Apocalypsis 1.05 Island of the Light (4 page)

She is worried about you. She is seriously worried. About you.

»Answer me, Peter Adam! What if you fail?«

Instead of giving her an answer, Peter did what he would have loved to do the other day, when she had linked arms with him. This time he acted on his impulse, bending forward and kissing her. She did not even seem surprised or shocked, and she did not try to get away from him. Her lips were warm and full and they opened slightly when he pulled her body close to his. He could feel her breasts against his chest, her hips, her cheek against his. And still no resistance. She was still responding to his kiss as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Until his tongue came into play.

She pushed him away from her, gently but insistently. The Arabic storeowner grinned contentedly.

»Enough,« she whispered, almost aghast, and then she abruptly left the store.

Throughout the entire afternoon, neither of them mentioned the kiss, not with a single word. But Peter could clearly sense that he had crossed a dangerous boundary. And by crossing this boundary, he had possibly pushed Maria away from him.

What an idiot you are! Was this necessary?

Yes, it had been necessary. Peter did not regret the kiss, not one bit. He just hoped that it had not damaged something between them.

They spent the afternoon in a little park where they could be alone for a while.

»Tell me about Ellen,« Maria said all of a sudden.

»How do you know about Ellen?«

»I asked Don Luigi a couple of questions about you. But he didn’t tell me much.«

Peter sighed. »Well, then you know that Ellen is dead. I don’t want to talk about it.«

»You loved her very much, didn’t you?«

»Yes, I did.«

»How did she die?«

»As I said, I don’t want to talk about it!«

Maria didn’t say a word, but she seemed to be a little hurt by his unexpectedly harsh responses. There was an oppressive silence hanging in the air, and Peter wanted to prevent it getting any heavier than it already was, so he began to talk about himself. About the fact that he had always felt incomplete, for as long as he could remember. About the fact that he had killed a human being, in Afghanistan, where he had been buried alive in a dugout. He told her about the fear that he had experienced in this hole, about his desperate wish never to have to kill again, and about his migraine attacks that had been plaguing him ever since. And he told her about Elke and Lutz, his adoptive parents who lived in Cologne.

»What about your real parents?« Maria asked.

»They are my real parents.«

»I am sorry. I mean, your biological parents.«

»As far as I know, they died in a car accident when I was four years old. I know their names and I even have a picture of them, but I can’t remember them.«

»Not at all?«

Peter shook his head. »This could be a result of the accident. Afterwards, I lived in an orphanage for a while. And on my fifth birthday, my parents adopted me.«

»And what about the family of your biological parents? Are you in touch with any of them?«

»There is no family.«

She furrowed her brows. »You are a journalist. Have you never tried to track them down?«

»Of course. There were once grandparents. But they were already dead when I began to search for them.«

Why are you lying to her? You kissed her a few hours ago, so don’t lie to her now!

She acted as if she believed him and left it at that.

»Where is the meeting point?« she asked him instead.

XLV

May 14, 2011, Ile de Cuivre, Mediterranean Sea

T
owards the evening, they took a cab to Montpellier airport. A man in a baseball cap was standing in front of the gate which the Mercedes had disappeared behind. Peter guessed that he was in his mid-thirties.

Athletic guy who knows how to defend himself.

Peter asked the cab driver to wait. The guy with the baseball cap walked up to him.

»Monsieur Adam?«

»Yes. Are you Noah?«

The man with the baseball cap broke into a grin and stretched out his hand. »That’s me. I will be your pilot.«

He greeted Maria with a kiss on her hand.

»I thought there would be only one person.«

»And that’s how it is. It will be just me flying with you. Madame…« Peter paused, irritated.

Shit! You don’t even know her last name!

»Krüger,« Maria said with a smile.

Krüger??? Never in a million years!

»Madame Krüger will be waiting for me.«

Noah, the pilot, stared at Maria with open interest.

»You can sit in the cockpit, if you like.«

»Thank you, but I am afraid of flying.«

Noah shrugged his shoulders in regret. »Eh bien. Then let’s get rolling! Shall we? Everything is prepared.«

He pulled a small beeper from the pocket of his jacket and pushed a button. Immediately the huge sliding door began to open.

Peter took a deep breath and turned to Maria. A mild wind was playing in the palm trees by the gate, reminding Peter of the dangers of the task at hand. But here he was, standing in front of the woman he had kissed only a few hours earlier, and the palm trees were rustling and the air was filled with the scent of hibiscus, the scent of spring, and the scent of promise. Not a good moment to say goodbye.

»Take care of yourself, Peter Adam,« Maria said. And before he could say anything in return, she kissed him. It was a kiss as gentle and as fleeting as a summer rain.

»God bless you.«

God. Again and again: God. Was it ever possible to do without Him? Just for a change?

Hastily and without waiting for a reply, Maria slipped back into the cab and closed the door. Peter struggled against the impulse to call her name. He would have loved nothing better than to abort the entire operation. But the cab was already turning around, quickly disappearing in the direction of the city. His last opportunity to abort the whole thing and he had missed it.

»How many jumps have you made?« Noah wanted to know.

»A little over two hundred.«

Noah nodded, impressed. »Private jumps or for the military?«

»We should get going and not stand around and yak,« Peter said brusquely, and then he walked through the gate into the airport grounds.

He could not find any sign of the battered Mercedes. But he was no longer interested in the car, anyway. Noah led him to a blue hangar and handed him a freshly packed parachute. A flat backpack with a solid harness.

»A parafoil,« Noah explained, »easy to steer.«

Peter checked the text on the sew-on badge and saw that the parachute was properly registered.

»Who packed this?«

»I did,« Noah said. »This afternoon. I’ve packed hundreds of parachutes in my life. For private jumps and for the military.«

Peter ignored the allusion, put the parachute on his back, and followed Noah to a small helicopter that was parked in front of the hangar. A three-seat model with an open cockpit.

Noah did not ask any further questions. And Peter avoided asking what secretive network connected someone like Noah to someone like Don Luigi. He had full trust in Don Luigi’s judgment, and so he put on his safety belt and focused on the jump ahead of him.

»
Generator on. Rotor brake off
…« Noah went through the checklist. The rotor blades were singing their song. After receiving clearance to take off for a »scenic flight«, Noah air-taxied the helicopter to the take-off point and pulled it gently up into the night sky.

After a few minutes, they had left the city lights of Montpellier behind them and flown into the black darkness over the Mediterranean Sea. Only on a few occasions did they see the glowing navigation lights of a fishing cutter or some floating buoys.

Noah flew higher and higher on an apparently random route. Slowly but surely it got cool up there. Peter stopped himself from asking whether Noah actually knew the exact position of the rock with the fortress. Approximately 10 minutes later, they had reached an altitude of over 5,000 feet. Noah looked down at the water, flew another circle, and then held the helicopter still in the air over the spot.

»That’s it!« he blared into the earphones of Peter’s headset. Noah pointed downwards where a light was blinking, which was so tiny that it was almost invisible. Other than that, Peter couldn’t see anything.

»That’s it?« he screamed into his headset.

»You will see it as you get lower. Good luck.«

Peter could feel the familiar surge of adrenaline rush through his body, a brief and hot sensation assuring him that he would be fully alert during his jump and capable of doing the job. He readjusted the straps of his harness, unbuckled his seat belt, and stepped onto the skid of the helicopter. As he looked down into the darkness, he could make out the shadowy silhouette of the fortress.

And then he jumped.

Right away, he extended his arms and legs to control his fall. He was plummeting towards the earth at a speed of 150 feet per second. A brief glance at the altimeter.

Wait.

He was free-falling. Nine hundred feet within the first ten seconds.

Wait.

He continued to fall and reached for the handle of the ripcord.

Wait.

Two thousand one hundred feet. Eighteen hundred. Fifteen hundred.

Now!

Peter pulled the yellow handle. He jerked to a halt, as his reserve chute shot upwards and spread out above him, filling with air and releasing his main chute. Peter felt another jerk and then he began to float towards the earth, now at a speed of merely 15 feet per second. He gripped the two guidance handles of his parafoil and directed himself in a wide bend to the right of the fortress, which he could now clearly see underneath. The wind had increased and was driving him towards the open sea.

Six hundred feet. Too much altitude to hit the landing.

Peter turned the parafoil into the wind and took the risk of flying another full circle. Now, the oval-shaped fortress was to his left. Nobody was in sight; no sign that anyone had detected him. Peter could see a wide parapet that abutted two low walls. That was the spot where he had to land. However, he had to do it against the wind, which was unfavorable and made it impossible to land on one of the longer stretches of the battlement. So he had to risk an approach from the side.

Three hundred feet.

One last time, Peter readjusted the position of his parafoil and then he started his descent towards the fortress. If the wind whipped up again, or if it changed direction, he would get slammed against the wall or plummet into the water. But Peter did not worry about that, not now. He focused all his energy and attention on the impending landing as he saw the battlements of the fortress getting closer and closer.

Too close, too fast.

Only thirty feet above the fortress, Peter pulled the guidance handles again, this time with full force to break his fall. The battlements were right underneath him. Then he hit the ground.

Harder than he had expected. Peter crouched and rolled over to his side. It was pure luck that he had not slammed into the small parapet wall; he had missed it by a fraction of an inch. As soon as he hit the parapet, he tried to get up again because there was still one danger that hadn’t been averted. The parachute was collapsing over him, turning dangerously into the wind. Peter jumped to his feet and pulled in the cords. It was difficult to move on the narrow parapet but he managed to walk around the chute and rolled it up so that it could not spread out again and drag him out over the ocean.

When he had managed that, he removed his harness and rolled up the rest of the chute. Only then did he cower down behind the parapet and try to catch his breath.

In the darkness beyond, the waves roared as if they wanted to announce his forbidden arrival. Peter tried to control his breath and listened for any sounds coming from the fortress. But there was nothing, save for an eerie chanting that seeped from the depths of the building. No footsteps, no shouting, nor any other sign that he had been detected.

Peter ignored the slight pain in his left temple that had been pulsing like a warning light since he had landed. He pushed the rolled up parachute into a recess in the wall and looked around to get his bearings. The historical illustrations seemed correct. At the far side of the parapet, he recognized the staircase leading into the building. Peter peeked carefully over the edge of the parapet into the inner courtyard of the fortress. Nobody in sight. In absolute silence, he walked down the stairs to the first level of the fortress, where the chanting was louder. He followed the strange sounds through dimly lit corridors with cell doors on either side. The entire structure looked like a prison. With the pain in his head came the images and the weird sense of déjà vu.

You know where you have to go. You’ve been here before.

Suddenly, he saw something at the end of the corridor, a figure in a monk’s cowl, and Peter pressed himself up against one of the cell doors, waiting breathlessly.

Not a prison – a monastery!

Peter expected to run into other monks at any moment. But nobody came, neither on the first level, nor on the lowest level. He saw the small courtyard in front of him. The chanting that was intermingled with polyphonic murmuring was coming from an open door on the other side. A strong smell of disinfectant hung in the air. The pain in his head got worse as Peter crossed the narrow oval-shaped courtyard of the fortress and slipped through the open door. He found himself in a narrow and dark passage that ended in a kind of hall. This was the direction from which the voices were coming; from there, a dim light cast rays out into the passage.

Why do you know what you will find in there?

There had been no hall in the historical prints, and this unsettled Peter. As quietly as he possibly could, he tiptoed through the passage towards the light.

And then he saw it. And what he saw made him freeze.

The hall had an octagonal layout and was the size of a crypt. A narrow colonnade surrounded the entire hall. Peter counted 14 monks standing around a circular stone table. They were wearing white hooded robes with a golden symbol on the back.

The crossed symbol from the amulet. There was no doubt, Peter could see it clearly. A wave of triumph washed over him.

You are in the right place.

The monks were humming the unintelligible chants that had led Peter into this hall. The only light in the room came from the torches attached to the pillars. When the monks took each other by the hands and lowered their heads for some kind of incantation ritual, Peter used the opportunity to enter the hall silently and hide behind one of the eight pillars. From there, he continued to watch the ritual that was taking place around the stone table. One of the monks, a kind of prayer leader, was standing a little bit closer to the stone table and seemed to be waiting for something.

Peter bent slightly forward to get a better look at the table. Something was engraved into the stone. In the torchlight, Peter could make out two concentric circles that formed a band of unfamiliar characters and numbers. The inner circle was filled with two pentagrams.

Peter had seen something similar before, in a book at Don Luigi’s when the priest had told him about the history of occultism.

A »Sigillum Dei«!

The »Seal of God.« A magical diagram from the Early Middle Ages, it was said to grant the initiated master power over all creatures, if he used the amulet to call the name of God and summon the Archangels. A
Sigillum Dei
could only be created by following complex and precise instructions. Seventy-two Latin letters in the circular band formed the
Shemhamephorasch
, the ineffable name of God, the
magnum nomen Domini Semenphoras licterarum
. The tips of a pentagram had to touch the circular band, and the points of the pentagram had to be labeled with the names of the Archangels: Cafziel, Satquiel, Raphael, Michael, Anael, Gabriel and Samael. As well as the five names of God: Ely, Eloy, Christ, Sother, and Adonay. A heptagon had to be drawn around the pentagram, and the upper tip of the heptagon had to touch the center of the pentagram. Around this first heptagon was a second and a third one, which created further segments that had to be labeled with crosses and additional names of God. Don Luigi had told Peter that variations of the
Sigillum Dei
were used in almost every occult ritual.

As Peter bent even further forward, he could see that this seal was not covered with Latin letters but with unfamiliar characters, which reminded him of the runic alphabet and the Carolingian minuscule.