Triskellion 3: The Gathering (32 page)

“I love you,” he shouted. The crowd roared. “I love you, and I have come to show you the way.” He lowered his arms and continued in a sonorous voice, a whisper that rolled across Central Park like a gathering wind. “Hush, Brothers and Sisters; hush, and hear these words. Today we are gathered for the last time in this life. Tomorrow we will begin anew in the Promised Land. I will lead you to our new fathers; I will guide you to the Rapture. I am Ezekiel One, and I will show you the light! I will show you the light!
I will show you the light!
”

“Say it again!” people howled from the front of the stage.

“I will show you the light. Sing with me…” Crane picked up his guitar and began to play, and as one, the hundreds of thousands of people in the park began to sing words that they had all come to know by heart…

Gabriel pushed through the crowd.

All were on their feet – singing, swaying, holding children on their shoulders – their eyes fixed on the stage. He needed to be closer in order to get control of the man he knew was his nemesis – the devil who had tried to undermine everything Gabriel had worked for as long as he had lived.

Gabriel stumbled over a twisted picnic blanket and accidentally kicked open a bright-red plastic lunch box. The feeling of foreboding that had been threatening to overpower him since he’d entered the park suddenly made sense. The lunch box contained bottles of pills and vials of liquid barbiturates. Enough drugs to kill an entire family. All were branded with the Triple Wheel.

He found another lunch box and another; their owners were far too obsessed with what was happening on stage to notice Gabriel going through their belongings. Each box was packed with the same cocktail of lethal drugs.

What was it that Crane intended to do?

The director imagined that this must be what it felt like to be a child on Christmas morning. Standing just inside the door that led out on to the building’s restricted-access helicopter pad, he was watching the sky, listening for the sound of the rotor blades, and imagining that this was how it must feel to anticipate a wonderful gift.

A brilliant …
spectacular
… surprise.

If the director of the Hope Project had had a normal childhood, he would have
known
that feeling, but as it was he could only
guess
at what it must be like…

He had learned many other things, of course, during his troubled adolescence and the strange and interesting years that had followed. He had studied archaeology, astronomy and history, the twin disciplines of science and war.

He knew about the Travellers who had visited over many centuries and he knew what they had brought with them. He knew about the Triskellions and where they had been found, and it had been his life’s work to see them united.

To see the Three Become One.

He had
engineered
it…

What nobody knew, what no amount of research could tell anyone, was exactly what the unification of the three amulets would bring about. The director could not possibly know
what
would happen, but he knew that the one who
made
it happen would be at the centre of the most powerful force that the planet had ever experienced. He knew that the one who brought the Triskellions together would know what it was like to be God…

He felt the excitement build in him like an electrical pulse as the helicopter buzzed into view: zigzagging across the canvas of sky that was changing minute by minute. He stepped back into the shadows. From here it was only ten floors up to the secret eyrie at the building’s summit; to the room in which the power of the Triskellions would finally be unleashed.

A few steps away, no more. A few minutes…

He watched the chopper descend, the blades slow and the rush of air fall away. The helicopter door opened and he stepped out onto the landing pad to welcome Todd Crow, his eyes eagerly searching for the package he was expecting to see in the man’s hands.

He saw nothing.

“Tell me they’re still in the chopper, Crow,” he said.

Crow said nothing; he just stood and stared. Over his shoulder the director saw others emerging from the heli-copter. Laura Sullivan stepped down first, followed by Rachel and Adam. The pulse of excitement became a power-ful surge of fury. He moved close to Crow and put a hand round his neck. “What the hell are
they
doing here? Since when did you stop following orders?”

Crow took hold of the director’s fingers, bent them back and pushed the hand away from his neck. “Change of plan,” he said.

The director’s mind raced; his brain struggled to adjust to the new situation, to make new plans. He tried his best to summon the smile he knew the children would be expecting as they rushed towards him, their arms outstretched.

Their expressions were open and eager; their voices were unrestrained and full of joy: as happy as children on Christmas morning.

“Dad…!”

L
aura hung back and watched, helpless and horrified, as Rachel and Adam ran past Crow towards the man on the landing pad. Their screams of excitement were shrill and felt painful above the sound of her own heart thumping.

The director of the Hope Project was Rachel and Adam’s father.

Ralph Newman was the man who had recruited Laura ten years earlier. He had been the scientist who had befriended her, or had pretended to. The one who had encouraged her and had organized funding for her studies, drawing her deeper and deeper into a project that she had not fully understood until it was far too late; until there had been no way for her to get out.

Now Laura’s mind was racing with dreadful questions. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that the man in charge of the Hope Project’s most secretive operation was also the father of the children it had hunted so mercilessly. Was it possible that the head of the Bureau of Extra-Terrestrial Activity just
happened
to be the father of the most special children in the world?

How
could it have happened? How could anyone have planned it?

And the most horrifying question of all.

How could a father order the murder of his own children?

Ezekiel Crane’s speech was coming to an end. As the crowd cheered and clapped, he bid his worshippers well and told them it was time to follow him. He ordered them to march from the park, to swarm down Broadway and gather together at the foot of the Flight Building.

He told them that they were doing something very special.

His followers began drifting towards the park’s many exits, and Crane stepped into the basket of a hot-air balloon which had been slowly inflating throughout his speech and which now stood waiting for him at the side of the stage.

Brother Jedediah untied the mooring rope. “See you on the other side, Pastor,” he said.

“I doubt it,” Crane replied.

With a gust of flame from the burner, the balloon – vast and white and marked with the sign of the Triple Wheel – slowly began to rise. It was at this moment that Gabriel pushed through the front row of the crowd and climbed onto the stage.

He screamed at Crane, who was now receding into the distance as the balloon climbed into the sky, and the pastor peered down over the edge of the basket.

He froze when Gabriel pulled the Triskellion from his shirt and held it up for him to see: out of reach.

High above the park, the wind rushing in his ears, Ezekiel Crane could clearly hear the voice of the boy far below. The boy into whose eyes he had stared at the theatre in St Louis only days before.

“What is my name?” the boy had asked then.

Crane now knew perfectly well who he was, and he recognized the mockery, the
threat,
in the boy’s voice as it rose up to taunt him: “It’s a big day for both of us.”

The relief, the happiness, that Rachel had felt on seeing her father had quickly given way to confusion and panic. Throwing her arms round him, she had felt only resistance. She and Adam had cried and babbled, telling their father how they had thought he was dead and that now they had found him, they could try and help their mother. Finally, they could be a family again.

He had looked at them as though they were ghosts.

“Dad?” Adam was pale and shaky and looked like he might collapse at any moment. “What’s the matter?”

Rachel looked into her father’s eyes, but they were fixed on the Triskellion round Adam’s neck. She stepped back and turned to Laura, who just shook her head. Glancing over at Major Crow, Rachel saw as much confusion on his face as she guessed was etched into her own.

“‘Dad’?” Crow said. “I don’t understand.” He stared at Rachel, confusion mixed with sympathy and … horror. “This is your…”

He didn’t need to say it.

“You’re the
director
?” Rachel was trying to stay calm, but she knew she was only moments away from breaking down completely; from weeping on her father’s neck … or clawing at it. Only seconds from throwing herself from the roof or at the face of the man who had turned her life upside down.

“I can explain, Rachel.” There was a shadow of the smile she had been dreaming about; a hint of the concern in his voice that she had known and loved since she was a little girl.

“Daddy…?”

“Come with me and I’ll tell you everything.”

“Wait!” Laura shouted.

“You should come with us too, Doctor Sullivan.”

The director walked across the tarmac to a metal door, which slid back to reveal the interior of a small lift. He beckoned to Rachel and Adam.

Adam took Rachel’s hand.

What the hell’s happening?
she asked with her mind.

We need to go and find out,
Adam said.

They walked to the lift and their father stepped aside to let them in. A moment later Laura joined them. Ralph Newman gave her a sickly smile of welcome as she moved inside. The smile quickly died when Crow appeared in the doorway and Laura and the children moved to accommodate him.

“Where they go, I go,” Crow said.

Ralph Newman nodded slowly, before reaching into the pocket of his jacket and producing a small black pistol. “Only room for four,” he said.

Then, as the lift doors started to close, he raised his arm and shot Todd Crow dead.

R
achel, Adam and Laura were still screaming as the lift took them up the final few floors to the very top of the Flight Building. Ralph Newman stared at them impassively – simply interested in their
reaction
to the murder that had just taken place in front of their eyes and not in their
feelings
.

The observation tower was a conical structure, like the tip of a cigar. It was made entirely of glass and nestled between the outstretched metal wings on the roof. The lift doors hissed open, and Ralph Newman pushed his children and Laura Sullivan out, the gun still in his hand.

Rachel took in the three hundred and sixty-degree panoramic view of the city. She noticed the white hot-air balloon drifting towards the building between the skyscrapers.

“Sit,” Newman said. He gestured at the leather chairs that were lined up by the windows.

Rachel and Adam did as they were told, but Laura, still trembling with shock, managed a little resistance.

“What if I don’t?” she asked. Her face was streaked with tears and spots of blood but she was defiant. “Are you going to shoot me, too?”

“Of course not,” Newman said. “I’ve invested years of time and money in you, Laura. You know more about these things than anyone. Your research was, and still is, invaluable to me. Why would I kill my investment? Now sit down.” Newman swiped the back of his hand across Laura’s face, and she dropped quickly into her chair.

Rachel began to cry. She called out to Adam with her mind, but could hear nothing. As far as she could tell there was no blocking device in operation like the one at Alamogordo – perhaps she was simply too traumatized. She had just seen the man who had saved them from Alamogordo shot dead; she had just seen Laura Sullivan viciously slapped. Both of these acts of violence had been committed by the man she had grown up calling Daddy.