The Lucifer Code (18 page)

Destination: San Francisco.

*

VenTec. Alaska

The first thing Amber became aware of was being awake, conscious, followed by an itching sensation all over her scalp.

She opened her eyes. Nothing happened. However hard she willed her eyelids to move they remained stubbornly closed. She tried to reach up to scratch her scalp but her arms remained inert at her sides. Frantically she tried to move some part of her body, any part, but she couldn't.

What was happening? Was she paralysed?

Nothing made any sense. Even time lost its meaning as she struggled to think amid the torpor that fogged her brain. In the last few days - or was it hours? - she had been vaguely aware of people around her but little else. Did this have something to do with what had happened at Barley Hall? Something Fleming had discovered about her through his NeuroTranslator? If so, what?

Think, damn you, think, she urged herself.

Something must have happened in the limousine driving her from Barley Hall. There was only one logical explanation, although it made no sense. She had been drugged and abducted. But why?

Suddenly she heard voices, a man's and a woman's. She dimly recognized the woman's and a distinctive musky scent hung in the air. She remembered it from the past.

The bed was moving now and, even from behind her eyelids, she could tell the light was brightening, as if she was leaving a room and entering a corridor.

A door hissed on her left, then the bed was wheeled into an even brighter area. Hands were on her now, lifting her from the bed and placing her on another. A hum filled the air around her.

Suddenly her eyelids were pulled open, making her want to blink at the lights overhead. A face appeared above her, wearing bulbous eye-protectors. Then stinging liquid was dripped into her exposed eyeballs, and pegs attached to the lids, pinning them open. The pain was excruciating but Amber couldn't squirm or turn away. Lightly tinted lenses were then inserted into her eyes.

Her head was raised and she saw a glass sphere resembling an astronaut's helmet being lifted over her head. In the curved glass she saw her image distorted like the reflection in the bottom of a spoon. What shocked her most was that her hair had been shaved off.

Amber was close to panic.

To her right, refracted through the helmet in her peripheral vision, she could see a phantom figure in white bodysuit and eye-protectors, holding up a hypodermic syringe. The woman's voice spoke: 'She's lucky, she's only going to die in her dreams.'

As the indistinct figure steered the needle closer to the exposed flesh of her right arm she smelt the frustratingly familiar scent again. Before she could try to make any connections she heard a hiss and an odourless luminous gas seeped into the helmet, bathing the world in a green actinic glow.

Then her consciousness dimmed and darkness claimed her.

No sooner had she surrendered to the comforting embrace of oblivion than she was racing towards the cone of light, to where she might find peace. She tried to control her terror as she sped towards it but she could sense the forces holding her back, threatening to rip her apart. The elastic tension grew and grew until she was absorbed in the light and close to the source. But even as she felt Ariel's luminous presence reaching for her, almost touching, the force ripped her back again. Back into the darkness. Back to herself.

This time, however, there was no respite from dying, no return to the living. Instead of waking or returning to normal sleep, she was instantly catapulted back through the void towards the cone of light. Experiencing afresh the terror of dying she merged again with the light, this time going deeper than before, almost reaching its core, the source. Ariel was closer, she could sense it, but still out of reach . . .

Then Amber was yanked away from the light. Only to be hurled back towards it again. And again.

Each time she entered the light, she came closer to the source, to death and reunion with her sister. But every time she was thwarted. The closer she came to her sister, the greater the force that pulled her back.

She was a pendulum swinging from life to death and back again, inhabiting neither, damned for ever to remain in limbo between them, in a hell of sorts.

*

Black sector conference room.

VenTec

'Bradley, is she all right?' Accosta was tense, watching Amber Grant's pale, sweating face in the glass sphere.

Sitting in the conference room with Carvelli, Diageo, Knight and Soames, he looked into the laboratory through the two-way mirror wall. Now that the Soul Project was entering the critical stage, the entire Truth Council had taken leave of their other responsibilities to convene at VenTec. Each wanted to see this experiment in the flesh.

Bradley Soames calmly studied the readings on a screen above them. 'Her life signs are fine, Your Holiness. Her heart's a little excited, but well within the safe range.' If he felt a qualm about turning his erstwhile business partner into a laboratory rat he gave no indication of it.

Accosta told himself again that he should feel grateful for Soames's dedication to his cause. 'And the injection? Won't it interfere with her dreams?'

Without looking away from the screen Soames said, 'On the contrary, Your Holiness. Revelax is a neurological wonder drug that our own Virginia Knight recommended.'

Knight nodded: her pale face was drawn and perspiration beaded her high forehead. Her gaze fixed on Amber as she said, 'It'll help Dr Grant sleep and will also stimulate her brain to enter a natural state of REM quicker and for longer. It will help us harvest her dreams, increasing their frequency and longevity tenfold.'

'In essence,' added Soames, 'her episodes of dying will last longer and occur more often, so every time her Bose-Einstein condensate leaves her body during her dreams of dying we can monitor the passage of her soul. Using modified technology similar to that found in an optical computer, we should then be able to get a lock on the tracking frequency'

At the foot of Amber's bed stood a bank of apparatus: an optical computer, several monitors and a black box the size of a large television with four vertical strips of lights laid out in columns. Each column contained four different-coloured lights flashing independently up and down it, and mirrored the smaller columns of light embedded in the top of the glass head-sphere. The lights on all four columns would align - forming four rows of colour - when they had established a trace.

Now that the moment of truth was drawing close Accosta felt drained. All the incandescent energy that had sustained him over the last few days had depleted what small reserves he had left. The rumour that he was dying, fuelled by his increasingly frail appearance and his recent absence from the Red Ark, had been fanned by the Vatican's press office. Without a successor, it was whispered, his Church would fold, leaving its members rudderless in a turbulent sea. Rome had indicated that it would forgive its fickle followers and welcome them back.

But the worst aspect of these rumours was that they were true. The prostate cancer diagnosed almost six years ago had spread to his bones and liver, and his lungs were riddled with metastases. The disease was reaching its final stages. With only a few months, if not weeks, of life remaining, he was a candidate for one of his own Church's hospices.

Amber Grant was his only salvation.

'She's entering the REM state again,' he heard Carvelli say. He sounded breathless.

Only Soames seemed calm, studying the monitors with an almost detached air. 'Excellent,' he said. 'That was the longest we've managed to hold on to the condensate as an integrated boson system.'

'Why is that excellent?' asked Accosta, looking at the randomly flashing columns of lights. 'You still didn't lock on to the soul frequency'

'Not yet, Your Holiness, but by tracking these first episodes of Amber dying, these first excursions of her consciousness from her body, we've come closer than with all the previous real deaths combined.'

'So how many days before we get a result?' Accosta said.

Soames laughed, and the scar tissue around his mouth distorted. 'Days, Your Holiness? Not days, hours - if not minutes. With the drug, Amber is entering and leaving the dream state indefinitely. She'll simply die again and again until we zero in on the exact frequency - like tracing a telephone caller by making them keep phoning. In fact, she'll die so often she'll wish she was dead.' Soames laughed again. 'Don't worry, Your Holiness, locking on to the human soul is no longer an issue. What we've got to focus on now is communicating with it.'

Soames turned to Carvelli. 'Frank, help His Holiness make preparations for the final act. And we've got to start thinking about Miles Fleming.'

'He won't help us,' Knight said.

'He won't help you, Virginia, but he has no reason to distrust me,' Soames retorted. 'And I'm not going to ask Fleming to help us. I'm going to offer to help him.'

Just then there was a beep and the four columns of light stopped their random flashing, settling into four static rows of colour.

For the first time Soames lost his customary cool. 'Get the readings,' he shouted at his assistants in the laboratory. Then he turned to Accosta, with an excited grin of satisfaction. 'It's done.'

But Accosta was no longer looking at Soames or the lights. He was looking at Amber Grant, and wondering why she seemed to be smiling.

*

The Church of the Soul Truth Hospice, Marin County.

The next day

The Sister's scarlet robes rustled as she checked the computer screen on the reception desk. She glanced up at the tall man, smiled and said, 'Mr Kent, I understand from your call that your father is ill and may need hospice accommodation.'

'That's correct. But I'd like to look around first.'

'Of course. I'll arrange for someone to give you a tour and get you an application pack, containing all the relevant information and forms you'll need to complete on your father's behalf. I'm sure you appreciate that accommodation here is limited, so we need to prioritize our care.'

'I understand. But you do have vacancies?'

The sister glanced at the computer screen and gave a serene smile. 'This is a hospice, Mr Kent. Vacancies always arise. It comes with the territory. If you don't mind waiting, I'll get your application pack and arrange for one of the sisters to show you around.'

'Thank you.'

'You're welcome.'

As soon as the sister turned and left the desk, the man reached over and rotated the computer screen towards him. It took only a moment to find the name and suite number. There was an asterisk by the name but he didn't have time to check what that signified. Instead he turned and walked to the waiting room. On the wall there was a photograph of Xavier Accosta, the Red Pope, and a picture of the Red Ark.

The man took a seat, and after a few moments another sister in scarlet introduced herself as Sister Angela and led him out of the waiting room on a tour of the hospice. The man listened attentively as she explained about the care and facilities available to the patients, but said little until they ascended the wide staircase to the second floor, where suite 21 was situated. Gillian Grant's private suite.

'May 1 use the restroom, please?' the man asked politely at the top of the stairs, and was relieved to be directed to the far end of the corridor.

'I'll wait here,' the sister said.

As he walked past the closed doors he paused when he reached suite 21. He checked that Sister Angela was out of sight and the corridor was deserted then moved closer to the door.

Hearing voices he stepped back as the door to suite 21 opened. A man and a woman in white overalls stepped into the corridor wheeling a sturdy white coffin bearing the Church of the Soul Truth motif. They stepped past him and carried on towards the far end of the corridor, leaving the door to suite 21 ajar. The man saw that the bed was stripped and the room empty.

He returned to Sister Angela. 'Thank you for your time. I think I've seen enough.'

Fleming strode out into the sunshine and went to his hire Taurus, got in, and drove back to the Golden Gate Bridge. He still wasn't sure exactly what he'd expected to achieve by coming here, but whatever it was he wasn't even close.

After his impulsive dash across the Atlantic to San Francisco he had driven to Amber's luxurious home in Pacific Heights, only to find it deserted. He had then called Father Peter Riga to check if he had had any news. He was unable to speak to him directly but received a cryptic message from the Jesuit's secretary: 'Father Peter Riga wants you to know he shares your concerns and has taken steps to assist you.'

"What steps? What are you talking about?'

But the secretary either couldn't or wouldn't clarify the message, leaving Fleming more confused than reassured. One of the remaining avenues of investigation was the hospice.

Since there was no longer any doubt that Virginia Knight was poisoning his reputation, he had resorted to the subterfuge of the lowliest tabloid reporter to reach Amber, but even concealing his identity in an attempt to contact her through her hospice-bound mother hadn't worked. Gillian Grant was dead.

Driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, he didn't notice the brown sedan following two cars behind. His eyes were focused on downtown San Francisco and the Bay Bridge beyond. He was concentrating on his last chance of contacting Amber Grant.