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The Apocalypse Syndrome
The Apocalypse Syndrome
The Apocalypse Syndrome
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The Apocalypse Syndrome

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When writer Hammond Sinclair arrives in Geneva to follow the World Climate Conference at first hand, he is not only interested in the global warming controversy. He suspects that a former student of his, now a right-wing extremist, is plotting a spectacular terrorist attack to disrupt the summit. In a city overrun by rival mobs of violent demonstrators from all over Europe, he meets a young anarchist girl, and in order to impress her takes part in a public debate. It plunges him into the maelstrom of an ideological conflict with high stakes, where opposing sides have their own visions of apocalypse, and are prepared to do anything to save humanity from the catastrophe they foresee.

Chief Commissaire Vauthey of the Geneva Police has his own problems with a new female Police Chief who is trying to oust him. When a body is discovered buried in the snow on an alpine pass, the rival factions in the police pursue radically different trails. But even the help of a woman inspector from Scotland Yards Special Branch may not be enough to allow Vauthey to uncover the terrorist plot before the fanatical believers in apocalypse try to trigger their own Armageddon.

A cliff-hanging thriller with an intellectual theme and a plot right out of todays headlines, this novel explores the ways in which visions of planetary doom may push activists to extreme violence, in a desperate attempt to change the fate of mankind.

www.michael-antony.com

LanguageEnglish
PublisheriUniverse
Release dateMar 10, 2011
ISBN9781450294645
The Apocalypse Syndrome
Author

Michael Antony

Michael Antony has lived and travelled in many countries and now lives in Switzerland. He is the author of several works of fiction, nonfiction ("The Masculine Century"), and poetry ("Visions of Kali").

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    The Apocalypse Syndrome - Michael Antony

    Copyright © 2010 by Michael Antony

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

    This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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    Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

    Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

    Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

    ISBN: 978-1-4502-9465-2 (sc)

    ISBN: 978-1-4502-9464-5 (ebook)

    Printed in the United States of America

    iUniverse rev. date: 03/02/2011

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    A Note on the Author

    1

    Hammond Sinclair strolled along the Quai du Mont-Blanc beside the Lake of Geneva, taking in the superb view with the delight of rediscovery. It was all exactly as he remembered it: the distant white peaks glittering against a pale turquoise sky; to the left the famous jet d’eau or water-spout—a watery Eiffel tower whose spray formed the ghostly outline of a sail restlessly turning in the wind—and further to the left, emerging from the shining expanse of blue, the wooded hill dotted with the villas of the rich, among which Byron’s villa could be picked out if you remembered where to look. The shores nearer to him were lined with elegant but faded turn-of-the-century hotels and office buildings, on whose roofs he could make out the names of legendary watch-firms. No other form of advertising was visible and not a single building in sight had more than seven floors. He heaved a sigh of relief. They hadn’t ruined it yet, the modernizing barbarians with their soulless, abstract skyscrapers. Everything seemed designed to ensure that the venerable Gothic cathedral rising above the Old Town dominated the scene like a patriarch brooking no rival. Its pale towers and green spire even projected above the long, loaf-shaped mountain behind it, which had a coating of snow on top like icing on a cake. The crisp scent of this snow was carried on the breeze across the lake to where he stood, and he breathed it in like a tonic while the rays of the winter sun danced over his face.

    He had buttoned up his leather jacket when he came out of the hotel, but now he undid it and loosened the cashmere scarf round his neck. He walked on, but after a while he stopped again and leaned on the railing to drink in the dazzling scene. The water below was the color of emeralds. A pair of brilliant white swans tilted their heads and gave him a questioning glance, like elegant sales girls in a luxury boutique assessing the worth of a client, before they glided away with superb indifference towards an island in the middle of the lake.

    How the hell do they do it? he found himself muttering to the swans in awe. How do they keep it so picture-postcard pretty? It was not as if it was a museum town like Stratford-upon-Avon, preserved in a Tudor time-warp for the tourists. Geneva was a banking capital and a hub of international organizations, busy with all the sordid affairs of the world, and yet it still looked as unspoiled and pretty as an alpine village. He recalled the impression it had made on him when he had first passed through it long ago as a hitchhiker on his way to Greece. In those days what had excited him had been the literary history, all the writers who had spent time here: Voltaire, Rousseau, Byron, the Shelleys, Conrad. You were forever passing buildings where Liszt or Lenin had lived. What a stamping ground it had been for the belle époque circuit of idle literati, rootless artists, wayward princesses, exiled revolutionaries —and in their footsteps had come Abwehr spies, followed by Cold War secret agents. In his youth Hammond had nurtured the romantic illusion that he would have been happier living in an earlier time, and this had been one of those places that seem, as in science fiction stories, to provide a portal into the past. He remembered thinking back then that this would not be a bad place to come and live at some future stage of his life. He had never done so, but he looked at the city now with the sentimental affection you feel for a woman you might at one time have married if things had gone differently. It was hard to believe it was over thirty years since he had formed that vague plan. It felt like last week.

    Of course he had been back a few times in between, but the visits blurred in his memory because nothing seemed to change. There were a few new buildings of glass and steel, but they were made to fit in with the shape and style of the old ones. And nothing was allowed to take from the majestic old edifice looming over the city, the Cathedral of St Pierre, where Calvin had launched his religious revolution nearly five hundred years before. How different from London, Hammond thought, where the old business quarter no longer had a memorable skyline dominated by St Paul’s but had become a brassy, soulless clutter of gigantic glass obelisks, proclaiming the new religion of money. What dogged spirit of conservatism had enabled the Swiss to keep this financial powerhouse of a city so unchanging, so graceful, so human in scale and style, so resistant to the soulless, geometric gigantism of modernism?

    In a way, he reflected, it was fitting that the World Climate Conference was to open here tomorrow. What city could better symbolize the idea of balanced development, preservation of heritage, and resistance to the environmental vandalism of capitalism? And yet they had struggled to obtain the conference, he knew. The reputation of Switzerland as a rich man’s paradise, a prosperous, business-friendly society, had oddly played against them. The most ecological of countries received little credit from that political quarter because its ecology sprang from a deep conservatism, a popular resistance to all that was pretentious, over-sized, or ugly, and not from the trendy, strident ideologies of the moment. In a day or two the streets would be crawling with journalists, activists, demonstrators, climate experts, and political leaders from the world’s great powers. They would all be trying to solve the great environmental problems—pollution, alleged climate change, carbon dioxide emissions —while the city around them discreetly and quietly embodied so many ecological solutions: small size, low buildings, no garish advertising, good public transport, lush parks, the conservative elegance of the past as an antidote to the futuristic megalomania of the present. Would they notice that this city, in its staid conservatism, was the answer to their frantic seeking? That it was, in short, a kind of anti-Shanghai?

    Which brought him to the question of what on earth he was doing here. He had asked himself the same thing a dozen times since he had boarded the plane on a whim the day before. Was it merely tourism? Or the intellectual curiosity of a (late) middle-aged writer in quest of inspiration? Was he just another summit groupie, as his agent had joked—a news junkie looking for another fix of international drama?

    No, he decided, he couldn’t pretend it was just that. It was altogether more personal. He couldn’t deny that it was Jason who had brought him here. Jason, his estranged one-time disciple, and the mad turn his thoughts seemed to have taken in recent years. He had a vague, horrible vision of what Jason was planning—some spectacular act to sabotage the climate summit (as a cryptic website message had hinted.) And Hammond feared it would reflect badly on him, for putting these ideas in Jason’s head so many years before. Would he be in some sense responsible for the actions of his former student—even though Jason had taken his ideas to a mad extreme which Hammond had made it clear he rejected? And yet there seemed nothing he could do since he had no way of contacting Jason, let alone influencing him. He had simply felt compelled to come here, like a grim witness to whatever it was that was going to happen.

    He knew that Jason had grown up here and would be at home in these streets. He had friends here from his youth, even family, and would have plenty of places to hide. It seemed hopeless to try to find him. He would certainly not be in a hotel. No doubt he had people with him who shared his convictions. Even if by some chance Hammond ran into him, what could he say to him to make him change his mind? Yet he could not help feeling that it was his duty somehow to do everything humanly possible to find out in advance what Jason was planning and try to stop it, if it was anything like what he feared. This was after all a summit where the leaders of all major countries—the United States, China, Russia, Japan, the European nations —and nearly a hundred others were going to meet. And they were going to discuss the environmental issues, the question of global warming and new limits on carbon dioxide emissions, which had become a subject of intense debate for much of the world’s chattering classes. Any violent incident could jeopardize the outcome. Hammond was still a little unsure about what outcome he hoped for. Jason, however, had no such doubts or hesitations. That much Hammond knew.

    He had come to a halt between a busy traffic bridge and a walking bridge where the lake gradually narrowed into the River Rhone, which flowed out of it again on its way to the sea. He decided to cross the pedestrian bridge and head up into the Old Town. He noticed that the bridge forked half-way across, one path going to a small island on the left, while the main structure veered right and continued to the other side of the lake. The island, he learned from a sign when he got there, was the Ile Rousseau, and boasted a statue of the local philosophical genius. The inspirer of the French Revolution was sitting, pen in hand, amid a clump of large trees, which in summer, Hammond imagined, would provide pleasant shade for a spot of revolutionary philosophizing. Under the bridge which led to the island was an enclosure and a tiny stone beach where swans and geese made their nests. He stopped and watched a few tourists throwing them bits of bread.

    Seagulls gathered in flocks and tried to get the bread too, and some children were shouting excitedly as the birds caught the tufts of bread in mid-air. A few yards away two middle-aged gypsies were playing a lively tune on a violin and a guitar, to general indifference. He dropped a two-franc coin into the open guitar case. Inside it, he was amused to see, they had propped a small, crumpled picture of Jesus. He wondered if this appeal to piety or religious solidarity had any effect. These were not the first street musicians he had noticed since he arrived here. It seemed oddly out of keeping with the spotless streets and air of law and order that these impromptu sidewalk concerts were tolerated, and he wondered idly if they were legal.

    As he neared the end of the bridge he came upon another street musician, this time a bearded Canadian in his thirties. Between two songs he struck up a conversation with him.

    I once did that thirty-two years ago on a street in Istanbul on my way back from India, volunteered Hammond, putting two francs in a battered cowboy hat. I think I made two dollars all day.

    I’d be feeling pretty pissed if I didn’t make that in ten minutes here, said the Canadian expansively. He was barrel-chested and looked strong enough to be a lumberjack. People here are loaded, man. One guy gave me fifty francs the other day. I came here to work as a ski-instructor in the mountains but there isn’t enough snow yet. So I figured, might as well make some money while I wait. This place is famous for it.

    And what makes people here give, do you think? asked Hammond.

    Hard to say. Guilt, maybe? They know how bad things are in other places. But they don’t take just any old crap in the music line, you know. They’ve got taste. They appreciate talent, man. The Canadian grinned, and his blue eyes twinkled and creased up as he played a slick riff on his guitar. He looked as if he had stepped right out of the late seventies, when Hammond had done his own stint on the road. Only his ginger hair was a bit shorter than it would have been then.

    And what about the police? Is this legal or do you have to keep an eye out?

    It’s legal—if you pay your license. He began tuning his guitar as if one string was out.

    License?

    Sure. This is Switzerland, man. Everything is licensed and regulated. We pay a tax for our right to stand here. We get fined if we haven’t paid it. He laughed and shook his head. And would you believe there’s a law that we have to move every twenty minutes—so we don’t drive some poor bastard of a shopkeeper crazy by playing the same three songs outside his shop all day?

    Well, that’s a sensible rule, said Hammond reasonably. There must be some bad musicians.

    You can say that again, said the Canadian, with a grimace. Especially the gypsies that get bused in from Romania. Some of them are terrible.

    What do you mean, bused in?

    It’s an organized business, man. He looked at him shrewdly, as if spotting a receptive listener for his inside knowledge of the world. The gypsy clans pack their people into minibuses and truck ’em over here to stand on street corners with a rusty old trumpet or a cracked violin—or maybe a kid. They make more in a week here busking or begging than in two months in Romania.

    And the authorities allow this? What do people here think?

    Well, some of them may not like it, but what can they do? It’s guilt, man. Most Westerners feel guilty because they’re rich, and especially the Swiss. He grinned. They see a foreign beggar with a kid in rags and they reach in their pockets. It’s a reflex. Globalization has brought guilt. Beggars without borders! You can’t keep them out. You feel guilty if you try. He stretched out his arm in a theatrical gesture. This is the city of Calvin! He was big on guilt. Man is a sinner! He laughed cheerfully. My ancestors were Scots, they were suckers for that shit. There’s a statue of John Knox beside Calvin in the park just up the street.

    The Canadian was clearly a scholar of the road, an itinerant philosopher. He seemed glad of a chance to talk to another English-speaker. Hammond was amused by his garrulousness, and had an urge to pump him for more local lore.

    But where on earth can a gypsy or any other busker stay in an expensive place like this?

    Well, the gypsies have their own camp under a bridge up the river. As for us, there’s always squats. Lots of squats in the city. It’s full of anarchists, but peaceful ones—at least they were until the Hun hordes began arriving here for this Climate Conference.

    Anarchists? repeated Hammond, with comic disbelief. Doesn’t sound very Swiss.

    You’d be surprised. The local anarchists work and pay taxes—or else they’re on welfare. The squatters pay rent. It’s so well organized it’s insane. He moved from one foot to the other as if getting some circulation back into his legs. Even the junkies here have legal premises for shooting up. They supply them with sterilized needles and spoons. I’m not kidding. They’re providing thousands of beds in big tents for the climate protesters and Hun anarchists that are starting to swarm in here. He cackled to himself. The Swiss believe in control. If you think of a way of rebelling, they’ll take it over, organize it for you, draw up rules, and tax it. You need a license to breathe here. He laughed, as though the absurdity of life gave him pleasure. But the air is pure. And look at the view. He nodded towards the lake.

    A well-ordered paradise, suggested Hammond. Meets all hygiene and safety standards.

    Well, there’s some crime here all the same, conceded the Canadian. Mainly by Moroccan and Algerian bag-snatchers and pickpockets over by the train station. They can’t keep them out either. Pickpockets without borders! In fact, it’s a funny thing, I was actually robbed here. Last week. He lowered his voice with a mock air of conspiracy. Do you know what they took?

    No idea.

    My guitar case. Not the guitar. Just the empty case. He looked at him as if to see what he made of this striking demonstration of man’s irrational criminal impulses.

    Bizarre. Hammond stared at the cowboy hat which lay at the busker’s feet instead of the usual guitar case for receiving coins. It had not occurred to him that the case was missing.

    Yeah, bizarre’s the word for it, nodded the Canadian. Why would anyone steal just a guitar case? Unless he was Al Capone, right? There’s some weirdo people around, especially the last couple of days. He gave him a look that spoke of grim secrets he could divulge if he felt inclined to. He fell silent and strummed a few chords.

    What about another guitarist? Maybe his own fell to pieces? Hammond was trying to be helpful.

    I thought of that. He was unconvinced. But I’ve checked out the other guitarists. Nada de nada. He sounded final. He seemed to have lost his urge to talk. Nope. Something else is happening here, man. There’s a weird vibe. He stared over Hammond’s shoulder as though he had seen a ghost, and added quietly: This place is getting a bit too hard-core for me.

    Hammond turned round to see what he was looking at. A group of eight or nine young men, some with strange haircuts, some shaven-headed, all of them in black bomber jackets, were sauntering towards the bridge. They were talking loudly in German and drinking from beer bottles.

    It’s certainly getting interesting, commented Hammond, with studied nonchalance. Tell me, if you wanted to find musicians and artists here, where would you go? Where do they hang out?

    The Canadian thought for a moment and then told him to try the Maison des Arts, the Grütli, over by the opera house. Hammond thanked him and walked away, giving the group of young Germans a wide berth. He was followed by the strains of Bob Dylan’s Simple Twist of Fate, which the busker sang in a low, melancholy voice. Hammond glanced back and saw that the gang of German anarchists or neo-Nazis or whatever they were had stopped to listen, swigging their beers. They were idly kicking their black combat boots against the curb, and reminded him of a herd of young bulls or stallions pawing the ground.

    He walked back along the lake shore to feast his eyes on the view for another minute or two before heading up into the Old Town. It was worth trying the Grütli on the off-chance. If Jason hung out anywhere, it would be somewhere like that. Hammond was beginning to get the feel of the city as a place to live, and its atmosphere, full of strange fauna, as activists arrived for the conference, but he was also getting back the feeling of the long past stretching behind it like a shadow. The Grütli, he knew, would have been named after the plain where Switzerland was founded, according to legend, back in 1291. He never forgot that date, as a former history lecturer, since it was also the year of the fall of St Jean d’Acre, the last crusader stronghold in the Holy Land, which would have thrown thousands of crusaders on the road as they straggled back from the great failed adventure in the East. It was on the plain of Grütli that the leaders of three small Swiss-German cantons had met and sworn an oath to help defend each other, mainly against the Habsburgs (who were beginning their long imperial ascent from their castles in Argovie and Alsace to the palaces of Vienna and Madrid.) From this tiny core the country had grown slowly over the centuries as other cantons asked to join the Confederation. He had always admired this idea of a nation, growing by voluntary adhesion rather than the more traditional means—conquest and assimilation—like Britain or France. That is how it had ended up with regions that still spoke three different languages (or four if you counted Romansch, a dying language which sounded like a drunk Swiss-German trying to bluff his way in Italian) because the core regions had not imposed their language on the newcomers. Geneva, he knew, had only joined Switzerland after the Napoleonic Wars, when the occupying French troops pulled out.

    As if his steps were following his thoughts, he came upon a monument at the end of the traffic bridge depicting Geneva and Switzerland as two female warriors arm in arm, gazing out over the lake. He noted from an engraving on the base that it commemorated Geneva’s entry into the Confederation in 1815. It was the sort of banal, bombastic nineteenth-century official sculpture that most people walked past without a glance, but he saw it in a different light. It was a symbol, however sanitized, of the bloody struggles of past generations of Europeans for the freedom they now enjoyed. It conjured up ancient battles and forgotten sacrifices by the heroes of bygone ages, something Byron had celebrated in The Prisoner of Chillon—a long poem about a sixteenth-century Genevan patriot imprisoned in the grim castle at the other end of the lake for resisting the local tyrant. They were things, Hammond reflected, that modern-day Europeans thought it trendy to dismiss as outmoded claptrap, but nonetheless owed their privileged existence to. As he walked round the sculpture, a group of Chinese tourists were taking photos of it and posing in front of it.

    He walked up into the Old Town towards the cathedral, which loomed above him more massively with every step. As the streets narrowed, he felt he was penetrating into a medieval citadel, almost a sanctuary, at the core of this prosperous bankers’ city. At the top of a steep, cobbled pedestrian lane was an ancient square with a fountain, bordered by higgledy-piggledy medieval buildings and picturesque cafés. He felt for a moment he had stepped inside an Impressionist painting, until he realized everything was much older. One café, opposite the Palais de Justice, still had its tables and chairs set up outside. On each chair a blue blanket was neatly folded in case a patron felt the winter chill. A score of people were sitting outside in their coats sipping their renversés (as café-crèmes were called here), but only a few had bothered to wrap themselves in the blankets. On the other side of the square he followed another narrow lane leading to the medieval Town Hall, once the seat of government of an independent republic. He stepped inside its ancient courtyard to admire the vaulted roofs which surrounded it like a Gothic cloister. The building had an unusual covered stone ramp which spiraled up to the top floor, so that the medieval burghers could ride their horses up to the very door of the council chamber. Across the street was a row of large cannons standing in what looked like an old roofed market-place. On the walls were historical frescoes depicting the arrival of Huguenot refugees from France in the seventeenth century. Their descendants, he knew, had set up some of the leading private banks of the city.

    He realized he had missed the cathedral, so he strode down a pedestrian lane to his right to have a quick look at it. He turned into a square and was suddenly face to face with a remarkable edifice. It was a twelfth-century Romanesque-Gothic cathedral, but it had a huge façade built in front of it in the neo-classical style. This was not merely the fashionable neo-classical portico of a baroque church. It was the full-sized frontage of a pagan Greek temple and it had all the aura of state power that Greek or Roman temples had. Towering, massive Corinthian columns gave the building an official, imperial air, reminiscent of the Pantheon. The frieze at the top displayed the Republic of Geneva’s coat of arms. Nothing better symbolized the fusion of religion with state power, even though the façade was built two centuries after Calvin’s dictatorship. Forty years later during the French Revolution and occupation, this cathedral, he remembered reading, was briefly converted into a secular Temple of Laws. What was slightly eerie was that it looked perfectly designed for this function, as though the architect of the façade had uncannily foreseen the direction of history.

    As he walked on through the Old Town, he felt the past rising up from its cobbled streets like an exhalation of gases from a lost world. He felt how special this city had seemed at one period of history, when it was an island of the religious Reform movement amid a sea of hostile nations, faithful to the old Church. It had been a haven for both persecuted Protestants and banished Enlightenment philosophers, a city where a political ideal of tolerance had grown up, but it was also the birthplace of a harsh, intolerant religion, the place where Calvin had banned dancing and burned his rivals for heresy. It was the contradictions of Calvinism, source of the Puritanism that had shaped both Pilgrim America and later Victorian Britain, which he found fascinating. How a spiritual revolt against an authoritarian, corrupt Church could give rise to a harsh, intolerant, gloomy, killjoy, moralistic religion, and yet finally mellow into a society of openness, democracy, and freedom—this was the paradox both of Calvinist Geneva and of the two great English-speaking Protestant nations. How does liberty grow out of intolerance? Does all progressive thought go through an initial phase of narrow fanaticism before it opens up? That is the way he put it to himself. Every good idea that comes into the world is perverted into a dogma, an extremist doctrine imposed by a revolutionary sect, which only gradually mellows and bears fruit. He wondered if the same was true of all the progressive ideas of the present age. Perhaps that was why so many of his generation, having carried the torch for these ideas in their youth, were now so repelled by some of them, as they became the new official dogmas imposed on the world by the grey-haired rebels of the sixties, now in power.

    He walked through an ancient Roman-style gate onto a promenade above the old city walls. A broad stone footpath lined with chestnut trees led down from the Old Town. Below was the university founded by Calvin, in a park full of hundred-year-old trees. Next to it was a spacious square surrounded by fine buildings. Following the Canadian’s directions, he headed towards the magnificent opera house, modeled after the one in Paris, a flamboyant mix of neo-classical and rococo styles typical of the French Second Empire. Next to it was a sober neo-classical museum. Both were buildings from the nineteenth century, he noted, and incomparably more graceful than anything built in the twentieth. He found himself wondering again (it was one of his favorite mental hobby-horses) what had led to the appalling fall from architectural grace of modernism. Was it merely new, cheap, nasty materials, or a perversion of taste and sensibility? Was there a link between the brutal architecture and the barbaric politics of the twentieth century?

    He walked along the street between the opera house and the elegant, neo-classical Conservatory of Music. After asking a passer-by he was directed to the Maison Grütli, also housed in a neo-classical building. He went in and found himself in an empty, modernistic lobby with bare white walls. Near a deserted counter a spate of posters advertised plays, films and artistic events, but for an art centre it was strikingly empty of art of any sort. He wandered down the wide, open-stepped staircase to the basement, which boasted a theatre. It was closed. The walls that could have held paintings or photographs displaying the works of local artists or students were defiantly naked, as though this was a minimalist statement in itself. He would have preferred to see the colorful, naïve scenes of graffiti artists splashed everywhere, rather than this bleak modernist cult of nothingness—like the blank white canvases touted every few decades as the latest form of revolutionary art. He walked back upstairs. Off the lobby was a restaurant. In contrast with the rest of the building, this was crowded. It was now lunchtime and he discovered he was hungry. He went in and sat down at a small table against a wall, the only one he could see free. He looked at the menu propped in a plastic stand.

    There was a plat du jour or day’s special consisting of rösti, a Schübling sausage and a salad. The young girl who served him responded to his college French as though it was perfectly normal, and made no attempt to speak English, though he heard her afterwards speaking it fluently at another table. He approved this respect for the linguistic efforts of the other. He looked around, with an eye out for the face of Jason. The people around him included a sprinkling of bohemian types (artists, musicians, or students who had gone past their sell-by date without changing style) but were mostly the turtleneck sweater crowd—he guessed teachers, architects, designers, social workers, journalists. There seemed to be a number of foreigners among them who might have come here for the climate conference starting the next day, as he thought he heard the sounds of English, German, Italian and Portuguese amid the hubbub of French. But Jason was not to be seen.

    The waitress delivered his meal. She had the professional, cool courtesy he found typical of the Swiss. It was like a pleasant face behind a plate of armored glass. The enormous sausage was tasty, the salad was fresh, and the bread was crisp as if not long out of the oven. The rösti, a Swiss-German specialty resembling hash-browns, was a little greasy but satisfyingly old-fashioned, like something your grandmother might have made. He tucked into it with relish and a sense of bold defiance of the absurd dietary injunctions of his cardiologist.

    Since he had nobody to talk to, and nobody looked approachable, he sank into his own mental world. He began thinking of how he had met Jason at a turning point in his life. He was forty-two and had just published a best-selling book, his first ever. It had transformed him from a failure into a success at an age when he had almost give up hope. He had gone from being a struggling writer of unsold novels, reviews, odd bits of journalism, supplemented with temporary college-lecturing jobs, into a man of means who gave interviews and signed books for queuing crowds. It was a heady experience, made slightly more piquant in that his psychiatrist wife had just divorced him. She had lost faith in his ability ever to turn a decent penny, and had missed out on his new-found wealth. She tried in the courts to get a share of it, on the grounds that he had written most of the book while married to her. Fortunately, even the feminist judges were put off by her naked greed. She had, after all, never kept him while he wrote. He had always paid more than his fair share of everything including rent, despite earning much less than her. This he was able to establish, though it was a humiliating struggle to be allowed finally to keep his own money from a rapacious ex-wife. The divorce had given him not only a deep prejudice against marriage (which had unfortunately been short-lived) but a brief second youth, a renewed period of bachelor insouciance, and a sudden mid-life urge to party again. He had been lecturing part-time at Queen Mary College in London on seventeenth and eighteenth-century cosmographies—the chronicles of voyages and depictions of newly discovered lands which had laid the basis of the modern picture of the world. Jason had been his keenest and cleverest student. He had also undertaken (out of friendship, pity or self-interest he was never sure) to draw Hammond into the student social scene of pub-crawls, wild parties, and midnight, drug-induced philosophizing, which he still remembered with nostalgia. It was the only period of his life when he had been the centre of a group of disciples, young admirers, fans, whatever you could call them, with Jason as his chief acolyte. The centre of their interest had been his book, with its alternative versions of history.

    His book had been a flash of inspiration. He had finally got fed up with the constant rejection of his high-brow novels on complex historical themes, and had decided on a whim to write a piece of popular trash. What do I really want to say to the world, he had asked himself. And he found that the answer was nothing to do with the complexities of the human heart or the ironies of fate, the themes of Tolstoy or Conrad, Umberto Eco or Milan Kundera. Instead, what he wanted to explore was what he called heretical history—the alternative versions to the conventional history of the world taught as gospel in the universities. He wanted to rewrite ancient history in the light of all the unorthodox stuff that had been thrown up in recent years. This was two decades after the Swiss Erich von Däniken had set off a storm with his thesis that extraterrestrial visitors had seeded early civilizations. Däniken’s work had been ridiculed by academics for its crudeness, piling up evidence pell-mell without any critical sifting, but his theory had been taken up and restated more credibly by more serious writers, notably the American scholar, Robert Temple. At the same time, ethnologist Thor Heyerdahl was putting forward his revisionist views on the voyages of ancient peoples and the links between them. Heyerdahl argued that the extraordinary similarities between Central American civilizations and those of Egypt and Mesopotamia pointed to the influence of one on the other. Old World voyagers had visited the New World thousands of years before Columbus. And when the usual argument was trotted out that no native New World cultures knew how to build ships out of wooden planks, and anyone who crossed the Atlantic would have introduced shipbuilding into America, Heyerdahl played a trump card. He showed the similarity between reed boats used on Lake Titicaca in Bolivia and those depicted in Egyptian wall paintings and still used on Lake Chad today, and argued that these boats could have crossed the Atlantic Ocean. When this idea was ridiculed as an impossibility, he took up the challenge. He got traditional craftsmen in Chad to build him a large reed boat, and with a motley crew of adventurers crossed the Atlantic on it—proving that it could have been done four thousand years ago.

    But what was shocking to Hammond was that Heyerdahl’s scientific, experimental demonstration of his thesis—that it was physically possible for people to have crossed the Atlantic thousands of years ago on reed boats, and that this bore out the ancient Aztec and Maya tales of bearded white men coming from the sea bringing new technologies—made no difference whatever to most orthodox academics. They dismissed Heyerdahl’s feat as a meaningless stunt, and continued to preach the total historical isolation of the cultures of the Americas. By now this had become a political issue. Central American scholars denied the influence of the Old World on their ancient cultures as though this constituted a new form of colonialism. For Hammond this demonstrated the bad faith and unscientific prejudices of mainstream academics. These people were not open-minded researchers but blinkered believers in an orthodox academic world-picture, which they were determined to defend in the teeth of all evidence. In short, the universities were ruled by liars (a statement, he now recalled, which Jason had come out with early in their acquaintance.)

    He set out in his book not only to support Heyerdahl’s thesis but also to suggest some other lines of inquiry for the diffusionist viewpoint—that ancient peoples travelled far more than has been assumed, and influenced other cultures. He had always had a feeling that the Vikings had had some input into Polynesian culture. He remembered visiting the outdoor Folk Museum in Oslo and seeing traditional Viking grain-storage huts on poles that reminded him at once of those of the Maoris of New Zealand, which he had seen only the year before. He argued that Viking seamen from Greenland could have crossed the seaways above Canada during the largely ice-free Medieval Warm Period and sailed down into the Pacific. He had long suspected a Viking genetic influence on the very tall Plains Indians. Perhaps they also influenced the Polynesians of Hawaii. These people had suddenly begun great exploratory voyages by ocean-going canoes shortly after the Viking period, and had reached and settled New Zealand. Elements as diverse as boat design, tattoos, and the decorative motifs of carvings on Maori canoes and buildings all hinted at Viking influence. The steep roofs of Maori meeting houses suggested a design by people used to snow. Early French visitors to New Zealand before British settlement had remarked upon the number of Maoris who were fair-haired. Maori legends spoke of a white people and a golden fairy-like people who had once lived in New Zealand, suggesting not only a European but a Chinese presence. Could the strikingly Caucasian appearance of many Maoris as described by the earliest observers be attributed solely to the vigorous partying of passing European sailors in the late eighteenth century? Or had the European genetic input been centuries earlier? The Vikings had recorded only their expeditions that returned from explorations of North America and the northern ocean—not those that never came back.

    But this was only one of the questions he raised about conventional historical perspectives. The Heyerdahl experiment had proved that man had the ability to cross the ocean even four thousand years ago. And he certainly had a knowledge of astronomy that would have enabled him to navigate by the stars at the same period. It was the extraordinary knowledge of early civilizations—a knowledge that had been largely discounted or underestimated by mainstream modern academics—which became the central theme of Hammond’s book. He pointed to the paradox of supposedly primitive cultures having very advanced knowledge in specific fields. There was the African Dogon people’s detailed knowledge of the star Sirius and its invisible white dwarf twin, which had recently been brought to light by Robert Temple in a bestseller called The Sirius Mystery. Temple opted for extraterrestrial visitors as an explanation. For Hammond what counted was that the Dogons’ astronomical lore clearly derived from the Egyptians. It was thus an example of ancient knowledge that was afterwards lost. He also analyzed at length the extraordinary construction skills of various prehistoric peoples. Primary exhibits were the huge stones, shaped by an unknown culture, on which the Romans had superimposed their vast temple at Baalbek in Lebanon. Three of the stones weighed as much as a thousand tons each, and no technology known to man could have moved them from their quarries before that of the twentieth century. The same ability to shape, move and put in place the vast stones used to build the fort at Sacsahuaman outside Cuzco, or certain huge, dressed stones found inside the Pyramids, or even the stones at Stonehenge, quarried nearly two hundred miles away, remains utterly inexplicable. All of these monuments pointed to a widespread ability by people thousands of years ago to shift vast weights—an ability which later ages then lost. Where did this ability come from? And why did so many unrelated peoples have it at such an early stage of history?

    He put forward the tentative hypothesis of some sort of power of levitation possessed by ancient peoples. This may have been a leftover from an earlier advanced civilization, or it may have had some origin in outer space, perhaps linked with the widespread fascination with the star Sirius. Not only did the Dogons have a peculiar relationship with this star, which they considered the home of their ancestors. The Egyptians used its heliacal rising to mark the beginning of their year and the onset of the Nile floods. One of the shafts pointing at the stars from the Pyramid of Cheops was aimed at Sirius. And it was possible that passage graves such as those at Newgrange and Knowth in Ireland were also devices aimed at focusing the light from the star Sirius, either at its heliacal rising at the summer solstice or just before its setting at the winter solstice. What was special about this light? Did it bring energies from the dwarf star Sirius B, a fantastically dense body with incalculable energy inside it? And did these energies have something to do with an ability to raise heavy stones—an ability which so many primitive peoples seemed obsessed with demonstrating in pointless and repetitive feats of monument building? What had motivated the first builders at Baalbek to use stones of such unwieldy dimensions—except to prove that they could? What had driven the Easter Islanders to their obsessive building of giant stone statues? What possessed the early inhabitants of Cornwall or Brittany to raise hundreds of heavy stones on end and place them in rows or circles? If these were astronomical clocks or calendars, why did they need so many of them? Why did the builders of Stonehenge transport such massive stones from the Preseli Hills in Wales nearly two hundred miles away—a feat of transportation beyond the capacity of much later societies? What was it all for—if not to demonstrate their extraordinary powers to those who came after them? Did they suspect that these distant successors would otherwise have no knowledge of how advanced they had been, because intervening catastrophes would have wiped out all but the most massive structures?

    He had concluded his book with a question. Did these powers of vanished prehistoric peoples suggest that the earth had been visited by much more advanced extraterrestrials, who had seeded our civilizations and given rise to the myths of gods and supernatural lawgivers so widespread among ancient cultures? This was the school of thought represented by Robert Temple and Erich von Däniken. Or did they point instead to a lost civilization that had reached a very advanced level and then been destroyed? Was it a handful of survivors of a previous advanced civilization who had transmitted these powers to the primitive cultures that came after them, and entered their folklore as gods? In other words, had there already been several cycles of civilization on earth, each one wiped out by a planetary catastrophe and leaving little trace except these enigmatic monuments to powers we no longer possess? If mankind has taken only nine thousand years to go from caveman to astronaut, who is to say this whole process has not happened before in the millions of years of earth’s existence? Did not certain ancient Greek and Indian thinkers believe exactly that?

    And when he posed that question, he had already laid the basis of his subsequent inquiries. And he had also laid the basis of the hypothesis that would appear so convincing to Jason that it would become an obsession to him—one that may have driven him now to fanatical and dangerous extremes.

    For he began to inquire in his next books into the kinds of planetary catastrophe that could have wiped out a previous advanced civilization. And there he found himself sinking into the vast subject of ancient man’s astronomical and astrological obsessions, and above all into the obscure mysteries of the precession of the equinox.

    He was interrupted in his thoughts by a woman stopping beside his table. He could tell from her posture she was staring at him even before he looked up at her face. He raised his eyes from scraping up the last of his rösti with a piece of bread and saw a tall, rangy-looking woman of about forty, with long, straggling dark hair and an expression of fixed intensity in her dark brown eyes. He gave her a questioning stare.

    Excuse me, are you Hammond Sinclair? she said, with a strong French accent.

    Who wants to know? he replied neutrally, ready to be either friendly or hostile.

    "Veronique Guillod. I am a journalist at the Tribune de Genève. I think you are Hammond Sinclair. I have read some of your books."

    She held out her hand. He shook it, as he felt it would have been rude not to.

    What can I do for you? he said. He had not expected to be recognized here, and he felt slightly irritated, and even under siege. She was blocking the space next to his table in a way that seemed to cut off any retreat. He wiped his lips with a paper serviette.

    Can I sit for two minutes? she asked him. He made a gesture of welcome, and she pulled out the other chair at his small table and sat opposite him. He felt it would be churlish and even somehow against the laws of hospitality to object. He was a guest in this city, and was determined to remain courteous. She seemed unsure how to proceed.

    May I take your photo? she said suddenly, and took out a late model mobile phone from her coat pocket. She aimed and clicked before he even had a chance to decide whether he wanted his photo in the local paper or not. He could have put his hand in front of his face, but he found himself thinking at the last moment that it might not be a bad idea. Perhaps Jason would see it and contact him, though why he should do this he had not thought through.

    Thank you. Are you here for the climate summit? And do you intend to take part in any conferences—such as the debate tomorrow? She spoke loudly, more loudly, he thought, than was needed to be heard above the general hubbub.

    No, definitely not. I’m here as a tourist, nothing more.

    It’s well-known that you are a global-warming skeptic. Do you hope there will be no agreement on limiting carbon emissions at the summit?

    Her English was fluent, despite the strong accent.

    I have no opinion on that. I leave it to world leaders to make the necessary decisions.

    But you are not convinced of the need to stop global warming?

    I reserve judgment on this question. I don’t think we have enough information yet.

    But you hope there will no hasty decisions which might endanger economic growth?

    I think hasty decisions are always a mistake. He gave what he hoped would pass for a smile of goodwill and tolerance. She seemed momentarily checked in her interrogation. She stared for a moment and then found a new angle.

    Do you think these climate summits are a waste of time?

    I think they allow people to exchange views. He felt he was playing a game of tennis, and aimed to put the ball back in her court while committing himself to nothing.

    But you don’t think useful decisions will come out of this one, after the disappointment in Copenhagen?

    I think leaders are right to take their time in making these decisions.

    So, for you there is no urgency in stopping global warming?

    She seemed determined to get a quote from him on this, and her voice had got louder and more insistent. Some people at other tables stopped talking and stared at them. He opted for a lighter touch.

    The planet has been here for a long time. I doubt if it will become uninhabitable just because our cows are belching too much.

    But you don’t think the rise in sea levels will threaten human life? He couldn’t tell whether she was sincerely worried about this, or whether this was just another attempt to get a juicy quote.

    Not in Switzerland, he smiled. You’re too far from the sea.

    But in Britain. Is not London under threat?

    I don’t think so. Sea levels are very unlikely to rise that much. The official prediction is for some forty centimeters over the next hundred years with present trends of temperature rises. That is hardly Noah’s flood all over again. Anyway, Venice copes with regular floods. Why shouldn’t London? He folded his serviette as if to conclude the interview.

    She was not to be fobbed off. She had a quality of stolid persistence he couldn’t help admiring, despite her total lack of charm—a characteristic he had found distressingly common among the Swiss. She was determined not to budge from the table, and he had a momentary image of stubborn Swiss pike-men stolidly facing a cavalry charge by heavily-armed

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