REVELATION: Book One of THE RECARN CHRONICLES (16 page)

“Enjoying yourself Mr. Saunders?”

Maurice didn’t know where to look. He started
to panic and shout.

“Help! Somebody help me!”

“Shouting won’t do you any good Mr. Saunders.
These rooms are soundproofed because sometimes our visitors get
distressed and start making a noise. The doors are locked too. The
only way you’re going to leave here is in a coffin. Well, not so
much a coffin, but a cardboard box.”

Maurice lunged forwards and tried to
overpower the woman, ignoring for a moment that he was stark naked,
but she was surprisingly strong for her build and threw him back
effortlessly into his chair. She placed her foot on the armchair,
between his legs, and raised the hem of her skirt until it was
almost above her thighs and ran her tongue along her lips.

“Want some before you go, Richard?”

“I don’t want anything. I’ve changed my mind.
Let me go.”

Maurice found it obscene how the young woman
could abuse and destroy what should be an emotional experience, the
last emotional experience of his life. It was ironic that the
treatment dealt out at the STC was probably sufficiently brutal
that it would have been an effective way of persuading would-be
suicides to change their minds, but once registered there was
definitely no turning back. The fact of the matter was that a
continuing increase in the number of suicides was essential to
keeping energy costs down. The cremation of bodies supplied
valuable energy to the national grid and the reduction in the
population meant that the planet's food resources could stretch
that much further. These suicides were doing society a great
service and society didn't want to lose such a plentiful,
consistent and free resource.

Suddenly there was a loud crash and the door
flew open, a bolt of orange light shooting across the room causing
the young woman to slump to the floor unconscious. Two dark clad
figures in ski masks ran towards Maurice, grabbed him under the
arms, and hoisted him off his feet, carrying him unceremoniously
through the door and out of the building, before bundling him into
the back seat of a waiting car. Once in the car, one of his
kidnappers - Maurice wasn't sure if he was being kidnapped or
rescued - covered him with a blanket.

"Sorry Maurice. Did we interrupt something
back there? You should be famous mate. Not a lot of people get out
of these places alive… well, nobody really.”

Maurice still felt very vulnerable.

“I don’t suppose you’ve got any clothes I
could change into? Please?”

“As a matter of fact we do. Your clothes from
your hotel room. When we get a chance you can put some clothes on,
but it's not safe for you to change here and now. Just use the
blanket for now"

The car sped off leaving a cloud of dust
in its wake and headed towards the nearest motorway junction. Time
was of the essence and the driver and his colleague wanted to get
as much distance between them and Paignton as possible. They drove
quickly but not so fast as to attract attention. A naked man in the
back seat of a stolen car would be particularly difficult to
explain if they were stopped by the police. The driver entered the
coordinates of the Welcome Break services at Junction 19 of the
motorway into the Self-Drive System, and relaxed as the car drove
itself to the destination at speeds of up to 150 mph. Since
self-driving cars had become the norm, speed limits had more than
doubled as the onboard computers and sensors made it almost
impossible to have an accident.

About forty-five minutes later they pulled
into the car park of the motorway services and the driver parked
the car manually, some distance away from the rest of the parked
vehicles. An SUV with darkened windows pulled up alongside their
vehicle and they all changed vehicles, as quickly and with as
little fuss as possible. Once in the new vehicle Maurice was given
some clothes to put on and once he was dressed he became much more
relaxed. He still wasn’t sure if he’d just been rescued or
kidnapped but his captors or rescuers seemed amicable enough and
were treating him quite well. Whichever they were he was grateful
that they had got him out of that place because he definitely
didn’t want to die just yet.

The SUV continued
its journey along the M4 motorway until junction
8/9. The vehicle hardly slowed as it left the motorway and cruised
effortlessly along winding roads, weaving between other cars at
speeds of up to 150 mph. Maurice marvelled at the efficiency and
quick reactions of the self-drive system. He glanced over at the
rescuer/captor sitting to his right in the back of the
car.

“I don’t know
how we managed before self-drive technology took over our traffic.
“

“We managed
like this. The last thing we want is to be traced. You do know that
self-drive systems are integrated with GPS, don’t you? And if the
car has GPS, then anyone can track it from their office desk or
wherever they have a computer. Even from smartphones. So…we’ve
taken out the self-drive system. The last thing we want is to be
tracked by the government or anyone else for that matter.”

“But, isn’t
that illegal? All cars have to have self-drive technology nowadays,
so they can drive fast but safe.”

“It may be
illegal… but so’s most of what we do. Don’t worry about it. And
Tony here is a real Lewis Hamilton.”

“Who’s Lewis
Hamilton?”

“Hey Tony,
Maurice here wants to know who Lewis Hamilton is. Lewis Hamilton,
Maurice, was one of our best Formula One drivers, back in the day
when cars used to race each other on racing circuits around the
world. The competition was called the Grand Prix. But since the
introduction of self-drive cars most people can get their kicks by
actually being in a car that’s going a couple of hundred miles per
hour, rather than watching someone else drive that fast. The public
lost interest and so the sponsors lost interest too. Apparently it
was a very expensive sport.”

“You mean that
was Tony driving at those breakneck speeds, not a computer?”

“Yep, that was
Tony.”

Maurice was
glad that they hadn’t told him earlier; he’d have been scared stiff
if he’d thought that a human being was controlling the car. He
decided that if he was in danger of being killed in a car crash,
he’d like to know if it would be as a prisoner or if he was being
rescued.

“You said that
what you do is mostly illegal. So what exactly do you do?”

“We resist.
Specifically we resist the oppression of the government and its
puppet-master. We work for the resistance. We work for One Life.
And today we’re your fairy godfathers.”

One Life was the worldwide network of resistance cells that
harassed, sabotaged and damaged The Order wherever possible.
Reincarnation was a fact and
One Life could do nothing about that, but their dream was to return
to a world without Recarns, a world where nobody remembered past
lives and made the best of each life that they had,
a world that considered each life an individual
life and not as part of an eternally renewing lifecycle where
corrupt Recarns could pass money and forward power to their
subsequent incarnations.

“But wasn’t the
government voted in democratically? Surely they can be voted out
just as easily as they can be voted in?”

“Maurice, do
you really believe that? Hasn’t your life got worse since the ONP
took power?”

“Yes, I suppose
it has.”

“You suppose it
has? You suppose it has? Maurice, are you fucking simple or
something? Look at you. You nearly lost your daughter because you
couldn’t afford the surgery she needed. You stole the money to pay
for her surgery from some bloke and accidentally killed him in the
process. You’ve lost your family and were about to top yourself.
Yes, you’re certainly living the life of Riley, aren’t you? Who the
fuck do you think is responsible?”

Maurice thought back to a previous time, a time when he was
still with Karen and his daughters. He had snapped under the
pressure that he might lose Caitlin and said what he really thought
about the Government. But that time he had been under the
protection of the
anti-bug sweeper. Now he had no such protection. What if
they were government agents trying to get him to incriminate
himself? He thought about it for a second and then realised that if
the government had wanted rid of him, then all they had to do was
to have left him in the clutches of that evil bitch at the Self
Termination Centre.

“Yes. Alright. Yes, my life has turned into a
giant fucking mess. And yes, I do blame the government. But that
still doesn’t explain why they can’t be ousted at a General
Election.”

“I’ll explain things to you, Maurice. There
are things that you’re obviously not aware of. Remember I mentioned
the word ‘puppet-master’?”

“Yes.”

“Well, the ONP was voted in. It’s a
democratically elected government. It was voted in because it
seemed to have the answer to the economic mess that the country was
in. It was supposed to be the saviour. Now, who do you think caused
the global recession?”

“I don’t know. The banks?”

“Yes, indirectly the banks caused it. But
they were acting under orders of a far higher authority.”

“What higher authority?”

“This is where you might find it hard to
believe.”

“What higher authority?”

“Have you heard of the Illuminati?”

“The Illuminati? Surely that’s just a myth
isn’t it? That’s just something conspiracy theorists go on
about?”

“I wish it were just a myth, Maurice. But the
truth of the matter is that the Illuminati really exists. It has
done for hundreds of years.”

“How do you know?”

“Because we have agents embedded inside the
organisation. They’re sympathisers – we call them SIMPs. They’re
disillusioned members of the Illuminati and they feed us
information about what’s happening.”

Of course, Maurice had heard about the
Illuminati but he thought it was just stories, made up by
over-active imaginations looking for someone to take the blame for
life’s problems.

“It gets even crazier. The ONP, or the Order
of New Perfectibilists as is their real title, is the political
wing of the Illuminati. Remember in your history classes when you
learnt that Sinn Féin was the political wing of the IRA, the Irish
Republican Army? Well, it’s the same thing. It’s all part of a plan
to establish a New World Order. Only, now it’s not just a plan –
it’s a reality. Don’t you think it’s curious that so many countries
have governments which behave in a similar way to ours? They all
apply the same policies, and they apply the same policies because
they’re the first really global party. They may have different
names but they’re all the same political party really. It’s a world
takeover.”

Maurice thought that it all sounded very
far-fetched but it did make some kind of sense too. He’d seen old
movies – especially those old James Bond film – where a
megalomaniac, power-hungry individual wanted world domination. He’d
read about the Second World War, and Adolf Hitler on the internet.
Did this kind of thing really exist now? He knew of the existence
of the resistance but he thought that they were just terrorists; he
had believed the ONP propaganda. If what this guy was telling him
was true, it meant that the country – the world - was in an even
bigger mess than he’d imagined.

“Right, we’re here.”

The car had pulled into the driveway of a
modest but elegant detached house. Maurice was curious.

“Where are we?”

“We’re home. Rather than having a lot of us
in one place – which could arouse suspicion and also be a security
risk – we have a cell system, i.e. small units ready to act at very
short notice. We never go on missions in our own area, we always
operate at a range of a hundred miles or more. That’s why we were
sent all the way to Devon to rescue you.”

“Rescue. That’s a welcome word. I was afraid
I was a prisoner.”

“A prisoner? Believe me, Maurice. If you’d
been a prisoner we wouldn’t have treated you with such kid
gloves.”

“So… what’s
your name? I know the driver’s Tony. But what’s your name? And the
other guy who hasn’t said a word since we swapped cars?”

“I’m Roberto.
And yes, I know I don’t sound Spanish. That’s ´cos I’m not. It was
my Spanish grandfather’s name. We’re all brothers. Tony is really
Antonio and the one who doesn’t speak much is Miguel, or Mike. We
call him Silent Bob.”

“Who’s Silent
Bob?”

“Jeebus, you
don’t know much do you? Where have you been hiding all your life?
Silent Bob was a character in an old film called ‘Dogma’. Don’t you
watch movies? You hungry?”

“Starving.”

Right, let’s go
into the house and have something to eat then.”

Thomas hadn’t let the grass
grow under his feet. He had been in charge of the Illuminati for
over six months now, and had already increased the priority of two
of Nathan Smith’s projects. There were a few raised eyebrows when
he diverted even more funds to those projects, but anybody who held
any office of stature in the organization knew that they were also
very important to Nathan, bordering upon an obsession, and so
nothing was said that could be construed as counterproductive to
the projects’ progress.

Thomas was glad to now be at
the helm. It suited his purpose perfectly. He wasn’t satisfied to
be just another name in the long list of acting Pindars, he wanted
to break Nathan’s stranglehold and replace it with a new dynasty.
Nathan’s and Thomas’s goals were almost identical but Nathan had
been the one in situ and therefore he had had the advantage. Now,
in the period between his death and his return as Pindar, Nathan
was vulnerable. He had left mechanisms in place to ensure that his
return to power was as trouble-free as possible, but nothing is
without its risks. Loyalty could always be bought. Removing Nathan
from the equation would be a difficult task but Thomas didn’t
believe it would be impossible. It may not be possible for a number
of years but Thomas was certain that in the not too distant future
he would be able to begin his own self-perpetuating dynasty as the
Pindar.