Triskellion 3: The Gathering (30 page)

“Thanks,” Laura said, as Crow put down the phone.

“OK. Now that you’ve probably cost me my job, what next?” He felt a weight lift from him instantly, now that he would no longer be taking orders from Hope. He’d met some tough cookies in his time, but this Australian woman took some beating. She could convince him that black was white if she wanted, and probably just had.

“Here’s the deal,” Laura said. “You tell the director I have classified information for his ears only. You tell him that only
I
know how to put the three Triskellions together and only
I
know what will happen when they come together; that
I
need to be there when that happens.”

“OK,” Crow said.

“And one more thing…”

Crow rolled his eyes. “Go on.”

“Tell him I’ll show him everything I know about the Triskellions on one condition: I want Kate Newman sprung from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary.”

She laid her hand on top of Crow’s. “Please.”

Gabriel looked up when the cell door slid open. Rachel and Adam stood there, wrapped in blankets, looking pale and shaken. They could barely speak, their lips puffy with recently administered anaesthetic. Laura and Crow were on either side of them.

Gabriel walked across to Rachel. He touched her face. “Are you OK?”

Rachel could feel the pain and numbness immediately begin to fade. “I am now,” she said.

Gabriel nodded. “The noise is gone too.”

“I switched the blocking frequency off,” Crow said. “You’ve got your powers back.”

Gabriel smiled and looked down at the plastic cuffs round his wrists. They began to smoulder and stretch until they fell away, blackened and useless.

“He’s switched sides,” Laura said, nodding at Crow. “And he’s going to take us to New York.”

Gabriel looked pleased. “We’re getting out of here?”

“Sure,” Laura said.

“How are we going to get there?” Rachel asked, feeling her numb lips with her finger.

“I’ll take care of it,” Crow said.

“Well, we’d better hurry,” Gabriel said. “It’s only hours until everything
really
kicks off.”

It was Laura’s turn to be surprised. “Hours? Why didn’t you say?”

“Nobody asked.”

Crane sat on the deck of
Ezekiel One,
enjoying a leisurely lunch. He knew there would not be much time for eating from this point on, so he had ordered Jedediah to provide something special. Oysters, champagne, soft-shelled crabs, steak. Followed by a large slab of waxy honeycomb.

Brother Jedediah had hovered nervously, trying desperately to please, fussing and pouring wine until Crane had become more than usually irritated by him; until he had dismissed him by throwing a heavy glass tumbler at his head.

The wheels for the Gathering were now in motion.

There would be no turning back now, and Crane needed a few moments in peace to reflect. The sky had been doing strange things all morning: a pink dawn had been followed by torrential rain and then a flurry of thick unseasonal snow. Now the sun was shining and Ezekiel Crane was enjoying the warmth of its rays on the taut skin of his face.

A face that did not really feel like his own – probably because it wasn’t.

But it was a useful mask to hide behind. He thought back to the terrible accident; to the burns that had robbed him of his own features and melted them into something frightening, skull-like. He didn’t look so bad now, he thought. He had seen pictures of a New York socialite whose plastic surgery had made her look like a monster-movie freak.

At least he looked human.

It never ceased to amaze him that this first near-death experience had triggered something almost supernatural in him; instead of breaking him and making him weaker, it had made him stronger.

And his second near-death experience had made him stronger still, releasing powers he never knew he had.

Now he felt invincible.

He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and looked up at the sky through his telescope. The clouds were boiling, twisting and racing by at unnatural speed, and Crane had never felt more certain about his destiny.

He swung the telescope around to look across at Manhattan and down towards Central Park. He could read the banners of the Triple Wheelers who were filling the streets. He had seen them on the TV: camping in the park, being interviewed by CNN journalists.

“Tick-Tock; the time has come,” they had told the cameras, their faces open and innocent. “Ezekiel One! The time is now!”

The journalist had handed back to the studio with the wry look of a professional used to interviewing lunatics.

They would learn, Crane thought. Very soon…

He watched his followers converge on an already crowded Central Park and a verse of a children’s song came back to him – something dredged up from his memory; from his childhood in England:
If you go down to the woods today, You’re sure of a Big Surprise…

Crane chuckled to himself and called to Jedediah, who came running from the other end of the boat, a cold compress held against the bruise on his head.

“Yes, Pastor?”

“Batten down the hatches, and prepare for the Gathering, Brother Jedediah.” Crane pointed across the water towards the towers of Manhattan. “We’re going ashore.”

T
he director looked out across the East River from the sixtieth floor. He could see queues of cars gridlocked down below and people on foot crossing the bridge from the Brooklyn side. He saw more groups of people being disgorged from the ferries and marching up Roosevelt Drive, and even from his vantage point way above, he could read the banners that they were unfurling to proclaim their commitment to their organization.

THE CHURCH OF THE TRIPLE WHEEL.

The picture feed was the same on the screens that lined the wall of his office. Cars were blocked in the Holland Tunnel on the New Jersey side, and families in their Sunday best were arriving on foot from Hoboken and Union City. They were converging on Central Park, having travelled through the rain, through the snow, through the burning sun – through all the bizarre meteorological conditions that were sweeping the country – to get here. News channels were showing the airports at a standstill as disciples of the Triple Wheel continued to arrive from all over America.

But there was one image that puzzled the director more than the others.

He had recorded the biggest Triple Wheel rally to date, which had occurred in Philadelphia a couple of days before. Ezekiel Crane’s face, rigid in freeze-frame, was flickering on the plasma. The director pressed
PLAY
and watched him stride backwards and forwards across the vast stage, holding fifty thousand people in his thrall. The director could not pinpoint exactly what it was about this charismatic man that captivated all these people, but as he watched he sensed that he was being mesmerized himself. But it was more than that: there was something in the walk, in the gestures, in the voice that chimed with him; something that awakened a long-dormant memory from somewhere deep in his mind.

He had done plenty of research on Ezekiel Crane. Since the preacher had first got his attention, the director had instructed Meredith to get him every press article and photograph on him. He had given others the job of digging into Crane’s background. Extraordinarily, for an intelligence agency, they had drawn a virtual blank.

A copy of Crane’s passport, gained from US immigration, had revealed that he had been born in the USA in 1957. But very little else.

It seemed Crane had arrived in society fully formed, little more than a year before. There was no record of him before that anywhere in the world. And in just over a year he had gained this phenomenal following. The director wanted to know how.

And even more importantly, why.

He understood the Ezekiel One legend: the belief that gods or aliens had come to earth in a burning chariot. He knew all about how ancient legends still guided people’s lives. But what he wanted to know was how Crane knew that the time was
now
.

How could he have known that the unique alignment of heavenly bodies happening now had been imminent? It had taken Hope’s astronomers twenty years to come up with the calculations. Everything the director had worked for throughout his life was about to come to fruition, and now this freakish charlatan seemed about to muddy the waters with superstition and guesswork.

He sat down and tried to think it through.

He remembered his childhood in the desert, watching the skies and looking for answers; waiting for something to happen. He remembered his time at the military school where they had broken him down and then built him up again. Made him fit and ready to do a life’s service for the government.

He remembered his early training as a scientist at Alamogordo; his forensic work on the specimens there and the research he had done on their DNA; how it had tied up with the archaeological research they had been doing in the UK and elsewhere.

He remembered his initiation by the Hope Project: how they had cauterized any feelings he’d had, so that he could work without guilt or compassion for anyone. Not that he had had much guilt or compassion to begin with.

Most of the good feelings had stopped when his mother had died. When she had been killed.

He reflected on his loveless marriage: a union arranged by Hope for the convenience of his work and research. A marriage of genetics rather than personalities. He thought about the children it had produced, the ones he had never been able to love. Children who were now as fatherless as he had been. He was glad he would never see them again.

He picked up the phone. “Meredith. Get me Crow on the line.”

He continued to watch Crane strutting on the screen, and seconds later the line buzzed. He picked up and heard Crow’s voice, high and crackling, above the noise of jet engines. “Where are you, Todd?”

“We’re in the air somewhere over Pennsylvania. Just past Pittsburgh. But we have a problem, sir.”

It was not what the director wanted to hear. His silence forced Crow to continue.

“I’ve spoken to JFK and LaGuardia; they’re completely shut down.”

“You have Grade One clearance, Crow!” the director shouted.

“I know, sir, but they don’t even
have
an airstrip they can clear. It’s mayhem down there. All the main roads are jammed up too. What’s going on?”

“There are a lot of people visiting the city today.” The director thought for a moment. “OK, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to scramble a Hope chopper. I want you to divert to Stewart International Airport up by West Point and we’ll pick you up there. I’ll get Meredith to make sure you have clearance. Now get to it. Time’s running out.”

He put down the phone and looked at the large clock on his wall: he still had time. He had waited the best part of his life for this to happen.

He guessed he could wait an hour longer.

A
s soon as Crow had broken radio connection with the director, he switched on the intercom and spoke to Rachel, Adam and Gabriel, who were out of sight behind him in the main cabin.

“We can’t get into JFK,” he said. “We’re being diverted to the military airport and we’ll get a chopper into the city from there. Puts another thirty minutes on the trip, that’s all. I’ll let you know when we’re coming in to land.”

He turned and looked at Laura, who was seated next to him in the cockpit. “Did you hear the director’s voice? It was weird.”

Laura nodded. “He’s excited. This is a special day for him.” She looked to her right and saw the fields of Pennsylvania laid out below her like squares on a quilt. “Shame it’s not going to turn out quite like he planned…”

With an F-35 jet capable of carrying no more than two people, Crow had fuelled up the Hope Project Gulfstream back in Alamogordo, and they had been in the air within fifteen minutes of his call to the director – the call during which he had outlined Laura Sullivan’s demands.

“Doctor Sullivan seems to think she’s holding all the aces,” the director had said.

“I reckon she is.” Crow had smiled at Laura, who was standing next to him.