by Peter James
So now, his head swimming with the pleasures of Mrs Naomi Klaesson’s fear, he sat at his desk, his laptop open, logged on to the internet, on to Google Earth. He saw the globe of the planet.
He moved the cursor, entered the name Sussex, hit a key and zoomed in until the screen was entirely filled by Sussex and parts of surrounding counties. Eagerly, he devoured the names of the towns near to the infidels’ home.
Worthing. Brighton. Lewes. Eastbourne.
He had never been to England. There was a Brighton in America, a Brighton Beach, he recalled. But otherwise, these names meant nothing to him. This place, Sussex, these towns, their names came out of the screen so solidly, so real, he felt he could hold them inside his heart.
He then entered: Caibourne.
Caibourne! He held the name, said it aloud to himself, then repeated it. ‘Caibourne!’ At this moment, it was the sweetest sound in the world.
He zoomed in, until he could see the aerial views of a small cluster of houses. One of these houses belonged to John and Naomi Klaesson. He typed in their postcode, and instantly zoomed in closer still.
The Disciple punched the air in excitement. Then his face flushed with guilt. This was a bad thing, to let himself get carried away by his feelings like this. He had to restrain himself. For now, all emotions were forbidden. Joy would come later.
Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy. Psalm 126.
But a small amount of pleasure, that could not be a sin, surely? And here, in this studio apartment God had found for him, in the low-rise building inhabited mostly by elderly people who kept to themselves, in this quiet suburban backwater of the town of Rochester in New York State, this is what Timon Cort was feeling now.
God’s pleasure.
It had been a long time since he had come down from the mountain in Colorado, into the sewer of the valleys below and the plains beyond. Two and a half years since he had first gone to that internet café in Boulder, Colorado, to download the instructions that awaited him. The names of the first couple and their spawn he was to kill, and where he was to go to collect his next instructions.
Now there was just one more act of the Great Rite to be carried out. And then he would become a true Disciple, and God would give him the beautiful, loving Lara, who had waited patiently for two and a half long years for him, and would continue to wait for however much longer was needed, as a reward. And then they would live for the rest of their lives in Paradise in the right hand of God.
Time had passed since then, but time had also stood still. He continued to wear his hair shaven to a light fuzz. He was dressed in the same simple uniform that all Disciples wore. A loose white T-shirt, grey chinos and plastic sandals. He passed his days in prayer, reading the Bible, eating frugal meals, biding his time, repeating each of the Forty Tracts he had learned by heart.
He possessed a business suit, a shirt, a tie and black loafers for when he needed to blend in with people, but other than his clothes and his Bible, his one possession was his sturdy laptop, through which he maintained contact with his Master. And through which he was kept informed of progress in the Great Mission of Salvation.
All the technology inside the computer gave him power. God’s hand was in this machine. God understood that man needed weapons to fight Satan.
I will send destroyers against you, each man with his weapons and they will cut up your fine cedar beams and throw them into the fire. Jeremiah 22: 7.
England was where Naomi Klaesson came from. England was where the Infidels had begun their life together. Now the Infidels would end it there!
In the county of Sussex. In the village of Caibourne.
In the house he was staring down at.
Timon Cort knelt and closed his hands in front of his face in supplication. His eyes ran with tears of joy.
‘Thank you, God, for showing me where they live.’
He brings princes to naught and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing. No sooner are they planted, no sooner are they sown, no sooner do they take root in the ground, than he blows on them and they wither, and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff. Isaiah 40: 23, 24.
68
John, his empty camera case slung from his neck, stood in the middle. Luke, in a fleecy anorak, was on his left, Phoebe, in a duffel coat, on his right. Behind them two gibbons leapt around their cage, shrieking.
John held Luke and Phoebe’s tiny, gloved hands tightly. They were both wrapped up warm against the biting November wind. Flecks of sleet blew around them, like ash. There was a sour reek of dung and animal feed and straw in the air, tinged with the odours of frying onions and burgers.
Naomi, holding the camera, wisps of hair flapping beneath her bobble hat, called out, ‘OK! Smile! Luke, Phoebe, everyone say c-h-e-e-e-e-e-s-e!’
She watched them through the viewfinder. John grinned; Luke and Phoebe, hesitant for a moment, both mouthed something back at her and then, to her absolute joy, grinned as well. She pressed the shutter. After some moments she lowered the camera, and looked at it, puzzled. ‘I’m not sure if it took,’ she said. ‘It didn’t make the right sound.’
‘Try another, hon.’
‘OK. Everyone, once again, ready?’
Despite the cold, and the fact that the sight of animals incarcerated in zoos always made her a little uncomfortable, Naomi felt happy this afternoon. The children were actually smiling at the camera! This was promising to be the first picture ever with them smiling!
She framed them again, adjusted the zoom, called out to them to get them to look at the camera. ‘Great!’ she said, and handed it back to John.
He pressed the display button and then showed the image to Luke and Phoebe. ‘See those two little folk?’ he said. ‘Who are they?’
Luke studied the image for a moment. Phoebe turned around, more interested in the monkeys.
‘Can you see?’ John said.
Luke looked up at him with wide, baleful eyes and gave him a look that seemed to say, Yes, fine, I can see, it’s a picture, what’s the big deal?
‘You stand with them now, hon, I’ll take one of the three of you.’
‘Let’s find a different background,’ she said.
‘OK.’
Luke and Phoebe prised their hands free of his and walked back to the gibbons’ cage.
‘Don’t get too close, darlings,’ Naomi said, worried, hurrying after them. She put a protective arm around each of them. Luke and Phoebe stood giggling at their antics, then said something to each other that Naomi couldn’t catch. It sounded like their usual code.
After a couple of minutes she could tell their attention was wandering. ‘What would you like to see next?’
‘How about owls?’ John said. ‘You want to see an owl? We hear them at night sometimes. Would you like to see what an owl looks like?’
Almost in synch, each of them gave him a nod. He caught Naomi’s eye and they grinned at each other.
John gripped Luke’s tiny hand, so frail, so warm, in one hand, and Phoebe’s in the other. Naomi held her other hand. The wind gusted bitterly, but John barely felt it, he felt such a warm glow of happiness inside him. At long, long last he was starting to feel a connection with his children. They were reacting to this place, enjoying a day out at the zoo; seeming to be emerging from whatever strange space they had been in.
They headed towards the owl house. As they passed the meerkats, Luke and Phoebe tugged excitedly, pulling him over towards the cage. They all stopped and stared at the creatures, which looked tiny and cuddly. Naomi peered closely at the sign on the cage and read from it aloud.
‘While the rest of the family are digging, sunbathing or playing, one meerkat will always be on guard.’ She turned to their children. ‘See that one looking at us, Luke? Phoebe? She’s the one that’s on guard!’
Luke giggled. Phoebe pointed, giggling too, and said, ‘Maccat!’
‘Meerkat!’ Naomi corrected her.
‘Maccat!’ she repeated.
‘Maccat!’ Luke shrieked.
They saw the owls, then spent a long time watching a sloth, upside down, asleep.
‘Would you like to be able to hang upside down like that, Luke?’
Phoebe burst into giggles again, then said something to Luke, and he started giggling, too.
John and Naomi exchanged another look. This is great! This is amazing! Simply amazing! Maybe our fears have been unfounded!
They went back outside, saw the llamas, then the camels, then the bears, then went into the insect house and stopped in front of a glass cage containing a pair of tarantulas. Luke and Phoebe moved closer to the cage, then shrank back, each squeezing John’s hand hard.
‘Not crazy about them? Me neither.’
‘Nor me,’ said Naomi, with a shudder.
They moved on and stopped in front of a giant East African hornet.
John knelt down and whispered to Luke, ‘Hey, tell me, what do you think about bugs? Creepy-crawlies? See these – they’re even bigger than the one you killed last summer. Remember that?’
He connected for a fleeting moment with Luke’s eyes. Then Luke looked away as if he was evading the question.
‘You guys hungry? Want to eat something? An ice cream? Want to go pan for gold? Play in the bubble tub? Go on a ride?’
‘S’ceam,’ Phoebe said.
‘S’ceam,’ Luke echoed.
They bought them each a huge ice-cream cone with a chocolate flake sticking out of the top. Within minutes, John and Naomi were fully occupied wiping the sticky mess from their faces. John put an arm around Naomi and hugged her, hard, and she hugged him back. Suddenly, standing out here, with the wind blasting his face with sleet and grit, he felt almost delirious with happiness. Finally he had a life that was as close to perfection as any man had a right to. A wife he adored, two beautiful children. A career that was going brilliantly.
Just seeing Luke’s chocolate-smeared mouth plunge once more into the cone, and watching Naomi wipe away a blob of ice cream from Phoebe’s nose brought feelings of joy deeper than he had ever thought a human being was capable of.
Then the shadows returned. The Disciples of the Third Millennium. The mystery hacker who played his chess moves against Gus Santiano for him. His concerns over the strange phone calls from the States that both he and Naomi had had last week.
But for the moment, for these few precious hours where they were just a normal family having an outing, he shrugged them aside.
69
On Monday morning the Disciple dressed warmly. It was cold outside, minus fifteen overnight and the temperature only expected to rise to two degrees during the day. He put on thick jeans, lined boots, a thermal sweatshirt, a heavy pullover, his fleece-lined anorak, bobble hat, woollen gloves, hoisted the straps of his backpack over his shoulders, then left his apartment.
He trudged through frozen slush to the Greyhound station, ten blocks from his apartment, and bought a single ticket to New York. One of the rules for Disciples was never to carry a return ticket. If you fell into the hands of the Enemy, let them have as little information as possible.
At four in the afternoon, with the light fading fast, Timon Cort left the bus in Times Square, purchased a street map, then set off on foot down Broadway. He walked carefully, economically, taking as few breaths as possible, the absolute minimum, the way any man might when treading through a sewer. It took him less than ten minutes to reach the internet café he had found on the net the previous day.
His first step after logging on was to open a Hotmail account, giving a false name and details. He had decided to combine an Old Testament name with a New. Joel Timothy he typed.
He addressed an email to the first account in a chain that would route it several times around the world, burying its origins in a complex electronic paperchase through dozens of anonymous servers in turn, before it reached its target destination. Then he typed out the email.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.
He sent it, paid for his time online, left the café and quickly immersed himself in the crowds. Every few minutes as he walked he looked over his shoulder. He had never felt nervous before, secure in the knowledge that God walked by his side, but maybe it was the hope that this was to be the last task that was playing havoc with his inner calm.
Just this to do, and then Lara.
Just this.
So long since had seen her, since they had held each other. Sometimes, even with God’s help, he had trouble remembering her face and had to take the creased photograph from his purse and look at it, to re-memorize it. And each time he did so there was a twist of pain in his heart almost too much to stand.
But now he had to concentrate not on Lara, but on where he was.
The noises all around disturbed him. The swoosh of tyres from the endless river of yellow cabs, the blaring of horns, the bass thump of music from speakers on the outside wall of a record shop, the thump of music from speakers in a van with blacked-out windows, the thump of heartbeats all around him, the busy click-click-click of leather heels on the sidewalk, the rustle of clothing fabrics.
He put his hands over his ears and boarded a bus. The engine whined. Behind him he heard a constant, tinny, skitter-skitter-skitter-skitter leaking from the headphones of an MP3 player. He turned. Met the stony glare of a massive black man with a Satanic Ankh tattooed on his forehead who was talking to himself. He turned back, faced the front, closed his eyes, tuning out everything except the swaying motion of the bus, and repeated the Lord’s Prayer over and over until he reached his destination.
In Central Park he felt better, walking along a track, away from the smells and sounds of the sewer and the man with the Ankh. They called this place a city! How did they dare? There was only one city – the City of God.
You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. Hebrews 12: 23–24.
70
Dr Sheila Michaelides was a petite, bubbly, very self-assured woman in her early forties, with an olive-skinned face, large, angular glasses and a shock of straight black hair. She was dressed neatly, in a tight-fitting jumper over a cream blouse and brown slacks.
Her consulting room, with French windows overlooking a well-tended walled garden, was at the back of an imposing red-brick Victorian house that had been carved up into doctors’ offices. It was a generously sized room, with a high, stuccoed ceiling, but furnished in contrast to its period in a cheery, modern style, with a pine desk on which sat a computer and framed photographs of two laughing children, and cushioned sofas arranged either side of a pine coffee table, at which John, Naomi and the child psychologist sat.
Naomi wondered if it was mandatory for any medic involved with kids to have saccharine pictures of children on display.
John was talking her through the history of Luke and Phoebe, omitting of course any mention of their background with Dettore. With Naomi interjecting to add details, he covered the incident with the wasp, the strange language the children had developed, Reggie Chetwynde-Cunningham’s opinion on their linguistic ability, their excitement on Saturday at the zoo, and their even bigger excitement yesterday, Sunday, when they had gone to a pet shop and bought each of them a guinea pig.
He said nothing about his suspicions that the children might be playing chess on his computer late at night – because he hadn’t yet mentioned this to Naomi.
When they had finished, Sheila Michaelides’s neutral demeanour seemed to have changed a little. She looked at both of them in turn with a distinctly sceptical expression. ‘This language you say they are speaking – do you really believe that?’
‘Absolutely,’ John said.
‘What you are telling me is just isn’t credible.’
‘Surely,’ Naomi said, ‘if it is some kin
d of autism—?’
The psychologist shook her head. ‘Even if you had one child on the autism spectrum, and perhaps capable of strange mathematical feats, it is inconceivable it could be the same for both.’
‘Not even in identical twins?’ Naomi asked.
‘Phoebe and Luke are not identical twins,’ she said.
‘So how do you explain it?’ John asked.
She tilted her head. ‘Are you sure this isn’t wishful thinking?’
‘What do you mean by that?’ Naomi said testily.
The psychologist glanced at one of her own fingernails. ‘You strike me as very ambitious parents – from the way you have been talking about your children. You’re an academic, Dr Klaesson, and you are clearly a very intelligent woman, Mrs Klaesson. I’m getting a feeling from you both that you have great expectations from your children. Would that be correct?’
‘I don’t have any expectations,’ Naomi said quickly, getting in ahead of John.
‘All we want is for them to be normal,’ John added.
‘And healthy,’ Naomi emphasized.
The psychologist bit her nail for a moment, then said, ‘You lost your boy, Halley, at the age of four. You adored him. Are you sure you aren’t searching for something in your twins that puts them above him, as a form of compensation?’
‘That’s ridiculous!’ Naomi exploded. ‘Absolutely ridiculous!’
‘Totally!’ John confirmed. ‘Look, we want to try to understand our children, that’s why we’ve come here – but you seem to be attacking us!’
‘No, I’m not. All I’m trying to say is that what you are telling me about them speaking backwards with every fourth letter missing is impossible! No model exists for this! You are claiming a linguistic skill for your children that no human being on this planet is capable of. Just think for a moment about the mathematics.’
‘So give us your explanation?’ John responded.