Silver (47 page)

Until then the faithful would be without a spiritual leader.

He walked away through the crowds.

All he wanted to do now was go home. He didn’t feel like being alone. He never felt like being alone. He didn’t like the dark hours. He didn’t like the silence. That was the dark country where his ghosts lived. That was why he drank. That was why he paid women to share his bed. He would face his dead when he joined them down in the fiery pits of hell. Until then he wanted to hear breathing beside him, as if the shallow rise and fall of someone else’s chest could stop the dead from finding him.

Blessed is the silence.

Noah was with
Neri in the same café, drinking the same thick, strong coffees when the TV feed switched from the news anchor to one of the many on-the-spot reporters covering the conclave. Their conversation veered from Juventus to supermodels and fast cars. It was the easy chat of two men whose friendship had been forged in hell and had come out on the other side of the pit together. He checked his watch. He had four hours until Sir Charles’ G5 would be ready for takeoff, which meant plenty of time to look at the stunning beauty of the city or the stunning beauties of the city as they walked by. He opted for the less energetic option. There really was something about the twenty-something Roman women he watched laughing and joking and utterly self-absorbed as only twenty-somethings can be. It was as if the world around them didn’t exist. He appreciated the view. “Very easy on the eye,” he said to Neri.

“This is Rome, my friend,” Dominico Neri agreed. “Even the buildings have the good grace to look hot.”

Noah grinned. “I need to come back one day when there isn’t a crisis, take some time to appreciate the natural beauty of the city on the seven hills.”

“There is a couch with your name on it.”

There was the flicker of movement on the screen over Neri’s shoulder. It caught Noah’s eye. The face on the screen held it. xistim Caspi. Solomon. He was holding an RTL microphone and talking.

“Turn it up!” Noah shouted, dragging his chair back from the table and standing up.

Neri turned around trying to see what Noah was shouting about.

“Carabinieri! Turn the damned TV up!” Noah yelled at the barista behind the counter. She didn’t seem to know what to do. “Just give me the bloody remote!”

Noah dodged between the tables to stand beneath the television set. He could barely hear Solomon’s speech. He would hear it again and again over the coming days, but at that moment it was barely a whisper until the barista found the volume.

Neri came up beside him.

“You don’t know my name,” Solomon said to him through the TV speaker, “but you will. It will be on your lips every day now for the rest of your lives. I will tell you this, your church is built on lies and death. Its very foundation is not the rock of Peter; it is the glorification of a false messiah. Today I bring the death back to the door of Rome. For five hundred years Rome tortured my people. For five centuries and more it turned them into slaves. It drove them out of their own homeland. It tried to purge the name of them and their home from the earth, so deep and unreasoning was its hatred. Today that changes. It was my blade that killed Peter Romanus. That blade forged from the silver pieces of Judas Iscariot. The coins that bought the death of your Messiah spend just as well today. They have bought another death—this time the Roman Pontiff—and with his death the world is ready for the new Messiah.” He stared out through the screen. His beautiful face was made for Hollywood.

Behind him the picture broke into a grainy image from a pinhole spy camera hidden within the Sistine Chapel.

It took Noah a moment to realize what he was seeing.

The Cardinals were dead.

Some had died on their knees in prayer, staring down into the pits of hell itself. Others on their backs, staring blindly up at the beauty of Michelangelo’s ceiling, out of reach like heaven itself.

Solomon’s face came back onto the screen.

“I am Solomon. Remember my name.”

Then he was gone, and the camera was focused on Maderno's facade. A moment later the live feed broke and the grainy image of the dead in the chapel returned to fill the television screen.

Noah pushed out through the glass doors of the café into the rising heat of the afternoon. There were thousands of people still packed into the square. He could see the RTL mobile broadcast trailer. He started pushing through the people to get to it.

But by the time he reached it Solomon was long gone.

Noah slammed his fist off the side of the trailer.

He had been there.

He had stood right in the middle of them and as good as said your God is dead.

He opened the trailer door and climbed up and inside.

The female anchor lay dead and bloody in one of the chairs, her cameraman lifeless on the floor at her feet. The screens all showed the grainy live feed from inside the chapel itself. He had no idea how to kill the transmission, so he went down the banks of switches and dials, tripping them all until the picture died.

Neri came into the trailer behind him.

He looked like a living dead man. He was talking into his cell phone in rapid Italian, shaking his head and gesticulating.

Noah wasn’t listening to him.

He had found the gift Solomon had left for him.

The woman clutched a battered leather drawstring purse in her hands. Noah pried it from her lifeless fingers and emptied it out. Thirty pieces of silver spilled out across the bank of displays. There was a note. He unfolded it. The message was written in blood.

All debts paid in full.

“Not even close,” Noah said.

The truth of just how badly he had failed was only beginning to sink in.

Beside him, Dominico Neri made the sign of the cross.

Steven Savile’s Ogmios Team will return in 2011 with

GOLD

From Variance Publishing

Author’s Note

Silver is a work of fiction, which, by necessity, means I have taken liberties with the facts to suit the purpose of my story—that is, to entertain, to thrill, to shock, to scare, to keep you turning pages, in other words; and every now and then, to make you think. However, where possible, I haven’t told any “lies.” Even so, wh
ere I have taken liberties, like the very best of lies, I have done everything I could to keep the story’s basis in what could well be the “truth.” Or, at the very least, aspects of it. That’s not to say that Menahem and Eleazar did inherit the thirty pieces of silver, nor to suggest that in the final days of Masada that they forged them into a silver dagger and hid it away. That’s a bit of creative license. The truth is that there are many conflicting explanations of what happened to those Tyrian shekels. But the one enduring impression is that, try as he might, Judas Iscariot could not rid himself of the damned things.

That set me to thinking.

This is how I work. Something gets under my skin and won’t leave me alone. Right around the same time as this started niggling at me, I read The Gospel of Judas, published by The National Geographic Society, and was, like a lot of the rest of the world, fascinated by the idea that the Great Betrayal could, in fact, have been the Ultimate Sacrifice.

I knew immediately that I wanted to tell the story from the other side.

Actually we need to go back a little further in time. It was the middle of the night, 3 or 4 am, September 1996, Counting Crows’ Aust and Everything After was on the CD player, and the yellow-faced Simpsons were flickering away on the small portable TV in the corner. I lay on a bed in a seedy student apartment in Newcastle (just around the corner from the place Ronan breaks into in the opening chapters, actually) with my then two best friends, Gary and Dene, when Gary flicked through the channels on the TV, bored, and stumbled across Henry Lincoln telling his fabulous story about Rennes-le-Château and Bérenger Saunière (check out Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh if you haven’t already). I was hooked. I kept thinking ‘this would make an awesome novel,’ but I knew I was a long way from accomplished enough to tackle something like that, so I filed it away, always intending to come back to it.

Move on the best part of a decade . . . move from the seedy apartment in Newcastle to a baking beach in Egypt . . . and dripping with sweat, I am finishing the last few pages of Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, and instead of closing the book on the final scene, I skimmed the ads in the back (don’t tell me I am the only one who does this, I won’t believe you) and saw the write up for his next novel, The Da Vinci Code, which, while being nothing like the story I had spent ten years imagining (being as I wanted to do it as an historical, from the perspective of the Templar Knights guarding the road to Jerusalem and holing themselves up in the temple before emerging with both mother and child they must smuggle out of the Holy Land), pretty much killed the idea stone dead. My wife tells me I actually threw my paperback into the sea. I do admit to feeling a huge amount of frustration. And of course, The Da Vinci Code had been out for several years by this point, but somehow I had managed to avoid hearing what it was all about.

Apparently I am very good at avoiding spoilers.

So, flash forward to London as 2005 became 2006 . . . I walked into Waterstones on Oxford Street, determined to find research material to write a thriller about Antarctica being the foundation for the lost civilization of Atlantis, and found hundreds upon hundreds of copies of Stel Pavlou’s Decipher everywhere. A quick glance at the back and my heart sank. Yet again, a great idea torpedoed by arriving late to the party. I think this is every writer’s nightmare. We could literally stop ourselves from writing a word if we discounted every idea that has been done before. On the shelf beside Decipher, however, was the very striking hardcover of the Gospel of Judas. I bought both books and had finished the Gospel before I went to bed that night. The beginnings of Silver were with me when I awoke the next day.

I didn’t talk about it with anyone, but decided I needed to do some research. Like most people, I had a passing familiarity with the biblical Gospels, and thanks to the millennial fear that had gripped the world around 1999, was au fait with a lot of end-of-the-world prophecies, the Gnostic gospels, the Dead Sea Scrolls and such.

Having decided I wanted to tell the story of Judas in some way, my mind went back to the shekels. It was a short step from ‘he can’t get rid of them’ to turning them into a cursed inheritance his children couldolor get rid of, but I am getting ahead of myself here. One of my very first research days was spent looking at the name Iscariot and its etymology. It was one of those days when, as a writer, you start to think not only does your story make sense, you’ve stumbled onto the truth . . .

The most likely explanation derives from the Hebrew
איש־קריות
(Κ-Qrîyôth) or ‘Man of Kerioth,’ Kerioth being the name of not one, but two Judean towns.

The second theory, and the one that I chose to exploit in Silver, is that Iscariot identifies Judas as descending from the line of Sicarii assassins, who were almost certainly the world’s first terrorist group. Historians argue that the Sicarii did not come into being until the fifth or sixth decades of the first century, which would mean Judas himself could not have been a member. . . but this is where fiction and reality blur so well.

Very few reliable histories exist from the day, obviously, but a lot of what we take as truth comes from the writings of Jospehus, i.e., The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews. The Jewish War is an account of the Jewish revolt against Rome (AD 66-70), and whilst reading this, I came across one reference to Menahem ben Jair, the grandson of Judas Iscariot. Until that point I had never considered the idea that Judas would have had children. It was as alien a concept as the idea that Jesus’ bloodline might have been smuggled out of the Holy Land. Menahem, grandson of Judas, leader of the Sicarii assassins.

Suddenly things began to formulate, threads of a story pulled together, and the idea of the cursed coins becoming a ‘family inheritance’ was born. But of course, with the revelations of the Gospel of Judas fresh in my mind, how cursed would these coins truly have been? Wouldn’t they have been more like a treasured reminder of just how much their grandfather had sacrificed? And how better to remember that sacrifice and honor the man ‘of the sicarii’ than to forge them into a silver dagger?

Of course silver makes a very impractical weapon because it is so soft, but as a ceremonial piece it makes perfect sense.

The next moment of synchronicity came in discovering that there had been an earthquake in the Masada region a few years earlier, and with that I knew not only how I would lose the dagger for two thousand years, but how I would recover it.

It was one of those beautiful moments where research gives us an answer every bit as good as any our creative subconscious could dream up. Give me a truth to lay down as a foundation for the building blocks of story every day of the week.

But, of course,
ilver
as a novel demands many more foundations.

Another moment of wonderful synchronicity came about on the 24th of February 2009, right in the heart of the writing. The green comet, Lulin, an astrological phenomenon that many had taken to calling Nostradamus’ comet, blazed across the night sky. Actually, it was a wonderful collision of The Book of Revelation and just about every end-of-the-world prophecy out there. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are traditionally said to be riding a white horse, a red, a black and a pale horse. Now, considering white has already been taken by the first horse, the Fourth Horseman’s (Death) mount is written χλωρóς (khlôros) in the original Koine Greek, which translates as pale, ashen, pale green or yellowish green. The color is indicative of a corpse’s pallor. Now, given the biblical links of astrological phenomena (the Wise men’s star, for instance), it is unsurprising that many consider the Four Horsemen to actually be astrological events; so, a green comet, like Lulin, could be interpreted as Death riding straight out of Revelation upon his pale horse.

That they were calling it Nostradamus’ comet dove-tailed beautifully with another dimension of the story I was developing—the idea of the Thirteen Martyrs that opens the book. Michel de Nostradame’s prophecies provided the basis for two important factions in Silver: Mabus and Ogmios. Nostradamus’ Mabus is the herald of the antichrist who must die for the Third Antichrist to rise.

Mythologically, Ogmios was a deity frequently depicted as a bald old man leading a band of prisoners with chains running from his tongue to their ears. The Gauls associated him with Hercules, whereas the Eastern Celtic tradition tied him to Hermes. The Irish equivalent would be the Dagda, brother of Ogma. Unlike Hercules, the chain linking the followers to the silver-tongued deity suggests a certain gift of gab, or as his Irish heritage would suggest, blarney. Ogmios appears in the quatrains of Nostradamus, although not once is it spelled with an s. Instead it always appears with an n—Ogmion or l'ogmion. In The Centuries, Ogmios counters the Antichrist, as it is prophesied that he is the only one who can stand in his way. So it seemed fitting that Sir Charles’ band of brothers take their name from him.

Of course, having inverted the story once by taking direction from the Gospel of Judas, it seemed just as fitting to invert it again, and instead of looking for a ‘Third Antichrist’ I turned to the meaning of the word messiah. I wasn’t surprised to learn that different faiths had different definitions and made different demands upon their messiah, or more accurately, messiahs. I was most taken with the Judaic definition—one who is anointed. Considering it was the Jewish faith that invented the term, I thought it fascinating that the Jewish meaning had become all but lost outside of their faith; but in story terms, it offered a wonderful avenue of exploration. Obviously the main aspects of the definition have been covered by The Disciples of Judas in the story, but it is worth mentioning them again here, as well as aspects I didn’t bring up. According to Rabbinical Law, the Messiah is born of two human parents, is able to trace his lineage through his father—back to King David—through the line of King Solomon and not through the lines of Jehoakim, Jeconiah, or Shealtiel, because this particular royal line was cursed.

These are four major reasons that the Jewish faith doesn’t view Jesus as the real Messiah. Indeed, according to the Jewish definition of the term, the real Messiah will make substantive and quantifiable changes in the real world, including re-establishing the Davidic dynasty through his own children; bringing an eternal peace between all nations, between all peoples, and people; bringing about the universal conversion of all peoples to Judaism, or at least to Ethical Monotheism; gathering to Israel, all of the Twelve Tribes; rebuilding The Temple; restoring each tribe of Israel to their lands of inheritance; and causing the nations of the earth to recognize that they have been wrong, that the Jews have been right, and that the sins of the Gentile nations—their persecutions and the murders they committed—have been borne by the Jewish people.

Together, these become the backbone of the beliefs of the Disciples of Judas in the book, and in a world where fear has become a commonplace negotiating tool (this isn’t new; think of the Templars, Holy Crusades and other attempts to influence faith with force), it made sense to turn my disciples militant.

During the course of researching Silver I came across over 250 End of Days prophecies ranging over 2000 years. Every one of the prophecies Abandonato cites Noah during his visit to the Vatican library is genuine. As a species, we’ve been obsessed with predicting the end of the line and, more often than not, these prophecies have been linked to ‘portentous’ dates, say, for instance, the end of a century, the turning of a millennium, the devil’s number, and so on. It’s fascinating, really.

But, back to Nostradamus and prophecies for a moment . . . Mabus the herald. I came across hundreds of intriguing discussions as to the nature of Mabus, from it being Sadam in mirror writing (misspelling aside, as Nostradmus had a habit of misspelling those he was predicting, like Hister); the Obama-Bush transition period (which mated wonderfully with the Lulin comet, for instance);  Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader; and so on and so forth. Like Archduke Ferdinand, Mabus, according to Nostradmus, is only important because he dies. Ferdinand’s assassination started World War I and paved the way for the rise of the Second Antichrist, Adolf Hitler.