The Armageddon Conspiracy (10 page)

‘
Fuck
off
!’
Lucy’s mouth fell open.
She couldn’t
believe what she’d just said.
In her whole time in the convent, no
one had sworn, not once.
To swear in a chapel…what kind of
punishment was reserved for that?
The words reverberated.
They
sounded strange, as if the convent had heard them, failed to
understand them, and was now spitting them out.
So obscene, so
nasty.
Lucy was ashamed.

The cardinal, clearly shocked, released
her, took a few steps then knelt in front of the altar.
He began to
pray.
For a second, Lucy thought she’d never seen anything so
absurd.
Then she felt idiotic.
How can you accuse a cardinal of
being ridiculous for praying?

Shooting began again,
this time much closer.
Sinclair prayed more loudly, in Latin.
The
words were beguiling, somehow much more potent than English.
They
were imbued with holiness, with
magic
.
Once, Lucy had prayed like that
too.
She prayed until her knees were red and raw, until her hands
were almost bleeding.
She wanted God to cure her mother’s cancer.
Within days, her mum was dead.

He’s not
there
, she said to herself, looking at the
figure of Christ.
He never
was
.
It was so obvious to her now.
Sure,
she had a Creator.
In fact, she had two, but they were both dead.
First her mother, ravaged by the tumours that spread everywhere
inside her, then her father, ravaged just as lethally by despair.
He left a suicide note.
In the blue
was scrawled all down the page in increasingly
desperate writing, until the last three words:
Forgive me, Lucy
.

What do you do when
your creators are dead?
They gave you life, but they couldn’t save
their own.
And they certainly can’t save yours.
They’d abandoned
her.
Nothing made sense any longer.
First, you’re created – and the
thing about that is that no created thing ever
asks
to be created – then you’re stuck
with it.
You’re forced into existence whether you like it or not.
The very last thing you’re offered is a choice.
And you soon learn
there’s only one exit: death.
The creators made you knowing how the
story must end.
And creation is meant to be
good
?

She closed her eyes.
All she could think of was an old nursery rhyme.
London Bridge is falling down
.
Over and over again, she said the words.
They comforted her
somehow.
Falling down, falling
down
.

14

‘
W
hat do you
mean?’
The veins on Commander Harrington’s forehead were bulging.
‘It can’t be gone.’

Vernon explained again, and surprised
himself by reporting the facts so calmly.
He hadn’t been calm a
little earlier when he stepped into the archive section, normally
the most well-ordered part of Thames House, and discovered the
archivist dead, his face stricken with terror, and the archive room
looking as though it had been bombed.
Top-secret documents, many of
them charred, lay strewn everywhere.
All the filing cabinets were
smashed open, bookcases pushed over, as if some intruder in a mad
rage had frantically been searching for something.

‘
The black files,’
Harrington said.
‘They must be OK.
They were in our top-security
vault.’

Thames House’s vault was modelled on
America’s Fort Knox.
Constructed from steel and concrete, it was
divided into several secure compartments.
The vault door weighed
more than 20 tons and no one person knew the precise combination
for opening it.
Now, somehow, it no longer existed.

‘
The vault door has
gone,’ Vernon said.
‘Vaporised.
All the files inside were taken or
incinerated.
There’s nothing left.’

‘
But that vault was
impregnable.’

‘
Commander, I saw it
with my own eyes.
It was completely destroyed, and
The Cainite Destiny
has
gone.’

Harrington slumped into his seat.
‘But
that was the key to this.’

‘
A forensic team is
sifting the wreckage,’ Vernon said.
‘The CCTV pictures show a white
light and nothing else.
It’s a mystery.’

Colonel Gresnick, who
had been quietly drinking coffee in the corner, put his cup down.
‘Have you considered that we’ve been set up?
Maybe Ferris and
Morson’s real plan was to get in here to steal
The Cainite Destiny
.’

Vernon glanced at the colonel in
surprise.
‘Christ, a Trojan Horse: the oldest trick in the
book.’

Harrington switched to the TV picture
showing the prisoners’ cells.
Sergeant Morson was sitting exactly
as before while Captain Ferris was lying under his sheets, writhing
and moaning.

‘
Poor bastard,’ Vernon
said.
‘I guess that’s the end of that theory.’
He turned to
Gresnick.
‘Why did you think the prisoners might be interested
in
The Cainite Destiny
?
You make it sound as if it’s something special.’

‘
The Cainite
Destiny
is the most valuable document in
the world.’

‘
What do you mean?’
Harrington shifted uneasily.
‘I’m one of only three people who have
seen it in the last sixty-seven years.
No one else has been
anywhere near it.
You couldn’t possibly know anything about
it.’

‘
That’s where you’re
wrong,’ Gresnick answered.
‘My grandfather…
he was the man who translated it
.’

15

L
ucy’s eyes
opened, reluctantly.
Sinclair was still on his knees,
praying.

‘
De profundis clamavi
ad te, Domine,’ he said in Latin.

Lucy knew those words
too well.
Out of the depths I have cried to
thee, O Lord
– the opening words of Psalm
129.
Sometimes, she thought they’d been branded on her heart.
They
were the cry of everyone annihilated by grief.

As more gunshots sounded, Sinclair’s
voice grew more desperate.
‘Vanitas vanitatum,’ he said, ‘et omnia
vanitas.’

Lucy bowed her
head.
Vanity of vanities, and all things
are vanity
.
How often had she thought that
since her parents died?
Life had no point now.
How could it when
the Creators were dead, when love had been ripped from her
forever?

She left the pews and tiptoed to a
side-door hidden behind red velvet curtains.
As quietly as
possible, she eased the door open and slipped into the corridor
outside.
A shot rang out in the next corridor, the one leading to
the refectory.
A soldier in a black uniform staggered into view and
slumped forward into the middle of the intersection of
corridors.

Lucy stared at the
man’s head.
Blood was pouring from a gaping hole in his lower jaw
and spreading over the floor.
His eyes were wide open, but there
was no life there.
She tried to move, but couldn’t.
All is vanity
.
She wanted
to curl up, lie on the floor, and hope no one would hurt
her.

In due course, the soldier’s poor
parents would learn of their son’s death.
His brothers and sisters
would be devastated.
His girlfriend, maybe pregnant, would never
recover: love destroyed just when it was needed most.
A whole tree
of suffering, branches sprouting in scores of places, pain
squeezing through the roots and spreading.
Broken hearts falling
like autumn leaves.

Out of the
depths
.

Feeling sick, she crept
into one of the toilets.
A bucket of dirty water had been pushed
into the corner, with an old mop sticking out.
She poured some of
the water over the floor in front of one of the cubicles then stuck
an ‘Out of Order’ sign from the cleaner’s cupboard on the cubicle
door, and locked herself in.
Perching on top of the toilet seat,
she pulled her knees up to her chin and tried not to make a sound.
She shut her eyes.
Minutes passed.
No noise.
Nothing
.

Her mind flitted back to Raphael’s
painting.
Everything about it was wrong, or too right – and maybe
those amounted to the same thing.
When she tried to mentally
reconstruct the mural, she found all the details were somehow
imprinted in her memory, as though they had been with her forever.
More and more, she was convinced she’d seen this mural before…but
she had no idea how that could be.

God, the delusions were coming back;
how else could she explain it?
The more she concentrated, the more
vivid the painting became.
It turned into a 3-D representation that
she could rotate and flip, see from every angle.
Why did she feel
she knew it so well?
In many ways, it was like a smaller-scale
version of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco.
It had
much of the same religious iconography and told a similar story of
Creation.
Except there was something subtly different, some
ambiguity.
Perhaps it was a mirror image, or not quite in focus.
What she didn’t doubt was that buried in these images was a
radically different history of mankind from the one she’d been
taught at school.

She brought the top left-hand panel to
the forefront of her mind and studied it as though she were back at
Oxford University.
Rusty thought processes cranked into gear.

The panel showed a dazzling lightshow,
full of rainbow lights swirling like the wind, but in one corner
was darkness; a thick, ominous murk.
This must be a depiction of
the separation of light from darkness described in the Book of
Genesis.

Moving clockwise to the next panel,
Lucy felt uneasy, but wasn’t sure why.
God was shown sitting on a
throne made of diamonds, surrounded by a host of glowing,
translucent angels.
But again there was an unsettling ingredient –
a dark angel about to throw a spear at God.
Lucy assumed this was a
depiction of Lucifer’s rebellion against God.

Next, the same dark angel was falling
to the earth clutching the spear, surrounded by a torrent of black
raindrops.
The expulsion of Lucifer from Heaven, presumably.

Next came the Garden of Eden, featuring
a Tree of Knowledge shaped like a human being with a huge brain.
A
naked Adam and Eve stood in front of it.
Near them, a serpent
slithered over an odd emerald globe.

Then Cain, a surprisingly handsome
figure, was depicted killing a swarthy Abel with a spear.
Next up
was Cain bearing a strange double S mark, like two serpents, on his
forehead.
The Mark of Cain, Lucy assumed.
Behind Cain stood a city
with a high, gleaming tower.
Lucy guessed this was the Tower of
Babel.

Panel 7 on the top right corner showed
God in a mystical cloud above the Ark of Covenant in a tent – the
Tabernacle – with a Moses-like figure looking on.
The next panel
showed the gold Temple of Solomon with a High Priest praying in
front of the Ark.