He relented, shrugging. ‘As you wish.’
Terri released his hands and stepped back a few paces.
‘Horace will have told you,’ Adam began, ‘that Lawrence died a soldier. That under unbearable pressure from me, acting for the Iwnw, he refused to talk, and eventually managed to grab the pistol in his office and shoot himself, rather than divulge the whereabouts of the hidden stocks of red gold.’
‘That is what happened, I’m sure of it,’ Horace said. Robert had never heard such frost in his voice.
Adam grimaced. ‘That isn’t entirely true, I’m afraid to say. On the heroic side, he managed to make a phone call to Robert here to try to tip him off. A shame that he was barely able to speak, in his pain. I called you right afterwards, Robert, to muddy the waters. I was entirely in the grip of the Iwnw, as you will have gathered. Hard to believe it was just a week ago tonight.’
Terri blinked back tears of rage, refusing to cry.
‘The fact of the matter, I regret to say, is that Lawrence cracked before he died. He whimpered and wept, and he let slip a clue – a small one, admittedly, but sufficient – about the whereabouts of the red gold. Then I let him write his goodbye note and shoot himself to end his misery.’
They all stared at Adam in shock as a ghastly expression of shame mingled with pride crept across his features.
Horace stared at Adam with contempt and outrage. ‘By all that is most holy,’ Horace whispered, ‘if this is true, may these actions turn back upon the Iwnw a hundredfold, whether I or another be the instrument thereof. I forgive them, as my oath requires, but I do not absolve them of the consequences of their actions.’
As he spoke, words formed in Robert’s mind. Remember the letter. Seek Lawrence’s message. Remember the letter.
Adam stared now at Robert. ‘It is very strange to realize, as I did just a few hours ago, how the Path works through us to express itself once we begin to walk it. I was remembering the Unicorn challenge at Cambridge, and I realized that the decryption keys I gave the contestants, when placed one on top of another, made a reasonable sketch of the shape of the Tree of Life. I’d had no idea. Horace had barely begun to initiate me into its use as a tool on the Path at that time, and yet there it was speaking through me, forcing itself into the world.’
Robert met his eyes, wondering whether even now, despite everything, Adam was still trying to pass him secret information. What aspect of the Unicorn game was he talking about? He tried to calm his mind and hear the words forming at its fringes. But he couldn’t grasp them.
‘Returning to Lawrence,’ Adam suddenly said. ‘He with stood enormous pain. The Iwnw tormented him through me. Physical pain, and mental. When I couldn’t beat it out of him, they came in with their own weapons. Torture of the psyche. Nightmares from the depths of childhood, secret fears dredged up from the dungeons of the mind. And he cracked. He talked, at least a little. He led me to understand that the red gold had been melted down, in minute amounts, into regular gold bars from the Hencott mines. Hidden in plain sight, in a way.’
Robert saw Horace’s face fall.
‘And those ingots were mostly stored at the place where everyone else stores their gold, naturally enough,’ Adam continued. ‘One of the safest places in the world. At the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in downtown Manhattan.’
The Iwnw, who for a year, since the last detonation, had been patiently trying to locate the rest of the red gold, now knew where a good proportion of it was to be found.
‘They had been seeking it because, not to put too fine a point on it, they were disappointed at the scale of the original explosion foreseen by the maker of the Ma’rifat’. Even if his weapon had fully exploded, instead of turning into the damp squib it became, it would have been something like Hiroshima, even though it used raw psychic energies as its fuel.
‘But now they want more, much more. That is why they sought the amplifying power of the red gold. They don’t want just physical destruction and passive victims. They want people to take death into their own hands. Internecine warfare. Brother against brother, family against family. Concentration camps across the land. Massacres with any weapon that comes to hand. It would not just be a physical bomb. It would be a soul bomb. It would rot the psyche of all those within its radius of destruction. Many millions of people. That is who they are. That is what they want.’
Adam looked at them defiantly. ‘They have eaten me away from the inside to make me help them, and I have resisted as long as possible. But there is a cancer invading Terri where a child should be. And still I hope that at the end of all this, our child may be returned to her. They have promised to keep us safe, and to reverse the cancer curse placed on her.’
Robert felt Adam had now lost all reason. ‘You believe them, Adam?’
‘I must.’
Katherine stared at Terri, then stood and slowly reached her hands to the younger woman’s belly. Terri put her hands over Katherine’s and held them in place. Adam looked away from them, directing himself to Robert.
‘Satisfied? As you can now see, I’ve had little choice in all this, try as I might,’ Adam said. ‘I may yet achieve at least one good thing. Now, the core. Please.’
‘I have it,’ said Horace. He slowly removed it from a jacket pocket. Robert could see its energy coursing through Horace’s arm. Horace kept his gaze deliberately on Adam’s eyes.
‘Same thing, put it down on the ground,’ Adam said.
But instead Horace called out to Katherine: ‘Speak to Tariq, Kat.’
She looked at him in astonishment. ‘What?’
‘Talk to Tariq. Now.’
Adam seemed disconcerted, stepping back as Katherine walked towards him, appearing to understand what was being asked of her.
‘Tariq, can you hear me?’
Horace drew closer to Adam, and then Terri approached Robert. At Horace’s shout, Robert and Terri joined hands with Horace and formed a ring around Adam. They all projected their most intense power into the centre of the ring, seeking to drive the Minotaur to the surface of Adam’s consciousness. Adam stood bolt upright, his head suddenly snapping back, every muscle knotted.
Standing outside the circle, Katherine weighed her words, choosing eachone with enormous care. ‘I let you down,’ she said. ‘I want you to know that I am ashamed of what I did. I betrayed you.’
Adam shuddered, saying nothing, lowering his head to lock his eyes on Katherine’s. Deep torment raged in his gaze. Pain and exhaustion.
‘I know that you have suffered greatly. Tariq, no one should have to go through what you have experienced. Your father arrested and mistreated. One intelligence service after another trying to use you, squeeze you, manipulate you for their purposes. Blackmail. Threats. And, through all of it, you struggled to do the right thing. To live as honourably as possible among the shameless. All these things I know and recognize. You did not deserve them. You did the best you could.’
Slowly, in the air around Adam’s head, a tenuous shape began to turn and spin, a shadow staring out at them from a place of torment deep within Adam’s own soul.
‘Quickly,’ Horace hissed. ‘Hurry!’
Robert felt the beginnings of a single, pure note sounding at the centre of his mind, in the place where the birds sang with unfettered joy.
‘Tariq, I know what the interrogators can do,’ Katherine said. ‘They broke you down because they can break anyone down. Nobody can resist suchtreatment. There is no shame. No shame at all for you. There is shame only for me.’
The shape around Adam’s head twisted and turned, giving off bolts of anguish and loss that hit Robert like punches in the gut. Robert tightened his grip on the hands of Terri and Horace as he saw the eye of death coalesce out of the air around Adam, flaring yellow and blue, achingly beautiful, staring at them all.
Katherine spoke into the eye. ‘You were a powerful man, a powerful being, stronger than I, but you have become weak, a parasite. It is not worthy of your kind soul. You were a brave man, and
you can be brave again. I know you built the Ma’rifat’ with me in your mind at every moment. I know you wanted me to see how badly hurt and betrayed you had been, how humiliated you felt by me, how dreadfully I had scarred you. I know how you took the little ditties and songs we used to make up and turned them into clues to the location of the keys. I know you hid things in such a way that I might be able to find them. I know you did these things, in a way, to ensure that there was a flaw in your plan, a possibility that you might be stopped, a chance for me to rescue you from what you were planning to do. And that chance is now.’
Katherine fell on her knees, staring into the eye. ‘Can you forgive me? Please forgive me. I beg you to forgive me, as I forgive you.’
For a split second, the eye flared an opalescent white, anger and fear battling with other possibilities, with ghosts of other outcomes. Robert felt a tidal wave of sadness, of grief. But then Adam filled his lungs and bellowed, at the top of his voice: ‘NO!’
He flung off his paralysis with a sudden frantic twist and broke through their circle of hands, sending them all flying backwards to the ground. Adam lurched towards Katherine, who screamed at him and burst into sobbing, desperate tears. Adam loomed over her, hands reaching out in uncertainty as though to cherish her, to hold her in a lover’s embrace.
Horace called out: ‘Adam, leave her alone!’
Too late, Robert saw Adam turn and lunge at Horace, flinging him through the air. The old man slammed into the bench, hitting his head and falling in a tangled heap. Adam leaped upon him again and seized the Malice Box.
Terri ran to Horace as Adam turned to face Robert and Katherine. Katherine placed herself four-square before him, arms by her sides, defying him to pass her.
Adam gave a roar of anger. ‘Too late! Too late!’ He turned and wheeled his hands in the air, holding the core, then flung a sheet of raging light into their faces.
New York, September 2, 2004
Dawn was breaking when Robert came to. He rolled upright and tried to stand. Every corner of his body lit up with pain.
Horace sat on one of the benches, eyes closed, in a posture of meditation. Robert could feel the old man was badly injured. Yet he emanated peace.
The early half-light bathed the park in gold. He could feel it on his skin, like warm, gentle rain. Robert shivered.
Terri was gone, and Katherine was still unconscious where she had fallen, near the foot of the obelisk. He went over to her and knelt stiffly by her side, placing his hand on her forehead. Without knowing how, he understood she was not harmed. He stroked her hair.
‘My darling. I’m so sorry.’
Horace spoke from behind him. ‘No need to be sorry, Robert. To go further we have had to come to this place.’
‘I can still save Adam,’ Robert said. ‘That wasn’t him.’
Horace grunted. ‘Look to your wife. Then we must talk. We must stop this thing.’
‘You’re hurt, Horace.’
‘Look to Katherine.’
Horace fished a map of Manhattan from his pocket and began to study it intently. It was the one he had taken from Robert at Grand Central, marked with the lines of the sacred shape he had traced on to the city during the trials.
Robert took off his jacket and knelt down again over Katherine, placing it gently under her head. He took her right hand and held it between his, kissing the rings on her fingers. After a few minutes, Katherine’s eyelids quivered. She came to and looked about her in a sudden panic. ‘I tried to save him! I tried! Horace? Terri?’
She attempted to stand. Robert restrained her with a touch of his hand.
‘You tried your best, darling. They were too strong. Rest for a moment.’
‘Is Horace OK? We have to stop them! Make it right!’
‘We will. We will.’
Horace waved the map. ‘The caches. The sites. The riddles. Pay attention. We have very little time now. They were all for something. Something more than simply reaching the next stage of the trials, I mean. They all resonate, and they all combine together. To give…’ He winced with pain as he got up to show them.
‘Horace, sit still.’
Katherine grabbed Robert around the neck and hauled herself to her feet. He half carried her over to Horace, and they sat down on either side of him.
‘These are the sites of the caches.’
Horace pointed to the circles and lines he’d drawn up and down the map. ‘You must understand how everything connects. Would you please pass me Terri’s weapon? Quickly.’
Robert retrieved the length of steel pipe from under the bench where it had fallen and handed it to Horace.
‘Now, please help me stand.’
Horace trod painfully forward, using the tube as a walking stick, then steadied himself and began to trace lines with it on the ground. As he drew, the lines began to glow faintly in the twilight.
‘This is Manhattan,’ he said, his voice harsh with pain. He traced an outline of the island, including the rectangular box of Central Park. ‘A powerful current of power – we might call it a ley line, or a stream of earth energy – runs the length of the island.’
He drew a vertical line down the centre of Manhattan.
‘Most people are not consciously aware of it, though unconsciously it has forced its way into the design and the life of the city in different ways. It has become the city’s central spine. Fifth Avenue broadly follows its path. No fewer than three obelisks are located along its course, as you yourself have seen, Robert, as well as the great skyscraper of Rockefeller Center.’
He drew a circle near the bottom of the island, at the location of St Paul’s Chapel, then another at the site of the Worth Monument, and a third where they were now in Central Park. All three were on the ley line. He traced a fourth circle to represent Rockefeller Center, just south of Central Park.
‘I think I saw that,’ Robert said. ‘I felt that pattern as I was completing the trials. But there was more to it. There was –’
Horace held up his hand. ‘One thing at a time. When the maker of the Ma’rifat’ was looking for a way to maximize the effect of his device, he clearly decided to use this ley line to link two devices, rather than using just one. By doing so, he could ensure that the destructive force was spread over a wide area, rather than just propagating from one point. And so he took the keys from one of the devices and hid them in a particular array along the island, around this central line of power, as a kind of antenna to transmit the force.’
He drew circles to show the location of each of the caches.
‘The array he chose is known as the Tree of Life. It has other names, but that is the most common one. He would have chosen it because it has been used, since time immemorial, to help human beings handle psycho-spiritual energies. It appears in ancient Egypt, in the Kabbalah of Jewishmysticism, in the Sufi strand of Islam, always as a key that unlocks such powers. It is an image of the Path.’
‘How is it used?’
‘It may be used in many ways. It consists of ten circles, or spheres, joined by a total of twenty-two paths. Some use it as a meditation aid, like a mandala, visualizing journeys along the Tree’s paths from one sphere to another. Each sphere, in this form of use, represents a different facet of human consciousness, from the purely sensory and physical at the bottom, to the ineffable mysteries of the divine at the top. Others give astrological value to the spheres, or link them to animals, stones and medicinal plants. Not in this case. Our man did not use all the paths, nor all the facets, of the pattern.
‘Rather, he reversed a tradition in which the Tree represents creation – with the inconceivably powerful divine light at the top, descending like a lightning bolt down through the other spheres, to attain physical reality in the lowest one. His intention was to use the shadow side of the tree, wreaking destruction instead of creation. A bolt of dark lightning, if you will.’
‘But that went wrong when Adam killed Tariq,’ Robert said. ‘He never got to position one of the device
s.’
‘That’s correct. It would have been the last piece of the puzzle. All the rest was in place. But Adam forced the Ma’rifat’ to misfire when it was still several miles away from Manhattan.’
‘So the keys were left where they were, and the other device… Where is the remaining Ma’rifat’?’
As they spoke, Katherine suddenly saw in her mind, with total clarity, the cube that constituted the fourth key of the Ma’rifat’, the one she had stolen from the safe in the bedroom. A cube of 125 smaller cubes, eachstamped with a number. The larger cube sliced into five slabs of twenty-five cubes.
She closed her eyes and ran its numbers through her mind. She imagined herself in a hotel, a cube-shaped hotel where each room had a different number.
Up, down and across, eachstring of five numbers added up to 315.
The very central room, at the core of the hotel, was unnumbered. That would have to be the central mystery, the key thing Tariq had wanted to hide. Yet he’d been unable to avoid playing.
She ran through the numbers of the waypoints. The first ones had been 025, 064, X62, 101. It was an interior diagonal of the cube. Top left to bottom right.
She knew she’d cracked it at that moment.
The next four waypoints had been 036, 057, X69, 090. Another interior diagonal. Bottom left to top right.
She ran through the rest. They all passed through the central unnamed cube. In eachcase, the X represented that same cube.
All the strings of five cubes added up to 315.
So the centre cube, the unnamed mystery, had to be… 63.
And, she saw, that would have to be the waypoint for the location of the Ma’rifat’.
Tariq’s deepest secret.
She breathed hard.
‘Robert, give me the Quad,’ Katherine said.
She fired up the GPS programme and looked for Waypoint 063 in the directory, but it wasn’t there. No waypoint with that number was listed. Somehow Tariq must have hidden it. She called up a blank Go to Waypoint_____ prompt and punched in the numbers manually. 063. And suddenly there it was. ‘Downtown! The remaining device is downtown! Near where you started the trials. It’s not showing exactly where, and there’s no accompanying clue to go with it, but it’s in the area of St Paul’s.’
The Malice Box Page 39