The Mayan Codex (36 page)

‘All right. I will give you one example. During the French Wars of Religion, the Corpus, being good Catholics, targeted the Huguenots. It was a de Bale who, alongside the de Guises, persuaded King Charles IX to agree to the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. It was a Corpus member, also, who tried to assassinate Admiral Gaspard de Coligny. This was done specifically to trigger the massacre. In this way, France was spared the greater horrors that would later be visited on the German princely states.’

Sabir shook his head in blank incomprehension. ‘So the Massacre of the Huguenots was a good thing, was it? The way I understand it, out-of-control French Catholics went on to slaughter thirty thousand innocent men, women, and children in the months following the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. It was a bloodbath, Lamia. But now you’re belatedly claiming that it was actually done to guarantee peace further down the line. Have I got that right?’

‘But these were devil worshippers, Adam. Cultists. People who thought the Pope was the Antichrist. They had to die.’

‘You can’t be serious?’

‘There are times when innocents must be killed in order to protect the majority.’

‘Oh, so they were innocent?’

‘Innocent in the sense of misguided. Yes.’

Sabir turned to Calque. ‘You’re a Catholic, too, I suppose?’

Calque gave an uncertain nod. ‘Yes. But I haven’t massacred anybody yet, so don’t look at me like that, Sabir.’

‘What do you make of what Lamia is saying?’

Calque hesitated. ‘I think the whole thing is a lot more complicated than it looks.’

Sabir pretended to fall backwards on his seat. ‘Oh, so now you’re in agreement with Lamia? The Corpus did do the right thing after all?’

Calque shook his head. ‘No. They didn’t do the right thing. It’s never right to massacre people, whatever you may think of their religion, or ethnicity, or point of view. But the Corpus
thought
they were doing the right thing. That’s the point that Lamia is trying to make. And that’s the point I realize we haven’t been taking into account about her mother.’

‘God God, Calque. If you carry on like this I may start suspecting that you have an open mind.’

‘An open mind? Perish the thought. But we do need to understand what actually drives the Corpus – the better, eventually, to defeat it. In my view Lamia has just made her own situation perfectly clear. She respects her mother’s viewpoint, but rejects it for herself.’

‘What are you saying? That we ought to share our information with the Corpus? Bring them into the loop?’ Sabir cradled his head on his hands, and gave Calque a sickly smile. ‘Perhaps you could offer the Countess a friendly hug when next you are passing Cap Camarat? I’m sure she would welcome you with open arms, Captain.’

Calque shrugged. ‘I’m not insane, Sabir. I remember only too well what that maniac Achor Bale was capable of. He killed my assistant, remember. A man no better than he should have been, perhaps. But a man, nonetheless, with a family, a fiancée, and a future. Achor Bale snuffed all that out without even pausing to draw breath.’

‘Then what are you suggesting?’

‘I’m saying that we need to understand exactly where the Corpus is coming from. What they are trying to achieve. Look, Lamia. You have to be considerably more open with us if we’re to have any chance at all of combating this thing. First off, does the Corpus still have the same sort of influence it appears to have wielded when France still had a king?’

Lamia hesitated. For a moment Sabir feared that she intended to duck the question. Then she shook her head. ‘No. All that ended with the Second World War.’

‘The Second World War? Explain yourself.’

Lamia took a deep breath. ‘Maréchal Pétain, the leader of Vichy France, was almost certainly a Corpus member. He attended both the St Cyr Military Academy
and the École Supérieure de Guerre in Paris, both of which were hotbeds of Corpus activity towards the end of the nineteenth century. Later, Pétain became a close friend of the Count, my father. But he and the Count disagreed bitterly on the Maréchal’s policy of appeasement towards Germany. My father did not believe, for instance, that Adolf Hitler was the Second Antichrist. He thought, instead, that this particular distinction belonged to Josef Stalin. He disagreed, also, with the Vichy government’s policy towards the Jews. If he hadn’t been seriously injured in one of the early German bombardments, he might have been able to take all of this much further – made his influence felt behind the scenes in some way.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Very. He was convinced, for instance, that France was a natural ally of Russia, and not of Germany, and that we should never have tacitly allied ourselves with the Nazis against Stalin.’

‘So he was a communist?’

‘No. But he was prepared to use communists for his purposes.’

‘A nice distinction.’

‘My father’s injury put an end to France pursuing that particular line – in a way, you see, his injury paved the way for the eventual disintegration of the Corpus.’ Lamia glanced back at Calque. ‘A bit like the injury suffered by the Fisher King which diluted the power of the Round Table. You understand the parallels, Captain?’

Calque nodded. ‘Succinctly put. I understand you very well.’

‘Before that time we had been strong in the cadet schools, the military academies, and also in the civil service. Like a sort of Freemasonry, really. But the war changed all that. With Monsieur, my father,
hors de
combat
, and taking into account his virulent dislike of the Hitler regime – which he privately believed to be devil-driven – all Corpus influence collapsed. Laval and Pétain had their revenge in the end, you see. By the time my father recovered from both the physical and the psychological damage that he had received, France had changed utterly, becoming riddled with retrospective guilt and denial. The Count simply withdrew from public life in order to allow the Corpus a dignified final disintegration. It was only with the advent of Madame, my mother, thirty years later, that the Corpus was to some extent renewed.’

‘In what form?’

‘In the form that you see before you now. The Count only allowed the Countess to adopt their thirteen children on the strict understanding that she, under the aegis of his still influential family name, would actively attempt to reintegrate the Corpus into public life. At his instigation, she would send each of their children out into the world to begin a new strand of the Corpus’s sworn duty. They would, within their ranks, incorporate all of the four great factors which determine aristocratic prestige –
l’ancienneté
,
les alliances
,
les dignités
, and
les illustrations
. They would represent ancient nobility, they would cement new alliances, they would hold high office, and they would perform great and noble actions. But none of this ever occurred. Society had changed too much. Monsieur, my father, had alienated too many right-wing establishment figures with his excoriation of Nazi Germany. We still had a certain degree of influence, but it was based upon nostalgia rather than on any real access to the corridors of power.’

‘So where does that leave the Corpus now?’

‘Working to a different stage of logic. What we cannot steal, we buy. And what we cannot have by right, we seize. With us, it has become a case of the law of the
jungle.’ Lamia raised her head defiantly. ‘If you wish to defeat the Corpus, you will only do so by using the law of the jungle against them in return. Otherwise the Corpus will chew you up and spit you out like a piece of rotting meat.’

Sabir scrunched himself back into his seat, his neck against the window frame, his head against the glass, so that he could see both Calque and Lamia at the same time. ‘So now we come to the million-dollar question, Lamia. The one that secures the prize. Why are your people still pursuing us? What can they conceivably hope to gain? What do they figure to get from the lost prophecies of Nostradamus?’

Lamia looked shocked. ‘But it is obvious, Adam. I thought you knew this without my having to tell you? It is all about power. The need to know what the future holds. And for this they require three things.’ She marked the points off on her fingers. ‘They need to know the identity and whereabouts of the Third Antichrist, whom some people call the “Wilful King”. They need to know the identity and whereabouts of the Second Coming. And they need to know whether 21 December 2012 marks the true end of the world, or merely the start of the predicted thousand-year return of the Devil. If it is the latter, then the Corpus will protect the Antichrist and kill the
Parousia –
in this way they will effectively delay the advent of the Devil because he will no longer feel that he is under-represented on earth. In this manner, also, they will have fulfilled their ancient task. If it is the former, they will commit collective suicide, and be translated into heaven to sit at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.’

Calque let his unlit cigarette flutter from his fingers. ‘Mary, Jesus, Joseph, and all the Saints. What? Like the Rapture?’

‘A little like that.’

‘But the Rapture relies on the Second Coming, Lamia. It
relies
on the
Parousia
. It’s not about killing Him, for pity’s sake.’

‘But the Pre-Wrath Rapture is, Captain. This is the moment when we are told the sun turns black and the moon turns red. An era of wars, famines, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis – what the Bible calls the time of the “abomination of desolation”. God’s wrath will fall on the unbelievers when the sixth seal is finally opened. There will be a long period of tribulation before the Second Advent.’ Lamia looked at her two companions. ‘Does any of this sound familiar to you, gentlemen? Does any of this ring a bell with you?’

Sabir felt as if his brain had been run through a clothes’ mangle. ‘You mean the eruption of Orizaba? The earthquake in L’Aquila? Global warming? The Indian ocean tsunami? The melting of the polar ice cap? That sort of thing?’

Lamia made a tired face. ‘Yes. And all the rest of it too.’

Abi was acting as look-out and Vau was driving. At first glance, the tracker had appeared to be misbehaving, which meant that the twins found themselves blundering past the stationary Grand Cherokee when they were least expecting it.

‘Christ. Did you see them? Did you see what they were doing? It was them, Abi, wasn’t it? Did they see us?’

‘Calm down, Vau. There’s no damage done. They were just sitting in their car talking. Or at least so far as I could see. We were moving way too fast when we passed them. Plus we’ve got a fresh car. Plus we’re wearing these stupid American baseball caps. They won’t have made us.’

‘I wish we’d planted a proper bug on them when we had the chance.’

‘Oh yes? And this from the man who couldn’t be bothered to break into their car when the opportunity was handed to him on a plate, but simply latched his tracker onto the fucking undercarriage in the fond hope that it wouldn’t fucking jerk off when they fucking went over their first fucking speed bump?’

‘Okay, Abi. Okay. You don’t have to rub it in.’

‘What do you think they were talking about? Maybe you’ve got a view on that too, Vau?’

‘How do I know? What do you think?’

Abi closed his eyes. He scrubbed at his face, then let his head fall back against the built-in headrest. He motioned to Vau to pull the car over. ‘Us, probably.’

‘How do you figure that, Abi? They don’t even know we’re following them.’

‘What? You think they’ve just relaxed down and forgotten about us, maybe? Put us out of their minds completely?’

‘No, Abi. I don’t think that.’

‘Why ever not?’

Vau’s face lit up. ‘Because they’re too smart. Lamia knows we’ll never give up. And she’ll have told them that. They’ll be shit scared we’ll spring out from nowhere and get them.’

Abi hunched down even further in the passenger seat in case the Cherokee overtook them again. ‘You know something, Vau? I think you’re right.’ He nodded his
head a few times, thinking. ‘I think we need to rush things a little. I think we need to put the fear of God into them, and get them to make a few unforced errors. I’m fed up to my back teeth with all this pussy-footing around.’

‘But Madame, our mother, told you to hang back, Abi. I heard her say so. She told you to let them lead us to wherever they are going, and not to interfere with them until she tells you to do so.’