The Armageddon Conspiracy (62 page)

‘
This
is the Grail.’
Now she understood exactly what was
expected of her.
She walked over to Sinclair and, without
hesitating, pressed the emerald orb against his open
wound.

Sinclair’s thigh glowed.
All of his
veins and arteries were visible through his mantle and chainmail,
glowing.
She could practically see the blood vessels repairing
themselves, sucking back the lost blood.
In seconds, the fatal
wound was healed.

Sinclair stood up, smiling.
‘Only once
before has the ceremony been successfully completed: by Galahad,
and now by Lucy Galahan, the new Galahad.’

Lucy didn’t know what to say.
She was
overwhelmed.

‘
The true Holy Grail
never had anything to do with Christ,’ Sinclair said.
‘It was no
chalice and it was never used at the Last Supper.
It never
collected any blood.
We invented that story to fool the Christians.
The rumours of the Cathars having the Grail at Montségur were true.
They smuggled this out the night before the castle surrendered to
the Crusaders.
And now I’ll call the Holy Grail by its true name –
the
Lucifer Stone
.’

Lucy was astounded.

Sinclair said that this
stone was unique because it was the only material object in
existence that wasn’t created by Satan.
Instead, Lucifer, the True
God’s brightest angel, made it, its purpose to allow him to take
human form in this material world.
He threw it from the sky into
the Garden of Eden and used it to materialise in front of Eve.
When
Wolfram von Eschenbach spoke of the
lapsit
exillas
–
the
exiled stone, the stone from heaven – this was what he was talking
about.

The stone was indestructible.
It was
taken to Atlantis where it survived the island’s annihilation, but
it vanished from history for millennia, until the Templars found a
document during their excavations of Solomon’s Temple saying that
the stone was in Scotland, at the location on which Rosslyn Chapel
was eventually built.

The Templars retrieved it and brought
it to their main base in the south of France.
They gave it to their
brothers in the Cathars to inspire them in their struggle against
the Catholic Crusaders.
After being smuggled out of Montségur, it
was hidden in the foundations of a small chapel not far away, on
the little hilltop village of Rennes-le-Château.
Centuries later,
in 1891, it was discovered by a Catholic parish priest when he was
renovating his chapel.
The priest’s name was Bérenger Saunière.
When Sinclair’s predecessors found out, they went to the priest and
paid him a fortune for the stone.
They didn’t reveal who they were
or why they wanted the stone.
Overnight, Saunière went from being a
poor nobody to an exceedingly wealthy man and a great mystery was
born.

After, he became
obsessed with understanding what it was he’d chanced upon.
He spent
the rest of his life trying to solve the mystery, and learned as
much as he could about the Cathars and Templars.
He rebuilt the
chapel in a much grander style, but added several unorthodox
features, for which he was condemned by his local bishop.
Above the
entrance, he placed a Latin inscription: Terribilis est locus iste
–
This place is terrible
.
On the archway above the gate to the cemetery, he put a
Templar-style Death’s Head stone carving.
Inside the chapel, he
erected a realistically coloured statue of a figure that was either
the Devil or the demon Asmodeus.
According to Judaic legend,
Asmodeus was the builder of Solomon’s Temple and the custodian of
the greatest secret of mankind.
There was little doubt Saunière had
begun to realise the enormity of what he’d found and of his crime
against Catholicism by selling it to the enemies of his
faith.

Sinclair said that Hitler then took
ownership of the stone when he became Grand Master of the College.
It was kept in Nuremberg with the other sacred treasures the Nazis
seized from all over Europe.

Sinclair stopped
speaking – the grandfather clock at the back of the hall was
striking midnight.
‘April 30 is here,’ he said.
‘
The world’s last day
.’

78

A
ll over Lucy’s
body, goosebumps erupted.
‘What’s supposed to happen?’
she
asked.

‘
Look at the stone,’
Sinclair commanded.

For a moment, nothing
happened then the inside of the ball seemed to fill with strange
milky clouds.
Through the clouds, Lucy noticed a tiny light,
rapidly growing brighter.
It was unlike anything she’d ever seen:
beautiful, tranquil, reassuring.
It filled her with a sense of well
being she’d never experienced in her life.
Her fear vanished, her
loneliness, all the hurt in her life.
She felt loved,
unconditionally, overpoweringly, as though her own parents were
inside that light.
Then the light began to write, in fiery letters.
Lucy gasped when she saw what was being spelt out –
her own name
.
As soon it
was completed, it vanished, taking the light with it.

‘
What did you see?’
Sinclair asked.

‘
My name – then it
disappeared.’

‘
That stone is made
from no ordinary material.
Lucifer himself created it.
It contains
a glimpse of heaven, and gives the names of those who are ready to
make the journey to paradise.’

Sinclair smiled.
‘I’ll answer something
that always puzzled you – why some of the mercenaries fighting for
the Cathars at Montségur agreed to convert to Catharism hours
before the castle surrendered to the Crusaders, knowing they’d die
at the stake.
It was because they took part in a sacred ceremony
that the Cathars performed in the early hours of 30 April.
During
that ceremony, they saw their names written on the Lucifer Stone,
just as you did.
They signed their own death warrants because they
knew they’d go straight to paradise.

‘
When Section 5
interrogated the Nazi officials in Nuremberg on April 30, 1945,
exactly the same thing happened.
The Nazis showed the Lucifer Stone
to the American officers.
Half saw nothing and the other half saw
their names written on it.
They converted to Gnosticism and killed
their non-Gnostic colleagues to stop them discovering the Gnostic
conspiracy.

‘
They took the Lucifer
Stone back to the States with them.
The Invisible College contacted
them and instructed them on how they should proceed.
For the last
sixty-seven years, we’ve been meticulously planning this operation.
That’s why Morson and his men are here now.’

‘
And what about you?
Why are
you
here?’

‘
My name is a
corruption of the French name
St
Clair
.
My ancestors were Normans who
settled in Scotland.
St Clair comes from the Latin words
Sanctus Clarus
–
sacred
and
clear
.
The purpose of my
family, our eternal purpose, was to clear the path to the world of
the sacred.
My family has had the greatest involvement of any in
the long mission to right the ancient wrongs.
We are the
pathfinders, the predestined Grail seekers.’

He stared at Raphael’s mural.
‘It’s
time to tell you precisely why you’re here, Lucy.
Even though I’ve
prepared you as well as I can, I have no idea how you’ll react when
you hear exactly what you must do.’

‘
What are you
saying?’

‘
I’m saying that if
there’s such a thing as an inconceivable, unimaginable act –
this is it
.’

79

S
inclair led
Lucy over to the mural.
‘This shows that our mission began before
the human race even existed.
Isn’t that incredible?’

‘
How can that
be?’

‘
Use your intuition,
Lucy.
You know this mural better than anyone.’

Lucy closed her eyes.
At some level,
she understood it perfectly.
Far from being complicated, it was
simple.
It told the story of God and his two leading angels,
Lucifer and Satanael, the latter coming to be known as Satan.
Absurdly, Lucifer and Satan came to be thought of as the same
person when they were the precise opposites.
Lucifer, the Angel of
Light, was God’s most loyal angel, his favourite.
Satanael, the
angel who stood on God’s left side, was jealous of Lucifer and,
above all, of God.
Satanael had the gift of intelligence.
He was
ferociously, diabolically clever.
Clever enough to think he could
challenge God.

The mural was the story
of how Satanael tried to overthrow God, only to be defeated in a
cataclysmic war of light when the entire universe lit up in every
colour: the biggest and brightest lightshow in history.
To avenge
his defeat, Satanael created the earth, setting himself up as its
God.
Far from being a simplistic hell of demons torturing and
tormenting the wicked, the earth was a laboratory where the most
subtle and ingenious psychological warfare was waged against its
population.
Pleasure and hope were granted as freely as pain and
despair.
The worst hell, Satanael understood, is the
almost
heaven, a false
paradise offering tantalising glimpses of bliss.
One day you’re in
love and you think the world couldn’t be better; the following day
your lover leaves you, and life, in an instant, is intolerable.
When love and hate, pleasure and pain are the closest neighbours,
misery is maximised, suffering brought to its apogee.

God gave Lucifer the mission of going
to earth to defeat Satanael.
But, in his own kingdom, Satanael was
much more powerful, forcing Lucifer to seek the help of the
inhabitants of Satanael’s world.
It was essential to make them
aware of the predicament they were in, so Lucifer taught them
Gnosis – true knowledge.
Cain was the first to fully rebel against
Satanael’s tyranny.
His people took up the struggle and war has
raged ever since.
Raphael’s mural showed a coded representation of
the struggle, and how it would end, one way or another.

Lucy opened her eyes.
‘But how can any
of this be real?
Science must dismiss this as nonsense.’

‘
No,’ Sinclair
answered.
‘Have you heard of the God particle?’

Lucy shook her head.

‘
Its technical name is
the Higgs boson.
In the 1960s, a Scottish physicist called Peter
Higgs predicted the existence of this elementary particle.
He said
that a field – the Higgs field – permeates the whole of space.
Any
particles moving through space encounter this field.
Many, but not
all, particles that interact with it acquire mass.

‘
Quantum theory says
that fields always have particles associated with them.
For the
electromagnetic field, the particle is the photon.
For the Higgs
field, it’s the Higgs boson.
No one has found one yet, but if they
do it will demonstrate the existence of the Higgs field and explain
where mass comes from.’

‘
How does this relate
to Gnosticism?’

‘
Gnosticism says there
are two universes – one of light and one of matter.
The True God
rules the former, the False God the latter.
The first is heaven,
the second hell.’