Biblical (38 page)

The ground heaved and pulsed. Again a wind came from nowhere, the air granular, laden with desert sand. The movement in the earth brought Benny to his knees and Ari struggled
to stay on his feet. His eyes locked with Shalev’s, who was supporting himself with one hand braced against the armored personnel carrier.

Another deafening noise. But this time unlike the first two sounds; unlike any sound Ari had ever heard. A massive shudder coursed through the ground beneath their feet, as if something deep within the earth had cracked open. And with the tremor the wind seemed to pick up in severity. Benny and the others were shouting, but their voices were drowned out in the storm. Ari could no longer see the elaborate frontages of the resort hotels. Everything was becoming lost in a swirl of sand and debris, but he was sure he should still have been able to see the hotel. Dismissing the thought, he moved over to help Benny get to his feet, but a sudden gust lifted the small corporal from the ground and into the vortex of sand and palm fragments.

“Benny!” Ari screamed, running towards his friend. The wind hit him like a tidal wave, forcing the air from his lungs and, now stronger than gravity, ripped the ground away from beneath his feet. A primeval panic rose in him as he realized he was helpless against the force of Nature. Ari felt a strong grip close on his arm and he turned to see Shalev, who started to drag him towards the flank of the personnel carrier.

“We need cover!” the Haredi shouted in Ari’s ear.

“Benny! What about Benny?”

“I’ll go back for him. I’m heavier than you.” Shalev placed his broad hand flat against Ari’s chest and pushed him hard against the side of the carrier, then down so he was sitting, his back propped against it. “Stay here!”

Ari watched as Shalev pushed back into the storm, his outline fading.

The storm ceased.

It happened within a space of seconds. The wind was gone. The dust and sand hung in the air for what seemed an age, then settled slowly. The sand-caked shapes of the rest of the
platoon became clear again, most prone on the ground, easing themselves to their feet, like clay men rising from the earth. He saw Shalev haul Benny to his feet. They looked at each other through the now faint curtain of suspended desert sand.

Ari moved away from the personnel carrier and towards the group of soldiers. He still could not see the outline of the hotels behind them, but the sun now probed the dust with bright fingers. It looked like the end of the world.

*

Ari had his back to it.

He realized in that sliver of a second that he had his back to it. Whatever it was, it was right behind him, right now. He knew that by the faces of the others as they stared past him towards the sea; by the shock, the awe and the terror in their expressions. But a terror greater than could have been caused by the storm. He saw Shalev sink to his knees slowly, his mouth agape. Benny Kagan stood frozen.

It was behind him. He could hear it thunder and growl. He could feel it cause the earth beneath his feet to shiver and shudder. Whatever it was that was behind him, he did not want to turn. Whatever sight had made statues of his comrades, he didn’t want to see it. He must not turn.

He turned.

As he did he felt the ground shake again, as if the whole world beneath his feet had dropped ten meters before crashing to a sudden stop.

The storm that had passed over them was now a whirlwind, but a whirlwind like no other Ari had seen. The funnel was fifty meters across and arched and twisted a kilometer up into a vast, fuming, black cloud. And beneath it … beneath it … Beneath it Ari saw something he could not believe. That he had never believed, that he had refused to believe, all of his life.

“Oh God …” Ari muttered. “Oh God, oh God, oh God …”

It had happened. It had happened and it had happened here. Where they were … this had been Yam Suph. This had been the Sea of Reeds.

This was where Moses had stood.

With a certainty he had never experienced before in his life, Ari knew he was witnessing God’s covenant. The sign of God’s protection of His people.

Ari Livnat stood on the beach at Eilat and stared out at the impossible. He gazed at the two titanic walls of water that rose up like gigantic mounds of heaped, rippling glass, a channel cleared between them. Lightning fizzed and crackled and sparked across the impossibly vertical surfaces of the water. Ari knew what he was seeing and refused to believe he was seeing it. But he was seeing it.

Ari Livnat was watching the Red Sea part.

*

He did not know how long he had stood there, gazing at it, seeing it, believing it. Eventually he turned back from it and walked past Shalev who, still on his knees, was rocking back and forth, repeating a prayer over and over. Ari told Benny and the others to follow him as he walked over to where the protestors still stood, staring at the soldiers, confused, mute, unmoving. Disbelieving.

He knew in that instant that they had not seen what he had seen. What the others had seen. A sign that was not for them. A message from a God that was not theirs.

A colossal, irresistible certainty settled on Ari and unslung his carbine from his shoulder.

“Kill them,” he said to the others in a dull, cold voice. “Kill them all …”

There was a sound like more thunder. But this time not from the sky.

The lead had lightened from the sky and Brian Newcombe, waiting for Macbeth on the steps of the Administration Building, suggested they take a walk around the hospital grounds.

Macbeth agreed, but he was still haunted by Deborah’s delusion: it was an occupational hazard of psychiatry that sometimes the alternate reality of a patient’s delusion would loiter in the corners of your mind, like a book you’d just finished reading.

Newcombe cut straight to the chase. “I’ve been asked to persuade you not to return to Denmark.”

Macbeth laughed. “That’s impossible. I’m flying out tonight …”

“We’ll take care of all of that. We need you here much more than the Copenhagen Project needs you in Denmark.”

“Well, that’s all very flattering, but as I told you, if you can track him down, Josh Hoberman is much—”

Newcombe cut Macbeth off. “Josh Hoberman was fished out of the Potomac this morning, his neck broken.”

Macbeth stopped. “Murdered?”

Newcombe nodded, his expression serious beneath the Cape yachtsman tan. “More than likely by Blind Faith. There’ve been more killings. And more bomb attacks – Washington, London, Haifa. Islamicists
and
Blind Faith are both involved. And some anti-secular, anti-technology, ultra-orthodox Jewish extremist
group has claimed responsibility for the Haifa bombing. And there’s news breaking about something else happening in Israel. A massacre. I’m telling you, John, we’re looking at a world stripped of reason – a new Dark Age with competing superstitions ripping each other apart in holy war.”

“And they’re using the hallucination epidemic as justification …” said Macbeth.

“All this anti-progress, religiomanic crap is feeding on the phenomena. They don’t accept they’re hallucinations, they believe they’re God-given ‘visions’. Every mullah, evangelist, every shade of cult crackpot in between – is pointing to these events as the sign of an approaching Rapture or Second Coming or whatever the hell it is that’s promised in the particular brand of eschatology they peddle. We’ve got to get to the bottom of it and stop it in its tracks before the whole world loses its reason.”

“I see your point, Brian, but I just can’t let Poulsen down. The best thing I can do is continue with my work, which is exactly the kind of thing these lunatics want to bring to an end. Anyway, I’m not an epidemiologist,” Macbeth said as they passed the knoll beneath the maple tree.

“We’re not dealing with an epidemic, and you know that. There’s no pattern, no statistical focus, no patient zero.” He sighed, taking a moment to collect himself. Macbeth could see the stress was beginning to unravel Newcombe’s professional cool. “We’re dealing with something unprecedented. These events are beginning to have physiological consequences. People are being hurt – really, physically injured – by things that aren’t there. A TV executive in New York hallucinated that he was burning to death. No one else around him experienced the hallucination, but they saw his skin flake and his flesh blacken. The autopsy confirmed death by thermal injury, despite there being no fire, and his lungs were damaged in a way consistent with smoke inhalation, but there wasn’t a single
smoke particle to be found in his lung tissue. He didn’t just hallucinate he was burning to death … he really
did
burn to death.”

“It doesn’t make sense …” Macbeth shook his head.

“There’s more,” said Newcombe. “We’ve identified distinct chronobiological elements to the phenomenon. The circadian rhythms of subjects are severely disturbed for the duration of the hallucinations – probably what causes the déjà vu-like feeling before and the disorientation afterwards. I know this sounds crazy, but everyone so far has exhibited symptoms of extreme desynchronosis.”

“Jet lag?” Macbeth said without incredulity; he had experienced something like it himself after the Boston ghostquake.

“Both ultradian and infradian rhythms are affected. Female subjects reported disruption to their menstrual cycles.” Newcombe shook his head. “It’s almost as if during the hallucination some kind of powerful mimesis deceives the body into believing it has been transported to another time – perhaps the same mechanism that causes the body to mimic real injuries.”

“Are you saying that these events are some kind of psychic time travel?”

“Of course not. But the feeling of a temporal shift engages every sense and causes physical changes. Like the few people who experience very real motion sickness when playing video games.”

“Not so few …” said Macbeth. “I’m one of them.”

“There’s something else … Look at this and tell me what you’re looking at.” Newcombe took a smartphone from his pocket, keyed something in and handed the phone to Macbeth. The photograph that filled the screen showed a museum display: an impossibly giant creature with massive jaws and teeth, dwarfing the person standing in front of the display.

“It’s a wolf …” he answered. “Obviously not a real one …
It’s too big and the what-big-teeth-you’ve-got thing is a bit overdone. Unless I’m wrong and there’s some kind of giant wolf out there.”

“No, you’re not wrong. But what you’re looking at
was
real right enough, and ten times the size of any wolf that ever lived.
Andrewsarchus mongoliensis
, the largest carnivorous mammal ever to walk the Earth. Looks like a giant wolf, but it couldn’t have been less related. It’s actually more of a sheep or a goat. A giant, hypercarnivorous sheep that would have been able to bite a man clean in half, had there been any men around at the time. It’s a perfect example of convergent evolution, where one species ends up looking very much like another, totally unrelated species.”

“Okay …” said Macbeth.

“
Andrewsarchus
has been extinct for more than thirty million years. Its main habitat was what is now Mongolia and western China. We’ve had a report from our Far East team about a girl there who described this–” he stabbed the phone’s touchscreen with his forefinger “–to a tee. Right down to the way it didn’t have proper claws, but feet with hooflike talons. And right here in Boston, a woman was able to describe, in perfect detail, giant prehistoric insects that only a serious paleoentomologist could have identified. What’s more, she described the ‘richness’ of the air in her hallucination and how she was able to run for long distances without breathlessness. All consistent with a time – over
three hundred million
years ago – when oxygen levels were way higher than those we have today – thirty-five per cent instead of twenty, allowing insects to grow to massive sizes. Like the Chinese girl with her perfect description of an
Andrewsarchus
, this woman described a giant sea scorpion,
Jaekelopterus
, in detail that confirmed what has only been theory to date.” Newcombe let the information sink in.

“Could be cryptomnesia …” said Macbeth. “They’ve seen
pictures or watched a documentary they’ve forgotten about and the information has resurrected itself in the hallucinations …”

Newcombe shook his head. “It’s all too detailed, too correct. In every single incident, the hallucination has been consistent with an event that we know has taken place, or could credibly have taken place, at some time in the past. That passenger plane that came down just outside Harrisonburg in Virginia? The black box data recorder showed it crashed because the pilot took sudden and extreme evasive action shortly after takeoff to avoid an ash plume and a mountainous caldera, when they were actually overflying a hill only nineteen hundred feet high. Turns out that this insignificant bump in the Virginian landscape – Mole Hill – is the eroded stump of what was a massive active volcano, thousands of feet high, about fifty million years ago. And you know that the event we all experienced here in Boston matched exactly the 1775 Cape Ann earthquake.”

“Brian, I don’t know what you’re trying to imply with all of this, but it isn’t very scientific …”

“Perhaps not
medically
scientific. Maybe these events aren’t clinical manifestations at all … Maybe this has got something to do with – I don’t know – physics. Something to do with time.”

Again Macbeth stopped walking; he stood in the path and looked up at the sky, which had brightened only to a diffuse sodium gray.

“You’re not the only person to have suggested that today, Brian …”

If there was one aspect of culture that was truly global, thought Macbeth, then it was the airport. An airport lounge was an airport lounge wherever you were in the world: identical seating, identical lighting, identical vast expanses of glass offering identical views of acres of tarmac runways. Even the coffee was identical. It was as if the same small team of architects, interior designers, store-fitters and glum-faced personnel were air-freighted around the world from airport to airport simply to disconcert the traveler by making the place of arrival as blandly indistinguishable from the place of departure as possible. Even climate had no part to play: hermetically sealed lounges were heated in Reykjavik or air-cooled in Abu Dhabi to a universal seventy-two degrees; just close enough to body temperature to make you feel vaguely sweaty and wilted.