet up at the car on Calle Murcia.”

  Njal nodded. He turned to Timmerman and spoke quietly. “Don’t run. I want to see you back with your family. I like you.” He pointed across the table at me. “But this crazy son of a bitch? He kills without thinking.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that.”

  He stood and took his bag, gave me an inscrutable Scandinavian look that could have meant anything, and made his way toward the bar. The stewardess arrived a little later, delivered our drinks along with a pretty smile and left.

  Timmerman watched me while I sipped my drink. “Where do we go from Madrid?”

  “Somewhere quiet where we can talk.”

  “You are going to torture me?”

  “I hope not. Like my friend, what I would really like is to see you go back to your family on Monday.”

  It wasn’t a lie. It was what I wanted. It was never going to happen, but that didn’t change the fact that it was what I wanted.

  “When will you tell me what it is you really want from me?”

  “When we arrive.”

  “When you can torture me if I refuse.”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  He looked away.

  I said, “I suggest you use this time to reflect, Timmerman. Every minute takes us two miles closer. If you know who I am, you know my reputation. You know what I have done and what I am capable of. Your best choice is to cooperate.”

  An hour and a half later, we pulled into Barcelona Sants. The doors opened and people began to spill from the train onto the night platform. I stood and smiled down at Timmerman. “We’re old friends. Try to look as if you like me. Your life depends on it, and so does your family’s.”

  He eased himself out of the seat and stood. “You can stop repeating it, Lacklan. You have made your point. I will play your game.”

  We moved toward the exit and climbed down into the balmy September evening. “Playing games, lying, creating illusions. Isn’t that what Omega is all about? We have forty minutes to kill. Let’s go grab a coffee.”

  There were armed Guardia Civil, the Spanish anti-terrorist squad, just about everywhere you looked. Three of them, a captain and two officers with assault rifles, were watching the passengers leave the train. Timmerman pulled his reading glasses from his breast pocket and put them on his nose, then pulled a slim diary from his inside pocket and walked along next to me, pointing out pages as though he was showing me something important. In my peripheral vision, I saw the captain frown at Timmerman. He took a step toward him and Timmerman looked me in the face, smiling, said something to me in German and burst out laughing. I laughed too, like it was the funniest thing I ever heard. The captain turned away and kept scrutinizing the passengers.

  When we got to the main concourse, Njal was sitting over by the Madrid platform, reading a newspaper. We made our way to the café, got two carajillos—coffee laced with whisky—and sat outside at one of the tables.

  “How well did you know Ben?”

  The question surprised me. “Not well at all. He was my father’s assistant. I hated my father, and I didn’t like Ben.”

  “But Ben loved your father?”

  “Yup.”

  “I knew your father. Not well, but we talked. I liked him. He was a good man.”

  “Yeah? Well, he betrayed you.”

  “I know. He loved you. When did you discover Ben was his son?”

  “At his funeral.”

  “You must have realized, Lacklan, from your father and from Ben’s behavior towards you and your father, that Omega is all about loyalty. Ben gave you every opportunity. He went against our advice more times than I can remember, because he had promised his father he would look after you and Marni. And because he loved and admired you, as his own brother.”

  “Timmerman, Ben tried and failed. You’re wasting your time.”

  He laughed. “I haven’t much else to do with my time. But I will tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “You damn us, you murder us, you cause incalculable damage to our projects, you reject us without listening to our cause, but you have nothing to offer in its place. You cannot deny that the world we have created has reached the end. It has become unsustainable. The system must collapse. Perhaps our solutions are not the best, but they are the best we have been able to provide.” He gave his Gallic shrug again. “Correct us. Engage with us. Show us a better way. What is your solution, Lacklan? You know?” He laughed again. “Criticism without some positive input is just whingeing!”

  I squinted up at the ceiling of the station. Big steel echoes rolled, lonely and cold into the dark corners. I wondered for a moment if there was something in what he was saying. What was my solution? After a while, I said:

  “I’m not a politician, Jean-Claude. I don’t know what the solution is. Maybe there isn’t one. But it seems to me, in a legitimate fight for survival, you can shoot somebody, knife him, cut him in half with a sword or an axe, and your enemy dies a human being. I don’t know if there is a soul, Timmerman. No doubt I’ll find out soon enough. But if there is, when I die, I want that soul to carry with it all my mistakes, all my triumphs, all the lessons I have learned from being me. Because it seems to me that if killing a man in self defense is a legitimate thing to do, robbing him of his soul by programming his mind to make him a willing, happy slave, is the most grotesque crime against humanity conceivable.” I smiled and shook my head. “Correct you? Engage with you? Show you a better way? No, Jean-Claude. The fact that you are a part of that, that you have signed up to it, tells me everything I need to know about Omega, and about you.” I leaned on the table and looked into his eyes. “There is no justification, there can’t be any justification, for robbing a person of their mind.”

  They had started boarding the train for Madrid and Njal had joined the line. I stood. Timmerman watched me without standing up. “You are going to kill me, aren’t you.”

  I held his eye for a long moment before answering. “I don’t want to. I want to send you home to your family on Monday. What happens here depends on you.”

  He thought about that. Maybe he spotted the ambiguity in the answer and maybe he didn’t. Either way, he didn’t have much choice. He stood and made his way slightly ahead of me, toward the train.

  Timmerman settled into the seat by the window, crossed his arms, clo
sed his eyes and seemed to sleep for the rest of the journey through the night, toward Madrid. There was no view, no landscape to watch through the windows, only the glare of the lights on the black glass, and our reflections, disembodied, like ghosts riding beside the train. I wondered vaguely if Timmerman had got to Njal, if Njal would give me trouble later on. I wondered about Timmerman’s wife and children. They were aware now that he had been abducted. They would be feeling sick, afraid, wondering if they would see him again.

  I looked at his sleeping face and wondered which one of us was the monster. Perhaps we both were. Perhaps the world would be a better place if it were rid of both of us. Perhaps utopia was a world of people subjected to Omega’s mind techniques, in which all the people like Timmerman and Ben, Njal, Jim Redbeard and me, were dead.

  ELEVEN

  We arrived at Atocha Station in Madrid at midnight. The place was huge and silent, save for sporadic, desultory sounds that rolled high across the cavernous ceiling: the iron scream of brakes, a woman’s voice peremptory, disembodied, a suitcase dropped on the tiled floor, loud and reverberating, yet distant and somehow lost among station echoes. And closer, the hustle and shuffle of feet herded along the concrete platform, sleepy coughs, and the mumbled conversation of people fresh from dreams but almost home.

  There is no ticket inspection in Spain when you leave the train. You alight onto the platform and you go on your way. But as we filed toward the exit from the Ave, I saw ahead that the Guardia Civil had improvised a steel barrier before the concourse, and all the passengers were being funneled through three openings, where armed, uniformed men were inspecting not just their tickets, but their ID. Beyond them, spread across the concourse, there was half a dozen officers with assault rifles and dogs. Timmerman and I were a hundred yards away, but up ahead, I could see Njal being questioned by a lieutenant in a green uniform with a peaked cap. Njal was doing a lot of shrugging and managing to look stupid, but the guard didn’t seem to be buying it and the exchange was getting heated.