The Armageddon Conspiracy (17 page)

‘
What have you got
there, Hugh?’
It looked like something Wells had printed from the
Internet.
Vernon took it then started swallowing hard, hardly
believing what he was reading.

And after some days my son, Methuselah,
took a wife for his son Lamech, and she became pregnant by him and
bore him a son.
And his baby was white as snow and red as rose; the
hair of his head as white as wool and his long curly hair
beautiful; and as for his eyes, when he opened them the whole house
glowed like the sun…And his father, Lamech, was afraid of him and
fled and went to Methuselah his father; and he said to him, ‘I have
begotten a strange son.
He is not like a human being, but he looks
like the children of angels of heaven to me, his form is different,
and he is not like us…It does not seem to me that he is of me, but
of angels…’

The Book of Noah

‘
What is this?’
Vernon
had never heard of the Book of Noah.
At a guess, he thought it
might be one of the books of the Apocrypha in the Old
Testament.

‘
There’s so much we’re
ignorant of,’ Wells said.
‘The Book of Noah was one of the holiest
texts ever written.
It described Noah’s life before and after the
Flood.
The original was lost and only fragments survived, like this
extract.’

‘
You can’t be taking
this seriously, Hugh.
It’s mumbo jumbo.’

‘
That prisoner should
have died,’ Wells retorted.
‘No one could have withstood the
changes happening to his body.’
His hands were shaking.
‘There’s
another part to that quotation from the Book of Noah.
It finishes
by saying that “angels” is perhaps the wrong word.
It ought to
be…’

‘
Let me guess.’
Vernon
closed his eyes.
‘
Demons
.’

24

I
t couldn’t
happen, but it had: two prisoners gone without trace.
Worse, it
seemed one of them wasn’t exactly human anymore.
It was a relief
when Commander Harrington gave Vernon something else to focus on.
Hunched over the computer in his office, he was now trying to put
together a PowerPoint presentation.
In half an hour, he, Harrington
and Gresnick would have to take their preliminary findings
concerning the two prisoners and their possible connection to world
events to the Director General.
With no answers, the prisoners no
longer in custody, Dr Wells possibly having a breakdown, an
ex-girlfriend in a lunatic asylum, and no end of fantastical
speculations, Vernon feared they’d be sacked on the
spot.

Where to begin?
Not with the angel,
that was for sure.
Dr Wells was speculating that maybe there had
always been some humans unlike any others, capable of supernatural
feats.
Vernon thought his friend was losing it, but there was no
denying something spectacularly odd was happening.
As for Lucy,
every time Vernon thought of her, he felt nauseous.

He peered at the
computer screen.
The bullet points he’d put into his presentation
were taunting him.
Again, he tried to fit the facts together into
some coherent hypothesis.
Facts?
Christ
.

Fact 1.
The world’s weather had turned
apocalyptic; animals everywhere were spooked.
Global disasters were
happening on an unprecedented scale.

Fact 2.
A unit of American Special
Forces had deserted and raided sacred sites linked with the Western
world’s three most famous religious artefacts.

Fact 3.
The Ark of the Covenant, real
or fake, had found its way to the White House where it was used to
conceal a bomb that killed the President.
No one had claimed
responsibility.
No demands were made, no explanations offered.

Fact 4.
The Delta Force deserters were
all grandchildren of U.S.
intelligence officers who interrogated
senior Nazi officials at the end of WWII.
These Nazis had specific
responsibility for looted religious treasures.
Half of the
intelligence officers then died in mysterious circumstances,
perhaps murdered by their own colleagues.

Fact 5.
The top-secret
document
The Cainite Destiny
was stolen from MI5’s archive, but Colonel
Gresnick had a copy of his grandfather’s original translation.
The
document said Hitler had a peculiar fascination for the Spear of
Destiny and spoke of a ten-thousand-year-old mission somehow
revolving around the Spear.

Fact 6.
Two members of the Delta Force
unit had been apprehended.
They broke into the British Library and
were caught looking at microfiche of old documents about the Holy
Grail.
They had returned from a surveillance mission in the
southwest of England and their target was someone very
familiar.

Fuck
.
Vernon still couldn’t accept that Lucy was part of all this,
yet one of the prisoners had actually described her as the most
special person in the world.
He had thought that himself at one
time, of course.
Maybe he still did, but that was because of love.
Sergeant Morson didn’t love Lucy, so why did
he
think she was so
significant?

Fact 7.
Fact 7
.
Fact 7
.
Vernon groaned.
It was preposterous, no kind of fact at all.
One prisoner turned
into an angel then vanished with his colleague after breaking out
of high-security cells and killing several guards without leaving a
mark on their bodies.
The angel also apparently attacked the MI5
archive and stole
The Cainite
Destiny
.

It needed occultists, not MI5 staff, to
make any sense of all this.

****

V
ernon had been
in the Director General’s penthouse office only once before.
He’d
never forgotten how spectacular the view of the Thames was from up
here.
Located in the top corner of the building, the penthouse had
a grand balcony with fluted Greek columns, and commanded a prime
location near the Houses of Parliament.

While the DG read his report, Vernon
opened the balcony doors and stepped outside.
From up here, on
bright days, the Thames sparkled like a vein of silver.
Last
summer, he stood on this same spot and marvelled at how beautiful
London was.
Several of Vernon’s friends fantasised about having sex
in their offices: if that were his game too, he would have chosen
to have sex right here.
But all he could see now was the strange
darkness that had clung to London for the last three days, scarcely
penetrated by the streetlights that were now switched on 24/7.
Even
during the day, with that sickly red sky, everything was dark.
Sometimes Vernon wondered if it were psychological – a
manifestation of the spiritual malaise that had afflicted
everyone.

The newspapers he’d seen in the last
couple of days used expressions like ‘peculiar haze’, ‘impenetrable
mist’, ‘smoky fog.’
Every few hours, fierce lightning storms broke
out, but there was never any thunder, and no rain, at least not
over London.
On the other hand, in the north of the country, there
was nothing but rain.
Flash floods were reported in scores of
locations.
Hailstorms in Scotland went on for hours rather than
minutes, with ice pellets the size of tennis balls that maimed
anyone caught in the open.

Not long ago, London had enjoyed a mini
heat wave.
The sun blazed down every day, a huge yellow disc in a
perfect blue sky.
Now Vernon scarcely remembered what it looked
like.
The thing that stood in its place cast nothing but that
eerie, unsettling, rust-coloured light.
London, full of energy days
earlier, was old and worn now, like a sepia photograph of a scene
of long ago.

He breathed in the
strange air.
It seemed to smell differently now, to have a
different texture.
Gazing out over the Thames, he wondered if
the
thing
were out
there somewhere – a dark angel, circling in the blackness, the
noise of its wings hidden by the birds’ incessant
squawking.

He returned to the main room and took a
seat in front of Director General Eva Barnes.
A small, fierce woman
with short, neatly parted grey hair, she never showed any signs of
feeling threatened by the select group of ambitious managers, all
male, who reported directly to her.
Commander Harrington was one of
them.
He’d made it clear more than once that he didn’t like Barnes,
but he respected her.
As for Colonel Gresnick, he sat quietly on a
sofa, with a folder in his hand.

Vernon wondered what Barnes thought
about his presentation.
The rings round her eyes showed she was
sleeping as badly as everyone else.
No doubt the Prime Minister was
phoning her constantly.
Vernon was glad he wasn’t in Barnes’s
position of having to answer the PM’s questions, to have to admit
there were no leads.
It was hard even to define the problem.
Was it
an intelligence matter or something for scientists?
For
priests?

According to the latest reports, fuel
shortages were rife across Britain.
Emergency reserves had dwindled
rapidly.
Power cuts had commenced in central England, and were
likely to get longer and more frequent.
The rest of the country
wouldn’t be far behind.

In America, CNN disclosed that the new
President had ordered key White House staff to relocate to an
underground bunker beneath the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
Did they know something everyone else didn’t?

But no one could hide the news
regarding the world’s volcanoes.
Dense, choking black clouds were
spewing out from all of them.
With an exploding volcano releasing
the same energy as five hundred atomic bombs, if they all erupted
at once it would be like the simultaneous detonation of 800,000
A-bombs.
If it happened, all the smoke and dust in the sky would
block out the sun and bring a permanent winter, a new and
irreversible ice age.
At the least, the blast was likely to
destabilise all the major fault lines across the world, triggering
massive earthquakes.

Was there any way out?
Newspapers, now
reduced to little more than a sheet, were still speculating about
the theft of the three world-famous religious artefacts and
promoting the claims of religious leaders that God was showing his
just wrath.
Could there really be a connection between stolen
relics and natural disasters?
At one level, it was absurd, but with
the world’s scientists squabbling amongst themselves, superstition
had filled the vacuum.
The assassination of the American President,
with its religious overtones, had only served to massively heighten
the frenzy.

On BBC
News 24
, bulletins
reported that COBRA meetings were taking place continuously, with
the Prime Minister chairing most of them personally.
What everyone
knew about COBRA was that it was activated only in times of
national emergency.

COBRA had always
fascinated Vernon.
The acronym was far more interesting than what
it stood for:
Cabinet Office Briefing Room
A
.
COBRA held its meetings in an
undisclosed location in Whitehall, although everyone in MI5 knew it
was a secure suite of offices within the Cabinet Office building
itself, adjacent to Downing Street.
It had everything an advanced
communications centre required – banks of computers, fibre-optic
cabling, fax machines, telephone lines, video conferencing
facilities, its own generators.
Everything was state of the art,
with all communications encrypted.
All so that the PM, senior
ministers and key government officials could obtain information
about critical incidents and have reliable, secure lines of
communication to the police, the fire service, the army, hospitals,
and all branches of government.