Robert Browne - The Paradise Prophecy

She was, she suddenly realized, verging on another panic attack, and it took everything she had to tamp it down. Her hands were trembling worse than ever and she knew that if she didn’t get some decent sleep, very soon, they’d have to carry her off this plane in a stretcher.

But, like always, sleep refused to come.

Unwilling to sit here and let her mind keep recycling the same events until they drove her completely nuts, she pulled Ozan’s notepad out of her bag and started going through the verses he’d copied, concentrating on the crossed-out letters and words, trying to see if she could find what Ozan had been looking for.

She’d read up a little on Trithemius’s code schemes and one of the codes featured in Steganographia was called the Ave Maria cipher, in which you looked for every other letter in every other word. But it was clear that Ozan had already covered that ground and had come up with zip.

And no matter how she rearranged these words, she got nothing. Absolutely nothing. If there were any hidden messages here, they were beyond her feeble mind. Still, she spent the good part of an hour running through the possibilities before she finally gave up in utter frustration.

And she still couldn’t sleep.

Pulling Ozan’s iPad into her lap, she thought about checking for more e-mails, but the labs at Section had already been alerted and were busy scouring Ozan’s server, so she didn’t see any real point. Instead, she navigated to the New York Times Web site and stared morosely at the home page:

STATE DEPARTMENT WARNS OF NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION

The story warned that U.S. intelligence agencies had encountered evidence of the recent distribution of weapons-grade uranium throughout the Middle East and Africa. Some were concerned that several nuclear warheads had already been built and could well be circulating on the black market, and the impending threat of doom hung heavy over everyone in D.C.

The attorney general insisted that there was no need for alarm. He was working night and day and, with the president’s help, was busy putting together an international coalition to study and address these concerns. Most experts, however, agreed that this was too little, too late. The fuse was already burning and might not be all that easy to put out.

Maybe it wasn’t dark angels they had to worry about, Callahan thought.

Why the hell was she headed to Thailand?

Dumping the iPad in disgust, she settled back in her chair and closed her eyes. Maybe if she could just let herself go, didn’t try so hard, her creeping anxiety would subside and sleep would find her.

When she was very young, and her father was still alive, he would perch himself on the edge of her bed at night and sing her a song. She could always smell the booze on his breath, but she loved him and he was there and that was all that counted. She remembered his voice, low and sweet, as he stroked her forehead with his fingertips.

Then, to her surprise, there it was-his voice-right now. There inside her head:

Sleep, Bernadette. Sleep.

The sound was as real as if he’d whispered in her ear. But she knew that was impossible. He’d been dead for most of her life.

Sleep, my angel. Sleep. I’m here with you. I always will be. So let yourself go and sleep.

Yes, she thought. Sleep.

Maybe she could manage it after all.

The moment she thought this, all of her cares began to melt away, like magic. Sleep was now a real possibility, an all- consuming possibility, and the temptation was too great to resist. Her anxiety would no longer be an issue. The tremors would stop. The world along with them. Everything would be better if she just let it take her.

Sleep, my darling.

And before Callahan knew it, sweet, blissful darkness wrapped itself around her . . . and swept her away.

Three minutes before the nosedive, Batty pulled the Milton manuscript from his book bag, finally ready to look at it.

It was a work of beauty. The worn leather cover. The time-aged pages. The fading ink. The flawless blank verse. Over ten thousand words. Words that had meant so much to him for so many years. Words that Milton claimed had come from God himself.

So was it possible that there was something in this draft that would open the door for them?

Batty supposed he should feel guilty for stealing it from a dead man, but he didn’t. If it wasn’t a fake-and he instinctively believed it wasn’t-then it deserved to be in a museum somewhere, to be shared with the world, not locked up in a private library.

The most commonly seen version of Paradise Lost , the one taught in schools and found in the bookstores, was twelve chapters long. The twelve-chapter version had first been published the year Milton died, but that wasn’t his original intent. The first incarnation of the poem, published several years earlier, had contained only ten chapters. But at the request of his publisher, Milton had divided chapters seven and ten and added short summaries to all twelve for the more poetry-challenged readers in the crowd.

The version Batty now held in his hands, dictated to Milton’s daughter, held the original ten chapters, and several of its pages showed additions and corrections, and marks in the margins.

Maybe this was where the secret lay.

But in leafing through it, his mind nearly frozen with awe, Batty frowned as he came to the end of the last chapter-Book X. Something looked off here. A subtle but unmistakable anomaly in the binding. And on closer inspection, he saw what may well have been torn edges, as if several pages had been removed.

Could he be mistaken?

He didn’t think so.

So was this Ozan’s doing?

When he read through it, however, there seemed to be nothing amiss. The verses flowed just as they should, from Michael’s revelation of the future to Adam and Eve’s departure from Paradise.

Then the missing pages. If he wasn’t imagining things.

So what had been removed?

He was pondering the significance of this when the jet suddenly bucked, a violent jolt of turbulence that dropped them several feet, leaving Batty’s stomach behind in the process. He quickly set the manuscript onto the table beside him and tightened his seat belt.

Outside his window, a storm was brewing, threatening to make the previous bit of turbulence seem like child’s play.

He glanced over at Callahan, but she was asleep. Lucky her. Then the plane buckled again and Batty grabbed his armrests, wishing to hell he had a parachute strapped to his back, because this wasn’t looking good.

Suddenly aware of the smell of sulfur, he glanced again at Callahan, surprised to find her fully awake now and looking right back at him. Her gaze was unsettling in its directness.

“What’s the matter, Sebastian? You afraid of a little turbulence?”

Her eyes didn’t flinch, and that gaze was mesmerizing.

“You shouldn’t be afraid, darling. I won’t let anything happen to you. I’d never let anything happen to you. You mean too much to me.”

Darling?

What the hell was going on with her? Batty tried to look away, but he couldn’t. His eyeballs seemed frozen. His head wouldn’t move.

Callahan unbuckled her seat belt now. “It hurt me to see you so angry, Sebastian. To see that hate in your eyes. You don’t really hate me, do you? I only did what had to be done.”

And all at once Batty realized that this wasn’t Callahan at all.

This was the redhead.

She got to her feet and crossed the aisle toward him. “After all, it wasn’t my fault, was it? Rebecca was the one who invited me into your home. Rebecca was the one who called. All I did was answer. So if you have to blame someone, don’t blame me. Blame her.”