The Armageddon Conspiracy (50 page)

She had only just managed to keep her
eyes closed for a few seconds when the noise began: the baying of
the wolves, a primal sound, as though the earth was travelling back
in time.
Their howling was so loud she thought it would carry for
miles.
She prayed Morson and his men wouldn’t hear.

James got to his feet.
‘Someone will
need to stand guard.
We have to make sure those wolves don’t come
any closer.
I’ll take the first watch.’

‘
Are you sure?’
Gresnick asked.

‘
Yes.’
James glanced at
Lucy.
‘Besides, I need to clear my head.’

65

J
ames took
Gresnick’s torch and stepped into the next room.
His worst fears
were coming true.
Lucy was
far
too friendly with Gresnick – he had no doubt he’d
seen an unmistakable look of lust, even love, on Lucy’s face when
she’d let Gresnick put his hands on her a few moments earlier – and
there was no ambiguity at all about the way Gresnick gazed at
her.

Aggressively, he swept
his torch round the ruins of the abbey.
Ruined love.
In the end, it
all crumbles.
Instead of joy at seeing Lucy again, he was
experiencing something else, new and utterly unexpected.
Hatred
.
Hatred because she
rejected him, because she had such a hold over him, because she was
so perfect.
Above all, he hated her for being capable of feeling
love for others.
Was she already falling for Gresnick with his
Hollywood good looks and his knowledge of the same obscure subjects
that she enjoyed?
In many ways they were a perfect match, and that
was…unacceptable.

He pointed his
torchbeam at the corner of the room.
A rat stared back at him.
He
picked up a stone and threw it towards the vermin, making it scurry
away.
The stone hit something metallic and he went over to see what
it was.
He picked up a penknife, in good condition.
He opened the
blade and touched it.
For a second, he stroked it, then abruptly
jabbed it into his palm.
Blood appeared.
Christ, what am I doing
?
He wondered
if something had happened to his brain in the helicopter crash,
some subtle injury that was causing his behaviour to change.
He
sensed a rage within himself that he’d never experienced before.
It
frightened him.

It was so cold here, away from the
fire.
Shards of ice were growing inside him, jagging into his
heart.
Why was it that we loved only the ones who got away?
They
had a magical lustre that time couldn’t diminish, unlike those who
stayed with us too long and grew stale.
Their skin that once seemed
so golden and untarnishable all too quickly corroded – second-hand
goods with no trade-in value.
What price wouldn’t we pay to bring
back those who left us before we noticed the first specks of
rust?

Lucy was more beautiful than ever, even
in her white army fatigues.
In the chapel back at Cadbury, she’d
looked so different from everyone else.
They all had camouflage
uniforms, while she looked ghostly – or maybe saintly was the right
word: pure and virginal amongst the hardened warriors.
He’d sensed
how uncomfortable she felt with him in the back of the carriage.
She didn’t say so much as a word to him – and if he was being
honest, he couldn’t speak to her either – so he pretended to sleep.
Every second pressed down on him like stone slabs on his chest.

It didn’t take long, in
this Gothic abbey, for the words of Keats’ gothic poem that so
haunted him as a schoolboy to come back to him.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
– the
beautiful woman without mercy – the perfect description of
Lucy.

O what can ail thee,
knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the
lake,

And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee,
knight-at-arms,

So haggard and so woe-begone?

It could so easily be
about himself.
No one ever mentioned the many knights who searched
for the Holy Grail but got nowhere.
He was one of
them
, the ones who never
made it; those who were killed, lost, driven mad: the losers and
failures no one spoke about, whose names no one remembered.
Lucy
was his Grail and she was further from him now than ever.
It was
impossible to believe there was once a time when he held her in his
arms, made love to her, spent as much time as he wanted with her.
The past was a mirage.
He wished he could set fire to his
memories.

He wandered over to the far wall, and
looked out of a space where there must once have been a stained
glass window.
No sign of the wolves.
If they were still out there,
they weren’t making any sounds.
There was no noise at other than
the faint crackling of the wood in the fireplace in the other
room.

He repeated a line from
Keats’ poem, the one he found most poignant:
And no birds sing
.
It was so long
since he last heard birdsong.
There was nothing he wouldn’t give to
hear just a few seconds of a bird chirping: a sign that life was
normal, that the nightmare might end.

What happened to Kruger?
All those men
dead back there, killed by Lucifer.
It seemed absurd to acknowledge
that Beelzebub was actually alive and on earth.
Was the creature in
the woods now?
Lord of the wolves, master of dark places.
Was it
possible to defeat him?
Maybe only an angel like Lucy could manage
it.

Sweeping the torch around him once
more, he imagined that the shadows were plotting against him, that
he had to kill them by stabbing his torchlight into them.
There
were so many weird shapes.
This abbey was like one of those creepy
ruins that vampires liked to colonize.
It was easy to imagine their
coffins in the crypt.

In its time, the abbey must have been a
spectacular sight, a beautiful stone edifice next to a babbling
brook in the middle of a forest.
You couldn’t get anywhere more
picturesque.
The monks who lived here must have found it an
inspiring place.
They could commune with nature, have as much
isolation as they desired.
Yet even this idyll crumbled, its walls
collapsing, leaving a shell with only a couple of intact rooms.

He crept back towards
the other room, noticing the dancing shadows cast by the fire, like
the restlessness in his own heart.
Would he ever manage to speak to
Lucy properly?
Or was she too preoccupied with Gresnick now?
It
seemed incredible that she was so friendly towards a man who’d made
it clear he would kill her.
Should he tell her that Gresnick
promised to shoot her if it came to it?
Gresnick was cold-blooded.
How could Lucy be falling for his act?
That ridiculously perfect
smile of his.
He was so
fake
.

Peering through a red pane of glass in
a broken window, James saw something that made him think an
ice-cold hand had gripped his heart.

Lucy was lying on her back next to the
fire.
Gresnick was leaning over her, his hand softly stroking her
arm.
The angle wasn’t quite good enough for him to see clearly, but
he could swear Gresnick was kissing her.
The American’s hand wasn’t
being pushed away by Lucy.
There was no denying the physical
intimacy between the two.

How could Lucy betray
him like this?
All those years of torturing himself, for what?
OK,
he was married, but only because Lucy rejected him.
She was the
woman he wanted to spend his life with.
That had never
changed,
not once
.
Women can’t love in the same way as men.
They lack that blazing
quality, the fire in the soul.
Their aim is to humiliate men, to
neuter them like dogs.

Now he understood why the grandparents
and parents of the Delta Force deserters had opted for male-only
offspring.
Who could possibly place any trust in females?
It was a
contradiction in terms.
Fickle, protean, they’d slip through any
net you used to catch them.
They themselves had no idea of what
they were, and nor did they care.
And the whole thing about test
tube babies was clear too.
Most Gnostics detested sex, seeing it as
the worst instrument of Satan, the mechanism by which new souls
were delivered into this hell.
So, the test tube technique saved
them from having to perform the act they most reviled.

James turned away,
wanting to vomit.
Had Lucy returned Gresnick’s kiss?
She loved the
American, didn’t he?
He couldn’t let this abomination of love
flourish.
He had to stop it.
A shudder passed through him when he
realised there was nothing he wouldn’t do to thwart
Gresnick.
To stop Lucy loving someone
else
.
Only then might the birds sing
again.

66

W
hen Lucy awoke,
it took her a few moments to remember where she was.
The fire was
still burning and Gresnick and Sinclair were stretched out in front
of it, asleep.
The world’s new style of dawn was throwing its
customary red light into the room.
Lucy didn’t think she’d ever get
used to it.

She felt a prickling on the back of her
neck, and twisted round to see if something was behind her.
For a
moment, she thought she glimpsed a figure staring at her through a
smashed pane of glass.

‘
James
?’

There was no answer.
She got up and
went into the next room.
Patches of red light fell onto the floor
through the holes in the roof.
A door was open in the corner.
James
was standing there with his back to her.

She felt uneasy.
Should she go back and
wake the others?
She still couldn’t think of anything to say to
James.
No words seemed to have the right shape.
They lacked the
meanings she wanted to convey.
She had an urge to hug him yet, at
the same time, the thought of being in physical contact with him
made her squirm.
She had buried her love for him as deeply as she
could, yet it was always there, always asking why she’d turned her
back on it.
The reason was obvious enough.
Love was a form of
death.
In the end, love died or the loved one died, so why put
yourself through it?
Despite herself, she found herself heading
towards the doorway.
She stopped just behind James.
He didn’t turn
round.

‘
There’s something
beautiful about this light,’ James said after a moment, then
stepped into the small, overgrown garden at the side of the abbey.
Lucy followed, her breath condensing in the cold air.
The grass and
the flowers were covered with snow.
An old fountain, miraculously
in full working order, sent a plume of water into the air, the
water-drops gleaming with the red tinge of the sun.
James wandered
round to the far side.
Lucy stayed where she was.
She still loved
him, but her heart felt as frozen as this garden.
The things she
wanted to say were locked inside, clinging to what little warmth
remained.

‘
The soldier who freed
us last night – you won’t believe what he told me,’ James said.
‘He
was a born traitor, he said.
He told me that in previous lives he
was Brutus, Benedict Arnold, even Judas himself.
He couldn’t
control himself.
Every group must have a traitor.
He was a
marionette, destined to betray his companions.
How could anyone
believe such a thing about themselves?
None of us is fated to do
anything.
You know that, don’t you, Lucy?’