The Demon Code (30 page)
‘What reasons?’ Kennedy asked. Dry as the subject was, she was keenly, even urgently, interested.
‘You’re inviting me to give you a lecture,’ Bouchard warned. ‘You may come to regret that.’
‘Go ahead,’ Kennedy told him. ‘You don’t scare me.’
Bouchard grinned, and spread his arms in a declamatory gesture. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,’ he said. ‘Well, mostly it was just the worst of times. Or at any rate, the most unsettled. The most unstable. The upheavals of the seventeenth century had the feel of a great and irreversible change, a culmination of human history. In Britain, the monarchy was overthrown and the king beheaded by his own people. In Europe, the Lutheran challenge to the Roman church seemed to echo the cataclysmic battles promised by St John in his Apocalypse. If Mother Church could be attacked, undermined, forced to fight for her survival, then what was safe?’
‘So there was acid in the Kool-Aid,’ Kennedy summed up. ‘For a century or so. Across a whole continent.’
Bouchard shrugged, seeming unconvinced by the metaphor. ‘Johann Toller belonged to a group called the Fifth Monarchists,’ he said. ‘Have you heard of them?’
Kennedy shook her head. ‘I’m probably not going to have heard of any of this stuff. Assume I’m completely ignorant. I won’t be offended.’
‘They were one of many, many radical organisations at that time. Religious zealots – and as part and parcel of that, political dissidents. They came from many different backgrounds – prominent politicians, magistrates, writers and high-ranking army officers – but they were united by a single article of faith. They believed that there was a shape to human history, which the wise and the good could analyse and understand.’
‘What shape?’
‘A cyclical one. They believed that there had been four great monarchies or empires, each ruling over a particular age, and that each in its turn had been conquered and overturned by the next. I believe the four were Babylon, Persia, Macedonia, and then Rome.’
‘So where was the fifth monarchy?’
‘Not where,’ Bouchard said. ‘When. The fifth monarchy was the one that was about to dawn. The new king would be Christ, and his reign would last for ever. They backed this theory up with close reference to Biblical texts. There was a very heavy emphasis on the Revelation of St John, which famously gives the number of the beast as 666. Many argued that the year 1666 would be the last year of the earthly calendar. They liked the Book of Daniel, too. In that book, Daniel receives a vision of four great beasts who will have dominion over the Earth, and then, after “a time, and times, and half a time” will be cast down. That will be the signal that the son of man was about to ascend his throne.’
Again, Kennedy heard a definite and scary echo of the Judas tribe’s world view, with its insistence on thousand-year-long cycles and its infatuation with St John. The only extant version of their secret gospel had been encoded in a copy of his.
‘And Toller was part of this group?’
‘A leading figure, along with the likes of John Carew, Vavasor Powell and Robert Blackborne. Blackborne was the first secretary of the admiralty, by the way. Their modern-day successors may be marginal crackpots, but these were solid, serious men, with public stature and political influence.’
‘Okay,’ Kennedy said. ‘Look, I’ve probably taken up more of your time than you can really spare …’
‘I’m happy to help,’ Bouchard said.
She got up from the desk and pushed the typescript in his direction, going for broke. ‘Then could you explain some of these prophecies to me? The proper nouns, at least?’
Bouchard raised his eyebrows. There were a lot of pages. It was a lot to ask.
‘I can perhaps add some annotations,’ he said, without much enthusiasm. ‘Marginal notes. Here and there.’
It was Kennedy’s turn to be surprised. ‘Marginal notes? On the only surviving copy of a lost book?’
‘No. Obviously not. What you’ve been reading is not the only copy. It’s a copy of the copy, which I made so you could take it away with you.’ He raised his hand, forestalling her thanks. ‘Thank John Partridge. He pleaded very eloquently on your behalf. Burn it when you’re done. And don’t, please, tell anyone who gave it to you. We have our reputation to consider.’
Kennedy understood perfectly. She’d had one of those herself, once.
Since there was no second chair, and no room in the narrow cubicle to set one down, Bouchard just sat on the floor and talked her through the prophecies one at a time. Some he just passed on, but on most he had at least a guess to offer – and Kennedy copied in his annotations in the margins or over the actual words of the text.
Münsters Churche
was the Überwasserkirche, where a group of religious extremists – Anabaptists – had inaugurated their new government during a short-lived coup.
The faithlesse Soldier
was almost certainly Thomas Fairfax, one of Cromwell’s generals who had been a friend to Toller and the Fifth Monarchy movement, but had subsequently withdrawn his support for them and backed out of public life entirely.
Ister
was one of many old names for the River Danube.
And so on, through all the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of a very intricate, idiosyncratic book. But Bouchard had nothing to offer Kennedy on
the Island that was given for an Island
. ‘It could be anywhere. This was a time when all the European powers were annexing territories in the New World as fast as they could be discovered, then fighting endless wars over them, using the native populations as cannon fodder.’ He frowned at the text, as though unwilling to admit that he was stumped. ‘It would have to be referring to something recent enough that it was still talked about in Toller’s day. Then again, he refers to the Münster uprising, and that was decades earlier. It will be hard to pin down.’
Kennedy was only half-listening. Something Bouchard had said had nudged a memory and she was chasing it up on the laptop. The Überwasserkirche. She found the reference and stared at it in mute horror.
And the faithless soldier. A few more clicks brought up a biography of Thomas Fairfax and she knew with a sickening certainty that she was right.
‘The ending of days,’ she muttered.
‘
Qu’est-ce que c’est?
’ Bouchard enquired politely.
Kennedy stared at him. ‘What all of this is about. The ending of days. The second coming. Armageddon.’
Bouchard nodded. ‘Yes, that’s the climax of Toller’s prophecies, of course. Christ will descend and destroy the unrighteous. Only the just will remain. All of these other events are merely warnings. Harbingers. They tell us that the beginning of Christ’s kingdom is imminent.’
‘Then He must be on His way,’ Kennedy said. ‘Because most of these things have already happened.’
Rush fretted a lot about how he was going to get his stash of illicitly borrowed books out of Ryegate House. But in the end, he just picked his moment and walked out of the staff entrance carrying them in a black plastic bin bag. If he was stopped, he was planning to say he’d found the bag in a corridor and assumed it was rubbish. But he wasn’t stopped.
An hour or so later, and seven miles east in Harlesden, he decanted his haul onto his parents’ kitchen table. His mum and dad were in bed already. His mother would have fallen asleep long ago, on half a temazepam, and his dad would probably be sitting up with a book, listening to classical music on his headphones. Neither had heard him return, which meant he didn’t have to pretend that everything was normal.
He’d chosen the books quickly, and some of them were no use at all. But Toller appeared in the indexes of most of them. And in one, Rush found a commentary of some kind on the mysterious book of prophecies.
It looked pretty promising at first, but it turned out to have nothing to say about the prophecies themselves. It was more interested in the book as a physical object, and in particular the revolutionary use of a process for the book’s few picture plates that anticipated some aspects of lithography.
Rush had no idea what lithography was, so he had no opinion about that. But as he was flicking through the pages he saw another reproduction of the frontispiece: the steep crag, and the town, and the Latin tag. Now he noticed the image had a second caption as well as the one Toller had given it.
It read ‘Gellert Hall,
circa
1640’.
His vision was starting to swim. It wasn’t ‘Gellert Hall’, it was ‘Gellert Hill’.
He gave up and closed the book. He’d get up early in the morning and read some more before he went into work. Or maybe he’d pull a sickie and spend the day reading. He was keen to have something solid to show to Kennedy when she got back.
He went into the kitchen, raided his dad’s meagre stash of booze and found a half-bottle of cheap brandy that was mostly full, but when he unscrewed the cap the smell of it made his stomach turn. What he really needed was sleep, but he knew that it would take its own not-so-sweet time coming. Whenever he closed his eyes, he could still see Professor Gassan with his hands clasped around the knife that was sticking out of his chest.
Rush put the bottle back and went up to his room, moving as quietly as he could in case his dad had taken off the headphones and turned in for the night. He opened his bedroom door, stepped inside and closed it firmly before turning the light on.
There was a girl on his bed. That registered first, because it was such a novelty in itself.
The gun in her hand presented itself to his mind a half-second or so later, but with even more breathtaking effect.
As a distant third, he realised that she’d been watching TV on his tiny portable, with the sound right down. Cartoon Network. A very old episode of
Courage, the Cowardly Dog
.
‘Lock it,’ the girl said, with a nod of her head towards the door.
On both sides of the Channel, wherever she could get any internet access Kennedy continued to work through Toller’s prophecies, trying to nail down the idea that had occurred to her when she was talking to Bouchard. By the time she was done, she was a few minutes away from St Pancras, and in a slightly surreal daze. She’d thought after meeting the Judas tribe that nothing could ever surprise her again.
She’d been dead wrong.
Her phone rang as the train pulled into the platform. She glanced at the caller ID: Ben Rush. As she was about to answer, Leo Tillman rolled slowly into her field of vision. He was leaning against a pillar halfway along the platform, hands in his pockets, conspicuously waiting for her. The train slowed to a halt, placing him dead centre in Kennedy’s window. In her current mood, that was slightly too flashy an effect for her liking. She hit IGNORE on the phone. She’d catch up with Rush later.
Tillman fell into step with her as she descended from the carriage and walked towards the barrier. ‘Welcome home,’ he said.
Kennedy looked around, first left and then right. ‘No marching bands? No parade? Some welcome.’
‘Heather, whatever this is about, it’s not ancient literature.’
‘I never thought it was,’ she said. ‘Actually, Leo, I think it’s about the end of the world.’
He gave her a slightly wary glance. ‘I wouldn’t have gone that far. But I went looking for your
Elohim
girl and I found—’
‘You did what?’ Kennedy stopped dead and swivelled to face him, unable to keep the horror from showing on her face. ‘Leo, I told you—’
‘I know. You told me to sit this out. But I didn’t make any promises. Listen, there’s something I need to show you. Can you give me an hour or two? I can promise you something you’ve never seen before.’
‘I’ve heard that from a lot of men,’ Kennedy muttered darkly. ‘It never comes to anything good.’
And this is no exception
, she thought, forty-five minutes later. She was standing in a lock-up in Lewisham, underneath a railway arch, with the gates locked behind her, and she was staring into the back of an articulated truck. The stuff inside it was maybe what you’d get if you asked a terrorist to come up with a vision of the earthly paradise.
She picked up a rifle from a case close to the truck’s tailgate that Tillman had already opened. It was a military machine gun – no use for sports, and scarcely better for public order deployment. It was designed to be planted firmly on the ground and set to full automatic, spewing out a few hundred rounds per minute into whatever piece of territory needed to be tenderised.
The next box held grenades, and the one after that, more rifles. They were stacked up against three drums of white phosphorus.
‘This is a nightmare,’ Kennedy said.
‘Or a wet dream,’ Tillman said. ‘Depending on where you’re standing. There was a warehouse full of this stuff, Heather. Thirty to forty times as much as you’re looking at here. The warehouse is mostly smoke and charcoal briquettes by this time. And I’m going to get rid of what’s in the truck, too, as soon as I’ve figured out how. I just wanted you to see it first so you’d know I wasn’t exaggerating.’
Tillman ran a hand through his unruly hair, looking more uneasy and uncertain than she could ever remember seeing him. ‘Heather, I got a look at the paperwork. The outfit that owned the warehouse – High Energy Haulage – was delivering to a hundred other places. It was a global network.’
‘Did you call the police?’
Tillman laughed lugubriously. ‘Yeah, I did, for what it’s worth. But like I said, this was just a distribution centre. Do you see what we’re looking at? We already knew that the Messengers were killers, but this …’ He threw out his arms in an inarticulate gesture, indicating the truck full of death. ‘Unless the London branch just experienced some kind of sudden shared psychosis, we’re talking about an incredible escalation of hostilities. They’re shipping industrial quantities of small arms, field munitions, high explosive and incendiaries. Moving it all into place. And it’s enough to fight a medium-sized war – which I guess is what it’s probably for.’