The Seventh Commandment

by Tom Fox

  ‘Take a closer look, please,’ she said, ignoring his discomfort, ‘now that the light’s better.’

  Ben did as instructed, trying to keep his eyes focused only on the injury. Gently, he treated the wound with warm water and soap, followed by a good dose of disinfectant and an antibacterial cream obtained from a first-aid kit he discovered in one of the drawers beneath the sink. As he had rightly suggested in the car, the wound was superficial. The bullet had scraped across Angelina’s flesh at a downward angle from her knee, tracing a red line of blistered skin and raw flesh about three centimetres across her calf, but the heat of the bullet had mostly cauterised the wound as it was formed. As long as it didn’t get infected, it would be a cause of pain but no real harm.

  Fifteen minutes after he’d begun, the wound was treated, covered in gauze that Ben had taped firmly to her skin.

  ‘Are there any waterproof plasters in there?’ Angelina asked, motioning towards the first-aid kit.

  ‘Waterproof?’ Ben shuffled through the contents, finally locating two paper packets containing large, square plasters made of nylon and marked as water resistant. ‘Planning on going swimming sometime soon?’ She was still half nude, and without the work on her wound to distract him, the joke seemed designed to make the situation feel less awkward.

  Angelina smiled, motioning him to unwrap one of the plasters and put it on.

  ‘No swimming,’ she answered, ‘but I’d give my right arm for a shower.’

  Minutes later, Angelina was standing in the tub beneath a hot flow of water, allowing its steady streams to wash away layers of sweat, adrenaline, dirt and fear. She cranked the lever as far towards ‘Hot’ as it would go, steam soaring off her body as water met skin and evaporated into the thick air.

  She’d taken a double dose of paracetamol before opening the tap, and she could feel the drug begin to come to life in her blood as the water calmed her from the outside. For the first time that day, Angelina felt safe.

  Getting into the shower had involved stripping out of the remainder of the clothes she’d worn all day – through both chases, her kidnap and her injury. In the bright surroundings of the bathroom, Angelina had realised how filthy she looked; but she hadn’t exactly left home this morning anticipating a hotel stay or the inability to return to her wardrobe, so the only clothes she had were those on her body.

  The hotel offered a six-hour wash and pressing service, advertised on a clipped hanger in the cupboard space, and as Angelina had undressed she’d funnelled all her dirty attire into the attached plastic bag. She’d taken a few moments to rinse her trousers off in the tub before she added them, to remove the blood that would surely arouse suspicion if it appeared in the downstairs laundry. The room she’d booked for her and Ben came with two plush – and, unsurprisingly, entirely white – bathrobes hanging behind the door, and she would have to do with that until her clothes came back clean.

  Ben would have to do the same. No blood, in his case, but the same tensions, sweat and panic of the day.

  She let the thought slip away from her as the water fell from the broad rain-style head goosenecked above her. For the first time today she allowed herself not to think, and was grateful that the inner voice that so often scolded, pondered and dwelt on the minutiae of her life was content for the moment to be silent. She wanted just to feel the heat against her flesh and the steam in her nostrils, as the tension, little by little, began to melt away.

  Ben sat at the absurdly white desk, its lamp switched on, and stared down at his mobile phone. He’d connected it to the charger a few minutes ago, but it hadn’t yet taken in enough juice to come back to life. In the bright room, its display seemed all the more black.

  It meant he couldn’t look at the photographs it contained, which had been his hope, but Ben realised even as he sat without them that the imagery was still fresh in his mind from the glances he’d caught over Angelina’s shoulder in the taxi. Not precise, of course, or exact. Ben certainly didn’t have a photographic memory – he’d always thought the idea more myth than reality – though his ability for recall was better than many. Yet what was truly significant in this moment was that he didn’t need it.

  The contents of the tablet were familiar, and not from seeing its surface.

  The hotel provided a small pad of notepaper and a plastic biro emblazoned with ‘Hotel Majestic’ in gold lettering, and Ben twisted it open and dropped its tip to the paper.

  He could remember what the tablet predicted. The words were within him. What was their order?

  The discoverer would die.

  That was first, and as of a few hours ago he knew its message hadn’t been idle. He jotted down ‘discoverer’s death’.

  The one that came next had been obvious to the world.

  The river.

  He wrote it down as well, just the two words. Then, on the next line, the most recent of the plagues.

  Darkness, in a city of light.

  Ben’s spine stiffened as the prophecies came back to him. God, they’d inspired him as they’d first come trickling in, the way they always did in a community of inspired faith: one voice revealing a truth, joined by another, and another – until the vision of things to come took flesh and form ‘and the people of God begin to see with the vision of God’. The words used by Father Alberto sounded in Ben’s mind. They inspired, as they always did.

  His mind flashed again to the revelations. The one that came next had always been the hardest to understand.

  Fog.

  The single word, drawn in his own sloppy handwriting, looked strange on the page.

  And fire.

  God, it was too much. Ben had never prepared himself for the possibility that these things would actually . . . happen. How was he going to make sense of what had been spoken, and what had now been written?

  And how was he going to tell Angelina?

  46

  Hotel Majestic

  Angelina emerged from the shower after nearly twenty minutes, making it one of the longest she’d ever taken. She’d have gone on longer, letting the water sweep away more and more of the strains of the day, but even the heat and steam couldn’t wholly calm her. Eventually, her mind caught up. Soothed muscles relaxed, and without the tension that had almost been crippling before, her thoughts returned with force and began to tread over everything that had happened.

  Everything that was still happening. There were still people after them. The tablet was public knowledge. And she still didn’t know what any of it meant.

  Her mobile remained dead, and while the ‘universal’ charger provided by the hotel fit Ben’s phone, it didn’t fit hers. Her normal first call for Internet access was out. However, Angelina had noticed as they entered the hotel that a small, well-decorated lobby off the main entrance contained a number of public computer terminals. For a few euros’ payment, she could have forty-five minutes of Internet access at her disposal.

  She emerged from the bathroom amidst a billow of steam that flooded out through the opened door, her towel-dried body wrapped snugly in the terrycloth robe. Ben was sitting at the room’s glossy writing desk, his face angled away from her and his mind, as she’d noted routinely was the case, elsewhere.

  ‘I’m all done,’ she announced, walking across the room and throwing down the plastic laundry bag on the bed. ‘The water’s still warm, if you want to have a go yourself.’

  Ben slowly brought himself out of his reverie. ‘No, it’s okay, I think I’m fine without.’

  Angelina turned and gave him a full, obvious once-over with her eyes, frowning. Ben’s black hair was as dishevelled as hers had been an hour ago, its mid-length locks clumped together with sweat. He’d ditched his bloodstained jacket back at the Vatican, but the wet wipe she’d provided for his face had missed a few spots, now speckled by reddish-brown flakes that clung awkwardly to a full day’s stubble. His shirt had escaped the spray of blood, but the marks under his arms were enormous, dark pools and a line of sweat ran down his
spine.

  ‘I really think, Dr Verdyx,’ Angelina announced formally, ‘that a shower would be a good idea. We’re going to have to be seen in public in the morning, and, well . . .’ She swivelled him to face a mirror next to the desk, allowing him to see his appearance directly. The change in his expression was acknowledgement enough that it wasn’t the most inspiring of sights.

  ‘To be honest,’ Angelina continued, ‘a shave wouldn’t hurt you, either. There’s a kit on the bathroom counter.’

  He nodded, returned a faint smile. As they had all afternoon, his emotions seemed to alternate fluidly between fear, friendliness and whatever plane he slipped off to when he was in between.

  Ben rose and walked towards the bathroom, beginning to unbutton his shirt.

  ‘There’s a second robe hanging behind the main room door,’ Angelina instructed, pointing towards it. ‘I’ll add your clothes into the bag with mine. They’ll be cleaned by the time we get up in the morning.’

  He entered the bathroom, closing the white door behind him. But Angelina stopped it before it could click shut, pushing back.

  ‘Now, please.’ She held out her hands, pointing towards his clothes. ‘I’m going down to the lobby for some Internet access. I’ll drop them off on my way.’

  Ben blushed again, and Angelina walked back into the centre of the room to wait.

  Behind her, the bathroom door remained ajar. It took a few moments for Angelina to realise that she was staring, not at the door itself but at one of the many reflections that bounced off the multitude of mirrors in the room. The light that came from the bathroom entrance was tantalising, steam still flowing out in the wake of Angelina’s shower. As it cleared, she caught a glimpse of Ben reflected in yet another mirror. His shirt was off and he was at work unbuttoning his trousers. He was partially hidden by the door, but Angelina caught enough of a view to see that he was surprisingly fit. His chest was almost hairless, but not quite, the delineation of his muscles clear. His shy demeanour and professionally drab clothes hid his body well.

  Angelina caught herself, jerking her eyes away before any more of his body was exposed to her gaze. She was surprised with herself. Not because she’d caught an illicit glance at a man she’d never thought of in anything close to physical terms, but because she found herself feeling . . . almost interested.

  She forced her thoughts to a halt. This was absurd. Angelina didn’t feel this way. About anyone.

  She glanced around the room for something to distract her from the unexpected heat rising inside her.

  On the desk was a small tablet of paper, and Angelina realised it might be useful for taking down notes when she was at the computer downstairs. Walking over to the desk, she noticed Ben had scribbled a few lines on the top page, but he would hardly mind if she took the remainder while he showered. She tore off the top page and left it next to his phone, then shoved the tablet into one of the plush pockets of her robe.

  ‘Here you go.’ Ben’s voice sounded from the bathroom and Angelina approached. The door opened more broadly, and Angelina saw he’d wrapped himself in a towel. He held his clothes in his hands and lifted them towards her. She grabbed the plastic bag, held it open, and let him drop them in.

  ‘Er, thanks,’ Ben said awkwardly, now standing exposed in nothing but the towel.

  ‘The water’s good and hot,’ she answered, purposefully looking past him, ‘and the shower gel’s got mint in it, I think.’ Got mint in it? Christ!

  He smiled, she thought, because she realised she was spinning away, embarrassed.

  ‘I’ll be downstairs,’ was all she said as she walked away, leaving the room with key in hand and hearing the door click closed behind her.

  At reception, Angelina handed over the bag of their dirty laundry and agreed to whatever overinflated rates they would charge to have it washed and ironed by morning, then paid for forty-five minutes’ Internet access in the lobby. If the woman at reception was shocked to see a guest milling through the chandelier-lit, burgundy-carpeted surroundings in a bathrobe, she didn’t show it. Maybe this wasn’t an entirely abnormal event in posh hotels.

  Angelina situated herself at one of the small desks and entered the hotel credentials into the computer. Seconds later, a web browser automatically opened in the middle of the screen and Angelina set to work.

  She spent a few minutes scouring the web for information about the circumstances of the day. There was still no explanation for the changing colour of the water, and nothing official about the power outage which she learned had taken in the entire city – a feat modern technology and something called ‘auto-redundant grid layouts’ was supposed to have made impossible. Yet, it seemed that there were very few people – at least, those who spent time on the Internet – who weren’t speculating on both events having something to do with what site after site called ‘the prophecy’.

  Angelina instinctively recoiled at the title, as she always did at the human tendency to see divine, miraculous meaning behind simple events it couldn’t explain. Why was ignorance so hard to acknowledge? Not to know something – it wasn’t a sign of weakness, simply a sign that there is something yet to learn. Yet humanity seemed hell-bent on attributing every new corner of its lack of understanding to the supernatural, until forcibly proved otherwise. And, just like her tour groups generally receiving the correction of their misperceptions only grudgingly, the race as a whole proved singularly unwilling to accept the truth, even once it became incontrovertible.

  Nevertheless, prophecy had become the word of the day. If the morning’s events with the river had stirred up the ranks of the sign- and vision-happy, the evening’s had fully brought out the host of the conspiracy minded. There wasn’t a search phrase Angelina could enter that didn’t garner a stream of blog entries and video clips offering increasingly wild theories as to just what the hell was going on in Rome.

  One group’s contributions, in particular, seemed to be at the top of all results. They had posted just a single video, and Angelina could only bring herself to watch the first few seconds of it before closing the window in disgust. Charismatically minded religious nuts boasting revelation and predicting plagues and the end of the age. God, if I haven’t heard that line before.

  She had more concrete things on which to focus.

  The most important was contained in the message she knew would be waiting for her. The email she’d sent herself from Ben’s phone had, thank God, arrived before the device had lost power, and had managed to catch the cellular network as it came back online. Angelina switched from browsing for news to scrutinising the photograph of the tablet in her inbox. She didn’t know how, but she couldn’t help but feel that this tablet was a key to understanding what was going on.

  She printed out two copies, one in colour and one in black-and-white for contrast, and scrutinised the text as thoroughly as her nerves and the available resources would allow. She had none of her books with her, but – God bless the Internet – she had access to a host of online lexical and morphological tools, which enabled her to search through databases and seek out guidance on the symbols. The language was far from simple. Whole sentences didn’t come easily or automatically. Instead, key words, phrases, started to leap out from the scrawl of indentations.

  She jotted down her notes in hotel pencil on the margins of the colour printout as she worked. Word by word, the text was starting to appear.

  And through all that she still couldn’t discern about it, a few things made themselves clear. It was remarkable. And unpredictable. And utterly bizarre.

  Via Tina di Lorenzo, north-eastern Rome

  ‘What do you mean, her signal’s gone?’

  ‘It went dead more than an hour ago. When she was just around here.’ Pietro placed a greasy finger on the massive display in front of him. It landed on an intersection marked in a multi-colour map of central Rome.

  Vico snorted, angry. ‘You told me you could track her signal despite the power cut, even if her phone was switc
hed off.’

  ‘Off, yes,’ Pietro answered, ‘but not dead. There has to be some juice leaking into the system. It had been off before, but it was here that it lost power entirely.’

  Vico wanted to slap the other man, but these were facts he already knew and for which he could hardly blame him. Mobiles continued to feed a slow trickle of power into their essential systems when asleep or even, in most cases, powered down. Those systems made it possible for them to be tracked even when they were switched off, which was what made the whole cellular infrastructure such a godsend for people like him. People could be followed anywhere. Always.

  But if a phone was genuinely dead, with a battery removed or truly out of juice altogether – well, the system wasn’t magic.

  ‘Hold on.’ Corso’s soft voice suddenly emerged from his corner of the room, drawing Vico’s attention.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Someone is . . .’ He sounded unsure of himself. But then, ‘Yes, yes.’ He looked up at the other two men. ‘Someone is searching the Net for Akkadian.’

  Vico straightened, but he held back any overt enthusiasm. ‘I would think everyone would be searching it, by now. The photo of the tablet is out there, in the public – it was released through Vatican channels. Even with a translation, people will still be curious about the original.’

  ‘This is more than just browsing the news or general word searches on a theme,’ Corso answered. ‘These are real queries, with access to lexical databases. Scholarly resources.’

  Vico slowly moved towards him.

  ‘What sort of queries?’

  ‘They started out as what appeared just to be casual surfing of news sites carrying stories about the tablet,’ Corso said. ‘There’s a buzz about them now the power’s back on, and our code on all the servers carrying them shoots us the IP and ping trail of everyone who visits the pages.’ He didn’t remove his eyes from the screen as he spoke, his hands multi-tasking during the narrative. Vico loomed over him, his daunting six-foot-seven-inch height accentuated by a pole-like frame.