The Armageddon Conspiracy (2 page)

‘
Our sins have brought
this punishment upon us,’ religious leaders were saying.
According
to atheists, it was a freak combination of natural disasters caused
by worsening global warming, but even they were running scared.
They whispered of tipping points being passed, of possible ELEs:
Extinction Level Events.
Just a different way of saying what the
holy men had already pronounced – maybe the end of the world was
really happening.

It now seemed bizarre that people were
so slow to respond to that first sign three days earlier.
They all
experienced the ‘three a.m.
event’, as it was now being called, but
everyone ignored it.
Then animals everywhere on the planet started
behaving oddly, scampering around in every direction, whelping and
whining.
It wasn’t just some animals – it was all of them.
Cats,
dogs, horses, lions, elephants, rats, reptiles, insects, the whole
list: stampeding, running, scurrying, fleeing, desperately trying
to find whatever refuge they could.
People still tried to pretend
there was nothing to worry about.
It was only when the swarms of
birds appeared over the cities that it became impossible to deny
something catastrophic was taking place.

As one of MI5’s senior intelligence
analysts, James Vernon was seconded onto an emergency team that
included his most talented MI6 counterparts, and experts with high
security clearance from top universities.
For the last three days,
he and his colleagues had waded through classified reports from
British agents in every part of the world.
It was his job to
collate all of the data, summarise it and present it to MI5 and
MI6’s decision makers.

A week earlier, he’d been thinking he
was at the top of his game, that fast-track career opportunities to
the top of the organisation were lining up for him.
Now he doubted
he’d see his thirty-first birthday.
He felt so exhausted, mentally
and physically.
There was a security shutdown and no one had been
permitted to leave the building for the last thirty-six hours.
He’d
snatched a few fitful hours of sleep in the rest room, but it
wasn’t enough.
The Director General had sanctioned the use of
amphetamines to combat tiredness.

Vernon glanced around at his
colleagues.
Everyone was as dishevelled as he was.
The sour reek of
body odour was everywhere.
Even the women, normally immaculately
turned out, had abandoned their grooming routines.

‘
Coffee?’
Caldwell
asked.

Vernon nodded.
He was in the habit of
stretching his legs every half hour: anything to avoid staring at
the data on his computer and the pictures on the TVs.

The two men went to the vending machine
and each selected a strong black coffee.
In the old days, they
would have gone to the window and admired the view over the Thames
while they sipped their drinks.
Now, the blinds were permanently
drawn.
No one in their right mind would enjoy looking at what was
out there.
Without speaking, the two analysts took their drinks and
headed in the opposite direction, towards the small lounge
adjoining the Situation Room.

‘
We can’t keep running
away,’ Vernon said, stopping abruptly.

Caldwell peered at him.
Only
twenty-two-years-old and fresh from Cambridge University, the
younger man was already impressing as an analyst.
At 6’4’’, he was
an ungainly figure, notorious for his ill-fitting suits, but no one
doubted his ability.

As they made their way back to the
window, several of their colleagues watched them.
Vernon pulled on
the cord to open the blinds.

‘
What does he think
he’s doing?’
one of the analysts grunted.

Even though it was a spring afternoon,
no light came into the room, just a fluttering darkness.
The birds
were out there, just as they had for the last three days, going
round in circles.
It was as though they were trying to find some
place of safety but always failing.
So they just kept flying.
Many
had dropped dead from the sky, exhausted.
All air traffic had to be
suspended; no planes could fly through the swarms.
The ground was
covered with bird droppings.
On the first day, the authorities
tried to clean it away.
On the second day they gave up.
The smell
was appalling.
Thousands of dead birds lay rotting in their own
excrement in every street.

Black vultures that had flown north
from Spain took a liking to the Gothic buildings along the Thames
and settled on the roofs like medieval gargoyles.
But it was the
crows that unnerved people, looking as though they’d come straight
from hell.
When they swooped low over people’s houses, they stared
with dead, black eyes at anyone who dared to look back.

Vernon rapped his knuckles against the
triple-glazed windows, relieved they so effectively blocked out the
sound of the outside world.
Some people claimed they would get used
to the noise – the interminable racket of the screeching birds –
just as they had to aircraft noise in the past, but he wasn’t one
of them.

Jesus
!

He recoiled as a black object came
hurtling towards the window.
At the last moment, he ducked.
A crow
thudded into the centre and disintegrated.
Mush oozed down the
windowpane.
The crow’s blood matched the queer new colour of
London’s sky.
In the brief moments when it appeared through the
gaps in the bird mass, it threw a sickly, rust-coloured light over
the city that had caused headaches, nausea and migraines to reach
epidemic proportions.
At sunrise and sunset, the light was
particularly lurid, forming great impressionistic coloured streaks
across the sky as though some mad artist was at work.

‘
Close the damned
blinds,’ a woman snapped.

Vernon pulled the cord and turned away,
his queasiness worse than ever.

‘
I bet you’re glad your
wife and baby are well out of all this,’ Caldwell said.
‘Sweden,
isn’t it?’

‘
That’s right.’
Vernon
was confident there was nowhere on earth safer than the island of
Björkö, eighteen miles from Stockholm, where Anna was living on a
farm with baby Louise.
But it wasn’t a recent move: Anna left him
six months ago.
‘What about you?’
he asked.
‘No girlfriend waiting
for you somewhere?’
In all the time he’d spent with Caldwell,
Vernon had never once asked his colleague about his private
life.

The response was typically terse.
‘No
one special.’

Talking was difficult for everyone.
The
whole of Thames House had surrendered to a peculiar quiet.
Voices,
when they were heard at all, rarely rose above a whisper.
The
volume controls on the TV monitors were turned down so that people
could barely hear what was being said.
Everyone preferred it that
way.

The two men finished their coffees and
returned to their desks.
Vernon found it impossible to concentrate.
When governments realised they couldn’t conceal what was happening
then, for good or ill, they let the media floodgates open, and now
one grotesque image rapidly followed another.

Vernon stared at the space on his desk
where the framed picture of his wife and baby once took pride of
place.
Now it lay at the back of his top drawer.
The future was all
he thought about when Louise was born eight months ago.
Now he
wondered if she had one: if anyone did.
At least Louise was too
young to understand.

He kept a second photograph, this one
in his bottom drawer, as far from his reach as he could manage.
It
wasn’t of his wife or child.
A picture of a ghost, maybe – it had
haunted his marriage from the beginning.

Reluctantly, he focused on the TV
pictures.
He’d never get some of these images out of his mind.
Two
days earlier, a series of apocalyptic earthquakes hit Turkey,
destroying forty percent of the country.
Istanbul was in ruins.
Millions were dead, their mangled bodies lying in open view as
overwhelmed emergency services dug trenches to bury the corpses.
In
some places, the bodies were gathered into mountainous heaps and
set on fire.

In Southeast Asia, two Tsunamis,
triggered by huge underwater earthquakes, struck one after another.
Most people managed to escape the first, but not the second.
No one
dared estimate the number of dead.
Then reports came in from
Thailand telling of people being healthy at breakfast time but dead
by noon.
They’d complained of nothing more than a sudden heavy
cold, but virulent avian flu was soon diagnosed, the start of the
lethal pandemic the experts had feared for so long.
Despite
attempts to impose quarantine zones, it was spreading rapidly
across Asia.
It wouldn’t be long until it reached Europe.

Everyone knew it was just the
beginning.
The most obvious sign was the sky.
Across the world, it
was changing colour, turning to the blood red now so familiar to
Londoners.
The history books said there had been nothing like this
since Krakatoa in 1883.
That volcanic eruption produced the loudest
sound ever recorded by humans.
The veil of dust it threw into the
sky blocked so much sunlight that the global temperature was
reduced by 1.2 degrees Celsius.
The deflection of the sunlight from
the suspended dust particles changed the sky’s colour for months.
Normal weather was disrupted for years.
A sideshow, apparently,
compared with what was happening now.

South of the Equator, storms covering
hundreds of square miles were raging, lit by flashes of lightning
so fierce that the U.S.
meteorological planes monitoring them said
they resembled atomic bombs detonating.
The video images they
transmitted to TV stations were extraordinary.
It seemed the
weather systems of hell had come to earth.

Vernon closed his eyes and gripped the
edge of his desk.
As a kid, whenever something on the TV frightened
him, his parents told him that if he shut his eyes, the ‘monsters’
would vanish.
Not in the adult world: here, they just got bigger
and loomed ever closer.

He heard a gasp and
hesitantly opened his eyes.
Everyone was still looking at the
screens, but all the monitors now showed the same image – a yellow
screen imprinted with three flashing scarlet letters:
UGT
.
It was the first
time in history it had happened.
Vernon swivelled round on his
chair and gazed at the analysts sitting behind him.
They were as
stunned as he was.
UGT was known as the ‘Word of God’ because no
one was sure whether it really existed, and it only appeared if it
was time to say your prayers.

‘
Now it’s official,’
Gary Caldwell mumbled.

Vernon swallowed hard.
It was official all right:
U
nspecified
G
lobal
T
hreat.

3

‘
J
ames Vernon,
please go to the detention cells immediately,’ a voice said over
the tannoy.

Vernon got up from his seat, grabbed
the jacket of his suit from its hanger, and headed for the door.
All around him, UGT kept flashing.
The UGT protocols could be
declared only if every government in the world concurred because
they meant that each service had to share its secrets with its
rivals to combat the common danger – usually anticipated as an
extraterrestrial threat of some sort.

Vernon shook his head.
Once you let
others see your secrets, that was it.
Right now, requests from all
over the world would be arriving, asking for access to the highest
security files, the ‘black’ files, forbidden to all but MI5’s most
senior staff, and MI5 would be doing exactly the same in
reverse.

As he walked along one
of the endless corridors in Thames House, heading for the central
block of lifts, Vernon wished the building wasn’t so enormous.
Built in 1930, it had two symmetrical wings connected by a linking
block, and visitors always fretted about getting lost.
The miles of
corridors kept the staff fit, that was for sure.
With its riverside
location and neoclassical architectural style, Thames House was
once described as ‘the finest office building in the British
Empire’.
Its elegant façade was made of
Portland stone, decorated with several fine sculptures.
Not a
building you’d normally associate with the secret services, but the
perfect stage, Vernon thought, for the grim announcements that
would surely be made in the next day or two.