The Armageddon Conspiracy (47 page)

She turned away from the stained glass
windows and walked along each pew, trying to sense something, but
nothing came to her.
Why should she be helping Morson anyway?
When
he told her that her father was their leader, she automatically
felt it right to help him and his men.
Yet she still had no idea of
what their ultimate plan was.
They would collect the Grail Hallows
and conduct some ceremony, but then what?
Was Gresnick correct that
maybe the Grail Hallows were a super-weapon?

Morson was a man with no love in his
eyes, just like Kruger.
Was it right to ally yourself with people
incapable of love?
She agreed with him that love could be the worst
thing of all – she’d thought it often enough – but a world without
love; was that a place where humans could live?
Wouldn’t it be the
worst hell of all?

She glanced at James lying stretched
out on the back pew.
One soldier was administering smelling salts
to him.
He wasn’t badly injured, it seemed.

It broke her heart when she’d had to
end their relationship, but she didn’t have any choice.
Love
paralysed her.
She couldn’t think or relax knowing it was sure to
end.
Being neurotic about a love affair ending is, she realised,
the same as ending it.

Much as she wanted to care for James,
she also felt uncomfortable being near him.
It was hard to believe
that she had her former lover behind her and her dead father in
front.
Love and death.
They were inextricably linked.

She went down the right-hand aisle, and
round the back of the altar, approaching it from the opposite
direction from where her father’s coffin lay.
It unnerved her to
have to look at that black box.
Earlier, she’d insisted on having
the lid put back on.

When she stopped in front of the altar,
her fingers tingled.
All along, she’d known that if there was any
object hidden in the chapel, the altar was the key.
It was the
chapel’s only original feature.

Reaching under the altar, she let her
hands roam across the cold marble.
Near the edge of the altar, a
burning sensation spread through her fingers, the same feeling she
got when she touched the sword in Merlin’s Cave.

She retreated a few steps and bowed her
head, almost ashamed of what she was doing.
‘It’s inside the
altar,’ she said quietly.
‘In a hollow compartment.’

Morson signalled to one of his men, and
the soldier returned seconds later with a sledgehammer.
He went
over to the place indicated by Lucy and began smashing the altar
apart.
Soon, he’d cracked it open, revealing the hollow section
Lucy had predicted.
He quickly hammered away the surrounding marble
then seized the lance hidden inside.

Lucy was expecting Morson to be
overjoyed.
Instead, his face had turned pale.
The soldier handed
him the spear and stepped away.

‘
Isn’t that what you
wanted?’
Lucy asked, puzzled by Morson’s reaction.

‘
I was dreading this
moment because I don’t understand what it means.’

‘
I don’t
follow.’

‘
The one thing we were
always certain about was that we already had the real Spear of
Destiny in our possession.
Hitler himself held it in his hands in
the Hofburg Palace in Vienna in 1938.
There was no doubt it was the
right one.
It glowed in his hands, exactly as legend said it would.
At the end of the war, General Patton arranged for it to be sent to
America while a fake was returned to the Hofburg.’

‘
General Patton was one
of
you
?’

‘
Have you ever heard of
Section 5?’
Morson asked.

Lucy nodded.
Gresnick had been keen to
emphasise the significance of Section 5 in their earlier
conversation.
She’d found it incredibly intriguing.

‘
Patton became a
believer when Section 5 had a chance to speak to him and present
him with the facts,’ Morson said.
‘Everything they said made
perfect sense to him.
It was all in accord with his existing
beliefs about being a reincarnation of Hannibal and so
on.’

‘
But Hitler’s spear
must have been a fake too,’ Lucy said.
‘This is the real one.
I’m
sure.’

‘
I can’t believe that.
What I know, though, was that there were always two spears claiming
to be the authentic one used by Longinus.
We have the spear that
was once part of the Imperial Regalia of the Holy Roman Empire.
As
for the other, perhaps this is it.’

‘
You mean the Spear of
Antioch, don’t you?’
Lucy was familiar with the story of the rival
spear.
During the First Crusade, the city of Antioch was under
siege by a large Muslim army and likely to fall at any time.
A
Christian monk claimed he’d received a vision from St Andrew saying
that the Holy Lance was buried in St Peter’s Cathedral in Antioch.
A lance was duly found and the next day the Christian army marched
out with the lance held aloft in front of them and won a famous
victory.

Morson nodded.
‘Even at the time, many
people were convinced the Antioch Spear wasn’t genuine.
We never
took it seriously, yet you’re the Chosen One and you’ve found this
spear for us.
For all I know, this is indeed the Spear of Antioch,
brought back to England from the Crusades and eventually hidden
here.’

‘
There are only four
Grail Hallows,’ Lucy stated.
‘All of them unique and distinct
objects.
There can’t be two spears.’

‘
Fakes have always been
our main problem,’ Morson said wearily.
‘Fake Grails, fake spears,
fake swords, fake dishes.
We’re not the only ones plagued by fakes.
Look at the Catholic Church.
Fake pieces of the true cross, fake
bones of the saints.
The Turin Shroud – a fake.
It actually shows
the body of Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights
Templar.
Because de Molay rejected Jesus, the Inquisition subjected
him to a mock crucifixion and a fake burial in a shroud.
After, he
was burned at the stake on a small island in the River Seine in the
centre of Paris.
So, the Turin Shroud was bogus like everything
else.
Fake miracles.
Fake visions.
Fake cures.
But you can never
underestimate the power of false beliefs, can you?
Many more people
have died for the sake of fantasies than for the truth.
For us,
only the truth suffices.
We must have the authentic Grail
Hallows.’

‘
I don’t understand
something,’ Lucy said.
‘If you thought General Patton took the
genuine Spear of Destiny to America and gave a fake back to the
Austrians, why did you raid the Hofburg Palace?
Colonel Gresnick
told me you raided seven different locations.
If you’re using me to
find the Grail Hallows, why did you carry out those
raids?’

‘
We had nothing to do
with them,’ Morson replied.

62

L
ucy was
astonished.
Gresnick had made a huge play of those raids.
Now, it
appeared, they were a spectacular red herring.
How was that
possible?
Didn’t Gresnick say the evidence showed that only a
Special Forces team could have carried out the raids?

‘
We were furious when
we found out about those incidents,’ Morson said.
‘It drew
attention to something we wanted kept quiet.’

‘
So, who was
responsible?’

‘
I have no
idea.’

Lucy was baffled.
‘That spear you’re
holding is genuine,’ she said again.
‘I swear it.’

‘
That’s what worries
me.
What better way to destroy us than to send us a false
Messiah?’

Lucy was startled.
How could Morson
think she was a fake when she’d never once claimed to be anything
special?

‘
We’ve become trapped
by the past,’ Morson said.
‘At all times, we were trying to find
ever more secure ways of protecting our secrets, better ways of
confusing our enemies, misleading them as to our true intent.
But,
over time, we lost many of our records.
On several occasions, the
most important members of our brotherhood were killed before they
could pass on their secrets.
Now it’s practically impossible to be
sure of the truth.

‘
There was only one
place that told the unadulterated truth: the history of Gnosticism
going right back to the Garden of Eden and up to the siege of
Montségur.
It was the Cathar Bible, one of the two great treasures
smuggled out of Montségur before it fell to the Catholic Crusaders.
The treasures were buried in separate locations.
The Bible was
concealed in a cave somewhere in the
Sabarthès Mountains
.
Crusaders
captured the knight who hid it before he could reveal the location
to other Cathars.
He was taken in front of the Inquisition and
tortured, but didn’t give anything anyway.
They burned him at the
stake.’

‘
So, it was lost
forever?’

‘
As it turns out, no.
It turned up two centuries ago in Carcassonne.
It’s now in the Rare
Book Library of Yale University.’

‘
In that case, what’s
the problem?’

‘
It’s been dubbed the
most mysterious manuscript in the world.
In fact it’s become a sort
of Holy Grail itself.
Codebreakers and cryptographers all over the
world revere this book above all others.
They have no idea it
belonged to the Cathars.
They call it the
Voynich
manuscript in honour of the
man who brought it to public attention.
Experts say there’s nothing
like it.
It’s written in an unknown script and contains numerous
inexplicable illustrations.
No one has come anywhere near
deciphering it.’

‘
So, how do you know
it’s the Cathars’ Bible?’

‘
We have other Cathar
documents.
They’re written in the same script and they contain
similar illustrations.
The trouble is, only the elite brotherhood
who led the Cathars knew the language, and they were all killed,
most of them at Montségur.

‘
The Knights Templar
took over where the Cathars left off.
They created a new
brotherhood and were able to put together much of what was lost,
but not everything.
The simple fact is that there are holes in our
knowledge.
We try to fill in the gaps as best as we can, but it’s
never easy.
The Templars themselves were largely wiped out, and
again vital pieces of the jigsaw were lost.
That, ultimately, was
why Hitler failed.
He acted on false information.
He used fake
Grail Hallows.
But he didn’t doubt the authenticity of the Spear of
Destiny for a second.’

‘
What makes you think
you can do any better than Hitler?’

‘
Because a member of
our organisation rediscovered one of our most valuable treasures –
Raphael’s mural.
The mural was Julius II’s attempt to preserve our
beliefs, but it vanished from our awareness for centuries because
it was so inaccessible.
Of course, the mural led us to
you.’

‘
But you said I might
be deceiving you, that I was a false Messiah.’
Something else
occurred to Lucy.
If everything Morson said about reincarnation was
true, a mechanism might exist to rediscover lost history.
If you
could tune into the memories of your previous souls, the past would
open like a book.
Maybe the knowledge of the Cathar Bible wasn’t
gone forever.
Maybe someone with the right soul-line could retrieve
it.