When the journalist spoke it was with the calmness of someone who knows he is about to die and is resolved to say his piece.
“Britain’s enemies have had this power before, Charlie,” he began. “Or have you forgotten how this science came to your attention in the first place? Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Heydrich – they are your predecessors. And mark my words, corpse after broken corpse, you people have got a long way to go to catch up with the Nazis. So consider instead the blood on the hands of the last men to wield this power as I put your question back to you. Is it for the good? Or for the bad?”
Waits had no answer and it enraged him. “You are a political child,” he spat. “Now, enough of this nonsense.”
He drew back the sword, ready for the capital stroke.
A new voice interrupted him, a female voice. “Hello, chuck.”
Waits wheeled around to see Florence Chung. The priestess had been inside the armoury when the alarm sounded, but rather than rushing for the exit she had hidden. Now the Disciplina Etrusca was clasped before her like an instruction manual and her cheeks were flushed with triumph.
Waits raised his blade. “You.”
Florence sniggered. “Do you really think a sliver of steel is any match for a fully blown fulguriator? A worthy opponent of the legacy of Tages and Rome? Really, Charles, I expected more. Let’s do this the old fashioned way. If you think you can handle me.”
“Very well. So be it.”
Waits dropped his sword and raised one arm to the sky, murmuring and closing his eyes.
His hand was trembling.
Florence placed on her head a scarlet cap that finished in a tube pointing skyward, as if funnelling the contents of her brain toward the clouds. Jake had seen one of these in Britton’s office; at the time he had laughed. But there was nothing funny about it now. There was nothing to laugh about as Florence also began murmuring, one hand raised in a rival supplication. The voices rose in intensity, chanting that tongue which bore no resemblance to any Indo-European language. Immediately the wind picked up, stirring this way and that, undecided which way to blow.
Jake noticed how cloudy it had become.
The sky was darkening, casting the world into half-light. Waits’s voice had become shrill, and to Jake’s dismay he realized he could understand snatches of what the spymaster was saying.
And then everything seemed to slow down.
*
The edge of Jake’s vision was deteriorating like a badly-tuned television picture. He viewed the world in three colours: black, white and purple. His neck was stiff and his head felt leaden. With an effort he turned to face Waits, whose face folded and flapped like a sail; his mouth was a jet-black hole. Florence stood with one arm raised: the pose of a rock star after a thunderous last chord. Her eyeballs flickered with violet and Jake could see right through to the capillaries inside her head, where lights danced. The leaves on the roof spiralled in dust devils and clouds were sucked towards the duelling fulguriators, as if there was a vacuum over the Tower.
He heard the first stirring of thunder.
The chanting turned manic, the beat of the drum, the beat that had begun so very long ago. Now a twinkle of purple-blue danced in Waits’s eyes too, as if a plug was short-circuiting in his frontal lobes. The cloud had gathered itself into two knots, one above Waits, one above Florence, the inverse peaks of the network’s wrath.
And then everything slowed down even more.
92
A seagull was frozen in mid-air, wings pushing downward like the hour hand of a clock, the space around them a solid. Florence’s face was halfway through saying something; her lips were thrust left as if she’d been slapped by an invisible hand and her eyelids were shut, though violet seared through them.
The clouds glowed ice-blue, electricity seeping into the twin protrusions. Jake remembered enough of his GCSE science to know what was happening. The clouds were becoming loaded with negative charges from the ionosphere, which were being pushed to the base of the cloud. When the electric potential hit ten thousand volts per square centimetre, ionization of the air would occur. Then the step leaders would trace their way from sky to earth, fingers of plasma seeking the quickest way down.
He could see it happening.
A purplish tendril snaked towards Waits; Jake knew a step leader took a few thousands of a second to reach the ground, and now he understood why the seagull was frozen in mid-beat. A second step leader began to burn its path towards Florence, superheated ions clearing a way for the negative charge to follow in a bolt of lightning. And here were the positive streamers. A lambent flame tapered from Waits’s head as positive ions strained upward, trying to make a connection; another sprouted from the funnel of Florence’s cap.
It was a race.
But the streamer flapping from the head of Charlie Waits was longer, already it was a metre high, and the step leader reaching for it was way ahead of Florence’s. Waits remained frozen; Jake wondered if knew what was about to happen.
Step leader and positive streamer connected.
The spell was broken. The air exploded. A billion volts of electricity surged through Waits’s body, which became hotter than the surface of the sun. In the resulting detonation his head, arms and most of his upper torso vanished. What remained – two blackened legs, a hunk of cauterized abdomen – wobbled on the spot and capsized. His chinos puffed into flame. Jenny and Davis were slammed into the west battlement by the shockwave and Jake was cast in the other direction, winding himself. Displaced air bypassed Florence like a razor in a wind tunnel; the seagull flew away.
The priestess glanced around the rooftop, seeking another victim, and her gaze settled on Davis.
“You,” she said, in a voice that sounded metallic and distorted. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you.”
Davis calculated the odds and threw himself off the battlements; the splintering of bone when he landed carried up to the rooftop.
“Suit yourself,” said Florence, turning to face Jake.
Her eyes were matt red.
“You did this to me, Jake,” she said with that same awful slowness. “Thank you.”
He was too petrified to speak.
“Did you have a thing for me once, Jake? You can tell me.”
Jake shook his head.
“Yes, yes you did. It’s ok, plenty of men do. Poor Jake. Poor, unloved Jake.”
She readjusted the cap, raising her arm once more, and Jake listened as for a final time Florence Chung invoked all the dark power of the void.
This time he understood every word.
The placation of dii consentes, the pitiless advisers of Tin. The seduction of dii novensiles, casters of lightning. The appeasement of dii superiores, the most potent of all the numinous powers that surrounded the All-Seeing Eye. And then the most dread incantation of them all: the appeal to Tin himself.
The sky darkened. The cloud above Jake had become an anvil, gathering itself up, ready to smash him. Time ground to a halt. The sense of gravity was overwhelming and the weight of atmosphere crushed the air from his lungs.
It began at the tip of his nose. A purple flame flickering upward like a glow-worm, wiggling out of his body. And here came the step leader, beautiful and bizarre. Negative and positive, yin and yang, just as Dr Nesta had hypothesized. Jake’s world had turned the colour of a photographic negative; he could make out the silhouette of Florence, but it was like staring through peaty water. The fingers of plasma strained to touch a few feet above him and Jake knew this was the ever-anointed date of his end. Foretold by thunder, like all things.
A flicker of movement.
A swipe in the gloom.
A dazzling shock of blonde.
And suddenly it was over.
93
Jake came round to see the priestess’s head topple off her shoulders and her body keel over backwards. Behind the decapitated fulguriator stood Jenny, blade clasped horizontally in the manner of a samurai. The severed appendage
rolled once, twice, three times, coming to a rest at Jake’s feet. Florence’s left eyelid twitched, steam rising from her corneas. The pupils of those blood-red eyeballs contracted to pinheads.
Sightless.
Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey; Florence Chung. The last person to be decapitated at the Tower, as Hess was its last prisoner. For the second time the sword of Oliver Cromwell had put an end to they who would rule absolutely.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
The clouds fizzled with unspent energy, lightning shimmering along their undersides, and again Jake was reminded of a cerebral mass: angry but impotent, thoughts seething through it.
Jenny dropped the blade and gasped. Then she fell to her knees, staring at Florence’s head.
“I killed her,” she said. “I killed someone.”
Jake placed a hand on Jenny’s shoulder. “You killed it,” he said. “She had become an it.”
They became aware of two things: first, the smell of burning oak, and second, the crowd. In an attempt to seal in the intruders Sir Richard had ordered the outer gates closed. But the storm was unlike anything the tourists had seen before and it had reduced them to panic. Now smoke rose from the roof, the beams ignited by the lightning; the general had no choice but to open the gates so the crowd to escape. They watched Evelyn Parr join the throng.
“Quickly,” said Jake, gathering up the Disciplina Etrusca. “We’ve got a window of opportunity to get out of here.”
The soldiers were taken up with the evacuation and they fled the White Tower unimpeded. As Jake joined the stampede he glanced at the keep and felt a stab of sorrow. A building that was evil and beautiful, English and French, a repository of history itself; it was being consumed. He took Jenny by the arm and steered her through the outer walls without looking back.
*
The City of London was a ghost town on a Saturday, its glass anthills dormant. The noise of sirens carried from Tower Hill as they ran and a helicopter skimmed overhead. They stopped underneath the Gherkin – a statement of power to rival Vespasian’s Colosseum – and Jake placed the bundle of papyri on the ground.
“Right,” he said, sparking his lighter. “Here goes.”
“Wait.”
Jake extinguished the flame. “What is it?”
“Before you destroy it … there’s something I need to do. One thing.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Whatever killed Mum. I need to know if I’m a carrier.”
She picked up the bundle and flicked through the pages from beginning to end.
“You’re not serious,” he said.
“Is it a laughing matter?”
He sparked the lighter and took the papyri from her. “No way. It burns.”
“Why not?” she said. “What harm would it do to find out this one thing? You don’t know what it’s like, living under a death sentence.”
The flame neared the papyri, but Jenny grasped him by wrist, pulling it back.
“Wait,” she hissed. “Let’s think about this. With this document we could do whatever we wanted. We could clean out Monte Carlo, go into politics. We could be rich – Jesus, Jake, we could be powerful beyond our wildest dreams.”
For an insane moment he considered it. But then he recalled the beat of the drum, the tramp of boots, the blood-red gaze of the lightning priestess at her most terrible.
She was proposing a deal with the devil.
“Jenny …” He stared at her, willing her back. “Let it go, Jenny.”
She blinked, and she was her old self again. She wept for a second time then, kneeling on the pavement and burying her face in her elbow.
“I almost gave in,” she whispered.
“But you didn’t give in.”
A breeze turned the pages of the manuscript, each of them stamped with a swastika.
“Burn it,” she said.
The flame danced in Jake’s hands before leaping to the bundle.
Energy.
Almost two thousand years ago it had fallen to earth in sunlight to be sucked up by the papyrus plants of the Nile Delta and converted to matter. Then it had been harvested, beaten wafer-thin, written upon and stored. For centuries it had lain underground, waiting to be disturbed. Waiting to end the lives of sixty million people. Now that energy was released at last in a flare of heat and light. Flame raced inward from all sides, like the Red Army encircling Hitler’s bunker.
The last scrap to be destroyed carried a name: TAGES.
And then it was gone.
*
Overhead the cloud had broken up to reveal a chink of blue.
“What now?” said Jenny.
“Now?” repeated Jake, as he crushed the ashes into dust. “Now we have a choice. We can publish everything we have. We can drag down Evelyn Parr and half of MI6. We can rewrite history. Christ, I might become the most famous journalist of all time. Watergate is a minor traffic accident by comparison.”
“Or?”
“Or we flee. We flee from Evelyn Parr and whoever she recruits. We go abroad and we never breathe another word of this to anyone who lives. We destroy what evidence we’ve gathered so Niall Heston’s got nothing to back up his story and the paper can’t run it.”
“Why would we do that?”
“To stop word of this science spreading to every government and treasure hunter and would-be despot in the world. The genie goes back in the bottle.”
“Where would we go?”
“I don’t know,” Jake admitted.
“What would we do?”
“I don’t know that either. But …”
His heart was pounding.
She looked up at him. “But what, Jake?”
Her eyes were clear.
“But …”
This was it. This was what it all came down to. Still his heartbeat raced, yet when he spoke it was with certainty.
“But we’d have each other.”
The air around them was charged. Jake held out his hand; his fingers did not tremble. She offered hers in return, the positive streamer to his step leader. There was the briefest hesitation. Then their fingers touched, and a spark seemed to dart between them – a spark that was wholesome and pure.
Jenny laughed. “Fate,” she said. “Do you believe in it, Jake?”
He looked at the ashes of the Book of Thunder. The wind was spreading them across the concourse with its invisible fingers, pushing them into the cracks of the pavement; taking them up into the air. And he couldn’t help wondering if what they had found together was the point in it all.
Epilogue
What is love? It is this: being so connected to someone you cannot bear to be apart from them, even for a moment. It is the sensation of possessing a bond to another person, and if you wander far from your beloved that bond is stretched and cries out in pain. But it never snaps, no matter how far you might travel. It is magical. And when you have it, that bond is the strongest power on earth.
Jake felt the might of it as he looked at Jenny sleeping in the aeroplane seat. He studied her perfect ear, the sprig of sunlight-coloured hair that erupted above it. He kissed her cheek, drawing in the aroma.
When one short hour, sees happiness from utter desolation grow.
The Boeing 737 was over Turkmenistan and in a few hours they would land in Bangkok. What then? He had absolutely no idea. But it was exciting – not knowing what path they would take, where their futures lay. Jake was happy.
He couldn’t sleep, so he decided to have another drink. But when the hostess poured him a glass of red wine Jake drew his hand away, staring at the blood-red liquid in its transparent cup. He didn’t want it, but he did want it. His contentment was thrown into disarray.
It was the stillness of the alcohol that was the irony. While Jake’s soul raged the wine was motionless, the membrane of its surface perfectly defined.
Waiting.
Such is a game she plays, and so she t
ests her strength.
He hated it then, just as he hated Tages and all the power of the void. But he also realized he had a choice. To drink, or not to drink? Whether or not the decision was preordained, it was his to make.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “I’ll have a soft drink. And a newspaper, if you’ve got one.”
“Certainly, sir.” She handed him a tomato juice. “Will the Telegraph do?”
Jake unfolded the broadsheet, careful not to disturb Jenny with its inky sails. The main article on page five caught his eye: an important portrait of Napoleon had just gone under the hammer at Sotheby’s, The Peace of Amiens by Devosge. The artist had portrayed the French Empire as a new Rome and the little corporal was depicted as Augustus. Jake admired the work as the cup went to his lips.
He let go.
The vessel pirouetted through the air, as another drink had done four weeks previously in a pub in King’s Cross. Napoleon stood before a stormy sky. In his hand was a scroll, and on that scroll were characters.
Etruscan characters.
Another copy was out there. History itself was a lie.
Dawn was breaking over central Asia, and at that altitude Jake could see how the world was truly a disc, rotating beneath the void. As he stared at the featureless landmass he fancied he heard laughter – it was grating, guttural, slightly amused. On the horizon storm-clouds were gathering.
Timeline of Etruscan and Roman History
Ninth century BC: The Etruscan civilization rises on the Italian peninsula.
Eighth century BC: Life and death of Tages, prophet of the Etruscan religion.
753 BC: The small town of Rome is founded, ruled at first by Etruscan kings.
600 BC: Etruscan civilization reaches the height of its power. It is based on independent city-states and gains its wealth through trade and iron ore.
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