Biblical (5 page)

Corbin shook his head disbelievingly. “You’re kidding … You’re really going to feed it a fake reality? You should christen your synthetic brain René.”

“René?”

“As in Descartes. He said he could never prove that he wasn’t a brain in a vat, being deceived by some malevolent demon. Turns out you’re the demon.” Corbin shrugged. “I’m sorry John, I get cynical when I’m tired. I think this project is the opportunity of a lifetime. I guess I’m more than a little jealous.”

“I wouldn’t be too jealous. The Project Director, Poulsen, is a real Captain Bligh.”

“Well, send me a postcard from Sweden when you’re picking up your Nobel …” Corbin raised his glass in toast.

Macbeth laughed and shook his head. “Trust me, if there’s going to be a Nobelist in the family, it’ll be Casey.”

“Well, I do envy you, John.” Corbin grinned. “Talking about envy, how’s your love life?”

“My love life?”

“Humor me,” said Corbin. “I need to live vicariously. You no closer to settling down? Whatever happened to … Melissa, wasn’t it?”

“Melissa moved out West with her job.” Macbeth forced a smile. “California. We’ve lost touch.”

“That’s a shame.” Corbin shook his head. “That’s the kind of touch you don’t want to lose. She really was something else, John …”

“I know. But these things happen. At least they seem to happen to me. I’m not the easiest guy to live with.”

“A real shame …” Corbin’s faraway expression suggested he was simulating Melissa in his mind.

“Why don’t you tell me about your work problems?” Macbeth changed the subject.

“Like I said, no shop …” Corbin clearly was as reluctant to
talk about his work as Macbeth was about his private life and they each retreated into superficialities.

They spent the next hour eating and chatting, the conversation skimming over the surface of each other’s lives. Macbeth found he did most of the talking, telling Corbin about his work for the university and his life in Copenhagen; about the similarities to and differences from life in the States and how you changed your personality and expectations to suit your environment. Corbin smiled. Nodded. Commented. But it was very clear that his mind was still elsewhere and his spirit even more sapped by tiredness. Macbeth decided to cut the evening as short as possible. The pretty waitress with the auburn hair came back and, skipping dessert, Macbeth ordered a coffee.

“Sorry,” said Corbin. “I’ve been lousy company.”

“Not at all.” Macbeth smiled. “It’s been great to catch up. But I can see you’re under a lot of stress. I do wish you’d tell me what’s been going on with your work …”

Corbin was about to say something when his cellphone rang.

Josh Hoberman’s heart was pounding.

His wakefulness nauseatingly sudden and total, he felt the burn of acid reflux in his gullet. He woke sitting bolt upright in his bed, unmoving, holding his breath, trying to work out what it had been that had ripped him out of sleep. There was silence. Or near-silence. He heard the sound of a police or ambulance siren somewhere far away on North Shore Drive. A dog barking, again distant.

Nothing in the house. Or near.

He let his breath go and sighed, lifting his watch from the nightstand. Midnight-thirty. Maybe it had just been a bad dream that had chased him out of sleep, or a raccoon knocking over a trash can, or too much coffee drunk too late in the day. Whatever it had been, Hoberman knew he would not get back to sleep for another hour or so. He walked through to the bathroom, urinated and flushed, then washed his hands, looking at himself in the mirror. Someone had stolen his reflection and replaced it with that of his father: same face, same doleful eyes, same shape. He was getting old. He had just turned fifty but the tired bags under his eyes added half a decade to his age. But his hair was still thick and dark. At least he had that. He’d have to do something about his weight though. He was too heavy for his height and it was all around his waist. A heart-attack roll. A heart attack had killed his father. At fifty-four.

Hoberman decided to go back down to his study and do an hour or so’s work. The trick was to do something necessary but tedious, something that would tire rather than stimulate.

The house was old. Somewhere around one hundred and fifty years old and set way out on its own, a mile or so back from the road and embraced by a muffle of thick Virginia forest. It had offered the isolation Hoberman wanted; but with the isolation came a degree of uncertainty, of risk.

Hoberman didn’t bother with a robe when he walked out onto the landing, switching on the light. One of the benefits of living off the beaten track was that there were no neighbors or passers-by to spy on you. It was as he stood there on the landing, naked but for his shorts, that he heard it. Something or someone outside, moving around the house. He rushed down the wooden staircase and went straight into his office. Opening his desk drawer, he took out the Jericho 941 semi-automatic he kept there. He stared at the gun for a moment, amazed at how alien it looked in his hand and trying to work out what the hell he was proposing to do with it. It had been Benjamin, Hoberman’s younger brother, who had given him the Israeli-made pistol, even arranging the license for him, insisting it was essential for Josh, living so remotely, to have protection. A gun like this wouldn’t look odd in Benny’s hands. Benny knew how to handle weapons, handle situations, handle women. Benny differed from his brother in every possible way.

There was another sound outside, and Josh found himself wishing that Benny had been there. He would know what to do.

He slipped the magazine into the handgrip, switched the safety off and snapped back the carriage, all the way, just like Benny had shown him. Walking back out into the hall, Josh killed the lights and moved across to the front door. He paused, straining to hear any sound from outside, holding his head close to the heavy oak of the door.

The sound of knocking was so loud that Josh almost dropped
the automatic. The kind of knocking that the police do in the middle of the night. The kind of knocking the police had done in Cologne the night they had come for Josh’s grandparents and twelve-year-old father.

“Professor Josh Hoberman?” The voice was all business. All authority.

“Professor Hoberman?” it repeated when Josh did not respond.

Josh took a deep breath. “Who is it?”

“This is Special Agent Roesler, sir. FBI. I’m here with Special Agent Forbes. May we speak with you, Professor Hoberman?”

“Hold on …” Josh looked around himself: at the hall and staircase behind him, at the study to his left, at his pot belly above the elasticated band of his shorts, at the gun in his hand. What were the FBI doing here? If it
was
the FBI. He switched on the porch light, slid the security chain into place and opened the door a crack, keeping the gun raised but out of sight behind the door. Two crew-cuts in suits looked back at him. There was a black Crown Victoria parked on the drive behind them with a third figure at the wheel.

“Let me see some identification …” Josh tried to invest as much authority into the demand as possible.

“Certainly, Professor Hoberman.” The young man at the door did not, as Josh had expected, simply hold up his ID, instead handing the black leather wallet to him through the gap in the door. Josh studied it carefully, looking from the photograph on the ID to the face at the door and back again, as if he would really have had any idea how to tell a fake FBI identity card from a real one.

“What do you want? Do you know what time it is?” Josh handed the wallet back.

“Yes, I’m sorry to disturb you so late, Professor Hoberman,” Special Agent Roesler said without a hint of apology. “But your help is needed with something very important, sir.”

“Needed with what?”

“I’ve been instructed to give you this …” Roesler handed a sealed envelope to Josh, who opened it and read it.

“Do you know what is in this?” he asked the young FBI agent, when he had finished reading the note. “Do you know who sent it?”

“No sir. We’re just here to transport you to where you need to be.”

Josh stared at the two FBI men for a moment, trying to grasp if what was happening really was happening. “Give me ten minutes to get dressed,” he said eventually. “I’ll be right out.”

He closed the door and, before turning and heading back up the stairs, looked again at the note.

The note headed with the seal of the President of the United States.

Confined by windows he could not wind down, doors he could not open and the heavy gauge mesh between him and the uniformed driver, Macbeth felt an incipient panic as he sat in the back of the police prowl car. This was not, by any means, an environment that offered him harmony.

He tried to focus on the city that slid by outside.

Clear-sky evening had turned to clouded night while he had sat in the bar with Corbin and the streets were now sleek with rain. The cop didn’t use the siren or the lights except at intersections, where an abbreviated whoop-whoop served both to clear the way and startle Macbeth. They cut through the Common on Charles, the silhouettes of the trees looking to Macbeth oddly two-dimensional, like stage scenery, before turning towards the towering sparkle of the Prudential Center. As they headed along Huntington, Macbeth could see more blue and white police cruisers blocking access to Christian Science Plaza.

*

“You the shrink?” the cop with the sergeant’s chevrons and the big Irish face asked Corbin as he got out of the patrol car.

“I’m Dr Corbin, the duty psychiatrist, if that’s what you mean. This is a colleague, Dr Macbeth …” said Corbin as Macbeth slid out of the police car after him. The cop didn’t acknowledge Macbeth’s presence.

“Yeah, well, we got a religious nut, looks like. Butt-naked on
the Christian Science Church roof. He’s the angel Gabriel, apparently.”

“Anybody talking to him at the moment?” asked Corbin.

“Father Mullachy. From St Francis just over there …” The cop had the same thick Boston accent that the cabbie had had.
Ovah they-ah
 … “I’ve got one of our guys with him. You never know when a crazy is going to try to take someone with them. Like that thing in San Francisco.”

“You’ve got a Catholic priest talking to him?” Macbeth grinned. “I would have thought that the Christian Scientists would have a demarcation issue.”

The sergeant looked Macbeth up and down wordlessly, before leading the way across the plaza. Ahead was a huge domed building that looked to Macbeth like a conglomeration of every style of religious architecture: part church, part cathedral, part basilica, part mosque. He had always thought of The Mother Church of the Church of Christ, Scientist, here in the heart of Boston, as something that should have been built in a theme-park for the godly. Or Las Vegas.

He had visited as a child – Macbeth, Casey and their father tourists in their own town – and remembered being awed by the scale of the interiors. Religious architecture had always fascinated him; particularly the way the dimensions were intended to overwhelm, to intimidate – to remind how big was God and how small man. His favorite part of the visit had been the ‘Mapparium’ in the Mary Baker Eddy Library: a vast, three-stories-high, inside-out, glass-globe encapsulation of the world as it had been in 1935.

The BPD sergeant led Corbin and Macbeth past the Reflection Pool, a long rectangle of water, dark and sparkling in the Boston night.

“There he is …” The sergeant pointed up to a flat-roofed area around the dome with a parapet-walled edge. It was on the original part of the structure and halfway up. A naked figure stood poised on one of the wall’s merlons.

Staring.

His focus seemed fixed on something far out over the city. Something in the sky. Macbeth looked in the direction of his gaze, but could see nothing. Even at this distance, Macbeth saw that there was no urgency, no distress in the way the naked man stood, arms at his side. The sight of him stirred an uneasy memory of a patient at McLean. Macbeth’s last patient before he went into pure research.

“Maybe he’s not serious,” Corbin said to the police sergeant. “It’s not high enough to ensure death if he jumps.”

“Maybe so …” said the cop assessing the drop. “But it’s still gonna smart.”
Smaaht
. He led the two psychiatrists to a side door, through a storeroom and up an internal service stairwell. When they came out onto the roof section by the dome, everything looked different, the height and the shifted perspective making Macbeth feel unsteady.

Here, at close quarters, he saw again that the fair-haired man on the edge of the parapet was poised. Calm. Almost serene. Not the usual jumper. In his late twenties or early thirties, Macbeth estimated. Seen from behind and a little to the side, stripped of his clothes, he looked pale and thin, except for a thickening of the waistline above the hips: a roll of soft fat hinting at a future weight problem. Again it appeared to Macbeth that the naked man was looking at something far away, out in the dark above or beyond the city.

The priest was about the same age as the man on the parapet and crouched, one knee on the floor, resting his elbow on the other, almost in a posture of genuflection. He had positioned himself to the side of the naked man, about six feet off, and Macbeth could hear he was lecturing him, in a soft, patronizing tone, about the sin of self-murder.

“That’s all we need,” Corbin muttered to Macbeth. “Someone to compound his religious mania. Two delusionals for the price of one …”

“Father Mullachy is doing just fine,” said the younger cop defensively, his face filled with hostility and ten generations of dumb believing. He could have been the sergeant’s son.

“You do realize that if your priest out there validates his delusion, he might just talk him into jumping?” Corbin shook his head and turned to Macbeth. “You’d better hang back, John, seeing you’re unofficial here.”

“I’ll watch and learn …” Macbeth smiled and moved over to where the younger cop and the sergeant with the big Irish face stood. From this vantage point, Macbeth could now see something of the naked man’s profile.