The Digested Twenty-first Century (29 page)

Then there’s sunshine. Virtually every living thing on the planet is ultimately powered by sunshine, which is why I started writing this sentence lying down in a field near the South
Downs and finished it on a train in Mexico. See my tan? That’s what happens when UV photons travel millions of miles to react with the melanin in my skin. Beautiful, isn’t it? It’s OK if you linger on this page. I don’t mind.

Colours. They are amaaazin and all. Who’d want to do all those drugs when you can just go out into nature and see all these reds and blues and yellows and greens. Wow! And then there’s my eyes. Have you ever seen such a hypnotic brown? Pigment of the gods.

Now take a look at this picture. Do you notice anything unusual about it? Yes, that’s right. I’m not in it. It’s just a boring shot of cyanobacteria under the microscope. So let’s move on. Air. Weird how something so light can be so heavy to explain. Like when did it first support life? I mean, what is life anyway? Not even Schrödinger knew for sure. So here I am on the Taal volcano in the Phillipines to purr on about the first law of thermodynamics. Are you getting sweaty? I know I am. Try hard and you can measure your desire.

Now let’s think about photosynthesis and entropy. On second thoughts, let’s not. Let’s just look at some more amaaazin pictures of animals and birds and fish and insects and all sorts. Some of them are really, really big and some of them are really, really small and the totally amaaazin thing is that it’s not a coincidence. We’re all one big family made out of the same molecular compounds. Though some of us are arranged rather more photogenically. And the most amaaazin thing of all is that we are all still evolving, so it’s possible that there will one day be a scientist even lovelier than me.

There’s so much left to say about carbon and quasars and mitochondria but what really does my head in is that there are over half a trillion galaxies in the observable universe; the idea that there are no other planets out there with webs of life at least as complex as our own seems to me an absurd proposition. Which
means that somewhere in a parallel space-time continuum, there is another drop-dead gorgeous rock legend standing on a Pacific atoll as David Attenborough whispers from on high: ‘Verily it is written that you are the chosen one.’

Digested read, digested:
The Life of Brian.

The sub surfaced just off the Algerian coast. ‘Ready?’ I barked to Hubba-Hubba and Lofti. They slung their waterproof bags over their shoulders and nodded. We dived in and headed for the shore. A three-mile swim in icy waters was nothing compared to my training in the Regiment. It was then just a 20km sprint to Zeralda’s compound.

Lofti lobbed a stun grenade, and Hubba-Hubba and I ran in. ‘It’s a fuck-up,’ shouted Hubba-Hubba. Instead of just Zeralda, there was another man, Greaseball, and a gang of frightened boys. ‘Leave these pervs,’ I yelled. ‘It’s Zeralda we want.’ I tapped him twice in the forehead and sliced his head off.

‘I swear I’ve given up all my dirty op work,’ I said to Carrie, back in Boston.

‘I know, I love you.’

‘That’s funny,’ countered George, Carrie’s father. ‘I could have sworn you had been working for me in Algeria.’

‘You bastard, Nick,’ Carrie shouted at me. ‘I’m never talking to you again.’

‘You bastard, George,’ I said.

‘No hard feelings, Nick, but we need you. Your Algerian job has put the wind up al-Qaida. You took out one of their main hawallada, their money man, and now they are panicking. They’re sending two men to France to collect cash from their three other hawallada. Your job is to kill them and prevent world terrorism.’

‘Jesus fuck, Greaseball is our contact,’ I said. ‘But we’ve got a job to do, so let’s do it.’

Hubba-Hubba, Lofti and I recceed the marina. ‘I’ve spotted
the Romeos.’ Lofti replied with two clicks. ‘Preparation is everything,’ I told them. ‘We must leave no traces.’ I sliced off my fingertips, burnt them and drank the ashes with a glass of my urine.

I slid on to the boat, set the charge, and followed the Romeos to the first meet. I dosed the mark with ketamine, and dumped him into the back of the Megane. One down.

‘Fuck, it’s a trap.’ Hubba-Hubba and Lofti bled to death as the lead flew.

‘Don’t worry,’ said George. ‘Greaseball has double-crossed al-Qaida and stolen their money. So let him go.’

I thought of Hubba-Hubba and Lofti and of that pervert making off with the dosh. It wasn’t enough to have prevented dozens of major terrorist incidents around the globe. I wanted revenge. I dialled the code into my phone and Greaseball’s boat turned into a fireball.

Digested read, digested:
Nick Stone saves the world again and still nobody can be bothered to thank him.

DI Rebus pulled deeply on his cigarette and eyed up his new colleagues. The Wild Bunch – McCullough, Gray and Ward. All of them known for pushing the law to the limit – too far at times – and who, like him, now found themselves on punishment block at Tulliallan police college for retraining.

‘We’ll start with team building,’ said DCI Tennant. ‘Look at the Lomax case. See if there’s anything that got missed.’

Could this be a coincidence? Did they know that Rebus had been
more involved in this case than he had ever admitted? Maybe it was him being set up, rather than the Wild Bunch.

‘I’m not happy about this,’ said Rebus. ‘I got myself thrown off the Marber case to help you out here, and I feel like I’m making no progress.’

‘Just keep at it,’ soothed the chief constable. ‘We know they took the Bernie Johns money, we just can’t prove it. Go and have a drink.’

Rebus poured himself a large whisky, put Led Zeppelin on the turntable and settled back into his chair. Somehow he felt that the Weasel, the Diamond Dog and Big Ger would soon be making an appearance. He picked up his phone.

‘How’s the Marber case?’ he asked.

‘Well. Laura the prostitute’s been killed by Donny Dow, one of Big Ger’s boys and...’ DS Siobhan Clarke’s voice tailed off. She’d been well trained by Rebus. She had a well-stocked record collection and she was learning not to tell anyone anything. With any luck, she would soon be a fully fledged maverick with a book of her own, rather than playing sidekick to Rebus.

‘I hear the Diamond Dog turned up dead,’ McCullough taunted Rebus. ‘Bit convenient for you and Big Ger, eh?’

‘There’s a warehouse full of drugs being guarded by the police,’ he said to the three of them over several drinks. Do you fancy a piece of the action?’

‘Yeah, all right,’ they replied.

‘Well, you can’t. It’s far too dangerous,’ Rebus responded nervously. Damn, his plan had gone completely wrong.

‘I’ve got the feeling that McCullough, Gray and Ward are involved in the Marber case, but I need some help proving it,’ Rebus whispered to Clarke.

‘Jesus, sir, you look half dead,’ she said a little while later.

‘You should see the others,’ he laughed.

‘Well you’ve solved both the Marber and the Lomax cases. How do you do it?’

‘Do you think I’d tell you?’

Digested read, digested:
The bodies pile up as fast as the drinks, as Edinburgh’s finest makes his annual appearance.

Freddy put down his copy of the
Daily Telegraph
and sighed. The stock market hadn’t been kind to the Master Storyteller. He pressed the secret panel of his large oak desk. It was time to bring his trusty Montblanc fountain pen out of retirement.

* * *

Anyone watching the 51-year-old wheeze along the New Jersey streets could have been forgiven for not realising they were in the presence of the fittest, cleverest, noblest and most dangerous man in the world.

Calvin Dexter had been brought up the hard way. He fought in Vietnam and he and his senior officer became the most feared Tunnel Rats in the US army. Their nicknames were Mole and Badger.

When the war ended Cal put himself through law school and became a brilliant public defender. After his wife and child tragically died he left the law to disappear into anonymity. Only those who really needed his services would know where to find him.

* * *

It had been many years since Ricky Colenso had disappeared in the former Yugoslavia. At last, his grandfather, the Canadian billionaire Steve Edmond, had a lead. A body had been discovered in
a slurry pit and the man suspected of the atrocity was Serbian warlord Zoran Zilic.

‘I don’t care how much it costs, I want him brought to justice,’ said Edmond.

It was June 2001.

* * *

Cal checked the small ads. He had a job. His superb tracking skills quickly picked up the trail. His aircraft had been spotted in the emirate of al-Fujairah, and from that it was relatively simple to deduce that Zilic was now living in a heavily protected fortress in Surinam.

It was July 2001.

* * *

CIA chief Paul Deveraux leant forward and spoke to his deputy, Kevin McBride. ‘We can’t let anything happen to Zilic,’ he said. ‘We know al-Qaida is about to launch a major attack on the west and Zilic has promised to lead us to Osama bin Laden.’

It was August 2001.

* * *

‘So,’ thought Cal, ‘the Americans are on to me. Shouldn’t make much difference.’

Armed only with a penknife, Cal skipped through the inhospitable terrain, waltzed past the private militia, swam through the piranha-infested stream, pirouetted through the dogs and the minefields and boarded Zilic’s private jet.

‘You are coming with me to face justice in the land of the brave and the home of the free,’ he snarled.

It was September 9 2001.

* * *

‘Project Peregrine is dead in the water,’ said Deveraux. ‘Ten more days and Bin Laden would have been ours. But just who did tip off Avenger?’

McBride smiled to himself, the outline of a badger tattoo just visible through his shirt.

It was September 10, 2001.

Digested read, digested:
This year’s winner of the Jeffrey Archer prize for creative writing.

Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere shuddered. The first page of a Dan Brown potboiler was no place for any character. ‘Count yourself lucky,’ growled Silas the monk, as he chastised himself with his chalice. ‘I’ve got to hang around for another 400 pages of this grabage.’

The phone rand in Robert Langdon’s hotel room. After his previous adventure with the Pope, nothing should have surprised him. But he was surprised. ‘I am surprised to be summoned to the Louvre in the dead of night,’ he said to himself.

Inspector Bezu Fache was a sangry as his name suggested. ‘I don’t like it when the renowned curator of the Louvre is found dead in the gallery at the dead of night in suspicious circumstances,’ he muttered. ‘So Monsieur Langdon. What do you make of Paris?’

‘It is a very beautiful city, steeped in art and religion,’ replied Langdon earnestly. ‘And if I’m not very much mistaken, the pose monsieur Sauniere has adopted in death is highly symbolic.’

‘Not so fast,’ said a young woman, who identified herself as Sophie Neveu, an agent of the French cryptology department. ‘You have a phone call’. She took him aside to the toilets. ‘Inspector
Fache suspects you of the nurders,’ she whispered. ‘You must run away with me, for I am Jacques Sauniere’s grand-daughter.’

‘Not before I have solved the riddle your grandfather left.’

13-3-2-21-1-1-8-5

O Draconian devil!

Oh, Lame saint!

‘Hmm, the numbers are the Fibonacci sequence,’ squeaked Sophie.

‘And the words are an anagram of Leonardo da Vinci and A Load of Hokum’.

They rushed to the world famous painting, known as the Mona Lisa. There they found another clue.

‘It’s another anagram,’ yelled Langdon. ‘Madonna of the Rocks’. They rushed to the world famous painting, known as the Madonna of the Rocks. There they found a key, only narrowly evading the combined forces of the Parisien gendarmeries.

‘That was close,’ squealed Sophie.

‘Thank goodness we have a 20 page car ride to our next destination so I can indulge in some more bogus art history.’

Sophie struggled to stay awake as Langson droned on about Leonardo, the Feminine and the Priory of Sion.

‘Wasn’t all this bollocks in
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail?’
she asked.

‘Yes, but the Yanks will have forgotten all about it,’ Langdon replied.

‘They arrived outside the private Swiss Bbank, ‘You will need a combination as well as a key.’

‘It must be the Fibonacci sequence,’ Sophie shouted, as they collected the keystone to the Grail while barrowly evading the combined forced of the Parisien gendarmerie.

‘We must take a long car journey to the home of Sir Leigh Teabing, the eccentric crippled Grail expert who lives in France,’
said Langdon, ‘as this will allow me to fill you in on some more bogus art history. Did you know Jesus married Mary Magdalene and your grandfather was the Grand Master of the priory of Sion and you are a direct descendant of Jesus?’

‘And you sentence construction is pitiful,’ she laughed.

‘Aha!’ said Sir Leigh, heaving his crippled leg across the room. ‘We have no time to lose if we are to unlock the riddle of the keystone. We must fly to England.’

The private jet arrived at Biggin Hill, narrowly evading the combined forces of the Parisien gendarmerie. Langdon used the atbash cipher and turned the keystone to S-O-F-I-A. It unlocked to reveal yet another riddle.

In London lies a knight a pope interred

They rushed to the Temple church. ‘This is a dead end,’ said Langdon as Silas and Sir Leigh’s manservant appeared. ‘Help! He’s been taken hostage,’ cried Sophie.

Langdon fretted over the riddle. He was in the wrong place. He rushed to Sir Isaac newton’s tomb in Westminster Abbey. There was Sir Leigh.

‘I was the baddy all along,’ sneered Sir Leigh. ‘The Priory of Sion weren’t going to release the secrets of the Grail so I persuaded Opus dei to kill Sauniere. Now I’ve killed Silas and the manservant and I want the cryptex.’