The Secret Prophecy

by Herbie Brennan

  Girls missed nothing. The change of clothes had come out of Victor’s wardrobe in the safe house, and he’d showered that morning. Em thought on his feet. “I washed in the public restrooms,” he said. Charlotte would have no idea what sort of facilities there were in men’s restrooms: she’d probably never been in one in her life. If she asked, he’d tell her that truck drivers showered there all the time. When Charlotte didn’t ask but continued staring at him, he licked his lips and went on with the first thing that came into his head: “I stole the clothes.”

  “You what?” She contrived to sound shocked, the girl who’d just told him how she lied to the police.

  “Off a clothesline,” Em added.

  “Oh, you poor, poor thing!” Charlotte exclaimed.

  He had to wait until she was out of sight before returning to Victor.

  “Did she get it?” Victor asked quickly.

  Em nodded.

  “Not too much hassle?” Victor asked.

  Em shook his head. “Just the right amount.”

  Victor looked at him blankly, then said, “Okay, let’s get back to the safe house and take a look.”

  When they reached the door of the apartment, Victor did not unlock it at once. Instead he knelt down and peered closely at the doorjamb.

  “What are you doing?” Em asked curiously.

  “Just making sure we’ve had no visitors in our absence.”

  “You haven’t fixed a thread down there?” Em asked incredulously. “Boy, you really take this seriously.”

  “Have to,” Victor told him. “This is survival we’re talking about. I’d have thought you’d have realized that by now.” He stood up. “All clear. The thread is intact.”

  They went inside; Victor closed the door and went directly to the window to draw the curtains. As he did so, there was a knock at the door.

  Em froze, his heart pounding. Suddenly Victor was holding a gun, clasping it with both hands, pointed upward the way they did in cop movies. He stepped to one side, behind the table. “I want you to open it, Em,” he said quietly, his eyes never leaving the door. “But the second you do, I want you to step back and to one side, leaving me a clear shot.” He brought the gun down so it was pointing at the door. “Unlock it, then pull it quickly wide-open so you’re shielded behind the door. It’s metal lined, remember, so you’ll be safe. Got that?”

  “Got that,” Em said. He wasn’t sure about the safe bit, but it never occurred to him to question Victor’s instructions.

  “Go,” Victor whispered.

  The knock came again, loud and insistent, as Em moved to the door. He uttered a silent prayer and then, before he could lose his nerve, unlocked the door and pulled it wide-open, stepping behind it as he did so. He couldn’t see who was outside; but he had a clear view of Victor, his hands rock-steady as he aimed the gun, and Victor’s expression went from grim determination to openmouthed shock. “What the hell are you doing here?” he gasped. But slowly, cautiously, he was lowering the gun.

  Em risked a glance around the door, and he too froze with shock.

  “Won’t you introduce me to your friend?” Charlotte asked him as she walked inside.

  Chapter 27

  “How did you know we were here?” Victor demanded. Em noted that the gun was still in evidence, although no longer pointed in Charlotte’s direction. Victor had set it within easy reach on the tabletop.

  “Followed you,” Charlotte told him calmly. She pulled up a chair and sat down. “In a taxi.” She gave Victor a sidelong look. “I wish you’d put that thing away. You must know I’m a friend of Em’s.”

  Victor slid the gun off the table and into his pocket, but continued to stare at Charlotte.

  “You haven’t told me who you are,” Charlotte said.

  “His name’s Victor,” Em said. He ignored Victor’s warning glance. “Come on, Victor. Charlotte’s a friend. She knows about the man with the gun. She knows I’m being followed. She’s already helped me twice. And now she knows where we live. We may as well tell her the rest. She could be of help. I think we need all the help we can get.”

  Victor continued to glare at Charlotte for another moment, then his shoulders slumped and he turned to Em. “You’re right. Fill her in while I make some coffee.” He glanced back at Charlotte. “Just remember, this isn’t a game. You’ve blundered into something very dangerous—potentially lethal, in fact.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Charlotte said, tight-lipped.

  Since there wasn’t really very much to tell, Em brought her up-to-date quickly while Victor made the coffee. She proved one of those rare people who didn’t ask silly questions—didn’t ask questions at all—until he had finished. Not even the news that Victor was an agent of Section 7 seemed to faze her. “And that’s about it,” he said in conclusion.

  “You think the iPod I collected might have some clue to what this is all about?”

  “Victor does,” Em said.

  “Then maybe we should have a look at it,” Charlotte said.

  Em opened the iPod box as Victor took fresh coffee mugs from the cupboard. He dropped the iPod into the palm of his hand, then checked inside the empty box for a card or note, but there was nothing. Next he examined the iPod itself. On the front, the gray-black touch screen was blank. Reluctantly he turned it over. Etched into the silvered back, above the Apple logo and the name iPod, was the inscription: Good listening. Happy birthday, Edward, from your loving father. Loving father. Em felt his eyes begin to brim again.

  Victor walked over. “Did you say you wanted coffee?” he asked Charlotte. “I made you a cup anyway.” He set her mug beside her on the table, then turned to Em. “Anything?”

  “Nothing in the box. I haven’t switched it on yet.” He pressed the button on the top edge and watched while the Apple logo appeared center screen. It seemed to hang there for a long time before it was suddenly replaced by a color photo of planet Earth taken from space above the message SLIDE TO UNLOCK. Em ran his thumb across the bottom of the screen, dragging the slider icon with it. The iPod screen flared into a grid of icons. Across the bottom, four were labeled MUSIC, MAIL, SAFARI, and VIDEOS.

  “There’s Wi-Fi in this apartment,” Victor murmured. “Switched off at the moment, but I can turn it on again if we need it.”

  “I don’t think we will,” Em said. “If Dad did leave me any sort of message, it wouldn’t be on the Net. It’ll be in the device itself.”

  “How about that thing labeled NOTES?” Charlotte suggested. “He may have left you a note.”

  Em thumbed the icon, and a lined yellow page expanded to fill the screen. But the page was blank. “Nope,” Em said.

  “What else might he have used?”

  “I don’t know,” Em said. “I’ll do a bit of a search.”

  The search took more than fifteen minutes as he checked icon after icon. Things like SAFARI and MAIL didn’t work without the Wi-Fi connection, but he decided to come back to them a little later. It was Charlotte who pushed the issue when she said suddenly, “Maybe he sent you an email.”

  “I’d have picked it up on my PC ages ago,” Em said.

  “Not if he set you up with a special email account on the iPod.”

  Em looked at her in sudden admiration. A special email account was certainly a possibility. It would be easy enough to set one up under Em’s name, or an assumed name for that matter, then change the iPod’s settings to download any mail that went there. Even a Luddite like his father might have managed it if he was desperate enough. “We’ll need the Wi-Fi if we’re to check.”

  “The router’s in my bedroom,” Victor said. “I’ll plug it in.” He came back only moments later. “Should be up and running now.”

  Em thumbed the MAIL icon and stared at the screen in disappointment when he discovered the factory settings were intact. “Great idea,” he told Charlotte, “but he didn’t do it. I’d have to plug the iPod into my PC at home to transfer my email settings, but that would just give
me my normal account—Dad didn’t set up a special one.”

  “I’ll leave the network on for a bit; you may need it later,” Victor said. “Keep trying.”

  Em kept trying with no luck whatsoever. After another five minutes, he decided Victor must be just plain wrong: Dad had left no message at all, at least not on the iPod. Out of curiosity, he thumbed the MUSIC icon and opened a screen headed PLAYLISTS. Only one showed, an item labeled ON-THE-GO, but he knew from past experience that this one would be empty. Until he synched with his home computer, none of his music would be on the iPod.

  There were five icons along the bottom of the Playlists screen. The first, highlighted, repeated PLAYLISTS. Next to it were ARTISTS, SONGS, ALBUMS, and MORE. The first three had to be blank as well, but he thumbed the last one curiously. It opened a new screen listing: AUDIO BOOKS, COMPILATIONS, COMPOSERS, GENRES, iTUNES, and PODCASTS. Podcasts was the only one that sported a small gray arrow. Em felt his stomach tighten. “There’s a podcast on here,” he said quietly.

  “Shouldn’t there be?” Victor asked.

  “Not unless somebody downloaded one. Which would have had to be my father.”

  “It’s not a demo that comes with the player?”

  “Not a podcast,” Charlotte broke in. “You have to download them.”

  “So your father downloaded one for you?” Victor said to Em. “Something he thought would interest you?”

  “Either that or . . .” Em didn’t want to finish the sentence in case the thought he’d had proved to be wrong.

  Victor waited for a moment, then said, “Can we listen to it?”

  “Hold on,” Em said. He found the ear buds that came with the iPod and plugged them into the socket on the bottom edge of the device. He pushed one bud into his own ear and held the other out to Victor. “You won’t be able to hear anything without this.” To Charlotte he said, “If you squish your ear up against mine, we should both be able to listen from the same earpiece.”

  Charlotte pulled her chair close beside his and leaned across without a word until her cheek was pressed against his, her ear against his ear. She smelled of lightly perfumed soap. Em reluctantly dragged his attention back to the task at hand and tapped the Podcast heading. He watched the screen slide sideways to reveal a title, the single word DISCOVERY.

  “Something from the Discovery Channel?” Victor asked.

  Em doubted it. As Victor sat down and began to fiddle with his ear bud, Em tapped the screen again.

  There was no video, but his father’s voice emerged from the tiny speaker in his right ear.

  Chapter 28

  Professor Edward Goverton sounded exactly as if he were in the university lecture hall facing an audience of students. His tone was dry and precise; his voice was strong. But as his first few words confirmed, he was lecturing to an audience of one.

  “Since you are listening to this, Em, I fear I must be dead. Doubtless this will upset you—I am none too pleased myself—but neither of us can afford the luxury of self-pity. I have made a dangerous discovery. In sharing it, I am aware that I place you in danger as well; but for the sake of our future, for the sake of the world, someone must stop what is planned. Although you are far too young for such responsibility, I know of no one else I can trust. I have already discovered that the enemy we face is ubiquitous and faceless. I suspect it has infiltrated many positions of power. I fear it has infiltrated my university. Thus, even academic colleagues and friends fall under suspicion.

  “As you know, I have long been fascinated by the life and works of the sixteenth-century French prophet Nostradamus. What you do not know, because I did not choose to tell you before now, is that during my research for that book, I came across some textural references to a hitherto undiscovered prophecy by Nostradamus.”

  Em stared beyond the iPod at the tabletop. No, but you told your best friend, and he chose to tell me after you went and died. So now I’m going to hear it for the second time. For some reason the thought made Em feel sad. It wasn’t right, somehow, that he should have heard about his father’s great discovery from anybody else.

  “And what you certainly don’t know, because I have shared this with no one, is that I managed to discover the full text of the prophecy itself.”

  So Charlotte was right! Dad had discovered the secret prophecy. But she couldn’t have been right about him stealing it. Em really did know his father better than that.

  Or thought he did.

  “‘Pendant les jours de la peste menacée . . .’” said his father’s voice on the podcast. “‘Quand des enfants seront percés avec la lance mince . . . un nouveau monde se lève de la douleur du monde vieux . . . et toute l’humanité soutiendra le joug de esclavage pour toujours.’ That is the prophecy, exactly as Nostradamus wrote it. I committed it to memory. I had to. The original text, the actual document, is in the possession of a Masonic Lodge in Toulon. One of their most closely guarded secrets. But the Grand Master happens to be a good friend of mine. I mentioned to him that I had reason to believe a secret prophecy existed. He made no comment at the time; but one evening, after he had too much Cognac, he confirmed the existence of such a prophecy and claimed to have seen it for himself. He even agreed to show me the document in question on condition I did not photograph or copy it. I held it only for a moment—just long enough to confirm the handwriting as that of Nostradamus, which was what he wanted. It never occurred to him that I could memorize it in so short a time. But it was only four lines of Early Modern French, not all that difficult, really. How’s your French these days, Em? Can you translate it for me?”

  Not a chance, Dad, Em thought.

  “No matter. I have never believed you were cut out for a life as a scholar, nor would I wish you to become one. I have made my own translation of the quatrain, which I am reasonably certain captures the sense of what Nostradamus was trying to say. What he wrote was . . . ‘In the days of the threatened plague . . . when children shall be pierced with slender lance . . . a new world rises from the suffering of the old . . . and all mankind shall forever bear the yoke of slavery.’”

  Whatever that means, Em thought. The prophecy said as little to him in English as it did in the original French. Although he’d never shared his father’s fascination for Nostradamus, he knew enough to realize that a whole raft of his prophecies were like pictures in the fire: they were so vague, they could mean almost anything you wanted them to mean. Then, suddenly, he remembered what Victor had said about Nostradamus’s connection to the Knights of Themis. Was this one of the prophecies that was meant to hasten the demise of democracy? But if it was, he couldn’t quite see how . . .

  “Now, you must have suspected I might believe Nostradamus to be a genuine prophet. That’s to say you must have suspected that I believed—in certain instances at least—that Nostradamus could see the future. Let me confirm that you were right.”

  For the first time, Professor Goverton’s voice lost its lecture hall edge. It became at once more intimate, confessional, and, if Em read it right, maybe just a little bit guilty. “This is a difficult area, Em. When I first began my study of Nostradamus, it seemed that some of his prophecies were genuinely predictive. So I decided to investigate the whole question of prediction and joined the Society for Psychical Research in London. Their records showed me it really was possible to foresee the future. But the very best precogs who were scientifically tested did not manage it every time or even most of the time.

  “This was a more exciting discovery than it sounds, because the prophecies of Nostradamus follow exactly that pattern. But it occurred to me that even if only one in a hundred of his predictions was correct, would that not be worth investigating?”

  On the iPod, Professor Goverton released an involuntary sigh. “Which is why, having discovered what was in effect a brand-new Nostradamus prophecy, my immediate instinct was to try to find out whether this was one of those rare instances in which he predicted accurately. I began my own historical research in the hope
of finding a set of circumstances that would provide a perfect fit for his words.

  “At first I thought the appearance of the word plague in the quatrain narrowed my field of investigation. I assumed it would refer to the period of the Black Death. But try as I might, I could find no circumstances matching the words of the prophecy. So I turned my attention to later centuries. Eventually my research brought me right up to the present day, but still with nothing to match the prophecy. I decided I was on a wild-goose chase.

  “Then something happened to change my mind.”

  “Listen,” Victor said, “this ear bud is giving me a crick in my neck. If that gizmo has a standard audio jack, I can rig it up to a set of speakers. That way we can all listen to it properly, and I can start taking notes without having to lean at an angle of forty-five degrees and you two can stop looking like Siamese twins.”

  Em tapped the button that paused his father’s voice in midsentence. “Okay,” he said. He was finding sharing the ear bud a bit of a trial himself.

  “What do you think about the message so far?” Charlotte asked quietly as Victor left the room.

  “Don’t know,” Em said. “I don’t think he’s come to the point yet.” He stared at the iPod a little gloomily. Nothing his father said so far had thrown the slightest light on what was going on.

  Victor returned from the other room after a moment carrying an old-fashioned set of powered speakers. He plugged them into a wall socket and then separated them out, wires trailing, on the table. He picked up the iPod. The connector fit. Victor made a couple of final adjustments to the speakers. “Okay, start it going, and we’ll see if this works.” Em thumbed the little START triangle on the screen.

  Professor Goverton’s voice emerged as if he were standing with them in the room. “—secret prophecy at this stage,” he was saying, “but this seemed like a promising—”

  “Hold on,” Em said. “I’ll rewind. I must have scrubbed the slider.” There was no way of telling where his dad was at any point in the podcast, but he fiddled around using trial and error until he found the place he wanted. As he sat back, Charlotte reached out to give his nearest hand a sympathetic squeeze.