The Armageddon Conspiracy (57 page)

As her torch futilely picked out
individual creatures from the surging mass, she noticed that the
front of her uniform, round her groin, was red.

Jesus
,
God
.
Bleeding
?
Her period?
But it wasn’t
the right time of the month.
It felt as though her insides were
gushing out, her body attempting to invert itself.
She sank to her
knees, trying to scream, but unable to find any sound.
Maimed.
Cut.
She thought of the Fisher King, incurably wounded, speared in the
genitals by a black magician.
The whole lower half of her uniform
was red now.
The blood was spreading everywhere.
She patted herself
in horror and then her hands became bloodstained too.

Is this how it
ends
?
Surrounded by her worst fears, every
nightmare come true.

Bats were swooping around Lucy’s head,
rats crawling over boots.
All the safety barriers in her mind were
collapsing.
There was nothing left except the blue that always
haunted her.
The last circle of hell – the purest blue.

Flames leapt up.
The creatures started
to screech hysterically.

Was this how she’d die?
Trapped in a
vision of the inferno.
Apocalypse now.
Just as Raphael’s mural
predicted.

Amidst the bedlam – the chaos of wings,
fangs, eyes, screaming, a maelstrom of movement, a glowing,
fluttering whirlpool trying to suck her in, a seething pit of life
and death – she heard one strong, determined voice: Gresnick’s.

I’ve set the pitch on fire.
We have to
leave right now, Lucy…Jesus, you’re wounded.

Wounded?
Lucy shook her head.
Physical
explanations.
Straight lines.
Cause and effect.
Things that made
sense.
But now, down here in the shadows, logic had lost its power.
Only unreason existed here.

She felt pressure against her arms,
oddly reassuring.
She was being gripped, propped up – Gresnick on
one side, James on the other.
Her two knights.
They would get her
to safety somehow, she was certain.
The smoke and the flames would
kill every other creature in the caves.

They managed to retrace their steps.
Lucy’s head kept lolling back, and every few seconds she let out a
whimpering moan.
Had she been stabbed in the stomach?
She panicked
when she realised she’d lost the dish, but then she saw it in
Sinclair’s hands.
He must have grabbed it from her in the
confusion.

In minutes, they were back at the
Frozen Waterfall.

Lucy’s lungs were choked with smoke,
stopping her from speaking.
She pointed frantically at a small gap
in the solid rock.
Gresnick went in first.

‘
There’s a narrow
passageway.
I can see an old door.
I think Lucy’s right – we might
be able to get out.’
The door was controlled by a rusting wheel
mechanism.
Gresnick gripped it with both hands and managed to turn
it.
‘It’s moving,’ he said.
‘We’re going to make it.’

Lucy felt an odd exhilaration, as if
she were in control of her fate for the first time since leaving
the convent.
Still here.
Still fighting.
She took the dish back
from Sinclair.

They all squeezed through the doorway
and emerged into the outside world.
A main road was in front of
them and sheer cliffs behind.
Before they had a chance to get their
heads straight, they heard an explosion.
The sky turned bright
pink.

‘
Flare,’ Gresnick
said.

From left and right, shapes appeared –
soldiers, pointing their assault rifles.
Morson was in the centre
of the group, with a pistol.
‘Give me the dish.’
He beckoned at
Lucy with his free hand.

She didn’t move.

‘
Have you had an
accident?’
he asked.
He marched up and took the dish from her.
‘Well, your journey’s almost done.
In a few hours, it will all be
over.
Now we’re taking you to one of our most special places:
Carbonek.’

‘
What’s there?’
Gresnick asked.

‘
The Holy Grail,’ Lucy
said.

75

M
orson kept
checking his watch.
He had made Lucy sit upfront with him in the
driver’s cabin, vowing not to let her out of his sight again.
He
said they were going to a private estate set in a valley close to
Glastonbury.

Lucy didn’t take her eyes off the road.
More snow was falling.
The world was trying to hide its blemishes,
she thought.
There was a constant pressure in her abdomen, as
though her guts wanted to dribble out.
She didn’t dare look down
for fear of seeing how much blood was staining the lower half of
her uniform.
Looking in the rear-view mirror, she caught a glimpse
of herself.
Some creature stared back, like a murderer, her face
smeared with blood, hair filthy and straggling, eyes sunken.

Best to close her eyes, to try to avoid
seeing what lay ahead.
Images flooded her mind.
She was in a forest
where every tree was made of mirrors, and the grass made from
filaments of mirror.

Running through the mirrored woods in
her bloodstained uniform, Lucy knew she was being pursued by
something.
Time?
Love?
Hate?
Her face was reflected back from
mirrored leaves dropping from the trees as a wind blew through
mirror world.
Everywhere, she was confronted by her reflection,
fluttering to the earth.
A million mirrored butterflies with her
image trapped in their wings.

She tried to run faster, away from her
life.
Instead, she saw her past flashing up on the mirror trees,
her personal history transformed into reflections hanging from
branches, shaking in the wind.

Got to outpace the reflections, to
escape from the forest.
But when she emerged from the trees, she
ran onto a mirrored lake.
She stood in the centre of the gleaming
surface.
Her life in a mirror.
A reversed life.
And then it
cracked.
She toppled in, taking a cascade of mirrored shards with
her.

Her eyes flashed open.

The two military trucks
had stopped in the outer courtyard of a stone castle on the crest
of a steep valley.
Carbonek
.
It was one of the names
given to the Grail Castle of legend.

‘
Get out,’ Morson
ordered.

Lucy clambered out, feeling dizzy.
When
she looked up at the sky, she was amazed by the spectacle.
Thousands of shooting stars of every colour were showering down
across southwest England.
Her legs wobbled beneath her as she took
a few steps across the snow-covered cobblestones.

‘
This is a recreation
of Montségur at the time it fell to the Catholic Crusaders,’ Morson
said.

Lucy had never known of the existence
of this place, even though it was so close to Glastonbury.
It ought
to be a famous landmark, yet she hadn’t come across a single
reference to it.
It meant the owners controlled all the land around
here, all the roads; that they could stop newspapers and TV
channels reporting on it.
These must be people of immense wealth
and power.
The puppetmasters standing in the shadows.

She twisted round, looking for James.
He was with Sinclair, his head bowed.

Soon it would be 30 April, sixty-seven
years to the day since Adolf Hitler shot himself in his bunker.
People thought he chose that day to kill himself because the
Soviets were within a few hundred yards of his bunker and might
make a final breakthrough at any moment.
Now, Lucy knew, April 30
was the Gnostics’ most special day, the day when they believed the
rule of Jehovah, the Demiurge, would end once and for all.
Hitler
had thought that day would come during his own lifetime, that he
would instigate the final act.
Instead, he ended his own world on
April 30.
Was the outcome Hitler craved about to come true now?
It
was still impossible to imagine that the heartbeat of the world was
hours from being quenched.

‘
Everyone inside,’
Morson barked.

Lucy joined the others as they trooped
through the castle’s portcullis and into a second courtyard, this
time within the castle walls.
At the rear was a tall, rectangular
keep, lit by blue floodlights.
A ghost castle.

In the centre of the inner courtyard
was a black wooden tower with many ledges, each packed with ravens.
Lucy shivered as she stared at the black birds.
Every one of them
watched her, tracking her as she moved.

Morson heaved open an iron door and
motioned with his pistol for everyone to go inside the keep.
They
entered an entrance area, covered with familiar banners: the Square
and Compasses of the Freemasons, the Rising Sun of the Gnostics,
the Soul Bird of the Alchemists, the black over white flag of the
Templars, the Cross pattée of the Templars, the Templars’ Skull and
Crossbones, the Cathars’ blue swastika on a white background, the
Nazi swastika and the lightning flash runes of the SS.
Finally, the
largest banner of all – two matching serpents – the Mark of
Cain.

Lucy found it grotesque.
It was so hard
to accept that all of these groups were just different aspects of a
single ancient religion whose sole aim was to destroy Jehovah’s
world.
No one had ever guessed at such a link, but it all stacked
up.
All of these groups featured in well-known conspiracy theories.
Perhaps the truth was that there was only ever one conspiracy,
stretching through history from the dawn of humanity.

Morson opened a second door at the far
end of the entrance room and led them into a grand hall with a
large fireplace, crackling with blazing wood.

A round table took pride of place in
the middle of the hall, with a Nazi swastika painted in its centre.
Lucy was appalled.
That symbol had always nauseated her: the banner
of the crematoria.
Yet here it was, being paraded as some sort of
knightly symbol, the emblem of King Arthur’s valiant court.
How
could the chivalry of the shining Knights of the Round Table be
linked to the horrors of Birkenau?
It simply couldn’t be true.

Morson’s soldiers took up position all
round the hall, leaving Lucy with Gresnick, James, Sinclair and
Morson.
One of the soldiers went towards a pair of black velvet
curtains covering one of the walls.
When he drew them back, Lucy
gasped.

In front of her was a
perfect reproduction of Raphael’s mural.
To the left of the mural
was the bald-headed eagle that appeared on the front of the Great
Seal of the United States of America and the back of the dollar.
To
the right were the pyramid and eye shown on the reverse of the
Great Seal.
Above the mural were the words of the official motto of
America,
In God We Trust
, and beneath,
Novus Ordo
Seclorum
– New Order of the
Ages.

Sergeant Morson looked at Lucy.
‘Now,
do you understand?’
he said.
‘Everything that the world believes is
separated is in fact connected.
Who would have thought that a
direct link existed between the Nazis and the founding fathers of
the Unites States of America, that America is the Promised Land of
Cain’s descendants, that the American people are the new Templars,
the new Cathars, the people in whom the power of Alchemy has
reached its highest point.
It’s no accident that it fell to
America’s most elite soldiers – Delta Force – to bring this mission
to its conclusion.
The longest, most complex mission in history was
always ours to finish.’