The Armageddon Conspiracy (45 page)

Lucy gazed down at her mother’s face,
and placed her fingers lightly on her mum’s cheek.
The skin was
waxy and ice-cold.
No longer human, the lifeblood long gone.
The
soul?
That was the critical question, of course.
If people didn’t
have souls then that was that.
She would never see her mum’s face
again, except in photos.
‘The enchantment of summer does not last
long,’ her mother wrote in her last diary entry.
Those were the
words Lucy put on her wreath of red roses.
Leaning over, she kissed
her on the lips and whispered, ‘Goodbye, mum.’

When her father was lying in the same
funeral parlour several months later, she refused to look.
She
couldn’t go through it a second time.
Looking at the dead makes
death part of you too.
Corpses are mirrors.
They put intimations of
your own death in your mind.

Sergeant Morson, dressed like all the
others, came and stood beside Lucy.

‘
Why
?’
Lucy whispered.

‘
You need to know who
you are, Lucy.
I want you to see that you’re one of us, that
you’ve
always
been
one of us.
Remove the veil and see for yourself.’
He took a step
back.

As Lucy’s hand hovered over the man’s
face, she was certain she shouldn’t look.
It simply wasn’t right.
She was in the same position as the tourist who found her dead
father in the sea at Tintagel.
But her hand stretched down into the
coffin, and her fingers touched the soft muslin veil.
She stared
hard, trying to see through the material to the face beneath.
A
man, she decided.
Not young, so not one of the soldiers.
What on
earth did Morson expect from her?

Slowly, she drew back the veil.
Her
eyes grew ever wider as more and more of the face was revealed.
Before she’d gone halfway, she stopped dead, her hands dropping to
her side as though she’d been electrocuted.

Oh, Jesus
Christ,
this can’t be
.

She held her hand over her mouth,
trying not to vomit.
She couldn’t breathe.
All of her limbs were
going numb.
Staggering over to the pews, she managed to flop into a
seat before her legs buckled beneath her.
She wanted to scream, but
her mouth just hung open.

Sick
.

These people were monsters.

57

T
he convoy of
Humvees didn’t reach Cadbury Castle until nightfall.
The vehicles
drove over snow-covered fields to get as close to the hill as
possible, the noise of their engines drowned by the high
wind.

The Battle of Camlann, Vernon now
remembered all too clearly, allegedly took place on the grassy
fields between the great mound of Cadbury Castle and the banks of
the River Cam, the fields churning into a muddy quagmire as first
snow and then rain lashed down on the battlefield that day.
Lucy,
when she brought him here three years ago, tried to conjure the
scene for him.
King Arthur was inside Camelot with his small army.
Crossing the river was Arthur’s nephew Mordred with his much larger
army of rebels.
Logically, Arthur should have remained inside the
fortress and tried to resist Mordred’s siege.
Instead, he and his
few remaining loyal knights rode out in their finest, most
glittering armour.
The last charge of chivalry.

Vernon stepped out of the Humvee, his
boots crunching into the thick snow.
In London, snow rarely fell
and didn’t lie long.
Here, the snow was several inches deep.
In the
headlights of the Humvee, he gazed at it as it glinted and sparkled
like a crystal field, but Kruger quickly ordered all lights to be
extinguished.

All around Vernon, the other soldiers
fanned out, including the handful of remaining SAS men.
There was
no smalltalk, just professionals doing their job.

‘
Can you feel it?’
Kruger whispered.
‘There’s something out there.’

Vernon nodded.
He’d felt it long
ago.

‘
Look up there.’
Kruger
pointed at the northern sky.

Vernon squinted upwards and spotted a
small, intense bright light, like a star.

‘
The sign of Satan.’
Kruger made the sign of the cross.
‘He’s
here
.
You know it, don’t you?
This is
his mockery of the Star of Bethlehem.’

Sherlock Holmes got it wrong, Vernon
thought.
Not even the impossible can ever be ruled out.
He was
certain Lucifer was really out there.
There was no point in denying
it, no reason to struggle with the impossibility of it.
It couldn’t
be true, yet it was.
‘What are we going to do?’
he asked.
He
remembered what Kruger had said earlier about the possibility of
killing Lucifer.
Silver bullets just didn’t cut it.
Crucifixes,
Holy Water, garlic – all useless.
They certainly didn’t have the
Ark of the Covenant at their disposal.

‘
We have to take any
chance we get to rescue Lucy,’ Kruger said.

‘
But how do we fight
the supernatural?
We don’t have the right weapons.’

‘
We have our faith.
Now, let’s get going.’
Kruger led the way up the steep slope to the
plateau of Cadbury Castle.

It was a difficult climb.
The soldiers
kept slipping as they made their way up the snowbound hill, through
the frozen trees shedding tinkling ice crystals.
A blood-red moon
hung above the mound, casting the same sickly red light as the
daytime sun.

After clearing the trees, they reached
the lip of the mound.
In the far corner of the plateau, lights were
visible.

Kruger raised his night-vision
binoculars to take a closer look.
‘It’s a Templar church,’ he said.
‘There’s a hearse outside.’

‘
A hearse?
You don’t
think…’

‘
Trust me, Lucy’s not
dead.’

Vernon felt the chill seeping through
his uniform and into his bones.
Would this nightmare ever be over?
He was exhausted, physically, mentally, every which way.
Yet,
somehow, he knew his true trials hadn’t even begun.

‘
There are no sentries
outside,’ Kruger said.
‘We’ll surround the church.
They won’t be
expecting us in this snowstorm.
It’s perfect cover.
The falling
snow will cover our tracks.
We’ll go straight across the field and
then surround the chapel.
If there’s a back entrance, we’ll split
in two and storm the front and back doors simultaneously.
Otherwise, we go through the front.
We use flash and stun grenades
to disorientate them.
We’ll have maximum surprise.’

All of the troops nodded.

It sounded so good in
theory, Vernon thought.
Yet
that
creature was out there.
How could they beat the
Prince of Darkness?

58

L
ucy held her
head in her hands.
‘No,’ she mumbled, ‘it’s not real.’

Morson sat down beside her and clasped
her hand.

‘
I buried him,’ Lucy
said.
‘That can’t be him.’

‘
You buried a box of
rocks, Lucy.
We took your father’s body and embalmed it.
It was our
right.’

‘
What do you mean?’
The
words came out of Lucy’s mouth so quietly she wasn’t certain Morson
heard them.
Her fingers groped for her locket, the one she found
back at Merlin’s Cave.
Now it hung from her neck, her most precious
object.
She raised it up and kissed it.

‘
Let me see that.’
Morson gestured at her to hand it over.

‘
I’ll never let it
go.’

‘
That’s not yours.
You
took it from your father, didn’t you?’

Lucy clasped it to her chest.

‘
We all have one of
those,’ Morson said.
‘It has the letters
DA
engraved on the
outside.’

Lucy was startled.
She’d always been
curious about those two letters.
Her dad said they stood for Latin
words that were particularly dear to him, but he never revealed
what they were.

‘
Deus Absconditus,’
Morson said.
‘It’s Latin for
Hidden
God
.’

‘
The Gnostic
god?’

‘
The True God,
the
only
God,’
Morson said.
‘Hidden from all those in thrall to the Creator of
this hellish world.’
He pointed at the locket.
‘Flip it
open.’

‘
I found it near where
he drowned.
It has my picture inside.’

‘
Under your picture,
you’ll find one of our most sacred symbols – the Death’s
Head.’

Lucy did what Morson suggested, but she
was just going through the motions.
She already knew he was right.
Slipping out the small photo, she gazed at the intricately etched
Death’s Head underneath.

‘
I told you, Lucy –
you’ve always been one of us.
Your father was our Grand Master, our
High Priest, the man with the most illustrious bloodline in the
world.
He could trace his lineage all the way back to the
beginning…to our earthly lord and master.’

‘
You’re saying my
father was a direct descendant of Cain?’

‘
That’s why you’re the
Chosen One, Lucy.’

‘
But why did he kill
himself?
Why did he leave me?
He never told me anything about this.
Not a word.
I can’t believe you took his body.’

‘
He wasn’t in his right
mind at the end, Lucy.
When he went to Tintagel, he was trying to
locate the Sword of Destiny – the one you found.
He wanted to give
it to you, to explain things, but he couldn’t discover any trace of
it.’

‘
You’re saying he
didn’t kill himself at Tintagel?
He slipped, or
something?’

Morson shook his head.
‘No, he
definitely took his own life.
He had to.
After all, he’d committed
a terrible crime.’

‘
What?’

‘
A crime against
Gnosticism, against the beliefs he’d held all his life: the crime
of
love
.
He loved
his wife and, above all, he loved you.’

Lucy shook her head.
‘How can you say
that love’s a crime?’

‘
Love was Satan’s
deadliest gift to mankind.
When Pandora opened her box, the first
and greatest evil to fly out was love.’

‘
I don’t
understand.’

‘
Love is the glue that
keeps souls attached to this world, stuck in this hell.
It mires us
in misery.
Love glitters and seduces.
No one would endure one
moment of this hell if they felt nothing but the pain.
It’s the
love that allows people to bear it.
Love traps us, keeps us in the
snares of the material world, this false world of the false god.
Yet you, better than anyone, know that the underside of love is
pain, the worst pain of all.’