‘The feeling’s about as unmutual as it could get,’ she said.
Not even insults could dampen his smug elation. ‘Come in. I want you to see what you’ve helped bring us.’
She entered the laboratory, Norvin at her back. Within, Simeon and Anna Fisher regarded her with unfriendly eyes. Beside them on the stainless-steel bench was a metal case; the same one Trant had carried the previous night.
Cross saw her flash of recognition. ‘Yes, this is it. The second angel.’ He opened the case.
The angel was revealed within, cleaned and polished, its metal wings glinting under the lights. It was made from a smooth grey material, cast rather than carved: pottery or ceramic fired in a kiln.
That was consistent with how Cross had described the artefact from Iraq. She glanced at the fragment of the first angel, still sitting inside its protective glass case, then back at the new arrival. ‘Is it the same as the one you found?’
‘Apart from the head, yes. That was a lion; this is an ox. Or a calf, depending which translation of the Bible you use.’
‘It looks more like an ox to me,’ Nina noted.
‘I know. The King James version seems closer so far.’
She peered more closely at the statue, spotting something inscribed into the surface. ‘There’s something written on it. Have you had it translated?’
‘I don’t need to. I already know what it says. The angel I found in Iraq had the same words.’ Cross carefully lifted the statue with his gloved hands, turning it to follow the text around its body. ‘Revelation chapter four, verse eight: “And they rest not day and night, saying ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.’” It doesn’t literally mean that they’re talking non-stop, but that the words written upon them are an eternal statement of God’s greatness. Another of John’s hallucinogenic interpretations of what he’d read.’
‘You should put all this stuff in a book,’ said Nina, not willing to be convinced, even though she couldn’t fault his logic. ‘There’s always a huge market for explanations of the Bible. Call it The Revelation Code or something, I’m sure it’ll be a best-seller.’
He shook his head. ‘I’m not interested in money, Dr Wilde. I’m only interested in the truth; God’s truth. Which is now one step closer to being revealed.’
‘Well, it is called Revelation,’ she said, but he was distracted from her facetious comment by a noise from outside – the roar of a helicopter coming in to land. ‘Expecting company?’ she asked.
‘A . . . friend,’ he replied. ‘Norvin! Go and meet him.’ The big man nodded and hurried from the lab.
Cross returned the angel to the case. Nina eyed it, but the close proximity of Simeon – and his gun – deterred her from getting nearer. ‘So that’s two angels accounted for,’ she said instead. ‘What about the others?’
‘That’s up to you,’ said Cross. ‘The Throne of Satan, and the Place in the Wilderness – we still have to figure out where they are. But since you found the Synagogue of Satan so quickly, I’m sure you won’t have any problems.’
Nina forced herself not to show any reaction to the first undiscovered location. She had known where it was from the moment Cross had initially mentioned it: the only possible thing it could be was the Pergamon altar in Berlin. If the former CIA man or any of his followers had possessed an archaeological background, they would have worked that out already. Fortunately, fundamentalists – of any stripe – were prone to sticking solely to their existing beliefs rather than exploring anything that might challenge them. ‘To be honest, I’m amazed that actually paid off,’ she told him. ‘My picking the Villa Torlonia was just a guess.’
‘Not just a guess,’ Cross replied. ‘You were guided.’
‘By whom?’
‘God, of course.’
‘God guided me?’ she exclaimed. ‘I don’t think so! If God were giving me a helping hand, he wouldn’t have let you kidnap me and torture Eddie.’
Something about her words briefly affected the others, glances – unsettled? Concerned? – flicking between Simeon and Cross, but whatever the cause, it quickly passed. ‘He’s not guiding you,’ said Cross. ‘He’s guiding me – but as part of that guidance, He brought you to me. Everything you’ve been through, everything you’ve survived, that was all His will.’
‘Really,’ Nina said flatly.
‘Really! You’ve fallen out of airplanes, escaped sinking ships, gotten through deathtraps – and you’ve had so many people try to kill you that you’ve probably lost count. Divine intervention is the only possible explanation for your survival. Wouldn’t you say?’
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ she insisted. ‘I’d put knowledge, determination, desperation and sheer dumb luck above God keeping me safe so you could use me for your crazy plan.’
‘It’s not just his plan,’ said a new voice from behind her. ‘It’s mine.’
Nina spun towards the entrance – only to freeze as she saw a horribly familiar face. ‘Son of a bitch . . .’
Victor Dalton, the disgraced former leader of the free world, regarded her mockingly. ‘If you don’t mind, Dr Wilde, I prefer to be called Mr President.’
11
‘I can think of plenty of other things to call you,’ said Nina, struggling to hide her shock. While in the White House, Dalton had collaborated with religious extremists to try to kill her and Eddie to suppress their discovery of the Garden of Eden. He had then been forced to resign after Eddie leaked online a graphic video of his affair with the woman who had plotted the nuclear attack on New York, only to resurface seeking revenge on both the couple and a cabal of the world’s wealthiest people, whom he considered to have betrayed and abandoned him.
The last she had seen of him was on television, being arrested by the FBI. ‘So you didn’t end up in a supermax prison? Damn.’
‘People like me don’t go to prison,’ Dalton replied, his smile becoming caustic around the edges. ‘You can’t jail the President of the United States, even a former holder of the office. It would be a national embarrassment.’
‘You were a national embarrassment!’
Any trace of good humour vanished. ‘I was a better president than the idiot who replaced me. But in America, anyone can be rehabilitated – and actually, I have you to thank for giving me my chance.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know what you and your psycho husband did, but the Group went chasing after you into Ethiopia . . . and never came back. You did, though, so I assume you killed them.’ She didn’t reply, not wanting to give him any leverage against her. ‘Hey, no need to be coy – I’m happy about it! Those bastards set me up, but after they disappeared, nobody at Justice had the balls to push the charges. So everything was quietly dropped.’
‘Everyone still remembers that you were busted for security violations, though.’
He shrugged. ‘The American public has a really short memory. There’s always some rock star doing drugs or an actor making an ass of himself to distract them. Once the media stops pushing a story, it becomes a footnote.’
Nina smiled a little. ‘Like your political career.’
‘It’s not over yet!’ he snapped. ‘That’s why I’m here. I knew Mr Cross’ – a brief look at the robed man – ‘from my time on the Senate Intelligence Committee; our paths had crossed, no pun intended. And I knew he shared my views about the state of America, and the state of the world.’ His tone became more oratorical. ‘I’ve joined with him to continue what I started in office . . . and soon, I’ll regain that office. I was hounded out of the White House as a philanderer. But I’ll be voted back into it as a saviour.’
Nina treated him to slow, sarcastic applause. ‘Nice stump speech. Who’s it aimed at – adulterers and snake-handlers?’
‘It’s aimed at everyone, Dr Wilde,’ Dalton said, with a flash of anger. ‘Everyone in America. And they will all support me.’ He moved to examine the statue, brushing past her. ‘So this is it?’
&
nbsp; ‘That’s it,’ Cross told him. ‘One of the angels of Revelation. The clues to finding it were in the Apocalypse of John all along, but it took me to crack the code.’
‘And me to find the statue for you,’ Nina said, cutting.
‘For which we’re both very grateful,’ said Dalton, politician’s smarm back at full intensity. ‘But the angels will let me finish what I started in office. Once they’re . . . used’ – he glanced at Cross again, as if to check that he wasn’t giving away some secret – ‘religious conflict around the world will reach new highs. All those jihadist groups, all those terrorists, they’ll be targeting America like never before – and that will create the unstoppable desire at home to unify behind a single banner. One religion: our religion. This won’t be some fake populism backed by billionaires who want tax cuts and the EPA disbanded. This will be real, and you’ll either be with it, or against it.’
‘Sounds like my idea of hell,’ she said with distaste.
‘Then get out.’ There was a sudden vehemence to his words. ‘You don’t like America? Leave. We don’t need you, or want you.’
‘I guess you don’t need or want the Constitution or the Bill of Rights either. The First Amendment ring any bells?’
‘We’ll be taking them back to their true intent. The next election isn’t far off, and by then, the world will be in chaos. America will be crying out for strong leadership, and that’s what I’ll give them. I’ll be standing as an independent against that jackass Leo Cole, and whoever the other side puts up against him – and I’ll win. Once I’m back in power, I’ll secure the homeland, and kick out anyone who’s a threat to it. Including your friends at the UN,’ he added. ‘America shouldn’t kowtow to anyone else’s laws. We make the laws. And enforce them.’
Nina could hardly contain her disbelief at his new-found megalomania. ‘America has treaties with the United Nations – are you just going to ignore them?’
‘The United Nations!’ Both turned at Cross’s outburst. ‘The most corrupt and evil organisation in history. It shouldn’t be kicked out of America, it should be destroyed!’ He gazed reverently at the angel, then stepped away and spread his arms to make a proclamation. ‘The kings of the world will witness God’s judgement soon enough. Babylon will fall. And then the kingdom of God will be founded here on earth!’
Both the Fishers and Norvin watched their Prophet, enraptured, while Dalton, clearly surprised, could only stare. But Nina was looking not at Cross, rather at the statue, exposed and unattended just a few feet away.
Her chance—
She shoved the startled Dalton aside and snatched up the figure. The others all whirled, Simeon drawing his gun, but she had already raised the statue above her head. ‘Back off or I’ll smash it!’ she cried.
They froze – but from the fear on Dalton’s face and Anna’s expression of horror, they were scared of something more than the destruction of a religious artefact. ‘I mean it,’ Nina continued, trying to cover her anxiety.
‘Don’t!’ said Dalton, holding up both hands. ‘That would be a – a very bad idea. For all of us.’
‘Why?’ she demanded. ‘Is it dangerous?’
‘Yes. It’s dangerous,’ said Cross. He indicated the glass case. ‘I keep that piece of the first angel in there for a reason. It shouldn’t pose a threat, not any more, but I’m not willing to take chances.’
‘What kind of threat?’
He gestured at the artefact above her head. ‘Will you put it down?’
‘Nope,’ she said defiantly. ‘If anyone tries anything . . .’
‘If you break open the angel,’ said Cross, ‘we’ll all die. Not just us in this room, but everyone in the Mission. Please. Put it down.’
Nina looked up at the statue. It didn’t appear deadly, but it was unusually heavy for its size. ‘Is there something inside it? Is that what you’re all so scared of?’
Cross nodded. ‘You remember I told you the Umm al Binni lake was a meteor crater? The meteorite that hit there wasn’t just a rock. There was something more to it – something deadly. “And I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth, and to him was given the key to the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth.” Revelation chapter nine, verse one. The pit was the impact crater, and I saw the smoke myself, in Iraq. When the first angel was broken.’
‘Smoke came out of it?’
‘Not smoke; gas. There was something inside the meteorite, a substance that doesn’t occur naturally on earth, that reacted with the air.’ He turned to Anna. ‘Anna was a chemist and biochemist for the CIA – she can explain it.’
‘It was a pyrophoric material,’ said Anna. ‘Something that ignites spontaneously when it comes into contact with oxygen. It burns at a high temperature, judging from the effect it had on the ceramic containing it’ – she indicated the fragment inside the cabinet – ‘until it’s completely consumed. But as it burns, it gives off an extremely toxic by-product.’
‘A yellow cloud, like sulphur,’ said Cross solemnly. ‘It kills almost instantly. I had protective gear, but the Arab rebels didn’t. They all died in agony, as if they were being eaten alive by insects, after just a few seconds.’
Nina gave the statue another look, this time considerably more nervous. ‘So this material, part of the meteorite . . . it’s inside the angel?’
‘Yes. The twenty-four Elders managed to contain pieces of it.’
‘How? If it burns on contact with air . . .’
‘Water stops the reaction,’ Anna told her. ‘Or at least slows it.’
‘It poisons the water, though,’ said Cross. ‘Exactly as Revelation said in chapter eight. “The sea became blood”, and then three verses later, “and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter”. The fragments must have poisoned the water supply around the crater. But the Elders figured out a way to make them safe.’
‘Seal them in clay while they’re still in the water, then harden the outer shell in a kiln, I’d guess. The wings were a way to reinforce it?’ Nina said, lowering the statue slightly for a better look. Cross nodded in confirmation. ‘And over time . . . the story of what happened turned into folklore,’ she realised. ‘The meteorite became a burning mountain, the locusts were the toxic gas, all inflicted on humanity by an angry God – and the statues became angels, based on existing mythology. I’ve seen the same four heads representing angelic beings before, in the Garden of Eden.’
Cross stepped closer, holding out his hands. ‘Put the angel down, Dr Wilde,’ he said. ‘If you destroy it, we won’t be the only ones who’ll die. The cloud will spread over the entire Mission. There are almost a hundred people here – do you want to be responsible for their deaths?’
‘Whatever you’re planning, they’re in it with you,’ said Nina, but with uncertainty.
The former CIA agent picked up on it at once. ‘You think Miriam’s in on it? She’s a sweet, innocent young girl who’s following her heart. She’s never hurt anyone in her life.’ A firmer tone. ‘Just like Macy.’
Nina’s jaw clenched at her friend’s name. ‘You son of a bitch. Don’t you talk about her.’
‘I know what you think – that it’s your fault she died,’ he pressed on. ‘And the guilt over that’s been eating away at you ever since, hasn’t it? That’s why you went into therapy. Because of the guilt.’
Tears stung the corners of Nina’s eyes. She angrily blinked them away. ‘Screw you.’
Another step nearer. ‘If you smash the angel, you’ll murder a lot of innocent people. Including Miriam.’
She looked at the heavy steel door. ‘Not if you close that. The only people who’ll die will be in here.’
‘Mr President?’
‘Yeah?’ said the sweating Dalton.
‘Leave the room, please. Norvin, Anna, Simeon – you too.’
Nina hefted the statue again. ‘I’m
warning you!’ But Dalton made a hurried exit, Cross’s followers doing so more reluctantly to leave the pair alone.
‘I know you won’t do it,’ said the cult leader. ‘You can’t accept more innocent people getting hurt because of you. Especially not the most innocent of all.’ He looked down at the bump marking the presence of the new life inside her.
She felt a hot tear run down one cheek. ‘Son of a bitch,’ she hissed. But the statue remained in her raised hands.
‘Give it to me.’
Nina drew in several angry breaths . . . then slowly lowered her arms. Cross reached out to take the statue. He had to pull it from her grip, her fingers refusing to surrender, but then it was his. ‘I should have done it,’ she whispered, but she knew he was right.
‘I’m glad you didn’t.’ He placed the angel in the case and closed the lid. ‘But it proves what I told you. God kept you alive as part of His plan.’ The statue secure, he called out: ‘Simeon! It’s okay. You can come back in.’
Simeon hurried into the lab. He aimed his gun at Nina, but Cross signalled for him to lower it. The others followed, Dalton last to enter after peering nervously around the door. ‘Is everything safe?’ he asked.
‘It’s safe,’ Cross replied.
Nina wiped away another tear. ‘So you got your precious angel,’ she said bitterly. ‘Is that your plan? You’re going to break it open and claim that all the victims died because it was God’s will? Poison Mecca or somewhere to start a religious war?’
Dalton looked momentarily startled, but Cross shook his head. ‘This isn’t about war, Dr Wilde. It’s about fulfilling a prophecy – and it’s about knowledge.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I was a CIA operative – a spy. It was my job to find out information about America’s enemies, to discover their secrets. But when I went to Iraq, when I found the temple and the first angel, I realised there was a way to discover the secrets, the most important ones in all creation. The secrets of God Himself!’
The Revelation Code (Wilde/Chase 11) Page 15