The Armageddon Conspiracy (23 page)

When they described the
Creator of the world, the Gnostics used an ancient Greek
word
demiourgos
, a
term used by Plato that meant
craftsman
.
Because Creation was
intrinsically evil, the Demiourgos – Demiurge in English – was
identified with Satan.
Sometimes the Gnostics used another
term,
Rex Mundi
,
meaning the
King of the
World
, but that was just one more epithet
for Satan, the Devil.

The True God existed in a universe of
pure, incorruptible light, the opposite of the violent world of
matter, this cruel circus.
Sometimes, angels from the divinely
illuminated universe fell in perverse love with the physical world.
Sex, inevitably, was what tempted them; Satan’s perfect bait.
Crazed with desire for carnal knowledge, the angels came down to
earth and inhabited human bodies to find out what sex was like.
Too
late, they discovered they were trapped.

When their physical bodies died, their
souls were reincarnated in new bodies.
There was no way out, unless
they acquired enough wisdom, enough true knowledge, to fathom how
to get back to the kingdom of the True God.
Gnosis – the ancient
Greek word for knowledge – was all about gaining that special
knowledge.
Faith didn’t matter in the slightest, only knowledge.
Gnosis was a religion for the intelligent, not for blind believers
brainwashed from birth.

According to
The Cainite Destiny
, the
Nazis were well acquainted with these ideas.
Were the Nazis
Gnostics?
That would explain so much, such as their pathological
hatred of the Jews.
After all, according to the Jews’ own account,
they were the Chosen People of the Creator.
To the Jews, that
Creator was Jehovah, but, to the Gnostics, Jehovah was
Satan.

It would also account for why Hitler
was fascinated by religious relics, why the Nazis chose an ancient
religious symbol as their emblem, why they sent expeditions round
the world looking for proof that they were unlike ordinary human
beings.
Was the Aryan Race some ancient Gnostic cult tracing its
origins back to Cain, the first human to have violently opposed the
will of Jehovah?

Vernon gripped his
armrest and closed his eyes.
It all fitted together.
These things
couldn’t be coincidence.
The Cainite
Destiny
was no mad fantasy of a deranged
soldier.
The Nazi leaders actually thought it was true, didn’t
they?
They genuinely believed they were the descendants of Cain and
that they had found the means to kill Jehovah.
When Hitler took
possession of the Spear of Destiny, he was convinced that gave him
the power to do it.
But how?
Was the Spear really
that
special?

He turned to Gresnick.
The American had
shown he was smart and unusually well informed about esoteric
matters.
How much did he know about the Spear?
A lot more than was
in the DIA report, no doubt.
Just as Vernon was about to ask, he
stopped himself.
There was something about the colonel he disliked.
Too confident?
Too much the perfect soldier?
He didn’t trust him,
and he wasn’t sure why.
Or maybe he knew too well.

He closed his eyes.
The hailstones were
louder than ever, threatening to blast through the Chinook’s metal
shell.
It seemed that the material world was coming alive, its soul
burning.
It was enraged by something, and determined to destroy
it.

It might be impossible for the Gnostics
to kill God, but destroying a planet was a different matter.
Across
the universe, planets were dying.
Earth itself was dying.
Billions
of years in the future, it would no longer exist.
It was, to use
the oldest of clichés, simply a question of time.
Had a group of
scientists, infected with extreme Gnostic beliefs, worked out how
to accelerate the process?
Perhaps they’d invented devices to
manipulate the weather, to activate fault lines, boost volcanic
activity.
Maybe the ‘angel’ that escaped from Thames House was the
product of some top-secret genetic engineering experiment to make
people resemble the angels the Gnostics claimed we’d all once been,
and might be again.
Maybe everything had a ‘rational’ explanation,
if that word still had meaning.

Vernon opened his eyes again and gazed
at the SAS troopers.
Most of them were cleaning their assault
rifles or staring into space, as if in meditation.
Could he rely on
them?
They were elite soldiers, but they had no idea of what they
were up against.

The wind was growing fiercer.
The
helicopter no longer seemed to be moving forward but was caught at
the centre of a violent lightning storm.
Thunderclaps boomed like
artillery fire.
It was easy to imagine that something was whipping
up this storm, an elemental force tapping the vast energy locked in
the world and focussing it on a single spot with catastrophic fury.
The Chinook shook so much that even Gresnick looked up from his
file.

In the cockpit, the pilot was
struggling with the controls and yelling at the co-pilot.
The words
vanished in the noise of the wind, hail, rotor blades and engines.
Everyone in the cabin was fully strapped into their seats, but
loose kit bags that had fallen from the overhead storage lockers
were sliding around on the floor.

In the distance, a few
faint lights appeared.
Thank
God
, Vernon thought,
almost there
.
He heard two of the SAS
troopers shouting that they could see a shape heading for the side
of the helicopter at high speed.

‘
Look out!’
the pilot
cried.

Inside the Chinook, every light
flickered.

‘
God, did you see
that?’
Gresnick shouted.

Vernon turned and
stared out through the cockpit window.
Something had appeared in
front of the helicopter.
Something
.
For a second, he thought a
rip had appeared in space.
The shape was so dark it was sucking
light into it.
It was more than an absence of light, it was as if
the thing were actually killing light.
Vernon was certain he knew
what it was, but his mind refused to accept it.
He felt exactly as
he had when all the lights went out back at Thames
House.

‘
Jesus, what the fuck
is that?’
The navigator threw his hands in front of his
face.

The soldier who had been reading the
Bible made the sign of the cross and got to his feet, gripping his
assault rifle.
‘You don’t understand, do you?’
he said, attracting
hostile looks from his colleagues.
‘It’s here, it’s come, just as
the Bible said it would.’

‘
What are you on about,
McGregor?’
his neighbour snarled.

‘
Don’t you get it –
none of us is coming back from this alive.’
McGregor was
wild-eyed.

‘
Shut up, trooper,’ his
captain yelled.

None of us is coming
back
.
McGregor’s words burned into Vernon’s
mind.
He was right, wasn’t he?
This was a one-way mission.
And
maybe the end was coming this very second.

Vernon’s saliva tasted foul.
Was that
what fear did to you?
All of his muscles were flexing, getting
ready for combat.
He blinked rapidly – shit, he wasn’t seeing in
colour any longer, just black and white.
Colour vision took up too
much brainpower, he remembered.
It simply wasn’t needed in survival
situations.
Just the essentials: tunnel vision, monochromatic,
everything stripped down.
Even time was becoming distorted, seconds
expanding, elongating.
He was able to notice so much more, all the
details that might help to save his life.

‘
I’ll pray for your
souls,’ McGregor yelled before receiving a punch in the abdomen
from his neighbour.

Vernon braced for a collision.
With
what, he wasn’t sure.

‘
Fire the machine
guns,’ Gresnick yelled at the pilot, but his voice turned back on
itself.
The din inside the helicopter was distorting every sound,
turning human voices into nothing but weird sound effects.
The
‘whup whup’ of the twin rotor blades had reached a deafening
level.

An SAS soldier unbelted himself and
tried to make his way to the front of the cabin.
Vernon thought the
trooper planned to slide open the side-door and shoot at the shape
with his assault rifle.

The pilot slammed the Chinook into an
emergency dive and the helicopter plunged towards the ground,
throwing the SAS man onto the floor.

Vernon unstrapped himself and tried to
reach out to the soldier to help him back to his seat.
The Chinook
lurched again and Vernon toppled onto the floor.
He found his face
inches from the trooper’s black boots, so close he could smell the
polish.
It made him gag, and he had to fight not to vomit over the
trooper’s feet.

Jerking his head away, he took in a
sharp breath.
His face ended up next to Gresnick’s folder: the
American must have dropped it in the confusion.
A picture of Lucy
had slipped out.
Staring at that face, he couldn’t stop a splutter
of vomit escaping from his mouth.

When, all those months ago, Lucy sent
him her letter telling him that she never wanted to see him again,
she might as well have shot him.
Before that letter, he’d never
thought of himself as anything other than a whole, happy person.
After, he imagined he had a gaping hole in his chest, as though
he’d been shot at point-blank range by a double-barrelled shotgun.
A wound, he knew, that would never heal.
Metaphysical injuries were
much worse than the physical type.
No medicine, no surgery, could
treat them.

The noise around the helicopter died
for a second.
The Chinook had found the eye of the storm.

‘
We’re OK,’ Gresnick
said, breathing out hard.
His forehead gleamed with sweat.
‘We’ve
levelled out.’

Vernon, unentangling himself from the
SAS trooper, started patting his chest.
There was no physical
wound, but the old hole was still there, radiating raw pain.
He
dreaded seeing Lucy again.
Would he hate her for what she did to
him?
Even worse, would he still love her?
He couldn’t go through
all that again.

‘
Making our approach
for landing,’ the pilot announced over the intercom.
‘I don’t know
what happened up there, but we’re OK.’

The SAS soldiers were clutching their
guns and grimly staring out of the porthole windows.

Gresnick went forward, whispered to the
pilot and came back seconds later, pale.

‘
What did the pilot
think it was?’
Vernon asked as Gresnick got back into his seat.
He
avoided Lucy’s picture, gazing up at him from the floor.

Gresnick hesitated.
‘He didn’t get a
clear view.’

‘
But he did see
something
?’

Gresnick leaned down, retrieving his
folder and Lucy’s photo.
‘He said the thing had wings.’

31

T
he small
cluster of picturesque cottages stood in darkness, their neat stone
walls picked out by the headlights of the Land Rovers.
No
streetlights were on anywhere in Tintagel village.
Lucy had never
been here in the dark before, and never since
it
happened.