The Code War (19 page)

Anxious remained staring at her
for several moments, wearing the outraged aspect of an alcoholic
who'd paid for a cider and been handed an apple juice.

Pilot and co-pilot continued standing on
either side of Anxious, their small bags in their hands, watching
the encounter with wry amusement on their faces.

They spoke to him again in dialect and
he answered them, but without taking his eyes off Nancy.

'You, drive?' he almost spat out the
question. Habib had asked that.

Nancy considered him for a moment.
Things were going too far. Her tiredness and temper joined
forces.

'Thank you. Y
es, I'd love a room for the night. And a cold shower. And
some food with a cold glass of wine. And when I've had all that
PERHAPS YOU CAN TELL ME WHO YOU ARE AND WHAT I'M DOING
HERE.'

All three were now staring at
Nancy. Their faces glowed like lampposts in the reflected
light.

After a long half-minute, Anxious
drew in a deep breath. He looked down at the ground apparently in
deep thought and then back to Nancy, repeated this several times
and finally regained some composure.

'Lafi,' he held his hand out. Nancy took
it.

'Nancy,' she said as though she had just
met him at a ball.

Lafi took a last look at pilot and
co-pilot and muttered something to them. Then he turned furiously
on his heel. 'Come Nancy,' he called imperiously and was gone into
the night.

Nancy looked at pilot and co-pilot. 'See
you boys,' she said quietly and followed Lafi even though she had
no idea where she was or where she was going.

Lafi led Nancy through a hole in a
chicken-wire gate at the edge of the airfield to where a small
taxi-cab was waiting with a driver. He opened the back door for her
to get in and himself climbed in the front. The car moved off and
sped away into the darkness.

Nancy
was a young woman alone in a car with an angry stranger in
a foreign country in the middle of the night without any money or
proof of identity. She had no idea where she was or how to get
home.

'You and I have much work to do before
sun come up,' said Lafi coldly without turning round.

And now she was heading into danger.

Heaven's
Shore

There was a knock. Jabez looked
up
.

'Yep?'

'It's Ruth, may I come in?'

'Of course, pull up a rock.'

Another knock. Agatha.

'Agatha. S
it down and come in.'

Agatha took her seat and settled
herself in. T
he globe wall readjusted
itself to include her within its circumference.

Both female angels appeared just a
few feet away from where
Jabez was
sitting on a grassy dune, grilling some fish over an open
fire.

Politely, they had arranged for
rough-hewn stone and tree-trunk seats to be in their apartments for
the globe meeting. They sat and looked around them at the sparse
landscape.

Luke was already there. He was
perched on a rope-swing and gently pushing himself forward and
back. He took his Stetson from his head and waved it to Ruth and
Agatha.

'Hope you don't mind if I grab a bite
while we talk,' continued Jabez while turning the fish. 'Just as
well I brought my fishing rod with me, being on the shoreline and
all,' he indicated the edge of Heaven just a few feet away and the
raw wilderness just visible on the other side of the schism. It may
have been called a shoreline but there was no sea to lap at its
edge. An open box at his feet hinted at the true origin of his
dinner.

The other three shivered slightly as
they contemplated the view. On the other side of the divide was the
beginning of Desoland. Of all the fingers of Inferno it was the
most scorched. Even so, a few squat creatures could be seen darting
about, scurrying from hole to hole.

All angels had been to some part
of the shoreline before. A trip to this region was part of the
induction into Paradise when they first arrived. Even then, they'd
viewed it from a distance without actually landing. But for all of
them, bar Jabez, this was the first time they'd seen it so
close.

Jabez looked across at Agatha. Her
brown hair, some of it threaded through ivory beads, cascaded down
to her hips. She was wearing a blue-hooped T shirt, calf length
jeans and pumps on her feet. Her wings were slightly open and
revealed a tartan inlay that perfectly accompanied her dressed-down
denim.

So that's the fashion for student
angels, thought Jabez. Fetching.

Ruth as ever was immaculate, this
time with her wing tops gold-dusted and wearing a shimmering yellow
knee-length dress and matching shoes all topped with a golden tiara
inlaid with those same liquid sapphire stones. 'Class act,' he
whispered to himself.

Luke as usual was wearing a check
shirt, blue jeans and cowboy boots. The Black Frontiersman. Jabez
had not bothered to dress up for this important meeting and was
still clad in traditional angel white pants and white
sweater.

'Angels, thank you for coming.' While
Jabez was eating the salmon freshly sent in from Ocean Rapids on
the other side of Paradise, Luke decided to begin the meeting by
introducing everyone formally. He steadied his swing and placed his
feet firmly on the ground. 'We only know a little about each other
from our records so let's play our baby bios now. I'll start.'

In the space between them another
Luke appeared and started to speak. The apparition described his
background and formative experiences and showed scenes from his
life on Earth as he guarded wagon trains of pioneers crossing
Oklahoma. It finished with a tour of his part of Heaven. The
apparition disappeared. Now a second Ruth took shape and went
through the same rapid biography. It was exciting to see the
makeshift hospital in the Alamo, a flustered Ruth binding up the
wounds of Mexican soldiers and American settlers on adjacent beds.
Then Agatha's avatar followed with its depiction of Second World
War Great Britain and the Bletchley Park codebreakers. Finally
Jabez's double described building a thriving farm in iron age
Judea, despite the foolishness of his spendthrift
brothers.

'So now we know each other a
little better, I hope we can also work well together,' declared
Luke, drawing the introductions to a close.

'Before we
get started, why don't we sing?' suggested Agatha
in her clipped Oxford accent. 'It'll put us in a
positive mood.'

'What are you thinking of?' Jabez.

'I heard a beautiful song recently. It's
about a man who falls in love with a woman only to find out she's
his long lost sister.'

'So they can't love each other?'
Ruth.

'Well, that's the point.
They
can
love each other. For ever.'

'Interesting.' Luke. 'Where did you hear
it?'

'David sang it. Live. At the Eden Hall
in Desert Springs, not far from where I live.'

'David?
The
David?' asked
Luke.

'Yes,
the
David. He says that when
he was King David in Jerusalem he spent too much time fighting so
now he's in Paradise he doesn't want to be in any of the combat
battalions. Instead he's built a business making harps and teaching
angels to play them. I've seen him play and sing live. He's very
funny.'

'Funny?' said Jabez. 'So let me get this
right, you mean King David who stoned Goliath and was always
beating up the Philistines is now an entertainer?'

'Yes,' said Agatha. 'He says he always
wanted to be a musician. He only got into soldiering because of the
lack of concert halls in one thousand B.C. Judea.'

'Very amusing.' Luke.

'It's a good line.' Ruth.

'Well it sounded funny when he said it,'
apologised Agatha.

'I think we should move on,' cut
in Jabez hurriedly. 'Before you tell us that Attila the Hun is now
an opera singer. Look, all of you, we need to make progress. We're
not getting anything done.'

'Jabez. Why are you looking so sad
suddenly?' asked Agatha. 'Is it something we said?'

'No. Nothing.' He smiled weakly. 'Thanks
for the suggestion about singing Agatha. But I'm not quite in the
mood. I'd prefer to get cracking.'

'Yes, let's get down to work,'
agreed Luke
quickly, with an eye on his
friend. 'So, bring us up to date on Nancy then, Jabez.'

Ruth and Agatha looked at each other
quickly. Neither said anything.

Jabez sat up on his rock, cleared his
throat and looked at them all.

'OK, the latest on Nancy is that
she's arrived in Gambia and been picked up by Lafi Touray who is a
Brother acolyte but also a ch
ancer. He's
taking risks by trying to run an independent operation outside of
Brother. Nancy has been given two code letters, a capital R and a
small e, by the other side. I'm going to ask Agatha in a moment if
she can help us with fiendish puzzles. Ruth has kindly joined the
team to enlighten us on Nancy's state of mind. We're going to need
all the help we can get on that front because her reaction to
meeting Lafi Touray, her cheek and feistiness in that meeting, were
not what I was expecting at all. I had Nancy down as being
petrified on arrival in a foreign country in the dark without any
papers, friends or money. In fact she had more fight in her than a
rhino. We're behind in this game and we need to catch up fast. Luke
you've got something for us to watch, let's begin with
you.'

'Sure,' responded Luke. 'Let's
just refresh our memories by watching this sequence together.'
He
looked at the ceiling of the globe
above him and spoke to it saying, 'Catch-up sequences
now.'

In the space between the four of
them, just in front of Jabez's fire, Nancy appeared at the moment
when she saw the letter e through the window of the jeep inside the
transport plane. The angels felt the tense atmosphere, heard the
throb of the engines and saw Nancy moving around in the dark
surrounded by military vehicles, far from home but bravely keeping
her spirits up. As they watched the e burn up and disappear, the
angels shivered inwardly. It was not often that a direct
manifestation of Infernal activity was witnessed, even in a
recorded sequence, within Heaven's golden realm.

Next the angels saw the action as she
descended from the plane at Banjul and met Lafi. They watched as
she met Lafi and dealt him the verbal right hook that knocked him
back on his heels "…yes I'd love a room for the night and a cold
shower…"

Jabez finished munching his grilled fish
off a skewer while they watched.

The sequence ended and the figures
vanished.

'Shall I go first?' Agatha.

'Sure, blue jeans, go ahead,' replied
Jabez warmly.

Agatha smiled back at him.

Serious now, Agatha folded in her
wings till the tartan disappeared from view. She looked down at the
ground, concentrating, and began to speak.

'There are many types of code that the
other side use to entrap men and women. It's still too early to be
sure which type they may have used. That's a problem because we
don't know how much time we have or how long the code is. It could
end soon with a third letter or it might be a whole sentence or
more.

But there are three main code
types and it's likely to be one of these. The first is a simple
instruction. An injunction. It may tell Nancy to do something.
Humans are intensely curious so they often follow these injunctions
just to find out what happens. Often with disastrous consequences.
The second is an appeal to ambition. It's a promise of wealth or
power if they follow a particular path, normally one that is
harmful to others. The ambition code has been used many times. It's
a powerful bait and has seen many souls lost. But the third is the
most dangerous and also the hardest for the enemy to pull off. It's
a code that spells out what a human
is
. If the code message arrives
at the same time as a revelation from somewhere else that 'this is
the person I was always meant to be', the combination of the two
together are powerful and invariably fatal. The soul will be lost
and the enemy will control their life for ever. It's hard for the
enemy to co-ordinate this, however. It needs detailed planning on
their part, which they're not normally good at. But on the rare
occasions when they've done it successfully in the past they've
gone on to inflict colossal damage on Earth. I sincerely hope it's
not the third code type.'

Agatha paused and waited for a
reaction.

Jabez was the first to respond. 'Thanks
Agatha, but I guess we're all thinking the same thing. Whatever
they're doing smacks of considerable planning. We'd be foolish to
assume it's one of the first two codes. My instincts are shouting
that it's the third. Luke, Ruth?'

Luke chimed in. 'I agree. They
know something about Nancy that we don't. That incident off the
plane was amazing. There's more to Nancy than even she thinks there
is. That's why this revelation idea rings true. Nancy's personality
hasn't stabilised, despite her years. She's still finding herself
and so she's open to something or someone revealing who she is and
what she is. She would find that kind of revelation difficult to
resist. Ruth?'

Ruth sat forward on her granite
seat looking thoughtfully at the ground. She plucked her golden
tiara from her forehead and contemplated its fluid stones for a
moment before replacing it in her hair.