The Armageddon Conspiracy (71 page)

End of story?
Gresnick
could scarcely believe what he was hearing.
‘Doctor, you swore one
of our prisoners turned into an angel.
Were
you
temporarily insane?’

‘
I’m not proud of
myself.
I wasn’t immune from the hysteria.
I admit it.’

‘
But you weren’t the
only one to see the angel.
I did too.
Others as well, but they’re
all dead now.’

‘
Was it really an angel
you saw?’
Harrington asked.
‘Maybe it was just a collective
hallucination, like the psychologists said.’

‘
The angel was there
right at the end, in the Temple.
It wasn’t any old angel.
It was
the Dark Lord himself.’

‘
Listen to yourself,
colonel.
I know I’m never going to write a report saying there was
a supernatural being in our interrogation cells in Thames House.
I
certainly won’t be saying the Devil paid us a visit.
If you know
what’s good for you, you’ll keep quiet too.’

‘
But I was in the
Temple.
I saw what happened.
Someone has to bear
witness.’

‘
As far as we know, you
were unconscious at the end,’ Wells said.
‘You were badly wounded
and losing a lot of blood.
At times like that, the mind plays all
kinds of tricks.
You might have been dreaming for all we know.
The
bottom line is that only two people survived whatever went on in
the Temple.
One is a patient in this asylum, and the other wasn’t
in a position to clearly see what happened.
Isn’t it better just to
leave it at that?
What could possibly be gained from probing any
further?’

‘
The
truth
,’ Gresnick
snapped.

‘
What is truth?’
Harrington asked.

‘
That’s exactly what
Pontius Pilate said.’

‘
Well, sometimes it’s
best to wash your own hands of the things you can’t control.
If you
want to resume your career – maybe get yourself a promotion – then
you’d be well advised to do the same.’

‘
What about the
Temple?’

‘
Structural engineers
had a look at it.
They said it could collapse at any time.
After
the bodies were removed, we concreted over the
entrance.’

‘
What?’

‘
Two thirds of the
world’s population are dead, colonel.
The planet faces the biggest
rebuilding job in its history.
We’re satisfied now that whatever
happened in the Temple had no bearing on world events.
I mean, how
could it?
We have more important things to do than waste our time
on wild goose chases.
The crime scene has been preserved, so maybe
years from now we’ll be able to go back and make some final sense
of what happened in there.’

‘
This is insane.’
Gresnick was practically shouting.
‘The Ark of the Covenant is in
there, and the Spear of Destiny.
Jesus
Christ
…the Holy Grail.’

‘
So you say, colonel.
We don’t deny there were several spectacular objects in there, but
we don’t know if they’re authentic, and frankly, we’re not overly
concerned right now.
You claim you encountered the supernatural,
but in London we were confronting plain old human panic.
We didn’t
see any of what you witnessed.
Like I said, we now have a world to
reconstruct.
In this country alone, five million people died.
Do
you think the survivors care about myths and legends?
They just
want to get their old lives back.’

Gresnick shook his head.
‘I don’t
believe this.
You’re burying the truth.
You’re trying to airbrush
Lucy out of history.’

‘
She’s insane, Colonel
Gresnick.’

‘
God Almighty, she
saved the world.
I don’t care what anyone says, she
did
.
We owe her
everything.
There should be a statue of her in every
town.’

‘
Believe me, colonel,’
Harrington stated, ‘Lucy Galahan will never feature in the history
books.
There’s not a shred of proof that she accomplished anything.
She became the focus of hysteria, a kind of latter-day Joan of Arc.
She’s not the first and I’m sure she won’t be the last.’

‘
The truth is inside
Glastonbury Tor, commander.
The people have to know what happened,
what Lucy did for us.’

‘
As I’ve said, the
contents of the Temple aren’t a priority right now.
I suspect it
will be years before anyone gets round to studying
them.’

‘
What about Morson’s
men?’

‘
Their uniforms were
found lying on the floor with some black powder inside them.
Who
knows what happened to them?
All over the world, people died in
horrific and bizarre ways.
We can’t investigate every suspicious
death.’

Gresnick felt numb.
Jesus, they were
really going through with this.
They were prepared to pretend the
most momentous event in human history never happened.
God had
actually appeared on the earth, and Gnostic fanatics led by
Sinclair and Morson tried to assassinate him, and only Lucy’s
heroic decision to hurl the Spear of Destiny at Lucifer instead of
God saved the whole of Creation from instant annihilation.

It was impossible not to contrast the
religious fanaticism of Sinclair and the others with the casual
secularism of Harrington and Wells.
If those two were to be
believed, nothing supernatural had happened: God and the Devil had
played no part in the events of April.

‘
I need some air before
I see Lucy,’ Gresnick said.

‘
Sure.
There’s a
side-door just down the corridor.
Shall I come with
you?’

‘
No, I’d like to be by
myself.’

Gresnick hobbled out of the chapel and
made his way along the corridor.
He felt sick.
Lucy deserved
everything but was getting nothing.
She was an embarrassment to the
authorities.
The Vatican now claimed it was the prayers of good
Catholics everywhere that had saved the world.
Lucy, it said, was a
troubled young woman whose significance was mistakenly exaggerated.
Incredibly, they emphasised instead that Cardinal Sinclair died a
hero’s death, giving his own life to save Lucy from the hands of
sinister anti-Catholic forces.
They were talking about making him a
saint.
Gresnick had heard it all now.

As he went out into the
car park, he gazed at the beautiful orange sun and the sky that had
never seemed so blue.
Ever since April 30, all across the world,
the weather was perfect.
All the dust and dirt particles that were
thrown into the sky during the crisis, threatening to block out the
sun and bring a lethal permanent winter, had miraculously vanished.
Scientists blithely said they’d discovered self-regulating and
self-cleansing mechanisms in nature, which, they asserted, rapidly
reversed the ill effects of all the disasters.
What did
they
know?
Just mindless
hypothesising.
It was God who made everything right, who healed the
wounds he’d chosen to inflict on the world because of man’s
sinfulness.

Gresnick couldn’t help thinking about
ROMA AMOR.
Everything was back to front in this new world.
Already,
it was off to the worst possible start, founding itself on lies.
No
one seemed to understand that the reason the earth was so stable
now, the weather so benign and beautiful, was that God had made it
that way to reward the human race for Lucy’s refusal to go through
with the Gnostics’ insane plan.
Lucy, Gresnick knew, could never
have killed God since that was impossible by definition, but if
she’d thrown the Spear of Destiny at God, it would have been the
final proof that humanity was irredeemably lost.
Instantly, God
would have eliminated the human race once and for all.
Only Lucy
had stood between humanity and extermination.

He wondered what would happen when the
Temple was eventually reopened years from now.
What would be done
with the Ark and the Grail Hallows?
Should they be destroyed to
make sure none of this ever happened again?
He feared they’d be
turned into a tourist attraction in due course and millions would
flock to see them, and not understand a single thing of their true
significance.
Not for one moment would they imagine that these
ancient relics concealed the deadliest secret of all.

Gresnick noticed
another old newspaper blowing past him in the cool breeze.
He
stopped the paper with his walking stick.
It was dated 10 May and
again showed Lucy’s picture on the front cover with a
headline:
Remember Her?
– The False
Messiah
, and underneath;
See Page 5 for ten other fake
Messiahs
.

So, it hadn’t taken the media long to
get back up and running, and they’d reverted to their bad old ways
without skipping a beat.
The world had learned nothing.
The human
race was as nasty as ever.

Gresnick felt tears welling in his
eyes.
Of all the people in the world who didn’t deserve this, Lucy
was that person.
She never asked for any of it.
Not once did she
make any claims for herself.
She was always humble and meek.
He’d
never met anyone so gentle and kind, so concerned for others.
Yet
the world wanted to mock her.
If they could, they would sit her on
the back of a donkey and parade her along the streets of every town
in the country so that people could throw rotten fruit at her.
She’d become the world’s scapegoat.
She was the ideal person for
the role – she couldn’t defend herself.

The truth was that the whole world had
gone mad with fear for a week.
Rather than confront that, reality
it was so much easier to say Lucy was the only mad person.
Now that
she was safely locked up, she had taken everyone else’s craziness
with her.

The world felt ashamed of how it
behaved in that week of horror, how it went to pieces.
It didn’t
like what it saw in the mirror.
Now people just wanted to forget.
Lucy, sadly, reminded them of everything they wanted to bury.

Gresnick didn’t like to admit it to
himself, but he’d fallen in love with Lucy.
The reason he tried to
avoid thinking about it was that he knew he wasn’t worthy of her.
No one was.
If anyone truly was a Messiah, she was.
She was far too
good, too full of heart and kindness, too sensitive, to be a normal
member of the human race.
She lacked that savagery that everyone
else thrives on.

He limped back inside.
His insides were
churning.
There was no future for him in the military anymore.
Not
just because he wasn’t fit for active service any longer.
He simply
didn’t have the stomach for it now.

His grandfather’s
theories were right in practically every regard.
There
had
been a
ten-thousand-year-old deadly conspiracy to kill God, dating all the
way back to Cain.
The Gnostics, the Cathars, the Knights Templar,
the Alchemists, the Freemasons and the Nazis were all involved.
It
was over now, thanks to Lucy.
Was the danger gone forever?
That was
another question.
Out there, there would be new Gnostics, and they
might rediscover the secrets of those who went before them.
Maybe,
one day, they’d try again, and maybe, on that occasion, there would
be no Lucy to stop them.