The Armageddon Conspiracy (11 page)

Panel 9 was Jesus being baptised by
John the Baptist in the river Jordan.
Another Jesus-like figure
waited in the background.
Lucy had no idea who this other person
was but, for some reason, she thought this figure had immense
significance.

Panel 10 showed Salome
doing the dance of seven veils for King Herod.
In the next panel,
John the Baptist’s severed head rested on a gold, jewel-encrusted
dish.
The eyes and mouth were wide open, and something about it
reminded Lucy of Munch’s
The
Scream
.
Another man was being beheaded in
the background.
Lucy wondered if this was the same person who was
shown earlier waiting to be baptised by John the Baptist.
Who was
he?

In Panel 12, The Last Supper was
depicted with 30 pieces of silver lying between Jesus and Judas.
Prominently displayed were a gold, jewel-encrusted dish containing
bread and a beautiful chalice full of wine – the Holy Grail.

Panel 13 on the bottom right corner
showed a Roman soldier thrusting a spear into Christ’s side at the
Crucifixion, with a man, presumably Joseph of Arimathea, collecting
blood in the Holy Grail.

Panel 14 presented the Resurrection.
A
crowd were witnessing the event, half of them cheering, the other
half with deeply gloomy faces.
Lucy couldn’t understand why Raphael
had painted some people looking so unhappy at this joyous
event.

Panel 15 showed a siege of a castle on
a mountaintop.
Men were climbing down the mountainside in the dark,
while on the other side of the mountain, men and women were being
burnt at the stake in the dawn light.

Panel 16 was the most baffling of all
the images: Lucy’s own painting.
How could it possibly have ended
up in this collection of unknown masterpieces by one of the world’s
greatest artists?

Panel 17 showed, apparently, King
Arthur’s Camelot – a castle overlooking a raging sea.
Panel 18
depicted the battle of Camlann where Arthur, clutching Excalibur,
was killed by the lance of his nephew Mordred.
In the background
was a round chapel and a castle on a high mound surrounded by
trees.
A cloud of dark ravens hovered above the chapel.

The next panel presented a desolate
land, full of beggars in rags.
In one corner was a dark cave, with
a pool at its centre, full of stalactites and stalagmites.
In the
other was a forest with a ruined abbey in the middle.

Panel 20 showed a mountain castle
overlooking a lake in a wooded valley.
Painted directly onto the
surface of the lake was the Holy Grail.

The next panel depicted the procession
of the Grail Hallows: Spear, Sword, Chalice and Dish in front of
the Fisher King, the guardian of the Grail Castle.

Panel 22 showed the Fisher King with a
spear sticking out of his inner thigh.

As for Panel 23, it was simply bizarre.
It was divided into four quarters, one of which showed a blue
swastika on a white flag, the next a rising sun, the third a black
and white flag, and the last a skull and crossbones.
In the middle
of the four flags was a circle containing a pyramid incorporating a
staring eye, with a Phoenix hovering over the whole structure.

The final side-panel was the most
striking of all.
It showed the city of Rome in a mirror.
The
Vatican was displayed upside-down in an egg timer.
In the upper
section of the timer was a miniature universe of dazzling
lights.

Lucy’s eyes opened
wide.
She could hear voices directly outside her cubicle, speaking
in German.
What’s
happening
?
The language changed.
Cardinal
Sinclair was with them, talking in Italian.
He was evidently
angry.

Without warning, someone kicked the
cubicle door open.
A soldier stared down at Lucy, a machine gun
slung over his shoulder.
‘If you want to live, you must come with
me immediately,’ he said in good English.

‘
I don’t want
to.’

The soldier gripped his machine gun and
pointed it at her.
‘Then I’ll kill you.’

16

‘
Y
our
grandfather was Professor Reinhardt Weiss of Cambridge University?’
Harrington asked, seemingly dumbfounded.

Gresnick nodded.
‘He
moved to Harvard at the end of 1945 because of the way MI5 treated
him.
They agreed his translation of
The
Cainite Destiny
was accurate, but said the
document was patently meaningless.’

Vernon remembered what
Caldwell had told him about
The Cainite
Destiny
.
Now Gresnick was confirming it.
He
wondered if he should confront Harris about his accessing
The Cainite Destiny
within
the last twenty-four hours.
He decided to wait.

‘
Reinhardt Weiss signed
the Official Secrets Act,’ Harrington said.
‘He agreed he wouldn’t
discuss this matter with anyone.’

‘
My grandfather said
you were all blind.
If you weren’t willing to help, he was prepared
to go it alone.
He made it his life’s work to discover the truth
behind
The Cainite
Destiny
.
Before he died, he passed on all
of his work to his daughter, my mother.
She’s now a History
professor at Harvard.
When my mum married, she made sure it was to
a leading authority in Esoteric Studies.
My father, at Yale, was
her perfect match.’

Vernon felt queasy.
Esoteric Studies
was what Lucy taught at Oxford.
Would Lucy – the old Lucy rather
than the shadow she’d become – be attracted to Gresnick with his
Hollywood good looks and his expertise in all the same stuff she
loved?

‘
Your grandfather made
an unauthorised copy of
The Cainite
Destiny
?’
Harrington was irate.
‘He
bequeathed it to his daughter and she to you, is that
it?’

Gresnick nodded.

‘
Commander,’ Vernon
interrupted, ‘I know for a fact that you accessed
The Cainite Destiny
yesterday.’

Gresnick stared at Harrington with
sudden curiosity.

‘
How…?’
Harrington
shook his head.
‘No matter.’
He stared into space.
‘When I joined
MI5 from Oxford, I was appointed special assistant to the then
Director General.
One night, just before he was fired, he got drunk
in his office.
He was in an odd mood.
I think he knew he was about
to be kicked out.
“If the world ever looks like it’s going to end,”
he told me, “seek out a document in our archives.
It’s
called
The Cainite
Destiny
.
I swear to you, Harrington, it
brings me out in a sweat whenever I think about it.”

‘
The DG then made one
of the strangest comments I’ve ever heard.
“If any of it is true,”
he said, “we’re kidding ourselves that we know anything.
It means
there are people out there who are party to an incredible secret
that the rest of us can only guess at – a secret history of the
world, a world stranger than we could ever imagine.”’

Harrington shrugged.
‘I had a quick
glance at the document out of simple curiosity, but it didn’t make
any sense.
I agreed with the official assessment that it was
nonsense.
I honestly can’t remember much of it.
The Spear of
Destiny was significant – that’s all that made an impression on
me.’

Gresnick gave a
half-smile then slid out a paper from one of his folders.
‘My
grandfather knew the document would be buried and forgotten.
He
couldn’t let that happen.
Although
The
Cainite Destiny
was baffling, my
grandfather recognised it as a key to something astounding: a
re-interpretation of history based on ideas we in the West have
never dared to take seriously.’
He placed the paper in the centre
of the table.
‘This is my grandfather’s translation of
The Cainite Destiny
.’

****

M
arch 12
1938

Schatzkammer, Hofburg
Palace, Vienna

How to begin?
I’m shaking as I write
these words.
Himmler made us swear to record nothing of what
happened today.
I’ve never disobeyed him in my life, and my only
excuse now is that these are private words that only I shall ever
read.
I want to be able to relive today for the rest of what, I
pray, will be my brief future in this world.

We arrived at the Imperial Treasury at
noon.
Himmler ordered the Austrian staff to leave and then twelve
of us stepped inside, one from each of the twelve families of the
original priesthood.
It made me shiver to think that we must have
looked just like Cain’s original twelve priests.
Just as they wore
black robes and carried the mark of the Death’s Head on their
silver rings, all of us were in our black SS uniforms, with the
gleaming Totenkopf badge on our caps.

The
Führer, in his brown leather coat, followed us in.
Cain
himself couldn’t have looked more majestic.
If anyone was marked
out by destiny as our deliverer, it was
the
Führer.
We formed two lines, gave
the Roman salute and shouted, ‘Heil Hitler!’
as he strode past
us.

Following him, we
w
alked through the Imperial Regalia of the
Holy Roman Empire, ignoring the
glittering
trinkets.
Already, we
felt the Spear’s
presence.
I imagined that the legions of martyrs who struggled for
so long to avenge our Lord, to bring us back to the true light,
marched behind us.

For thousands of years,
the Enemy’s persecution of us never faltered.
They hanged us,
beheaded us, drowned us, burned us alive, disembowelled us, did
everything in their power to exterminate us.
Always there were
traitors, infiltrators, spies, deserters, turncoats, the weak and
the fainthearted, but the
Secret
Doctrine
survived every attempt to destroy
it.
And now the Spear of Destiny was about to be ours.

It lay in an ordinary glass cabinet –
the world’s most sacred relic, the most powerful object ever
created, resting on a red velvet cushion.
It was under their noses
all the time and they never saw the truth.
Born in ignorance, mired
in error, damned by their stupidity.
They deserve every horror
we’ll soon unleash upon them.

Sunshine caught the
Spearhead and it glinted as though it were bathed in the light of
the one, true God.
I could practically reach out and touch the
weapon that would free us forever.
The words of the legend came
back to me:
The man who wields the Spear of
Destiny will control the fate of the world
.
We knew the legend better than anyone: it was
our
legend.
We alone knew where the
Spear originated, the identity of its true owner and the reason it
was made.

The
Führer gave a signal to
SS-Hauptsturmführer
Neumann.
He
unlocked the cabinet and
the
Führer stepped past him and gripped the Spear.
When he raised it in his right hand, the spearhead glowed, just as
the legend said it would.
We all clicked our heels and yelled,
‘Sieg Heil!’