The Armageddon Conspiracy (8 page)

‘
You’ve gone to a lot
of trouble,’ Gresnick said to Morson.
‘She must be very
special.’

Morson grinned.

‘
Why her?
She can’t
possibly help you, or be a threat to you.
She’s been diagnosed as
suffering from acute post-traumatic stress disorder, leading to
Dissociative Identity Disorder.
If she were going to harm anyone,
it would be herself.’

‘
You know nothing,’
Morson snapped.
‘That woman…’

‘
Yes?’

‘
She’s the most
important person in the world.’

9

C
ardinal
Sinclair was tall, probably in his early fifties, with silver hair,
a weather-beaten face and grey eyes.

‘
I’m not here to harm
you,’ he said.
‘Our enemies always exaggerated our reputation for
torture.’

Lucy, sitting up in her bed, was amazed
by the cardinal’s physical likeness to her father.
Maybe her brain
was deceiving her again, projecting her own desires.
In her black
pyjamas, she was a good match for the cardinal.

Dressed in black with a white dog
collar, like an ordinary priest, Sinclair wore nothing to suggest
he was the second most powerful man in the Catholic Church, the
Vatican’s doctrinal enforcer, their ultimate authority on heresy.
Taking the candle from the dressing table, he held it up to examine
Lucy’s paintings.

She watched him closely.
For the last
few minutes, she’d been silent, trying to absorb his news.
No TVs,
radios, newspapers or computers were permitted to the patients in
the convent and none of the nurses or nuns had chosen to pass on
word of the outside world.
From what the cardinal said, hell itself
had materialised out there in the last few days.
Her own life was a
wasteland, and now it seemed the rest of the world was joining her.
Sinclair claimed that seven so-called supervolcanoes were on the
verge of eruption.
America, with three, including one in
Yellowstone National Park, was particularly vulnerable.
If, as now
seemed likely, they all erupted in the next day or two,
civilisation, if not all life on earth, would vanish.

‘
Why would you come
here?’
Lucy asked.
‘I mean, at a time like this you must have so
many more important things to do.’

The cardinal didn’t take his eyes off
the walls of her room.
‘These paintings,’ he said.
‘What I haven’t
told you is that I’ve seen one of them before.’

Lucy stared at him.
He had never been
to the convent before, so how could he possibly have seen one of
her paintings?
Was he playing a game?
She looked towards her
medicine cabinet.
Got to calm down.
She reached towards the cabinet
where she kept her tranquillisers, but the man took her hand and
held it firmly.

‘
You’re not having
delusions, Lucy.
I read your latest medical report.
It says you’re
getting much better.
They were about to put you on day release into
the community.
Dr Levis is delighted with your
progress.’

Getting better?
Lucy wanted so much to
be well again, but every time she imagined it, it ended with her
falling over.

‘
How can you say you’ve
seen my paintings?
It’s impossible.’

‘
I scarcely believed it
myself until now.’

Lucy was startled when
the cardinal sat down beside her.
Her father used to sit beside her
in that exact same way.
Not
dead
.
Still here, still able to comfort
her.
She’d give anything for that to be true.

The cardinal pointed at the painting in
the middle of the wall behind the headboard of Lucy’s bed.
It was
the first she ever worked on, the template for the others.

‘
I don’t know how,’
Sinclair said, ‘but that painting right there is also in Rome.
It’s
part of a huge mural found in a secret vault in the tomb of Pope
Julius II.
The artist who painted it died the day after its
completion.
The mural was his final, greatest
masterpiece.’

Lucy closed her eyes.
A
name leapt into her mind.
It was as though thousands of locked
doors were opening in her mind and light was bursting through,
banishing the darkness that had gripped her for so long.
All manner
of weird facts were pouring into her, things she couldn’t possibly
know.
She started to tremble.
My God,
what’s happening to me
?
‘Raphael,’ she said
hesitantly, hoping Sinclair would tell her she was wrong.
The
expression on his face proved there was no mistake.

‘
Only three living
people have seen Raphael’s mural,’ Sinclair said slowly.

‘
Raphael died almost
five hundred years ago.’
Lucy was mystified.
Ideas were flashing in
her mind, things she didn’t have time to process, almost
overwhelming her.

‘
Raphael died in 1520
at just thirty-seven years of age,’ Sinclair replied.
‘He painted
your picture five hundred years before you did.’

Lucy clutched her knees, shaking her
head from side to side.

‘
Come with me.’
Sinclair got up and walked towards the door.
‘You can see for
yourself.’

10

V
ernon peered at
the TV screen, searching Sergeant Morson’s face for clues.
How
could Lucy be so important?
While Harrington had a whispered
conversation with Gresnick, he again flicked through her DIA file.
It said she spent most of her time working on a series of
depressing paintings, covering every inch of her room with them.
Each canvas had a blue background and featured a female figure with
long black hair, wearing a black wedding dress.
The female’s face
was always blank; just a white, featureless oval.

A psychiatrist’s report said Lucy was
terrified of being ‘in the blue’ – Lucy’s own description of her
condition, apparently.
Vernon didn’t need any translation.
Lucy and
her father were both keen divers and they’d taken him out with them
on several expeditions.
‘In the blue’ was a diving term for the
place in a deep dive in clear water where the diver could see
neither the surface of the sea nor the seabed: all he had around
him was the colour blue in every direction.
Many divers found it an
inspirational, exhilarating place, but for a few it was
disorienting and filled them with panic.
Vernon was one of the
latter.
He once heard a diver who’d suffered a mental collapse
describing the experience as being ‘in the blue’.
The diver had
subtly changed the meaning from a specific point in a dive where it
becomes difficult to know up from down, backwards from forwards, to
the perfect label for acute depression – the loss of a person’s
bearings, their very identity.
Lucy was now using it in that
context too, it seemed.

Vernon had been in the blue just once –
on a summer’s dive in amazingly clear water off the Cornish coast
near Penzance – and never wanted to be there again.
Lucy and her
dad accompanied him at the start but were anxious to explore an old
shipwreck.
He stupidly said he’d like to be on his own for a while,
and they swam off.
After a couple of minutes, he couldn’t see
anything except blue.
He was in a blue world extending in all
directions, a place where he had no anchors, no bearings, no
pointers.
He quite simply lost himself.
He began to think he might
actually have drowned and was now in some blue hell, but Lucy swam
up from below and dragged him back to the surface.

‘
What’s happening to
your captain?’
Gresnick’s voice jerked Vernon back to the present.
‘What caused those injuries?
You must know he’ll be dead within
hours.’

‘
The captain isn’t
dying.’
Morson smirked.
‘He’s being reborn.’

‘
What?’

‘
You’ll see by
morning.’

‘
Some people are saying
the world is about to end.
What’s your opinion,
sergeant?’

‘
Something astonishing
is coming.
The very earth will tremble beneath your
feet.’

‘
Are you referring to
the Turkish earthquakes?’

Morson continued to
smirk.
‘
He
knows
we’re coming for him.
He stopped us before, but this time there’s
nothing He can do.’

‘
What are you talking
about?’
Commander Harrington spoke for the first time in the
interrogation.
‘Who is
He
?’

‘
Are you a religious
man?’
Morson asked.

Harrington nodded.

‘
Then you know exactly
who I mean.’

Vernon leaned forward, curious to see
Harrington’s reaction.
His boss had never concealed the fact that
he was a fully paid up God squadder – a Methodist, Baptist or
Quaker; Vernon couldn’t remember which.
He wasn’t interested enough
to find out the difference between the three, and always got them
mixed up.
Harrington, to Vernon’s irritation, kept a Bible
prominently displayed on the desk in his office.
Vernon felt it was
inappropriate for religion to make such a brazen appearance in
MI5’s HQ.

Harrington’s expression barely changed.
He gazed at a wall-calendar showing Ferrari supercars.
‘Are there
any significant days coming up, Mr Vernon?’
he asked.
‘Anniversaries, religious festivals, that sort of thing?’

Vernon knew the drill.
Spectacular acts of terror, protest, revolt, rebellion were often
scheduled for memorable dates, as if they could draw legitimacy,
power perhaps, from the previous incidents.
Swinging round to a
computer on a side-table, he used the internet to search for
imminent big dates.
The first one up was 30
April, the eve of May Day.

‘
The Germans call April
30 Walpurgis Nacht.’
Vernon read from the first entry that appeared
onscreen.
‘It’s supposedly the night when witches emerge into the
open to wreak revenge on God-fearing people.’
He quickly scanned
the second entry.
‘It’s also an ancient Celtic festival called
Beltane, involving a sacrificial fire.’
He noticed a third
possibility, unconnected with the supernatural, but quite as
chilling.
‘And it’s the day Hitler committed suicide.’

Gresnick sat up straight when he heard
that.
‘What do you think of Hitler, sergeant?’

‘
He
knew
.’

‘
Knew what?’

‘
The dead have always
outnumbered the living.
They call the living
monsters
.
They’ll call us monsters
too, perhaps the worst monsters of them all.’

‘
This is getting us
nowhere.’
Harrington cut off the link to Morson.

The mathematical screensaver reappeared
on the TV monitor.
Ancient Greek letters, large and small, in every
colour, flooded the LCD screen, rotating, inverting, shrinking and
expanding.
An insoluble equation, Vernon thought, just like this
whole situation.
Distracted, it took him a moment to register that
Dr Wells had entered the room.