The Armageddon Conspiracy (34 page)

‘
Let’s say you’re
right.
Where does Lucy fit in?’

‘
Lucy is a unique
person, Mr Vernon.’

‘
You don’t need to tell
me that.’

‘
You don’t understand.
We carried out the most detailed trace of Lucy’s ancestry.
We
discovered something astonishing about her.
Whatever you may think
you know about her, you have no inkling of who Lucy Galahan really
is.’

41

L
ucy had always
considered the chapel of
St Gaius
a peculiar place.
It looked hundreds of years old
but in fact only the altar and its surroundings were ancient,
dating back to 1150 CE when the Knights Templar constructed the
chapel in their traditional circular style.
When the Templars fell
from grace, so did the chapel.
Local farmers carted away much of
the stone for building walls and outhouses in their
fields.

According to the tourist brochure
available in the chapel’s entrance hall, an anonymous benefactor,
with a particular interest in old Templar churches, rebuilt it
after WWII.
He reconstructed it in the original style, and provided
funds for a long-term caretaker, who was nowhere to be seen today.
The brochure paid particular tribute to the beautiful stained glass
windows showing the Stations of the Cross, the most iconic
incidents in Christ’s last hours on earth.
The chapel was never
actually used for religious services because the Catholic Church
refused to consecrate it because of its Templar connotations, and
there weren’t enough locals in this rural location to provide a
congregation anyway.
The whole thing was a vanity project, a
pointless folly in the wilderness.
Tourists were the only people
who ever visited, and they were mostly only interested in the
toilet facilities.

Sergeant Morson ordered two men to
stand guard then everyone else filed inside.
The soldiers spread
out into the wooden pews, some lying down and stretching out.
It
was obvious to Lucy they’d be staying for some time.

Cardinal Sinclair and Colonel Gresnick,
with their hands in cuffs behind their backs, were placed in the
front pew on the left of the altar, with Lucy in the right-hand
pew.
No attempt was made to restrict her movements.
In fact,
Sergeant Morson couldn’t have been nicer to her.
Quaintly, he
offered to make her a cup of tea, but she declined.
He showed no
friendliness towards Sinclair, staring at him with cold eyes.

‘
How’s our holy fool?’
he said.
‘All the prayers in the world won’t save you
now.’

Sinclair didn’t answer.
He just gazed
at the altar.

Morson glowered at Gresnick, but didn’t
speak to him.
Lucy sensed there was something going on between the
two men.
Because they were both American and both in the military?
Or some racist thing?
If her original suspicion was correct and
Gresnick was a double agent, he was doing his job well.
She was
rapidly feeling she could trust him.

She was permitted to go to the toilet
and, on her return, she found everyone sitting or lying around,
trying to relax.
She went back to her pew, wondering why no one was
showing any signs of urgency.
Wasn’t the world supposed to be
ending at any moment?

As she gazed around the ornate chapel
with its peculiar carvings of mythical creatures, reminiscent of
those in Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, she tried to figure out the
significance of this place.
The answer, she was still convinced,
must lie with Longinus’s Spear.

In her book
The Unholy Grail: The Secret
Heresy
, one of the central themes was the
significance placed on the Grail Hallows by the Cathars and the
Knights Templar.
She argued that these were essential elements in
the heretics’ most sacred ceremonies.
In the past, she believed,
the heretics had all the Grail Hallows in their possession, but
lost them one by one as Catholic persecution intensified and they
ran out of safe hiding places for their treasures.

What if the mission of these Delta
Force soldiers was to rediscover the lost Hallows?
Maybe they
thought she had expert knowledge of where to find them.
Was that
the real reason they’d kidnapped her?
Maybe it was something else.
Perhaps it was more than knowledge they wanted.
Her intuition?
Somehow, she’d managed to retrieve the hidden sword at Tintagel,
literally pulling it from a stone and demonstrating, if old legends
were true, that she was a rightful leader.
But a leader of
what?

Kruger predicted she
would do something to remove all doubts about who she was.
Had he
been proved right?
Was it all preordained?
In her blood somehow,
her
holy
blood?
Somehow, she was connected to these Hallows in a way she couldn’t
fathom.
The sword she found in Merlin’s Cave was no ordinary sword.
As soon as she touched it, she knew it was one of the Hallows,
probably hidden there by Templars trying to conceal their most
precious treasures from the reach of the Inquisition.

The Spear of Destiny was even more
special than the sword.
Some people claimed it had existed on earth
since the beginning of time, passing from one powerful dynasty to
the next.
Another story said it was forged by the Ancient Hebrew
Prophet Phineas to embody the power of God’s Chosen People.
It came
into Moses’ possession and he gave it to his brother Aaron.
It was
then passed down the line of Jewish High Priests, right up to the
time of Caiaphas.
On the Friday of Jesus’ Crucifixion, the Temple
Guard, led by their captain holding the Spear of Destiny, went to
the mount of Golgotha to break Christ’s legs as he hung on the
cross.

The legend said that Longinus thwarted
their plan by grabbing the Spear from the captain and thrusting it
into Jesus’ side.
The Spear then passed into Roman hands and was
used by Plautius, the general commanding the army of Emperor
Claudius that conquered Britain.
Centuries later, Emperor
Constantine carried the Spear in his victory over a pagan army at
Milvian Bridge, the battle that established Christianity as the
official religion of the Roman Empire.
When Alaric the Visigoth
sacked Rome in 410 CE, he took possession of the Spear, and it was
then passed onto his illegitimate son Theodoric I.
The Visigoths
and the Romans combined their armies in 451 CE to fight Attila the
Hun at the Battle of Chalons.
Theodoric led a heroic cavalry
charge, but after losing his grip on the Spear, fell from his horse
and was trampled to death.
Despite his death, the allies were
victorious, the battle proving to be the final major military
operation ever undertaken by the Western Roman Empire.

The Spear next resurfaced at the
decisive Battle of Poitiers in 732 CE when the Frankish commander
Charles Martel stopped the Muslim hordes and saved Europe from
succumbing to Islam.
Decades later it became one of the most potent
symbols of the Holy Roman Empire, being wielded by great emperors
such as Charlemagne, Otto the Great and Frederick Barbarossa.
Napoleon, a high-ranking Freemason and the man who ended the Holy
Roman Empire, tried to take ownership of the Spear after his
spectacular success at the Battle of Austerlitz, but it was
deliberately hidden from him, and some said that was why he was
eventually defeated at the Battle of Waterloo.
Later, Hitler and
General Patton were both obsessed with it, each being familiar with
the legend that whoever possessed the Spear of Destiny would be
master of the world.

The legend said that if
the Spear’s owner or his minions should ever lose it, it would
prove fatal.
Charlemagne, successful in forty-seven battles with
the Spear, died soon after he accidentally dropped it.
The Emperor
Barbarossa died seconds after the Spear slipped out of his hands
when he was crossing a river with his army.
Two ravens that had
accompanied him everywhere for years flew off just before he began
the crossing, and he apparently knew at that moment that he’d never
get across the river alive.
Minutes after American soldiers found
the Spear in Nuremberg near the end of WWII, Hitler committed
suicide in his bunker in Berlin.
He couldn’t have known anything
about the Spear’s fate, but that wasn’t how the Spear
operated.
It knew
.

Lucy always thought the stories were
complete baloney.
Now, she wasn’t so certain.
Maybe it was true,
maybe the Grail Hallows contained a power that could start and end
empires, that controlled the personal fate of those who dared to
possess them.
She’d never heard of any legend describing what would
happen if all the Grail Hallows were brought together.
Perhaps they
generated a power unprecedented in human experience.
Enough to
destroy the world?

Was the Spear of
Longinus the most potent Grail Hallow of them all?
Some called it
the
Heilige Lance
–
the Holy Lance – because of its religious connotations.
Others said
it was the
Reich Lance
because the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, the First Reich,
revered it.
Hitler had wanted to make it the most sacred relic of
the Third Reich.
He believed it was the guarantor of his historic
destiny, the ultimate talisman of world conquest.
If Lucy
remembered right, the spear Hitler coveted so much was now in a
museum in Vienna, back in exactly the same place from where he took
it in 1938.

Then another thought occurred to her.
What if that spear were fake?
What if someone had substituted it at
some point in its long history?
Perhaps the true lance of the Grail
Hallows disappeared from history and a replica took centre stage.
Was that why they’d brought her here?
Were they expecting her to
find something they’d lost long ago?
The genuine Spear of
Destiny?

42

W
hatever it was
Kruger knew about Lucy, Vernon wasn’t sure he wanted to hear.
He
was already struggling to take in that the woman he loved was at
the centre of world events.
He’d always found her exceptional, of
course, yet she was ordinary too.
Outside her academic life, she
liked smalltalk and gossip, watched junk TV, read trashy novels,
enjoyed getting drunk.

‘
Lucy is the only
living descendent of Seriah,’ Kruger said.

‘
Who?’

‘
Seriah was the last
High Priest of King Solomon’s Temple before the Babylonians
destroyed it in 586 BCE.’

Vernon stared straight ahead.
High
Priests and King Solomon’s Temple?
Crazy talk.

‘
The Book of Exodus
makes it clear that the Ark of the Covenant only functions properly
in the presence of a High Priest,’ Kruger stated.
‘The High Priests
always came from a particular bloodline – the descendants of Aaron,
brother of Moses.
When her mother died, Lucy was left as the last
of that holy bloodline.’

‘
I had no idea, and I’m
certain Lucy didn’t either.’

‘
There was no reason
for her to know.
Things like that get buried over the centuries.
Some secrets are just too dangerous.’

‘
Weren’t High Priests
always male?’

‘
The Vatican has
documentary evidence that Aaron said that the High Priest could be
male or female, as long as they belonged to his bloodline.
Moses
was the one who insisted on a male-only succession.’

‘
Am I understanding
this?
The Delta Force deserters think Lucy can operate the Ark of
the Covenant for them?’

Kruger nodded.
‘And by unlocking the
power of the Ark, they believe they can destroy the planet.’