The Secret Prophecy

by Herbie Brennan

  After a moment Em turned around. Victor was staring at him. Em waited for him to say something, then when he didn’t, walked to the door and knocked briskly. He was sweating a little when Denise opened it.

  “How did it go?” Charlotte asked him.

  “I think I cocked it up,” Em said. He considered for a moment, then added, “Royally.”

  Chapter 47

  Em was even more convinced he’d cocked it up when the following day passed without incident, as did the day after that. Even the debriefing with his father proved a nervous anticlimax. Clearly Professor Goverton hadn’t expected much from Em’s meeting with Victor for he did little more than shrug when Em reported he’d got nothing of use from their prisoner.

  On the evening of the third day, Em went to bed in a fog of frustration, uncertainty, and fear. Once Victor escaped Em would hear about it. He was bound to. His father would certainly tell him something like that, maybe even question Em again about their meeting. But Victor should have escaped by now. Unless, of course, he hadn’t found Em’s swipe card. Em’s imagination kept replaying the dismissive way in which Victor had thrown the I Ching onto his bunk. He might not have bothered to pick up the book again. Or, if he did pick it up, he might not have found his escape key hidden underneath the card on which the three Chinese coins were mounted. Or, worse still, he might have found the card, tried to use it, and been caught again. The more Em thought about it, the more things he could imagine that might have gone wrong. He lay awake for more than an hour imagining them before sinking into a fitful, dreamless sleep.

  Em woke, heart pounding. His bed was unfamiliar, the room in pitch darkness. For a moment he didn’t know where he was. What he did know was that there was somebody with him.

  He tried to control the rasp of his breathing. There was a lamp on a bedside table—he was sure of it. He started to reach for it, then remembered: everything in this place was computer controlled, voice controlled. To make the lamp work, he had to say “Lights on.”

  What Em did say was “Who’s there?” It came out as a croak. There was not a glimmer of light in the room. The windows were made from some sort of reactive glass. When he climbed into bed, they automatically turned themselves opaque. He couldn’t remember the command to turn them transparent again.

  A rough hand clamped over his mouth. A hoarse voice snapped, “Quiet!” Then: “Where the hell are all the light switches?”

  Em pried the hand away from his mouth. “Victor?” he whispered.

  “You wouldn’t believe how difficult this place is to break into,” Victor whispered back. “Bloody alarm systems all over the shop. Last thing I need is to cope with the foundation’s private police.” He withdrew his hand completely. “How do you turn on lights?”

  “Lights on,” Em said, remembered the modifier, and added, “Level one.” His bedside lamp illuminated with a gentle glow. For eyes adapted to the velvet darkness, it lit up the whole room. Victor was dressed as Em remembered him in the cell, with one difference. Somehow he’d found a balaclava to cover his face.

  Victor pushed up the mask. His features looked tense, and for some reason his scar seemed much more prominent than usual. “I need you to talk to your father,” he said without preliminary. “There’s not much time.”

  “Father?” Em echoed stupidly. All the same, he slid out from beneath the covers and reached for the clothes he’d left on the floor when he came to bed.

  “We’ve mined the petrochemical tanks,” Victor told him grimly.

  Em woke up fast. “Who has?”

  “The Section. We air-dropped a crack team. The Knights are just days away from distributing the vaccine.”

  “When did you break out?” Em asked, tugging on a sock.

  “About an hour after you left me—thanks for the card, incidentally. Clever to hide it under the coins; you must have known I’d use them.”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d found it. My father didn’t tell me you’d escaped.” It occurred to Em that his father must already have known at the time when Em reported back to him. It also occurred to him that Victor might still not know his father’s position in Themis.

  But Victor acted as if he did know. “I’m afraid your father has never told you everything. All the same, I wouldn’t want him . . .” Victor stopped.

  “Wouldn’t want him what?”

  “Dead,” Victor muttered. “We just wanted to stop the vaccine.”

  Em laced his shoe. “What’s going on, Victor?”

  “Once we mined the tanks, we sent your father a warning so he could order an evacuation. The charges are staggered to produce a rolling explosion—maybe even a firestorm. The plan isn’t just to destroy the current vaccine stocks, but to demolish most of the facility so they can’t produce more—at least not quickly. If there are people still on the premises, hundreds, maybe thousands of them will die. But your father didn’t issue the evacuation order.”

  Em stared at him, trying to make sense of what he was hearing. Eventually he said, “He didn’t?”

  “Told us to defuse the charges, otherwise we’d have any deaths of foundation employees on our conscience. Made the point that most of them would be entirely innocent victims.” Victor shook his head. “I’d forgotten how ruthless the Knights can be.”

  “Did you?”

  “Did I what? Defuse the charges?” Victor shook his head again. “Nobody can defuse those charges—they’re tamperproof. They’ll explode at once if anybody tries to defuse them. And when one goes, the others follow automatically.” He looked faintly apologetic. “It was the only way we could be absolutely sure of destroying the vaccine—and the facilities to make more.”

  “So people are bound to be killed when the explosions happen? Especially those close to the tanks?”

  “Yes.”

  “Including my father?”

  “Your father is in his office in the center of the facility, waiting to hear from us. There’s a storage tank next to the adjoining laboratory. It’s unlikely he will survive.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “We’ve made it absolutely clear to him,” Victor said soberly.

  “But he doesn’t believe you?”

  “He believes us, all right. The man is a fanatic. He’s perfectly prepared to die for his Themis principles.”

  Em was getting the full picture now, and the last remnant of sleep had cleared from his mind. “Wait a minute. If the charges are tamperproof, he must know you can’t defuse them now. So why’s he trying to hold out?”

  “He doesn’t believe us,” Victor said. “At least, he probably believes we’ve set safeguards on the charges, so he’s unlikely to risk having his own people defuse them; but he doesn’t believe we can’t do the job ourselves. That’s what he’s gambling lives on; and he’s going to lose.” He hesitated, although only barely, before adding, “Unless you can persuade him otherwise.”

  And there it was, laid out before him. Victor was making him responsible for any lives lost in the Bederbeck Foundation. How many were employed? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? The facility was a small town in the desert: the figures must be somewhere in that range. Given those numbers, the death toll could be enormous. It was a responsibility Em didn’t want to take on. “How much time do we have?”

  Victor glanced at his watch. “About three quarters of an hour.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Victor!” Em exploded. “What are we hanging about here for?”

  Chapter 48

  “You’d better have this back,” Victor said.

  They were standing at the side-street entrance to the building where Em had first been taken to meet his father. Through the glass door he could see that the reception area was closed, with only limited lighting. Most of the rest of the building was in gloom as well, with the exception of a few well-lit offices, presumably in charge of late-working Bederbeck executives. One of them, so far as Em could judge from street level, was the office his father used. Em could imagine him up ther
e now, soberly waiting for Section 7 to make its next move.

  Em glanced at the swipe card, then took it wordlessly.

  “Can you find your way up to him?” Victor asked.

  “You’re not coming with me?”

  Victor shook his head. “He hates me—he hates the whole of Section 7, and now he knows who runs it. You’ll have a far better chance of persuading him if you’re on your own. Now, can you find your way up?”

  “I think so,” Em said. He hesitated. “Unless somebody stops me.”

  “There’ll be no security,” Victor told him confidently. “He wants to talk to us.”

  So it was us now—Em had joined Section 7, at least in Victor’s head. Em wondered how he felt about that and decided it was okay. He was far less certain how he felt about his father. He glanced around him. The streets were largely deserted, the buildings largely darkened. But all around him were thousands of people, asleep for the most part, who would soon be in peril of their lives. Unless Em could make his father see sense. He was not overconfident.

  “Em . . . ?” Victor said quietly.

  Em turned back to him, wondering what was coming now. “Yes.”

  “You know that you don’t really have three quarters of an hour, don’t you?”

  Em eyed him cautiously. “I don’t?”

  “If your father does give the word, it’s going to take at least half an hour to be sure of getting everybody to safety.”

  Em did the math. “You’re saying I’ve only got fifteen minutes to persuade my dad?”

  Victor jiggled one hand, palm down. “In or around that.” He hesitated. “The thing is . . .” He hesitated again. “The thing is, when I say it will take at least half an hour to get everybody to safety, that includes you.”

  “You’re saying if I don’t persuade my father inside fifteen minutes, I’m dead?”

  “I’m saying if you haven’t persuaded your father inside fifteen minutes, you walk. Fifteen minutes, Em, not a second more. Then run. You get out of the building; we’ll make sure you’re out of range when the balloon goes up. Our first priority.”

  “What about my father?”

  Victor looked at him grimly. “You’re not responsible for your father,” he said.

  After a moment Em said, “Better get on with it then.” He used his swipe card to open the main door.

  The door to his father’s penthouse suite was wide-open, as was the door to the study area inside. The study was lit by a single reading lamp. Em’s father was standing at the far side of his desk, silhouetted against the light, staring through the window at the street outside. He looked a lonely figure.

  “You have to give the order to evacuate, Dad,” Em said without preamble.

  His father turned slowly. There was no surprise on his face or in his voice as he said, “So you’ve gone over to Section 7, Em. Or were you with them all the time?”

  This was the last thing Em wanted to get into. “Dad, we don’t have time. You need to issue the evacuation order now, otherwise people are going to die!”

  His father moved away from the window. For the first time Em noticed a microphone on his desk attached to a control console and wondered if this might be the facility intercom. “I don’t think so,” his father said. “I think your friend Victor is bluffing. He doesn’t want those deaths on his conscience any more than I do.”

  “He doesn’t want millions of deaths from your vaccine either!” Em blurted. A part of him still didn’t believe his own father could have planned something so monstrous. There had been too many lies for Em to hold to the old certainties anymore.

  “Ah,” his father said thoughtfully.

  “Ah?” Em echoed fiercely. “Is that all you can say: Ah?”

  “I wasn’t sure how much you knew, how much you believed,” his father said calmly.

  “I didn’t believe any of it at first,” Em told him. “How could I? Wiping out a whole generation of young people is something you expect from Dr. Evil in a comic book, not from your own father!” The denial would come now. Of course it would come now.

  But the denial did not come. “Em,” his father said gently, “would you rather sacrifice a few million souls or see the entire human race wiped out?”

  Em stared at him. Eventually he said, “The entire human race isn’t going to be wiped out.”

  His father moved behind the desk and sat down. Suddenly he looked very tired. “Oh, yes, it is,” he said. “With an absolute certainty, we are as doomed as the dinosaurs. And soon. Unless someone does something about it.”

  Em’s mind went back to something Victor had told him about the Themis plan. “Are we talking about global warming?”

  “Of course we’re talking about global warming. For all the denials and the twisting of statistics, there remains one incontrovertible fact: the climate of our planet has been warming since the beginning of the industrial revolution. If the trend continues, it will eventually wipe out all life on Earth—with the possible exception of a few particularly hardy bacteria. Nobody argues about that. The only real controversy is about the cause: is it due to a warming of the sun or to the production of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by human activities? But that’s a false controversy, because even if the warming is ultimately related to a cycle of the sun, we are still hurrying the process along through the production of greenhouse gases. Our own scientists have calculated that we are less than two decades away from the tipping point.” He knuckled his eyes. “Do you know anything about the planet Venus?”

  Em stared at him in bewilderment. What had Venus got to do with anything? “Not much.”

  “Venus is roughly the same size as Earth; it was once called our sister planet, and perfectly respectable scientists speculated that it might harbor life. Then in the 1960s, space probes showed it had a surface temperature high enough to melt lead. Know the reason?” Professor Goverton did not wait for Em to answer. His face flared into an expression of high intensity. “A runaway greenhouse effect. All the heat reaching Venus from the sun is trapped by its atmosphere.” He leaned forward. “And that’s what we’re racing toward on Earth right now with our greenhouse gas emissions. If we don’t stop it, the human race and just about every other life-form on the planet will be wiped out.”

  “But we are stopping it!” Em protested. “With better cars and new laws and carbon emissions and stuff.” He was a bit vague on the details, but every time you picked up a newspaper, there were articles about international protocols and limits on industry and something about carbon emission trading that he didn’t really understand.

  His father snorted. “Tokenism,” he snapped. “Too little, too late. Frankly, what an invidual can do will not make one jot of difference. Only large-scale action is going to touch this problem, but there isn’t a government on the planet that would dare to take the steps actually necessary to make a difference—they’d be out of office in a week if they did. Everybody talks about saving the planet, but how many people do you know who have given up their cars and their consumer goods—all the pretty gadgets that are polluting the planet in their operation or their manufacture? This is the problem with our so-called democracies. They have to pander all the time to the will of the people, as if the will of the people were something noble, or even sensible. Can’t you see that experience has shown time and time again that the will of the people is just another way of saying mass stupidity?” Once again he didn’t wait for an answer. Instead he asked another question. “Em, what do you think is actually causing global warming?”

  Em blinked. “What you just said. Greenhouse gas emissions.”

  “That’s only a symptom. The actual cause is the population explosion. There are too many people on the planet—far too many. Em, you and I produce a liter of methane from our backsides every day. So, on average, does everyone on the planet. That’s 6,866,000,000 people. Methane is a greenhouse gas. We’re pumping nearly seven billion liters of it into the atmosphere every day just by digesting our food!
Two trillion five hundred and fifty-five billion liters a year.”

  “But—” Em protested, without quite knowing what he was going to protest about.

  As it happened, his father gave him no chance. “World population is increasing exponentially. Eventually it will reach unsustainable levels. The result will be worldwide famine and misery. Believe me, Em, humanity doesn’t have a whole host of problems, as most people believe. It has one single problem from which all else follows: overpopulation.” He stood up. “Democracy will never, can never, tackle that problem. You’re too young to remember when China introduced a single-child policy to curb its own population. The whole Western world was up in arms, accusing them of infringing on individual liberties. As if individual liberty didn’t simply amount to ‘Me first and to hell with everybody else.’ The Knights are the only people on the planet with the power and the will to do anything about these problems!”

  “But you don’t have to kill people!” Em exploded. “You don’t have to murder a whole generation.”

  “What solution would you propose?” his father asked quietly.

  Em stared at him blankly. Solving the world’s problems wasn’t something he had time for right now. Em glanced at his watch. To his horror, he discovered he’d already spent twenty minutes in this office—five longer than the deadline Victor had given him. Em forced himself to stay calm. He’d already decided that if he couldn’t talk his father around about evacuation, his next move had to be to persuade his dad to leave the building with him, thus saving both of their lives. But that was a last resort. Before then he had to make one last try.

  He saw the flash, like a nearby lightning strike, then, a heartbeat later, the window blew violently inward, carrying a shower of burning debris. Em’s father, who was nearest, was lifted off his feet and flung directly across the desk like a sack of potatoes. His head met the leg of a wooden chair with a resounding crack. Em was struck in the chest by a giant fist and careened backward, gasping for breath, to strike the half-open door.