The Armageddon Conspiracy (46 page)

Lucy looked away.
Morson, in his mad
way, was right.
Love is poison.
A beautiful poison, but poison all
the same.
The first taste might be paradise, but what followed was
hell.

‘
What are you going to
do with the body?’

‘
Our tradition is to
give our Grand Master a Viking funeral.’

Lucy had no objections.
When the
funeral director asked her all those months ago how she wished to
bury her dad, she almost chose the cremation option.
As a Roman
scholar, he would have approved of leaving this world in the same
way as Julius Caesar, on a funeral pyre.

‘
A ring,’ she said.
‘My
father always wore a ring.
Have you got it?’

‘
The ring was passed on
to your father’s successor as Grand Master.
I’ve spoken to him on
the phone, but I’ve never met him.
His identity is a closely
guarded secret.’

A scuffling sound behind them made Lucy
twist round.
Colonel Gresnick was standing in the centre of the
aisle.
His handcuffs were gone, and he was holding a pistol.
Lucy
gasped.
The pistol was pointed straight at her head.

‘
Get over here,’ he
barked.

Lucy glanced at Morson.
His face was
curiously blank.

‘
Don’t look at him,’
Gresnick shouted.
‘He can’t help you.
Just do as I say and step
over here.’

Lucy got to her feet.
She’d started to
like Gresnick.
They had so much in common, so many reasons to be on
the same side.
Now, she realised, she didn’t know him at all.
He
was going to shoot her, wasn’t he?
Morson was right all along –
only he and his men were interested in protecting her.
Her heart
pounded as she made her way towards the colonel.

‘
I’m leaving here with
Lucy,’ Gresnick yelled, ‘so I want all of you to back
off.’

‘
You’re not going
anywhere.’
Morson stood up.
He and his men drew their
pistols.

Gresnick grabbed Lucy, twisted her
round, with his arm round her neck, and prodded the barrel of his
pistol against her temple.
‘I swear, I’ll shoot her.’

All of the soldiers raised their
pistols and pointed them at Gresnick.

‘
Don’t make me do it,’
Gresnick said.
‘You know I won’t hesitate.’

‘
I’ll count to three,’
Morson said.
‘If you don’t hand over Lucy, we’ll shoot you.
One…Two…’

Gresnick dropped his pistol and
released his hold on Lucy.
She darted back to Morson’s side.

‘
I don’t understand,’
Gresnick said.
‘You were willing to let me shoot Lucy.
Your whole
plan depends on her.’

Morson smirked.
‘No wonder the DIA are
so unsuccessful.
Intelligence is useless if it’s detached from
psychology.’

‘
What?’

‘
You had a pistol,
colonel, and you had Lucy.
If you had intended to kill her, you
would have done it instantly.
You value your own life too much, or
perhaps you value Lucy’s as much as we do.’

Gresnick stared at the ground.

‘
Put the colonel and
the cardinal in one of the middle pews,’ Morson ordered.
‘This
time, use ankle restraints as well as handcuffs.
I don’t
want…’

He stopped, and all of his men spun
round.

Machine-gun fire had erupted
outside.

59

V
ernon sheltered
behind the small stone wall he’d found during the mayhem.
His heart
was thudding so much, he thought he’d pass out.
Jesus Christ, what
had happened?
It was as if those things were waiting, as though
they knew all along.

They had been advancing over the
plateau towards the chapel.
Snow was falling.
The night was
strangely beautiful.
Vernon always found snow magical.
It
transformed old, tired sights.
It was like a wonderful rejuvenating
powder being sprinkled over the earth.

Then the snow-covered field simply rose
up.
Vernon gasped as thousands of ravens shook off the snow they’d
lain beneath.
As the birds flew upwards in a huge, flapping mass,
the snow fell from their wings like white rain.
It was terrifying
and stunning at the same time.
The ice the ravens had dislodged
tinkled like weird musical chimes as it fell back to the earth.
As
the ravens accelerated upwards, they merged with a storm.
The wind
whipped across the plateau, full of snow and ice, stinging Vernon’s
eyes so much he couldn’t see properly.
All of his colleagues seemed
to be swallowed up by the night.
He was alone, lost.

Every raven cawed, creating a hideous
cacophony as they wheeled and fluttered in the night sky.
Then they
started to swoop down like Stuka dive-bombers, with the same
terrifying screech.

Vernon heard the staccato of machinegun
fire.
He threw himself onto the snow, and reached for the Uzi
machine pistol Kruger gave him earlier.
Through the snow flurry, he
saw vague shapes moving around.
An SAS trooper sprinted past him,
spraying bullets into the air as a seething cloud of ravens
attacked him.
Scores of ravens fell out of the sky, their blood
splattering onto the snow, but soldiers were letting out horrific
screams too.
No one could survive these aerial attacks.
There were
just too many ravens.

That was when Vernon crawled away to a
wall beneath the cover of some trees.
He sat there, breathing hard,
his back pressed against the wall.
The ravens were protecting the
chapel, he realised.
God Almighty, it was as if they had human
intelligence, or something was controlling them.

Through the blizzard, an immense dark
shape appeared.
At first, it was high above the ravens, but it soon
came swooping down, passing in front of the bloodshot moon.
For a
moment, the moon flickered, as if its light were being sucked in by
a black hole.
The shape seemed to have huge beating wings,
distorting the air, generating overwhelming blasts of wind
turbulence.

‘
Christ save us,’ a
soldier shouted.

Vernon recognised Kruger’s voice and
tried to see where he was.

The dark shape swept low over the
field, beating its wings.

Vernon could see a little more clearly
now.
Most of the soldiers had thrown themselves onto the snow and
were firing upwards from their prone positions.
Kruger tossed a
grenade into the sky, straight at the shape.
There was a pause,
almost silence, and then an explosion.

The clatter of machine-gun fire began
again, yet it sounded desperate.

Kruger came running out of the chaos
and threw himself towards the wall where Vernon was hiding.
‘It’s
slaughtering us,’ he screamed.
‘We have to get out of here.’

‘
We can’t leave,’
Vernon blurted.
‘Lucy’s still in the chapel.’

‘
I should have killed
her when I had the chance.’

‘
What
?’

‘
Open your eyes, you
fool.
Lucy Galahan is the child of the Devil.
If we let her live,
the whole world will perish.’

Vernon pushed him away and ran out from
behind the shelter of the wall.
Immediately, the vast, dark shape
appeared above him.
He tried to scream, but the noise stuck in his
throat.
The creature was beating its wings, closer and closer to
Vernon.
He held his hands to his ears, trying to shut out the
deafening sound.

‘
God help me,’ he
screamed…but everything was going black.

60

L
ucy was
astonished by how unfazed Sergeant Morson was by the
gunfire.

‘
No one’s going to harm
you, Lucy.’
He strode towards the door where his men were busy
changing back into their camouflage uniforms.
‘I want a patrol
ready in five,’ he barked.
‘Reconnaissance only.’

‘
Shouldn’t we be on
full alert, sir?’
one of the men asked, just as the shooting
outside ended.
Then the only sound was the ravens’ high-pitched
cawing.

‘
Trust me, it’s just
corpses out there now.’

As Lucy watched a handful of soldiers
troop outside, she was certain it was Kruger and his Swiss Guards
who had tried to assault the chapel.
Coming to kill her, or rescue
her?
Everything was so confusing.
Did it make sense to talk of good
people and bad?
Morson, Kruger, Sinclair and Gresnick all had their
own agendas.
Her father was mixed up in it too.
She never expected
that.

It was appalling to think of the Swiss
Guards lying frozen out there in the snow, being mutilated by the
ravens.
To die so far from home.
Maybe one or two escaped.
She
hoped Kruger was still alive.
It was too cruel for both brothers to
be dead.
Someone would have to inform their mother.
It would break
her heart.
Her two strong, proud sons throwing their lives away.
In
pursuit of what?

She sat in her usual position in the
front pew, and found herself studying the elegant stained glass
windows.
It took her a moment to notice something odd: in the pane
showing the Crucifixion, every figure other than Jesus was smiling.
His death was a cause of celebration, it seemed.
No wonder no
priest came here.

After quarter of an hour, the front
door flew open and the patrol returned carrying an injured man.
They laid him on one of the pews at the back and Lucy went forward
to see if she could help.

‘
Oh, my God –
James
.’
She reached out,
trembling, towards him.
Unconscious, not dead.
He’d survived the
helicopter crash, and now this.

‘
That man takes a lot
of killing,’ Morson muttered.

Lucy glanced back at Gresnick.
He had
twisted round and was gazing at James.
Was it true what he said,
that James had planned to kill her?
Apart from her parents, she’d
never trusted anyone as much as she did James.

‘
Let me look after
him,’ she pleaded.

Morson frowned.
‘Like father, like
daughter.
For all our sakes, I ought to kill him right now.’

‘
Please, don’t harm
him.’

Morson stared at the
altar.
‘I’ll decide about him later.
Right now, Lucy, it’s
time
.
One of the Grail
Hallows is in this chapel.
Find it for
us.
’

61

E
veryone stopped
to stare at her.
Sinclair and Gresnick glowered.
Lucy didn’t want
to leave James, but she knew she mustn’t antagonise Morson.
Slowly,
she forced herself to walk round the chapel, staring one by one at
the Stations of the Cross.
Yehoshua ben Yosef she mouthed to
herself.
Just as Morson said, it didn’t seem right.
Names were so
important.
Did they define your fate?
Lucy
Galahan
.
Was she standing here in this
chapel simply because she had that name?
If she were Jenny Brown,
would she be at home with her husband and children, praying for the
Prime Minister to save the country?