The Digested Twenty-first Century (30 page)

Bezu fache burst in and arrested Sir Leigh. ‘I aplogise,’ he said to langdon. ‘You weren’t the killer after all.’

Langdon and Sophie took the train to Rosslyn in Scotland, near England. ‘Will we find the grail here?’ asked Sophie.

‘No,’ said an old woman who happened to be Sophie’s granny.

Langdon shivered as he kissed the direct descendant of Jesus for the first time. Sophie smiled. Maybe she would see him again. Langdon headed to Paris to start digging in the vaults
under the Louvre. There he knelt before the bones of Mary Magdalene. ‘You took your time,’ Mary smiled, before ascending into heaven.

Digested read, digested:
Millions of readers can be wrong.

A scientist dies in Paris after having sex with a mysterious stranger. A supplier of mining equipment is also killed in Canada. Nobody – least of all the reader – pays any attention. Except Kenner, the MIT-educated, special-forces-trained lone wolf.

‘Hmm,’ he smiled grimly to himself. ‘The environmental activists are on the move.’

Back in California, Nick Drake, head of the National Environmental Resource Fund (Nerf), was sharing his thoughts with George Morton, his tycoon backer.

‘It’s really heavy,’ said Drake. ‘The water level of the Pacific has risen so much that these islands are going to be swept away. We need money to sue the multi-nationals for global warming.’

‘You got it,’ replied Morton. ‘I love this planet.’

Peter Evans, Morton’s attorney, and Sarah, Morton’s impossibly beautiful PA, nodded in agreement. ‘We love this planet.’

Two weeks later, Morton appeared drunk when he got up to speak at a Nerf gala. ‘Global warming’s a load of rubbish,’ he shouted, before driving off in his Ferrari.

Peter and Sarah tried to follow him, but found only his wrecked car. There was no sign of his body. ‘Guess he must have been thrown into the ocean,’ they sobbed.

‘Give me Morton’s money,’ yelled Drake.

‘I can’t,’ replied Peter. ‘His estate is in probate.’

Drake stormed out.

‘What are we going to do now?’ asked Sarah.

‘Not so fast,’ said Kenner, abseiling in through the window. ‘You two are coming with me.’

On the way to Antarctica, Kenner delivered a long lecture on how global warming wasn’t really happening, and that many scientists had allowed themselves to be lured into a state of fear by environmental pressure groups.

‘Nerf is funding terrorists to create environmental catastrophes to reinforce their message,’ warned Kenner. ‘We have to stop them.’

A day later, Sarah and Peter crawled out of a crevasse. They were bruised and bloodied, but at least they had prevented a huge piece of the ice-shelf from being calved off into the ocean.

Two days after that, Sarah and Peter crawled out of a mudslide in Arizona. They were bruised and bloodied, but at least they had prevented another disaster.

‘Just the Solomon Islands to go,’ yelled Drake.

Sarah and Peter looked at each other. They were about to die trying to save the world from a tsunami and they hadn’t declared their love for one another.

‘I’m alive,’ shouted Morton, as he rescued them. ‘The world is saved, and I’m going to start a new environmental organisation based on truth.’

Author’s note: I’m very, very clever and have read a lot and you’re all stupid wishy-washy liberals.

Digested read, digested:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Crichton, and the Word was Crichton.

Imagine opening the door on Dr Hannibal Lecter’s memory palace. Let us journey portentously into its deepest recesses in a laboured bid to milk a prequel out of America’s cleverest serial killer.

The eight-year-old Hannibal sat beside the castle moat with his younger sister, Mischa. A black swan begged for food. ‘Yes,’ he thought. ‘This is indeed a credibly gothic start to my story.’

‘Hurry children,’ their father cried. ‘We must escape the Nazis.’

It was the second day of Operation Barbarossa. Grutas, Kolnas, Milko and Grentz committed indescribable acts of cruelty that were described in great detail. For that’s what Nazi collaborators always did.

The Lecter family survived in the woods for more than a year, with young Hannibal wiling away his days memorising Euclid, until they were captured by the Nazi collaborators. Only Hannibal was found alive by the Soviets, a chain still attached to his neck.

‘The poor boy has been left mute,’ wept Hannibal’s uncle Robert, a noted painter.

‘Indeed,’ replied his wife, the impossibly beautiful and exotic Lady Murasaki. ‘He has suffered unimaginable horrors that readers can all too easily guess. We must take him back to our French chateau.’

The fall, as the French don’t call autumn, was late that year as Lady Murasaki nursed Hannibal back to speech. First, a farting flubber sound; then fully formed words.

See how Hannibal looks at Lady Murasaki. Hear how he cries out, ‘Mischa’ in his nightmares. Notice how the text switches to italics and the present tense. Recognise the hand of a master storyteller with no editor.

‘Oi, Japonnaise,’ yelled the coarse butcher, who was well known in the village as a Nazi sympathiser. ‘Does your pussy go crossways?’

Robert dropped dead from a heart attack, as Hannibal entered Lady Murasaki’s boudoir and removed her samurai sword. Later that day the dismembered body of the butcher was found next to the post-box.

‘I want to run a polygraph test on you, young Hannibal,’ said Inspector Popil. ‘Be my guest,’ replied the 13-year-old evenly.

Not a flicker. ‘My, but you’re a poisson froid,’ Popil countered. ‘I know you did it but I can’t prove it.’

Hannibal and Lady Murasaki moved to Paris, where the young man became the most remarkable boy in the capital by memorising every textbook within minutes and becoming the youngest ever medical student. Lady Murasaki feels an intense longing for Hannibal. Yet she knows she cannot reach him. She can also sense that Popil has feelings for her.

‘We have reached that random point in the plot where I need to introduce some looted art treasures,’ said Popil. ‘So I need your help tracking down your family’s long-lost Leonardos and Titians.’

‘Ah, good,’ laughed Hannibal. ‘I expect the looters are the same people who killed my family. That will give me an excuse to go to Lithuania and kill a few of them in graphic detail.’

‘I know you executed those people and ate some of their flesh,’ Popil snarled, ‘but I can’t prove it.’

‘Oh Noh, Hannibal,’ sobbed Lady Murasaki, undoing her gown and exposing her nakedness. ‘You can take me if you renounce your course of violence.’

‘I can’t,’ Hannibal said. ‘For they ate Mischa.’

See how the reader struggles to feign surprise.

‘You must hand these Nazis over to me,’ Popil implored.

‘But did you not yourself collaborate with the Nazis?’

‘I did, but only a little bit once. We are all imperfect.’

Hannibal returned to the dissection table and opened the brain of a recently guillotined man. Over the next few days Milko and Kolnas were found hideously mutilated, their wounds lovingly documented over many pages.

Only the showdown remained.

‘You ate Mischa, too,’ Grutas laughed.

See how the reader struggles to feign surprise.

A bloodbath ensued.

Hannibal smiled. He had got away with his greatest crime to date. A bestselling thriller with no thrills at all.

Digested read, digested:
À la recherche de corps perdus.

Dr Tony Hill was working late at Bradfield Moor secure hospital. He heard a noise outside his office and went to investigate. The last thing he saw before he lost consciousness was an axe hacking into his knee, splintering bone and pumping jets of blood across the corridor.

‘You’re awake then,’ DCI Carol Jordan observed as she visited Tony in the ICU.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Oh, I dunno. Just creating a little sexual frisson between us before the main action kicks off.’

‘My leg is agony,’ he gasped.

‘Tough,’ DCI Jordan laughed, pressing on his open wound. ‘If you couldn’t stand a little pain and gore, you should have stayed in an Ian Rankin book.’

In another part of Bradfield, Yousef began to carefully prepare the explosives. ‘Only a few days to go,’ he muttered to himself.

Robbie Bishop lay dying of ricin poisoning, his bloated body as unrecognisable as that of Bradfield Victoria’s star midfielder.

DCI Jordan called in her team.

‘I’m a lesbian,’ announced Chris. ‘And I’m proud to be out.’

‘Me, too,’ chipped in Paula.

‘Great,’ said Carol. ‘Now we’ve established that two-thirds of the women in my squad are gay, have you got anything for me?

‘Bishop and his celebrity DJ girlfriend had a stalker,’ they replied.

Tony shook his head. ‘It’s not him. He doesn’t fit the profile.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Carol. ‘There’s always one pointless wild goose chase in detective fiction so I’m going to waste 50 pages going after him anyway.’

Tony entered the mortuary. If he was going to get anywhere with the case he had to deal with some unresolved issues concerning his mother; and for that he needed to be alone with Bishop.

‘So my mum is a bit of a nightmare,’ he whispered in Bishop’s putrid ear. Suddenly he felt his mind clearing. ‘The person who did this to you has killed before.’ He limped to his computer and began a search. ‘Got you,’ he smiled, as he came across a lottery winner who had been poisoned with belladonna.

‘Bishop and the lottery winner went to the same school,’ Tony said. ‘Our man will be a classmate who is jealous of their success.’

‘That’s the most ridiculous piece of psychobabble I’ve ever heard,’ said Carol.

Yousef checked his watch. It was time. He drove the van to Bradfield Victoria’s ground. In a couple of hours, everyone in Britain would have heard of him. So be it. He would be thousands of miles away.

Tony settled down with Carol in front of the TV to watch
Bradfield play Spurs. Midway through the first half, a massive explosion tore through the stands. Limbs and torsos were scattered everywhere.

‘OK,’ said Carol to her team, ‘We’ve got a major incident here.’

The door cracked open and two stubble-faced men barged in. ‘We’re from the counter-terrorism squad,’ they snarled. ‘This has all the hallmarks of al-Qaida. We’re going to shake down every Mozzer in town.’

‘You’re wrong,’ Tony muttered. ‘This doesn’t look like terrorism to me. What we’ve got here is a Jewish woman who tricked her Muslim lover into blowing himself and her husband up.’

‘That’s absurd,’ said Carol. ‘Why would anyone blow up 35 people just to get rid of a husband and lover?’

‘Look,’ Tony snarled, ‘as we’re in a thriller written by a woman, you’ve got to expect an abnormally high body count. And as you caught the poisoner who went to school with Bishop, I think you owe me an apology.’

‘You’re right,’ Carol concurred. ‘Again.’

‘It’s nothing,’ Tony replied tenderly, taking her hand. ‘It’s all in a book’s work.’

Digested read, digested:
DCI Jordan is not quite yet over the Hill.

The rain hammered against the window. Kurt Wallander sank lower into his armchair, his thoughts returning to the futility of his existence. What had he to show for his career? A failed marriage, a lonely old age and still Ystad was teeming with
paedophiles and political corruption. His phone rang. He picked it up wearily.

‘How are you, Dad?’ It was his daughter Linda. ‘Cold, depressed and I think I’m getting Alzheimer’s.’ ‘Then at least you’ll have forgotten what a bad parent you were. But that’s not why I’m calling. Hans and I have just had a baby.’ ‘What’s its name?’ ‘It doesn’t have one yet. Hans’s parents are having a party next week so you can see it then.’ ‘Do I have to go?’

The sleet stung Wallander’s face as he walked up the Von Enkes’ path. ‘It’s good to finally meet the other grandfather,’ said Håkan and Louise. ‘Is it?’ Against his better judgment, Wallander had begun to enjoy himself when Håkan invited him into his study after dinner. ‘I’m a worried man,’ Håkan said. ‘I was a submarine commander during the cold war and I believe there were spies in the Swedish navy who have never been unmasked.’ ‘Whom do you suspect?’ Wallander asked. ‘I cannot say right now because that would spoil the story.’ Wallander remained silent. He had the feeling Håkan had been trying to tell him something. But what?

Hail reduced visibility to near zero. Wallander felt a tightness across his chest. He was having a heart attack. What a sad way to die, he thought, not even knowing his granddaughter’s name. He undid his shirt button and the pressure eased. Maybe he just needed a new shirt. His phone rang. He picked it up wearily. ‘We’re calling our daughter Klara,’ Linda said. ‘And Håkan’s disappeared.’

Louise said nothing as Wallander searched Håkan’s study. After an hour he found what he was looking for. An address book. He called Håkan’s two oldest friends: Sten in Stockholm and Steve in San Diego. ‘Do you think Håkan was a Russian spy?’ he asked them. ‘Certainly not,’ they replied. ‘He was a true patriot.’ ‘I’ve discovered he and Louise had a profoundly disabled daughter that
they’ve never told anyone about, who has been in an institution for the past 40 years.’

‘How does this affect the story?’

‘It doesn’t, but it makes it gloomy and Swedish.’

Wallander felt there was so much he didn’t understand as he went on one pointless journey after another. How come Steve had suddenly appeared on his doorstep and then had phoned him from America without seeming to remember he had been in Sweden? Was it him or Henning who was losing his memory? The phone rang. He picked it up wearily. ‘It’s Louise,’ said Linda. ‘She’s been found dead. By the way, Mum is in alcohol rehab.’

The wind howled and flurries of snow caught in his throat. He phoned one of his old contacts in Copenhagen. Too late. He had died five years earlier. Suddenly Wallander knew where Håkan was. He rowed out to an island on the archipelago. ‘I’ve been in hiding,’ said Håkan. ‘I’d always suspected Louise of being a Russian spy. But I didn’t kill her.’