The Armageddon Conspiracy (12 page)

‘Our quest is nearing
its end
,’ the
Führer
said.
‘Cain’s destiny is
almost fulfilled.’

I wanted to weep when I heard those
words.
I stared at the two sig runes that made up my SS insignia.
Sig for victory.
Sig for vengeance.
Sig Sig – the mark the Enemy
once branded on us to humiliate us, but which we now wore with
pride.
It reminded us every day of what we had to do.

‘
The creature’s
box
is in Chartres
Cathedral,’ the
Führer
continued, ‘and it will be ours as soon as we conquer
France.’

When he
lifted the spear above his head, we all
knelt.

‘After France falls,
England will be helpless,’ he said.
‘Then we’ll locate the
remaining two Grail Hallows and finish this once and for
all.’

He
ordered us to leave then remained alone with the Spear for
over an hour.
When he emerged, he didn’t speak, but it was obvious
something had changed.
I can’t begin to describe the odd expression
in his eyes.

‘Our Enemy hasn’t
begun to suspect our true nature,’ he said.
‘They call us
warmongers, fascists, totalitarians.
Not for one second have they
conceived who we really are.
Soon we’ll bring humanity its greatest
and most unexpected gift.’

He smiled in a way
I’d never seen before, as though he knew that the great burden he
carried would soon be lifted.

‘Don’t you feel it?’
he remarked, and I could swear he trembled.
‘It’s almost here.’
Then he said the words we had all waited so long to
hear.

‘
The end of the world
.’

17

H
arrington
pushed away the translation as though he found everything about it
distasteful.
‘You know no one has ever satisfactorily explained it.
Your grandfather offered plenty of speculation, but no facts.
We
didn’t think we’d ever find out what it meant.
I suppose you’re
going to say now that you understand it completely.’

‘
I wasn’t chosen for
this mission by accident,’ Gresnick replied.
‘When I was at West
Point I wrote a dissertation on the influence of mysticism and the
occult on the Nazi war effort in WWII.
As soon as the DIA
established a Nazi link to the Delta Force deserters, I was called
in.’

‘
So, what do you
think
The Cainite Destiny
means, colonel?’

‘
I have no more hard
facts than my grandfather did, but I’m as certain as he was that
the mystery can be solved.
You have to realise that the Nazis were
very strange.’

‘
That’s hardly
news.’

‘
I assure you,
Commander Harrington, you have no idea of just how weird they were.
When I wrote my dissertation, I had to tone it down because I
didn’t want the DIA to think I’d gone crazy.
I said that a few
senior Nazis – Himmler in particular – were interested in
mysticism, but that it was little more than a sideshow.
What I
really thought was that mysticism was at the core of Nazism.
The
Nazis were anything but an ordinary political party, and the war
they waged was unlike anything that had gone before.
They were more
like religious fanatics fighting a Crusade, but it was no
conventional God they believed in.’

Vernon flicked his
thumb against his index finger as Gresnick gave an account of the
Nazis’ secret beliefs.
It was hard to credit his story.
Apparently,
many of those who helped to set up the Nazi party were members of
the
Thule-Gesellschaft
– the Thule Society.
They believed that a mythical land known
in ancient times as Thule was the home of a blue-eyed, blond, Aryan
master race – the original Germans – who later populated the famous
Atlantis.
Thule was said to be Iceland, Greenland or somewhere
close to the North Pole.
A central part of the Nazi dream was to
recreate Thule/Atlantis on a global scale, with Aryans restored to
their godlike status and everyone else enslaved.
It was a member of
the Thule Society who chose the swastika, an ancient Aryan symbol,
as the Nazi emblem.
In addition, the members of the Thule Society
were well known for their virulent anti-Semitism.
The SS had a
special division called the
Ahnenerbe
Forschungs und Lehrgemeinschaft
– the
Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society, nicknamed
the
Nazi Occult Bureau
by their enemies.
Their task was to find scientific,
anthropological and archaeological evidence to support the theories
of the Thule Society.
They went on an expedition to Tibet because
there was a legend that descendants of the original master race of
Thule settled there.
The legend said there were huge underground
caves in Tibet where descendants of the first master race still
lived in hi-tech cities in a subterranean paradise.
These hidden
Aryans were masters of an astonishing occult power known as
vril
.
It was one of the
tasks of the Ahnenerbe to make contact with the people in these
cities and learn the secrets of vril.

Right up to the end of the Second World
War, the Nazis believed a secret weapon would save them.
The weapon
they had in mind was vril.
When Russian troops entered Berlin in
1945, they made one of the most extraordinary discoveries of the
war.
They found a thousand Tibetan monks dressed in SS uniforms in
a bomb-wrecked barracks, all of whom had committed ritual suicide.
These monks were the Third Reich’s last, futile attempt to harness
vril as a WMD to repel the Red Army.

‘
I can see why you kept
that quiet,’ Vernon said.

‘
Hold on.’
Harrington
was fiddling with his cufflinks.
‘Do you think it’s possible vril
is real?
One could imagine that a release of unusual energy was
behind all the disturbances we’ve seen lately.’

Gresnick shrugged.
‘I can’t rule it
out.
But why all the raids on holy relics.
That doesn’t fit, does
it?’

‘
Well, we know the Ark
of the Covenant was treated by the ancient Hebrews as a kind of
WMD.
Perhaps holy objects can channel vril in some way.’
Harrington’s face reddened.
‘Jesus, am I really saying
this?’

‘
I’ve heard of vril
before,’ Vernon said.
‘It’s the stuff they put in Bovril.’
He
smiled awkwardly.

‘
That’s precisely where
Bovril gets its name from,’ Gresnick said.
‘Bovine
vril.’

‘
What?’

‘
Forget Bovril,’
Harrington snapped.
‘If, for argument’s sake, we accept the Nazis
were occultists, where does the Spear of Destiny come
in?’

Gresnick frowned.
‘It
crops up in Arthurian mythology, and that was something else the
Nazis were obsessed with.
In Himmler’s castle of Wewelsburg, the
central banqueting hall contained a round table.
Years before the
outbreak of WWII, Himmler sent an SS officer called Otto Rahn to
the south of France to look for the Holy Grail.
Rahn was convinced
the last owners of the Grail were a heretical sect called the
Cathars, exterminated by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages.
They were the first people to face the Inquisition – in fact, it
was invented specifically for dealing with them.
Rahn thought
the
Cathars were descended from Celtic
Druids and that they were steeped in the legends surrounding King
Arthur.’

‘
We’re coming back to
Lucy’s book, aren’t we?’
Vernon said.
‘She used Otto Rahn’s work as
one of her primary sources, and the Cathars featured heavily in her
writings.’

‘
Actually, I know very
little about Lucy’s book,’ Gresnick remarked.
‘It was never
published in the States.’

‘
The world wasn’t ready
for Lucy,’ Vernon said flatly.

‘
I hope you have a good
memory, Mr Vernon.
I need to know exactly what Lucy’s theory was.
She may have inadvertently stumbled on the key to this whole
thing.’

18

‘
W
hat the…’
Vernon was just about to reply when all the lights flickered and
went out.
The temperature plummeted.

‘
Christ, what’s going
on?’
Gresnick blurted.

‘
Must be a generator
failure,’ Harrington said.
‘The backup should kick in
soon.’

Vernon gazed into the blackness.
‘That
wasn’t a generator fault…’

‘
What do you
mean?’

‘
Didn’t you feel it?
When the lights went out…some sort of…
presence
.’

‘
Get a grip of
yourself,’ Harrington said.
‘You can’t be falling for that hokum
about angels.’

The lights came on again, and the room
heated up.
‘You see – simple technical fault.’

‘
I felt something too,’
Gresnick said.
‘It was the weirdest thing.
Like some huge power
source being activated.’

‘
Well, it’s gone now,’
Harrington said.
‘We’re all a little on edge.
Our imaginations
getting a bit overactive, I dare say.’

Vernon called Gary Caldwell and asked
if anything unusual was going on.
Caldwell said security teams were
sweeping the building, trying to find whoever was responsible for
the attack on the archive department.
The badly damaged electrics
amongst the wreckage had shorted out and crashed the primary
generator.

‘
Satisfied?’
Harrington
said.
‘Nothing mysterious.
Now, let’s get on with this.
You were
about to tell us about Lucy’s book.’

****

V
ernon poured a
glass of water and took a long drink.
He was rattled and felt
embarrassed.
He urged himself to focus.
‘Yes, Lucy’s book.’
He’d
proofread it before she submitted it to her publisher.
It wasn’t
exactly his field, but he still remembered most of it – one of the
benefits of being a research analyst.
Ever since he was a kid, he’d
been able to rapidly absorb a lot of complex material, and was
often able to recall chunks of it years later.
It helped that he
was genuinely fascinated by Lucy’s work.

‘
Lucy’s starting point
was an old book by an English folklorist called Jessie Weston,’ he
began.
‘Weston claimed that the Grail legends were a recasting of
old fertility rituals from ancient Egypt, Babylonia and Greece.
She
went through each of the main aspects of the Grail stories and
showed how similar they were to features of myths concerning the
ancient gods Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis and Attis.

‘
Lucy agreed with
Weston about the Grail legends being a representation of something
else, but she disagreed that fertility rites were involved.
Her
idea was that a particular group of people produced the Grail
stories to preserve their beliefs from an enemy they could never
defeat.’

‘
The Cathars, right?’
Gresnick interrupted.