The Armageddon Conspiracy (22 page)

Sinclair squinted at her.
‘How could
you possibly know that?’

Lucy turned towards the soldiers.
She
wanted to be warm and comfortable inside a vehicle just as they
were, but she knew this was the only chance she’d get to talk to
Sinclair in private.

‘
Pope Julius IV gave
himself that name in honour of Julius II, didn’t he?
Yet it was
Julius II who commissioned that mural hidden in his tomb.
It’s
utterly unorthodox.
Those images from Arthurian legends were
unacceptable to the Catholic Church.
I wrote about papal hostility
to the Arthurian romances in my book.’

She reeled off the reasons.
Arthur’s
Knights of the Round Table – military knights with religious
leanings – were an obvious echo of the Knights Templar whom the
Church had outlawed.
Arthur himself died in mysterious
circumstances and legend had it that he and his army were asleep in
a great cave, waiting to be resurrected and ride out to save the
world from destruction.
That sounded like an alternative Messiah.
The legend of the Holy Grail revolved around the figure of Joseph
of Arimathea, not St Peter.
That suggested a Secret Church of the
Grail and a potential rival priesthood, taking their legitimacy
from Joseph rather than Peter.
That was a direct challenge to the
authority of the popes.
As for Merlin, the Catholic Church would
unquestionably have burned him at the stake as a sorcerer.
Then
there was the cult of ‘courtly love’.
Young knights were supposed
to declare their love to ‘unattainable’ married women, just as
Lancelot did to Guinevere.
That was tantamount to advocating
adultery.
So, the papacy gave no encouragement to Arthur’s legends.
No Arthurian art was commissioned – no paintings, no sculptures,
nothing.

Sinclair nodded.
‘Those are just the
most obvious reasons.
You’re aware of others, of course.’

‘
What do you
mean?’

‘
I have to confess you
weren’t unknown to me before I came to the convent tonight.
I read
your book last year.
It was brought to my attention because it was
about heresy and it’s my job to know everything about the latest
theories on heretical ideas.
Most things you wrote were
correct.’

‘
Well, thanks for your
support.’
Some of Lucy’s old rage fired up again.
It infuriated her
how her book was dismissed so easily by a bunch of old men.
Sinclair’s endorsement would have been priceless.

‘
You know it’s not the
Vatican’s policy to fuel controversies,’ Sinclair said.
‘Anyway,
we’d always known that the Arthurian stories were rife with heresy.
Julius II was posthumously regarded with suspicion because of his
mural.
He’s not actually buried in that tomb – he’s in St Peter’s –
but that doesn’t change anything.
The mural was paid for by him,
was worked on secretly and without explanation, and no senior
Churchmen were allowed to see it.
When the mural was uncovered
several years after the death of a later Pope, Julius III, no Popes
ever again took the name Julius.
So, you can imagine the
consternation when the last Pope chose Julius as his papal
name.

‘
You just need to look
at the centrepiece of the sculpture over Julius II’s tomb to see
how suspect he was.
He commissioned Michelangelo to produce a
statue of Moses.
Nothing so surprising about that, except for one
thing – Moses was given horns like the Devil.
Anyone can go along
there and see it for themselves.
We have no reason to believe it
was Michelangelo’s idea.
Even the name of the church containing the
tomb is curious.
It’s called
San Pietro in
Vincoli
– St Peter in Chains.
Perhaps
Julius was acknowledging that the successors of St Peter ought to
be chained like criminals because the line of Joseph of Arimathea
were the true leaders of Christianity.’

Now Lucy understood why there was so
much tension between the cardinal and Kruger.
One was the loyal
defender of the late Pope, while the other suspected he was a
heretic.
They didn’t trust each other, and she, in her turn, saw no
reason to trust either of them.
Ernest Hemingway once said that the
best way to find out if you could trust somebody was to trust them.
It was also the best way to get yourself in a lot of trouble, she
thought.

‘
How did Julius IV
die?’
she asked.

‘
His aide handed him a
note moments after he’d completed a speech to the world from the
balcony of St Peter’s.
He collapsed on the spot.
Within minutes, he
was pronounced dead.
A massive heart attack,
apparently.’

‘
What did the note
say?’

‘
No one understood
it.’

‘
Well,
what?’

‘
The precise words
were:
Not one of us
.’

‘
Who
wasn’t?’

‘
No one
knew.’

‘
Who sent it?
They must
know that much, surely.’

‘
The aide said the Pope
had asked to be notified immediately if an anonymous message
arrived from Israel.
It concerned a matter the Pope believed was
critically important.
The aide didn’t divulge any other details.
We
think a Mossad agent sent the message, but Mossad later denied they
knew anything about it.’

‘
But why did the aide
give the Pope the note at a moment like that?’

The cardinal shrugged.
‘As I said, the
Pope wanted to hear immediately.’

‘
Why would the Pope
have any dealings with Mossad?’

‘
The whole thing was
odd.
I guess we’ll never discover the truth now.’

Lucy’s guard knocked on the window of
the Land Rover and gestured at her to get back in.
When Lucy didn’t
move, the soldier got out of the vehicle.

Sinclair grabbed Lucy by the hand and
pulled her towards him.

She recoiled, hating his rough grip.
His breath was all over her.

‘
Listen to me, Lucy,’
he whispered as the soldier came closer.
‘I didn’t want to tell you
this, but I can’t lie.
If it looks like you’re about to be captured
by the deserters, Kruger has orders to kill you.’

30

C
an’t bear the sound
.
Vernon pressed
his hands against his ears to shut out the din.
For ten minutes,
hailstones had battered against the helicopter’s fuselage like
machine-gun fire.
The pilot climbed steeply to get above the
weather, but it hadn’t worked.
It amazed Vernon that the hailstones
weren’t smashing through the cockpit’s windscreen.
How could the
pilot fly through this?
The Chinook kept plunging downwards into
air pockets.
Vernon scanned around for something to vomit into.
The
wind was gaining strength, howling.
He was terrified one of the
rotor blades would shear off, sending the helicopter into a death
spin.

He stared at Colonel
Gresnick.
That bastard’s
inhuman
, he thought.
The colonel was calmly
reading his reports, acting as if this were a routine flight.
How
could the American be so relaxed after what they discussed
earlier?

Vernon repeatedly clenched and
unclenched his hands, trying to channel his nervous tension into a
single action.
The helicopter was vibrating so much he imagined he
was in a tin suspended in a wind tunnel.
Everything not firmly
locked down shook and rattled, threatening to fly loose.
Normally,
the thought that the helicopter could drop out of the sky would
have absorbed all of his concentration, but now his mind flitted
back to Gresnick’s theory.

Even if the Biblical Cain really
existed and had the most murderous hatred of God imaginable, he
surely didn’t think he could kill his Creator.
It was impossible by
definition.
God was immortal, deathless, the first and last.
How
would you even begin to plan his murder?
There was no starting
point because there was no possibility of an end.

Lucy, in her book,
hadn’t mentioned anything as absurd as a cabal of fanatics
conspiring to assassinate God, but what she
had
said was that some religious
believers – the Gnostics – had a very odd idea of whom the Creator
of the earth was.
According to them, he wasn’t the benevolent,
loving God everyone else imagined, but an evil monster: the Devil,
in fact.
The Gnostics maintained that the earth, as the Devil’s
finest creation, was an abomination, a prison camp for souls.
The
more extreme Gnostics believed that the Last Judgment had already
taken place and this planet was where the damned were sent.
Earth
was quite literally hell.

Sometimes, when he saw
how vile people were, Vernon thought the Gnostics had a case.
Glancing to his right, he noticed an SAS soldier in the far corner
reading a book.
He squinted to see what it was.
When he recognised
it, he suppressed an instinctive snigger.
He’d never imagined that
an SAS trooper would read the Bible, but why not?
Maybe the SAS
were more in need of divine reassurance than anyone else.
He didn’t
doubt which chapter the trooper was studying so intently – St
John’s Revelation, the
Book of
Apocalypse
.

As a God-fearing Christian, the trooper
would no doubt be horrified by the Gnostics.
As for Vernon, he’d
never got round to either embracing or rejecting Christianity.
Raised as an Anglican, he found that religion never impinged too
much on his life.
Weddings, christenings, funerals and midnight
Mass at Christmas – those were his only contact with the
Church.

He first read about Gnosticism as a
teenager for a school A-level history project.
One Gnostic text
claimed that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and that they had
a daughter, Sarah.
He’d found that notion deliciously subversive.
Many commentators, he discovered, had a soft spot for the Gnostics
and often portrayed them as early hippies – tolerant, non-violent,
vegetarian, non-sexist, unmaterialistic – pretty much the nicest
people in the world.
So, it was a shock when he dug deeper and
discovered that their core beliefs were about as disturbing as you
could get.

He’d never heard of any other religion
openly proclaiming that this world, its Creator and everything in
it were wicked to the core.
He admired its perversity.
If you went
along with it, it opened up a new way of thinking about the world.
It meant the forces of darkness had cunningly deceived the human
race.
We were the unknowing damned.

Apart from the
Gnostics, that is.
They weren’t fooled.
For them, being ‘good’ was
meaningless.
What counted was knowing the truth, and the Gnostic
truth was the astounding one that the material world was malignant.
The stuff that comprised the world – what we nowadays labelled as
protons, electrons, neutrons, and all the atoms and molecules born
from them – was imbued with evil.
At the most fundamental level of
material existence, evil was ingrained.
Vernon remembered enough of
his Oxford PPE degree to know that philosophers of antiquity often
referred to the
animus
mundi
– the world soul.
To the
Gnostics, this soul was irredeemably wicked.

From that belief, everything flowed
with inexorable logic.
The Creator of the material world was evil,
everyone who worshipped him was evil, everything his prophets and
priests proclaimed as true was false.
On the other hand, everyone
who opposed those prophets and priests was righteous.
The task of
the human soul was not to be good, but to be clever enough to
escape this hell.