The Third Antichrist (25 page)

‘That’s impressive, Calque.’

‘Thank you, Sabir. That’s very gracious of you.’ Calque surreptitiously crossed his fingers in his lap. ‘I then did a numerological study on Putin’s name. Imagine my delight when I realized that the numerological value of his name did indeed add up to the “number one”, just as you had suggested in the clues you gave me. I can still remember the sums I did, with V being six, L being three, A being one, D being four, I being one, M being four, I being one, and R being two, making a first total of twenty-two. Then you have P equalling eight, U equalling six, T equalling four, I equalling one, and N equalling five, making a second total of twenty-four. Add the two names together and you have two and two from twenty-two makes four, and two and four from twenty-four makes six. Add four and six together and you have ten. And ten is one plus zero which equals one in Cagliostro’s numerological system. It all seemed as clear as day.’ Calque was briefly tempted to burst out laughing at his pathetic attempt at intellectual slickness.

‘So you think Vladimir Putin is the Third Antichrist?’

‘Of course I bloody well don’t. A few minutes rational thought, after the heady excitement of the chase, persuaded me of the absurdity of that idea. Putin is single-minded, yes. He may even be a bit of a megalomaniac. But by no stretch of the imagination is he an Antichrist. I can’t see him flipping the nuclear button on an unsuspecting West and bringing destruction down on his own head and that of the country he loves. He’s far too pragmatic for that. Heck, I’d probably even like the man if I met him. Plus he knows that he doesn’t need to engage in conventional warfare. He simply needs to grab half the Arctic Circle and then hold the rest of the world to ransom over the resources it contains. The man clearly intends to make Russia the Saudi Arabia of the West. Not another North Korea or an Iran.’

‘So where does that leave us?’

‘You tell me. You’re the one asking about Moldova. Who is there in Moldova? It’s the poorest country in Europe bar none. What can it possibly produce that’s a threat to anyone? Contagious poverty?’

‘No, Calque. Not contagious poverty. There are far worse contagions than that. Have you ever heard of a man called Mihael Catalin?’

Calque frowned down at his damaged shoulder – one could almost hear the cogwheels turning inside his head. After a long pause he met Sabir’s eyes and gave a hesitant nod. ‘Yes. I’ve heard the name. I believe you’re talking about that maniac with his own religious cult. The one they claim is poaching adherents from both sides of the Catholic divide. Am I right?’

‘The “maniac” with his own town, yes – with his own mini Luxembourg. The same “maniac” who has cleared away all competition from hundreds of square miles of otherwise sovereign territory. Listen to me, Calque. There isn’t a single mosque, a single synagogue, a single evangelical church left anywhere this guy’s so-called “Crusaders” have visited. This “maniac”, as you call him, breeds disciples like ringworm. He is even managing to lure people away from the formerly impregnable Islam. People are risking apostasy to join him, man. They are risking hell. He’s that convincing.’

‘That doesn’t make him the Antichrist.’

‘Maybe not. But do you remember “ten seven ten seven”? The numbers you ascribed to Vladimir Putin? Well Catalin was born on 7 October 1970. So, like Putin, he ticks both that box and that of the “Scorpion Ascending”.’

‘That’s nothing. Sheer coincidence.’

‘Listen to this, then. Catalin’s Roman namesake, Lucius Sergius Catilina, was known as the “Great Whore” by his arch-enemy, Cicero. After sliding out from under a prosecution for extortion in 65
BC
(Cicero’s brother Quintus claimed that Catilina “left the court as poor as some of the judges had been before his trial”), Catilina then engaged in open rebellion against the Roman State (“I will put out my own fire through the general destruction of all”). The Catiline conspiracy forced the Senate to issue a
senatus consultum ultimum
against him, which led directly to Catilina’s death in battle. Before his death, it had been an open secret that Catilina had once drunk the blood of a sacrificed child, and had been subject to the most depraved of vices and lusts. Later, when the Book of Revelation talks of the Whore of Babylon, it is to the decadent Roman Republic, as encapsulated by Lucius Sergius Catilina, that it is allegorically referring. Both Romania and Moldova are Latin countries, Calque. Even the language owes more to Latin than it does to either the Cyrillic or the Azbuka.’

‘Go on, Sabir. There’s more, isn’t there? There had better be.’

‘Oh yes. There’s more. At the same time as he is evangelizing already committed Christians, Catalin is seeking to convince the as-yet-uncommitted that 21 December 2012 is going to mark the actual day of the Rapture – the day when God’s chosen people will be translated up to Heaven to sit at their Master’s right hand. What’s more he claims that if there are any haverers out there who still want to jump onto the bandwagon, they’d better put a spring in their step and sign up with him. Sharpish.’

‘But this man is crazy, Sabir. One of many. History is littered with cult leaders and religious megalomaniacs who gull the simple-minded into following them. Look at Charles Manson, Shoko Asahara, Jim Jones – these people were past masters at mind control.’

‘Yes, but none of them was elected a senator in his own country, as Catalin has been. At the rate he’s going, there’s a fair chance Catalin will make President if Moldova holds further snap elections in 2011. There have been two elections this year already, and a succession of bloody riots which the government famously called “an attempted coup d’état”. The whole place is a volcano ready to erupt. If new elections do happen, any incoming President will have an immediate standing army of 15,000 men at his command – each of whom already holds a grudge against the rest of Europe for slowing up Moldova’s entry into the European Union. Transform that army into “Catalin’s Crusaders” and you’ve got one heck of a problem on your hands.’ Sabir paused for breath. His face was covered in a sheen of sweat. ‘Listen. Adolf Hitler needed just one lucky election to lock himself into power for a generation. What do you think is going to happen when a man like Mihael Catalin gains total control of his country’s means of communication? A country dangerously close to the geographical centre of Europe? That’s on the fault line between East and West? What effect do you think a man who maintains he is the Second Coming of Christ could have on a country of three and a half million people with a poverty rate of more than 50 per cent, and which is still largely run by gangsters?’

There was silence around the fire. Dawn was breaking on the distant horizon. The sky was tinged an angry pink, as if blood and rainwater were somehow mixed. Alexi had collapsed sideways and was snoring lightly, one hand thrown casually across his face. Radu had rocked forwards at the waist as if he were attempting some advanced yoga posture. His eyes were closed and his mouth was open. A filament of saliva was pooling onto one knee.

‘Look at the horizon, Calque. You too, Yola. Doesn’t it remind you of something?’

Calque frowned. Then he shrugged. ‘The sky is the sky. It reminds me of nothing but itself. What does it remind you of, Sabir?’

Sabir’s gaze grew distant. It was as if he were returning inside himself and reliving what had happened in Mexico – the horrendous visions he had seen whilst under the influence of datura in the Maya sweat lodge. ‘It reminds me of one of Nostradamus’s greatest quatrains. The one which goes:

The Third Antichrist will soon be annihilated

His bloody war will have lasted twenty-seven years

The heretics are either dead, captive, or exiled

Human blood reddens the water that

covers the earth in hail.’

Yola leaned forwards, her face intent. ‘But the quatrain says that the Third Antichrist will soon be annihilated, Damo. That he won’t win. That his followers – the heretics – will either be killed, captured, or exiled.’

Calque cut in. His expression was sombre. ‘You’re right, Yola. That’s what it says. But only after “a war lasting twenty-seven years”.’ Calque teased a wooden spill from the fire and lit himself another cigarette. ‘Let’s put that into perspective, shall we? The Second World War lasted six years and cost sixty million lives. What if we multiply that combat period by a factor of five? Then throw in nuclear devices. What are we talking about then? Three hundred million dead? Four hundred million?’ Calque sucked on his cigarette, letting the smoke trickle out through half-opened lips. ‘The Bible tells us that each fresh Antichrist is set to be exponentially worse than the last. As we know, the First Antichrist, Napoleon Bonaparte, was directly responsible for more than three million deaths. The Second Antichrist, Adolf Hitler, for upwards of thirty million. Now look at present-day Europe. It’s an ethnic tinderbox in comparison with what it was even in the 1930s. This time we have Moslem, Jew, Christian, atheist and pagan all at each other’s throats – and all with markedly differing agendas. Half of them don’t even speak each other’s language anymore, making rational communication well-nigh impossible. And each vested interest is jostling for a diminishing amount of real estate – and a diminishing share of the communal pot. What do you think this Catalin person might achieve if he became President? What sort of unholy schisms could he create?’

‘Tell me. Please.’ Yola’s eyes were wide. She had never heard Calque on one of his intellectual jags before. His off-the-cuff historical riffing seemed to mesmerize her.

‘He could set Russia and the Western Alliance at loggerheads via a putsch on Transnistria for a start. Or he could trigger a conflict with the Islamic world by influencing neighbouring countries like Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, and the Ukraine to turn round and eject their Muslim minorities. People always like a scapegoat – it saves them from having to think for themselves. That’s what Hitler counted on with the Jews. It worked for him. And it could work again. Or he could simply set the Churches against each other. People kill for religion more readily than they kill for any other reason. It’s a classic paradox. Most dogmas exhort their followers to be peaceful. And at the same time the priests and mullahs who translate those dogmas tell their followers that they must be prepared to die for their faith, and, if necessary, to kill others in defence of it.
In extremis
only, of course. And with the best of all possible intentions.’

Yola stared from one man to the other. ‘But I still don’t understand. If this man has all the power you say he has – or will have – what can the Corpus possibly offer him?’

Sabir smiled. ‘In a nutshell, Yola? The key to gain that power. And the most pernicious of all commodities. Money.’

Odessa, Ukraine
18 November 2009

41

Odessa looked like exactly what it was – a formerly rich town fallen on hard times. The buildings were elegant but dishevelled, as if a thin film of dust had descended over everything some years before, and now the metropolis was patiently waiting for a gust of wind to blow off the dust and reveal the wonders concealed beneath. The cars were serviceable but old-fashioned. The shops were neat, modest, but understocked. The women, however, were magnificent. Milouins watched a blonde goddess sashaying past his taxi window. She was dressed in a blue denim micro-skirt, no stockings (she didn’t need them), and powder-blue suede ankle-boots with pyramid heels. Privately, he promised himself a whore that evening – a blonde whore with never-ending legs, just like the blonde goddess he had seen pass by. God, how he would make her squeal.

Hervé Milouins had worked for the de Bale family for nearly thirty years now. He had started, aged sixteen, as a trainee gamekeeper on the late Count’s Loire estate. Milouins’s father had worked for the Count after the war as chauffeur-cum-valet, and his grandfather had been woodsman on the estate from the 1920s to the 1940s. Both men had died unexpectedly. Milouins’s grandfather as a result of a rogue tree that had corkscrewed during woodland clearing, and Milouins’s father in the process of saving the Count from an attempt on his life by elements of the OAS – France’s illegal Secret Army Organization – whom the Count had alienated after the total withdrawal of his financial support following their botched assassination attempt on President de Gaulle in 1963.

Milouins’s mother, Mireille, had continued the family tradition of service to the de Bales as the Countess’s dressmaker and seamstress until her death from stomach cancer, aged sixty-nine, eight years before. His mother’s privileged position in the de Bale household, and the fact of his father’s personal sacrifice, had ensured that Milouins received special attention from the Count from an early age.