Newton’s Fire (42 page)

Life jackets were bobbing all around them, rubber ducks in a giant bath. Luke grabbed the nearest. It was a struggle to fit it around Rachel’s neck and clip in the straps. He cursed himself for all those safety demonstrations he’d ignored over the years. But finally she was in. He blew into the intake valves to inflate it as far as it would go then he found a life jacket for himself. His right arm was growing increasingly numb from some blow he couldn’t even remember having taken. But finally he had it on. Blood was streaming from a cut in Rachel’s scalp. He wiped it away just as she opened her eyes. She looked pale and groggy, but she raised an eyebrow even so, making it instantly clear that she recognized him, that she was going to be okay, and the relief was so intense that it wasn’t just the sting of salt water that made his eyes tear up.

She tried to say something, but it was beyond her for the moment. He put a finger to her lips. A slick of oil was spreading on the sea, calming it like the proverb, creating an iridescent haze all around them. Its vapour was somehow reassuring, like hospital disinfectant. The sun was rising on the horizon, a new day dawning. And Luke was suddenly suffused by an extraordinary and unexpected gladness to realize that now it would merely be another in the usual sequence. Not the End of Days. Not Armageddon. Just Tuesday.

‘Is it over?’ murmured Rachel.

‘It’s over,’ he said.

As if to underline his words, the noise of a boat’s engine reached them at that moment, rising and fading with the swell. They had to be closer to the coast than he’d realized. Its white fibreglass bow slapped water as it slowed for the debris field. He called out and waved to it and it picked its way carefully through the flotsam, looking in vain for other survivors, then cut its engine and let momentum bring it alongside.

Friendly hands reached down to take hold of him and Rachel and haul them aboard. And then there was
the sound of jubilant, relieved laughter; his, Rachel’s or the
crew of the boat, he simply couldn’t tell.

Downing Street, three days later

Luke felt intense pride as he watched Rachel negotiate. Or maybe it was just happiness at seeing her again. They’d hardly spent ten minutes together since the crash. Her concussion and near drowning had been severe enough for her Israeli doctors to insist on keeping her in hospital and under observation for an extra couple of days, so by default he’d been the one speaking to the police, the intelligence services and the media, first in Israel, then back here in England.

The Prime Minister sighed as he flipped through the settlement agreement once more. ‘These are difficult times,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s having to make sacrifices.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Rachel. ‘And this is yours.’

His cheeks pinked a little. He uncapped his pen, wrote his name with a flourish on each of the copies. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Satisfied?’

‘Thank you, Prime Minister.’ She took three sets, passed two to her lawyer, then held a brief whispered conversation with him.

Luke looked around. The walls of the conference room were hung with portraits of great men in dark suits. He’d had his fill of self-important people recently. All the manoeuvring. All the excuses. All the blame shifting. He looked out through the facing windows instead; a sunlit garden with magnolias and cherry trees in magnificent blossom. And he had a sudden wild hankering to be out of here, just him and Rachel and the open road.

His new mobile buzzed in his pocket. He’d turned the ringer off for this meeting, but the police had insisted
he keep it on at all times in case of urgent questions. He
checked it; it could wait. But developments were breaking all the time. Just this morning an Israeli dive team had found the front half of Croke’s jet on the sea floor, five bodies still trapped inside. But no sign yet of the Ark.
Not that it mattered much any more. With the full story
out, it had lost its power to do harm. It almost certainly wasn’t the real thing, after all, but a scientific curiosity barely three hundred years old. Yet the leaders of Israel and her neighbours had still been sufficiently sobered by their closeness to catastrophe to adopt a new spirit of cooperation, even an eagerness to talk.

Other investigations were on-going in England. The vaults beneath St Paul’s and the Museum of the History of Science were being thoroughly and carefully explored. And everyone wanted to know exactly how the National Counterterrorism Taskforce had been able to take over Crane Court and then tear up the cathedral floor with so little supervision. Questions had been raised in Parliament; an emergency session in the House of Commons had left the government in turmoil and the Prime Minister fighting for his political life. Hence his desperation for some of Luke and Rachel’s new stardust.
Hence today’s announcement of substantial and immediate
new funding for veterans’ care and homes, and the photo-op
that would accompany it.

It wasn’t just in England that powerful people were fighting for their careers, even their lives. A Washington DC lobbyist had been arrested on suspicion of bankrolling Croke’s operation. An evangelist with ties to the White House had hanged himself in his garage. And the President had declared himself fit ahead of schedule, and had ordered the Vice President to clear her desk.

The Prime Minister capped and put away his fountain pen, rose to his feet. He looked decidedly chipper now that the unpleasant business was done, bouncing up and down on his toes. ‘Are they ready for us outside?’ he asked.

An aide took half a pace forwards. ‘Five minutes, Prime Minister.’

‘As well to make them wait,’ he confided to Rachel. ‘It lets the excitement build.’ He gave her an avuncular smile and added: ‘And you’ll probably want to let me field the questions. These media packs can be quite intimidating, if you’re not used to them.’

‘Yes,’ said Rachel. ‘Because Luke and I clearly scare easily.’

His lips went tight. He raised an eyebrow at an aide.

Luke went to join her. ‘So what are your plans?’ he asked. ‘After this press nonsense, I mean?’

She held up her copy of the agreement. ‘I promised Bren we’d go celebrate,’ she said. ‘You want to join us?’

‘I’d love to,’ he said. ‘But I can’t. Not this afternoon. I’ve another meeting with the police and then I’ve got a month’s worth of phone calls to return.’ The whole affair had rehabilitated him. His old university had offered him his job back, and he’d been invited to multiple interviews elsewhere. He needed to take advantage before his popularity faded. ‘But I’ll be heading down your way tomorrow. I promised Pelham I’d drop by.’

‘Ah, yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve had about thirty messages to call him. He insists I go out with him. Says it’s the least I owe him after the way he sacrificed himself for us and had to endure being driven around Birmingham for a day.’

Luke’s mouth felt unaccountably dry. ‘And? What are you going to tell him?’

She shook her head emphatically. ‘I think I made it pretty clear where I stand on going out with anyone called Pelham, don’t you?’

‘Damned right,’ he grinned. Without really thinking, he touched her hand, felt a delicious tingle at the contact. These past few days, he could scarcely touch anything without a spark of static, as though the Ark had charged him to overflowing, and he was still shedding. ‘Speaking of which,’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘The name Luke,’ he said. ‘You never said where you stood on going out with someone called Luke.’

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘I didn’t.’

‘Well?’ he asked, his heart in his mouth. ‘Would you?’

And there it was at last, that smile from the photograph. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I rather think I would.’

Newton’s Fire
is, of course, a work of fiction. That said, I’ve tried to stay as true to the historical background as a story of this nature allows. Sir Isaac Newton did indeed make predictions about the date of the Second Coming. He was fascinated by Solomon’s Temple and he worked for many years at the Royal Mint. He drove himself into a breakdown in 1693, in part due to his alchemical experiments, and he claimed in
Praxis
to have achieved multiplication. He was also very good friends with Christopher Wren, who in turn was close to both Elias Ashmole and John Evelyn. And Conrad Josten really did discover an anomaly beneath the basement of the old Ashmolean with a metal detector, yet he lacked the funds and opportunity to explore further.

I have deliberately avoided saying in which year the action takes place, in the hope that readers will find it more immediate that way. That said, the story is anchored to certain historical events (the climax takes place exactly forty-nine years after the Six Day War of 1967, for example), so it’s not very hard to work out for those readers who so wish. Incidentally, the day in question genuinely does enjoy a rare conjunction with
Rosh Chodesh Sivan
.

As ever, I’d like to thank my agent Luigi Bonomi for his invaluable advice and encouragement during the writing of this book. I’m extremely grateful to Thomas Stofer for his insightful feedback on the first draft, and to Kati Nicholl for her excellent fact-checking and copy-editing. I’d also like to thank the whole team at HarperCollins for helping to make this book look so good and read so well; and most especially I’d like to thank my editor Jamie Cowen for his encouragement, hard work and willingness to fight for changes that I wasn’t certain about at the time, but which in retrospect were right.

I had surprisingly good fun researching this book, not least because of the many kind and knowledgeable people I met along the way. I’d like to thank all those at the Museum of the History of Science, the National Library of Israel, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Monument and elsewhere for giving me so much of their time and expertise. But I’d particularly like to thank Stephen Snobelen of the History of Science and Technology Programme at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who not only advised me during the writing of this book, but was also kind enough to read an early draft of the manuscript to let me know where I’d gone too far off my Newtonian rails. I’ve followed his guidance in most, but not all, cases, so any mistakes that remain are most definitely mine and mine alone.

Will Adams has tried his hand at a multitude of careers over the years. Most recently, he worked for a London-based firm of communications consultants before giving it up to pursue his life-long dream of writing fiction. His first novel,
The Alexander Cipher
, has been published in sixteen languages, and has been followed by three more books in the Daniel Knox series,
The Exodus Quest
,
The Lost Labyrinth
and
The Eden Legacy
. He writes full-time and lives in Suffolk.

The Alexander Cipher

The Exodus Quest

The Lost Labyrinth

The Eden Legacy

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper

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Copyright © Will Adams 2012

Will Adams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Source ISBN: 9780007424221

EPub Edition © December 2012 ISBN: 9780007424252

Version 1

FIRST EDITION

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