The Armageddon Conspiracy (6 page)

‘
Let me get this
straight, colonel,’ Vernon said.
‘The DIA are claiming that a few
days ago an elite Special Forces unit deserted en masse and became
– how shall I put it – Tomb Raiders, or Raiders of the Lost Ark?
And now their activities may have brought down, um, God’s fury on
us.’

‘
That’s as good a way
of putting it as any other.
We think all of the deserters are now
in the UK…in the southwest of England, to be precise.’

Vernon turned to Harrington but his
boss’s blank expression signalled that he too wasn’t sure what the
hell he was listening to.

Vernon couldn’t figure it.
Why would
Delta Force deserters steal holy relics?
And what were they doing
in the southwest of England?
It was a part of the country he was
more than familiar with, and it certainly wasn’t where you’d expect
to find renegade U.S.
Special Forces.

‘
I’m sorry,’ he said,
wondering why Gresnick was now, in his turn, exchanging a
meaningful glance with Harrington.
‘This is a lot to take
in.’

‘
There are some other
things I need to throw into the mix,’ Gresnick said.
‘Two of the
deserters were apprehended in London last night by your armed
police group CO19.
They had detailed maps of southwest England in
their possession.
They were picked up in one of the reading rooms
of the British Library after breaking in very amateurishly, almost
as though they wanted to be discovered.
When CO19 found them, they
were studying microfiche of rare manuscripts.
They’re being held in
the cells next door.’

‘
The British Library?’
Vernon queried.
‘Microfiche of what?’

Gresnick and Harrington again
interchanged glances, but neither replied.

‘
Beyond what it says in
the document you’ve just read,’ Gresnick said, ‘what else do you
know about the Holy Grail?’

‘
Nothing,’ Vernon
snorted.
‘Absolutely nothing.’
He folded his arms.

Gresnick raised his eyebrows.
‘That’s
not quite right though, is it?’

Vernon dug his fingers
into his arms.
He’d had his fill of hearing about the Grail.
For
three years, his former girlfriend talked of little else.
Girlfriend?
Ghost
.
How else would you describe the person who haunted you day and
night?
The last thing he wanted was to be dragged back into that
circus of horrors.

‘
Mr Vernon,’ Commander
Harrington said, ‘the reason we’ve brought you down here is that
one of the prisoners had certain information in his
possession.’

Vernon felt the room growing cold.

‘
It appears the
prisoners were planning to kidnap or assassinate someone,’
Harrington went on.

Vernon jerked his hand forward, almost
knocking over his coffee.
‘The Prime Minister?’
he ventured.
‘The
Queen?’

‘
Actually, it’s your
ex-girlfriend.
We have no idea why, particularly given her
condition.’

Vernon’s hands trembled
and he thrust them against his thighs to steady them.
This is impossible.
He
stared hard at Harrington.
‘Lucy?’
The name, as it emerged, scraped
his mouth like sandpaper.
‘Condition?’

Harrington looked away.
‘I’m sorry,
James, I thought you knew.’

7

‘
T
ime for your
medication.
One blue and one red.
Take a sip of water.’
The nurse
leaned over and placed the tray with its pills, glass of water and
half an orange on the table next to the patient.

Lucy Galahan let the nurse see her
taking her pills then sat back in her rocking chair, pulling her
blue blanket up to her neck.
It didn’t take long for her to feel
the usual drowsiness creeping over her: the dull march of numbed
senses, of everything fading into the distance.
Occasionally she
resented how her life retreated from her at pill-time, but usually
she simply felt less bad.
That was all she wanted, for the hurt to
stop.

Sometimes she fantasised about
gathering all of her pain together, every jagged fragment she had
collected in her life, and fashioning it into some misshapen
snowman.
She’d place it next to a radiator and watch it melt,
taking all her hurt with it.

As she drifted off, Lucy remembered
that as a kid the thing she’d most looked forward to was when her
mum put her to bed, kissed her good night and said, ‘Sleep tight,
don’t let the bed bugs bite.’
Nothing had hurt in those days, not
even the bed bugs.
Every time mum switched off the light, she felt
warm and safe.
There were never any bad dreams.
Now, that’s all
there were.

When her eyes opened again, she was in
her bed and two nuns and a nurse were staring down at her.
The only
light in the room came from a couple of candles, the flickering
light drawn to the silver crucifixes hanging from the nuns’
necks.

‘
Leave us,’ a voice
said – a man’s voice.

Lucy was startled.
It was months since
she last encountered a man.
The six-hundred-year-old convent of Our
Lady of Perpetual Succour was strictly women-only.

‘
Are you certain, your
Excellency?’
one of the nuns said.
‘Mother Superior
didn’t…’

‘
There’s no mistake,’
the voice said.
‘She’s the one.’

Lucy didn’t
understand.
Excellency
?
Who was this person?
She tried to prop herself up on her
elbows to see him, but she was exhausted and her head flopped back
onto the pillow.

The nuns and the nurse closed the door
behind them as they departed.
They’d left a single candle on Lucy’s
dressing table.
She could hear the sound of breathing – her own and
the man’s.
Where was he?
The foot of her bed, she decided.
It
didn’t leave him much room.
It was a narrow hospital bed with
broken springs.
Not much else could be fitted into the room.
In the
days when this was an ordinary convent, it would have been called a
cell rather than a room.

‘
Let me apologise for
disturbing you like this,’ the man said.

Lucy thought she detected traces of an
Irish or Scottish accent.

‘
I know this must be
uncomfortable for you,’ the man went on.

‘
Who are you?’
Lucy’s
eyes followed the direction of the candle flame up to the ceiling.
The candlelight danced over the paintings she’d stuck up there so
that when she awoke each morning they would be the first things she
saw.
She sensed the man was as intent on her paintings as she was.
They covered most surfaces of her cell.
She’d even doubled up in
some places.
It would be a lie to describe her as a skilful
painter, but it was the one activity that relaxed her.
She
transmitted her pain through the brush and onto the canvas.
It
comforted her to see the pain becoming something separate from her,
in the distance, anywhere other than lodged in her
heart.

Maybe the signs had
always been there.
As a teenager, she engaged in mild self-harm – a
few shallow cuts on her legs and arms with razor blades.
She read
Sylvia Plath’s
The Bell
Jar
, entranced by expressions like
‘breathing sour air.’

The man’s voice interrupted her
thoughts.
‘So, it’s true,’ he said.
‘I hardly dared believe
it.’

‘
You still haven’t said
who you are.’
Lucy wasn’t certain she was having this conversation.
Dr Levis, her psychiatrist, told her she’d been delusional on a few
occasions.
The delusions were only part of it.
Severe trauma can
lead to Dissociative Identity Disorder, Levis said.
The new name
for old-fashioned Multiple Personality Syndrome.
Voices in the
head; several of them.
But that was in the past, wasn’t it?
Getting
better now, Levis said, much better.

‘
I’m from the Vatican,’
the man stated.
‘My name is Cardinal Joseph Sinclair.
I’m the
Prefect of the Congregatio pro Doctrina Fidei.’

Lucy concentrated hard.
Was this a new voice in her head, or the genuine voice of a real
person?
All the time, she had to check for clues to separate the
real from the imagined.
In the ancient world, she wouldn’t have had
a problem.
‘Reality’ was much more fluid then.
People knew there
was an afterlife because they’d seen it.
Dreams
– how wondrous they must have
seemed to those who had no idea what they were.
Another world,
where the dead were alive again.
The ancients believed the dream
world was the
real
world, that when we went to sleep we were afforded glimpses of
the world we would inhabit when our sleep became permanent.
When
her parents died, Lucy lost the ability to know where the dream
ended and reality began.

‘
Sorry, I should have
said the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,’ the cardinal
said.
‘It’s my job to protect the teachings of the Roman Catholic
Church from those who seek to subvert them.’

Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith
?
A fragment of Lucy’s
old life came back to her.
At Oxford University, she was an expert
in non-standard belief systems and she was well aware of whom the
unorthodox – the heretics – feared the most.

‘
Why don’t you say who
you really are?’
She felt she was talking to the past, to all the
normal things she’d lost.
Maybe she had conjured this urbane man as
a substitute for her father.
She longed to be hugged by her dad
again.
It seemed impossible that he would never hold her anymore,
nor ask how she was feeling, never make clumsy inquiries about her
love life or how her career was going.

‘
So, you’ve heard of
us,’ the man said.
There was something different about his voice.
A
sudden harshness.

Lucy felt a shiver running through her.
‘When did you people stop calling yourselves the Inquisition?’
she
asked.

8

V
ernon couldn’t
concentrate.
In a world that might be dying, his personal ghost had
resurfaced.
Lucy Galahan was the love of his life, the one who for
three years treated him to every bizarre theory about the great
holy relics – real and fabled – that littered human history.
A
lecturer in Comparative Mythology and Esoteric Studies at Oxford
University, she was dazzlingly clever.
It helped that she had great
looks too, and an athletic body honed by her obsession with scuba
diving.
Put it all together and she was Vernon’s ideal woman…until
she dumped him.

‘
This is a file found
in the possession of one of the prisoners,’ Gresnick said, sliding
a folder to Vernon.
‘It’s a surveillance log.
It’s all there: a
detailed diary of Lucy Galahan’s movements in the last week, her
daily schedule, who are carers are, long-lens photographs,
background reports and so on.’

Vernon, shifting uneasily in his chair,
glanced at one of the pictures: a close-up of Lucy in a wheelchair
in a garden, accompanied by a nun.
It shocked him to see the face
that had tormented him for so long.
Even worse was to see Lucy so
helpless.
Often enough, he’d tried to pretend she meant nothing to
him, but that just made things worse.
Her raven hair entangled his
thoughts.
He’d spent so much time running his fingers through it,
playing with it and smelling it.
Her eyes did the most damage,
though.
They were big and tender, almost childlike.
The shade of
blue was remarkable, practically violet.