The Paradise Prophecy

by Robert Browne

  He could see that despite all she’d seen tonight, she was having trouble accepting this idea. But he had to give her credit for not dismissing it out of hand.

  She was making progress.

  “What do you mean ‘a piece of it’?”

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he told her, “but I don’t always have the sunniest of dispositions.”

  Callahan said nothing.

  “I think part of the reason for that is what I’ve seen, but it’s also something inside me, as if a living piece of the place attached itself to my soul before I was revived. Like a parasite. For all I know, I’m only one kiss away from being a drudge myself.”

  Which was why, he supposed, he still felt that attraction to the redhead.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Callahan said.

  “We went way past ridiculous a long time ago. And you can throw in absurd, ludicrous and laughable as well. Unfortunately, none of this is very funny.”

  “So what’s your solution? Sit here and wallow in your misery? Or do you want to do something productive?”

  “The two aren’t mutually exclusive, are they?”

  “Come on, Professor, I need you to sober up. You’re not any good to me like this. What do you say we call down to room service and order a pot of that really disgusting coffee these Turks love so much?”

  “You make it sound so inviting.”

  “It’s better than no invitation at all, isn’t it?”

  He thought about it and sighed. “All right. I give.”

  “Good,” she said. “I have something I want to show you.”

  The coffee was so thick and strong that Batty nearly gagged the moment it touched his tongue. He wasn’t close to being sober yet, but he knew he needed to snap out of this and pay attention to what Callahan was saying.

  “I went through Ozan’s client list,” she told him. “He had over six hundred active accounts, and the auction house is doing brisk business. In the last two months alone, they’ve shipped seven hundred and twenty-seven packages, all over the world.”

  “So the database is a bust. What about the iPad?”

  “That’s what I want to show you.” She picked up Ozan’s iPad from the table and touched the home button, bringing the screen to life. “His e-mail app is connected to two different mailboxes. Work and personal, both attached to the same server, run by an Internet provider here in Istanbul.” She touched the screen and called up the browser. “But when I started exploring, I found a Web page in his cache. An anonymous mail service, running in the cloud.”

  “The cloud?”

  “Out there on the Internet. Like Google apps or Skytap, where everything is centralized.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “In itself, not much. But when I found it, I had to ask myself, why would Ozan need a separate Webmail account, especially an anonymous one? Was he subscribing to porn sites and trying to cover his tracks? That doesn’t seem likely.”

  Batty suddenly understood. “He was corresponding with the other guardians.”

  Callahan nodded. “Not often, but when I hacked into his account, I found four separate recipients, all of whom were sent messages by Ozan the day before he died. He’d already dumped them into his trash folder, but he hadn’t bothered to empty it-a mistake amateurs always make. They assume that once a message is deleted, it’s deleted.”

  “So who were the recipients?”

  Callahan huffed. “I wish it were that easy. But they’re all anonymous Web accounts, too.”

  “So it’s a dead end.”

  “Not really. I managed to hack into the accounts, run an IP trace and found they’d last been accessed from four different Internet cafes. Sao Paulo, D.C., London and Chiang Mai, Thailand.”

  “We already know the recipient in Sao Paulo.”

  Another nod. “But Gabriela hadn’t accessed the account since before she went on her last tour, so she never got the message.”

  “What is the message?”

  “That’s where I ran into a little snag. It’s nothing but spam. ‘Viagra at Internet Prices,’ blah, blah, blah. The kind of stuff most people delete, which, of course, is the point. It’s actually pretty ingenious.”

  She touched the iPad’s screen, then handed it to Batty, and sure enough, the message she’d retrieved was a long, solid paragraph of a poorly written advertising come-on. Get one of these in your inbox and you immediately hit the kill button. But he knew there was more to it than that.

  “It isn’t spam,” he said. “It’s a hidden message.”

  “Right. I started thinking about what you told me in Ozan’s library. About Trithemius-and this little puppy . . .” She patted the copy of Steganographia on the table beside her. “But if you look at the stuff on Ozan’s notepad, you can clearly see that he was about as good at steganography as he was at e-mail security. So he took the easy route and used a shortcut to code his messages.”

  Batty glanced at the screen full of spam. “What kind of shortcut?”

  “I checked his browser cache again and found a Web site that allows you to enter a phrase into a text box, then encodes it to look like this. I figure the guardians on the other end are using the same Web site to decipher it.”

  “So much for ancient tradition. I assume you decoded it, too?”

  She nodded and touched the screen again, showing him the result:

  Someone watching. Stay alert.

  Batty studied the message grimly. “He obviously wasn’t being paranoid. He was a sensitive, so he knew what was coming. Must’ve felt it.”

  “And, unfortunately, Gabriela was so wrapped up in her tour she never bothered to read the warning.”

  “I’m not sure how much difference it would’ve made. What about the D.C. and London accounts?”

  “Both read and deleted,” Callahan said. She touched the screen again. “But that wasn’t the only spam Ozan sent. I found another exchange in his trash file-with the recipient from Thailand, dated a couple weeks earlier. I decoded it, but it’s still pretty cryptic.”

  She showed him the results. First Ozan’s message:

  Tell me about C Gigas, 7 pages.

  Followed by the Thailand recipient’s reply:

  Don’t make the same mistake the poet made.

  You may lose more than your eyes.

  Batty felt his heart accelerate.

  “I tried Googling this C. Gigas guy,” Callahan said, “but all I got was a page on Pacific oysters. And I don’t think Ozan and his buddy were discussing seafood.”

  “Or a person. They’re talking about the Codex Gigas.”

  “Which is?”

  “Another book.”

  “What-are these people obsessed?”

  “Apparently so,” Batty said. “But what surprises me is that it’s Ozan asking the question. He has one of the most extensive collections on the occult I’ve ever seen, so it seems to me he’d already know all about the Gigas.”

  “That makes at least two of you. You mind filling me in?”

  “It’s also called the Devil’s Bible,” Batty told her. “It was written in the thirteenth century, supposedly in one night. With the help of Satan.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “It’s about the size of a small packing trunk, and at one time it was considered one of the wonders of the world. This thing has survived fire and the Thirty Years’ War. And right now it’s housed in a library in Sweden.” He looked at the e-mail again. “But like I said, Ozan would already know all that. His interest was in the seven missing pages.”

  “The what?”

  “There are seven pages missing from the Gigas. Nobody knows how or when they disappeared, but there’s been all kinds of speculation about what’s on them, from a message from Satan to the secrets of God and the universe. And that’s probably what Ozan was after.” He tapped the iPad screen. “But it’s the response that has me puzzled.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it mentions the poe
t. ‘Don’t make the same mistake the poet made. You may lose more than your eyes.’ I think we both know who he’s talking about.”

  “John Milton.”

  “Exactly. He went blind nearly a decade before he wrote Paradise Lost. But this reply is couched as a warning to Ozan-don’t make the same mistake-as if Milton did something to cause his blindness.”

  “So let me get this straight,” Callahan said. “On one hand we have these seven missing pages, on the other hand we have two guardians searching for secret messages, and smack in the middle of it all we’ve got a blind fucking poet.”

  “There’s obviously a connection there. We just need to figure out what it is.”

  Callahan got to her feet, stretched. “Well, maybe we’ll get lucky when we talk to the monk.”

  Batty looked at her. “Monk?”

  “I cross-referenced those e-mails with Ozan’s client database,” she said. “I got about a hundred different hits for D.C. and London, but only one for Chiang Mai. Three months ago he sent a package to a Christian monastery there. To a monk called Brother Philip. I’ve already chartered a flight.”

  “Then maybe he will have the answer. I guess it makes sense when you think about it.”

  “Why?” Callahan asked.

  “The Devil’s Bible was written by a Benedictine monk.”

  BOOK VII

  The Fourth Moon of the Lunar Tetrad

  Then in the East her turn she shines,

  Revolvd on Heav’ns great Axle

  -Paradise Lost, 1667 ed., VII:380-81

  31

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  Finding a new skin was always a problem for him.

  Had he been like his sister, Belial, he’d simply tempt, seduce and lie his way into getting what he wanted. But over the years he had formed a personal code. One he did his best to follow.

  No subterfuge, no games.

  He would get what he needed simply by asking.

  So his choices were limited. There weren’t too many humans out there who would willingly give up their bodies without the promise of some kind of reward. Which was why he found himself in Central City East, a section of downtown Los Angeles known as “the Nickel” or skid row, just blocks from the Angels Flight-a hillside rail tram that had only recently reopened for business.

  The body he occupied-the body he was now forced to replace-had been found right here, a young man in his mid-twenties who had been a heroin addict since he was seventeen years old and had no qualms about leaving this world behind.

  The young man’s speech had been slurred by drink and drugs, but he was cognizant enough to know what was being asked of him. Rewards no longer mattered. He had simply wanted a change, and was more than willing to take his chances in the afterlife.

  “What’s it like out there?” he had asked.

  “Like nothing you’ve ever known.”

  “Will I see God?”

  “I can’t give you any promises, but I can tell you that what you’ll see is a world created by God. What you make of it will be up to you-and it won’t be without its dangers.”

  “I’m willing to take my chances.”

  “Are you? I don’t want to do this unless you’re absolutely sure.”

  “I’m sure,” the young man had said. “There’s just one thing I want to know before we start.”

  “Ask.”

  “Your name. I need to know your name.”

  He remembered resting his palm on top of the young man’s head and thinking that, despite appearances, this was a good soul who would do well in the otherworld. Telling him his name was the least he could do.

  “Michael,” he’d said softly. “They call me Michael.”

  But that was then and this was now.

  After the fight in the alley and the severe loss of blood, the young man’s body was no longer useful to him. So Michael had patched up his wounds, gotten some much-needed rest, then used what little strength he had left to make his way back to skid row.

  He hadn’t felt good about leaving Jenna behind. His instinct was to stay with her, keep watching her-especially with Zack still on the loose. He hadn’t intended to lose an entire day and much of the night, but what choice did he have? She seemed to be in good hands at the shelter, and with any luck he’d be back listening to her song before morning.

  He began roaming the streets, feeling the life draining out of him with every step he took. He could, of course, abandon this body where it stood, but traveling through this world without a host was difficult and would only complicate his task. And he found it much easier to communicate with these beings when he looked and sounded like them.

  As always, skid row was crawling with the wasted and the disenfranchised. Old and young, male and female, each one of them victim to human prejudices and often to their own mental or emotional weaknesses. They carried a sense of hopelessness so deeply rooted in their psyches that they saw no other remedy than to give up and give in. They drank and drugged themselves into oblivion, waiting and hoping for that final release.

  Was he wrong to exploit that wish?

  Maybe.

  Maybe it made him no better than his brethren.

  But his intent was pure. That much he knew for certain. He was here to help humankind, not hurt them. A cause he had dedicated himself to long ago.

  He was a good hour into his search when he found a candidate. Older than he would have liked-late fifties or possibly early sixties-but there was a natural muscularity to his frame that couldn’t be disguised by the oversize shirt and the ill-fitting jeans.

  The man lay sleeping under the marquee of an abandoned movie theater, huddled close to the boarded-up ticket booth, his hair long and gray, the equally gray stubble on his chin making the transition to full-grown beard.

  He looked physically healthy and didn’t seem to be suffering the ravages of booze or drugs, so Michael had to assume he was mentally ill.

  Which was both a blessing and a curse.

  A blessing because his body wouldn’t give out so quickly, yet a curse because it was difficult to explain to someone suffering from mental illness why you want him to make the ultimate sacrifice.

  A dilemma that Michael would just as soon avoid.

  So he continued on, moving past the old man and dismissing him from his mind.

  Half a block up, however, he felt a stab of pain in his side and realized that his stitches had torn loose and he was bleeding again.

  He didn’t have much time.

  Staggering to a bus stop, he sank onto the bench and checked the wound, doing what he could to stop the flow of blood. The moon hung low in the night sky, nearly close enough to touch, and as he sat there, holding his side, he thought about what was coming in just a few short days:

  The last phase of the lunar tetrad.

  The fourth in a quartet of full eclipses, unbroken in sequence, over the span of a single year. The last of four moons sliding through the umbra, turning a deep shade of copper.

  A blood moon.

  There were those who believed that consecutive eclipses were a signal from God. A sign that his son would soon return to the earth, that the dead would be resurrected and final judgment passed.

  But there were others who knew better. Those-like Michael-who had been here from the beginning and had witnessed the creation of man and the world he inhabited.

  Those who wanted possession of that world.

  The dark rebels who had once been Michael’s friends.

  The rebels had always thought of themselves as the heroes of the story. The bringers of light, the purveyors of truth, the bold few who had dared rise up against a tyrant to make their world a better place.

  But history is written by the victors, and when the War in Caeli came to an end, those who had dared defy their father were beaten down and broken, labeled traitors, exiled to the belly of Abyssus.

  To the world at large, they were seen as infernal spirits. Dark angels.

  Daemones.

>   To their minds, however, the only thing that separated them from the so-called angels of God was their allegiance to individual freedom. They did not believe that their father, the creator of all things living, was infallible. Nor did they believe that he was fair or just or kind. And when he took it upon himself to create a colony of slaves, giving the poor hapless creatures the illusion of freedom, the rebels felt it only proper that they show him just how fallible he was.

  These mindless beasts-these homo sapiens, as they would later come to be known-were weak willed and violent, superstitious and easily corrupted, susceptible to the ever-changing and often conflicting mythologies their creator had conjured up in order to mollify and manipulate them.

  The rebels decided to exploit these weaknesses. What better way to expose their father’s arrogance than to lure his precious slaves into the endless fire? To tempt them into joining the New Rebellion?

  Perhaps if he had treated these creatures with more dignity, this would not have been possible. But he had made a mistake in telling them that they were free to choose, only to punish them if they defied his will.

  The contradiction did not go unnoticed.

  While history would continue to be written by his followers, painting the rebels as evil and self-serving-using fear as a common motivator-the rebels worked quietly and with purpose, forging their own kingdom amidst the fires of Abyssus and doing all they could to undermine his authority.

  Lucifer, a formidable warrior who was once God’s most perfect angel, had demonstrated a capacity for ruthlessness beyond all others. He rose among the ranks to become the leader of the rebels, urging them to return to Caeli to fight again. To conquer their father’s kingdom and take back the dignity he had stripped from them.

  But on the night of the fourth moon, at the end of the first lunar tetrad, news of this rebellion reached their father’s ears and he lashed out preemptively, showing the rebel king no mercy.

  Too cruel to simply kill Lucifer, he instead banished him to the City of the Seventh Gate, locking him in a cell of fire to forever contemplate the consequences of his deeds.