The Lucifer Code (7 page)

'I appreciate you calling me, Papa Pete,' she said, not wanting to get drawn into a discourse on the Red Pope. 'It's been a long time.' And she knew why. Ever since her adoptive mother had taken ill two years ago, and Amber had paid for her to stay in the best hospice in the bay area, Father Peter Riga, the man who had saved her life, had felt betrayed: not only did Catholics not run the hospice but 'the enemy', the Red Pope's Church of the Soul Truth, did. Amber had explained to him that she was determined to give her mother whatever she wanted, and if that meant staying in a hospice run by a rival church so be it.

'Saw your mother yesterday' Riga said.

'In the hospice?'

'Sure. She seemed okay'

'That was kind of you, Papa Pete. She felt bad about you not approving.

'Don't worry. Gave her my blessing. Nice place, too. Just felt ashamed that the Mother Church couldn't look after its own.'

'Things change.'

'They sure do,' he said. Anyways, I'm over for a couple days so if you're back on time we can meet up.'

'I'd like that,' she said. 'I'll call you tomorrow.'

'Okay my child, take care of yourself.'

Amber switched off her communicator and placed it on the table beside her bed in the Think Tank. Earlier when she had switched on the device, it had been loaded with concerned messages from well-wishers. The news was out. One of her early-morning swimming buddies, as well as her best friend, Karen, had called. Even Soames had left a brief message to say the presentation had gone well and to call him if there were any developments.

The one call she had made tonight was to the hospice, confirming that she would be returning as planned. Her mother was in the final stages of terminal cancer and Amber hated leaving her. The thought of returning to Barley Hall, as Fleming had recommended, increased her anxiety. Sitting up in bed, she tried to ignore the video camera staring at her from its mount overhead. She wore the blue latticework Thinking Cap and her scalp tingled where the conductive gel held the electrodes in place.

The NeuroTranslator at the base of her bed emitted a soft hum as it read the electrical impulses generated by her brain; the lower half of the split-level plasma screen showed a grid with individually coloured pulsing horizontal lines, each representing a wavelength in her brain. Some lines peaked violently while others remained virtually flat. At regular intervals the screen scrolled down to reveal other wavelengths, all recording the pattern of her thoughts. The upper half of the screen displayed the stimuli designed to engage her mental processes. Currently she was studying a spatial puzzle. Three lines were overlaid on a nest of concentric squares, which appeared to recede into the distance, and she had to determine which line was the shortest. Despite a suspicion that it was an optical illusion, and the two obviously shorter lines were identical in length, she selected the one on the right.

She had been tackling the on-screen puzzles and exercises for over an hour. They were intelligent and well designed, stimulating most of her brain's cognitive processes ranging from verbal reasoning, logic and numerical dexterity to intuitive guesswork. Earlier, she had been given an injection to stimulate her unconscious neural activity during sleep and so give the NeuroTranslator a clearer read when she started what Staff Nurse Pinner called the 'easy mental exercises'. 'That's when you just close your eyes, drop off and let Brian do all the work.'

Her jet-lag was under control and the puzzles were interesting, but she was finding it hard to concentrate. Her mind kept wandering to her mother and sister. Particularly her sister.

Talking about her twin with Miles Fleming and seeing the medical pictures of when they had been conjoined had stirred up all her old feelings of guilt, regret and loss. Reaching for the bedside table, she retrieved the worn photograph she always carried with her. It showed Ariel and herself embracing in front of a full-length mirror. Because of the angle from which the picture was taken, both their smiling faces were visible and nothing appeared to connect them except their love for each other.

She had spent her entire solo life struggling to resolve her guilt and anger about her dead twin. First she had turned to Catholicism, but however kind and patient her godfather had been in explaining the Mother Church's view of the world she found its judgemental dogma unhelpful. Then she had turned to philosophy and physics to try to understand why things were as they were. Eventually she had focused on the mysterious world of quantum physics, studying the almost telepathic relationships that linked the trillion particles of elemental Stardust that made up everything in the universe. So far it had yielded no clear answers but it offered infinite possibilities. And distraction. She might not have found meaning in the vagaries of the quantum world but she had found solace in searching for it.

The sheer intellectual rigour and hard work required to explore the contradictions and dualities of particle physics diverted her from the guilt and loss that clouded her peace of mind whenever she lay idle for long. But tonight, however hard she tried to contain her unresolved feelings for Ariel, they kept rising to the surface.

When Frankie popped her head round the door the puzzle on the screen changed to a crossword. 'I'm off home now,' she said. 'We've got a big clinical trial tomorrow, but there'll be a nurse in the observation room all night. Everything all right?'

Amber smiled. 'My mind keeps wandering and I'm tired. Does that matter?'

The nurse shook her head. 'Not at all. The stimuli are only used to get a broad read of mental activity and to keep you amused. Brian's fuzzy logic is flexible. If you need to drop off to sleep, don't worry about it. To be honest, for the baseline scan we get the most useful diagnostic data from the sleeping brain anyway. Good night and sleep well, Dr Grant.'

'Night. Thanks.'

She turned back to the screen and completed the crossword. Her eyelids began to droop and she didn't register the puzzles changing on the screen. Drifting in that hyper-lucid state between wakeful-ness and sleep, her mind returned to her sister.

On and off over the last thirty years she had been disconcerted to feel that her life wasn't entirely her own. Whenever she tried to forge any deep relationship she was frequently accused of being mentally 'miles away' or with 'someone else'. It seemed that, asleep or awake, Ariel was always buried somewhere in her thoughts, as if Amber couldn't let her go, couldn't get on witih living her life because it wasn't entirely hers to live. Only when she threw herself into her work and her research had she found peace, a distraction from the other person in her head.

The eight-year-old little girl she had loved more than she loved herself.

The eight-year-old girl who was once part of her.

The eight-year-old girl who had died for her.

*

The ward. Barley Hall

When Fleming entered cubicle five in the research ward, the first place his eyes went to was the ECG monitor. 'How is he, Emma?' he asked the nurse sitting by the apparatus. 'His heart steady?'

The nurse smiled. 'He's stable and should be fine for tomorrow.'

'Thanks. You take a break. I'll look after him for now.'

Turning to the bed, Fleming saw that the nurse had dressed his brother in his favourite faded black Ralph Lauren polo shirt and jeans, and his hair had been cut short in the military style he had favoured when he was in the army. Sitting upright on the motorized bed in his cubicle, Rob still looked good, although the shirt and jeans hung loose on his once powerful body.

Fleming walked round the bed to be directly in line with Rob's good eye. 'Hi, Rob - your cognitive exercises have been great and your heart's behaving itself so we should be on for the trial tomorrow. I've got a great surprise for you now, though. Would you like to see it?' He looked down at the computer screen directly below Rob's face. Sixteen words were displayed on a four-by-four grid. They had formed Rob's vocabulary since he had suffered the stroke to his brainstem, which had paralysed all of his body except his left eye. Using electro-oculographic signals, Rob's eye movements directed a cursor on the screen. When he had chosen a word, he blinked and a computer-generated voice said the word.

'No,' the computer voice said.

Fleming laughed. 'In that case I won't show it to you, you ungrateful bastard.'

He could tell that his older brother was trying to smile - and that the smile was as strained as his own banter. Rob had always been his hero, an action man who was always fitter, stronger and faster than he was. But now when he looked at Rob he felt a crushing sadness and remembered Billy French.

Billy had been a friend when they were in their late teens. They had all shared a passion for climbing, and every summer they bummed around Europe trying their luck on the big Alpine peaks. Rob was already an exceptional climber, while Billy and Miles were merely enthusiastic amateurs. Nevertheless, with Rob as leader, they tackled most levels of climb up to ED, extremement difficile, and had even scaled a few ABOs, abominable ascents. It was on the notorious Nordwand of the Eiger that it happened.

It was the end of the summer. Fleming was nineteen and due to start his medical degree at Cambridge. Rob was talking about joining the Royal Marines. Billy was still deciding what to do with the future, which stretched out before them, shimmering with endless possibilities.

It had been one of the wettest Augusts on record and the mountain face was plastered with rime and loaded with unstable snow. But they had come to climb the Eiger and nothing could deter them. On the lower reaches, near the top of a buttress known as the First Pillar, Billy made a misstep. His ice axes and crampons sheared out of the rotten ice and he was airborne. The belays should have held him but the ice screws shot out of their moorings.

Rob and Miles dug in deep and stopped themselves being pulled off the face, but Billy fell until the rope went taut, then swung in a pendulous arc and hit an overhang, which broke his neck. In seconds he went from being a fit young man pondering his future to a paraplegic with none.

On the endless, harrowing descent down the mountain, Rob and Miles nursed Billy's trussed body and tried to keep him conscious, hoping to meet someone who could go for help. But no one appeared until they were almost at the base. On the last drop, as they lowered Billy, Rob turned to Miles. 'If this ever happens to me, Milo,' he whispered, his tanned face as pale as the snow, 'just cut the rope and let me go. You're never more alive than when you're close to death. But you're never more dead than when you're stuck in a life you don't want. So let me go. That's what I'd want. A little pain, don't mind that, a little fear and then nothing.' Two days later, Billy died in hospital.

The Fleming brothers had continued climbing together even after Rob married Susan seven years ago. They had travelled round the world in their search for new mountains to conquer, and often felt as though Billy was with them, especially when the going got tough. Fleming had never forgotten his brother's words, and had always thought that if he did come to harm, it would be on a mountain or in combat. It never occurred to him that Rob would have a stroke while driving a Ford Mondeo up the Ml to Leeds.

As he wheeled his brother's bed out of the ward and into the corridor, he told himself again that tomorrow he would help him. He recalled the countless times Rob had pulled him from a crevasse or helped him reach a difficult peak. Now he would support his brother on his toughest climb.

He had already helped Jake to walk again. Tomorrow he 'would help Rob to talk.

He hoped this was what Rob wanted. Their parents, especially their mother, wanted it. Their mother was an Anglican, who had become even more devout since the accident and believed with an almost blind fervour that in time, with God's love and Miles's skill, her eldest son would be restored to full health.

Fleming knew, though, from witnessing laborious communication sessions with psychologists, that Rob wanted to die. His stroke had caused the car crash that had left him paraplegic, his wife dead and his young son's legs crushed. He had tried twice to broach Rob's depression with their parents, but each time they had been unwilling to talk about it. 'It's just a phase,' they said. 'He'll feel different when he starts to get better.'

And when Fleming had tried to explain that there was no guarantee Rob would get better, his mother had smiled bravely and said that God and she weren't giving up on him just yet. 'God will guide him.'

Like when Rob had had the accident, Miles had thought but not said.

It never occurred to his mother that Rob might blame God for what had happened.

For a guilty second Fleming envied Amber. At least she had the solace of knowing that her sister was beyond suffering. His brother's plight had only strengthened Fleming's conviction that there was no God and no afterlife. It had never been clearer to him that the only choice for any man was to make the best of this life with its suffering before oblivion took over for ever - and for ever was a long time. Fleming had one simple aim for his brother: to help him in the here and now. He needed to show him how Jake had been helped, and in turn convince him that one day he, too, could be whole and happy again.

Almost there, Rob,' he said, wheeling the bed down the corridor towards the physiotherapy room.

As they approached the swing doors, the surprise leapt out. Jake was hopping up and down as nimble and agile as if the accident had never happened. 'Dad! Dad! Look at my legs!' He ran to the bed and bounded up to kiss his father's cheek.