The Paradise Prophecy

by Robert Browne

  He flipped the medallion over, pointing to the beetle etched into its back.

  “This scarab symbolizes the promise of resurrection for all human beings. A symbol you won’t find on any other Saint Christopher medal. In fact, if you ask most religious scholars, they’ll tell you these don’t even exist.”

  “So how do you know this isn’t some kind of mock-up? A forgery?”

  “The same way I knew how to find Gabriela’s secret room. I can feel its energy.”

  Patience, Bernadette. Patience. She sipped her wine, half wishing she’d ordered a Tullamore herself. “So what do these chosen people get out of this?”

  “The honor of serving God.”

  “That’s it? No special seat in heaven?”

  “That’s not really the point,” he said. He looked at the medallion in his hands. “Gabriela wouldn’t have this unless she was one of the chosen. And it’s only fitting that she had such an intense interest in Paradise Lost.”

  “Why?”

  “Because John Milton himself was rumored to be a member of Custodes Sacri.”

  This was news to Callahan, but then her knowledge of Milton could barely fill a thimble. “Why Gabriela of all people?”

  “Probably because she was so good at getting God’s message out with her music. Just like Milton did through his poetry. But there are those who think that the guardians are much more than messengers.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “That they’re also protectors. Like Saint Christopher. Chosen to protect something or someone specific. That the sacred traveler is not just an idea, but a person or an object of some kind.”

  Callahan felt a sudden stutter of excitement. “Defende eam . . . Protect her.”

  “Exactly. It didn’t make sense when you first told me, but now that we know what Gabriela was part of, it’s obvious her last words were meant for her fellow guardians-or maybe even Saint Michael himself.” He gestured to Callahan. “Do you have that copy of Paradise Lost?”

  Callahan grabbed her backpack from under the table, pulled out the dog-eared book and handed it to LaLaurie. He flipped through the pages until he reached the eleventh chapter, then pointed to Gabriela’s notations and highlighted passages.

  “This isn’t just random doodling,” he said. “She was trying to crack a code.”

  “That’s what I thought. But why?”

  “I’m not sure, but I have a guess. Milton was known to be an admirer of Francis Bacon, and some historians think he may have subscribed to the Baconian theory.”

  “Which is?”

  “Bacon often referred to himself as ‘the secret poet’ and there’s a whole group of literary detectives out there who believe he was the true author of all of William Shakespeare’s work. They claim Shakespeare was too uneducated to have written it himself.”

  “And what the hell does Shakespeare have to do with cracking a code?”

  “The Baconians are convinced that if you carefully analyze his poetry, you’ll find clear instances of cryptology-Bacon secretly signing his work so that the world would know who he really was. By extension, there are Milton followers who believe the poet may have done the same, in homage to Bacon. Only with a difference.”

  “Meaning?”

  LaLaurie tapped the book with a finger. “In the opening stanzas Milton claims his words were divinely inspired. Most of us agree that what he wrote was a thinly disguised allegory, an indictment of the tyranny of his times. But some of those fringe accounts I told you about claim that the true meaning of Paradise Lost is hidden within its poetry. A secret message or prophecy from God that relates to who or whatever Custodes Sacri is trying to protect.”

  “So what is this prophecy?”

  “That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? But I can tell you I’ve been through this book backwards and forwards, and I haven’t been able to find any kind of code at all. Neither has anyone else, as far as I know.”

  “So then it’s bullshit.”

  LaLaurie shrugged. “I’m sure that’s what the people who write for any of the Milton periodicals will tell you-assuming they’ve even heard the rumor in the first place. But Gabriela obviously didn’t think so. And she was Custodes Sacri.”

  “But then wouldn’t she already know the prophecy?”

  “Another good question. Maybe the guardians’ knowledge is limited only to what they need to know. And maybe she didn’t like that. Curiosity can get you into all kinds of trouble.”

  Need to know. That was a concept Callahan was intimately familiar with.

  She glanced at the scars on LaLaurie’s wrists. “Why do I get the feeling you speak from experience?”

  “Like I told you, I’ve seen this kind of thing before.”

  “Oh, I haven’t forgotten. I’ve just been sitting here practicing my Zen.”

  “Does your mantra include the phrase, ‘kill LaLaurie’?”

  She smiled. “Maybe you really are psychic. But I’m the one who blew you off when you tried to tell me about this at Gabriela’s penthouse.”

  “Look, I don’t blame you. You’re a skeptic. I probably would be, too, if I were in your shoes. But I come from a long line of people who were acutely aware that there’s a lot more going on out there than most of us want to acknowledge. And what I witnessed, first hand, only confirms that.”

  She lifted her brows. “So do I have to keep chanting, or are you going to tell me about it?”

  LaLaurie took a moment to gather himself, as if what he was about to say didn’t come easily to him. He was dredging up a memory that he’d just as soon leave buried for a couple lifetimes.

  He drained his glass and signaled to the bartender for another.

  “What I saw was nearly identical to what happened to Gabriela. There was never any indication that Custodes Sacri was in the picture, but the body was in the exact same condition, and the exact same symbol was burned into the mattress beneath it.”

  Despite her doubts about good and bad angels and psychic energy and all other forms of supernatural hogwash, Callahan felt herself getting excited again.

  Was this the breakthrough she’d been hoping for? Was it possible that whoever had killed Gabriela had killed before?

  “Do you have any idea what that symbol signifies?”

  “Hubris, vanity, arrogance-take your pick. Whoever left it has a very high opinion of himself.”

  “And you’re sure the symbol on that mattress was the same?”

  “I have eyes, Agent Callahan. I’m not mistaken.”

  Her heart was thumping. “When and where did you see it?”

  “About two years ago,” LaLaurie said. “In my own house.” He paused, a somber look on his face. “On the night my wife, Rebecca, burned to death.”

  20

  Batty had never told the story before. He had played it on his interior movie screen enough times to make him permanently nauseous, but he’d never said it out loud. Had never given voice to the horror.

  “We were living in Ithaca at the time. My book on Milton had been published to good notices a couple years before, and I’d accepted an associate professorship at Cornell while I slogged through the next book.”

  “That’s a long way from Trinity Baptist College.”

  No doubt about that, he thought. A lot had changed in the last two years.

  “A return to Louisiana wasn’t even on the radar then. We’d settled into a fairly routine life and Rebecca was feeling a little restless. She had her degrees in philosophy and religious studies but she wasn’t working, and as ashamed as I am to admit it, I was too busy to pay much attention to her.”

  He often beat himself up for not realizing this at the time. Maybe if he hadn’t neglected Rebecca, she’d still be alive today.

  “Sounds like a pretty typical marriage to me,” Callahan said. “How did you two meet?”

  “In a dream.”

  It took a moment for the answer to compute, then her eyebrows went up. “And how exactly does
that work?”

  “Sometimes I dream things. See people.”

  “And your wife was one of those people?”

  He nodded. “I was a graduate student at Princeton then. In the dream I saw Rebecca standing on the steps of Nassau Hall and was a little shocked when she turned and stared right back at me. Said my name. I found out later that she was psychic, too.”

  Callahan looked confused. “I don’t follow.”

  “We were sharing the same dream.”

  Batty remembered that dream with great clarity, and the sudden stab of excitement he’d felt when he later saw Rebecca standing on those very steps and realized that she recognized him.

  Dream sharing wasn’t uncommon between sensitives, but it usually took a coordinated effort to make it work, and this one had been spontaneous and exhilarating. It didn’t hurt that the girl he’d shared it with was breathtakingly beautiful.

  Callahan said nothing, but Batty knew she was adding another item to her growing list of absurdities.

  The waiter finally brought him his drink and he took a sip before continuing. “Anyway, back to Ithaca. Rebecca and I had settled in and she was feeling restless, but she’d always had this vast curiosity-another trait we shared-and she turned it toward the occult and angelology.”

  “Angelology? That’s a new one.”

  “Not really. People have been studying angels for centuries.”

  “Is this where all your good angel/bad angel stuff comes from?”

  Batty nodded. “There are as many theories about angelic spirits as there are tires in a junkyard, but Rebecca never did anything half-assed, and when she dove into it, what she discovered was that these so-called ‘beings of light’ are really no different than their dark brethren.”

  “How so?”

  “They’re all fallen angels. Cast out of heaven by their creator.”

  “Even Gabriela’s favorite?”

  He nodded again. “Michael, Raphael, Uriel-all of them. At one time they were right down there in the fire alongside Beelzebub, Mammon and Moloch. The only difference is that Michael and the others decided to ignore Satan’s call to arms and go their own way. Decided to honor their creator rather than fight against him. So a myth was born, promoting them to Archangels. The same myth that’s sold to schoolkids every Sunday. But the truth is, they’re not much different than us. Just struggling to do what’s right.”

  Callahan took a healthy sip of her wine, then sighed. “I think my brain is about to implode.”

  “Imagine how I feel. Rebecca became more and more obsessed with this stuff and told me she’d started hearing voices in her head.”

  Callahan stiffened slightly. “That’s exactly what Gabriela’s boyfriend told me. But he claims a lot of people hear voices when they pray.”

  “A lot of sensitives hear them, too. So I didn’t really give it much thought until she came to me one night and said she was afraid she might be in danger. She’d been experimenting with conjurations and was worried she may have summoned up a malevolent angel.”

  “Or maybe attracted some psychopath who thought he was one.”

  “You go ahead and hang on to that, if it makes you feel better. But I was there, and I’m here to tell you that this was no human stalker. There was a presence in our house. Something watching us.”

  He remembered waking up next to Rebecca and feeling that presence right there in the darkness of their bedroom, the faint smell of sulfur in the air. But oddly enough, the malevolence didn’t seem to be directed at him. Only at Rebecca. And as he watched her sleep, he knew something had to be done.

  “So we dove headfirst into the literature,” he told Callahan, “looking for an incantation to rid the house of any dark spirits. But we were working with the original Latin text and we were both a little rusty at that point.”

  “So you got it wrong,” she said.

  He nodded. “I got it wrong, and Rebecca paid the price.”

  He was quiet a moment, mentally reliving that night. The dark angel plaguing Rebecca had become more aggressive in the last several hours, rendering her confused and nearly incoherent, begging for the thing to leave her alone.

  He told Callahan this. Then he said, “I can’t imagine it was much different for Gabriela.”

  Callahan didn’t respond, but it was evident by her expression that he’d struck a chord.

  “It must have been two in the morning by this time. I kept trying the incantation, even tried the standard Catholic exorcism rights, but this thing had grabbed hold of her and wasn’t about to let go until she gave in.”

  “Gave in?”

  “That’s how they operate. They can’t make you do anything you don’t want to. So they work on you from the inside-tempt you, seduce you, play mind games with you, throw hallucinations at you, scare the ever-loving crap out of you . . . It’s like they’re waterboarding your brain until you finally succumb. And the weaker you are, the faster you fall.”

  Batty had known that Rebecca was about to crack and had been desperate to stop it. What she was experiencing wasn’t the same as a dream, but he tried to share it with her, to get inside her head, and when he finally did, he’d heard his own voice shouting at her, telling her how much he despised her-that he wanted her to die.

  The room around him began to shake then, the windows rattling, the bed rolling, and before Batty could duck, a drawer shot out from the dresser, slamming into his head, knocking him cold.

  “When I came to,” he told Callahan, “the room was back to normal. Looked as if it had never been touched, except for her body on the bed, and that symbol burned into the mattress beneath her.”

  He closed his eyes, trying now to push the image from his mind, tortured by the knowledge that Rebecca’s last moments had been filled with words of hatred, spoken in his voice. Had she known it was only a trick? He could only hope so.

  He grabbed the glass in front of him and drained it. “I don’t know why I was spared, but I was.” He laughed softly. Mirthlessly. “If you can call this being spared.”

  “I assume there was an investigation?”

  “Not much of one. I knew my story sounded crazy, so I called the police and told them I had just come home and found her like that, knowing full well that they’d consider me a murder suspect. But without a motive or even a workable theory about how she got that way, they never bothered charging me. They got a look at the books she was reading, then chalked it up to a freak accident and called it a day.”

  “Section had to know about this,” Callahan murmured. “So why didn’t they tell me?”

  “Section?”

  “Never mind,” she said. “But you’ve gotta know I’m clinging to the lifeboat right now-one with the letters WTF stamped on the side.”

  “Like I said, I don’t blame you. And you may think I’m certifiable, but I know what I saw. Put a goddamn straitjacket on me, lock me up in Chabert Memorial, and my story won’t change.”

  He considered ordering another drink, but decided against it. For the first time in recent memory, he didn’t want one. As if finally telling his story had somehow purged him of the need.

  He watched Callahan drain her own glass and could see that she was struggling with all of this. Should she take that leap and believe him? Or simply fall back on what she knew, like the cops in Ithaca had?

  But Batty wasn’t done yet. “With Gabriela, we’ve got a whole new wrinkle in the fabric. She was Custodes Sacri, and if this angel came after her, he’s bound to go after the other guardians, too, hoping to get whatever secret they hold. So they’re all in danger.”

  “How many are there?”

  “I’m not sure. I only know of one.”

  “Who?”

  “An antiquities dealer named Koray Ozan. But until today, I thought his involvement was just a rumor.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “I get his quarterly catalogues and I recognized some of the pieces from his collection in Gabriela’s apartment. I don�
�t think that’s a coincidence. As far as I’m concerned, it pretty much confirms he’s Custodes Sacri. Which means he’s a marked man.”

  “So where do we find this guy?”

  “Istanbul.”

  Her eyes widened slightly and she nodded. “There was a box from the Garanti Auction House in Istanbul in Gabriela’s bedroom yesterday. The figurine I asked you about was inside-Michael fighting the dragon.”

  “That figurine might have been a warning to her. That trouble was coming.”

  “These people don’t have e-mail?”

  Batty shrugged. “I’m not sure how they communicate. Or even if they do. The important thing is, we need to get a message to him before it’s too-”

  Callahan’s cell phone cut him off. She reached for her backpack and fished it out, putting it to her ear. “Callahan.”

  She turned away from Batty and listened a moment, then murmured something into the mouthpiece before clicking off. When she turned to face him again, the color had drained from her cheeks.

  “That was Section. I’ve been ordered to cut my losses here and pull up stakes immediately.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re sending me to Istanbul.” She looked at him now as if she was finally starting to think that maybe, just maybe, there was some truth to everything Batty had told her. “Koray Ozan is dead.”

  BOOK V

  The Sun Also Shines on the Wicked

  So spake the false Arch-Angel, and infus’d

  Bad influence into th’ unwarie brest

  Of his Associate

  -Paradise Lost, 1667 ed., V:694-96

  21

  AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

  Dimitri Kovalenko did not like Amsterdam.

  The city was always crowded, people pushing their way from here to there, always in a hurry, but never in enough of a hurry to suit Dimitri.

  The worst of it was the Rosse Buurt. The red light district. By day, the area was quite beautiful, with its cobbled streets and its centuries-old architecture. By night, however, those streets were so packed with human debris, looking for a private strip show or a cheap fuck, that Dimitri was quick to lose all patience with the place.