The Armageddon Conspiracy (51 page)

Lucy didn’t answer.
Gresnick’s version
of what the soldier said was much more plausible.
Why should the
soldier tell a different story to James?
Then again, why not?
If he
were the reincarnation of Judas, he could have any number of
duplicitous tales to tell.
Anyway, according to Morson, she was
even more of a puppet than that soldier.

‘
What happened to
Sergeant Kruger?’
she asked.

‘
He was still alive
when I left him.
For your sake, I hope he’s dead.’

‘
Why are you saying a
terrible thing like that?’

‘
Because he swore to
kill you.
If he’s alive, he’ll track you down.’

Lucy turned away and trudged into the
heart of the garden, stopping in front of a thorny bush.
A single,
absurd, red rose was poking through the thin covering of snow.
Crouching down to smell it, she let the scent overwhelm her.
She
held one of the petals between her fingers.
The feel of it, the
texture, was exquisite.
For a second, she could forget.

At the rear of the garden was the small
graveyard they’d chanced upon the previous night.
There was
something about graveyards that made them so much more poignant
when they lay beneath snow.
Everything was starker, more in keeping
with death.
As Lucy walked between the headstones of the monks who
once lived and worked here, she thought of her father.
Had Morson
gone ahead with his plan and burned the body on an open-air pyre on
top of Cadbury Castle?
It would have been a spectacular sight.
The
best way to commemorate her father.

Returning to the fountain, she put her
hand in the water then instantly snatched it back.
She gazed down
and felt sick – the water was full of dead goldfish floating on the
surface.

‘
It doesn’t make sense,
does it?’
James said.
He was directly opposite her, his body hidden
behind the ornamental marble angel that formed the centrepiece of
the fountain.
‘I mean, it’s freezing, but the water in the fountain
hasn’t iced over.
How is this fountain working at all?
I bet it
hasn’t functioned for centuries.’

‘
Dead fish,’ Lucy
mumbled, pointing.

‘
Everything dies.’
James’s voice sounded so strained.

Lucy deliberately kept her head behind
the angel.

‘
I thought maybe you’d
met someone else,’ James said.

‘
What?’

‘
When you said you
didn’t want to see me anymore in your letter.’

Lucy bowed her head.

‘
But there was no one
else, was there?’

Lucy remembered one of her
conversations with Gresnick.
He said he’d seen a DIA intelligence
report on her, covering everything that had happened to her in the
last year.
James must have seen it too.
A thin file.
She’d done
nothing except have a breakdown.

‘
How about you?’
she
asked.
‘Is there anyone special?’
She wasn’t certain what she
wanted the answer to be.
An emphatic yes and, simultaneously, an
equally emphatic no.
Then she could remain frozen.
For the last six
months, she’d lived in a glass world where nothing ever changed.
It
comforted her.
Nothing ever got worse; the most frightening
nightmares were kept at bay.

There was a long pause.
Too long?
Long
enough?

‘
No one
special.’

****

J
ames wanted to
vomit into the fountain.
Lucy had reduced him to a liar, made him
deny his wife and his beautiful baby.
Somehow, he was inside Keats’
poem, living it, breathing it.
He remembered one line in
particular:
Full beautiful, a faery’s
child.
Was that Lucy?
And, of course, the
line that haunted him most:
And no birds
sing
.
Lucy was the one who stopped them
singing.

Despite it all, he
couldn’t find it in himself to stop loving her.
He remembered what
one of his friends once said to him after he’d been moaning too
much on a boozy night out: ‘
The only
haunted house you’ll ever enter, James, is your own past.
All the
ghosts are personal, and no one is ever leaving.’

Everything was on hold until he dealt
with Lucy, one way or another.
His own life had become estranged
from him.
He felt as though he were receiving news from a land far
away, about someone he didn’t recognise.
Nothing was scarier than
the fact that the person who was your best friend, your soul mate,
could become unrecognisable to you in the blink of an eye.
With a
few words, they could kill your happiness.

The ancient Greeks said you shouldn’t
eat your own heart.
He never understood what it meant, not until
Lucy left him: if you bottle everything up, if you don’t confide in
someone, you’ll end up consuming yourself.

‘
I haven’t seen any
sign of the wolves,’ he said.
‘We ought to get going again.’
He
pointed up at the sky.
‘You see that bright light up there?
I first
saw it last night.’

Lucy nodded.
‘I did too.
It made me
think of the Star of Bethlehem.
Maybe someone special has been born
somewhere in England.’

James peered hard.
‘I swear it’s
getting bigger.’

67

H
alf an hour
later, they were on the road again.
All the wolves had gone, just
as James had said.
Lucy was worried the creatures might have
attacked the horses during the night, but the horses were exactly
where they left them, cold but otherwise fine.
She and Sinclair
climbed into the back of the carriage while James sat up front with
Gresnick.
It was a relief to be separated from James.
The
atmosphere between them was like a Chinese water torture, each drip
inflicting agony.
She longed to go back in time to when she could
hold his hand without giving it a second thought, when they sat for
hours without saying a word and didn’t feel a trace of
self-consciousness.

They found a route through the forest
and soon reached a sign for Cheddar Gorge, saying it was fifteen
miles away.
As Gresnick drove the horses forward, Lucy stared back
at the forest.
In the pale red light of morning, with snow covering
the treetops and the ruined abbey peeping out, it was utterly
magical.

None of them spoke as the carriage
plodded forward.
Hours passed as they made slow progress towards
their destination.
They found an old barn with bales of hay and
were able to feed the horses and get them in out of the cold for a
while.
There was running water, and they all had a drink.
After a
fifteen-minute break, they set out again.

Lucy kept expecting to hear the engines
of Morson’s trucks, but the sound never came.
The occasional
snorting of the horses and their heavy breathing were the only
sounds that broke the silence.
Further on, Gresnick said he saw a
flash of light, as though the sun had glinted off a mirror, or the
lens of something…binoculars perhaps.

‘
Morson?’
Sinclair
asked.
‘He must have spotted us.’

‘
I don’t know,’
Gresnick said.
‘Maybe it was nothing.’

Lucy felt uneasy.
For a while, she’d
had the sense they were being followed.
Not by Morson and not by
anything supernatural.
She didn’t say anything, but she feared it
was Kruger’s brother.

By mid-afternoon, an uncanny landscape
had materialised in front of them.
To the left was a desert of
black sand, snowless and stark.
Ahead were mountainous slopes
covered with pebbles and huge boulders, the crests snow-capped.
To
the right, an impenetrable forest of black trees, snow-laden on one
side, without a trace of snow on the other.
Why was snow lying in
some places but not others?
Lucy didn’t realise England contained
terrain like this.
But the hills were familiar enough – the
Mendips, through which Cheddar Gorge gouged its path.

The carriage stopped in a designated
picnic area for tourists.
They all got out to stretch their legs
and the men went for a toilet break.
Lucy, dehydrated and hungry,
didn’t feel any need.
She stood and gazed at the bleak terrain.

When the men had returned, they debated
what to do next.
It appeared that a landslide had cut off the main
route through the Mendips.
James went over to an information point
that provided a large map of the local area.
He confirmed that the
main road shown on the map was exactly where the landslide had
occurred.
They would have to find another route.

‘
There’s a track over
the hills,’ James said.
‘It will take us straight to Cheddar
Gorge.’

Lucy gazed at the hills in front of
them.
They didn’t look inviting.

‘
Isn’t there another
road?’
Gresnick asked.
‘A long way round?’

‘
There are two other
possible roads.
One’s about a mile away and the other’s a further
ten miles.’

‘
We can rule out the
ten-mile trip,’ Gresnick said.
‘The other sounds
perfect.’

‘
What if there’s been a
landslide there too?’
James objected.
‘Maybe going by foot is the
best bet now.
According to this map, we’re only a couple of miles
from the heart of the Gorge.’

‘
I’m not going
hill-walking,’ Sinclair said.
‘Let’s try the other
road.’

James shook his head.
‘What makes you
think that road will be in any better condition than the one in
front of us?’

Their bickering voices gave Lucy a
headache.
She turned away and went over to one of the picnic
tables.
Flopping onto a wooden bench, she sighed then looked back
at James.
When they went out together they never argued.

The others eventually came over to join
her.

‘
We’ve agreed to meet
back here in an hour,’ James said.
‘I’m going up the hilltrack to
see if there’s a clear route.
The others are taking the carriage to
check out the next road.’
He held out his hand.
‘You can come with
me if you like, Lucy.’

She saw how eager he was for her to say
yes.
It was such a simple word to say, yet often the hardest.
‘I’m
tired,’ she said weakly.
‘I think I’ll have to take the carriage.’
Seeing how crushed James looked, she bowed her head and stared at
the top of the picnic table as though it were the most interesting
object in the world.

‘
Christ!
’ Gresnick yelled.

Lucy looked up.
Far to the north, the
brilliant light they’d seen before was vastly bigger, practically a
second sun.

‘
That’s heading
straight for us,’ Sinclair bellowed.

The light in the sky had transformed
itself into a huge fireball travelling obliquely at incredible
speed through the atmosphere, leaving a blazing trail in its wake.
There was no question it was on a collision course for the
earth.

Without warning, a light brightened the
horizon and the air warped into a vast shimmering heat-haze.
For an
instant, it was as though the sky were splitting apart.
Seconds
later came a thunderous roar accompanied by a stinging, raging
wind, so forceful it knocked them over.
Gravel-sized stones
showered down everywhere.