The Armageddon Conspiracy (65 page)

Morson pushed open the
wrought-iron gates of the gardens and everyone went inside.
Although the rest of Glastonbury was snowbound, the gardens were
untouched by a single flake.
As at
Carbonek, blue floodlights lit everything.

They walked over a cobbled stone path
beneath a living archway of ivy entwined with great oak beams, past
two great yews – trees sacred to Druids, Lucy remembered – then
past a summer house and a couple of benches overlooked by a
sculpture of an angel.

They reached one of
Glastonbury’s most frequently visited sights – a
Holy Thorn
hawthorn tree.
Automatically, Lucy recalled the legend.
Joseph of Arimathea, it
was said, drove his staff into the earth at Glastonbury, and it
miraculously took root and blossomed into a
Holy Thorn
tree.
The tree standing
here now was a direct descendant of that sacred original and
famously flowered at two special times each year – Christmas and
Easter.
The perfect Christian tree.

They soon arrived at the Chalice Well.
Lucy had always found it astonishingly beautiful.
She could stand
here for hours gazing at it, set in its small sunken stone circle,
especially at sunset when it was bathed in a golden-brown glow.

The well’s opening was
covered by an oak lid, overlaid by an intricate design showing
the
vesica piscis
–
a sacred geometrical symbol in which the circumference of one
circle passed through the centre of a second identical circle –
with a
‘bleeding lance’ going through the
middle of both circles.
It seemed to represent the task confronting
Lucy.
She would have to take the spear and destroy the two matching
circles: the beginning and the end.

She stared hard at the well, trying to
keep her emotions under control.
This was where, legend claimed,
Joseph originally hid the Holy Grail, the very chalice she’d just
retrieved from Carbonek.

Sinclair pulled her
away and Morson led the party through the exit, across a road, and
onto a snowy track leading towards Glastonbury Tor.
They
reached
a circle of cherry blossom trees,
weirdly in full flower and preternaturally pink, at the foot of the
Tor.

Lucy stood in the centre.
The trees
were covered by pristine snow.
The sky was changing again,
generating an incredible display of fast-moving, coloured
streamers, long filaments of glowing light in the darkness.

‘
The Northern Lights,’
Sinclair said.
‘The earth’s magnetic fields are
reorienting.’

The night sky started to flash; huge
sheets of rainbow lights, the frequency getting faster and faster,
becoming dizzyingly rapid.

‘
The end is coming,’
Sinclair said.

Everyone hurried through the cherry
blossom trees towards the Tor.
Lucy wondered if apple trees once
stood here instead.
Glastonbury was reputed to be Avalon, the Isle
of Apples, gateway to the Otherworld, where the dying Arthur was
taken after the battle of Camlann.

Glastonbury Tor itself was a great
500-feet-high mound shaped like a teardrop.
Everything was covered
by snow: a spooky white hill surrounded by flat land.
On its crest
was St Michael’s Tower, a roofless remnant of an old church.

Where was Sinclair intending to go?
To
the top of the Tor?
Was the Ark of the Covenant inside St Michael’s
Tower?
Is that where Lucifer was waiting?

‘
We’re going
inside
,’ Sinclair said,
turning one of the spotlights away from the grove of cherry blossom
trees and pointing it at the foot of the Tor.
He produced a small
remote control and pressed a button.
For a moment, nothing
happened.
Then came a creaking sound.
A section of the hillside
started to slide to one side.

God
Almighty
.

A small stone passageway appeared, with
a bronze door at the far end, engraved with swastikas.
All at once,
Lucy realised the truth: Sinclair’s organisation had built a secret
passage into the hill.

‘
Come inside,’ Sinclair
said.
‘All the answers are here.’

81

S
inclair went in
first to open the bronze door then beckoned Lucy inside.
Shuffling
along the small stone passageway, she imagined that hell lay in
front of her.
Above the entrance – the hellgate – was a copper
strip bearing two lines from Dante’s
Inferno
.

By justice was my heavenly maker
moved

I, too, was created by eternal
love.

Lucy could accept that hell was created
in the name of justice, but it baffled her that anyone might think
eternal love was involved.
How could a place of never-ending
punishment be conjured into existence as an act of love?
Was it
conceivable that a god of love and forgiveness, as Christ claimed
to be, could create a place of limitless pain, of suffering
sanctified?
It was a contradiction in terms, a category error.

Wouldn’t it be an act of eternal
justice to destroy hell?
Did love demand it?
Maybe it would be the
ultimate mercy for it to be all over in one flash of light – six
billion souls delivered from Satan at a stroke.

Something was welling inside Lucy.
Temptation?
They would ask her to plunge a spear into a box and,
with that simple act, they had promised that everything would end.
They said that the stars in the heavens had moved for billions of
years to reach an alignment where she would be right here right now
to do this thing.
Did she have any right to act differently from
what was ordained?

The more she thought of
the world’s suffering, of her own, the more she found the idea of
ending it all irresistible.
Destruction was what she craved.
Euthanasia – a good death – for all of humanity.
Over in one
cataclysmic, painless instant.
No one would know what had happened.
Here then gone.
If Sinclair were right, she would be killing Satan,
destroying once and for all the author of evil.
A one-time
opportunity to cut out the ultimate malignancy from the universe.
No more injustice, cruelty, sin and strife.
Wouldn’t it be a crime,
the worst mortal sin of all,
not
to go ahead?

She went through the door and gasped
when she realised that the Tor had been hollowed out.
Her eyes
practically jumped out of her head.
Sinclair’s Gnostics, it seemed,
had used all of their wealth – the vanished treasure of King
Solomon, the lost treasure of the Knights Templar, the looted
treasures of the Nazis – to build the perfect setting for their
Doomsday plan.

A perfectly smooth cavern had been hewn
out of the rock of the Tor.
The rock ceiling was painted to
resemble the cloudless blue sky of a perfect day, with an
unshielded sun beating down so realistically that the heat was
almost palpable.
The walls were covered with a cityscape of what
was unmistakably ancient Jerusalem.
The ground was laid with slabs
of golden-brown sandstone.
But that was all incidental to the main
scene confronting Lucy.

‘
This is a perfect
recreation of King Solomon’s Temple,’ Sinclair said.
‘The original
nine Knights Templar found the precise plans for the construction
of the Temple during their excavations on Temple Mount.’

In front of Lucy was a
long white rectangular building with chambers jutting out on either
side, giving it a stepped appearance.
Three breathtaking objects
stood in the Temple’s forecourt.
Sinclair explained what they
were.
The first was a sacrificial altar
where animals could be slaughtered and burnt as a ritual offering
to Jehovah.
The second was an enormous bronze basin supported on
the backs of twelve bull sculptures.
There, priests were able to
wash their hands and feet.
The water in the basin represented the
Red Sea, and the bulls the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

Directly in front of the Temple were
more bronze basins, five on either side, mounted on wheeled carts,
and bearing ornamental carvings of lions and palm trees.
Any
residual blood from the sacrifices was washed off here.

Two bronze pillars guarded the entrance
to the Temple, representing, so Sinclair said, King Solomon and his
father King David.
The pillars were referred to as Boaz and Jachin
and they played a pivotal role in the rituals of Freemasonry.
Legend said that the originals were hollow and contained the sacred
writings of the ancient Hebrews.

‘
Who did all this?’
Lucy asked.

‘
We’ve been working on
it since the end of the Second World War.
We used our influence to
get the Government to agree to the secret construction of a top
security nuclear command bunker inside the Tor.
When the Cold War
ended, the military complex was dismantled and we bought the site
outright.
We created what you see now, using the finest craftsmen
in the world.
Everything is based on an idea over eight hundred
years old.
Ralph de Sudeley was the man who dreamt up all
this.’

‘
Who
?’

Sinclair gave a rueful smile.
‘Isn’t it
odd how so many of the greatest figures in history are so little
known?
Ralph de Sudeley was the man who discovered the real Ark of
the Covenant.’

Lucy listened in amazement as Sinclair
revealed the extraordinary story of the English Templar who found
the hidden Ark in 1188 CE.
Ralph de Sudeley was the commander of a
small Templar garrison stationed in the ruined desert city of
Petra, with the job of protecting the lucrative trading route
through the Shara Mountains.

Lucy had always wanted
to visit Petra thanks to one of the
Raiders
of the Lost Ark
movies.
In it, Indiana
Jones discovered the Holy Grail in an extraordinary temple known as
the
Treasury
, hewn
out of a sheer cliff-face.
Appropriately enough, the ghost of a
Templar guarded the Grail.
Now, it seemed, the movie had missed a
trick.
It wasn’t the Holy Grail that once lay hidden in the secret
caves of Petra, but the Ark of the Covenant.

‘
In 1188, Ralph de
Sudeley was a Templar with no personal wealth,’ Sinclair said.
‘When he returned to England the following year he was one of the
wealthiest men in the world.
He made several attempts to start
excavation work at Glastonbury Tor, but the technology didn’t exist
to do the job he wanted, so he wrote down detailed plans of what he
was proposing.
De Sudeley had French ancestry and it transpired he
knew Chrétien de Troyes.
In fact, de Troyes helped him draw up his
scheme.

‘
With the approval of
the Gnostic College, de Sudeley and de Troyes were responsible for
the plan to bury the Grail Hallows in sites associated with the
Arthurian legends in southwest England.
It was on the basis of this
plan that, centuries later, Pope Julius II, Grand Master of the
College, commissioned Raphael to paint the mural so the secret
locations would be preserved for all time in a safe
place.’

‘
But what about the Ark
of the Covenant?’
Lucy asked.

‘
Ever since 1189, the
Ark has been here in Glastonbury,’ Sinclair answered.
‘De Sudeley
wasn’t able to hollow out the Tor, but he did dig a small
underground chamber in which the Ark was stored, awaiting the day
when his plan could be put into effect.’

‘
I don’t understand,’
Lucy said.
‘De Sudeley came along decades after the original
Templars.
Didn’t they find the Ark in the hidden passages of
Solomon’s Temple?’