The Armageddon Conspiracy (40 page)

None of the congregation looked up at
Vernon.
They were all too caught up in their religious ecstasies.
Maybe that was the best way to face the end – out of your skull,
overdosing on false beliefs, gorging on whatever comforting lies
and emotional crutches you could find.
Vernon preferred the hospice
solution; the large injection of morphine.
He’d never taken hard
drugs in his life.
There was something enticing about slipping away
during your first major league drug trip.

Depressed, he wandered
back out, soon finding himself in the square of a luxury estate
called
Blue Anchor Court
.
Just when he thought he’d lost the others, they strolled
into the centre of the court, almost nonchalantly.

‘
Listen,’ Kruger said,
raising his hand to stop his soldiers.
‘What’s that?’

The sound was
unmistakable – an ice cream van, playing
Three Blind Mice
.
It was so
discordant.
Why would an ice-cream van be here in the middle of
this ghost city?

‘
There can’t be any
vans here now,’ Vernon said.
‘The city has been shut
down.’

They went looking for
the van and found it parked a street away, outside a tower block.
As soon as he saw it, Vernon knew something was wrong.
No one was
inside, and there were no customers.
Just that tune playing.
Three Blind Mice
, over and
over again.
Vernon hated it.
Stop
.
Just stop, for Christ’s
sake.

He went over to shut off the damned
sound.
Staring into the service hatch, he saw that all the ice
cream in the trays had melted.
A severed hand rested in a tray of
melted vanilla, a grotesque raspberry ripple.

Kruger opened the front door and
switched off the jingle.
‘There’s a body inside,’ he said.

Vernon went round to look and instantly
put his hand over his mouth.
The ice-cream vendor had been hacked
to pieces by machetes.

‘
Let’s get out of
here,’ Kruger said.

At the corner of the street, they found
an electronics shop.
Plasma TVs were in the window display, lying
amongst broken glass.
Several of the TVs were missing, probably
looted.
The rest were sitting there in pristine condition.

‘
Look,’ Kruger said,
pointing at the tiny glowing red lights on the TVs’ control panels.
‘Their standby lights are on.
There’s still power.’

He went into the shop
and, a moment later, all the TVs came on.
Half of them showed
BBC
News 24
,
probably the only channel still broadcasting.
On the others, there
was nothing but static.
Dead channels.
Vernon stared at the bursts
of meaningless noise.
Was the whole world like that now?
Blank
transmissions.
Dead air.

On the BBC screens, a stressed-out male
anchorman gazed grimly at the camera.

‘
I can’t hear
anything,’ Vernon shouted to Kruger.

A moment later, the sound came on, and
the picture changed.

‘
Jesus,’ Vernon gasped.
A picture of Raphael’s mural had appeared.

‘
Today, the Vatican
revealed the existence of an unknown masterpiece by Raphael,’ the
anchorman said.
He seemed incredulous as he read from his
teleprompter.
‘The mural is said to give the date of the possible
end of the world.
That date is 30/4/2012, under thirty-six hours
from now.
Vatican officials claimed that the mural identifies
someone living today who can prevent the destruction of humanity.
They have asked the whole world to pray for Lucy Galahan.
Ms
Galahan is reported to be a thirty-year-old English Catholic whose
current whereabouts are unknown.
The Vatican refused to comment on
a claim that Ms Galahan is in fact a mental patient.
A former
lecturer at Oxford University, Galahan wrote a controversial
analysis of the Holy Grail legends a couple of years ago in which
she maintained that they concealed a heretical secret.’

A picture flashed onto every screen –
the glamorous publicity photograph Lucy had used for the dust
jacket of her book.

‘
The world’s last
hope?’
a caption said under the picture.

49

‘
I
n a bombed-out
library in Berlin in late 1945, my grandfather came across an
ancient manuscript by a Gnostic sect known as the Ophites,’
Gresnick said.
‘They got their name from the Greek word
ophis
– serpent.
They were
snake handlers and practically worshipped snakes.
The remarkable
thing about them was that they had an entirely different take on
the story of what happened in the Garden of Eden.’

Lucy thought some of the ideas she had
put forward in her book were outlandish, but Gresnick was doing his
best to prove they were distinctly sober.

‘
I have your attention,
I see.’
Gresnick stared hard at Morson.
‘In this version of the
story, a stranger arrived in Eden bearing an extraordinary
birthmark – a double serpent on his forehead.
Through time, the
myth became confused and people came to believe that an actual
serpent appeared in the Garden of Eden.
The stranger spent all of
his time with Eve, telling her amazing things.
He said he had
secret knowledge of the true nature of the universe.
He called this
special knowledge
Gnosis
, and the
Tree of Knowledge
was his symbolic way of representing Gnosticism.
Good and evil, he said, were entirely different from what Adam and
Eve were taught by Jehovah.

‘
So, the legend arose
that Eve was tempted by a serpent to eat the forbidden fruit of the
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
In fact, what happened was that
she was taught Gnosticism by the serpent stranger.
There was no
literal Tree of Knowledge in Eden, and no forbidden fruit.
After
all, why would Jehovah create a Tree, put it in the middle of the
Garden of Eden and then stop Adam and Eve eating from it?
That made
no sense, even for Jehovah.
If he had done that, he himself would
have been guilty of tempting Adam and Eve.
What
was
forbidden was any knowledge that
challenged Jehovah.
Gnosticism was
the
forbidden knowledge; forbidden
because it was the very first heresy – Original Sin.

‘
Eve managed to
persuade Adam to listen to the Gnostic ideas; hence the myth that
Eve tempted Adam to join her in eating the forbidden apple.
What
she kept secret was that she was pregnant, and Adam wasn’t the
father.
The first person born on the earth, according to the Old
Testament, was Cain, the first true human being.
His brother Abel
soon followed, and this time Adam
was
the father.

‘
When they grew up, the
difference in appearance between Cain and Abel was obvious.
They
fought over their parentage, and, on Cain’s birthday, Abel tried to
kill Cain – with an old spear he’d found.’

‘
I’ve heard enough,’
Morson said.
‘Go back into the other room.’

‘
No,’ Lucy said, ‘I
want to hear this.’
She was surprised when Morson shrugged and
gestured to Gresnick to finish his story.

Gresnick allowed himself a smile.

‘
Cain wrestled the
spear from Abel and slew him.
He knew he could no longer live with
Adam and Eve and fled eastwards.
The Old Testament said he was
banished to the Land of Nod, but there’s no such place.
Nod
simply means
wandering.
In other words, he began a nomadic life.
He eventually
settled in Canaan,
Cain’s
Land
, the same territory Jehovah later
promised to Cain’s mortal enemies: the Jews, Jehovah’s Chosen
People.

‘
The Old Testament also
says Cain was branded by God.
That too was false.
Cain, like his
true father, had a double-serpent birthmark – the so-called Mark of
Cain.
For some reason, it only became distinct once a year: April
30, Cain’s birthday, and, following Abel’s death, the anniversary
of the first killing in human history.’

‘
SS,’ Lucy
said.

‘
Pardon me?’

‘
Don’t you see?
If the
Nazis are linked to Cain, that’s why the SS adopted two sig runes
for their insignia.
The Ss represented the two
serpents.’

‘
They also had the
Death’s Head symbol, just like the Knights Templar,’ Gresnick
said.

Lucy felt her brain sparking.
It was
all flooding back to her, all her old academic enthusiasm.

‘
And the swastika,’ she
said.
‘That was an ancient Hindu symbol for reincarnation.
The
Gnostics called reincarnation metempsychosis – the transmigration
of souls.
Any soul, trapped in a human body, that failed to achieve
Gnosis was condemned to be reincarnated in a new body, and live
again in the material world.
So, the Nazis chose the swastika to
show their Gnostic allegiance and their belief in reincarnation as
the penalty for remaining wedded to this world.
The swastika is
just two square Ss stuck together at right angles, another form of
the Mark of Cain.’

Gresnick smiled.
‘Cain
and his people became famous for technological accomplishment, and
they spread far and wide from Canaan, building great cities
wherever they settled.
Their most famous city was an architectural
and engineering marvel, full of people from all over the world,
speaking different languages –
Babel
.’

‘
And that became
Babylon,’ Lucy said.
‘And centuries after Canaan fell to the
Hebrews, becoming the land of Israel, the Babylonians invaded,
sacked the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, and carried off all the
treasures it contained, including, perhaps, the Ark of the
Covenant.’

Gresnick nodded.
‘Some Babylonians took
to ships and went looking for new lands to settle in, and the
rumour was that they took the Ark with them.
They went to the far
North, to a land that legend said lay beyond the north wind.
It’s
called Hyperborea in Greek.
The Latin name was Ultima Thule, or,
usually, just Thule: the land at the end of the world.’

Lucy tried to gauge Morson’s reaction,
but his face was expressionless.

‘
The people of Thule
made another great journey,’ Gresnick continued, ‘to the most
famous island of all…
Atlantis
.
According to legend,
Atlantis was destroyed over two and a half thousand years ago on
none other than April 30, following an apocalyptic religious
ceremony.
The rumour was that the Ark of the Covenant was the
centrepiece of the ceremony.

‘
The few survivors then
spoke of finding a new Atlantis, a lush land marked by a special
star called
Merica
.’

Lucy almost clapped her
hands.
‘
America
!’

‘
That’s right.
America
wasn’t named after Amerigo Vespucci.
It got its name because the
people who discovered it thought it was the mythical Gnostic land
that lay under the shining star
Merica
.’