by Scott Baker
Eventually Malbool forced his way against the flow of the people and came to stand in front of me. His eyes were red rimmed from sadness and rage, but now there was something else in them. Wonder. When at last he spoke it was a simple statement. ‘Your hand.’
Without moving, I looked down at my hand, then brought it up in front of my face. My simple hand. My simple, complete, whole hand. My hand with five full fingers. My hand that had touched the man with the cross. A wave washed over me and I sank to my knees. As never before in my life, I cried tears from the depths of my soul.
Shaun turned the page. It took him a few moments before he registered that he could not read the words written on it. He stared at it for a second, and then his brain told him … It’s not in English.
CHAPTER 51
‘What?’ Shaun asked aloud. ‘What!?’ he yelled.
Business-class travellers from around the world now stared uncomfortably at Shaun. He did not notice. He stared at the pages, trying to make sense of it. There were still five pages in the diary, but not in any language that he could understand. What was it? Hebrew? Roman?
What had he just read? He was still sitting in the plane cabin surrounded by modern technology, but just a minute ago he had been walking through Jerusalem more than two thousand years before. The roadblock he had just encountered had forced him to sit back for a moment, to remember where he was and what he was doing. What had he just read? A miracle. It could not be true … could it? It was the same question Shaun had asked himself again and again about the diary, and yet its very existence vouched for its authenticity. The possibility that the whole thing was an elaborate set-up was even less plausible than the chance, however bizarre, that this whole thing was real. Then, there was the disc. He had seen with his own eyes the amazing footage on it. How could that have been anything but genuine? He had seen the video in the most amazing way, a living image of unparalleled depth and detail, clarity and substance. It was unlike anything he – or anyone, he suspected – had seen before.
So, what about the disc? Could it be a fake, some kind of Hollywood movie magic? He looked over at David, now sleeping soundly. Was he for real, or was he part of the conspiracy? On cue, David belched in his sleep.
No. If Shaun felt certain about anything, it was about David. Simply, he believed in his new friend. The man was too flawed to be an evil genius.
Then, he really had seen the escape of Napoleon from the isle of Elba more than two hundred years ago. Which meant that someone, somehow, had succeeded where Shaun had failed. Someone had figured out how to travel through time.
Shaun was a scientist, a very good scientist. He could believe in the process of creating the means to travel back in time. But for Saul to have captured video of Jesus Christ performing a miracle? In all his experience and all his study he had never seen anything that he thought could not be explained by science. Religion? Superstition; stories created to explain life to the masses because they could not understand the science behind it. Stories created to maintain control of people, to keep their behaviour in check. No, Shaun did not see any need for religion. So, how could he believe this? How could he believe that this time-travelling journalist with stumps instead of fingers was miraculously healed by a man beaten to within an inch of his life? How could he believe in this miracle?
No matter how Shaun refitted the situation, trying to force and squeeze it into his current system of belief, he could not deny the logic of it all. Science was a system of hypothesis, testing, results and conclusion.
The boundaries of Shaun’s beliefs squeezed outwards under the pressure of the new information. Why was it so hard to believe? Did he want there to be nothing beyond what he could understand? Did he want there to not be some sort of God? He examined himself and realised that he had shut himself off to even the possibility for one simple reason; it meant that he was wrong.
Like many men on the planet, he did not want to be wrong. If he was wrong, then maybe there was a chance there was a God of some sort. Maybe Jesus was some sort of divinely inspired, connected, all-knowing deity, and if all that were possible, then that meant that maybe death was not the end Shaun had always asserted it to be. And if that were the case, then maybe Lauren still … maybe Lauren … Lauren … Tears welled at the thought.
Say it! his brain urged.
‘I can’t!’ he shot back.
Say it! Why can’t you just say it? It doesn’t mean you believe it, it just means that you’ve said it.
‘I won’t!’
Why?
‘Because …’
Because why?
‘Because … then I would have been wrong all this time!’
About everything?
‘No, just about this, but this is everything.’
Then say it! his brain commanded.
Shaun had always listened to his brain. His internal dialogue had provided him with startling insights in the past. It had given him breakthroughs when he had been able to reason his way no further. So, why did he not listen to it now? Why?
Why?
‘Because if I have been wrong all this time, then somehow, somewhere, Lauren might still exist.’
Yes. Say it again.
‘Lauren might still exist.’
Again.
‘Lauren might still exist. She might not be gone. She might be here. She might know how I feel. She might know how much I miss her. She might know how sorry I am for every time I hurt her, for every time I made her cry or didn’t pay her enough attention. She might be with me right now, right here with me. She might not be gone.’
Yes.
‘She might not be gone.’
Is that so bad?
The tears that had welled spilled over and streamed down his face. Suddenly something changed. The energy that had kept him going, the driving energy borne of anger, of hate, of revenge, released its hold just a little. The possibility that he had been wrong all his life, and that perhaps there was something more, folded around him like a blanket and enveloped him in a warmth he had never felt. As he released his breath, he sank deep into the chair and relaxed a little for the first time in what seemed like days.
As he started to drift off to sleep with his fingers curled around the small brown book, he took comfort in the thought that just maybe, he was wrong.
PART 3
GRAND PLANS
‘On a night like this there came a stranger on the road,
I saw him stumble, heard him fall, I helped him with his load.
The further that we walked, well the heavier it became,
And I believe I’ve felt the weight from another world.’
‘The Risen Lord’, Christopher Davison
CHAPTER 52
VATICAN CITY, 2014 AD
Cardinal François Le Clerque bit into his steak. He chewed the meat thoroughly while he considered the information. He liked his steak well done. It tasted exquisite with the merlot he had selected. As he mashed the meat in his jaws, he contemplated the poor judgement exercised by the man sitting across from him, fixing him with a steely stare. Had Le Clerque been in this man’s situation, he would not have chosen to deliver the news to a man holding a steak knife. Le Clerque sipped at the wine and savoured the taste. Good length. It was a dry red that left him puckering his lips, and with a deep richness – the colour of blood.
A second man sat across from Le Clerque, several years younger than the cardinal. With the delicacy of the information involved, there were few others who could have delivered it. He had no choice.
‘You have checked all the manifests for each of the ticketed flights?’ Le Clerque inquired in a thick French accent.
‘Yes, Your Eminence, all that we could gain access to. We had agents at each of the airports where they should have landed, but they bought more than fifty tickets, each with different airlines, different destinations with multiple arrival times. Our agents are spread very thin.’
Le Clerque raised an eyebrow. The second man immedi
ately went silent. He knew better than to phrase anything in a way that might sound like an excuse. He scrambled to change topic.
‘The documents we recovered at the motel in America are of extraordinary value. The ones you could not translate are being translated now by The Society.’
‘You gave them to The Society?’ Le Clerque snapped, suddenly serious.
‘Ah, we have no one with the expertise in our inner fold, Your Eminence. We did not give The Society all the documents, only five. We are using the find to act as a contingency should there be no other discoveries in the expected timeframe. We can filter the documents out and make it appear that we have recovered them from several sources.’
Le Clerque nodded. It was a sound enough decision, and was not of great importance.
‘Do not tell the professor about the remaining documents. Have an independent expert brought in to translate them.’
‘And then?’
‘And then see to it that our expert has an accident on his trip home.’
The Italian sitting across from Le Clerque nodded once. He relaxed a little now that he had been given a task; it meant the cardinal was not going to kill him on the spot. He was Le Clerque’s most trusted aide – and had accompanied him when they had confiscated the player from Newcom years earlier. It now sat idly in the cardinal’s safe, waiting for the time it would show the cardinal the disc that no one else would ever see.
‘And what of the others?’
‘Ah, we are having some trouble keeping up with them. We lost them at the hospital in Charlotte. He seems to know where we are going to be before we get there.’
‘Oui, oui. He would. He is a traveller. This is why he beat us to the diary in the first place.’
‘We assume that the map could be within the diary itself. It is not among the rest of the discovery. None of the other documents from the motel appear to be anything like a map.’
‘In the diary? It is possible, although when the school teacher was questioned at the hospital under influence he did not reveal this to be the case. He did not know about the map, that much is certain. We should have killed him there and then.’ Le Clerque threw down his napkin in disgust. His meal was not finished, but he had lost his appetite.
‘Should I have teams continue to investigate the known hide locations for the other discs?’
The cardinal, rosy-cheeked from the wine and running scenarios quickly through his mind, shook his head. ‘No. Louis Delissio was extremely cautious getting the list to us, and we do not want our friends at The Society to know we have it, or that we infiltrated The Journalist Project. We must have patience. The matter at hand is the important one.’
Le Clerque leaned forward a little and his eyes narrowed. ‘I do not need to tell you how important it is that we find this disc. It is the only thing that can stop my rise to the papacy. Müller will announce his retirement within days, and the conclave will gather. We find the school teacher and his friend and we will have the diary. The map and the diary shall be together, as it is written, and the map will lead us to the disc. When I have the disc they will have no choice but to elect me …’ his words trailed off. ‘Concentrate everything on finding the school teacher, he is the one with the diary now,’ the cardinal said as he sat back, satisfied with his command.
François Le Clerque was a man of intense intellect who could process information rapidly, reaching decisions quickly and concisely. He had been immensely frustrated when his people reported that the signal they were receiving had been traced to a jacket in the bottom of a ravine, but then, quite unexpectedly, the man turned up again.
An officer reporting back upon his daily surveillance of Giovanni had raised the alarm. The description of the two men with whom Giovanni had met was unmistakable, but Le Clerque had not expected them to move this quickly.
To allow them too much time with Giovanni would have proven dangerous. It had given him the excuse to do something decisive about his predecessor on The Journalist Project. But now the two men had run scared; the car bomb had frightened off the prize they were after in the first place. The team should have chosen a different method – the diary was, after all, highly flammable. He could not afford to lose it now.
Few knew of Müller’s ill health and his plans to retire. Le Clerque had spent considerable resources researching members of the one hundred and fifteen cardinals who would vote when the time came, and he had gathered enough evidence of their habits, vices and failings to ensure he would be elected. In the Church, reputation was everything – and blackmail was more powerful than bullets. It had been a plan in the works for decades, but then Pope Nicholas had died, and he had learned of Giovanni’s project – he had learned of The Facility.
If someone presented the conclave with a disc showing an interview with Christ, all bets were off, which was why Le Clerque had created a contingency – a chance that the disc proved that Jesus had not, in fact, died on the cross; that he was nothing more than a mortal man. If this plan succeeded, Giovanni would not dare present such a disc to the council and destroy the Church he loved.
Le Clerque considered the two options: the disc showed Christ’s interview and would never be seen by anyone, or it showed that Christ did not die on the cross. Either way, Le Clerque would be the next Pope, and when he was, his plans would far surpass holding a Mass for the faithful. He would change the world in a very real, very decisive way. He licked his lips in anticipation.
CHAPTER 53
WASHINGTON DC, 2014
The President of the United States sat at his desk in the Oval Office. He stared at the sheet of paper in front of him, but his mind was on other things. He had just received a phone call from a university professor in England. He had expected the call but had still been disturbed by it. It was not the first time he had spoken with Professor Landus, but he knew this would be the last, at least for the rest of his term in office. To say that the President owed much of his success to the professor would be an understatement. Indeed, many of the key decisions he had made during his term relied on important information provided by the professor on this very telephone.
The professor had an uncanny knowledge of what was going to happen. He had forewarned the President of disasters before they occurred so the government could properly prepare. He had told him of the motivation of key allies or enemies, and what actions they would take. He had even casually phoned one day and told the President, before he came into office, that he should lay a few dollars on the Patriots when they faced the Carolina Panthers in the 2004 Super Bowl.
The cost of all this knowledge? On the single occasion President Samuels had met the professor, Landus had made him promise something. To be honest. To be honest and stay honest. It was something the President at the time found curious. He was, after all, as honest as a politician could be, but it was only later when he held the weight of world-changing decisions in his hands that he came to know the true weight of his promise. But he had kept it. How could he not?
‘You will become President in early 2013,’ Landus had said simply, and he had, after the untimely resignation of the former leader midway through his second term.
But honesty was not the only cost. Ongoing support for The Society for World Historical Accuracy was something else the President had authorised. Not specifically financial, but it meant that The Society and its activities were not to be questioned or challenged. The third, and most immediate matter, however, was the one Landus had just mentioned. It was a favour. Landus had said that when this favour was completed, their communications would cease.
Samuels owed the professor at least that much, and a lot more. He was the first Hispanic American to become leader of the free world. The whole political landscape of US politics had changed thanks to the assistance of the professor. President Samuels owed much of that to Landus and was a man of his word. So be it.
The intercom buzzed and Samuels gave the all clear for his guest to be admitted. The Oval Office door swung inwards and
an army general, dressed in full ceremonial uniform, strode purposefully into the room.
‘You asked to see me sir.’ It was a statement, not a question.
‘Yes. Jack, I need a favour in Afghanistan.’
CHAPTER 54
David’s head hurt. His brain pulsed and seemed to want to escape his skull about once every two seconds. He looked over at Shaun sitting in the rickety old car behind him. It bounced and bumped along the road, threatening to collapse with each new corrugation. Shaun looked well, David thought, all things considered. He had slept for nearly the entire flight from Paris to Pakistan. David had not shared the pleasure. It was the smell. The smell of the aircraft resembled the odour of recycled Indian food, and had not made for easy napping.
Shaun was nervous. He was nervous because of the third man in the car, the man who drove. Shaun had not thought much beyond the flight. He did not know how he was going to get to the Afghan border, but he knew it would not be as simple as jumping in a taxi. That the problem had been taken out of his hands was more than disconcerting. Shaun did not like it one bit.
After landing in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, and shuffling their way through the chaos of an overcrowded baggage claim, Shaun and David had headed towards an information booth hoping to formulate a first step when David saw the sign. It read ‘Black, Strickland’ and was held by a man who had somehow fought his way to the front of the crowd at the arrivals gate. The man’s face was familiar. They had both seen it on CNN many times over the past few years as the front-line journalist had reported on the latest developments in the Allied war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Craig Schwartz. Why he was waiting for them at the airport was a mystery.
‘I have instructions to get you to the border,’ the journalist replied when Shaun had questioned him. ‘The only people they’re letting through the checkpoints are news crews and reporters. Just can’t get up there without credentials.’