The Lucifer Code (27 page)

And someone had to pay.

The bigger the church the greater the anger: from Hagia Sophia in Istanbul to Canterbury Cathedral in England to St Peter's in Rome to the Jewish Synagogue in Jerusalem. The denomination didn't matter. Priests sought sanctuary in their now redundant churches as torch-bearing crowds surrounded these ancient places of worship whose spires pointed confidently to a heaven that the Red Pope had exposed as a lie.

A state of emergency was called in many countries as the authorities tried to explain the darkness. The following day, when the power returned with the sun, the American president appealed for calm and logic to prevail, making a robust televised address to his nation and the world.

'There is no proof yet that this is related to the Red Pope's address, or indeed that the Red Pope's address was genuine,' he stated. 'The FBI and the coastguard have taken the rare step of boarding the Red Ark, while it is still in international waters, and a full investigation is under way. More important, whatever Cardinal Accosta did or did not say is irrelevant to the laws of this land. I cannot control what does or doesn't happen in heaven or hell, but here in this world I can. Whatever anyone else chooses to believe, I believe that the law stands and it must be obeyed. I don't know who will or won't be punished in the next life but I can promise you one thing: if you break the law you will be punished in this life. If you've lost faith in everything else, have faith in that.'

Sitting alone in the conference room in the black sector, Soames stroked his wolves and watched the news bulletins. Even as the CNN and BBC anchormen both claimed that an uneasy calm had been restored, he smiled. He knew that the world was bracing itself for the real storm to come.

*

VenTec.

The next day

A storm was brewing outside VenTec. Dark snow-clouds blanketed the mountain peaks and gusting winds buffeted the helicopter flying the Truth Council back to the Foundation.

'C'mon, it ain't necessarily a disaster,' Soames said soothingly, as he stood in the lobby to greet the shell-shocked Carvelli and Knight. Carvelli appeared dazed: his handsome olive-skinned face was pale, and his usually immaculate hair dishevelled. Virginia Knight looked worse: the horror of what she had witnessed aboard the Red Ark was written across her face. She seemed on the verge of collapse.

After we left the Ark was crawling with FBI agents,' Carvelli said. 'Must have been monitoring it ever since we announced the Day of the Soul Truth, and when the first sign threw the world into panic they boarded us. If we'd waited any longer we'd be answering difficult questions now.'

'You're safe here,' Soames said, laying a reassuring hand on Knight's forearm. 'We've just got to reconvene and think through what this means.'

He looked across at Tripp and Bukowski, who were following the two members of the Truth Council into the Foundation. Their faces were expressionless as they brushed snow off the shoulders of their Arctic jackets and turned towards Soames. Catching his eye, they both nodded understandingly and hurried purposefully to the lift that connected with the red sector.

'Where's Monsignor Diageo?' Soames asked. 'I thought he might come back here with you for the . . .' he searched for the appropriate phrase '. . . post-mortem.'

Virginia Knight shook her head, unable to speak. Her fair hair seemed more streaked with grey than when she had last been there, a few days ago.

'He's dead,' Carvelli said slowly. 'Threw himself off the Red Ark's highest deck.'

'Even though he knew he would find no escape in death,' Knight said.

'He panicked,' Soames stated, 'and we must avoid doing the same.'

He led them to the black sector. The corridors of the Foundation were deserted. VenTec was self-sufficient with its own generator and utilities, and a sterile environment that required minimum maintenance. Except for a skeleton crew, he had evacuated almost everyone on the day before the Red Pope's revelation.

The broken glass had been cleared from the conference room in the black sector but the mirrored wall hadn't yet been replaced. The echoing blue-white space of the adjoining laboratory changed the acoustics of the enlarged room and made it feel colder. The wolves sat motionless as Knight and Carvelli took their seats at the table.

Soames poured them some coffee from the flask beside him and took a sip from his can of Coke.

Knight put her head in her hands. 'Everything we did was in vain - all the killings, all the time we spent. There was no justification for any of our crimes.'

Soames smiled. 'It hardly matters now, does it?'

Knight turned to him, appalled. 'We were used by Satan to do what we thought was God's work. We did evil, believing it was good. Of course it matters.'

Soames's smile grew broader. 'Why? Okay, God turned out to be Satan - but so what? In fact it's good news. If there's no God, you won't be punished for your sins.'

'How can you say that, Bradley? You were a believer too. How can you be so unaffected by this?'

'Let's just say I'm not unduly surprised.' He pointed to his scarred face. 'You aren't born like this and immediately think that God's a good guy. I've always suspected the bastard was a sadist, so to have Him unmasked as the Devil comes as something of a relief. It sure explains a few things and cuts through all the contorted bullshit the Churches have been churning out, trying to make sense of how their all-knowing, all-powerful God could allow so much misery into the world.'

He smiled at Knight, who was sitting open-mouthed. 'If you think about it, what the Red Pope's soul revealed was a refreshing, liberating truth. That's why it doesn't matter. After all, nothing's changed.'

'Of course it has,' Knight said angrily. 'Everything's changed.'

Soames laughed. 'No, it hasn't. The only thing to change is what you believed in. Stop being so melodramatic, Virginia. It's not like God's suddenly packed His bags and gone. He was never there - you just didn't know it. Now, at least, you know life's basically a crap game with the dice loaded against you, so you can stop whining and get on with it.'

Virginia sat very still, staring at Soames, eyes narrow with hatred and disgust. 'You never believed in God, did you?'

Soames said nothing. For a moment, however, he almost told her everything. The need to make her understand the secret knowledge he had kept locked in his heart was so strong. But he had to be patient. His long wait was almost over.

'Hey, hey,' Carvelli interjected. His broad smile was forced, but his smooth confidence was returning. 'C'mon, guys, let's not turn on each other. This has been a setback, a major disappointment, but we've got to be practical. Virginia, Bradley's right. Perhaps we should accept the new way of things and try to adjust accordingly.'

Knight let out a long sigh.

Soames leant towards her. 'Virginia, we've got to make the best of this. And, as you so clearly pointed out, we have transgressed - not necessarily in the eyes of our new Lord and Master, but we have broken the law.'

Carvelli looked alarmed. 'Will the FBI find anything on the Red Ark to implicate us in the killings and . . . ?'

'Don't worry about the Red Ark. The authorities have got their hands full trying to explain the first sign and preparing for the next ones. However, perhaps we should be concerned about the witnesses to our over-enthusiastic and, on reflection, misguided acts of murder and abduction.'

The horror on Knight's face deepened. 'What are you saying?'

Amber Grant and Miles Fleming are serious liabilities.'

'But the Red Pope said we shouldn't harm them,' Knight said automatically. 'He said the violence-'

Soames guffawed. 'But he was wrong, wasn't he? You still haven't grasped it yet, have you, Virginia? The Red Pope was a self-deluding arrogant fool who knew nothing.' He looked directly at Carvelli, then Knight. 'Look, it's simple. Fleming and Grant have to be silenced permanently so that we can put this sorry episode to rest and get on with the rest of our lives. And, Virginia, stop looking so horrified. Your conscience is redundant now that there's no longer a God to give you credit for doing good.'

'Damn God,' Virginia shouted. 'What about our humanity? What about our human belief in what's right or wrong?'

Soames spoke in a contemptuous whisper. 'What about it, Virginia? What about this precious humanity you've suddenly discovered? Is it the same humanity that allowed you to collaborate in the deaths of a hundred terminally ill patients just because you thought you were serving God?'

*

Black sector secure accommodation.

Two hours later

In the secure suite two doors down from Fleming's, Amber was sleeping. After her mother's death she had been too traumatized to rest, but after the Red Pope's Day of the Soul Truth and the subsequent chaos a strange calm had descended upon her. She had fallen into a deep sleep unlike any she had experienced before. It seeped through her bones, relaxing her muscles and dissipating the stress and anxiety.

She entered the dream state with calm serenity; she didn't struggle or exhibit signs of disquiet. Instead she lay still and although her eyeballs exhibited the classic signs of movement when she entered REM the lids remained closed and her breathing regular.

Then, as it had so often before, her mind took the journey to death.

The darkness envelops her in a velvet cocoon and a numbing calm possesses her. No harm can come to her here. Even when she sees the now familiar pinprick of light and experiences the rush through the black vortex towards it she remains untroubled. This time she is not alone on her journey. A presence is with her, leading her. It's as if she and Ariel have never been apart as they approach the cone of light. They fuse and become as one, and Amber knows all that Ariel knows.

Racing through the darkness she understands that Ariel has been waiting for her in the no man's land between life and death. Her sister's patience only ran out on the day that Bradley Soames first detected the human soul in his early experiments on terminal patients. That day, the wave particle duality of soul and body collapsed, which so warped the universal membrane connecting life and death that its disturbance affected Ariel and caused Amber, her entangled twin, to feel phantom pain.

Amber's dreams of dying were caused by Ariel's bid to warn her to stop Soames's tampering. The nature of their bond meant that every time Ariel tried to use Amber's descent into the dream state to inhabit her living consciousness she pushed her sister away. The more aggressively Ariel pushed through the rotating door towards life, the faster Amber spun away towards death. Ironically, Soames's experiments on Amber released Ariel to make contact with her before continuing her long-delayed passage towards death. And now as her sister guides her into the light Amber knows that Ariel is saying goodbye. She also knows that Ariel intends to show her something.

Entering the cone, they are moving so fast that the light seems to stand still around them like a frozen blizzard of silver particles. No longer is she travelling through the luminescence, but merging with it, becoming indivisible from the photons that surround her. But she feels no fear now that Ariel is with her. For the next few timeless moments they are joined again, the dancing twins, moving together in concert, in perfect accord. And as they near the peak of the cone a feeling of bliss flows through Amber as they reach the apex and merge with the source of the radiance. Then Amber is aware of being both a discrete entity - herself - but also a part of her sister and a part of a greater host, a greater self.

Then a blinding blue-white supernova blots out everything and a swirling maelstrom of light consumes her, pulling her apart and reconstituting her, again and again.

Suddenly the light-storm is gone and she is alone, waiting to be plucked back from the light, back into life. But she feels no sadness or loss. Instead, for the first time, she feels complete. Lingering at the apex of the cone, her vision is restored and the bright light which once dazzled now illuminates. Like a climber standing on a peak and looking out over a sunlit plain she can see clearly where her sister has gone. And her adoptive mother. And all those she has loved.

In one stunning revelatory instant, before she is yanked back into the vortex, she catches a glimpse of what lies beyond the source of the light and inhabits the next world.

Amber, wake up! Wake up!' Confused and disoriented, Amber couldn't distinguish whether the familiar voice was real or in her dreams. Then she opened her eyes and saw Soames standing in the half-light of the open doorway, flanked by the two wolves. 'I just wanted to check everything was okay with you,' he whispered. After all that Amber had experienced over the past week, his concern was ill-timed and inappropriate.

Amber slipped out of bed and padded over the carpet to him. 'I could never understand why you and Accosta were in league together . . . but you never believed in him, did you? Somehow you knew what he'd discover. You knew it would be terrible.'

Amber, I simply wanted to find out what happens when we die. No different from what Miles was trying to do - or any scientist worth their salt would do if they had the technology. I had the technology, which you helped me to develop. All I did was seek the truth. Is that so bad?'

'What about the way you did it, murdering and abducting people?'

'It was necessary, Amber.'

'Why?'

'To find the truth: