by Tom Fox
But never in her life had she seen an Akkadian document this closely – one not hidden away behind three centimetres of museum casing next to a placard offering an inanely simplistic description of its contents. Never had she been able to reach out and . . .
‘Angelina, don’t!’
But she couldn’t stop herself. Every careful academic instinct she had demanded that she wait, get gloves and a proper cushioned stand to examine the relic – to do everything correctly – but something else had overtaken her. Something was different about these circumstances, and this moment.
She pressed her fingers into the edges of the foam and lifted the tablet out of its encasement. Her hands held its smooth shape securely, though she was trembling in her core as she lifted it up towards her face. Doubts over its origins notwithstanding, everything about the tablet screamed authenticity. The cuneiform indentations of the ancient script were realities, centimetres from her eyes – the impressions in the clay becoming three dimensional as the once-soft material took in each angular groove intentionally pressed into it. The past reached forward to touch Angelina. A world lost, so vaguely known, connected stone to skin. Her heart began to sing, her eyes began to mist.
And then the world went black.
33
Across the Seven Hills of Rome
From the tallest of skyscrapers to the smallest of shopfronts and kiosks, every light in Rome blinked its way into simultaneous oblivion. The bright technicolour hue of evening vanished, and save for the headlights of cars, unaffected, which in their lengthy bonnet-to-boot queues suddenly became like luminous snakes, slithering along the paved corridors of the city, a blackness overtook all else.
There was a pause, the whole city momentarily shocked, unable to absorb the sudden change. So much had happened during the daylight; the population’s nerves had not yet recovered. But then sirens began to sound, first from one quarter then another, overlapping into an auditory cacophony. The purity of surprise led swiftly to confusion. Confusion not at one neighbourhood or quadrant of the city going dark, but the whole of Rome, from one edge to the other – black like the night itself.
No one understood. But with visceral swiftness, they remembered.
The strange prophecy that had circulated on the Internet since the river had run red in the morning churned through the memory of the city. As did the words of the small group of charismatic believers in the east of the city.
And the face of a young man, speaking into a camera after the first plague had come and gone.
‘The next shall be like it in power, as the bright places become dark in a city filled with light.’
The first plague they had experienced today had been, it appeared, predicted. Now, a whole population stood in the midst of the second.
With a deepening unease, sceptics and believers alike recalled that they’d been told there would be more.
Atop the Esquiline Hill
Near the peak of one of the fabled ‘Seven Hills’ of Rome, Bartolomeo drove away from the insertion point with as much satisfaction as he had ever felt in his work and as much power as he had ever sensed in his person.
The choice of insertion point had been, by some measures, arbitrary. Once the work of hacking into the city’s power grid had been accomplished, it was possible to initiate the necessary protocols from almost any point in the city. Bartolomeo had chosen the small hub atop the Esquiline Hill for personal reasons. The view from the call box, which was normally wired to affect the connections of only a few local streets but which had been toggled by Vico and his team to affect the entire grid, allowed him to look down over Rome from a superlative height, affording him what he knew would be a direct and unrepeatable view once the switch had been flipped.
His expectation had been amply rewarded.
He’d plugged his computer into the weather-reinforced ethernet port in the small hub, and with a few keystrokes Vico’s boys had pre-recorded into a scripted macro, the system-wide shutdown had been initiated. There was just enough lag time between his initiating the script and its dramatic coming into effect for Bartolomeo to reflect on the magnitude of the work he was undertaking, and to revel in the artfulness of what he’d done.
Evidence of the machinations behind the shutdown of the city’s power grid was being, even as the thought passed through his mind, eliminated from the data recording systems that normally monitored all grid activity. The usual observational protocols that allowed for the tracking of a problem’s source, so that technicians could be sent and repairs could be made, had all been disabled by Emil’s tech boys. It was masterful work. Artistic and, as near as Bartolomeo could tell, technically flawless.
When the power grid was switched back on – and the work they had undertaken together would ensure that switch was just as sudden as its going off – there would be no way to trace the problem’s source. No single point within the city that could be isolated as its origin. Instead it would simply be the case, to all eyes and all observers, that inexplicably, unpredictably, indefensibly, Rome had gone wholly dark.
Just as they’d all been told it would.
He looked out over the city as the next millisecond ticked over on the clock, and watched with intense satisfaction as the second plague descended and took hold.
34
The bunker
The blackness that overtook the Vatican Secret Archives’ bunker was immediate, complete, and overwhelming. The subterranean vault wrapped in concrete beneath the earth had no avenue for exterior light, and so the darkness that came as the power failed was of the purest, deepest black – like a night sky, without the pinpoint texture of the stars, extending from blind senses in every direction.
It was unlike anything either Angelina or Ben had ever experienced.
Her instinct was to freeze. As her most familiar sense was stripped from her, her body clenched into a mass of taut muscle, her tongue instantly tainted with the taste of pure adrenaline – a flavour with which she’d become familiar only a few hours ago. In the blackness all the terror of her experience at the Tiber bridge came coursing back: the explosions of gunfire behind her, the bursting stonework at her side. Once again her breath started to come in shallower, faster flutters. She sensed her head lightening, her balance starting to wobble.
But Angelina’s rational mind wasn’t ready to be wholly outdone by the anxiety of memory, however intense. She forced the panic down.
You can’t see, she forced a scolding voice into her consciousness, but that doesn’t mean you’re blind. One sense might be gone, others remained. Calm yourself down.
Angelina could still hear, and she heard no gunshots. No footsteps charged across the metal flooring above or thudded over the concrete beneath her. No one was shooting, no one was chasing. This experience wasn’t mirroring that of the afternoon.
Her grip around the tablet tightened, all the same. The fingers that clutched it were, she suddenly realised, sweaty and slippery, and in a surprising moment of intellectual clarity she realised she had to be careful or she might snap the precious object in half. Or drop it on to the solid floor. Or—
‘Angelina, are you there?’ Ben’s hesitant voice broke the silence that had fallen upon them with the darkness. For a moment she’d almost forgotten he was only a few steps away.
‘Yes, right where I was a moment ago.’ She pushed down the anxiety in her throat, relieved at the sound of his voice. ‘You okay?’
‘I don’t know what’s happened,’ Ben answered. ‘We’ve never had a power outage down here before. There are supposed to be back-up systems. The emergency lighting’s linked up to another part of the grid.’ His voice came as a disembodied narration, but Angelina could tell his head was moving as he spoke – a vain attempt, perhaps, to scan surroundings that were impossible to see. ‘Or at least, that’s what they told us.’
‘I’m sure it’ll be back on in a minute,’ Angelina replied, though in the moment it was difficult to believe her own words.
It took a few seconds for them to be proven right, at least partially. A few minuscule lights appeared, though they came from the floor rather than the blocky security light boxes she’d seen mounted on the walls as they entered. The little pinpricks of light were a muted red and ran in rows at their feet.
‘Exit path lighting,’ Ben muttered. The red dots beneath them barely cast a glow as far as his face, and the little light that reached it cast his features into an otherworldly pallor. ‘It seems to be all that’s working.’
Angelina’s thoughts were not on which lighting system was managing to function.
‘Ben, I don’t think this is coincidence.’
From his direction, the scuffling of motion stopped abruptly and the barely illumined, Halloween-esque visage of his face turned towards her.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I’m out on the street earlier today,’ she answered, ‘when the river turns red and I get shot at. You’re minding your own affairs, I presume, when the same thing happens to you.’
‘I was following the crowd . . . towards the . . .’ His voice trailed away.
‘Then the Swiss Guard takes us in. Then this tablet, which it turns out you knew about, without really knowing about it.’ Angelina paused, but Ben said nothing. ‘Now we’re here, the tablet literally in hand, and the lights go black?’
She swivelled to face him more directly, expecting a look of recognition, acknowledging that this was too strong a coincidence not to set off a few alarm bells. But not only had Ben gone silent, he had turned away from her. His head was lowered, his gaze somewhere beyond the floor, his lips mumbling words Angelina couldn’t hear.
Something had changed within Ben Verdyx when Angelina had impulsively untied the filing box and revealed the tablet to both of them.
At first he’d been reactionary, shocked at a capable scholar acting so impulsively around an ancient artefact. When Angelina had gone beyond opening the box and actually reached in to extract the object with her bare hands, he’d exploded in cries to stop – to think about what she was doing, to at least let them take it to a place where they could deal with it carefully.
Then Ben had caught his first full sight of its surface, and the protestations had ceased.
It was, indeed, right there, right in front of him – this tablet which he had never seen before, yet which he had seen. But it wasn’t the fact that Cardinal Giotto Forte, as he now knew, had sent him the first lines for translation, that struck such awe into Ben’s soul as he saw the actual object in front of him. What filled him with a wonder capable of muting all his instinctual protests was that, in a way that defied his rational credulity, he knew exactly what the rest of the text on this stone said.
He could not translate Akkadian instantaneously any more than anyone else, including the woman next to him. Even the best experts, for which title they both qualified, required lexica and dictionaries for serious translation work. But Ben saw certain symbols he knew well. Water. Red. Darkness. Fog.
They were enough to convince him of something that an interior voice had already brought him to sense was true. This was not just any tablet, nor could his involvement with it be a random circumstance. This tablet – inexplicably – contained . . . them. The prophecies. The revelations.
The sure vision of future things.
He mumbled about the lighting as Angelina queried it, but his head wasn’t with his words and soon he felt the ability to respond slip away from him altogether.
Instead, his gaze fell to the floor as the revelations of the Lord spun their way again into his mind.
‘It shall come to pass in the seventeenth year of the second millennium after the coming of the Sun . . .’
The words echoed in his ears, heard so often.
‘The first sign . . . the river shall run with blood . . .’
Ben wasn’t sure whether he was still in the bunker or somewhere in another world, in another realm. All he could hear were the words that he somehow knew were inscribed on the tablet held in Angelina’s hands.
‘The bright places shall become dark . . . in a city filled with light.’
Ben’s behaviour in the new-found darkness defied Angelina’s understanding. He appeared to have descended into some kind of quasi-catatonic state, crouched over his knees and staring at the floor, and neither her words nor her taps on his shoulder would snap him out of it.
Claustrophobia. The thought came to her suddenly. Ben had social . . . ‘issues’ would probably be the PC word these days. It wasn’t out of the question that claustrophobia could be tied into them, and if it was, the world suddenly going black in a concrete-reinforced bunker metres beneath the surface of the earth wouldn’t exactly settle nicely.
But he’d have to get over it. Angelina was convinced that there could be nothing coincidental about the lights going out while they were here – which meant the sooner they could be out of here, the better. Even so, she wasn’t ready simply to turn on her heels and run. Not yet. She hadn’t come this far, and neither had the catatonic Ben, just to give up with nothing to show for it.
‘Does your phone have a torch function?’ she asked abruptly. Ben didn’t answer, but she could see where he’d slid it into his shirt pocket and she simply reached down and snatched it. Her own mobile’s battery had died somewhere in the middle of the morning – she’d forgotten to connect it to the charger overnight – and so his was the only hope for the plan swiftly forming in her mind.
She clicked the home button and the device came to life. The illumination of the display transformed their surroundings from the palest red to a ghostly, bright blue.
‘I need your pin number,’ she said abruptly, pointing the display down at him. Ben said nothing, and Angelina’s impatience flared. Perching the tablet on her knees, she grabbed his shoulder and forcibly turned him to face the phone’s display.
‘Snap out of whatever you’re in, Ben.’ She waved the device in front of him. ‘Your pin.’
His eyes slowly rose and held her gaze for a second that felt far longer. Fixed, unmoving. Then he simply began to recite digits.
Angelina had been right before: his access code was longer than customary. Ben had recited twelve digits before the numbers stopped, and a second later, the system registering the right code, the display transformed to the rows of icons that marked its home screen. A few finger presses later and Angelina had activated the torch, a powerful beam of light flashing into sweeping brilliance in her moving hand.
The light was small, but in the utter blackness it might as well have been the sun.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Ben suddenly announced. He sprang up from his crouch and Angelina instinctively turned the light towards him. It lit up a pale, frightened face. ‘Right now. We have to leave.’
His sentiments had been Angelina’s own only moments ago, but she had something else she wanted done before they fled this place.
‘Not yet,’ she answered, voice hard and filled with more resolve than she’d realised she possessed in the moment.
‘We have to go right now, we have to—’
She didn’t permit Ben to continue. ‘Hold this,’ she said abruptly, then lifted the tablet off her knees and thrust it gingerly into his hands.
Ben’s eyes widened as it came into his grasp, and his tongue went silent.
‘Hold it flat, just like this.’ Angelina positioned it perpendicular to his chest, held out parallel to the floor like a dinner tray. ‘Now, keep still.’
‘Angelina,’ Ben finally said, ‘enough. You said yourself, no coincidences. We have to go!’
But her attention was on the series of icons on his phone.
‘There’s a camera app in here somewhere, right?’
Photographing the tablet in the utter blackness took moments neither Ben nor Angelina felt comfortable expending, but which Angelina insisted were absolutely necessary. Ben’s phone was capable of torch mode or camera mode, but not both at the same time, so he and Angelina wer
e forced to line up the shot with the torch on, then freeze in the blackness as she switched it off, opened up the camera app and prayed that when the LED flash burst into life she was still holding it in the right position over the clay surface in Ben’s hands to allow for autofocus and a clear shot.
They made six attempts before they landed one Angelina felt would be sufficiently clear to allow them to examine the entire surface of the tablet once they were outside. By that time the anxiety level between them had increased dramatically.
No coincidences. Ben’s approximation of her own words, together with his bizarre behaviour more generally, were beginning to rattle her. She didn’t know what had come over him, but on one point they were now both agreed. It was time to leave.
Angelina took the tablet back from Ben and lowered it into its foam encasement, closed the filing box, and returned it to the shelf.
She turned to him.
‘Now?’ he asked simply, imploringly.
‘Now, Dr Verdyx, we get the hell out of here.’
Outside
‘How long do we wait for them to come out?’ André fidgeted in his position behind the collection of rubbish bins on the far side of the courtyard. ‘They’ve been in there for ages.’
‘We wait until we see them come through that door,’ Ridolfo answered. ‘There’s only one way in and out of that building. They’ll show up eventually.’