God's Lions - The Dark Ruin (29 page)

“No, sir. By the time they discovered this cave the war was pretty much over, so they stopped construction. This cavern is mostly just a tourist attraction nowadays, but I wouldn’t go wanderin’ around down here by yourself, especially in the dark. People have disappeared in these caverns ... and then there’s the legend.”

“The legend?”

“Yes, sir. Most people have never heard of it. Kind of spooky, actually.”

“That’s OK, Corporal,” the pope nudged Leo. “We’re kind of used to spooky things. Why don’t you tell us about it? I have a feeling we’ll be down here for awhile.”

“Sure thing, Your Holiness, but I think we need to move away from this tunnel before the whole thing comes crashin’ down on our heads.”

“Good idea.”

Following behind the soldier, they made their way back out into the open cavern where they saw that the others were building a small campfire next to a path that wound off into the darkness. Walking toward the fire, Pope Michael glanced over at the British soldier. “What’s your name, young man?”

“Niles ... Niles Wentworth, Your Holiness.” The corporal jerked his thumb toward the other soldier. “And that there’s me mate, Charlie. We’re soldiers in Her Majesty’s Horse Guards. Up until four months ago we was guarding Buckingham Palace, but then they sent us here. It’s been pretty good duty so far. Better than Afghanistan, I reckon ... at least up until today.”

“What about those spooky legends?” the pope asked, his eyes gleaming in the campfire like a Boy Scout at camp.

“Well, I’m no expert mind you, but this place does hold a few mysteries. The strangest one involves a disappearance back in 1840. A British colonel by the name of Mitchell decided to explore some of the caverns around here with another officer, and that’s the last anyone ever heard of them. Their commander sent out search parties that scoured every inch of the place, but no trace of them was ever found. Seventeen years later the army decided to search the entire cave system again, but they still never found anything. They even tried to solve the mystery again back in the 1930’s. They sent out two scientific expeditions that went through the whole cave system, but still no human remains were ever found.”

“Sounds to me like they deserted,” Alon said.

“Not likely, sir. We’re talkin’ about career military officers who had just written letters home tellin’ their wives how much they liked their duty here. No, sir, from what I heard those men were good family men, and they were loyal to the Crown. Something happened to them that took them away from everything they loved. Some people think they found the tunnel that runs under the Strait of Gibraltar all the way to Africa and got lost somewhere down there.”

“A tunnel to Africa?”

“Yes, sir,” Niles continued, “there’s a legend that harkens back to the old days when people believed there was a subterranean tunnel that ran right under the Strait of Gibraltar and ended up in Africa. Then there’s the Barbary Macaques ... the monkeys you see runnin’ all over the rock. Some said they came here through the tunnel, but just like the officers who went missin’, no evidence has ever been found to prove that a tunnel like that ever existed.”

The others leaned in closer, caught up in a story that had stirred memories of days when they had gathered in their youth around the campfire at night to listen to ghost stories. Only Shane Trent seemed immune to the romance of the soldier’s tales as his analytical mind raced ahead. “Is this the lowest cave in the Rock?”

“Yes, sir. Our engineers have used ground-penetrating radar and they said there’s nothing below us.”

“Well, then, I think it’s pretty safe to assume that the missing men never disappeared into some fictional tunnel to Africa. For one thing, the most likely terminus for such a tunnel would be the lowest point in the Rock, which would be this cavern. But since it was sealed off from the rest of the cave system until World War II, there’s no way the missing men ever made their way down here in the first place. Your engineers have probably searched every inch of this cave, so if there ever was such a tunnel it would have been discovered by now.”

“That’s true, sir, but there are cracks in this cavern that breathe.”

Ariella coughed in the smoke from the fire as she waved her hand in front of her face. “Did you say walls that
breathe
?”

“I know it sounds strange, ma’am, but there are several fissures along the eastern wall at the end of this path, and if you put your face close to them you can feel fresh air blowin’ against your cheek.”

“That probably indicates there’s some connection with the surface,” Leo said. “Anything else?”

“There’s also a lake down here. Clear blue water ... and its fresh. It comes up from a deep blue hole that looks like it goes down forever. No tellin’ how deep it is.”

Leo held his head down while he brushed the dust from the explosion out of his hair. “Hmmm. Fresh water and fresh air. We have two things that are better than gold to trapped miners. We shouldn’t have any problem holding out here until we’re rescued.”

“Have you tried your radios again?” Lev asked, staring down the path into the darkness.

“Yes, sir. Still jammed.”

“I’m pretty sure reinforcements have arrived in the upper cavern by now. One way or the other, the people who were trying to kill us are probably long gone, but it will take days for rescuers to get to us.”

“Then what, Professor Wasserman?” Doug Peterson asked. “We still don’t have any idea who just tried to kill us. They could be anywhere, just waiting for us to show our faces after we’ve been rescued.”

Eduardo smiled absent-mindedly as he looked around at all the faces staring blankly into the fire.

“What’s so amusing, Mr. Acerbi?” Trent asked, his irritation at their situation increasing.

“You’ll have to forgive me, Mr. Trent. It’s just that I find our current predicament most appropriate. You might as well get used to sitting around fires in caves, because as I mentioned earlier, your world is about to be hit by a computer worm so powerful that it’s about to send you all back to the Stone Age unless you cooperate with its maker.”

“Is that some kind of threat?”

“Yes, it’s a very real threat, Mr. Trent, but I’m not the one making it. Please, allow me to continue with what I was about to say before we were interrupted in the mess hall.”

“Yes,” Trent said, tossing a stick into the fire. “I guess the word
interruption
would be a good description of what just occurred. Go ahead, Acerbi. We’re listening.”

Acerbi’s smile narrowed as he eyed Trent. “Let me begin by saying that, as I mentioned previously, a great destroyer has arrived in our world, and he’s about to take advantage of a species that has evolved to the point where we have come to rely on computers for almost all of our needs. We have allowed technology to take control of practically everything we do, and although technology can be a wonderful thing, we have attached a god-like status to it. Science has gifted modern man with a lifestyle that would have been completely unrecognizable to people who lived only fifty years ago, but it has also given us a tool for control of one another like none that has ever existed before in the history of man. In the blink of a cosmic eye, computers are everywhere, and we don’t even notice them. They’re already in your cars, appliances, your cell phones, the new credit cards with the radio frequency chips that provide access to your bank account ... even your home thermostat that can be controlled by the power company. We’re linked to computers in hundreds of ways we don’t even know about. They’re being absorbed into our surroundings, and soon they’ll be embedded in everyday things like watches, jewelry, neckties ... even the walls of our homes. We’ll probably have computer chips imbedded within our own bodies in the next few years, and soon anyone with the power, like a government for instance, will be able to know everything about you by merely tapping a keyboard. They will know who you are, where you are, who you’re talking to, how much you’re spending, what you’re doing and who you’re doing it with ... in other words, you’ll never be alone.

“Computers are literally dissolving into our environment ... like an electrical current flowing through society. Billions of sensors are probing every aspect of our lives, and some even predict that the Earth will soon be wrapped in a digital skin transmitting signals via the internet, like a living creature that relays impulses through its nervous system. Even now we’re all connected to orbiting satellites, enabling our movements to be tracked by a central control center, and that, my friends, will be our ultimate undoing. It will be through the marvels of technology that the destroyer will take control of our lives, and after I escaped to Paris I finally realized how he planned to do this.

“The destroyer will not need guns and bullets and bombs to beat us down into submission, because once he controls every aspect of our daily existence he can rule from afar, safely hidden away from prying eyes, and anyone who unplugs him or herself from the destroyer’s computer-controlled world will be left out in the cold, unable to access even the most basic necessities of life.”

Acerbi paused because he could see by all the stunned faces staring back at him that his words were having the desired effect. “All this talk of a computer-controlled world brings me to the point I was trying to make earlier.
Who will be our destroyer?
”

Eduardo’s face began to take on the look of a man who was letting go of years of pent-up anger. “I can see from the looks on your faces that you are all at a loss for words, so please ... allow me to answer that question for you. The destroyer is none other than my own son, Adrian Acerbi.”

Gwyneth Hastings inhaled sharply. “Your son! What on God’s earth are you talking about?”

“
God’s Earth
,” Acerbi responded. “A very insightful, if accidental comment, Ms. Hastings, because the world we live in now will no longer be
God’s Earth
when my son comes to power.”

The corporal looked up from sharpening his knife as he sat before the fire. “What’s the old bloke talkin’ about?”

“Quiet!” Lev Wasserman hissed. “Go on, Mr. Acerbi.”

“First let me say that, whatever your own personal religious beliefs may be, they will have little bearing on the events that are about to take place, for the days ahead will be very dark indeed for believers and non-believers alike. For lack of a better term, let’s just say that there is now an evil force in the world that will soon rule over everything we hold dear, and that force ... the destroyer I just spoke of ... has another name. He is the Antichrist, and he is now alive and living in the world of men. A dark star has risen in the heavens announcing his presence, but before he can take his place at the head of a shadow world government that will soon rule over us all, he must undergo a transformation from his human form to that of the Beast.”

Leo’s expression had taken on a dark cast. “How do you know about all of this, Mr. Acerbi?”

“The code, Cardinal ... the one Professor Wasserman discovered in the Old Testament. It’s all there. Once I heard about the dark star and its connection with the birth of my adopted son Adrian, I began running my own computer analysis. It was all laid out before me.”

“But we’ve run literally thousands of computer scans of the code looking for clues about Adrian’s birth,” Lev said, “and to date we’ve found no mention of any transformation, especially a transformation that’s linked to the Antichrist.”

“The code in the Bible was just the first step in my search, Professor. I had to dig deeper. What have you learned so far from the book you took from Satan’s Cathedral in the Negev Desert ... the book you refer to as the Devil’s Bible?”

“We’re still trying to decipher it, but we know that it also contains a code. We did manage to translate some encoded phrases that contained Adrian’s name, but none of them connected him to the Antichrist ... or any kind of transformation for that matter.”

“When were you going to tell me about the
cave of the sign
, Professor?”

Lev’s expression barely concealed his astonishment. “How did you find out about that?”

“Over the years, my company has hired some of the most brilliant computer scientists in the world. If you would have shared your information with me, I would have gladly shared what I knew with you. But let’s let bygones be bygones. You went to Patmos looking for clues concerning the coming of the Antichrist based on coordinates you discovered in the code ... coordinates that were linked with the words
cave of the sign
. Then, in Genesis, you discovered the words
birthplace
linked with the phrase
mother of the two.
But there was another phrase you seem to have forgotten.”

“Another phrase?”

“Final transition.
Do you remember those two words, Professor?”

Leo and Lev looked at one another with their mouths gaping open.

“I can’t believe we missed that,” Lev said.

“You didn’t miss it, Professor. You just failed to link it to the other passages you discovered because you lacked an important piece of the puzzle. I also know that you found a scroll in the cave on Patmos, because I also had people there searching for the cave, but you beat them to it. The scroll you found buried in a clay jar contained a depiction ... a rather vivid depiction of the dead carcass of a jackal lying on its side inside a circle of stone. An incision had been made over its womb, and two black snakes could be seen slithering from inside, causing you to call out two names ... the names of my sons ... Rene and Adrian. Do you remember now, Professor?”

“Yes, but how did you ...?”

“Like I said, you beat us to it, but my people had time to install hidden listening devices before you returned and began digging. We heard every word spoken by you and your team when you discovered the clay jar.”

Lev lowered his eyes. “I don’t know what to say, Eduardo, except that I’m sorry. I know I should have shared this information with you sooner ... I was planning on telling you eventually, but we wanted to make sure we had interpreted the images correctly. I mean, we’re talking about your son here, and I know how protective you are of him. I can’t blame you. I would have felt the same way. I didn’t ...